Borne

by Jeff VanderMeer

  No dwelling now cleared five stories, as Mord liked to be able to see when he went on a stroll and had brought much around him into compliance with his deranged building code. Some of this jumbled riot, which in places looked like a giant had picked it up and then rolled it across the plain, was broken and stacked while other structures revealed little of the trauma, the level of injury, that must lie within.

  That ground wasn’t simple, wasn’t dead or alive, but contested between the animate and the inanimate. Not just communities and scavengers invisible to us from the blind, but waiting there in the sandy soil: the Company life that had been discarded and dispersed like dandelion tufts. It waited for a touch—a drop of water or blood, say—to germinate and to be counted on the battlefield as loot. No one could say where this might happen or when, and so even a derelict, abandoned lot toxic with oil pools and black mold might in a week or a year or a century blossom into strange life.

  The sky above was simple, though: It belonged, all the fierce blue of it, to Mord, and wherever he alit and bestrode the ground, he owned that, too, even as he destroyed it. Belowground … well, the proxies now roamed there, wherever they could fit, but otherwise it was a reflection of the allies and enemies above, depending on the extent of tunnels and old subway systems and the basements of buildings now leveled and unremembered by the surface. The Magician’s growing influence led us to believe that there was an invisible wave rising from below that might in time wash us all away.

  Seeing the map revealed so nakedly made naked, too, the thought of a growing conflict—to rule the city—and what choices! We were so lucky, after such strife, to be able to choose between a homegrown tyrant in the Magician, who strove to win by any means, and a Company-grown tyrant in Mord, who held the city in stasis, us unable to do more than react to his whims. Neither imagined as rulers could long be tolerated. Yet we could not imagine what lay beyond them except, with a shudder, the specter of the Company itself rising once again from its own ashes.

  * * *

  As we watched there came a sound deep and sonorous, and then the sound again, and a third time. Mord raised his broad head, upon which we could almost have built another Balcony Cliffs, muzzle pointed toward the sun, that he might better scent the air, in that swaying, singsong way of ursines.

  Was this the sound of delicious protein being reckless enough to announce itself? Whatever Mord believed, he went from scenting to standing at full extent on two stout legs—so tall and so massive—until he’d identified the sound as coming from the observatory. Then, too light to be believed, Mord sprang up into the air while his proxy lieutenants stood on their hind legs as well and scented the air and huffed their approval. Up, up, he flew, until he was but a distant shadow in the heavens, a miraculous traveler, a psychotic inkblot, and then down, down with a plummeting certainty toward the source of the sound, the greatness of his bulk ever more solid.

  But as Mord’s dive straightened out, as he swooped in a curve toward the observatory, there came a ragged gout of flame from the gun emplacements. A stuttering fire and a roar not like a bear but like a mighty engine.

  The Magician had launched a missile at Mord. The missile came out of the ground corkscrewing and shrieking, incredibly fast, spewing black smoke out behind.

  Mord performed a maneuver I can only describe as skidding to a stop in midair, using his weight to reverse his position from headfirst attack to buttfirst scramble, now more vertical than horizontal. The missile adjusted, but with only a split second until impact, Mord’s maneuver was enough. The missile spiraled whistling past Mord’s head.

  We thought it had missed because the missile kept going and gouged the ground on the desolate plain facing the Company building, exploding in a spray of flames and smoke. A sparkle of stars that quickly became a spreading fire.

  But then we saw the side of Mord’s head burning, too, and realized the missile had grazed the side of his skull, the damage hard to gauge at that distance.

  Mord let out a howl of agony, an almost-human scream of rage, but the Magician’s second and third missiles were already headed toward him, and Mord accelerated straight up, toward the sun. Up and up he went, and the missiles veered toward his heat signature, despite a creaking resistance from gravity, at a ninety-degree angle.

