Dead Astronauts (Borne, #2)

by Jeff Vandermeer

Came a mighty yipping and barking from the multitudes, the gathered folk that were foxes but not foxes as had been known in the past. For what had a fox been but what a human thought it was?

But Grayson welcomed the duck with the broken wing because it reminded her that even something broken could have a use. That nothing should be wasted. And that what might appear broken might in fact be whole.

Each had had the experience of self-annihilation. Chen had killed Chen. Moss had absorbed Moss. Grayson had killed them both. Moss had killed Chen, Chen Moss. Thus their intimacy had become exponential, along with their sadness and their regret. And it was cocooned within that, that they lay together, so close, to treasure the Chen, the Moss, the Grayson, that still lived.

Moss by then was a conduit as well as a person, and even as a person she was an accumulation of Mosses, all of whom lived inside her. Every time Moss encountered another Moss, across timelines, they merged, and she had become more powerful because of it.

In space, discipline meant life or death. Here, there had been no penalty for freedom until the end.

“You don’t come back often,” Moss said. “Sometimes I search for you. But most times you die up there.” “I don’t know what that means.” Soon enough, she would.

A creator who no longer remembered the creation: Wasn’t that one definition of a god?

The body did not exist separate from the soul because the soul didn’t exist. But the future never left the past behind, either.

What was a person but someone who turned monstrous, anyway? What was a person, in Moss’s experience, but a kind of demon.

Last words. First words.

So much information incoming to a receiver inadequate to receive it.

In truth, some demons were once people who did bad things even though they knew better. In truth, people were demons when they didn’t know any better. The girl had learned that it hardly mattered in the end.

Out across the night, a leviathan was dying near the holding ponds, killed by a flying monster. Out across the night, something emerged from the carcass in its last moments that the dark bird thought she recognized. A person. One of the three, yet not one of the three.

Ah, Mother, even if I knew your face, how could this not be hell?

And a soul is just a delusion that lives in the body. No delusion survives death. Death is more honest than that.

But, in the end, joy cannot fend off evil. Joy can only remind you why you fight.