Borne

by Jeff VanderMeer

  “He’s very far away,” I said, in a soothing tone. “He can’t hurt you.” Neither statement was entirely true.

  “That is what you mean by Mord proxy,” Borne said. “This is the source.”

  “Yes.”

  “They are his children.”

  “In a way, yes.”

  “Why would he let his children do that to other children?”

  I didn’t have a good answer for him, but I was sure that Borne had absorbed enough about Mord from me and from Wick that he had an idea of what he was looking at. We had turned Mord into the boogieman in his imagination, the monster under the bed. Don’t go outside, don’t do this, don’t do that because: Mord. But now Borne had been mauled by one of Mord’s emissaries, and he was trying to understand Mord. The real Mord.

  Mord continued to dip and glide and wheel and drop across the sky like a god.

  “Mord is beautiful,” Borne said with disdain. “Mord is strong. Mord is not nice.” From his tone, I believe Borne was beginning to parody his own innocence.

  “Mostly not nice. Remember the not-nice part. Avoid him.”

  “He kills the stars,” Borne said. “He kills the stars and brings darkness.”

  “The stars all come back, though.”

  “But not the people down below.”

  You killed four of them yourself, back at the Balcony Cliffs, I wanted to say. But didn’t.

  WHAT WE BROUGHT BACK TO WICK

  Escaping death made me giddy as we snuck back into the Balcony Cliffs, and Borne giddy because he saw me being that word and because I was trying to distract him from his pain. If pain he felt; he wouldn’t tell me if it hurt.

  Life took on a bright and shining glow after being so newly almost dead. I was also giddy with a kind of don’t-care anger because I had stumbled upon a secret when we had finally gone down to the factory floor, one I had to bring back to Wick because it belonged to him.

  Down those drab corridors we walked tall and then would be bent over with guffaws—which is how I knew I was my father’s daughter, for that was his way, too. To be “doubled over” with his laughter or his grief. For during the trek back, Mord had gone in our estimation from “spectacular” to “buffoonish,” his star-blotting the work of a clumsy, maniacal floating bear.

  “Whoever heard of a floating bear?” I told Borne. “That’d be like finding a plant that was actually a talking octopus.”

  Borne latched on to a word he hadn’t heard before. “Buffoon!” he said with enthusiasm. “Foon buff! Buffalo balloon!” I knew that word would distract him, that he would be turning it over in his head for a few minutes at least, wouldn’t be thinking about the bears, just mutating “buffoon” until it was unrecognizable.

  “Yes,” I said. “Buffoon.” Sobering a bit. Joking around with my friend Borne, who seemed no different after having moved out. Who had saved my life and his own, and suffered in the process.

  “Buffaloon.”

  It’s not that Borne wasn’t genuine. No, he was always genuine. But he took his cues from me, had been learning how to react from me primary, and the world and books secondary. And I was determined that, for a few hours at least, Borne being hurt wouldn’t mean being defeated.

  If I hadn’t been giddy, Borne wouldn’t have expressed a “headlong happiness.” He wouldn’t have danced up to Wick by the swimming pool, danced around Wick on that nimble set of cilia—or taken it into his head to “get shallow,” as he put it, and spread out his body weight before surging up the wall and halfway up the cathedral-like ceiling, there to peer down through star eyes, as he replicated the night sky once more.

  “Hello, Wick,” Borne said from the ceiling. “Hello, Wick. I brought you a present. Rachel had me bring you a present. Hello, Wick.”

  We had burst in on Wick with such bravado that I hadn’t noticed how drunk Wick was, either on minnows or the more banal rotgut moonshine he traded for. But he was giddier than we were, and though I sensed danger in that, I was also too wired to care. We had made it back to the Balcony Cliffs. We were safe.

  “Wick, this is Borne. Borne, this is Wick,” I said.

  I had some stupid idea in the back of my head that Wick could look at Borne’s wounds. But what was Wick? A doctor? A veterinarian?

  “We’ve met,” Wick said. “We’ve talked. We’re practically brothers now.” A hint of something dark and self-deprecating in his tone.

