Диана Дуэйн - How Lovely Are Thy Branches

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?”