Sker’ret laughed that ratchety laugh and headed for the kitchen. “Don’t get me started,” he said. “I might get my revenge some other way. She’s got the right attitude for liaison work, and we can always use more hominid staff…”
Nita turned back to find Kit’s pop standing next to Filif again, now with something of the air of a workman taking a break with a co-worker. “You going to be okay standing there all night like that?” said Kit’s pop. “I don’t want you to be stuck away from the fun.”
“Oh, this is fun! But I don’t have to be stuck. If I want to, I can just leave all this here.”
Kit’s pop blinked at that. “Uh, am I missing something?”
“Watch.”
The “Christmas tree” seemed to shake itself gently. Then there was a strange sort of a sideways blur in the air, as if the whole scene was a watercolor painting that had had a wet brush pulled across it. A second later the watercolor haze was gone, and the Christmas tree was standing exactly where it was, not a light or ornament jostled, not a needle out of place… but Filif was standing a couple of yards to one side of it, wearing nothing but a twin of the star.
“That being is an artist,” Ronan called from across the room, “and if he drank, I’d buy him one.”
Filif burst out laughing. “Of course I drink,” he said, “what do you take me for, some kind of rockmoss?”
“No, I didn’t mean water…”
“Drinking habits aside,” said Kit’s pop, “that is some stunt.”
“Nothing much at all,” said Filif. “It’s a constructed appearance, what we call a mochteroof.”
“I won’t even try to remember how to say that…” Kit’s pop said. “Or to pretend I’ve got the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”
“Think of it as like a hologram, but solid,” Filif said. “I can slip in and out of it, and of the ornaments, at will. And back in…”
And suddenly Filif was conducting a masterclass in mochteroof construction for the layman, translating the most technical terms out of the Speech into English on the fly. Juan leaned back on the wall nearest him, absolutely fascinated. At the point where Filif dropped into Spanish without warning, Nita’s jaw dropped.
“How is he doing that??” she said to Sker’ret as he passed with his third trayful of buffalo wings, from which she pilfered one.
“Reverse-proactive Speech recension,” Sker’ret said. “He’s a many-talented lad, our Filif. The reverse recensions take a lot of work…”
Nita knew they did: she’d hit them more than once, and bounced. Idly she reached down for a buffalo wing as Sker’ret headed off to do the rounds.
She was just turning around to see if she could find a napkin, because the sauce on the wings was fairly aggressive, when Carmela came wandering over to her, bent toward Nita’s ear, and whispered:
“You know something?”
“What?”
“It’s not enough.”
Nita blinked. “What? This was what he always wanted.”
“But there’s more now. You know what else he wants.”
“What do you—” Then she realized.
“The rest of his Christmas present. Neets, come on. He wants the candles. We have to figure out a way to give him this!”
Nita thought about it. Carmela’s mischief was a bit infectious and hard to resist right now. But so was the intensity of her feeling about this… and Nita’s sense that Mela had this right. That was what finally tipped Nita over into agreement. “The parental types would pitch a fit if they found out…”
“Better make sure they don’t find out, then,” Carmela said. “We’ll handle it later. Down in one of the puptents.”
“Makes sense,” Nita had to admit. “Not even in the same space as the house, really…”
“And believe me, this time of year my folks don’t have the staying power to ride herd on us when we’ll be staying up all night. If they even wanted to try.” Carmela snickered. “Dairine did a smart thing. Installed her own puptent downstairs and took Mama in to show her.”
“And?”
“What the decor didn’t do to her, the size of it did. All the gilding and jewels and weird alien furniture…”
Nita blinked. That description meant only one thing to her. “She installed Roshaun’s puptent…”
“Uh huh. I assume the Mobiles have a version of it saved. Or she does, in her manual…”
That was food for thought. “Well, at least in there you’ve got a lot less chance of burning the house down…”
Carmela laughed at her. “With a house full of wizards, good luck with that happening. And anyway there are about fifty more interesting things that could happen, with the cellar full of elective pinched spaces. All you need is a portal fringe overlap and the whole area collapses into a superdense black hole. Good thing the Master of the Crossings is here walking the hors d’oeuvres around.”
Nita cracked up laughing.
Things got a little more relaxed after that. “Now about this Santa Claus being…” Filif was saying to Kit’s pop. “Perhaps this is only an avatar of one of the Powers? Working clandestinely, and hoping to be mistaken for a chaotic force aligned with the Lone Power? Because the presence of the associated small nonhuman workers does confuse the picture somewhat. That said, possibly that’s its whole idea…”
That was the point at which Nita got around to actually putting the buffalo wing in her mouth. Instants later, she was incredibly, incredibly sorry.
“Oh, it’s a he?” Filif was saying. “Thanks. Sometimes it’s hard to tell around here. In any case, certainly the appearance of being in violation of common Galactic labor accords could lead an unwary observer to believe—”
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’?”