Читать книгу Borne - Jeff VanderMeer - Страница 15

For every clear-eyed view of my room that took in the lack of running water, the mold that had begun its war against the constellations of fireflies embedded in my ceiling, the half-collapsing wall with the window that looked out on a mountain of dirt … for all of that, and the scenes out on the streets of one tired and dirty person fighting another person who was just as tired and dirty over a scrap the old world would have found useless or disgusting … for all of that, I still could imagine a time when the small things we used to love might be returned to us.

“It’s just me,” Borne said and for a long time huddled on my bed, trying to recover, I didn’t answer. Not really. I just spewed words at him, lost and rambling. Wick appeared next to him from time to time and winked out again. Sometimes I would feel Wick’s arms around me. Sometimes I would see him staring at me with an expression of guilt and, I thought, of suspicion.

Was the suspicion because of Borne? Since the attack, Borne had changed again. He had abandoned the sea-anemone shape in favor of resembling a large vase or a squid balanced on a flattened mantel. The aperture at the top had curled out and up on what I chose to interpret as a long neck, sprouting feathery filaments, which almost seemed like an affectation. The filaments, with a prolonged soft sigh, would crowd together and then pull apart again like bizarre synchronized dancers. He was tall enough now that the top of him loomed a good two feet above the bed. Colors still flitted across his body, or lazily floated in shapes like storm clouds, ragged and layered and dark. Azure. Lavender. Emerald. He frequently smelled like vanilla.

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.

¤

On the sixth day, I felt more lucid, woke with only a slight fuzziness. Wick had gone out again, reluctant, to conduct business. He hadn’t found my attackers, and I knew he probably never would. We hadn’t talked again about what had happened, or about much of anything. I even pretended to be asleep when he came in. I had energy only for Borne.

From my bed I asked Borne a question. It was really the only question—a dangerous question to match a dangerous mood. I was still on the worm-drugs and I wanted to be of use, to do anything but just lie there.

“What are you?” My heart beat faster, but I wasn’t afraid. Not really.

“I don’t know,” Borne said in a rough yet sweet tone. For a confused moment I thought he’d spoken in the voices of both my parents at once. Then, sincere and eager: “Do you know what you are?”

I ignored him. “Let’s play a game to figure out what you are.”

Borne went quiet for a second and his colors dimmed. Then he flared up.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay!”

“Then you have to be honest with me.”

“Honest.” Turning the word over in his head.

“Tell the truth.”

A ripple of vibrant purple traveled across his skin.

“Honest. I can be honest. I am honest. Honest.”

Had I upset him or triggered some other emotion, or was he just testing out the word?

“You know a lot about me,” I ventured. “But I know nothing about you. The game is about questions. Will you answer some questions?”

“I will answer questions,” Borne said, uncertain. Did he understand the word question?

“Are you a machine?” I asked.

“What is a machine?”

“A made thing. A thing made by people.”

This puzzled Borne, and it was a long while before he said, “You are a made thing. Two people made you.”

“I mean something made of either metal or of flesh. But not through natural biological means.”

“Two people made you. You are made of flesh,” Borne said. He seemed agitated.

“Why didn’t you save me from those boys?”

“Save?”

“Rescue. Help. Stop them from hurting me.”

There came a long pause and everything about Borne shut down until he was just a gray shape. Even the eyes went away.

Then the colors came back in an explosion of reds and pinks and a roiling, turbulent green. The eyes popped up as a rotating halo embedded in the skin near the top of his aperture. “But I did help! I helped! I helped Rachel. I helped.” This said in an anguished tone.

I tried to control the trembling of my voice. The spirit of Mord filled me up.

“Those boys hurt me for hours.” I spat out the words. “Those boys did that and you did nothing. They hurt me badly. And you could have done something.”

Silence again, then, in a whisper, “I could not. I did not. Help. Until.”

“Until what?”

“Until I knew them.”

I realized knew wasn’t the word he meant. That the word he sought might not exist, that he was trying, perhaps, to tell me two or three things at once.

“Knew them how?”

“I am not complete,” Borne said. “I was not complete. I am not complete.” He tried “put together,” which didn’t help, finished his sentence with a kind of frustration for words that caused the feathery pseudopods to straighten like spikes.

“Now you are complete? Aware?” I didn’t want to use the word activated, because it scared me.

“More complete,” Borne said.

“You killed them,” I said, calm. But not before they hurt me, came the raging, screaming thought behind the words.

“Kill?”

“Cease to be. No longer alive. Dead. Not here.”

Confusion shuddered through Borne. “I know them now. I know them.”

“Killing is bad,” I said. “Killing should never happen. Don’t kill.” Unless someone attacks you. Unless you have to. But I didn’t think to make the distinction to Borne, because I didn’t have the strength.

Those eyes no longer seemed beautiful. They looked ever more trapped and horrible. Was it my imagination, or was one of them a familiar gray? I turned away from Borne then, and drifted into unconsciousness for a while. It was easier than facing what he’d said.

And yet why would I turn away unless I felt safe?

