Replicant night br-3

by Kevin Wayne Jeter

  “Are you all right?” Cautiously, Deckard scanned the room as he stepped forward. It looked as it had when he’d been in Sebastian’s private world, dusty and stuffed with wind-up dolls and mannequins. The laughing clown figure towered over one end of the table, its manic smile frozen on the stark white face. “Did anything happen to you?”

  “I’m fine,” announced the child. “Well m bored. This is a stupid place.

  Everything’s broken, or it doesn’t work.” She poked the bride doll standing next to her chair; the organza veil fluttered as the doll fell over, its arms and delicately poised hands sticking up in the air. “But those people, the ones who brought me here . . . they didn’t hurt me or anything. They were nice enough, I suppose.”

  “All right Deckard barely listened to what the girl said. The crash of the bride doll had echoed through the room, stirring the white powdery plaster that had settled on the toys and overstuffed furniture. As the dust settled, he tried to hear anything else moving nearby. Lenses glinted as the video cameras, more carefully hidden in this set than outside, swiveled silently on their mounts, tracking the slow turn of his head. “Is there anybody else here with you?” He glanced at the child from the corner of his eye. “Anyone at all?”

  “That woman.” The Rachael child laid her hands flat on the book. “You know, the one that looks like me. The one you call Sarah.” An annoyed expression crossed the girl’s face. “The one who didn’t think I was real. She’s here.”

  “Where?”

  “Up there.” She gave a single nod to indicate the room’s ceiling and what lay above. “That’s what she told me. She’d just gotten back here a little while ago; she’d been out in the rain and stuff, like you. See?” The girl pointed to one of the other chairs, where Sarah’s high-collared coat had been tossed across the scrolled arms; the floor beneath was spotted with the raindrops shed by the fur. “She said she was going up there to wait for you.”

  “I bet.” Deckard realized he was being a fool. He knew what he should do; he should just gather up the Rachael child and lead her out of the building and off the faux L.A. set entirely. The skiff was waiting at the station’s loading dock, and it could carry both him and the little girl away from here. What was the point in going up and confronting Sarah, with her loaded gun and equally lethal madness? She was primed to blow him away, only delaying the moment for the perfect camera opportunity. Up on the building’s roof—the set that had been put together by Urbenton’s techs, the detailed reproduction of the one in L.A.—the two of them would again be under the multilensed eye of the video cameras and lights in the overhead rigging; much better, cinematically, than the relatively constricted setup here in the rooms beneath. That must’ve been part of the agreement, thought Deckard. 1b get me out where the best camera angles are. Completing the arc, a nice sense of structure on the director’s part: to die where he hadn’t died before, where he’d been saved from dying by the replicant with Roy Batty’s face. “I’ll just bet she wants me to go up there.”

  “That’s what she said.” The Rachael child gave a shrug. And a sharp-eyed gaze at Deckard. “You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.”

  The little girl was eerily smart—for reasons that Deckard knew something of; back in the Martian emigrant colony, Marley had told him about the child’s lonely, eccentric growing-up aboard the scuttled Salander 3, and more than that—but she was wrong now. He did have to do it, to go and meet Sarah on the rain-swept roof beneath the watching cameras.

  “We could never get away,” he said to the girl sitting at the table. “There’d be no place we could go . . . that I could take you to. Not Earth, not Mars, not anywhere. No place that she wouldn’t find us again. So I’d just have to do it eventually. And get it over with. Here or there; now or some other time. But it has to happen.”

  “I don’t know about any of that.” The Rachael child looked guilelessly at him. “That’s not any of my business. But you have to do what you think is best.”

  “All right.” Deckard nodded slowly. “That’s just what I’ll do.” He took the gun out of his jacket and laid it on the table. “This isn’t any good—it’s not loaded. So forget about it; I just don’t want to carry it around with me anymore. If anything happens . . . if I don’t come back down, or if Sarah comes down without me, or if those other people come here .

  He shrugged. “There’s not really anything you can do. And you shouldn’t have to.”

  “Should I go hide? If that’s what happens?”

