Borne

by Jeff VanderMeer

  He could die, he’d said, without his nautilus pills. But I still didn’t know what the broken telescope meant, or the woman’s face drawn across the head of a giant fish.

  Would I ever know?

  HOW WE LOST EACH OTHER

  Then came a day that felt like a victory and a defeat—the day when Wick and I reached a lull. We had been working on fortifying the Balcony Cliffs with such all-consuming purpose that we could not now see any way to do more. Our muscles always ached and our minds were sore from trying to see the gaps in our thinking. With each hour of preparation, Wick was telling me that he rejected the Magician’s hold over him—the evidence of his labor, his time, his effort.

  We were done, but suspicious of being done, and now truly we had a siege mentality. I felt like I was waiting for a great force, a great pressure to burst down the doors, scale the walls, or to give up and go away. Perhaps the real reason Wick and I believed we were finished is that we both, on some subconscious level, understood that the quest to make the Balcony Cliffs safe was futile. There would always be a way in.

  Still, we had done everything right—secured our inner ramparts, hoarded supplies, anticipated angles of attack—and yet no attack came. No zone or layer we could monitor with Wick’s beetles and spiders or his informants registered any rumor of attack. Had we overestimated our worth with the city in turmoil? Were we, perverse thought, forgotten? Was this already a kind of aftermath and we would die of starvation or thirst rather than a knife to the gut or our throats ripped out? Our ironic new source of panic was that, in the event, there would be no one to surrender to.

  It seemed preternaturally quiet on our borders most days.

  “That just means they’re biding their time,” Wick said, not realizing how much Borne had done on his own to “clear out our perimeter,” as Wick put it.

  “Not even a lizard left,” Borne had told me, and with nothing in that stretch of land, no scavengers waiting to glean.

  But to feel under siege, even with an undercurrent of futility, was better than being under siege, or under outright assault. It could be stuffy and close in our refuge; we had plugged up the hole in Wick’s laboratory ceiling for fear of Mord proxies peering in; and I never went out on the balcony anymore because I envisioned some homemade arrow through the throat or someone climbing up the wall and surprising me. Yet we still held on to what was ours, and celebrated the fact. Four weeks in, and no sign of the Magician, or her ultimatum. Clearly, she had more pressing problems, like being hunted by Mord, or being dead.

  The night of the lull, I left Wick at his swimming pool, still reflexively obsessing over how to get the most out of his remaining biotech, and went to bed.

  But I woke up with a start less than an hour later.

  Wick had appeared at the foot of my bed. There was a moment of panic until I recognized him, and then I relaxed, although unhappy with his abruptness and the late hour. I didn’t like how Borne and now Wick had taken to coming in without knocking or asking permission. It conjured up the past in a way I didn’t want to think about.

  “I locked the door, Wick. How did you get in? Why are you here?”

  Wick shrugged, an awkward, rough motion. “The same way you get into my apartment.”

  Something about Wick’s voice was off. In the bad light, my bleary state, his white skin seemed patchy, there pale and here translucent and in a few places ice-blue, as if he’d had an accident with his chemicals.

  “What do you want that couldn’t wait until morning?” I asked, sitting up in bed. Truth be told, I wanted him gone.

  “Nothing much. I just wanted to know if you love me, Rachel.”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” I said, exploding. “You wake me up to ask if I love you?” Irritation was the least of it. I wanted to really turn into a Mord proxy and maul Wick. After all we’d done, all that had been done to us, to get our relationship back to some kind of normal, he asked me this.

  “But do you love me?”

  I did growl, then. “Go get some sleep, Wick.” Sleep it off. “Go back to your apartment.” He’d been suffering insomnia from stress, but I needed my sleep, too.

  Wick didn’t hear me or was ignoring me or didn’t care, and, listless, sat down on my bed.

  “What about Borne? Do you love Borne? How much do you love Borne?”

  We’d come to the edge of this before, the way Wick’s view of Borne bordered on jealousy, but I’d never been asked to state my position quite so baldly.

