Interim Errantry

by Diane Duane

  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?”

  “Santa Claus,” Tom said to Carl with great seriousness, “is one of the Powers that Be.”

  Carl looked at him thoughtfully. “Did you get the bottom of the eggnog?”

  Tom looked askance at him, and then started laughing again. Most of the people in the room looked confused. And Carl sat on the arm of the sofa and told the story of how once upon a time Tom’s father got The Bottom of the Eggnog—where all the nutmeg winds up if you forget to shake the jug—and then (due to nutmeg’s psychoactive qualities) had to go to the ER due to what Tom described as Accidentally Seeing God. Shortly half the room was helpless with laughter. Tom, meanwhile, seeing that Marina had indeed just brought out the first of the eggnog jugs, got up and went over to it and shook it in the most ostentatious way possible before pouring Carl a glass.

  Filif was watching and listening to all this in fascination. Nita leaned over to him. “I think this is some of what Christmas is about,” she said. “Tradition. The stories that come out this time of year.”

  “Old interactions,” Filif said, “that can be depended on. Reinforcements of the cyclical nature of, well, Nature. Tales and reminiscences and old jokes…”

  “There’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories / of Christmases long long ago…” Ronan sang.

  “We need him tomorrow night,” said Kit’s mama through the passthrough. “He sings on key, and he plainly has something better than a bucket to carry a tune in. You are not going anywhere tomorrow, you hear me?”

  Ronan just grinned.

  “Look,” Dairine said, “let’s go downstairs and leave the oldsters to their own devices—”

  “Do I detect the sleepover beginning?” Kit’s pop said.

  Carmela rose up in great dignity and grabbed Filif by one frond. “Might as well,” she said. “We’ll leave you to talk grownup talk… we know you’ve been dying to get us out of here.”

  There was less disagreement with this than Nita would have expected, and more good-natured laughter. “Anything you people want to take downstairs with you?“

  “Make another pot of the hot chocolate?”

  “Way ahead of you, Leprechaun. It’s right there on the stove staring at you.”

  The younger participants mouthed Leprechaun?! at one another.

  “And there’s some ice cream, too. That double chocolate Kit likes. Nita, maybe you want to grab that, and the bowls and spoons...” Kit’s mama glanced at her watch. “No point in telling you to get some sleep sometime tonight because we know you won’t,” Kit’s mama said. “And for once I don’t care. If things get noisy, just do whatever you have to to keep it under control, all right?”

  There was a general chorus of “Okay” and “G’night” and “Thanks, Mrs. Rodriguez” as the group making for the puptents headed down the stairs. But as she followed Dairine and Carmela and Ronan and Filif and Matt and Marcus and Sker’ret toward the stairs, Nita looked over her shoulder and saw Kit’s mama stop him as he picked up the pot of cocoa.

  “Sweetie, I keep meaning to ask you…”

  “What, Mama?”

  “All this stuff Legs has brought us is really lovely…”

  “Yeah, it is!”

  “And you should thank him again. But one question.”

  “Yeah?”

  She lowered her voice. “I was kind of nervous. I didn’t know if it was a religious thing…”

  “What?”

  “Why is so much of this food blue?”

  Nita hung back a little to help Kit with the cocoa if he needed it. “Is she okay?” she said. “They don’t think we’re ditching them?”

  “They’re fine,” Kit said. “They look about ready to start Adult Talk. Best time for us to get out, yeah?”

  Nita nodded as they got to the bottom of the stairs. Kit’s basement looked much like hers, except tidier: it wasn’t the catch-all area that her family’s basement had turned into over time. Over against the back wall were several wide vertical dark patches that marked inactive portals, but one, the central one, glowed golden with activity and light from its far side. They stepped through.

  Nita looked around and breathed out, nodding. Dairine’s description of Roshaun’s puptent space from his previous visit as “overdone” was at best an inadequate summation of a tall bright space full of gilding, of rich carpets and hangings and ornately carven furniture. Instead of the usual bright light pouring in from the hot bright sun of Wellakh, though, the windows were dark, and lamps standing on tall pedestals around the edges of the room were lit, casting a subdued light over everything, catching the glint of a gem here, the sheen of a carving there. And in the middle of it all, in front of a trio of big sofas arranged in a U-shape, and heaps of big pillows and cushions, was a twin of the entertainment center upstairs.

