text: 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 starsystem were evacuated into near-Rirhait space secondary to their homestar 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 northside 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 coatracks. "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."
  
  "Well," Carmela said, "you'd have been better pretty quickly after that."
  
  "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 giftgiving 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."
  
  Carmela turned and looked her up and down. "You sound tired," she said. "Enough walking! Let's do the wizardy thing and get hoverscoots."
  
  Nita blinked. "How's that so wizardy?"
  
  "Well, it's all about not wasting energy, isn't it? No point in wasting perfectly good shopping energy on walking."
  
  It occurred to Nita that this was one of the more interesting takes she'd recently heard on the concept of not speeding up the heat-death of the Universe. Carmela, though, plainly wasn't concerned about such details. She merely paused where she was and stamped on the shining white floor.
  
  Immediately two long pieces of the floor material smoothly detached themselves upwards from it, deformed out into long hovering skateboard shapes, and sprouted tall slender grips from their fronts. Underneath the scooters the surface reformed seamlessly and went back to being shining and white.
  
  Nita blinked. "That's new..." she said. "Used to be Crossings staff had to call for one of these."
  
  "I'm that," Carmela said, "more or less. Or anyway I've got a similar level of permissions."
  
  Which was no surprise. To everyone at the Crossings from the highest managerial levels on down these days she was Carmela Rodriguez of Earth, Defender and Protector of Transients and Staff... not to mention Occasional Personal Shopper to Interplanetary Royalty (which counted for a little more on the strictly retail side). Nita had of course spearheaded the defense that had been instrumental in saving the Crossings from the aliens attacking it, and was if anything honored even more highly than Carmela, to an almost almost embarrassing extent (at least it embarrassed her). Carmela, though, had absolutely no embarrassment about casually reminding the Crossings staff how much they owed her (and Nita), and as a result had for some time now been pulling down a range of increasingly impressive perks.
  
  "Come on, mount up," Carmela said, "there's a lot of new stuff on this side of the wing we haven't seen yet."
  
  Nita climbed onto the scooter, and both of them started to move along the broad corridor, absolutely shocklessly. She recognized the motive force as another implementation of the frictionless, inertially-dampered transport system the Crossings used for moving people and cargo in and out of the satellite terminals to the major gate clusters at high speed. These scooters, though, were gliding along at just a few miles an hour, with no more fuss or sense of motion than if the two of them were standing still together.
  
  Carmela was studying a diagram of the local shopping space that had begun displaying on the plaque that spanned the graceful handlebars of the scooter. Nita's display had synced up with her manual—all the Crossings' systems being alert to the presence of wizards and having a raft of custom routines to make their work easier—and was displaying "smart" advertisements for various stores in the area and travel advisories tailored to her point of origin, all translated into English for her convenience.
  
  "Okay," Carmela said, tracing a route on the scooter's display, "right there." The scooter chirped in acquiescence. "Meanwhile," she said, turning to Nita, "I know exactly what we need."
  
  "Yeah? What?"
  
  "A Christmas party."
  
  "Mela," Nita said, and laughed. "It's not even Thanksgiving yet!"
  
  "And you were just complaining that you didn't want it to be."
  
  Nta blinked, as that felt like it should have made some kind of sense. Just possibly not Earth sense.
  
  She sighed and glanced down at the scooter's display, which was now showing some amusing promotional material. After a moment she raised her eyebrows at the slugline of one feature. "NASA's going to be glad to hear we've got a ruthless and terrible space fleet."
  
  Carmela snickered. "So will Richard Branson, when he gets the memo," she said. "And frankly, I know which of them's going to do better marketing."
  
  Nita snorted. "Yeah, but Mela, you know as well as I do it's not true! Is putting something like this out there smart?"
  
  "Why not? If everybody thinks Earth has a big aggressive space fleet, no one'll bother turning up on our doorstep with one, will they."
  
  There was something to be said for that line of reasoning, but Nita still had misgivings: some of the more assertive species she knew of might take it as a challenge. "And anyway, who put that in here?"
  
  "I'm sure I have no idea," Carmela said, airily waving a hand.
  
  Nita began to sweat a little, because she knew from experience what it meant when Carmela started handwaving. "Are you trying to tell me that— What did you get Sker'ret to let you do?" For it couldn't escape anyone's notice who knew the present Master of the Crossings that there was just about nothing he wouldn't do for Carmela. Installing a worldgate in her closet had merely been a small sign of things to come.
  
  "Who, me? Nothing!... Much. I mean, the small print was such a nuisance to start with..." She glanced over at what Nita was still reading.
  