  “Yes, Rachel! I know Wick. Wick knows me. I went over and was neighborly. I went over and said hi to him after I moved into my new apartment.”

  That brought me up short, Borne much too pleased about being neighborly.

  “In fact, Rachel,” Wick said, “Borne already seemed to know a lot about me before we even talked.”

  “Yes, Rachel talks about you all the time, Wick.”

  “So I gathered.”

  My giddiness was evaporating.

  I was just standing there, unable to believe that one of the things I’d covered with my giddiness—the anxiousness of two un-alike chemical compounds coming into contact for the first time—wasn’t the first time.

  Wick and Borne knew each other. Wick and Borne had talked. It felt like a betrayal, as if Wick had done something behind my back—even worse, that Borne had, though that was ridiculous. What could I have wanted more than for Wick and Borne to talk to each other, to find a way to get along?

  “What’ve you brought me, my friend?” Wick said, staring up at Borne and ignoring my surprise. “Have you brought me a very late lunch? Have you brought me spare parts? Have you brought me something else from the Company?” Wick was wearing mismatched flip-flops too large for him and plaid shorts and a white undershirt with a green smudge on it. He had probably been about to go to sleep.

  “Claaaaaaaaaaaw,” Borne said. “I bring claaaaaaaaaaaaaaw.” With a showman’s flourish, a pseudopod sproinged out from his flat body, much to Wick’s discomfort—he started, took a step back—while the stars withdrew and Borne’s normal eyes dotted his surface. The tentacle thus extended did indeed offer up to Wick: claw.

  Wick just looked at the proffered claw and I shuddered, seeing the blood-splashed factory floor all over again. Claw was almost as long as someone’s forearm and fearsomely curved and ended in a point both broad and sharp.

  “What. Is this?” Wick asked, wobbly. “Something from the holding ponds?”

  “You know what it is, Wick,” I said. I didn’t like this version of drunk Wick.

  “Claaaaaw! Glorious claaaaaaaw. From a Mordbear,” Borne said, and let the claw fall to the stone floor. Pseudopod retracted. Eyes alight with, brimming with, a kind of amusement, or was he bright with pain? “Now I want to expedition the ceiling.”

  “‘Explore,’ not ‘expedition,’ Borne.”

  There came a smell from him like the salt edge of a wave: clean, crisp, pure. Borne got even “shallower” until he couldn’t have been more than a quarter-inch thick and covered the ceiling.

  “Are you marrying the ceiling, Borne?” I asked.

  “I’m not married! I’m never getting married!”

  “Sure looks like you’re getting married.”

  “No! Just tasting. I’m getting tasted today. A lot.”

  “Tested.”

  “Toasted.”

  I knew he was recovering, that somehow going shallow helped, that tasting helped. I could see the scars, the mark of Mord upon him, realized all over again how traumatic the rooftop had been for him, despite his protests that he “would be fine.”

  Wick had picked up the claw, was turning it over in his hands as he stumbled to a chair next to his vat of swampy elixirs. The pool was dark tonight, a kind of mumbled bubbling close to its surface, a subdued green glow. Our light came from the fireflies and the lichen on the ceiling, most of which Borne now covered, although all during his exploration he thoughtfully turned on lights in his “face” to compensate.

  I pulled up a chair next to Wick. “We had a run-in today. With Mord proxies. It�
�s why we’re late.”

  “I guessed as much—from the claw.” Said as harsh as it sounded, preoccupied.

  I took a good long look at Wick, slumped there in the chair, holding the claw. Oh gaunt skeleton, oh drawn cheekbones and hooded, shadowy quality to the eyes. Seeing him that way, distracted and concerned and so thin, I couldn’t tell him that his first thought should have been to ask if we were okay. That his second should have been to hug me. That his third, if he was smart, was to know from the look on my face that we needed to talk.

  “Can’t you find out a lot from the claw?” My grasp of biotech and Wick’s abilities would always be fuzzy, but I had been imagining stupid things, like making a clone of Mord, but a good Mord, a responsible Mord, a Mord that helped us.

  “Yes, it’s a claw. From a bear—a Mord proxy. I can do a lot with it. Thanks.”

  “What’s wrong, Wick?”

