EdgeOfHuman

by Unknown

  His own weight began dragging his arm from its hold upon the vertical slat. His agonized vision took in the freight car's occupants, their naked forms picked out by the engine light bouncing off the tunnel's arched ceiling. Male and female replicants, packed behind the freight car's sliding door, locked with a single steel bolt.

  The other cars behind, stretching into the tunnel's darkness, were the same, filled with the rejects from the Tyrell Corporation's production lines-the replicants whose memory implants hadn't taken, the ones who hadn't passed the mental and physical tests that qualified them to be slaves in the off-world colonies. Their creators routed them through a clearing station administered by the police department, checking them off in numbered lots to make sure all were accounted for prior to disposal. Not retirement-an industrial process, quick asphyxiation and smokestacks belching out the odors of incinerated flesh.

  He could no longer tell what things he saw before him, and what fear and exhaustion had pulled from his memory, overlaying the rep train's reality with his own past. A slope-jawed face turned away from him, the male replicant's massive shoulders hunched with a sullen, proverbial resentment; his bare arms glistened with sweat. Kowalski-he could remember the face, or one just like it, another unit of the same model. What had the other Kowalski said to him? A long time ago, in another world, up on the streets of the city far above. Wake up -- it's time to die . . .

  Another Nexus-6 looked at him for a moment, her gaze reaching past the other replicants' naked shoulders. Dark-haired, long-limbed . . . her name had been shaken from his skull, leaving only the vision of another one like this, crashing through one plate-glass window after another, blood between her shoulder blades, the bullet from his gun turning her into a wingless angel, a thing that flew amid bright razor crystals . . .

  "Help . . ." Deckard couldn't tell if that was his own voice rasping from his throat or the memory of his voice. "Help me . . ." What he had asked of another one of the replicants. His arm dragged farther from its hold, only the crook of his wrist against the cross-beam keeping him from falling under the wheels clashing sparks from the tunnel's iron tracks.

  Another woman huddled in the corner of the freight car. The Tyrell Corporation had given her enough knowledge so that she could be afraid; her face, pressed against the paleness of her arms, was wet with tears. The tangled curls of her brown hair fell across her knees.

  "Rachael . . ." He didn't know if it was her, or if they would have given this one a name yet. He called to her again. "Please . . ."

  The female replicant raised her head and looked at him. And did not know who he was.

  He suddenly felt an arm at his back, clutching him and pulling him up against the freight car's side. One of the replicants-he couldn't see which one-had reached through the slats and grabbed him, kept him from falling. He looked down and saw the tracks cutting by, a few inches from his dangling feet.

  Brighter light flooded across him, as the rep train burst from the tunnel's mouth and out into the open. The reddish glow of morning slanted across a barren landscape, darkened with years of soot and spattered oil droppings. Abandoned freight cars and rusted-out tankers formed parallel barricades along the rows of tracks to either side.

  Deckard managed to get his free hand between his chest and the slats. He pushed himself back against the arm's grasp; the replicant, still unseen by him, sensed what he was trying to do and let go.

  He landed on his shoulder, rolling clear of the rep train's wheels. He kept his face down against the stones and rubble, until the noise of the train had passed and faded into the distance. Cautiously he raised his head, enough to see the last of the cars disappearing with its silent cargo.

  On his hands and knees, Deckard managed to focus his vision past the tops of the motionless freight cars to his right. The towers and spires of the L.A. skyline carved the advancing daylight into hard-edged segments. He knew that he was out of the city, somewhere in the industrial wastelands ringing its vast sprawl.

  A desiccated, blood-temperature wind rolled across his back. He managed to stand up, the rags of the stolen police uniform gaping over his torn and abraded flesh. Slowly, his feet stumbling against the oil-covered rocks between the tracks, he began walking.

  Not north, where his unreasoning heart wanted to start for. But someplace where he knew he could hide.

  For at least a little while . . .

