Replicant Night (37 page)

"If that's true," said Deckard slowly, "then it means... everything. Everything would be different. And not just for the replicants."

"You got it, pal. That last batch of replicants that escaped and came to Earth-the ones you hunted down-they weren't part of the insurgents. The Batty replicant and the others- they didn't know what was going on. The rebellion hadn't gotten hold of them yet. And they missed it." Marley shrugged. "Kind of ironic, don't you think? Cruelly so. The Batty replicant and the other ones with him-they all wanted more life. To live longer than four measly years. And they could've had that if they'd just stayed where they were. Out in the stars. Instead of coming to Earth. That's where their death was waiting for them all along. And it didn't even have anything to do with you."

"What do you mean?" Deckard looked harder at the other man, trying to figure out the words.

"The spontaneous life extension-it's only happening out there." Marley pointed up to the bar's ceiling. "In the outer colonies, where the insurgents are. It doesn't happen anywhere near Earth. Actually, there are some indications that replicants who've changed, who've acquired a life span longer than four years, will revert if they get within range of their home planet, the place where the Tyrell Corporation put them together. Earth is toxic to them; the planet itself is the trigger for that life span bomb that Tyrell wired into each one of them."

"You said they were still changing. The ones out there..."

"That's right," said Marley. "Because there's more to life, isn't there? More than just extending your own. There's the cycle, the way one generation gives birth to another. That's a big part."

He could already see where Marley was going. "But that's something replicants can't do. Give birth. Have children. Replicants are sterile; they can't reproduce. They were designed to be that way. That's how the Tyrell Corporation built them. The only way you could get another replicant would be to have Tyrell build it for you." Deckard regarded his own hands for a moment, then looked back up to the other man. "That's the way it's always been..."

"But that's not the way it is now. Now, things have changed.
The replicants have started to reproduce
. On their own, without the Tyrell Corporation; there are replicant mothers and fathers, and replicant children." Marley tilted his head toward the Rachael child sitting next to him. "And guess what? They look just like human children, the way replicants look like adult humans. And they grow up and become like their parents, just the same as human children do."

"Then what's the difference?" It was the Rachael child who spoke, peering at Marley. "What's the difference between them? Between humans and those other people?"

"Ah." Marley nodded. "That's a good question. A real good question."

"Then answer it," said Deckard. "I'd like to know."

"All right. Here's an answer for you." Marley regarded the girl for a moment, then looked back up at Deckard. "The replicants aren't the only ones changing out there. So are the humans. Or what used to be the humans. This is what the U.N. doesn't want people back on Earth to hear about; it would put a real crimp in the emigration program if it got out that going to the stars has some real hairy effects on the human species."

"Like what?"

"Sterility, for one. The colonists are in danger of dying out just from lack of reproduction. There hasn't been a human infant born in the outer colonies for a nearly a decade." With his thumb and forefinger, Marley made a zero. "
Nada
. No kids; the end of the line, unless the U.N. starts sending out more colonists. Who will in turn go sterile, from all indications; nobody's found a cure for what's happening. But that's not the only change. The mass reproductive failure is just the most obvious sign that something is going wrong, at least for the humans out there. There's other changes, which are a little more subtle but just as bad."

"And you're going to tell me about them." Deckard felt a wave of foreboding pass through him. "I'm beginning to be sorry that I asked."

"Too late for that," replied Marley. "It's why I'm here. To clue you in. Here's the deal on what else is happening with the emigrants in the outer colonies. Psychological changes; a decrease in that faculty usually known as empathy. You remember that one, don't you, from your blade runner days- the ability to feel what another living creature is feeling: its pain, its suffering, its joy. Well, the colonists are showing lower and lower marks on the standardized tests that measure that sort of thing. To the point where, if they were administered empathy tests with a Voigt-Kampff machine, they'd flunk. Some of them have already been given the V-K tests, and they didn't make it; the machine registered them as being below the cutoff point for the empathic response that characterizes human beings."

"Then they're not human." Deckard saw the cold logic of what he was being told. "They're not human any longer."

"Well, there you go." Hands grasping the edge of the table, Marley sat back in the booth. "Life's a bitch, isn't it? Things just happen, and then you have to deal with them." He shook his head as though in wry amusement. "Of course, the U.N. authorities have their own way of dealing with the situation." One hand patted the briefcase's lid. "Thus, you and this bomb you were told to carry out to the replicant insurgents."

