Borne

by Jeff VanderMeer

  But I exhibited discipline, did not rush to bring Borne along with me, even though that was the only remedy. I ventured out twice more first, although not in the exhilarating, dangerous sense of climbing up onto a sleeping Mord. I bought this time by promising Borne that the third time I went out into the world, he would go with me. I would be his teacher, even though I was still being taught.

  Twice, then, I took to the streets alone, and twice I thought of myself as bait. I would not believe in my traps or my ability to see traps. I would see myself as bait, like the dead astronauts, who had never fallen to Earth but looked like they had. To be bait was to think of what or who I was bait for, and what might entice those who might want to take the particular bait that was me.

  I was twenty-eight years old and from another country. Someone who scavenged for a living and who, when not searching for spare bits of biotech, took care of a child who wasn’t human. I was good at using weapons. I could sniff out a trap from a distance. I had no formal education, but had been home-taught well and could read at an advanced level. I could, with Wick’s guidance, grow things in my bathroom that I could eat. That was the treasure that was me, and every time I went out I would need to gauge who would ignore the résumé to gather the protein or want the skill set, or want the skill set snuffed out.

  When I came back from those expeditions with enough salvage for Wick to take it as a sign that I had fully recovered, and that perhaps our relationship might recover, too … I had no excuse not to take Borne with me.

  * * *

  Because Borne was coming with me, I would have to forage much closer to home, which was against the rules, but I didn’t have much choice. I had been circling closer to home anyway, on my own. Mord was a mighty weight that could not disguise itself, but the Magician was the blade slipped between the ribs that you don’t sense until too late. Her signs and symbols were everywhere, and certain neighborhoods had become unsafe swiftly, overrun by a mix of her true believers and her converts in the flesh. A scrawled M on the side of a building might mean Mord or it might not.

  I had decided to hazard the factory district to the northwest of the Balcony Cliffs. In that tangled mass of warehouses and rusted industry lay every excuse and promise of a death foretold—inert, empty, silent, vast. Those were the smokestacks that had killed off this part of the world. Those were the assembly lines that had choked us with products we did not need and had to be told we wanted—before the Company had snuck in and shown us our truest, deepest desires.

  The district had a deceptive feel to it of dark and calm and quiet. Most of these buildings had structural damage, some even ripped open by the missiles of an ancient war. The route was easy to find but physically difficult—a lot of climbing over stacked and cracked girders. You could trap a foot and twist your ankle, and I was soon sore in all the places where I had been wounded. I was armed this time with a metal bat and a beat-up pair of binoculars. No more spiders to spare, so I had one of Wick’s poison beetles in the pouch on my belt. The beetles burrowed into flesh, opened their carapaces, and twirled around once inside you. The shock alone would be enough to kill.

  The way became less arduous once we were in the middle of the warren; there were narrow streets and pathways, and not always blocked by broken machinery or the remains of trucks, tires long gone. Torrents of rocks and concrete girders to the left, the highway of dust through it, and the factories on the right. Rocks, rocks, rocks. Pillars, pillars, pillars. All smashed to hell. I always felt small in that place, amongst the cathedrals of that age.

  Trailing a little behind me, Borne was a large rock that bumbled to a stop, soundless, when I looked back. Almost stealthy.

  I kept walking, with a quick glance back every once in a while, since I couldn’t persuade Borne to walk beside me.

  Soon I was no longer being followed by a rock but by a giant undulating worm, very similar to the ones that broke down waste in my apartment.

  Then, for a brief time, an enormous fly nervously buzzed forward—most unlikely of all!—but my stalker soon realized that such an organism stood out like a sore thumb. Given what I knew about Borne’s sense of humor, I would not have been surprised by then if the next time I had looked back and seen a sore thumb. Instead, the next incarnation just confirmed what I already knew about Borne: that he loved lizards, even though they did not love him.

