How Lovely Are Thy Branches Read online

  Contents

  Title page

  Front matter

  Time fix

  1: We Need A Little Christmas

  2: Oh, The Weather Outside Is Frightful

  3: O Tannenbaum

  4: Bring A Torch, Jeanette, Isabella

  5: In The Bleak Midwinter

  6: I'll Be Home For Christmas

  Afterword

  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 re
asons 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 fo
r 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.