Borne

by Jeff VanderMeer

  “The closet is full.” But something he read in the expression on my face made him volunteer to get rid of the astronauts, so he added, “I’m sure I can find something better.”

  I didn’t inquire as to what “better” meant, and he never did remove the dead astronauts.

  * * *

  I could give Borne no semblance of a standard education because we had only what I could find in the Balcony Cliffs because who would risk salvage time to bring back books? So I showed him the biology text. I lied and told him that I had gotten it from my parents, and I wanted him to have it. That maybe we could go through the book together.

  The tendril had withdrawn and the big eye floated above the big smile once more. Borne was a kind of sibilant blue-green, seemed almost to reflect the waves of a sea he’d never seen, as if the water and surf were washing over him.

  “That’s kind, Rachel,” Borne said. “I do appreciate it—so much. But I’ve already read all of the books in the Balcony Cliffs. I’ve read them all and I think that might be enough for me to have read rather than to have lived.”

  “I don’t see much of a library in here.” A vaguely hurt comment, because I felt wrong-footed once more. I had already promised myself I wouldn’t ask him where he’d disappeared to, that to do so was somehow dangerous, but I felt a distance between us I associated with the intermittent beacon that was Wick, not me and Borne. Not the me and Borne that had run up and down the hallways of the Balcony Cliffs when I’d been recovering.

  “Oh, the stacks and stacks and stacks. No one needs the clutter. So much clutter. So many things to trip over. I have remembered it all. I read it all. I read everything.”

  I tried to think like Borne then: A very large invertebrate only getting larger, who needed room to stretch out. With skin that was more intelligent than mine. He wasn’t human, even if he was a person. He didn’t need what we needed. Which is why he had no furniture. Had it caused him mental anguish to be around so much clutter in my apartment?

  “But you must have questions.”

  I meant “in general,” but Borne merrily launched into specific questions.

  “Oh, yes, questions! How long have humans lived on this planet? And what have they accomplished? I can’t tell. You mentioned ghosts before. Do you believe in ghosts? Do you know if there is still a spaceship somewhere on Earth? There must be a spaceship somewhere, or two or three. Do you ever feel haunted? Do you ever find anything ‘spooky’? Who are ‘we’ and who are ‘them’? Did human beings ever colonize any other planets? How many human beings are still alive on Earth?”

  “Those are a lot of questions, Borne,” I said. I wasn’t sure which to answer first, or what my answers might be. The books I’d brought him were of little help, not appropriate for what Borne needed—or needed from me.

  “I’ve been haunted by them.” Hauntings came up a lot with Borne once he wasn’t a “child” any longer. I would come to realize a haunting meant something different to him. The landscapes he traversed looked nothing like what I saw, might to me seem like a bombardment of senses I couldn’t even imagine.

  “Who?”

  Borne swiveled his turret toward the dead men on the wall, shone a mist-like magenta light upon them. “Them. But not as ghosts … I see it, I taste it. All the contamination. The low-level radiation, the storage sites, the runoff. Every place is sick—there’s sick everywhere. I estimate I expend eighteen lizards a day keeping it off of me. It makes me be sure of my self every moment and keep track of my self.”

  I had looked forward to having adult conversations with Borne, and now I didn’t want them. I didn’t even quite understand what conversation we were having, and I didn’t want to be reminded of the ways my body was being tested every day in the city.

  But I tried twice more. First, I shared a schedule I had come up with, a schedule that, day by day, turned from one subject to the next. Basic math, language arts, hard science, soft science. It even included music and philosophy.

  Borne examined the piece of paper in his nub of a pseudopod; he hadn’t even done me the courtesy of extending a full tentacle but made me get up and hand it to him.

  “Hmmph,” Borne said. “Hmmph.” Outsize, hammy acting. Satirical sounds. He also hadn’t made any effort to appear to be reading the sheet, but I knew he had. This was Borne being rude on purpose.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Borne plays the piano. Borne dances. Borne sings. Borne recites poetry. Is that what you want? While I’m doing other, more important things, I guess part of me could do that for you. I guess I could find a way if it’s something you want.” Said in a flat, irritated tone that must have been as much an attempt at learning the inflections of my language as the words themselves.

