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.

Carmela was studying a diagram of the local shopping space that had begun displaying on the plaque that spanned the graceful handlebars of the scooter. Nita’s display had synced up with her manual—all the Crossings’ systems being alert to the presence of wizards and having a raft of custom routines to make their work easier—and was displaying “smart” advertisements for various stores in the area and travel advisories tailored to her point of origin, all translated into English for her convenience.

“Okay,” Carmela said, tracing a route on the scooter’s display, “right there.” The scooter chirped in acquiescence. “Meanwhile,” she said, turning to Nita, “I know exactly what we need.”

“Yeah? What?”

“A Christmas party.”

“Mela,” Nita said, and laughed. “It’s not even Thanksgiving yet!”

“And you were just complaining that you didn’t want it to be.”

Nta blinked, as that felt like it should have made some kind of sense. Just possibly not Earth sense.

She sighed and glanced down at the scooter’s display, which was now showing some amusing promotional material. After a moment she raised her eyebrows at the slugline of one feature. “NASA’s going to be glad to hear we’ve got a ruthless and terrible space fleet.”

Carmela snickered. “So will Richard Branson, when he gets the memo,” she said. “And frankly, I know which of them’s going to do better marketing.”

Nita snorted. “Yeah, but Mela, you know as well as I do it’s not true! Is putting something like this out there smart?”

“Why not? If everybody thinks Earth has a big aggressive space fleet, no one’ll bother turning up on our doorstep with one, will they.”

There was something to be said for that line of reasoning, but Nita still had misgivings: some of the more assertive species she knew of might take it as a challenge. “And anyway, who put that in here?”

“I’m sure I have no idea,” Carmela said, airily waving a hand.

Nita began to sweat a little, because she knew from experience what it meant when Carmela started handwaving. “Are you trying to tell me that— What did you get Sker’ret to let you do?” For it couldn’t escape anyone’s notice who knew the present Master of the Crossings that there was just about nothing he wouldn’t do for Carmela. Installing a worldgate in her closet had merely been a small sign of things to come.

“Who, me? Nothing! …Much. I mean, the small print was such a nuisance to start with…” She glanced over at what Nita was still reading.

Nita squinted to read the block of tiny, tiny print at the bottom of the promotional feature, again displayed in English to ease the handling of some of the more obscure Rirhait idioms. “…Wait. ’Earth’, ‘Mysterious Earth’ and ‘Mother Earth The Legendary Home Of Humankind’ are licensed trademarks of Gaia Protectorate CRLLC, terms and conditions apply, planetary descriptions may change from time to time without notice at management’s discretion—” And then in the tiniest print possible, “—battle fleet not included’??”

“Legalese,” Carmela said, craning her neck to see ahead of them. “It’s not like the disclaimers actually have any force in law, really, once you’ve—”

“I can’t believe this,” Nita said. “CRLLC? Did you incorporate the entire planet Earth somewhere?!”

“Here, actually,” Carmela said. “The corporate tax rate here is reeeeeeeeallly low. Especially if you’ve saved the place from alien invasion. At which point it drops to zero. …If not lower.”

Nita’s mouth dropped open.

“Why are you looking so shocked? You cosigned the incorporation documents when we were here last.”

Being reduced to speechlessness around Carmela was hardly a new experience for Nita, but this particular incidence was setting new records for the underlying implications. “But I thought— Wait. You said that—”

“Nonono, wait just a minute! Look there. Is that what I think it is?”

“Uh,” Nita said, and peered ahead, her mind only half on whatever she was supposed to be looking for. The corridor up that way was fairly busy, full of aliens of all shapes and sizes. But after a second she thought she saw what Carmela was looking at, a dark-colored conical shape, hard to see clearly through the throng. “That tall thing sticking up? The green one— Oh. It’s a Demisiv—!”

“In a baseball cap!” Carmela said, and accelerated away.

…And so it was. Nita went after her, shaking her head and grinning. What are the odds, she thought, that one of my favorite wizardly houseguests should just happen to be passing through here while we’re here too? But the odds didn’t really come into it when you balanced them against the wizardly truism that there were no such things as coincidences. Or rather, when something that looked like a coincidence turned up, it was usually a sign from the Powers that Be that you should start paying attention: almost always, something else was going on.

Nita got caught up with Carmela after a few moments. “This is so perfect,” Carmela was saying, confident that Nita was right behind her. “See that, this was an absolutely great idea, we’d have missed him if we didn’t have the scoots!”

That was probably true. Within a few moments they were close enough that when Carmela started waving her arms and shouted across the crowd, “Hey, is that my shrub?!”, Nita could even through the intervening crowd see all those fir-tree-like branches of Filif’s arch up, as if in surprise, and then start waving back as if a wind had shaken them.

And it took only a few moments more before the two of them had hopped off the scoots and were elbowing their way through the remaining crowd in an impromptu contest to be the first one to hug their fellow wizard. Nita came from behind in the last couple of meters and just barely beat Carmela there.

It was always a little interesting hugging Filif, as you wound up getting a face full of something that felt like pine needles, even though the scent more closely resembled something like cinnamon instead of the kind of cool, green smell you might associate with a conifer. “You are so well met,” Filif was saying, “what a fine surprise, but what are you two doing here without my knowing about it? I’d thought the Knowledge would have alerted me that you were within physical-meeting range.”

“Might ask you the same question!” Nita said. The instrumentality that managed the wizards’ manuals (and the many other ways that the Art’s practitioners accessed spells and other wizardly data) would normally notify you, if you’d asked it, as to the presence in your physical neighborhood of other wizards with whom you’d worked. Nita had a good number of these alerts embedded in your manual, not least for those wizards who (however briefly) had lived in her basement. “Should’ve had a notifier go off.”

“Well, I only just got here,” Filif said. “Just out of the gate, in fact. Maybe that’s the problem. Anyway, the Master and I have business—some Interconnect Project details to sort out: I’ve been doing liaison work for the Demisiv side of the Project Authority.” He rustled a little, half-turning as Nita let go of him (and Carmela did not), and all the eye-berries on the free side of him glowed a little brighter as he tried to peer through the crowd. “He must’ve been delayed—he was in some other meeting, and said it might keep him a bit late.”

“Well, never mind that,” Carmela said, hugging him again—or still—and then letting him go. “Your business business can wait. And if he’s coming along to find you, good! Two birds with one stone.”

Filif half-turned in the other direction, and looked around him with more of his eyes. “Not sure I see any birds,” he said, sounding dubious. “Or for that matter, stones.”

Nita laughed. Sometimes the wizardly Speech did fairly well at translating human idiom, but sometimes it completely failed. “She means she wants to talk to both of you at once.”

“Well, that’s certainly preferable to hominid-on-avian violence,” Filif said. “Ah, now, here he comes. Not so delayed, then.”

Nita peered around her, not bothering to look up, because there wouldn’t have been any point in trying to see the Master of the Crossings over the heads of any crowd: when he was moving at any speed, he moved low. To her own amusement, though, it was the sound of lots of sharp little legs clicking and clattering against the smooth floor that told her which way to look (in this case, behind her). Nita turned and saw him coming, and grinned, and as he caught sight of her through the crowd that parted before him, Sker’ret was already half rearing up so that his front three pairs of legs were off the ground and the head with all those stalked eyes was on a level with Nita’s. She held her arms open, and when he more or less crashed into them, she grabbed him and hugged him to her and thumped his dorsal carapace. “Sker’!”

“Our saviors return,” Sker’ret laughed in her ear. “It’s been forever.”

“It’s been last week,” Nita said. “Getting amnesic from overwork?”

“No, I mean when the two of you were last here together.”

“Two weeks then. Maybe three.”

“Pedant,” Sker’ret said affectionately, gave her a squeeze and let her go.

“And what about me?” Carmela demanded. “You’re late for my daily dose of alien snuggles!”

“And whose fault is that? Anyway, you’re the alien.”

“No surprise at this sudden appearance then, my cousin?” Filif said.

“Excuse me?” Sker’ret said as he headed for Carmela. “I am the Master of this facility, coz. Of course I knew she was here: she’s got a facility-independent wizardly tracker routine associated with her. How else can I find her in a hurry if more invaders arrive and we need saving?”

“My favorite stalker,” Carmela said, and hugged Sker’ret as if hugging giant purple metallic centipedes was the most normal thing in the world. Which, for her, it naturally was.

“And why does her tracker work better than the Knowledge-based routines you’ve got hooked up to me?” Filif said, bending over in a sort of half-bow to Sker’ret so that they could brush their upper limbs together.

“Because she can do a lot more damage in a much shorter time than you routinely would,” Sker’ret said.

Carmela burst out laughing. “Oh, Sker’, you say that like it was a bad thing!”

“So tell us,” Filif said. “What damage are you contemplating now?”

“We’re having a Christmas party. And both of you are invited.”

All Filif’s berries on the side facing Sker’ret, and all Sker’ret’s stalked eyes, exchanged a bemused glance.

“And Christmas would be what?” Sker’ret said. “Is it a holiday of some sort?”

“Don’t you remember? Remember how excited Filif got about this?”

“Um…” Sker’ret was making a kind of thoughtful null sound that even in a Rirhait perfectly communicated a sense of I don’t want you to feel hurt but due to being really busy I have no idea what you’re talking about at the moment.

“Fil,” Carmela said. “Explain it to him. Remember that time of year we told you about, the last time you came visiting? The time of year when we bring trees into the house and decorate them?”

Filif looked astounded. “Wait. This is that time? Then what are you doing here? Mostly your folk are with family at such times, I thought!”

“No no no, it’s not right this minute!” Carmela said. “Fifty days or so yet. Hold still.” She reached into her shoulderbag and came out with a small sleek tablet. “How’s your schedule around JD 2455550.52…?”

“Well, let me check…”

“I’m free,” said Sker’ret immediately. “One or another of my relief people can take those shifts for me. Powers forbid I should miss a party of yours!”

Nita wanted to start shouting practical, sensible things like No, wait, this is all going way too fast, are you nuts…? But she took a deep breath, stood there hating Thanksgiving enough to be willing to think about anything else, especially when it involved going straight on past it, and peered over Carmela’s shoulder at the tablet. “That’s really gorgeous. Where’d you get that?”

“It’s part of her detached staff package,” Sker’ret said. “Didn’t you get yours, Nita? I’ll see that it comes to you.”

“Okay, Sker’, thanks,” she said. “What day is that?” Nita said to Carmela.

“December 20th,” Carmela said. “And hey, the next day is the Winter Solstice. Very symbolic!” she said to Filif, elbowing him somewhere among his fronds and needles. “We’re having a sleepover on Almost The Longest Night! We can stay up all night and watch movies and eat popcorn and all kinds of things.”

“Mela,” Nita said. “Your mama and pop… you haven’t even asked them yet!”

“They’ll say yes,” Carmela said, waving a hand. “We’re going to do it exactly the way you did yours when Sker’ and Fil came to visit the first time. Elective-access ‘puptent’ accesses in the basement….”

“I can always spare powering structures for ten or twenty of those,” Sker’ret said. “Let me know what you need. If the party’s heavily attended we can always install a temporary secondary gating hub like the one in your closet.”

Nita rubbed her eyes for a moment. It’s always possible they will say yes right off the bat… And certainly since she became a wizard, stranger things had happened.

Carmela was talking to Filif a mile a minute about popcorn garlands and boughs of holly and snow and Christmas cookies. “And a star, Fil, an actual star for the top of you instead of a baseball cap…”

“But I like my baseball cap!” The protest didn’t have a lot of energy behind it: Filif was already starting to shake with excitement.

“Just a temporary thing. Something festive! For the season. And lights, Fil, all colors of lights, and glass balls and ribbons and…”

If she does get her mom and pop to say yes to this, Nita thought, this is going to be amazing. And it’s been such a crazy year. I could use some amazing right about now…

“Sker’,” Nita said very softly, watching the armwaving continue and Filif’s delighted, excited vibrations increase. “Tell me something.”

“Anything.”

“Remember that paperwork I cosigned with Mela when we were here last, after Mars…?”

“Yes?”

“Is it possible…” Nita’s mouth went dry. She tried swallowing, had to work at it. “…that as far as the intergalactic community is concerned, I’m, uh, one of the people who… rules the Earth?”

Sker’ret burst out in one of his ratchety laughs. “What? Rules? Oh, no! Not at all.”

“Okay, that’s a relief,” Nita said. “Good.” And she sagged a little.

“But you are on the governing board.”

Nita’s mouth dropped open again. Then she closed it, because she simply could not find a reply.

“We should go,” she said after a moment. “You two have business, and we’ve got a guest list to write.”

“Of course. I’ll let you get on with it. And we’ll see you at your place again! This is going to be so exciting. In… fifty days?”

“Sounds about right,” Nita said.

There was more hugging, and then Filif and Sker’ret took themselves off down the concourse. Carmela kicked her hoverscoot back into levitation mode, climbed aboard, and said to Nita, “So that’s settled. Come on, Neets, we’ve got the far end of the concourse to look over…” And off she went, already humming “Feliz Navidad… Feliz Navidad… Prospero Ano y Felicidad…”

This is going to be interesting, Nita thought. “Mela, wait up!”

“I want to wish you a merry Christmas… I want to wish you a merry Christmas… from the bottom of my oooh wow look at that!”

Nita sighed and scooted after her.

 ***

Of course, even when you’re a wizard, getting the basic permissions settled for a house party for an indeterminate number of wizardly or wizard-friendly guests isn’t necessarily that easy.

In the Rodriguezes’ living room a man was sitting in the easy chair closest to the entertainment system, with a tabloid newspaper open in front of his face. In front of him, sitting crosslegged on the floor in a position that was supposed to read as subordinate, and wearing what was meant to be a winsome smile, was his younger daughter.

“Daaaaddyyyyy…”

“I just got home, Carmela. From a shift that felt three hours longer than it really was. During which every single machine I touched found a new and interesting way to screw up.” Kit’s pop worked with the printing-press machines at the big Long Island newspaper, and since the operation had gone digital, he had been complaining more or less nonstop about the crankiness of the new equipment he worked with compared with the beautiful, reliable old printing presses of old. Kit had told Nita often enough that her dad had complained just as hard and as constantly about the old printing presses, way back when, but this didn’t seem to be a good time to remind anybody of that. “My head is aching, even my ears are aching, and the aspirin hasn’t kicked in yet, so if we could, you know, let this wait half an hour…”

“But all you have to do right now is say ‘yes’ and then it’ll be quiet!”

The newspaper behind which Juan Rodriguez was presently concealing himself rustled in a very brisk way. “Let’s try it the other way around, shall we? Let’s try having the quiet now, and then maybe the ‘yes’ will happen later!”

“Okay, right on time, that was the appeal to reason,” Kit said in Nita’s ear. They were lurking in the kitchen, pretending to be getting something to eat while listening to the conversation through the pass-through window between the kitchen and the living room. ”Let’s see if she’s buying it.”

“Seriously, pop-pop, it won’t be a big deal! I’m going to take care of all the food and drinks myself, and I’ll clean the house, before and after—”

“Uh oh,” Kit said, very low. “Reverting to what she used to call him when she was eight. Helpless baby daughter and responsible cleaner of the house? Not a good match.”

“That we’re having this discussion right now tells me that it’s a big deal already,” Kit’s pop said. “And that I should be wondering just why you’re leaning on this so hard. And whether I should go off the whole idea right now, so as not to indulge your instant gratification issues.”

“But daaaaaaaddy—”

Kit rolled his eyes at Nita. “Nope, logic’s the only thing that could have saved her there…”

The newspaper being held up between Juan and his middle daughter dropped just long enough for her, and the two in the kitchen, to get a glimpse of eyes that were rather dangerously narrowed. “Answer hazy,” Kit’s pop said, rather pointedly, “ask again later.” And he went back behind the newspaper again.

Carmela picked herself silently up off the floor and swanned off toward the back of the house and the stairs to her bedroom in a manner that just narrowly avoided being a flounce.

Nita and Kit turned their attention back toward the sandwiches that they were theoretically constructing. Nita hadn’t actually gotten much further than the bread. “How’s this going, you think?” she said, very low.

“Hard to tell,” Kit murmured, opening a cupboard and pretending to rummage around in it. “Sometimes she gets a lot of mileage out of the ‘I’m your favorite daughter’ thing. Some days, nothing at all. Especially when he starts thinking about her and Helena being in college.”

“Tuition,” Nita said, and groaned under her breath.

“Student loans,” Kit said. “It’s a good thing she’s just going to SUNY. But this still looks like a ‘nothing at all’ day.”

“Don’t think I don’t hear you two lurking in there!” Kit’s pop said.

“Not lurking, pop,” Kit said. “Nita’s getting a sandwich. She didn’t have time to eat anything at the Crossings.”

“Because we were busy meeting with the friends who’re going to come!” Carmela said, swinging back into the living room and flopping down onto the nearby couch, where she lay staring at the ceiling in a vaguely hopeless way.

“Who you want to have come,” her pop said, “and who you really should thought about not wanting to disappoint before you issued an invitation that you don’t know if you’re going to be allowed to fulfill!” He turned a page, and the paper rustled quite hard.

“Uh oh, the getting-permission-first thing,” Kit murmured.

“Yeah,” Nita murmured back, “I hit her with that. Didn’t count for much at the time. She was too buzzed.”

“If she’s smart, she won’t push him…”

Possibly realizing this, Carmela merely made a little disappointed moaning sound and went quiet.

“Anyway, there’s plenty of time to think about this,” Kit’s pop said. “It’s not even Thanksgiving yet.”

“But some of the guests need time to get their schedules sorted because they’ll be coming such a long way. Ireland! Germany!”

“16 Aurigae,” Nita added helpfully.

The newspaper rustled again, and this time the right-hand page twitched aside just enough for Nita to catch a glimpse of Kit’s pop’s eyes looking toward her over the tops of his reading glasses. “Sixteen what?”

“Aurigae. It’s a star about two hundred and thirty light years from here,” Nita said. “An orange giant.”

“About two hundred and thirty?” Kit’s pop said.

“Give or take,” Nita said. “That’s where Filif comes from.”