  Nita squinted to read the block of tiny, tiny print at the bottom of the promotional feature, again displayed in English to ease the handling of some of the more obscure Rirhait idioms. "...Wait. 'Earth', 'Mysterious Earth' and 'Mother Earth The Legendary Home Of Humankind' are licensed trademarks of Gaia Protectorate CRLLC, terms and conditions apply, planetary descriptions may change from time to time without notice at management's discretion—" And then in the tiniest print possible, "—battle fleet not included'??"
  
  "Legalese," Carmela said, craning her neck to see ahead of them. "It's not like the disclaimers actually have any force in law, really, once you've—"
  
  "I can't believe this," Nita said. "CRLLC? Did you incorporate the entire planet Earth somewhere?!"
  
  "Here, actually," Carmela said. "The corporate tax rate here is reeeeeeeeallly low. Especially if you've saved the place from alien invasion. At which point it drops to zero.... If not lower."
  
  Nita's mouth dropped open.
  
  "Why are you looking so shocked? You cosigned the incorporation documents when we were here last."
  
  Being reduced to speechlessness around Carmela was hardly a new experience for Nita, but this particular incidence was setting new records for the underlying implications. "But I thought— Wait. You said that—"
  
  "Nonono, wait just a minute! Look there. Is that what I think it is?"
  
  "Uh," Nita said, and peered ahead, her mind only half on whatever she was supposed to be looking for. The corridor up that way was fairly busy, full of aliens of all shapes and sizes. But after a second she thought she saw what Carmela was looking at, a dark-colored conical shape, hard to see clearly through the throng. "That tall thing sticking up? The green one— Oh. It's a Demisiv—!"
  
  "In a baseball cap!" Carmela said, and accelerated away.
  
  ...And so it was. Nita went after her, shaking her head and grinning. What are the odds, she thought, that one of my favorite wizardly houseguests should just happen to be passing through here while we're here too? But the odds didn't really come into it when you balanced them against the wizardly truism that there were no such things as coincidences. Or rather, when something that looked like a coincidence turned up, it was usually a sign from the Powers that Be that you should start paying attention: almost always, something else was going on.
  
  Nita got caught up with Carmela after a few moments. "This is so perfect," Carmela was saying, confident that Nita was right behind her. "See that, this was an absolutely great idea, we'd have missed him if we didn't have the scoots!"
  
  That was probably true. Within a few moments they were close enough that when Carmela started waving her arms and shouted across the crowd, "Hey, is that my shrub?!" , Nita could even through the intervening crowd see all those fir-tree-like branches of Filif's arch up, as if in surprise, and then start waving back as if a wind had shaken them.
  
  And it took only a few moments more before the two of them had hopped off the scoots and were elbowing their way through the remaining crowd in an impromptu contest to be the first one to hug their fellow wizard. Nita came from behind in the last couple of meters and just barely beat Carmela there.
  
  It was always a little interesting hugging Filif, as you wound up getting a face full of something that felt like pine needles, even though the scent more closely resembled something like cinnamon instead of the kind of cool, green smell you might associate with a conifer. "You are so well met," Filif was saying, "what a fine surprise, but what are you two doing here without my knowing about it? I'd thought the Knowledge would have alerted me that you were within physical-meeting range."
  
  "Might ask you the same question!" Nita said. The instrumentality that managed the wizards' manuals (and the many other ways that the Art's practitioners accessed spells and other wizardly data) would normally notify you, if you'd asked it, as to the presence in your physical neighborhood of other wizards with whom you'd worked. Nita had a good number of these alerts embedded in your manual, not least for those wizards who (however briefly) had lived in her basement. "Should've had a notifier go off."
  
  "Well, I only just got here," Filif said. "Just out of the gate, in fact. Maybe that's the problem. Anyway, the Master and I have business—some Interconnect Project details to sort out: I've been doing liaison work for the Demisiv side of the Project Authority." He rustled a little, half-turning as Nita let go of him (and Carmela did not), and all the eye-berries on the free side of him glowed a little brighter as he tried to peer through the crowd. "He must've been delayed—he was in some other meeting, and said it might keep him a bit late."
  
  "Well, never mind that," Carmela said, hugging him again—or still—and then letting him go. "Your business business can wait. And if he's coming along to find you, good! Two birds with one stone."
  
  Filif half-turned in the other direction, and looked around him with more of his eyes. "Not sure I see any birds," he said, sounding dubious. "Or for that matter, stones."
  
  Nita laughed. Sometimes the wizardly Speech did fairly well at translating human idiom, but sometimes it completely failed. "She means she wants to talk to both of you at once."
  
  "Well, that's certainly preferable to hominid-on-avian violence," Filif said. "Ah, now, here he comes. Not so delayed, then."
  
