Borne

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Drunk-stumbling in their own blood-murder, Mord proxies growled from fang-filled snouts a language that none had ever heard before, articulated even as they slaughtered, thoughts and desires that had never been expressed in the city, that were beyond even Mord. From the entrails left behind we tried in vain to divine what they meant, what sense could be made of … any of it.

  Mord had never spoken except to roar or rage, had said no intelligible word. Yet these emissaries in his image—breaking down walls, smashing through doors to get to the live flesh-meat beyond—they spoke continually. They would not or could not stop speaking. Sometimes muttered. Sometimes huffed out or choral, together, from deep in their throats. We knew of their passage through the world by this entangled, glottal speech that we could not interpret. No translation existed, and there was no intermediary to explain. So since we could not understand anything but their actions, we resolved to snuff out these proxies, to halt their stream of speech as they desired to halt our own, did not care what phase in Mord’s rough dominion they might mark.

  But, mostly, we hid from them, avoided them, tried not to be killed by them. We disguised our scent, disguised our home even more. Ventured out less. With most of his clients dead or gone into hiding, it took little to convince Wick to remain behind our barricades.

  During this time, I would wake in the middle of the night, startled from sleep, with the memory of Mord’s giant carious eye, shining like an evil sun, replacing the real sun, and shining over my bed, only to find Borne instead, watching me, in need of comfort I believed, of someone to talk to.

  I gave Borne what I had to give, even when exhausted, because I never wanted to lose track of him again. I feared that more than anything. I feared that he would slowly merge with the background, as the background became my primary concern: to shore up walls, to place a new barricade at the end of a corridor I now thought might be a security risk, and a pit below. We were afraid of people coming up on us from below, having seen the feral children pop up out of their lair. We could hear sometimes a lazy inquiry, a random digging here and then there that I thought must be the Mord proxies, perhaps even at rest, not giving a second thought to the likes of us. But not for long, not for long, Wick thought.

  During Borne’s visits, he would be in what he called travel mode about half the time, and he glowed a deep icy blue flecked with patches of gold that created star-shaped patterns on the wall. My fireflies had fallen below a level he deemed acceptable. His eyes were only two in number in that mode and had an odd intensity to them.

  Sometimes Borne would adopt a kind of a new “bloat” position that made him look like a huge, fleshy eggplant on its side, his tentacles pulled down over his torso to provide stability. But, with more and more frequency, Borne would also change shape and color so often during a visit that it was hard to look at him, as if there were some things the human eye was not adapted to see. I didn’t know if he was losing control of himself or entering some new phase.

  I learned not to mind that he just appeared inside my apartment, even though I had to make an appointment to visit him. Even if he’d surprised me untying my shoes after a long day or walking around in my underwear. We couldn’t afford to use biotech to secure our apartment doors anymore; there was nothing that valuable for Borne to eat.

  “How was it out there?” I would ask, rather than, “Why, why were you out there again?” Yet he always came back unscathed. Yet he always told me about his day, or some version of it.

  “What happened in this city?” Borne asked once, in a voice like a world-weary old man.

  I had no answer for him, thinking: I don’t know, it just happened. Everything everywhere collapsed. We didn’t try hard enough. We were preyed upon. We had no discipline. We didn’t try the right things at the right time. We cared but we didn’t do. Too many people, too little space. Weighted down, unable to see the way Borne saw. Maybe the Mord proxies weren’t an aberration but the end product of it all.

  “It’s dead. It’s all in ruins. Everyone is … defeated.”

  I know a responsible parent would have pushed back, told him that wasn’t true. But I’d had yet another hard day on the back of several more, with little sleep, and I couldn’t help but laugh, scathing, at that. So he’d finally noticed. Some petty part of me rejoiced that he was becoming more like us. Or more like me in that moment.

  “That’s just the way it is, Borne. Survival isn’t pretty. We’re trying to survive. Do you know what I mean?” An honest question. Despite my worries, Borne seemed to have it easier than we did in some ways. We could starve away in the Balcony Cliffs and he’d just absorb a chair or something to keep on living.

