All the Birds in the Sky

by Charlie Jane Anders

“It’s okay,” she told the bird. “I’ll take you home. There’s an old birdcage in the attic. I know where to find it. It’s a nice cage, it has a perch and a swing. I’ll put you in there, I’ll tell my parents. If anything happens to you, I will hold my breath until I faint. I’ll keep you safe. I promise.” “No,” the bird said. “Please! Don’t lock me up. I would prefer you just kill me now.” “But,” Patricia said, more startled that the bird was refusing her protection than that he was speaking to her. “I can keep you safe. I can bring you bugs or seeds or whatever.” “Captivity is worse than death for a bird like me,” the sparrow said.

“Is the Endless Question going to take a long time? Because I bet my mom and dad are worried about me.” It was hitting her all over again that she was up way past her bedtime and she hadn’t had dinner and she was out in the middle of the freezing woods, not to mention she was still lost. “Too late,” the grouse said. “We’re asking it,” said the eagle. “Here is the question,” said the turkey. “Is a tree red?” “Uh,” Patricia said. “Can you give me a hint? Umm. Is that ‘red’ like the color?” The birds didn’t answer. “Can you give me more time? I promise I’ll answer, I just need more time to think. Please. I need more time. Please?”

He just wanted to be left alone and maybe have people get his name right if they had to talk to him.

“Hey, Larry Fairy,” Brad Chomner said at school, “think fast.” Which was one of those phrases that never made sense to Laurence: People who told you to “think fast” were always those who thought much more slowly than you did. And they only said it when they were about to do something to contribute to the collective mental inertia. And yet Laurence had never come up with the perfect comeback to “Think fast,” and he wouldn’t have time to say whatever it was, since something unpleasant usually hit him a second later. Laurence had to go clean himself up.

Besides, jumping forward in time just underscored the basic problem: Laurence had nothing to look forward to.

(He had already figured out a great universal truth, that people never asked for documentation of anything, as long as you asked them for documentation first.)

He was Laurence of Ellenburg, and he was unflappable. Laurence had just figured out that “unflappable” did not have anything to do with whether people could mess up your clothing, and now he used that word as much as he could. “I am unflappable,” Laurence told the bus driver. Who shrugged, as if he’d thought so too, once upon a time, until someone had flapped him.

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

“So what’s so great about nature?” “It’s real. It’s messy. It’s not like people.”

Let’s make a deal: You help me convince my parents I’m already spending plenty of time in nature, so they stop sending me frakking camping all the time. And I’ll give you twenty bucks.” “You want me to lie to your parents?” Patricia wasn’t sure if that was the sort of thing an honorable witch would do. “Yes,” he said. “I want you to lie to my parents. Thirty bucks, okay? That’s pretty much my entire supercomputer fund.” “Let me think about it,” Patricia said. This was a major ethical dilemma. Not just the lying, but also the part where she would be keeping Laurence from an important experience his parents wanted him to have. She couldn’t know what would happen. Maybe Laurence would invent a new windmill that would power whole cities, after observing the wings of dragonflies. She pictured Laurence years from now, accepting a Nobel Prize and saying he owed it all to the Great Outdoors Adventure Weekends. On the other hand, maybe Laurence would go on one of those weekends, fall into a waterfall, and drown, and it would be partly Patricia’s fault. Plus, she could use thirty bucks.

The man in black slippers and worn gray socks was an assassin, said Patricia, a member of a secret society of trained killers who stalked their prey, looking for the perfect moment to strike and kill undetected. “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.” * * * IN FACT, PATRICIA had been correct about the man in the gray socks and black shoes. His name was Theodolphus Rose, and he was a member of the Nameless Order of Assassins. He had learned 873 ways to murder someone without leaving even a whisper of evidence, and he’d had to kill 419 people to reach the number nine spot in the NOA hierarchy. He would have been very annoyed to learn that his shoes had given him away, because he prided himself on blending with his surroundings.

And at the last, a 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.

“Joy?” Laurence thought he had misheard for a moment. “I’m not joyful, I’m pissed off, all the time. I’m a misanthrope.” That was his new favorite word, and he had been waiting to use it in a sentence for a while.

“There’s a difference between your type of outcast and mine. If you’re a science geek, people give you wedgies and don’t invite you to their parties. But if you’re a witch, everybody just assumes you’re an evil psycho. It’s kind of different.”

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

Sometimes I wish I was crazy, it would make everything easier.” “If you were crazy,” CH@NG3M3 responded, “how would you know you were crazy?” “That’s a good question,” Patricia admitted. “You would need to have one person who you completely trusted. Like, if you trusted one other person, you could check to see if you were seeing the same things they were.” She chewed her thumb, sitting cross-legged on her brass-kettle quilt, legs tucked under her skirt. “What if you didn’t see the same things?” CH@NG3M3 said. “Would you be crazy?”

“Sorry,” Patricia said, “was that weird?” Berkley was purring in her lap. Like a band saw. “Kind of. Yeah,” Laurence said. His shoulders were a scaffolding around his ears. “Uh. Good weird, or bad weird?” “Just … weird. Weirdness is value neutral.…

Not the kind of fight where anybody hopes to win. Or even find some solution. This was hopeless, pointless, mindless aggression, two creatures caught in a trap with nothing to do but tear each other apart.

He no longer cared if this girl was crazy. He was a bad person, and what was worse, being crazy or being evil? Plus she might be the only girl who would even consider kissing him before he turned thirty.

