by K. W. Jeter
"Don't worry." The briefcase, Batty's voice inside, radiated a familiar confidence. "I haven't even begun telling everything that's in store for you."
"I can't wait." Deckard had to remind himself that Dave Holden had died in order to carry this thing out to him. He supposed he owed his dead ex-partner the posthumous courtesy of listening to it. Shading his eyes with one hand, he peered out of the limply fluttering, low-pressure bubble tunnel that extended from the rental yard shack. He was in luck, or as much of it as existed in his personal universe. Through the sand-scoured plastic, he spotted a worm-treaded shuttle working its way across the desert; the segmented ground transport was probably ferrying contract miners back from the jagged hills to the planet's east. He and the briefcase could hitch a ride all the way in to the emigrant colony's imploded center. "Now would be a good time to clam up again," he told the disembodied voice. Sealing his mouth and nose off with the palm of his free hand, he unzipped the bubble's exit flap and shouldered out into the stinging wind to flag down the shuttle.
"Hey-I'm discreet." The briefcase's voice slid through the crystals stinging against the side of Deckard's face. "You're not the only person who can carry off a silent act."
On the shuttle, he sat with the briefcase on his knees, sandwiched in between the mine workers on the scuffed steel benches, each breath taking in the mingled odors of their sweat. The jogging motion of the treads across the red dunes rocked the bodies from side to side, bumping hard into Deckard's shoulders. No conversations sounded in the shuttle's tight interior; the mine workers sat with their silted bandannas pulled down around their throats, breathmasks and rehydration tubes dangling disconnected like some amphibian species' vestigial organs. They all looked to Deckard like first-generation Mars natives, some of the younger ones possibly second-gen, the children and grandchildren of the Earth-born emigrants who'd gotten this far and had then given up on getting all the way to the stars. Through eyelids drawn nearly as tight as the shuttle's slit windows, they gazed out on the landscape that they'd inherited, that they had evolved to possess. Deckard could sense the rewiring of the nervous systems sitting around and across from him, the shuffling of synaptic fibers and input receptors that had taken place in the womb, the human body's instinctive response to the foreign territory in which it had been exiled. The creatures around him, that still wore the outward appearance of human beings, were off the cable monopoly's feed. They didn't need the canned stimuli to survive; they could go out into the hills and dry ravines and suck up all the bandwidth this world had to offer. Deckard had wondered before what their strangers' eyes saw, what their spatulate, black-nailed fingertips read from the grains of red sand trickling through their touch. He'd given up wondering; he had enough trouble dealing with human things, and the things that were at least trying to be human. There was more in common between his blood and that of the replicants he'd killed before than there was between him and the sharp-angled faces that stared past him as if he no longer existed.
The fatigue seeping from Deckard's bones, forearms lying like deadweights across the briefcase in his lap, drew his eyelids shut. With the scent of alien sweat in his nostrils, the press of blood-warm flesh near his own, he almost believed himself to be back on Earth, in L.A., the dark, neon-veined city extending on all sides around one of the cramped public buses shoving its way through the traffic stalled with retrofitted Detroit relics. He'd always felt overwhelmed by sheer otherness there as well; simply being on the planet, in the city, on the streets where he'd spent his whole life, that didn't mean he could look into the face right next to his, so close he could practically taste the other's mingled exhalations of kimchi and phrik kii noo and see anything that resembled a mirror, anything that made him think he was looking at his own genetic code.
That was a bad mental place to be in, especially for a cop wearing a big black gun inside his jacket. Even more so when you'd been working the blade runner unit, and you were supposed to blow away anything that didn't pass for human with you; that was your job. It'd been his; it'd been Dave Holden's, and a bunch of other poor crazed bastards'. Some of whom he'd worked with, some he'd steered a wide distance away from, catching that weird look in their eyes and the subliminal tick of a dynamite clock counting down. Some of the blade runners he'd known had wound up massaging the backs of their throats with their gun muzzles and had gone under the ground in carefully sealed caskets. Others were still out there on the streets, chasing their own deaths and the accusatory revelation that could only be glimpsed in the eyes of those you are about to kill. Or retire, to use that morally compromised departmental lingo.
