Borne

by Jeff VanderMeer

  “He’s still alone.”

  “You have me, Borne.”

  “I mean, are there more like me? Or am I alone? Like Mord.”

  “I’m alone, too, Borne,” I said, a little self-pitying. But was I alone because I’d made myself alone, or …

  I had no real answer to that question. But I remember I didn’t like Borne comparing himself to Mord. I didn’t know what that meant or where that could lead.

  * * *

  I meant to join Borne at my apartment, but halfway there I changed direction and decided to go up to Wick’s apartment and search it one more time. Given he was down at the swimming pool drunk out of his mind, it didn’t seem like much of a risk, but that might have been my own drunkenness talking. It was my own drunkenness talking, my own sense of what I was entitled to after the trauma of that night. I wanted to inflict damage on Wick, find a way to punish him.

  But after I’d disabled the couple of defense worms in the door and had turned to the more prosaic defense of the lock, I felt a presence at my back and turned and started—and there was Wick, behind me, in the amorphous darkness of the corridor.

  I was tumbling over excuses or explanations as I pulled out the picklock, but when I looked again the corridor behind me was empty. Where had he gotten to? The drunk me decided it didn’t matter and went to work again. Only, as the door opened, as I pushed it open, there was a tap at my shoulder, and there was Wick, reappearing like a practical joke.

  This time I jumped up and cursed and fell back into the corridor.

  “Oh-ho! Oh-ho!” Wick exclaimed, pointing a finger at me, drunk enough to do a shuffling dance of triumph. “I know what you’re trying to do. Again. You’re trying to break into my apartment. Again.” Smugness broke some illusion or spell, pushed aside his drunkenness to make his thin charm cadaverous or needle-sharp, the angular planes of his face harsh.

  “Don’t sneak up on me,” I said, mounting my best defense.

  “You know how boring it is when you try to sneak into my apartment without me knowing? So boring. Because I always know. Why wouldn’t I know?”

  “Maybe I forgot something I wanted to tell you and maybe I thought you might be in here. And asleep. And couldn’t hear me knock so I, you know…” Motioning at the door, and making the nonuniversal sign for lock-picking.

  Wick didn’t understand.

  “What’s that? What are you doing? Driving a corkscrew into someone?”

  I started laughing at that. For some reason I found that the funniest thing I’d ever heard, maybe because in my mind I was the sneakiest human being on the planet, and Wick was telling me I was more like a cartoon character taking extra-big sneak steps up to a door while the eyes on some painting on the wall moved and saw me.

  “Yes, I’m sneaky that way. I’m sneaky. Sneak.”

  Wick rewarded me with his own little dry laugh, pushed past me into his apartment. But left the door open.

  “Borne showed you sneaky tonight,” Wick said as I followed him into his apartment. “He took on a Mord proxy and survived. Borne can do whatever he wants now. How can you stop him? Claaaaaaw! Claaaaaaw! Claaaaaaw!” Mocking me.

  “Shut up.”

  Wick jumped onto his bed and lay there propped up on one elbow. I joined him, although with a distance between us.

  “Maybe they wouldn’t have lived long anyway,” Wick said. “The Magician’s children. Her charges. Her little people. Whatever they are. Besides being fucked up, because they’re definitely fucked up.” Some of that slurred, so I had to piece it together.

  “You shouldn’t talk about that.” I felt cold, exposed, angry all over again.

  “I told you—I never thought that the Magician would come after me.”

  “And she didn’t! She came after me!”

  I hit him in the side, hard. He flinched, wincing, said, “That hurt.”

  “It was supposed to hurt.”

  Wick turned away from me, staring at the wall. The taut quality, the armor that almost physically sheathed him when he didn’t want to confront something.

  I sighed, more like a deep convulsion that relaxed my tight chest, my tensed shoulders. I looked at the ceiling with the firefly lights. So pretty, so like living constellations. But one by one they were going out, at the average rate of two per day, and even with hundreds of clusters stuck there, Wick’s place had become noticeably dimmer. Another few months and it would be dark, but by then we’d be in the thrall of the Magician or forced out by her.

