EdgeOfHuman

by Unknown

  Well, not exactly forever, thought Holden with glum relief. He supposed the police would have eventually shot the freight spinner out of the sky, just for violating air-space regulations. Or else they would've let it go on, and it would've eventually run out of fuel, plunging down into the streets. He could just see some by-the-manual uniformed cop with one jackboot up on a fender-high piece of the wreckage, writing out a ticket for parking in a restricted zone.

  The night had settled in complete, the somberly violet line at the horizon, the last vestige of sun slicing extinguished beneath the cliff front of mounting clouds. Dark enough now for him to move further into the specifics of the plan upon which he'd decided. If he needed assistance, to keep from either dying or blacking out, there was only one place he could go, one person to whom he could turn. The police department, either on an official basis or by getting hold of his old friends and acquaintances on the force, was out of the question. No telling how rotted out the whole structure of the central station was with conspiracy; anybody he talked to there could be one of the bastards who'd determined, for their own malevolent reasons, that the only good blade runner was a dead one. And as for Deckard, who was presumably as much a target as anyone else . . . that was a no-go as well. For a lot of reasons, some of which Holden had spent the time up in the air mulling over.

  He reached out to the control panel and switched off the freight spinner's autopilot. Another looping circuit had been completed, bringing him back over the dense, poorly lit warrens of the city's Los Feliz district. Holden took over the freight spinner's manual controls, steering it down toward the building in which his ex-partner had once lived.

  On the building's rooftop landing deck, he sat frozen in the pilot's seat, a layer of perspiration forming between his palms and the rudder's inert metal. Go on, one part of him nagged all the rest. What're you waiting for? Don't crap out now. He ascribed the knot of fear festering in his gut to the malfunctioning of his new lungs, the brain they fed reacting to partial oxygen deprivation with innate animal terror. But he knew that the cowardly body was in league with his own cold rationality. He'd left Roy Batty in the apartment below, handcuffed to the pipe behind the toilet; just replaying the tape in his head, of Batty cursing and flailing around at the limit of the short chain, like some baleful genetic cross between a bull and an enraged hornet, sent a squirt of adrenaline through his heart's polyethylene valves. And now he was going to go back in there and tell Batty that the two of them should be pals again? Good luck, whispered a lobe of doubt.

  "Might as well get it over with." His own voice, speaking out loud. Holden opened the freight spinner's cockpit and climbed out.

  In the apartment, a puzzle: the handcuffs were there, bright chrome dangling beneath white porcelain, but Roy Batty was gone. Holden stood up from his kneeling inspection of the cuffs, seeing his own puzzled face in the mirror above the sink. The fluorescent tube's partial spectrum gave the skin of his cheeks and brow an even more death approaching, cheesy appearance.

  He got away, thought Holden. He must have, though there was no indication of how. The building was constructed so shabbily-parts of it, those that looked like concrete, actually were embossed styrofoam -- that even an old man like Batty could possibly have yanked the plumbing free from the bathroom wall. But he surely wouldn't have bothered putting the pipe back into place, mortaring it with toothpaste and soap. Plus, the handcuffs would've still been dangling from Batty's wrist, not there on the pipe.

  Turning the mystery over in his thoughts, Holden flicked off the bathroom light and wandered out into the apartment's corridor. Immediately he was slammed up against the wall, the impact against his spine sufficient to knock the air from his lungs, the new heart twitching through a spasm of rapid fibrillation.

  "You stupid sonuvabitch. I oughtta kill you." Batty's face, its crevices reddened with a fierce energy, pushed itself nose-to-nose with Holden's. "Matter of fact, I'm planning on it. I hope that doesn't come as a surprise to you."

  He got his hands onto Batty's wrists, trying to pull them far enough away from his throat to suck in air. A detached fragment of his mind noted that the handcuffs were gone. "Wait . . . wait a minute . . ." He gasped out the words as his feet dangled clear of the hallway's floor. "I have . . . to talk with you . . ."

