Borne

by Jeff VanderMeer

  The feral children, the ones the Magician created, dissolved into the city. Some were too damaged, and these formed their own outlaw communities, entrenched deep below the factories, and at night the remnants come out to terrorize, to remind us they still exist. But they, too, are much reduced, and they can never again hold territory as they did under the Magician.

  Others found their own way out—some could return to families and be forgiven and taken in, despite their physical deformity, despite their psychosis. Others had no such recourse but gave up their old ways and lived in the shadows under bridges and in abandoned buildings. They would never be entirely whole again, and there was nothing anyone could do to remedy that.

  But I can stroll down an avenue lined with young trees now, visit a market where people under shelter of makeshift tents barter for goods. I can do that, even if there are still parts of the city I could never visit because too much violence lurks there. At times in the observatory district, we see regular lights, and some are electric, a part of the old world brought back to us. Wells dug or cleaned out, filtered, and communities growing up around them. The planting of vegetables. The rumors of an orchard or two.

  There are fewer dead astronauts at the intersections to confuse us. There is only us now, and the monsters, who are both part of history and always with us. In this new-old city, I want no great power, no power at all, only power over my own life. All I wanted is for there to be no great power in the city at all. No Company. No Mord. No Magician. And, in the end, although I loved him, no Borne.

  For a time, I saw the little fox outside the Balcony Cliffs. For a time, the fox followed me. The bright eyes, the alert ears, the quick gait. Did you pick me? I would ask her. Did you mean for me to find Borne? Or was it an accident, a mistake, chance? And did you know what might happen when I found him? I never expected an answer, and eventually the fox did not return.

  Wick tells me we live in an alternate reality, but I tell him the Company is the alternate reality, was always the alternate reality. The real reality is something we create every moment of every day, that realities spin off from our decisions in every second we’re alive. I tell him the Company is the past preying on the future—that we are the future.

  A glittering reef of stars, spread out phosphorescent, and each one might have life on it, planets revolving around them. There might even be people like us, looking up at the night sky.

  Was there a world beyond? Is that what the shining wall of silver raindrops meant? A gateway? Or is that a delusion?

  It doesn’t matter. Because now we can make one here.

  A world.

  HOW I LIVE NOW

  The Balcony Cliffs lay empty when we returned. We came in cautious, prepared to drive intruders out, but the bears had left and everyone else had been too scared to move in. The Mord proxies had destroyed so much, but what set us falling to the floor laughing was that at first we could not tell the parts they had destroyed from the parts they had left alone, except by the sign of their droppings. So many holes punched in walls by Borne. Seeing the Balcony Cliffs with fresh eyes, we realized we had lived in a tidied-up shithole that needed a more thorough airing than we had ever given it.

  “What now, Rachel?” Wick asked me. “What do we do now?”

  “Whatever we want to do,” I said.

  So we set to work.

  * * *

  Wick has never been the same physically, although he has some good days. The left side of his body has seized up and his left arm doesn’t work right. His skin never became pale again but is crisscrossed with black vein lines. He sometimes has a distant look, as if listening to music I cannot hear. But most of the time he is not lost in fugue or memory, or wherever he goes during those episodes. We live, we stand by each other and make do with what we have. He fixed his swimming pool, still makes biotech, found ways to create his medicine before reaching the fourth month and the last nautilus pill.

  I never told Wick I killed the Magician—she just never came back. If Wick could carry the heavy burden of his secret for so long, then I could hold on to mine and not burden him with it.

  Nor did I tell Wick that I knew his secret, his final secret. We never talked about his letter, although he must know that I read it. To be together, Wick and I needed some secrets from each other, and some things we could not talk about—the talking was the trap. The things we say to each other, thinking they are so important to say, and yet later regret, that become a part of you no matter how hard you push them away, even as you can’t stop thinking about them.

  I prefer the old betrayals, the ones based on trust. My presence beside him tells him all he needs to know, and no matter what else he has done in his life, Wick has never killed anyone with a rock. Nor does Wick sell memories anymore.

  Wick never believed he was a person, was continually being undone by that. Borne was always trying to be a person because I wanted him to be one, because he thought that was right. We all just want to be people, and none of us know what that really means.

  Early on, I had thought Wick was reaching for a body across the bed. But, for a long time, he had been reaching for me—for the person called Rachel, who did indeed, in the end, love back the person named Wick.

  Life is still hard, but it is fair, and there is more joy in it that doesn’t feast on heartbreak.

  * * *

  There are also territories not worth holding on to, traps not worth setting.

  Other people live at the Balcony Cliffs with us now. Other faces stare at me when I walk these corridors. Most of them we invited in, and many are children with no place to go. We do not ask anything of them except that they scavenge what they can and help maintain the Balcony Cliffs.

  Wick creates things for the children, bits of biotech from odds and ends that make them laugh or astonish them. I like to watch Wick at play. I like to hear the children laugh. It is so much better than a fancy restaurant. It is more like the botanical garden on the island. It is almost like that.

  Teems is one of the boys here and the closest to being my child. I had the fantasy of finding the girl, the leader, and raising her as my own, but I never found her. Instead, I found Teems, and I took him in. He was the first.

  Teems is just an ordinary boy who likes playing catch and hates vegetables and reads my collection of books when I make him. Teems doesn’t mind roughhousing in the mud, and the stubborn set to his jaw always makes him look as if he is objecting to something. But his eyes are large and wide and they take in everything, do not miss the smallest detail. He is honest and respectful and he has honor and courage as he is able.

