Kitabı oku: «Borne», sayfa 5

HOW IT HAD BEEN, AND WHAT CAME NEXT

The first time I saw Mord it was twilight six years before I found Borne, on a day when I’d found nothing much except some autonomous meat quivering foul in a ditch next to a half-open storm grate. I knew a trap when I saw one. I marked the area with chalk to remember and made my way far to the west, to the remains of an abandoned highway covered over with lichen and rust and bone fragments. They formed a green-red-white pattern that almost looked purposeful. Not the good kind of lichen, or I would’ve harvested some for later.

The high level of chemicals in the city’s air has always made sunset a stirring sight, even if you were jaded, had become fatally distracted, or just had no room left for poetry. Orange and yellow melted in layers into blue and purple. I checked to the north and south, saw no one. I found a faded deck chair somewhere and sat in it, eating some stale crackers from the week before. My stomach was a tight, aching ball as I watched the sun go down.

I was filthy from climbing through tunnels all day in the semi-abandoned factory district. I stank. I was exhausted. Despite my precautions, anyone could have seen me. Anyone could have attacked me. I didn’t care. You had to let your guard down sometimes or you forgot what that felt like, and I’d reached my limit for the week. That meat going to waste to bait a trap set by a crazy person, a cannibal, a pervert—it had gotten to me.

Mord rose from the cluster of buildings directly ahead of me. At first he was a large, irregular globe of dark brown against the orange edge of the sun. For one terrified moment I thought he was an eclipse or a chemical cloud or my death. But then the “eclipse” began to move toward me effortlessly, blocking out the sun, destroying the sky, and I could see the great furred head in every detail.

I couldn’t run. I should have run, but I didn’t. I should have leapt out of my deck chair and made for a drainage tunnel. But I didn’t. I just sat in my deck chair with a cracker half in, half out of my mouth, and watched as the shadow of the behemoth stole over me.

Back then, Mord wasn’t as large, and he still lived in the Company building. As he rose over me like a living dreadnought, his pelt was golden brown, pristine, and clean-smelling, as if an army of Company employees had done nothing but groom him for hours.

His enormous eyes were bright and curious and curiously human, not as bloodshot and curved as they would later become. The smooth white of his fangs seemed less a bloody threat than the promise of a swift, clean execution. He luxuriated in the feel of the wind against his fur.

I cannot fully explain the effect of Mord on me in that moment. As that silky, gorgeous head glided toward me, as his gaze slid over me and past, with what seemed almost a secret amusement, as that pelt hovered mere feet overhead and the smell of jasmine came to me from his fur … and as I watched that whole vast body pass over me, I fought the urge to raise an arm to touch him.

Some part of me could not decide if I was witness to the passage of a god or, perhaps, out of hunger, a hallucination. But in that moment I wanted to hug Mord. I wanted to bury myself in his fur. I wanted to hold on to him as if he were the last sane thing in the world, even if it meant the end of me.

After Mord had passed me, I didn’t dare look over my shoulder. I was afraid. Afraid he would be staring back with a ravenous look. Afraid I had conjured him up out of some dark need and he didn’t really exist. How could Mord possibly fly? By what miracle or what damnation? I didn’t know, and Wick had never offered up a theory. That Mord might once have been human, then, seemed like some distant, remote truth that lived on a mountaintop far from here. But it was this ability that made some in the city believe we had died and now existed in the afterlife. Some purgatory or hell. And some portion of all of those who believed sacrificed themselves to Mord—and not by gaping at him from a lawn chair, munching on a cracker. Because if you were already dead, what did it matter?

I sat there with the last of my crackers, as dusk settled over me and the stars made themselves known. Only after some time did I begin to shiver and take note of strange sounds coming closer, and seek safety for the night.

I had only been in the city a short time. Soon enough, I would meet Wick, and then, after some caution, move into the Balcony Cliffs with him.

¤

Even knowing that Borne had killed my attackers—even though I still knew too little about Borne—I could not give in to Wick’s judgment. Wasn’t there so much that was good and decent in Borne that I could bring out, no matter what I discovered about his purpose? This was the essential question that kept coming to me out of the darkness, even if I already had Wick’s answer.

I worked so very hard at accepting Borne in the weeks that followed that I no longer saw him as odd. Even as he grew larger and larger, until he was taller than Wick, even as he kept trying out new shapes—changing from cone to square to globe, and then back again into his inverted squid pose.

