Borne

by Jeff VanderMeer

  “They’re dying, Borne,” I said as I watched it. “They’re being killed.”

  “Not here anymore. Not there, either.”

  Where was there? Did I want to know?

  “When are they doing this?”

  Another strange question. “Now, Borne, they’re doing it now. Right in front of you.” But I had the idea that his gaze was seeing more than mine.

  “Why are they doing this, though? Why?”

  I didn’t have a good answer for that one. I didn’t at all. Or for why Borne no longer seemed frightened by it all.

  But now a Mord proxy was pawing up the stairs to investigate the roof, and the tremors of that passage left no doubt what would happen on the roof. To me. To Borne.

  “Borne,” I said, “can you hide us?”

  “Hide?! Hide from what?” Something in my urgency had triggered urgency in his reply.

  “From the bear.”

  “Bear?”

  “The thing coming up the stairs!”

  “Hide.” At a critical moment, I seemed to have hit a communication glitch. A translation problem.

  “Like a rock. Can you pretend to be a rock, with me inside—with room for me to breathe inside?” I already knew he could be a rock. So, why not? We had no other choice.

  “You told me not to be a rock,” Borne pointed out.

  “Forget that! Forget it! You can be a rock now. Can you be a rock?”

  “Yes, I can be a rock!” Borne said, enthusiastic. “I can put you in a rock.”

  “And can you stay a rock no matter what happens? Can you stay a rock? Be quiet as a rock?”

  The bear bounded up the stairs at a blistering pace now, recovering. The bear would be out on the roof in a moment. Just a moment more.

  “I can stay a rock.”

  “Can you smell like a rock too? You must smell like a rock.”

  “I can!”

  “Then do it—now!”

  “Yes, Rachel!”

  Borne unfurled, uncurled, and rose high and came down like a crashing wave, and me tumbling in the middle of it all, bent over and half crushed by cilia and rubbery flesh.

  I could see nothing.

  I could do nothing.

  I was trapped within Borne, hoping that on the outside he looked like a rock.

  * * *

  I did not do well in truly dark places. They reminded me of other times I’d had to hide, as a child, with my parents. Confined. In a pit. In a tunnel. In a closet. Waiting to be discovered, uncovered, given away. Staying silent, still, trying not to breathe, until the danger had passed. My panic in such situations had gotten worse when I reached the city, not better.

  The huffing of the bear came close, closer, a rabid snarl of pure animal bloodlust, but still the strangled words behind that, the muffled lunge of language forming: “Drrrkkkkkkk. Drrrrrrk. Drrrrrk.”

  I was having trouble breathing, trouble controlling my breath. I was in a situation no human being had ever been in and a situation that human beings had experienced for thousands of years. In one world, I was cocooned inside a living organism that still defied explanation, that was, no matter how I loved it, a mystery to me. In the other world, I was inside a cave trying to hide from a wild animal. The depths of the familiar and the unfamiliar were colliding. Disoriented, I saw again the fox’s strange eye. I saw again the dead astronauts. I saw the odd bit of meat left as a trap for me. I saw Mord’s shuddering flank.

  I wanted Wick then. I wanted Wick to be there on the rooftop, to tell me what to do beyond what I had done already. I wanted Wick to make things easy and to make the Mord proxy go away. Surely there was something he would know how to do. Borne was just a child. Borne was just a rock.

  A moment more, as the bear circled the Borne-rock, and the claustrophobia would have sent me over the edge. I would’ve cried out, I would’ve begged Borne to release me. It was as if I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think.

  But Borne sensed this, Borne knew what was happening within and without. The space widened and a dull green light came from the flesh walls all around to let me see and a flesh book extended out of the wall and on a shelf that formed I saw a flesh telephone.

  The telephone shook like it was ringing. I picked up the receiver.

  “Hello,” I whispered.

  “This is Borne. This is Borne calling you.”

  “I know,” I said. I felt like a child on a pretend phone, having a chat with an imaginary friend.

