Replicant night br-3

by Kevin Wayne Jeter

  Things had changed, though; he wondered if they had changed enough. Maybe he could do it now, despite her mirror resemblance to the dead Rachael. If Ihave to, he decided at last. If that was what Sarah was counting on, his inability to kill anything that looked so much like the woman who had slept in a glass-lidded coffin and who now slept and woke only in the sealed chambers of his remembering, then she might have a surprise coming to her.

  They all might. In his hand, when he’d come to, had been the last thing that Marley had given him, the ancient photo that had been hidden inside the lid of the Salander 3 first aid kit. That photograph was now safely tucked inside his jacket. And in another compartment of his memory were Marley’s words, explaining what the photograph showed, what the image meant . . . everything.

  As much as the others knew, the strings that Sarah and Urbenton and the ones behind them could pull, there were still some things that they didn’t know.

  And that he did.

  Deckard laid his fingertips against the lapel of his jacket, feeling underneath the thin, still substance of the photo, warmed by his skin and pulse. He figured the time was coming, and soon enough; at the front of the cockpit, the miniature lunar sphere of the Outer Hollywood station was rapidly approaching. A ripple passed across the stars as the skiff’s drive units modulated down into uncompressed space.

  The hissing of snakes was merely the station’s docking gates sealing behind the skiff, followed by the cockpit unlatching. Deckard emerged from the craft into near-total darkness; a few LEDs glimmered on the control panel mounted on a nearby bulkhead, and the skiff’s own running lights sent his blue-edged shadow merging with the empty space.

  His footsteps rang against the metal flooring as he headed toward a faintly recalled passageway. No point in trying to conceal his presence or his movement toward the station’s center; they knew he was here. Or not, depending upon whether anyone else was; the last time he’d been at Outer Hollywood, the girdered substructure had vibrated with the activity going on in the various soundstages and studios; the recirculated air had carried the subliminal molecules of the techs’ and extras’ sweat and exhaled breath. This time, as soon as Deckard had stepped down from the skiff, he’d perceived the station as empty and dead, as though abandoned by all the human and close-to-human forms that had been here before.

  He resisted the urge to call out, to attempt provoking a response. No need; reaching the limits of the station’s landing dock, he laid his hand on the rim of the barely perceived doorway, and pseudo-life creaked into action. A beam of light flared on and swung toward him, striking him full in the face. Even as Deckard winced and shielded his eyes, another section of machinery stirred at his presence. He saw the glistening eye of a camera lens, suspended a few meters above, as it tracked and focussed upon him. The device’s aperture irised farther open, then narrowed, as though the overlapping blades were biting down upon his curved reflection.

  A few more lights came on ahead of him, not enough to dispel the darkness, but sufficient to divide it into crescent shadows and blind corners. In the metal struts above, cameras flexed and shifted like roosting birds, control cables and video mix-down feeds looped like the tendrils of a black neoprene jungle.

  All the blank, glassy optics turned toward him, some drawing back for wide-angle shots, others zooming in close upon his face. In the closest ones, Deckard could see himself, his own eyes turned into yet smaller mirrors in which the station’s tracking network could be discerned.

  Nothing human behind the lenses; he could sense that they were on automatic, programmed to find and lock upon him, recording every step he took. With idiot concentration, they performed their appointed task, their wide, obsessive eyes staring at Deckard in perfect, rapt silence.

  As he stepped onto the outskirts of the faux L.A. sets, picking his way over the tangles of cables and massive, banyanlike tripod legs, a rumbling sound came from the unlit reaches above his head. He looked up and saw neither stars nor clouds; the video cameras swiveled beneath an interlinked net of white PVC piping. The first drops of water struck Deckard’s brow; within seconds, a monsoon torrent swept over him and along the empty, simulated street, as the rainstorm from the metal disDerser heads was whiDued hori zontal by the silvery rotating blades stationed around the set’s edges.