  Deckard smiled at the girl. “Where do you think you’d go?”

  “I don’t know.” The Rachael child gave another shrug. “Somewhere. There’s a whole city out there.” She pointed to one of the arched windows. “With people and stuff. I could find someplace where nobody would know where to look for me.”

  He glanced over his shoulder at the window, with the artificial rain beating against the glass, the gauzy curtain stirred by the drafts that had penetrated the meticulously constructed decay of the interior set. She believes it’s real, thought Deckard. The ones who had brought her here—Urbenton and the others—had let the child go on with the notion that they had left her in the middle of a real city, the real Los Angeles. He didn’t know if that had been cruel or kind on their parts, or whether it made any difference. The way the girl had been brought up, by the autonomic machinery of the Salander 3, the city outside these windows, such as it was, probably seemed as real as any other could have.

  “No,” said Deckard. “That’s not a good idea. Don’t try to hide. I don’t think they’ll hurt you. If I don’t come back . . . then just let them take you to where they want to. Maybe they’ll take you back home. You know, where you came from. You could stay there a long time, and you’d be all right.”

  “But I don’t want to.” A tear had welled up and trembled at the Rachael child’s dark lashes. “I don’t want to go there. I’d rather stay with you.” The high-backed chair toppled over with a crash as the girl pushed herself away from the table; she ran to him and hugged him around the waist, the side of her face against his jacket. “I’m going with you.”

  “No, you’re not. You can’t.” The same protective, almost paternal feeling as before passed silently through Deckard’s thoughts. The girl looked so much like Rachael, the woman he’d loved; she could have been their daughter, a child that could never have happened. Not here, he mused. Maybe out there, in the stars. Perhaps Rachael would have been one of those that changed, became human; they could have had a life together . . .

  Too late for that, he knew. Now there were only the bits and pieces of his own life to pick up and sort out, make something of. Something other than killing.

  That was why he’d quit being a blade runner a long time ago—but that hadn’t been enough. That was why he’d agreed to take on the other job presented to him, the business of delivering the briefcase with Batty’s voice and Isidore’s list inside it; too late for that as well. Whether it had been salvation or death for the insurgent replicants—it didn’t matter now.

  The only things left to him were the little girl . . . and what Marley had told him about her. About who she really was. And the slim proof—not even that; evidence that had to be taken on faith as to what it meant—that Marley, two minutes away from death, had given him. Deckard touched the front of his jacket, a finger’s width away from where he had been carrying the empty gun, and felt the thin stiff rectangle of the ancient photograph, the one that had been hidden in the Salander 3’s first aid kit. That was all he had with which to confront Sarah; one way or another, it would be enough.

  “Look—” With difficulty, he managed to push the child away from him. “You stay down here, and everything will be all right. I promise.” He wondered for a moment why she had formed such a sudden, dramatic attachment to him. There’s no one else, thought Deckard. The child was all alone in this universe, or in any other. Plus—it was impossible to tell—she might have sensed the fragments of his past, the memories
of someone else named Rachael that the girl’s dark eyes and grave manner conjured up so painfully in him. Even if she didn’t understand yet how those things had come to be. Maybe she just felt sorry for him. “All right?” Deckard put his hands on her shoulders and leaned down to look straight into her eyes; the glimpse of them ran through his own heart like a dagger of silver and ice. “The bad things have already happened,” he told the girl. “Nothing else can go wrong,” he lied. “So don’t worry about me.”

  He left her sitting at the table again, surrounded by the mutely uncomforting dolls. The Rachael child folded her arms across the thick, leather-bound book and laid her head down, concealing her face from him. Deckard stepped out to the open corridor beyond and quietly pulled the door shut behind himself.

  The last time—the first time Deckard had been in this building, in fts original form back in L.A—he’d had to climb laboriously to its roof, his scrabbling progress through the crumbling, waterlogged plaster and sagging beams impeded by a hastily bandaged hand, the fingers that the Batty replicant had broken aching and useless. Fear had driven him then; he’d been trying to escape death. This time, he was walking toward it. I’ll take the stairs, he thought wryly.