  A giant lizard, roughly human-size, clambered across the terrain behind me. An apologetic lizard. An embarrassed and socially awkward lizard, with huge bulging eyes and protruding tongue, a reptile that progressed in stops and starts, peeking out from behind boulders. Checking to make sure I hadn’t gotten too far ahead of him. It was hideous and amazing all at once, and that bothered me. I was continually being taught by Borne how to “read” him, and yet what did this mean except that I was supposed to accept the impossible?

  It was then I stopped and, bat balanced over my shoulder, faced down the lizard.

  The lizard morphed back into a rock, close enough now I didn’t have to shout to talk to it.

  “Borne. I can see you. You came out here with me. I know that it’s you.”

  Silence.

  “Borne. You’ve been a rock, a worm, a fly, and now a lizard. Do you think I’m stupid? Even if I hadn’t brought you out here?”

  The rock moved from side to side a little.

  “You are the wrong size to be a fly or a lizard. And you look disgusting. Like a swimming pool.”

  “I am a rock,” Borne said, muffled, as if from some orifice now underneath him. “I am a rock?”

  “Oh, you’re a rock all right. You’re a great big fucking rock. You’re a boulder. Change back right this instant!”

  I was seething. Was this a joke to him? It wasn’t a joke to me. I did not like his style of camouflage—crude and almost comic, but not on purpose. Or, if on purpose, even worse. Amazing, maybe, but the opposite of camouflage. A changed context could kill. And maybe I was paranoid, but I thought I’d caught another glimpse of that fox following us.

  “Borne, I need you serious,” I said to the boulder.

  The boulder mumbled something to itself. I wasn’t sure if he knew I meant it or not.

  “I raised you from a pod. You know I did.” We shared this myth because it was simple and easy, even though he’d not really been a pod and the “raising” had been all of four months, not exactly a lifetime. But maybe it felt like a lifetime to him.

  “Yes,” the boulder admitted. “You raised me from a pod.”

  “And you know I want only the best for you?”

  The boulder became a lizard again, but its skin matched the dull dust color everywhere around us. From a distance, I had no doubt that it looked like I was arguing with no one, with nothing.

  “The very best,” Borne said, “or the best you know how. How do you do, Know How?”

  I ignored that rebellion, sidestepped it as my mom always had raising me. “Out here, Borne, you cannot be playful. You can be clever, watchful, resourceful, but you cannot be playful.” All words he knew, that I’d taught him. “You can only be playful inside the Balcony Cliffs.”

  Borne became Borne again, which still managed to startle me.

  “I’m sorry, Rachel,” Borne said.

  “Can you please try to look like a person?” I asked. “Please?”

  “Yes,” Borne said, and became as person-like as he could, without a wizard hat but instead a “normal” one, even though it was made of his own flesh and skin. That meant cowboy-style, something he’d discovered in a tattered comic book, a Western. I wish he hadn’t—it was foreign to me and meant less than nothing.

  We’d agreed on robes as his camouflage because that meant he didn’t have to grow feet. He hated feet more and more as he grew up, maybe because his architecture, his physicality, made it uncomfortable. God forbid he couldn’t have a thousand cilia propelling him forward over that rocky ground!

  * * *

  More than anything, though, Borne’s antics had
thrown me off, cut the connection between me and my surroundings, and I was having a hard time getting that awareness back. I should have marched him right back to the Balcony Cliffs. But instead I decided to press forward.

  Seeing an open doorway ahead, I ducked into a building at random: a large, four-story place with a buckling steel frame and not a window unbroken. Maybe someone had tried to live here once, but what we called Company moss grew along the sides. You could eat Company moss if you were starving, and its presence usually meant an abandoned place.

  Inside, spread out across the vast floor of the factory: the corroded remains of machinery, enough dust to choke ten of me, pools of liquid rust, a series of ladders and stairs along the side wall leading to the roof, and nothing worth scavenging. We needed what could be burned or bled or transformed.

