Borne (Borne, #1)

by Jeff VanderMeer

As I set down the packet, the aperture on top of Borne widened, releasing a scent like roses and tapioca. The sides of Borne peeled back in segments to reveal delicate dark-green tendrils that even in their writhing protected the still-hidden core. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Incredible, how a slip could become a freefall and a freefall could become a hell where we lived on as ghosts in a haunted world.

They told me the stories even as we continued to be refugees, moving from camp to camp, country to country, thinking that we could outrun the unraveling of the world. But the world was unraveling most places.

We made our way quickly more eastward still, fearing the exodus of the survivors as if it were a wave that might drown us, and yet they were no different than us.

As I lay on my side and stared at him—half curious, half afraid—I could see that Borne had developed a startling collection of eyes that encircled his body. Each eye was small and completely different from the others around it. Some were human—blue, black, brown, green pupils—and some were animal eyes, but he could see through all of them. They perplexed me because I didn’t know what they meant. I decided to think of it as a kind of odd adornment, Borne’s equivalent of a belt. When Borne saw me staring at him, he would make a sound like the startled clearing of a throat, and his flesh would absorb all of the eyes except two, which would migrate higher on his body and away from each other. Sometimes they would slip back down to his hips, but once in position on his torso they became larger, took on a sea-blue color, and grew long, dark lashes; they moved independent of each other. He must have thought he looked more normal that way.

I even pretended to be asleep when he came in. I had energy only for Borne.

Ignoring the strain on my own body, Borne and I would race down dim-lit, dust-covered corridors, Borne afraid of colliding/congealing with the wall and tripping over his own pseudopods, wailing as he laughed: “You’re going toooooo fast!” Or, “Why is this fuuuuuuuun?” Which just made me laugh, too. When you don’t have to run and you have the chance to run for the hell of it, it becomes a strange luxury.

I’d sometimes find him hunched up on the edge of a midden of discarded books, two tentacles extending out from his sides to hold a book and a single tentacle tipped with light curling down from the top of his head. He would study any number of topics and had no real preferences, his many eyes enthusiastically moving back and forth as he read the pages at a steady clip. I don’t believe he needed light, or eyes, to read, but I know he liked to mimic what he saw me doing. Perhaps he even thought it was polite to seem to need light, to seem to need eyes.

“Uh-oh,” he said, because he’d forgotten. In those days, he always said “uh-oh” when he felt he’d made a mistake. Maybe he also was trying to be a little “difficult,” a concept he’d been field-testing, usually in charming ways.

He reared up, exuding pseudopods as if they were coming out of his pores. “I am not a machine. I am a person. Just like you, Rachel. Just like you.” It was the first time I had ever done anything to offend him. I’d perplexed him, yes, but not offended him.

“I found myself when you picked me up! I was found by you. You plucked me. You plucked me.” The word pluck was new, but always and forever amused him; he could not tire of “to pluck” or “plucked.” He would make a sound like a chicken saying it, something I had taught him—“pluck pluck pluck”—and go running down the halls like a demented schoolboy. But this time when he said it, Borne’s voice got lower and lower and he flattened himself across the floor next to my bed, as he did when talking about things that scared him.

Borne went into what he would later call, jokingly, “dumb mode” or “sucking in your gut.” He drew in his eyes, got small, waddled to a corner, and sat there, immobile and mute.

I had learned that when Borne used this tone of voice he was about to trust me, was sharing something important.

“I want to go,” Borne said, as if the city were just another tunnel. “I should go. It’s settled. I’ll go.” He liked to settle things before I could decide.

“I have an idea,” he said. “Don’t say no yet.” Another favorite gambit. Don’t say no yet. When had I ever really said no to him? The number of discarded lizard heads gathered in a wastebasket in a far corner of the Balcony Cliffs was testament to that. “No.” “But I said you can’t say no!” In a flurry and fury, he expanded in all directions and covered the walls like a rough, green-tinged surreal sea with what now became two huge glowing red eyes, staring down from me at the ceiling. I smelled something burning. He knew I didn’t like that smell. (Unfortunately, he didn’t mind the smell of me farting in retaliation.) I was wise to this form of tantrum, and it did not startle me. I had grown accustomed to so many things while recovering.