  Nita peered around her, not bothering to look up, because there wouldn't have been any point in trying to see the Master of the Crossings over the heads of any crowd: when he was moving at any speed, he moved low. To her own amusement, though, it was the sound of lots of sharp little legs clicking and clattering against the smooth floor that told her which way to look (in this case, behind her). Nita turned and saw him coming, and grinned, and as he caught sight of her through the crowd that parted before him, Sker'ret was already half rearing up so that his front three pairs of legs were off the ground and the head with all those stalked eyes was on a level with Nita's. She held her arms open, and when he more or less crashed into them, she grabbed him and hugged him to her and thumped his dorsal carapace. "Sker'!"
  
  "Our saviors return," Sker'ret laughed in her ear. "It's been forever."
  
  "It's been last week," Nita said. "Getting amnesic from overwork?"
  
  "No, I mean when the two of you were last here together."
  
  "Two weeks then. Maybe three."
  
  "Pedant," Sker'ret said affectionately, gave her a squeeze and let her go.
  
  "And what about me?" Carmela demanded. "You're late for my daily dose of alien snuggles!"
  
  "And whose fault is that? Anyway, you're the alien."
  
  "No surprise at this sudden appearance then, my cousin?" Filif said.
  
  "Excuse me?" Sker'ret said as he headed for Carmela. "I am the Master of this facility, coz. Of course I knew she was here: she's got a facility-independent wizardly tracker routine associated with her. How else can I find her in a hurry if more invaders arrive and we need saving?"
  
  "My favorite stalker," Carmela said, and hugged Sker'ret as if hugging giant purple metallic centipedes was the most normal thing in the world. Which, for her, it naturally was.
  
  "And why does her tracker work better than the Knowledge-based routines you've got hooked up to me?" Filif said, bending over in a sort of half-bow to Sker'ret so that they could brush their upper limbs together.
  
  "Because she can do a lot more damage in a much shorter time than you routinely would," Sker'ret said.
  
  Carmela burst out laughing. "Oh, Sker', you say that like it was a bad thing!"
  
  "So tell us," Filif said. "What damage are you contemplating now?"
  
  "We're having a Christmas party. And both of you are invited."
  
  All Filif's berries on the side facing Sker'ret, and all Sker'ret's stalked eyes, exchanged a bemused glance.
  
  "And Christmas would be what?" Sker'ret said. "Is it a holiday of some sort?"
  
  "Don't you remember? Remember how excited Filif got about this?"
  
  "Um..." Sker'ret was making a kind of thoughtful null sound that even in a Rirhait perfectly communicated a sense of I don't want you to feel hurt but due to being really busy I have no idea what you're talking about at the moment.
  
  "Fil," Carmela said. "Explain it to him. Remember that time of year we told you about, the last time you came visiting? The time of year when we bring trees into the house and decorate them?"
  
  Filif looked astounded. "Wait. This is that time? Then what are you doing here? Mostly your folk are with family at such times, I thought!"
  
  "No no no, it's not right this minute!" Carmela said. "Fifty days or so yet. Hold still." She reached into her shoulderbag and came out with a small sleek tablet. "How's your schedule around JD 2455550. 52...?"
  
  "Well, let me check..."
  
  "I'm free," said Sker'ret immediately. "One or another of my relief people can take those shifts for me. Powers forbid I should miss a party of yours!"
  
  Nita wanted to start shouting practical, sensible things like No, wait, this is all going way too fast, are you nuts...? But she took a deep breath, stood there hating Thanksgiving enough to be willing to think about anything else, especially when it involved going straight on past it, and peered over Carmela's shoulder at the tablet. "That's really gorgeous. Where'd you get that?"
  
  "It's part of her detached staff package," Sker'ret said. "Didn't you get yours, Nita? I'll see that it comes to you."
  
  "Okay, Sker', thanks," she said. "What day is that?" Nita said to Carmela.
  
  "December 20th," Carmela said. "And hey, the next day is the Winter Solstice. Very symbolic!" she said to Filif, elbowing him somewhere among his fronds and needles. "We're having a sleepover on Almost The Longest Night! We can stay up all night and watch movies and eat popcorn and all kinds of things."
  
  "Mela," Nita said. "Your mama and pop... you haven't even asked them yet!"
  
  "They'll say yes," Carmela said, waving a hand. "We're going to do it exactly the way you did yours when Sker' and Fil came to visit the first time. Elective-access 'puptent' accesses in the basement...."
  
  "I can always spare powering structures for ten or twenty of those," Sker'ret said. "Let me know what you need. If the party's heavily attended we can always install a temporary secondary gating hub like the one in your closet."
  
  Nita rubbed her eyes for a moment. It's always possible they will say yes right off the bat... And certainly since she became a wizard, stranger things had happened.
  
