All the Birds in the Sky (39 page)

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?”

“Yeah. No.” Patricia searched her memory. “It was a random phrase, like a nonsense question. It was supposed to shock you into awareness. I still can’t believe it worked. I got it from Laurence. I don’t remember the wording.” Her brain clicked and the phrase fell into shape. “Wait. I do. It was, ‘Is a tree red?’”

“That’s right,” the Caddy said.

Patricia chewed her thumb and felt a kind of cognitive dissonance, like a buried thread of memory. “Someone asked me that when I was a child,” she said at last. “Like, really little. I think it was my first experience of magic. How did I forget that?”

“I don’t know,” Peregrine said. “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that question. I’m guessing you don’t know the answer?”

“Shit,” Patricia said. “No. I don’t.” This made her think about the way the birds had started telling her it was too late, and then she thought of her childhood fancy about the Tree. She had a flash of birds sitting in judgment and her child self asking for more time. What if this was all real? What if it was real and it all mattered, and what if she’d never really earned the right to be a witch after all, because there was something she was supposed to do, all this time?

“Shit,” Patricia said. “Now I won’t be able to stop thinking about this, either.”

“You being unable to suppress a thought is somewhat different from me being unable to suppress a thought,” said Peregrine, clearly trying to be diplomatic. “It’s like a riddle. Or a Zen koan. But there are no answers to that question anywhere online, in any language.”

“Huh,” Patricia said again. “I guess it’s one of those things that’s not supposed to make total sense. I mean, a tree is red in the autumn.”

“So maybe the question is whether we’re in the autumn of the world,” Peregrine said. “Assuming it’s a generalization, and not just referring to a specific tree.”

“A tree could be red if it was on fire. Or at dawn,” Patricia said. “It’s not even a real riddle. Riddles are never yes-or-no questions, are they? It would be more like, ‘When is a tree red?’”

“I think finding the answer might be my purpose in life,” said Peregrine.

Patricia found herself wondering whether this might be her personal lifelong quest as well, even as a voice inside her said,
Aggrandizement
!

Laurence came back. “That was Isobel,” he said. “I don’t quite know how to tell you this.”

The earthquake struck while Laurence was leaning over to put his phone down, so he pitched forward and clocked his head against Isobel’s steel coffee table, sending blood out of a gash in his forehead and nearly knocking him out cold. The room shook hard enough to send books and knickknacks raining down onto Patricia, and the television full of wartime scenes slipped off its moorings, falling on its side. Patricia sat, unshakable, as everything collapsed around her.

33

HERE’S WHAT ISOBEL
said to Laurence, just before the earthquake hit: “This isn’t about revenge. You know that. Our people haven’t spent the past few months cooped up in Seadonia, dealing with scabies and bedbugs in close quarters, obsessing about mere payback. But we needed to find a way to move forward, after Denver. Because rebuilding the wormhole machine from scratch would take years, and we can’t risk having those people come back and destroy it again. We could try and set up better defenses, but we didn’t see them coming last time and we can’t guarantee we’ll see them next time. So we have no choice but to take preemptive action.”

“What have you done?” Laurence pressed the phone against the hinge of his jaw until it throbbed. “Isobel, what have you done?”

“We built the ultimate machine,” she was saying. “Tanaa, you know what a miracle worker she is, she did most of the hard part. It’s called the Total Destruction Solution, and it’s amazing.”

Isobel geeked out about the design challenges of creating the T.D.S.: They needed to cram as much armament as possible into the main chassis, without creating something too top-heavy. They wanted something amphibious and all-terrain, with omnidirectional movement and the ability to take out multiple targets at once. Like every designer of cool hardware, Tanaa wound up reaching for shapes from nature: the segmented bodies of the major arthropods, the shock-absorbing properties of a hedgehog’s quills, the stabilizing tail, the six insectoid legs, the multi-sectioned carapace, and so on. The cockpit was spacious enough for two people, with manual controls that were redundant so long as you had someone connected to the brain/computer interface. (Milton had gotten the laparoscopic operation not long earlier.) The result was perhaps a bit busy, but it moved with a sleekness, and when it came time to open up with the five SAMs, the seven industrial lasers, the front and rear napalm launchers—and the crown jewel, the antigravity cannon—the T.D.S. would
dance
.

