How Lovely Are Thy Branches: A Young Wizards Christmas Read online

  “He’s been working with the authorities at the Crossings as a go-between for the Interconnect Project,” Nita said. “The Demisiv have been a big part of the Project for a long time. It’s a group of species who specialize in long-distance intergalactic transit: keeping it running, helping people get around. They also do emergency work… help move populations who have to find new worlds to live on, because their stars have blown up or they’ve had planetary natural disasters or whatever.”

  “So… kind of a humanitarian organization?”

  That wasn’t a comparison Nita had thought to make. “Yeah,” she said.

  “For a whole lot of values of ‘human,’” Kit added.

  Kit’s mama didn’t say anything for a moment, just kept looking around in the cupboard. “Juan,” she said, “are we out of spaghetti again?”

  “There’s fettucini…”

  “It’s not the same.” She got up, sighing, and opened an upper cupboard. “Okay, we’ll do it with fusilli. But you said you were getting spaghetti on the way back from work…”

  The paper rustled. “Sorry. My head was killing me and I just wanted to get home.”

  “Well, tomorrow then.”

  “I’ll make a note.”

  Kit’s mama rummaged around for a big pot and started filling it with water. “Well,” she said while the faucet was running. “He sounds like a good influence. One thing, though.”

  Kit and Nita looked at each other. “Yeah?”

  “Is your friend a needle-shedding type?”

  “Not that I’ve ever noticed,” Kit said.

  “The occasional berry,” Nita said. “But only when he’s in trans.”

  Kit’s mama put her eyebrows up. “Doesn’t sound like a problem,” she said. She put the pot on the stove and turned on the heat under it. “How many people are we talking?”

  “We’re still working that out,” Nita said. “Wanted to get the okay from you first.”

  “You did, at least,” Kit’s mama said, and flashed a grin at Nita.

  Nita did her best to produce a We-are-so-busted expression that would acknowledge the realities of the situation without assigning blame to any specific party. Kit simultaneously looked elsewhere and looked innocent.

  “And this is supposed to be a one-night sleepover? On the twentieth?”

  “That’s right,” Kit said. “We wouldn’t be up here all that much. Mostly in the puptents: there’ll be more room.”

  Nita heard another newspaper page turn, but purposely didn’t look that way, because Kit’s mama was doing so.

  A second passed. “The carol-singing thing’s the night after,” Kit’s mama said. “Don’t forget.”

  “We won’t,” Kit said.

  His mama headed out of the kitchen and through the living room again. ”Just try to keep the other collateral damage to a minimum, yeah?” she said to Carmela as she passed by the couch. “It wouldn’t be good to freak the neighbors.”

  “At least any more than they have been already,” muttered Kit’s pop from behind the paper.

  “Oh Mama thank you!” Carmela shrieked and bounded up off the couch to grab her and hug her as she passed through.

  “Don’t thank me,” said Kit’s mama. “Thank your Pop.”

  The logic of this might not have been instantly obvious to the casual bystander, but Nita had seen enough of these family discussions at Kit’s house to understand that with his folks, parental consensus was often reached by some mechanism she didn’t understand and probably wasn’t meant to. “Thanks, Mr. Rodriguez!” Nita immediately said over the noise of Carmela diving past the newspaper, seizing her Pop and covering his face with smooches.

  “You’re welcome,” Kit’s pop said as soon as Carmela let him loose and more or less went dancing out of the living room and up the stairs to get her tablet and start making notes and plans.

  Kit’s pop shook his head, shook the paper back out into something like a readable configuration, and went back to his reading. As he did, Kit turned to Nita and said silently, She just lay there with her sad face on and let us run interference for her, didn’t she!

  Yep, Nita said. She owes us one.

  Good, Kit said. And meanwhile… “Looks like we get to have a party!”

  A second later the sound system up in Carmela’s room fired up with a raucous British-accented voice more or less screaming over a noisy drum solo, “It’s CHRIIIIIIIIIIIIISTMAAAAAAAAS!!”

