Replicant Night (8 page)

Deckard closed his eyes for a moment, trying to conserve his waning strength. "What happened." He didn't feel like telling his life story to the briefcase. "What happened is why I needed the money in the first place, why I took this joke gig as technical adviser on Urbenton's crappy little video production. The U.N. transit colonies on Mars are a total bottleneck. People on Earth-even the living ones-don't know that. The U.N. keeps a tight lid on information about what's going on there. The emigration program they're so hot on would collapse if it got out that when you leave Earth, you don't go to the stars, you just wind up in some cramped, dingy hovel on Mars, glued to the cable feed or going slowly crazy from stimulus deprivation."

The briefcase took pains to sound unimpressed. "There's been rumors."

"None that I'd ever heard. Not that it would've changed my mind. There was no way I was going to stay on Earth."

"Why?" Genuine puzzlement sounded in Batty's voice. "You can die there as well as anywhere else. Believe me; I'd know."

Deckard slowly shook his head. "I had other plans. Ones I didn't tell Holden. He didn't need to know."

"Plans? Like what?"

Deckard let his eyelids draw down to slits. "You don't need to know, either." Fatigue crept up his knotted spine and down into his limbs, turning them into leaden weights. "But since you asked, that's why I was hustling for the money. To buy our way off Mars."

"Money's always good," said the briefcase. "It might not be able to do that, though."

"Worth a shot." Deckard didn't feel like arguing the point. "There haven't been any transports leaving Mars for the far U.N. colonies in the last two or three years. Some kind of problem going on out there. But there's rumors-there's always rumors-of travel starting up again. It'll have to; there's hardly any room left to cram people into at the Martian colonies, and the U.N. still keeps bringing them out from Earth. Something's got to break. And if anybody's leaving, it's going to be me and Sarah Tyrell. That's what the money was going to be for."

"But there isn't any money, is there? You're kind of screwed on that one, Deckard."

"I'm screwed." It wasn't an unusual condition for him. "That's the way it goes."

"Bad luck for you." The voice of Batty, emerging from the briefcase's concealed speaker, held an equally familiar smile. "Good luck for me, though-and the people who sent me out to you. Now you might be a little more receptive to the offer we're going to make you."

"I don't want to hear it."

"What? What're you talking about?" Batty's voice went up a notch. "'Don't want to hear it'-listen, Deckard; I didn't get sent all this way just for you to cop an attitude. You can be all burnt out and cynical on your own time, and this isn't it. There's things-important things-that have to be done."

With his arms still folded on his chest, Deckard opened one eye wider to gaze upon the briefcase beside him. "And that's why you're here? Dave Holden brought you out just so you could tell me about these 'important things'?"

"That's about the size of it."

Deckard let the eyelid sink shut, as though of its own weight. "Like I said-I don't want to hear it."

Silence held in the skiff's cockpit. For a few seconds, Deckard heard only the motion of his own blood sliding through his veins, the tick of random air molecules at his eardrums. Then the cockpit's other inhabitant spoke again.

"You're a cool customer, Deckard-you know that?" Whatever parts of Batty had been encoded and placed inside the briefcase, his snake-twisting mind and sharp-eyed perceptions, now sounded impressed despite himself. "Nothing fazes you. You've reached some kind of weird point where nothing surprises you anymore, but you're still walking around as if you're alive somehow. That's a hell of an achievement."

Deckard shifted in the thinly padded seat, trying to find some comfort for his bones and muscles. "What am I supposed to be so surprised about?"

"For Christ's sake, Deckard-I'm in a fucking box. With a handle and two chrome-plated locks and a decent grade of simulated leather on the exterior." Annoyance permeated the briefcase's speech. "Shit-you mean you didn't
notice
?"

"I noticed." Deckard couldn't keep a thin smile from lifting one corner of his mouth. "Actually, I prefer you this way."

"Yeah, well, it doesn't suit me at all. They should've left me at least one leg and a foot, so I could kick your sorry ass." The disgust in Batty's voice shifted to its former perplexed condition. "Don't you wonder how this all came about? The last time you saw me, I was
dead
. I even got shown photographs of how I looked, hanging upside-down on that busted-up freeway. Seeing your own corpse is one of those transformative experiences-"

"Thought you didn't have eyes."