Riding in a worm-tread shuttle across another world's dead surface, Rick Deckard felt himself sweating, a crawl of self-generated excretions over his skin. An old, familiar claustrophobia tightened his muscles, a shrinking from contact with the creatures around him. Not to avoid their touch, but to keep them from being touched by him. Why should they suffer? As he did...
He opened his eyes and turned his head to look out the slit window behind him. A desultory wind moved red sand around, like the floor-sweepings of his heart. There were supposed to be other creatures out there, skinny wolflike slinkers, all lank jaws and burning eyes-he'd thought he'd spotted one before, the barest glimpse of motion from the corner of his eye, when he'd been on his way out to the skiff rental yard. You didn't have to eat a gun to find release; you could simply wander out past the emigrant colony's limits, keep walking, and your splintered bones would be found, marrow sucked out like soft marzipan.
To have spotted that wolfish spectre, seen it before its teeth closed on your throat-that was a bad sign. I've been here too long, thought Deckard. His neuro-system was starting to adapt, sensors working overtime, picking up the wavelengths of a world he hadn't been born on. That happened sometimes-rumors and emigrant myths were rife-the whole process cannon-firing ahead, not taking two or three generations to work itself out. At some unconscious, cellular level, the poor bastard to whom it happens just gives up on being human, lets go and becomes . . . something else. Like these things around me-Deckard glanced at the sullen, motionless forms lining the interior of the shuttle. One way or another, they'd already said their good-byes to all the others they'd left behind.
The shuttle ground on, nearing the emigrant colony's perimeter. A muted rustling moved through the seated figures, the mine workers rousing themselves from reptiloid torpor- the tiny shifts of their bodies, raising of heads, glances out the narrow windows, reminded Deckard of lizards on sun-baked rocks, the flick of yellow, slitted eyes toward an insect too far away to catch and eat. He supposed they probably were thinking about whatever meals were waiting for them-they had the lean, knife-ribbed look of people who went a long time between protein sources-in the dark shacks and nests of the colony's most silent quarter.
Speculating about aliens with human faces, and what their unknowable lives might be like, had one advantage: it had derailed the even darker reverie into which Deckard had fallen, that pit lined with self-accusation he knew all too well. Now he could put on his own mask, the one that looked just like him but bore the name Niemand, and go home and see what Mrs. Niemand had waiting on the table for him.
God only knows, thought Deckard glumly as the shuttle slowed down to a crawl, the soft labial flaps of the colony's ground transport airlocks folding over the windows. What Sarah would've gotten up to, decided upon, in his absence-she was as far around the bend, he knew, as he himself was. The married state of the pseudonymous Niemands, the alias he shared along with equal measures of hate and guilt, was as mentally toxic as any sensory void to be found on Mars. No vacuum existed between himself and Sarah; the space between them was filled, and overfilled, with memory and the slow ebbing tide of the past that left things on a common shoreline-old photos, sheet music on an untuned piano, names whispered in that sad moment between sleep and waking, empty bottles overturned by a fumbling hand. Everything that could be picked up, still tear-wet, and studied as it turned to th
e same ashes in his and Sarah's mouths...
No wonder she was as crazy as he was. How could she be anything else?
"Takes you back, doesn't it?" The briefcase with Roy Batty's voice spoke up as Deckard toted it through the colony's body-dense main corridor, the hubbub of the black-market stalls, customers and purveyors, swirling around them. "Feels like being back at home, doesn't it? Your real home, I mean."
