All the Birds in the Sky (41 page)

She saw the look of misery and annoyance on Laurence’s face, and then she realized.

“Oh. You didn’t.”

He nodded.

“You stupid dumbass. What were you thinking? Why would you do that?” She was shaking his whole torso, with all her strength.

He finally slipped out of her grasp, got his Caddy out, and typed. “Saved yr life. Isobel was going to shoot u. She wanted/deserved an explanation.” His face was a different shape without words constantly coming out of it. Like his eyes were bigger and his mouth smaller.

“You…” She started to say “you stupid dumbass” again, but it turned into: “You gave up your voice for me.”

Laurence nodded.

She put her arms around him, tight enough to feel him breathing. Lungs inflating and deflating, no sound but airflow. She couldn’t make herself grasp that he had done this on purpose. For her. Nothing magical had ever confounded her so much.

A pigeon landed on her shoulder. “Too late!” it burbled in her ear.

Fucking interrupting pigeon.
“Why is it too late?” she asked.

“Too late,” was all it said in response.

“It can’t be too late,” Patricia said, “or you wouldn’t be talking to me.”

Laurence looked at the pigeon on Patricia’s shoulder, pecking at the air and babbling, and his eyes narrowed like he really wanted to say something snarky.

“Almost too late,” the pigeon said. “Practically too late.”

She tried to ask, again, why it was too late, but the bird flew off—although maybe like it wanted her to follow. In any case, nothing would be worse than standing in front of the shuttered Bench Bar obsessing about everyone who had been silenced, one way or another. “We need to follow that bird,” she told Laurence, who shrugged, like
why not? So we’re following a bird now
.

She took off up the hill, away from Mission, keeping the pigeon in sight as it kept wheeling and then soaring uphill again. The pigeon led them up a tiny staircase, set in the hillside, and then to a tiny lane that zigzagged through trees. The street got smaller and smaller until it was just a pathway through a terrace clogged with willows and banyans, big low-slung branches putting their leaves in her face as she raced to keep the pigeon’s messy wings in sight.

The pigeon banked and went up another tiny outdoor staircase, rising into darkness. The trees collided over the stairs, their branches packed so tight Patricia kept losing sight of the bird they were chasing. She grabbed Laurence’s hand as the staircase turned into a loose dirt slope going upwards, and the trees became wider and even tighter-packed. Bark thick as tire treads, branches like barbed wire. They masked the sky. She spent all her concentration steering Laurence and herself on a clear path. The slope grew steeper and steeper until it was vertical, and then it flattened. Patricia glanced behind her and couldn’t even see the path they’d come from.

Patricia realized with a jolt that she hadn’t been this deep into a forest since the time she’d become a bird, back before Kanot had taken her away to Eltisley Maze.

“My GPS is having a meltdown,” Peregrine said.

Now that they had deep forest all around them, the pigeon seemed chattier. “So I’m not sure if I ought to be bringing your friend along,” it said. “My name is Kooboo, by the way.” At least, that’s what the name sounded like.

“My friends are very respectable,” said Patricia, including Peregrine in that. “And I’m guessing it’s too late to worry about bringing outsiders. Are we going to the Parliament? I’m Patricia, and this is Laurence. And that’s Peregrine that he’s holding.”

The trees thinned out a little, and Patricia had a feeling they were almost at the clearing with the great spread-eagled Tree. She paused and took Laurence’s free hand, the one not holding Peregrine, in both of her hands. “I have no clue what I’m doing here,” she said. “Nothing prepared me for this. But I’m really glad you’re here with me. I feel like I must have done something right sometime, if you’re still in my life after all the stuff that’s happened.”

Laurence typed on the Caddy: “Best friends.” Then he erased the word “Best” and wrote: “Indestructible.”

“Indestructible. Yeah.” Patricia took Laurence’s hand again. “Let’s go see the Tree.”

*   *   *

PATRICIA HAD FORGOTTEN
how massive and terrible the Tree was, how overwhelming the embrace of its two great limbs. How like an echo chamber the space in the shadow of its canopy was. She had expected it to seem smaller now that she was a grown-up, just a tree after all, but instead she looked at its great hanging fronds and its gnarled surface and felt presumptuous for even coming into its presence again.