"There's a jack for an optical scanner inside here. Along with some other stuff like that. Besides, why should you care how I saw it? That's not important, Deckard. What you should be worrying about is
why
all of this is being done. Why drag my corpse off, why download my skull contents into this contraption-the whole trip. Hey, it's all for your benefit, pal. Or at least most of it. If you can't display gratitude, you could at least show some
curiosity
."

"I don't have to," Deckard said dryly. "I'm sure you're going to tell me all about it, whether I want to hear it or not."

He'd been telling the truth to Batty. Deckard could let an unsoothing but necessary sleep claim him, where he pushed back in the skiff's pilot seat, with little regret. That his old nemesis, a nightmarish figure all glistening with rain and smeared blood over taut muscle and sinew, could come back from the dead in the form of an articulate briefcase-what was there to be surprised about? Stranger things had already happened. Once before, he'd thought Roy Batty was safely dead, only to find out otherwise-or rather, to find out that one Batty was dead, and another, claiming to be the human original from which the replicant had been made, was trying to kill him. And coming close to accomplishing that goal. If it hadn't been for Dave Holden, who put a highcaliber slug between Batty's eyes, Deckard knew that it would've been his own corpse draped over the side of one of L.A's ruined freeways.

And now Holden was dead, with his former partner from the LAPD's blade runner unit fairly sure that he at least wouldn't be coming around again. The corpse on the floor back at the Outer Hollywood studio had appeared more than final; Holden's blanked-out eyes had looked as if they had gazed at last upon and into some soul-quieting vista of peace. Maybe, thought Deckard,
that's what he saw when he looked down the barrel of the Kowalski replicant's gun
. Fire and thunder, and then the silence beyond ...

"Oh, you'll find out soon enough." Batty's voice seemed to come from miles away, a distance bound by the cockpit's tiny space. "You don't have to worry about that."

That was a mystery almost worth puzzling out. Deckard let the black behind his eyelids deepen and swallow him up. The briefcase with Batty's personality wired in and Deckard's initials below the handle-that's what the now-dead Holden had been carrying, had come all that way from Earth to deliver to him. There'd been a time when Batty and Holden had been working together, trying to kill Deckard, claiming that he was another escaped replicant; that was how wrapped up in craziness the two of them had gotten. Then they'd had their big falling-out, from which only one of them had survived . . . or so it'd seemed at the time ...

Something had hooked the two of them back together, Holden and Batty, or whatever was left of him inside the briefcase. Something that probably wasn't good news.

It was too much for Deckard to try to figure out now, at this point of his exhaustion. As long as the briefcase was quietly sulking to itself, he might as well try to find sleep.

Deckard found himself half wondering, half dreaming, of what reception was in store for him on Mars, how Sarah would welcome him home from his long, futile venturing.

A knock at the door.

"Oh, boy!" The alarm clock danced on top of the bedside table. "Daddy's home!"

"Christ-" Sarah laid the back of her hand across her eyes, trying to block out what was left of the day's illumination and any other sensory data coming into her nervous system. As much as she had been expecting, even-in a perverse fashion-looking forward, to this moment, it had still crept up on her without warning. Until now.

"I bet that's him! I bet that's him, all right!"

She wished again that she had spent the money for the third bullet. "Just shut the hell up." Her brain felt both sandfilled and fuzzy from the cumulative toxins of troubled sleep. Sarah pulled herself into a sitting position on the edge of the grey mattress, then watched as the apparent separate entity of her hand fumbled inside the table's single drawer.

"Mrs. Niemand ... excuse me." From the opposite wall of the bedroom, the calendar had caught sight of the bright metal cylinders tumbling in Sarah's palm. "But what exactly are you doing?"

Brass glinted at her fingertips, though the bullets' tapered points were dull leaden in color. "None of your business." She slipped the bullets into the gun from the table, then closed up the chamber. "Don't worry about it."

