Borne

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Still, it was better at night and better crossed at night, the ground in places faintly luminous from some memory of artificial microorganisms. In daylight, the plain was hotter and unpleasant and any predator could see you coming from miles away unless you had camouflage like the Magician. Cement foundations lurked beneath a sluice of crushed and useless things, with no landmarks for coordinates and even the vultures rarely hovered over the hinterlands. It stank of sour mud and chemicals, and depending on the wind we had to cover our mouths and noses.

  The Company building through the ancient safe-house binoculars was a cracked egg well ahead of us—a flat white oval from the air, perhaps, and the damage spread out around it like Mord had been rummaging in the building’s internal organs. But as Wick pointed out, the walls still disappeared into the ground, gave a suggestion of depth and of further layers preserved from damage.

  To the southeast, huddled next to the building, we could make out the wide leaking ponds, more like lakes, that still held the dead and failing bodies of the Company’s mistakes and the things that had escaped, or thought they had. I had escaped them for a time, too, but now I was coming back.

  We had picked up hints of conflict during our trek across the plain. In the first hour, we could hear what sounded like Mord proxies distant on our trail, and as the light faded and sunset bore down on us in a searing bloodred flecked with gold, accompanied by a hot wind, there appeared two of the beasts in the middle distance.

  By then we had already started our journey across the plain and felt exposed, hit the ground painfully behind a mound of gravel and surveilled the proxies with our binoculars. On my stomach, I felt as if the ground was going to curl up around me and devour me. I was hurting and knew I would have to get up soon, even if just to crawl, if I was to make my brain override my body.

  The Mord proxies had been hunkered down like soldiers in trenches they’d dug and disguised, and as the last light used up the red and extinguished the gold, in the haze of blue-gray heat, we thought they’d peered out and spotted us walking hunched across that landscape, caught a glimpse of us in a shimmer or shadow.

  But no: Their eruption and churning gallop from those trenches led them southwest, in a horizontal across our field of vision, kicking up dust behind. We could see no adversary, though, even when they seemed to have cornered their prey, blindly clawing and biting around an invisible source.

  At a safe distance, the foxes that were not foxes mirrored the bears, mocked them with their own reversals of direction, their own snapping at the air—using their camouflage to disappear and then reappear in some other place, chasing their tails, and once a proxy stopped and stared at the foxes, as if unsure whether they were enemies.

  “Someone’s out there,” I said.

  “Someone’s always out there,” Wick replied.

  “Rabies? Madness? Play?” I guessed.

  “Or the Magician,” Wick said.

  “Biting flies?”

  As we watched, whatever we couldn’t see eluded what we could see, and the chase resumed far off onto the western reaches of the plain, although the invisible prey kept trying to dart south, dart south again, and as the light disappeared completely I thought I saw one of the proxies stumble, fall, as if receiving a blow, but then it was time to make our escape across the plain.

  The foxes became burnt-umber flashes against the setting sun, then silhouettes sitting, watching. Then nothing at all.

  * * *

  So we strove on in darkness, across a plain less dead than we might have wished. There came lesser growls than those of bears—and the yap-yip of the foxes and the slither-rustle of what we hoped were snakes, a pitter-patter as of the pink starlike toes of burrowing mammals and even a quark-quark we avoided from a stand of cactus that might have only been a frog calling out for water. Blocks and slabs of black stymied any attempt to know what was threat and what was innocent.

  “I don’t remember it being this alive,” Wick complained. But I doubted he had roamed here nocturnal in years.

  The moon came out, muffled by clouds, and added a light purple wash to the sky, and with it came a hint of a more forgiving wind. We continued to trudge, then an hour before dawn we stopped in a place where the ground was darker and formed shallow ridges or gouges that carried sound to us undistorted. We made camp in the lee of a huge fallen pillar, as deep into the crevice as we could go, as far as we could override an irrational fear of the pillar rolling over and crushing us, or some midnight bear scooping us out like termites.

