How Lovely Are Thy Branches

by Diane Duane

  “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 yo
u 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.