  “Do you think it’s a good idea, bringing Borne in here?” He looked up at the ceiling, where Borne was expeditioning some texture, exploring some fireflies, and enveloping a nest of (non-biotech) spiders. “Leave the fireflies alone,” he told Borne.

  “You should know,” I said. “You’ve already talked. You’re already friends.”

  “Not friends. We talked in the corridor. If I had no choice about him being here, then I should at least get a sense of what he’s up to. I’ve never let him in here before. Have you?”

  “Yes, actually,” I admitted. “And Borne and I have walked through all of the corridors and all the secret places, and there have even been places Borne could squeeze into and I couldn’t.” Rubbing our stink on everything, I wanted to say, rebellious. Making sure to rub our stink on everything. “Which means that not only is your question too late but Borne could help us to uncover more of our home. With his help we might find more supplies hidden away under all that trash.”

  “Borne this, Borne that,” Wick said, tapping the point of the claw against the side of the swimming pool. “It was bad enough before and now you tell me this. Rachel: There is not now in the entire Balcony Cliffs, except this room, a single living creature other than you, me, and Borne. Doesn’t that tell you anything? I asked you to have him out of here. I—”

  “For all I know he’s been bringing the lizards to you, Wick.”

  “No, he hasn’t. He’s been bringing them to the mouth he doesn’t need.”

  “And neither Borne nor I are listening, Wick,” I said, because I wasn’t. Pests, vermin. Borne was just keeping the place clean. “Because we live here, too. We live here with you. Borne and me. Me and Borne and you. And isn’t he amazing? Can you deny he’s amazing?”

  Borne was currently using competing tentacle puppet heads to have an argument above us about the uses of “expeditioning” versus “exploring” and the differences between them, clearly for my benefit.

  “A work of art,” Wick said. “A genius.”

  Before that I hoped Wick hadn’t noticed Borne muttering about how Wick wasn’t as much of a “stick in the mud” as I’d said. That the swimming pool from above was “really cool but kinda hot, A-OK.” Had he discovered the remains of a treasure trove of teen heartthrob mags in the Balcony Cliffs?

  “So I say again, What’s wrong?”

  “Send Borne out of here first,” Wick said. “Get him out of here.”

  “No,” I said. He hadn’t realized it yet, but I was at the limits of my patience. In addition to being giddy and angry, I was exhausted and feeling the aches of our misadventure, and I needed sleep soon, to come down from the high of escape.

  Wick considered that, astonished me by tossing the claw into the swimming pool as if it meant nothing, had no value at all.

  “Okay, the hell with it,” he said, sounding so unlike Wick. “Why not?”

  He rummaged through a metal box and took out a fistful of alcohol minnows. Now I felt maybe he wasn’t so much drunk as in distress.

  “Here, Borne, have a minnow,” he said, and tossed a half dozen up into the air. Not nearly high enough, but it didn’t matter—Borne-bits reached down to pluck them out of the air anyway.

  “Ooooh, minnows for a claaaawww!”

  “Yes, Borne,” Wick said. “Minnows for a claw. You are generous.”

  Borne began to feast with what for him were polite gobbling noises meant to thank us. His slobbering made him sound like an old circus seal, and that annoyed me, too.

  “So now you know Borne so well you’re getting him drunk?”

  Wick spun his chair around so he was facing me. “They don’t have the same effect on old Borney-o. They just don’t. Biotech’s not the same as you. Most biotech’s unpredictable—more than you realize. Borney-o biotech becomes blotto … some other way. Here, have some,” and he threw a few minnows at me.

  The minnows were really more like salted sardines, but when you bit into them a soft minty coolness crept through your mouth, and then the alcohol, or alcohol equivalent, slid in behind, with a real chill to it, and the cold and the tart aftertaste were good. On a hot day, it felt great.

  “What didn’t you want to tell me with Borne here?” I asked after I’d crunched down on a couple of minnows. “Just spit it out.”

  Another pause, and then he began to launch into it, but in a Wick way: through a side door, through a maze.

  “Rachel, it’s too dangerous here now. At the Balcony Cliffs. Too dangerous on our own. You know that yourself from tonight.”

