Borne

by Jeff VanderMeer

  The fox gave me a look I suppose I was meant to interpret, but signs and symbols did not interest me.

  “Go away,” I said.

  The fox cocked her head, appraised me, let out a yip.

  “Go away,” I said again.

  The fox did something with fur that clearly wasn’t fur but some trick of bioluminescence to resemble fur … and slowly faded, bit by bit, until she had indeed gone away. But only by disappearing in front of me. I thought I heard the pitter-patter of paws receding.

  Had she always known how to do that or had Borne taught her?

  * * *

  Something in me was tired of how the dead astronauts kept switching their allegiance, of the way these bodies kept being disrespected, had no fixed address or location. In truth, I didn’t want to ever see them again.

  So I took the time. I went back inside, found a rusty shovel, came back out, and buried them in those graves, tossed the placards away, rubbed out with my boot the word LEAVE, and said a few words over the ground, which I tried, with moss and pine needles, to make as anonymous as possible so no one would know anyone had been buried there.

  “Be at peace,” I told them. “Be at peace now and let no one recruit you for their stupid games.”

  When I had first heard the story of the Magician and the strange bird, it had struck me as somehow impressive or important—that it meant something. But it meant nothing.

  Especially to a ghost, and that’s what I was then. I was a ghost. I was a ghost. The lines had begun to fray and snap. The fireflies went out in my apartment. The toilet wouldn’t work. We were down to two meals a day. I moved into Wick’s apartment to conserve resources, but eventually his fireflies would go out, too.

  Wrote Borne in his journal: “I met a kind fox today. She was following me and I meant to eat her, but she wouldn’t let me, although she apologized nicely. After we had talked for a while, I decided I didn’t want to eat her anyway.”

  Wrote Borne in his journal: “My earliest memory is of a lizard pooping on me and ever since I have hated lizards for ruining my first memory. But I also love them because they are delicious.”

  Wrote Borne in his journal: “The river isn’t beautiful. It’s toxic. It’s full of poison. I sampled it, tested it. I’ll never swim there, although I think I would like to swim. This entire city seems made to not let me swim anywhere. The river is poison, the wells are mostly dry, the Company ponds are also toxic, no matter what the fox says, and the sea underneath us all dried up hundreds of years ago. I should like a real bath, like children get in books. In an old bathtub with the feet like creatures. What I need is a big bath. A long bath. Bath. Born to bathe. Borne to bath.”

  Wrote Borne in his journal: “I know that Rachel says killing is bad. And I know that means I must be bad because what I do sometimes is ‘killing.’ But I cannot stop it, and it feels right, like breathing, and not like killing must feel, and I still can see them inside of me, and talk to them, and they are still who or what they were before, even the lizards, so how can that really be ‘killing’?”

  Wrote Borne in his journal: “It is hard to feel as if I am two or three places at once and have to concentrate on talking. It makes me sound like I don’t know the meaning of my words.”

  Wrote Borne in his journal: “The world is broken and I don’t know how to fix it.”

  * * *

  When I could not find Borne’s journal after a time, I knew Wick had hidden it from me, and I did not mind—was almost grateful. I had memorized everything I could understand, everything in a language I knew. The journal itself did not matter. It could be taken away from me at any time, by anyone. What mattered is what I chose to remember.

  Borne’s absence had simplified something in the Balcony Cliffs. It simplified me and Wick, and this made everyday life duller or leeched of some essential, stormy spectrum of color, made me think of myself as not quite alive. I often felt chastened and small and useless. But there was also the moment-to-moment relief of life being closer to what it actually was, with less pretense. Even this might have been an illusion, but everything is a kind of illusion in the end.

  We had to create passwords for our identities, because of Borne, that we changed every day, every time we woke up or met each other in the corridor—any time we were parted by sleep or the demands of work. We lived in fear for a while of Borne returning and taking up a disguise once more.