  “Yes, I know what you mean,” he said impatiently. “But it doesn’t need to be this way.”

  “So what are you going to do about it?” I meant that almost as a joke, or a provocation, but I must admit I was curious.

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  “Let me know when you’ve figured it out.”

  “I met an old man today. He was digging a hole.”

  “Yes?”

  “He was digging a hole and talking to me.”

  “Did he notice what you looked like?” And had he been real or a character in a book?

  “No. But he told me he wasn’t from here.”

  “No surprise there.” Hardly anyone over thirty was from here.

  “The old man told me he was digging for food, but all I saw were roots down there.”

  “Maybe he was too old.” Maybe he was digging his own grave, had the dignity to sense his future and plan for it.

  “He also told me you have to give up something to get somewhere. That’s what he told me. So that’s what I’ll have to do. If I want to get somewhere.”

  “Haven’t you noticed? Everyone is out there trying to create their better future. Especially old men digging holes.”

  “Sarcasm?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He asked that one-word question now, and so I wasn’t sarcastic very often.

  “Come help me, Borne,” I said, sobering up, remembering who I was to him, and because I didn’t like his jaded tone. “You should help me with the Balcony Cliffs.”

  “I guess I could spare an hour here and there,” Borne said, as if his social calendar was full of appointments.

  I just had to come up with a task for him that might keep him occupied and help us at the same time. Maybe keep him out of the clutches of old men digging holes.

  * * *

  Most nights now there was some kind of cacophony and a rawness, and such a sense of covert movement. So much noise out there—and echoes of noise—and a keening or growling or the sound of something or someone being killed. That was the sound of a city that no longer believed in one ruler or one version of the future. And, indeed, Mord at times would growl in a kind of disgust at this new version of events, and above us the proxy bears would dig where Mord had laid his head or maybe it was the Magician’s men pretending—and that was the other confusion: one side trying to make their kills look like the work of the other side.

  Although the Magician had more luck in this regard; the proxies were not dainty. Another sound in the night: the strangled agony of people dying on the street who had escaped the proxies but not the poison of their bite. Soon, too, the Magician’s mutants not only came with harder carapaces but with their own poison, which shot out through their fingernails in a vain hope of piercing thick bear fur. With these “improvements” came a shorter but more intense life, their speed unnerving.

  Borne coined the term Nocturnalia, for the way that life now welled up in unexpected ways whenever darkness slid over the city. There had always been a life out there in the blackness that did not include us and that moved to its own rhythm. But added to that now, what made the night both opportunistic and perilous, were the others lurking, so many out in it, thinking the night gave them cover. We couldn’t interpret these others, hardly knew where they had come from, could not grasp, eit
her, their allegiances, or the eruption of those who worshipped Mord in the aftermath of the Magician’s failure, who sided with the great bear and chose to give their fealty and foolishly thought this made them immune.

  Gunfire in the night was the barometer of our desperation—bullets so scarce in the city that each single shot that rang out, whether near or far, signaled a last stand. On nights when we heard more than a dozen, it was difficult to believe we would not be swept away by some inexhaustible wave of slaughter. Lights at night were traps, too, in a way they weren’t before. Little pools and points of life, and nothing good could come from investigating.

  The Magician had not returned, but her innovations were a tell, I thought. In her absence, too, myths had grown up around her, new stories, as if she had become a martyr. Borne brought one back to me as if it were valuable salvage. In this story, a strange bird with beautiful plumage had found its way to the city. A very strange bird that had come from far away. It flew around, lost and disoriented, trying to figure out the city. Where it was, exactly. What it was supposed to do.

  But it wasn’t supposed to do anything. On the second day, someone tried to catch it and broke its wing. The bird got away, kept flying as best as it could. Then a bit of walking biotech caught it, killed it, ate it. Then the Magician killed the biotech and used it for parts, and once again the strange bird flew in the city, but now at the Magician’s behest, and no one would touch it, for it was the emissary of the Magician, and it was clear to everyone why the strange bird had come to the city.

