by Diane Duane
That’s it, Nita thought. Let’s rumble! To Jackie she said silently, Are you absolutely sure you’re up for this?
Up for this? I was grown for this!
Nita nodded. “Okay,” she said, and lifted Jackie high. “See you on the other side!”
And she took a large breath, said the last word of the spell she’d constructed, and dashed the pumpkin down hard on the ground.
It smashed. From inside it, an explosion of orange-golden light splashed out for yards around, then surged back and started to gather around the wet, smashed pieces. And a sound slowly began to build: like the earth shaking, like the sea crashing somewhere nearby—something growling.
A swirling shape started to mass up into the air between the wizards and the zombies. It was round, and orange, and it got bigger and oranger every minute. It was beach-ball sized, pop-tent sized, garage-sized. And it kept growing.
Nita stood there, fists clenched, feeding the spell power as Kit fed it through to her from himself and Dairine and Ronan. She staggered a little with the tension of managing such a big feed all by herself. Not too fast, or it’ll burn out early. Not too slow, or it’ll collapse. Keep it steady—
The shape got bigger, swirled, coalesced, started to solidify. It was a pumpkin, massively ribbed, hugely and perfectly globular, a pumpkin the size of a house, a truly great pumpkin, growing and shouldering up against the dark sky. The snapped-off vine place at the top of it started to go green again, started to grow more vines down around it—tendrils of verdant light that snaked away in all directions as they reached the ground under it, then started to boost its shape a little clear of the ground. Then slowly eyes started to show from under the skin, shining through it as if the pumpkin was lit from inside. Glowing, glaring eyes, they got brighter, burned flaming orange, fixed on the zombies, grew brighter. And then a dreadful fanged mouth tore open, full of orange fire, and the awful face turned itself up toward the risen harvest moon and roared.
You go, Jackie! Nita thought, and concentrated on keeping herself upright and holding onto her connection with the spell so that the power feed would keep running. But it was hard to concentrate when events around them were approaching a level of weird that was unusual even by wizardly standards. The gigantic pumpkin-shape had been lifting itself up on an ever-thickening set of vines of light that were curling out from it, twining themselves in among the vines in the pumpkin patch, spreading fast until the whole place was all one expanse of throbbing dark-green fire. And then the giant pumpkin came down so hard the ground shook with it. Nita wobbled and put out a hand to keep her balance: Kit caught it from behind her, steadying her, as the dark green fire spreading in the field started suddenly going pale in places; golden, then orange—
The remaining pumpkins scattered across the field, the ones that hadn’t been big enough or the right shape or otherwise perfect enough to be picked and sold, were now lighting up from inside as if every one of them had its own candle… and, very quickly, much more than just a candle. Eyes opened, that interior light streaming out. Jaws opened, every one of them fanged. Every pumpkin began pushing itself up off the weedy dirt on ever-stronger vines. And every one looked at the staggering zombies and growled.
Jackie, now taller than some of the trees around the field, glanced around with slow fierce exaltation at the crowd of its people gathering around it, burning. And then, with one accord, they turned their attention to the zombies…
Jackie roared again so that the sky shook with it, a truly monster-movie-ish roar, and the pumpkins charged.
All hell broke loose—or at least what might have been mistaken for events in one of those dark outer spheres of existence where the Lone Power’s minions normally prefer to congregate. The whole field turned into a mad vista of snarling mouths, eyes full of devouring fire, roaring shapes that started to purposefully herd the zombies, piling up on one another and hemming them in out of view.
Then the serious screaming began.
Dairine came up behind Nita, staring. “What is going on in there??” she said.
But her tone of voice suggested that she knew, and Nita shook her head with mingled shock and approval as a couple of detached zombie-legs and arms came flying out of the fracas. These pieces did not have time to reproduce themselves, for other pumpkins rolled or leapt after them and devoured them, then turned to look for more prey: and with every zombie they ate, the pumpkins got bigger. Nutrients, Nita thought. It’s all just nutrients to them. Uh oh—
In desperation a crowd of the zombies, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, had managed to break out from the main body of the attack and were lurching in desperate speed for the edges of the field. It was futile. A second wave of ever-growing pumpkins charged after the zombies and hunted them across the field no matter which way they ran, snatching at them and pulling them down, grabbing and gobbling every hastily-shed scrap, every half head and pulled-off leg: everything.
