Borne. Jeff VanderMeer

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      Without thinking, I said, “Borne, you’re not a sea anemone at all—you’re a plant!”

      I’d already gotten into the habit of talking to him, but at the sound of my voice Borne snapped back into what I thought of as his “defensive mode” and didn’t relax again for a full day. So I put him on a plate in the bathroom, on a shelf beneath a slanted hole in the ceiling that let in improbable sunlight from far above. I savored that green-tinged, musty light in the mornings before I went out to do Wick’s work.

      By the end of the second day, Borne had taken on a yellow-pink hue and the tenacity of his defensive posture hinted at either sickness or religious ecstasy, both of which I had seen too often out in the city. He smelled overcooked. I removed Borne from the shelf and returned him to the kitchen table. However, by then I noticed that the worms that composted my bathroom waste and excreted the nutrients Wick used in his vat had “disappeared.”

      Now I knew a few useful things. Borne could overdose on sunlight. Borne was a glutton for compost worms. Borne could move around by himself but wouldn’t while I was there. So Borne chose to overdose on sunlight. Nothing now indicated that Borne was malformed or in any way a mistake.

      I upgraded Borne from plant to animal, but still did not reclassify him as “purposeful.” I should have, though, because following his bathroom adventures, Borne made no attempt to disguise his movements. I would come home to find him in the bedroom when he had been in the kitchen when I’d left—or back in the hallway when he’d been on the living-room floor. Upon my approach, Borne always remained silent and unmoving, and I could never catch him in the act. I sensed amusement from Borne over this, but I was probably projecting. This made me smile. It became a kind of game, to guess where he might be when I returned. I looked forward to coming home more than usual.

      When I mentioned this to Wick, while giving him a half-dead azure slug I’d found near the Company, he didn’t find it funny.

      “You’re not worried?”

      “Why should I be worried?”

      “Because it is concealing its capabilities from you. Already. You have no idea what it might do next. You’re telling me it’s organized and possibly as intelligent as a dog, and we still don’t know its purpose.”

      “You said Borne didn’t have to have a purpose.”

      “I might have been wrong. Give it to me. I can find out what it is.”

      That made me shudder. “Only by taking Borne apart.”

      “Maybe. Yes, of course. I don’t have any sophisticated equipment here. I don’t have the time or the ability for anything noninvasive.” The Magician encroached, the supplies wouldn’t last forever—the rhythm that ruled our lives.

      To Wick, Borne was just another variable, something he needed to control to manage his own stress. I understood that, but perhaps the lie created by life inside the Balcony Cliffs was that at some point we might think beyond the next day or the next week. That was the sliver of doubt that had crept into me along with the laughter at Borne’s antics.

      On impulse, I hugged Wick, held him close, even though he tried to pull away. This was business, this was survival, that resistance told me, and I shouldn’t mix our personal relationship with business. But I couldn’t help it.

      And I still couldn’t give him Borne—not out of pity or concern or anything else false. And because I couldn’t give him Borne, I stopped talking about Borne with him. When he asked about Borne, I kept my answers brief and casual. He’s fine. He’s really nothing more than some kind of vegetable. A potted plant that walks. Wick would look at me like he saw right through me, but he didn’t take Borne away from me.

      It was all a test as to whether trust could still exist between us, and every time I extended that trust a little further I expected it would be unable to take the weight, or the pressure of my weight on it, and snap.

      WHAT I FOUND IN WICK’S APARTMENT

      Trust, though, required certain betrayals. Long before the arrival of Borne, I had searched Wick’s quarters while he was out selling his drugs. I assumed he had done the same to me, but who knew? This aspect of trust you don’t talk about with the recipient.

      My betrayal required skill—to un-puzzle locks, to bypass traps, to snuff optics—but in the end it wasn’t worth the effort. Wick’s three rooms did not reveal much about the man. The sum of his existence in that cramped space came to so very little. No family photographs or portraits, few personal items.

      Perhaps, I thought, he chose to live so small to keep whatever secrets he hid out of his mind? I imagined that somewhere buried deep in our Balcony Cliffs midden lay a warehouse full of artifacts Wick kept locked away so he could not be compromised by them. But if that was true, I never found that place.

      I had only the stark evidence at hand, coerced gently from a desk drawer with a little creative lock-picking: a diagram of a fish curled inside the outer tube of a broken telescope and a metal box filled with tiny vermilion nautilus shells, curled up and dry.

      I pocketed one nautilus shell for later, examined the fish diagram. I held the diagram unfolded beneath the dim light of the fireflies Wick had embedded in the ceiling. I knew it was a relic from Wick’s final project at the Company, the one he would only talk about when he was drunk. Certainly nothing like this had ever arisen from Wick’s makeshift swimming-pool vat. Yet.

      Whatever purpose the schematic had served, in the end it depicted an ugly fish, like a huge grouper or carp. A sideways, cutaway view, with lines radiating out from the brain, but also other parts, with numbers and random letters at the end of the spikes. That the fish had a wistful face of a woman with pale skin and blue eyes did not help, the effect ghoulish. It made me wary, as if some mad scientist had decided to make real a figurehead from an old sailing ship.

      Wariness was not the term for the scrawling on the back. The more recent notes around the edges I could tell were in Wick’s handwriting, and amounted to nostalgia: little nudges about how he might re-create the fish project, which had clearly petered out over time. But there was also a second writer, dominating the center space, with what looked like older marks, whose clear passion had increased into madness. The handwriting devolved into sweeping or stabbing marks, less and less legible, and then became gouged dark clouds of scribbles. The damage obscured meaning or told me too much. And what words that did peer through the mess were less than useful. Near the end of legibility, the scrawled words, No more company.

      I put the empty telescope on the bed, continued my rummaging, worried Wick might catch me in the act. But I quickly realized there was nothing left to riffle through. So some scavenger’s sixth sense made me return to the telescope. A patina like mother-of-pearl covered the surface. I held the telescope up to the firefly lights to admire it.

      Then frowned. Something seemed etched on the surface. In fact, up close, the “metal” surface revealed itself as hundreds of tiny hard fish scales forming a pattern so integrated you almost couldn’t see the joins. The surface was still silver shiny, blank, but when I adjusted my grip I discovered that the heat of my fingers had done something to the scales: miniature photographs had formed there. Sneaky, sneaky Wick—although I couldn’t understand the purpose of concealment. The photographs appeared to date from before the city’s ruination, reproduced from old books, but hardly seemed worth keeping secret.

      Curious, СКАЧАТЬ