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,” s
he 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 he
ard 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.