EdgeOfHuman

by Unknown

  "You see?" Rachael's voice, but not Rachael's voice; Sarah's voice, a whisper from the monitor. "She's as good as dead. You know that, don't you? All that keeps her here is time . . . and that's such a little thing, Deckard. And memory is so much . . . truer." The whisper lowered, gentler, almost a kiss at his ear. "I made you this offer before. I could be for you . . . what I was for my uncle. Not the real thing . . . not the woman you loved . . . not the dead. But close enough."

  He said nothing. As if he had heard nothing. He reached down and stroked Rachael's brow, soothing away the bad dreams that had troubled her long sleep. He laid his hand, softly, against the side of her face, and her lashes trembled against his fingertips.

  "I knew you wouldn't." Bitterness etched the voice that came from the monitor. "Nothing can change your mind."

  "No . . ." He spoke without turning to look at Sarah's image.

  "I knew it would be this way. You prefer the dead to the living, the fake to the real. The memory . . . to me." The voice became harsher and more grating. "The same as he did. That's why I've had to do these things. Perhaps if I became the dead . . . if I became a memory . . . then I'd have a chance."

  Another voice spoke. The same, but another. A whisper: "Deckard . . . "

  He looked down and saw that Rachael had opened her eyes. She gazed at him, calmly and unafraid, as she had done once before, a long time ago. When he had woken her from a deathlike sleep.

  Do you love me? Memory, his own words.

  I love you . . .

  Do you trust me?

  He bent down and kissed her. "Don't worry . . ." He placed his fingertips against her lips before she could say anything. "We'll be leaving here soon."

  I trust you . . .

  "That's very touching." Sarah's voice came from the monitor. "I admire your faithfulness. I'm not lying when I say that. What I wouldn't give . . ." The voice broke off for a moment, then spoke flat and harsh again. "You're right. It is time to leave. Time to finish . . . everything."

  Deckard glanced over his shoulder, to the image on the screen. "Where are you?"

  "I'm right here in the building with you." She laughed, short and humorless. "I wouldn't miss this for the world. I've waited too long for it."

  Outside, visible through the high windows at the far end of the suite, jagged lightning shot down from clouds pressing lower with their own weight. A low rumbling noise, almost beneath the limits of human audibility, trembled through the expectant air.

  "Did you hear that?" On the monitor screen, the image looked away, listening.

  "It's the thunder." He spoke to both the image and to Rachael near him. "That's all it is."

  "Oh, no-" The image looked back at him. Sarah slowly shook her head, eyes widening. As though with delight. "It's starting. The end of everything . . ."

  "What are you talking about?" A cold fingertip touched his spine.

  "You never remember. I tell you things . . . but it seems you just don't want to remember." Pity in the gaze of Sarah's image, in her voice. "The red button . . . though there is no button, nothing to be pushed. If it were that easy, I would have done it myself . . . a long time ago. There's a command series, transmitted by the U.N. authorities, to initiate the auto-destruct sequence, the explosive charges that were built into and throughout the Tyrell Corporation headquarters. Right here."

  Another low-pitched noise rolled through the building; the candle flames shivered. Deckard reached down, his arm around Rachael's shoulder, pulling her closer to him.

  "They must have made their decision." The image spoke as though savoring its own words. "The U.N. authorities have been monitoring your progress all along; not as closely as I have, but enough to be aware of the results. Of yours and Batty's and Holden's futile quests. The fact that none of you were able to track down this missing sixth replicant. That you were, in essence, defeated by it."

  "But they also know-they'd have to-that it's all lies." He tightened his grip on Rachael's upper arm. "It was all concocted by you, for your own reasons-"

  "That doesn't matter to them. The U.N. has been looking for a pretext to shut down-to eliminate-the Tyrell Corporation. Now they have it. Why it came about is of no concern to them. They'll be able to make the changes to the off-world colonization program that they've wanted to for a long time. No Tyrell Corporation . . . and no replicants." The image smiled. "As has been shown now-they're just too dangerous. Too much . . . like us."

