How Lovely Are Thy Branches: A Young Wizards Christmas (11 page)

“Reverse-proactive Speech recension,” Sker’ret said. “He’s a many-talented lad, our Filif. The reverse recensions take a lot of work…”

Nita knew they did: she’d hit them more than once, and bounced. Idly she reached down for a buffalo wing as Sker’ret headed off to do the rounds.

She was just turning around to see if she could find a napkin, because the sauce on the wings was fairly aggressive, when Carmela came wandering over to her, bent toward Nita’s ear, and whispered:

“You know something?”

“What?”

“It’s not enough.”

Nita blinked. “What? This was what he always wanted.”

“But there’s more now. You know what else he wants.”

“What do you—” Then she realized.

“The rest of his Christmas present. Neets, come
on.
He
wants
the candles. We have to figure out a way to give him this!”

Nita thought about it. Carmela’s mischief was a bit infectious and hard to resist right now. But so was the intensity of her feeling about this… and Nita’s sense that Mela had this right. That was what finally tipped Nita over into agreement. “The parental types would pitch a fit if they found out...”

“Better make sure they don’t find out, then,” Carmela said. “We’ll handle it later. Down in one of the puptents.”

“Makes sense,” Nita had to admit. “Not even in the same space as the house, really…”

“And believe me, this time of year my folks don’t have the staying power to ride herd on us when we’ll be staying up all night. If they even wanted to try.” Carmela snickered. “Dairine did a smart thing. Installed her own puptent downstairs and took Mama in to show her.”

“And?”

“What the decor didn’t do to her, the size of it did. All the gilding and jewels and weird alien furniture…”

Nita blinked. That description meant only one thing to her. “She installed
Roshaun’s
puptent…”

“Uh huh. I assume the Mobiles have a version of it saved. Or she does, in her manual…”

That
was food for thought. “Well, at least in there you’ve got a lot less chance of burning the house down…”

Carmela laughed at her. “With a house full of wizards, good luck with
that
happening. And anyway there are about fifty more interesting things that could happen, with the cellar full of elective pinched spaces. All you need is a portal fringe overlap and the whole area collapses into a superdense black hole. Good thing the Master of the Crossings is here walking the
hors d’oeuvres
around.”

Nita cracked up laughing.

Things got a little more relaxed after that. “Now about this Santa Claus being…” Filif was saying to Kit’s pop. “Perhaps this is only an
avatar
of one of the Powers? Working clandestinely, and hoping to be mistaken for a chaotic force aligned with the Lone Power? Because the presence of the associated small nonhuman workers does confuse the picture somewhat. That said, possibly that’s its whole idea…”

That was the point at which Nita got around to actually putting the buffalo wing in her mouth. Instants later, she was incredibly,
incredibly
sorry.

“Oh, it’s a
he?
” Filif was saying. “Thanks. Sometimes it’s hard to tell around here. In any case, certainly the
appearance
of being in violation of common Galactic labor accords could lead an unwary observer to believe—”

Nita’s eyes were tearing with something that wasn’t laughter. “Got one of the hot ones did you, sweetie?” Kit’s mama was saying. “Legs, leave that tray with me and go bring her some sour cream...!”

4:

Bring A Torch, Jeanette, Isabella

Nita recovered soon enough, and the evening continued sliding smoothly by. Food and drink were more or less continuously manifested through the good offices of Kit’s mama (
“What?
Don’t start with me about the kitchen, at least I know where everything is in here, and anyway he’s worse with food than I am, and anyway I’ve been out of the kitchen as much as I’ve been in it, I sure now know more about
mochteroofs
than
you
do, you wouldn’t know a semblance receptor site if one bit you in the butt, and in other news Legs here is doing all the work anyway, he’s
wasted
as a white-collar type! More wine, Tom?”), and good cheer filled the space. Filif was stepping into and out of his decorations at will, alternately chatting with the guests and then resuming his adornments with the glee of a small child opening the same Christmas gift over and over and liking it better every time.

Meanwhile, the entertainment system, apparently feeling ignored in the face of so much unbridled human and extrahuman interaction, had begun shouting at the party guests. Even after Kit lectured it on proper behavior there seemed no way to placate it except to turn it on and leave it running.

“Nothing from off this planet,”
Kit’s mama called from the kitchen. “I
still
haven’t got over that thing with all the tentacles.”

Kit threw Nita a glance that suggested he was in no rush to let her know that “the thing with all the tentacles” had been one of Carmela’s
leave-it-running,-I-want-to-record-that-late-night-anime
errors, and was way too Earth-local for comfort. Nita snickered and got herself more cider.

“If you just leave it to its own devices like this, of course it’s
going
to misbehave,” Dairine said, wandering through, picking up one of the buffalo wings that Nita was still recovering from, and ingesting half of it without turning a hair. “Tell it to
do
something and you’ll get a lot less grief from it. Mechanicity abhors a structure vacuum. What’s that? ‘The Christmas Channel’?”

“This could either be very good or very
very
bad,” Ronan said as the TV guide came up. “…’The Christmas Invasion…’ Well, okay. Fair play to them. ‘Bugs Bunny’s Looney Tunes Christmas Tales’? Surely you jest. …‘The Big Little Jesus?’ Is that actually in black and white?” And then a dumbfounded pause. “’
Santa Claus Versus the Martians
’? What in the name of the sludge at the bottom of the Powers’ bottomless Bucket is
that??”

“Probably something about the True Meaning of Christmas,” Dairine said, folding down crosslegged in front of the TV and filching the remote from Nita.

Ronan flopped down beside her, looking genially scornful. “Might as well ask about the true meaning of
life.”