  They were silly things, the passwords, the only bright words amongst all the dull words, most of them suggested by Wick—who made it like an extension of the games we played when I brought biotech to him. That I sometimes laughed because of these passwords only made the rest of my days duller.

  “Cheese please,” I would say to Wick.

  “Goddamn oyster,” he would reply.

  “Roosterhead.”

  “Mudskipper.”

  “Bear-crap bear-print bear-bear.”

  “Magician fester cloak.”

  Silly, very silly, but by these words we knew we were real—that who we spoke to was real. Even if I didn’t feel real.

  Maybe I laughed because the passwords sounded like things Borne would have said.

  * * *

  Wick no longer talked about giving in to the Magician’s demands, even after the discovery of the graves. Something had changed in Wick with Borne’s absence and our togetherness despite Borne’s absence, so that now her demands made Wick think more and more of the Balcony Cliffs as a fortress or redoubt against her. While, for me, I would just do what Wick said and make the words come out of my mouth that supported Wick’s vision, because I had no vision of my own.

  Work consumed us—thankfully. It drove most other thoughts from my head, and we welcomed that and we rejoiced, or at least I did. We could not predict the city, but we still had the Balcony Cliffs. We still had them, and we toiled once more to make the Balcony Cliffs ever more impervious to the scenting of random murder-bears, labored unspeaking side by side at that hard work.

  The most ingenious was rigging the fireflies in our apartment, using pheromones. It had a time delay of about thirty seconds, but if anyone other than us tripped the bioreceptors at the entrances into the Balcony Cliffs, the fireflies on the ceiling would start to die out in clusters. Least ingenious: clearing the air duct above the bed as an escape of last resort.

  We were preparing for some catastrophe, the form of which we couldn’t see. Because the networks and hierarchies had yet to become clear, and we had no real allies. Because the Mord proxies had learned to use tools, and Mord, vulnerable now, had become cunning and deployed them more like a general ordering his troops. We took stock of food packets, even though I’d rather have eaten live insects than the runny, goopy, long-expired lumps in those packets. Chicken salad congealing. Beef-carrot stew. We had twenty-three, which meant in terms of days we had about fourteen. Rainfall had been intermittent and largely toxic, so our water supply extended a meager week beyond our thirst. From what Wick jury-rigged to collect from the morning condensation, we could potentially keep that week in reserve. From what Wick could cannibalize from the swimming pool, we could gain ourselves another week or two of food. If we included the remaining memory beetles, which had a particular crunch and a sourness that made them another food of last resort.

  “Food packet or memory beetle?” Wick asked me, holding up one of each.

  “Food beetle?”

  “Not on the menu.”

  Other things were back on the menu, though. The lizards had already crept back in, and the spiders, and I had witnessed three huge silverfish careening across a corridor floor, leaving a trail in the dust as if having a race. Every time I saw a living creature inside the Balcony Cliffs, I thought of Borne.

  In our “spare” time, Wick and I sat side by side in a tunnel, in a room, in a corridor, shoulders touching, password-protected. Was this you? Was that you? Was that Borne? We were still reconstructing what we had actually said to each other, what he had not said, when I had not been
there. As we removed the falsehood, as we built up the truth, damaged places became restored, whole rooms inside flickered with at least a semblance of light, and we cast the intruder farther out into the cold.

  But I was not ready to cast out the intruder for good.

  WHAT I TOOK FROM THE NOCTURNALIA

  I began to walk out into the night a month after we lost Borne—several times. I told myself I was still a ghost, and no one would be able to see me because I was a ghost. Or I told myself it was recon to help out the Balcony Cliffs, or I told myself whatever lie would work. Because I needed a lie. Because Mord had become a more deadly predator and the Magician was resurgent. The Magician had found more recruits to join her medicated army; the Mord proxies had discovered their venomous breath could set fires, given the right accelerant. Mord vulnerable had lost a measure of awe, of dread, but that had not ended his rule. He had just become a more fearsome predator, adopted ruthless tactics.