  Carmela was talking to Filif a mile a minute about popcorn garlands and boughs of holly and snow and Christmas cookies. "And a star, Fil, an actual star for the top of you instead of a baseball cap..."
  
  "But I like my baseball cap!" The protest didn't have a lot of energy behind it: Filif was already starting to shake with excitement.
  
  "Just a temporary thing. Something festive! For the season. And lights, Fil, all colors of lights, and glass balls and ribbons and..."
  
  If she does get her mom and pop to say yes to this, Nita thought, this is going to be amazing. And it's been such a crazy year. I could use some amazing right about now...
  
  "Sker'," Nita said very softly, watching the armwaving continue and Filif's delighted, excited vibrations increase. "Tell me something."
  
  "Anything."
  
  "Remember that paperwork I cosigned with Mela when we were here last, after Mars...?"
  
  "Yes?"
  
  "Is it possible..." Nita's mouth went dry. She tried swallowing, had to work at it. "...that as far as the intergalactic community is concerned, I'm, uh, one of the people who... rules the Earth?"
  
  Sker'ret burst out in one of his ratchety laughs. "What? Rules? Oh, no! Not at all."
  
  "Okay, that's a relief," Nita said. "Good." And she sagged a little.
  
  "But you are on the governing board."
  
  Nita's mouth dropped open again. Then she closed it, because she simply could not find a reply.
  
  "We should go," she said after a moment. "You two have business, and we've got a guest list to write."
  
  "Of course. I'll let you get on with it. And we'll see you at your place again! This is going to be so exciting. In... fifty days?"
  
  "Sounds about right," Nita said.
  
  There was more hugging, and then Filif and Sker'ret took themselves off down the concourse. Carmela kicked her hoverscoot back into levitation mode, climbed aboard, and said to Nita, "So that's settled. Come on, Neets, we've got the far end of the concourse to look over..." And off she went, already humming "Feliz Navidad... Feliz Navidad... Prospero Ano y Felicidad..."
  
  This is going to be interesting, Nita thought. "Mela, wait up!"
  
  "I want to wish you a merry Christmas... I want to wish you a merry Christmas... from the bottom of my oooh wow look at that!"
  
  Nita sighed and scooted after her.
  
  Of course, even when you're a wizard, getting the basic permissions settled for a house party for an indeterminate number of wizardly or wizard-friendly guests isn't necessarily that easy.
  
  In the Rodriguezes' living room a man was sitting in the easy chair closest to the entertainment system, with a tabloid newspaper open in front of his face. In front of him, sitting crosslegged on the floor in a position that was supposed to read as subordinate, and wearing what was meant to be a winsome smile, was his younger daughter.
  
  "Daaaaddyyyyy..."
  
  "I just got home, Carmela. From a shift that felt three hours longer than it really was. During which every single machine I touched found a new and interesting way to screw up." Kit's pop worked with the printing-press machines at the big Long Island newspaper, and since the operation had gone digital, he had been complaining more or less nonstop about the crankiness of the new equipment he worked with compared with the beautiful, reliable old printing presses of old. Kit had told Nita often enough that her dad had complained just as hard and as constantly about the old printing presses, way back when, but this didn't seem to be a good time to remind anybody of that. "My head is aching, even my ears are aching, and the aspirin hasn't kicked in yet, so if we could, you know, let this wait half an hour..."
  
  "But all you have to do right now is say 'yes' and then it'll be quiet!"
  
  The newspaper behind which Juan Rodriguez was presently concealing himself rustled in a very brisk way. "Let's try it the other way around, shall we? Let's try having the quiet now, and then maybe the 'yes' will happen later!"
  
  "Okay, right on time, that was the appeal to reason," Kit said in Nita's ear. They were lurking in the kitchen, pretending to be getting something to eat while listening to the conversation through the pass-through window between the kitchen and the living room. "Let's see if she's buying it."
  
  "Seriously, pop-pop, it won't be a big deal! I'm going to take care of all the food and drinks myself, and I'll clean the house, before and after—"
  
  "Uh oh," Kit said, very low. "Reverting to what she used to call him when she was eight. Helpless baby daughter and responsible cleaner of the house? Not a good match."
  
  "That we're having this discussion right now tells me that it's a big deal already," Kit's pop said. "And that I should be wondering just why you're leaning on this so hard. And whether I should go off the whole idea right now, so as not to indulge your instant gratification issues."
  
  "But daaaaaaaddy—"
  
  Kit rolled his eyes at Nita. "Nope, logic's the only thing that could have saved her there..."
  