  Wick kept too many secrets. It was getting too difficult—occupying the same space but traveling through separate universes of need, of want.

  “You owe me,” I said, not angry anymore. “You need to tell me something, anything, about what’s going on. And if you can’t, then this is a lie. If you can’t, then we have nothing.”

  “You hit me, remember?” he said. “Just now.”

  “You deserved it.”

  For a long time, Wick was quiet and very still. When he spoke, it was in a tone that told me not to ask questions about what he was going to tell me.

  “The Magician found me because of the fish project,” Wick said. “She’s not from the city. She’s from the Company—last generation before it all began to fall apart. I knew her when I worked on the fish project, and that’s how she knew who I was when she abandoned the Company.

  “When she first came to me, we struck a deal. She had access to vast quantities of raw materials. What I stole from the Company had already run out. What she sold me saved me. Since, I pay her off in biotech and salvage. But now she wants everything…”

  “What else does she know?”

  “Too much. But there’s one thing she doesn’t know.” Wick reached across me into the drawer beside the bed, pulled out the metal box full of the biotech that looked like nautiluses, handed it to me. “I think you’ve already seen these.”

  “What are they?”

  “I used to get them from the Company,” Wick said. “Now I make them here.”

  “But what are they?”

  “Medicine. A very specialized medicine that I have to take. I have a condition.”

  “What happens if you don’t?”

  “You understand why I’m telling you? You are the only person who knows.” I knew what he was saying: I still have secrets, but now you have power over me.

  “What happens if you don’t, Wick?”

  “I’ll die.”

  * * *

  I stayed with Wick for several hours, my arm over his chest, in part because I was exhausted, wrung out because of our argument. Not just because we had argued, but relief. That we’d come back, again, from the precipice. That some of the frustration we’d inflicted on each other had come from the knowledge that, in the end, as long as we were shouting at each other we weren’t done, we weren’t over, and thus the sense that even though we weren’t playacting in our disagreement … we were playacting in our disagreement. Where could I go? Where could he go?

  I kept turning the new facts over in my head. Wick was sick, evidence of which had been right in front of me all this time, in his thinness, his translucent quality, his need for having diagnostic worms vigilant in his arm at all times. The Magician had been helping keep us alive in the Balcony Cliffs, and Wick had been more dependent than I knew. Our situation remained just as bad as before, maybe worse.

  By the time I went back to my apartment to find Borne, he wasn’t waiting for me. Nor was he in his apartment, and after searching everywhere, I realized Borne had gone back out into the night while Wick and I were arguing.

  It was clear that what Wick had said was true: I couldn’t control Borne anymore, if I’d ever had that power. Borne would roam the city whenever he liked from now on.

  HOW BORNE TAUGHT ME NOT TO TEACH HIM

  My parents took me to a fancy restaurant when I was twelve, as a reward for good grades, in our final sanctuary before the end. We had come to that city almost miraculous out of a landscape of lawlessness, fle
eing a mad dictator who had taken to cannibalism and random amputations. We had made it through the outer fortifications and barricades, the quarantine of endless questions, because they needed teachers and doctors, and for eighteen months our new home had provided a measure of stability. My mother had a job as a nurse in a clinic and my father used his skills working for a builder.

  The restaurant had spotless silverware and bone-white napkins and a server who started each sentence with “sir” or “madam.” They even had hot towels and china finger bowls so you could wash your hands between courses. The walls projected images of the most calming and peaceful nature, from a rippling surf at the edge of a black-sand beach to a mountain view of a forested valley so fresh and clear you could almost feel the wind. Little biotech creatures that looked like fluffy baby birds mixed with adorable hamsters gamboled and chittered and put on shows on the wide window frame. Through the window, past the cute biotech: an ordinary evening scene, with streetlamps, a paved avenue, and even a few cars grumbling along.