  11

  She ascended to the appointed place, at the appointed hour. Without effort, almost without will-thermal sensors had registered her presence within the small space, a disembodied voice had asked if she'd wanted to go up to the building's roof, far above the dense weave of structure and light that formed the static ocean of the city. All Sarah had had to do was say yes.

  Thus we rise, she thought as she closed her eyes and leaned the back of her head against the wall of the elevator's vertical coffin. Not as angels, transparent to gravity, buoyant in God's sight, but as inert, gross cargo, hauled aloft by cable and winch, like stones and dust in a box.

  What machine would clasp her in its embrace when her death came, bearing her aloft the way the elevator did now? Nobody, she thought glumly, self-accusingly. Everything she did, everything she was about to do, was designed by her own intent to bring about that exact lonely result. Fate as programmed as a train's iron rails-she figured she'd wind up like her uncle Eldon, isolate in glacial splendor, brooding over a chessboard like an owl watching for mice to scurry across the forest's dead leaves and twigs. Unless . . .

  Unless what? She raised a hand, pressing thumb and forefinger against her eyelids, blue sparks wriggling inside her head. Unless every not-living thing quickened and breathed, all the earth's graves burst like ripe seed pods, and the drowned rose with seaweed hair and pearls in their mouths. It could happen -- neither thought nor belief, but what she would have believed if she were still capable of that. Her own resurrection, or the simulation that was as much of one as she could hope for, pushed light through her hand and into her eyes as the elevator came to a stop and the doors slid open.

  He was waiting for her. On the building's executive landing deck, the private one that had been reserved for Eldon Tyrell, but rarely used. She stepped out of the elevator and strode toward the unmarked spinner and the figure lounging against its flank, his arms folded across his chest.

  "How did it go?"

  Andersson shrugged. "Oh . . . pretty much as I expected. He didn't put up a struggle or anything. Not that it would've made much difference if he had."

  "My." She let herself smile. "You're such a professional. Aren't you?"

  "I'm paid to be."

  "Whatever you indicate will happen, happens. Like pushing a button . . . on the elevator over there." She nodded toward the closed doors, the brushed stainless steel raked by the sun's fierce glare. She turned her own gaze away from the man. The light and heat would siphon away any possible tear. She felt genuinely sorry about Isidore; the poor little geek's neck, with its wobbling bespectacled head on top, would probably have fit inside one of Andersson's fists. Perhaps that was how he'd done it, like twisting and pulling the knobbed cork out of a bottle of Dorn Perignon. More likely, the obliging Isidore had volunteered, soon as he'd figured out what was wanted of him. Wuhwould you like me to kuh-kill myself? Huh-huh-happy to.

  "You're the one who pushes the buttons."

  "Am I?" That still seemed an odd concept to Sarah Tyrell. "I suppose so." She remembered being a three-year-old child and looking up at her uncle-the doors of the Salander 3 had unsealed and popped open; a nurse hack led her down the ramp, with the long boxes holding the remains of her parents following right after-and seeing his thick glasses, the lenses shaped like the computer monitors that had been her windows aboard the starship, the cold eyes behind them scanning and assessing, calculating. He had reached down and touched her hair, rubbing a lock of it between his thumb and forefinger, as if gauging its suitability for some new industrial process . . .

  "What're you
doing?" Her voice, sharp' and startled; she felt her spine go rigid, every muscle tensed for flight or attack. The reverie into which she'd sunk had been translated into this reality, the rooftop landing deck of the Tyrell Corporation headquarters, right now. Her uncle's touch had become Andersson's; the man, still leaning back against the spinner, had reached out and stroked the stray wisp of fine brown hair at the nape of her neck. His fingertip stayed there, a fraction of an inch away from her tremulous skin. "What . . . I don't . . . "

  "Yes, you do." He leaned forward and kissed her.

  Kissed and fell to the landing deck's hard surface, both his hands upon her, as they had been before. She turned her head and saw the undercarriage of the spinner, the extruded landing gear, the vents and air intakes: she could smell the sharp reek of its fuel and the condensation of steam, mixed with the closer scent of his sweat as he reached between them and undid the front of his jumpsuit; she couldn't tell the mingled odors apart anymore, or whether they came from him or the machine. It didn't matter to her.