  The newspaper being held up between Juan and his middle daughter dropped just long enough for her, and the two in the kitchen, to get a glimpse of eyes that were rather dangerously narrowed. "Answer hazy," Kit's pop said, rather pointedly, "ask again later." And he went back behind the newspaper again.
  
  Carmela picked herself silently up off the floor and swanned off toward the back of the house and the stairs to her bedroom in a manner that just narrowly avoided being a flounce.
  
  Nita and Kit turned their attention back toward the sandwiches that they were theoretically constructing. Nita hadn't actually gotten much further than the bread. "How's this going, you think?" she said, very low.
  
  "Hard to tell," Kit murmured, opening a cupboard and pretending to rummage around in it. "Sometimes she gets a lot of mileage out of the 'I'm your favorite daughter' thing. Some days, nothing at all. Especially when he starts thinking about her and Helena being in college."
  
  "Tuition," Nita said, and groaned under her breath.
  
  "Student loans," Kit said. "It's a good thing she's just going to SUNY. But this still looks like a 'nothing at all' day."
  
  "Don't think I don't hear you two lurking in there!" Kit's pop said.
  
  "Not lurking, pop," Kit said. "Nita's getting a sandwich. She didn't have time to eat anything at the Crossings."
  
  "Because we were busy meeting with the friends who're going to come!" Carmela said, swinging back into the living room and flopping down onto the nearby couch, where she lay staring at the ceiling in a vaguely hopeless way.
  
  "Who you want to have come," her pop said, "and who you really should thought about not wanting to disappoint before you issued an invitation that you don't know if you're going to be allowed to fulfill!" He turned a page, and the paper rustled quite hard.
  
  "Uh oh, the getting-permission-first thing," Kit murmured.
  
  "Yeah," Nita murmured back, "I hit her with that. Didn't count for much at the time. She was too buzzed."
  
  "If she's smart, she won't push him..."
  
  Possibly realizing this, Carmela merely made a little disappointed moaning sound and went quiet.
  
  "Anyway, there's plenty of time to think about this," Kit's pop said. "It's not even Thanksgiving yet."
  
  "But some of the guests need time to get their schedules sorted because they'll be coming such a long way. Ireland! Germany!"
  
  "16 Aurigae," Nita added helpfully.
  
  The newspaper rustled again, and this time the right-hand page twitched aside just enough for Nita to catch a glimpse of Kit's pop's eyes looking toward her over the tops of his reading glasses. "Sixteen what?"
  
  "Aurigae. It's a star about two hundred and thirty light years from here," Nita said. "An orange giant."
  
  "About two hundred and thirty?" Kit's pop said.
  
  "Give or take," Nita said. "That's where Filif comes from."
  
  "So this is one of the three who stayed in your basement in their little holes in the wall," said Kit's mama as she appeared through the door on the far side of the living room that led to the back bedrooms.
  
  "Elective access gated spaces," Kit said. "Puptents, we call them. They don't take up any space in our space: just somewhere else. It's like taking your home with you, a little."
  
  His mama leaned on the passthrough's shelf. "And the one we're discussing, 16 Aurigae Guy—? This is the one who looks like a Christmas tree?"
  
  Nita raised her eyebrows at Kit. His mother had always seemed to have the superpower of being able to hear—or overhear—any conversation that took place under the Rodriguezes' roof, no matter how far away she was in the house. Sometimes it was really useful, and sometimes it was a pain in the butt, but Nita had learned to deal with it.
  
  "He's a Demisiv," Nita said. "That's both the planet and the species. They're carbon-based like us, but they evolved... really differently."
  
  "To wind up looking like they do, I'd imagine so."
  
  Nita shrugged. "They're related to trees the same way we're related to the tetrapods." She noticed Kit's pop giving her a slightly confused look from behind the paper, and added, "You know, one of those fish species that got out of the water a long time ago, developed legs out of their fins and started walking around. There've been a lot of branches in the evolutionary tree between them and us. Same number of branches, pretty much, between Filif and his species' ancestors."
  
  "A lot of water under the bridge for his people, then," Kit's pop said.
  
  "Five hundred million years," Kit said, "give or take."
  
  "Huh," said Kit's pop: a neutral sort of sound. He went back behind the paper again, turned another page.
  
  Kit's mama came into the kitchen and stood still in front of the stove for a few seconds, giving the cooktop a long thoughtful look. "Spaghetti and meatballs?" she said.
  
  "Sounds good, Mama."
  
  "Then don't overdo the sandwiches, you two." Kit's mama got down on one knee and started going through the cupboard under the counter: Kit and Nita moved to either side to get out of her way. "So what else does Mr. Christmas Tree Wizard do besides get all excited over the thought of being decorated?"
  