  We did not know if the Mord proxies might now be headed our way, but tracking their intent had already slowed us, as had the way the night was more aware than expected. We would rest for an hour, and then, in the early morning, we would continue on to where the plain gave way to the holding ponds. Even wrapped, the ankle gave me problems on the uneven ground and Wick had to carry the pack most of the time while my shoulder recovered. I felt like some creaking, ancient creature, old before her time.

  Wick and I shared a food packet in silence. After a sip of water from our meager supply, Wick slept while I kept watch, because I could not rest anyway. My hip ached and I felt as if I inhabited an exoskeleton that had been battered by hammers.

  The moon from the recesses of the pillar looked dead, poisoned, a special kind of factory gray: the rounded head of a dead robot with the skull half exposed. But still I looked up at it because there was no other light in the sky that bright and nothing else in front of me.

  I tried to conjure memories of nighttime on my island sanctuary, to convert the brisk wind into a tropical breeze and the shadows and sand into the play of surf, a fringe of dark palm trees. But I was surrounded by a landscape too dirty and yet antiseptic, and I was exhausted by my own obsession with the past.

  My gaze wandered, drifted, and I suppose I almost fell asleep despite myself. I kept seeing the Mord proxies pursuing the invisible across the plain. I kept seeing the pads of Mord’s giant foot descending to crush me, mingled with a peculiar feeling of self-annihilating awe.

  When I started back into watchfulness, there was an overpowering smell to the air, like an ancient, waveless ocean buried in its own silt and salt and reflections. The darkness had arranged itself into something that resembled intent. The plain before me that had conveyed even in the murk the sense of its ridges now had smoothed out into a uniform glistening black layer. A kindness, really, a reminder, a memory to soothe: the tiny flashes and flickers of a thousand fireflies, like the ones on the ceiling at the Balcony Cliffs. A soft, golden blinking from the ground that wished for me to be calm.

  The lip of this sea of dim twinkling light pushed up to the ledge of broken rock that flumed out from the pillar, peered in at me, inquisitive.

  “Shhhhh, Rachel. It’s me.” A familiar voice, this illusionist’s trick.

  I went very still and resisted the urge to wake Wick.

  “I scared the bears away,” he said. “I sent them away, for a little while.” But which bears?

  “How did you find us, Borne?” That question seemed essential.

  “Oh, a little fox told me you were here. I’ve been in the city, fighting Mord proxies.”

  “What do you want?” I kept my voice low and calm.

  Now Wick stirred behind me, and I knew exactly what he would say, and he wouldn’t be wrong.

  “Hello, Wick, how are you?”

  “Go away,” Wick said.

  “Or what, Wick?” Borne said, dismissive. “You’ll toss some worms at me? You’ll call me names? You’ll banish me?”

  I glanced back, put a hand on Wick’s chest, whispered, “Let me talk to him. Trust me.”

  “I was sad you had to leave the Balcony Cliffs,” Borne said. “That was such a nice place for all of us. Don’t you want to go back to it?”

  “Someday, Borne.”

  Despite the knife in my pocket, I was searching around for some weapon that might protect me, but I knew there was nothing. Only what would make me feel better i
n a false way. A rock. A piece of pipe.

  He was so vast, covering the ground like an oil slick. I knew he’d been eating, he’d been sampling. If Borne’s true nature came out and he killed us and Rachel and Wick only existed inside Borne, would we be truly dead or would we still exist in some altered state?

  “You’re going to the Company building,” Borne said.

  “Yes.”

  Borne made a clucking sound like he was disappointed in me. “But the Company building is disgusting. Just disgusting. I hate it. I don’t want anything to do with the Company building.”

  Hiding an old fear of his, I knew from his journal.

  Wick spoke then. There was even sympathy in his voice. “Borne, we’re not going north. We’re going south. And you can’t help us.”

