Borne

by Jeff VanderMeer

  But there hadn’t been water flowing for years and the trees were all dead and leafless and half fossilized, their lie exposed by the gnarled green cactus that had grown up around them. The weeds were fractious and yellow against the sandy ground and near the slope of the ravine had to burst up through a cracked asphalt so old, so dislodged and broken up, that in its blackened aspect that surface could as well have been the upsurge of some vast underground volcano.

  Vultures circled above—a good sign. Something dead below meant too that things had lived, at least for a while, and broken tree trunks and a few mounds of refuse gathered around the nubs of old walls provided good cover if we wanted to try our luck down the ravine.

  Wick’s safe place lay to the west, a little to the north of our position. The ravine would take us out of our way, but otherwise to the immediate northwest there was little cover past the shadow of the Balcony Cliffs and we were fearful of being exposed to the Mord proxies.

  My throat was parched. I had on my worst pair of shoes. In my pockets I’d found a dried-out alcohol minnow I split with Wick and not much else other than a pocketknife. Whatever Wick had he would not say, only that he would “hold it in reserve.”

  We started toward the ravine, scrambling down the incline to where it leveled out before a steeper descent, now walking on the field of asphalt and weeds. I looked back at the Balcony Cliffs, so overgrown with moss and grass at this angle it did look like a cliff top and not the edge of a vast building at all.

  But as I stared, there came a glitch or stoppage in time, and the sound of Wick’s voice as he screamed at me some far distance and pulled at my arm, and I thought it odd that the sun had gone away and that there was a shadow across the Balcony Cliffs when there was no cloud in the sky.

  A sun carious and bloodshot alongside the real sun. The Balcony Cliffs ripped away from me, a wall of dark brown between us. A counting out of my heartbeats so slow that each became like the drip of the last honey out of the jar onto a plate far, far below, and as elastic.

  The world was full of noise and then full of silence, and in the silence all the air left my lungs and a great peace came over me and I was on my back on the ground as if I’d always been there.

  A thunderous wave, a monstrous vibration through the earth, had flung me to the ground. I was falling away from Wick or he was falling away from me down the incline, come to rest tossed to the side, bleeding among the weeds, startling white against black asphalt. I could see him at the edge of my vision, but I had to force my gaze skyward, as if a weight already pressed down on me from those coordinates.

  Mord rose above me, had been hiding or invisible, and the asphalt thrown into the air with the impact of him smashing his feet into the ground near us now rained down in clumps and I put up one hand to protect my face but could not stop staring. The blue sky, curiously calm, and the silence, and Mord, a huge golden-brown bear rearing up on hind legs to blot out the sky, to destroy everything from the dust motes to the sun … and me lying there looking up at that as his body extended higher still and the sky around that mass of fur burning and seething, a corona around the utter impossible smothering thickness of his fur, and there was his mighty foot raised and there his claws and above that the sight of a paw and at an impossible height up that golden length the muzzle, the fangs, the great yellow eye, the deranged beacon, as dangerous as in my dreams. And the eye saw me, I swear it saw me, locked onto me and worried at me and would not let go. I swear Mord knew me and yet I was still on my back, adrift in aftershocks, one of my eardrums burst and something moist and sticky running down the side of my head. I couldn’t feel my arms or legs, those poor sad twigs.

  With excruciating slowness, Mord grew larger and larger in my field of vision. Weeks passed as I lay there and Mord contrived in his infinite mercy and patience to remove the sky, remove the world, and become God of Nothing. Until one day, in harsh sunlight, Wick bleeding beside me, I could see the scarred black pads of his raised foot so close, every whorl and tuft of fur around the toes, the huge clods of dirt there dislodged and now lazily spiraling down with the foot while still waves of dust spilled off the sides. He smelled of rich mud and subtle honeysuckle. He smelled of shit and, impossibly, of mint. The long, yellow claws were so very large, the tips curling over me so sharp, and I could see the fracture lines in them, the places where those claws had been split and repaired many times, how they were in their way as delicate and miraculous as they were deadly.

