All the Birds in the Sky

by Charlie Jane Anders

  “I mean…” Patricia looked unbearably sad for a second, then she pushed ahead. “I guess I wound up playing a much bigger trick on you than just tricking you into giving up your ring, didn’t I? Even if I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. I became your lover and part of your life, and then I … well, you know what I did. And the antigravity machine that sent Priya away, the one that this ring was offered to save her from, became part of the doomsday machine that I wrecked. So I don’t need it anymore, because I wound up building a much bigger wheel around the smaller wheel. And I guess, in a way, this ring is tainted for me.”

  She offered the ring again. Laurence still didn’t take it. “It wasn’t a doomsday machine,” he said.

  “It wasn’t? Then what was it?”

  “It’s a long story. Listen, I can’t be around people right now. It’s nothing personal.” He made a move to close the door, but her outstretched hand and his family heirloom were in the way.

  “Why not? Are you having a weird feeling? Like that you’re coated with garbage that makes your skin crawl and you can’t recognize other people as belonging to the same species?”

  “No. No! Why would you ask something like that?”

  “Oh, uh. Nothing. It’s just, lately, whenever I hear someone say they can’t be around people, I start to worry that … it doesn’t matter.”

  “It’s just that all my friends are on Seadonia, and I’m here on my own. And I’m still pretty broken up about what you did in Denver.”

  “What are they all doing in Seadonia?”

  “Mostly? Figuring out ways to kill you and your friends. Probably using ultrasonics, or some kind of antigravity beam, similar to what happened to Priya only more directional and portable. That’s my guess, anyway.”

  “Oh. Thanks. That was easy.”

  “What was easy?”

  “They asked me to come here and see if I could find out what was going on at Seadonia. They figured you would know.”

  “And you got it out of me.”

  “Yep.”

  “Because you’re so good at being a ‘Trickster.’”

  Patricia looked down. She seemed less tough than she had a few minutes earlier. Then she looked up and it was Laurence who had a hard time looking at her. He remembered all of a sudden how she had described the Pathway to Infinity as a “doomsday machine.”

  Neither of them could face the other without shame. Laurence had a feeling most adults he knew had gotten used to this feeling of mutual abashment. But it was new to him.

  “But actually,” Patricia said, “I’m glad we got that stuff out of the way. About Seadonia. Because that wasn’t what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  “No. It was what they wanted me to talk to you about. But it wasn’t what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “So what did you want to talk to me about?”

  “I don’t know.” She just stood there and he could hear both their breathing and someone running, a few streets away. “I don’t know. Nothing. Nothing, I guess.” She pushed the black box at him. “So do you want your ring back or not?”

  “I can’t, I just can’t. I can’t take anything from you, even if it used to belong to me.”

  She put the ring back in her pocket. She looked more beautiful than ever. His heart was in tatters. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for what? What do you think you have to be sorry for?”

  “Ernesto says I betrayed my lover—meaning you—and I have to come to terms with that. Even if you were building a doomsday machine, it doesn’t change that fact.”

  “It wasn’t a doomsday machine,” Laurence said again.

  He looked at the Caddy nestled in her hand and forearm, providing meager illumination to the dark world as it woke up. The Caddy was purring, probably syncing with the one in Laurence’s bedroom, and checking for real-time updates from the nearest server. How much of Peregrine was in the Caddies and how much was in some secure facilities hidden around the world where the Caddies drew their updates from? Why had Peregrine warned him obliquely that Patricia was on her way? With not enough time to make a break for it, but enough time to freak out?

  They just stood there, neither of them talking at all, until the streetlights came back on. The sudden lurch from pitch darkness to yellow brightness felt like the sun had popped up all at once—except the light was weaker and there was no warmth. They were both jolted out of their mutual reverie.

  “Okay,” Patricia said. “Take care of yourself. Hard times are coming. Harder times, I mean. I’ll see you around.”

