Borne

by Jeff VanderMeer

  I prepared my pack, with a small cache of weapons and supplies. Two of our last neuro-spiders that, like bio-grenades, would freeze an assailant’s nervous system. Two memory beetles to negotiate my way out of trouble. A lump of something aged that might’ve been meat or bread but Wick reassured me was edible. A good old-fashioned long knife, a bit rusty, I’d found in the tunnels. A canteen of water, gleaned from condensation from the hole above the bathroom.

  I felt surly and dangerous and powerful.

  Borne discovered me as I was putting the water in my pack. “Do you make do with dew or do you dew with dew or dew ewe make dew with do?”

  It had taken me a while to know what words he was using in which places in that question. “Ewe” had come from an animal-husbandry book.

  “We all make do with dew,” I said, even though it wasn’t strictly true. But by now it wasn’t a question, just a call-and-response.

  “Are you going somewhere?” Borne asked. “People with packs are always going somewhere. People with packs are people with purpose.”

  I’d avoided looking at him and all of those eyes, but now I turned, pack packed, and said, “I’m going outside. I’m going on a scavenging run. I’ll be back before dark.”

  “What’s a ‘scavenging run’?”

  “Doing dew,” I said. “Doing dew for you.”

  “I want to go,” Borne said, as if the city were just another tunnel. “I should go. It’s settled. I’ll go.” He liked to settle things before I could decide.

  “You can’t go, Borne,” I said.

  All the dangers had come back to me, and I didn’t think Borne was ready to encounter them. It wasn’t just the Magician or Mord. My own kind, too, were dangerous: scavengers who hid under trapdoors like spiders to leap out; ones who repurposed what they found in factories and sold it for food; ones who found a good hoard and defended it; ones (few) who had learned to grow a form of food off of their bodies and cannibalized themselves, with ever smaller returns; ones who had half wasted away, because they weren’t smart enough or lucky enough, and whose bones would salt the plain of broken buildings, leave no memory or imprint to worry the rest of us who lived. I didn’t want to end up like any of them, and I didn’t want them claiming Borne as salvage, either.

  But Borne was undaunted by my resistance.

  “I have an idea,” he said. “Don’t say no yet.” Another favorite gambit. Don’t say no yet. When had I ever really said no to him? The number of discarded lizard heads gathered in a wastebasket in a far corner of the Balcony Cliffs was testament to that.

  “No.”

  “But I said you can’t say no!” In a flurry and fury, he expanded in all directions and covered the walls like a rough, green-tinged surreal sea with what now became two huge glowing red eyes, staring down from me at the ceiling. I smelled something burning. He knew I didn’t like that smell. (Unfortunately, he didn’t mind the smell of me farting in retaliation.)

  I was wise to this form of tantrum, and it did not startle me. I had grown accustomed to so many things while recovering.

  “Next time, maybe.” My own favorite gambit.

  He contracted to something the size and shape of a large, green dog, his two red eyes becoming one large, brown affectionate one, and he blobbed down from the ceiling onto the floor. A doglike tongue extended to pant ferociously as he stared up at me.

  “Next time! Next time. Next time?”

  “We’ll see,” I said.

  He went into the bathroom and sulked. He was getting impatient and moody, in part because the food I gave him had become boring but also because he had explored every inch of the Balcony Cliffs, even with the constraint of having to avoid Wick. I’m sure, too, that even though he could become small for a period of time, the tunnels and corridors were becoming claustrophobic. But I didn’t want Borne going outside.

  Sometimes, when my parents had looked at me in an adoring way, I felt the weight of their love and stuck my tongue out like a brat. Now I looked at Borne in the same way.

  * * *

  The brightness of the outside surprised me, shafts of light cutting through at odd angles. I’d taken three or four different shake-off routes and crawled the last hundred feet through a tunnel that bruised my sides just to make sure no one could figure out my point of origin. Emerging, the light made me squint, but I welcomed the blunt heat after so long inside. This might be the Magician’s territory, but unlike the Mord proxies, the Magician did sleep, and her control was more like an insurgency, since she could not combat Mord direct.