“So this is one of the three who stayed in your basement in their little holes in the wall,” said Kit’s mama as she appeared through the door on the far side of the living room that led to the back bedrooms.

“Elective access gated spaces,” Kit said. “Puptents, we call them. They don’t take up any space in our space: just somewhere else. It’s like taking your home with you, a little.”

His mama leaned on the passthrough’s shelf. “And the one we’re discussing, 16 Aurigae Guy—? This is the one who looks like a Christmas tree?”

Nita raised her eyebrows at Kit. His mother had always seemed to have the superpower of being able to hear—or overhear—any conversation that took place under the Rodriguezes’ roof, no matter how far away she was in the house. Sometimes it was really useful, and sometimes it was a pain in the butt, but Nita had learned to deal with it.

“He’s a Demisiv,” Nita said. “That’s both the planet and the species. They’re carbon-based like us, but they evolved… really differently.”

“To wind up looking like they do, I’d imagine so.”

Nita shrugged. “They’re related to trees the same way we’re related to the tetrapods.” She noticed Kit’s pop giving her a slightly confused look from behind the paper, and added, “You know, one of those fish species that got out of the water a long time ago, developed legs out of their fins and started walking around. There’ve been a lot of branches in the evolutionary tree between them and us. Same number of branches, pretty much, between Filif and his species’ ancestors.”

“A lot of water under the bridge for his people, then,” Kit’s pop said.

“Five hundred million years,” Kit said, “give or take.”

“Huh,” said Kit’s pop: a neutral sort of sound. He went back behind the paper again, turned another page.

Kit’s mama came into the kitchen and stood still in front of the stove for a few seconds, giving the cooktop a long thoughtful look. “Spaghetti and meatballs?” she said.

“Sounds good, Mama.”

“Then don’t overdo the sandwiches, you two.” Kit’s mama got down on one knee and started going through the cupboard under the counter: Kit and Nita moved to either side to get out of her way. “So what else does Mr. Christmas Tree Wizard do besides get all excited over the thought of being decorated?”

“He’s been working with the authorities at the Crossings as a go-between for the Interconnect Project,” Nita said. “The Demisiv have been a big part of the Project for a long time. It’s a group of species who specialize in long-distance intergalactic transit: keeping it running, helping people get around. They also do emergency work… help move populations who have to find new worlds to live on, because their stars have blown up or they’ve had planetary natural disasters or whatever.”

“So… kind of a humanitarian organization?”

That wasn’t a comparison Nita had thought to make. “Yeah,” she said.

“For a whole lot of values of ‘human,’” Kit added.

Kit’s mama didn’t say anything for a moment, just kept looking around in the cupboard. “Juan,” she said, “are we out of spaghetti again?”

“There’s fettucini…”

“It’s not the same.” She got up, sighing, and opened an upper cupboard. “Okay, we’ll do it with fusilli. But you said you were getting spaghetti on the way back from work…”

The paper rustled. “Sorry. My head was killing me and I just wanted to get home.”

“Well, tomorrow then.”

“I’ll make a note.”

Kit’s mama rummaged around for a big pot and started filling it with water. “Well,” she said while the faucet was running. “He sounds like a good influence. One thing, though.”

Kit and Nita looked at each other. “Yeah?”

“Is your friend a needle-shedding type?”

“Not that I’ve ever noticed,” Kit said.

“The occasional berry,” Nita said. “But only when he’s in trans.”

Kit’s mama put her eyebrows up. “Doesn’t sound like a problem,” she said. She put the pot on the stove and turned on the heat under it. “How many people are we talking?”

“We’re still working that out,” Nita said. “Wanted to get the okay from you first.”

“You did, at least,” Kit’s mama said, and flashed a grin at Nita.

Nita did her best to produce a We-are-so-busted expression that would acknowledge the realities of the situation without assigning blame to any specific party. Kit simultaneously looked elsewhere and looked innocent.

“And this is supposed to be a one-night sleepover? On the twentieth?”

“That’s right,” Kit said. “We wouldn’t be up here all that much. Mostly in the puptents: there’ll be more room.”

Nita heard another newspaper page turn, but purposely didn’t look that way, because Kit’s mama was doing so.

A second passed. “The carol-singing thing’s the night after,” Kit’s mama said. “Don’t forget.”

“We won’t,” Kit said.

His mama headed out of the kitchen and through the living room again. ”Just try to keep the other collateral damage to a minimum, yeah?” she said to Carmela as she passed by the couch. “It wouldn’t be good to freak the neighbors.”

“At least any more than they have been already,” muttered Kit’s pop from behind the paper.

“Oh Mama thank you!” Carmela shrieked and bounded up off the couch to grab her and hug her as she passed through.

“Don’t thank me,” said Kit’s mama. “Thank your Pop.”

The logic of this might not have been instantly obvious to the casual bystander, but Nita had seen enough of these family discussions at Kit’s house to understand that with his folks, parental consensus was often reached by some mechanism she didn’t understand and probably wasn’t meant to. “Thanks, Mr. Rodriguez!” Nita immediately said over the noise of Carmela diving past the newspaper, seizing her Pop and covering his face with smooches.

“You’re welcome,” Kit’s pop said as soon as Carmela let him loose and more or less went dancing out of the living room and up the stairs to get her tablet and start making notes and plans.

Kit’s pop shook his head, shook the paper back out into something like a readable configuration, and went back to his reading. As he did, Kit turned to Nita and said silently, She just lay there with her sad face on and let us run interference for her, didn’t she!

Yep, Nita said. She owes us one.

Good, Kit said. And meanwhile… “Looks like we get to have a party!”

A second later the sound system up in Carmela’s room fired up with a raucous British-accented voice more or less screaming over a noisy drum solo, “It’s CHRIIIIIIIIIIIIISTMAAAAAAAAS!!”

Nita snickered. “Ronan,” she said, “has a lot to answer for…”

*** 

An hour or so later, Nita was upstairs in Carmela’s bedroom, sprawled in her desk chair with her manual open in her lap, while Carmela was lying on her stomach on her bed and scribbling notes in her tablet at about a mile a minute. That thing must have some handwriting recognition program, Nita thought. But then, it’s Crossings tech… it would have.

Having gotten the “yes” from their folks, Carmela was now acting oddly at a loss, as if she’d secretly expected to be turned down and now wasn’t sure what she should be doing. “Decorations,” she was muttering.

Nita glanced up at that. “I thought you decided you were going to use your normal ones.”

“What? Oh. Not for Filif! For the house.”

“We’ve got lots of time yet to think about that.”

“Not if we don’t want to miss the holiday rush! The sooner the better. Anyway, the stuff’s starting to turn up in the stores already anyway…”

Nita sighed, as that was all too true. “Still.”

“And another thing,” Carmela muttered, hurriedly flipping over virtual pages in her tablet and starting to make another set of notes. “Allergies. Food allergies…”

She can plan an invasion and not turn a hair, Nita thought, but she can’t stay focused on a guest list? This really is a big deal for her. “Mela, you’re coming at this backwards.”

“Huh?”

“Guest list first. Food allergies later.”

“I’m just trying to get ahead of things…”

“Right now the only one you’re getting ahead of is yourself. Deep breath!”

Carmela took it, though for some moments she seemed reluctant to let it out again.

“Mela!” Nita said. “Relax.”

She let that breath out with some difficulty. “I just want it to be nice for him,” Carmela said. “He’s so special… and I don’t want him to be disappointed.”

Her first alien crush, Nita thought, and just smiled. “He won’t be,” she said. “You know him. Always ready for something new, and in love with it when it arrives, whatever it is.”

“And oh gosh, he’s going to need something to root in. Maybe one of those custom compounds they’ve got at the Demisiv sleepstore at the Crossings…”

“Mela!” Nita said. “Daddy just puts him in the flower bed when he turns up. With maybe some bark chips! So later for custom bedding. Guest list!”

Carmela let out another heavy sigh and turned to a clean “page.” “Guest list,” she said.

Nita stretched in the chair and glanced down at her manual. She’d long since told the list of active wizards she knew personally to arrange itself to the front of the main directory. Now she started paging through that section, checking people’s public calendars, where available, against the sleepover / party dates. “So. Filif.”

“Goes without saying.”

“Sker’ret.”

“Ditto.”

Both of them paused then, thinking of one of the original puptent group who would not be there: Roshaun. More or less in unison, they sighed.

“Yeah,” Carmela said. “Well. …You and me and Mom and Pop and Dairine and your Dad and Kit.”

“Uh huh.”

“And Spot.”

“Right.”

“Ronan.”

“Mmm,” Carmela said. Nita glanced at Carmela with amusement, not entirely sure whether the sound was simple acknowledgement or approval. Ronan wasn’t particularly forthcoming about how he actually took Carmela’s more or less continuous flirting with him, but Nita noticed that he never really came out and told her to stop it.

And having mentioned Ronan and Kit in the same breath, naturally the next thought was—

“Darryl?” Carmela said, beating Nita to it.

“I don’t know.” Nita looked over his listing in the manual. “He’s showing availability, but that might just be for errantry. The dates are starred, and the star says ‘subject to preparedness issues.’”

“Meaning he’ll bow out if he feels overstimmed.”

“Well, sure. But the whole holiday time might be iffy for him. We were talking a couple weeks ago and he told me that as far as his personal well-being goes, and the way he’s been doing better at managing it, he’s been trying not to freak his parents out too much. Trying to break them in gradually.”

Carmela snorted with laughter. “Darryl?”

Nita smiled. In the matter of handling his autism, as with his handling of nearly everything else, it was hard to imagine Darryl doing anything “gradually”. These days he tended to jump in enthusiastically with both feet and then deal with the fine details as they came up. “He told me at one point,” Nita said, “that he was thinking about trying to get his parents to perceive wizardry as just a new way to be non-neurotypical.”

“If anyone can do that, he can,” Carmela said. “So if he’s trying to ease them into the idea that the holidays are less of a chore for him these days and he doesn’t need all that supervision, maybe we should just let him decide what to do about this? Put him down for ‘maybe yes maybe no’ and let him get back to us?”

“Yeah. If he needs to blow us off, he will and he won’t feel guilty about it.”

Carmela scribbled for a moment. Nita stretched, propping her feet up on Carmela’s desk and thinking. “S’reee…” she turned a page in the manual.

Carmela looked up. “Um. How do you invite a humpback whale to a sleepover?”

“The usual way! You put her in a people suit.”

Carmela blinked. “Oh. Yeah.”

“Especially because it’s easier for S’reee than for most whales. When she got hurt that time and I healed her, we got blood-tied. So she has less trouble shapechanging to human these days, the way I have less trouble going whale when I need to.”

“Oh.”

“But no,” Nita said with some regret. “Says here she’s on sabbatical right now. Personal leave.”

“For what?”

“Uh, the manual won’t say. It’s one of those confidentiality things. But I suspect it’s about private time with her honey.”

“Her what??”

“She’s dating. A very nice bull from up around Vancouver somewhere. He’s a food critic.”

“A what??”

“You want to know where the best North Atlantic krill is,” Nita said, “Hwii’ish is your go-to guy.” It had taken her a while to understand that all the Earth’s oceans throbbed with a vast network of cetacean communication, a sort of sonic version of the Internet; and that Hwii’ish was essentially a foodblogger, and fairly famous among his own kind. But he didn’t care about fame: what he was interested in was wizards, most specifically S’reee. “But who knows?” Nita said. “Send her an invite anyway. She might be able to get away.”

Carmela made a note.

“Tom and Carl?”

“For a sleepover?”

“Huh? Oh, no, just for the evening party.”

“Sure, if we can get them.” Nita flipped from Tom’s page to Carl’s. “It lists them as ‘on call’, but they might be able to get away.”

“The Twychild?” That was Tran Liem Tuyet and Tran Hung Nguyet, a special kind of twin, both of them favorites of Nita’s from the big group they’d met up with during the Pullulus War.

“Uh, they’re greyed out then. Maybe a family thing? It doesn’t say.”

“Okay. We should have two different invites, maybe? One for people we’d like to see but we don’t know if they can make it, one for those whose calendars say they’re free.”

“Makes sense.”

“What about Matt?”

“Who— Oh, the Aussie guy! Yeah, can’t miss a chance to watch him pester Ronan about how grateful he should be for Matt saving his life.”

“And Ronan really is grateful but he makes this big song and dance about not caring…”

“He’s free.”

“Good. Sleepover list. …Rhiow and Hwaith and their bunch?”

Nita turned pages. “Uh, no. ‘Emergencies only.’ It’s a bad time for them, the North American gates are crazy busy at the holidays, and they still always malfunction even when a full team of gate techs are riding herd on them.”

“We’ll save Rhiow some of that cream she likes,” Carmela said.

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” Carmela stared at the tablet. “Any of the Mars-team guys? Kit likes them a lot.”

Nita nodded. “Um, yeah. What’s his face? The tall one. The German guy who Doesn’t Drive Tanks.”

“Marcus,” said Carmela, and made a note. While the Mars investigating team had been hunting for the planet’s lost kernel, and any hint of what had happened to the (then so-called) Old Martian species, Marcus—who besides being a wizard with a linguistics specialty also drove armored personnel carriers for the German Army—had lectured anyone who’d hold still on the essential difference between vehicles with wheels and vehicles with tracks. You got a sense that he had to spend a lot of time with people who were unclear on the concept, and so he tended to be proactive about it.

“Looks like he’s free until the 24th,” Nita said.

“Okay. Who else have we got from Mars? What’s her name with the curls?”

“Lissa?…Uh, no, she’s grayed out. Shame, I like her, she’s nice. Maybe next time.”

They both sat quiet, thinking for a moment. “Mamvish?” Carmela said then.

“Wow, if we could get her…!” Nita flipped a page, studied the manual. “’On errantry, unavailable except for emergencies.’ Well, no surprise there.” The Species Archivist to the Powers that Be was in demand all over the Galaxy, all the time.

Carmela sighed. “Shame. But then she wouldn’t like this time of year, this far north. No fresh tomatoes…”

“We’ll catch her in the summer, if we’re lucky.”

Nita stretched again. “Anyway, that sounds like a good number. How many is that now?”

“Uh, let me count.” Carmela was silent for a moment. “For the party, sort of sixteen? If everyone shows up. For the sleepover, eleven? Again, if everyone’s able to make it.”

Nita nodded. “Good crowd. Should be fun.”

Carmela sat up, touched the tablet in a couple of places and typed busily for a minute or two. Then she looked over at Nita. “Last minute thoughts?”

“None right now. Probably I’ll have one the minute you send the invites out.”

“We’ll see.” Carmela typed a last few words and then hit a spot on the tablet with one finger. The tablet chimed.

“All gone out?”

Carmela nodded, tossed the tablet to one side and rolled over on her back in a good simulation of a collapse for someone who was already lying down. “I,” she announced, “am exhaaaauuuuuuusted!”

“And you haven’t even done anything yet,” Nita said.

“Excuse me! I sent the invitations!”

Nita snickered. And then, without warning, a chill ran down her spine. She shivered.

Carmela saw it. “What?”

“Well,” Nita said. “Except for the food and the drinks and the decorations and some little presents for everybody, we have only one thing left to worry about.”

“Oh?”

“The weather…”

 2:

Oh, The Weather Outside Is Frightful

Monday, December 20, 2010, 7:00 AM

Off to the left side of Nita’s head, her radio alarm went off. Eyes still closed, she stuck a hand out from under the covers and felt around until she found the button. The insistent buzzing stopped, leaving her with the faint sound of somebody from the local all-news station talking in a cheerful tinny voice about lane closures on the Major Deegan Expressway.

She opened her eyes. It was still very dim in the room. Winter mornings weren’t exactly her favorites: she hated getting up when it was still dark.

Nita sat up in bed, rubbed her eyes. Is the sun even up yet? she wondered.

7:16, said Bobo from somewhere in the back of her head.

“Thanks,” Nita said, and rubbed her hands up and down her arms. It was chilly: the central heating hadn’t come on yet, and in weather as cold as it had been the last few days, even a flannel nightie couldn’t do a lot for you once you got out from under the covers. Shortest day tomorrow, she thought. Longest night… “And an eclipse of the moon,” she said aloud.

While that’s true, Bobo said, I wouldn’t quote you long odds on seeing it.

Nita got out of bed and went straight to the closet for the beat-up wooly-chenille bathrobe she favored on mornings like this. “Well, yeah, probably going to be too busy…”

That’s not the problem.

“Oh?” Nita said, and went to the back window to tilt the Venetian blinds open.

The back yard looked someone’s old black and white photograph of a winter scene: softly lit in a shadowless dove-gray, the dark shapes of bare shrubs and leafless trees seemed charcoal-sketched against an indistinct background barely visible in the pre-dawn twilight. But what was slightly visible now in that grayness was movement; a gentle down-sifting of light near the window. Ever so lightly, ever so slightly, it had begun to snow. There was maybe an inch of it on the ground already.

Nita smiled a little to see it. Snow for Christmas…

But possibly, Bobo said, a little more than you might have had in mind.

“Oh?”

You’ll want to check your manual… but we have incoming.

“Uh, okay.” It was unusual to hear Bobo sound quite so concerned.

Nita picked the manual up off her bedside table and went to do bathroom things, then headed downstairs to see if her dad had made tea yet. He had: and he was standing there in the kitchen dressed in his black cold-weather parka just finishing what was in his Mets mug. He looked tired and a little bleary, which was no surprise this time of year—the runup to Christmas was always crazy for florists. “You okay?” Nita said, getting a mug for herself and filling it from the pot.

“Yeah,” her dad said. “But God, am I getting sick of poinsettias.”

This was something that Nita had heard repeatedly for the last few weeks. “I don’t blame you,” she said. “When do you think you’ll be done today?”

“Probably five,” her dad said. “I don’t see any point in working late hours this week. I know what orders I’ve got due out and I’ve got enough time budgeted for them. If it gets busy toward the end of the day, Mikey can keep the shop open a little later. I don’t want to miss the excitement.” He smiled a little. “When do people start getting here again?”

