All the Birds in the Sky

by Charlie Jane Anders

  “I promise you I haven’t been dragging my feet since that setback.” Laurence was freezing, in shock. “But still, we’re no closer than we were to figuring it out. There are huge theoretical problems.”

  “I know,” Isobel said, handing Laurence an empty khaki duffel bag. “That’s the point. From this moment on, you’re working on the wormhole thing 24/7. We are going to need a new planet.”

  Laurence tried to explain that he couldn’t leave, that there was no way, he had a life here, he’d finally found real love and it was everything to him, but he already knew this argument was lost. He took the duffel bag and started stuffing clothes and crap into it.

  Patricia made it to Danger in record time, ignoring all the people on the bus who wanted to talk to her about the terrible-can-you-believe-it-this-is-going-to-change-everything. She jumped up the stairs three or four at a time and ran into the bookstore so fast she was breathless and yet still crying, but the moment she got there she knew it was too late. Everybody just sat there, looking horrified. And helpless. And like they’d been expecting her. Ernesto looked her in the eyes. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “For your loss. For all of us.”

  “Who did this?” Patricia said. “We need to find them. We need to turn them into ash and then blow them into space. We need to make them fucking pay. Tell me who did this.”

  “Nobody,” Ernesto said. “Nobody and everybody. We all did this.”

  “No, no.” Patricia started weeping harder and louder than ever. She was hyperventilating. She saw spots. “No, this was somebody, there’s a fucking bastard witch behind this, I can tell.”

  “It’s a superstorm,” said Kawashima. “It’s been building for days, remember? It hit Cuba a few days ago, and then it converged with a cyclone. It ran into a high-pressure front in the North Atlantic that pushed it ashore.”

  “There’s no spell big enough to move the ocean and the air currents,” said Taylor, coming up and touching Patricia’s arm. “You’d have to fool the Moon.”

  “You could heal those storms. You could heal them until they got out of control, like weeds, someone did this with a healing spell. I know they did. It might have taken months, but they’ve had months. Someone did this.”

  “Not this time.” Ernesto came and stood so close to Patricia, he was in danger of touching her and making her body a bacterial and fungal playground. He looked into her eyes, sad but not surprised. “I tried to warn you that bad times were coming, and we would be asking more of you. And now they are here. You will need to do terrible things. But we will be sharing the responsibility, it will not be on you alone. There will be no Aggrandizement if we face this together.”

  “What do you mean?” Patricia was still shaking, but her breathing was slowing. She could smell the pure life energy coming off Ernesto, like nutrient-rich soil or a summer rainstorm.

  “This is the beginning of something, not the end of it,” said Kawashima, coming closer as well and actually hugging her. He never hugged anybody. “Or rather, it’s the end of one thing and the beginning of something else. This country will be destabilized, with New York and D.C. gone, and other cities damaged. There will be refugees, in camps. Which means more disease. The chaos and starvation will worsen. There will be more wars, and worse wars. Wars like nobody has ever seen. God forbid we have to resort to the Unraveling.”

  “When the whole world turns chaotic, we must be the better part of chaos,” said Ernesto. Patricia couldn’t find it in herself to cry anymore.

  25

  LAURENCE WISHED PATRICIA could be here, by his side, to see this. He imagined explaining to her what she was seeing, and why it was even more amazing than it looked.

  Laurence stood on a gantry, hundreds of feet above ground level, with Denver spread in a fetal position to his left. Six steel-and-fiberglass praying mantises perched over an empty space in the gantry’s center—the space that could, one day, burst open and reveal the Pathway to Infinity. Normally Laurence would be paralyzed with vertigo, standing on top of a skyscraper with no railing, but he was too overwhelmed with the magnificence before him to worry about heights. Each of the huge red mantises had a power coil in its “tail” section, and then a midsection supported by two pairs of legs, with a collection of equipment that included the antigravity generators that Laurence’s team had been working on for two years. The “heads” of the insects consisted of focusing devices, which would stabilize the opening that the antigrav beams helped to create. This insane structure seemed to dwarf the mountains in the distance. Even in the face of unthinkable horror, even with what had happened to Patricia’s mom and dad and so many other people Laurence had known, there was still brilliance in the world. Saving wonder. He only wished he could show Patricia, so she could either feel comforted or laugh at his hubris; he almost didn’t care which, as long as it lifted her misery a little.

