Borne

by Jeff VanderMeer

  “I mean something made of either metal or of flesh. But not through natural biological means.”

  “Two people made you. You are made of flesh,” Borne said. He seemed agitated.

  “Why didn’t you save me from those boys?”

  “Save?”

  “Rescue. Help. Stop them from hurting me.”

  There came a long pause and everything about Borne shut down until he was just a gray shape. Even the eyes went away.

  Then the colors came back in an explosion of reds and pinks and a roiling, turbulent green. The eyes popped up as a rotating halo embedded in the skin near the top of his aperture. “But I did help! I helped! I helped Rachel. I helped.” This said in an anguished tone.

  I tried to control the trembling of my voice. The spirit of Mord filled me up.

  “Those boys hurt me for hours.” I spat out the words. “Those boys did that and you did nothing. They hurt me badly. And you could have done something.”

  Silence again, then, in a whisper, “I could not. I did not. Help. Until.”

  “Until what?”

  “Until I knew them.”

  I realized knew wasn’t the word he meant. That the word he sought might not exist, that he was trying, perhaps, to tell me two or three things at once.

  “Knew them how?”

  “I am not complete,” Borne said. “I was not complete. I am not complete.” He tried “put together,” which didn’t help, finished his sentence with a kind of frustration for words that caused the feathery pseudopods to straighten like spikes.

  “Now you are complete? Aware?” I didn’t want to use the word activated, because it scared me.

  “More complete,” Borne said.

  “You killed them,” I said, calm. But not before they hurt me, came the raging, screaming thought behind the words.

  “Kill?”

  “Cease to be. No longer alive. Dead. Not here.”

  Confusion shuddered through Borne. “I know them now. I know them.”

  “Killing is bad,” I said. “Killing should never happen. Don’t kill.” Unless someone attacks you. Unless you have to. But I didn’t think to make the distinction to Borne, because I didn’t have the strength.

  Those eyes no longer seemed beautiful. They looked ever more trapped and horrible. Was it my imagination, or was one of them a familiar gray? I turned away from Borne then, and drifted into unconsciousness for a while. It was easier than facing what he’d said.

  And yet why would I turn away unless I felt safe?

  * * *

  The seventh night, I slept in Wick’s quarters, and Mord, far above, slept over us, sprawled across the sea of loam and debris that covered the Balcony Cliffs. We experienced his breathing as a haunted depth charge that tumbled down through the layers, the beams, and the drywall, the supporting columns and the cracking archways. The sound of it permeated the atoms of a dozen ceilings, vibrated through our bodies. We felt it in our flesh after we heard it in our ears, and it lingered longer under the skin.

  The stench came to us, too, faint, carried by the ducts and the thousand imperfections in the sediment above us, carried by the subterranean tunnels of worms and beetles. Like the thunder after lightning, it came to us late, but then wrapped around our throats. It was the stench of every living thing Mord had killed in the last week. Could Mord smell us down here? Could he smell us mice? Us little human mice?

  Wick lay frozen, unable to move, terrified that somehow this was not random, that Mord knew he was there, that come morning Mord might start to root us out. And so, for a time, we whispered and moved in slow motion and in all ways acted as if we were submarines and Mord a destroyer above, seeking us. Even to whisper, Wick would put his mouth right up against my ear. He could not stop talking about rumors of Mord proxies being seen, searching in the city and the hinterlands beyond. Searching for what? Wick wouldn’t say, but I had the sense he knew.

  Then we didn’t even whisper, as Mord began to moan in his sleep. His moans sounded like gnashed, crushed words, filtered through the dirt, and we could not understand them. I knew only that they felt like anguish.

  Some hours later we felt his weight leave us, the Balcony Cliffs almost seeming to spring back up around us with relief. When we examined the spot above in the morning there was a deep depression from Mord’s weight. If he had spent the whole night there, would he have fallen through, smashing down level by level until, still sleeping, his body bulged through our ceiling? The stench remained for a day or two, and whenever I smelled it I felt a pressure pushing down on my head.

