All the Birds in the Sky

by Charlie Jane Anders

  “Here’s the thing,” said Milton when the initial outrage had died down. “This technology was always a last resort. We went into this knowing we were leaping into the dreadful darkness. And I give you all my word: This technology will never see use, unless we all judge that the human race is past the brink of self-destruction.”

  He paused again. Everybody inspected his or her hands.

  “The sad truth is, there is a strong possibility our entire species is hosed, unless we act. It’s all too easy to imagine a number of different scenarios in which conflicts escalate to the point where doomsday weapons are unleashed. Or a total environmental collapse happens. If we see an overwhelming likelihood of that happening, and if we have confidence that we can keep a wormhole open for long enough to transport a sustainable population, then we have a duty to proceed.”

  Nobody spoke for a while, as everybody chewed on this.

  Anya was the one who decided to jump straight to being process-oriented. “What kind of safeguards or guarantees do we put in place to make sure the device isn’t activated unless we’re all convinced the world is in a near-doomsday situation?”

  Earnest wanted to know just how many people they could hope to gather at short notice and send through the portal in the time it remained open. Not to mention supplies. Could they have a whole colony’s worth of people and material stashed someplace nearby, for the green light? Could they attempt to fly in people from other parts of the world, to maintain a diverse gene pool, in lieu of their original plan to build identical machines all over the planet?

  “Let’s not derail into talking about logistics,” said Tanaa. “We’re still on the ethical question.”

  “There is no ethical question,” said Jerome, another engineer, who wore tight braids and a collarless shirt. “As long as we all agree it won’t be used unless the world is for-certain doomed. That’s clear-cut. We have a moral imperative to prepare a safeguard.”

  Milton was sitting back and letting them all argue, either waiting for them to come around to his point of view on their own, or else watching for the right opening to seize control again. Meanwhile, they were suffocating, sitting on folding chairs or beanbags, while Milton had an Aeron. Laurence flinched at the thought that history was being made in this disused server room, which was acquiring a sour-cabbage odor.

  “I don’t think anybody in this room is qualified to make the decision we’re attempting to take on here,” said Sougata.

  “And there’s someone somewhere else who is?” said Jerome.

  “Even if there’s no disaster,” someone said, “what if the planet is uninhabitable within a few decades?”

  They started talking ocean acidification, atmospheric nitrogen, food web collapse.

  “What if we’re only eighty percent sure it’s the apocalypse?” someone else asked.

  Laurence tried to hear the ghost of Patricia that he had been keeping in his head since they’d been separated. What would Patricia be saying if she were here? He couldn’t imagine. She didn’t even believe ethics were derived from universal principles, like the greatest good for the greatest number. She seemed farther away than ever, as though he’d already gone to a different planet than her. But then it hit him: They were talking about maybe condemning Patricia to death, along with billions of others, on the assumption that they were all doomed anyway. He couldn’t even picture himself starting to unspool that for Patricia.

  Laurence opened his mouth to say that of course they should pull the plug, this was insane. But at that moment he caught sight of Isobel, who had stopped rocking in her chair and now looked just immobilized. Isobel’s eyes were furrowed and she was inhaling through her nose with her lips pulled inward, and you could almost believe she was about to bust out laughing. Her dishwater bob was getting shaggy and her white wrists were like saplings. Isobel looked so breakable. Laurence felt a stabbing cardiothoracic pain, like a more grinding version of a panic attack, at the thought of hurting Isobel.

  Then he flipped the question around in his head: He tried to imagine how he’d feel if humanity really did run out of hope in a year or ten and they didn’t have this radical option to offer. How would he explain that to some hypothetical person, in this apocalyptic panic? We might have had a solution, but we were too scared to pursue it.

  “We can’t give up now,” Laurence heard himself say. “What I mean is, we can carry on with the research, for now, in the hopes that we’ll find a way to make it totally safe. And we can all agree we won’t even test the machine unless things look really, really bad. But if it comes down to a choice between the whole human race dying out in some nuclear holocaust or total environmental collapse, and a few hundred thousand people making it to a new planet, that’s no choice at all, right?”