  Borne, once inside, couldn’t stay still. In an instant, he reverted to a kind of converted “travel” mode: shorter, about five feet tall, with an expanded base for support. At the top the aperture had also widened out, the tentacles multiplying in number, but shorter and thicker, except for one that slowly rose like a periscope for a better vantage. The eyes that appeared occurred at the end of the tentacles and peered out in all directions like sentinels. He called this mode being “layered thick.”

  “What do you think you’re doing?” I asked.

  “Exploring with you?”

  “Just because we’re inside doesn’t mean you can be Borne again. You have to stay Person Borne as long as we’re outside the Balcony Cliffs.” I had told him this plenty of times before we’d left.

  None of the eye-tentacles would look at me, but I didn’t get the sense he was embarrassed or concerned. More that his attention was elsewhere.

  “Yes, Rachel. You’re right. But they’re coming. They’re coming soon and you want to be ready. I think. I think you do?”

  They’re coming soon.

  That put the fear into me, quick. That and the sound of running feet. Many running feet.

  They were coming right then—the sound close and fast and I couldn’t tell from where. I just knew someone or something was coming. The only way out was up. So I ran with Borne—up the ladders, the stairs, to the roof, Borne once more a lizard so he could scuttle faster.

  Me and my lizard-monster, lunging up the stairs to the roof.

  WHAT HAPPENED UP ON THE ROOF

  We didn’t see the intruders at first because they were seething up from the underground. I couldn’t figure out where they were coming from for this reason, too: The inside of the factory threw the sounds off. But soon enough from our vantage on the roof, looking down to the factory floor through a couple of loose slats, I saw who it was: more poisoned half-changed children, like the ones who had attacked me. Spilling out of a culvert. An explosion of colors and textures and such a variety of limbs. Some had iridescent carapaces. Some had gossamer wings. Some had fangs like cleavers that half destroyed their mouths. Soft and exposed and pink or hardened and helmeted, they spilled out. A carnivalesque parade of killers. Some, if I were looking through Wick’s eyes, would’ve registered as “mods” and others as “homegrowns.”

  Borne’s intake of breath matched mine. He didn’t need binoculars, apparently, to zero in on them. He’d gone rough and prickly beside me, and a faint snuffed-match/grain-alcohol smell wafted over.

  “More,” he whispered. “More. Many more. Of the same.”

  “Hush,” I said. “Hush.”

  Yes, more, and they looked like they had purpose, like they were on patrol. They had spears and bats and knives and machetes and a smattering of shotguns that might have been loaded or, from the way carried, used as clubs. They spread out across the factory floor, searching for something. A coldness colonized me seeing them so small, from above, their footprints and paw prints and hoofprints and boot prints leaving such a dance of marks in the dust, and our own not betraying us only because the children had frothed up like flames to obscure all that had come before, so that seeking, they had only the evidence of their own lives all around. The stairs to the roof didn’t leave such traces. Yet they clearly sought us, had heard us or been tracking us from below.

  The patterns of those footprints are what I focused on for a moment, unable to look directly at the children. I let the splinters of wood and tar pebbles from the roof cut into my palm. I wanted to be so still and so silent and so not-there that those children would never think to come up to where we were. Never even think to look up and perhaps catch a glint off my binoculars. Every scar on my body seemed to pulse, to burn. But pulsing there too was a need for revenge, and that I had to tamp down. I was with Borne. I knew he’d killed four of them, but this was more than twenty.

  But Borne had no intention of going down there. Something else was coming in across his superior senses—senses that might outnumber mine. Borne became hard, rigid, and his eyes became blowholes that pushed out curls of pink mist.

  “Other creatures are coming, Rachel,” he hissed at me like steam. “Other things are coming—now!”

  Other things?

  “Not nice,” Borne was breathing, “not nice not nice,” and what scared me was Borne being scared.

  Borne turned the drab color of the roof and went pancake-flat and spread out, and tried to curl over me like a carpet was rolling me inside of it. Or like he was a giant harsh tongue.

  “Stop it!” I whispered, losing my grip, binoculars jangling at my throat. “Stop it, I don’t need your help,” pushing back, pulling back the edge of Borne. “I need to see this. I need to see this.”