  Nita snickered. “Ronan,” she said, “has a lot to answer for…”

  ***

  An hour or so later, Nita was upstairs in Carmela’s bedroom, sprawled in her desk chair with her manual open in her lap, while Carmela was lying on her stomach on her bed and scribbling notes in her tablet at about a mile a minute. That thing must have some handwriting recognition program, Nita thought. But then, it’s Crossings tech… it would have.

  Having gotten the “yes” from their folks, Carmela was now acting oddly at a loss, as if she’d secretly expected to be turned down and now wasn’t sure what she should be doing. “Decorations,” she was muttering.

  Nita glanced up at that. “I thought you decided you were going to use your normal ones.”

  “What? Oh. Not for Filif! For the house.”

  “We’ve got lots of time yet to think about that.”

  “Not if we don’t want to miss the holiday rush! The sooner the better. Anyway, the stuff’s starting to turn up in the stores already anyway…”

  Nita sighed, as that was all too true. “Still.”

  “And another thing,” Carmela muttered, hurriedly flipping over virtual pages in her tablet and starting to make another set of notes. “Allergies. Food allergies…”

  She can plan an invasion and not turn a hair, Nita thought, but she can’t stay focused on a guest list? This really is a big deal for her. “Mela, you’re coming at this backwards.”

  “Huh?”

  “Guest list first. Food allergies later.”

  “I’m just trying to get ahead of things…”

  “Right now the only one you’re getting ahead of is yourself. Deep breath!”

  Carmela took it, though for some moments she seemed reluctant to let it out again.

  “Mela!” Nita said. “Relax.”

  She let that breath out with some difficulty. “I just want it to be nice for him,” Carmela said. “He’s so special… and I don’t want him to be disappointed.”

  Her first alien crush, Nita thought, and just smiled. “He won’t be,” she said. “You know him. Always ready for something new, and in love with it when it arrives, whatever it is.”

  “And oh gosh, he’s going to need something to root in. Maybe one of those custom compounds they’ve got at the Demisiv sleepstore at the Crossings…”

  “Mela!” Nita said. “Daddy just puts him in the flower bed when he turns up. With maybe some bark chips! So later for custom bedding. Guest list!”

  Carmela let out another heavy sigh and turned to a clean “page.” “Guest list,” she said.

  Nita stretched in the chair and glanced down at her manual. She’d long since told the list of active wizards she knew personally to arrange itself to the front of the main directory. Now she started paging through that section, checking people’s public calendars, where available, against the sleepover / party dates. “So. Filif.”

  “Goes without saying.”

  “Sker’ret.”

  “Ditto.”

  Both of them paused then, thinking of one of the original puptent group who would not be there: Roshaun. More or less in unison, they sighed.

  “Yeah,” Carmela said. “Well. …You and me and Mom and Pop and Dairine and your Dad and Kit.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “And Spot.”

  “Right.”

  “Ronan.”

  “Mmm,” Carmela said. Nita glanced at Carmela with amusement, not entirely sure whether the sound was simple acknowledgement or approval. Ronan wasn’t particularly forthcoming about
how he actually took Carmela’s more or less continuous flirting with him, but Nita noticed that he never really came out and told her to stop it.

  And having mentioned Ronan and Kit in the same breath, naturally the next thought was—

  “Darryl?” Carmela said, beating Nita to it.

  “I don’t know.” Nita looked over his listing in the manual. “He’s showing availability, but that might just be for errantry. The dates are starred, and the star says ‘subject to preparedness issues.’”

  “Meaning he’ll bow out if he feels overstimmed.”

  “Well, sure. But the whole holiday time might be iffy for him. We were talking a couple weeks ago and he told me that as far as his personal well-being goes, and the way he’s been doing better at managing it, he’s been trying not to freak his parents out too much. Trying to break them in gradually.”

  Carmela snorted with laughter. “Darryl?”