  She closed her eyes. That was part of the payoff, the regular arrangement between herself and Andersson, that kept him working for her, plus the checks drawn upon the Tyrell Corporation's black operations account and made payable to an electronics supply warehouse in Mexico City. The arrangement must have been satisfactory to Andersson: she had lost track of which installment this was. Easy to forget that she wanted this, wanted everything, as much as he did . . .

  Something else to be sorry about. That the arrangement had come to an end; she knew it, even if he didn't yet. At the edge of her awareness, she felt her hand remove itself from his back and reach inside her coat pocket, for the object she had taken from the drawer of the bureau plat down in her uncle's office.

  Andersson gasped-too soon, at least for him; she could feel the shock wave run through his body. He pushed himself back from her, his spine arching. One hand clawed at his back, fingertips smearing through the bright red that had burst open there.

  "Goddamn . . ." He'd rolled onto his side, finally having managed to pull out the knife she had inserted, point first, between his shoulder blades. Andersson shook his head ruefully. "I knew you were going to do this. I knew it . . ." The knife clattered on the hard surface of the landing deck. He managed to push himself up into a sitting position, propped up against the spinner. His blood shone on the black metal. "It's not like . . ." Voice weaker. ". . . it's unexpected .. .

  "Please don't ask me why." She kept her own voice formal, polite. She had gotten to her feet and was now putting her own disarrayed clothing back in order, reaching down to smooth the skirt of the dress over her knees. "I'd find it tiresome to explain." Sarah straightened up, noticing a spot of his blood on the front of her blouse. Silk, and thus ruined.

  He managed to laugh. "Don't bother . . ." He gazed at her, almost admiringly. "It's pretty much . . . the nature of the business . . ."

  Checking the time, as much by glancing up at the sun as looking at the slender watch on her wrist. And waiting; as always, Sarah hoped he wouldn't take too long.

  A few minutes later she succeeded in dragging his body to the low parapet surrounding the landing deck, her shoes leaving a triangle and dot pattern in the thin pool of his blood. She was surprised at how light he seemed when dead; she had unexpectedly little trouble in lifting the corpse high enough to topple it over into the empty space at the center of the Tyrell Corporation's slanting towers. Adrenaline, she thought; some little surge in her own bloodstream, unnoticed by her cognitive processes, had perhaps given her the extra strength required,

  Andersson's body fell of its own accord, arms and legs splayed out in air. Hands braced against the parapet, she watched until it was lost to sight; the corporation's employees, working in the replicant manufacturing units that formed the base and core of the complex, had no doubt already had the surprise of the corpse smashing into one of the reinforced skylights above their heads.

  Business to take care of -- Sarah straightened up and took her cell phone out of her coat pocket, punched in the security division. "There's been an accident." She smoothed her hair into place as she spoke. "It can be taken care of on an internal basis. There's no need to call in the police." She gave a few more details, some of them true, then disconnected. The corporation's own security people were drones, without Andersson's initiative; she could count on them to do no more than what she wanted. Even the mess up here on the landing deck-they'd all keep their silence, and their jobs.

  She started to turn away, to walk back toward the elevator doors, then stopped. A shudder ran through her body; dizzy and nauseous, she had to lean against the spinner for balance. The adrenaline, and whatever other hormones had been released, now seemed to evaporate from her veins. She closed her eyes, her pulse scurrying faster, breath quick and shallow. "I'm sorry," she spoke aloud. As if there were anyone to hear her, as if it would have done any good if there had been. She resisted the impulse to lie back down upon the deck and curl up with her trembling fists and elbows tucked close against herself.