  “But it’s for you! It’s something for you, so you can learn.” Not for me. Never for me. Not even for the memory of a schoolgirl in a far-distant city, in music class, in a fancy restaurant, playing on a real playground and dreaming of being a writer.

  “I’m learning every day, Rachel,” Borne said in exasperation, as if I could not see the most obvious things. “I read and sample and observe every day. It is what I do.”

  It is what I do.

  I pointed to the globe of the world, tried one last time. “Can I at least teach you about that?”

  This caught his interest, and he pulled the globe over, held it up in his muscular tentacles, hoisting it like it was a paper mobile. For the first time I thought of him as not just strong but formidable.

  “This place looks rocky, and I’d like to climb a mountain someday, and then down here are all of these lakes. Can you imagine it, Rachel? So many lakes. We have no lakes here at all. No lakes. I’d like to see a lake. Even a lake as a lark. I’d like to see a lark, too.”

  He began to excitedly ask specific questions about cities, about countries, about regions. But those places, most all of them, didn’t exist anymore with those boundaries, or those countries had been absorbed by other countries and then those larger countries had dissolved into anarchy and lawlessness and become smaller cells once again. Most of the cities had burned, in my recollection—were the kinds of places my parents never taught me about because it cost them too much to do so.

  Borne acted as if he’d been trying to solve a problem that had already been solved for us long ago, and I couldn’t help him with that, didn’t want to revisit it.

  * * *

  Finally, I stopped. I just stopped. The more I tried, the more Borne was becoming distant, disengaged, and the more I began to be taken aback by his stubborn refusal and on some level insulted by it. I had come here to educate Borne, but if I was honest I wanted to make sure I stayed close to him.

  Yet I also wanted Borne to be “normal,” to fit in, to be like a normal “boy.” I wanted this desperately, especially after the events of the past few days. And it struck me, too, that maybe I hadn’t kept up, that maybe it wasn’t just Borne’s physical growth that had accelerated but his mental growth, too. That, with no time to adjust, I still saw him as a child. That giant eye. That silly turret.

  Which led to my surrender, which led to my next question: “What can I do for you then, Borne? There must be something.”

  No more turret, but once again the upside-down vase design, the Borne Classic. He contracted so that my stool was pulled closer and closer to the ring of eyes, and his skin was like an electric storm at twilight, with shocks of lightning manifesting as silver cracks in his skin and a mottled darkness of deep, deep green sliding into black but also a startling glimpse of blue, as of a boat floating over clear water. The smell of him was sickly sweet then, like brandy mixed with crispy waffles lathered in butter and syrup.

  “There is one thing, Rachel,” he said. “One thing you said you’d do. Something you promised you would do.” There was a pleading quality to his tone.

  “Yes?” I nudged.

  “You could check the places I can’t feel anymore. You could tell me what’s happening there.”


  And I was struck dumb by the depths of my thoughtlessness.

  * * *

  So that’s what I did—check the places Borne couldn’t feel anymore—setting aside my books, shelving my thought of “educating” Borne, because it’s not what he needed. Doing what I’d promised to do the night the Mord proxy had attacked him. I felt awful.

  That’s the problem with people who are not human. You can’t tell how badly they’re hurt, or how much they need your help, and until you ask, they don’t always know how to tell you.

  * * *

  What to say about Borne’s body, or my inspection of it. He was all the things he could be—rough in places, smooth in others, bumpy and sandpapery in one area and as worn as river stone in another. The quadrants of Borne, the logic that held his body together and animated him, had a deep awareness of the tactile, and it was through touch that I began to understand his complexity—the circular tension of the suckers he could create, the waving stubby toughness of the cilia, which looked so delicate but were not, the utter indestructibility where he formed ridges, the glassy imperviousness of those eyes, which had a film over them that hardened as soon as the eye appeared and left only a millisecond before the eye was subsumed in the skin.