  Just like every moment since Patricia ran out on Laurence months ago, he tried to guess what she would be saying if she were here. And where she actually was, and what she was doing. Whether she was okay. He felt as though he were having an argument with her in his head, his optimism against her despair. Next to him here on this platform, Anya, Sougata, and Tanaa were freaking out over every detail of the engineering, but Laurence barely even heard what they were saying.

  “Let’s hope it works,” Anya said.

  “We could be months away from preliminary tests,” said Sougata. “But it’s still a beautiful thing, man.”

  By the time they took the elevator back down to ground level, Laurence was obsessing about Patricia again, to the point where the fantastic wormhole generator—the coolest device in the history of the planet—was shoved to the back of his mind. He felt like he was trapped in a moment of time, where he’d just told her he loved her, and hadn’t been able to move forward to whatever happened after that. The further away he got from that moment, the thinner he stretched. He was temporally dislocated, and the time differential was only growing more severe.

  Back at ground floor, Laurence wandered the old industrial park that Milton Dirth had refurbished. People in dark uniforms guarded the perimeter. Nobody was allowed in or out without Milton’s verbal permission—and nobody had seen Milton in weeks. All phones, personal computers, and Caddies were confiscated on arrival at this campus, and none of the computers were connected to the internet. There was an intranet, plus someone had created internal mirrors of a number of scientific and technical websites. They did have a TV with CNN, so they’d been able to keep track of the slow-motion emergency: Chinese saber-rattling in the South China Sea, Russian troops massing, the water wars. People, people they knew personally, in refugee camps full of disease back east. But there was no way Laurence could get a message to Patricia, or find out how she was doing.

  The building where Laurence worked (and lived, in a converted office with bunk beds) was the former headquarters of a start-up company called HappyFruit, Inc., which had marketed fruit that was genetically modified to include a tiny amount of antidepressants. “SQUEEZE THE JOY OUT OF LIFE” read one poster with a cartoon papaya that Laurence saw from his top-bunk perch every night. The first day or so, the idea of camping out at a start-up had seemed thrillingly surreal. Now, he was over it. At least HappyFruit had encouraged its employees to jog, so there were three showers. For a hundred people. The whole place smelled like dead otters.

  Laurence took his time walking along the tar path, past the leafless cedar tree and the Dumpster where the smokers smoked. He was rehashing what he would say to Patricia if she were here. And drawing out the afterglow of seeing the completed Pathway to Infinity, before he had to go back to his little office and the crushing disappointment of failing to balance the gravity equations.

  Back at the office that Laurence shared with Anya and Sougata, though, Laurence’s chair was occupied. Isobel sat and gazed at Laurence’s computer, but not as if she was reading anything.

  “Hey,” Laurence said. “I saw the machine. It’s the most beau
tiful thing.”

  “Yeah.” Isobel smiled, but she had her usual wreath of sadness.

  Laurence said, “Listen, can you help me get a phone?” At the same time that Isobel said, “Milton is back.” Then they were both like, “You first.” Laurence won—so Isobel went first.

  “Milton is back. He wants me to bring you and the others up to his office right away. I think things are about to get interesting around here.” She stood, to lead Laurence away, and then remembered. “What were you trying to say, before?”

  “Uh, nothing. Actually, no, wait. It is something. I need a phone. My frien—my girlfriend, I guess. Patricia. You met her a few times. I haven’t talked to her since the flood. Her parents died. It’s been the hardest time, and I should have been there for her. I need to make sure she’s okay and let her know I’m thinking about her. It’s really important.”