“If you see any pigs around,” Nita said, relieving Dairine of the remote and moving another page down in the onscreen TV guide, “might try asking
them…”

“Does he even
do
Christmas?”

“He’s everywhere,” Kit said. “Why wouldn’t he?”

“Pigs?” Kit’s father said from where he’d wound up on the sofa next to Filif, sounding a little bemused. “Why would there be pigs?”

“Um…”

“Is this one of those explanations that’s going to make me sorry I asked?”

Nita laughed. “No. Just confused. But you won’t be alone, not at
all.”

Kit started attempting to explain the Transcendent Pig to his father. Nita, listening to this process with one ear, found it to be going about the way she’d thought it would. She turned her attention instead to the group in front of the TV. This had briefly flipped to one of the video channels, where some boy band was singing “Santa Claus is Coming To Town”. “…He knows when you are sleeping… He knows when you’re awake…”

From the nearby easy chair, Tom snickered. “’Kindly old elf or CIA spook?’”

“Yeah, exactly,” Ronan said, “Between the intelligence-gathering and the coming-down-your-chimney-to-eat-your-food stuff, it’s all a bit creepy.”

“Not to mention unlikely, in terms of the physics,” Dairine said. “You figure, four hundred million kids under ten on earth, give or take… Say a hundred ten million households, right? And let’s assume there’s at least one good kid in each…”

Ronan flopped back on the floor and covered his eyes.
“So
adult centric. I distrust the math already.”

“And then you’ve got, what, thirty-one time zones to deal with over the entire Christmas Eve period? And Earth’s rotation. Do the math and you get sort of a thousand visits a second, rounding up. A hundred ten or so million stops…forget the evenness of the statistical distribution, it’ll make you crazy…”

“It’s making me crazy already.”

“So the sleigh has to be doing six hundred fifty-odd miles per second, right? Even though it has to be carrying at least three hundred thousand tons’ worth of payload even if everybody’s getting nothing but Lego and Barbies. Then you have nine reindeer, counting Rudolph, and forget ‘tiny’ if they’re pulling a load like that, which pushes the whole business up to about the mass of the
QEII
—”

“Was math even
meant
to be used for these purposes? I really have my doubts.”

“And all this is happening in atmosphere, remember, like a constant spacecraft re-entry. Fourteen quintillion joules of energy per second getting expended isn’t going to do them any good, they’ll all be vaporized before they hit the fourth or fifth house. And then there’s the G force—”

Filif had slipped out of his ornaments again for a little while and was looming over this discussion with some confusion. But apparently the G force became too much for him. “It’s very nice as a
physical
-universe explanation,” Filif said, “but of course the methodology’s completely flawed.”

Dairine peered up at him. “What?”

“Well, since this being is plainly one of the Powers, if a bit of an anarchic or chaotic one,” Filif said, “why are you trying to solve this problem inside a single dimension? It doesn’t work. A dimensionally transcendent being like one of the Powers would hardly limit itself to functioning in only three or four dimensions. The evidence clearly indicates someone working in six or better. See, the temporal element—”

Kit’s pop looked up at that. “Wait, I thought time was the fourth dimension — “

All the wizards in the room groaned.
“No no no,”
Kit moaned, “too much popular culture!”

“Listen, don’t blame
me
, I hit New Math and bounced,” Kit’s dad said. “Or maybe I got it from Rod Serling.”

“—but once you’re into six-and-up, millions of apparent visits to physical reality per second is no great problem. It’s only
inside
the orthogonal plane of time that everything seems to be happening amazingly fast. But if you’re one of the Powers, there’s not the slightest rush. You slide sidewise into the applicable orthotemporal dimension,
just that one,
mind you, and then you drop off whatever playthings are required make a drop. And then you pull out again and restock at your leisure, and then dip into that timeplane again. When you’re in D7 or thereabouts, the temporality of D3 and D4 is hardly an issue...”

“That’s it,” Ronan said, “he’s solved
Santa.
We have nothing left to live for.”

Tom started chuckling and couldn’t seem to stop. Carl, who’d been in the kitchen chatting with Kit’s mama and Marcus, now wandered out with a bemused expression. “What?”

“Santa Claus,” Tom said to Carl with great seriousness, “is one of the Powers that Be.”

Carl looked at him thoughtfully. “Did you get the bottom of the eggnog?”

Tom looked askance at him, and then started laughing again. Most of the people in the room looked confused. And Carl sat on the arm of the sofa and told the story of how once upon a time Tom’s father got The Bottom of the Eggnog—where all the nutmeg winds up if you forget to shake the jug—and then (due to nutmeg’s psychoactive qualities) had to go to the ER due to what Tom described as Accidentally Seeing God. Shortly half the room was helpless with laughter. Tom, meanwhile, seeing that Marina had indeed just brought out the first of the eggnog jugs, got up and went over to it and shook it in the most ostentatious way possible before pouring Carl a glass.

Filif was watching and listening to all this in fascination. Nita leaned over to him. “I think this is some of what Christmas is about,” she said. “Tradition. The stories that come out this time of year.”

“Old interactions,” Filif said, “that can be depended on. Reinforcements of the cyclical nature of, well, Nature. Tales and reminiscences and old jokes…”

“There’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories / of Christmases long long ago…” Ronan sang.

“We
need
him tomorrow night,” said Kit’s mama through the passthrough. “He sings on key, and he plainly has something better than a bucket to carry a tune in. Whoever's bucket it is. You are not going
anywhere
tomorrow, you hear me?”

Ronan just grinned.

“Look,” Dairine said, “let’s go downstairs and leave the oldsters to their own devices—”