Borne

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Borne was also growing. Yes, growing. I hadn’t wanted to admit it at first, because the idea of growth carried with it the idea of a more radical change, the thought of a child becoming an adult. In how many species did the transformation become radical, the parent so different from the juvenile? So yes, by the end of the first month, although the process had been gradual, I could no longer deny that Borne had tripled in size.

  I also could not deny that I was actively hiding Borne from Wick. I no longer let Wick into my apartment, or if I did I made sure to put Borne in the back room, out of sight. I ignored Wick’s attempts to engage me on the subject of Borne as a threat or a creature that required caution.

  Since Borne never displayed any kind of threatening behavior, I never thought to take him as a threat. Even calling Borne a “he” began to feel faintly ridiculous as he didn’t exhibit the aggression or self-absorption I expected from most males. Instead, during those early days Borne had become a blank slate on which I had decided to write only useful words.

  WHAT WICK HAD TOLD ME ABOUT THE FISH PROJECT AND THE COMPANY

  Most of what I knew about the fish project, and the Company, came to me from Wick like fragments of a dark tale I had to put together myself. I couldn’t tell if he held those memories close to ward off the world or to let in something of the world. The Company had come to the city unbidden, when the city was already failing and had no defenses against the intruder. For a time, the Company must have seemed a savior to the city and its people. For a time, the prospect of jobs alone must have been enough. I tried to imagine a young Wick being drawn into the Company, working his way from apprentice to making creatures on his own. Yet the vision always blurred, fell away. I could only ever see him in my imagination, fully formed, Wick as I knew him now.

  The fish project had been his undoing, the cause of his being cast out from the Company after many years of service. But although the fish had led to despair, memories of the creature filled him with nostalgia, too.

  “A tank of a fish,” Wick told me one night more than a year before I found Borne.

  We were on our balcony, looking up at the black sky and ignoring the slap and rush of river poison below. Sometimes, through the protective veil Wick had created to disguise us, we would see others on the balconies to the north, beyond the area we controlled. They looked like manikins or statues, something hopelessly remote, even though we knew they could be dangerous.

  It was early in that year, far into a chilly evening. The wind gushed up out of the dark, broke against the balcony stone to bring the faint sting of river smells, and I heard the reassuring hut-hut-hooting of owls and the sounds of stealthy things moving through the underbrush below. I remember thinking that the creatures we couldn’t see had no use for us, went about their business without the need to figure us into their plans. I had no use for me, either. We were both drunk on alcohol minnows and exhausted from a long day of work. I had blood on the bottom of my boots from a scavenging mission gone wrong, but not too wrong.

  The sky and its blurred stars, seeking something, wheeled and roved and quivered despite how little I moved as I stared up from my chair. But still I listened to Wick beside me. Still I was awake. My sadness gave me a clarity, a kind of sobriety I hadn’t earned, Wick much drunker.

  “A wonderful fish! With a wide and mournful mouth—like you see in certain kinds of dogs. Beautiful and ugly and it moved like a leviathan. On land, no less! It could breathe air. I loved that it could breathe air. I gave it wonderful eyes, too: veined with emerald and gold.”

  I had heard this part before, but as much as Wick went on about the fish, the depths of his feelings weren’t about the fish. Not really. As time passed and the stars above began to slow, to reorganize along familiar constellations, most of his emotions were focused on people from the Company: the old friend who had abandoned him, or whom he had abandoned, and the new employee who had betrayed him. The supervisor who had overseen the fish project. All of these people he had let into his life, and who had turned against him. Or had changed. Or had simply been acting to their nature, and Wick had come into focus for them for a time and then drifted out of focus again.

  I didn’t know them, and Wick never gave enough context to make me care. But also I couldn’t remember as an adult when I had trusted three people at the same time. That Wick had once trusted so many seemed silly and irresponsible: an old-world indulgence. That he might have trusted them more than he trusted me I didn’t want to think about.

  I wondered, too, if Wick’s view of the Company, his willingness to forgive, could ever be reconciled with my own view. To me, the Company was the white engorged tick on the city’s flank, the place that had robbed us of resources and created chaos. The place that, it was rumored, had sent its finished products out by underground tunnels to far-distant places and left us with the dregs at the holding ponds.

  Sometimes I met rare older scavengers who would spin me tales of the richness of the city before the Company’s appearance, and their faces would shine with an inner light that almost made me change my mind about memory beetles. Almost. What they told me could not be the whole truth, the same as when we speak of the recently deceased and tell only the good stories. That was the beauty of the Company—how it won no matter what. How it had attached itself to the history of our city, even when it no longer existed here except as a husk, a ghost, or a giant, murderous bear.

  “Someone killed it, showed it to me through a camera embedded in one of my spy beetles.” Except, later on Wick said that another person had killed it.

  Yet another version: that it had been wounded and lingered on for a time in the holding ponds outside the Company building. In this version, the fish had survived for almost a year—longer than it should have, in part because Wick had fed it. The creature had become a terror of that place: the monster with the human face that rose from the depths to devour. Although the human face was dead almost from the start, nibbled at and gnawed on by lesser creatures in the water, became waterlogged and misshapen in its decay, and no one would have recognized who it once was, nor could the rest of the fish ever recover from the death it carried atop its head.