¤

The seventh night, I slept in Wick’s quarters, and Mord, far above, slept over us, sprawled across the sea of loam and debris that covered the Balcony Cliffs. We experienced his breathing as a haunted depth charge that tumbled down through the layers, the beams, and the drywall, the supporting columns and the cracking archways. The sound of it permeated the atoms of a dozen ceilings, vibrated through our bodies. We felt it in our flesh after we heard it in our ears, and it lingered longer under the skin.

The stench came to us, too, faint, carried by the ducts and the thousand imperfections in the sediment above us, carried by the subterranean tunnels of worms and beetles. Like the thunder after lightning, it came to us late, but then wrapped around our throats. It was the stench of every living thing Mord had killed in the last week. Could Mord smell us down here? Could he smell us mice? Us little human mice?

Wick lay frozen, unable to move, terrified that somehow this was not random, that Mord knew he was there, that come morning Mord might start to root us out. And so, for a time, we whispered and moved in slow motion and in all ways acted as if we were submarines and Mord a destroyer above, seeking us. Even to whisper, Wick would put his mouth right up against my ear. He could not stop talking about rumors of Mord proxies being seen, searching in the city and the hinterlands beyond. Searching for what? Wick wouldn’t say, but I had the sense he knew.

Then we didn’t even whisper, as Mord began to moan in his sleep. His moans sounded like gnashed, crushed words, filtered through the dirt, and we could not understand them. I knew only that they felt like anguish.

Some hours later we felt his weight leave us, the Balcony Cliffs almost seeming to spring back up around us with relief. When we examined the spot above in the morning there was a deep depression from Mord’s weight. If he had spent the whole night there, would he have fallen through, smashing down level by level until, still sleeping, his body bulged through our ceiling? The stench remained for a day or two, and whenever I smelled it I felt a pressure pushing down on my head.

I had come to Wick’s place so he wouldn’t come to mine and be reminded of Borne, but Borne is the subject he raised as soon as Mord had left. I almost wished Mord was still there to silence him.

“I could still take him,” Wick said.

“Who?” I asked, although I knew.

“Borne. It’s time. I should just take him and figure him out. While you recover.”

“You don’t need to.”

He hesitated, about to say more, thought better of it, and seemed to accept what I had said. He hugged me close and, as if I were his shield against Mord, soon enough snored quietly against my shoulder. I let him, even though it hurt; the price of peace. Because it was simple. Because it helped us both.

But I could not sleep. I was thinking about the silly conversations Borne and I were having because Borne didn’t seem to know much about the world, had only fragments that didn’t quite fit together.

Borne: “Why is water wet?”

Me: “I don’t know. Because it’s not dry?”

Borne: “If something is dry, does that mean it’s not wit.”

Me: “Wit or wet?”

Borne: “Wit.”

Me: “Wit is in the eye of the beholder.”

Borne: “What?”

I tried to explain wit to him.

Borne: “Like grit in the eye? Is wit like dust?”

Me: “Yes, dry.”

Borne: “I’m thirsty. And I need a snack. I’m hungry. I’m hungry. I’m hungry.”

Conversation would fall away again while I tried to find a snack for Borne, which, again, wasn’t hard. He especially liked what you might call “junk food,” even though that concept had become obsolete long ago.

Maybe, too, I liked Borne so much because Wick by then was almost always serious. For the longest time, Borne didn’t know what serious was.

In the morning, with Mord and the weight of Mord just a bad dream, Wick tried again.

“I can do it in a gentle way,” he said, but that didn’t reassure me. “I can return him the way he is now.”

“No.”

His weight went taut against my back.

“I shouldn’t have to ask. You should know it’s the best thing.”

“It’s not.”

“You know something’s not right, Rachel.” Now he was almost shouting.

Like most men, Wick could not help terror about one thing erupting as anger about something else. So I said nothing.

But he wouldn’t let up. “Give me Borne,” he said.

I refused to turn to look at him.

“You need to give him to me, so we know what he is. He lives here, among us, and you protect him in a way that’s unnatural. This thing you know nothing about.”

“No.”

“He may be influencing you using biochemicals,” Wick said. “You may not know your own mind.”

I laughed at that, even though it could be true.

“You have no right, Rachel,” he said, and there was a wounded quality to the word right.

“Tell me about your time at the Company.” I was tired of talking, just tired period. “Tell me all about your weird telescope.”

But he had nothing to say about his telescope. He had nothing else to say at all, and neither did I. We both knew that one word more and either I would leave his bed or he would ask me to leave.

Wick. Wick and Rachel. Portrait of us. Wick and I, at opposite ends of the frame, half out of the picture. Oddly wary of each other now, for all that he took care of me, perhaps because he expected more blame from me, to bolster the guilt he had decided to keep. And perhaps I did blame him—for making me weak, for making me rely on his surveillance, his beetles and spiders, rather than my own traps.

Was that fair? No, it wasn’t fair. But I had my own guilt: I now kept an even bigger secret from him.

Borne can talk. Borne killed my attackers and hid their bodies. Borne is intelligent. Borne makes me happy.