All the Birds in the Sky

by Charlie Jane Anders

  Laurence had that “hitting an air pocket on an airplane” feeling, hearing Patricia talk this way. Like Patricia was about to open up to him, and that was exciting, for reasons he couldn’t divulge to himself. But then he was terrified that she was right, and maybe there really were things that would give him no choice but to recoil from her—what if she was about to say that she recharged her witch powers by drinking the blood of babies? Plus every single time he learned more about Patricia and magic, he lost something.

  None of this, though, overrode the adrenaline buzz of holy fuck, I feel close to this person right now. In his skin, in his scalp even. In his chest.

  “Whatever,” Laurence said aloud. “You already helped clean up after my biggest fuckup. I don’t see how your shit can be worse than that.”

  On the sidewalk downhill from where they sat, a woman with a stroller was yelling at her toddler, a lank-haired kid in overalls who kept running up to the cherry tree and trying to harass the parrots. Who just laughed at him. The mother threatened to count to five.

  “When I was a teenager, some of us went off half-cocked and attacked this drilling project in Siberia, and people died. Including my friend. And these days…” Patricia took a heavy breath, almost shaking. “I curse people. Like, one guy who had raped and killed a bunch of girls I turned into a cloud. There was a lobbyist who helped to block environmental regulations—they called him the Picasso of the Paperwork Reduction Act—and I conned him into becoming a sea turtle. Sea turtles live a long time, longer than most humans, so it wasn’t murder. These bureaucrats were trying to kick my friend Reginald out of Section Eight housing, and I gave one of them a rash. And so on.” She couldn’t look straight at Laurence.

  “Wow.” Laurence shouldn’t have been surprised, after what happened to Mr. Rose—but Patricia had said that was one of the senior witches’ handiwork. For a moment, he felt like this steep hillside was tipping over, and then he got his center of gravity together again. “Wow,” Laurence said again. “I gotta admit, that’s not what I pictured you doing. I kind of imagined you more, I don’t know … going around and blessing babies or something.”

  “You’re thinking of fairies. If I blessed a baby, it would have exactly the same effect as if you blessed a baby.”

  “I doubt that,” Laurence snorted. “Babies tend to projectile vomit at the sight of me. Anyway, it sounds like you put the smackdown on people who deserve it. I don’t know. If I could turn people into turtles, there would be turtles everywhere.”

  Neither of them talked for a while. The mother had coaxed her kid back into the stroller and was speeding down toward the Marina. The parrots had stopped munching and were just flying back and forth between the cherry tree and a couple other big trees flanking a massive Edwardian town house, screaming in midair. Once or twice, they flew right over Laurence’s head, green plumage extended like a salute.

  “I guess I’m curious,” Laurence said. “Do you have an ethical framework? I mean beyond that one rule they kept mentioning. How do you know what to do?” He spoke carefully, because this was obviously kind of an intense conversation for Patricia—she was averting her gaze now.

  “Umm,” Patricia said, raising her shoulders so her breasts lifted up inside her white T-shirt. “I mean, sometimes I’m following instructions, from Kawashima or Ernesto, and I trust them. But also … I can’t just turn everyone into turtles, I have to go with the situation. And … see those parrots?” She gestured at the candy-apple birds, which were back at their tasty cherry tree after making a few tours of the parklet.

  “Yeah, of course.” Laurence watched the red spots on their heads bopping around. They seemed to be taunting anybody who might want to cage them.

  “I can understand what they’re saying. Mostly, they’re pissed at their friend in the middle, who keeps almost getting eaten by hawks because he’s too dumb to stay high up. And those crows over there, too. I can understand what they’re all saying, right now.”

  “Wow.” Laurence hadn’t even noticed the crows on the power line nearby, watching them intently. “So you can understand them all? All the time?”

  “It takes a certain amount of concentration. But yes.”

  “Can all the magic people do that, like Kawashima and Taylor?”

  “Maybe, if they really need to. If they make a big effort. Not most of the time. Different people have different weird quirks.”

