Borne

by Jeff VanderMeer

  “It’s beautiful,” he exclaimed. “It’s beautiful beautiful beautiful…” Another new word.

  The killing thing, the thing I couldn’t ever get over, is that it was beautiful. It was so incredibly beautiful, and I’d never seen that before. In the strange dark sea-blue of late afternoon, the river below splashing in lavender, gold, and orange up against the numerous rock islands and their outcroppings of trees … the river looked amazing. The Balcony Cliffs in that light took on a luminous deep color that was almost black but not, almost blue but not, the jutting shadows solid and cool.

  Borne didn’t know it was all deadly, poisonous, truly disgusting. Maybe it wasn’t, to him. Maybe he could have swum in that river and come out unscathed. Maybe, too, I realized right then in that moment that I’d begun to love him. Because he didn’t see the world like I saw the world. He didn’t see the traps. Because he made me rethink even simple words like disgusting or beautiful.

  That was the moment I knew I’d decided to trade my safety for something else. That was the moment. And no matter what happened next, I had crossed over into another place, and the question wasn’t who I should trust but who should trust me.

  PART TWO

  HOW IT HAD BEEN, AND WHAT CAME NEXT

  The first time I saw Mord it was twilight six years before I found Borne, on a day when I’d found nothing much except some autonomous meat quivering foul in a ditch next to a half-open storm grate. I knew a trap when I saw one. I marked the area with chalk to remember and made my way far to the west, to the remains of an abandoned highway covered over with lichen and rust and bone fragments. They formed a green-red-white pattern that almost looked purposeful. Not the good kind of lichen, or I would’ve harvested some for later.

  The high level of chemicals in the city’s air has always made sunset a stirring sight, even if you were jaded, had become fatally distracted, or just had no room left for poetry. Orange and yellow melted in layers into blue and purple. I checked to the north and south, saw no one. I found a faded deck chair somewhere and sat in it, eating some stale crackers from the week before. My stomach was a tight, aching ball as I watched the sun go down.

  I was filthy from climbing through tunnels all day in the semi-abandoned factory district. I stank. I was exhausted. Despite my precautions, anyone could have seen me. Anyone could have attacked me. I didn’t care. You had to let your guard down sometimes or you forgot what that felt like, and I’d reached my limit for the week. That meat going to waste to bait a trap set by a crazy person, a cannibal, a pervert—it had gotten to me.

  Mord rose from the cluster of buildings directly ahead of me. At first he was a large, irregular globe of dark brown against the orange edge of the sun. For one terrified moment I thought he was an eclipse or a chemical cloud or my death. But then the “eclipse” began to move toward me effortlessly, blocking out the sun, destroying the sky, and I could see the great furred head in every detail.

  I couldn’t run. I should have run, but I didn’t. I should have leapt out of my deck chair and made for a drainage tunnel. But I didn’t. I just sat in my deck chair with a cracker half in, half out of my mouth, and watched as the shadow of the behemoth stole over me.

  Back then, Mord wasn’t as large, and he still lived in the Company building. As he rose over me like a living dreadnought, his pelt was golden brown, pristine, and clean-smelling, as if an army of Company employees had done nothing but groom him for hours.

  His enormous eyes were bright and curious and curiously human, not as bloodshot and curved as they would later become. The smooth white of his fangs seemed less a bloody threat than the promise of a swift, clean execution. He luxuriated in the feel of the wind against his fur.

  I cannot fully explain the effect of Mord on me in that moment. As that silky, gorgeous head glided toward me, as his gaze slid over me and past, with what seemed almost a secret amusement, as that pelt hovered mere feet overhead and the smell of jasmine came to me from his fur … and as I watched that whole vast body pass over me, I fought the urge to raise an arm to touch him.

  Some part of me could not decide if I was witness to the passage of a god or, perhaps, out of hunger, a hallucination. But in that moment I wanted to hug Mord. I wanted to bury myself in his fur. I wanted to hold on to him as if he were the last sane thing in the world, even if it meant the end of me.