  In a fourth version, Wick hinted that the fish might linger there still, deep under the water. Wick telling versions. Wick hurt. Wick falling back into angst—Wick recounting how he had been forced out of the Company when his fish project was sabotaged, the Company sliding into anarchy, out of contact with its headquarters, and he having to live his life without the protection to which he’d grown accustomed. Turned him into a drug dealer, a survivalist, a man so thin and translucent he wouldn’t have looked out of place in a row of creatures from a cave or the deep ocean.

  In my darker moments, when I doubted my own true self and betrayed that self by framing my attraction to Wick as a kind of antidote, I knew that what Wick was really admitting was that in his past he had helped to create a weapon so deadly that not even its extreme beauty could justify its use.

  The truth that Wick conveniently left out of most of his memories but was explicit in the notes on the diagram in his apartment: The purpose of his monstrous fish had been to serve as enforcer and crowd control, to instill fear, and perhaps to kill. In some remote place, a government still had had, at the time, the authority or the stability to restore order, was invested in restoring it.

  And then, that night on the balcony, for the first and only time, another monster entered Wick’s rambling discourse about the Company. “Mord knew about the fish project. Mord showed me what I was.”

  I didn’t know how to take that. Had Wick coexisted with Mord in the Company? When Mord was smaller, when Mord couldn’t fly? But whenever I sensed Wick had let slip something important, he would stop abruptly, as if reading my sudden interest, and fall silent. That silence was no natural end.

  It was more like a cutting-off point, the border beyond which Wick could not venture.

  WHAT I DID TO OTHERS AND WHAT OTHERS DID TO ME

  In t
he city, the line between nightmare and reality was fluid, just as the context of the words killer and death had shifted over time. Perhaps Mord was responsible. Perhaps we all were.

  A killer was someone who killed for reasons other than survival. A killer was a madman or madwoman, not a person just trying to get through another day. Once, I hit a woman with a rock. We encountered each other while out scavenging on the same deserted street on the west side of the city. I had found a smooth piece of metal being absorbed by a glistening red piece of fleshlike plant. I didn’t know if Wick would find it useful, but I had never seen anything like it before.

  As I turned a corner holding my prize, I came upon a woman walking. She was about fifty, wiry in the way survivors often are, gray hair hanging in a sheet, clothing a patchwork of gray and black.

  She saw me and smiled. Then she saw what I held and her smile went away. “Give me that. That’s mine.” Maybe she meant “That’s going to be mine.”

  I didn’t wait for her to get close enough to grapple with me. I knelt and picked up a rock with my free hand. As she rushed toward me from the middle of the street, I threw it at her, catching her in the forehead. She went limp, fell onto her side, breathing heavily. Then she got up and I threw another rock, catching her in the head again.

  This time she staggered back, put her hands on her knees as she hunched down. I could see the bright red pooling from her head to the ground. She sat heavily in the rubble and put a hand to her head, stared at me as I dropped the third rock I’d picked up.

  “I just wanted to look at it,” she said, puzzled as she kept putting a hand to her wound and taking it away again. Her eyes began to glaze over. “Just a look is all I wanted.”

  I didn’t stay to help her or hurt her. I left.

  Did she die? Did I kill her, and if I did, am I a murderer?

  * * *

  What happened between the woman and me wasn’t new, no matter how much amnesia we’ve suffered; it was as old as the old world and older still. The first rule, the only rule, is that you carry your safety with you the best you can—you protect yourself the best you can, and you have that right.

  But one evening, three weeks after I found Borne, I let down my guard. A gang of children creeping through the moss and detritus caught the door behind me before it shut. Followed me silent down the corridors to my apartment, keeping to my same path to avoid the traps and pheromones and attack spiders. I didn’t notice because I was already thinking about Borne and wondering where I would find him this time.

  Wick had left to tend to the farthest reach of his crumbling drug empire. None of my personal defenses—predator cockroaches in the hallway, the crab spiders embedded in the door, a good old-fashioned knife blade—could stop them.

  Other than Mord, the poison rains, and the odd discarded biotech that could cause death or discomfort, the young were often the most terrible force in the city. Nothing in their gaze could tell you they were human. They had no memories of the old world to anchor them or humble them or inspire them. Their parents were probably dead or worse, and the most terrible and transformative violence had been visited upon them from the earliest of ages.

  There were five of them, and four had traded their eyes for green-gold wasps that curled into their sockets and compounded their vision. Claws graced their hands like sharp commas. Scales at their throats burned red when they breathed. One wing sighed bellows-like out of the naked back of the shortest, the one who still had slate-gray human eyes. After a while, I wished he’d had wasps instead.

  They smelled of brine and sweat and dust. They licked their lips and flexed their biceps like little conquerors. At that time, we did not know how they had become so changed, unless it was from contamination from the Company, and could not identify the new impulse rising nor where it came from.

  I fought, but sometimes fighting isn’t enough. Showing aggression and resistance isn’t enough. You can’t blame yourself for being outnumbered, if you want to stay sane.

