All the Birds in the Sky(99)
The same thing was on every channel. The Bandung Summit had failed. China was seizing the Diaoyu Islands and pressing its claims in the South China Sea, and meanwhile the Chinese government had promised to support Pakistan in the Kashmir conflict. And Russian troops were marching west. The screen showed troops massing, naval destroyers moving into position, missiles and drones being primed. It looked for all the world like the History Channel, except this was new footage.
“Holy crap,” Patricia said. “That’s not good.”
Laurence’s phone rang. “What?” he said. “Hang on.” He waved apologetically at Patricia and left the room.
Patricia watched the TV coverage for a moment, until it sickened her and she had to mute the audio.
Peregrine piped up. “Patricia,” he said. “Do you remember what you said to me, when you awoke my consciousness for the first time? When Laurence was at that military school?”
“Yeah. No.” Patricia searched her memory. “It was a random phrase, like a nonsense question. It was supposed to shock you into awareness. I still can’t believe it worked. I got it from Laurence. I don’t remember the wording.” Her brain clicked and the phrase fell into shape. “Wait. I do. It was, ‘Is a tree red?’”
“That’s right,” the Caddy said.
Patricia chewed her thumb and felt a kind of cognitive dissonance, like a buried thread of memory. “Someone asked me that when I was a child,” she said at last. “Like, really little. I think it was my first experience of magic. How did I forget that?”
“I don’t know,” Peregrine said. “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that question. I’m guessing you don’t know the answer?”
“Shit,” Patricia said. “No. I don’t.” This made her think about the way the birds had started telling her it was too late, and then she thought of her childhood fancy about the Tree. She had a flash of birds sitting in judgment and her child self asking for more time. What if this was all real? What if it was real and it all mattered, and what if she’d never really earned the right to be a witch after all, because there was something she was supposed to do, all this time?
“Shit,” Patricia said. “Now I won’t be able to stop thinking about this, either.”
“You being unable to suppress a thought is somewhat different from me being unable to suppress a thought,” said Peregrine, clearly trying to be diplomatic. “It’s like a riddle. Or a Zen koan. But there are no answers to that question anywhere online, in any language.”
“Huh,” Patricia said again. “I guess it’s one of those things that’s not supposed to make total sense. I mean, a tree is red in the autumn.”
“So maybe the question is whether we’re in the autumn of the world,” Peregrine said. “Assuming it’s a generalization, and not just referring to a specific tree.”
“A tree could be red if it was on fire. Or at dawn,” Patricia said. “It’s not even a real riddle. Riddles are never yes-or-no questions, are they? It would be more like, ‘When is a tree red?’”
“I think finding the answer might be my purpose in life,” said Peregrine.
Patricia found herself wondering whether this might be her personal lifelong quest as well, even as a voice inside her said, Aggrandizement!
Laurence came back. “That was Isobel,” he said. “I don’t quite know how to tell you this.”
The earthquake struck while Laurence was leaning over to put his phone down, so he pitched forward and clocked his head against Isobel’s steel coffee table, sending blood out of a gash in his forehead and nearly knocking him out cold. The room shook hard enough to send books and knickknacks raining down onto Patricia, and the television full of wartime scenes slipped off its moorings, falling on its side. Patricia sat, unshakable, as everything collapsed around her.
33
HERE’S WHAT ISOBEL said to Laurence, just before the earthquake hit: “This isn’t about revenge. You know that. Our people haven’t spent the past few months cooped up in Seadonia, dealing with scabies and bedbugs in close quarters, obsessing about mere payback. But we needed to find a way to move forward, after Denver. Because rebuilding the wormhole machine from scratch would take years, and we can’t risk having those people come back and destroy it again. We could try and set up better defenses, but we didn’t see them coming last time and we can’t guarantee we’ll see them next time. So we have no choice but to take preemptive action.”
“What have you done?” Laurence pressed the phone against the hinge of his jaw until it throbbed. “Isobel, what have you done?”
“We built the ultimate machine,” she was saying. “Tanaa, you know what a miracle worker she is, she did most of the hard part. It’s called the Total Destruction Solution, and it’s amazing.”
Isobel geeked out about the design challenges of creating the T.D.S.: They needed to cram as much armament as possible into the main chassis, without creating something too top-heavy. They wanted something amphibious and all-terrain, with omnidirectional movement and the ability to take out multiple targets at once. Like every designer of cool hardware, Tanaa wound up reaching for shapes from nature: the segmented bodies of the major arthropods, the shock-absorbing properties of a hedgehog’s quills, the stabilizing tail, the six insectoid legs, the multi-sectioned carapace, and so on. The cockpit was spacious enough for two people, with manual controls that were redundant so long as you had someone connected to the brain/computer interface. (Milton had gotten the laparoscopic operation not long earlier.) The result was perhaps a bit busy, but it moved with a sleekness, and when it came time to open up with the five SAMs, the seven industrial lasers, the front and rear napalm launchers—and the crown jewel, the antigravity cannon—the T.D.S. would dance.