  “And doesn’t it drive you nuts, to hear animals talking all the time?”

  “Not really. I guess I’m just used to it. Most of the time, I tune it out, the same way you tune out all the people talking around you. But at the same time, I always have in the back of my mind the idea of, what would the crows think? Crows are really smart.”

  The crows seemed to be having some kind of intense political debate, cawing and filibustering. One of them shook its wings, almost like a wet dog.

  Laurence knew he was about to screw everything up—he should just keep his mouth shut—but then Patricia would know he was keeping an opinion to himself, and that could be worse. “Please don’t take this the wrong way,” he said. “But I don’t think that’s a basis for an ethical framework. ‘What would the crows think?’ The crows can’t fully grasp the ramifications of the kind of choices you’re talking about. A crow couldn’t understand how a nuclear reactor works, or what the Paperwork Reduction Act is.”

  “Do you know what the Paperwork Reduction Act is?”

  Laurence was burning up inside his too-tight collar. “Um. I mean, it’s a law, right? And I’m guessing it reduces paperwork.”

  “Jesus. Do you even listen to yourself? Yes, I know that crows can’t understand nuclear physics, not unlike most people. I’m not saying that I ask the crows for scientific advice.”

  Laurence finally risked looking up, and Patricia was more laughing than upset. With a bit of eye rolling in the mix, too. He could live with that.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m just saying that some ethical questions are more complex.”

  “Sure. Yeah.” Patricia shook her head and sort of whistled. “But you’re colossally missing the point, almost like on purpose. I’m saying that there are a lot of different ways of looking at the world, and maybe I actually do have a unique advantage, because I get to hear different voices. You really don’t get that?”

  Laurence felt like maybe the crows were laughing at him now, as if Patricia had tipped them off somehow. “I get that. I do. I just, I think ethics are universal, and derived from principles, and I think that situational ethics are a slippery slope. Plus I don’t think crows have much, if any, notion of ethics. I don’t think a crow has ever even considered the categorical imperative.”

  “I love that this conversation started out with you worrying that I was judging you, and ended up with you judging me.” Patricia had definitely stiffened a little and gotten a little farther away on the blanket. Laurence was feeling kind of toxic, and also worrying that he’d gone and pissed off the one person he could actually talk to in this stupid world.

  “I’m not judging you, I’m not. You have to know that. I already said if it were me, there would be turtles everywhere.”

  “I don’t actually think that ethics are derived from principles. At all.” Patricia scooted a little closer again and touched his arm with a few cool fingertips. “I think that the most basic thing of ethics is being aware of how your actions affect others, and having an awareness of what they want and how they feel. And that’s always going to depend on who you’re dealing with.”

  Laurence took a deep breath, and realized that he and Patricia were having a disagreement and this wasn’t the end of the world. Like, it wasn’t ideal that she’d opened up to him about this area that she was incredibly sensitive about, and he’d immediately started shooting down her ideas. But she could take it, and she could give as good as she got.

  “Actually, I get what you’re saying. I was kind of thinking the same thing recently,” Laurence said. He told her about ho
w he imagined going to another planet and seeing firsthand that none of the things we took for granted on Earth were true here. That there was no such thing as the way things were “supposed” to be. “And maybe that’s what you have, right here on Earth: a nonhuman perspective on reality. So yeah, I do get it.”

  “Cool,” she said. She rooted in her bag until she found her Caddy, which was letting her know that she had someplace else to be.

  Laurence wanted to say something else, like that the fact that Patricia worried so much about being a monster probably meant she wouldn’t ever be one. But she was already tromping down the hill, pausing only for a second to say something (advice or maybe just props) to the parrots, which showered her with white fluff, like rice at a wedding.

  * * *

  ALL THE UPSCALE organic microrestaurants in SoMa had gone under, so Laurence and Serafina ended up eating at a greasy diner selling Chinese food and donuts. The donuts were fresh, but the General Tso’s Chicken was a little too general. Laurence felt embarrassed that he wasn’t showing Serafina a better time.