  Milton was nodding with his arms folded. Isobel snapped back to life with a gasp, as though he’d done CPR on her just in time.

  Laurence expected someone else to jump in and argue with him, but everybody was hanging on his words for some weird reason. So Laurence said, “As long as humanity survives, the best part of planet Earth will have endured. I mean, you wouldn’t do anything without a backup plan, right? So this is just our backup plan, in case Plan A fails.”

  They’d been meeting a few hours, and people were starting to come together behind the notion of developing the wormhole generator as an absolute last resort. Especially since the alternative was just packing up and going home, and waiting for the worst to happen.

  At last, Milton spoke up again. “Thank you, all of you, for sharing your perspectives. This is not going to be an easy decision to make, and we’re not going to finish making it today. For now, though, I hope we can all agree to keep moving forward. With safeguards in place, as Anya suggested, to keep the device from being activated without overwhelming likelihood of a true doomsday occurrence. But I will say this: I believe it’s coming. The only question in my mind is the timescale. It could be six months or sixty years, but at some point, if things keep going along these vectors, we will be in a place where we are poised to end ourselves. We can only hope there will be enough warning before it happens to allow us to get some people out.”

  The exact nature of the safeguards was left vague.

  Everybody left the server room reeling with tension headaches and moral torment. Tanaa and Jerome rushed off to the storage closet, the only place with privacy in the entire compound, for some emergency nookie. For everybody else, there was a pleasant surprise: Someone had delivered two dozen pizzas while they’d been debating the fate of the world. Nobody had eaten pizza in months, since they got to Denver. Laurence grabbed three wide slices, folding the first slice lengthwise and stuffing it in his mouth.

  The sun had gone down, and the one tree on the front lawn of the industrial park campus was making an evil silhouette against the outsized moon. Laurence ended up changing seats so he could eat pizza with his back to the big window, but he could still feel the world breathing down his neck. He looked over at Isobel, and she nodded at him, with one eye half-shut in a kind of minimalist smile.

  26

  WEEDS PUSHED OUT of all the cracks in the walls, the moment Ernesto broke the magical seals on the entrance to Danger and took his first steps out onto the landing. Patricia and Kawashima had spent hours disinfecting and defoliating the landing and stairs, and their efforts didn’t seem to have made any difference. Fungus blossomed and spread until the floor was squishy and the ceiling sagged with the added weight. Ernesto smiled, unsteady, and grew a beard of green. The seeds and spores on his hands sprouted, and greenery came out of every seam or opening on his embroidered suede vest, clean white shirt, and gray flannel pants. His white-streaked hair turned dark. Stems and leaves obscured his face.

  “Crud,” Kawashima said. “We need to move fast. Help him down the stairs.”

  Patricia did her part, but Ernesto could barely walk even with two people (shielded by protective spells) supporting him. And the stairs had gotten treacherous, with vines a
nd bracken coming up through all the crevices. Patricia already felt bogged down by a mixture of weariness, guilt, and anger, since she hadn’t slept in weeks and her mind was overtaxed with trying not to obsess about the same two or three things. Everything was hopeless, people were drowning in death everywhere, and Patricia felt like a selfish monster every time she dwelt on her own personal shit. Like her parents—which, whatever, she hadn’t been close to them, in spite of their recent weak attempts at fence-mending. And Laurence, who had randomly declared his love for her and then gone missing for months. Just when she’d opened up to someone and started to feel like maybe she was worthy of love after all … She shouldn’t obsess about these things, because there was no fixing them, and people needed her to be present. Like Ernesto, who was about to tumble down the overgrown stairs while she was wallowing.

  The banisters were mossy and the stairs were growing branches. Patricia and Kawashima gave up on supporting Ernesto, and just carried him down, two stairs at a time. They reached the final flight just as the staircase burst open and erupted with shrubbery. Patricia and Kawashima jumped over the rising branches, in unison, and reached the bottom step, with Patricia supporting Ernesto’s head and Kawashima holding his legs. Ernesto was a green man. Patricia could feel her own clothes growing a layer of gunk.