  I managed to free myself from enough Borne to lie half in and half out of his protective embrace, put the binoculars to my eyes once more.

  Down below, the roaring and screaming and bleeding had already begun, the wet, flopping sounds of people being taken apart. Mord proxies. Pouring in from the doorway where Borne and I had entered. Smashing through the windows.

  “Don’t look,” I told Borne. “Don’t look.”

  But how could I stop him? His entire skin was full of eyes, full of other receptors I couldn’t even name.

  * * *

  How to describe what I saw? It was a terrible, swift slaughter, possessed of an awful precision that made it hard to look away. Worse, the Mord proxies were enacting a revenge I’d played out in my mind a thousand times—sped up and preternatural.

  The speed shocked me the most. For they were all golden bears, all huge in their hideous beauty, much taller than a man, with thick muscles that, in their stride and bounding, came at times to the surface of their fur like the hardness of a vine-wreathed tree trunk wrung and stretched taut. Yet they moved so lithe and sinuous they could’ve been snakes or otters or flowing water pushed along in a strong current.

  Monstrous gold-brown blurs, they took apart the feral children with a gruff, ballet-like ease, the footprints on that dusty floor splattered with blood and offal. The arterial spray. Heads swatted from necks. Gouts of dark blood from deep gouges in thighs. A kind of communal baying or shrieking from the ferals as a last half dozen formed a semicircle soon rendered down into a chaos of viscera and exposed bone, the Mord proxies lunging forward from either side in hugs that burst, through fang and claw, the flesh that separated them.

  The sharp, bitter smell of blood carried even to the roof. The smell of piss and shit, too.

  There were pleadings and rough refusals to submit, although the Mord proxies never asked for surrender. You could not surrender to a proxy except through your death.

  When they were done, the factory floor had been transformed into a violent canvas of body parts and fluids. A rough raw circle that pushed a broom or mop of reds and yellows and darker tones across its surface to create swaths and paths that almost had meaning. Here too were swirls and outcroppings of thicker paint that had not been smoothed out. I felt as if I were looking at a cross-section of Mord’s brain.

  When they were done, the hummingbird quality to their movements, the blurring effect, faded, and the Mord proxie
s became just bears again—bears who, unlike Mord, could not fly. Fur matted with blood, the bears examined the evidence of their own battle lust, waded through it, and all the while huffed and bellowed and coughed deep in their throats, went from all fours to standing on two legs, to all fours again. Sniffing the air and finding it smelled good. Batted into the center the heads that hadn’t been crushed flat. As they panted and hummed and mumbled their contentment.

  Now that the Mord proxies had come to rest, I could count their numbers. Five had slaughtered twenty-five ferals, with hardly any effort.

  Yet, even with no proxy casualties, I could calculate the cost, for once the initial battle lust faded, some animating impulse fled with it, and these bears moved not in normal time but much slower, and shakes rippled through their fur and at times amongst the roaring and snarling came a whimper or a moan. Something about their speed before had been unnatural. Something about it cost them now, almost like the human body coming down from amphetamines. Which meant they might be vulnerable, if only you could catch them after a slaughter.

  “Drkkkkkk,” one gutteralized to another.

  “Drrkkkkkkkrush,” said a third.

  “Drrrkkkkssssiiiiiiii.”

  With that, the fifth Mord proxy, now ponderous and slow but still dangerous, began to head up the stairs to the roof where we hid. Through a trail of blood.

  * * *

  Half wrapped in Borne, it had made no difference when he’d extended a pseudopod to my ear and talked to me in a surreptitious way while the carnage took place. If it helped him from panicking, if it stopped him from intervening, all the better. I was like a dreamer half asleep who responds when someone talks but is not really awake yet. I was too captured by the carnage, too aware of the vulnerability of my own flesh.

  “Not nice not nice,” was still in Borne’s vocabulary as the ferals died. And, less usual, “A waste. What a waste. They wasted it.”