  A stronger shock wave traveled through the building. He felt the floor buckle beneath his feet as the columns running the length of the suite cracked around their bases. There was no use for the gun now, if there ever had been; he tossed it aside. Rachael made no resistance as he drew 'her from the bed and got her to her feet.

  "So now you'll have what you want." Through the far windows, he could see a roiling light, flames, and smokechurning explosions, advancing up the sides of the other slanted towers. "Nothing that Eldon Tyrell created will be left. That should make you happy."

  "No . . ." Sarah's image shook its head. "Not happy. Satisfied, perhaps. In this little time we have left together-"

  Harder, and deafening; he was barely able to stay upright, stumbling backward a step, with Rachael pressed close against himself. Columns toppled and crashed to the floor, as the walls were torn apart, raw-edged darkness showing through the chasms splitting wider. Glass fragments sprayed across the rooms as the tall windows twisted in their frames and shattered.

  Immediately before him, the antique desk reared and fell, the monitor snapping free of its cables. The monitor struck the floor, the screen bursting into bright shards, the voice struck silent.

  "Come on-" Deckard pulled Rachael toward the suite's doors. The carved wooden panels had flown open, hinges wrenched loose, and thick smoke pouring across the ceiling.

  The corridor beyond was a racketing hell, alarm sirens shrieking as red light pulsed through the churning black. The elevator shaft gaped open, a torrent of fire leaping from the levels below. As they ran, the floor suddenly tilted beneath them; he landed on his shoulder, skidding and drawing Rachael down against himself. A steel girder, twisted loose of its anchorings, ripped through the ceiling panels like a massive scythe, gouging a ragged trench a few inches away from them.

  He couldn't tell if Rachael had screamed in fright and shock; the noise of the explosions climbing through the buildings obliterated his hearing. She might have thought it was part of the same nightmare in which she'd been mired before he woke her-he didn't know. Taking her around the shoulders, he tottered upright, stumbling through the spaxk-laced smoke toward the stairwell door, barely visible at the corridor's far end.

  There, below him; Holden could see them, small human figures surrounded by the larger forms billowing toward the night sky's darker clouds. The other towers had already collapsed, their flank torn open by the sequenced charges, steel frames twisting apart section by section, then falling toward the flame-engulfed center of what had been the Tyrell Corporation headquarters.

  Rain lashed across the freight spinner's cockpit, the heavy monsoon gouts hissing into steam as they battered wavelike against the inferno that had burst from the city's heart. Holden gasped for breath, the pulse inside himself staggering in the wash of heat, as he leaned against the controls, willing the spinner through the updraft's coiling hurricane.

  He had flown straight here from the sideways world, only to find one even more chaotic. Whatever was going on, it looked terminal; even as he forced the freight spinner down, another series of explosions rolled through the remaining tower, bringing it even closer to the point of toppling into the molten center of the compound.

  The building's sudden lurch knocked the two figures from their feet-looking out the side of the cockpit, he recognized his ex-partner Deckard, with a dark-haired woman. They had been trying to reach the spinner parked on the roof's landing deck, but the last shock wave had put an end to that: the empty spinner toppled off the tower's brink, pinwheeling down into the f
lames, then adding another, smaller explosion to the ones already shaking the surrounding city.

  With the flat of his palm, Holden hit the control for the cargo hatchway. A nearly solid gust of heat and smoke slammed against his back as the freight spinner's midsection slid open. He could see Deckard, one arm supporting the woman, looking up at him as he brought the craft down closer to them. He punched the autopilot into proximity hover, then pushed himself up from the seat and made his way to the rear section, grabbing one bulkhead strut after another to keep from falling.

  "Deckard!" He held on to the side of the hatch, reaching down. "Give me her hand!" The dark-haired woman looked barely conscious, as though asphyxiated by the smoke churning upward. He could hear, through the roar of the flames, his own artificial lungs wheezing for oxygen. Deckard managed to lift the woman, his arm around her waist, high enough that he could grab her by the wrist and elbow, and draw her up and into the freight spinner. She wasn't unconscious; when Holden lowered her to the tilting floor of the cargo area, she was able to grasp the metal ribs and pull herself away from the bottom of the hatch.