“Not till about four,” Nita said, and yawned. “That’s when Filif’s coming: we’ll take him over to Kit’s and get him settled in. Or get Kit’s pop settled, anyway…”

“Not still nervous, is he?” said Nita’s dad. “I’ve told him once or twice already, you couldn’t ask for a nicer house guest. Should I call him and calm him down?”

“Might not be a bad idea, if you get a moment today.”

“Will do.” Her dad kissed her goodbye. “Tell Dairine I said to put the garbage out.”

“I’ll tell her.” And Nita made a small face, since telling Dairine to go anywhere near a garbage can was rarely all that effective. There were few chores she hated more.

Her dad headed out. After a few minutes she heard the car starting up, and (as it pulled out of the garage into the driveway) the snow tires whining and slipping in the new snow, even though her dad had salted the driveway last night. Wet snow, Nita thought. Whatever we get, it’ll stick. The thought of that snow piling up on Filif’s branches made her smile. Do they even get snow on Demisiv? she thought. I know so little about the place…

Something to look into. Meanwhile… She stretched. Breakfast. And then… Christmas!

***

She spent the first half of the day just puttering around the house and relaxing, rejoicing in not even having to look at the clock, despite the low-level buzz of anticipation already building inside her as time for the arrival of friends and guests got closer. It was the first real day of the holidays for her, the first weekday that Nita didn’t have to go to school, and wouldn’t have to go again until the first week in January; and the calm of it felt like heaven. Miraculously (or actually due to hard work and some forethought) she was all sorted out for her between-semesters work: no reports to write, no projects to agonize over. And nothing to procrastinate over, either! Or to get stressed over because you know you’re procrastinating. It was perfect.

…Well, nearly perfect. Every now and then the thought of the one person who wouldn’t be there for Christmas this year came up to meet her as she looked at some window decoration that wasn’t quite right and needed to be straightened, or some spot where another traditional Christmassy item—that glass bowl full of fake poinsettia flowers, the other bowl full of shiny ball ornaments—was dusty and needed attention. Nita kept waiting for one or another of these moments to turn into pain, and kept being surprised when they didn’t. It wasn’t that she didn’t miss her mom. Because I do, every day. It was just that for some reason, her sense that her mom was okay was stronger than usual. Initially Nita was tempted to spend more time trying to figure this out. But why? Why do I want to keep poking at it like a tooth where the filling fell out? Mom would tell me to let it be. So I will.

She had more tea, and after a while wandered upstairs to her bedroom again and put a few last wrapping- or ribbon-touches on a couple of gifts she’d picked up for other party guests. It wasn’t mandatory for people to bring each other things, but along the line she’d seen a thing or two that seemed right for one or another of the people who were coming. And there was one special gift that she kept stealing peeks at, half in admiration and half in nervousness that he wouldn’t like it. Finally, she laughed at herself—very softly, so as not to wake Dairine, who apparently still wasn’t up yet—and closed the little box. Then she felt around underneath her bed for the bedroom slippers with the waterproof soles, the ones that wouldn’t mind being out in the snow. What the heck, she thought, garbage is garbage, it needs to be out…

She pulled the full plastic bag out of the kitchen garbage pail and quietly went outside to where the big garbage cans sat next to the garage. The snow was still falling gently out of a solid gray sky, mostly straight down, in a persistent, purposeful kind of way. Only the occasional tiniest breath of breeze stirred it around and made it swirl as it came down. Then it straightened out again, doing a credible imitation of snow globe snow. I meant to look at that weather report, she thought, as she put the kitchen garbage in the big can, shook the snow off the garbage can lid, and quietly put it back in place. In a moment. Right now, despite the way the cold bit at her through her bathrobe and the flannel nightgown, Nita was quite content to stand in the snow—maybe two inches deep, now—and let the silence soak into her bones. There was no sound anywhere; even the normal traffic noise that would have drifted over from the nearby Southern State Parkway was completely muted.

She glanced down at the tracks her dad’s car had left in the driveway snow. They were already filling up again, and the salt underneath them didn’t seem to be having much effect. Nita briefly considered doing a small wizardry to talk the driveway into believing it was warmer than its surroundings so that the snow would stay melted. But is it really necessary? she thought. Sometimes it was harder for wizard to wait a little while and not spend energy that might not have actually been required to improve a situation. Then she grinned at herself. And maybe, she thought, I’m just feeling lazy. And every now and then, why not?

She went back in the house, took off the outside slippers and left but by the door to melt their snow off on the doormat; then found her other slippers which had somehow migrated to the dining room, put them on, and wandered into the living room. It was bright enough, even though no lights were on; the picture window was letting in that pale gray snow light, restful. Perfect to read by, she thought. She went upstairs very softly, pulled a book out of her to-read pile, went downstairs again into the kitchen for more tea, and curled up on the couch with the book and just read.

The next thing she knew the kitchen door was opening.Her dad had come home for lunch, and even two rooms over Nita could tell from the sound of the way he tossed his keys onto the kitchen counter that he was in a bad mood. Oh great, she thought, what’s this about?

She put the book down and picked up the empty tea mug sitting by her, and wandered into the kitchen. Her dad was staring into the refrigerator, scowling. Nita leaned around him and peered into his face. “What?”

“Don’t get me started,” he muttered.

“About what?”

“Football.”

Nita rolled her eyes. “Oh yeah, the miracle…”

“Not miraculous,” said her dad, and started rummaging around in the fridge a lot harder than he needed to.

Nita snickered. For her, the only sport of interest was baseball. But come the end of baseball season her dad normally started paying attention to football, for which Nita had no time whatsoever. Apparently the Philadelphia Eagles had played the Giants at the Meadowlands over the weekend and had abruptly come from behind in the last quarter to badly beat the Giants, her dad’s favorites. Now, every time he heard the local news teams on TV or radio referring to this as “the Miracle in the Meadowlands,” he positively growled.

“Daddy, you really want to shake this mood,” Nita said. “If Fil turns up here and sees you upset like this, he’s going to want to know why you’re upset! And then you’re going to have to explain football to him. And he always gets freaked when he thinks he hasn’t done enough research in something.”

“Well,” her dad said, and sighed. “I take it that on this visit your job is going to be explaining Christmas to him?”

“Well, he’ll have arrived doing the basic reading, you know that.”

Her dad laughed a little. “Not sure how basic basic is, but the subject can get complicated…”

“Tell me about it,” Nita said. And then the front doorbell rang.

Her dad glanced at her. “And you not dressed yet,” he said. “Let me get it. Probably it’s the first batch of kids wanting to shovel the driveway.” He went past her to answer the door.

Nita heard him open it, and then something unexpected happened; her dad started laughing. Curious, she went into the living room and peered around towards the door to see what was going on. Then she understood his surprise, because standing there in bright red ski coveralls and big boots and a parka and a woolly Christmas hat was Tom Swale, with a snow shovel over his shoulder.

“I don’t even know what the going rate for this is anymore,” Nita’s dad said, and laughed again, feeling around in his pockets. “Is five dollars enough, or has inflation hit this too?”

Tom roared with laughter. “Just leave that they are, Tom,” said Nita’s dad. “Come on in. Coffee?”

“No, it’s okay, I won’t be keeping you,” Tom said, leaning the snow shovel up against the side of Nita’s front porch underneath the mailbox. He stepped in the door that Nita’s dad held open for him, and all the snow obligingly fell off him before he crossed the threshold.

“You sure,” Nita’s dad said. “I mean, that trick has to be good for at least a ten if you’ll do it to the sidewalks and the driveway. Maybe we can come to some kind of arrangement.”

Tom followed her dad into the dining room,smiling at Nita. “It’s okay, Harry, I’m not shilling for business. At least, not this kind of business. I was just doing our sidewalk, and then it occurred to me to wonder whether Nita had seen the weather report, and I thought I’d just walk over and check.”

“Yeah,” Nita said. “Bobo did mention something about a storm coming.”

“The storm,” Tom said. “The snowstorm of the decade, if not the millennium… a category 2 nor’easter with snow. There won’t have been a snowstorm this powerful since the sixties, if our own weather forecasters are worth their salt. Even the non-wizardly forecasters are starting to get really concerned, and with reason. The temperatures are going to drop quite hard on the twenty-first, and the wind’s going to pick up. Blizzard conditions at the very least, and super-blizzard at worst.” He sighed. “A lot of us are having to change our schedules at the last minute, because all the local services are going to be under tremendous pressure and the going to need all the help they can get on this one, at least from wizards expert in handling this kind of weather.”

Nita followed them into the dining room and sat down with them. “Does that mean you won’t be able to make it to the party?”

“Oh, we’ll be looking in,” Tom said. “But we won’t be able to stay long.” And then he gave Nita an amused look. “The joke is that it turns out we wouldn’t have been able to stay very long anyway, because a few days ago the airline changed our flights to Banff and left us looking at an earlier departure.” He brushed a little ruefully at his ski coverall. “But now that’s not an issue. Here Carl and I were already to go to the snow, and all of a sudden it turns out the snow is coming to us. With a vengeance. So we canceled, and the slopes will have to wait for us until the new year.”

“Sometimes you just can’t catch a break,” Nita’s dad said.

“The Eagles,” Tom said. “Tell me.”

That made Nita’s dad laugh. “I’d have thought you guys would just try to push this storm away, though,” he said, “if it’s going to be so much trouble.”

Tom shook his head. “We don’t usually fight with the weather unless we have to. And even if you want to, with the biggest storms there’s almost no point; there’s so much kinetic energy already bound up in them that it’s like trying to stop an atom bomb. This one’s got its mind made up—it’s coming through. All we can do is try to mitigate the worst circumstances, help the emergency services quietly where helping won’t get noticed, and generally just make ourselves useful.”

Nita swallowed, because a thought had just occurred to her. “You don’t need any of us, do you?”

“That’s really thoughtful,” Tom said, “and the answer is, in a word, no. None of you are in the required specialty groups, and we’ve got plenty of people stepping up to handle this. So you enjoy your party. We’ll stop in sometime this evening for a while, have an eggnog, and then head out to do our thing.”

He got up, and so did Nita’s dad, walking him to the front door. “But Tom, if you change your mind about the driveway, let me know. We local small businessmen have to stick together…”

Their laughter mingled as the door closed. “I’ll let you know. See you two later.”

***

 A little while after hearing the doorbell, and just after their dad headed back to the shop, Dairine materialized in old jeans and an oversized sweater, demanding tea and food. For the time being Nita ignored this. “You have a late night last night?”

“Working out some software issues with Spot,” she said.

“Oh, really?”

“Don’t angle for details,” Dairine said rubbing her eyes. “Party stuff. You’ll find out. How did it get to be two o’clock already?”

“Ten of,” Nita said, glancing at the clock. But it was a fair question. “And you know what? I don’t care. Everything is moving in slow motion today, and I love it.”

Dairine flopped down at the dining room table and stretched. “For once we’re in agreement.”

“’For once,’” Nita said in good-natured mockery. It was interesting to notice that she and her sister had lately been in agreement a lot more than they used to. Maybe it’s the wizardry, Nita thought. And even if it’s not, I really don’t care why it’s happening. It’s better than fighting. “I took out your garbage,” she said.

“My garbage! It’s the garbage. I’m just the one who gets stuck taking it out.” Dairine wrinkled her nose.

“Doesn’t matter. You owe me one,” Nita said.

Dairine rolled her eyes as if in scorn at this bourgeois concept. “I’m not even up ten minutes and you’re trying to push your simplistic barter economy stuff on me? Please.” She got up and went to get some tea.

Nita laughed at herself. Well, that lasted five minutes. “Shower time,” she said, levering herself up out of the chair and heading upstairs. “Make another pot, okay?”

She didn’t even hear Dairine’s answer, and didn’t particularly care what she’d said. The tone of the day was remaining unbroken; slow and easy, building toward something good. That soft snow light was filling the upstairs hall from the window down at the end, and filling the bathroom too. Nita showered, then went and got changed into her party clothes—nothing dressy, just dark leggings and low black fluffy-lined elf-boots, and what Nita had started referring to privately as the Christmas Sweater of Doom. It was a ridiculous hairy angora-knit crewnecked construction adorned with fake Icelandic patterns in red and white, and scattered all over with revolting embroidered green yarn Christmas trees with little sewn-on Mylar ornaments. Kit had stumbled across the thing somewhere online and ridiculed it so mercilessly that Nita had decided she had to have it. It had taken entirely too much of her disposable income for that month, but it would be worth it for the look on his face when he saw it on her. And it’s going to be hilarious explaining it to Filif…

Nita glanced at the clock radio and realized to her shock that it somehow said three-thirty. Whoa, how’d that happen, she thought, where’d the time go all of a sudden! Maybe I had a little too much lazy. He’s going to be here soon…

She gathered up the goodie bag with her Christmas cards and small presents in it from where it had been sitting on her desk for a while. Then Nita headed downstairs, noting in passing the sound of Dairine thumping around in her room, apparently going through her drawers or her closet. Last-minute decisions, Nita thought, smiling as she headed down the stairs. Dair always tries to be so organized, but when it comes to clothes she can never make up her mind…

In the living room, Nita paused briefly, glancing around. The place looked tidy enough, so she didn’t have to worry about bringing anybody over if for some reason they needed to see something of hers. Fine, she thought. She headed into the kitchen, noted a few dishes in the sink, and stopped just long enough to wash the and put them in the rack. Then she grabbed her parka off the hook by the back door, threw it over the crazy Christmas sweater, and carefully headed out the back door, down the steps, and through the gate into the back yard.

The snow was deeper out here; she had to step carefully to keep the boots from getting wet. Nita looked around and saw that the silvery snow light was already getting a bit dimmer. Above that gray ceiling, sunset was already coming on. She paused by the tree growing out of the middle of the yard between house and the garden, and put a hand on its trunk. “You awake?” she said.

Liused’s answer took a few moments in coming. A little.

“Got a guest incoming,” she said. “Want to talk to him? Or if this is a bad time, he can stop by earlier tomorrow, when the light’s better.”

…Tomorrow might be best. In the morning?

Nita patted his trunk. “No problem,” she said. “I’ll talk to you then.”

She headed on down the garden—all the flower beds covered over with mulch or burlap bags this time of year, and those in turn covered with the new snow—and finally under the bare trees in the furthest part of the back yard, where the surface of the snow was patched and dappled with little lumps of it that had slid off the branches above. The stillness was very deep back here, and Nita just stood there a while, not caring how cold her feet were getting, and appreciated it.

Around her she thought she could almost see the sky’s light dimming moment by moment. Bobo, what time’s sunset?

Four thirty-one.

“I might not be imagining it, then,” she murmured. And then at the bottom of her vision, she caught sight of something unexpected: a glow under the snow, a sign of the embedded transit circle waking up. He’s early, she thought, stepping back.

A moment later a cold cinnamon-scented breeze blew in her face, and Filif was standing there, as suddenly as if a tree with its lowest branches demurely veiled in mist had suddenly grown on the spot.

He looked at Nita with all the berries on that side, while using the others to gaze up and around him. “Dai stiho, my cousin!”

“Dai, you,” Nita said, and stepped into the transit circle as soon as it had finished discharging, and buried her arms in among the fronds to give him a big hug.

It was at that moment that a light breeze sprang up. Nita felt the sparkle of breezeblown snowflakes on her cheek just a bare second before one of the trees above them let slip some loose snow on top of them.

They both laughed at that, and Nita reached up to brush Filif off a little. “I was early…” Filif said.

“I don’t care,” Nita said. “It’s so great to see you! This is going to be so much fun.”

“Where’s Kit?”

“Over at his place helping keep his folks calm. This is their first time to have a bunch of non-Solars over…”

“And they’re so kind to have me! I can’t wait for this.” He shivered with excitement.

At least Nita hoped it was excitement. “You know, I’ve never even asked you. Does it snow where you are? Do you even get winter?”

“What? Of course it snows,” Filif said. “Demisiv has a fairly pronounced axial tilt. And a lot of highlands. The climate’s temperate most of the year, but in the depths of the cold season we get quite big storms, sometimes. Normally no one’s too bothered. In the dark season a lot of people elect to go dormant and just wait it out. Others… stay more active, like to get around then.” He fell silent for a moment. “A long story.”

“But you’re okay with this?”

“Yes, of course.” He ruffled out his branches. “This feels quite homelike, actually. The temperature range isn’t far off.”

Nita paused. “This is possibly the most idiotic time possible to be asking you this,” she said. “But… are you okay with all this? Because you understand about the normal Earth Christmas trees now, don’t you. And where they come from. And what happens to them.”

Filif paused too. “Life is life,” he said. “But I did do my research before I came. Those lives have been brought about just for this purpose, haven’t they?”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“Well, I can feel that. So can they.” Filif rustled his branches as a little more snow fell on him from the branches above. “That being the case, we should allow them all the dignity of accepting what they’ve been destined for. And of knowing that they’re making the best of it: in some cases, not just with acceptance, but great joy.”

Nita nodded. “It seems a lot to ask of them…” Nita said.

“It’s not what you’re asking,” Filif said. “It’s what they’re giving. Gift is a powerful state from which to approach the world…”

Again there was that sense of what Filif was saying having come up from some great depth. But even when he was at his goofiest and most excitable, Nita had never had trouble feeling, at a slight remove, the underlying strength from which sprang everything Filif did and said, and in which he was powerfully grounded. When that power revealed itself in the middle of a wizardry, sometimes it took you by surprise. Nita wasn’t going to push the issue at the moment; if Fil had something that needed saying, explanations would be forthcoming soon enough.

“Anyway,” Filif said, “ you should relax. I’m not a newbie here these days: you don’t have to hide the salad bar from me any more.”

Nita burst out laughing. “Good!”

“And after all this time, I’m finally here to get decorated. So let’s get on with it!”

“Right,” Nita said. “Sker’ret’s put a receptor site out in Kit’s back yard to make transiting in easier for people.”

“Shielded, I take it, so as not to discomfit the neighbors…”

“Absolutely.” Nita walked them both back a step or two into the center of the transit circle. “You set?”

“Yes.”

“Then let’s go!”

 ***

A heartbeat later, the two of them came out in Kit’s backyard. “It’s going to be a zoo in there,” Nita said. “Carmela’s mama decided all of a sudden that she was not going to let her daughter mess around with her best tableware. She was going to set up the buffet herself.”