  “I’m sorry.” Isobel had already gotten halfway to the door, and she turned back. “I’m sorry, there’s just no way.” This had turned out to be a bad time to ask, given that Isobel was in a hurry to get to this meeting, but Laurence was committed.

  “Please, Isobel. I just want, need, to talk to her a moment. Really.”

  “We’re on total lockdown here. This whole campus is full of people who want to talk to their loved ones. I don’t know if you’ve been following the state of the world out there, but it’s total chaos. We can’t trust anybody.”

  “Isobel. I’ve never asked you for anything before.” Laurence let a little of his desperation and dislocation show in his voice, and then had to struggle to keep it from overwhelming him. Keep calm, make your case. “I’ve been your friend my whole life, and now I’m asking you for something that’s massively important to me. Like, this could make the difference between me having a life and not having a life.”

  “So she’s the one, huh?” Isobel shut the door and smiled. “I thought Serafina was the one.”

  “So did I. But you know, the heart is not a lie detector. Or something. Falsely identifying the One is part of how you find the One.” He squelched a Matrix joke.

  “I guess so.” Isobel gave another tragic smile. “I wouldn’t know. I married my college boyfriend.”

  Laurence didn’t point out that Isobel and Percival had stayed together nearly fifteen years, which was a pretty respectable run. Instead, Laurence just waited, with arms folded and what he hoped was a decently pathetic look on his face.

  Isobel held out a second longer, then handed him a phone. “But I have to stay and listen in. For security reasons. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s fine.” Laurence seized the phone with both hands and dialed Patricia’s last known number.

  It rang, while Isobel watched him, and rang some more, and went to voicemail. He dialed again, same result. This time, Laurence let it beep.

  He breathed, trying not to look at Isobel. “Hey. It’s Laurence. I just wanted to make sure you were okay. And also, just to say that I’m really sorry about your loss. Your parents, I mean. They were … I can’t even begin to say. There’s nothing I can say. I wish I could be there for you, in person.” He wasn’t sure what else to say, on her voice mail, without being able to hear her response. Anything he could think of seemed inadequate, or maybe insensitive.

  He almost just hung up and handed the phone back to Isobel, but then he realized: He’d just been looking at a freaking wormhole generator, a working model. He had no way of knowing what might happen next. They were, all of them, standing on terra incognita, and this felt like a moment that was radically discontinuous with everything that had come before. There was a nontrivial chance these were the last words he would ever speak to Patricia.

  So Laurence pretended Isobel wasn’t there, staring, and he said, “Listen, I meant it when I said I loved you, it just sort of came out but it was the truth coming out. There’s a huge, vital part of me that reaches out to you in some kind of emotional phototropism. I have so many things I want to say to you, and I wish our lives could wrap around each other forever. I’m kind of … I can’t go anywhere right now. I have to see something through. But I promise you, as soon as I’m free I will track you down and we will be together, and I will try my fuckedest to make up for all the comfort I’m not giving you right now. That’s a promise. I love you. Goodbye.” He hung up with the flat of his thumb and handed the phone back to Isobel. She seemed pretty overcome, by a grab bag of emotions.

  Isobel put her hand on Laurence’s upper arm as she slipped the phone back into a hiding place in her purse. But all she said was, “Tell nobody about this phone.” Laurence nodded.

  Milton surveyed a roomful of geeks from his Herman Miller throne, ankle crossed over thigh and lips pursed as if he’d just finished a slice of the tartest Meyer lemon pie. Laurence stumbled over the limbs of a dozen of his colleagues, seeking a corner of a beanbag to occupy. Someone gave up his folding chair for Isobel. They were in an old server room, with no windows and only one thick door, so it would be hard to eavesdrop. Nobody was talking, and Laurence realized they were in the middle of one of Milton’s dramatic pauses. As soon as Laurence got settled, Milton restarted in the middle of an unfinished sentence, about the crisis in the U.S. government, the possibility of a new civil war, martial law, the deterioriating international situation in the absence of American military resolve, all the ways this could soon turn to hellshit. Something in Milton was pessimistic to the point of brokenness, and yet he was usually right. Listening to Milton’s dark litany, Laurence felt a surge of affection for the nearly bald man with his moth-wing eyebrows. Part of Laurence still wanted to be Milton Dirth when he grew up.