  Borne was quiet for longer than made me comfortable. In the silence I could hear a kind of quaking and gentle hissing and a querulous whimper—all from the field of fireflies that was Borne. Wick had receded into the darkness under the pillar, and I knew he was alert to attack, would rally his very last biotech against Borne should we need it. But that’s not where my mind was.

  “Are you all right, Borne?” I didn’t mean to show concern, because then I would have to worry about how Wick felt about that concern … but I was tired and I’d raised him and couldn’t help it. Even now, on this hellish plain under the dead moon, headed for an open grave, some part of me felt I owed Borne.

  “Oh, Rachel,” Borne said, sounding weary and, for the first time since I had known him, old. “I’m doing okay. I try hard. But the Mord proxies are clever. Even when I disguise myself as them, they eventually flush me out. I defeat them, I absorb them, but there are so many and their bites sting.”

  “Show me where you’re hurt,” I told him.

  The fireflies faded and dull silver-gray patches glowed all across the broken plain that was Borne.

  So many dead patches, so many places the venom had killed the tissue. Borne was too vast now and still growing too fast for it to hinder him much, but he’d suffered wounds, taken a toll. I could not tell looking at him who would win the war of attrition in the end.

  “You should stop,” I said, the old motherly concern coming out from under the armor. “You should find someplace safe to hide for a while and heal.”

  Borne laughed as if I’d said something ridiculous, ripples and whorls appearing across his surface. Such a human response from a creature that now manifested so inhuman. Borne laughed and the wounds disappeared and the fireflies reappeared, although not so many as before.

  A small version of the old him manifested in front of me. The silly, looping vase with the ring of eyes, with the tentacles curving up out of the top.

  “I’m too big to hide for long, Rachel. I can’t compress myself into the right space. And I’m so hungry all the time, you know that, Rachel. You always knew that, and you told me and I didn’t listen. Because I couldn’t. The hunger only gets worse the more I eat.”

  So many eyes now, looking out at me with a knowing gleam, resignation. One weary veteran talking to another.

  “Easier prey,” I said, venturing into dangerous territory.

  “No, Rachel, I’ve stopped trying to be good,” Borne said. “It isn’t in my nature. I was made to absorb. I was made to kill. I know that now. And it’s no use.”

  “You must try.”

  Empty words that agitated him, made him flare up. “I’m telling you, Rachel, I can’t anymore. I’m not built like you. I’m not human. I’m not a person.”

  Across the vast sea of him, in amongst the ripples, human heads appeared, like swimmers treading water. Animal heads, too, and the heads of mutant children and Mord proxies. A dozen proxies at least. These shiny, dark heads with holes where their eyes should be. Staring.

  But there was no shocking me anymore.

  “Stop, Borne,” I said.

  The heads withdrew, the sea became gentle and quiet. I smelled the sun on sand and the scent of the surf and all the things he knew lay in my past that I loved.

  “You are a person,” I said, because I had to say it. Even with the evidence before me, or perhaps because of it.

  “Rachel, you can’t see what I see. I can see all the connections,” Borne said. “I can see where it’s all headed, what it’s headed toward. I just haven’t been strong enough to see it through. I’ve lingered and I’ve delayed. I’ve thought maybe…”

  I knew what he’d thought. I’d thought it, too, even after my promise to Wick. Wick was restless behind me. He believed Borne was going to attack us, but we were safe. We had always been safe, even if no one else had been.

  “Do as I said and hide,” I said. “Find a place. Disguise yourself.”

  But Borne had other ideas.

  “Rachel, what happens when we die? Where do we go?”

  “Borne—”

  “Where, Rachel?”

  “Nowhere, Borne. We go into the ground and we don’t come back out.”

  “I don’t think that’s true, Rachel. I think we go somewhere. Not to heaven or to hell, but we go somewhere. I know we must go somewhere.”

  “Borne, why?”

  “Because I came to you to say that I know how to make everything right again. I can see it so clearly, and I can do it now. I can do it. I’ll make things right. You’ll see—and you’ll know I was telling the truth.”