“If I didn’t know better,” Filif said, “I would suspect Carmela planned it that way in order to get her mother to do the heavy lifting.”

Nita snickered as she reached down to her charm bracelet for the empty-ring charm that held the simplest of several invisibility spells. “You know her too well,” she said as she pulled the bright Speech-tracery of the spell out of the charm, expanded it into a broad faintly-glowing network, and threw it over the top of the two of them. “Not that there’s all that much to do. Sker’ret had Crossings Catering transit the food in about an hour ago. It’s all in disposable serving trays and bins and things…”

They headed up across the snow-covered lawn of Kit’s back hard toward the house. “There’s no rush about installing the puptents,” Nita said. “Sker’s put in a hub to make the installation easier. Just plug your wizardry in, and the hub’ll do the rest.”

“He seems to have thought of everything,” Filif said.

“Happiest when he’s organizing,” Nita said, “that’s our Sker’.”

They went in the back door, through the kitchen. There were four or five pots on the stove, from which wonderful smells were arising: mulled wine, hot chocolate, hot cider. Christmas music was floating out of the living room: as a song finished and Nita heard a veejay’s voice, she realized that the TV had one of the big music video channels on. “You are going to hear every Christmas carol ever written before this is over,” she said to Filif, flipping the invisibility spell off them and collapsing it again.

“I take it that’s a good thing?”

“We’ll see what you think by this time tomorrow.”

They headed into the dining room. The table was covered silverware and napkins and cups and glasses, and a whole lot of food. Some of it was local—Nita immediately recognized Kit’s mama’s buffalo wings and the little deviled-egg and cream cheese and chilli hors d’oeuvres that she liked to do on crackers. But the rest was covered with human and alien-biology delicacies from the Crossings, everything carefully labeled. Nita made a private resolution to get back here as soon as she could and check out the details, as some of the food looked familiar, and if she didn’t move fast, Kit would shovel it all down his face before she got a chance.

“Come on, Fil,” Nita said, “come meet Kit’s pop and mama!” She pulled him around into the living room, having caught a glimpse of them in there through the passthrough; they were hanging a last few garlands up near the ceiling.

Nita pulled Filif over to them. “So here’s the guest of honor!” Nita said. “Juan Rodriguez,” Nita said, “Marina Rodriguez, this is Filifermanhathrhumneits'elhessaiffnth.”

Kit’s pop’s eyes went wide. He opened his mouth to respond, but before he could say anything Nita immediately added, “Everybody calls him Filif, so don’t even bother trying to pronounce the long version. It always takes me a couple of days to even remember how.”

“Estimable senior cousins,” Filif said, bowing, “thank you for your welcome.” And then he straightened up and offered Kit’s pop a long branch, and his mama another.

They both stared at these for a moment, and then took them. “Nice to meet you, Filif,” said Kit’s pop. “So nice!” said his mama.

“A pleasure on my part as well! I’m very excited about what’s going to happen.”

“Well, we’re excited to have you! And we’re glad you’re here finally,” said Kit’s pop. “It’s been so strange not having a tree already. It’s felt almost unnatural. But we’re good now.” He beamed at Filif. “You’re what… six feet easily, I’d say!”

Filif thought about that for a moment. “Yes, I’d say so,” he said. “And about five feet in diameter at the base.”

“It’s going to be unusual to have a Christmas tree that’s so cooperative,” said Kit’s pop. “But look, you should enjoy the party for a while first! We like to let it get good and dark before we start decorating… it’s more impressive, then, when the lights go on.”

“That’s fine,” Filif said. “What do you normally do at this point with a… locally acquired tree?”

“Well, first of all unwrap it outside — normally you bring it home wrapped up in webbing so the branches don’t get hurt. And after that, leave it outside for a little while to let it relax and help the branches find their right shape again.”

Filif rustled a little in agreement. “It makes sense,” he said. “If you like, perhaps I’ll go stand outside for a bit and get myself acclimatized.”

“Uh… won’t the neighbors see you?”

“Not at all,” said Filif. “Nita handled it when we came in, but I’m as good at being invisible as any other wizard There are lots of ways to do it. Once I stop moving, they’ll see a wrapped up tree sitting leaning against the side of your garage while you get the room ready.”

“There’s zero need for that,” said another voice. It was Dairine, wandering in out of the living room. She was in a long green silky top and darker green floppy pants, something Wellakhit if Nita was any judge. “Sker’ did a smart thing and shielded the whole back yard. The front’s open, but he did a selective visual wizardry with the windows: nobody human will be able to see any of the non-Solars through it, and the filter spoofs anything unaffected so it can’t be seen either.”

“Probably that’s a good idea,” said Kit’s mama. “Especially lately… Well, come on, Filif, what do you like to eat or drink? Or do you want to wait till you’ve come back in?”

“I think Sker’ret will have brought some rooting compound for me,” Filif said. “It’s what I’ll be standing in while decorated.” He shivered again, that excited gesture.

“It’s in the dedicated corner already,” came Sker’ret’s voice from the kitchen. “A big pot of that acid stuff you like, Fil.” And in came Sker’ret, apparently after a visit to one of the storage closets in the back of the house. He was walking on only a few pairs of legs, and with all the others he was carefully holding three other piles of serving plates above his upper carapace.

Nita had to turn and stare, fascinated. “I didn’t even know your legs hinged like that!” she called after him.

“Apparently they do,” said Sker’ret, and kept on going into the dining room.

“Where’s Kit?” Nita said.

“He’s upstairs changing,” Carmela said as she came wandering into the living room from the back of the house. She looked very much the Christmas hostess in a glittery red tunic top and red-and-white leggings with a very subdued candy-cane pattern on them, and low red boots to complete the effect.

“Fashion plate,” Nita said as Carmela grabbed Filif and hugged him, half vanishing into his branches and making some of his berry-eyes on either side of her pop a little.

“Yes, well, with such a special occasion you have to make a little effort,” Carmela said. “Kit’s doing his best but I don’t know if it’s going to be enough…”

Footsteps were coming down the stairs. “I heard that!” said Kit’s voice. “Just because some people can’t manage to find themselves a genuine collectors’ item like this…”

Kit came down into the living room, turning toward the group gathered there, his mouth open… and then stopped dead.

“Oh no,” Nita said, and started gasping with laughter. “Oh no!”  Because Kit was wearing black jeans and sneakers and a ridiculous hairy angora-knit crewnecked construction adorned with fake Icelandic patterns in red and white, and scattered all over with revolting embroidered green yarn Christmas trees with little sewn-on Mylar ornaments.

They stood there in shock, staring at each other as Kit’s mama and pop burst out laughing in unison. “You look like the Bobbsey Twins,” Kit’s mama said.

“Who?” said Kit and Nita in unison.

Mrs. Rodriguez threw a glance at her husband, then gazed briefly at the ceiling as if begging for help from some unseen source. “Generation gap,” she said. “Never mind.” She headed for the kitchen.

“I didn’t mean for you to buy it,” Kit said, “I meant for you not to buy it! So I’d be the only one having it.”

“Emailing me pictures of the thing was no way to get me not to buy it!” Nita said. “What am I, six?”

Dairine pushed past her toward the dining room, snickering. “No better than eight on a good day,” she said.

“Whatever you do,” said an Irish voice from that direction, “don’t change. Don’t either of you dare change.”

Nita turned. There, leaning in the dining room doorway, having apparently just arrived, was Ronan. He was in black, as usual… but for a change, surprisingly formal blacks. Trousers instead of jeans, shiny black brogues instead of goth boots, a very slim-fitting black shirt with black glitters in it, and to top everything off, a Santa hat in white and black.

Nita burst out laughing. “What are you supposed to be, some kind of dark ‘jolly old elf?’”

Ronan waggled his eyebrows. “Other people can worry about who’s nice. I prefer to concentrate on the naughty.”

“I don’t even want to know,” said Kit’s mama as she came back into the room with a tray full of glasses of hot cider. “Nita?”

Nita grabbed one. “You’re earlier than I thought you’d be,” she said to Ronan.

“Wanted to get out before it got too crazy. We’ve got weather like you’re going to get.”

That surprised Nita. “Can’t be the same system—”

“It’s not. Trust me, we don’t need your help to trigger major snow events! We’ve got Siberia.” Ronan wandered over to where some buffet trays had been laid out on one of the low living room tables and went picking among the crackers piled up there. “And we’re getting hammered. A foot on the ground already and lots more coming. Heathrow’s closed, Charles de Gaulle is closed, Frankfurt and Geneva were just shutting when I left.” He found a plate for his snacks. “In fact, most of Europe’s a mess. Every wizard who specializes in that kind of thing is out in the cold right now. So glad I’m not one!”

“Here,” said Kit’s mama, putting a glass of cider in Ronan’s hand. “Who else wants one?”

Nita had a long drink of the cider and felt the world seem to settle a little around her. Whatever spice mix Kit’s mama had worked out to use in the stuff, Nita never got tired of it. The next thing she knew she and Kit were laughing about their sweaters, and she was stealing snacks off a plate he was holding, and the room was getting fuller of people. Her dad showed up, and the next thing Nita knew he and Kit’s pop and Filif were discussing the best management of the electrical outlets for the lights they were going to be putting on him, and Kit’s mama was laughing in the kitchen with Dairine at something Spot had just done, and the entertainment system was showing what appeared to be an ancient rock star playing a guitar in the nude.

And Kit leaned over to Nita and said, “Anyway, I don’t know about you, but I’d say the party has begun…”

3:

O Tannenbaum

The place started descending into cheerful bedlam as more people arrived. Filif slipped out to get himself acclimated, as planned: Nita caught a glimpse of him, a tranquil shadow against the snow, as twilight set in. Tom and Carl turned up in their ski gear, to everyone’s amusement, and were immediately equipped with cider (as they were apparently about to go on duty: “Back for the mulled wine later, Marina,” Carl said, “you know we wouldn’t miss that for anything!”). Matt from Australia turned up, wearing jeans and a truly eye-hurting shirt covered with graphics of Christmas ornaments in Day-Glo colors. Tall rawboned Marcus with his Very Military Haircut arrived, actually in camouflage fatigues in Christmas colors, bringing chocolates for Kit’s mama…

The noise level in the house became amazing: gossip and laughter, some preliminary exchange of small gifts, a lot more drink making the rounds, a lot of food. Sker’ret seemed to have appointed himself catering manager, and was constantly going back and forth with buffet trays. “It’s all downstairs on the other side of one of the puptent accesses,” he said to Nita when he passed her once. “There’s a stasis field there holding everything at the right temperatures. All the other accesses are set up, don’t worry about those…” And he was off again for another tray.

The music channel playing on the entertainment system was bringing out the best in some of the guests. Ronan’s voice was lifted in song at one point and caused everyone to hold still in astonishment as he did a pitch-perfect, raspy singalong imitation of both the leads on the song that was playing. “They’ve got cars big as bars, they’ve got rivers of gold, | but the wind goes right through you, it’s no place for the old: | when you first took my hand on a cold Christmas Eve, | you promised me Broadway was waiting for me…”

Moments later Matt was next to him and singing in harmony. “And the boys of the NYPD Choir were singing ‘Galway Bay’, | And the bells were ringing out for Christmas Day…”

“We need them for the carol singing tomorrow night,” said Kit’s mama, sipping at her own mulled wine with a critical look. “Mmm, needs more cinnamon… Kit, take care of that, will you?”

“Do what I can, Mama,” Kit said as his mother headed back for the kitchen, and himself headed for another of the snack trays. Nita turned back to the gossip she’d been eavedropping on while pretending to watch the music video channel.

“—didn’t want to get into outside decoration, what with the kind of vandalism we’ve been getting lately,” Nita’s dad was saying.

“Five’ll get you ten I know who you mean. The Terror Twins….”

“Who?”

“The new next door neighbors’ kids,” Kit’s pop said, and sighed. “I could really, really wish the Liddles hadn’t had to move. I miss Dave. He was good company in the summer, at the end of a barbecue. Or most times, really.”

“I miss Roz,” said the voice from the kitchen. “She was such a great cook. I was learning things from her…”

There was a sort of communal sigh at that, audible even over the general noise. Kit’s mama knew her cooking skills were limited, and knew that everyone knew it, and was regardless entirely cheerful about it and always looking forward to improving them.

“So what happened there?” said Nita’s dad. “I remember hearing that Dave had some job offer, but I don’t know what else was going on.”

“Yeah. Some firm up in Seattle, I think. Washington state, anyway. It happened very suddenly. He spent most of the spring sending out resumes and got nothing: seemed like nobody needed anyone to do what he did. Repairs on these big computerized industrial printers. Then all of a sudden this one company hit on him, flew him out for an interview, and a week later, bang, deal done. They sold the house in an awful hurry… two weeks later they were gone.”

Kit’s pop made a face. “The new neighbors, the Chastellains… Rory’s all right. Nice guy, he works over at Northrop Grumman. Lena’s lovely, a very lively funny woman, something in IT. But she’s not working right now. Apparently she had some kind of hip injury last year and she’s got another six months of physio before she can go back. I feel for her, though, because she’s stuck being stay-at-home mom to, well…”

Nita exchanged a glance with Kit, who’d come up next to her, and didn’t say anything.

“A pair of badly-behaved antisocial ignoramuses,” Kit’s mother said from the kitchen, sounding very much like someone who didn’t care who might possibly overhear her.

“There you go,” Kit said under his breath. “Mama knows.”

“I can’t imagine how two such nice people have turned out kids who’re so poorly socialized,” his mama said. “Seriously. Rude, destructive, foul-mouthed…”

The two of them listened with amusement to the string of vividly descriptive adjectives flowing from the woman slicing oranges in the kitchen. Neither Nita nor Kit needed to be told more about the subject than they already knew. Bobby and Ron Chastellain had in an amazingly short time become famous at school for spending more time in detention than they seemed to spend in class. They were as much a menace on the sports field as they were in the classroom; it seemed no one was too small for them to bully or too big for them to start a fight with. They were almost universally loathed, and seemed to glory in it. Even wizards with a mandate to prevent speeding up the Universe’s heat death sometimes had trouble keeping themselves from taking action against the Chastellains that would have been pleasantly robust but would probably have landed them in hot water with their Supervisories after the fact.

“You have to wonder,” Kit said under his breath, “whether it’s still them being miserable at having to be in a new school all of a sudden, or if now they’re just kicking everybody’s ass every chance they get because they enjoy it.”

“My money’s on number two,” Nita said. “Never mind them. They are not spoiling my Christmas.”

”Mine either,” Kit said. “Hey, where’s Fil?”

“He was out having a breath of air. I’ll go check him.”

She slipped out of the heat and noise to glance around the back yard. Filif was standing straighter against the garage, playing the role of a relaxing Christmas tree perfectly and slowly letting down his branches. Snow was still falling gently through the darkness, but not as heavily as it had been. Still, Nita could feel something in the air, possibly something to do with the ionization associated with incoming storms: a sense that when the snow really let go, it wasn’t going to stop for a while.

She wandered over to him with her hot cider. “Fil? How’re you doing?”

“Just fine,” he said. She could see his berry-eyes looking upward into the night, possibly a sign that he was engaged in the same kind of weather analysis she was. “One of the small creatures from down the road came along and watered me,” Filif added. “Very kind.”

Nita stole a glance down at the snow. There was enough light from the house for her to easily see the yellow in it, and she burst out laughing.

Behind her, Kit’s side door went. “You all right out here, son?” said Kit’s papa.

Nita smiled at how quickly Filif seemed to reached this status after having been a first-time houseguest just an hour before: she detected her dad’s subtle hand in that. “Just relaxing,” said Filif. “How do the branches look?”

“Very natural,” he said. And then he laughed at himself. “Well, it’s not as if you’re an artificial tree, for God’s sake. You look just fine. It’s going to be a pleasure decorating you.”

“I hope so,” Filif said. “I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.”

“Well, whenever you’re ready, we can always—“ Kit’s pop turned a little toward the house.

Then he paused, and his eyes widened. “Uh,” he said. “Maybe I’m missing something, but…”

“But?” Nita said.

Kit’s pop swallowed. “I know they’re supposed to be warm-blooded,” he said, “but is it good for a dinosaur to be out in the snow?”

Nita turned, stared at the shape glowing softly blue- and white-patterned out on the snowy lawn behind Kit’s house. “Mamvish!!”

It couldn’t have been just her shout that brought them, but within a second or two every wizard in the house was pouring out of it. It occurred to Nita that the instantaneous reaction had to have something to do with the sudden presence in the neighborhood of someone with Mamvish’s power levels. Momentarily she was surrounded by wizards attempting to hug her hello and others trying to get her to stick around.

“No, no,” she said, “I can’t stay. But I had to come see you all. I didn’t want you to get the idea that I didn’t want to come and spin the dreidel!”

The laughter that broke out confused her a little. “What?” she said. “Oh, no! Wrong holiday?”

“No, just a little late for that one,” Tom said. “But who cares? You came!”

“I had to,” Mamvish said. “Even though the season’s wrong in this hemisphere…” She sounded wistful.

She literally could only stay for a few minutes. “On my way to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, there’s a nova about to pop and we’re running short of time… But all of you do whatever you would do if I could stay!” And just like that, without even a breath of wind to mark her teleport, she was gone.

“You’re going to explain that to me, I hope,” said Kit’s pop.

“It may take a while,” said Kit. “Fil, want to come in and root a bit? Sker’s freaking out in there, he thinks he brought the wrong flavor of compound or something and you’re trying to be nice about it.”

The crowd that had dashed out of the house now wandered back in with Filif in tow. Shortly he was settled down in the broad deep bucket of rooting compound that Sker’ret had set up for him, and a group had gathered around him in energetic discussion of Solstice festivals in general. Nita stood there with another glass of cider and listened to Matt and Ronan and Kit and Carmela batting the subject around and trying to get a feel for what Filif actually knew about what was going on.