  Less blue and more Mord, and I was about to be pulverized by our god, made into pulp beneath his tread, and then everything would be over and this stuttering, stilted attempt I had made at life would be over. All that effort relaxed into not-moving, not-thinking, my atoms released to become something else.

  The pads of Mord’s foot were cool and dark and comforting and very, very close.

  But very close too was a word being shouted into my good ear, my own name: “Rachel! Rachel! Rachel!” It sounded ridiculous, like the cawing of a crow. With the word came a dragging sensation, a bumpy sliding drag, and I was moving over the ground fast as the foot continued to come down toward me.

  The darkness spread but my face was in the light and I could see sky again. The darkness was very close. My chest was in the light, but my legs were in shadow. That seemed peculiar to me, as if it were raining on just one side of the street.

  One final wrenching, jolting pull on my arms and I was flipped through the air by the impact of some monster stamping on the skin of the world and Rachel was set down again and was rolling downhill, rolling and rolling with some other creature attached to her back and still shouting the name of a ghost: “Rachel!”

  The world went dark, but if I was dead at least I could hear again, and not just the voice in my head. The rumble and roar, screams, and imagined “Drrrk! Drrrk!” while a sack of flesh was dragged and thrown about.

  Somewhere close was a river of fur that became a dark, dry river full of rocks and chemicals, and that’s where I washed up, waiting for someone, anyone, to find me.

  HOW WE FOUND TEMPORARY SHELTER

  Once, as a bedtime story, though he never truly slept, I told Borne about my island of refuge, the place my parents brought me to when I was six or seven. There I had experienced a hard-won two years without upheaval, without war or refugee camps. On that island, I had begun to think I might live out my life. It had the same false sense of permanence as the Balcony Cliffs, only more so.

  We lived in an apartment in the harbor capital, but I remembered with such vividness not our home or the buildings in the city but the botanical gardens and its decorative pond with a dead fountain in the center. Water lilies covered the surface with butter-yellow blossoms and round green lily pads with a raised edge that replicated the circular gray granite wall that surrounded the pond. The wall was just the right height that I could, on tiptoe, reach into the water and trail my hand there, tiny fish nibbling at my fingertips. In the silty water swam also carp, ponderous goldfish, and brown, mysterious eels with gills like explosions of lace. Fat ugly frogs stood sentinel on the lily pads and turtles the size of my thumb sunned themselves in that miniature world. Snails whose gray shells were transparent so you could see the darkness of their coiled bodies hid against the wall, and I had to be careful before leaning so I wouldn’t crush them with my awkward, clumsy human body.

  Nothing that had been altered lived there; biotech had been banned from the gardens, with the government set to classify artificial animals as akin to espionage. Malformed animals or rare ones could incite panic, and the newspapers ran articles about suspected biotech cornered and hacked to death by men with machetes.

  But my mother would say at dinner, my father rolling his eyes, that biotech was already out in the world more than people knew. That it was pretending, trying to blend in, to escape notice.

  * * *

  After school, my friends and I would play at the gardens, overseen by one of the mothers or my father. We would climb the labyrinthine trees
that overhung the pond, the ones with the intense strands of bright red blossoms that made me sneeze, the wind off the sea from across the road bringing a hint of salt and fresh coolness to our sweaty endeavors. Then we would be walked down the sea road to the harbor, and home. Along the way, when I had money from chores, we would run into the corner store and get salted plums and rice candy. The old lady behind the counter never smiled but would give me, free of charge, the little decorative umbrellas people used to put in drinks.

  Most days, if it hadn’t yet gotten dark, my parents would go down to the beach with me after dinner. We would look for shells or wade in the shallows with our shoes off. I liked to watch the grumpy-looking sand-colored fish sway back and forth under the surf. Then it was back home to do schoolwork, and before bed my father would read to me from a children’s book or maybe even an adult book, or poetry with pictures alongside it. No one made printed books on the island anymore, and electricity was on-again, off-again. But I didn’t notice that, didn’t think anything of it. I was going to live on the island forever. Each day would be just like the last, and each night also, with the ocean breeze surging like the sea was surging, with wind crackling gentle through the palms and, sometimes, the little foot-patter of rats or mice that entranced me but sent my father into frenzies of mousetrap building.

