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 reve
nge 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 besides that 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 act
ually 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’ Holy 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…”