Borne. Jeff VanderMeer

at the hidden center of our Balcony Cliffs. It suited me that we could be lovers there and retreat to being mere allies in the aftermath.

      But the truth is, when we were together on those nights, I knew that Wick lost every part of himself and let himself be vulnerable. I felt this quite strongly, even if I might be wrong. And if I held back something from Wick because of it, still I let the Balcony Cliffs in, connected by something almost like lasers. These lines that radiated out from both of us surged from body and brain and through the rooms our talents kept safe. Sensors, trip wires, sensitive to touch and vibration, as if we lay always at the center of something important. Even lying there, beneath me, Wick could not be free of that connection.

      There was also the thrill of secrecy, for to preserve our security, we could not be seen outside together—left by different pathways, at different times—and some of that thrill entered into our relationship. Anyone passing furtive far above us would have thought that underfoot, beneath the copse of sickly pines, lay only a vast midden, an old garbage dump with dozens of layers of crumbled girders, human remains, abandoned refrigerators, firebombed cars—crushed into a mulch that had a springy, almost jaunty feel.

      But beneath that weight lay us, lay the stalwart roof of the Balcony Cliffs and the cross-section of body that served as our home—the lines that connected a woman named Rachel to a man named Wick. There was a secret shape to it all that lived inside us, a map that slowly circled within our minds like a personal cosmology.

      This, then, is where I had brought my sea anemone named Borne—into this cocoon, this safe haven, this vast trap that took time and precious resources to maintain, while somewhere a ticking clock kept track of the time we had left. Wick and I both knew that no matter how much raw biotech material he created or bartered for, the beetle parts and other essentials he had taken from the Company so long ago would run out. My physical traps without Wick’s almost uncanny reinforcement would not keep scavengers out for long.

      Every day brought us closer to a point where we would have to redefine our relationship to the Balcony Cliffs, and to each other. And, in the middle of all routes, my apartment, where, pulled taut by our connections, we fucked, we screwed, we made love, equidistant from any border that might encroach, any enemy that might try to enter. We could be greedy there and selfish there, and there we saw each other fully. Or at least thought we did, because whatever we had, it was the enemy of the world outside.

      That first night after I had brought Borne into our home, we lay there in my apartment and listened to the remote, hollow sound of heavy rain smashing into the mossy surface far above. We both knew it was not real rain; real rain in this city came to us ethereal and brief, and thus we did not venture out. Even real rain was often poison.

      We did not speak much. We didn’t have sex. We just lay there in a comfortable tangle, with Borne on a chair as far from us as possible, in the corner of the bedroom. Wick had strong hands with fingertips worn almost smooth from his years of handling the materials that went into his vats of proto-life, and I liked to hold his hands.

      This is how far we had come, that we could be silent and we could be still together. But even then, that first night, the presence of Borne changed things and I didn’t know if part of the silence was because of that.

      In the morning, we peeked out through one of our secret doors to find the cracked earth writhing with the death throes of thousands of tiny red salamanders. So intricate, their slow-questing limbs, their obsidian eyes. So much like a mirage. A mosaic of living question marks that had rained down from the darkened sky without meaning. And already to the west we could hear the rage of Mord and feel the tremor of his passage. Rage against this illogical rain or against someone or something else?

      Once, comets had appeared in the heavens and people mistook them for celestial creatures. Now we had Mord, and salamanders. What did they portend? What fate was the city working toward? Within minutes of the sun hitting their bodies the salamanders dissolved into liquid, absorbed by the earth so that only an off-red sheen like an oil slick remained behind, dotted with the tiny tracks of investigating animals.

      Wick did not seem much concerned about the salamanders despite his need to replenish the supplies in his swimming pool.

      “Contaminated,” he said, which I had known already from the look on his face.

      WHY I CALLED HIM BORNE AND HOW HE CHANGED

      I called the creature Borne because of one of the few things Wick had told me about his time working for the Company. Remembering a creature he’d created, Wick had said, “He was born, but I had borne him.”

      When I wasn’t scavenging for myself or Wick, I took care of Borne. This required some experimenting, in part because I had never taken care of anyone or anything before—except some hermit crabs as a child and a stray dog for a day that I had to give up. I had no family, and my parents had died before I had arrived in the city.

      I knew nothing about Borne and treated him like a plant at first. It seemed logical, from my initial observations. The first time Borne felt comfortable enough to relax and open up, I was sitting down to a quiet dinner of old Company food packets I’d found buried in a half-collapsed basement. He was sitting on the table in front of me, as enigmatic as ever. Then, mid-chew, I heard a whining noise and a distinctly wet pucker. As I set down the packet, the aperture on top of Borne widened, releasing a scent like roses and tapioca. The sides of Borne peeled back in segments to reveal delicate dark-green tendrils that even in their writhing protected the still-hidden core.

      Without thinking, I said, “Borne, you’re not a sea anemone at all—you’re a plant!”

      I’d already gotten into the habit of talking to him, but at the sound of my voice Borne snapped back into what I thought of as his “defensive mode” and didn’t relax again for a full day. So I put him on a plate in the bathroom, on a shelf beneath a slanted hole in the ceiling that let in improbable sunlight from far above. I savored that green-tinged, musty light in the mornings before I went out to do Wick’s work.

      By the end of the second day, Borne had taken on a yellow-pink hue and the tenacity of his defensive posture hinted at either sickness or religious ecstasy, both of which I had seen too often out in the city. He smelled overcooked. I removed Borne from the shelf and returned him to the kitchen table. However, by then I noticed that the worms that composted my bathroom waste and excreted the nutrients Wick used in his vat had “disappeared.”

      Now I knew a few useful things. Borne could overdose on sunlight. Borne was a glutton for compost worms. Borne could move around by himself but wouldn’t while I was there. So Borne chose to overdose on sunlight. Nothing now indicated that Borne was malformed or in any way a mistake.

      I upgraded Borne from plant to animal, but still did not reclassify him as “purposeful.” I should have, though, because following his bathroom adventures, Borne made no attempt to disguise his movements. I would come home to find him in the bedroom when he had been in the kitchen when I’d left—or back in the hallway when he’d been on the living-room floor. Upon my approach, Borne always remained silent and unmoving, and I could never catch him in the act. I sensed amusement from Borne over this, but I was probably projecting. This made me smile. It became a kind of game, to guess where he might be when I returned. I looked forward to coming home more than usual.

      When I mentioned this to Wick, while giving him a half-dead azure slug I’d found near the Company, he didn’t find it funny.

      “You’re not worried?”

      “Why should I be worried?”

      “Because it is concealing its capabilities from you. Already. You have no idea what it might do next. You’re telling me it’s organized and possibly as intelligent as a dog, and we still don’t know its purpose.”

      “You said Borne didn’t have to have a purpose.”

      “I might have been wrong. Give it to me. I can find out what it is.”

      That made me shudder. “Only by taking Borne apart.”