  Would Mord reach the sun before the missiles found him? We watched, holding our breath. It struck me that the Magician might have succeeded in killing Mord. That Mord might die right now, right here, in front of us. And as much as we had all hoped for that day, some part of me, deeply perverse, was rooting for Mord to outwit the missiles, that it was too soon, we were not ready, none of us were ready.

  Still Mord blistered up toward the sun until he was again just a dot, a satellite hovering above the Earth—and still the missiles followed, but at a slower and slower speed.

  Until they faltered.

  Until gravity began to weigh upon them, take a greater and greater toll.

  Until they reached the moment of their greatest ascension, and fell off the trail.

  Fell back, inert, to Earth.

  That was an excruciating slow fall, too, trying to guess where they might land, these now-tumbling bombs, hoping and praying it would be nowhere near us. Thankfully, terribly, into that contested ground they smashed, exploded, and sent shock waves of flames shooting out to all sides. Some were extinguished immediately, but other fires crackled on and would for several hours, laying waste to what had already been half devastated, driving out those who had taken refuge and burning the rest.

  The Magician’s forces had no more missiles, and soon no missile launchers, for Mord came down again, this time more cautious, in silence from a position over the desert beyond the city. Low and silent, claws scraping and sparking the tops of desert rocks.

  Those still defending the observatory, the gun emplacements, could not have seen what we saw from our vantage. They might even have thought Mord had been killed by a missile high above, for from their position he must have seemed to disappear.

  At speed, fur buffeted by his acceleration so that he looked furiously in motion across his entire body, Mord approached from behind the observatory—came up and lunged over, and with a guttural battle cry, crushed the gun emplacements to dust, and to pulp any who still manned them. Then he demolished the observatory so that no glass at all remained and the solid bands of steel that ringed it were left contorted and deranged as if by a meteorite or the warping of extreme time, but in fact only because of Mord.

  Already the Mord proxies had begun to close in on the observatory, which did not bode well for the Magician’s future, and we could see their solid dark shapes clambering up the sides and tumbling inside as if to fill it up and render it down. I had an image in my head of that globe filling with blood until the Magician’s entire force had been reduced to a more essential form.

  But Mord was not finished. The crackling flame at his cheek had been snuffed out by his accelerations, but his fur there was singed and bloody and blackened, and the mute openings of his muzzle, the agony in one frantic paw held to his face, made it clear he now sought sanctuary to heal it. As the Mord proxies poured into the observatory district, their leader flew south, and at the wide ponds of runoff and offal and abandoned biotech next to the Company building, Mord laid down his head, put out the pain with water, and remained there long enough for an evil mud to form over the wound.

  But as he did so, some relic of the Company defenses lurking in the holding ponds, a leviathan gray with age and be-gilled and scaled, pulled itself up out of that murky water and attacked Mord from the side. It resembled more an iguana than a fish, with a gaping bite, an off-center lunge that seemed to admit to missing limbs. From our vantage it was a scene in some aquarium, a fight between random creatures that had been placed there by a god who had wanted to see if a shark could defeat a bear. But a brief fight, for Mord swatted the thing senseless with his paws and then ripped out the leviathan’s brain, and it slumped in the sand like somethin
g that had never been alive.

  This was a scene that seemed scarcely believable, and yet I have not told you the most miraculous true thing, how the day progressed from myth to mythic, which no retellings can embellish. For Mord, thwarted it seemed by the derelict condition of the observatory and the poor fight put up by the leviathan, and still smoldering with rage and in search of an easier revenge, turned his anger on the Company building.

  We watched in a shock I can barely describe as Mord tore open the top of the Company building like it was a sleek beehive and tossed the upper floors off to the far west, into the desert beyond the city. Now he was scooping out the contents and slurping his huge tongue through the maze of stone and plastic to get at the sweetness of flesh and blood, spitting out the rest. There was nothing human in his gaze in that moment, just the kind of hunger that could never truly be satiated. It was awful. People and creatures were jumping out of that exposed honeycomb to their deaths in the holding ponds, and he ignored them.

