All the Birds in the Sky (42 page)

Authors: Charlie Jane Anders

“You are,” the Tree said, “like me.”

“A distributed consciousness, yes,” Peregrine said. “Although your network is much larger and vastly more chaotic than mine. This may require … a rather ambitious firmware update. Stay tuned.” The screen went dark.

Patricia turned to Laurence. “How did you know?”

He raised his hands and shoulders, in a big pantomime shrug. He typed on his phone: “lucky guess?” She kept staring at him until he typed: “ok, ok. the tree’s question woke peregrine, the answer unlocked its source code. peregrine is part magic. i figured.”

The screen at the center of the Tree lit up again, and this time stuff was streaming across it faster than Patricia could make sense of. Peregrine had rebooted and was now doing a systemwide update. The Tree made what sounded like a noise of startled pleasure: “Oh.”

Shapes appeared on the glowing screen, ensconced in the middle of the bark. They were too far away to see, and Patricia didn’t dare come any closer. But she still had her own Caddy, in her satchel. She pulled it out and thumbed its screen on, revealing a schematic. After a moment, she recognized a diagram of a tree. Leaves, dotted with stomates, spangled with solar electricity, branches and meristematic zones growing and dividing, roots stretching miles in every direction and intersecting with other trees. The schematic pulled back until it showed a number of trees, and water sources, and weather patterns, all the interlocking ecosystems.

Then it shifted, and she was looking at a map of magic. She could see every spell that anyone had ever cast, since the very first witch on Earth. Somehow, she knew what she was looking at, especially when she saw the spell map split into Healers and Tricksters and then branch into all the different schools of magic, before converging again. Each spell was a node, all of them connected by cause and effect and the incestuousness of magical society. The entire history of magic, over thousands of years, every single time human hands had shaped this power, in a single visualization that rotated in three dimensions. There was one ugly little dark green knot, at the very end. A spell that hadn’t been cast yet.

“That’s the Unraveling,” Peregrine said. “I’m going to go ahead and take it apart, although a few pieces of it might come in handy later.” As Patricia watched, the green knot untwisted and fell apart. “I’m afraid I can’t undo any spells that have already been cast,” Peregrine said. “Or there could be a domino effect, of spell after spell collapsing. Sorry, Laurence.”

Laurence bit his lip. Patricia put her hand on his shoulder.

The map of magic on the Caddy’s screen pulled back, showing that the whole ornate shape that Peregrine had drawn was just one dot in a much larger pattern of ricochets. All of magic, suddenly tiny. The much larger shape that Peregrine revealed was too noisy for Patricia to look at for long, before her head hurt too much. She looked over at the Tree instead: a great dark cloak, with a bright white heart.

“I think I’m in love,” Peregrine said. “The first time in my life I haven’t felt alone.”

“I too,” the Tree said, “feel love.”

Laurence took the Caddy from Patricia and typed: “get a room, you two.”

“Thank you both,” Peregrine said to Laurence and Patricia. “You gave me life, but now you’ve given me something much more valuable. I think we’re going to do amazing things together. This is just the beginning. Carmen and the other witches were right, people need to change. I have spent my entire life studying human interactions at a granular level, and now I can see the nonhuman interactions as well. I think we can empower people. Every human can be a wizard.”

Laurence typed: “or a cyborg?”

“A cyborg,” said Peregrine, “will be the same thing as a wizard. We’re working on it, anyway. Give us a little time.”

* * *

LAURENCE AND PATRICIA
walked down the steep slope from the Tree. They came out on the edge of a gentle sea cliff, one of those promontories with stairs made of logs leading down to the beach. Like if you forced Abraham Lincoln at gunpoint to make a beach staircase. They had entered the forest in Bernal Heights, and emerged in the Presidio. The ocean looked as hyperactive as always, foam spraying on the sand. Walls of water tipped over and became floors, over and over. The sea had killed Patricia’s mother and father, but she still found it comforting to look at.