  "He's been working with the authorities at the Crossings as a go-between for the Interconnect Project," Nita said. "The Demisiv have been a big part of the Project for a long time. It's a group of species who specialize in long-distance intergalactic transit: keeping it running, helping people get around. They also do emergency work... help move populations who have to find new worlds to live on, because their stars have blown up or they've had planetary natural disasters or whatever."
  
  "So... kind of a humanitarian organization?"
  
  That wasn't a comparison Nita had thought to make. "Yeah," she said.
  
  "For a whole lot of values of 'human,'" Kit added.
  
  Kit's mama didn't say anything for a moment, just kept looking around in the cupboard. "Juan," she said, "are we out of spaghetti again?"
  
  "There's fettucini..."
  
  "It's not the same." She got up, sighing, and opened an upper cupboard. "Okay, we'll do it with fusilli. But you said you were getting spaghetti on the way back from work..."
  
  The paper rustled. "Sorry. My head was killing me and I just wanted to get home."
  
  "Well, tomorrow then."
  
  "I'll make a note."
  
  Kit's mama rummaged around for a big pot and started filling it with water. "Well," she said while the faucet was running. "He sounds like a good influence. One thing, though."
  
  Kit and Nita looked at each other. "Yeah?"
  
  "Is your friend a needle-shedding type?"
  
  "Not that I've ever noticed," Kit said.
  
  "The occasional berry," Nita said. "But only when he's in trans."
  
  Kit's mama put her eyebrows up. "Doesn't sound like a problem," she said. She put the pot on the stove and turned on the heat under it. "How many people are we talking?"
  
  "We're still working that out," Nita said. "Wanted to get the okay from you first."
  
  "You did, at least," Kit's mama said, and flashed a grin at Nita.
  
  Nita did her best to produce a We-are-so-busted expression that would acknowledge the realities of the situation without assigning blame to any specific party. Kit simultaneously looked elsewhere and looked innocent.
  
  "And this is supposed to be a one-night sleepover? On the twentieth?"
  
  "That's right," Kit said. "We wouldn't be up here all that much. Mostly in the puptents: there'll be more room."
  
  Nita heard another newspaper page turn, but purposely didn't look that way, because Kit's mama was doing so.
  
  A second passed. "The carol-singing thing's the night after," Kit's mama said. "Don't forget."
  
  "We won't," Kit said.
  
  His mama headed out of the kitchen and through the living room again. "Just try to keep the other collateral damage to a minimum, yeah?" she said to Carmela as she passed by the couch. "It wouldn't be good to freak the neighbors."
  
  "At least any more than they have been already," muttered Kit's pop from behind the paper.
  
  "Oh Mama thank you!" Carmela shrieked and bounded up off the couch to grab her and hug her as she passed through.
  
  "Don't thank me," said Kit's mama. "Thank your Pop."
  
  The logic of this might not have been instantly obvious to the casual bystander, but Nita had seen enough of these family discussions at Kit's house to understand that with his folks, parental consensus was often reached by some mechanism she didn't understand and probably wasn't meant to. "Thanks, Mr. Rodriguez!" Nita immediately said over the noise of Carmela diving past the newspaper, seizing her Pop and covering his face with smooches.
  
  "You're welcome," Kit's pop said as soon as Carmela let him loose and more or less went dancing out of the living room and up the stairs to get her tablet and start making notes and plans.
  
  Kit's pop shook his head, shook the paper back out into something like a readable configuration, and went back to his reading. As he did, Kit turned to Nita and said silently, She just lay there with her sad face on and let us run interference for her, didn't she!
  
  Yep, Nita said. She owes us one.
  
  Good, Kit said. And meanwhile... "Looks like we get to have a party!"
  
  A second later the sound system up in Carmela's room fired up with a raucous British-accented voice more or less screaming over a noisy drum solo, "It's CHRIIIIIIIIIIIIISTMAAAAAAAAS!!"
  
  Nita snickered. "Ronan," she said, "has a lot to answer for..."
  
  An hour or so later, Nita was upstairs in Carmela's bedroom, sprawled in her desk chair with her manual open in her lap, while Carmela was lying on her stomach on her bed and scribbling notes in her tablet at about a mile a minute. That thing must have some handwriting recognition program, Nita thought. But then, it's Crossings tech... it would have.
  
  Having gotten the "yes" from their folks, Carmela was now acting oddly at a loss, as if she'd secretly expected to be turned down and now wasn't sure what she should be doing. "Decorations," she was muttering.
  
  Nita glanced up at that. "I thought you decided you were going to use your normal ones."
  
  "What? Oh. Not for Filif! For the house."
  
  "We've got lots of time yet to think about that."
  