  I teach him only the useful things, the hopeful things. I teach him to be both the things I am and the things I can never be.

  I am sure Teems thinks of me, of Wick, as old, as people who are too generous and not hardened enough. People who can no longer see the traps. But did we ever really see them? And we have had our adventures, Wick and I. We have had all the adventures one lifetime could endure, and it is fine that no one knows but us, that Wick and I hold on to those secrets together. There is so little of this account that anyone else in the city would understand or believe, and so little of it they need to understand.

  * * *

  I have only one thing left to tell. How, on a sunny gunmetal day not long after we returned to the Balcony Cliffs, I went searching, as any scavenger would, near the place in the city where Borne and Mord had disappeared.

  There, I found Borne again. I picked him out of the rubble. I brushed him off. He was weak, tiny—as small as the first time I found him. But it was him. He smelled like the ocean of my youth—the sea salt, and the surf, and the seaweed. But he might have smelled different to someone else.

  I gathered Borne up as good salvage, and I took him back to the Balcony Cliffs. He did not speak, could not speak, but I felt as if he were still there, inside. He had killed so many people. He had done terrible things despite not wanting to do them. We had all done terrible things.

/>   I put him on our balcony, right where Wick could see him, and promised myself that if Borne ever grew, if he ever spoke, I would end him. That if Wick wanted to take him, Wick should take him and use him for parts.

  But none of those things happened. Wick did not take him. Borne did not move on his own; he was just a kind of plant, taking sustenance from the sun. Borne never spoke again, although I spoke to him and maybe I wished he could respond, but only a little. A lingering doubt, a lingering need, and I think you can forgive me that, at least.

  We sit on the balcony on the good days, Wick and I, and we hold hands and look out at the light on the river at dusk. To those who know me, so many years later, I am just a middle-aged woman who lives in the Balcony Cliffs and takes care of children, a person who they see sometimes high above a river that is not as polluted as before, a river that one day may be truly beautiful.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My gratitude to bears for putting up with my nonsense about them. Bears are fascinating, intelligent, clever, awe-inspiring animals. They deserve our love and support. If you see one, please do not run. Instead, stand still. If necessary, fall to the ground, be still, and pretend you are a boulder.*

  All bears are miraculous. Many humans are, too. Thank you to my first reader, my wife, Ann, and to Sean McDonald, my patient, brilliant editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and everyone else at FSG for being patient and brilliant. Thanks to my UK, Canadian, Chinese, and German publishers for their early adoption of the novel. Thanks to my agent, Sally Harding, and the Cooke Agency—as well as Joe Veltre at Gersch. Thanks as well to Eli Bush, Scott Rudin, Alana Mayo, and Paramount Pictures for their enthusiasm and creativity.

  Thanks to my stepdaughter, Erin Kennedy, and my grandson, Riley (Mr. R), for some of their thoughts on how Borne might speak. Special thanks to Erin for loaning me “long mice.”

  Thanks to one of my literary idols, Steve Erickson, for taking an early excerpt from Borne for his wonderful magazine, Black Clock, well before I had finished the novel. His edits and his support meant the world. Additional thanks to Elizabeth Hand for red salamanders, and to Scott Eagle for telescope scales.

  Finally, thanks to our monster cat, Neo, otherwise known as Massive Attack, without whom certain aspects of both Borne’s and Mord’s personality would not exist. For instance, attitudes toward lizards.

  * Please consult official bear-safety manuals prior to encountering bears.

  ALSO BY JEFF VANDERMEER

  FICTION

  Annihilation

  Authority

  Acceptance

  Area X

  The Book of Frog (stories)

  Dradin, in Love

  The Book of Lost Places (stories)

  Veniss Underground

  City of Saints and Madmen

  Secret Life (stories)

  Shriek: An Afterword

  The Situation

  Finch

  The Third Bear (stories)

  NONFICTION

  Why Should I Cut Your Throat?

  Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st-Century Writer

  Monstrous Creatures

  The Steampunk Bible (with S. J. Chambers)

  Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction

  The Steampunk User’s Manual (with Desirina Boskovich)

  A Note About the Author

  Jeff VanderMeer is an award-winning novelist and editor, most recently the author of the New York Times bestselling Southern Reach Trilogy—the first volume of which, Annihilation, has been made into a movie to be released by Paramount in 2017—and the coeditor with his wife, Ann VanderMeer, of The Big Book of Science Fiction. His work often includes environmental themes, and he has spoken about global warming and storytelling at Vanderbilt, DePaul, the University of Houston, and MIT, among other universities, with related writings appearing in the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and Electric Literature. Recently, he served as the Trias writer-in-residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. VanderMeer grew up in the Fiji Islands and now lives in Tallahassee, Florida. You can sign up for email updates here.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Jeff Vandermeer

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright

  MCD

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 2017 by VanderMeer Creative, Inc.

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2017

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: VanderMeer, Jeff, author.

  Title: Borne: a novel / Jeff VanderMeer.

  Description: First edition. | New York: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016033244 | ISBN 9780374115241 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780374714925 (ebook)

  Subjects: BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Fantasy / General. | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction. | Science fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3572.A4284 B67 2017 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016033244

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