  A shaft of utility stairs at the back of the building—it was undoubtedly the same route that Sarah had already taken. In the damp air, as Deckard craned his neck to look upward, he caught a trace of perfume, one of the opiated floral scents that his mind and senses had learned to associate first with Rachael, then with Sarah. The invisible molecules were tinged with something more acrid but just as distinctive and evocative: cigarette smoke, something dark and expensive, suited to the taste of a Tyrell heir. He looked down and spotted, on the landing’s rough concrete, silken white paper and brown shreds of tobacco ground out cold by her shoe.

  The metal steps echoed in the narrow space, loud enough to evoke a shiver in the video camera lenses that peeked out at him from their clefts in the unfinished walls. Up ahead, above him, Deckard saw a rust-mottled door left open, creaking on its hinges as the fan-driven storm winds swung it back and forth. He stopped, rain spattering in his face as he tried to catch sight of anyone waiting in the darkness. Nothing; he grasped the cold pipe rail and continued climbing.

  “Sarah?” He pushed the door all the way back—the metal clanged against the side of the hatchway structure—and stepped out onto the roof. Warm rivulets trickled down his throat as he called out again. “Where are you?”

  No answer came. Deckard walked farther from the door, leaving the stairs and his escape behind him. Looking up, he saw no stars but the broader points of the lights in the studio’s truss-work rigging; only a few meters away, as though—in a child’s notion of the world—he had climbed all the way to the dark heavens, the universe’s weld-stitched limit. The lights’ spectra had been shifted down to an icy blue, colder than the streets’ veins of neon; shadows fluttered across him like the wings of unseen, untouched ’birds as staggered ranks of archaic wind turbines, blades long and scimitar-curved, rotated in the damp breeze coming from the edges of the set.

  He worked his way through the windmills, avoiding the scything arms, coming at last to the roof’s raised parapet. His hands, grasping the crumbled brick and thick tatters of asphalt sheeting, looked as bloodless as a corpse’s flesh.

  They hardly seemed to belong to him at all; the uncanny sensation passed through him as though he were looking at someone else, someone who had slid inside his body and face. The hands, and the body that leaned its insubstantial weight into them, might have been those of the actor who bad played him in the video he had seen; the disoriented feeling increased, setting him even farther away. For a dizzying moment, Deckard wondered if he were still watching the video, the artificial world into which his own life had been transformed.

  Squeezing his eyes shut, his hands gripping even tighter on the fragile stone, he tried to make himself feel real again. Or as real as possible. I’ve become my own ghost, thought Deckard. A dead thing that watches and mourns the past; he’d felt that way before, when he’d sat beside a glass-lidded coffin, leaning forward with his chin on his doubled fists, looking at the sleeping, dying woman he’d loved. Keeping his vigil through one sleepless night after another, time seeping away beneath the real stars, the rain swallowed by earth and the dead leaves beneath the trees. It might as well have been his own face he’d seen beneath the glass, in a video monitor rather than a coffin. He had died, or as good as, even before Rachael had; he’d just had the privilege of witnessing his own death, over and over, in one cold world after another.

  The bleak meditation didn’t end, but became familiar enough, an old wound, that he could function once more. Deckard opened his eyes and looked over his shoulder at the elaborate rooftop set. They did a good job, he had to admit.

  Urbenton and his crew of technicians, the people who had constructed the set—in the thin, fragmented light, he could see how close they had come to the original, how much the fake was indistinguishable from the genuine. The turbines spun in place, like idiot dervishes on edge, over a buckling field speckled with pigeon shit—had they scraped up the droppings from an actual L.A. building roof and shipped them here, or was there a flock of birds kept on hand in some remote aviary zone of the station? It all smelled real enough, a blending of monsoon steam and guanoid archaeology, that at least some of Deckard’s senses were fooled.

