How Lovely Are Thy Branches: A Young Wizards Christmas
Read How Lovely Are Thy Branches: A Young Wizards Christmas Online
Authors: Diane Duane
2: Oh, The Weather Outside Is Frightful
4: Bring A Torch, Jeanette, Isabella
How Lovely Are Thy Branches:
A Young Wizards Christmas
Diane Duane
Errantry Press
County Wicklow
Republic of Ireland
How Lovely Are Thy Branches
Diane Duane
Published by Errantry Press at
EbooksDirect.dianeduane.com
Co. Wicklow, Ireland
A division of the
Owl Springs Partnership
© 2014 Diane Duane. All rights reserved. This work may not be republished or reproduced by any means, electronic or otherwise, without the express written permission of the author.
This work is canonical in the Young Wizards universe and conforms to the timeline established in the YW New Millennium Editions. Terms and conditions may apply. For dramatic purposes, slight liberties have been taken with descriptions of local weather conditions. Your mileage may vary. Not a flying toy.
Time Fix
This story takes place between the events of
A Wizard of Mars
and the forthcoming
Games Wizards Play
*,
in the period between early November and late December 2010.
(coming February 2, 2016 from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
1:
We Need A Little Christmas
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Four thousand years ago, when the Crossings Intercontinual Worldgating Facility on Rirhath B was in its initial stages of development, the populations of the Alterf starsystem were evacuated into near-Rirhait space secondary to their homestar being irreparably damaged by a passing black hole. The four carbon-based species originally native to Alterf IV’s giant moon Temalbar brought with them to their new homes an awesomely advanced sheaf of technologies that became the foundation of a cultural partnership with the Rirhait that has stood the test of millennia, and thrives to this day. Daily life in much of the modern Galaxy now depends on some of the devices and tech they brought with them—such as the Interconnect Project’s worldgate management and deployment technology that makes it feasible to cluster worldgates together on demand without destroying the planet they’re based on, and the far-famed SunTap limitless-energy capture system that satisfies the power demands of worldgate complexes in this galaxy and numerous others.
And that said… beings based on every sort and state of matter, and resident from this side of the Galaxy to the other, will swear up and down (if asked) that the very
best
thing to come of that ancient partnership is the concept of the multispecies shopping mall. What had originally been a retail wing intended only to handle the immediate needs of passengers traveling through the ancient/legacy Rirhath B gating facility has over the millennia been transformed into a huge array of shopping opportunities scattered through and arranged around the already-vast area of the Crossings. Everything, literally
everything
the mind of [insert the gender-neutral name of your favorite sentient species here] can imagine acquiring, and a lot of things they can’t, is here for the buying, leasing, or other method of acquisition…so that whether you’re a commuter in a rush to make your gate or a tourist with time to dawdle and browse for that perfect souvenir, they’ve got you covered. Need an correlating hypersemantic obfuscator and have no plans to be anywhere near Mendwith any time soon? You want to head for the Crossings: the Mendwittu have a factory store there with the deepest discounts anywhere. Got some heavy grenfelzing on your mind and can’t lay your hands, fins or tentacles on one of those vital
dadeithiv
roots to save your life? You want to make for the Crossings and head straight for the Ingestibles and Assumables Wing, in the Carbon-Friendly Fresh Foods corridor of the Main Produce market, just past the Hydroxyls Snack Plaza.
And while we’re speaking of grenfelzing… want
chocolate? Genuine
chocolate as eaten by the legendarily wealthy and powerful denizens of the fabulous faraway world known as Earth? Well, who doesn’t! But why bother making the long, perilous journey to that dangerous part of space and daring the wrath of Earth’s ruthless and terrible space fleet? Save yourself a trip. Shop at the
Crossings.
…Believe it or not, however, not all the species who pass through The Worlds’ Premier Travel And Shopping Venue (SM) are interested in chocolate. Even
dark
chocolate.
Or not
that
interested.
***
Among the usual crowd of beings from every corner of the galaxy (insofar as galaxies have corners) that one might find moving under the vast high Crossings ceiling and through its bright day, more or less unremarked (because there really are a lot of bipeds around and to most other species they all look alike), came wandering two shapes that might read as one of the simpler kinds of female, at least in species that were boring enough to have only two or three major morphisms that fall into the category. One of the two wanderers was a bit taller than the other, that being what would have been most noticeable about the differences between them for most beings in Crossings transit who’d notice them at all. Their culture or microculture apparently went in at the moment for brightly colored clothing that sat fairly close to the body, and one had much longer head-fur or -plumage than the other, though the cresting of both was more or less similar in shade. It would’ve taken a much more acute observer to realize that both of were just recently out of latency age—one more recently than the other—for they were walking with the assurance of people who had been to the Crossings many times before, and in a variety of circumstances that made the present one seem utterly commonplace.
“So you never did tell me,” said the shorter of them. “What exactly are we shopping for?”
“Oh, I don’t know. At the moment? Anything that doesn’t have to do with Halloween.”
Nita Callahan sighed. “I hear you there,” she muttered.
“Still suffering?”