Wick was there almost all the time now, still taking care of me. I should have been more appreciative, but I resented his presence more and more. When he was around Borne had to be motionless, voiceless, eyeless—sitting there in the far corner while Wick and I talked. He resembled a giant question mark, and the way in which Wick never looked at Borne made me know just how aware Wick was of my new friend.

But even when Wick left, my conversations with Borne continued to be halting and stilted at first. I had avoided the questions I had to ask at first, but then returned to them because I had no choice. I thought of myself as a shield against Wick, that Wick’s questions would be more invasive, his conclusions harsher.

I returned to the idea of Borne as a machine. I found an old book amongst the wreckage and showed him a photo of a robot and then of a bioengineered cow. How we would long today to find a cow wandering the city!

“See? Like this?”

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’m sorry, Borne,” I said, and I was sorry. I changed the subject, a little. “Do you know how you came to the city, then?”

“I don’t remember. There was water, a lot of water, and then I was walking. Just walking.”

“No,” I said patiently. “That’s my memory. That’s something I told you.” This kind of confusion happened more often than it should have.

Borne considered that for a second, then said, “I know things about things that are not mine. But it’s mixed up. I mix it up. I am supposed to mix it up. In the white light.”

I thought of the white light common to tales of death, of dying. I was in a tunnel. I saw a white light.

“What do you remember about the light?”

But he wouldn’t answer that question, defaulted to a common response that he thought pleased me.

“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.

“Do you know your purpose?” I asked.

Borne’s eyestalks, newly budded and continually extending and then retracting into his body, all looked at me quizzically.

“The reason,” I said. “You know—the point of being alive. Were you made for a purpose?”

“Does everything have a purpose, Rachel?”

His words got to me, sitting in the living room, looking up at the mold-stained ceiling.

What was my purpose? To scavenge for myself and for Wick, and now for Borne? To just survive … and wait? For what.

But I was trying to be a good parent, a good friend, to Borne, so I said, “Yes, everything has a purpose. And every person has a purpose, or finds a purpose.” Or a reason.

“Am I a person?” Borne said, and his eyestalks perked up and took special attention.

I didn’t hesitate. “Yes, Borne, you are a person.”

He was a person to me, but one already pushing on past to other concepts.

“Am I a person in my right mind?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, my standard ploy when I wanted time to think. With my right mind.

“If there’s a right mind, then there’s a wrong mind.”

“I suppose so. Yes.”

“How do you get a wrong mind? Is it borned into you?”

“That’s a tough question,” I said. Usually I would have responded with something like “Do you want a wrong mind?” or told him it could happen either way: borned into you, or through trauma. But I was too tired from repairing traps all day.

“Is it tough because I already have a wrong mind?”

“No. Do you like to be silent sometimes?” Borne might be a person, but he was a difficult person, because he probed everything.

“Is silence because of a wrong mind?” Borne asked.

“Silence is golden.”

“You mean because it’s made of light?”

“How do you even speak with no mouth?” I asked, but not without affection.

“Because I’m not in my right mind?”

“Right mind. Wrong mouth.”

“Is no mouth a wrong mouth?”

“No mouth is …” But I couldn’t stop from erupting into giggles.

I saw these conversations as Borne playful. But really it was a youthful, still-forming mind that couldn’t yet communicate complex concepts through language. Part of why Borne couldn’t is that his senses worked differently than mine. He had to learn what that meant, at the same time he had to navigate the human world through me. The confusion of that, of finding unity in that, of basically becoming trilingual while living in the world of human beings, was very difficult. Always, as long as we knew each other, Borne was offering up so many approximations, so many near misses on what he meant that might have meant other things.

Much later, when I realized this, I went back over our conversations in my memory, to see if I could translate them into some other meaning. But it was too late. They are what they are. They mean what they meant, and I know I misremember some of them anyway—and that pains me.

¤

The last night before I would have to go out scavenging again, Wick came to check on me. It was perfunctory during this phase of our relationship, a duty and an obligation. 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.

“How are you?” Wick asked from the doorway. The intensity of shadow hollowed out his cheekbones, and I felt as if I were being approached by a concept, an abstraction.

“Good, thanks,” I said.

“You’ll be okay tomorrow.”

“Yes,” I replied although he’d not asked a question.

Wick lingered there for a moment, eyes glinting like mineral chips, holding himself apart, distant. I didn’t like to see him hurt by me, but I was stuck. He didn’t have to be so adamant about Borne—that was his fault—and I said nothing more. So he receded from me, back into the corridor, perhaps to go shove a memory beetle in his ear.