Sometimes, when my parents had looked at me in an adoring way, I felt the weight of their love and stuck my tongue out like a brat. Now I looked at Borne in the same way.

Three dead astronauts had fallen to Earth and been planted like tulips, buried to their rib cages, then flopped over in their suits, faceplates cracked open and curled into the dirt. Lichen or mold spilled from those helmets. Bones, too. My heart lurched, trapped between hope and despair. Someone had come to the city from far, far away—even, perhaps, from space! Which meant there were people up there. But they’d died here, like everything died here. Then I realized they were not astronauts but only looked like astronauts because the sun had bleached the contamination suits white, and I felt perversely less sad.

“What were you disguised as?” I asked. “Nothing much,” Borne said, not looking me in the eye with his eyes, which was quite a feat. “What?” “A wizard,” he said grudging, bashful.

On the way back, we passed the dead people in their contamination suits one last time, and Borne waved to them and said goodbye. As if he’d known them, as if they’d been his good friends.

“And there were astronauts. Buried in the ground.” He would remember the dead astronauts for a long time. In the next few weeks he even took three dolls and pretended to have conversations with them. They’d just come back from the moon and were helping to replant the Earth, or some such nonsense. Borne had so many tentacles, he could’ve put on a complicated play if he’d wanted to.

A few days after I’d caught Borne following me in the city, he shocked me with a formal announcement: He was moving out of my apartment. To tell me this, Borne had made himself small and “respectable” as he called it, almost human except for too many eyes. But, really, “respectable” meant he looked like a human undergoing some painful and sludgy transformation into a terrestrial octopus with four legs instead of tentacles. This is how he presented himself to ask a favor. Anyone else confronted with Favor Borne would have run screaming.

“You come visit me every day.” “Of course I will!” He seemed sad I’d thought he might not, or maybe I projected that onto him.

Then we played a game from when he was younger, scant weeks ago. He was too old for it, but it served as a happy memory, something we shared now to show affection.

Biting my lip to suppress a kind of nervous giggle, I said, “Stop thinking for a while, Borne. All that thinking can hurt your brain. Do you want to hurt your brain?” “I don’t know,” Borne said. “If I hurt my brain, will I get a bigger one? One that isn’t in my fingertips?”

The rock moved from side to side a little. “You are the wrong size to be a fly or a lizard. And you look disgusting. Like a swimming pool.” “I am a rock,” Borne said, muffled, as if from some orifice now underneath him. “I am a rock?”

“I raised you from a pod. You know I did.” We shared this myth because it was simple and easy, even though he’d not really been a pod and the “raising” had been all of four months, not exactly a lifetime. But maybe it felt like a lifetime to him. “Yes,” the boulder admitted. “You raised me from a pod.” “And you know I want only the best for you?”

“Not nice,” Borne was breathing, “not nice not nice,” and what scared me was Borne being scared. Borne turned the drab color of the roof and went pancake-flat and spread out, and tried to curl over me like a carpet was rolling me inside of it.

There were pleadings and rough refusals to submit, although the Mord proxies never asked for surrender. You could not surrender to a proxy except through your death.

But Borne sensed this, Borne knew what was happening within and without. The space widened and a dull green light came from the flesh walls all around to let me see and a flesh book extended out of the wall and on a shelf that formed I saw a flesh telephone. The telephone shook like it was ringing. I picked up the receiver. “Hello,” I whispered. “This is Borne. This is Borne calling you.” “I know,” I said. I felt like a child on a pretend phone, having a chat with an imaginary friend.

The light was gone along with all of the fake things he’d created to put me at ease, and I lay there, panting, as the skin of Borne around me, the flesh of Borne, went prickly and rigid again and the cilia that rubbed up against me turned into tiny mouths that screamed into my clothes, arms and legs and hair. Borne was screaming silently into his own body because he could not scream on the outside.