  “I’m like a mother to Borne,” I said with patience. “He’s like my child.” I tried to be calm about Borne with Wick for fear I’d say something reckless and drive more of a wedge between them.

  A wry grin, a sad one. “Is that what Borne still is to you? A child?”

  “Yes,” I said, lying a little.

  What was the word for raising an orphaned intelligent creature? Maybe the word didn’t exist yet. For the first time I dared to imagine if Borne had real parents, and a kind of despair overtook me. This idea that Borne had parents out there, somewhere, in a night that popped with distant gunfire.

  “Thank you for telling me, Rachel,” Wick said, and then he left.

  I bolted the door behind him.

  Yet an hour later, in the middle of the night, I hadn’t fallen back to sleep. I kept thinking about the weirdness of Wick’s visit, the way he had looked wrong. I couldn’t let go of that. He’d been like a ghost. Not ghostlike but a ghost.

  I put on some clothes, went to Wick’s apartment, knocked, no answer. I knocked again, loud. Still no answer. Either he was in a deep sleep or out. So I walked down to the swimming pool, just in case.

  As I approached the doorway, I heard voices. Borne must be in the room with Wick, I thought. Borne and Wick must be having a conversation. Great. I quickened my pace.

  I rounded the corner, burst through the doorway into Wick’s laboratory.

  I came in on Rachel talking to Wick.

  I came in on myself talking to Wick.

  It was a clever fake, a good likeness, and it shook me to the core, to see myself like that. To see me having a conversation with Wick as if my body had been stolen and I was just a wraith.

  Wick looked over at me, looked back at the other Rachel, flinched, with defensive beetles now raging across his arm. Apparently he could tell the original from the mimic.

  “What are you?” he was shouting at the other Rachel. “What are you?”

  But I knew what the other Rachel was.

  The other Rachel was Borne.

  * * *

  Once upon a time there was a woman who found a creature on the flank of a giant bear. Once upon a time there was a piece of biotech that grew and grew until it had its own apartment. And once upon a time a person named Borne put on the skins of two people he admired and pretended to be those people. Maybe his cause was just, maybe his reasons were sound. Maybe he thought he was doing something right for a change. Maybe.

  “Borne,” I said. “Borne.”

  At the sound of my disappointment and horror, the other Rachel collapsed into Borne. A spasmodic ripple, a sigh that came from everywhere, echoed in the cavern, and soon: the Borne I knew, but more like a vast whirlpool full of eyes, narrow end attached to the wall behind him, the vortex spinning like a hypnotic illusion.

  Where I had stood. Where Rachel had stood.

  But that magician’s trick came with a cost. “Rachel” had extended her hand, arm outstretched toward Wick’s wrist, and as she looked at me in alarm, as her features dissolved into the vortex, as I watched myself fall to pieces, and as the eyes multiplied, and as the tentacles grew, they extended toward Wick’s arm—touched his arm.

  Wick cried out, stumbled back against the edge of the swimming pool, burned or in some way injured by that touch. As he did so, a sweeping gesture of his other arm, frantic to keep away from Borne’s questing tentacles—and Wick released the beetles swarming around his body. They flew toward Borne in their dozens, meant to burrow into flesh,
drill damage into him.

  But they never reached Borne. Instead, they met Borne’s surface and melted into him and he let out a great cry, surged out toward Wick like a darkly glittering tidal wave.

  Except I was there, then, between them—Borne to the left and Wick on my right, mortal combatants.

  “Stop! Stop!” I screamed.

  I could have been caught in a crossfire. Either one could have ignored me and given in to impulse.

  But, instead, Borne fell back even as he became even more huge and ominous, blotting out the light from Wick’s remaining fireflies because he surged out across the ceiling like an angry surf. While I watched, as frozen as if I were the other Rachel.

  Wick’s remaining battle beetles swarmed over his body in defense against the next attack, and there came the slap and croak of creatures in the swimming pool behind him that suggested reinforcements.

  But there was no further attack.