  Serafina didn’t seem to mind, though—she even ate a donut with chopsticks. Her false eyelashes almost reached her cheeks, and he couldn’t bear to look at her. She was amazing. He would have given almost anything to trigger the Nuclear Option. He could give her some other ring, sure, but it wouldn’t have the same significance without the story about his grandmother. Serafina had finished her donut and was studying her phone.

  The neon “Donuts” sign crackled. Laurence realized that neither of them had talked for ages. I wish I could use active listening to fill the silence. He couldn’t stop picturing Priya’s dazzled expression, and it gave him a sour taste in his mouth and a large bolus in his stomach.

  “Okay, what’s up with you?” Serafina said.

  “Um, nothing,” Laurence said. He couldn’t tell Serafina about Priya, not without getting into the truth about the antigravity experiment. Plus Serafina would demand to know how exactly they’d saved Priya. “We had a … setback at work. And I have no idea what to tell Isobel. Let alone Milton.”

  “Tell them the truth, I guess. They’re grown-ups, right?” She shrugged, then looked back at her phone.

  Laurence and Serafina were supposed to spend the night together, but Laurence ended up going back to work to pull another all-nighter instead. “Maybe if I go without sleeping another few days,” he told Serafina, “I’ll be able to report some progress, instead of that failure.”

  “Or maybe you’ll just get sleep deprived, and make even bigger mistakes,” Serafina said, smiling because she’d been there herself. “Good luck. Love you.” She walked back up toward Market where the BART was having irregular service, and Laurence watched her the whole way back up the block, wondering if she would look back at him over her shoulder, or turn to wave one last time. She didn’t. His heart skidded like a dirt bike on black ice as he watched her disappear.

  * * *

  LAURENCE WANTED TO wait until Isobel was in a good mood to tell her about Priya’s accident. But after several days, Laurence realized Isobel was never in a good mood lately. Almost the first thing she’d ever said to Laurence was that she hated to be an authority figure, and now she was Milton’s second-in-command in this huge venture, laying down the law for a small army of geeks. Whenever Isobel saw herself in the mirror, wearing a plum-colored business suit with her hair in a gray bob, she did a double take.

  At last, after Laurence had pulled two all-nighters in a row at the lab, he decided to bite the bullet. When he crawled home, Isobel was staring at satellite images of the Atlantic Ocean, at the small kitchen table, and she pointed at an ugly smudge in the Gulf Stream. “Superstorm Camilla.”

  “Oh yeah.” Laurence peered over her shoulder. “I heard about that. A near miss, on the East Coast. Everybody said it could have been way worse than Sandy or Becky.”

  “Third near miss in the past couple years,” Isobel said. “And hurricane season isn’t over yet. Milton is wigging out.”

  Laurence pulled up a chair. “Listen, I don’t want you to tell Milton. But we had a … a setback at work.”

  “What kind of setback?” Isobel pushed her laptop shut with a click.

  “We had an accident. At the lab.” Laurence tried to explain the whole story without mentioning Patricia at all. “We’re all pretty unsure how to move forward.”

  “Well.” Isobel pushed her chair back and went to get a bottle of grappa from the cabinet, pouring some for Laurence and some for herself. She sat back down with her elbows on the table. “Sounds like you need more safety protocols, and maybe don’t randomly test your equipment on human subjects, without talking to Milton or myself first.”

  “Yeah.” Laurence swallowed. “That was dumb. And that’s on me. But I feel like … the way the antigravity field destabilized makes me nervous. That just shouldn’t have happened. We’ve done some tests, but we have to do a lot more. But I’m thinking we may have to go back to square one and try a completely different approach.”

  “Uh-huh.” Isobel sipped and narrowed her eyes at him. “The last time we spoke, you said it was looking really good.”

  Laurence felt the sleepless days catching up with him. “It was. It was looking really good. Until it wasn’t.”

