All the Birds in the Sky

“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.”

“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.