All the Birds in the Sky

by Charlie Jane Anders

“Every day is the same as every other day. Except for today.”

When Laurence was old enough to do what he liked, he would be old enough to understand he couldn’t do what he liked.

And he found himself curious to ask her stuff and see how she responded—because he never, ever knew what Patricia would say about anything. He only knew it would be something weird.

“It’s amazing how much you can tell about people from their feet,” said Patricia. “Shoes tell the whole story.” “Except us,” said Laurence. “Our shoes are totally boring. You can’t tell anything about us.” “That’s because our parents pick out our shoes,” said Patricia. “Just wait until we’re grown up. Our shoes will be insane.”

war between magic and science that would leave the world in ashes.

Then at last, he decided that life would not be worth living if he couldn’t eat ice cream from time to time without worrying it was poisoned and he began to eat.

She thought it was cute when she was little, but when she got older she decided it was a subtle reference to her failure to be a boy.

“Children,” said Theodolphus Rose, “are adults who haven’t yet learned to make fear their hand puppet.” He smiled.

Everybody else had gone inside. They were ringing the second bell. “I guess if you’re a Satanist, you believe that God is the bad guy, and He rewrote history to make Himself look good.”

“But if that’s true,” Patricia said, “then you’re just worshiping a guy who needs to get a better PR team.”

so the cold came to seem much worse than it was. Mythic, in its ability to freeze the life out of you the moment you left your front door.

But Patricia felt like both she and Laurence knew, in the deepest crevices of their hearts, that they would each ditch the other in a second, if they had a chance to belong, really belong, with a group of others like themselves.

“That would royally suck. Eventually someone touches you, and then they know the truth. And then, nobody would ever take your illusions seriously again. There’s no point, unless you can physically change.”

He would be supportive and friendly as long as something seemed like a grand adventure. But the moment you got stuck or things were weirder than expected, he would pull away. You could never predict which Laurence you would get.

“Because who cares what your physical form looks like, as long as you can control how everybody perceives you? You could be all deformed and messed up, and it wouldn’t matter. The key is controlling the tactile as well as the visual.” “Yeah.” Patricia picked up the pace and tromped back to the back parking lot, so Laurence had to rush to catch up. “But you’d know what you really were. And that’s all that matters.”

The most horrifying thing was, Theodolphus sort of cared about these children and their ludicrous problems. Maybe just because he’d invested so much time, he wanted to see how it all came out. He worried about school politics. He had a gnawing sense that all the debates over whether to allow kids to advance even if they had failed some part of the testing regime were somehow meaningful. He had vivid nightmares about sitting in on parent-teacher conferences.

“You never learned the secret,” said Roberta. “How to be a crazy motherfucker and get away with it. Everybody else does it. What, you didn’t think they were all sane, did you? Not a one of them. They’re all crazier than you and me put together. They just know how to fake it. You could too, but you’ve chosen to torture all of us instead. That’s the definition of evil right there: not faking it like everybody else. Because all of us crazy fuckers can’t stand it when someone else lets their crazy show. It’s like bugs under the skin. We have to destroy you. It’s nothing personal.”

I’m dedicated to not being the person they wanted to make me.”

“You know … no matter what you do, people are going to expect you to be someone you’re not. But if you’re clever and

lucky and work your butt off, then you get to be surrounded by people who expect you to be the person you wish you were.”

Preach

So I’m still kind of enjoying going solo in a big city where nobody knows who I am. You know? I feel like that’s what being a grown-up ought to be like.”

the netsuke maker/assassin would have to take the frog back from his client, by force if necessary, and would sacrifice his own life in the process. The frog would have to claim someone’s life, in the end—if not the client, then the man who made it.

But suppose you had the power to change things? You still might not be able to fix anything, because every time you solve a problem you’d cause another problem. And maybe all these plagues and droughts are nature’s way of striking a balance? We humans don’t have any natural predators left, so nature has to find other ways to handle us.”

nature doesn’t ‘find ways’ to do anything. Nature has no opinion, no agenda. Nature provides a playing field, a not particularly

level one, on which we compete with all creatures great and small. It’s more that nature’s playing field is full of traps.”

“Seeing him so helpless, and watching him get transformed into this tiny object.… it doesn’t change my memories of how huge and terrible he was,” Patricia said. “It’s like two different people.

Patricia remembered hearing there was a creek here originally, before it was drained or paved over. Sometimes she imagined she could still feel the current of the banished ecosystem.

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.

“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 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 wanted to be all over him forever.

“As long as humanity survives, the best part of planet Earth will have endured.

life story was the story of Patricia and him, after all, for better or worse, and if she ended his life might go on, but his story would be over.

So Laurence told Isobel the whole story, keeping his voice as steady as he could. How he met this girl when they were kids, and she was the weirdest person ever, and he paid her to pretend he was being outdoorsy. And then it turned out she was a real-life witch, who could talk to animals, and she made his computer think for itself and saved his life. They were the only two weirdos at this awful meat locker of a school and they couldn’t be there for each other the way they wanted to, but they tried. And then they grew up and met each other again, and this time Patricia had her whole society of witches, who helped people and only had one rule, against being too proud. And somehow,

even though Patricia had her magician friends and Laurence had his geeky science friends, they were still the only ones who could figure each other out. And Patricia used her magic to save Priya from the void, which was the main reason they were able to go ahead with the wormhole machine that could have split the world in half.

“Even after she wrecked our machine, I couldn’t let blaming her keep me from realizing that she and I are bound together, like she and I are broken in different but compatible ways, and even beyond her having magical powers and the ability to transform things with her touch, there’s also just the fact that she’s the most amazing person I’ve ever met. She sees things nobody else does, even other witches, and she never gives up on caring about people. Isobel, you can’t kill her. She’s my rocket ship.”

She couldn’t make herself grasp that he had done this on purpose. For her. Nothing magical had ever confounded her so much.

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