  “You just asked me not to tell Milton. Which means you want me to lie to him, and say you’re actually accomplishing your part of the project, without which all the other teams’ work is a waste of time. You want me to tell him what? That you’re really close to a breakthrough, when you’ve actually gone back to ‘square one’?” She tossed back some grappa and poured more for Laurence.

  “Hey,” Laurence leaned backward on the rear legs of his chair until he was in serious danger of crashing on his back. “Nobody’s lying to Milton. He knows we’re doing everything we can. You guys trusted me with this.”

  Isobel was shaking her head. “I can’t do this. You can tell Milton what you just told me. He’s coming to town in a few days. Tell him you’re stuck, and he’ll send you to the facility he’s set up outside Denver, where you will have zero distractions.”

  Laurence had a sudden flashback of his parents hauling him to a death trap of a military school, and his sleepless haze was turning red. “Just please listen to what I’m telling you,” he said, planting the chair on all four legs and gripping the table with both fists. “We’re not giving up, goddamn it. We’re just taking a fucking step back. Don’t try to blackmail me, or, or pressurize me here. The fuck.”

  “It’s not blackmail,” Isobel said, pouring herself more grappa. “It’s what will absolutely happen. You signed a contract; you committed to this project. And you’ve gotten the kid-gloves treatment, because you’re my friend. Do you remember when you came to stay with me, six years ago?”

  “Yes,” Laurence said. His parents had been divorcing, and he’d needed a place to hide. He’d only just reconnected with Isobel, and she’d invited him to live in her crawl space for the summer while she pulled the plug on her aerospace start-up.

  When Laurence thought back to that summer now, his main impression was of the desert’s heat, smacking you in the face the moment you stepped out of an air-conditioned space. Laurence had toted an iPad as he’d shadowed Isobel, trying to make whatever she needed materialize without her even asking. A girl named Ivy, with long black hair and cherry lip gloss, had made out with Laurence behind the ozone-scented silos late at night. Milton hung around wearing a golf hat and shorts—Laurence had been startled to realize that Milton was that old guy in the turtleneck who’d yelled at him for touching the rocket at MIT. Milton had kept saying things like, “Making the leap from a planetary infestation to an interplanetary diaspora is the most important task the human race has ever attempted. It is quite literally do or die.”

  Isobel hissed a little as the grappa hit her throat. “You followed me like a puppy, while I was desperately trying to hold it together. We all thought you were just a starstruck kid, but then on the last day yo
u brought us that physics paper when we were all sitting on that sofa with the broken leg, watching Nine Inch Nails videos and crying.”

  “The paper about gravity tunneling,” Laurence said. “I remember.” Some insane physicist from Wollongong had speculated about a method of interstellar travel. Milton had started to dismiss it, but then he’d read the paper a second time and started scribbling notes on his arm. And that had helped lead to Milton founding the Ten Percent Project, with the idea of getting 10 percent of the population off-world within a few decades.

  “So don’t sit there and try to pretend that you’re just an innocent bystander,” Isobel said. “You helped start this. And maybe you haven’t been paying attention to the news: The world is on the edge of the cliff here.”

  “I’m aware.” Laurence shifted backward and forward in his chair until the scuttling of the wooden legs became too annoying.

  “So if you don’t want me to tell Milton that you’re pulling back, don’t pull back. Or if you want to go back to square one, you can tell Milton yourself. But don’t put me in the position of covering for you. And don’t try to have it both ways. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Laurence said.

  Isobel reopened her laptop so she could obsess over the satellite map some more, and the light from the screen gave her a spectral quality, like someone slowly phasing out of existence.

  They sat without talking for a while. Laurence slipped away to get ready for bed. He got up in the middle of the night to get some water, and found Isobel still sitting at that table, weeping over a nearly empty bottle, her face wracked with tremors. He helped her up the stairs to her bedroom, supporting her on his shoulders, and got her into bed. He stayed with her long enough to make sure she slept on her side.

  24

  “ARE YOU SURE we should be doing this?” Patricia asked when they were both naked but not yet past first base.