  Just an infinitesimal pause then, and if I hadn’t known him so well, I wouldn’t have caught it, or known what it meant.

  “And in the end everything will be okay again between us and you can live in the Balcony Cliffs again and I’ll move back in with you and it’ll be like the times we ran down the corridors laughing, or the time you dressed me up and took me out onto the balcony above the beautiful river. It’ll be just like that.”

  “Borne.”

  All I could say was his name because I couldn’t say anything that really told him how my instincts clashed with my reason. Not in front of Wick. And I thought, too, that Borne was gripped by the false power of remorse, which makes you think that by the strength of your convictions, your emotions, you can make everything right even when you can’t. Remorse and a false vision made Borne say these crazy things, I thought.

  “Goodbye, Rachel,” Borne said.

  “Goodbye, Borne.”

  How I misjudged that moment, and how I regret it. I believed I had to make my heart hard and not give in. I had to stand there and I had to say goodbye and I had to mean it.

  “But we will see each other again. I know it,” Borne said.

  If I could go back, I would give him permission. I would let him leave having given him my approval, having told him I believed him, whether I did or not, to make him feel some form of happiness in his chosen path. Even given him the lie of a happy life in the Balcony Cliffs. I just hope that something in my face, my demeanor, told him that despite what he had done, I could never abandon him completely.

  It happened very, very fast, then, with Wick scrambling up beside me in alarm.

  Borne retracted and drew up into himself with fantastic speed as streaks of dawn light appeared across a muffled gray sky. For a split second he became thick and formless and dark, and from the thick stout stump that was the clay of him, Borne grew a massive golden-brown head of fur: a bear’s head with kind eyes and an almost-smile about the muzzle, the wide pink tongue, so that I knew it was him looking out at me one last time.

  Then the eyes grew yellow, carious, and the muzzle longer and sharper, the head bigger, so that Wick and I both retreated into the shadow of the pillar, and beneath the head a body expanded and spread out, vast and powerful, topped by that broad and beautiful head, and on that face for the longest time in the light of sunrise, an expression not of sadness or hatred or horror but of a kind of beatific certainty, an angelic beastliness, and fangs that were clean and white.

  The body grew and grew and grew, shooting up toward the sky until the head of Borne as bear was so high above me and the massive,
muscled body below it, those hind legs, the feet, wider than the pillar in front of us, and we shrank farther into refuge. The resemblance was uncanny and complete and yet based on absorbed Mord proxies, not Mord, and thus more inhumanly savage than Mord, the body more compact and less shambly than Mord.

  This new Mord, new Borne, peered down at us from that great height, growled once, and then lurched off back north, back toward the city, while we sprang out of our sanctuary to watch.

  Borne-Mord ran at first like a lizard, then a silverfish, and then staggered as if drunk, a huge swaying wobble that sent up clods of dirt and dust as he adjusted to being a bear. Then he caught himself, righted himself, and became ursine in the churning of his limbs, taking great strides on all fours as he roared out one word: “Mord! Mord!” Calling out his opponent. Committed now. Leaving us behind. Striking out for uncharted territory.

  Borne was set on his course and we on ours. There was nothing to say, nothing we could do but pack up our supplies, head south. Nothing I could do but turn away from that horizon, while in that distance biotech traps exploded underfoot, squirting out from beneath Borne’s heavy weight, erupting in his wake, in the form of behemoths, leviathans, illusions of life that snapped impotently at the empty air and cast around for flesh to rend, and then fell back down into spasms of their own false dying.

  Yet even as Borne receded, I could not help feeling he was still there, beside me, in some form, some disguise as subtle as the molecules of air I breathed.

  * * *

  The morning light revealed that the ridged ground around the pillar was the gouge in the earth created by the Magician’s failed missile attack.

  Coming off the plain, we spied a single duck with a broken wing near a filthy puddle. It waddled back and forth in front of the puddle, drank from it, stood sentry, drank again, stood silent. Waiting. A kind of mercy that no one had killed it, that it had escaped notice.