Borne. Jeff VanderMeer

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СКАЧАТЬ appearance, and their faces would shine with an inner light that almost made me change my mind about memory beetles. Almost. What they told me could not be the whole truth, the same as when we speak of the recently deceased and tell only the good stories. That was the beauty of the Company—how it won no matter what. How it had attached itself to the history of our city, even when it no longer existed here except as a husk, a ghost, or a giant, murderous bear.

      “Someone killed it, showed it to me through a camera embedded in one of my spy beetles.” Except, later on Wick said that another person had killed it.

      Yet another version: that it had been wounded and lingered on for a time in the holding ponds outside the Company building. In this version, the fish had survived for almost a year—longer than it should have, in part because Wick had fed it. The creature had become a terror of that place: the monster with the human face that rose from the depths to devour. Although the human face was dead almost from the start, nibbled at and gnawed on by lesser creatures in the water, became waterlogged and misshapen in its decay, and no one would have recognized who it once was, nor could the rest of the fish ever recover from the death it carried atop its head.

      In a fourth version, Wick hinted that the fish might linger there still, deep under the water. Wick telling versions. Wick hurt. Wick falling back into angst—Wick recounting how he had been forced out of the Company when his fish project was sabotaged, the Company sliding into anarchy, out of contact with its headquarters, and he having to live his life without the protection to which he’d grown accustomed. Turned him into a drug dealer, a survivalist, a man so thin and translucent he wouldn’t have looked out of place in a row of creatures from a cave or the deep ocean.

      In my darker moments, when I doubted my own true self and betrayed that self by framing my attraction to Wick as a kind of antidote, I knew that what Wick was really admitting was that in his past he had helped to create a weapon so deadly that not even its extreme beauty could justify its use.

      The truth that Wick conveniently left out of most of his memories but was explicit in the notes on the diagram in his apartment: The purpose of his monstrous fish had been to serve as enforcer and crowd control, to instill fear, and perhaps to kill. In some remote place, a government still had had, at the time, the authority or the stability to restore order, was invested in restoring it.

      And then, that night on the balcony, for the first and only time, another monster entered Wick’s rambling discourse about the Company. “Mord knew about the fish project. Mord showed me what I was.”

      I didn’t know how to take that. Had Wick coexisted with Mord in the Company? When Mord was smaller, when Mord couldn’t fly? But whenever I sensed Wick had let slip something important, he would stop abruptly, as if reading my sudden interest, and fall silent. That silence was no natural end.

      It was more like a cutting-off point, the border beyond which Wick could not venture.

      WHAT I DID TO OTHERS AND WHAT OTHERS DID TO ME

      In the city, the line between nightmare and reality was fluid, just as the context of the words killer and death had shifted over time. Perhaps Mord was responsible. Perhaps we all were.

      A killer was someone who killed for reasons other than survival. A killer was a madman or madwoman, not a person just trying to get through another day. Once, I hit a woman with a rock. We encountered each other while out scavenging on the same deserted street on the west side of the city. I had found a smooth piece of metal being absorbed by a glistening red piece of fleshlike plant. I didn’t know if Wick would find it useful, but I had never seen anything like it before.

      As I turned a corner holding my prize, I came upon a woman walking. She was about fifty, wiry in the way survivors often are, gray hair hanging in a sheet, clothing a patchwork of gray and black.

      She saw me and smiled. Then she saw what I held and her smile went away. “Give me that. That’s mine.” Maybe she meant “That’s going to be mine.”

      I didn’t wait for her to get close enough to grapple with me. I knelt and picked up a rock with my free hand. As she rushed toward me from the middle of the street, I threw it at her, catching her in the forehead. She went limp, fell onto her side, breathing heavily. Then she got up and I threw another rock, catching her in the head again.

      This time she staggered back, put her hands on her knees as she hunched down. I could see the bright red pooling from her head to the ground. She sat heavily in the rubble and put a hand to her head, stared at me as I dropped the third rock I’d picked up.

      “I just wanted to look at it,” she said, puzzled as she kept putting a hand to her wound and taking it away again. Her eyes began to glaze over. “Just a look is all I wanted.”

      I didn’t stay to help her or hurt her. I left.

      Did she die? Did I kill her, and if I did, am I a murderer?

      What happened between the woman and me wasn’t new, no matter how much amnesia we’ve suffered; it was as old as the old world and older still. The first rule, the only rule, is that you carry your safety with you the best you can—you protect yourself the best you can, and you have that right.

      But one evening, three weeks after I found Borne, I let down my guard. A gang of children creeping through the moss and detritus caught the door behind me before it shut. Followed me silent down the corridors to my apartment, keeping to my same path to avoid the traps and pheromones and attack spiders. I didn’t notice because I was already thinking about Borne and wondering where I would find him this time.

      Wick had left to tend to the farthest reach of his crumbling drug empire. None of my personal defenses—predator cockroaches in the hallway, the crab spiders embedded in the door, a good old-fashioned knife blade—could stop them.

      Other than Mord, the poison rains, and the odd discarded biotech that could cause death or discomfort, the young were often the most terrible force in the city. Nothing in their gaze could tell you they were human. They had no memories of the old world to anchor them or humble them or inspire them. Their parents were probably dead or worse, and the most terrible and transformative violence had been visited upon them from the earliest of ages.

      There were five of them, and four had traded their eyes for green-gold wasps that curled into their sockets and compounded their vision. Claws graced their hands like sharp commas. Scales at their throats burned red when they breathed. One wing sighed bellows-like out of the naked back of the shortest, the one who still had slate-gray human eyes. After a while, I wished he’d had wasps instead.

      They smelled of brine and sweat and dust. They licked their lips and flexed their biceps like little conquerors. At that time, we did not know how they had become so changed, unless it was from contamination from the Company, and could not identify the new impulse rising nor where it came from.

      I fought, but sometimes fighting isn’t enough. Showing aggression and resistance isn’t enough. You can’t blame yourself for being outnumbered, if you want to stay sane.

      It was useless. I was useless. They tortured me in various unimaginative ways for hours. The shortest mostly just watched, stood beside the bed with his slate-gray gaze shining dull from huge eyes, the whites not as white as his pale skin. They were on drugs they’d probably found on a toxic waste heap.

      Between my whimpers and screams and thrashing, as the sheets grew red and the other three howled their dominance, I kept saying to the gray-eyed child, “Don’t watch. Don’t watch.” I wanted to believe I СКАЧАТЬ