  Because the Magician had willed it.

  And even if the Magician died, her strange bird would live on.

  * * *

  The stories about the Company building weren’t much better. The Mord proxies patrolled the perimeter, and Mord had dug out a place to sleep on its flank, and a kind of refugee stream of bizarre biotech still came out of the damaged places to join the Nocturnalia. I did not like to glimpse these half-dead things, most gobbled up by Mord proxies, that crawled when they should have walked, or rolled or hobbled …

  Nor could I stop thinking of the perfect little biotech slaves that had paraded themselves around my special cake in the fancy restaurant. In my mind, they kept spiraling that cake for years, as it decayed into black mold and then nothing, and they had to keep trudging around that cake, around and around, singing, until they died in mid-step and their flesh rotted and then faded away, revealing their sad, delicate skeletons.

  Which kept dancing.

  HOW I TRIED TO HELP BORNE BY HAVING HIM HELP ME

  The way I tried to keep Borne out of trouble was to enlist his help exploring more of the Balcony Cliffs. I would have him along to punch a tentacle through the exterior walls of apartments and rooms we couldn’t reach through the rock slides and other impediments. With my ability to scavenge outside severely curtailed, this was the only way to bolster our supplies.

  Trying to break through in a normal way was nearly impossible with a hand-cranked drill, and more dangerous. But Borne had a knack for it using his own body, because when necessary his tentacle could become either diamond-hard or more vinelike, negotiate existing cracks, and then pulverize that part of the wall necessary to peer in. I had created a very long, narrow telescope out of the parts of three or four telescopes, so if Borne could make a fairly regular hole of a certain diameter, I could push the makeshift telescope through and take a look for useful salvage. Or, if it was a thin wall, I’d just eyeball the contents.

  When that didn’t work, Borne grew an eyeball on the end of a tentacle and told me what he saw. If there was something valuable, we’d widen the hole or risk blasting through enough of a doorway to retrieve the contents of the room. Borne and I played a game where we tried to predict what was in the room before we tunneled into it. Borne got them all right at first, and then started to get them wrong, on purpose I thought, sometimes ridiculously so.

  “Spatula, kitchen table, bowls, dead fridge, some chairs, a sculpture of a giant bird.”

  Squinting through my pirate telescope, I’d laugh and reply, “Storage room, ladders, barrels, paper supplies, coffee machine.”

  But two rooms later, what would we find but the sculpture of a giant bird. Again, I began to believe that Borne had some kind of radar or sensing organ that went beyond our five senses.

  Once, we spied on a room full of useless dead cell phones. Lizards crawled over the heaps of phones, having gotten in from a crack above. But it didn’t hold lizards for long.

  Another time, I had a moment of dislocation when I put my eye to a hole Borne had made and was looking at an entire house … a dollhouse, which dominated the room. Nothing in that room but the dollhouse, the disrepair of its five levels mimicking the neglect of the Balcony Cliffs. In that moment we peered in on an entirely different world, one that belonged to a far-distant time and place. I scoured that dollhouse for longer than I should have, given it had no value to us whatsoever.

  Bodies were everywhere, but you found those out in the city, too, and these weren’t even dead astronauts, so far gone it was easy to ignore the few husks of bones, the disintegrating skulls, a strand of hair resting atop a rusted-out toy car.

  Through our efforts, we gained food packets, a couple of axes for defense, fuel to burn, and even, once, a box in shrink-wrap of a dozen emerald Company-made beetles in crisp metallic rows. Wick cackled when he saw that prize, and maybe for a moment he relented in his disapproval.

  A floor, when I spilled water on it accidentally, turned out to be full of writhing alcohol minnows under the surface—much to Borne’s delight, although I had to stop him from gobbling them all up. After that, I would bring along a tiny canteen of water just to moisten surfaces and coax out what lay hidden. Warn Borne to hang back a bit, first, because of his mighty appetite.