  Nita smiled. In the matter of handling his autism, as with his handling of nearly everything else, it was hard to imagine Darryl doing anything “gradually”. These days he tended to jump in enthusiastically with both feet and then deal with the fine details as they came up. “He told me at one point,” Nita said, “that he was thinking about trying to get his parents to perceive wizardry as just a new way to be non-neurotypical.”

  “If anyone can do that, he can,” Carmela said. “So if he’s trying to ease them into the idea that the holidays are less of a chore for him these days and he doesn’t need all that supervision, maybe we should just let him decide what to do about this? Put him down for ‘maybe yes maybe no’ and let him get back to us?”

  “Yeah. If he needs to blow us off, he will and he won’t feel guilty about it.”

  Carmela scribbled for a moment. Nita stretched, propping her feet up on Carmela’s desk and thinking. “S’reee…” she turned a page in the manual.

  Carmela looked up. “Um. How do you invite a humpback whale to a sleepover?”

  “The usual way! You put her in a people suit.”

  Carmela blinked. “Oh. Yeah.”

  “Especially because it’s easier for S’reee than for most whales. When she got hurt that time and I healed her, we got blood-tied. So she has less trouble shapechanging to human these days, the way I have less trouble going whale when I need to.”

  “Oh.”

  “But no,” Nita said with some regret. “Says here she’s on sabbatical right now. Personal leave.”

  “For what?”

  “Uh, the manual won’t say. It’s one of those confidentiality things. But I suspect it’s about private time with her honey.”

  “Her what??”

  “She’s dating. A very nice bull from up around Vancouver somewhere. He’s a food critic.”

  “A what??”

  “You want to know where the best North Atlantic krill is,” Nita said, “Hwii’ish is your go-to guy.” It had taken her a while to understand that all the Earth’s oceans throbbed with a vast network of cetacean communication, a sort of sonic version of the Internet; and that Hwii’ish was essentially a foodblogger, and fairly famous among his own kind. But he didn’t care about fame: what he was interested in was wizards, most specifically S’reee. “But who knows?” Nita said. “Send her an invite anyway. She might be able to get away.”

  Carmela made a note.

  “Tom and Carl?”

  “For a sleepover?”

  “Huh? Oh, no, just for the evening party.”

  “Sure, if we can get them.” Nita flipped from Tom’s page to Carl’s. “It lists them as ‘on call’, but they might be able to get away.”

  “The Twychild?” That was Tran Liem Tuyet and Tran Hung Nguyet, a special kind of twin, both of them favorites of Nita’s from the big group they’d met up with during the Pullulus War.

  “Uh, they’re greyed out then. Maybe a family thing? It doesn’t say.”

  “Okay. We should have two different invites, maybe? One for people we’d like to see but we don’t know if they can make it, one for those whose calendars say they’re free.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “What about Matt?”

  “Who— Oh, the Aussie guy! Yeah, can’t miss a chance to watch him pester Ronan about how grateful he should be for Matt saving his life.”

  “And Ronan really is grateful but he makes this big song and dance about not caring…”

  “He’s free.”

  “Good. Sleepover list. …Rhiow and Hwaith and their bunch?”

  Nita turned pages. “Uh, no. ‘Emergencies only.’ It’s a bad time for them, the North American gates are crazy busy at the holidays, and they still always malfunction even when a full team of gate techs are riding herd on them.”

  “We’ll save Rhiow some of that cream she likes,” Carmela said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay.” Carmela stared at the tablet. “Any of the Mars-team guys? Kit likes them a lot.”

  Nita nodded. “Um, yeah. What’s his face? The tall one. The German guy who Doesn’t Drive Tanks.”

  “Marcus,” said Carmela, and made a note. While the Mars investigating team had been hunting for the planet’s lost kernel, and any hint of what had happened to the (then so-called) Old Martian species, Marcus—who besides being a wizard with a linguistics specialty also drove armored personnel carriers for the German Army—had lectured anyone who’d hold still on the essential difference between vehicles with wheels and vehicles with tracks. You got a sense that he had to spend a lot of time with people who were unclear on the concept, and so he tended to be proactive about it.

  “Looks like he’s free until the 24th,” Nita said.