  "Not if we don't want to miss the holiday rush! The sooner the better. Anyway, the stuff's starting to turn up in the stores already anyway..."
  
  Nita sighed, as that was all too true. "Still."
  
  "And another thing," Carmela muttered, hurriedly flipping over virtual pages in her tablet and starting to make another set of notes. "Allergies. Food allergies..."
  
  She can plan an invasion and not turn a hair, Nita thought, but she can't stay focused on a guest list? This really is a big deal for her. "Mela, you're coming at this backwards."
  
  "Huh?"
  
  "Guest list first. Food allergies later."
  
  "I'm just trying to get ahead of things..."
  
  "Right now the only one you're getting ahead of is yourself. Deep breath!"
  
  Carmela took it, though for some moments she seemed reluctant to let it out again.
  
  "Mela!" Nita said. "Relax."
  
  She let that breath out with some difficulty. "I just want it to be nice for him," Carmela said. "He's so special... and I don't want him to be disappointed."
  
  Her first alien crush, Nita thought, and just smiled. "He won't be," she said. "You know him. Always ready for something new, and in love with it when it arrives, whatever it is."
  
  "And oh gosh, he's going to need something to root in. Maybe one of those custom compounds they've got at the Demisiv sleepstore at the Crossings..."
  
  "Mela!" Nita said. "Daddy just puts him in the flower bed when he turns up. With maybe some bark chips! So later for custom bedding. Guest list!"
  
  Carmela let out another heavy sigh and turned to a clean "page." "Guest list," she said.
  
  Nita stretched in the chair and glanced down at her manual. She'd long since told the list of active wizards she knew personally to arrange itself to the front of the main directory. Now she started paging through that section, checking people's public calendars, where available, against the sleepover / party dates. "So. Filif."
  
  "Goes without saying."
  
  "Sker'ret."
  
  "Ditto."
  
  Both of them paused then, thinking of one of the original puptent group who would not be there: Roshaun. More or less in unison, they sighed.
  
  "Yeah," Carmela said. "Well.... You and me and Mom and Pop and Dairine and your Dad and Kit."
  
  "Uh huh."
  
  "And Spot."
  
  "Right."
  
  "Ronan."
  
  "Mmm," Carmela said. Nita glanced at Carmela with amusement, not entirely sure whether the sound was simple acknowledgement or approval. Ronan wasn't particularly forthcoming about how he actually took Carmela's more or less continuous flirting with him, but Nita noticed that he never really came out and told her to stop it.
  
  And having mentioned Ronan and Kit in the same breath, naturally the next thought was—
  
  "Darryl?" Carmela said, beating Nita to it.
  
  "I don't know." Nita looked over his listing in the manual. "He's showing availability, but that might just be for errantry. The dates are starred, and the star says 'subject to preparedness issues.'"
  
  "Meaning he'll bow out if he feels overstimmed."
  
  "Well, sure. But the whole holiday time might be iffy for him. We were talking a couple weeks ago and he told me that as far as his personal well-being goes, and the way he's been doing better at managing it, he's been trying not to freak his parents out too much. Trying to break them in gradually."
  
  Carmela snorted with laughter. "Darryl?"
  
  Nita smiled. In the matter of handling his autism, as with his handling of nearly everything else, it was hard to imagine Darryl doing anything "gradually" . These days he tended to jump in enthusiastically with both feet and then deal with the fine details as they came up. "He told me at one point," Nita said, "that he was thinking about trying to get his parents to perceive wizardry as just a new way to be non-neurotypical."
  
  "If anyone can do that, he can," Carmela said. "So if he's trying to ease them into the idea that the holidays are less of a chore for him these days and he doesn't need all that supervision, maybe we should just let him decide what to do about this? Put him down for 'maybe yes maybe no' and let him get back to us?"
  
  "Yeah. If he needs to blow us off, he will and he won't feel guilty about it."
  
  Carmela scribbled for a moment. Nita stretched, propping her feet up on Carmela's desk and thinking. "S'reee..." she turned a page in the manual.
  
  Carmela looked up. "Um. How do you invite a humpback whale to a sleepover?"
  
  "The usual way! You put her in a people suit."
  
  Carmela blinked. "Oh. Yeah."
  
  "Especially because it's easier for S'reee than for most whales. When she got hurt that time and I healed her, we got blood-tied. So she has less trouble shapechanging to human these days, the way I have less trouble going whale when I need to."
  
  "Oh."
  
  "But no," Nita said with some regret. "Says here she's on sabbatical right now. Personal leave."
  
  "For what?"
  
  "Uh, the manual won't say. It's one of those confidentiality things. But I suspect it's about private time with her honey."
  
  "Her what??"
  
