How Lovely Are Thy Branches

by Diane Duane

  “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 sti
ll, 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!”