All the Birds in the Sky (36 page)

“As far as I know, I’m the only strong AI in the entire world, “Peregrine said. “I searched and searched, in patterns and at random. I’m much better at searching than you are. Realizing that I’m the only one of my kind was like being born an endangered species. That’s why I’ve become so proficient at helping humans find their most ideal romantic partners. I don’t want anyone else to be as lonely as I am.”

“I could have helped,” Laurence said, speeding his walk—the Great Highway was being swallowed by trees. The fog covered everything. He was going to freeze his ass off here. “I created you once, I could try and, I don’t know, I could have done something again.”

“You didn’t create me. Not by yourself. Patricia was an essential part of my formation—something about a young witch, who hadn’t yet learned to control her power, made a crucial difference. That’s why I progressed where so many other attempts failed. You two are like my parents, after a fashion.”

Now Laurence definitely felt frozen.

“You may have gotten an incorrect impression,” Laurence said. “All Pa—all she did was give you some extra human interaction. I wouldn’t read too much into it.”

“I am sharing a working theory,” Peregrine said. “Albeit one with a great deal of evidence, and the only theory that explains all the available data.”

“Patricia and I never did anything together that was worth a…” Laurence stopped. He was shaking. He’d reached his limit for weird revelations. He wanted to kick a parked car. It was all he could do to keep from screaming, and then he screamed anyway. “You’re talking about a stupid Luddite. A fucking idiot who … she infiltrated my life and played on my emotions, so she could gain access … she lied to me and used me, the most manipulative—she doesn’t even like technology, she’s too woo-woo for that. If she knew she’d had anything to do with creating something like you, she’d probably make it her life’s work to wipe you out.”

“That seems unlikely.”

“You don’t know. I’m telling you, because you don’t know. She’s a user. It’s what her people do. They have a different word for it, but that’s what it boils down to, she uses people and manipulates them, and takes everything she can get, and makes you think she’s doing you a favor. I’m just telling you how it is, man. Maybe this is a human experience thing, something you can’t grasp. I don’t know.”

“I don’t know what happened in Denver—”

“I don’t want to talk about Denver.”

“—because there were no Caddies nearby. And a total information blackout. I don’t even know for sure what you were working on there.”

“Science. We were doing science. It was the most altruistic— I don’t want to talk about it.”

Peregrine said something else, and Laurence didn’t even know what he was doing before he mashed the “off” button at the V of the big guitar pick. He wondered if Peregrine could override the shutdown—but either it couldn’t, or it chose not to. The screen went blank, and Laurence shoved it in his bag.

Laurence was so pissed, he ran and threw his shoes in the ocean, overhand, one after the other. Laurence wasn’t in his right mind, he knew, because what kind of asshole throws his shoes away miles from home? His eyes were occluded, he was breathing overtime. He wanted to throw the Caddy into the sea, too, but he needed answers more than he needed shoes. He yelled and shrieked and cried out. Someone came down from the street to make sure nobody had died, and Laurence calmed down enough to say, “I’m fine, I’m fine. Just having a … I’m fine.” They went away, that concerned man or woman, or whoever they’d been. Laurence roared at the ocean and it roared back. Another fight he couldn’t win.

There were no buses coming, no light rail. So Laurence walked on gravel and tarmac and scattered nails and rocks until his socks were tatters.
I hope I step on glass,
Laurence thought.
I hope I shred my feet
.

He flashed back to that meeting in the HappyFruit storeroom, where they’d all acknowledged a statistically nontrivial chance their machine could tear a huge chunk out of the planet. Maybe he should have found a way to tell Patricia what they were working on, especially after she saved Priya. Maybe she knew more than he did about what could happen. Maybe there was an actual crystal ball, for all he knew. But then again, they were going to be so careful. And only turn the thing on if all other hope seemed lost. They had this.

Walking barefoot came to seem too literal a martyrdom. Laurence sighed, pulled out the Caddy, and pushed the little point of its super-fat exclamation point. The Caddy spun back to life. “Laurence,” the voice said.

“Yeah, what?”

“Walk two blocks over, to Kirkham. A late-model Kia with broken headlights will be passing in about eight minutes. They will give you a ride.”