  My mother loved the biotech, wondered where it came from; something so advanced had to come from a place that had security, that could feed and house people. Biotech, she had come to believe, created a trail—became a kind of clue as to where might be safe.

  This was just as things began to fall apart in that city, too, so the question of safety was on our minds. Even as everyone was trying to ignore the situation by attending with ever more vigilance to the finer things in life. I still was going to school, for the first time in ages. I worked hard for good grades. I was treated with no more than the average distrust of strangers. I fit in just enough to avoid most teasing about my frizzy hair and odd accent. What teasing I got came with a good-natured smile because so many children in the schools had come from somewhere else, too. I was proud of my effort, I was proud that I’d managed to adjust, to make my mind leave behind the horrors we had experienced before reaching that place.

  My parents gave me a present: a biology book with foldouts showing cross-sections of different environments drawn in detail and in vivid but realistic colors. Jungles came wreathed in vines with tiny monkeys with huge eyes and poison frogs and ridiculously fancy birds. Deserts came with burrows under the sand that held solemn-looking mice and, above them, scaly monsters with flickering tongues and vistas broken by gnarled cactus. It looked new, but I knew my mother had been hoarding it for more than a year, wrapped in a brown paper bag. I’d snuck short reads a few times when my parents were asleep. I didn’t know they’d meant it for me.

  The food, when it finally came, was so perfect … it melted on the tongue, the meat like butter, the vegetables cooked just right, the bread rustic and silky inside the wonderfully burnt crust. Dessert was heavier, a sweet and tangy and spongy tower of something, with vanilla ice cream alongside. For dessert, too, the pratfalling biotech came tumbling off the windowsill and did a little dance around my dessert while singing “Congratulations!” I looked at these two creatures with delight, but a year earlier, in the wilderness, we would have caught them, cooked them, and eaten them.

  By the time we left and walked home, my parents were agreeably drunk and we sat in the living room talking and laughing until midnight. I had no idea that I would someday lose them, that I would become a scavenger in a nameless city. That I would have dreams of drowning, that I would be a parent to pratfalling biotech that talked back, that challenged and pushed me in so many ways.

  I often wished we had just stayed home, skipped the restaurant, because in memory the meal overpowers the evening afterward. No matter how hard I try, I can’t remember what I said to my parents or what they said to me, yet I can still remember the taste of the ice cream.

  “The world is so big, Rachel,” Borne had said to me on the way back to the Balcony Cliffs, after we left the rooftop. “It just keeps going and going.”

  “It ends eventually.” I almost said, “It gets smaller,” but bit my tongue.

  I didn’t know if my world was getting bigger again after Wick’s revelations. I didn’t know which direction was down and which was up. But I did know I had broken my word to Borne that night and gone through a miserable day pining for him and putting up with a lightness to Wick’s step, even a whistle at times that I resented, attributed to his happiness that Borne was gone, and blunted my sympathy for Wick’s condition.

  I don’t know where Borne went the day he was missing, or in what disguise. I don’t know if it even matters other than the stress it put on me, a mother’s worry, or if that was the moment—the moment of inattention that caused all of the rest to go off course. All I know is he came back safe, and greeted me like nothing had happened and he had just stepped out for an hour.

  But I wanted to make it up to Borne, and I wanted to do it by teaching him things more formally, so that he would know what stars were and what the sun was—the way my parents used to teach me even when there was no school, no dinner, no fancy restaurant. Because I still had what they had given me—rituals, values, knowledge—their way of preparing me for a hopeful future.

  I’d lost all my possessions when I came to the city, but in my scavenging I’d found another biology book. It didn’t have foldouts and there were fewer illustrations, but some of the art reminded me of the book I’d loved. I thought I’d give it to Borne, along with books on other topics. But the other books were camouflage, really, for what was personal to me.