  "No, you don't." Batty pushed him up higher against the wall. "You and I have talked plenty already. I'm so on your pitiful wavelength, I don't have to talk to you anymore. I knew you were going to come back here, looking for me. Once you figured out that you're too screwed up to get by on your own." A shark's grin floated into Holden's fuzzed vision. "So you see. I know what you're going to say before you do."

  A thread of oxygen flowed down his throat. The other man was tiring, not visibly so, but detectable by the slight weakening of his arms, the weight dragging them down. The black spots in front of Holden's eyes, that had interposed a drifting polka-dotted veil between his face and Batty's, faded a little.

  "Look . . . it's important . . . ' The words scraped through his constricted larynx. "I wouldn't have come back here . . . if I just needed help . . ."

  "Yeah, right." Batty followed the words with a scornful grunt.

  "Really . . . I figured it out . . ." He tugged at the other's wrists. "I figured out . . . who the sixth replicant is . . . "

  Batty tilted his head to one side, studying the pinned figure in front of him. "What're you talking about?"

  "Put me down . . . and I'll tell you . . ."

  Through narrowed eyes, Batty regarded him for a moment longer. "All right." He lowered Holden to the floor, letting go of the front of his shirt. Batty stood back, arms folded across his chest. "This better be good."

  Holden doubled over, gasping to fill his lungs, head level with his artificial heart to increase the passage of blood between the two organs. Weakly, he straightened back up, balancing himself against the wall with one hand. He stumbled toward the apartment's living room, with Batty following after.

  "It's simple. Really." He flopped down into one of Deckard's overstuffed chairs. With his foot, he nudged aside the toppled piano bench, so he could stretch out his legs. "Once you think about it." The numbness in his limbs had changed to prickling as his circulation rattled back to normal. Or what passed for that. "The sixth replicant . . . the one that's still missing. It's Deckard."

  "You idiot." Batty looked down at him with contempt. "I'm the one who told you that." He sat down heavily on the padded bench, his elbows knocking two atonal chords from the piano as he leaned back against the keyboard. Disgusted, he shook his head. "Jesus Christ. I can't believe this. If you've been worrying about whether that new pump of yours is starving your brain of oxygen-and you should be; I can hear it wheezing all the way over here then you don't have to worry anymore. Your brain's obviously gone to mush."

  Unruffled, Holden smoothed his hands out along the rounded arms of the chair. He managed a smile. "Sure you said something about Deckard being the sixth replicant. But I know how your mind works. You'd never have made it as a blade runner. You're too sloppy. The whole modus operandi of someone like you is to kill someone else, and then if it turns out to have been the wrong person, do another. Until you finally get it right." He paused for a moment, to regain his breath. "Blade runners, on the other hand, try to be a little more precise about who we kill."

  "Piss off."

  He knew he'd nailed him. Holden leaned forward, relishing the small measure of control he'd gained, the shift of power between himself and the other man. "There; you see?" It'd been worth coming back here, taking the risk, just to screw with Batty's mind. In the best way possible, by feeding his own words back to him. But with a difference. "You know I'm right. When you said Deckard was the sixth replicant, that was just an idea you had. You didn't know for sure. Did you?"

  Batty shifted uncomfortably on the piano bench, but made no reply.

  "Whereas I can say that Deckard is the sixth replicant -- and I can prove it." He leaned back into th
e deep upholstery. In triumph.

  "Go ahead." Batty had reassembled his own composure. "I'm listening."

  "There's a safe-house apartment, out in the sideways world-you know, all that toppled-over seismic zone-that Deckard and myself and some of the other guys in the blade runner unit set up. Without any departmental connection; we used it for stakeouts, remote operations, all that sort of thing. That's where I knew Deckard would go. And I was right." Holden forced down a deep breath. "After I took care of you, I went out there and found him, talked to him-"

  "You should've plugged him. And if you were so friggin' smart, you wouldn't have left me where I could get hold of dental floss and a razor blade. Those handcuffs ain't shit, when you know what you're doing."

  Holden rolled past the comment. "At any rate, I didn't get very far with him. I'd figured that between the two of us, he and I could locate the sixth replicant and retire it but Deckard wouldn't buy into that plan. Turned me down flat. So I left . . . but I didn't go away. I kept an eye on the place, from outside. And sure enough, Holden had a visitor. A woman-"

  "Oh?" Batty raised an eyebrow. "Young, dark-haired? Expensive-looking?"