  Everywhere he felt like one thick muscle with no hint of fat, but also he could be diaphanous in places that spread like fans or webbing. Articulated there I found patterns that seemed too filigreed and ornamental to have purpose, and yet they did have purpose.

  With each new unfurling, Borne was letting me get closer to the heart of him, while he spoke not a word but let me find the wounds first myself. Nor did he change his scent, left all neutral but the touch of him, and the light … he changed the light so that it streamed from the top of his head like a fountain and sprayed across the ceiling and back down upon us, that I might better see him. Was this what it was like to touch something that no one had ever touched before, or rarely? Like a blue whale or an elephant? To understand that beyond the seeing eye, the knowing eye, there was such a wealth of unique touch? Such a different way to experience what came across in photos as wondrous enough?

  I found the defects easily but kept going to ensure that I missed nothing, that I uncovered each broken place. When I was done, I had discovered three hardened areas—a roughness with no give, a stubborn thickness that slashed through areas of rippling motion, paralyzed Borne’s normal functioning. When I had identified them, Borne confirmed they matched the areas he could not feel, and he changed the color around them to a deep burgundy, which leeched the color away from the places where he hurt. This left Borne almost unbearably white across those sections: a stretch of tentacle, a part of the side of his “face,” and then another patch far off on the periphery, on what I would call a skirt of his flesh.

  The imprint of Mord proxy fang, Mord proxy claw was clear to see there. The mark of Mord, like a brand. Less clear was the nature of the injury.

  “Borne, now I need you to answer two questions. The first is, do you know if that affected flesh is dead?” I meant “necrotic” but didn’t know if he knew the word. “And the second is whether there has been a spreading of the numbness since you were bitten.”

  Splayed out like that, fully exposed, under the fountain of light, Borne looked more human than he ever had, for reasons I can’t explain, despite the tentacles spraying out in one direction and the skirt in another and the central column of his presence and also various hunched-over assemblages of flesh under which the cilia writhed. It was in that mode that he felt the most familiar to me, in that moment when I knew him best.

  “The flesh is dead. I receive nothing from it. The numbness spread at first, but I sealed off the dead flesh. I sense no other contamination.”

  “Borne, do you understand the concept of ‘poison,’ of being poisoned?”

  “Yes, Rachel.”

  “Do you know if this substance, the contamination, came into your body when the Mord proxy bit you?”

  “Yes—it was then and no other time. I was alert to environmental contaminants, sealing them out. But I thought a bite was just dead or lost cells.”

  “You’ve been poisoned. I think the Mord proxy’s fangs or claws, or both, were coated in something poisonous.”

  As it turned out, I was right, and I had discovered another hazard to take note of in negotiating the world outside: Mord proxies were venomous as snakes. This poison had aided the Mord proxies in their fight with the Magician’s patrol, helped hasten the utter annihilation of the mods and homegrowns.

  “What should I do, Rachel? Am I in trouble? Am I going to die?”

  “No, you’re not going to die. But you may be in discomfort for a while. If you’re like other animals, it will become scar tissue and go away. But infection could occur, so you need to watch them, and let me know if those areas change.”

  “Infected? Change?”

  “Become inflamed.”

  “Inflamed?”

  “You know—like, see this scab.” I extended my forearm. I had gotten the bruises from stumbling on the stairs the night we’d been stuck on the factory rooftop. “See how it’s red and there’s some pus.”

  “Pus. Scab. Pussssssssscaaaaaabbbbbuh.” Such not-nice words.

  “Some pus is okay, but not a lot of pus. And you need to clean a wound if there’s pus in it, because it means the wound is infected. But you won’t die. But keep an eye on it.”

  “Not too much pus,” Borne said, and three tiny stalks extended near each wound and three tiny eyes budded from each to keep watch. Which, from past experience, meant Borne was making a little joke about sentry duty.

  “Something like that.”

  “Thanks, Rachel. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, Borne. Anytime.”