  “All of our unpaid bills are coming due at once,” Milton was saying.

  Laurence and Sougata kept looking at each other and half-grinning, because as soon as Milton got done talking about the collapse of civilization, he would move on to the fact that they had actually built it, the machine, and it seemed like it might work. Milton wanted to remind them all of the reasons why this could be humanity’s last hope, and then they would get on to the good part.

  “All of this just makes this project even more urgent than we already thought,” said Milton. “Isobel, where are we with that?”

  “Very preliminary tests on the equipment are looking good,” said Isobel. “It could be months before we’re ready to try anything more serious. Meanwhile, the most promising exoplanet candidate continues to be KOI-232.04. The Shatner Space Telescope has gotten some very promising readings as it transits its star, and we know it has oxygen and liquid water. And we’re pretty sure that if we create a stable wormhole with an opening near to KOI-232.04’s gravity well, the mouth of the wormhole will be drawn down to the planet’s surface. But there’s no guarantee it would be pulled down onto solid land.”

  Laurence couldn’t believe they were talking about visiting another planet. This was really really happening. He kept falling off his half beanbag with the giddiness. Every time Isobel said something about the evidence for KOI-232.04’s habitability, and the other exoplanet candidates they’d identified, he had to sit on his hand to keep from pumping his fist. Even with so many people dead and dying, even with the world on the edge of ruin. This was straight-up amazing.

  “Thank you for that update.” Milton stared into his own lap for a moment. Then he looked up, in every direction at once. “There’s been a wrinkle. Earnest Mather has been running some numbers, and he has a … let’s say a concern. Earnest, can you share your findings with the group?”

  “Umm.” Mather looked as though he’d been through a lot since Laurence dropped out of the sky and bought his company. He’d cut off his exuberantly frizzy hair and started wearing chunky engineer glasses. His shoulders were permanently hunched as he sat on a stool. “I have done the math about two thousand times, and there’s, well, a possibility. Let’s put it between ten percent and twenty percent. A possibility that if we turn this machine on, we’ll start a reaction that would lead to an antigravity cascade, which in turn could
tear the Earth apart.”

  “But tell them the good news,” Milton said quickly.

  “The good news? Yes. The good news.” Earnest did his best to sit up straight. “First, we would probably have about a week, between turning the machine on and the Earth being obliterated. So, with efficient crowd control, we could get a lot of people through the gateway before Earth was gone. And there’s around a fifty percent chance that if the destructive reaction started, we could stop it by turning the machine off.”

  “So,” said Milton. “Let’s say it’s a ten percent chance of the destructive reaction starting, and a fifty-fifty chance that we could avert a catastrophic outcome in that case. In fact, it might only be a five percent chance of planetary rupture. Or a ninety-five percent chance that everything would be fine. So, let’s discuss.”

  Laurence felt like he’d jumped off that high gantry, instead of taking the elevator. He wondered if he should have found a way to warn more people about what happened to Priya. Everybody was trying to talk at once, but all Laurence could make out was Sougata’s cursing. Laurence looked at Isobel, whose folding chair wobbled as she hugged herself, and he wouldn’t swear she wasn’t crying. With no windows and the door sealed tight, the room seemed even more airless than it had before, and Laurence had an irrational panic that he would step outside this room and find the whole outside world erased, gone for good.

  Earnest Mather was weeping into a wad of paper towels, even though he alone had known about this bombshell in advance. Maybe because he’d been processing the information for longer, he was readier to cry over it. Laurence couldn’t believe it was going to end like this. How was he going to keep Isobel from falling to pieces?

  The room was full of declarations. Someone quoted Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita. Tanaa said even a 1 percent chance of blowing up the planet was too much. “We always knew there were risks,” Tanaa said, “but this is insane.”