"Humanity is my business, Mrs. Niemand. Though that was said in other contexts, it applies in this situation as well."

"I don't need the literary allusions." Sarah shifted the gun to her left hand and used her right to smooth her dark, disordered hair back from her brow. Some previous tenants of the hovel, who had either killed themselves or managed to get shipped off the planet while the starbound emigration vessels were still running, had shelled out for the appliances to be hooked up to the library trunk feed. The penurious Niemands had canceled the service, but the calendar had the rudiments of a university education soaked up in its off-line banks. And didn't mind showing it off, all of which had added to the general hell of Sarah's existence.
Maybe four
, she thought.
I should've bought four bullets
.

The knock at the door sounded again, blows hard enough to shake the hovel's thin plastic walls. A rain of soft, sneeze-provoking dust drifted down upon the bed.

"Come on!" The alarm clock shrilled even more excitedly. "Let's go see!"

Sarah placed the muzzle of the gun against the clock's face, at the exact center from which the two black hands radiated. "Let's be real quiet." She pushed the clock back across the table. "So Daddy and Mommy can have a little quality time together. All right?"

"Okay," squeaked the clock. It cowered back against the wall.

"Mrs. Niemand!" The calendar fluttered its pages at her as she walked past. "I implore you-don't do anything you'll regret later."

"There's not going to be a later." The gun's weight dangled at the end of her arm. "So regret's not a problem."

"Sarah!" Using her real name, the calendar cried after her. "Please ... don't ..."

In the front part of the hovel, a space barely wider than what her outstretched arms could have reached across, the percussion on the door was even louder. Enough to start peeling some of the web of silvery duct tape and glue-tacky patches away from the torn seams and other leak points. The hovel shivered and hissed as though apprehending its own demise. Sarah wondered what Deckard was going on about, pounding on the door with that much force.
He's that happy about being home?
Maybe he had finally flipped out, gone all the way around the bend of that dark corridor that'd always been there inside his head; some bad retro-TV fantasy of domestic bliss had wormed its way into his thoughts and taken over. Some vision of Mr. Niemand coming back here after a long, hard day at work, to be greeted by Mrs. N in a lace-edged kitchen apron and heels, bearing a cold stainless-steel pitcher of gin and vermouth-the life their great-great-grandparents had lived, at least inside their sitcom fantasies.

"Take it easy!" More strips of sealant tape dangled loose, trailing like thick party streamers from the hovel's low ceiling. "You're going to knock the place over-" A muffled voice came from the other side of the door, but Sarah couldn't make out what he'd said. She batted another sticky section of tape away from her face and reached for the door's knob.

In the sliver of time it took to turn the knob and pull the wobbling front door open, Sarah had entertained the notion of going with Deckard's anticipatory fantasy . . . or at least stringing him along with it for a few minutes. She could act as though there were, in fact, some measure of affection between them; she could even try once more to be Rachael, his long-dead and long-remembered love. The pretending wouldn't be unpleasant; there was still a room inside her head in which her own desire for all of that was still kept, like an ancient white wedding dress, never used and carefully folded between sheets of tissue paper.

It's what the bastard deserves
, thought Sarah as her fingertips touched the doorknob. To be jerked around the way she had been, by a forged-iron chain bolted to the heart. To be led to believe one thing, even for a second, then be slammed up against the even more unyielding steel wall of reality ...

In her other hand, the one dangling by her side as she reached to pull open the door, she had the perfect representation of what reality had come to mean for her. Loaded and cocked; she had already decided she didn't want to even try to screw around with Deckard's head anymore. There would be no Rachel-like homecoming kiss for him. If there were any irrational hopes left inside the sonuvabitch that would rise upon his seeing the human original of the replicant face for which he'd fallen, they'd be dashed by the very next thing he'd see. A circle of cold metal, with a darker black space at its center-Sarah's hand was already lifting the gun into position as she stepped back from the door swinging open toward her.

Two faces looked in at her. Two men, neither of them Rick Deckard. The eyes behind their matching square-rimmed glasses widened as they focussed on the gun she was holding a few inches from their foreheads.