  In the mornings, a man who had grown up on the island and sold, among other items, boiled, filtered water in glass jars would keep an eye on me and the neighbor kids as we walked to school in our brown leather sandals and the badly made itchy gray uniforms the school recycled year after year. We’d do our language arts, our math, our science, and then be released into recess. The school was across the road from the beach, and we’d rove wider than was prudent, blunder, explore the very limits of our territory—to uncover a huge palm crab or some wayward crayfish taking a walk from the nearby river.

  We rarely made it all the way to the sea without some adult calling us back. But I sometimes made it to the fence, to watch the mud flats where the river fed into the sea. I liked to observe the mudskippers—soft, slimy, puckish creatures with bulgy eyes and fins that doubled as a way to walk on land. I didn’t even notice the marsh reek all that much, I liked the mudskippers so much—and the cautious fiddler crabs that would cover the mud when I was in the middle distance but then disappear down their holes leaving behind an empty ghost town when I was at the fence.

  The mudskippers didn’t even blink, though, remained behind like gray statues, unmoving but for a delicate flutter around their amphibious gills. Gulp, gulp, gulp they’d go, before, at their own pace, plopping back into the water. Some of them acted like sentries, and others seemed to enjoy goofing off. It was hard to tell the difference, though.

  My mother asked a lot about the mudskippers, about whether any had strange eyes or acted differently. Or if I had ever seen anything else odd out there. No, I said, none of them did. No, I had not. She said she had heard a rumor about biotech seeking refuge on the mud flats. The biotech left a trail, she felt—and if you could track it to the source, that might be where safety lay. Which was when I guessed the truth: My parents didn’t think that life would last. They thought the island was just a temporary shelter, that we would be moving on soon enough.

  It astonishes me now that I could have ever led such an opulent life or had so much leisure time, or have looked at all that protein with a non-predatory eye. Any of that transported to the city I now lived in would have been ravaged and stripped down in half a day or less—the pond in the botanical gardens reduced to an empty pool of cloudy water, the mud flats just a barren plain.

  When I had finished telling Borne about the island, he asked, “Is that from a story?”

  “No, Borne. That was part of my childhood.”

  “So it was a story.”

  “No, it was real.”

  “Oh yes. From ‘when I was a kid,’” he said, as if he’d been filing away some of what I said as a separate book of fairy tales. I was the old bore who couldn’t shut up about the good old days that had never existed.

  “It was real, Borne,” I insisted.

  “What’s a dog?” he asked. Sometimes I also told him, if I was up to it, about the dog I’d fed on the island and had to abandon.

  “You know what a dog is.”

  “A dog is a meal on four paws.”

  “Borne!”

  “You said that.”

  “I said it as a joke.” But there weren’t any dogs left in the city, except on the fringes, distant and wary. No friendly dogs anywhere, because a friendly dog was a meal on four paws.

  “Where’s the island now?” Borne asked, as if islands could just float away, but mostly to change the subject.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is it still the same?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think it’s not the same now.”

  “It could be the same.”

  What did Borne know? I remembered thinking. His own brief childhood he’d spent rooted in place as a kind of glorified houseplant. He had never been anywhere.

  But Borne had pressed on, not realizing how much it bothered me.

  “How do you know it happened?” he asked. “Is it written down anywhere?”

  How did I know it had happened? Because of its absence now, because I still felt the loss of it, but I didn’t know how to convey that to Borne then, because he had never lost anything. Not back then. He just kept accumulating, sampling, tasting. He kept gaining parts of the world, while I kept losing them.