“Oh, not any more. I really thought I was over the sweet tooth,” Nita said to Kit’s sister Carmela as they wandered down an aisle of unrecognizable objects that she knew had to be food, because they were in the food hall. “And then after things got crazy…”
“Yeah,” Carmela said, “Kit described it to me. You had kind of an odd night… I can imagine some comfort eating would have felt good afterwards.”
“And of course there was plenty of that around, because, well,
Halloween.”
Nita sighed. “I just could
not
lay off the chocolate. When we got back we had about a hundred of those little Three Musketeers bars in the bags…”
“Uh oh.”
“Yeah.” They’d strolled over to one side of the wide concourse that was only one of the many clothes-shopping “streets” in this area of the Crossings’ upper northside retail wing, and stood briefly examining what appeared to be an intimate-lingerie shop. Nita was particularly impressed by the lustrous corsetry displayed in the window.
Has to be a lot easier doing up all those laces and things when you’ve got that many legs…
They headed on past that shop window toward another that appeared to be full of jeweled coatracks. “Those things sneak up on you, don’t they?” Carmela said. “There never seems to be a lot to them at first. It’s that whipped center.”
“Yeah. And the next morning…
”
“Alka-Seltzer.”
“Ugh. Yes.”
“Well,” Carmela said, “you’d have been better pretty quickly after that.”
“Yeah,” Nita said, “but what’s the point? We’re no sooner done with one holiday than here comes another.” It was one of the reasons Nita was enjoying being at the Crossings at the moment. There was not an accordion-paper-tailed cardboard turkey or Pilgrim hat or decorative cornucopia to be seen in the place… which was a relief, because the things were already all over the stores and the commercials were all over the TV back home. “And another
food
holiday.”
She sighed. Since her mom died, the prospect of Thanksgiving at her house was still feeling fairly abnormal. Mostly—and somewhat guiltily—Nita hated it and wished it would go away. Christmas, strangely, was easier to deal with. It had always been a kind of lightly celebrated holiday in her family, more about relaxation and visits from relatives than extravagant giftgiving or crazed levels of decoration. And Christmas dinner had always been something different from year to year (because her Mom had loudly proclaimed to anyone who’d listen,
“One damn turkey a year is enough!”
). So when her Dad had made sauerbraten last Christmas when her Mom was too sick to cook, it had still seemed strangely normal. This year, when the subject came up, he’d announced he was going to do a standing rib roast, which was fine with Nita. But she was dreading Thanksgiving, which had been the one holiday her Mom had willingly made a song and dance over in terms of food.
“You’re really not up for Turkey Day,” Carmela said.
“Nope,” Nita said.
“Dodgy holiday anyway,” said Carmela. “Never mind. Let’s skip it and go straight to Christmas.”
“If only,” Nita said.
“No,” said Carmela. “I’m serious! Why spend any more time on it than we have to? Eat the stupid turkey and move right on.
Christmas!”
Nita smiled at the thought. “I wish they gave out timeslides for this kind of thing,” she said. “Because boy, would I requisition one right this minute.”
Carmela turned and looked her up and down. “You sound tired,” she said. “Enough walking! Let’s do the wizardy thing and get hoverscoots.”
Nita blinked. “How’s that so wizardy?”
“Well, it’s all about not wasting energy, isn’t it? No point in wasting perfectly good shopping energy on
walking.”
It occurred to Nita that this was one of the more interesting takes she’d recently heard on the concept of not speeding up the heat-death of the Universe. Carmela, though, plainly wasn’t concerned about such details. She merely paused where she was and stamped on the shining white floor.
Immediately two long pieces of the floor material smoothly detached themselves upwards from it, deformed out into long hovering skateboard shapes, and sprouted tall slender grips from their fronts. Underneath the scooters the surface reformed seamlessly and went back to being shining and white.
Nita blinked. “That’s new…” she said. “Used to be Crossings staff had to call for one of these.”
“I’m that,” Carmela said, “more or less. Or anyway I’ve got a similar level of permissions.”
Which was no surprise. To everyone at the Crossings from the highest managerial levels on down these days she was Carmela Rodriguez of Earth, Defender and Protector of Transients and Staff… not to mention Occasional Personal Shopper to Interplanetary Royalty (which counted for a little more on the strictly retail side). Nita had of course spearheaded the defense that had been instrumental in saving the Crossings from the aliens attacking it, and was if anything honored even more highly than Carmela, to an almost almost embarrassing extent (at least it embarrassed
her
). Carmela, though, had absolutely
no
embarrassment about casually reminding the Crossings staff how much they owed her (and Nita), and as a result had for some time now been pulling down a range of increasingly impressive perks.
“Come on, mount up,” Carmela said, “there’s a lot of new stuff on this side of the wing we haven’t seen yet.”
Nita climbed onto the scooter, and both of them started to move along the broad corridor, absolutely shocklessly. She recognized the motive force as another implementation of the frictionless, inertially-dampered transport system the Crossings used for moving people and cargo in and out of the satellite terminals to the major gate clusters at high speed. These scooters, though, were gliding along at just a few miles an hour, with no more fuss or sense of motion than if the two of them were standing still together.