  A desperate squadron of helicopters, long-hidden and clearly in bad repair, tried to rise from the upper levels, but Mord rose with them and swatted them out of the sky. Some of their broken remains, wings crumpled, lay around Mord and others became embedded in the surrounding desert, the desolate plains, as if they had always been there.

  Then came, last defense, a swarm of flying biotech like locusts or wasps, so thick and dark it formed a vast cloud, but Mord only gave out a bellowing, huffing laugh and flew through that cloud again and again, with his mouth wide open like a whale filling its belly with krill, until almost none were left and the rest reduced to less than the sad comradery of tiny clusters on the horizon.

  There was a joyous aspect to Mord in those moments, some sense of liberation to the way he moved that made me wonder if the Magician’s attack, the reflexive action of the leviathan, had given Mord the pretext to maul the Company building. To do what he wanted to do anyway.

  Defenses gone, the Company lay open to him and Mord dug deeper, and wrenched his claws through metal, stone, wood, and people alike, every once in a while finding a true treasure trove, and raising his muzzle to let a bolus of screaming, bloody morsels slide down his throat, the better to devour them. Even from our distance, you could now see the red smeared across his muzzle.

  We watched, mesmerized and horrified by the torment suffered until, finally, all lay still and, sated, Mord gathered up the leviathan and flung its viscera and spine atop the mess he’d created of the building, a final insult, and flew away.

  We could not escape the yowling and moaning of Mord in the aftermath, the way it permeated the air—how it made the blackest night seem to ignite with sparks of a grief and rage the depths of which we could never understand. Seether’s flank. Seether. Mord. The great bear that might once have been human, who would return at dusk to the ruins of the Company for many nights, to sleep fitfully atop its remains, tormented by visions that would turn our own attempts at sleep into squint-eyed insomniac rovings.

  While from all over the city Mord’s proxies responded with their own growling, their own “Drrrrrk!”

  And it was too much. It overwhelmed. The odds. The odds we’d be alive in a month, or a day. How I dithered in my wishes, thinking that perhaps the Magician’s ultimatum would have been preferable, that if only the missile had hit its mark the chaos in the city would have remained manageable, of a kind we recognized.

  The fires from the missiles lasted well into the night. By the next morning the rumor in the city was that the Magician was dead, dragged from her underground stronghold, disemboweled by the Mord proxies, and then eaten by them so that no trace of her should ever again appear upon the Earth.

  But I did not believe it.

  * * *

  I have tried to do justice to the vast scale of these events in this account, but at the time I was so scared I almost lost my shit watching from the blind, with Wick offering up a muttered commentary the whole time—and for minutes after.

  “Is he really going to attack the Company? He is he is.

  “How did she acquire missile launchers or missiles? That was clever. All those excavations underground.

  “Now will this mean she comes after us sooner or much later? Is she damaged or is she fatal?

  “The Company building goes down several levels below the surface—he’s just cut off the head. The body’s still down there. There’s still life down there. Maybe.

  “The Company has no control over Mord. None whatsoever. But at least now he’s cut off his supply of Mord proxies. There is no other source. Unless they can breed.”

  I had no words with which to reply, not even the words to tell him I had no answers or to dispute the answers he provided. The only person he could reassure was himself. All I knew was that the Magician had proved a dangerous, reckless fool to have set all of this in motion but to have failed, with no evidence of a backup plan, and we would all pay for it in some way. Even if she was dead, her mutant children still roamed the city, and we did not know what might come out of the Company’s now-exposed lower levels.

  But we were very close and intimate in the blind, me and my poor sick Wick. I could smell the sweet bone-salt tang of alcohol minnows on his breath again. I didn’t mind, and his hair smelled cleaner than it should have, and my hip was up against his, and my arm against his arm, and it was impossible to just see Wick as sickly or an enemy or an obstacle, not with all the lines and networks and traps radiating out from the Balcony Cliffs—still in place despite what we had witnessed.

