All the Birds in the Sky

by Charlie Jane Anders

  Mr. Rose was still thrashing and yelling about his vision of madness and destruction and a hole in the world. But Dorothea came closer and whispered a story, about a man she had known. He had been a maker of netsuke, those little carved figurines that Japanese people used as kimono clasps, but he was also a journeyman assassin, and some of his carvings had hidden death traps: little poison needles, reservoirs of toxic smoke. The deadly netsuke were always in the shape of a beautiful woman in a lewd pose, and you could give one to a person knowing he or she would wear it and die. Until one day the man became confused and put a lethal spring-loaded dart into a frog, that he had meant to put inside a courtesan. He then sold the frog to one of his favorite clients, who was sure to wear it that evening and who knew nothing of the man’s side business as an assassin. How could he warn his customer?

  At this point in the story, Dorothea’s murmurs had gotten so soft that Patricia didn’t hear how the story ended. And Theodolphus was no longer in a position to listen, either, because somehow without anybody noticing he had changed from a person to a tiny wooden figurine, an inch and a half tall. Dorothea picked him up and showed him to Patricia: He was a slender woman lifting her skirt, except that the face was that of a very solemn frog.

  Dorothea dropped the figurine into Patricia’s palm, then closed Patricia’s fingers around him, for safekeeping.

  “I can’t believe we didn’t kill that douchebag a long time ago.” Kawashima unlocked the Lexus and got in the driver’s seat. “Seriously, such a dick.”

  Dorothea nodded and rolled her eyes.

  On the drive back to San Francisco, Patricia tried to ask Kawashima about the thing Theodolphus had mentioned, the Unraveling—but of course, that sort of question was the worst possible Aggrandizement.

  Patricia dozed, and in her dream she tried to figure out how Dorothea’s story ended. Then the answer came to her: the netsuke maker/assassin would have to take the frog back from his client, by force if necessary, and would sacrifice his own life in the process. The frog would have to claim someone’s life, in the end—if not the client, then the man who made it.

  * * *

  PATRICIA FELT ZERO closure from seeing Mr. Rose get what was coming to him. He’d seemed so pathetic, she even had to struggle to avoid feeling guilty. And she couldn’t let go of the notion that maybe Mr. Rose was telling the truth and she was doomed to become a war criminal. Kawashima kept insisting that visions of the future were worse than worthless, but then with the next breath he would tell Patricia again that her pride was dangerous. She ended up with an internal monologue that said she was a terrible, destructive person who should watch her every step.

  Right after she got back from Sacramento, she had to rush to the Tenderloin to look in on Reginald, the AIDS patient she’d been assigned to as a Shanti Project volunteer. As usual, she tidied his apartment, cooked him a healthy breakfast, helped him shop. But then she paused, watching him in his unstained wooden rocking chair. And she thought, This time, I’m just going to do it. I’m going to cure him. Because why not? It would be so easy.

  Except that she knew, for sure, what Kawashima and the others would say about that. You can’t just go around curing someone’s incurable disease, especially when everybody knows you were there. It would raise too many unanswerable questions. And maybe curing Reginald would be the first step toward her becoming some kind of monster, like Mr. Rose had warned.

  “I hope it’s the good kind of dilemma.” Reginald broke Patricia’s reverie. “Whatever one you’re on the horns of.”

  She went over and sat by Reginald, taking his hand. I’m just going to do it. She always reduced his viral load whenever she visited, anyway. Curing him outright wouldn’t be that much more of a big deal. Right?

  Reginald’s studio smelled like cannabis and Nag Champa. He had a thin mustache, short gray hair and Elvis Costello glasses, and his neck had prominent tendons.

  “I was just thinking,” she said. “There are so many crazy problems in the world. Like, I was just reading that we could be seeing the last of the bees in North America soon. And if that happened, food webs would just collapse, and tons more people would starve. But suppose you had the power to change things? You still might not be able to fix anything, because every time you solve a problem you’d cause another problem. And maybe all these plagues and droughts are nature’s way of striking a balance? We humans don’t have any natural predators left, so nature has to find other ways to handle us.”