  “No,” Laurence said. “You won’t.”

  32

  THE SUN STILL hadn’t risen. Maybe it never would. Maybe the sky was sick of these endless costume changes: Casting off cloak after cloak, but never revealing what it wore under all those cloaks. Patricia climbed the tall staircase to the top of the hill, stumbling on the cement steps. Nearby, a hawk swung past, making its last hunt of the night, and it glanced at Patricia and said, “Too late, too late!” Which was what birds kept saying to her these days. She clomped to the top of the staircase and staggered across Portola to reach the brink of Market, looking out over the whole city and the bay, all the way to Oakland. She dug in her satchel for a tiny bag of Corn Nuts, crushed to greasy powder, and the dregs of a 5-hour ENERGY drink. She hoped the sun wouldn’t come up. When it did, she was going to report in to Carmen and tell her that they had pissed off some people with nearly limitless wealth, arcane superscience, and nothing to lose. That conversation would lead to Carmen making some decisions, some of which Patricia would have to implement personally. Those, in turn, would lead to more consequences, and more decisions.

  Oakland glowed pink. Patricia could glimpse a panic attack coming out of her blind spot, but as long as she didn’t look at it directly, it would never arrive. Except that just as she hatched that notion, her bag made a loud klaxon blast, like she was in a submarine that was venting water. She jumped up and nearly took a spill over the railing. The alarm was her Caddy, which was displaying a “New Voicemail” message at the center of its swirl of spokes. The voicemail was not new, it was one that Laurence had left her right before the attack on Denver, which she had later found and deleted without listening to it. He had left it on her phone, not her Caddy, so her Caddy shouldn’t even have it. She put the Caddy back in her bag and watched the red blanket creep toward the AT-AT shipyard, while an orange thumbprint grazed the horizon. The alarm sounded again: “New Voicemail.” Once again, not a new voicemail. She deleted it a second time and turned her Caddy off for good measure.

  Color returned to the world, cone time replaced rod time. Patricia thought about what it would be like to suffer Priya’s fate forever. She tried not to feel sorry for Theodolphus. She thought about Dorothea, getting her brains blown out. Her mouth tasted foul.

  Her bag vibrated, then rattled and shrilled. The Caddy had turned back on somehow and was, you guessed it, trying to get her to listen to an old dead message.

  “What is up with you?” she said to the device.

  “You’re going to want to listen to this,” it said aloud, in its directions-to-the-airport voice.

  She deleted the message again.

  It came back again, with the same obnoxious noise.

  She’d saved some childhood pictures on this Caddy, or else she would have lobbed it off the hillside. And anyway, whatever, it was a voicemail, how bad could it be? She pressed “listen.”

  At first, she just felt disconcerted, listening to the Laurence of another time line talking about a future that had been erased. Poor dumb alternate Laurence. But then he talked about her dead parents, as if they’d only just died—whereas Patricia had been thinking of her parents as having died many, many years ago. First there had been no time to grieve for her parents, and then she had decided that she’d already grieved enough. In fact, her parents had died recently, not years ago, and she had given them short shrift except for a pang here
and there, and one messed-up dream talk with Roberta. She’d buried the grief, the way she buried everything. Now her head was full of decapitated sandwiches and sandpaper shirts, and her father’s kisses on the bridge of her nose, and the canary-yellow frosting on the seventh-birthday cake her mom had baked her, and the way the “o” in “disown” became a diphthong under severe strain, and her mother’s broken arm.…

  She was never going to see her parents again, or tell them she loved them, or tell them they ruined her childhood. They were gone, and she had never even known them, and Roberta had insisted they’d really loved her best in spite of all their cruelty, and Patricia would never, ever understand. The not-understanding was worse than anything else, it was like a mystery and a wound that couldn’t heal and an unforgivable failure.