  “That’s good!” He couldn’t keep himself from shouting, from tilting his head back so that the artificial rain-warm as his own blood, as though it had rolled all the way across deserts to the east-trickled under his collar and down his chest. “That’s really good! I like that!” Deckard’s voice boomed against unseen walls, beyond the false-fronted buildings next to him. The rain plastered his hair against his brow, pooled in the palms of his hands, dripped from the hem of his jacket. The wet skin of pavement shivered around him as the neon tubing at the corners and above the vacant shops’ doorways sparked and flickered into blue and red life. One more switch had been thrown, a circuit completed, somewhere in this world’s artificial heavens. “Bring it on!”

  As though in reply, the wind edged up to storm level, the puddled water at his feet driven into a sea of miniature waves before it was sucked away by the plumbing system hidden in the gutters. Deckard came close to being knocked off his balance, staying upright only by grabbing a lamppost wrapped with sodden kanji posters; the paper’s heavy ink smeared across his hands and the point of his shoulder. Above his head, a dragon’s red tongue flickered, the serpentine grace of its illuminated coils an icy electric blue.

  She’s here, thought Deckard. He scanned across the drenched cityscape to the enclosing reality of cameras and shuttered lights beyond. Everyone else—Urbenton and his crew—might have left Outer Hollywood, but Sarah Tyrell was still here. Deckard felt sure of her presence, as though some part of her had seeped into the fabric of the irreal Los Angeles. The lenses that watched him might as well have been her eyes, the steaming rain the fury of her kiss.

  He had wanted to confront her—he had been fated to—and now found himself embraced by her in a zone of no escaping.

  The rain slackened a bit; it could almost have been an invitation to him.

  Deckard pushed himself away from the lamppost and walked, with the false storm in his face, deeper into the city’s artificial heart.

  “Wake up! Time to die!”

  He heard the voice before he saw the figures before him. Two men, or what could have been men; Deckard saw one of them only from the back, as the long-coated figure was lifted nearly off its feet by the other’s fist bunched at the throat. Deckard recognized one of the Kowalski replicants, but couldn’t tell which it was, or what segment of repeated time he had stumbled into. Then that must be me, thought Deckard; his gaze shifted to the one the replicant’s fierce smile burned toward. A burst of visual static rolled across the images.

  Deckard reached out his hand; his palm and fingertips touched the smooth, cold glass of a high-rez viewscreen, billboard size, taller than himself. The Kowalski and Deckard inside the screen’s illusion of depth were as big as in life, as in the reality on the other side. One world enfolded the other, each equally false; Deckard looked away from the image before him and saw the walls of the same alley, the high metal flank of the autonomic trash-collection vehicle against which he had been trapped by the first Kowalski, the one back in the real L.A. on Earth, all the details that had been re-created on the Outer Hollywood set. He looked back again at the giant viewscreen and saw, only slightly blurred by the magnified pixel lines, the same alley’s confines, like a photocopy one generation further on.

  The camera angle shifted, cutting to one directly over the Kowalski replicant’s shoulder. Deckard saw his own face struggling for breath against the massive knot of the white-knuckled fist under his chin. They dubbed it in, he realized. The video unreeling on the screen was what Urbenton had originally intended, the computer-generated simulation of Deckard’s face over that of the actor playing him.

  Time to die . . .

  Kowalski’s line
, the echo from real time and Deckard’s memory, had already been spoken. On the other side of the viewscreen, he watched as the replicant’s blunt fingers rose toward his double’s eye sockets. He braced himself for the sound of the gunshot, the bullet that would shatter Kowalski’s forehead from behind, dropping the dead replicant to the ground . . .

  There was no shot. No gun roared from the mouth of that other alley, the one inside the viewscreen’s doubly false world. The scene played on to the end that left its Deckard a bloody-faced corpse sprawled at Kowalski’s feet. From outside that world, Deckard had watched his own death with a mixture of fear and awe. For a moment, he wondered which side of the viewscreen was real, whether the dead thing with his face was the one who’d lived and died in L.A., and the one watching was its substanceless ghost. He looked down at his own hands, almost expecting to see the alley’s rubbish-strewn ground through them, as though they were made of mist and rain.