  Borne liked this “game,” but it was still slow work, because Borne wouldn’t do it continuously for more than a couple of hours at a time, made excuses why he couldn’t work longer—why he had to retreat to his apartment. None of his excuses seemed genuine, but I was too distracted by the chaos beyond our walls. It was like a constant dark spiral in my thoughts, pulling me away from the moment, from whatever I was doing.

  Sometimes we talked as we worked, and that made me forget the pressure in my head.

  “The first people I saw when I went out yesterday I said hello to and then they threw rocks at me and ran,” Borne told me once. “The next person, a little girl, tried to stab me with a rusty knife and started screaming. After that, I adjusted my disguise again.”

  “They might have done the same to me or anyone.” I said it calm, but was trying to push aside my worry for him. I could not mind that Borne now ventured out by himself. I had so very little control over him. Except I could still get him to bore a hole in a wall.

  “They’re all afraid of everything,” Borne said. “Especially Mord. But Mord is just a very big bear and the Mord proxies are just bears that are smaller than Mord.” He said this with disdain.

  “That’s a dangerous way to think about it,” I said.

  “Would they be afraid of me?”

  “They’re already afraid of you,” I said. I meant it as a joke, but it came out wrong.

  “I know,” Borne said, sad. “That’s the first thing I have to take away—and Wick, he doesn’t say it, but he thinks I’m a freak. A monster. I pass him in the hall and say hello and he says nothing back. He’s no better than the people in the city. Didn’t you give him my salvage?”

  I had, dutiful, and said, “These are from Borne,” and it would always be something precious from beyond the walls, something that made flare up within me a momentary gratitude that Borne was foraging in the city. And Wick might say, “Thank Borne for me,” but he wouldn’t be smiling. There were limits to him with Borne, and he’d become paranoid again.

  “He knows all our traps, all the passageways,” Wick had said to me. “I had him show me yesterday. He knows everything, Rachel.” Of course he did—that w
ay Borne couldn’t betray us entering or leaving the Balcony Cliffs, but Wick didn’t see it that way.

  He didn’t remind me again, but it was in my head: Borne had stripped the Balcony Cliffs of every lizard, every spider, every cockroach, and thus now every extra source of protein that didn’t require foraging outside. So what if his gifts made up for that—they didn’t put us in his debt, by Wick’s reasoning.

  “I had an argument with Wick,” Borne said. “He was probably in a bad mood. Then I went back later and tried to tell him I wasn’t what he thought I was.”

  “An argument?” I never liked the idea of Wick talking to Borne, or Borne talking to Wick.

  “Yes, it’s when two people—”

  “I know what an argument is. About what?”

  “Oh—things. Lots of things. It’s okay, Rachel. It’s really okay now. I’m making it okay.”

  A moment later, he was telling me about nightmares he’d had and asking what they meant. A moment after that, he had become a pair of eyes floating in midair, but that was just him sidling up the wall while changing his skin to the color and texture of the ceiling, to perch there and ask, “Can you see me? Or am I invisible?”

  At least I had found something new for Borne and me to do together, something useful, and I rejoiced in that, felt forgiven for trying earlier to educate him with my books.

  * * *

  Wick admired my ingenuity, but not the means. He didn’t like Borne’s involvement, didn’t like how our excavations messed up his floor plan, because inevitably this meant the Balcony Cliffs changed, with some corridors we’d left buried now exposed. Any deviation from the floor plan in his mind caused a kind of trauma I didn’t understand.

  Yet other times, late at night, Wick would reverse himself, come by my apartment and when we talked show weakness, express admiration for Borne. He seemed in flux, truly conflicted, unwilling to resolve, and he lost focus for me. I found I hated his weakness more than I resented his former resolve, and during these times it was as if he recognized the fact, because he would leave before we could have sex.