  “You don’t even need to make sound. I’ll hear you if you mouth the words,” Borne told me.

  “What is going on outside,” I mouthed, even as Borne lurched a bit from some push off to the left of me.

  “The bear is circling me. The bear just pushed me and I rolled a bit like a rock. But only a bit. Because I’m a rock, not Borne.”

  “Good. Maybe the bear will go away.”

  “Should I be afraid, Rachel?”

  “Are you afraid, Borne?”

  “I worry the bear might eat part of me.”

  “Bears don’t eat rocks.”

  “I worry that if I worry too much about the bear eating part of me that I will stop being a rock and then the bear might eat me.”

  “You. Must. Be. A. Rock.” I willed Borne with all the force of every secret thought to continue to behave like a rock.

  “I am going to end this call,” Borne said. “I think the bear is about to do something else. Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye, Borne,” I mouthed.

  Goodbye Borne, and hello Borne all around me.

  Borne lurched dangerously and I put out my arms to keep my balance. I was terrified that no matter the illusion, the bear would eat through Borne to the center, to me, and we would both die here, on the rooftop, for Wick to eventually find.

  A shudder, a recoil, a head-over-heels moment, and again Borne was tight and close, leaving only a globe of air around my head. The light was gone along with all of the fake things he’d created to put me at ease, and I lay there, panting, as the skin of Borne around me, the flesh of Borne, went prickly and rigid again and the cilia that rubbed up against me turned into tiny mouths that screamed into my clothes, arms and legs and hair. Borne was screaming silently into his own body because he could not scream on the outside.

  I had a horrible panicking, instinctual moment where I realized that the bear might be able to smell me, inside the rock, and I kicked out, flailed out, then went still because each movement made Borne constrict on me more, and it hurt to breathe.

  I could feel the vibration of Mord proxy paws and Mord proxy jaws biting into Borne. I could sense the bear hugging and squeezing and mauling the top of Borne. Excavating the rock. Savaging the rock. And me a dead person in a living coffin, preparing to be revealed as alive, to be face-to-face with the enormous broad furry head of a bear. To meet Mord’s emissary. To meet death.

  Came the prying snarl. Came the toothsome growl, so thick and loud it permeated every surface, seemed to shake my bones out of alignment. Came the huffing after.

  But then the bear sounds receded and I felt through the floorboards the padding away of a great weight.

  When that weight transferred to the stairs, when I could feel nothing, hear nothing, I whispered, “Borne. Borne are you there! Are you all right?”

  The cilia had stopped screaming. The flesh had stopped responding. Nothing about the Borne around me seemed alive. I could as easily have been in something inert—in an emergency space capsule ejected from an exploding starship far from Earth or in a one-person submarine deep beneath our deadly river, surviving within a pocket of air that would soon exhaust itself. There was that sense in my lungs of having plunged deep underground, of being so far from the surface of anything that I had no idea how I might emerge. If I would have the sick, terrible task of digging my way out of Borne.

  “Borne!” I risked a louder voice.

  There came an accumulated reply, a voice from everywhere and nowhere: “I am here, Rachel. I am here. I am still a ro
ck.”

  “Are you hurt?” I mouthed.

  “Parts of me I cannot feel,” Borne said. “Parts of me are gone.”

  “Keep still,” I said. “Keep still until they’ve left.”

  “It is easier to keep still now,” Borne said, “when there is less of me to move.”

  He sounded odd, not just damaged but puzzled. His own wounding puzzled him.

  * * *

  In the old world, when I emerged with my parents from secret rooms or tunnels or caves or closets, we knew what we were returning to—the same place we had left, as dangerous or as safe as before. We had hidden so we could remain in that world, were saying we believed in that world no matter what. Because we had no choice. Because there was no better or worse world, there was just the place we came out into.

  But when I emerged from Borne, out onto the rooftop again, I did not feel the same way. We had waited until Borne told me the Mord proxies had truly gone and all that remained below were the kinds of scavengers that would scatter at our approach. The cast-off biotech that could move, well or not so well, that came out nocturnal.