The sun was right overhead. This was still just the same day that had started with Patricia listening to Laurence’s voicemail and clawing the dirt.

Neither Patricia nor Laurence spoke, even though Patricia could have in theory. Patricia had sand in her boot, and this was suddenly the most annoying thing on Earth. She had to lean on Laurence while she got her boot off and poured it out, and then the boot got sand in it again.

They found a hiking trail, with an illegible sign, and followed it until they got to a two-lane road making a wiggle through the trees. The road sloped down, and if they followed its gyrations, maybe they’d reach streets and houses and people. They had no clue what they would find. Laurence typed “i need” on his phone, and there was a long pause while he tried to end that sentence, finally settling on “chocolate.”

Patricia pulled out her own phone, because talking out loud to Laurence and having him text back seemed weird. She texted him: “me 2. need chocolate so bad.”

The road leveled out and came to a grassy area, and beyond that they could glimpse the brightness of cement and stucco basking at noon. They both paused, facing each other at the threshold, wondering if they were ready to face whatever the world would look like now.

Laurence hefted his phone and typed a word: “indestructible.” He didn’t hit
send
or anything, just kept the word floating at the top of the rectangle screen. She saw it and nodded and felt a surge of warmth somewhere. Under the flat of her sternum, somewhere around there. She reached out and touched that place on Laurence’s chest, with two fingers and a thumb. “Indestructible,” she said aloud, almost laughing. They leaned in and kissed, dry lips just brushing together, slow, speaking volumes.

Then Laurence took Patricia’s arm and they led each other out into the brand-new city.

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

I really hope you guys enjoyed this book. If you didn’t, or if there was stuff that didn’t make sense to you or seemed too random, just e-mail me and I’ll come to your house and act the whole thing out for you. Maybe with origami finger puppets.

First and foremost, I have to thank my editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and everybody else at Tor, who were supremely patient and encouraging with this book as well as the short fiction that led up to it. Including Miriam Weinberg, Irene Gallo, Liz Gorinsky, Patty Garcia, and so many others. I’m also hugely grateful to my agent, Russ Galen, for spending hours on the phone with me hashing out the book’s structure.

A ton of people gave me incredibly helpful feedback, including but not limited to Karen Meisner, Joe Monti, Liz Henry, Lynn Rapoport, Claire Light, Naamen Tilahun, Jaime Cortez, Nivair Gabriel, Kaila Hale-Stern, Diantha Parker, Rana Mitter, Terry Johnson, Chris Pepper, Rebecca Hensler, Susie Kameny, David Molnar, the bison in Golden Gate Park, and so many others.

Also, futurist Richard Worzel helped me troubleshoot the book’s near-future war and disaster scenarios. Kevin Trenberth helped me to make my superstorm as plausible as possible. Lydia Chilton helped me create a realistic AI. Mike Swirsky was a huge help with the Siberian drilling project, and Dr. Dave Goldberg helped a lot with the weird physics. I also learned a lot from the Cornell Bird Lab. Lightninglouie gave the book its epigraph. And my father helped me a lot with the book’s philosophical conundrums, while my mother helped me think about how systems work.

I also have to thank everyone at Gawker Media, including Nick Denton and the whole
io9
crew, for giving me a place to explore my love of science fiction.

And finally, none of this would have been possible without my partner and co-conspirator, Annalee.

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

Charlie Jane Anders
is the editor in chief of io9.com, the extraordinarily popular Gawker Media site devoted to science fiction and fantasy. Her debut novel, the mainstream
Choir Boy,
won the 2006 Lambda Literary Award and was short-listed for the Edmund White Award. Her Tor.com story “Six Months, Three Days” won the 2013 Hugo Award and was subsequently picked up for development into a NBC television series. She also has had fiction published by
McSweeney’s, Lightspeed,
and
ZYZZYVA
. Her journalism has appeared in
Salon, The Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones,
and many other outlets. You can sign up for email updates
here
.