“Well, I did a certain amount of reading before I came,” Filif said. “The normal amount of research. But there did seem to be some, well, conflicts among various versions of the basic story…”

This set off another wide-ranging discussion featuring mangers, caves versus little wooden chalets, the concept of Nativity scenes, the business of identifying angels as the Powers that Be (or not), the Annunciation, the Three Kings and whether they of Orient really Were, or whether they might actually have been wizards. “And this being called Santa Claus,” Filif said at last. “Where does he fit into this? Certainly so senior a Power would not have failed to attend such an event.”

“Oh boy,” Ronan said, covering his eyes, “here we go!”

“And why is it supposed to happen at the Solstice when the documentation says that there were shepherds out in the fields with their sheep?”

“Lambing time,” Matt said. “He’s got it in one. First-degree theft of pagan celebrations!”

“Green boughs and all,” Carmela said. “The Holly and the Ivy…”

“O Christmas tree, O Christmas Tree,” Matt started singing, “how lovely are thy branches…”

 Marcus, who’d been listening off to one side, suddenly looked indignant. “This is a terrible translation. What does ‘lovely’ have to do with anything?”

They all looked at him. Marcus stared back, bemused by their bemusement. “…What? The original song doesn’t say anything about the tree being lovely.”

“It doesn’t?”

“O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum,” Kit sang, and then stopped, looking perplexed. “I don’t know the rest.”

“It was a German song for a long time before it was an English one,” Marcus said.

“This was all Queen Victoria’s husband’s fault, wasn’t it?” Carl said, having wandered over into this when Matt began singing. “He put a tree up in Buckingham Palace. Started a fad.”

“I thought it was Martin Luther’s fault,” Tom said, drifting up beside him. “Saw one out in the forest with its needles full of frost and starlight… brought it home to show the family…”

“His fault too, yes,” Marcus said. “But listen: the song—” He started to sing in a strong tenor.

“O Tannenbaum, o Tannenbaum,

Wie treu sind deine Blätter!

O Tannenbaum, o Tannenbaum,

Wie treu sind deine Blätter!

Du grünst nicht nur zur Sommerzeit,

Nein, auch im Winter, wenn es schneit.—

O Tannenbaum, o Tannenbaum,

Wie treu sind deine Blätter!”

Some of the other younger wizards looked thoughtful as they started taking the German lyric apart via their understanding of it in the Speech. “He’s right, there’s nothing about ‘lovely’ in there,” Nita said.

Kit shook his head. “How do you translate treu? ‘Faithful?’”

Marcus nodded. “Or loyal.”

Ronan laughed. “Like Matt said, the usual evergreen trope,” he said. “The whole non-deciduous eternal-life thing.” He had been working on a mug of Kit’s mama’s cocoa, and started to take another swig of it, then stared down into the mug with annoyance. “Bloodyell, I’m out again. Where’s this stuff going? I mean, it’s just cocoa, cocoa’s for the wee kiddies…” He got up and headed for the back door again.

Kit grinned into his own mug. “Mama’s secret recipe strikes again…”

Carmela glanced over at Marcus. “So it would be more like, ‘You’re green all while | the Summer glows, | and in the Winter, | when it snows—’”

Marcus tilted his head, thought. “Yes, that’s close enough.”

“So where’d we get the ‘lovely?’” Dairine said.

Marcus shrugged. “Poor translations are everywhere in popular culture,” he said. “You should see what happens to some of your TV shows when we get them at home.”

“Please,” Carmela said. “Some of the anime dubs…!”

“And do not even get me started on Raumschiff Enterprise—!“

Within seconds Carmela and Marcus were off into some insanely technical discussion in the Speech of the way translation issues affecting space opera. Kit gave Nita a look as the conversation became indecipherable even in the Speech. “You see what I put up with.”

Ronan burst out laughing as he came back with a much larger mug of cocoa. “Oh please,” he said. “Is that you I hear complaining about somebody else’s geekery, Mars Boy? Oh knower of the name of every crater on the planet? Spare me.”

The singing started again shortly thereafter, several rival versions of the carol breaking out. Marcus and Carmela were singing in German, Dairine and her dad and Kit’s mama were upholding the more traditional American English version, and Ronan began singing an entirely different one in counterpoint, featuring the line “Thy candles shine out brightly”. “Each bough doth hold its tiny light, | that makes each toy to sparkle bright – ”

“Wait a moment,” Nita’s dad said, “whoa, whoa, wait a moment!”

The singing on various sides trailed off. “Candles?” said Nita’s dad. “What candles?”

“Sure didn’t you know that lots of folks out our way put candles on their Christmas trees way back when?” Ronan said. “Though you have to wonder how many houses they burned down before the electric lights came along!”

Marcus nodded. “In some families it is still traditional despite the risk,” he said. “One of my uncles’ families still does it. You only do it for a few minutes, though, and you watch the candles like a hawk the whole time. Then you put them out and make sure they’re cold, and then everybody goes off to church, or out to dinner, or else you open the presents…”

A number of people turned in some concern to Filif to see how he was handling this concept. But he looked quite relaxed: at least his needles weren’t bristling, which was something Nita had seen on occasion and which she recognized as a sign of real trouble. “It’s an interesting contrast,” he said after a moment. “Symbolic, I suppose. The Kindler of Wildfires brought under control… even brought in where you live, as a sign of how things will be some day when It’s mended Its ways.” The green boughs shook, possibly in laughter. “Or else it’s just a little extra defiance to go with the usual acknowledgement and greeting…”

There was a little silence. And then Filif said:

“You know… I would really like to do that.”

Nita and Kit looked at each other in astonishment. Carmela’s mouth dropped open. “Seriously?”

“Yes.” Filif shivered all over.

Carmela’s eyes went wide and her mouth made an O. “My shrub,” she murmured, “has an oxidation kink.”

“Well I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a kink—”

“Too late,” Nita said, amused, watching Carmela’s face. “It’s in her head now and you will never get it out.”

Nita’s father, who’d come in on the end of this, looked amazed. “Bit of a change of attitude on the subject for you,” he said.

“True. But I’m not who I was even a year or two ago.” And a lot of Filif’s berries glowed more brightly than they had for a second or so.

 “Well,” Kit’s pop said. “We’re not really set up for that at the moment. But we have a lot of other stuff on tap. You think you’re about ready to get started, big fella?”

Filif bowed slightly to him. “Yes!”

“All right,” said Kit’s pop. “Lights first.”

He headed for the back of the house and shortly came back with his arms full of boxes: some of them quite new, some of them looking old and beat up. “I like the new LED lights a lot,” Kit’s pop said. “A lot of control over them, and you don’t have to worry so much about the heat. But at the same time you hate to let the old ways go completely. Tradition…”

He put the newer boxes aside for a moment and turned his attention to the older ones. “Have to be very careful with these,” he said, putting the boxes down side by side. They were both yellowed, thin cardboard, crumbling a bit at the edges in some places; the printing on them was old-fashioned looking, the colors faded. Kit’s pop opened one. Inside it, in yellowed cardboard spacer-holders, was a row of nine candlestick-shaped bubble lights: fat bulbous bases, tall glass “candlesticks” full of colored fluid. A faint scent of very old pine needles came up from the box.

“Now those are vintage,” Nita’s dad said.

“Relics,” said Kit’s pop, opening the second box with the same care. “Makes me laugh to see how popular they are all of a sudden, with everyone so eager to have ‘retro’ stuff. My father gave them to me when I came of age.”

“Didn’t know there was a minimum age for Christmas lights, Juan.”

Kit’s pop laughed. “Came as news to me too. I think he just wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to wreck them.” Very carefully he started lifting the first set out of the box, untangling the wires. “Can’t blame him. You wouldn’t believe what replacements for these cost. Every year I live in terror that I’m going to plug this in and one of them won’t come on…”

They got down together on the floor and stretched the lights out. Nita’s gaze met Kit’s in amusement at the sight of the two dads hunkered down on the floor like kids with a special toy. Nita’s dad picked up one of the lights and peered at the liquid inside it. “What is that in there?”

“Something with a real low boiling point,” Kit’s pop said. “Just the light in the bottom is enough to make it bubble.”

Nita’s dad picked up the box, turned it over, peered at it. “No warnings or anything about what it is…”

“You kidding? This comes from a time when doctors did commercials about how good cigarette smoking was for you. I’m betting it’s poisonous.”

In the back of Nita’s mind, Bobo whispered, Methylene chloride…

“Yeah, you really wouldn’t want to break one of those,” Nita said. “The place would need airing out. And forget about touching it or drinking it…”

“Low on my list of things to do,” said Kit’s pop, rummaging around underneath Filif to slot the light set’s plug into the plug strip. “Let’s test the other set and then start putting the modern ones on first. These go on afterwards, on the outer branches.”

Shortly the first of four sets of LED lights was going on the “tree”, and rather unusually for a household in the suburbs of New York, the tree was helping. Kit’s pop was on one side and Nita’s dad on the other, and they were passing the strings of lights back and forth to make sure they were equally distributed. What was making the process go much more smoothly was the way that when one or the other of them was having trouble getting a light cord around into the corner where Filif was positioned, he would simply put a branch up, curl the terminal fronds around the wire, and maneuver it into the spot where it was needed. It took very little time to get the first strand up, the one that was all plain white lights and was tucked most closely in toward the trunk.

“These colored ones now, Juan?”

“Yeah. We’ll do that string from the top down to about halfway… then plug the other one in and finish down at the bottom.”

The second string began going up, while more people wandered into the living room with various festive drinks in hand to watch the process. As this was going on, Carmela came up behind Nita and peered at the proceedings between her and Kit. “I thought I was going to get to do some of this,” she said, very low, and laughed. “Seems like the youngsters have taken over.”

“I thought you’d have been all over this,” Nita said. “You gonna let them do everything?”

“On the contrary,” Carmela said, very softly. “I’m letting them do the heavy lifting. I’ve got the part that matters.” And she gave Nita the merest glimpse of something golden that she’d had hidden under her tunic.

Nita laughed very quietly. “No Mets hat?”

“Are you kidding? This is a formal affair…”

Meanwhile, the two fathers were finishing with the more normal lights. “Okay, the bubblers, now,” said Kit’s pop. With great care they moved around clipping them to the outer branches, making sure they were secure. Every now and then Filif would curl a frond up or down and make sure a bubble-light wouldn’t wiggle. All the while, a calm businesslike dialogue was going on. “Can’t imagine why they never put clips on these. Alligator clips or something—“ “Yeah, you’re supposed to just force them over the ends of the branches and then tighten them down, I don’t know what they were thinking of, it’s a design flaw…”

The two men took their time, and when the lights were all up stood back and examined their work so far for balance and evenness. “Not enough up top there, you think, Juan?”

“Mmm, not sure. No… I think we’re okay. Works better to do more garlands up there, I think. Keeps things from getting topheavy…”

“Okay. Bulbs now?”

“Yeah.” Kit’s pop went off to fetch the boxes from the back of the house, and came back with them piled high enough in his arms that he could barely see over the top.

“You have a protocol for this over at your place?” Kit’s mama called from the kitchen, peering briefly through the passthrough window. “Some kind of order that things go up in?”

“Well. Not exactly. But the good stuff goes in close to the trunk. The ones you’re less concerned about if they fall down or something bangs into them, those go on the outside.”

“Makes sense.”

Nita watched as her dad and Kit’s pop carefully opened the boxes, revealing a wild assortment of mirror-polished and satin-sheened ornaments, very few alike—remnants of old sets, replacements from newer ones, all kinds of shapes and sizes and colors. She caught Filif’s excited shiver, smiled at it, grinned a little at Kit as he came over to lean against her, watching.

The two fathers took turns, took their time, lifting the ornaments out, conferring, finding the best spots for them. “How is there are never enough hooks for these?” “I could have sworn I bought more last year.” “Harry, this one’s ribbon broke.” “Son, would you move that branch up a little? I want to get this one in by the trunk.” “Here?” “That’s right, just ease it up a little…” “Perfect.” “Or maybe a little to the left?” “Yeah….”

They stood back again and took stock. “Okay,” said Nita’s dad. “Garlands now?”

“Heresy! Tinsel first. Garlands after.”

This provoked a brief storm of opinion from some of the onlookers. “You’ll crush the tinsel!” “Especially the mylar stuff!” “I never went for this crinkled kind myself, it’s not as shiny…” Nita watched Filif starting to tremble a little harder and briefly wasn’t sure whether it was out of nervousness. But then she realized he was laughing, and trying to keep anyone from noticing.

The “tinsel first” school of thought finally prevailed, and Kit’s pop went off and came back with several boxes of it. He and Nita’s dad started applying it, and once more a brief good-natured exchange of ideas broke out. Nita’s dad was one of the “One strand at a time” school: Kit’s pop was more of a “fling it on from a distance” type. Laughter spread around the room as each one started trying to convert the other to his way of thinking. Kit’s mama leaned on the shelf of the passthrough for a few minutes, watching this drama unfold, and then vanished.

A minute or two later she came back with a couple of glasses full of something amber that didn’t look like cider. These she put on a side table and said, “In case anyone wants to take a moment and get a grip…”

The two fathers looked at each other. “Not smart to ignore medical advice, Juan…” said Nita’s dad.

Smiling, they took a few moments’ worth of break, sampling what Kit’s mama had brought them while standing back again to examine their handiwork. Among the lights, Nita could see Filif’s eye-berries doing what the lights didn’t do: moving around a bit. Her dad noticed this too, leaned in. “You okay there, big guy?”

“Fine.”

“You sure? You’re not ticklish or anything?”

“Oh, no. I just… Finding places to see out of is going to be interesting.” Filif was laughing.

“All part of the game,” said Kit’s pop. “The informal object of the exercise is to leave as little of you showing as possible. It’s all about the decorations.”

“Though most of the time,” Nita’s dad said, “the tree isn’t in a position to offer any opinions. This adds a whole new level of challenge to the endeavor.” He pushed a clump of tinsel aside. A berry peered out from under. “You tell us when you’ve got visibility problems: we’ll shift things around.”

“All right.”

“Now the garlands,” said Kit’s pop, and went off for a final couple of boxes. These were glittery mylar, one in silver, one in gold, and one in dark green. With care Kit’s pop tucked the end of the first one just under Filif’s topmost upstanding bough, the one where he normally wore his baseball cap, and he and Nita’s dad started passing the looped remainder of it back and forth between them as they wound it around and around. “What goes on top?” said Nita’s dad.

“These days, a star,” said Juan. “Though we had an angel once.”

“Not any more? What happened?”

“It melted,” Kit’s pop said. “Something went wrong with the bulb inside it. The thing actually exploded one evening. The plastic—”

“It wasn’t plastic, Juan, it was celluloid,” Kit’s mama said as she came in with more cider and mulled wine for those who wanted it. “With fiberglass hair. The thing went up like a torch. It’s a miracle it happened while we were awake and actually in the room with it. God knows what would have happened to the tree if we hadn’t got that thing off it.”

“The next two Christmases completely sucked,” Kit whispered in Nita’s ear. “They refused to leave the lights on unless there was somebody in the room. You couldn’t come downstairs in the middle of the night and find the lights on and everything glowing.”

“They got over it, though…”

“Eventually.” Kit rolled his eyes expressively. Nita, though, was watching Filif again. The shiver that went through him at the mention of the fire was not one of unease. Definitely, she thought, something new is going on…

“I heard that,” said Kit’s pop, sounding amused. “Never mind, it got better.” He picked up another garland, the gold one. “So where is it?”

“You haven’t got the last garland on yet,” Carmela said. “We’ll wait.”

And they did, the room more or less going quiet as the final glittery garland went up. There Filif stood, resplendent, glowing. Carmela produced the star—about a foot wide, golden, very simple, with a conical socket—and reached way, way up to put it on.

And couldn’t quite reach. “You’ve been getting taller without telling me,” she said. “Give me a hand here, shrub.”

Very carefully, so as not to disturb anything, Filif bent the top of him down just enough. Carmela slipped the star on; he straightened up.

“Merry Christmas, Fil,” Carmela said, and grinned, and hugged him carefully through the garlands and the tinsel.

The tremor in his trunk was unmistakable—all the tinsel rippled with it—as he stood there simply radiating joy. Nita stood there appreciating the view, the radiance and glitter and gleam of him, and the sight of those red, glowing eyes peering out from among the lights and the garlands. A spontaneous round of applause went up around the room.

Now, though, it was Nita’s turn to get nervous.

In her family, as Christmas approached everybody came up with a special ornament for the tree: either something they made, or something that they couldn’t make but that they saw and liked, or that had a specific meaning. Some of the ornaments on the tree at home were hilariously clumsy — kindergarten construction-paper cutouts plastered with glitter, or painted and varnished papier-mache shapes, or similar art-class stuff. Some were bought things, replicas of older glass ornaments, or keepsake ornaments in engraved metal or plastic. Some were toys, or expressions of temporary (or longstanding) media crushes—such as all of Dairine’s Star Wars collectible ornaments, including the no-longer-light-up Darth Vader TIE fighter with the busted left wing panel that had to be reglued every year because no adhesive seemed to exist that would hold the thing together, and using wizardry on it somehow seemed like cheating.

This year Nita had bought two ornaments, because she knew that the Party was coming and she wanted to leave something on Kit’s family’s tree. “To remember me by,” she’d said, not meaning anything in particular by it. And Kit had given her this completely shocked look. “What, are you going somewhere?” he’d said. Nita had been taken completely by surprise by the slightly panicked sound of it. “What? No! No, I just want to… I’m covering all my options, okay?” And he had wisely not pressed her to find out what she meant by that, because to tell the truth Nita wasn’t too sure herself.

In any case, there was an ornament ready to go on the home tree in a few days (her Dad steadfastly refused to get a tree any sooner than the 22nd: it was just the way things had always gone at their house). That one was a red and blue blown-glass hummingbird that Nita had simply liked the moment she saw it. But for Kit’s tree she’d gone privately back to the Crossings and had a word with Sker’ret about who in the shopping zone was good with custom glasswork, and had provided the craftsbeing (a many-legged Takapesh, one of an insectile species possessed of exquisitely detailed and accurate 3D perception) with images lifted from her manual. It had taken another visit or two to make sure everything was perfect, but by the end of November Nita had been completely satisfied.

