In a blink or so a young dark-haired guy of about fifteen, in jeans and a jacket and a T-shirt underneath that said LINEAR TIME IS TOO A LIFESTYLE CHOICE was standing where Sker’ret had been, with a startling purple streak in his shaggy mop. “Probably we can come up with something,” he said.
Kit’s mama and pop stared. Then his mama said, “Can you sing?” And his pop went back to his paper.
Nita put a last few pancakes on the griddle, checked its temperature, and left them to get on with cooking, then wandered out to the living room. Filif watched her come, and rustled his branches a little. “So has this gone as expected?” she said.
“Better,” he said, all his eyes shining.
“Got it all figured out yet?”
Filif laughed at her. “First impressions, perhaps, and admittedly superficial. …Though there are some similarities to the Outlier’s Time. …Joy. The memory of joy. Loss, and the memory of it.”
Nita breathed out, looking at the one ornament that shone like Earth at its full. “And getting past it,” Nita said, very low.
“Or getting through it,” Filif said. “Does anyone ever get ‘past’? I wonder. Why would you want to pass old joy, or sweet memories that now cause you pain, without greeting them, as if they were just someone in a crowd at the Crossings? It seems rude.”
Nita nodded. “Sounds true.”
They were quiet together for a moment. Finally Filif said, “You have to come up to the Nightless Days festival with me some time,” he said. “The family will want to meet you. More concretely than last night, anyway.”
“I’d really like that,” Nita said.
“So would I, coz,” Filif said. “Family can plainly become extended in mysterious ways. Doubtless the Powers’ plan for us, meant to compensate for the ways our schedules become otherwise disrupted.”
“It’s so true,” Nita said, looking back toward the kitchen, and Kit.
“Meantime,” Filif said. “About Christmas. I keep forgetting to ask. How long does this go on?”
Nita was just opening her mouth when Kit’s mama put her head through the passthrough.
“Twelve days,” she said.
Filif looked at Nita. “It’ll take at least that long to sort out this Santa Claus character,” he said. “Let’s get started.”
Afterword
How Lovely Are Thy Branches was in progress, on and off, for several years. It was first conceived in 2011 while I was working on the “outline” for the “Christmas special” The Six Tasks of Snowman Hank, which appears here; and it was in relation to the outline that HLATB was first mentioned, at the bottom of this post. (Six Tasks is of course itself a somewhat thinly veiled joke about / reference to other Christmas specials such as the classic Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, which celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2014.)
Much of this work was written to Christmas music, as you might imagine. An informal playlist, referring to the chapter titles:
“We Need A Little Christmas”: The song comes from the musical Mame. Here is Angela Lansbury singing the lead vocal on the original 1966 Broadway cast recording, or here in live performance with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir & Orchestra. Or at Amazon.
“Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow”: A classic written by Sammy Cohn and Jule Styne when they were trapped in Hollywood during a heat wave, and covered since then by almost everybody you can think of. The original Vaughn Monroe recording of the old favorite (probably best known these days for turning up at the end of Die Hard) is here. A smooth-but-upbeat Big Band-era, boogie-woogie-ish rendition by Frank Sinatra is here. For something more recent, try Idina Menzel’s cover.
“O Come, All Ye Faithful”: The English-language restatement of the Latin title Adeste Fideles. Hugely popular in both the English and Latin versions. The “Three Tenors” version here contains both. A 1950s-ish cover by Mario Lanza is here.
“O Tannenbaum”: Dissected here in some detail by the participants. German-language versions worth listening to are this one by Andrea Bocelli—in Italian, with different words again—and this one by Nana Mouskouri. …For many North Americans, the best-known version is the famous instrumental from A Charlie Brown Christmas, performed by the Vince Guaraldi Trio.
“Bring A Torch, Jeanette, Isabella”: Traditional, French, and four centuries old, give or take a few decades; possibly better known these days as an instrumental than a vocal (though here is a typical vocal rendition by the Robert Shaw Chorale). One cheerful instrumental cover is this one by Loreena McKennitt.
“In The Bleak Midwinter”: Relatively new as carols go; written by the poet Christina Rosetti in the 1870s, and set to music by numerous composers including Gustav Holst, who did what’s probably now the best-known setting. One nice version is the King’s College Cambridge cover here. Another is this Allison Crowe cover.
“I’ll Be Home For Christmas”: Its original 1943 recording by Bing Crosby (the B side of “White Christmas”) probably remains its best-known version, but many many other artists have covered it over the years. The Frank Sinatra cover is worth hearing, as is the one by Michael Bublé.
Some other minor issues:
Bubble lights: See the incredible patent hoohah surrounding the introduction (and shameless pirating) of these lights here.
The fire kink: The special Christmas tree candle holders that Markus goes back to fetch from his home in Freiburg can be seen here at the website of that superlative online (and offline) German department store, Manufactum. Older solutions to the candles-on-the-tree problem can be seen here at OldChristmasTreeLights.com.