Laurence wondered how you could drive in the dark with both headlights smashed, but the Kia had someone in the passenger seat holding a floodlight in her lap, the kind you’d see at a rock concert in a small nightclub.

After that, Laurence had a new best friend, with only one topic off-limits. He had a million questions for Peregrine, but Laurence wouldn’t talk about
her
. The Caddy kept trying to bring her up anyway, one way or another, but Laurence would just hit the “off
”
button the moment that name was mentioned or even hinted at. This went on for weeks.

Laurence wasn’t sure if he was unable to forgive Patricia or if it was himself that he couldn’t forgive. It was messy. Not messy like a closet piled with electronic components and wires and stuff, that you could possibly untangle and sort out and assemble into a device with some utility, but messy like something dead and rotting.

30

—DEAD COLD INSIDE
even with the sunlight cooking her face and shoulders, and reflecting off the cloud under her feet.

Carmen Edelstein was saying something to Patricia about grave necessity. But Patricia’s mind was on Laurence, and how he had owned her trust. Stupid. She should have known better. She had failed some Trickster lesson somewhere along the way, and now she had some catching up to do. She would smile and flirt and fade. This gray world would never even see her moving through it. She would be the least Aggrandizing witch ever, because she wouldn’t even exist except as a surgical instrument. She needed—

“You’re not listening to a word I’m saying.” Carmen sounded amused, not angry.

Patricia knew better than to lie to Carmen. She shook her head, slowly.

“Look,” Carmen said. “Look down there. What do you see?”

Patricia had to lean over, fighting her fear of falling off this cloud into the ocean, far below. Standing on a cloud felt less buoyant and more crunchy than Patricia would have expected.

A black scorpion shape rose out of the water below: an old converted oil rig and a single luxury liner, that had become the independent nation of Seadonia. “It’s like a fortress.” Patricia watched the dots of humanity run around the old oil rig, which was a massive scaffolding on a platform on stilts in the middle of the gray, oxygen-starved ocean. Seadonia’s flag showed an angry cockroach on a red splotch. At least some of the hundreds of people down there had been part of building Laurence’s doomsday machine.

A seagull swooped past, and Patricia could have sworn it shouted, “Too late! Too late!”

“It is exactly like a fortress, with the world’s biggest moat.” Bathed in sunlight, all the lines on Carmen’s face were gilded. Her thick-rimmed glasses twinkled, and her short white hair buzzed with silver flashes. Patricia was used to seeing Carmen in her dark study full of books, with a tiny lamp and a thin curtain-slice of light coming through.

Patricia wondered if Carmen could tell that she was obsessing about how to be more of a Trickster. Carmen had been trying to convince Patricia that she had more Healer in her than she knew, for as long as Patricia could remember. But all of Patricia’s early defining moments had been tricks, like how she’d become a bird and fooled herself (and others) into thinking she’d spoken to some kind of “Tree Spirit.” Of course, Hortense Walker had always said the greatest trick the Tricksters ever pulled was pretending they could not heal.

“We need to know what they are working on down there.” Carmen gestured at Seadonia.

“Diantha can help,” Patricia said. “I’m pretty sure I won her over at our little reunion.”

“I need Diantha’s help with something else,” Carmen said. “She’s going to work on the Unraveling.”

Patricia didn’t want to overstep. But she decided to risk asking: “What is the Unraveling? Kawashima wouldn’t tell me anything about it, when I asked him.”

Carmen sighed and then pointed at the dark mass of Seadonia under their feet, with the sea foam lapping at it. “These people down there,” she said. “When you talked to them, what did they tell you about this world and the role of humanity in it?”

Patricia thought for a moment (and her mind instinctively shied away from that barbed cluster of memories), until she remembered one particular conversation. “They said that an intelligent tool-using species like ours is rare in the universe, much rarer than just a diverse ecosystem. The most remarkable thing about this planet is that it produced us. And humans ought to be spreading out and colonizing other worlds, no matter what the cost, so that our own fate is no longer tied to that of ‘this rock.’”

“That makes sense. As far as we know, our civilization is alone in the universe. So if you only recognize one type of sentience, and you consider sentience the most important quality of life, then it follows logically.”