  Now, too, patterns began to emerge. There were people who seemed to just disappear, and the city had no answer for this except rumors—murmurs of an invisible killer from the tattered remnants of Wick’s contacts and my contact with a handful of fellow scavengers. At first these disappearances had not registered as unique. Already the city lay open like a treasure for psychopaths. People disappeared all the time. People were dying with some frequency.

  Yet, exchanging rumors with an old woman on a street corner, or a young boy at the places Mord proxies had just abandoned … it became clear something new was happening. Mord was terrible and horrifying and frightening, but this new thing could become shadow. It became what it ate. It could be your neighbor or your friend, some said. Rumors pinned the blame on various sources. One theory went that this was some new tactic on the part of the proxies—that to spread even more fear, they had taken to burying their kills instead of leaving them as a bloody warning. Or that just one Mord proxy, cleverer than the rest, had become psychotic and was acting like a serial killer rather than a bear.

  Another theory held that the Magician, injured and deranged from Mord’s assault on her strongholds, roamed the city at night, garroting the unwary and hiding (or eating) their bodies. Or, worse, that she had begun to use them for her biotech creations. But by far the worst rumor was that the Company had done the disappearing—that Mord’s destruction of the upper levels of the Company had led to mysterious rulers in the lower levels to begin kidnapping people at night and brainwashing them and making them into zombified, deranged biotech.

  I knew the truth.

  * * *

  I said nothing to Wick about my roaming, not even that I would be gone, and once outside I imagined Wick in the halls of the Balcony Cliffs calling out the name of a ghost, but no ghost would appear, and I would sustain myself with this meager hope: Every time I thought there could be no further breach of trust that our relationship could withstand, that Wick and I would be driven apart never to come back together, we discovered our limits were elastic, that we had so much more room to mistrust each other the worse it got out in the city.

  But underneath my excuses, this ghost wanted to see Borne, no matter what the danger. Or perhaps because of it. The ghost wanted to see Borne and find some way to fix it. The ghost was confused, and the ghost knew that if Wick knew, he would not understand, so he could never find out. The ghost believed that she had put in the work being responsible and helping out around the Balcony Cliffs, and that she was only risking herself. Perhaps the ghost didn’t care what harm might come to her. Perhaps deep down the ghost thought that without Borne there, Wick had no right to say where she wandered or did not wander.

  Yet for any of this to work, for it to make any sense, the ghost had to think back to a simpler time, to travel into the past, through parts of Borne’s journal, and in that past Borne had just been out for longer than was safe. Borne was a lost child who needed looking after. So I searched that nocturnal night—Nocturnalia, as he’d called it—treading wraithlike and anonymous down the ruined streets of our fucked-up city.

  This ghost conducted a subtle search, making use of veteran survival skills. No ghost would wander half crazed, shouting out Borne’s name. No ghost would walk up to a Mord proxy and ask if it had seen Borne, because, deep down, the ghost didn’t really want to die—just maybe come right up to the edge, so that the entire spectrum of colors would click back into place behind her eyes.

  Evidence of prudence: Once, at the heart of what had been the city’s commercial district, the ghost peeked around a corner and saw two Mord proxies in the middle distance. They were tearing at a human corpse. The ghost turned back and detoured several blocks, then course-corrected again when encountering a handful of skeletal people at a street corner drinking homemade alcohol out of old bottles. Their eyes were looking out somewhere else and nothing about them even mimicked the idea of “kind” or “reasonable.” The ghost believed the people would be ghosts soon enough, and she could talk to them then.

  No, the ghost channeled anger and grief in another way: through controlled, bloodless, clinical searching. First, the ghost searched the perimeter of the Balcony Cliffs, and then, starting to the south, clearing those areas where he might have been most likely to go. While inside the ghost’s heart raged, but what could a ghost’s heart rage about? That the ghost hadn’t been able to protect Borne from the world or the world from Borne, or frustration with herself at the impulse to still seek him out?

