Borne retracted and drew up into himself with fantastic speed as streaks of dawn light appeared across a muffled gray sky. For a split second he became thick and formless and dark, and from the thick stout stump that was the clay of him, Borne grew a massive golden-brown head of fur: a bear’s head with kind eyes and an almost-smile about the muzzle, the wide pink tongue, so that I knew it was him looking out at me one last time.
Then the eyes grew yellow, carious, and the muzzle longer and sharper, the head bigger, so that Wick and I both retreated into the shadow of the pillar, and beneath the head a body expanded and spread out, vast and powerful, topped by that broad and beautiful head, and on that face for the longest time in the light of sunrise, an expression not of sadness or hatred or horror but of a kind of beatific certainty, an angelic beastliness, and fangs that were clean and white.
The body grew and grew and grew, shooting up toward the sky until the head of Borne as bear was so high above me and the massive, muscled body below it, those hind legs, the feet, wider than the pillar in front of us, and we shrank farther into refuge. The resemblance was uncanny and complete and yet based on absorbed Mord proxies, not Mord, and thus more inhumanly savage than Mord, the body more compact and less shambly than Mord.
This new Mord, new Borne, peered down at us from that great height, growled once, and then lurched off back north, back toward the city, while we sprang out of our sanctuary to watch.
Borne-Mord ran at first like a lizard, then a silverfish, and then staggered as if drunk, a huge swaying wobble that sent up clods of dirt and dust as he adjusted to being a bear. Then he caught himself, righted himself, and became ursine in the churning of his limbs, taking great strides on all fours as he roared out one word: “Mord! Mord!” Calling out his opponent. Committed now. Leaving us behind. Striking out for uncharted territory.
Borne was set on his course and we on ours. There was nothing to say, nothing we could do but pack up our supplies, head south. Nothing I could do but turn away from that horizon, while in that distance biotech traps exploded underfoot, squirting out from beneath Borne’s heavy weight, erupting in his wake, in the form of behemoths, leviathans, illusions of life that snapped impotently at the empty air and cast around for flesh to rend, and then fell back down into spasms of their own false dying.
Yet even as Borne receded, I could not help feeling he was still there, beside me, in some form, some disguise as subtle as the molecules of air I breathed.
*
The morning light revealed that the ridged ground around the pillar was the gouge in the earth created by the Magician’s failed missile attack.
Coming off the plain, we spied a single duck with a broken wing near a filthy puddle. It waddled back and forth in front of the puddle, drank from it, stood sentry, drank again, stood silent. Waiting. A kind of mercy that no one had killed it, that it had escaped notice.
We moved on, toward the Company.
HOW WE FARED AT THE HOLDING PONDS
Dead fin and fluttering gill, the tremor disembodied, the slap-crawl of something meant for four legs that had two. Little curling shrimp creatures trapped in puddles that hatched and died, hatched and died perpetual, the same organism over and over, its own procreation. Toxic. A closed vessel. A piece of genetic material dovetailing, perpetual and never ending, and never really living, either.
Across half the surface of the larger pond, a leaking of blood like a sightless eye, that had no origin, no source, but somewhere down below the blood kept pumping out diseased—drink of it and die—and perhaps it was one of the Company’s more diabolical traps. Or perhaps it was beyond their control. No one there to turn it off so it kept spreading and wasn’t their problem anymore, or their fault. Who would create such a place?
That was the nature of the holding ponds that abutted both the Company building and the desolate plain, those salt flats that weren’t natural at all but ground-up plastic, glass, and metal. The waste produced that they could not burn or chose not to burn. It lay at the bottom of the holding ponds, too. It pushed up against the edges of the Company building like the sticky caviar of some industrial fish. It gushed out around our boots, clung there in clumps. It gave the lakes their color, so they reflected every hue that could be imagined, but, combined, made for us a dark green in a certain light, a pale blue or pink in others. That slight glow resonated in the curling wisps of mist that came off the flats, dissipated into nothing long before reaching knee height.
This was pollution and contamination at the source. This was where the biotech had been tossed to die or drown or be eaten by other discarded biotech, or scavenged by vultures or coyotes or people like me, who had the arrogance to think ourselves professional scavengers of living tissue. Down there, too, more dead astronauts, a clump of them lashed to the bottom of the smaller pond, their contamination suits still bright orange, little or nothing left of their flesh or bones inside.
I had not hunted here for ages, but I knew the place, had always hated it, found it mournful and diseased and the purest evidence of how much the Company must despise us. I did not like being part of its ecology, but I’d had no choice until Mord’s rages, his unpredictable stance toward the Company, had made it off-limits. Then the conflict between the Magician and Mord, the Mord proxies, had kept it off-limits.
Wick had not been inside the building since he’d left the Company.
“As nice as you remember?” I asked Wick as we approached.
“Nicer.”
It had never been nice, but now the side of the Company building along the length of the two lakes sagged inward and had become fire-blackened, and carrion spackled the white so that what had been pristine had become streaked red, green, and smudged charcoal with white peering through. Now, too, wall shards like thick eggshells, some two stories high, cut the artificial sand where they had fallen from Mord’s rippage, some landing in the lakes. Along with the elongated lumps of fused-together helicopter like crumpled black dragonflies: the helicopters sent out to attack Mord. An oddly bloodless tableau, and not a pilot remained inside—not even a scrap of skeleton.
What had been less dealt with was Mord’s shit, which lay at the approaches to the Company building in gently sloping piles like badly made bales of hay. It was dried and old and picked clean; thankful we were that Mord rarely came here now.
But we had to find the side door—camouflaged, there but not there, meant to open only to a careful, knowledgeable hand like Wick’s. A place half underwater that few used or even knew about. It wouldn’t have been possible before Mord ravaged the Company, and might not be possible now, but it was the first place to try.
Worse, there was a bear, and I say worse because at first it had run away from us across the dead plain, looking back over its massive shoulder as if confused as to its purpose.