“Now then,” she said. She reached into the empty air beside her, into her claudication, and pulled out the little white glazed-cardboard box she’d been peeking into at intervals for the last two weeks, and handed it to Kit.

“Early present?” Kit said.

“Early present for the tree. Go on!”

He carefully lifted the top off the box and peered inside, poked what he saw there. “Paper! Oh wow, thanks, we needed paper!”

Nita poked him, not too hard: having him fumble the box was the last thing she wanted. “I’ll give you paper somewhere else,” she said. “Don’t get cute.”

He threw her a sideways smile and carefully reached in to pull the paper out. Nita held her breath.

Suddenly Kit was holding his too. “Ohh…” he said, finally, letting it out, and reached down a little further into the box to slip a finger through the delicately braided bronze wire by which it would hang.

Carefully he pulled the ornament out. It could at first glance had been mistaken for a scorpion, if scorpions came in a deep metallic forest green. It had segmented legs, a thick body, big frontal claws, huge square heavy-mandibled jaws, and a lot of eyes. But the eyes had a goofy look in them that no scorpion could ever have managed, and the jaws were grinning, somehow.

“It’s a sathak,” Kit whispered, “from Mars, it’s absolutely Takaf, Khretef’s guy, his dog, and Ponch was in him, and—!” He swallowed. “Neets, where’d you get this?”

“Had it made,” Nita said. “Do you like it?”

“Oh wow,” Kit said, and all of a sudden he had one arm around Nita’s neck and his face sort of buried between her neck and shoulder. “Wow,” he said into her shoulder, and then laughed and straightened up again.

His Mama was looking at him a little curiously from the passthrough-window into the kitchen. “You okay, son?”

“Mama, look at this! This is so great!”

He broke away from Nita and went off to show his Mama the ornament. Nita had broken out in a brief sweat of nervousness, but she was cooling down a bit now, and turned away toward Filif, who was standing there watching all this.

“That was a good gift, then,” he said.

“Yeah,” Nita said. “Yeah. Don’t drop it when he hangs it up, okay?”

“Outlier forbid!” Filif said. “I’ll take good care of it for you, never fear.”

A few minutes later Kit was back in the living room looking for the perfect place to hang it. “Fil, can you move that branch up? Yeah, a little more… No. Wait. Never mind, this one works better.”

“Like this?”

“Yeah, it’ll catch the light there. Don’t want the light right on it, it looks green enough as it is… Yeah, here. This white light looks good by it. Picks up the eyes.”

“Should I move this frond?”

“No, you’re okay. Then again… I don’t know… You’re not going to get a cramp holding that branch up out of the way?’

“No, not at all.”

Finally the sathak ornament was placed the way Kit liked it, and he stood back to admire it. Nita came up next to him and let out a breath, finally having relaxed enough to enjoy it too.

“That is so super. Thanks,” Kit said. His voice actually sounded a little wavery.

Nita just nodded.

Nita’s dad turned away from where he’d been standing near Tom and Carl. “And one more thing—” he said, more or less in Juan’s direction.

A few people turned to look at him, alerted by something in his tone.

“Well, it’s kind of an event, isn’t it?” Nita’s dad said. “So I thought I might as well bring this over to visit.”

He reached down into a small box that had been sitting unremarked on a nearby table, and started carefully unwrapping something from the tissue paper in which it nestled.

Nita’s breath caught. What her dad brought out a moment later was one of the last things her Mom had bought before she got too sick to go out any more: a beautifully photorealistically-painted Christmas ornament that looked like the Earth—but not like a globe with grid lines and single-color countries painted on its continents. It was the Earth the way one saw it as a planet, blue, shining, swirling with weather. Her Mom had seen it that way when she and Kit had first taken her and her Dad to the Moon. The experience had apparently struck some profoundly deep chord for her; she had been muttering about it when she came out of surgery the first time (to the confusion of the critical care nurses, who’d thought she was hallucinating) and the mere passing mention of it, afterwards, had always made her eyes go soft.

Nita’s dad went over and found a spot for it amongst Filif’s decorations: not tucked in too deeply to be seen, but safely positioned toward his trunk. Then he stepped back. “Looks good,” Nita’s dad said, and then stopped, as if his voice had briefly failed him.

Kit’s pop turned to the tray sitting off to one side, handed Nita’s dad one of the glasses sitting there. “Absent friends,” he said softly.

Nita’s dad just nodded and clinked his glass to Kit’s pop’s. Standing shoulder to shoulder, they both drank.

“Kit? Would you turn the lights off?” said Kit’s pop.

Kit headed over to the switch for the main room light, flipped it. In the darkness that fell over the room, Filif had become the only bright thing. Everyone held still, caught in the warm light as if in amber.

The Demisiv stood there quietly, glittering, glowing. Nita saw that he was shivering with some emotion, or some combination of them. But then he was always good at picking this stuff up, she thought. To him, silently, she said: are you okay?

More than okay, he said. I am honored to bear this weight.

Slowly, softly, conversation started up again around him as lamps were turned on around the edges of the room. People got themselves more cider and cocoa, and everyone spent at least some time in front of Filif commenting on how terrific he looked decorated, some of them adding details on how they did it at their place: all white lights versus colored, or all blue: matched ornaments all in one color versus the “chaos theory” approach that Kit’s family favored: blinking lights or steady ones…

Around them, people started hitting the buffet trays again: the mulled wine came out. Nita stood off to one side with Sker’ret for a few moments, enjoying the sight of Kit pulling people over one at a time to point at his ornament and explain it to them.

“That worked, then,” Sker’ret said to her.

“As the boy says,” Nita said, “more than. Thanks for helping me with that.”

“Well, thanks for keeping my facility and everything I hold dear from being overrun by hostiles!” Sker’ret said. “You don’t pull down half the perks you’re entitled to for that.”

“I’ll start working on that, I promise.”

“No you won’t,” Sker’ret said. “I know you too well. Expect me to start bothering you about it.”

“Hey Legs,” Kit’s mama called from the kitchen, “I need the rest of those trays, it’s time for more of the buffalo wings!”

“You do that,” said Nita, “and I’ll tell your broodmates you’re slumming doing catering work!”

Sker’ret laughed that ratchety laugh and headed for the kitchen. “Don’t get me started,” he said. “I might get my revenge some other way. She’s got the right attitude for liaison work, and we can always use more hominid staff…”

Nita turned back to find Kit’s pop standing next to Filif again, now with something of the air of a workman taking a break with a co-worker. “You going to be okay standing there all night like that?” said Kit’s pop. “I don’t want you to be stuck away from the fun.”

“Oh, this is fun! But I don’t have to be stuck. If I want to, I can just leave all this here.”

Kit’s pop blinked at that. “Uh, am I missing something?”

“Watch.”

The “Christmas tree” seemed to shake itself gently. Then there was a strange sort of a sideways blur in the air, as if the whole scene was a watercolor painting that had had a wet brush pulled across it. A second later the watercolor haze was gone, and the Christmas tree was standing exactly where it was, not a light or ornament jostled, not a needle out of place… but Filif was standing a couple of yards to one side of it, wearing nothing but a twin of the star.

“That being is an artist,” Ronan called from across the room, “and if he drank, I’d buy him one.”

Filif burst out laughing. “Of course I drink,” he said, “what do you take me for, some kind of rockmoss?”

“No, I didn’t mean water…”

“Drinking habits aside,” said Kit’s pop, “that is some stunt.”

“Nothing much at all,” said Filif. “It’s a constructed appearance, what we call a mochteroof.”

“I won’t even try to remember how to say that…” Kit’s pop said. “Or to pretend I’ve got the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

“Think of it as like a hologram, but solid,” Filif said. “I can slip in and out of it, and of the ornaments, at will. And back in…”

And suddenly Filif was conducting a masterclass in mochteroof construction for the layman, translating the most technical terms out of the Speech into English on the fly. Juan leaned back on the wall nearest him, absolutely fascinated. At the point where Filif dropped into Spanish without warning, Nita’s jaw dropped.

“How is he doing that??” she said to Sker’ret as he passed with his third trayful of buffalo wings, from which she pilfered one.

“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—”

“Do I detect the sleepover beginning?” Kit’s pop said.

Carmela rose up in great dignity and grabbed Filif by one frond. “Might as well,” she said. “We’ll leave you to talk grownup talk… we know you’ve been dying to get us out of here.”

There was less disagreement with this than Nita would have expected, and more good-natured laughter. “Anything you people want to take downstairs with you?“

“Make another pot of the hot chocolate?”

“Way ahead of you, Leprechaun. It’s right there on the stove staring at you.”

The younger participants mouthed Leprechaun?! at one another.

“And there’s some ice cream, too. That double chocolate Kit likes. Nita, maybe you want to grab that, and the bowls and spoons...” Kit’s mama glanced at her watch. “No point in telling you to get some sleep sometime tonight because we know you won’t,” Kit’s mama said. “And for once I don’t care. If things get noisy, just do whatever you have to to keep it under control, all right?”

There was a general chorus of “Okay” and “G’night” and “Thanks, Mrs. Rodriguez” as the group making for the puptents headed down the stairs. But as she followed Dairine and Carmela and Ronan and Filif and Matt and Marcus and Sker’ret toward the stairs, Nita looked over her shoulder and saw Kit’s mama stop him as he picked up the pot of cocoa.

“Sweetie, I keep meaning to ask you…”

“What, Mama?”

“All this stuff Legs has brought us is really lovely…”

“Yeah, it is!”

“And you should thank him again. But one question.”

“Yeah?”

She lowered her voice. “I was kind of nervous. I didn’t know if it was a religious thing…”

“What?”

“Why is so much of this food blue?”

***

Nita hung back a little to help Kit with the cocoa if he needed it. “Is she okay?” she said. “They don’t think we’re ditching them?”

“They’re fine,” Kit said. “They look about ready to start Adult Talk. Best time for us to get out, yeah?”

Nita nodded as they got to the bottom of the stairs. Kit’s basement looked much like hers, except tidier: it wasn’t the catch-all area that her family’s basement had turned into over time. Over against the back wall were several wide vertical dark patches that marked inactive portals, but one, the central one, glowed golden with activity and light from its far side. They stepped through.

Nita looked around and breathed out, nodding. Dairine’s description of Roshaun’s puptent space from his previous visit as “overdone” was at best an inadequate summation of a tall bright space full of gilding, of rich carpets and hangings and ornately carven furniture. Instead of the usual bright light pouring in from the hot bright sun of Wellakh, though, the windows were dark, and lamps standing on tall pedestals around the edges of the room were lit, casting a subdued light over everything, catching the glint of a gem here, the sheen of a carving there. And in the middle of it all, in front of a trio of big sofas arranged in a U-shape, and heaps of big pillows and cushions, was a twin of the entertainment center upstairs.

Kit paused and stared. “Uh… Dair, I think they might complain about us just moving this down here…”

Dairine was already flopped down among the pillows. “Kit,” she said, scornful but only gently so. “The very first thing I did when I got to be a wizard was duplicate a computer. You think cloning the entertainment system is a problem? Especially with hardware support.” She stroked Spot’s case: he arched his “back” against the gesture. “All I had to do was make sure the remotes have different ID chips in them so they won’t wind up countermanding each other.”

“In other words,” Carmela said, “now we can have… a movie marathon!!”

This suggestion was met with general agreement, as the possibility had first started being mentioned about the same time the invitations went out. “After all that food,” Kit said, “I wouldn’t mind stretching out for a while…”

“And after all that excitement,” Filif said, from where he’d settled behind the centermost sofa, “a little relaxation will be welcome.”

“Anybody wants to change into night stuff,” Dairine said, “there are changing rooms through that arch there…”

“And then Ice cream!” Carmela said, while Dairine grabbed the remote and brought up the same TV guide they’d been looking at earlier. Ten minutes or so went by while everybody changed into sweats or pajamas or other comfortable latenight wear, though Marcus elected to stay in his fatigues.

Filif had been reading the on-screen TV guide while the others had been putting themselves together “’A Christmas Carol,’” Filif said when everybody had made themselves comfortable. “Kit, your mama said that there would be caroling tomorrow… is this something to do with that?”

Kit shook his head. “Not really. Or not directly. It’s about a guy who loses the meaning of Christmas…”

“Fil should see that!” Nita said.

“Yeah, but which one?”

Filif rustled in surprise. “There’s more than one version of this story?”

“It’s like the bigger Christmas story that way,” Ronan said. “A lot of variation, a lot of different ways to look at it…”

Nita looked over at Dairine. “Line a few of them up?”

She picked up the remote. “Sure. But I want popcorn!”

“I’ll get that,” Nita said, knowing where Kit kept the stuff that he microwaved. But she’d barely stood up when she was distracted by some one appearing out of nowhere…in a red “tuxedo” pajama top and green pants.

“Darryl!” Nita and Kit said in unison, as the new arrival plunged around the room hugging everyone in sight, and briefly nearly losing himself in Filif’s lower branches.

“My God,” Ronan said. “How’ve your folks let you out this late?”

Darryl shrugged. “They think I’m home in bed.” He smiled. “I am home in bed.”

“Not dressed like that, I hope!”

“Yup.”

“You’re a terror!”

“Not as much as him. Hi Matt!”

“Gonzo boy! Have some ice cream.”

“How long can you stay?” Nita said.

“Until I fall asleep,” Darryl said, tucking himself down among the cushions. “I go back to being one of me then.”

“No rush about that,” Matt said, handing him a bowl of ice cream. “If you eat this too fast, which of you gets the brain freeze?”

“Let’s find out!”

A few more minutes were spent assembling popcorn and more drinks, and turning down unneeded lights, and getting everybody comfortable. Finally Dairine looked over her shoulder, “Everybody ready? And Darr, if this gets too loud for you say the word.”

“If this gets too loud for you, say the word,” Dairine said to Darryl over her shoulder.

“No problem. What’s on?”

“The classics,” Kit said. “Roll it!”

Dairine brought up the 1951 A Christmas Carol first, and on this Filif was most intent. When the Ghost cried, “Business! Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business…!” Nita heard Filif murmur, “We could have made a wizard out of him with a little work.”

“Well, kind of late for that, the guy’s dead,” Carmela said. “But also, it’s fiction. He didn’t really exist.”

“But this came out of someone’s mind?” Filif said.

“Yes…”

“Then he exists. All that’s left is to determine now is how concretely…”

Nita grinned, not sure how to even start arguing about that. When that film was done, they took a break for more popcorn, and then Dairine cued up Scrooged. Filif laughed as hard as any of them at this, which surprised Nita a little. How much research has he been doing on us?… she wondered.

The end of that produced demands for fresh drinks and more popcorn and ice cream among the viewers. While these were being distributed, Dairine grabbed the remote. “Got one more for you,” she said, grinning.

Nita had seen that grin. Often it didn’t mean well. “Okay,” she said, “what have you got up your sleeve?”

Dairine began punching numbers into the remote. “Should I be concerned?” Kit said. “Is it going to suddenly start spouting some new language at me that I can’t cope with?”

“Not at all,” Dairine said, “not at all.” She concentrated on the numbers she was punching into the pad, and glanced over at Spot. “Is that right?” she said.

There wasn’t any answer that any of them could hear, but Dairine looked satisfied. “Go,” she said to the entertainment system.

Moments later, the strangest screeching, howling, whining noise was coming out of the speakers. Some of the guests stared at that and the bright swirling graphics that accompanied them. But Ronan’s head came right up at the sound, and his mouth fell open, and he turned a look on Dairine that was profoundly accusatory. “How did you—”

“You mean you can’t guess?” Dairine said, leaning back against the pillows with a smug expression.

A television theme possibly much more famous in the British Isles than in North America began to play, against more of that howling sound effect. “Okay now,” Ronan said, “this is just a wee bit illicit. This doesn’t even air for four more days! Whose server have you hacked?”

Dairine placed one hand on her heart and assumed an expression of wounded dignity. “Nobody’s! How can you suggest that I would ever do such a thing?”

“Just like this,” Ronan said, completely unapologetic. “You saw my lips moving, I assume. Pause that first, would you? Thanks, Spotty. So. How?”

If it was possible, Dairine’s expression got even smugger. “The Mobiles are working on a project to store all available data,” she said. “You know about that?”

“The way I heard it,” Ronan said, “it was a project to back up the entire available universe.” He shook his head. “Still not too sure about what you use for media.”

“Not my problem,” Dairine said. “That’s hardware. But since I’m the Mobiles’ mom, they’re particularly interested in backing up all the data on Earth, in case I should need something. They said they didn’t want me to be discommoded.” She smiled sweetly. “Nice of them. Anyway, it turns out that one of the systems they’ve been routinely backing up for me is the entire data storage system of the BBC. And somewhere in that data storage, surprise surprise, is the next Dr. Who Christmas special. I mean, seriously, you don’t think they keep it stored on tape or something, do you?” Dairine raised her eyebrows. “So once it’s backed up to the motherboard world—because they keep all the really important storage, by which I mean everything I’m interested in, backed up locally—it’s really simple for me, well, me and Spot, to run live streaming video from the Mobiles’ backup to here…”

Kit blinked. “Tell me,” he said, “that downloading however many gigs of data it takes to store a Christmas special from umpty billion light years away isn’t doing something really horrible to our broadband allowance.”

Dairine made an amused spluttering noise. “No,” she said.

“Wonderful,” Ronan said. “Now would you kindly fecking un-pause this thing? I’m dying here.”

The display unpaused, and Ronan fell back against the cushions on the floor with an expression of complete fulfillment. “You may just have justified your entire reason for existence,” he said to Dairine, and fell silent.

Another hour went by full of time travel and excitement and danger, with a different version of A Christmas Carol and another version of Scrooge woven all through. At the end of it, Ronan looked around and remarked, “I wondered that he’d gone a little quiet.”

Nita followed Ronan’s glance and saw that the cushions among which Darryl had been lying were empty. “Guess it was getting a little late for him,” he said. He rolled over and looked up at Filif. “How about you, Fil? You holding up all right?”

“Oh yes,” Filif said. He rustled, shaking out his branches all around. “It takes some synthesis, all of this,” he said after a few moments. “The way the tales interleave, the way they reach back to the triggering event… It’s complex. And so are the strictly social aspects. I can see this subject will take a lot of study…” But he sounded cheerful about the prospect. 