  * * *

  After Mord had passed me, I didn’t dare look over my shoulder. I was afraid. Afraid he would be staring back with a ravenous look. Afraid I had conjured him up out of some dark need and he didn’t really exist. How could Mord possibly fly? By what miracle or what damnation? I didn’t know, and Wick had never offered up a theory. That Mord might once have been human, then, seemed like some distant, remote truth that lived on a mountaintop far from here. But it was this ability that made some in the city believe we had died and now existed in the afterlife. Some purgatory or hell. And some portion of all of those who believed sacrificed themselves to Mord—and not by gaping at him from a lawn chair, munching on a cracker. Because if you were already dead, what did it matter?

  I sat there with the last of my crackers, as dusk settled over me and the stars made themselves known. Only after some time did I begin to shiver and take note of strange sounds coming closer, and seek safety for the night.

  I had only been in the city a short time. Soon enough, I would meet Wick, and then, after some caution, move into the Balcony Cliffs with him.

  * * *

  Even knowing that Borne had killed my attackers—even though I still knew too little about Borne—I could not give in to Wick’s judgment. Wasn’t there so much that was good and decent in Borne that I could bring out, no matter what I discovered about his purpose? This was the essential question that kept coming to me out of the darkness, even if I already had Wick’s answer.

  I worked so very hard at accepting Borne in the weeks that followed that I no longer saw him as odd. Even as he grew larger and larger, until he was taller than Wick, even as he kept trying out new shapes—changing from cone to square to globe, and then back again into his inverted squid pose.

  Wick was there almost all the time now, still taking care of me. I should have been more appreciative, but I resented his presence more and more. When he was around Borne had to be motionless, voiceless, eyeless—sitting there in the far corner while Wick and I talked. He resembled a giant question mark, and the way in which Wick never looked at Borne made me know just how aware Wick was of my new friend.

  But even when Wick left, my conversations with Borne continued to be halting and stilted at first. I had avoided the questions I had to ask at first, but then returned to them because I had no choice. I thought of myself as a shield against Wick, that Wick’s questions would be more invasive, his conclusions harsher.

  I returned to the idea of Borne as a machine. I found an old book amongst the wreckage and showed him a photo of a robot and then of a bioengineered cow. How we would long today to find a cow wandering the city!

  “See? Like this?”

  He reared up, exuding pseudopods as if they were coming out of his pores. “I am not a machine. I am a person. Just like you, Rachel. Just like you.”

  It was the first time I had ever done anything to offend him. I’d perplexed him, yes, but not offended him.

  “I’m sorry, Borne,” I said, and I was sorry. I changed the subject, a little. “Do you know how you came to the city, then?”

  “I don’t remember. There was water, a lot of water, and then I was walking. Just walking.”

  “No,” I said patiently. “That’s my memory. That’s something I told you.” This kind of confusion happened more often than it should have.

  Borne considered that for a second, then said, “I know things about things that are not mine. But it’s mixed up. I mix it up. I am supposed to mix it up. In the white light.”

  I thought of the white light common to tales of death, of dying. I was in a tunnel. I saw a white light.

&nb
sp; “What do you remember about the light?”

  But he wouldn’t answer that question, defaulted to a common response that he thought pleased me.

  “I found myself when you picked me up! I was found by you. You plucked me. You plucked me.”

  The word pluck was new, but always and forever amused him; he could not tire of “to pluck” or “plucked.” He would make a sound like a chicken saying it, something I had taught him—“pluck pluck pluck”—and go running down the halls like a demented schoolboy.

  But this time when he said it, Borne’s voice got lower and lower and he flattened himself across the floor next to my bed, as he did when talking about things that scared him.

  “Do you know your purpose?” I asked.