  * * *

  When I woke in Wick’s safe place for the first time, or came to, Wick had propped me up against the stone wall next to him, facing the shallow water of a well. All was in shadow except the water, which emitted a light blue rippling glow. Above, the walls came in toward each other like a steeple, leaving just a small point of light at the apex. It smelled like moss and a clean sort of darkness.

  Two of my fingers welcomed me back with a vicious, lancing throb, along with a shoulder laced with shooting pains like an electric spiderweb. My legs were scraped and bloodied through my ripped pants and my pelvis and left hip felt bruised, not right, hurt against the stone floor. A weakness in my ankle could be walked off, but the state of my left ear was more serious. That I might always have to listen out of the other ear, the sound coming to my left side muddy—always have to be alert. I could still feel in my bones the reverberations of Mord’s weight striking the earth, and I was much too aware of my body to even pretend to be a ghost again.

  Our shoes were dusty, dirty travesties, perched there defeated on the end of our legs, and I did not want to take mine off for fear of what I might find underneath.

  Wick’s wispy hair had become disheveled to mad-genius levels and his face had gotten so dusty it looked like a mask, through which his eyes shone wicked and intense. I didn’t like the redness of Wick’s face, his arms. I had thought him shaken but otherwise uninjured by our escape, but that redness made it seem as if he had been drinking or evoked certain algae when the water’s been poisoned, a bloom that seeks contamination. It astonished me that despite this he was relaxed, lighter, less worried, giving me an impish look.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  He told me.

  Between us and the well he had overturned an empty crate. A single black kidney bean trembled atop that rough surface, served up on a little plate.

  “Can you guess what that is?” he asked me. Playing our old games, except usually I brought the salvage to him.

  “A bean.”

  “Correct! A bean.”

  “But is it really a bean? It could be something better?”

  “No. Unfortunately, it is a bean. Of sorts.”

  “Where did you get the plate?”

  “Never mind the plate.”

  “Are we going to eat the bean?”

  Wick shook his head. “No, even though that is, technically, our last food. From my pocket.”

  Down to a single bean.<
br />
  “A bean,” I said. “Impressive. Prodigal. The bean returns.”

  “I just thought you should know how resourceful we were in our flight, before I open the pack I found here and see what else we have.” He pulled a pack out from the shadows by his other side.

  “Open the pack, then,” I said. I was hungry.

  “Wait, though. Wait a minute.”

  Before us, on the saucer, the trembling bean hatched and a tiny, moist insect emerged glittering, spread diaphanous wings that seemed etched from obsidian. It looked like a dragonfly but much more delicate. A damselfly that shook its wings once and took to the air, spiraled up above the well, and disappeared into the darkness of the stone walls. Maybe it went out the hole atop the cistern, or maybe it decided to live in the cistern. Either way, we never saw our “bean” again.

  “What kind of biotech was that?”

  “No kind of biotech at all,” Wick said. “I have no idea how it got in my pocket. I have no idea how it got there. No one made it. It was an egg. Something laid it in my pocket. Isn’t that amazing?”

  “You let it go.” Mock disapproval, still playing, but after Borne it wasn’t the same.

  Wick shrugged, fatalistic. “If there’s nothing to eat in the pack, Rachel, it doesn’t matter anyway. Let a bit of the Balcony Cliffs live on here. Why not?”

  * * *

  Our new shelter wasn’t nearly as elaborate as our old shelter. The cistern looked from the outside like a sunken mound or slag heap of stones that must have fallen in and buried whoever had once lived inside. There was access through a movable stone where the mound had relaxed into the hillside and a trapdoor beside the well that led to a tunnel that led to a disguised exit a quarter mile away.

  The circular well that occupied half of the flat stone floor enclosed brackish water recessed a few inches below floor level and perhaps once was contaminated. But biotech filters in the form of fat luminous blue slugs clung to the sides of the well, patrolling back and forth under the water’s surface. That and the electric, burnt-match smell to the water were the best indicators that no one else had ever found this place. Otherwise, they would have been taken by someone long ago.