Wick receded; Borne blossomed. That was the way of it in those days—and in those days, too, the situation in the city had changed, and strange things were flourishing and familiar ones withering.

Since I’d last been outside, the Magician had become a major force in the city. She now held an area in the northwest starting roughly in a line extending out from where the Company building’s jurisdiction ended on the city’s southern edge. A growing army of acolytes helped make her drugs and protected her territory against Mord and others; Wick had only his peculiar swimming pool, the bastion of the Balcony Cliffs, a scavenger-woman who could make traps but kept secrets from him, and a creature of unknown potential that he desired to cast out.

Worse, the rumored Mord proxies had finally made their presence known and seemed more bloodthirsty than their progenitor. They knew no rule of law, not even the natural law of sleep. Upon their appearance, as if there were some collusion between the proxies and the Company, Mord spent several days huffing and puffing in front of the Company building. Under his uncertain aegis, the Company building was becoming more and more unstable and unsafe. Mord would sleep in front of it, and then other times he would forget his seeming role as protector and absentmindedly butt into the walls with his broad head. We could see that people still lived in the top levels, under siege in a way as they were reduced to serving Mord’s whims—while rumors came to us that beneath them, in the Company’s deepest levels, no one ruled at all.

Despite these dangers, Wick had given me no refuge. We had an agreement and I had to begin to honor my side of it again. I would go forth and scavenge. I didn’t know if that was a mercy or a cruelty, or where that impulse came from in Wick. I didn’t care. It was time to get out of bed.

When Wick had gone, Borne extended a tendril of an arm, to take one of my hands in his own “hand.” A reasonable facsimile, if a little damp.

“Rachel?”

“What, Borne?”

“Do you remember what I said about the white light?”

“Yes.”

“Part of me had a nightmare about it while your friend was here.”

I checked myself from asking all of the questions I could have asked.

Part of me?

Just now you were asleep?

You have dreams?

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

“What kind of nightmare?” I asked. How did he know the word nightmare? I hadn’t taught it to him; he hadn’t used it before.

“I was in a dark place. Only it was filled with light. I was alone. Only there were others like me. I was dead. We were all … dead.”

“Not alive?” Sometimes Borne said that something was dead if it didn’t move, like a chair. Or a hat.

“Not alive.”

“Like a heaven or a hell?”

“Rachel.” Said with soft admonishment. “Rachel, I don’t know what those things are.”

I didn’t know, either. How could I know, talking to a cheery monster, living in a hole in the ground, among too many broken things? I laughed as much to dispel that thought as because anything was funny.

“Never mind. It’s ‘religion,’ which I can teach you … never.” My parents hadn’t been religious, and I’d learned from the Mord cults that religion in the city wasn’t about hope or redemption but about tempting death.

“Okay,” Borne said, and his eyes formed a kind of reproachful smile. “I don’t always understand, Rachel. I love you, but I don’t understand.”

Love? He’d just admitted he didn’t know about heaven and hell. What could he know from love? I pushed forward, past it.

“And what happened next?”

“I tried to wake up. I tried to wake us all up. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t because I was dead. That’s the word: dead. And I needed to wake up because a door was opening.”

“Door” to Borne could, again, mean many things that were not doors.

“What happened when the door opened?” I asked.

“They would make me go through the door. I don’t want to go through the door, and not just because I am dead.”

“What’s on the other side of the door?” I asked.

All of Borne’s many eyes turned toward me, like rows of distant, glittering stars against the deep purple earth tones of his skin. For the first time in a long time I felt as if I didn’t know him.

“Because I am dead, I do not know what is on the other side of the door.”

That is all that he would say.

WHAT HAPPENED WHEN I WENT OUTSIDE AGAIN

My plan had been to try to take up with Mord, shadow him as before. This was still the best way to find useful things—and because the truest test of my recovery was to go right back to his shuddering flank, to risk it all now rather than find out later that I no longer had the nerve, or the skill. But now, that was too dangerous. Instead, I would travel to an area controlled by the Magician.

I delayed. I woke leisurely, pretended it was just another day in my recovery. But by early afternoon, I was all out of play-pretend and all out of excuses. It was a good time to go. Wick slept very late after having been out longer than he’d planned, to make sure neither the Magician nor Mord’s proxies followed him.

I prepared my pack, with a small cache of weapons and supplies. Two of our last neuro-spiders that, like bio-grenades, would freeze an assailant’s nervous system. Two memory beetles to negotiate my way out of trouble. A lump of something aged that might’ve been meat or bread but Wick reassured me was edible. A good old-fashioned long knife, a bit rusty, I’d found in the tunnels. A canteen of water, gleaned from condensation from the hole above the bathroom.