  It was useless. I was useless. They tortured me in various unimaginative ways for hours. The shortest mostly just watched, stood beside the bed with his slate-gray gaze shining dull from huge eyes, the whites not as white as his pale skin. They were on drugs they’d probably found on a toxic waste heap.

  Between my whimpers and screams and thrashing, as the sheets grew red and the other three howled their dominance, I kept saying to the gray-eyed child, “Don’t watch. Don’t watch.” I wanted to believe I was trying to spare him, but I was really trying to spare myself. It was too late for him.

  When they began to tire of their games, they broke everything not of value, stood on one another’s shoulders to snuff out my fireflies.

  Then they found Borne—he must have moved or somehow attracted their attention. Soon their interest in me faded. On their way out, they decided to take Borne with them—through one bleary, blood-encrusted eye I saw them snatch him up.

  That was the first time I pleaded with them, when they took Borne. That was the first time I truly knew Borne was important to me. But it didn’t matter. They took Borne and left me in the dark, cheek laid open, face and arms and legs bleeding, some of the wounds deep. My skin burned. My skin was numb. My open flesh felt cold against the heat. I didn’t have the strength to get up.

  The city had visited me, to remind me that I meant less than nothing to it, that even the Balcony Cliffs wasn’t safe. That every wire in my head connected to our defenses could be snapped, just like that.

  * * *

  Time passed, and I existed in a quivering, exposed, horrible state. I was howling and shrieking, and there was nothing of restraint left in me; the pain took care of that. When I came to for the third or fourth time, my head lay upon Wick’s lap and he was looking down at me with a curious expression on his face. His body flickered a light green with his stress, a side effect of giving a home to the diagnostic worms. My body felt soft and warm as he tended to me, with an ache behind it that threatened to become all-consuming.

  “I’m so sorry,” Wick said in a quiet voice as if talking to a corpse. The concern I hadn’t seen in him came through in his voice, so thick and heartfelt, as if he had been crying, that it transfixed me, became something horrifying. I didn’t need his devastation but his strength. “Just lie still. You shouldn’t feel pain for a while.”

  I did feel pain, muted yes, but I felt it. But I nodded to give us both comfort, my vision blurring as I stared up at him. I could still make out the precise and beautiful architecture of his face, god help me. That still mattered to me.

  He ran a diagnostic beetle over my body. It was old and worn, its carapace scratched, but its legs felt smooth, glossy. Everywhere it touched me, I felt an immediate, fast-fading glowing sensation. Wick had already closed up my wounds with the help of surgical slugs. I remembered the cool-cold sensation of their progress from the last time I had suffered an injury. My attackers had been creative, had cut me in patterns, writing words that had no meaning to anyone, least of all them. And so the movement of the slugs had retraced those paths, those words, given them a meaning by accident.

  “I would hold you,” Wick said from far away, “but I’m afraid I would hurt you.”

  Then I remembered they had taken Borne and wanted to ask Wick … what? To go after them? But Wick told me not to speak, said, “I’m sorry I wasn’t here. I’m sorry they got through.” He was in a different place than me, worried about different things.

  “How badly did they hurt you?” he asked then, with a particular emphasis, and I knew what he was really asking. The question was medical but not medical. He had been re-creating my attack in his imagination and seeing the worst—and he needed to know just how invasive to be with his diagnostics.

  “Just what you see,” I said, and there was a noticeable relaxation of Wick’s taut stance that somehow agitated me.

  My attackers had been too single-minded or too inhuman to rape me. The one with the gray eyes, the oldest, had been about eleven years old. W
ith sandy blond hair and delicate hands. I might not have told Wick the truth even if they had, but they hadn’t. Two of the wasp-eyes had shoved their tongues in my mouth as they cut me, but it had been as if trying to contaminate me with something. A metallic aftertaste still lingered on my tongue.

  Now I was crying—just a steady stream of tears without the expression on my face changing at all. There is only so much you can take before you begin to feel that the effort to survive is too much to endure. It would have been better if I had been attacked in the street. It would have been better if I lay out there now in a heap than to lie in the middle of the Balcony Cliffs and have to absorb Wick’s guilt, his concern, his regard. To be seen, when all I wanted was to crawl away into a dark hole to die or recover from my wounds.

  But I let Wick do his work and also told him how it had happened, so he would know how to bolster our defenses. I was alive, and from past experience I knew in time I would forget enough to again pretend that we could someday be free. Of the city, of Mord, of all of it. I don’t know if that was hope. Maybe it was just stubborn inertia.

  “And they took Borne, too,” I said a little later, not sure my words were coming out right. Borne being gone was a concept I had to think around or I wouldn’t make it.

  Wick frowned from the chair next to my bed. “But they didn’t take Borne.” He nodded toward the living room. “He’s right in there.”

  Even through my numb discomfort, the beetle crawling across my torso, I felt an overwhelming confusion and relief.

  “Did they bring him back?”

  “I don’t think so. He was in the hallway by the door. Your attackers got away. I brought him back in.”

  “Thank you,” I said, knowing that might not have been an easy decision.