  I had come to Wick’s place so he wouldn’t come to mine and be reminded of Borne, but Borne is the subject he raised as soon as Mord had left. I almost wished Mord was still there to silence him.

  “I could still take him,” Wick said.

  “Who?” I asked, although I knew.

  “Borne. It’s time. I should just take him and figure him out. While you recover.”

  “You don’t need to.”

  He hesitated, about to say more, thought better of it, and seemed to accept what I had said. He hugged me close and, as if I were his shield against Mord, soon enough snored quietly against my shoulder. I let him, even though it hurt; the price of peace. Because it was simple. Because it helped us both.

  But I could not sleep. I was thinking about the silly conversations Borne and I were having because Borne didn’t seem to know much about the world, had only fragments that didn’t quite fit together.

  Borne: “Why is water wet?”

  Me: “I don’t know. Because it’s not dry?”

  Borne: “If something is dry, does that mean it’s not wit.”

  Me: “Wit or wet?”

  Borne: “Wit.”

  Me: “Wit is in the eye of the beholder.”

  Borne: “What?”

  I tried to explain wit to him.

  Borne: “Like grit in the eye? Is wit like dust?”

  Me: “Yes, dry.”

  Borne: “I’m thirsty. And I need a snack. I’m hungry. I’m hungry. I’m hungry.”

  Conversation would fall away again while I tried to find a snack for Borne, which, again, wasn’t hard. He especially liked what you might call “junk food,” even though that concept had become obsolete long ago.

  Maybe, too, I liked Borne so much because Wick by then was almost always serious. For the longest time, Borne didn’t know what serious was.

  * * *

  In the morning, with Mord and the weight of Mord just a bad dream, Wick tried again.

  “I can do it in a gentle way,” he said, but that didn’t reassure me. “I can return him the way he is now.”

  “No.”

  His weight went taut against my back.

  “I shouldn’t have to ask. You should know it’s the best thing.”

  “It’s not.”

  “You know something’s not right, Rachel.” Now he was almost shouting.

  Like most men, Wick could not help terror about one thing erupting as anger about something else. So I said nothing.

  But he wouldn’t let up. “Give me Borne,” he said.

  I refused to turn to look at him.

  “You need to give him to me, so we know what he is. He lives here, among us, and you protect him in a way that’s unnatural. This thing you know nothing about.”

  “No.”

  “He may be influencing you using biochemicals,” Wick said. “You may not know your own mind.”

  I laughed at that, even though it could be true.

  “You have no right, Rachel,” he said, and there was a wounded quality to the word right.

  “Tell me about your time at the Company.” I was tired of talking, just tired period. “Tell me all about your weird telescope.”

  But he had nothing to say about his telescope. He had nothing else to say at all, and neither did I. We both knew that one word more and either I would leave his bed or he would ask me to leave.

  * * *

  Wick. Wic
k and Rachel. Portrait of us. Wick and I, at opposite ends of the frame, half out of the picture. Oddly wary of each other now, for all that he took care of me, perhaps because he expected more blame from me, to bolster the guilt he had decided to keep. And perhaps I did blame him—for making me weak, for making me rely on his surveillance, his beetles and spiders, rather than my own traps.

  Was that fair? No, it wasn’t fair. But I had my own guilt: I now kept an even bigger secret from him.

  Borne can talk. Borne killed my attackers and hid their bodies. Borne is intelligent. Borne makes me happy.

  WHAT I TAUGHT BORNE AND WHAT HE TAUGHT ME

  Borne made me happy, but happiness never made anyone less stupid. During my recovery, I had such trouble remembering what waited for me outside, as if I had to learn it all over again, despite having been taught so many lessons.

