“This could either be very good or very very bad,” Ronan said as the TV guide came up. “…’The Christmas Invasion…’ Well, okay. Fair play to them. ‘Bugs Bunny’s Looney Tunes Christmas Tales’? Surely you jest. …‘The Big Little Jesus?’ Is that actually in black and white?” And then a dumbfounded pause. “’Santa Claus Versus the Martians’? What in the name of the sludge at the bottom of the Powers’ bottomless Bucket is that??”
“Probably something about the True Meaning of Christmas,” Dairine said, folding down crosslegged in front of the TV and filching the remote from Nita.
Ronan flopped down beside her, looking genially scornful. “Might as well ask about the true meaning of life.”
“If you see any pigs around,” Nita said, relieving Dairine of the remote and moving another page down in the onscreen TV guide, “might try asking them…”
“Does he even do Christmas?”
“He’s everywhere,” Kit said. “Why wouldn’t he?”
“Pigs?” Kit’s father said from where he’d wound up on the sofa next to Filif, sounding a little bemused. “Why would there be pigs?”
“Um…”
“Is this one of those explanations that’s going to make me sorry I asked?”
Nita laughed. “No. Just confused. But you won’t be alone, not at all.”
Kit started attempting to explain the Transcendent Pig to his father. Nita, listening to this process with one ear, found it to be going about the way she’d thought it would. She turned her attention instead to the group in front of the TV. This had briefly flipped to one of the video channels, where some boy band was singing “Santa Claus is Coming To Town”. “…He knows when you are sleeping… He knows when you’re awake…”
From the nearby easy chair, Tom snickered. “’Kindly old elf or CIA spook?’”
“Yeah, exactly,” Ronan said, “Between the intelligence-gathering and the coming-down-your-chimney-to-eat-your-food stuff, it’s all a bit creepy.”
“Not to mention unlikely, in terms of the physics,” Dairine said. “You figure, four hundred million kids under ten on earth, give or take… Say a hundred ten million households, right? And let’s assume there’s at least one good kid in each…”
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. Whoever’s bucket it is. 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?”