  Patricia broke down. She fell on her hands and knees in the dirt at the road shoulder, facing the blinding sunrise, and she started shaking and scrabbling in the ground and her eyes blurred from the overflow. She wiped her eyes clear as her vision fell on a single yellow flower beyond the metal fence, and just as Ghost Laurence said the words “emotional phototropism” the sunlight hit the flower and it actually raised its motherfucking head to greet the sun, and Patricia lost her shit all over again, the tears just cascading out of her as she clawed at the ground she was salting.

  The message ended and vanished forever and Patricia kept weeping and digging the stony dirt with both hands, until the sun was upon her.

  When she could see again, still dry-heaving and bawling a little, she looked at the Caddy, which was perched in the grass looking innocent, and she had a pretty shrewd idea who this was but that was the least of her worries. “Fuck,” she said, “you.”

  “I thought you needed to hear that,” the Caddy said.

  “The trap that cannot be ignored,” she said, “is fucking bullshit.”

  She sat, head on dirty knees, looking out at the city. She felt like there was nobody in the world she could talk to about how she was feeling, as sure as if a plague had killed every other human. This thought led her back to the Unraveling, the way every thought eventually did.

  She banged on Laurence’s door, not knocking and pausing and then knocking again, but rather a steady pummeling that says “I’m going to break this door down.” Her hand bruised up and she kept going.

  This time, Laurence had probably been asleep. He looked even more disheveled than before, and way more disoriented. He had one sock on and an arm through one T-shirt sleeve. “Hey.” He squinted.

  “You promised you would never run away from me again,” she said.

  “I did promise that,” he said. “And I don’t remember you promising not to destroy my life’s work. So you have me there.”

  Patricia almost turned away, because she could not deal with any more blame. But she still had dirt under her fingernails.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. And then she couldn’t get any more words out. She couldn’t find words, any more than she could feel her extremities. “I’m sorry,” she said again, because she needed to make this totally unconditional. “I feel like I owed you more trust than I gave you. I shouldn’t have destroyed what I didn’t understand, and I shouldn’t have done that to you.”

  Laurence kept looking at her with a dull expression, like he was just waiting for her to shut up and go away so he could go back to sleep. She probably looked like a mess, sweating and covered with dirt and tears.

  Patricia made herself keep talking, because this was another situation where there was no way but forward: “I think part of me knew all along that you were working on something that could be dangerous, and I thought that being a good friend meant not judging or asking too many questions. And that was messed up, and I should have tried to find out sooner, and when I saw the machine in Denver and realized that it was yours I should have found a way to talk to you about it instead of just finishing the mission. I screwed up. I’m sorry.”

  “Shit.” Laurence looked as if she had kicked him in the junk instead of apologizing. “I … I never actually thought I would hear that from you.”

  “I mean it. I was a colossal dick.”

  “You weren’t a colossal dick. Just kind of a regular dick. We were playing with fire in Denver. No question. But yeah, I wish you had talked to me.”

  “I listened to your voicemail from before,” Patricia said. “Just now. CH@NG3M3 forced me. He wouldn’t let me delete it without listening.”

  “It’s a pushy bastard. It goes by Peregrine now.”

  “Listen, I have to tell you about something really important. And it’s not something I can discuss out in the open.”

  “I guess you ought to come in, then.” He stepped back and held the door open.

  They sat on the same sofa where they’d shared the elf-shaped bong, facing the wide-screen TV where they’d watched Red Dwarf with Isobel. The apartment was a lot more cluttered, Hoarders-esque even, and there was a millimeter-deep layer of gunge on everything.

  Patricia told him about the Unraveling. And then, because he couldn’t have grasped even some of the enormity of it, she told him again. She found herself lapsing into clinical terms, instead of conveying the full gut-wrenching experience. “The population would drop within one generation, but some people would still manage to breed. Breeding would be highly unpleasant. Most babies would be abandoned at birth. On the other hand, there would be no more war, and no pollution.”

