Borne. Jeff VanderMeer

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СКАЧАТЬ worm-drugs and I wanted to be of use, to do anything but just lie there.

      “What are you?” My heart beat faster, but I wasn’t afraid. Not really.

      “I don’t know,” Borne said in a rough yet sweet tone. For a confused moment I thought he’d spoken in the voices of both my parents at once. Then, sincere and eager: “Do you know what you are?”

      I ignored him. “Let’s play a game to figure out what you are.”

      Borne went quiet for a second and his colors dimmed. Then he flared up.

      “Okay,” he said. “Okay!”

      “Then you have to be honest with me.”

      “Honest.” Turning the word over in his head.

      “Tell the truth.”

      A ripple of vibrant purple traveled across his skin.

      “Honest. I can be honest. I am honest. Honest.”

      Had I upset him or triggered some other emotion, or was he just testing out the word?

      “You know a lot about me,” I ventured. “But I know nothing about you. The game is about questions. Will you answer some questions?”

      “I will answer questions,” Borne said, uncertain. Did he understand the word question?

      “Are you a machine?” I asked.

      “What is a machine?”

      “A made thing. A thing made by people.”

      This puzzled Borne, and it was a long while before he said, “You are a made thing. Two people made you.”

      “I mean something made of either metal or of flesh. But not through natural biological means.”

      “Two people made you. You are made of flesh,” Borne said. He seemed agitated.

      “Why didn’t you save me from those boys?”

      “Save?”

      “Rescue. Help. Stop them from hurting me.”

      There came a long pause and everything about Borne shut down until he was just a gray shape. Even the eyes went away.

      Then the colors came back in an explosion of reds and pinks and a roiling, turbulent green. The eyes popped up as a rotating halo embedded in the skin near the top of his aperture. “But I did help! I helped! I helped Rachel. I helped.” This said in an anguished tone.

      I tried to control the trembling of my voice. The spirit of Mord filled me up.

      “Those boys hurt me for hours.” I spat out the words. “Those boys did that and you did nothing. They hurt me badly. And you could have done something.”

      Silence again, then, in a whisper, “I could not. I did not. Help. Until.”

      “Until what?”

      “Until I knew them.”

      I realized knew wasn’t the word he meant. That the word he sought might not exist, that he was trying, perhaps, to tell me two or three things at once.

      “Knew them how?”

      “I am not complete,” Borne said. “I was not complete. I am not complete.” He tried “put together,” which didn’t help, finished his sentence with a kind of frustration for words that caused the feathery pseudopods to straighten like spikes.

      “Now you are complete? Aware?” I didn’t want to use the word activated, because it scared me.

      “More complete,” Borne said.

      “You killed them,” I said, calm. But not before they hurt me, came the raging, screaming thought behind the words.

      “Kill?”

      “Cease to be. No longer alive. Dead. Not here.”

      Confusion shuddered through Borne. “I know them now. I know them.”

      “Killing is bad,” I said. “Killing should never happen. Don’t kill.” Unless someone attacks you. Unless you have to. But I didn’t think to make the distinction to Borne, because I didn’t have the strength.

      Those eyes no longer seemed beautiful. They looked ever more trapped and horrible. Was it my imagination, or was one of them a familiar gray? I turned away from Borne then, and drifted into unconsciousness for a while. It was easier than facing what he’d said.

      And yet why would I turn away unless I felt safe?

       ¤

      The seventh night, I slept in Wick’s quarters, and Mord, far above, slept over us, sprawled across the sea of loam and debris that covered the Balcony Cliffs. We experienced his breathing as a haunted depth charge that tumbled down through the layers, the beams, and the drywall, the supporting columns and the cracking archways. The sound of it permeated the atoms of a dozen ceilings, vibrated through our bodies. We felt it in our flesh after we heard it in our ears, and it lingered longer under the skin.

      The stench came to us, too, faint, carried by the ducts and the thousand imperfections in the sediment above us, carried by the subterranean tunnels of worms and beetles. Like the thunder after lightning, it came to us late, but then wrapped around our throats. It was the stench of every living thing Mord had killed in the last week. Could Mord smell us down here? Could he smell us mice? Us little human mice?

      Wick lay frozen, unable to move, terrified that somehow this was not random, that Mord knew he was there, that come morning Mord might start to root us out. And so, for a time, we whispered and moved in slow motion and in all ways acted as if we were submarines and Mord a destroyer above, seeking us. Even to whisper, Wick would put his mouth right up against my ear. He could not stop talking about rumors of Mord proxies being seen, searching in the city and the hinterlands beyond. Searching for what? Wick wouldn’t say, but I had the sense he knew.

      Then we didn’t even whisper, as Mord began to moan in his sleep. His moans sounded like gnashed, crushed words, filtered through the dirt, and we could not understand them. I knew only that they felt like anguish.

      Some hours later we felt his weight leave us, the Balcony Cliffs almost seeming to spring back up around us with relief. When we examined the spot above in the morning there was a deep depression from Mord’s weight. If he had spent the whole night there, would he have fallen through, smashing down level by level until, still sleeping, his body bulged through our ceiling? The stench remained for a day or two, and whenever I smelled it I felt a pressure pushing down on my head.

      I had come to Wick’s place so he wouldn’t come to mine and be reminded of Borne, but Borne is the subject he raised as soon as Mord had left. I almost wished Mord was still there to silence him.

      “I could still take him,” Wick said.

      “Who?” СКАЧАТЬ