  He heard the gunshot then, not at the mouth of the view-screen’s alley but the narrow space in which he stood. It shouted from behind him, the muzzle blast tinging his shadow with fire. At the same moment, the viewscreen shattered with the bullet’s impact. The other alley, with its Deckard corpse and blood-handed Kowalski, broke into darkness and shards of whirling glass. He flinched, turning his shoulder against the razor-edged storm, shielding his face with his upraised hands as the fragments bit at his wrists.

  In a few seconds, the shards had finished tumbling to the ground with the quick, high-pitched notes of breaking ice. Deckard lowered his hands; in front of him was the metal frame of the viewscreen, bent and twisted by the bullet’s explosion. Scattered around it were the cables and debris of the workings, now reduced to dull, unrecognizable scraps of silicon and unlit phosphors. The world that had been contained in the screen was gone, replaced by the one in which Deckard stood, the simulation of an alley in Los Angeles. No corpse, his own or Kowalski’s, lay on the rain-soaked concrete this time.

  He turned, knowing what he would see behind him. Standing there, as Rachael had stood so long ago, her coat’s high collar brushing against her bound hair—Sarah Tyrell lowered the gun she held in both hands. The neon of the empty cityscape silhouetted her form, enough light leaking past to show the coldness of her gaze, the slight lift to one corner of her mouth.

  “That’s not right,” said Deckard. “If you want to get it just the way it was.

  Rachael didn’t smile after she shot Kowalski. It wasn’t so easy for her.”

  Sarah let the gun dangle at her side. “We don’t need an exact re-creation.”

  She regarded him through half-lidded eyes. “Why don’t we just say that . . . we’re rewriting history. Changing things to the way they should have been.”

  With the gun, she gestured down the alley’s length, as if the other figures were still visible there. “After all-consider how much simpler things would’ve been, for so many people, if Rachael hadn’t come out and found you, and saved you. Then Her gaze shifted back to him. “Whatever else happened . . . you would’ve been dead before I’d ever had a chance to meet you.” An undertone of regret sounded in her voice. “Simpler . . . but I wouldn’t have wanted it that way .

  From the front of his shirt, Deckard brushed away a few more bits of glass.

  “Where’s the girl?” That was his most important business. “Where did you take her?”

  “The girl?” Sarah looked puzzled for a moment, then nodded. “Now I remember . . . they left her with me. Urbenton and the others; they thought you wouldn’t come otherwise. But that’s not true, is it?” She smiled knowingly. “You would’ve come here . . . just for me.”

  “That’s true.” The backs of Deckard’s hands were spotted with blood where the shards of the viewscreen had struck him. “I wouldn’t have missed it. For anything.” He watched a red drop fall from the tip of his little finger, then looked back up at Sarah. “But I just want to know that she’s safe. Where is she?”

  “Oh . . . she’s safe enough.” Sarah looked unconcerned. “As safe as anything can be in this world.” She raised the gun, bringing it up at the end of her straightened arm. “You should be more worried about yourself.” The black muzzle pointed directly at him. “You’re the one who’s not quite safe.”

  He didn’t bother taking the unloaded gun from inside his jacket; he knew she couldn’t be bluffed by it. Instead, Deckard looked up at the video cameras mounted in the rigging overhead. “What about all those?” Some of the lenses were focussed on him, others on Sarah, with a few drawn back to take in the whole scene. “You must have cut some kind of deal with Urbenton. To provide him with the kind of footage he likes.” He pointed to the gun levelled at himself. “Is this going to do it?”

  “You’re good, Deckard.” She nodded in appreciation. The fur of her coat’s collar was spiked with raindrops, like miniature jewels. “That’s the cop in you-always analyzing the situation.” The gun lowered in her hand. “You’re right, though. They wanted more—Urbenton and the rest of them. They set this all up She gestured toward the lights and the tracking video cameras.

  “Just for the two of us. There’s just some things that special effects and computer-generated images can’t really do.” A shrug. “No substitute for live action, is there?”

  Deckard shook his head. “No—there isn’t.”

