Dead Astronauts (Borne, #2)

by Jeff Vandermeer

For glory was wasteful, Grayson believed, and Chen cared nothing for beauty that declared itself, for beauty had no morality,

for you cannot give us what we already have

Here, there had been no penalty for freedom until the end.

Fostered the impression screams were more important than hunger.

Because dead things felt only love for the universe.

Ready would be too late.

The body did not exist separate from the soul because the soul didn’t exist.

The past always waited. To wound, to rend, to tear.

“Do you have a plan that includes the human?” “It includes people. Are you a person?”

pretty alive, confused, and ready to be convinced of extinction.

The way he wandered and only knew his past by the steps he left behind.

Most of the owls have left, and the mice apparently loved the owls so much, they left too.

A collection of ills like pots and pans banging together in a jostling van.

What if it is nonsense? Most days, all you have is reality, which is nonsense, too.

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.

This was the story: Over all the forest beyond their home and the little shed, over all of it. Over all. Ruled the forest mind.

“What men make of the future must be better than the past. If the world is to live, we must make better things.”

Did you ever have a need so great that the vestiges of your mission existed even if you weren’t sure you did? Did you ever believe you were a ghost? Did you ever reach a point when you weren’t sure purpose existed anymore? And yet, still, you were here.

7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 3 3 3 10, 0 “We shall fight the 3, we shall live within the 7.” “We shall be the Company in both the 0 and the 10.”

A thing you created that is not me. 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?

You wouldn’t understand me even if I made sense.

sported not a bat head but instead a kind of smooth soft whiteness that wobbled like an imperfect satellite in decaying orbit.

(Everywhere we walk, the desert gives way to the ghosts of trees, of streams.)

(We walk forests like you walk a room you built.)

(But what is too much to bear?)

(Not being alive.)

(So we kept being alive even as they destroyed us.)

(So we buried our secrets though they tried to extinguish our secrets with us.)

(Up until this very day.)

(They keep coming; they never stop.)

You couldn’t kill us all.

We kept our secrets though they tried to extinguish our secrets with us. Still we died. Still we lived. Up until this day.

What was wasted was no less or no more than what was wasted before the fall.

What a nothing you made out of the world you were given.

We ate him instead and set his chickens free to show that we could be fair and just.

All the instrumentation of trauma in the old shed. The one that might someday burn down, but that was not our concern.

Talons held tender yet still held unwilling.

He, the object, objected, but we pushed past that point, until the binocular necklace was pressed tight against his throat. We took his blood. We weighed him. We shined bright lights upon his lined face. He didn’t understand. How could he? We barely understood ourselves. These rituals, how do they evade scrutiny. How they evade scrutiny. What we tell ourselves is important.

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

Oh, how these dead people who lived in houses on lots where they had cut down most of the trees loved trees. How they loved to be out in the trees.

Killing is easy. I think that’s why people do it so much.

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. Everything will remain.

(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.)

(Knew that we would return there, if we lived that long.)

(Did I see you through the bramble? Once or twice. Did I sneak up to the edge of the forest to surveil the factory?)

(Did I watch the dark bird at its work but do nothing? And was I a ghost? Was I so far away I could do nothing anyway? For what was to be done? Nothing.)

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

The banal drawling drowning speech of men who don’t care about what they’re doing. Until forced to. Who all unawares destroy their own warrens, who poison their own food, convinced of righteousness.

In the end, if you change the enemy enough, if you wear them down, perhaps losing is good enough.

No strength left for being strong.