  He looked back over the parapet at the imitation city that surrounded the building. All the little tricks of the video trade had been used, from foreshortened perspectives to banks of fiber optics for a vista of pinpoint lights stretching to an imaginary horizon; other whole sections were blank or covered with chroma-key backdrops, for digitized mattes to be ceegeed in during postproduction. The miniature city seemed caught between different levels of reality, at some muddled point halfway on the line from dream to something that could be touched. In some way, that made the dark nocturnal city he saw now as real as the L.A. he remembered on Earth. Realer than real, thought Deckard. A night made of the same stuff as the replicants, dreams and fears and a desperate longing to exist. He had lived in that inchoate city, had been part of it, but—he knew now-hadn’t belonged in it. It’s their world.

  He nodded slowly, rain trickling across the backs of his hands. Their night as well, in which he was just a shadow, a thing that wouldn’t even be remembered when the sun came up.

  “Hello, Deckard.” The voice—the one that he’d known he would hear-came from behind him. “I was waiting for you.”

  From over his shoulder, he looked and saw Sarah standing a few yards from him, in the center of the roof’s area, the wind turbines spinning and stretching away into darkness. He turned and leaned back against the parapet, hands gripping its edge on either side. “I had some business to take care of first.

  With the little girl. I had a talk with her.”

  “How sweet.” Sarah stepped forward into the partial light filtering down from above. The skin of her face and throat looked cold, bloodless. “I suppose that was a good thing for you to do. Whether she’s real or not. Actually . . . I don’t care anymore.” The gun in her hand glinted as though a piece of the dark had frozen. “It’s not important, is it?”

  “Maybe not.” His heart had ticked faster for a moment at seeing a weapon in someone else’s hand, knowing that he didn’t have one. “It all depends. On what you want.”

  “Ah.” She nodded and smiled. “That’s true. I used to want things. Different things.” With cruel playfulness, Sarah raised the gun to eye level, arm straight, and looked down the barrel at him. “And now . . . just one thing.

  Guess what it is.”

  “I’ve got a pretty good idea.” Inside him, his pulse had slowed back down as a resigned calm moved through his blood. Whatever was going to happen, he had prepared himself for it. “I wouldn’t have come here if I didn’t know.”

  The face of the woman he loved studied him over the gun’s black metal. “You’re not really human, a
re you, Deckard?” Rachael’s face, Sarah wearing it like a mask, though it had been hers to begin with. “If you ever were, you’ve managed to get over it. Like I have. So it’s not just a cop thing, having ice water going in and out of your heart. It’s just something that happens to people like us.”

  He nodded in agreement. “The Eye of Compassion .

  “What was that?”

  “Nothing,” answered Deckard. “Something . . . somebody told me about. We’re not the ones who decide who’s human and who’s not.” He looked over to the faked skyline surrounding the building, then back to her. “There’s nothing we can do about it.”

  “Yes, there is. There always is.” No trace of irony or sarcasm sounded in the woman’s voice. “You shouldn’t give up hope like that.” Her hand squeezed the gun, tight and trembling. “You can always kill. That works. Especially if you do it to the things you love. Then . . . then you have a chance.”

  “A chance of what? Of being human?”

  “No Sarah gave a shake of her head. “Of not caring anymore. So when you die-when you take care of yourself finally—it’s not so hard.”

  The voice of madness, speaking the same words inside his head—Deckard listened to her and knew that it would be easy to agree. Or to go even further, deeper into one’s own madness; the temptation always existed in him to accept only what he saw, what part of him wanted to see and believe. That it really was Rachael standing in front of him, alive again, unchanged. That the other woman with the same face, the one named Sarah, was as irreal as she had thought the child waiting downstairs inside the building was. A memory, a bad dream, a hallucination. If that were the case, he wouldn’t have any problem with her pointing a gun at him and pulling the trigger. That was a small price to pay for seeing Rachael again, if only for the moment between the firing of the bullet and its entry into his deluded heart.

  He had closed his eyes, though he could still see her-remembering was enough for that. Easier as well, to mentally edit out the infinitesimal differences—the coldness at the dark centers of her eyes, a hard curl at one corner of her mouth—that made her Sarah instead of Rachael. It didn’t help much; when Deckard opened his eyes again, the sight of the woman sent a sharp-pointed blow through him, more painful than if she had actually squeezed the trigger of the gun.