  The VW Jetta that they’d spent a week enchanting for Ernesto idled out front, with Dorothea honking the horn every few seconds. They jumped over roots and branches in the vestibule, and ducked under the low-hanging vines in the doorway. The sidewalk cracked the moment Ernesto came near it, as long-buried jacarandas crashed upwards, casting trumpet flowers everywhere. Patricia shoved Ernesto in the back of the Jetta and got in next to him. She and Kawashima slammed the passenger-side doors and Dorothea sped toward the freeway before anybody had their seat belt on.

  The bridge was closed. There was a wreck. They had to veer off and head for the Dumbarton. People had set fire to a bank and the fire had spread to other buildings: black smoke over SoMa. Patricia closed her eyes. On the radio, the president fizzed about plans and resolutions, but Congress couldn’t even convene because nobody could agree on temporary chambers and it was a Constitutional nightmare. Next to Patricia, Ernesto sloughed vegetation until he looked human again.

  Trapped in the car with three other witches, Patricia felt desperately alone. Her eyes stung from lack of sleep, and her body felt like it was cannibalizing itself. She only wished she could go all-the-way feral from sleep deprivation and devolve to a lower state of consciousness, shut her higher brain down, because there was no way to think without obsessing and she was absolutely not going to do that. Ever since Superstorm Allegra hit, Ernesto and Kawashima had been sending her out on missions constantly, and it had almost kept her distracted enough. People were in trouble and needed a discreet helping hand. Other people were being predators and needed to be devoured by flesh-eating bacteria. Patricia had gotten so she could inflict flesh-eating bacteria in her sleep, if she ever slept. Now, in this car, she had nothing to do but sit with her thoughts, and it was unbearable. The only person she wanted to talk to was Laurence, who had dropped a bomb on her and then disappeared with no explanation. Sometimes she felt as though she’d had a chance at happiness and self-acceptance dangled in front of her and then snatched away. But that was the most selfish notion of all.

  * * *

  THE LAST TIME Patricia had dreamed of the forest, there was a hailstorm, so sharp it nicked your face, and every hailstone was a frozen fish with a look of terror on its face. The razor-sharp fish sliced at Patricia’s skin and tore her clothes until she staggered through the icy woods wearing just her underwear and some cowboy boots. Her blood froze as it came off her. She skittered on the frosty ground, as the hail grew heavier and heavier and fish piled up around her bare ankles. At last she came to the great magic Tree, which was no kind of tree she could identify, and she threw herself on its base, crying for protection as the rain of tiny fish came thicker. She looked out from the shelter of the Tree and saw nothing but skeletons in all directions, not just dead trees but dead creatures of all kinds, animal skeletons and human skulls and leafless petrified trees as far as she could see, the only signs of life herself and the great shape she huddled under.

  * * *

  PATRICIA’S INCREASINGLY UNRELIABLE phone seemed to have lost signal for good once they’d set off on the road, but she could still pull up the cryptic e-mail she’d gotten from Laurence right after Superstorm Allegra, saying only that he had to go off the grid for a while and not to worry about him.

  All along the roadside, people stood holding signs that begged for a ride or a job or some food. They passed a mall that looked like it had been burnt and torn apart, and then burnt a second time. Near Vacaville, there was a blocked-off exit where the sign said, “TOWN CLOSED. QUARANTINE.” Patricia glimpsed plumes of smoke off in the distance, coming from a distant hillside where the trees or someone’s fields were on fire. There should not be this many fires so close to Christmas.

  The sheer volume of bad news had gotten beyond anybody’s ability to process into a narrative. Everybody knew people back east who had died in the flood or succumbed to diseases in the refugee camps, and a ton of people couldn’t get at the money they’d deposited in one of the banks that had gone belly-up. Almost everybody knew people who were living through the Arab Winter or the Irish famine. Patricia had spent days trying to reach her ex-boyfriend Sameer, to make sure he hadn’t gotten caught up in the violence in Paris.