"But if what you're saying is true Deckard no longer doubted it. "Then they're not replicants anymore. They're the human ones out there."

"Matter of semantics, isn't it? It's all in how you define the word." Marley's hand gestured lazily toward Deckard. "Now you, given your background-being a blade runner and all that-you just naturally tend to think that anything that passes a Voigt-Kampff test is human, and anything that doesn't isn't. And maybe you're right. But what it means is that the U.N. emigration program has been successful, but not in the way they intended. There is a human presence in the outer colonies, way out there in the stars, but it's not us; it's not the things that used to be human beings. It's those other ones, that were the replicants. They're the humans now."

"Why ... why is it happening?"

"There's different explanations." Marley shrugged. "Little hard to get a definitive answer right now; the U.N. authorities want to keep a lid on what's going on, and the replicants are busy fighting for their lives and their freedom. All that sort of thing. But there's basically two schools of thought on the issue. One is more or less scientific, having to do with a hypothesized morphogenetic field centered on Earth itself, a field that determines, in addition to the genetic code carried in our DNA, the essential characteristics of the human species. The outer colonies are beyond the range of that morphogenetic field. Once that happens, there's slippage for both humans and replicants. Their outward physical appearance might not change, but other things will happen, like the shift in fertility and the empathic faculty." Another shrug. "As good a theory as any."

Cold, abandoned vistas opened inside Deckard's thoughts. "I knew," he murmured to himself, "we should never have left home." He found himself inside a seedy bar in the Martian emigrant colony, wrapped in darkness, an image with his name but not his face on the scattered video monitors, an image in a long coat like the one he used to wear, moving through neon-laced streets and endlessly deep shadows, none of which were real but all a simulation, far from home, far from L.A.
And this isn't even as far as those other ones went
, he mused. They went so far, and got so lost, that they even lost themselves.

He wondered what they were like now, those things with human faces that used to be human. A bleak memory came to him of riding back into the colony on the shuttle filled with the native mine workers, the grown-up children that had been born here on Mars. And of feeling alone among them, more alone than he had ever felt, even in L.A., where aloneness had pretty much defined the human condition in the thickest of crowds. The stage beyond alone, that of disconnected; he had looked around the shuttle and seen faces like his, human faces, but had felt no kinship with them. In turn, their unfathomable gazes had swept past him with no spark of recognition. They'd changed just by coming this far. Not so much evolved, which implied some better state, but at least adapted. They'd shed their skins, all the excess baggage that came with being human; they didn't need that stuff anymore. "Maybe nobody does..."

"What was that?" Marley leaned toward him, trying to catch his whisper.

"Nothing. Just thinking." He let the uncheering vision drain away, like water poured on the red desert sands. "You said there was some other explanation. What's that one?"

"Simple enough. There are some more mystical types who believe that being human isn't an inherent, genetically based condition at all. Humans don't decide who's human and who's not; that's taken care of by something outside them. Way outside." Marley looked uncomfortable, as though he were speaking of things not meant to be revealed. "There's supposedly an aspect of God that's called the Eye of Compassion . . . and it can only see suffering; it's blind to everything else. And those things that it sees, the suffering ones, those are what are fully human. Anything else is . . . something less. So there may have been a time when the things that we consider to be human may actually have been that way . . . but not anymore. The Eye doesn't see us; you and I, Deckard, we're part of that which
causes
suffering. The ones who used to be the replicants-the ones we made-they suffer at our hands. They suffer, and the Eye of Compassion sees them and judges them to be human. They become human. It's the gaze of the Eye-its ability to empathize with other creatures-that determines who's human. It's nothing we do. There's nothing we can do about it." He gave a nervous shrug. "Anyway ... that's what some people think."

"More human than human-"

"What was that?" Marley peered at him. "What did you say?"

Deckard had closed his eyes while listening to the other man. He opened them, then slowly shook his head. "Nothing. Nothing important. I was just thinking of that slogan that the Tyrell Corporation had. 'More human than human.'" A grim half smile appeared on Deckard's face. "Eldon Tyrell didn't know how true that would be."

For a few moments of silence, Marley studied him. "You know, though. You know it's true, don't you?"

