All the Birds in the Sky

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!