Deckard let his gaze, the hard encompassing cop scan that'd become engrained in his optic nerves, pass over the crowd. He knew what the briefcase meant, what it had picked up on without even having eyes. The city vibration, the inaudible blood-pressure hum beneath all the other shouting and murmuring voices-as he shouldered his way through, the briefcase dangling in one hand's tight grip, its corners catching like a barbed anchor against the press of others' thighs and hips, he saw the same faces he'd seen in his other life, the one spent on Earth. Nothing had changed, at least in its essential sense-identical eyes glittered too bright and hungry, whether they were naked or shielded behind dark lenses or bombardier-style goggles. Other eyes, that he remembered as well, opiated or glazed over with any number of pharmaceutical combinations-the marketplace's recycled air smelled rancid with the receptor-specific molecules exuded through the sweat upon shivering, pallid skin. And those whose eyes were still focussed, but on some point far from here, a deific vision they'd come to the shabbiest stall and overcoated, secret-pocketed vendors to find-Deckard remembered seeing those before as well.
"Just goes to show," he spoke aloud-nobody in the crowd noticed a person talking to himself or having a conversation with the small luggage he carried. "That L.A's not a place. It's an idea. A bad idea."
The crowd thinned out as Deckard got farther from the marketplace's center. He made better time, striding through the colony's residential quarters, his passage marked by the strips of loosened duct tape wavering overhead. Stepping over the crawling forms of the stim-deprived terminal cases, their blank stares swiveling up in his direction, Deckard reached for the knob of his hovel's front door.
The door was unlocked, and slightly ajar; the slightest push of his hand set it drifting into the unlit interior. Old cop instincts held Deckard back, his gaze moving across the revealed angle of motionless space inside.
"What's wrong?" The briefcase had sensed the hesitation.
"Nothing." Deckard drew in a careful breath, as though he could roll on his tongue any stray, captured atoms. "Everything..."
Once he'd had devices to do the work for him, the full array of department-issued gadgetry, the trick units that came out of the LAPD's research labs, down in the deepest basements where the sunless geeks groomed their oscilloscope tans. The voice-controlled espers, the softly breathing Voigt-Kampff machines-now he had to do it the old-fashioned way, firing up the subtle instincts that cops had depended on for centuries.
Something crackled under the sole of Deckard's boot as he shifted his weight. Looking down, he spied the bright glitter of fractured electronics, splinters of metal; a wedge of an autonomic clock face stared back at him, the little dots it'd had for eyes blank and inactive. More bits and pieces of the alarm clock, he saw now, were scattered for several meters near the hovel's entrance. He reached down and picked up a broken corner of a miniaturized circuit board; its edges crumbled as he rolled it between his thumb and forefinger. He threw the green-gritted fragment aside, then pushed the door the rest of the way open.
Deckard stepped inside the hovel, aware that it was empty of any other human form. He stood motionless in the center of the room, then slowly set the briefcase down beside himself.
"How does that old song go? Something about another mule in your stall?" Batty's voice sounded smug. Whatever sensors had been built into the briefcase were still as sharp as Batty's had been, in either his human or replicant incarnation. "There were other men here ... just a little while ago, as a matter of fact. You can tell that, can't you?" The silence of a thin smile could almost be heard. "And you know what else? I don't think they were here to check the meters."
"Why don't you shut up," said Deckard in disgust. "As if I care." The truth was that he did, though not for any reasons of jealousy. Whatever sexual or romantic claim he and Sarah Tyrell might have had on each other had long since evaporated in the fierce glare of what they knew about, and had done to, each other. Even the resemblance between Sarah and his long-dead Rachael-close enough to constrict his heart each time he'd looked upon the living face-wasn't enough to evoke any emotion besides hatred. "She can do whatever she wants. We're not really Mr. and Mrs. Niemand, you know."
"Of course not." The briefcase's voice still contained its knowing smile. "That would be too easy-being the same thing inside as you are on the outside. You haven't been that in a long time, Deckard."
"Tell me about it." He gazed around the empty space and toward the dark rectangle of the bedroom door.
"And of course she can do whatever she wants. Except walk out on you. Because she's not here, is she?"