  Borne’s eyestalks, newly budded and continually extending and then retracting into his body, all looked at me quizzically.

  “The reason,” I said. “You know—the point of being alive. Were you made for a purpose?”

  “Does everything have a purpose, Rachel?”

  His words got to me, sitting in the living room, looking up at the mold-stained ceiling.

  What was my purpose? To scavenge for myself and for Wick, and now for Borne? To just survive … and wait? For what.

  But I was trying to be a good parent, a good friend, to Borne, so I said, “Yes, everything has a purpose. And every person has a purpose, or finds a purpose.” Or a reason.

  “Am I a person?” Borne said, and his eyestalks perked up and took special attention.

  I didn’t hesitate. “Yes, Borne, you are a person.”

  He was a person to me, but one already pushing on past to other concepts.

  “Am I a person in my right mind?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I said, my standard ploy when I wanted time to think. With my right mind.

  “If there’s a right mind, then there’s a wrong mind.”

  “I suppose so. Yes.”

  “How do you get a wrong mind? Is it borned into you?”

  “That’s a tough question,” I said. Usually I would have responded with something like “Do you want a wrong mind?” or told him it could happen either way: borned into you, or through trauma. But I was too tired from repairing traps all day.

  “Is it tough because I already have a wrong mind?”

  “No. Do you like to be silent sometimes?” Borne might be a person, but he was a difficult person, because he probed everything.

  “Is silence because of a wrong mind?” Borne asked.

  “Silence is golden.”

  “You mean because it’s made of light?”

  “How do you even speak with no mouth?” I asked, but not without affection.

  “Because I’m not in my right mind?”

  “Right mind. Wrong mouth.”

  “Is no mouth a wrong mouth?”

  “No mouth is…” But I couldn’t stop from erupting into giggles.

  * * *

  I saw these conversations as Borne playful. But really it was a youthful, still-forming mind that couldn’t yet communicate complex concepts through language. Part of why Borne couldn’t is that his senses worked differently than mine. He had to learn what that meant, at the same time he had to navigate the human world through me. The confusion of that, of finding unity in that, of basically becoming trilingual while living in the world of human beings, was very difficult. Always, as long as we knew each other, Borne was offering up so many approximations, so many near misses on what he meant that might have meant other things.

  Much later, when I realized this, I went back over our conversations in my memory, to see if I could translate them into some other meaning. But it was too late. They are what they are. They mean what they meant, and I know I misremember some of them anyway—and that pains me.

  * * *

  The last night before I would have to go out scavenging again, Wick came to check on me. It was perfunctory during this phase of our relationship, a duty and an obligation. Borne went into what he would later call, jokingly, “dumb mode” or “sucking in your gut.” He drew in his eyes, got small, waddled to a corner, and sat there, immobile and mute.

  “How are you?” Wick asked from the doorway. The intensity of shadow hollowed out his cheekbones, and I felt as if I were being approached by a concept, an abstraction.

  “Good, thanks,” I said.

  “You’ll be okay tomorrow.”

  “Yes,” I replied although he’d not asked a question.

  Wick lingered there for a moment, eyes glinting like mineral chips, holding himself apart, distant. I didn’t like to see him hurt by me, but I was stuck. He didn’t have to be so adamant about Borne—that was his fault—and I said nothing more. So he receded from me, back into the corridor, perhaps to go shove a memory beetle in his ear.

  Wick receded; Borne blossomed. That was the way of it in those days—and in those days, too, the situation in the city had changed, and strange things were flourishing and familiar ones withering.

  Since I’d last been outside, the Magician had become a major force in the city. She now held an area in the northwest starting roughly in a line extending out from where the Company building’s jurisdiction ended on the city’s southern edge. A growing army of acolytes helped make her drugs and protected her territory against Mord and others; Wick had only his peculiar swimming pool, the bastion of the Balcony Cliffs, a scavenger-woman who could make traps but kept secrets from him, and a creature of unknown potential that he desired to cast out.