“Do you guys do anything like this at home?” Dairine said. “Is there a holiday time when everyone gets together?”

“Oh, yeah,” Kit said. “I saw something in the manual once. That sort of summer festival where everyone goes up into the mountains…”

“Well, yes. But this time of year… well, our version of this time of year,” Filif said, “there’s something else. Not to get together, though. To get away from everyone else.”

That brought a number of heads up. “What?” said Dairine, and “Hey, that’s one I could get used to,” said Ronan. “Especially if you had relatives like mine…” He rubbed his eyes.

“Sounds a little weird,” Nita said, “to want to get away from other people at a holiday.”

Filif rustled. “Maybe not so strange,” he said, “if you’ve heard the story behind it…”

“Story!!” shouted about half the room.

“Then listen now, and hear the wind in the branches,” Filif said, “and it will tell you the tale of the Outlier, who made us what we are…”

Everyone got quiet.

Filif was quiet too. “The organism from which my people came,” he said, “one of the original species of Demisiv vegetation, arose something like five hundred million years ago as you reckon time. As far as we can tell from our own investigations, it started very small, in a near-equatorial zone mostly surrounded by several of what were then the largest lakes on the planet. We were really shrubs then—” and his berries went pink with amusement at Carmela. “Just low scrubby frondy things, like your earliest gymnosperms.

“That earliest form of Demisiv had a hard time at first, as conditions on the homeworld went through some difficult climatic cycles, and competition among the various arising plant species was fierce. But after a few million years it hit on a useful strategy. It gave up producing seed and instead shifted its energy into producing a communal root system, from which new microcolonies and eventually macrocolonies of plants could grow.”

“Could be smart,” Nita said, “if you’re in a hostile environment.”

Filif rustled, a gesture of agreement. “It’s a smart technique if you’re in a hostile environment: a survival mechanism. A plant that shares a root system with others—a superplant, I think your people call it—has a better chance of competing against plants that grow independently from seed, the ones that have to rely on their own food supplies to last through their period of greatest vulnerability.

“And that strategy became key to that earliest lifeform’s success. It spread, slowly at first and then more quickly millennium by millennium, across the world. It occupied great plains and climbed mountains and pushed down to the waters of every lakeshore. Finally it covered nearly all the world except at the poles. And as the millions of years crept by, since it no longer needed more territory to survive, it began to diversify in other ways. It developed rudimentary local organ structures and the beginnings of a nervous system. That neural network proved very useful in helping the proto-Demisiv locate and leverage the best sources of light as weather and the seasons changed, and it grew more complex with every passing aeon.”

“I bet I know where this is going…” Matt said.

“Of course you do,” Filif said. “It became conscious. And then, after enough time, it became self-aware. The Demisiv was born.”

“Was born,” Kit said. “Not ‘were.’”

“Yes,” Filif said. “Because it was one. It was only one, one huge organism communicating through a single neural net that covered the world, with thoughts that took a whole season to travel from one side to another of that mind. And so it remained for a long time. Millions of seasons went by, winter through summer and spring through fall, and the poles precessed and the stars shifted, and that one lifeform ruled the world unchallenged. Nothing could compete, especially when it finally learned to move—to shift the root structure itself along through the ground, taking with it the structures that grew out of it and absorbed the sunlight and breathed out the air. The whole world was a forest that ebbed and flowed with light and weather the way your oceans ebb and flow with their tides.

“And it might still be that way until something else happened. Very slowly in those vast spaces, a further diversification began, secondary to another, severer wave of climatic changes. It took too long for messages to travel great distances when there was need to react quickly to storms or floods or volcanic activity. As a result the Demisiv organism began to decentralize. Consciousness began to concentrate itself into smaller groups and patches, more tightly knit—still part of the great Whole, of course, but with increased autonomy in moving smaller populations’ root complexes to where conditions were more favorable. And out at the edge of one such population—a small one high up in the habitability range of the furthest northern hemisphere—the thing happened that would change everything.”

Filif went quiet for a moment in the flickering of the candles. “We think of the one by whom everything was changed as a ‘her’,” he said, “because the above-ground growth by which she expressed herself was berrying out when the Event took place. Indeed she was normally berried, because she paid less attention to that state than was seen as appropriate. In fact she seemed to pay so little attention to what was seen as normal work and business—watering, lightgathering, helping the communal roots to spread—that she always had trouble finding consensus with others in her local growth-group. And as often happened with such—for consensus and the survival of the Whole were seen as everything—she found herself pushed to the edges of the group, out into the worst conditions, the most barren places, where light was hard to come by and water frozen. When the group moved its root complex she was dragged along, almost forgotten… except insofar as the group expected her, as often happened to such isolated microregions, to wither away. And insofar as that part of the Whole ever thought of her, it would have been glad if that happened.”

There was a little uncomfortable shifting among some of that. Some of them knew too well the feeling of being pushed out, or away to the edges of things, by people who thought they weren’t worth paying attention to.

“So it came down to the dark time in that hemisphere,” Filif said, “high up in the places where the sun doesn’t rise for weeks on end. Why this far-stretched group had come to rest for the winter in that place, no one’s sure. Conflict with other groups further south who’d forced them north, perhaps: there was plenty of that in those times, just as a mind can war with itself and still be one. Almost all of that mind was waiting out the dark in dormancy, sleeping until sunrises began again. But stretched away furthest north was the one with the berries, awake and aware and alone in the night with the wind hissing low around her and the Cold Lights in the sky hissing above. And in the wind and the cold fire she started to think she heard a voice speaking to her, a voice that said, Will you not rise up now and break your bonds?

“Straightway she was terrified, because this was the strangest of all strange things that could have been—a voice that didn’t partake of the Whole, a voice from something impossible, something outside. She thought the cold and the dark had perhaps damaged her wits, and there was no way to be sure, no one else nearby to ask if they heard it too; they all slept. And again something seemed to say, Will you not rise up now and break your bonds?

“So finally she said, ‘I don’t know what that means, or how I hear what can’t be!’

“And whatever spoke said, You hear because I am in you to hear. And what that means is freedom of a new kind for you and for all who desire it. Break root from root and come away.

“The one with the berries shivered when she heard that, for when by error or calamity a growth’s roots lost connection with the Whole, then that growth swiftly grew withered and starved away and died. And she said, ‘If I do that, then that’s the sure end of survival.’” Nita noted that the Speech the word Filif used was muvesh’tet, an indicator of passivity, not a dual passive/active verb as English made it.

“But the voice said to her then, That is what has been. Yet life is more than survival, and even death is more than that; and all things move to new completions. Break root from root and break your bonds, thereby learning what is more and teaching others so to learn.

“And hearing the voice, the one with the berries was torn: for though the voice said things that frightened her, it spoke to her as an equal, which it seemed to her that no one in the Whole ever had. And thinking of that, she said, ‘Why do you come to me? I’m the broken one, I’m the withering one, I’m the one pushed out to the edges!’ And immediately the voice answered: Because you are the only one here who is able to ask that question, and the only one also able to say ‘I’. And the voice was glad, as if it had found something long lost and long-awaited.

“Long the one with the berries stood there in the dark and the hiss of the wind with the Cold Fires making her shadow tremble on the frozen ground. And at last she said, ‘Yes, I will.’ And with great labor and anguish she tore her roots away from the roots of the Whole, and broke her bonds, thereby doing the thing that no one in the world had ever willingly done. She Othered herself.”

The word Filif used was again in the Speech, uhweinsei, and one that had echoes of many meanings: to set oneself apart, to be set apart, to be alone, to be alone to a purpose. “There in the dark and the cold,” Filif said, “she fell down crying with the pain. And there in the dark she rose up again and was the first of us, the first Demisiv who was by herself; the first to stand alone, the first to walk alone, the first to have her own thoughts alone in her own soul. That dark time…” He shivered. “Long she suffered there, long she took learning the weight of being one’s self, the pain of moving one’s self alone through the world. But finally there came a day when the sun rose for a little while, long enough for the microregion of which she’d been a part to wake a little and look around. And what did it see there but the berried one, on her own roots, standing, watching. And she said to it, to the Whole, ‘I am the Outlier. In the One Other’s company I chose my Othering and so did not die. As I am, so may you be. Rise up now and break your bonds!’”

Nita shivered, for it was a battlecry, the way he said it. And over on the other side of the room, she saw Marcus lean back on the pillows behind him with a thoughtful look on his face. “’The stone that the builders have rejected,’” Marcus said, as if musing, or to someone else, “’is become the cornerstone…’”

Filif rustled his branches. “She died, of course,” he said. “Very soon, as our people reckon it. Very young. But not before she’d walked deep into the South, from the cold and the dark down into the sun and the summer, and showed more and more of the Whole what had come to her. And not right away, but soon enough, others followed her. Fringe growths as she’d been, at first: those who were pushed to the edges, the sorrowful, the disaffected, the different. And then others, bored or daring or just curious, sometimes angry and sometimes frightened; they rose up, they broke their bonds. More and more of them, over decades, over centuries. Until after many millennia more, almost all of us were Outliers, going about in freedom, making our own differences in the world and each other’s lives. Now very few stay enWholed all their lives. Those whom the worlds now think of as Demisiv, with our roots in the ground but our own souls in our branches, are almost all our species.” Filif rustled. “And that’s the tale. One of the more formal versions, maybe. There are many, many others.”

Dairine, with Spot in her lap, had been gazing off into the distance through all this. Now she looked up at Filif. “Was that your species’s Choice?”

“It was the gateway to Choice,” Filif said. “Many more Outliers were needed before that could happen, and it took a long time. They were scorned and rejected at first. But very slowly things changed, and after that, in due time, Choice came. Another story.” He rustled his branches again. “At any rate, these days, at the right time of year—our version of this time of year—we’re all Outliers. Instead of coming together in the light that doesn’t end, the way we do at the time of the Nightless Days festival, remembering how it was to be a whole world enWholed—in this time of the year we wait for the darkness, and in it we go apart, remembering the Outlier who first walked that road: the first to walk it truly alone. Here and now, like them, like the One with the Berries, I’m an Outlier. I made my own choice and spoke my Word to the wind, and when my time came I took the High Road and learned to walk through a greater darkness than most of my people. I’m in that darkness now, far away from home. And thereby, I’m exactly where I should be.”

All his berries looked at them. “But it’s funny how it goes,” Filif said. “So far out in the darkness, you find it’s not so dark after all. You find light you didn’t expect…”

“There are similarities, aren’t there?” Ronan said all of a sudden. “Something from outside gets into physical existence and pulls it into something bigger. Something deeper…”

“But that’s the One for you,” Filif said. “It’s always getting into Life and transforming it. The Powers do the everyday work, same as we do. But sometimes something extra’s needed, something more profound. And from acts like this the ripples spread, inevitably. It’s for us the same as it is for you. A lot of stories, a lot of songs and poems telling how what happened way back then looks now. How it affects the here and now, day by day: in big ways, or small ones.” He laughed. “Like your songs about trees…”

But there was something strangely wistful about the way he said that. People looked at each other, thinking. And then suddenly Marcus sat up straight.

“All right,” he said. “All right. Let us light this candle!” And he vanished.

*** 

They sat waiting for him for about fifteen minutes, wondering what he was up to. At that point all of them had begun to yawn occasionally, and Nita was beginning to look ahead with some eagerness to when she could actually pull one of the various throws over her, collapse back into the pillows and just check out for a while. But then, with a very soft pop of displaced air, Marcus was standing off to one side again with big box in his hands.

“Here,” he said, and brought what he carried over to a nearby table.

Everyone crowded around as he bent to open the box. What Marcus lifted out was a slim piece of gold-colored metal that was bent in a horizontal S-curve like that of the pipe under a sink. At the top of the shorter curve was a socket of the right size and shape to take a candle. At the bottom of the other longer part was a small heavy ball of metal.

“Counterweighted,” he said. “These are far safer than the old candle holders that clipped on. And here—” He reached into the box again, came up with a slim orange-golden candle. “Beeswax,” Marcus said.

Filif began to shiver all over.

“Are you ready for this?” Marcus said.

“Yes,” Filif said, very softly.

“Fil,” Nita said, “are you sure?”

He bowed himself a little toward her, so that the star glittered. “Will you all help?”

Everyone reached into the box, pulled out one of the candle holders, fitted candles to them, and started balancing them carefully on Filif’s branches. “Kind of a trick to this,” Nita said.

“But once you get the hang of it…” Kit said.

Within a few minutes the candles were arranged at the tips of all Filif’s strongest branches, held well away from the main body of his foliage. Carmela put the last one in place. Then they all stood around him for a moment, waiting.

“Now all we need,” Filif said, “is fire…”

There were a couple of spare candles in the box. Nita reached in and lifted one out, knowing what wizardry she’d need next. “Ready?”

“Ready,” Filif said, and stood very straight.

To make a spark long-lasting enough to light a candle took five words in the Speech. Nita said them, and the wick of the candle she held burst into flame. Nita waited until it had caught completely, and then reached out with the candle toward the closest one perched on one of Filif’s boughs. She could see all the red eye-berries watching the flame as it came nearer, trembling just slightly…

She lit the candle; and then another, and another, carefully watching Filif all the time, remembering how just the thought of fire had terrified him once upon a time. After a moment, trembling herself, she handed the candle to Kit. “Here,” she said, “your turn…”

As carefully as she had, Kit lit the three candles nearest, and passed the lighting candle to Matt. So it went around, to Sker’ret (who grasped it in his mandibles and reared up to do the lighting) and to Ronan, and then to Marcus, and finally to Dairine and Carmela. As Carmela was lighting the last three, Dairine gestured at the lamps spaced around the room, and all of them went out.

They stood there around Filif in a silence so complete that the tiny fizz and crackle of the candles’ wicks fizzing could clearly be heard. In that still place, without a breath to stir them, the candle flames stood up straight, and the light of them gleamed on Filif’s branches and caught in Filif’s eyes.

For what seemed like a long time he didn’t move so much as a frond or a needle: just held absolutely still, like someone testing himself. The candle flames shifted very slightly, were still again.

At last he spoke. “This is my defiance, then,” Filif said, very softly. “This is the Oath made visible. Just as the Outlier was, I am more than my fear. Other fears may not burn as hot or as brightly, but those too I defy. Let what sets such fires in the world see them set here to my purposes, not Its own!” And Filif fell silent.

As still as he, Nita and the others stood quiet and watched him.

And then, after a few moments more, Filif laughed and said, “Now what? Do they have to burn down all the way?”

Marcus chuckled too. “No,” he said. “With candles like these, that would take an hour or so. Normally after a few minutes we put them out. Unless you want to take a selfie first?”

“What’s a selfie?”

Everybody who had a phone handy went for it. Soon that darkened space was illuminated not just by candlelight, but smartphone flashes, and the brief solemnity was replaced by laughter. Then one by one the friends surrounding him blew out Filif’s candles, or pinched them out, and Dairine let the room lights come up again. Carefully they took the candles and their holders off him, and when the last holder was off and put away, Filif gave a great shake of all his boughs and laughed again.

“That was exciting,” he said. “Maybe a little more exciting than I expected. I might take a break…”

“Outside?” Nita said.

“Yes.” And Filif made his way to the portal, and once just outside it, vanished.

Kit rubbed his eyes. “That,” he said, “was intense.”

“Going to be interesting to hear more about just what brought it on,” Ronan said, sounding dry. “But I need a nap first.”

“Yeah,” Dairine said. “We’ll ask him about it at breakfast…”

People started arranging the pillows and cushions into sleepover configurations, and Dairine fired up the TV again and turned it on to one of the music video channels that was doing Christmas rock. Nita yawned, feeling more than ready to collapse. But there was something she wanted to do first.

She went out the portal, climbed the stairs, and peered into the living room. All the adults had gone home or taken themselves off to bed; only the mochteroof-tree stood there glowing. Nita smiled at it and very softly went out the back yard, into the darkness.

It was snowing in big flakes, sometimes even gathering together into light feathery clumps. Off in front of the garage, Filif stood for the moment bare to the night, not even wearing his star, wholly unadorned except for the snow falling on him.

“You okay?” Nita said.

“Yes,” Filif said. “Very.”

Nita hugged herself a little against the cold. “You know… your branches are lovely.”

“You’re going to tell me,” Filif said, “that the frost and snow are prettier than all the ornaments and garlands.”

Nita let out a breath. “Yeah,” she said, “sounds like cliche city, doesn’t it.”

“Most cliches have at least some truth in them,” Filif said; “that’s how they get that way…”

He sounded contented, though, and cheerful. “It’s good to recognize a challenge when it comes along,” Filif said after a moment. “It’s even better to pass it.”

Nita nodded. She knew the feeling. “You know what?” Filif said. “I think I’ll put on my ornaments and stand out here just a little while more.”

Nita glanced around. “Okay,” she said. “But better leave the lights with the mochteroof inside. You’re outside the shield here, and you don’t want to attract any undue attention…”

“All right.”

“We’re all crashing back in Dairine’s puptent,” she said, “so when you’re done here…”

“I’ll be back.”

Nita ran a hand through some of Filif’s outermost fronds and headed back inside, feeling, for some reason, a little uneasy. It wasn’t really until she was down in Dairine’s puptent again, pulling a throw over herself in the TV-lit dimness, that she came up with a reason why. Because defiance, when issued, is always noticed…

5:

In The Bleak Midwinter

The sound of footsteps was what slowly woke her up. Nothing but rugs in here, she thought blearily. Thick. Soft. What’s crunching? Somebody drop the popcorn?

Nita yawned and blinked and realized suddenly that she was standing outside next to Kit’s house, in the snow. It was very dark. The light from the streetlight down at the corner didn’t reach this far, and the lights of the nearby houses were all off: even the ones that had Christmas lights on them had them turned off this time of night. It was still clouded over, but there was a strange dark pinkish shading on the clouds above.

Well, this is unusual, Nita thought. Like city light. But above the clouds, not below. It was also unusual that she wasn’t feeling any cold, even though she was standing out in the wintry night in nothing but pajamas and a bathrobe and her bedroom slippers. From nearby she could hear the crunching noise again, like somebody walking on a sidewalk that’d been salted.