  All kinds of dangerous ideas entered my head while groggy. It was as if the little foxes and other animals out in the desert ran in circles around my mind, barking and kicking up dust, stopping only to stare at me from afar and encourage me to wander. I kept fantasizing that I lived in a real apartment in one of the stable sanctuaries from my past. Everything would be fine—I just had the flu or a cold and was out sick until I got better. And when I was better, what would I do? When I was better, I would go back to university and to some part-time job. I would complete my studies so I could become a writer. Because the ruined city was just a bad dream and my life as a scavenger was a bad dream, and soon I would wake up, and the visions of almost drowning, of losing my parents and with them all connection with the past, would prove to be an illusion, too.

  The longer Wick expended time and energy protecting me, the more ideas like this took hold of me. They had only a vague relationship to my memories of flight, of trying to find refuge, of all the dangers before the city.

  But minds find ways to protect themselves, build fortifications, and some of those walls become traps. Even as I started to walk around my rooms with Borne, even as I ventured out into the corridors. It was so sad a fantasy that I brushed by without recognition the revenants that told me it was a lie. The chair stuck in the wall. The filing cabinet rusted beyond use, now just a barricade at the mouth of a tunnel. The lack of libraries or other people.

  Yet those sequestered weeks also contain some of my best memories because of Borne. Wick was gone a lot, spying on the Magician’s movements, providing beetles to his small band of dealers … and possibly because of our argument.

  Which left Borne and me ever more time to explore. He’d gotten tired of being cooped up in the apartment. On days when I knew Wick would be out for hours, I’d take Borne into the hallways, prickly with the fear of discovery and stiff from my slow-healing wounds.

  It was all a construct by then, this game of not telling Wick that Borne could talk. He had to know. But because I never admitted it and Wick never brought it up, Borne became an open secret that existed between us like a monster all its own. It made me reckless, as if I wanted Wick to confront me. That somehow our relationship would be a total lie if Wick didn’t confront me.

  Ignoring the strain on my own body, Borne and I would race down dim-lit, dust-covered corridors, Borne afraid of colliding/congealing with the wall and tripping over his own pseudopods, wailing as he laughed: “You’re going toooooo fast!” Or, “Why is this fuuuuuuuun?” Which just made me laugh, too. When you don’t have to run and you have the chance to run for the hell of it, it becomes a strange luxury.

  Then we’d collapse at the end of the hall and Borne, in addition to his usual observation that he was hungry and needed a snack—I now let him hunt lizards and rats to blunt his appetite—would ask some of his questions. He never stopped asking them, as if he were really ravenous for the answers.

  “This dust is so dry. Why is dust so dry? Doesn’t it need some wet for balance?”

  “Then it’s mud.”

  “What’s mud?”

  “Wet dirt.”

  “I haven’t seen mud yet.”

  “No, you haven’t. Not yet.”

  I would show Borne a photo of a weasel in an old encyclopedia and he’d point with an extended tentacle and say, “Ooooh! Long mouse!” Which brought me quickly to the idea of teaching Borne to read, except he picked that up on his own. When we played hide-and-seek, I’d sometimes find him hunched up on the edge of a midden of discarded books, two tentacles extending out from his sides to hold a book and a single tentacle tipped with light curling down from the top of his head.

  He would study any number of topics and had no real preferences, his many eyes enthusiastically moving back and forth as he read the pages at a steady clip. I don’t believe he needed light, or eyes, to read, but I know he liked to mimic what he saw me doing. Perhaps he even thought it was polite to seem to need light, to seem to need eyes.

  But the truth is, I don’t really know what he thought or how he thought it, because most of the time I just had his questions.

  * * *

  Eventually, I took him to Wick’s swimming pool, which was Wick’s laboratory. I loved the swimming pool, and perhaps that meant I loved Wick, too, in a way. The swimming pool had originally had a skylight above it, extending to the top of the Balcony Cliffs, and a divot of open space remained all the way to the top, with Wick contriving to camouflage it from above with his illusions.

  When the light from the hole in the ceiling was right, it formed green-and-gold waves, as if the moss and lichen on the surface had mingled with the sun’s rays and been transformed in some fundamental way. The light would glisten against the living filaments Wick had placed there as part of his work, and you could see dust motes floating and the occasional water bug or glider and, rising off the water, a mist that curled back on itself like certain kinds of ferns.