The Tree did not speak. Instead, the birds sitting on its branches all fluttered and shouted at once. “Order! Order!” said a great osprey in the junction of the two huge branches. “This is highly irregular,” said a fluffy pheasant higher up, with a roll of its wings.

“This is as far as I go,” whispered Kooboo the pigeon. “Good luck. I think they were already in the middle of a No Confidence vote. Bad timing!” The pigeon flew away, leaving Patricia and Laurence standing alone before the Parliament.

“Hello,” Patricia said. “I’m here. You sent for me.”

“No, we didn’t,” the pheasant said.

“We did,” the osprey reminded his esteemed colleague. “However, you are late.”

“Sorry,” Patricia said. “I got here as fast as I could.” She glanced at Laurence, who raised his eyebrows, because none of this chatter was making any sense to him.

“We asked you a question, years ago,” the osprey said. “And you never came back to answer it.”

“Give me a break,” Patricia said. “I was like six years old. I didn’t even remember that I was supposed to answer a question. Anyway, I’m here now. That counts for something, right?”

“Late!” an eagle said from the uppermost fork of the right-hand branch. “Late!” some of the other birds chorused.

“We did not think you would make it here soon enough,” the eagle said. “Your time is ending.”

“Why is that?” Patricia said. “Because of the Unraveling? Or the war?”

“Your time,” said a lean crow on the other side of the Tree with a slow dip of its sharp beak, “is ending.”

“In any case, you are here, yes,” the osprey said. “So we might as well hear your answer. Is a tree red?”

“Is a tree red?” repeated the crow.

The other birds took up the question until their voices blended together into one terrible din. “Is a tree red? Is a tree red? Is? A tree? Red?”

Patricia had been bracing herself for this moment, especially since her talk with Peregrine. She had sort of hoped the answer would just pop into her head from wherever her subconscious must have been gnawing at it for years, but now that she was actually here she felt light-headed and completely blank. She still couldn’t even make sense of it. Like what tree were they even talking about? What if you asked someone who was color-blind? She stared at the Tree, right in front of her, trying to figure out what color it was. One moment, its bark was sort of a muddy gray. Then she looked again, and she saw a deep, rich brown that shaded into red. She couldn’t tell, it was too much, she didn’t have a clue. She looked at Laurence, who gave her an encouraging smile even though he was out of the loop.

“I don’t know,” Patricia said. “Give me a minute.”

“You’ve had years.” The osprey scowled. “It’s a perfectly simple question.”

“I … I…” Patricia closed her eyes.

She thought of all the trees she’d seen in her life, and then weirdly her mind slipped to the fact that she’d glimpsed a whole other universe when she was rescuing Priya. And that other universe had impossible colors, with wavelengths that humans weren’t even supposed to see—and what color would a tree be there? That thought led her to Ernesto, who was lost in that universe forever and who had said that this planet was a speck and we were all just specks on a speck. But maybe our whole universe was just a speck, too. And it was all part of nature, all of it—every universe and all the spaces in between—as much nature as this Tree in front of her. Patricia thought of Reginald saying nature doesn’t “find a way” to do anything, and Carmen saying they had been right but rash in Siberia, and Laurence saying humans were unique in the cosmos. Patricia still didn’t know anything about nature, or anything else. She knew less than when she was six years old, even. She might just as well be color-blind.

“I don’t know,” Patricia said. “I don’t know. I’m sorry. I really am.” She felt a deep ache, in her joints and behind her eyes, like she hadn’t really gotten healed from being roasted alive after all.

“You don’t
know
?” A heron wagged its long scissor beak at her.

“I’m sorry. I ought to know one way or the other by now, but…” Patricia struggled for the words, feeling tears fill her eyes again. “I mean, how am I supposed to know? Even if I knew which tree you’re asking about, I would only know my perceptions of it. I mean, you could look at a tree and see what it looks like, but you wouldn’t be perceiving what it actually
is
. Let alone how it would look to nonhuman eyes. Right? I just don’t see how you could know. I’m really sorry. I just can’t.”

Then she stopped and felt a jolt of realization. “Wait. Actually, that is my answer: I don’t know.”

“Oh,” said the osprey. “Hmm.”

“Is that the right answer?” Patricia said.

“It’s certainly
an
answer,” the osprey said.