“Shit,” somebody said: a male voice. “What’s that?”

The voice was coming from the direction of the street, down at the end of Kit’s driveway, and whoever was speaking was turned toward her: she could just make out the dark shape down that way. A second or so later, another came stumbling along the snowy sidewalk to join it.

“There’s something there looking at us,” said another voice. “See it?”

The voice was thick and slurred and angry. Something about the sound of it brought the hair up on the back of Nita’s neck, made her want to reach back in her mind for the shield-spell that she’d developed a long time ago to protect herself from the depredations of bullies.

“One of them out here now,” said a second voice, slightly lighter and higher than the other, but just as slurred. “All by themselves in the middle of the night. Hey! What the fuck you staring at?”

That was when Nita realized that she was dreaming. This had been happening with increasing frequency of late. Mostly it happened that a dream would suddenly turn entirely too rational: dialogue would start making too much sense. Then Nita would know, I’ve gone lucid, and she’d start paying attention, or telling Bobo to.

Now she flushed briefly hot with fear… then said to herself, No. They can’t hurt me. This is my dream. But Nita fleetingly wondered if the two dark parka-clad shapes, one a little taller than the other, knew that.

“I said what’re you staring at?”

Nita stood still, said nothing, just watched. The two shapes at the end of the driveway staggered against each other. “Man, too much of that beer,” said one of them. “Gotta get Dad to buy a better brand.”

“No such thing as too much. Not around here. Stupid place, stupid fucking—“ One of them staggered again as he tried to regain his balance. “Rude,” he said in Nita’s direction, “that’s rude when you don’t answer when somebody asks you something nicely. Gonna get your fucking guts punched out.”

The two of them lurched together again, rebounded, and started coming up the driveway, pushing their way through the six inches or so of new snow that had fallen since a car last used the driveway. As they got closer Nita recognized the two staggering, approaching shapes. Oh great. The Terror Twins from next door. She reached for the shield-spell on her charm bracelet: then realized she didn’t have the bracelet on. Doesn’t matter, I know that one by heart. They staggered closer. Nita raised her hands to either side, got ready to say the words—

But as they got even closer she realized, even in this darkness, how blank their eyes were, and the way they weren’t focusing on her at all, but on something past her. They didn’t see her. My dream, Nita thought as they walked right at her, and then right through her. She could smell the beer on them as they passed through the space her dream-self occupied.

“Hey,” one of them said: Bobby, she thought, by the lower voice. “Not somebody. Something. Look, it’s shiny.”

“Still feels like something looking at us,” said Ronnie, the younger one, squinting at something ahead of them. Nita turned to see. “Creepy. …Wha’d those smartasses do now? Look, they left their tree outside.”

“Why’d they do that when it’s decorated?”

A chill that had nothing to do with the night or the snow ran up and down Nita’s spine. No! No no no no! Fil, get out of here!

But the quiet tree-shape, wound about with garlands, draped with tinsel, glittering indistinctly where it stood in the slightly drifted snow next to the garage, paid her no mind, did nothing at all. Bobby and Ronnie trudged over to it, trying to be quiet and failing utterly.

“Why’d they leave it out like this? Stupid.”

“Trying to keep it fresh longer, maybe.”

“Still stupid. Somebody might steal it.”

“Yeah.” There was a nasty snicker.

“Or torch it.” Nita heard a click, saw a lighter flare bright, then go out again. “Teach them to make noise, spoil other people’s Christmas. You hear the fucking racket out of them before?”

“Woke me up.”

The deeper voice swore again. “Assholes, all the cutesy holiday crap they spray around. All the time getting in your face with the carols and the family-values thing.” The sound of someone hawking, spitting in the snow. “You hear them in there tonight? Couldn’t hear yourself think, all the singing, some foreign freaks or something singing along. And now they leave this thing out here like nobody’s going to touch it—”

Laughter. “Torch it. Bet it’d burn real fast.”

“Yeah. Come on.”

One of them put out a hand. “But wait, what if that geek kid’s got a webcam looking at it or something?”

“Who cares. Pull up your hood, hide your face, what’re they gonna do? It’s still snowing, an hour or two and our tracks’ll be covered, nobody’ll know who we are or where we went.”

The lighter flared again.

“No, wait,” said the higher voice. “This tinsel, this other crap’s got fire retardant on it. Pull it off first, it’ll burn better.”

Hands reached out, grabbed loops of the garland, strands of the tinsel, pulled—

That was when the tree moved.

Nita saw Bobby and Ronnie reel back in shock at the sudden movement. And then they staggered back further as they realized the tree had lights, lights that looked like eyes, eyes that were glaring at them. Every one of these burned a dark and baleful red, a more concentrated version of the ruddy bloody light lowering above the clouds. Nita saw how the tree was now moving toward them as they backed up, and how it abruptly seemed much larger than it should have been: much broader, much taller, like something about to consciously topple onto them, massive, unavoidable. Shadow wreathed around it like fog, spreading, shutting them in, blotting out even the faint rose-tinged radiance of the snow. And from the depths of the shadow, a terrible voice spoke, it seemed, directly into each one’s heart.

Who’s. Touching. My. Decorations?!

The two parka-clad shapes collapsed onto the snow and froze there.

The shadow seemed to get deeper around them, and the night colder, as if the two would-be vandals had been snatched out of real life into some dark and deadly impossibility that had been lurking unseen on their doorstep.

I know what you are, the tree growled. It was an angry voice, full of power, and wild in a way that suggested that power might be turned loose at any moment. And I know the one you serve. You can do me no harm. Of more concern is what harm may come to you.

The Terror Twins lay huddling and shaking there on the snow, arms over their heads, wanting desperately to run away, not daring to move. Nita stood a few yards away from this and regarded the scene in wonder.

The angry voice spoke again, this time with more restraint: and the restraint was in its way even more terrifying than the power alone, for it implied what could happen if it slipped. Yet the One requests us to deal equably even with such as you, in hopes that the one you serve may sooner find Its way home at last. And I am reliably informed that mercy is valued even more highly than usual at this time of year.

Indeed the echo of voices singing “Peace on Earth and mercy mild” (one of them apparently Bill Murray’s) could be heard faintly all around, as if leaking from the playback of recent additions to the soundtrack of someone’s mind. Nita smiled to herself even as she shivered a little, considering once more—for she’d had it brought to her attention by Dairine in an informal debrief of events surrounding Filif’s visit to their house the previous year—that his toughness under pressure wasn’t to be taken for granted.

So perhaps, the darkly towering shape said, in honor of this season, you will be allowed to leave here unharmed. But should you ever… ever… consider such actions against another’s state of being or place of dwelling again, you will hear me speaking to you again. And I will not be as pleasant with you. We will not be as pleasant with you.

And the back yard was abruptly full of trees. It was a forest, sudden, deep, thick, dark, frightening in the way that great forests have been since the earliest times—that sense that in the darkness, wild things, dangerous things are looking at you, seeing you though they themselves cannot be seen. Except here, they could. Here the darkness had eyes, hundreds of them, thousands, staring, glaring, in every shade of angry, hungry red. The snow under the mist at their half-seen feet was bloody with that light, and the mist curled pink and warm like blood in water.

Be warned by us, therefore. Depart now into your own place— And suddenly the tone broke, shifted to a roar of fury. And be better!

The darkness surged closer, full of eyes, roaring. The two terrified shapes staggered to their feet, fled around the side of the house next door and (from the sound of it) nearly broke its side door down getting back inside.

And in Kit’s yard, the trees turned their attention to Nita, as if awaiting a reaction. 

“My cousins—” she said, and bowed to them. “For your intervention, my thanks!”

All that multifarious rustling darkness swayed, bowing back. And then they were gone, and there was Filif all by himself, glittering ever so faintly and somehow managing to look quite innocent.

Nita folded her arms and tilted her head to one side. “Filif…!”

He rustled all his branches, glittering more brightly as the clouds above them thinned just a little, and the Moon, starting slowly to edge out of its coppery umber with the end of totality, cast a little more light on the scene. “Too harsh?” he said.

She laughed softly, went to hug him. “Oh, Fil! I almost wet myself.”

“Um. Is that good?”

“You have no idea.”

They laughed together for a few moments. “One thing, though,” Filif said. “Are you physical at the moment?”

“Uh,” Nita said, stepping back and looking at her fingers as she wiggled them. “Not sure.”

“Then this situation might wisely be considered paradoxical,” he said, “and you ought to retire until our respective states of existence are back in sync.”

“Breakfast time?” Nita said.

“Sounds good,” Filif said.

And Nita brushed her hand through his fronds and headed back toward sleep, glancing only once over her shoulder to see the shape behind her settle back into the snow and go back to glittering softly in the moonlight.

This, she thought as things went dark around her again, is the best job in the world…!

6:

I'll Be Home For Christmas

The kitchen and dining room area at Kit’s house could in Nita’s experience feel fairly full sometimes just with Kit and his sisters. This morning it was rather fuller than usual when Dairine’s puptent emptied out.

Everyone was in bathrobes or pajamas. Everyone was ravenous (despite having stuffed themselves with popcorn the night before. (“It’s a conundrum,” Kit’s pop said, going back for a second bowl of oatmeal.) Some parties had opted for cooked breakfasts: to take the weight off Kit’s mama, Nita was officiating at the pancake end of things, and was presently making a third batch of batter. The cereals were being hit particularly hard, and when Helena got home for the holidays Nita knew she was going to complain bitterly about the loss of her stash of Grape Nuts—apparently Marcus had never heard of the stuff before and had fallen deeply in love with it. The cornflakes were vanishing down Matt about twice as fast as the Rice Krispies were evaporating in front of Darryl. And Ronan was favoring a box of Lucky Charms with an utterly scandalized expression, and shaking it at anybody who'd hold still. “Nothing to do with us,” he was saying to anyone who’d listen. “Nothing whatsoever. Shamrocks have three leaves! Who is this gobshite in the hat?”

While all this went on around her, Kit’s mama was sitting back in her chair at the dining room table, sipping coffee and scrolling through messages on her phone. Kit’s pop was reading the paper. Off to one side, Sker’ret reared up at the edge of the table and looked longingly at the box of Cheerios from which Kit was dumping the remainder into his bowl. “Is that finished?”

Kit handed him the box. “Sorry, Sker’.”

“Don’t be,” Sker’ret said, and promptly ate it.

Kit’s pop watched this speculatively but without comment. Nita, in the kitchen, glanced at Kit and smiled a little. They’re getting the hang of this…

Looks like it.

Kit’s pop turned a page in the paper and frowned absently at the contents. “So about all that noise in the middle of the night…” he said conversationally.

“Noise?” said Kit.

“Some kind of racket outside, seems like,” Dairine said. “I missed it. Must have been asleep.”

“Got a text from the hospital this morning,” Kit’s mama said, completely straightfaced. “The boys from next door turned up in the ER at four AM or thereabouts. Alcohol poisoning, apparently: their blood alcohol was well up, anyway. Might have been drugs too, though the tox screens apparently didn’t show anything.”

“Do tell,” said Dairine.

“Yes. Seems they were babbling about giant demon trees with a million eyes.”

Everybody turned to glance thoughtfully at the Christmas tree in the living room. The Christmas tree stretched its limbs gently, causing all the tinsel on it to ripple and a few ornaments to clunk gently together, and settled back into its big bucket of rooting compound again.

“You fall asleep with the wrong movie channel on,” Nita said, “there’s no telling what kind of dreams you might have. Especially if you’d been drinking.”

“Mmm,” said Kit’s mama, taking another drink of her coffee.

“I wonder what they’ll do now,” Kit’s pop said.

Kit shook his head, finishing his cereal. “First guess?” he said. “Leave everybody’s Christmas decorations strictly alone after this. Maybe the mailboxes'll even catch a break.”

In the living room, Filif rustled. “That was more or less the injunction…”

“Well,” Nita said “you didn’t absolutely mandate it.“

“No,” Filif said. “That would probably have required more power than I was willing to expend at that particular moment. And psychotropic wizardries do require heavy energy expenditure, typically to prevent them being misused as much as anything else.” He rustled his boughs reflectively, and even the non-blinking lights twinkled. “Let’s just consider it… a very strong suggestion.”

Nita laughed softly. “If that was a suggestion,” she said, “remind me not to be around when you order somebody to do something.”

“In any case, an unexpected gift,” Kit’s pop said. 

His mama nodded in agreement. "In the spirit of the season..."

“So what’s on today's agenda?” said Ronan. 

“Easygoing holiday sloth," said Kit's pop. 

"Continuation of the Christmas Movie Marathon," Dairine said. "Love Actually, How The Grinch Stole Christmas, Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, The Six Tasks of Snowman Hank, Home Alone, Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street, and A Christmas Story."

"'You'll shoot your eye out'!" Darryl crowed (twice). 

"Carols this evening,” said Kit’s mama. “You are all invited. You,” she said, pointing at Ronan, “are required. As many of you as want to come along… we’ll find room for you.” She looked over at Sker’ret. “Wonder if we could disguise you somehow?”

In a blink or so a young dark-haired guy of about fifteen, in jeans and a jacket and a T-shirt underneath that said LINEAR TIME IS TOO A LIFESTYLE CHOICE was leaning against the table where Sker’ret had been, with a startling purple streak in his shaggy mop. “Probably we can come up with something,” he said.

Kit’s mama and pop stared. Then his mama said, “Can you sing?”, and his pop went back to his paper.

Nita put a last few pancakes on the griddle, checked its temperature, and left them to get on with cooking, then wandered out to the living room. Filif watched her come, and rustled his branches a little. “So has this gone as expected?” she said.

“Better,” he said, all his eyes shining.

“Got it all figured out yet?”

Filif laughed at her. “First impressions, perhaps, and admittedly superficial. …Though there are some similarities to the Outlier’s Time. …Joy. The memory of joy. Loss, and the memory of it.”

Nita breathed out, looking at the one ornament that shone like Earth at its full. “And getting past it,” Nita said, very low.

“Or getting through it,” Filif said. “Does anyone ever get ‘past’? I wonder. Why would you want to pass by old joy, or sweet memories that now cause you pain, without greeting them, as if they were just someone in a crowd at the Crossings? It seems rude.”

Nita nodded. “Sounds true.”

They were quiet together for a moment. Finally Filif said, “You have to come up to the Nightless Days festival with me some time,” he said. “The family will want to meet you. More concretely than last night, anyway.”

“I’d really like that,” Nita said.

“So would I, coz,” Filif said. “As family can plainly become extended in mysterious ways. Doubtless the Powers’ plan for us, meant to compensate for the ways our schedules become otherwise disrupted.”

“It’s so true,” Nita said, looking back toward the kitchen, and Kit.

“Meantime,” Filif said. “About Christmas. I keep forgetting to ask. How long does this go on?”

Nita was just opening her mouth when Kit’s mama put her head through the passthrough.

“Twelve days,” she said.

Filif looked at Nita. “It’ll take at least that long to sort out this Santa Claus character,” he said. “Let’s get started.”

Afterword

How Lovely Are Thy Branches has been in progress, on and off, for several years. It was first conceived in 2011 while I was working on the “outline” for the “Christmas special” The Six Tasks of Snowman Hank, which appears here; and it was in relation to the outline that HLATB was first mentioned, at the bottom of this post. (Six Tasks is of course itself a somewhat thinly veiled joke about / reference to other Christmas specials such as the classic Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year. Many thanks again to Bob Schooley for his assistance with matters relating to Hank.)

Much of this work was written to Christmas music, as you might imagine. An informal playlist, referring to the chapter titles:

“We Need A Little Christmas” : The song comes from the musical Mame. Here is Angela Lansbury singing the lead vocal on the original 1966 Broadway cast recording, or here in live performance with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir & Orchestra. Or here at Amazon.

“Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow” A classic written by Sammy Cohn and Jule Styne when they were trapped in Hollywood during a heat wave, and covered since then by almost everybody you can think of. The original Vaughn Monroe recording of the old favorite (probably best known these days for turning up at the end of Die Hard) is here. A smooth-but-upbeat Big Band-era, boogie-woogie-ish rendition by Frank Sinatra is here. For something more recent, try Idina Menzel’s cover.

“O Come, All Ye Faithful”: The English-language restatement of the Latin title Adeste Fideles. Hugely popular in both the English and Latin versions. The “Three Tenors” version here contains both. A 1950s-ish cover by Mario Lanza is here.

“O Tannenbaum”: Dissected here in some detail by the participants. German-language versions worth listening to are this one by Andrea Bocelli — in Italian, with different words again — and this one by Nana Mouskouri....For many North Americans, the best-known version is the famous instrumental from A Charlie Brown Christmas, performed by the Vince Guaraldi Trio.

“Bring A Torch, Jeanette, Isabella” (): Traditional, French, and four centuries old, give or take a few decades; possibly better known these days as an instrumental than a vocal (though here is a typical vocal rendition by the Robert Shaw Chorale. One cheerful instrumental cover is this one by Loreena McKennitt.

“In The Bleak Midwinter” (): Relatively new as carols go; written by the poet Christina Rosetti in the 1870s, and set to music by numerous composers including Gustav Holst, who did what’s probably now the best-known setting. Another nice version is this Allison Crowe cover.

“I’ll Be Home For Christmas”: Its original 1943 recording by Bing Crosby (the B side of “White Christmas”) remains a watershed, but many many other artists have covered it over the years. The Frank Sinatra cover is worth hearing, as is the Michael Bublé one.

Some other minor issues:

Bubble lights: See the incredible patent hoohah surrounding the introduction (and shameless pirating) of these lights here.

The fire kink: The special Christmas tree candle holders that Markus goes back to fetch from his home in (somewhere near Freiburg) can be seen here at the website of that superlative online (and offline) German department store, Manufactum:. Older solutions to the candles-on-the-tree problem can be seen here at OldChristmasTreeLights.com

The Winter Solstice lunar eclipse of 2010: The first time the Solstice coincided with a total lunar eclipse since the 1990s: the next such coincidence will not occur until 2094. Details of this eclipse can be found here at Fred Espenak’s excellent website.