Borne (Borne, #1)

by Jeff Vandermeer

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.

“Yes. And there were cities all over the world where people lived in peace.” There had never been a time when all the people everywhere lived in peace. No one had ever had a lasting peace without ignoring atrocity or history, which meant it wasn’t lasting at all. Which meant we were an irrational species.

This was just as things began to fall apart in that city, too, so the question of safety was on our minds. Even as everyone was trying to ignore the situation by attending with ever more vigilance to the finer things in life.

I don’t know, it just happened. Everything everywhere collapsed. We didn’t try hard enough. We were preyed upon. We had no discipline. We didn’t try the right things at the right time. We cared but we didn’t do. Too many people, too little space. Weighted down, unable to see the way Borne saw. Maybe the Mord proxies weren’t an aberration but the end product of it all.

In the near distance, the lake and all that tragedy of half-lives, of the mysteries of existence and why we did the things we did, to each other and to animals. And us, struggling through the difficult purchase of the artificial sand that we might make it to the side of the Company building, find a door, get inside before we became a bear’s dinner.

Sometimes you eat the bar, sometimes he eats you.

Apparently we’d been richer than we thought, to suffer such continual diminishment and still be alive. But what was endurance and shared diminishment if not devotion?

There comes a moment when you witness events so epic you don’t know how to place them in the cosmos or in relation to the normal workings of a day. Worse, when these events recur, at an ever greater magnitude, in a cascade of what you have never seen before and do not know how to classify. Troubling because each time you acclimate, you move on, and, if this continues, there is a mundane grandeur to the scale that renders certain events beyond rebuke or judgment, horror or wonder, or even the grasp of history.

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.

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.