The Winter Solstice lunar eclipse of 2010: The first time the Solstice coincided with a total lunar eclipse since the 1990s: the next such coincidence will not occur until 2094. Details of this eclipse can be found here at Fred Espenak’s definitive eclipse website.
Lifeboats
For the absent friends
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any [long-term] survival value.
— Arthur C. Clarke (amendment via Stephen Hawking)
You don't drown by falling in the water; you drown by staying there.
— Edwin Louis Cole
There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
— Thornton Wilder
ONE
JD 2455600.4380
In the pursuit of the business of errantry, most wizards who walk the High Road past the borders of atmosphere swiftly become used to looking up into strange skies—nights with extra moons, days with extra suns, skies with (compared to the observer’s homeworld) too many stars or not nearly enough. Rings arching overhead, their complex detail blunted and tinted by atmosphere in a hundred shades of pastel; multicolored nebula-veils flung crumpled and glowing across tens of millions of miles of darkness; comet-tails painting the endless night with the palest and most attenuated of brushstrokes—all these become relatively commonplace.
Over the busy few years since Kit Rodriguez had passed his Ordeal and become a wizard, he’d seen all these and more. One or two such sights had become familiar enough that he hardly noticed them any more. But what hung over Kit now was something he knew would be haunting his dreams for a long time to come.
Across the broad, shadowy twilit landscape where he sat, down from the distant mountains edging the horizon, a chill wind blew. Out before him in the darkness, a broad plain faintly suffused with bloody light, uneasy with the distant half-seen movement of thousands of people, lay glittering with the lights of hundreds of scattered electronic campfires—the most visible sign of people sharing their last meals, and their last moments of warmth together, before their lives ended. A quarter of the sky above him was blotted out by a great lowering mass of darkness and fire: horribly convex and claustrophobic, seemingly pressing downwards from the sky like a burning roof about to collapse on everyone trapped underneath it. The appearance was at least partly an illusion, Kit knew, but the reality it hinted at was d
eadly enough. All around him a world was ending—was literally in its death-throes—and nothing he could do was going to stop it.
Kit sat there shivering in that thin cold wind, feeling (for the moment anyway) both helpless and very much alone. And then even the shivering stopped, very suddenly, as he realized that very near him, something was moving in that darkness. He could hear the rustle of it as it made its way toward him through the wind-shaken grass… could see a hint of its movement, indistinct, bizarre.
Kit forced himself to stay absolutely still, waiting, watching, as darkly shining tentacles slowly came oozing along toward him out of the smoky twilight. And along with them, wide and staring, came the eyes… so many eyes fixed on him: alien, unreadable, strange.
As the creature crept toward him and more and more of those weird cold eyes became apparent every moment, Kit sat still and gripped his antenna-wand and tried to keep himself calm, waiting to see what would happen. But the main thought running through his mind at the moment was:
When they asked me to do this job… why exactly didn’t I wait a few moments before I said yes?
TWO
Sol III: 2/2/2011
About a thousand years ago, it now felt like, it had been five in the afternoon, and gray outside: just gray.
It was cold. It was cloudy. It was getting dark already. It was the beginning of February, and there was going to be a math test two days from now, on Friday, and Kit was going to flunk it. Massively, he thought. Horribly. In ways that no human being has ever flunked before. I’m about to make history. Future generations will laugh at the sound of my name.
Kit was sitting upstairs at the desk in his room, leaning on his elbows, his head propped in his hands. Normally the desk was comfortably cluttered with piled-up books and old CDs and DVDs and stick drives and scrap paper and soft drawing pencils; but all that had been cleared away in a desperate attempt to help focus his concentration. Now the desk was unnaturally tidy, and on it in front of him Kit had his math book open and a workbook open and a notebook open, and a calculator app up and running on his phone. He was gazing in an unfocused way at all of these while he played with a fairly hard-leaded pencil he’d just sharpened for the fourth time—the pencil being a mute and miserable acknowledgment of the fact that this was not going to be homework he could do using a pen. All over the floor around Kit were ripped-out, crumpled-up pages from the notebook, the most recent ones crumpled up a whole lot harder than the earlier ones, and thrown a lot further away.
Also open in front of him was his manual, which was not helping, not even slightly. Neither was the person using it to talk to him.
“I really can’t do this,” Kit muttered.
You really can, said his manual: or rather, that was what it said on the text page of his manual, which was displaying the texts Nita was sending him. Just take your time.
“I really wish you’d just, you know, give me a hint about this…”
You mean do it for you. He was sure she was laughing at him.
“Why not? Isn’t this what—” He was going to say what friends are for, and then had an instantaneous moment of panic, because of course that’s what we are, friends, except of course it’s kind of—more, and if I just say ‘friend’ what if she misunderstands me and she thinks that—
Nope, Nita said.
Kit rubbed his eyes, ridiculously grateful to have been let off the hook so easily. At the same time he was annoyed by it, and at the moment couldn’t really figure out why. So he fell back on annoyance at the math, which was a lot easier to rationalize. “Why do I even need this? I am never going to need calculus for anything!”