  “Okay. Who else have we got from Mars? What’s her name with the curls?”

  “Lissa?…Uh, no, she’s grayed out. Shame, I like her, she’s nice. Maybe next time.”

  They both sat quiet, thinking for a moment. “Mamvish?” Carmela said then.

  “Wow, if we could get her…!” Nita flipped a page, studied the manual. “’On errantry, unavailable except for emergencies.’ Well, no surprise there.” The Species Archivist to the Powers that Be was in demand all over the Galaxy, all the time.

  Carmela sighed. “Shame. But then she wouldn’t like this time of year, this far north. No fresh tomatoes…”

  “We’ll catch her in the summer, if we’re lucky.”

  Nita stretched again. “Anyway, that sounds like a good number. How many is that now?”

  “Uh, let me count.” Carmela was silent for a moment. “For the party, sort of sixteen? If everyone shows up. For the sleepover, eleven? Again, if everyone’s able to make it.”

  Nita nodded. “Good crowd. Should be fun.”

  Carmela sat up, touched the tablet in a couple of places and typed busily for a minute or two. Then she looked over at Nita. “Last minute thoughts?”

  “None right now. Probably I’ll have one the minute you send the invites out.”

  “We’ll see.” Carmela typed a last few words and then hit a spot on the tablet with one finger. The tablet chimed.

  “All gone out?”

  Carmela nodded, tossed the tablet to one side and rolled over on her back in a good simulation of a collapse for someone who was already lying down. “I,” she announced, “am exhaaaauuuuuuusted!”

  “And you haven’t even done anything yet,” Nita said.

  “Excuse me! I sent the invitations!”

  Nita snickered. And then, without warning, a chill ran down her spine. She shivered.

  Carmela saw it. “What?”

  “Well,” Nita said. “Except for the food and the drinks and the decorations and some little presents for everybody, we have only one thing left to worry about.”

  “Oh?”

  “The weather…”

  2:

  Oh, The Weather Outside Is Frightful

  Monday, December 20, 2010, 7:00 AM

  Off to the left side of Nita’s head, her radio alarm went off. Eyes still closed, she stuck a hand ou
t from under the covers and felt around until she found the button. The insistent buzzing stopped, leaving her with the faint sound of somebody from the local all-news station talking in a cheerful tinny voice about lane closures on the Major Deegan Expressway.

  She opened her eyes. It was still very dim in the room. Winter mornings weren’t exactly her favorites: she hated getting up when it was still dark.

  Nita sat up in bed, rubbed her eyes. Is the sun even up yet? she wondered.

  7:16, said Bobo from somewhere in the back of her head.

  “Thanks,” Nita said, and rubbed her hands up and down her arms. It was chilly: the central heating hadn’t come on yet, and in weather as cold as it had been the last few days, even a flannel nightie couldn’t do a lot for you once you got out from under the covers. Shortest day tomorrow, she thought. Longest night… “And an eclipse of the moon,” she said aloud.

  While that’s true, Bobo said, I wouldn’t quote you long odds on seeing it.

  Nita got out of bed and went straight to the closet for the beat-up wooly-chenille bathrobe she favored on mornings like this. “Well, yeah, probably going to be too busy…”

  That’s not the problem.

  “Oh?” Nita said, and went to the back window to tilt the Venetian blinds open.

  The back yard looked someone’s old black and white photograph of a winter scene: softly lit in a shadowless dove-gray, the dark shapes of bare shrubs and leafless trees seemed charcoal-sketched against an indistinct background barely visible in the pre-dawn twilight. But what was slightly visible now in that grayness was movement; a gentle down-sifting of light near the window. Ever so lightly, ever so slightly, it had begun to snow. There was maybe an inch of it on the ground already.

  Nita smiled a little to see it. Snow for Christmas…

  But possibly, Bobo said, a little more than you might have had in mind.

  “Oh?”

  You’ll want to check your manual… but we have incoming.

  “Uh, okay.” It was unusual to hear Bobo sound quite so concerned.