“But you don’t even know who you’re dealing with.” Laurence looked into the foamy grounds in the French press on Isobel’s kitchen counter.

“We know more than you think,” Isobel said, with great heaviness. “We know they have a network, with a number of clandestine facilities around the world, including a hostel in Portland, a ballroom-dancing school in Minneapolis, and a bookstore and absinthe bar here in San Francisco. Plus a training facility which they call The Maze, which has a hidden entrance in the Pyrenees. That one, The Maze, appears to be too heavily protected for a conventional assault—but then, that’s why they make bunker busters. It’s today. It’s now. We’re hitting all of the targets simultaneously, before they know what’s happening.”

“Isobel, don’t. Don’t do this. Call it off, please. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“I’m in the cockpit of the Total Destruction Solution right now, with Milton,” Isobel said. “On Mission Street, a block away from that bookstore place. I waited until the last minute to call you, because I didn’t want you to interfere.”

In the background, Laurence could hear Milton saying something to Isobel, plus the unmistakable sound of “Terraplane Blues,” blasting over the speakers in the T.D.S. cockpit.

“You can’t do this,” Laurence said. “You’ll just—”

“We’re aware that you were dating one of the Denver Five,” Isobel said. “We identified your girlfriend in surveillance footage from a gas station in Utah, where they stopped to refuel. I tried to keep you out of this, but by now everybody knows you’ve been compromised. So please, stay away. If you show up here, I can’t guarantee you won’t be treated like an enemy combatant.”

“Isobel, please listen.” But she had already hung up.

*   *   *

LAURENCE LAY ON
the floor groaning, blood gushing from his forehead where he’d thwacked it on Isobel’s coffee table. Patricia squatted over him and licked his wound in one quick motion, apologizing for doing this the quick way rather than the classy way.

The bleeding stopped. Laurence’s head felt better. He had an erection. Patricia leaned back so Laurence could sit up, and for a moment they were face to face, Patricia blushing and doe-eyed, perched above his upper thighs. He had a sense that this was a moment when all sorts of pathways might be open between them, and he was about to slam all of them shut with what he had to tell her. He only wondered for a moment if he should keep Isobel’s news to himself, because telling Patricia would mean betraying Isobel and Milton. But not telling Patricia would be, marginally, the bigger betrayal, and the one he was less likely to forgive himself for. Even though he’d just been tooth-grinding mad at Patricia and her friends, he couldn’t look her in the face and not tell her about this. He recognized this was a major life decision he was making, and then he made it.

Patricia was on her feet by the time Laurence finished his third sentence. A flurry of black rags, elbows pushing out and neck full of tendons, she was moving too fast to go anywhere. For a moment he thought she was going to shake herself to pieces with rage, and then he realized it was a second earthquake, much worse than the first. If Laurence hadn’t already been prone he would have fallen again, and this time everything that wasn’t bolted down went flying. The quake stopped, then started again, even worse. Like being inside a power drill. The ceiling was opening fissures, the floor slanted.

Of course. Focused antigravity beam. Seismic hazard zone. What else. Would you expect.

Isobel was going to need new stuff, and a new house. The quake seemed to have been good for Patricia, though. She was the only still point, as everything else went in the blender, and when the quake finally stopped she looked serene. “I spent eight years training for this day,” she said to Laurence. “I’m all over this. You should stay here. I’m glad I got to talk to you, one last time. Goodbye, Laurence.” And then she was heading out the front door.

Like hell. Laurence ran after her, huffing a little. “I’m going with you,” he said. “You’ll need me to help talk them down. How are you even going to get to the Mission, in the immediate aftermath of two massive earthquakes? Can you fly right now? I didn’t think so. I know where there’s a motorcycle we can borrow. Look, I’m really sorry my friends did this, I know how mad they were, but this wasn’t the answer, and the longer this goes on, the more stuff like this is going to heap up on both sides until we get to the point of the Undoing.”