  “That is evil. I mean, that might be the most evil thing I’ve ever heard.” Laurence rubbed his eyes with all ten knuckles, brushing away the last crumbs of sleep but also like he was trying to wipe away the images Patricia had put in his head. “How long … how long have you known about this?”

  “A day, maybe three,” Patricia said. “I heard people mention it in hushed voices once or twice, but it’s not something we discuss. I think it’s been cooking for over a hundred years. But they’re still refining it. My old high-school classmate is adding some finishing touches.” She shuddered, thinking about Diantha, with all her self-loathing, and how Patricia had strong-armed her into this.

  “I can’t even imagine,” Laurence said. “Why are you telling me about this?”

  He went to make coffee, because when you’ve just heard about the possible transformation of the human race into feral monsters, you need to be doing something with your hands and creating something hot and comforting for another person. He ground the beans, scooped them out, and poured boiling water into the French press, waiting to push the plunger until the liquid reached the right sour mash consistency. He moved like a sleepwalker, like Patricia hadn’t really woken him up.

  “I’m sorry I laid that on you,” Patricia said. “Neither of us can do anything about it. I just needed to talk to someone, and I realized you were the only one I could talk to. Plus I felt like I owed it to you, in some way.”

  “Why not talk to Taylor? Or one of the other magical people?”

  “I don’t even know which of them know about this, and I don’t want to be responsible for spreading this around the community. Plus if I said I was having doubts about any of this, it would be like ultimate bonus Aggrandizement. And I guess … you’ve always been the only one who could get me, when it counted.”

  “Remember when we were kids?” He handed her a hot mug. “And we used to wonder how grown-ups got to be such assholes?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Now we know.”

  “Yeah.”

  They drank coffee for a long time. Neither of them put their mugs down between sips, they just held them to their faces like rebreathers. They both looked into their cups instead of at each other. Until Laurence lashed out with one hand and grabbed Patricia’s free hand, in a sudden desperate motion. He held on to her hand and looked at her, eyes swollen with desolation. She didn’t pull away or squeeze his hand back.

  Patricia broke the silence. “All those years, I did magic on my own, no other people around except for you that one time. In the woods, or the
attic. Then I come to find out that proper magic is all about interacting with people, one way or the other—either healing them or tricking them. But the really great magicians can’t be around people at all. They’re like Ernesto, who can’t leave his two rooms. Or poor Dorothea, who couldn’t carry on a simple conversation. Or my old teacher Kanot, whose face changes every day. Set apart. Like they can do things to people, but not with people.”

  “And those are the people,” Laurence said, “who cooked up the Unraveling.” She noticed he flinched when she mentioned Dorothea.

  “They want to protect the world,” Patricia said. “They think the dolphins and elephants have as much right to live as we do. But yeah, they have a skewed perspective.”

  Laurence started to describe a meeting he had been in, at that compound in Denver, where his friends had talked about the possibility that their big machine could do to the world what the little machine had done to Priya. The image of the nerds crammed into a server room made Patricia think of being scrunched into a chimney at Eltisley Hall, and her reverie threatened to spiral endlessly, until Peregrine interrupted.

  “You might want to turn on the television,” Peregrine said.

  The same thing was on every channel. The Bandung Summit had failed. China was seizing the Diaoyu Islands and pressing its claims in the South China Sea, and meanwhile the Chinese government had promised to support Pakistan in the Kashmir conflict. And Russian troops were marching west. The screen showed troops massing, naval destroyers moving into position, missiles and drones being primed. It looked for all the world like the History Channel, except this was new footage.

  “Holy crap,” Patricia said. “That’s not good.”

  Laurence’s phone rang. “What?” he said. “Hang on.” He waved apologetically at Patricia and left the room.

  Patricia watched the TV coverage for a moment, until it sickened her and she had to mute the audio.

  Peregrine piped up. “Patricia,” he said. “Do you remember what you said to me, when you awoke my consciousness for the first time? When Laurence was at that military school?”