  I would worry about him now. I would worry about his safety, because I had no control over it anymore, with no guarantee I could keep him safer if I had control anyway. I would worry about his naïve sense of trust. I would worry about the gaps, “forget” to take my books back with me because I believed he still had so much to learn.

  * * *

  Before I left, Borne said, “I can’t stop, Rachel.”

  “Can’t stop what?”

  “Reading. Learning. Changing. That’s why I don’t need your books, Rachel. I’m learning too much too fast already. I feel it filling me up, and I can’t stop. So when you want me to learn more, it makes me … makes me…”

  “Stressed?”

  “Yes! That’s the word. Stressed. There is stress.”

  The Magician couldn’t stop what she was doing, I couldn’t stop what I was doing, Wick neither, and now Borne was telling me he couldn’t stop.

  “It’s okay,” I said, too relieved that I was back in Borne’s good graces to examine what he was saying. “It will be fine. I won’t force you to learn. But get rid of the dead astronauts.”

  “They’re burrowing, but we’re in no danger,” Borne replied.

  “What?”

  “Mord proxies. I can hear them.”

  I could hear nothing, and no one attacked the Balcony Cliffs that day, or the next, or the week after. But that didn’t mean he hadn’t heard them.

  HOW THE MAGICIAN MADE THINGS WORSE

  Perhaps I had hoped that if I ignored the Magician’s ultimatum, if I kept avoiding Wick’s attempts to discuss it with me, that both the ultimatum and the Magician would cease to exist, be driven from the city as if neither had ever existed, and some new path would shine out before us, showing us a way to keep the Balcony Cliffs and keep ourselves safe in the process.

  But the Magician had other plans.

  Ten days after I learned of the Magician’s ultimatum, Wick took me to a secret vantage near the top of the Balcony Cliffs, one that required climbing up an unstable wrought-iron spiral staircase, one so looped and tight it felt a bit like being a contortionist to ascend. But near the top, you came up into a shallow buried pillbox with enough room to stand. Vents in the ceiling led to the surfa
ce maybe twenty feet above. A trough of a passageway at our feet headed due west.

  It smelled pungent, like mold and earthworms, but a faint light bled out from the far end. We had to inch our way through it, narrow enough that our elbows clashed and the friction against our clothing made us sweat. The passageway led to a blind atop a high bluff, looking out from the eastern edge toward the rest of the city. A tight rectangle of a view so as not to be visible from below or above, but panoramic.

  Wick had intel, gleaned from someone who badly needed his memory beetles. I thought perhaps that information was false and Wick just needed a break from his swimming-pool vat, wanted a panoramic view to clear his head. But I went along.

  From our vantage there, peering through my binoculars, I can tell you these things were true: The crazy golden gleam of the sun off the cracked dome of the observatory to the northeast, the Magician’s stronghold, was almost blinding—and no longer alone. Below that artificial promontory and somewhat south the gleam had been joined by smaller glints that signified gun emplacements. They hadn’t been there three days ago.

  To the southwest lay the Company building, a bloated white oval, the vast egg that had spawned so much discontent and chaos, and yet still fed us at varying rates and in a variety of ways, even if we did not always like the feeding.

  At dead center from our vantage sat Mord, at a cleared intersection, cleaning his fur. Even dull or blood-covered or matted, that fur shone in the sun, and moving around that muted god-beacon in a rough arc we saw the burly shapes of Mord proxies, standing guard. Done cleaning his fur, Mord pulled a slender tree out of the ground, grasped the branches, and used the roots to scratch his back. Then he abandoned his sitting position to roll in the dirt. The earth-shattering roars and yawns that emanated from him then were all about scratching a good itch. Who knew how many skeletons lay crushed beneath his dust bath.

  Between, the contested ground, the low country: a wide expanse of buildings, courtyards, former commercial structures, museums, business districts, a scattering of trees and bushes, and the telltale muted orange-and-green veins of Company lichen that covered so much of the stone there. There you could see both the blueprint for a return of civilization, of the rule of law, of culture … and how much work that would take.