  "Pretty much." He nodded. "I figured that it was the one who owns the Tyrell Corporation now-"

  "Sarah Tyrell. Good guess."

  "They were both inside the safe-house apartment for a while, then there was a gunshot. Then both Deckard and the woman came out, climbed into a Tyrell Corporation spinner, and flew off. The person who didn't come out of the apartment was this little weird guy, who was also there. Used to be one of the corporation's top bio-engineers, name of Sebastian."

  "Yeah, I know about him. Big involvement in the design of the Nexus-6 models. I met him when they were putting together the prototypes for the Roy Batty replicant model."

  "That's my whole point." The artificial heart in Holden's chest revved with excitement.

  "Deckard and this Sarah Tyrell iced one of the few people-hell, maybe the only one left-who could identify the Nexus-6 replicants. Why would they do that, unless they wanted to make sure that there wasn't anybody around who could put the finger on the missing sixth replicant? And who'd be more concerned about that then the sixth replicant itself? So it has to be Deckard. All that stuff about him having run off up north, that was all a ruse, an alibi to make it look like he wasn't on the scene down here. But he was, and he was busy taking care of anybody who could identify him. Like Bryant. It's obvious-Deckard killed the one guy who'd seen the original escape report from the off-world authorities, after Bryant had already purged the info on him from the police files. Just goes to show what a thorough bastard Deckard is; he's not leaving any loose ends."

  Batty musingly stroked his chin. "Why didn't Deckard kill you? Out at this safe-house apartment."

  "Because I had a gun, and he didn't-at that time. The Tyrell woman must've brought out the one they shot Sebastian with."

  "Huh." Slowly Batty nodded. "That makes sense, I guess." He gave a shrug. "Look, I'm glad you've come around to my way of thinking about this-"

  "'Thinking,' hell."

  "All right, all right." Batty held both his palms outward. "I admit I operate more on instinct than reason-so sue me. But what you've come up with just confirms what I'd felt was the case about Deckard. So it must be true, right?"

  Holden relaxed a bit. He'd managed to push the other man into a mellower portion of whatever manic cycle he. operated on. Like a mollified wolf, it struck him. Important to not display any fear, to show the wild animal who was really in charge.

  "Now that we know," said Holden, "who the sixth replicant is, we just have to calculate what we're going to do about it . . ."

  He leaned forward, as Batty did the same from the piano bench, bringing their heads closer together. Breathing together; a back part of his mind recalled that that was what the word conspiracy meant.

  Fires at night put some people in a holiday mood. Or some creatures, he corrected himself. The one below him had actually broken into a little stubby-legged jig, more enthusiasm than dance skill, at the sight up ahead, flickering incendiary glow and sparks threading through mounting columns of smoke.

  "Whoa!" Sebastian clung to the teddy bear's neck, to keep himself from being jounced out of the papoose carrier. "Steady on there, will ya? You're going to make me seasick."

  Squeaker Hussar had spotted the fires as well. "What's that? What's that?" He jumped up and down, pointing. "What the heckety-heck is that, Sebastian?"

  "I don't rightly know." A pirate-style brass telescope was packed somewhere in the gear that the animated teddy bear and the toy soldier had been dragging along between them. Out here in the dark, he didn't feel like rooting around for it. "People, I guess." He let himself slip back down into the papoose carrier. "A lot of 'em, actually. I can see their shadows and all."

  "Hmmm . . ." Subdued, Squeaker tilted his nose into the air, as though trying to sniff out the nature of the unseen others. "Gotta think!"

  The toy soldier didn't really think, not on a deep analytical level-Sebastian hadn't programmed him for that-but he did a good imitation of the process, something he'd probably picked up from observing his maker. Sebastian knew he'd have to do the thinking for all three of them, as he'd always done before. Not that I ever did such a good job at it. Maybe it was time to give Squeaker and Colonel Fuzzy a crack at these necessary tasks. Once, just a little while ago, he'd done the thinking for a group of four, counting in Pris; though even when she'd been alive, really alive, she hadn't been the sort of girl for whom thinking had been a preferred mode of making one's way through the rigors of existence. And all that his thinking had accomplished, at least for her, had been death, utter and final. And his own, inasmuch as he was now a one-limbed, withered husk-like thing; the core of his life having been extinguished along with Pris's feverish, constantly scanning red eyes. A toy soldier with a Pinocchio nose couldn't screw it up any worse.

