Borne. Jeff VanderMeer

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СКАЧАТЬ heating up every scale with my touch, almost as if playing a musical instrument, and then squinting at the results.

      Most that weren’t photographs of places now destroyed held a record of impressions of the city. There were lists of places under titles like “Reclaim” and asked/answereds like “How do you kill a building? Do nothing.” Some of it appeared to be the equivalent of microfiche containing a rich history of the city before the Company’s appearance. Other fragments were so microscopic I could only guess at their importance, and wondered how Wick could read them, unless he had some viewing device hidden away, too. None of this seemed like the Wick I knew—who was a loner, who had never mentioned the city as it had existed before the Company, and who seemed to have blocked the hope of any future for the city from his mind.

      But I finally understood the need for secrecy when I realized it wasn’t just old photographs and older data. Some scales held monstrous visions of projects never completed that scared me because they made Mord seem mundane. Most important, other scales included a fair number of technical specifications for biotech that I knew Wick had created. None of our enemies needed that information.

      Sometimes I wondered whether I would still find Wick fascinating if I uncovered all of his secrets, if I would even know who he was without them.

      Back in my apartment, I dropped the nautilus I had stolen into a glass of water and watched as it reanimated, turned a brilliant shade of crimson, began to uncoil as it stared at me, almost defiant, and then disintegrated into nothing as if it had never existed. A disappearing trick. An illusion.

      Drinking that elixir of Wick mysteries was impossible for me. I poured the water out, cleaned the glass, tossed the glass onto a pile of dirty old clothes out in the corridor.

       ¤

      My other betrayal was simple: I liked Borne too much. I knew this in my bones, knew I really should give him up. But I also knew it would take something catastrophic for me to do so. The more personality Borne showed, the more I felt attached to him.

      Borne also made it easy to keep him because I discovered he would eat just about anything—any crumb, lowly pebble, or scrap of wood. Any worm of any description that came within reach would disappear, never to be seen again. Borne ate a lot of what I would have discarded as trash and in a sense made a compost pile redundant. I think he would’ve eaten a garbage can if he’d been hungry enough.

      This ease of life with Borne didn’t stop him from continuing to puzzle me. The most basic and troubling puzzle? Even though so much went into Borne, nothing ever came out of Borne. This fact struck me as absurd, even humorously sinister. It actually made me giggle. No pellets. No dung. No little puddles. Nothing.

      Borne was also growing. Yes, growing. I hadn’t wanted to admit it at first, because the idea of growth carried with it the idea of a more radical change, the thought of a child becoming an adult. In how many species did the transformation become radical, the parent so different from the juvenile? So yes, by the end of the first month, although the process had been gradual, I could no longer deny that Borne had tripled in size.

      I also could not deny that I was actively hiding Borne from Wick. I no longer let Wick into my apartment, or if I did I made sure to put Borne in the back room, out of sight. I ignored Wick’s attempts to engage me on the subject of Borne as a threat or a creature that required caution.

      Since Borne never displayed any kind of threatening behavior, I never thought to take him as a threat. Even calling Borne a “he” began to feel faintly ridiculous as he didn’t exhibit the aggression or self-absorption I expected from most males. Instead, during those early days Borne had become a blank slate on which I had decided to write only useful words.

      WHAT WICK HAD TOLD ME ABOUT THE FISH PROJECT AND THE COMPANY

      Most of what I knew about the fish project, and the Company, came to me from Wick like fragments of a dark tale I had to put together myself. I couldn’t tell if he held those memories close to ward off the world or to let in something of the world. The Company had come to the city unbidden, when the city was already failing and had no defenses against the intruder. For a time, the Company must have seemed a savior to the city and its people. For a time, the prospect of jobs alone must have been enough. I tried to imagine a young Wick being drawn into the Company, working his way from apprentice to making creatures on his own. Yet the vision always blurred, fell away. I could only ever see him in my imagination, fully formed, Wick as I knew him now.

      The fish project had been his undoing, the cause of his being cast out from the Company after many years of service. But although the fish had led to despair, memories of the creature filled him with nostalgia, too.

      “A tank of a fish,” Wick told me one night more than a year before I found Borne.

      We were on our balcony, looking up at the black sky and ignoring the slap and rush of river poison below. Sometimes, through the protective veil Wick had created to disguise us, we would see others on the balconies to the north, beyond the area we controlled. They looked like manikins or statues, something hopelessly remote, even though we knew they could be dangerous.

      It was early in that year, far into a chilly evening. The wind gushed up out of the dark, broke against the balcony stone to bring the faint sting of river smells, and I heard the reassuring hut-hut-hooting of owls and the sounds of stealthy things moving through the underbrush below. I remember thinking that the creatures we couldn’t see had no use for us, went about their business without the need to figure us into their plans. I had no use for me, either. We were both drunk on alcohol minnows and exhausted from a long day of work. I had blood on the bottom of my boots from a scavenging mission gone wrong, but not too wrong.

      The sky and its blurred stars, seeking something, wheeled and roved and quivered despite how little I moved as I stared up from my chair. But still I listened to Wick beside me. Still I was awake. My sadness gave me a clarity, a kind of sobriety I hadn’t earned, Wick much drunker.

      “A wonderful fish! With a wide and mournful mouth—like you see in certain kinds of dogs. Beautiful and ugly and it moved like a leviathan. On land, no less! It could breathe air. I loved that it could breathe air. I gave it wonderful eyes, too: veined with emerald and gold.”

      I had heard this part before, but as much as Wick went on about the fish, the depths of his feelings weren’t about the fish. Not really. As time passed and the stars above began to slow, to reorganize along familiar constellations, most of his emotions were focused on people from the Company: the old friend who had abandoned him, or whom he had abandoned, and the new employee who had betrayed him. The supervisor who had overseen the fish project. All of these people he had let into his life, and who had turned against him. Or had changed. Or had simply been acting to their nature, and Wick had come into focus for them for a time and then drifted out of focus again.

      I didn’t know them, and Wick never gave enough context to make me care. But also I couldn’t remember as an adult when I had trusted three people at the same time. That Wick had once trusted so many seemed silly and irresponsible: an old-world indulgence. That he might have trusted them more than he trusted me I didn’t want to think about.

      I wondered, too, if Wick’s view of the Company, his willingness to forgive, could ever be reconciled with my own view. To me, the Company was the white engorged tick on the city’s flank, the place that had robbed us of resources and created chaos. The place that, it was rumored, had sent its finished products out by underground tunnels to far-distant places and left us with the dregs at the holding ponds.

      Sometimes I met rare older СКАЧАТЬ