  It could take a while to get used to the mélange of chemicals, which gave off a dank smell, cut through with something spicy. That spice could be sweet or sour, but was always sharp. Wick needed the light in the mornings to feed the rich, revolting, shimmering stew-brew to finish his beetles and other creations. But our shit and piss fed it, too, although the harsh smell was more of algae and peat and some bitter chemical. I’d long ago gotten used to it, even found it pleasant.

  Eellike things wriggled in the mire and the fins of weird fish broke the surface only to submerge again.

  “What’s a swimming pool?” Borne asked.

  “A place people go into to … swim.”

  “But it’s full of disgusting things! Disgusting things live in there. Just disgusting. Really disgusting.” Disgusting was a word Borne had just picked up and used often.

  “Well, just leave those disgusting things alone, Borne, even if you are hungry.” I gently slapped away a tentacle he’d begun to inch toward the water. I had no idea what effect those chemicals would have on him. Nor did I want Borne eating Wick’s supplies, which would only endear him further.

  Borne summarized for me: “A swimming pool is a place where people like to swim in disgusting things.”

  “Close enough,” I said, chuckling. “You won’t be encountering many of those when you’re out in the real world.”

  And then I wished I hadn’t said it, because I’d acknowledged that this wasn’t the real world. That we lived in a bubble, of space and time, that just couldn’t, wouldn’t last.

  * * *

  I took him to the balcony out on the cliffs, too, but that was a little harder because I felt Borne needed a disguise, to be safe. I found a flower hat with just one bullet hole and a brown bloodstain to match. I found a pair of large designer sunglasses. I had the choice of putting him in a blue sheet or a black evening dress that I’d salvaged from a half-buried apartment. The evening dress was moth-eaten and had faded to more of a deep gray, but I chose it because I had nowhere to wear it and it was several sizes too big for me now.

  So Borne reconfigured himself to be a little longer and less wide than usual, sucked in his “stomach” more or less, and put on thi
s ridiculous outfit. Only, on Borne it looked good, and it wasn’t until later that I realized he’d drawn himself up into an approximation of my own body, that I was looking at a crude faux version of myself with green skin.

  But it wasn’t complete enough for him.

  “What about shoes?” he asked me, and I regretted having gone off on a rant about the value of a good pair of shoes a couple of days before.

  “You don’t need shoes. No one will see your feet.” Probably no one would see him, period.

  “Everyone wears shoes,” he said, quoting me. “Simply everyone. You even wear them to bed.”

  It was true. I’d never gotten over having to sleep in the open so often. When you slept in the open in dangerous places, you never took off your shoes in case you only had a few seconds to gather your things and take off running.

  Borne really wanted shoes. He wanted the full ensemble. So I gave him shoes. I gave him my one extra pair, which were really boots, the ones I’d come to the city in.

  He made a great show of growing foot-legs and with his hand-arms reached down to put on his new shoes. He’d muted his skin to a shade that mimicked my own. From the aperture at the top of his head, muffled by the hat, came the words, “We can go now.”

  But if Borne wanted the full ensemble, I wanted the full human.

  “Not until you grow a mouth,” I said, “and a real face.”

  “Uh-oh,” he said, because he’d forgotten. In those days, he always said “uh-oh” when he felt he’d made a mistake. Maybe he also was trying to be a little “difficult,” a concept he’d been field-testing, usually in charming ways.

  The transformation only took a second. All of his eyes went away, then two popped up where appropriate—never, ever gray anymore—and a nose protrusion that looked more like the head of the lizard he had eaten a few hours earlier, and a kind of crazy grinning mouth. In that hat. In the black evening dress. In the boots.

  He looked so earnest that I wanted to hug him, I never for a second understood the gift I’d given Borne. Never realized what other uses disguises could be put to.

  We went out on the balcony. Borne pretended he couldn’t see through his sunglasses and took them off. His new mouth formed a genuinely surprised “O.”