  “But you didn’t even ask what happened. You didn’t even ask.” I couldn’t keep the hurt from my voice, though it made me seem like a child.

  He winced. “Maybe because you’re safe. Maybe because you’re here and you made it back. Maybe because the Magician just sent me a message.”

  The chill of the alcohol couldn’t compete with the chill at the back of my neck, the way that news made me feel claustrophobic and itchy and not-right.

  “What did the Magician want?”

  “What we get is protection,” Wick said, ignoring my question. “We get supplies, food, water, more and better biotech. I work with her against Mord.”

  I was giddy all over again, but it was the giddiness of feeling your stomach drop as you plunged over an abyss, the wild, terrible thrill of everything going the wrong way up or down.

  “What does the Magician want in return?”

  Wick winced, looked down at his hands. “You won’t like it.”

  “Of course I won’t like it, Wick. You don’t even like it.”

  “She wants the Balcony Cliffs. And probably Borne-Borney-o up there. Because she’ll want access to all the biotech. Every last bit.”

  The Balcony Cliffs. Borne.

  The Magician wanted everything, including our souls.

  HOW I FIRST MET THE MAGICIAN AND WHAT SHE MEANT NOW

  The rumors about the Magician up to that point had come to me vast and unsubstantiated, because Wick was terse on the subject and I had few other sources. Some said she was homegrown, rising from the broken communities in the west, and that she had made the Company’s business her long area of study. That she had, early on, begun to gather up memories from anyone who could give her something useful—not just to sell but for any intel that might help her see what was going on inside the Company. She planned to use whatever she could glean against the Company. Until recently, that had seemed an idle threat. But when the time came, she knew enough to extort and bribe more tools and biotech off the last Company personnel holed up in the building, abandoned, eking out their existence complying with Mord’s demands.

  But others said the Magician had once worked for the Company or that she came from beyond the mountains that didn’t exist because they were so far away or that she came here because her ancestors had ruled the inland sea that was now salt and desert and next to nothing. They said she was cruel and just, that she was tall and short. They said whatever they wanted, because the elusive Magician so rarely showed her face.

  I had seen the Magician only once. She did not like to
be out in the open, and, as she became more powerful, made herself visible mostly through the ragtag army of people she had made into allies. She worked her power, Wick said, from the way she could reimagine parts of the city as hers, and we had no competing vision with which to fight back. Those places only had form and substance and boundaries because of her efforts, lacked structure otherwise. We gained our power, or at least survived, by rejecting those boundaries and those spaces. By ignoring her control. From wanting to live apart, in the Balcony Cliffs.

  The time I saw her I’d been driven to the far south to avoid a psychopathic scavenger. It was a day when I’d planned to take up my familiar position at Mord’s flank, had tracked him far to the west, once again into territory I’d not visited much, with the cracked skull of the observatory to my right as a landmark. But I lacked the nerve that day to latch on, to pull myself up into that besotted fur, and my adversary had taken that as a sign of weakness.

  To the south lay only the desolate plain and the Company building beyond it. On the edge before the plain, I veered to take refuge amongst some circular ruins on a ridge of hills. I had my binoculars in my pack and searched for evidence of my pursuer.

  Soon my attention was drawn to the hill opposite, where there was a similar circular ruin. Perhaps both had been cisterns, or both had been sentinel strongholds, but against that brown-gray stone shot through with lichen and yellow vines, for a moment only, I saw the outline of a tall figure gliding across the ancient stone wall. It was gone so fast I doubted, put it down to being overly alert for signs of the other scavenger.

  Not more than ten minutes later, I heard a kind of rustle or unfolding, and a voice came from beside me.

  “Hello, Rachel.”

  I had my knife out, cast about me, stabbing, turned in a circle but was alone. My blade passed through nothing and no one. The attack beetle I’d readied floated out and, whirring, fell harmless to the ground.

  “Put your knife away,” the voice said, husky, deep, but a woman’s voice. “Put it away. I’m not here to hurt you. If I was, you’d be dead.”

  I sent another attack beetle toward the direction of the voice. It divebombed the ground, landed on its back, circled there with its wings buzzing.