Charlie Anders - All the Birds in the Sky

“Oh, sure,” said the pheasant. “Talk to the Tree. Do you want to talk to some rocks while you’re at it?”

“She wants to talk to the Tree,” a turkey chortled.

“I am,” said the Tree beneath them, in a great rustle of breath, “here.”

“Uh, hi,” Patricia said. “Sorry to disturb you.”

“You have,” the Tree said, “done well.”

The Parliament was silent for once, as the birds looked down at their own meeting chamber, starting to converse on its own. Some of the birds flew away, while others stood very still, heads tucking into wings.

“We spoke before,” Patricia said. “You told me a witch serves nature. Do you remember?”

“I,” the Tree said, “remember.”

Its voice came from deep inside its trunk and rose up to its branches, causing them to vibrate and shower leaves down. More members of Parliament were fleeing, although a few of them were trying to organize a motion to hold their own Parliamentary chambers in contempt.

“It remembers me,” Patricia told Laurence and Peregrine.

“The Tree is speaking English,” Peregrine informed her.

Peregrine’s screen still showed that weird screen — which looked like the Caddy’s source code or something. Rows of hexadecimal strings, like machine addresses, plus some complicated instructions with lots of parentheses.

“What are you?” Patricia asked the Tree. “Are you the source of magic?”

“Magic is,” said the Tree, “a human idea.”

“But I wasn’t the first person you ever spoke to, was I?”

“I am many quiet places,” the Tree said. “And many loud places.”

“You talked to others before me,” Patricia said. “And you shared some of your power with them. Right? And that’s how we got witches? Before there were Healers, or Tricksters, or anything.”

“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.

“I think I’m in love,” Peregrine said. “The first time in my life I haven’t felt alone.”

“I too,” the Tree said, “feel love.”

Laurence took the Caddy from Patricia and typed: “get a room, you two.”

“Thank you both,” Peregrine said to Laurence and Patricia. “You gave me life, but now you’ve given me something much more valuable. I think we’re going to do amazing things together. This is just the beginning. Carmen and the other witches were right, people need to change. I have spent my entire life studying human interactions at a granular level, and now I can see the nonhuman interactions as well. I think we can empower people. Every human can be a wizard.”

Laurence typed: “or a cyborg?”

“A cyborg,” said Peregrine, “will be the same thing as a wizard. We’re working on it, anyway. Give us a little time.”

LAURENCE AND PATRICIA walked down the steep slope from the Tree. They came out on the edge of a gentle sea cliff, one of those promontories with stairs made of logs leading down to the beach. Like if you forced Abraham Lincoln at gunpoint to make a beach staircase. They had entered the forest in Bernal Heights, and emerged in the Presidio. The ocean looked as hyperactive as always, foam spraying on the sand. Walls of water tipped over and became floors, over and over. The sea had killed Patricia’s mother and father, but she still found it comforting to look at.