  Kit paused and stared. “Uh… Dair, I think they might complain about
us just moving this down here…”

  Dairine was already flopped down among the pillows. “Kit,” she said, scornful but only gently so. “The very first thing I did when I got to be a wizard was duplicate a computer. You think cloning the entertainment system is a problem? Especially with hardware support.” She stroked Spot’s case: he arched his “back” against the gesture. “All I had to do was make sure the remotes have different ID chips in them so they won’t wind up countermanding each other.”

  “In other words,” Carmela said, “now we can have… a movie marathon!!”

  This suggestion was met with general agreement, as the possibility had first started being mentioned about the same time the invitations went out. “After all that food,” Kit said, “I wouldn’t mind stretching out for a while…”

  “And after all that excitement,” Filif said, from where he’d settled behind the centermost sofa, “a little relaxation will be welcome.”

  “Anybody wants to change into night stuff,” Dairine said, “there are changing rooms through that arch there…”

  “And then Ice cream!” Carmela said, while Dairine grabbed the remote and brought up the same TV guide they’d been looking at earlier. Ten minutes or so went by while everybody changed into sweats or pajamas or other comfortable late night wear, though Marcus elected to stay in his fatigues.

  Filif had been reading the on-screen TV guide while the others had been putting themselves together “‘A Christmas Carol,’” Filif said when everybody had made themselves comfortable. “Kit, your mama said that there would be caroling tomorrow… is this something to do with that?”

  Kit shook his head. “Not really. Or not directly. It’s about a guy who loses the meaning of Christmas…”

  “Fil should see that!” Nita said.

  “Yeah, but which one?”

  Filif rustled in surprise. “There’s more than one version of this story?”

  “It’s like the bigger Christmas story that way,” Ronan said. “A lot of variation, a lot of different ways to look at it…”

  Nita looked over at Dairine. “Line a few of them up?”

  She picked up the remote. “Sure. But I want popcorn!”

  “I’ll get that,” Nita said, knowing where Kit kept the stuff that he microwaved. But she’d barely stood up when she was distracted by some one appearing out of nowhere…in a red “tuxedo” pajama top and green pants.

  “Darryl!” Nita and Kit said in unison, as the new arrival plunged around the room hugging everyone in sight, and briefly nearly losing himself in Filif’s lower branches.

  “My God,” Ronan said. “How’ve your folks let you out this late?”

  Darryl shrugged. “They think I’m home in bed.” He smiled. “I am home in bed.”

  “Not dressed like that, I hope!”

  “Yup.”

  “You’re a terror!”

  “Not as much as him. Hi Matt!”

  “Gonzo boy! Have some ice cream.”

  “How long can you stay?” Nita said.

  “Until I fall asleep,” Darryl said, tucking himself down among the cushions. “I go back to being one of me then.”

  “No rush about that,” Matt said, handing him a bowl of ice cream. “If you eat this too fast, which of you gets the brain freeze?”

  “Let’s find out!”

  A few more minutes were spent assembling popcorn and more drinks, and turning down unneeded lights, and getting everybody comfortable. Finally Dairine looked over her shoulder. “Everybody ready? And Darr, if this gets too loud for you say the word.”

  “No problem. What’s on?”

  “The classics,” Kit said. “Roll it!”

  Dairine brought up the 1951 A Christmas Carol first, and on this Filif was most intent. When the Ghost cried, “Business! Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business…!” Nita heard Filif murmur, “We could have made a wizard out of him with a little work.”

  “Well, kind of late for that, the guy’s dead,” Carmela said. “But also, it’s fiction. He didn’t really exist.”

  “But this came out of someone’s mind?” Filif said.

  “Yes…”

  “Then he exists. All that’s left is to determine now is how concretely…”

  Nita grinned, not sure how to even start arguing about that. When that film was done, they took a break for more popcorn, and then Dairine cued up Scrooged. Filif laughed as hard as any of them at this, which surprised Nita a little. How much research has he been doing on us?… she wondered.

  The end of that movie produced demands for fresh drinks and more popcorn and ice cream among the viewers. While these were being distributed, Dairine grabbed the remote. “Got one more for you,” she said, grinning.

  Nita had seen that grin. Often it didn’t mean well. “Okay,” she said, “what have you got up your sleeve?”

  Dairine began punching numbers into the remote. “Should I be concerned?” Kit said. “Is it going to suddenly start spouting some new language at me that I can’t cope with?”