You might need it for wizardry.
“And if I do, the manual will do it for me!”
Except you can’t bring your manual into the test on Friday.
“I could! I could disguise it as a calculator!”
It won’t let you. It’ll know you’re doing it to cheat.
“This is so unfair.”
What, that I won’t do it for you? Or that wizardry won’t let you cheat?
“You could have a word with Bobo! Bobo would change the rules for me.”
In your dreams, but nowhere else, something breathed in Kit’s ear.
All the hair on Kit’s neck abruptly stood up, for what he’d heard was no voice of a living thing. It sounded like his own thoughts, happening inside his own head, except it wasn’t anything that Kit had been thinking. —What? Kit thought, and “What?!” he said.
What? Nita said.
“Uh. I heard something. I think—” Kit dropped the much-chewed pencil on his much-erased notebook page and shook his head, because this shouldn’t be possible, at least not as far as he knew. “I think I heard Bobo!” Which was leaving him seriously freaked out, because having Wizardry itself in his head was definitely not his department, it was Nita’s. Does this mean that we—is this something that’s happening because we’re— Kit broke out in a sweat.
But when the text field on his manual started filling up again, the feeling he got from the message was perhaps a touch annoyed, but otherwise unconcerned. Oh great, not you too.
Kit opened his mouth, closed it again. Then said, “Wait. Me too?”
Yeah, Ronan heard him once a couple of weeks ago.
His immediate reaction was Oh what a relief!… instantly followed by Wait a minute, how does he rate? Then Kit rolled his eyes at himself. Get a grip. “Really?”
Yeah. We were having a conversation about some girl Ronan said he was having trouble with, and then he said he heard Bobo tell him to ‘stop acting the maggot.’
Kit blinked. “What?”
You’re asking me what it means? How do I know what maggots act like in Ireland? All I know is that Ronan messaged me afterwards and told me that the Spirit of Wizardry was going to get its head punched in if somebody didn’t put some manners on it.
That made Kit snicker. “You sure Bobo’s not trying to pick up some overtime working as the voice of people’s consciences or something?”
Please. He’s been snarky enough lately that I’m wondering what’s going on with him. Like somebody took Jiminy Cricket and replaced him with Jon Stewart.
Kit laughed harder.
Meanwhile, look, you’ve just got to loosen up about this… You’re just making it harder for yourself. Calculus is just a way of describing change; of modeling systems that’ll show the way things move through space and time.
“I have a manual for that!” Kit said. “And as for this, I want to kick whoever invented it.”
That would be Sir Isaac Newton, Nita said, and tracking him down to kick him’s probably gonna take a lot more moving through space and time than either of us wants right now. Just go back and read the chapter on differentials again. Seriously, it’s not that bad.
Kit groaned and dropped his head onto his folded arms, rolling it back and forth. Yes it is! Why are you so optimistic?
Because you’re smart, and I know you’ll get it if you work on it.
“Oh please,” Kit muttered. “Only if you do find Isaac Newton and lock him in here with me.”
Anyway, this shouldn’t be so hard for you! How come you’re having so much trouble concentrating lately?
There were about fifty answers to that, Kit thought. The problem was trying to figure out which one was affecting him today. The Christmas holidays had been good—in fact, unusually good, because of aliens coming to camp out “in the basement,” a truly memorable holiday party and sleepover, and other wizardly incursions into the normal events of the season. It had all been so terrific that Kit almost didn’t mind going back to school afterwards, due to being kind of wrung out by all the happy excitement.
But that hadn’t lasted long. School had without warning turned mind-numbingly boring. It was the contrast, maybe, Kit thought, with all the stuff that happened in December. All of a sudden everything went back to normal. Too much normal. Nothing that interesting’s come up for me and Neets at the errantry end
, these last few weeks. And the other wizards we know have all been busy with stuff: too busy to have time to hang out. Kit rubbed his eyes. Then this calculus unit started, and life hasn’t been worth living ever since. It’s like it’s all in some other language that even knowing the Speech can’t help...
Which was part of the problem, maybe. Kit wasn’t used to feeling helpless, these days. What he was used to was figuring things out—for wizardry was all about working your way through to the answers—and about depending on stubbornness to get him to and through the places where figuring things out wasn’t enough. Unfortunately, calculus seemed to be gazing with faint amusement at his stubbornness and just barely resisting the urge to burst out laughing.
And then of course there was the other issue, which Kit absolutely wasn’t going to mention to Nita at the moment. Twelve days yet. Twelve days… Kit started chewing on the pencil again.
Earth to Rodriguez? the text in the manual said. Come in, Rodriguez!
Kit dropped the pencil in annoyance. “Neets, seriously,” Kit said, “what’s with the texting? You coming down with laryngitis or something?”
There was a pause. Busy, she said after a moment.
“With what? Or is Dairine hanging over your shoulder?” Because that was always a possibility. If that was the case, what she was doing made sense: the manual could take a wizard’s subvocalizations, or even raw thought, and render them as text when necessary.
Another pause, longer this time. Well…