Borne was reaching out a tentative tentacle, as if to touch the stars. He must have known he couldn’t, but I still said, “You can’t touch them!” “Why not? Are they hot?” “Yes, they are. But that’s not why. They’re very, very far away.” “But my arms are so long, Rachel. My arms can be as long as I want.”

He had a little tell when he joked—or it was actually a big tell. Some of his eyes would drift to the left, a particular cluster. He couldn’t control that.

“What are they?” Borne asked. “Are they … lights like in the Balcony Cliffs? Or … electrical lights? Who turned them on?” So whatever he’d seen in books hadn’t explained stars. At all. “No one turned them on,” I said, realizing after I’d said it that I’d just discounted thousands of years of religion. But it was too late to turn back.

“Mostly not nice. Remember the not-nice part. Avoid him.” “He kills the stars,” Borne said. “He kills the stars and brings darkness.” “The stars all come back, though.” “But not the people down below.”

“Whoever heard of a floating bear?” I told Borne. “That’d be like finding a plant that was actually a talking octopus.”

“Because we live here, too. We live here with you. Borne and me. Me and Borne and you. And isn’t he amazing? Can you deny he’s amazing?” Borne was currently using competing tentacle puppet heads to have an argument above us about the uses of “expeditioning” versus “exploring” and the differences between them, clearly for my benefit. “A work of art,” Wick said. “A genius.”

“Hmmph,” Borne said. “Hmmph.” Outsize, hammy acting. Satirical sounds. He also hadn’t made any effort to appear to be reading the sheet, but I knew he had. This was Borne being rude on purpose. “What’s wrong?” “Borne plays the piano. Borne dances. Borne sings. Borne recites poetry. Is that what you want? While I’m doing other, more important things, I guess part of me could do that for you. I guess I could find a way if it’s something you want.” Said in a flat, irritated tone that must have been as much an attempt at learning the inflections of my language as the words themselves.

“You could check the places I can’t feel anymore. You could tell me what’s happening there.” And I was struck dumb by the depths of my thoughtlessness. So that’s what I did—check the places Borne couldn’t feel anymore—setting aside my books, shelving my thought of “educating” Borne, because it’s not what he needed. Doing what I’d promised to do the night the Mord proxy had attacked him. I felt awful. That’s the problem with people who are not human. You can’t tell how badly they’re hurt, or how much they need your help, and until you ask, they don’t always know how to tell you.

“Some pus is okay, but not a lot of pus. And you need to clean a wound if there’s pus in it, because it means the wound is infected. But you won’t die. But keep an eye on it.” “Not too much pus,” Borne said, and three tiny stalks extended near each wound and three tiny eyes budded from each to keep watch. Which, from past experience, meant Borne was making a little joke about sentry duty.

I was made by the Company. I was made by someone. I am not actually alive. I am a robot.

I do not know when I am being what they want me to be and when I am myself. It is better when I am “cute.” It is safer.

BORNE MUST STOP KILLING. BORNE MUST STOP TASTING. BORNE MUST STOP BEING BORNE. BORNE MUST EAT WHAT IS ALREADY DEAD, LIKE NORMAL PERSONS. What if I am the only one? What if I cannot die? What if no one made me?

Rachel can’t protect me from Mord, and I can’t protect her from me. In so many ways, Borne had told me, “I can’t stop.” I can’t stop growing. I can’t stop who I am. I can’t stop killing people, and I had shut him out, ignored him, tried to pretend he was something other than what he was, and in doing so I had betrayed him.

Mord could not fly and a dozen cults across the city must have collapsed and their followers fled in confusion or disbanded or killed themselves. God was God no longer. God would have to walk the Earth like the rest of us. He had lost something he had come to believe he would always have and relied on to be there, and its absence came as a shock. Still, Mord tried to become a god again. He hurled himself at the sky, only to lurch and stumble and catch his balance with his front paws smashing against pavement.

Wrote Borne in his journal: “My earliest memory is of a lizard pooping on me and ever since I have hated lizards for ruining my first memory. But I also love them because they are delicious.”