  He reached back down for Deckard's outstretched hand. Their fingertips had almost touched, when another explosion, the loudest and nearest of all, ripped open the last remaining panels of the roof. Holden saw the surge of glaring light a split second before its impact concussed the spinner; he was thrown backward, catching a flash of Deckard leaping desperately for the hatchway.

  The spinner tumbled nose downward. Holden's spine hit the back of the pilot's seat; he twisted about, hands pressed against the controls, a fireball like the interior of the sun welling up to engulf the craft. Over his shoulder, he saw the hatchway door sliding shut; Deckard, teeth clenched in agony, fought to claw his way inside. The woman screamed his name, reached, and grabbed his hand and forearm; the door's edge scraped open Deckard's shirt and the skin beneath as she pulled him toward herself. Deckard got one foot on the doorway's rim and gave a final convulsive push. He and the dark-haired woman slid together against the opposite bulkhead.

  In the same moment the fireball was cleft in two by the fall of the last tower. The updraft swung the freight spinner around in a dizzying loop as Holden struggled to keep from being torn away from the controls. Suddenly he found himself looking at the dark storm clouds above, the monsoon's torrents pounding the curved glass of the cockpit; with a single lunge he hit the throttle full-on. He clung to the pilot's chair against the mounting g-forces as the freight spinner shot skyward.

  Then stars, a diamond sweep from one horizon rim to the other, and silence, the storm left below. Holden managed to claw his way up to the control panel and pull the spinner's ascent into a level flight.

  "Here-let me take over." Deckard came forward from the cargo area. Gasping in exhaustion, Holden watched as his ex-partner climbed into the pilot's seat. The bio-mechanical heart in his chest staggered and lurched, then settled into a slower and more stable rhythm.

  The craft banked into a slow turn as Deckard's hands moved across the controls. The rain had plastered his hair black against his forehead, a cut along one cheekbone diluting pink down his throat. The sodden coat hung on him like a wet shroud. Watching the navigation screen, he brought the freight spinner slicing back down through the clouds.

  Deckard cut the throttle to a slow crawl as they came directly above the Tyrell Corporation headquarters. Or what had been the corporation; a gigantic square section had been cut from the center of L.A. and transformed into what now looked like the mouth of a ground-level volcano. The wind gusts and saturating Pacific rains drove the flames far enough back to reveal the twisted skeletal girders, the distorted structural webs all that remained of the towers.

  Black specks, what humans looked like from this altitude, and the larger shapes of emergency vehicles, clustered around the apocalypse perimeter, the ululating wail of their sirens piercing the night.

  Holden gazed down through the snakelike rivulets coursing over the cockpit glass. "What the hell brought all that on?"

  Reaching again for the controls. Deckard lifted his hard-set gaze from the scene underneath them. "Bad attitudes." He punched the throttle.

  A few minutes later-or hours; Holden had lost track of time, closing his eyes while the freight spinner bad shot above the city-he felt the craft slowing and descending again. To a landing; he looked out and saw a bleak desert landscape, silvered by the moon and stars. The monsoons' seasonal return hadn't extended this far inland yet. No buildings or fences nearby; the Reclamation Center that Batty had brought him to was obviously miles away.

  Deckard cut the engines as the freight spinner settled into the loose gravel and sand. The quiet of the empty landscape penetrated the cockpit glass. He glanced over toward Holden. "We gotta talk." He pushed another control and the side panels swiveled open.

  As they walked away from the spinner, leaving prints in the sand, Holden dug the gun out of his jacket. "You know . . . I could take you in. To the police station. And turn you over."

  "Sure." Deckard glanced at him. "But you won't."

  "I guess not." He put the gun away. "That Batty guy . . . he screwed up my brain. Right now, I don't know whether I'm a replicant or not." He shook his head, still trying to make the pieces come together. "The way it works out for people like us-it comes with the territory, I suppose-a certain leap of faith is required. To assume that we're human at all."