And yet the Nameless Assassin School was a country club compared to Canterbury Academy. For one thing, he had been learning things, skills that he still used in his vocation, and he had taken pride in them. For another, nobody had forced him to answer multiple-choice questions on battered notebook computers. If they had given standardized tests in assassin school, he would not have lasted a day. (Theodolphus made a mental note to hunt down Lars Saarinian, the psychologist who had studied the slaughterhouse behavior of pigs and come up with an educational regimen for human children, when he finally got out of here.)

“A society that has to burn witches to hold itself together is a society that has already failed, and just doesn’t know it yet.”

Someone who doesn’t care if they get Tater Tots or turnip slurry is a person who has given up on life.

“Why would anybody be a Satanist, anyway? I don’t get it. You can’t believe in Satan without believing in God, and then you’re just picking the wrong side in a big mythic battle thing.” 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.”

THEODOLPHUS HAD NOT eaten ice cream since the poisoning at the mall, and he didn’t deserve any now. Ice cream was for assassins who finished their targets.

Worry is often a symptom of imperfect information.

CH@NG3M3: What do you think would have happened if you’d told him? Patricia: He would have thought I was making it up. He would have thought I was nuts. That’s why it was the perfect trap. Whatever I do, I lose. CH@NG3M3: The trap that can be ignored is no trap. Patricia: What did you say? CH@NG3M3: The trap that can be ignored is no trap. Patricia: That’s a weird thing to say. I guess a good trap should be camouflaged, so you don’t realize you’re walking into it. On the other hand, you have to want to walk into it. A trap that doesn’t make you want to fall in isn’t much of a trap. And once you’re caught, you shouldn’t be able to ignore the trap because you’re stuck. So a trap that you can just pay no attention to is a failure. I guess I get it. CH@NG3M3: Society is the choice between freedom on someone else’s terms and slavery on yours.

Just as she reached his doorway, a phrase popped into her head: “The trap that can be ignored is no trap.” She caught her breath—maybe CH@NG3M3 was wiser than it knew—but then she breathed in once again, and the maddening decay got in her nostrils again. She was going to confront this monster, once and for all.

“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.”

This is Kanot, by the way. He’s a witch too, but his main skill seems to be sarcasm.”

“I’ve read on the internet that parents always impose their unfinished business onto their children.”

“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.”

“I was just thinking,” she said. “There are so many crazy problems in the world. Like, I was just reading that we could be seeing the last of the bees in North America soon. And if that happened, food webs would just collapse, and tons more people would starve. 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.”

“I am, as you know, a fan of nature,” said Reginald. “And yet, 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.”

“She can help,” Laurence said. “I can’t explain. But she can help.” “What’s her area of expertise again?” Anya folded her arms over her unicorn shirt. “Dimensional transcendentalism,” said Patricia. “You just stole that from Doctor Who. This is not a joke, this is serious,” Anya said. “Okay, look,” Patricia said. “Do you guys want your friend back or not?” Everybody nodded slowly. “Then just stand the fuck back and let me work.”

“But how did you do it?” Anya kept asking. “What did you do?” “I used my sonic screwdriver.” “No, really. What did you do?” “I reversed the polarity of the neutron flow.” “Stop giving Doctor Who answers! Tell me the truth!” “It was sort of a wibbly wobbly,” Patricia said, fully teasing Anya now.

Booze really was medicinal, after a near-death experience.

Nobody wanted to befriend someone who was both nerdy and bad at homework.

Did the adults at Eltisley Maze know about the Tree? Either: (A) It was something all the adults knew about, and they were just keeping it secret from the kids because they weren’t ready to know about it yet, or (B) they didn’t know about it, and this was something you had to be a kid to understand.

If I could turn people into turtles, there would be turtles everywhere.”

“But you’re colossally missing the point, almost like on purpose. I’m saying that there are a lot of different ways of looking at the world, and maybe I actually do have a unique advantage, because I get to hear different voices. You really don’t get that?” Laurence felt like maybe the crows were laughing at him now, as if Patricia had tipped them off somehow. “I get that. I do. I just, I think ethics are universal, and derived from principles, and I think that situational ethics are a slippery slope. Plus I don’t think crows have much, if any, notion of ethics. I don’t think a crow has ever even considered the categorical imperative.” “I love that this conversation started out with you worrying that I was judging you, and ended up with you judging me.” Patricia had definitely stiffened a little and gotten a little farther away on the blanket. Laurence was feeling kind of toxic, and also worrying that he’d gone and pissed off the one person he could actually talk to in this stupid world. “I’m not judging you, I’m not. You have to know that. I already said if it were me, there would be turtles everywhere.” “I don’t actually think that ethics are derived from principles. At all.” Patricia scooted a little closer again and touched his arm with a few cool fingertips. “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 w...

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.

“When the whole world turns chaotic, we must be the better part of chaos,”

A possibility that if we turn this machine on, we’ll start a reaction that would lead to an antigravity cascade, which in turn could tear the Earth apart.” “But tell them the good news,” Milton said quickly.

“We could not ‘break’ nature if we spent a million years trying. This planet is a speck, and we are specks on a speck. But our little habitat is fragile, and we cannot live without it.”

Trust hipsters to make even the collapse of civilization unbearably twee.

“Like Kawashima said, visions of the future are pretty much always total crap,”

“Loose ends are cool.” Roberta got upright and parted the bushes with both hands, craning her neck to look up at her skyscraper sister. “Loose ends mean that you’re still living your life. The person who dies with the most loose ends wins.”

We were trying to create robots that would be able to interact with people’s feelings in a visceral way. But we were focusing on the wrong thing. We don’t need better emotional communication from machines. We need people to have more empathy.

Laurence had a feeling most adults he knew had gotten used to this feeling of mutual abashment. But it was new to him.