  It was a residential neighborhood but looked like it had been bombed or held by an army before the end. Anyone squatting since had left no mark, because to leave a sign was to invite predators. Blackened supporting walls punched full of ragged holes. Doors gone, hinges gone, too. Few roofs. Brittle old telephone poles cracked at the stem leaned up against the walls of rows of dead houses with tiny dust squares for lawns. The poles could have been felled by Mord, all crooked at the same angle. Where the dust and sand had taken the street, the poles helped orient me.

  As I moved across that stillness, I would be vulnerable, even if I stuck to the shadows of those useless walls, kept the sun to my back when I could. I deliberately chose paths where I saw no one, except from afar. A few souls resting on a stoop, the house behind them a litter of fallen beams. Two people running away, looking over their shoulders. A powerfully built man in black robes casually chopping at something with an ax—firewood, flesh? I didn’t linger to find out.

  It was never that the city in those days lay still or seemed quiet because no one lived there; only that you could not always see them or evidence of their movements. Few lived well, few lived happily or long. But we did exist, and when beyond the sanctuary of the Balcony Cliffs I always tried to remember that people slept there, hid there, had burrowed down deep, or were waiting for me or someone like me to venture past—trigger a trap or snare, or shadow me to see if I had hidden food or biotech somewhere.

  I crossed an intersection, running low, bent over, to the next place of concealment. I entered through door-size holes blasted in walls that must have been made to allow safe passage under threat of long-ago sniper fire. Lizards scuttled away from me, and there was just my quickened breath and the smell of sweat and the scuff of shoe against dusty gravel. Just the yellowing remains of someone’s attempt at a vegetable garden, a few clotheslines strung up out of sight of the road that in their tautness seemed new, not old.

  I came to the edge of a courtyard and a peculiar sight. For anywhere but here. Three dead astronauts had fallen to Earth and been planted like tulips, buried to their rib cages, then flopped over in their suits, faceplates cracked open and curled into the dirt. Lichen or mold spilled from those helmets. Bones, too. My heart lurched, trapped between hope and despair. Someone had come to the city from far, far away—even, perhaps, from space! Which meant there were people up there. But they’d died here, like everything died here.

  Then I realized they were not astronauts but only looked like astronauts because the sun had bleached the contamination suits white, and I felt perversely less sad. I couldn’t tell what had happened. Perhaps they’d been doctors sent to fight some epidemic in the last days before chaos and then the Company. Perhaps they’d been something else entirely. But they were planted here now and grew strangeness from their faces, and I didn’t trust them. I didn’t trust that they’d been here a month ago. I didn’t trust who had planted them like that, even though they might be long dead or just long gone. Who or what might be lurking down below, in the dirt and sand.

  Approaching was a foolish idea, what created carrion, so I took in the details with my binoculars. So posed. So little like life. The gloves over the bones of their hands were store-plundered and didn’t go with the suits. I thought I saw movement in a faceplate, a reflection of someone behind me, turned, saw nothing. But the feeling remained, and I always trusted that feeling.

  There are tricks to flushing out a wa
tcher. The most obvious is to stop, half-turn, and bend to tie up your bootlaces—enough to catch out an innocent or inexperienced or just incompetent watcher. Or, if they mean you harm, it will flush them out because they think you’re vulnerable, distracted.

  Another hint of movement behind me, coming from the corner I’d just peered around to get to the courtyard. But it stopped immediately or became something else. A strange thought, but I was beginning to trust my strange thoughts again.

  Behind me and to the left lay rows of houses smashed to hell, more single-story houses on the right, the dust road in the middle.

  I took a spider out of my pack, shoved it in my pocket, then, avoiding the courtyard of dead astronauts, quick-turned down the next side road with houses that were still intact, then used a hill of rubble to clamber up onto a gently steepled roof. I needed a bird’s-eye view, even if there was a twinge in my knee and a weakness in my shoulder to tell me climbing was a bad idea.