  "It's not just for us." A dark edge moved through Deckard's voice, as though it were the product of long, deep brooding. "That's the way it is for everybody. Human or not."

  "Yeah, well . . . maybe." Holden wasn't sure he understood what his ex-partner was talking about. "Right now, though, what I think I'll do is, I'll turn myself over to the police. Maybe they'll be able to tell me what I am. Not that it really matters, of course."

  "Suit yourself."

  "What're you going to do?" He stopped and tilted his head back toward the freight spinner. "The woman in there. Is that . . ."

  "Rachael. She's Rachael." Deckard closed his eyes for a moment, then slowly nodded.

  "The other one-Sarah-is dead. Back at the Tyrell Corporation. That's what she wanted."

  The black clouds had massed higher to the west, blotting out the stars close to the horizon. It wouldn't be long before the storms swept across the desert, all the way to the mountain ranges. And beyond.

  "Are you going to try to get away? The two of you?" Holden felt a chill creeping in toward his artificial heart. "If you go north again . . . I won't tell them. They'll come looking for you, and they'll find you, but it won't happen because of anything I said."

  "No . . ." Deckard shook his head. "We won't go north. That's not far enough . . ."

  Holden watched him tilt his head back, eyes barely open. A blue needle of light touched the drop of water that inched along the corner of his brow.

  "We'll have to go farther . . ." Deckard's voice a murmur, taken by the wind sifting the desert. "As far as we can . . ."

  After

  The official behind the counter returned the blue leatherette folder, smiling as he handed it back. "I hope you have a pleasant journey, Mr. and Mrs. Niemand." He gazed upon them kindly, though that was merely part of his job. "And that you find everything you're looking for."

  "Thanks." Deckard tucked the folder-it had the seal of the U.N. emigration services on it, along with gold-embossed letters spelling out A NEW LIFE! -- inside his jacket. "I'm sure we will."

  He picked up the carry-on bag beside him. A knot in his stomach unclenched-getting the forged ID cards and other documents stamped had been the last barrier they'd needed to get past. He turned away from the counter. "Come on, sweetheart. We don't want to miss the flight."

  Rachael held on to his arm all the way through the corridors of the San Pedro off-world terminal. Scenes of happy life in the colonies-Norman Rockwell mixed with early Soviet Realism, laughing children and fields of grain lined the gleaming chrome walls. Even when Deckard and Rachael were sea
ted aboard the ship, she leaned her head against his shoulder, as though she were already fatigued from the rigors of flight.

  Rachael kept her eyes closed all through a lecture from a pair of uniformed attendants, on the various safety procedures. She might have been asleep. He let her hand rest in his; he could just feel the flicker of pulse at her wrist.

  Eventually, a low-pitched vibration shivered through the cabin. He looked across the tops of the seats; there were only a few other passengers-emigrants-besides themselves.

  "I was dreaming . . ." Rachael's eyelids had fluttered open. She gazed upward.

  "Of what?"

  She shook her head. "I don't remember." She glanced out the small round window at her side. Not really a window, but a simulation, a video feed from one of the ship's exterior cameras. The slate-grey Pacific extended to the horizon, its curvature visible now.

  "'From Earth we shall quickly remove . . . " Her voice a murmur. "'And mount to our native abode . . . '"

  An old song-a moment passed before he recognized the Protestant hymn. It called forth a memory; not of childhood, but of another world, the one that had been enclosed by the rough wooden walls of the cabin far to the north. And of that other moment, when a woman had leaned down to look through the glass of a black coffin, at the face that had been a sleeping mirror image of her own. She had spoken the words of a different hymn then. But he had known it, as he knew this one.

  He spoke its title aloud: "'Away with our sorrow and fear . . . '"

  Rachael turned and looked at him. Her eyes widened, as though in sudden realization. Of what her own words had disclosed.

  "Don't worry." He leaned his head back against the seat. "It's not important." More of the ancient words came to him.