  After a while in the car, Patricia suffocated, but she couldn’t crack a window or Ernesto would grow weeds again. Taylor had fallen asleep with headphones on, behind the driver’s seat. Dorothea was telling a story about a woman who built a house in the middle of a never-ending landslide, and her story made their car go 300 miles per hour. Kawashima was busy driving. The only one Patricia could talk to was Ernesto, who kept almost touching her, in between pointing out all the things that had changed in the forty years since he’d been outside.

  “… and most days the house rocked like a boat,” Dorothea said to Kawashima from the front seat. “You don’t need a porch swing if you live on a bottomless landslide.”

  Maybe all of this suffering was Patricia’s fault. Two years after Diantha had led that assault in Siberia, the Pipe and Passage had suffered an accident. The borehole had started gushing methane into the atmosphere, a near-invisible geyser, and the satellite images were everywhere on the internet for a few years. Global temperatures had spiked soon after. Maybe if they’d succeeded in stopping the project, none of this would have happened. Or maybe Patricia’s EMP had dealt the people in Siberia just enough of a setback that they’d cut some corners to get back on schedule—and there would have been no accident if Patricia hadn’t disrupted things. Maybe Patricia killed her parents.

  If she could explain that theory to Laurence, he would laugh at her. He’d have some reasonable explanation for how she could not possibly blame herself, at least not any more than everyone else on Earth. Laurence would spout facts about methane clathrates and the inevitability of those planetary farts getting released. He would point out the fault lay with Lamar Tucker and his crew, who decided to drill for methane in the first place. He would say something random and weird, to snap her out of it.

  Whereas if she shared her theory with Ernesto or the others, they would just tell her blaming herself for the world’s problems was pure Aggrandizement. But her actions in Siberia had been pure Aggrandizement, too. She tried talking to Ernesto about her sense that we had broken nature—nature was a delicate balance, and we, people generally, had messed it up.

  Ernesto’s response: “We could not ‘break’ nature if we spent a million years trying. This planet is a speck, and we are specks on a speck. But our little habitat is fragile, and we cannot live without it.”

  Laurence telling Patricia that he loved her and then vanishing—it felt way too much like those birds telling Patricia she was a witch and then giving her t
he silent treatment, when she was a child. Except she couldn’t have any faith that this declaration would come true the same way the first one had. Magic was always bound to claim her in the end, in retrospect, but love was the most susceptible to random failure of all human enterprises. Laurence had always been preoccupied with his mysterious weird experiments, that he’d kept working on even after that accident, and any relationship was probably always going to come second for him. In her darkest moments, she imagined Laurence shuddering and rolling his eyes, in that way that he sometimes did, as he recollected how he’d almost dated his loony friend.

  “Do you know why the Tricksters and the Healers went to war, two hundred years ago?” Ernesto asked Patricia, just as she was starting to spiral into obsession in spite of herself.

  “Um,” she said. “Because they had different approaches to magic.”

  “They witnessed the Industrial Revolution,” Ernesto said. “They saw the sky turn black. The dark Satanic mills, the great factories. The Healers feared the world would be choked to death, so they set out to break all the machines. The Tricksters opposed them, because they believed none of us had the right to impose our will on everyone else. Their conflict almost destroyed everything.”

  “So what happened?” Patricia whispered. Taylor had woken up and was listening, too, fascinated.

  “After Hortense Walker made a peace between them, they reached a compromise. That is where our rule of Aggrandizement comes from, that none of us will try to shape the world too much. But also, they started working on a fail-safe. Which I hope we never have to use. And now, perhaps you understand why we were so concerned about you, these past months.”

  Patricia nodded. It made sense now. If she made any of this about her, she would only screw up again. Ernesto was right: She should just try to be a speck on a speck. So instead, she held on tight to her anger, even as she choked on the recycled air in the car. Patricia had no time for grief, blame, or a broken heart, but anger, there was endless time for. Stay angry. Hold on to it. Anger is your tightrope over the abyss. She repeated in her head what she said right after the storm hit: Some fucker had to pay.