“Works for me,” said the pheasant, fluttering.

“I deem it acceptable,” said the eagle at the top of the Tree. “Despite the appalling lateness.”

“Phew,” Patricia said. She told Laurence what the answer to the question had been, and she noticed that as she spoke the answer the Caddy in Laurence’s hand displayed a menu that she’d never seen before, as though something had been unlocked. She turned back toward the Parliament. “So what do I get? For answering the question?”

“Get? You get to be proud,” the osprey said, with a sweep of wingtips. “You are free to go. With our congratulations.”

“That’s it?” Patricia said.

“What else did you expect?” said an owl, poking its head out of the far left side of the Tree. “A parade? Actually, we haven’t had a parade in quite a while. That could be fun.”

“I thought, maybe, a boon or something? Like, I don’t know, if I answer the question I get a power-up? This was supposed to be a quest, right?” The birds all started debating among themselves about whether there was something in their own bylaws that they’d ignored, until Patricia interrupted: “I want to talk to the Tree. The Tree that you’re all sitting on right now.”

“Oh, sure,” said the pheasant. “Talk to the Tree. Do you want to talk to some rocks while you’re at it?”

“She wants to talk to the Tree,” a turkey chortled.

“I am,” said the Tree beneath them, in a great rustle of breath, “here.”

“Uh, hi,” Patricia said. “Sorry to disturb you.”

“You have,” the Tree said, “done well.”

The Parliament was silent for once, as the birds looked down at their own meeting chamber, starting to converse on its own. Some of the birds flew away, while others stood very still, heads tucking into wings.

“We spoke before,” Patricia said. “You told me a witch serves nature. Do you remember?”

“I,” the Tree said, “remember.”

Its voice came from deep inside its trunk and rose up to its branches, causing them to vibrate and shower leaves down. More members of Parliament were fleeing, although a few of them were trying to organize a motion to hold their own Parliamentary chambers in contempt.

“It remembers me,” Patricia told Laurence and Peregrine.

“The Tree is speaking English,” Peregrine informed her.

Peregrine’s screen still showed that weird screen—which looked like the Caddy’s source code or something. Rows of hexadecimal strings, like machine addresses, plus some complicated instructions with lots of parentheses.

“What are you?” Patricia asked the Tree. “Are you the source of magic?”

“Magic is,” said the Tree, “a human idea.”

“But I wasn’t the first person you ever spoke to, was I?”

“I am many quiet places,” the Tree said. “And many loud places.”

“You talked to others before me,” Patricia said. “And you shared some of your power with them. Right? And that’s how we got witches? Before there were Healers, or Tricksters, or anything.”

“It was,” the Tree said, “a long time ago.”

“Listen, we need your help,” Patricia said. “Even the birds knew it, time is running out. We need you to intervene. You have to do something. I answered the question, so you owe me. Right?”

“What,” said the Tree, “would you have me do?”

“Do?” Patricia tried, really hard, to hold it together. Her hands were nuggets. “I don’t know, you’re the ancient presence and I’m just some dumb person. I barely managed to answer one yes-or-no question. You’re supposed to know more than me.”

“What,” the Tree said again, “would you have me do?”

Patricia did not know what to say. She needed to say something, she needed to find a way to make this day something other than the day everything fell in the dirt around her. Her friends, dead. Laurence, speechless. And much worse to come soon. She couldn’t let this … She couldn’t let this be all there was. She couldn’t. She trembled and groped for the right thing to say, to fix everything. She stumbled over words.

Laurence stepped past her, walking right up to the Tree, which by now was empty of birds. Patricia wanted to stop him or to ask what the hell he was doing, but Laurence had a look on his face that said,
I’m doing this, don’t argue,
and she wanted, needed, to trust him.

Laurence had something in his hand, and he was lifting it up to the Tree: his Caddy. He felt all around the trunk until he found a knothole that was just big enough, and he eased the silvery fish scale through the thick bark around the opening and then carefully rotated it, until its screen was shining from within the Tree’s bark, right side up. He wedged it into place, then stepped back toward Patricia, making an exaggerated palm-slapping motion.

“Oh,” Peregrine said. Tendrils were growing out of the Tree’s insides into its network and zipwire ports. Peregrine’s screen involuntarily lit up with a notice that said: “New Network Detected.”