Dead Astronauts (Borne, #2)

by Jeff Vandermeer

For what had a fox been but what a human thought it was?

Chen was a heavyset man, from a country that was just a word now, with as much meaning as a soundless scream or the place Grayson came from, which didn’t exist anymore either.

Moss remained stubbornly uncommitted—to origin, to gender, to genes, went by “she” this time but not others.

and Moss had already given herself over to a cause beyond or above the human.

Rendered their corpses down into dust, and then quarantined the dust and salted it, as if knowing how dangerous even the DNA of ghosts could be.

the world so much incoming data that it was no data at all,

Moss liked, well, moss—and lichen and limpets and sea salt and the beach and guessing the geological scale of things.

as if she leaked memories without her knowledge.

She had no answer, had decided for no good reason that the atoms of which she was made were not yet ready to disperse to form someone or something else.

Moss presented ethereal.

“You don’t come back often,” Moss said. “Sometimes I search for you. But most times you die up there.”

Oracular stigmata, appraising.

Because dead things felt only love for the universe.

clung to soft tissue with their sanitized toes.

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

Charlie X just thought in the old way. Plants couldn’t feel pain, animals were objects to be manipulated as products or resources.

A wraith of wreathes. An impression in a now barren field where once wildflowers had grown.

A lethal cut that bled backward, started as a scar, became a wound, fountained red, then was nothing at all.

Dead astronauts were no different than living astronauts. Neither could shed their skin. Neither could ever become part of what they journeyed through. Suits were premade coffins.

Everything was contaminated. Nothing was.

Stared at a promise from so long ago. Destined for some other Grayson. She could not bring herself to see Moss there. Bear false witness. Oracles that misled.

The green resided across the indistinct features of one, whose bones were looser, whose features had dissolved into a mask of a face made of dead lichen.

You imagine the journal vibrating with the energy of what it contains. You imagine the lichen and moss murmuring to it.

A plant that becomes a sea anemone that becomes a squid.

You never talk about your past with anyone. Talking just releases memories into the air, and they aren’t really yours anymore, or they become changed or other people capture them and hold them prisoner. You want to keep them.

Resembles a salamander. A large salamander. Almost but not quite.

In truth, people were demons when they didn’t know any better. The girl had learned that it hardly mattered in the end.

That you can hurt by touch. That you can hurt another living being just by existing in the world. Just by passing through the world. That is all.

Her past happened to another person. Another girl. Drab, dull, ordinary.

You love the soil against your skin. You love the water against your skin, the forest a kind of bliss.

The loam and the lichen, the earthworms and the snails, the mushrooms and the mold. Fungi like lampposts or markers illuminating the world.

Do you understand? Nothing thrives without being broken. Nothing exists without being dead first.

I cannot pretend this was not agony, but agony repeated so many times is a different kind of suffering.

The rage so familiar, like breathing, that the dark bird felt only the aftermath, which was a kind of weakening.

To think an autopsy was a person. To think a dissection meant a type of mind. If I went rummaging through your carcass, would I find you?

I should have gone insane but I was a fox, not a human.

Let them know the way it hurt somewhere so basic, so plain, so laid bare, that I could not hide from it.

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

Yet still I lost, because I was being human. Killing is easy. I think that’s why people do it so much.

I wondered if I ran over the taxidermist and preserved her in resin if she would feel beautiful. If she would feel pure. Exploded first into a jagged eruption and pulling apart of flesh and tissue and bone and sinew. Left with a hole where the chest had been. A face half sawed off.

There is no end to us. Only to you. You’ll never understand that. You’ll never understand that without us, you don’t exist. You wink out of existence. You become something else. Forever. And when I’m gone, what will remain? Everything.

(While we felt it in the soil and danced on dead leaves and rutted and drank at the stream that ran behind the row of apartments and watched the sun, that radiant star, and kept the island in our hearts.)

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

There was no moment like any other moment and yet each moment was the same.