And then, without much warning, the roaring and the growling stopped. There were no more zombies. There was nothing left but a field full of gloriously bright orange pumpkins of unusual size, rolling slowly to various sprawling patches of vines, settling themselves down against the ploughed-up ridges, the light gently fading out of them. One last pumpkin, the very biggest of them—much shrunken from its previous massive size but still easily four feet across, its top beautifully webbed with the browned veining of sunburn—was settling down into a spot at the corner of the field: but it had a ghostly quality about it, unlike its smaller kindred. As the spell ceased execution, as the huge pumpkin’s interior effulgence very slowly faded and the cut places in its face smoothed over and healed themselves, the pumpkin looked at Nita one last time with eyes that had nothing to do with knives.
Thank you, Jackie said, for picking me.
And it faded gently away into the dark, and was gone.
All around the four wizards fell a great stillness. The only thing breaking the sudden peace was the much-amplified noise from some nearby neighborhood’s own “haunted house”, a single werewolf-y howl echoing into the moonlit night around them.
Nita dusted her hands off; Dairine put up her lightsaber, and Kit stowed his wand. Ronan knocked one last sliotar of light across the field, where it fell in a brief bright burst of wizardry and dissipated. “And now we see,” Ronan said as they looked across the former scene of zombie carnage, “why demons are scared of pumpkins.”
Off to one side there was an abrupt BANG! as someone teleported into the field a few yards away, in so much of a hurry that they didn’t care about the air displacement. Carl was standing there in his ghoul outfit, though all around him was a hot blue halo of light that suggested he had arrived ready for serious destruction of almost anything he might find. He looked around him in slight bemusement at finding nothing but a quiet moonlit field, a surprisingly large number of large leftover pumpkins for a suburban Halloween, and a caveman, a pirate, a Jedi and an alien princess, all looking somewhat out of breath but very pleased with themselves.
“Tell me I missed the zombies,” Carl said, sounding actively regretful.
“We handled it,” Nita said. “But thanks for checking.”
Carl laughed. “I have a feeling the précis on this is going to make interesting reading,” he said. “Don’t skimp on the details. And don’t forget, you left your candy bags at our place.” He glanced around him one last time, shook his head, smiled. “Meanwhile, I have to go put more dry ice in that punch bowl…”
He vanished again, more quietly this time.
Ronan sighed and looked around the field. “Is it just me,” Ronan said, “or has my desire for large amounts of sugar completely deserted me?”
“It’s just you,” Dairine and Kit said, more or less in unison.
“Come on back with us anyway,” Kit said. “Who knows, you might recover.”
“Oh, all right…”
“One thing first,” Nita said, as Ronan and Dairine wandered off toward the edge of the field, wi
th Spot trailing after, to set up a new set of transit circles.
“What?” Kit said.
“Right here…” Nita had bent down to examine the spot where she’d smashed Jackie to the ground. Some pulp and smashed skin fragments still lay there. She started turning over the broken pieces carefully.
Kit got down beside her. “What?” he said.
“Here,” Nita said. Under one of the broken pieces she found a few pale white seeds. Carefully she picked them up and slipped them into the pouch that held her manual. “You see any more of these?”
Kit helped her look. “A few under here…”
“Good.” After a few moments Nita sat back on her heels and accepted them from Kit, considering for a moment. “I think we take these home and leave them out to dry a little.”
“In the oven?”
“No, just near the radiator, I think. Then put them away… wait for spring, start the seedlings going, plant them out. Daddy was talking about starting a vegetable patch. I bet he wouldn’t mind some pumpkins.”
Kit gave Nita a look that even in this moonlight was plainly visible as a teasing one. “Not sure this really counts as changing the equation…”
“What?”
“You have got to stop giving things nicknames.”
She gave him a look of deadly amusement. “‘Kit’,” Nita said, “is a nickname.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t give me—”
Nita pulled off Kit’s crooked mustache, chucked it away, grabbed him by the collar and pulled him close in the dark.
“What are you two doing back there?” Ronan said from some yards away. “Hurry up and come on, or the Jedi Pig here’s gonna get ahead of you and raid your bags for all the chocolate.”
For a few seconds there was no answer. Then Kit said, “Tell her she can have it.”
Ronan and Dairine exchanged a glance and a grin, then vanished.
And behind them, the Halloween moon kept shining down, glorious and round and somewhat scarred… like a pumpkin with character.
How Lovely Are Thy Branches
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 star system were evacuated into near-Rirhait space secondary to their home star 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 north side 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 coat racks. “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.”
“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 reasons 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 gift giving 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.”