He didn't answer. Leaving behind the briefcase-and Roy Batty's mocking, under-the-skin voice-Deckard strode into the bedroom, flipping on the switch beside the door. Low-wattage light, yellow and flickering, seeped through the dusty web of tape and corner-dangling patches on the ceiling. The air seeping through the leaks wasn't enough to draw out the smell of aging laundry and bottoming-out mood swings.
"Mrs. Niemand isn't here." A different voice spoke behind him. "She left."
Deckard looked over his shoulder at the autonomic wall calendar, the companion to the alarm clock missing from the bedside table. "Where'd she go?"
The mountain-filled scene fluttered above the rows of numbers. "She didn't" -the calendar spoke aggrievedly- "choose to inform me of her destination." Its voice darkened. "She probably didn't even know."
There'd been a time that he and Rachael had spent out in the wilds in a ramshackle cabin surrounded by a dark cathedral of trees, north of the scene in the calendar photo. A toobrief interval between their fleeing L.A. and his being forced to return. Nights colored silver by moonlight, days blackened by the coffin that he'd sat beside, gazing at the sleeping face of the woman he loved. Sleeping and dying; the coffin, a transport module stolen from the Tyrell Corporation-the glass-lidded device in which replicants were shipped to the outer colonies before their four-year life spans could expire-had been the means of stretching out their stolen hours together. Of sipping half-life moments, rather than watching all time, all Rachael's life, spill out upon the ground and seep away like rain. I thought I had it bad then-his grieving station by the slowly dying woman, the silent vigils between the dwindling minutes of her waking. Looking at the picture on the wall calendar, Deckard knew he'd give the rest of his own life, if he could, to be back in the midst of that dark forest, in the yellowed circle of a kerosene lantern, sitting beside the coffin and waiting, waiting forever, in the unending moment between one dream and the next...
"Mr. Niemand?" The calendar's reedy voice tapped at the edge of his thoughts.
He'd give anything. Even the plans he'd made, the decisions and vows he'd sealed down into his heart, about what he'd do with Sarah Tyrell. Her fate, and his. Even that...
The calendar tried again, using his real name. "Mr. Deckard? Hello?"
A slow nod, the drawing in of his breath, as he refocussed on the calendar and the flat, meaningless picture on its surface. "All right," he said. "So who was it she went with?"
"I wouldn't know. She didn't tell me that, either." The calendar had an innate dislike for details not being filled in. "There were two of them-I could tell that much. They were talking in the other room, but I couldn't make out what they were saying. I just have this little directional microphone built in, you know. Now, if I had the intercom option, if you'd paid to have that feature activated, then the advantages would be-"
"Yeah, right." Deckard interrupted the sales pitch. A longstanding peeve of his was the way these low-rent domestic appliances were always whining
for upgrades. "How long ago did all this happen? When did Sarah leave with these men?"
"You should ask the clock. That's more its department-"
"The clock's dead." Deckard didn't mind saying so. "So you tell me. When did they leave?"
"Um..." A fearful quaver sounded in the calendar's voice. "The clock? She did that, didn't she?" The calendar made an audible effort to pull itself together. "I guess . . . it was about, maybe six hours ago. That Mrs. Niemand-I mean Sarah-that she left with those two men. Gosh..." Its voice faded, then picked up again. "If it's any help, she left a note. Over there on the table."
Deckard walked over and picked up the bullet that had also been left for him. He rolled it between his fingers, then weighed it in his palm. A wordless message, or one that didn't need words to get its meaning across. Sarah had probably bought it, and the necessary gun as well, down in the black-market stalls, where just about anything could be acquired. Thus, she must've iced the nagging clock; on her way out, Deckard figured, with whoever these two men had been. This one, he thought, looking down at the bright, tapered metal, was meant for me. The kind of homecoming surprise he'd been expecting for a while now; his caution at the hovel's front door had been mainly due to not wanting a hole the size of a baby's fist plowed through his forehead.