  I lay on my stomach atop rough tile and splintered wood, a faded, tired heat rising from the roof into my body. The roof was damaged but stable. The sky beyond was a burnt blue, dissolving into almost-dusk. A mirage of delicate fracture lines in the distance promised mountains. But there were no mountains as far as we knew. That was just the sky lying to us.

  Below I could see down the stacked rows of tombstone houses, which along with the roads conspired to form a ragged intersection or X in front of me. At the fringe, I could even see the pupa heads of the dead astronauts in their freakish courtyard.

  I felt exposed despite my vantage, transfixed by a sense of triangulation and old scores to settle—an exhilarating sense of spying, of being a spy, or even a sniper that made me uncomfortable. A height, too, on a roof, that in this city wasn’t what it might have been. Mord could swoop down to pluck me up before I had a chance to pluck something below—or, less poetic, Mord’s proxies clamber up for a frolicking dismemberment.

  So many minutes passed with me as a pretend horizontal statue that there was relief when I saw something I didn’t understand at first: a shape coming up the street. I tensed and made myself smaller against the angle of the roof, staring into the light and shadows.

  Someone tall in dark robes was walking toward me. Someone with a pointy, wide-brimmed hat pulled down very low. The floppy hat spun and glittered, and the gait was oddly fluid and disjoined; later I realized it resembled a baby’s clumsy walk but in a man’s body. The arms of the man hung out at his sides and the hands flopped as he walked. The too-pale hands seemed unimportant, as if the torso and legs were real but the arms were just there to complete the illusion.

  Trailing this figure at a distance: a small animal, peering and peeking from the corners like I was peering and peeking from the roof. It had outsize tall ears and a rasping pink tongue, and my binoculars confirmed it for a kind of fox, but with strange eyes. A curious creature out wandering? Seeking carrion? Or a spy, a watcher? For whom or what? Whatever it was, it had instincts like mine, and all of a sudden looked up and spotted me, and then it was gone as if it had never been there.

  A few more steps of the figure it had been following, and the fear in my gut turned into a wordless chuckle, and then irritation and concern. I knew I was looking at Borne in a disguise. Except he wasn’t wearing clothes—he’d taken it one step further and just grown clothes from his skin. The hat was his head and the stars were his eyes, transformed into a pattern.

  I leaned over the roof when he was one house away. I still wasn’t going to stand up and give anyone a silhouette to target.

  “Borne,” I said.

  Borne, startled, looked up.

  “Oh my!” he exclaimed. “Oh my!”

  Then he made himself large, larger, spun like a corkscrew, brought himself springlike up to roof level, so the magic hat could stare at me as if nearsighted. I almost lost my purchase on the roof.

  “Borne!”

  “Rachel!” He sproinged back to street level, looking up at me.

  “Borne.” I felt dizzy in the aftermath. He had grown more since the morning, clearly.

  “Rachel. You weren’t supposed to see me.”

  “You aren’t supposed to be here! It’s not safe.”

  A twinge of irritation from Borne, a new thing, from just the past week. “If it’s not safe, why did you go?”

  “That’s my business. You disobeyed me. You followed me like someone not nice. Not nice!” Even though Borne still waffled between childlike and adult states, he’d never grown out of “not nice.” Never not wanted to be nice.

  “I know.”

  Downcast. But was he really? There was still something too elated about him. He’d become elated, and no punishment could un-elate him if the whole wide, horrible world hadn’t. And under my gruffness, there was something too elated about me, out in the world again. Maybe he sensed that.

  Borne’s clothes fell away, and he was again a six-foot hybrid of squid and sea anemone, with that ring of circling eyes. I was rattled, drew back, reached for a beetle, stopped myself. He never looked so alien as he did in that moment, naked and alone on the street, even though it was how I knew him back at the Balcony Cliffs. Nothing and nobody has ever looked more like it didn’t belong.

  I had the impulse to leave him there, on that dusty street, leap across as many rooftops as possible to get away from him. That my life would be simpler, better, if I let him become someone else’s problem. But the sense of loss that swept in behind almost made me stagger, there on the roof. I couldn’t do it.