  “Where do we go if we have to leave the Balcony Cliffs?” I asked.

  A naked question, and I could feel his heart beat faster against my skin. He was like a giant tree frog, eyes large, remaining motionless but for the heartbeat that trembled out of him. It confused some instinct in me, some default, that Wick didn’t change color or shape, I had been hanging out with Borne so much.

  He did not move, and so I leaned over and kissed him on the lips as his reward for contemplating the abyss. Or maybe because he was still not Mord nor Magician nor proxy, but only himself.

  Then I wrestled his wiry form until I was on top of him and there was a severe question or concern in his eyes about what I meant to do, where we had left things after our epic argument.

  What I meant to do was to huff like a Mord proxy. What I meant to do was huff and growl and paw at Wick. To nip at him and breathe on him, and in all ways be a bear. Except for the kissing.

  Maybe I’d gone a little crazy in the aftermath of slaughter. Or maybe I was trying to break out of my skin, thinking about how my parents had been actors in roles and the roles were to be my father and mother—and the reason I could see those as roles was that in such extremes, in private, they must have let down their guard and expressed their doubts, their fears, the extent of their despair or hopelessness as our situation worsened and the world revealed the outlines of its true harshness. But because of me, there were whole eternities of hours each day when they had to pretend otherwise, and how I wish I could go back and tell them not to do that. That all I wanted was to see their true selves, remember their true selves. These were my thoughts as I looked down at Wick, wanting us revealed each to the other, forgetting that Wick, too, was playing a role. And Borne, too. Our lives were rapidly becoming impossible.

  “Mord’s proxies are going to hear you and eat us both,” Wick whispered in my ear after a while, after he’d figured out I wasn’t going to eat him. We were close, so very close.

  “You’d like that.”

  “No, you’d like that!”

  And then giggling—out of humor, out of stress.

  He stopped struggling, let me kiss him again and again, let me smell him like a bear. So this was what it was like to be Mord or a Mord proxy. The snuffling, the great strength, the prey that could not get away.

  Crouched there on top of Wick, every point of my body against every point of his, I realized, as if for the first time, that happiness never came easy to Wick. I don’
t mean happiness in general but moments of happiness. Happiness in the moment eluded him without his alcohol minnows, his memory beetles; he carried too much weight, a weight he was always mindful of, that must be present in his life at all times.

  But I could tell me on top of him was a stress, too, because he was so much thinner, and after a time, while outside trails of black smoke rose from the Company building and people in the low country with no shelter tried panic-stricken to find shelter, I dismounted, lay beside him, my arm around his side, my hand on his chest. Such a fragile heart for such a hardened man.

  “How do we get out of this, Rachel?” Wick said after a moment. “I can’t see how to get out of this. Anymore.”

  “Keep fortifying the Balcony Cliffs. Wait things out,” I said.

  I didn’t have any more traps and the only other plan I could think of in the aftershock of watching Mord attack the Company was for someone to come along to save us. But no one would ever come along to save us.

  We held each other for a time in that hideaway, that unexpected sanctuary, while the city smoldered and the world went on changing without us.

  HOW I TRIED TO COPE

  Although we did not know if the Magician was dead or alive, chief among our ills now seemed Mord’s proxies, reeling across the city in the aftermath of the missile attack. I had so many terrible dreams connected to the proxies, terrible thoughts, in those times, and couldn’t distinguish which were mine and which were imposed from some other source. For that’s the way I felt: that I was not entirely myself. It seemed for a time that the Mord proxies forced all action and everything came out of their machinations. Even Borne’s rejection of my books became part of the proxies’ plan, because I had lost my mind. I was haunted by dreams of the proxies in which they now flew as well, and that the space in the roof above the swimming pool had opened up into a yawning chasm and the Mord proxies had swooped down into that space to talk to Wick, and that Wick plotted with the proxies to take over the Balcony Cliffs from me and Borne.