  Reginald had tattoos all over his pale torso, one for each species of insect he had discovered across the Americas. These insect drawings resembled something out of a Victorian naturalist’s handbook, with just splashes of color here and there. As Reginald’s body had changed, his loose folds of skin and potbelly made it appear as though the locusts and butterflies were flexing their wings and twitching their heads. His pecs were all wasps, his arms sleeved with shiny chitinous beetles.

  “I am, as you know, a fan of nature,” said Reginald. “And yet, nature doesn’t ‘find ways’ to do anything. Nature has no opinion, no agenda. Nature provides a playing field, a not particularly level one, on which we compete with all creatures great and small. It’s more that nature’s playing field is full of traps.”

  In the end, she stopped just short of curing Reginald outright. Just like always.

  * * *

  PATRICIA DREAMED SHE got lost in the woods, like she had when she was a girl. Stubbing her toes on roots, skidding on dead leaves, feeling transported by the cavelike scent of damp earth. Clouds of insects in her eyes, and up her nose. She laughed so hard she snorted dead bugs, for joy at being out of the city at last. And then she wandered into a clot of thornbushes, which tore at her skin and clutched so hard she couldn’t go forward or backward without shredding, and her giddiness turned to anxiety, because what if people needed her help? Or the other witches? What if she was going AWOL right when someone was in trouble?

  The more she tried to force her way out of the bracken, the harder it tore at her, until she realized that this was her dream, and she could always fly in dreams. She lifted up out of the thicket and flew up, along a steep incline that was studded with roots. And then it came into view: huge and dark, like a raven formed of branches and leaves. A huge ancient Tree, filled with patience and enough memories for a billion rings, twin branches undulating as in greeting.

  * * *

  “SO WHAT WAS the thing you couldn’t tell me about over the phone?” Laurence asked as he brought their espressos from the counter.

  In response, Patricia just pulled the tiny wooden figurine out of her bag and told Laurence who it was. Mr. Rose stared up at them, wide-eyed frog face looking prayerful one moment, whimsical the next.

  “This is him? This is the actual person?” Laurence kept holding it up to the light, like he was trying to see some resemblance. “He’s so … tiny.”

  “Yeah,” Patricia said. “I have no idea what to do with him.”

  Laurence and Patricia were in the Circle of Trust, which had been the trendy coffee shop in the Valencia Street corridor about eighteen months earlier. It still had all of the nice wooden fixtures and the super-expensive espresso machines, but it was half-empty because all the best people had already moved on to the new place, a block away. The Circle of Trust was having an art show featuring finger paintings done by a twenty-eight-year-old woman, with subversively naive word balloons. The coffee was super-pricey, with all the shortages, but they still went Dutch.

  “Seeing him so helpless, and watching him get transformed into this tiny object.… it doesn’t change my memories of how huge and terrible he was,” Patricia said. “It’s like two different people. And it sounds like he’s spent a lot of the last several years being a thorn in the side of the other witches. Because he went crazy and had some kind of apocalyptic vision. That’s why he was at our school in the first place, because he thought I would grow up to become a monster.”

  “Huh.” Laurence stared at the figur
ine. Patricia felt self-conscious about how borderline obscene the raised skirts were, how weird this was in general. “But you didn’t. Grow up to become a monster, I mean. And come on. Did he ever tell anyone the truth? About anything?”

  “No,” Patricia said. She took the figurine and slipped it back into her purse. She was going to beg Kawashima to take Mr. Rose off her hands. “No, he didn’t.”

  “He was a compulsive liar. Is. Was. Not sure what tense to use.”

  There could be a better conversation killer than plunking down your most hated childhood authority figure, shrunk to the size of a man’s thumb. But Patricia couldn’t think of one. The two of them sipped coffee and shook their heads, trapped in recursively horrible memories. Patricia had to fetch water and guzzle it. The café’s stale air had stayed almost as hot as noon, even as the sun drifted below the skyline.

  Laurence was staring at Patricia’s purse, where she’d put the figurine away. “I think all the time about how close he came to ruining my life. It’s one of the reasons I’m so desperate to succeed, because I almost didn’t get this chance.” Abruptly he stood up. “Come on. I want to show you something.” Patricia was struck anew by just how tall he’d gotten. Patricia was tall too, but she came up to his collarbone. And he had enough nervous energy for nine ferrets.