  As the ghost immersed herself in the night, became steeped in it and more comfortable, the ghost’s search became more and more meaningless. The ghost’s purpose changed and the ghost became a chronicler in her head of a damaged city, a city that could not go on like this forever, torn between foes and monsters, before it, too, became a ghost. The body still gasped and drew breath and reanimated itself—contained the capacity to be rejuvenated, even now. But not forever. Eventually the collective memory would fail, and travelers, if travelers ever came again, would find a stretch of desert that had once been a vast ocean and hardly a sign that a city had ever been here.

  Yet, despite this, people still cared. As the ghost wandered, she could see that people still cared, and there was a kind of dangerous ecstasy in that—a kind of displaced passion and recklessness from seeing the way people could still care about something dying, dead.

  * * *

  I might have snuck out until someone did kill me, if the ghost hadn’t eventually found what she was looking for. Even a ghost could sicken of combing through a place populated by the fearful and dangerous, even if this particular ghost often snuck around with a confidant’s stride, had become an actor steadied by sadness and self-loathing, making others leery of asking questions.

  A man I could not see, a stranger recessed into an alcove, the ground in front seeded with broken glass and worse, gave the ghost the tip.

  “Something strange? Something strange? Past the burning bear. Past the playground. Foraging. You’ll find something strange all right. Then, maybe, you’ll wish you hadn’t.”

  Was the something strange enough? The ghost would have to discover that for herself.

  “What about something familiar?” the voice said, cackling, proud of his joke, as the ghost drifted away. “Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer something familiar?”

  The burnt bear lay beneath the faded pink archway for an arcade long destroyed, paint peeling like a disease of the skin to reveal cracked stone and a latticework of exposed steel bars beneath. It was a landmark the ghost had used before, about half a mile from the neighborhood formerly graced by dead astronauts. Something had gone wrong with the proxy’s breathing of fire and the flames had washed back over it, so swift that in death the bear remained on its haunches, blackened and hairless, looking like a huge half-demonic bat or rat. The skull was black and glistening and narrow without the fur, the torso all fused bones and withered meat and ash. The claws on the broad feet were an astonishing, threatening white, and no one would touch the corpse, fearing a trap. Every time I sa
w it, the corpse looked more like a statue: a memorial sent back in time from a future where Mord ruled the city unopposed and all worshipped him. We would go from the Age of the Company to the Age of the Bears, unless the Magician had her way.

  I used the bear corpse to orient myself, venturing ever farther out on sweeps to check first for the Magician’s patrols. It was safer on this side, in territory held by either the Magician or no one, as Mord pressed his advantage to the west and the Magician changed tactics.

  Down through a darkened courtyard strode the ghost that night, past a handful of muttering specters, headed for an abandoned, long-looted department store, so old no one could read the sign. I climbed a ladder up the building’s side. The ladder was new and shiny, which made the ghost smirk. Such an obvious trap must be a kind of joke left behind by whoever had killed or captured the trap-setters. As expected, nothing waited for me on the roof but safe passage and a slight breeze. The moon had gone to sleep or died and I couldn’t look at the stars without thinking of Borne.

  On the other side I found the fossilized remains of a public park centered around a rotting fountain. Despite evidence of attempts to resurrect that space, the swing set had become deformed and crumpled into the earth, and there was a faint smell of carrion and sour marrow. I would not set foot there, experienced ghost that I was, and I sidled along the edge, careful and slow, as if the playground dirt might be toxic or was actually a vast and horrific swimming pool that went deep and was full of monsters.

  Beyond the park, I came across the exposed ground level of a skating rink or storage hangar and watched from the threshold as five scavengers sorted through a rich mélange of probably worthless debris. They had a glowworm trapped in an hourglass to see by, and when the sand ran out I assumed they’d move on. Their quarry included filthy plastic bags filled with nothing, old barrels, boxes sagging from water damage and mold, and a few piles of upended garbage that had been there long enough to have already been gone through and to have stopped stinking. But each generation lowered its expectations.