  “Or death, either. It’s so unsatisfying when that’s faked. It’s like . . . what was it the replicant said to you? I read it in the script. ‘Like an itch you can never scratch.’ ” Sarah smiled at him. “That’s why I’m so glad you could make it here, Deckard. We’ve been through so much together—it would be a shame not to do it right when we’re just about at the end.”

  “Oh . . . I agree.” He wondered how he was going to get the gun away from her.

  If she had been crazy before, she was worse now. But not stupid—Sarah had carefully kept enough distance between them so that he didn’t have a chance of suddenly lunging toward her, grabbing her arm and twisting it behind her until she dropped the weapon. She’d drill him before he got halfway to her, and he’d land at her feet with the back of his skull at the closed end of the alley.

  “Maybe we should go somewhere and talk about it.”

  “We’ll talk, all right. But not just now.” Sarah turned away from him, then coyly glanced over her shoulder. “I think you’ll know where to find me.”

  He watched her walking away, out into the empty street, the pools of rain reflecting her image like polished obsidian.

  A bank of video cameras watched as well, the glistening lenses turning on their pivot mounts to follow her, until she had disappeared from view.

  His guess was right. Even before Deckard got to the entryway of the set’s replica of the Bradbury Building, he saw the footprints shining wetly in the protected space between the ornate columns; small, a woman’s, with no attempt having been made to erase them. It had to be Sarah; no one else was aboard the station, Outer Hollywood having been vacated by the watchers of his progress.

  He supposed that Urbenton was safely tucked inside some transport in the same orbit, viewing at long distance the results of his production arrangements. As Deckard had sloshed from one rainy zone of the L.A. set to the next, the certainty of being isolated in this small world had increased, as though the city itself had been emptied of every face except his own.

  Behind him, the artificial rains lashed the street, the marquee of the Million Dollar Theater shedding its plastic letters one by one, the winds spelling out some obscure noun in the pooling waters. Deckard pushed the creaking door into a cathedrallike dark, then stepped after it. The cameras focussed on his back went dead, like birds in winter, as the ones inside the building were roused by his presence.

  Shafts of clouded light swerved through the elaborate set’s interior as he gripped the stair rail and looked upward. No U.N. blimp moved outside—there wouldn’t have been clearance for even a simulation beneath the rigging’s pipes and struts—but a carefully synchro
nized array of lights achieved the same effect. It’s not even as real, thought Deckard, as Sebastian’s world. In that little pocket universe, at least, there had been something like a sky and distance between one point and any other; there would have been miles for the genetic engineer turned deity to have travelled before he found his heart’s desire. But here, in this false L.A., everything had been compressed and squeezed down to its essentials, the way the insane obliterated all but the pieces of their obsessions. As Deckard mounted the steps, cold wrought iron sliding under his palm, he wondered if it was his head or Sarah’s that he had entered, the thin trails of light revealing the wreckage of her hopes or his own.

  At the end of the encircling corridor, with rain trickling down through the rafters and decaying plaster above him, with the unlit empty space traversed by the elevator’s elongated vertical cage to one side, Deckard pushed open the door. The same door that he had opened in the past, in memory, in a real L.A., and in dreams and a pocket universe—it swung away from his hand, revealing the high-ceilinged room beyond. He almost expected the same things to happen as the first time, the two sawn-off friends of Sebastian’s—the animated teddy bear and the spike-helmeted toy soldier—to march out and greet him.

  Instead, Deckard saw the Rachael child sitting at the massive claw-footed table, her legs dangling at the front of the chair, its carved dark-oak back extending above her head. She didn’t notice him when he first stepped inside the room; the braid of her dark hair draped over her shoulder as she bent her head over the sepia-toned illustrations in a Victorian gardener’s manual.

  Between the pages a single rose had been pressed; she lifted the brown, ancient flower to her nose, trying to catch whatever scent still remained.

  That was when she spotted Deckard silently watching her.

  “You’re here.” The Rachael child spoke calmly, flipping her ribbon-tied braid behind her back. She carefully laid the papery rose inside the book and closed the stiff leather covers. “I knew you would be. Eventually.”