  Patricia followed Laurence down to Mission Street and then around a couple of side streets until they were near Shotwell, on one of those streets that goes for just a block or two. It was another itchy parched day. Patricia remembered hearing there was a creek here originally, before it was drained or paved over. Sometimes she imagined she could still feel the current of the banished ecosystem.

  They reached a cement block with nothing to distinguish it from the other blocks. Laurence pulled out a key but didn’t put it in the lock on the maroon steel door. Instead, he punched a series of a dozen numbers into a keypad recessed into the wall, which Patricia hadn’t even noticed. And then he turned the key in the lock.

  Two and a half flights of steps up, there was a door with a bunch of metal studs in it, and a sign that read: “PROCRASTINATION SOLUTIONS. COME BACK TOMORROW.” Laurence knocked seventeen times, in a precise sequence of long and short knocks, and the door swung open.

  “Welcome to the Ten Percent Project,” Laurence said. “The local office, anyway.”

  The space behind the steel door was bigger than you’d expect, and much cooler than the outdoors: a square loft, with an opaque skylight along one edge of the ceiling. Ergonomic chairs jostled against workbenches, which were stacked with equipment and soldering irons and Arduino boards and laser tools. The centerpiece of the room, though, was a massive piece of equipment, the size of a Buick, culminating in a sort of ray-gun nozzle. It was aimed at a white Plexiglas circle.

  Laurence introduced Patricia, in turn, to the three people in the room:

  Tanaa was an African-American woman wearing a welding mask, tank top, and shorts. Her forearms were strong, but her neck and shoulders were fluid, mercurial. Tanaa could build anything, said Laurence—in fact, she’d found Milton the same way Laurence had long ago, by figuring out some schematics on the internet. Except that these schematics were ones that nobody else had managed to make work, and they’d led to that oversized ray gun on bent legs. Tanaa waved, then went back to shooting sparks in all directions.

  Anya was a freckled Midwestern girl whose nut-brown hair had blue tips, like she’d dyed it and then given up. She wore denim overalls and chunky engineer glasses, and looked like someone who never smiled. She muttered to Laurence about giving tours to outsiders.

  Sougata had a thick black mustache, a Southern California surfer accent, and a Caltech sweatshirt. Laurence whispered that Sougata had wanted to work in television and had even interned at the Space: Above and Beyond reboot, but now he’d fallen back on his second-choice career of saving the world in real life.

  Patricia wasn’t sure if she should ask about the big machine with the giant vacuum-tube-looking body and the pointy nozzle. But then Laurence started explaining it anyway: “We’re working on solving gravity.” He examined some readings on the machine. “We don’t have true antigrav yet, just a few isolated instances. And antigrav isn’t the point, controlling gravity is. We know that it’s a weak force in our universe, which means it’s a strong force somewhere else. And we’re trying to figure out where, or what, that is.”

  “Wow.” Patricia could fly without any fancy ray, of course, but only when the situation warranted, and/or when she could trick someone into a bargain that included giving her the power of flight. (Or in dreams.) The idea of turning gravity on or off, or harnessing its power, amazed her.

  She was going to be late for Kawashima’s latest assignment, an oil executive who was partway responsible for the North Sea disaster. But she wanted to admire Laurence’s machine. Laurence showed her the readouts of just how much energy throughput they had gotten into those sleek tubes without anything blowing up.

  “That’s sure an impressive machine,” Patricia said. And yeah, there was something both aesthetically pleasing and satisfying about a great piece of engineering. Shiny and sturdy. She felt the same affection for this machine that she did for the old manual typewriters they sold in the hipster gallery on Valencia, or for a nice steam engine. These things were made of hubris, because they always broke down, or worse, broke everything. But maybe Laurence had been right and these devices were what made us unique, as humans. We made machines, the way spiders made silk. Staring at the red wasp-shaped chassis, she thought of how disgusted she had been with Laurence, not long ago. And maybe she shouldn’t judge him—judging was a kind of Aggrandizement—and maybe this device was the culmination of everything she’d always admired about him, from the start. And yes, a sign that they’d both won out, over the Mr. Roses of the world.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said.