  “Not at all,” Dairine said, “not at all.” She concentrated on the numbers she was punching into the pad, and glanced over at Spot. “Is that right?” she said.

  There wasn’t any answer that any of them could hear, but Dairine looked satisfied. “Go,” she said to the entertainment system.

  Moments later, the strangest screeching, howling, whining noise was coming out of the speakers. Some of the guests stared at that and the bright swirling graphics that accompanied them. But Ronan’s head came right up at the sound, and his mouth fell open, and he turned a look on Dairine that was profoundly accusatory. “How did you—”

  “You mean you can’t guess?” Dairine said, leaning back against the pillows with a smug expression.

  A television theme possibly much more famous in the British Isles than in North America began to play, against more of that howling sound effect. “Okay now,” Ronan said, “this is just a wee bit illicit. This doesn’t even air for four more days! Whose server have you hacked?”

  Dairine placed one hand on her heart and assumed an expression of wounded dignity. “Nobody’s! How can you suggest that I would ever do such a thing?”

  “Just like this,” Ronan said, completely unapologetic. “You saw my lips moving, I assume. Pause that first, would you? Thanks, Spotty. So. How?”

  If it was possible, Dairine’s expression got even smugger. “The Mobiles are working on a project to store all available data,” she said. “You know about that?”

  “The way I heard it,” Ronan said, “it was a project to back up the entire available universe.” He shook his head. “Still not too sure about what you use for media.”

  “Not my problem,” Dairine said. “That’s hardware. But since I’m the Mobiles’ mom, they’re particularly interested in backing up all the data on Earth, in case I should need something. They said they didn’t want me to be discommoded.” She smiled sweetly. “Nice of them. Anyway, it turns out that one of the systems they’ve been routinely backing up for me is the entire data storage system of the BBC. And somewhere in that data storage, surprise surprise, is the next Dr. Who Christmas special. I mean, seriously, you don’t think they keep it stored on tape or something, do you?” Dairine raised her eyebrows. “So once it’s backed up to the motherboard world—because they keep all the really important storage, by which I mean everything I’m interested in, backed up locally—it’s really simple for me, well, me and Spot, to run live streaming video from the Mobiles’ backup to here…”

  Kit blinked. “Tell me,” he said, “that downloading however many gigs of data it takes to store a Christmas special from umpty billion light years away isn’t doing something really horrible to our broadband allowance.”

  Dairine made an amused spluttering noise. “No,” she said.

  “Wonderful,” Ronan said. “Now would you kindly fecking un-pause this thing? I’m dying here.”

  The display unpaused, and Ronan fell back again
st the cushions on the floor with an expression of complete fulfillment. “You may just have justified your entire reason for existence,” he said to Dairine, and fell silent.

  Another hour went by full of time travel and excitement and danger, with a different version of A Christmas Carol and another version of Scrooge woven all through. At the end of it, Ronan looked around and remarked, “I wondered that he’d gone a little quiet.”

  Nita followed Ronan’s glance and saw that the cushions among which Darryl had been lying were empty. “Guess it was getting a little late for him,” he said. He rolled over and looked up at Filif. “How about you, Fil? You holding up all right?”

  “Oh yes,” Filif said. He rustled, shaking out his branches all around. “It takes some synthesis, all of this,” he said after a few moments. “The way the tales interleave, the way they reach back to the triggering event… It’s complex. And so are the strictly social aspects. I can see this subject will take a lot of study…” But he sounded cheerful about the prospect.

  “Do you guys do anything like this at home?” Dairine said. “Is there a holiday time when everyone gets together?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Kit said. “I saw something in the manual once. That sort of summer festival where everyone goes up into the mountains…”

  “Well, yes. But this time of year… well, our version of this time of year,” Filif said, “there’s something else. Not to get together, though. To get away from everyone else.”

  That brought a number of heads up. “What?” said Dairine, and “Hey, that’s one I could get used to,” said Ronan. “Especially if you had relatives like mine…” He rubbed his eyes.

  “Sounds a little weird,” Nita said, “to want to get away from other people at a holiday.”

  Filif rustled. “Maybe not so strange,” he said, “if you’ve heard the story behind it…”

  “Story!!” shouted about half the room.

  “Then listen now, and hear the wind in the branches,” Filif said, “and it will tell you the tale of the Outlier, who made us what we are…”

  Everyone got quiet.