  There was just Borne, rearing back and rearing back, as if he meant to dissolve into and through the ceiling, all of his surface wide eyes and tentacles that branched off and dissolved like slow-motion water droplets. And an attitude of cringing for forgiveness that became mixed with something still defiant in his posture until I could not read him at all. A stench of burnt butter, rancid liver, fading into nothing.

  I play those first few moments over and over in my mind even now. I keep searching for what Borne was thinking, how he was thinking it. I want to stop time. I want time to stop and for Wick to leave and for me to talk to Borne without Wick there. And then I want Borne to leave so I can talk to Wick without Borne there. I need to know that I understood those moments correctly, that I made the right decisions. But I can never know that.

  All I know is that I had put my body in front of Wick, in defense of Wick, and I was staring up at Borne, who covered the whole ceiling now and who could like a tsunami thunder down upon us and drown us in his flesh if he wanted to. As I looked up at Borne there were no constellations bright enough to blind me to him as a monster.

  I was so close to Wick that I could feel the nervous thumping beat of his pulse against my body and his shaking against my shoulder as he stared off into nowhere. The screaming had stopped. The diagnostic worms were threading through the surface of his skin, doing the best they could against the shock of whatever wound Borne had inflicted, which meant Wick was semiconscious. We hadn’t been able to feed the worms much for weeks, so I worried they’d die before healing him. But there was no blood, just bruising and the shock.

  “I didn’t mean to, Rachel,” Borne said, pleading. “I didn’t mean to hurt him. I wasn’t going to hurt him. You startled me, Rachel. You made me.”

  “Did I make you pretend to be me and talk to Wick? Did I make you pretend to be Wick and talk to me?”

  I was shouting at Borne. I was shouting and screaming at him because I couldn’t do anything else. How stupid I’d been, how careless he’d been, and now everything was ruined. I could see that even if Borne couldn’t.

  “I wanted to help,” Borne said. “I wanted to help. I wanted you both to be nice to each other.” Nice, not nice. But he wasn’t a child anymore. “I didn’t want you to argue about me all the time.”

  “That wasn’t for you to decide,” I croaked, done shouting, my throat raw. “That wasn’t right for you to decide.”

  I was scared as well as angry. Because something I’d known had been revealed to me. Something niggling at the back of my mind. The times Wick or I had said to the other “I never said that” and put it down to miscommunication or mishearing, or anything other than that the person we were talking to or not talking to was someone or something else. The way that had corroded my relationship with Wick, brought a special kind of insane distrust into our lives. Now we would have to verify every moment of our recent past, piece together our time together and apart, determine what was real.

  Borne pleading, Borne trying to explain, and me not really listening.

  Had it been Borne I got on top of in the blind and growled at like a Mord proxy the morning the Magician fired her missiles? Had it been with Borne not Wick that I’d planned the defense of the Balcony Cliffs? Had he been Wick when we’d slept together?—

  No, that was a violation of trust I couldn’t contemplate. Could not be true. I had to believe I knew the real Wick’s body, that in tracing every scar and every imperfection, in having him inside of me, that there had never been a lie that monstrous.

  But I had to ask the question.

  “Borne, how many times have you been us? Have you been in my bed, in Wick’s?”

  It took a moment, but when he understood the question, Borne recoiled, took on a gray color as he said, “No. Never. How could you think that!”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “You’re scared of me right now,” Borne said. “But all I did is what you both do.”

  “We don’t do that.”

  “You went into his apartment, sneaking around. He went into your apartment, sneaking and spying.”

  “Borne…” I looked up at him. He looked down at us, a ton of alien flesh with hundreds of eyes.

  “I love you,” Borne said in my voice. “But I’m scared of you and can’t trust you.”

  “You hurt Wick.”

  “He was going to hurt me,” Borne said. “I know he was. No matter how I tried, he was always going to hate me.”

  A cold, practical mood came over me, Wick so warm and febrile behind me, reminding me of the truth of some things.