  19

  LAURENCE AND PATRICIA hashed out their respective relationship problems while smoking an elf-shaped bong on the couch. Laurence infodumped about Serafina, the ongoing “probation,” and then he got embarrassed about monologuing and asked Patricia about the guy she’d been drinking with. Kevin, the webcomics guy.

  “Ummm.” Patricia took the bong and filled both lungs before trying to answer. “It’s confusing. I’m still not sure if Kevin and I are dating, or just booty-call friends. Whenever he sleeps over, he tries to steal away in the middle of the night. But nobody can sneak out on me, after all the training I’ve had. So he winds up either having to say goodbye properly or staying until morning. He’s tried both, and neither way quite seems to work for him.”

  “Ah.”

  “I keep almost having a conversation with Kevin about what it is we’re doing, and then it doesn’t materialize.”

  Somehow seeing the wooden Mr. Rose had been a turning point in Laurence and Patricia’s relationship, not just as a bonding thing but also as a reminder that they had known each other as total losers in eighth grade. Patricia might be the hardest person for Laurence to disappoint, because she’d already seen him at his worst. In fact, this was the most at ease Laurence had felt in months, and not just because of the elf bong.

  Nobody talked for a while, until Patricia changed the subject: “So how are your parents? Still wanting you to be outdoorsy?”

  “I think they are actually pretty happy,” said Laurence. “They got divorced about seven years ago, and my mom found a guy who likes to go bird-watching. My dad quit his awful job and went back to college to become a high-school teacher. I always kind of thought they’d be happier if they split up, even though you never want to root for your parents to do that. How are yours?”

  “They’re, uh … okay,” said Patricia. “They actually disowned me for a few years, but this past year they’ve made this big effort to reconnect.” She sighed and sucked in more smoke from the elf’s head, even though her throat was getting scratchy. “It’s all thanks to my sister, sort of. Roberta keeps getting arrested, or winding up in t
he ER. She was always the one who had it together, of the two of us. Now, all of a sudden, my parents have noticed that I’m holding down a job and don’t have a criminal record, and they’ve decided that I can be the good daughter now. Like Roberta and I could just trade places. I have no idea how to deal.”

  Laurence was going to say something else, but Isobel came home. She was soaked, because it was raining and the experimental self-configuring umbrella had gotten stuck in a nonoptimal shape, judging from the complainy servo noises it was making and the fact that the left side of Isobel’s cardigan was drenched while the right side was totally dry. She no longer had the long brown braids she’d sported when he’d first met her as a child and instead wore her graying hair in a bob.

  “Oh dear,” Laurence said. “Lord Umber let you down.” This nickname had not caught on with anybody else yet, but he kept trying.

  Isobel just snorted and threw Lord Umber at the kitchen sink, where he could drain. Lord Umber groaned and attempted to transform into a shape that would protect the sink from any indoor precipitation. He got stuck again, making loud whining noises.

  “Not cool.” Isobel grimaced. “Not cool at all. A regular umbrella would have been way better. Oh, hello.” She had gotten enough rain out of her eyes to see the unfamiliar young woman seated on the couch. “Nice to meet you. I’m Isobel.”

  Patricia said her name and they shook hands, then Isobel ran off to get out of her half-wet clothes. When she came back, she had a snifter of brandy. She sat on the sofa next to Patricia and started making low-maintenance small talk about all the places around the world that would kill for some of this rain.

  “So I think I heard about you,” Isobel told Patricia. “You go back almost as far with Laurence as I do. He seems to collect people for life.” She glanced at Laurence, who squirmed, as he sensed he was supposed to.

  They were pretty high up in the hills—despite its name, most of Noe Valley was a steep hillside. The living room had picture windows facing over the downward slope of garden out front and the tops of trees farther out. Potrero Hill answered the hill they were on, with its own trees and split-level houses. Their front room had high ceilings, and then a spiral staircase led up to the upper level containing Isobel’s bedroom, bathroom, and study, with a balcony overlooking the living room. Laurence’s in-law bedroom was down a few steps, over on the other side of the kitchen, with a view of the tiny backyard.