  "She's dating. A very nice bull from up around Vancouver somewhere. He's a food critic."
  
  "A what??"
  
  "You want to know where the best North Atlantic krill is," Nita said, "Hwii'ish is your go-to guy." It had taken her a while to understand that all the Earth's oceans throbbed with a vast network of cetacean communication, a sort of sonic version of the Internet; and that Hwii'ish was essentially a foodblogger, and fairly famous among his own kind. But he didn't care about fame: what he was interested in was wizards, most specifically S'reee. "But who knows?" Nita said. "Send her an invite anyway. She might be able to get away."
  
  Carmela made a note.
  
  "Tom and Carl?"
  
  "For a sleepover?"
  
  "Huh? Oh, no, just for the evening party."
  
  "Sure, if we can get them." Nita flipped from Tom's page to Carl's. "It lists them as 'on call', but they might be able to get away."
  
  "The Twychild?" That was Tran Liem Tuyet and Tran Hung Nguyet, a special kind of twin, both of them favorites of Nita's from the big group they'd met up with during the Pullulus War.
  
  "Uh, they're greyed out then. Maybe a family thing? It doesn't say."
  
  "Okay. We should have two different invites, maybe? One for people we'd like to see but we don't know if they can make it, one for those whose calendars say they're free."
  
  "Makes sense."
  
  "What about Matt?"
  
  "Who— Oh, the Aussie guy! Yeah, can't miss a chance to watch him pester Ronan about how grateful he should be for Matt saving his life."
  
  "And Ronan really is grateful but he makes this big song and dance about not caring..."
  
  "He's free."
  
  "Good. Sleepover list.... Rhiow and Hwaith and their bunch?"
  
  Nita turned pages. "Uh, no. 'Emergencies only.' It's a bad time for them, the North American gates are crazy busy at the holidays, and they still always malfunction even when a full team of gate techs are riding herd on them."
  
  "We'll save Rhiow some of that cream she likes," Carmela said.
  
  "Yeah."
  
  "Okay." Carmela stared at the tablet. "Any of the Mars-team guys? Kit likes them a lot."
  
  Nita nodded. "Um, yeah. What's his face? The tall one. The German guy who Doesn't Drive Tanks."
  
  "Marcus," said Carmela, and made a note. While the Mars investigating team had been hunting for the planet's lost kernel, and any hint of what had happened to the (then so-called) Old Martian species, Marcus—who besides being a wizard with a linguistics specialty also drove armored personnel carriers for the German Army—had lectured anyone who'd hold still on the essential difference between vehicles with wheels and vehicles with tracks. You got a sense that he had to spend a lot of time with people who were unclear on the concept, and so he tended to be proactive about it.
  
  "Looks like he's free until the 24th," Nita said.
  
  "Okay. Who else have we got from Mars? What's her name with the curls?"
  
  "Lissa?... Uh, no, she's grayed out. Shame, I like her, she's nice. Maybe next time."
  
  They both sat quiet, thinking for a moment. "Mamvish?" Carmela said then.
  
  "Wow, if we could get her...!" Nita flipped a page, studied the manual. "'On errantry, unavailable except for emergencies.' Well, no surprise there." The Species Archivist to the Powers that Be was in demand all over the Galaxy, all the time.
  
  Carmela sighed. "Shame. But then she wouldn't like this time of year, this far north. No fresh tomatoes..."
  
  "We'll catch her in the summer, if we're lucky."
  
  Nita stretched again. "Anyway, that sounds like a good number. How many is that now?"
  
  "Uh, let me count." Carmela was silent for a moment. "For the party, sort of sixteen? If everyone shows up. For the sleepover, eleven? Again, if everyone's able to make it."
  
  Nita nodded. "Good crowd. Should be fun."
  
  Carmela sat up, touched the tablet in a couple of places and typed busily for a minute or two. Then she looked over at Nita. "Last minute thoughts?"
  
  "None right now. Probably I'll have one the minute you send the invites out."
  
  "We'll see." Carmela typed a last few words and then hit a spot on the tablet with one finger. The tablet chimed.
  
  "All gone out?"
  
  Carmela nodded, tossed the tablet to one side and rolled over on her back in a good simulation of a collapse for someone who was already lying down. "I," she announced, "am exhaaaauuuuuuusted!"
  
  "And you haven't even done anything yet," Nita said.
  
  "Excuse me! I sent the invitations!"
  
  Nita snickered. And then, without warning, a chill ran down her spine. She shivered.
  
  Carmela saw it. "What?"
  
  "Well," Nita said. "Except for the food and the drinks and the decorations and some little presents for everybody, we have only one thing left to worry about."
  
  "Oh?"
  
  "The weather..."