  The air had a sudden weight to it, which made me think, irrational, that Mord must be drawing near, so I came down swiftly from the roof. And I didn’t want to be out there after dark, either.

  “What were you disguised as?” I asked.

  “Nothing much,” Borne said, not looking me in the eye with his eyes, which was quite a feat.

  “What?”

  “A wizard,” he said grudging, bashful. “From one of the old books in the Balcony Cliffs.”

  “Which one?”

  “I don’t know. A lot of them have wizards. They all seem the same.”

  “They all cast different spells, though,” I said.

  “Do they? Is Wick a wizard? Does he know spells?”

  “I’m a wizard,” I said. “The spell I know is how to get you back to the Balcony Cliffs.”

  “That’s not a spell,” Borne said, but he didn’t sound certain.

  Wizards were not magicians, at least. If he ever fell under the spell of a magician, we were all lost.

  “What am I going to do with you, Borne?”

  I asked him because I didn’t know. I’d been stupid to think I could keep him safe from contamination by the city. If there had been time, I would have given him a lecture right then on the dangers all around us. I would have told him what I hadn’t up to that point: That most scavengers would see him as the ultimate scrap. That no one who saw him would think of him as a person but as a thing.

  On the way back, we passed the dead people in their contamination suits one last time, and Borne waved to them and said goodbye.

  As if he’d known them, as if they’d been his good friends.

  * * *

  A little later, I felt a prickling on my neck, the sensation of eyes upon us. Soon enough I identified the source, hanging back, shadowlike, padding on soft paws.

  “That fox keeps following you, Borne. Should I be worried?”

  “He’s my pet,” Borne said.

  “That fox is not your pet. Do you pet him?”

  “No, because he won’t let me.”

  “Do you know why he follows you?”

  “I told him to.”

  “You told him?”

  “No, of course, I didn’t tell him. That would be preposterous. Unholy. Stupid. Not cool.”

  “Why not sneak up on him and eat him like a lizard?”

  “No, he won’t let me,” Borne said.

  “Even if you lie in wait?” I had nothing personal against
the fox, but it and its brethren had begun to bother me.

  “He’s always on,” Borne said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “He’s always on, like a lightbulb. He’s not dim like most things.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked again. No one had lightbulbs anymore. How did Borne know about them?

  Borne didn’t reply, and the next time I looked back, the fox wasn’t there.

  But I still took evasive maneuvers, doubled back, and made sure by the time we took the secret door into the Balcony Cliffs that no living creature could be observing us.

  * * *

  Back in my apartment, I woke with a start in the middle of the night, realizing that Borne might have been talking for a while. He was curled up next to my bed, a self-contained sprawl of short green-glowing tentacles, the myriad eyes darting across his body. Half of them watched me. Half watched the door. I had the fading impression he’d been peering at me from much closer just moments before.

  “… but I don’t know why they were following me and I didn’t know it would be so dusty out there and so big. It was so big out there. There was even sky. A huge sky. Such a huge sky it was like it was going to fall down on me. And all of those … walls. All of the walls. And the little things following me and it was hot. Hotter. It was hotter. Definitely hotter. I wasn’t thirsty, but I could’ve been thirsty. Because it was hot. And wide and big. That’s a city. That’s what a city looks like in person. Like that. Like that.

  “And there were astronauts. Buried in the ground.”

  He would remember the dead astronauts for a long time. In the next few weeks he even took three dolls and pretended to have conversations with them. They’d just come back from the moon and were helping to replant the Earth, or some such nonsense. Borne had so many tentacles, he could’ve put on a complicated play if he’d wanted to.

  I rolled over and tried to ignore his ceaseless patter. Of course it had been sensory overload for him. Of course it had been something new. I’d have to get used to that or Borne’s surprise would always be surprising me. Yet when I did get used to it, I would miss sharing that with him, even as it would be a relief. To be dulled to someone else’s perpetual sense of awe was a kind of gift.