I felt surly and dangerous and powerful.

Borne discovered me as I was putting the water in my pack. “Do you make do with dew or do you dew with dew or dew ewe make dew with do?”

It had taken me a while to know what words he was using in which places in that question. “Ewe” had come from an animal-husbandry book.

“We all make do with dew,” I said, even though it wasn’t strictly true. But by now it wasn’t a question, just a call-and-response.

“Are you going somewhere?” Borne asked. “People with packs are always going somewhere. People with packs are people with purpose.”

I’d avoided looking at him and all of those eyes, but now I turned, pack packed, and said, “I’m going outside. I’m going on a scavenging run. I’ll be back before dark.”

“What’s a ‘scavenging run’?”

“Doing dew,” I said. “Doing dew for you.”

“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.

“You can’t go, Borne,” I said.

All the dangers had come back to me, and I didn’t think Borne was ready to encounter them. It wasn’t just the Magician or Mord. My own kind, too, were dangerous: scavengers who hid under trapdoors like spiders to leap out; ones who repurposed what they found in factories and sold it for food; ones who found a good hoard and defended it; ones (few) who had learned to grow a form of food off of their bodies and cannibalized themselves, with ever smaller returns; ones who had half wasted away, because they weren’t smart enough or lucky enough, and whose bones would salt the plain of broken buildings, leave no memory or imprint to worry the rest of us who lived. I didn’t want to end up like any of them, and I didn’t want them claiming Borne as salvage, either.

But Borne was undaunted by my resistance.

“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.

“Next time, maybe.” My own favorite gambit.

He contracted to something the size and shape of a large, green dog, his two red eyes becoming one large, brown affectionate one, and he blobbed down from the ceiling onto the floor. A doglike tongue extended to pant ferociously as he stared up at me.

“Next time! Next time. Next time?”

“We’ll see,” I said.

He went into the bathroom and sulked. He was getting impatient and moody, in part because the food I gave him had become boring but also because he had explored every inch of the Balcony Cliffs, even with the constraint of having to avoid Wick. I’m sure, too, that even though he could become small for a period of time, the tunnels and corridors were becoming claustrophobic. But I didn’t want Borne going outside.

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.

¤

The brightness of the outside surprised me, shafts of light cutting through at odd angles. I’d taken three or four different shake-off routes and crawled the last hundred feet through a tunnel that bruised my sides just to make sure no one could figure out my point of origin. Emerging, the light made me squint, but I welcomed the blunt heat after so long inside. This might be the Magician’s territory, but unlike the Mord proxies, the Magician did sleep, and her control was more like an insurgency, since she could not combat Mord direct.

It was a residential neighborhood but looked like it had been bombed or held by an army before the end. Anyone squatting since had left no mark, because to leave a sign was to invite predators. Blackened supporting walls punched full of ragged holes. Doors gone, hinges gone, too. Few roofs. Brittle old telephone poles cracked at the stem leaned up against the walls of rows of dead houses with tiny dust squares for lawns. The poles could have been felled by Mord, all crooked at the same angle. Where the dust and sand had taken the street, the poles helped orient me.

As I moved across that stillness, I would be vulnerable, even if I stuck to the shadows of those useless walls, kept the sun to my back when I could. I deliberately chose paths where I saw no one, except from afar. A few souls resting on a stoop, the house behind them a litter of fallen beams. Two people running away, looking over their shoulders. A powerfully built man in black robes casually chopping at something with an ax—firewood, flesh? I didn’t linger to find out.

It was never that the city in those days lay still or seemed quiet because no one lived there; only that you could not always see them or evidence of their movements. Few lived well, few lived happily or long. But we did exist, and when beyond the sanctuary of the Balcony Cliffs I always tried to remember that people slept there, hid there, had burrowed down deep, or were waiting for me or someone like me to venture past—trigger a trap or snare, or shadow me to see if I had hidden food or biotech somewhere.

I crossed an intersection, running low, bent over, to the next place of concealment. I entered through door-size holes blasted in walls that must have been made to allow safe passage under threat of long-ago sniper fire. Lizards scuttled away from me, and there was just my quickened breath and the smell of sweat and the scuff of shoe against dusty gravel. Just the yellowing remains of someone’s attempt at a vegetable garden, a few clotheslines strung up out of sight of the road that in their tautness seemed new, not old.