  Worse, the rumored Mord proxies had finally made their presence known and seemed more bloodthirsty than their progenitor. They knew no rule of law, not even the natural law of sleep. Upon their appearance, as if there were some collusion between the proxies and the Company, Mord spent several days huffing and puffing in front of the Company building. Under his uncertain aegis, the Company building was becoming more and more unstable and unsafe. Mord would sleep in front of it, and then other times he would forget his seeming role as protector and absentmindedly butt into the walls with his broad head. We could see that people still lived in the top levels, under siege in a way as they were reduced to serving Mord’s whims—while rumors came to us that beneath them, in the Company’s deepest levels, no one ruled at all.

  Despite these dangers, Wick had given me no refuge. We had an agreement and I had to begin to honor my side of it again. I would go forth and scavenge. I didn’t know if that was a mercy or a cruelty, or where that impulse came from in Wick. I didn’t care. It was time to get out of bed.

  When Wick had gone, Borne extended a tendril of an arm, to take one of my hands in his own “hand.” A reasonable facsimile, if a little damp.

  “Rachel?”

  “What, Borne?”

  “Do you remember what I said about the white light?”

  “Yes.”

  “Part of me had a nightmare about it while your friend was here.”

  I checked myself from asking all of the questions I could have asked.

  Part of me?

  Just now you were asleep?

  You have dreams?

  I had learned that when Borne used this tone of voice he was about to trust me, was sharing something important.

  “What kind of nightmare?” I asked. How did he know the word nightmare? I hadn’t taught it to him; he hadn’t used it before.

  “I was in a dark place. Only it was filled with light. I was alone. Only there were others like me. I was dead. We were all … dead.”

  “Not alive?” Sometimes Borne said that something was dead if it didn’t move, like a chair. Or a hat.

  “Not alive.”

  “Like a heaven or a hell?”

  “Rachel.” Said with soft admonishment. “Rachel, I don’t know what those things are.”

  I didn’t know, either. How could I know, talking to a cheery monster, living in a hole in the ground, among too many broken things? I laughed as much to dispel that thought as because anything was funny.

  �
��Never mind. It’s ‘religion,’ which I can teach you … never.” My parents hadn’t been religious, and I’d learned from the Mord cults that religion in the city wasn’t about hope or redemption but about tempting death.

  “Okay,” Borne said, and his eyes formed a kind of reproachful smile. “I don’t always understand, Rachel. I love you, but I don’t understand.”

  Love? He’d just admitted he didn’t know about heaven and hell. What could he know from love? I pushed forward, past it.

  “And what happened next?”

  “I tried to wake up. I tried to wake us all up. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t because I was dead. That’s the word: dead. And I needed to wake up because a door was opening.”

  “Door” to Borne could, again, mean many things that were not doors.

  “What happened when the door opened?” I asked.

  “They would make me go through the door. I don’t want to go through the door, and not just because I am dead.”

  “What’s on the other side of the door?” I asked.

  All of Borne’s many eyes turned toward me, like rows of distant, glittering stars against the deep purple earth tones of his skin. For the first time in a long time I felt as if I didn’t know him.

  “Because I am dead, I do not know what is on the other side of the door.”

  That is all that he would say.

  WHAT HAPPENED WHEN I WENT OUTSIDE AGAIN

  My plan had been to try to take up with Mord, shadow him as before. This was still the best way to find useful things—and because the truest test of my recovery was to go right back to his shuddering flank, to risk it all now rather than find out later that I no longer had the nerve, or the skill. But now, that was too dangerous. Instead, I would travel to an area controlled by the Magician.

  I delayed. I woke leisurely, pretended it was just another day in my recovery. But by early afternoon, I was all out of play-pretend and all out of excuses. It was a good time to go. Wick slept very late after having been out longer than he’d planned, to make sure neither the Magician nor Mord’s proxies followed him.