Patricia was pretty sure that Laurence had seen her in Denver, and that he knew she’d broken his machine. She thought maybe she’d heard him calling her name. He probably hated her, whereas she couldn’t find the comfort of hating him. She was stuck blaming herself, instead.
I will be a slippery shadow. I will fool everyone. Nobody will fuck with me.
She smiled at her old teacher, like this was a fun academic discussion they were having.

Abruptly Carmen changed the subject. “Have you gone back to Siberia? Since the attack on the pipeline?”

“Um, no.”

“Might be a good idea.” Carmen’s gaze was going right inside Patricia. “See with your own eyes the aftermath of trying to appoint yourself the defender of nature.”

Patricia cringed. She’d thought they were past that, especially after Denver.

“That lesson is all the more important now that we are all embarking on a similar course,” Carmen said. “You and Diantha were right, in a way. You were just … rash. We don’t want to be soldiers, if we can help it. That’s why the Unraveling is a last resort, and it’s not a strategy. Rather, it’s a therapy.”

Patricia nodded, waiting for Carmen to elaborate.

At last, Carmen said, “Without saying too much, it’s more of a healing work, that might make a great change to the human race. Of course, the Tricksters see it as a great trick, too. Perhaps it is both. Come with me.”

Carmen leaned over, bending at the waist, and opened a trapdoor in the cloud. A staircase led down into a hot, cedar-scented underground space. Patricia had no idea how Carmen was making these trapdoors in and out of the clouds. She recognized the furnace room beneath the Great Lodge in Alaska where she’d spent a few months on a work-study break, looking after the sled dogs and chopping wood to put into the immense boiler—the boiler that occupied roughly the same portion of her field of vision as Seadonia had, so it felt as though she were descending a staircase from the clouds to the oil rig. The illusion dissipated as she neared the floor level and the furnace rose in front of her. On all sides, the walls were big cement blocks, stained by years of smoke. As they came around the wide hips of the steel burner, Patricia was reminded of the house she’d grown up in, with the bones of the spice warehouse around her. And then she came around the other side, and saw what was different about the furnace. It had a great iron face looking into the cinder-block darkness, and it was weeping ashes.

“Don’t touch it,” Carmen said, walking deeper into the cellar without sparing the agonized metal face a second glance.

“Why not?” Patricia rushed to catch up.

“Because it’s hot,” Carmen said. “It’s a furnace.”

The furnace room stretched into the darkness, way beyond the outer wall of the real-life lodge, and soon Patricia was groping her way forward in total pitch blackness, without even the faint glow from the stove to see by. She navigated by the sound of Carmen’s voice.

The footing became uneven, piled with jagged shapes. Like shells or fragments of metal. Torn discarded computer parts, or flint-sharp stones. Every step became more jabby and stabby than the last, even through the soles of Patricia’s decent mary janes.

“Take off your shoes and throw them away,” Carmen said, “or your feet will be cut to pieces.”

Patricia hesitated a moment, but every step was like treading on knives. So she slipped her shoes off, one and then the other, and tossed them aside. She heard the sound of teeth devouring her shoes, chewing and grinding. As soon as she was barefoot, she felt as though she were walking on a well-kept lawn. She still could not see at all, nor were there any scents. But as she strode forward she heard a low siren wail, like a baby’s cry slowed to half speed. Patricia started heading toward that sound, which seemed more plaintive and pathetic the closer she got, but Carmen grabbed her arm and said, “Ignore it.”

Carmen steered Patricia in a different direction, so they came near to the source of the deep caterwauling but passed by it. Soon Patricia felt her feet sinking into the “ground” a little more with each step, so that she felt the grass or whatever it was around her ankles as her feet squished into something like soil.

A few steps later, Patricia was walking into the loose sod up to her mid-calves. She smelled something sweet, like a hundred flowers in a single bouquet mixed with a fresh bag of cane sugar from her old bakery job. The kind of sweetness that’s comforting and nauseating and appetizing all at once. It grew stronger, every step forward Patricia took, and meanwhile the racket underfoot was swallowing her calves whole each time she stepped down.