  “Should I have let Wick take you for parts, Borne? What are you?”

  “Rachel, it’s Borne. Your child. You love me like a child. You said you love me like a child.” And I’d disappointed him, saying that, so why should it save him now?

  “You’re not human,” Wick said, in a gasp like he was taking a breath for the first time. And I knew he’d stabilized, begun to recover from whatever Borne had done to him.

  “But I am a person,” Borne said. “Rachel told me—I’m a person!”

  “A person who pretends to be other people,” Wick said.

  “Do you know me the way you know one of those lizards you ate?” I asked.

  “No!” Borne protested.

  “Then how can you pretend to be me.”

  “I can look like you, but I couldn’t be you without—”

  “Without killing you,” Wick said. He stood beside me now, and from his stillness I knew he was ready to attack Borne again.

  “I would never hurt you, Rachel,” Borne said.

  “Borne understands,” Wick said. “Borne knows what he is. He’s a killer. We have to take him apart.”

  Borne had turned stormy and midnight blue and black. A caustic smell of ink and seared moss. His voice when it came was troubled, uncertain.

  “I won’t let you. I didn’t. I wouldn’t. I haven’t.”

  “I don’t understand,” I insisted. But I understood now. I really, deeply understood although I didn’t want to. Perhaps I had known all along. What Borne had been doing out in the city, his acts disguised by the carnage of Mord proxy against Magician mutants. These people he had told me about, the old man, the others—what had those conversations been like? Had they ended abruptly? Sampling.

  “He must have been doing it a long time,” Wick said. “To have learned so quickly. To have grown so quickly.” Across his features some reaction I couldn’t recognize or fathom, a look so alien and wild and yet mechanical that it frightened me, made me feel caught between two monsters.

  “Ask him, Rachel,” Wick said. “Ask him. Nothing comes out of him, everything goes in.”

  Borne had attained his full expanse across that rough ceiling, head peering down from that expanse like a swimmer in an upside-down ocean. The full, impressive, frightening extent of him. I could see now that the Rachel doppelgänger still lived as an impression in the middle of him, as if he could always bring her out of storage, like a puppet, and that an impression of Wick lay beside her.

>   “There is a cost,” Borne said. “A cost for what I am. For what I do. But I love you, Rachel. I love you and I can do better. I can stop.”

  I wavered, I’m ashamed to say, and Wick saw it.

  “Prove it. Tell the truth. Be honest,” Wick said. “Do you kill people? Do you?”

  “I don’t kill,” Borne said. “I absorb. Digest. It is all alive. In me.”

  “Kills them,” Wick insisted. “Ransacks their memories. Ransacks their knowledge of the world. Agree. Agree, Borne. It’s for the best. Let me take you apart. You know it. Otherwise, someday you’ll be worse than Mord.”

  Didn’t it matter that Borne was conflicted, that he didn’t want to kill? Maybe not. But the fear stole over me, from some almost imperceptible change in Borne’s aspect, that we couldn’t make him agree to die. That he would never agree to be taken apart, and that I would have such a difficult choice then, and Wick would never understand, even though it was about our survival.

  “Leave,” I said. “You have to leave and never come back. You have to.”

  Banishment. It just came out. But was there ever any other choice? Anything else betrayed Wick, betrayed the Balcony Cliffs, and Borne had made the decision easy. Yet it was one of the hardest things I ever did. The hardest.

  Borne became sea-green, and all soft, diaphanous surfaces and reflected light.

  “But I love you,” Borne said. “You’re my family.”

  “I love you, too, Borne,” I said, and it was true. “But that doesn’t change things.” Maybe the memory of love was enough, maybe the time we’d had together would be enough. Yet, inside, I was panicking already, screaming at the thought of it.

  “I’ll have no home,” Borne said.

  “I know, Borne.”

  “I’ll have no one to talk to.”

  I almost couldn’t bear it, but I had to bear it.

  “Borne,” I said. “Borne, you have to do this for us. If you love us. I know it’s hard, but it’s not safe for us.”