  He waited, but Squeaker didn't say anything more. Colonel Fuzzy looked over its shoulder at him, the expression held in its button eyes apprehensive.

  "Okay . . ." He sighed, aware that they were depending upon him. "Let's figure it out. Out here, at night, the things you gotta be afraid of are the ones you can't see Right?" The teddy bear and the toy soldier nodded. "These folks, whoever they are-" He pointed to the radiant distance with his one hand. "They don't seem to care if we see 'em. I mean, they built those fires and stuff. So it seems only logical that we shouldn't be afraid of them. You follow?"

  "Maybe they're savages!" Eyes wide, Squeaker had already spooked himself. "Cannibubbles!"

  "Oh, shoot. That's only in bad movies. Post-apocalypse tootie-frootie jive." Sebastian had found his own logic convincing enough. He urged Colonel Fuzzy forward. "Come on, let's go check 'em out. Maybe they got a barbecue going. Welfare weenies and marshmallows-you guys like that, don't you?" They didn't actually eat, but they enjoyed using their ceremonial dress swords to hold things in the flames.

  That notion motivated his companions. They left their supplies, food and water and batteries, tucked into a crevice they'd be able to find later. Clambering over the flank of a Neutra-derived retail pavilion, they made their way toward the fires.

  Even before they could clearly make out the human figures, they heard the single raised voice, loud and stentorian. Colonel Fuzzy's round ears twitched at either side of his head; Squeaker looked genuinely perplexed. "Sounds like church!"

  The toy soldier's notions were derived from old televangelical broadcasts, but he was right; it did sound like that. Sebastian couldn't make out the words, not until they had actually come through the line of wavering shadows and near enough to feel the heat of the fires against their own faces.

  "'With this wisdom, enlightened disciples will be able to master every inordinate desire!'" A man dressed in a white jumpsuit-one of the sleeves was torn, and there were black char marks across the front, as though he'd wandered too close to the fire, or been in some kind of explosion-stood o
n a box, reading from a battered old paperback book. "'Every kind of living creature, whether hatched from an egg, grown in a womb, evolved or brought forth by metamorphosis, whether it has form or knowing, whether it possesses or lacks natural feeling-from this constantly shifting state of existence, I command you to seek deliverance!"' The man's voice grew stronger and more fervent. "'Then you shall be released from the sentient world, a world without number or limit. In reality, no sentient world even exists; for in the minds of enlightened disciples, such arbitrary notions have ceased . . . '"

  Perhaps a couple dozen other people stood around in a circle, listening; regular, full-size humans, not like what he'd become. They were all a little on the ragged side; in this territory, it was impossible to stay exactly spiff. A few curious faces turned toward Sebastian and his diminutive pals.

  "Sorry." He raised an apologetic hand above the teddy bear's head. "Don't let me interrupt you." The sermon, if that's what it was, had ended; he didn't know whether it was supposed to have or not. "Just go ahead."

  The man stepped down from the box and walked over toward them. He looked to be some kind of spiritual leader; he had the sort of craggy, God-haunted face for it, complete with a straggly, greying beard, also slightly singed.

  "Have you come to roust us?" The evidently holy man leaned down to peer into Sebastian's face. "Perhaps you are an advance scout of the law-enforcement agencies, specifically those in charge of stamping out heresies such as represented by our little group. Would that be the case?"

  "Um, no . . ." He shrank back from the other's piercing gaze. "We're more like private-individual types."

  "I see." The man straightened back up. A number of the others had collected behind him, following the discourse. A sigh came from their leader. "In some ways-many ways-that's a pity. Inasmuch as the doctrines of our faith invite martyrdom. The final sacrament, as it were. Without which, many of our activities, if not all, seem to be in vain."