I came to the edge of a courtyard and a peculiar sight. For anywhere but here. 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. I couldn’t tell what had happened. Perhaps they’d been doctors sent to fight some epidemic in the last days before chaos and then the Company. Perhaps they’d been something else entirely. But they were planted here now and grew strangeness from their faces, and I didn’t trust them. I didn’t trust that they’d been here a month ago. I didn’t trust who had planted them like that, even though they might be long dead or just long gone. Who or what might be lurking down below, in the dirt and sand.

Approaching was a foolish idea, what created carrion, so I took in the details with my binoculars. So posed. So little like life. The gloves over the bones of their hands were store-plundered and didn’t go with the suits. I thought I saw movement in a faceplate, a reflection of someone behind me, turned, saw nothing. But the feeling remained, and I always trusted that feeling.

There are tricks to flushing out a watcher. The most obvious is to stop, half-turn, and bend to tie up your bootlaces—enough to catch out an innocent or inexperienced or just incompetent watcher. Or, if they mean you harm, it will flush them out because they think you’re vulnerable, distracted.

Another hint of movement behind me, coming from the corner I’d just peered around to get to the courtyard. But it stopped immediately or became something else. A strange thought, but I was beginning to trust my strange thoughts again.

Behind me and to the left lay rows of houses smashed to hell, more single-story houses on the right, the dust road in the middle.

I took a spider out of my pack, shoved it in my pocket, then, avoiding the courtyard of dead astronauts, quick-turned down the next side road with houses that were still intact, then used a hill of rubble to clamber up onto a gently steepled roof. I needed a bird’s-eye view, even if there was a twinge in my knee and a weakness in my shoulder to tell me climbing was a bad idea.

I lay on my stomach atop rough tile and splintered wood, a faded, tired heat rising from the roof into my body. The roof was damaged but stable. The sky beyond was a burnt blue, dissolving into almost-dusk. A mirage of delicate fracture lines in the distance promised mountains. But there were no mountains as far as we knew. That was just the sky lying to us.

Below I could see down the stacked rows of tombstone houses, which along with the roads conspired to form a ragged intersection or X in front of me. At the fringe, I could even see the pupa heads of the dead astronauts in their freakish courtyard.

I felt exposed despite my vantage, transfixed by a sense of triangulation and old scores to settle—an exhilarating sense of spying, of being a spy, or even a sniper that made me uncomfortable. A height, too, on a roof, that in this city wasn’t what it might have been. Mord could swoop down to pluck me up before I had a chance to pluck something below—or, less poetic, Mord’s proxies clamber up for a frolicking dismemberment.

So many minutes passed with me as a pretend horizontal statue that there was relief when I saw something I didn’t understand at first: a shape coming up the street. I tensed and made myself smaller against the angle of the roof, staring into the light and shadows.

Someone tall in dark robes was walking toward me. Someone with a pointy, wide-brimmed hat pulled down very low. The floppy hat spun and glittered, and the gait was oddly fluid and disjoined; later I realized it resembled a baby’s clumsy walk but in a man’s body. The arms of the man hung out at his sides and the hands flopped as he walked. The too-pale hands seemed unimportant, as if the torso and legs were real but the arms were just there to complete the illusion.

Trailing this figure at a distance: a small animal, peering and peeking from the corners like I was peering and peeking from the roof. It had outsize tall ears and a rasping pink tongue, and my binoculars confirmed it for a kind of fox, but with strange eyes. A curious creature out wandering? Seeking carrion? Or a spy, a watcher? For whom or what? Whatever it was, it had instincts like mine, and all of a sudden looked up and spotted me, and then it was gone as if it had never been there.

A few more steps of the figure it had been following, and the fear in my gut turned into a wordless chuckle, and then irritation and concern. I knew I was looking at Borne in a disguise. Except he wasn’t wearing clothes—he’d taken it one step further and just grown clothes from his skin. The hat was his head and the stars were his eyes, transformed into a pattern.

I leaned over the roof when he was one house away. I still wasn’t going to stand up and give anyone a silhouette to target.

“Borne,” I said.

Borne, startled, looked up.

“Oh my!” he exclaimed. “Oh my!”

Then he made himself large, larger, spun like a corkscrew, brought himself springlike up to roof level, so the magic hat could stare at me as if nearsighted. I almost lost my purchase on the roof.

“Borne!”

“Rachel!” He sproinged back to street level, looking up at me.

“Borne.” I felt dizzy in the aftermath. He had grown more since the morning, clearly.