  The attack passed. Breath slower and deeper again-she took the few steps back to the parapet and looked across the vast space, to the three other towers of the Tyrell Corporation headquarters. A city in itself, surrounded by the larger compressed mass of Los Angeles. The four towers slanted in toward each other and the truncated pyramid in their midst, like the petals of a cubist flower that hadn't fully opened yet. When she had come back from Zurich, with the corporate minions who now worked for her, she'd been given the grand tour, through all the sectors of the complex, the areas that she'd never been allowed to enter while her uncle had been alive. It'd taken days to complete. They had told her everything, all the secrets. Including what they had called the red button, though there wasn't any red button, but an overlapping series of commands that had once been keyed to Eldon Tyrell's voice pattern, but hadn't been keyed over to hers. The one thing beyond her control-even as the minions had been telling her about what would happen if she could have spoken those magic words, a vision had come to her. That had made her heart swell with a fierce gladness.

  She looked out now across the landing deck's parapet, that vision overlaying the solid, slanting towers. Fire and force, this world she owned riven by its own private apocalypse. The explosions would start at the base of the structures and continue upward, following the Wagnerian sequence of the programming that had been built into them from the beginning . . .

  Brennt das Holz heilig brünstig und hell, sengt die Glut sehrend den glänzenden Saal. . .

  "'If the wood catches fire,'" she murmured, eyes closed, "'and solemnly, brightly burns, then the flames will destroy the glorious hall . . .'"

  Wagner had that much right, at least. Not programming; she knew that was a stupid word for it. Fate was the true word.

  Der ewigen Götter Ende dämmert ewig da auf . . .

  "'The eternal gods' last day then dawns . . . '

  Sarah opened her eyes. The vision had faded, leaving the parallelogram towers of the Tyrell Corporation still standing.

  She turned away and headed for the elevator, to go back down inside the building's heart.

  He'd made his decision. Or, at least, the next step in his rapidly evolving plans.

  What do I need this loony sonuvabitch around for? Dave Holden glanced over at Batty, sitting beside him in the cockpit of the freight spinner. They were flying west, returning from the Reclamation Center out in the desert, to the sprawl of the city. The same harsh sunlight that darkened the curved glass's photochrome membrane heated the brown stew of pollutants hanging in the air above L.A.; he could see it up ahead, like an old, frayed edge wool blanket spread over the simmering buildings. Batty's hands moved across the controls, manually piloting the craft. When he was busy doing something, he didn't look quite so maniacal. But that didn't change the situation.

  The question didn't need an answer -- Holden had decided that part a while back. But there were other questions that did.

&nb
sp; "So, uh, exactly what is your interest in all this?"

  "I told you." Batty turned his cracked smile on him again. "The sixth replicant. The one that's still missing."

  "What about it?" The smile still had the capacity for making him nervous. "You just want to shake its hand or something? Get an autograph?"

  "Don't want anything from it. Except to find it and kill it. And take back the evidence to the people who hired me that I've completed this little job for them."

  "And who's that?"

  "Can't tell you." Batty's eyes shifted. "It's . . . a secret."

  "Bullshit." His inner radar, his honed blade runner senses, flashed on the other's momentary unease. "I can tell you're soamming me." He peered closer at Batty. "You don't know who hired you, do you?"

  "Well . . . I got my suspicions about it." Batty gave a minute adjustment to one of the controls. "Might be the LAPD, Or it could be a gov agency. Possibly the feds, maybe even the U.N. -- bad replicant business can call down some pretty high-level heat. Whoever it is, they're working outside the official channels, so we're talking cover-up. Ultraspook stuff; I got the job details and my up-front money through a double-blind courier service, no trace possible on who sent them my way."

  "How'd they find you? In the yellow pages?" Probably under Cannons, Loose -- the thought gave Holden a twist of smug amusement.

  "The fact they found me at all just proves these guys're up there. Man, I'd pretty much figured if I was going to be retired against my will, then I was going to be retired all the way-I'd taken every dime I'd saved up, from when those bastards over at the Tyrell Corporation had been still paying me my royalties on their line of Roy Batty replicants, and I'd dug myself in tight into a nice, safe little conapt in one of the Cracow ex-pat zones. I was gonna do nothing but drink gin and listen to Mahler's Second for the rest of my life." He shook his head. "You know, I don't have to kill people to have a good time."