  We had waited until nightfall, even then, and so when I stood outside of Borne the world had changed in more than one sense. It was not just that Borne had shielded me rather than the other way around. It was not the change in the sky.

  Pieces of Borne had been torn from him by the Mord proxy in its suspicion. These pieces had bounced like rock, settled on the rooftop like rock, but now quivered and flexed like hands opening and closing, reformed as Borne flesh.

  The Borne that faced me was, even in that dim light, scarred and misshapen. He had returned to his normal size and shape, the one that looked like an upside-down vase, that combined attributes of a squid and a sea anemone, but he had a slumped, subdued quality that I’d never seen in him before.

  I winced to see that his left side was fissured and purpling-black and the ring of eyes, darkly luminous, circled his body in a haphazard way, like a rotting carnival ride one loose bolt away from spinning off into the crowd. He had a smell like turpentine and rotting fish sticks and moldy bandages.

  “I’m sorry, Borne,” I said, feeling shaky. “I shouldn’t have brought you out here.”

  Somehow they had known. Somehow they had known where we would be—but which ones? The ferals or the proxies? I was unwilling to accept that this had just been coincidence or bad luck. And also tumbling through my mind, an awful sense of responsibility: that if Borne hadn’t moved out, if Borne hadn’t pretended to be more like an adult, I might not have taken the chance.

  “It’s okay, Rachel,” Borne said. “It’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not okay.”

  Borne’s eyes flashed up at me, and another new thing: anger, and not over me saying no to him. This was a real thing, an adult emotion that had never been there before. It expressed itself through an orange-red glow just visible at the core of him. Who knew if red meant caution to Borne, but he knew it meant that to me.

  “It is okay,” Borne said. “I need to learn. I need to know.”

  “But not by being hurt.”

  “It’s not being hurt that hurts,” Borne said.

  Borne might be alien to me, he might have more senses, he might do things no human could do … but I thought I understood what he was saying. (Although, did I, really?) He knew now that he could be harmed. He knew now that he was vulnerable. No joy would be the same for Borne. No playfulness, either. Because behind it would be this certain knowledge: that he could die.

  “I’m tired, Rachel,” Borne said. “I need not to move for a while.”

  “That’s okay,” I said, and it was. If we had to make this rooftop our home for a few hours, I was prepared to do it.

  It had cooled as the sun disappeared and the stars came out across an unusually cloudless sky. We were silent for a long time, and I made no move to go downstairs to recon. Borne needed my attention, but I also think we both dreaded going downstairs. Neither of us wanted to experience the aftermath up close, even in the dark. But Borne was also looking up at the stars, all of his attention drawn there.

  Borne was reaching out a tentative tentacle, as if to touch the stars.

  He must have known he couldn’t, but I still said, “You can’t touch them!”

  “Why not? Are they hot?”

  “Yes, they are. But that’s not why. They’re very, very far away.”

  “But my arms are so long, Rachel. My arms can be as long as I want.”

  “That might be so, but…” I trailed off when I realized Borne was joking. He had a little tell when he joked—or it was actually a big tell. Some of his eyes would drift to the left, a particular cluster. He couldn’t control that.

  “Diabolical,” he said, still captivated by what lay above. “Diabolical. Deadly. Delirious. Deep.” Four new words he’d been trying out. Except he had not learned “diabolical” from me, and I felt a twinge. Some book, some other source.

  A normal night sky, but I was attuned to Borne in that moment and I saw it from his eyes—like a rush or an onslaught. Because as far as I knew, he had never seen the night sky so unguarded before—glimpses, maybe, from the Balcony Cliffs at dusk or in his books. So many stars, so little light from the city to disguise them. It was just like I remembered it from our island sanctuary so long ago. Walking down the beach and not needing a flashlight because the stars were so strong.