He made no reply. He looked at the image of himself on the nearest monitor; that Deckard had a gun raised in one hand and was picking his way carefully over a field of shattered glass. "I don't care," he said at last. He looked back around to the other man. "Human is as human does, I suppose. It doesn't make all that much difference to me. There was a replicant that I fell in love with, and it didn't matter to me if she was human or not. Like you said-I'm not the one who decides about that sort of thing."

"That might be, Deckard. But there are still other things that you do have to decide about. That nobody but you can decide." Marley tapped a finger against the briefcase. "Like what you're going to do with this thing. Whether you're going to go ahead and try to carry it out to the replicant insurgents. Or whether you're going to bag that whole notion, because you know what kind of a weapon it is."

"But I don't know." He looked hard at the man across from him. "I've heard a lot of talk from you about what's happened to the humans and the replicants out in the stars. And maybe I even believe some of it. But even if it's true that the replicants have started becoming human-that they live as long as humans, and they have children like humans-that doesn't tell me anything about what's inside this box. And about why it should be so deadly to the replicants."

"That's right." Batty's voice broke into the conversation, coming from the briefcase. "Remember that, Deckard. This guy hasn't proven anything. All you know for sure is that he wants to stop you. Just like the U.N. security forces and all the other cops in the universe would like to stop you. He's just got a fancier line."

"Yeah," agreed Deckard, "he does talk a good line. Which makes him a funny kind of cop. I'm used to the kind that solves problems with a bullet." He studied the other man, looking for the clue he needed. "That was the kind of cop I was. And let's face it, Marley-you're not exactly squeamish about that sort of thing yourself. You didn't have any trouble over killing that Kowalski replicant when you thought you had to. So why are you being so careful with me?"

"I'm not being careful at all." Marley smiled at him. "I don't
care
about you at all. I'm just thorough, that's all. I've got a job to take care of, same as you. So I've got my orders, and they specifically said to leave you alive. Since I'm working for the rep-symps-the real rep-symps, not the phony-ass U.N. collaborators who set you up-I figure they must know what they want. Otherwise, I would've taken care of this whole problem my own way. The same way I took care of that Kowalski replicant back at Outer Hollywood." The smile became wider and meaner. "You know, you cop types are right: a bullet really
is
the best way. Simple and effective. If I weren't operating under restrictions, you would never even have seen what hit you, and that briefcase would be dismantled to atoms. And I'd be long gone from here."

"Hey! Screw you, pal!" Batty's miffed voice sounded again. "I'd kick your ass-if I could get to it."

Both men ignored the angry words. "So what is the deal?" Deckard pointed to the briefcase. "All that stuff you were talking about a memetic bomb. Some kind of data, pure information. That the U.N. security forces want to get piped to the insurgents. What kind of data would cause that much damage, to make all this worthwhile?"

"You got to remember," said Marley. "The Tyrell Corporation had all sorts of clever ideas. Eldon Tyrell had a knack for looking ahead and imagining the worst possibilities. Like the replicants' getting out from under his and the U.N. 's control. So they built in things like the four-year life span. But that wasn't the only fail-safe mechanism that Tyrell designed into the replicants. There's another one that's specifically re lated to the whole reproductive issue. The only reason it works is that it's a variation on a deeply buried mammalian instinct, some dark coding that's in the primitive layers of the human nervous system. Which is, after all, the basis for the replicant nervous system, so it's in there as well. All that Eldon Tyrell did was to invert part of it, design his own little twist into the replicants." Marley took a deep breath before going on. "The original instinctive behavior is the one by which adult male animals are driven to kill the offspring of other adult males of the same species, thus increasing the ratio of their own offspring in the breeding group; it's sometimes called the 'stepfather syndrome.' Just one of those ugly parts of genetically directed behavior where the gene's own survival and propagation are the only things important to it. Morality doesn't enter into the equation. What Eldon Tyrell did with the replicants he designed was to program in a pair of aberrations to that basic, primitive instinct. The first was to make it much stronger, to the point of being a homicidal obsession; the child-murdering behavior takes over the entire organism, overriding even its own instincts for self-preservation. The other aberration on the basic instinct directs the behavior
toward the organism's own offspring
. You following me? The organism-the replicant-murders his own children. It's like a breakdown in an extended immune system, one that extends beyond the replicant's own skin. The primitive drive is inverted, so that the individual attacks and destroys the very thing it's supposed to protect."