  * * *

  Borne had locked the door of his new apartment, but why I tried to turn the knob rather than knock first, I don’t know. Maybe because it seemed to have no biotech defending it. When I did knock, Borne didn’t answer right away, and I thought maybe he was out, and I had a startled moment imagining him back out in the city before I heard a muffled “Coming!” and “I’ll be right with you,” and then the door swung open and he hustled me in with a curling tentacle, and him so familiar to me I didn’t mind the strength around my waist, reeling me in.

  So there I was in his apartment, a place he’d “made” himself, me clutching my books and trying to fend off images conjured up by Wick’s words two nights ago. It was a single room, very large, though, as if he’d torn out a dividing wall, even if I could see no evidence of such destruction. I smelled fresh paint, though that was nearly impossible, and an underlying scent of lilac that he had no doubt wanted to be the overlying scent.

  “Sit down,” he said. “Sit down.”

  But he had no furniture, just an empty space, a bare floor, a huge globe of the world in one corner, like you used to find in old libraries, and a closet in the other corner, a cache of little plastic children’s records spilling out from under it. He played them by forming a needle from his cilia and rotating the record. I could never hear anything, but apparently he did.

  I sat on a stool made of him and between us was a carpet made of him that felt like the underneath of a bath mat … with a turret of him facing me so I’d feel comfortable. The turret wore a huge smile and had a big, goofy blue eye right in the top of it.

  Although I had come to educate him, I also wished I could help him decorate his apartment, because the only things on the walls were the three “dead astronauts” we’d happened across our first time out, hanging from hooks.

  The sight got our conversation off on the wrong foot. It made me cold all over, seeing those dead skull faces through the smashed glass. As if Borne had brought something deadly into our home.

  “What are those doing there, Borne?” They did loll, they did sag, the faces looking down at the floor. Those were three dead bodies on the wall, three skeleton corpses.

  “Oh, the dead astronauts? The fox said I needed to jazz up the place. I needed to give it some pizzazz, some oomph.”

  I was rendered speechless by so many parts of what he’d said. Foxes. Dead astronauts. Least of all, jazz, pizzazz, oomph—three words he never should have used outside of the books he found them in. But that wasn’t the point.

  “They’re not dead astronauts. The fox told you what?�
��

  “Never mind,” Borne said. “It was a joke. I was joking. Now, what did you come over for? How can I help you.”

  How can I help you?

  “Those are three dead skeletons on the wall, Borne.”

  “Yes, Rachel. I took them from the crossroads. I thought they would look nice in here.”

  Gaping, gaunt, one torn suit for each of us. When had he taken them? What traps had he set off and how had he survived them?

  “They’re dead people, Borne.”

  “I know. They’re definitely not living in there anymore. The dead astronauts have gone away. There’s nothing to read in them.” The big eye in the turret had gotten small, intensely focused, growing out on the end of a delicate tendril to wander and wisp in front of me. I could have reached out and patted Borne on the eyeball if I’d wanted to.

  “It’s ghoulish,” I said.

  “Ghoulish,” he said, savoring, making it sound like goulash. “You mean like ghosts? Like being haunted?”

  “No.”

  “I promise you, there’s no one here,” Borne said, touching the suits, making them rock a little in their harnesses. “… Have I done something wrong, Rachel?”

  I tried to adjust to the dead astronauts on the wall. Borne would not stop calling them dead astronauts, which means I must have called them that around him, and so their history was set. But the straight-up unimportant truth was that it irritated me that Borne had moved the dead astronauts to decorate his apartment, because that meant the intersection would be so much harder to identify next time.

  “No, you haven’t done anything wrong. But I know that some people might be offended by you hanging dead people on the wall.” As if the Balcony Cliffs was full of other tenants.

  “They look peaceful to me, Rachel. They seemed lonely. I think someone had put them at the crossroads, Rachel. I think some bad people had put them there. Now I have rescued them. Now they’re safe, I think.”

  Safe and still dead.

  “Borne, I hate to ask, but can you promise me you’ll put them away at least, in the closet?”