  A glittering reef of stars, spread out phosphorescent, and each one might have life on it, planets revolving around them. There might even be people like us, looking up at the night sky. It was what my mother said sometimes—to be mindful that the universe beyond still existed, that we did not know what lived there, and it might be terrible to reconcile ourselves to knowing so little of it, but that didn’t mean it stopped existing. There was something else beyond all of this, that would never know us or our struggles, never care, and that it would go on without us. My mother had found that idea comforting.

  Borne’s many eyes became stars as he watched them, and his skin turned the color of velvety night, until he was just a Borne-shaped reflection. So many eyestalks arose from him that his body flattened away to nothing, into an irregular pool of flesh across most of the roof, the edge lapping up against my boots. I could still see how he had been injured, because he looked like a circle that had had a bite taken out of it. Each eyestalk ended in a three-dimensional representation of a star, and the stars clustered until he was a field of stars rising from the rooftop, forming nebulae and galaxies, and a few fireflies like meteorites across the depth and breadth of him.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said, from across the star field of his body. “It’s beautiful.”

  For once what he thought of as beautiful really was beautiful. It was as if we had become closer even as he exhibited more alien attributes, but I quashed that with an instant of wariness. Was he truly without guile? Wasn’t this repetition because of my reaction about the polluted river? But even if I suspected “beautiful” was just him making conversation or in some other way for my benefit, I knew that he’d taken this form to begin to heal, that there was something comforting about it, something that helped him.

  “What are they?” Borne asked. “Are they … lights like in the Balcony Cliffs? Or … electrical lights? Who turned them on?” So whatever he’d seen in books hadn’t explained stars. At all.

  “No one turned them on,” I said, realizing after I’d said it that I’d just discounted thousands of years of religion. But it was too late to turn back.

  “No one?”

  “We’re on a world,” I told him, not knowing what gaps existed from his reading. “We’re on a world that revolves around a star, which is a giant ball of fire. So enormous that if it weren’t so distant we would all be dead—burned up. We call it the sun—and the sun is what you thought wasn’t nice when it shone so bright on you the other day. But all of those points of light above are also suns, even farther away, and they all have worlds, too.”

/>   My eyesight had gotten blurry telling Borne this, the aftershock of our ordeal hitting me.

  “All of them? Every single one? But that’s like hundreds.”

  “Thousands. Maybe millions.”

  Across the star fields of Borne’s body there coalesced one great sun in the center, also atop a stalk. Heretical was his astronomy at this point. He’d become metaphorical or metaphysical or just silly.

  “But that’s incredible,” Borne said, quietly. “That’s amazing. That’s devastating.”

  Then something began to blot out the stars, to turn that glittering, shining brilliance into a great and final darkness.

  “And what is that?” Borne asked, as if it was something normal, something else he didn’t know about yet, and he trusted me to tell him, to let him know what to think about it.

  I was speechless, because for an instant I thought the world was ending, that fate had conspired to put us on that roof to watch the end of … everything.

  Then I realized what we were seeing, and I couldn’t help a stifled chuckle. Oh, this was rich! Because it was the end of the world.

  “What’s so funny, Rachel?” An edge to that voice as Borne withdrew from the edge of my toes, drew himself up into his normal form, still sagging, still wounded.

  “That’s Mord,” I said.

  Yes, it was Mord—floating and diving across the night sky, high up, so huge that even from a distance he blotted out the stars. Across the night sky the giant bear Mord glided, seething, and we could hear faint rasps and roaring from the stratosphere, the choking gasps of his rage. Snuffing out first this constellation then that one, his form as it occluded the stars making me aware of them again. His was the greater darkness, and although I feared him and hated him and despised him, Mord was still, in that moment, the purest reflection of the city.

  “Moooooorddddddddddd,” Borne said in a kind of hissing way, and I saw even in the reflected light that every inch of Borne’s unscarred surface had become sharp, jagged, pointed like spears and spikes, and the eyes now revolving tracked Mord’s obliterating progress like gun emplacements tracking aircraft. Strafed Mord’s position with analytics and calculations and trajectories.