by K. W. Jeter
Edge Of Human
( Bladerunner - 2 )
K. W. Jeter
K. W. Jeter
Edge Of Human
1
When every murder seems the same, it's time to quit.
"That's good advice," Bryant told himself. "I'll drink to that." A hard swallow, and jellied gasoline spread across his ulcer; he could barely breathe as he set the small glass back down on the desk and poured another shot. "That's why I went to a desk job."
The sticky-backed slip of paper, with its words of wisdom, floated at his vision's limit. He had pulled open the bottom drawer to fetch the square bottle out, and the past had clung to it like his own half-shed snakeskin. Every brilliant thought, 3 A.M. illumination, unacted-upon suicide note, he'd pitched in there. Until the drawer held a shifting dune of yellow scraps, the residuum of his entire goddamn cop career, that plus enough cash in the pension plan to blow his nose on. The drawer's slips of paper, some carefully folded, some wadded up, were an exact replica of the contents of his skull; if the police department's shrinks ever looked inside either one, they'd ship him out on a permanent psychiatric leave so fast…
"Bastards." Between one thought and another, the glass had drained itself again, without him noticing. Bryant dug a finger into the loose wattle of his throat and tugged his necktie loose. The station's oxygen, soured with pheromones of fear and despair, trickled into his lungs. The fan on top of the filing cabinet struggled to move the dust-heavy air.
Under his feet, through the soles of his dumb-ass cop shoes, the earth shivered. In an unlit tunnel, the rep train slid along its iron rails, carrying its silent, watchful cargo to another darkness. He tilted the bottle, liquid brown splashing over the glass's rim.
"You drink too much."
Bryant knew that wasn't his own voice. None of the voices inside him would ever have said anything that stupid. He squinted to bring the distant side of the office into focus. By the fall of shadow across cheekbone he recognized the other person.
"I drink," Bryant answered, "because I must. I'm dehydrated."
That was true at least. He'd come back into the cathedral cavern of the station from a department funeral, standing under the battering sun while one of their own had been dropped into an empty rectangle of earth. That stupid sonuvabitch Gaff had finally managed to talk a bullet into his gut, big enough that he could've been buried in two boxes. A double row of the department's ceremonial honor guard had lifted their silver-lensed faces to the sky, fired, reholstered their weapons, turned on their shining boot heels, and marched away. He had felt blood-warm sweat crawling under his collar.
He'd stood looking down at the brass plate in the raw dirt and dead-yellow grass after everybody else had left. The inscription under Gaff's name was in that infuriating affected cityspeak. That was when he'd really been sorry about the heat wringing him dry: otherwise, he could've whipped it out and written his own name across the steaming metal. He'd never liked Gaff.
The other person in the office inhaled, exhaled smoke; the slowly pivoting fan smeared it into blue haze. "If whiskey were water, you could've swam to China by now." A thin smile moved behind the cigarette.
"Tell you what. You can help save me. From drowning." He brought the second glass from the drawer, set it beside his own, filled it; he watched as the other person drew it back beyond the desk lamp's reach. "It's a bad habit to drink alone."
"Then you should try to keep your friends longer."
"I never had any." Bryant's turn to smile, all nicotine teeth and too-bright eyes. "Just the poor bastards who work for me." Another fiery swallow. "And blade runners are too far along the Curve to be anybody's friend."
A smile even colder than his. "That's their excuse, too."
He looked away from the other, toward the pitched blinds covering the office's windows. Through their narrow apertures — not the L.A. night, stifling in airless heat — the darker spaces of the police station's ground floor were visible. When he'd come back from the funeral, thirsting and radiating contempt for the department's goddamn primitive blood rituals — When I buy it, he'd fiercely mused, they can just throw what's left of me in the dumpsters out back — he'd walked by members of the elite squads, tall and sweatless in their jackboots and black-polished gear. He'd felt like a rumpled bug next to them, their hard-edged gaze setting a needle's point between his shoulder blades. Pinned beneath the contempt of the fiercely beautiful, he'd scuttled into the decaying security of his office and moved his drinking schedule up an hour's notch.
Goddamn stormtroopers — they were all gone now, black leather angels drawn upward through the police station's spiral of floors by the setting sun. In this season the dry winds rolling over the horizon brought the night temperature down to the mid-nineties; that was low enough for the city's life to creep out of its holes, and the patrol units to fan out across the sky. To watch and descend…
"It was raining then." Bryant murmured the words against the rim of his glass. "I remember…" L.A.'s monsoons, the storm chain across the Pacific, Bangkok its terminal link. Memory flash like ball lightning: he could see himself turning back toward the spinner as diluted blood threaded into the gutters, leaving that poor bastard standing there. The watchcam's tape had caught his words: Drink some for me, pal. That was his standard advice to everyone.
There'd been somebody else watching as well, across the street, the rain a shifting curtain before her. He'd glanced in the spinner's mirror and sighted her; he could've had Gaff turn the spinner around; he could've gone back and killed her himself. But he hadn't. He'd wanted Deckard to do it.
That'd been a long time ago, when it'd been raining. "Not that long…" A whisper, as he set the empty glass down on the desk. His vision shifted from memory to the dim, high-ceilinged space beyond the blinds. Abandoned now, locked down, sealed tight…
Another thought troubled Bryant, an itch inside his skull. He swiveled the chair around. "How did you get in here?"
"There are ways." The person in the shadows regarded the glass held in one hand. "There are always ways. You know that."
"Yeah, I guess so." It'd been the wrong question. "But why? Why'd you come here? I never expected to see you here again."
"I brought you something."
He watched as the glass, its contents barely sipped, was set down beside his own. The other person leaned back in the chair, reaching inside the jacket and bringing out a handful of black metal. His breath stopped in his throat when he saw what it was.
There wasn't time for another breath. The shot echoed in the office, loud enough to clatter the blinds' knife edges against each other.
The bullet struck his heart full-on, lifting him from his chair, splaying his arms, stretching his throat taut as his head snapped backward. He saw a red spatter write over the acoustic tiles' map of stained islands.
What a surprise, thought Bryant. The chair toppled over, spilling him onto the office's floor, where he marveled at this new darkness that washed over him. The last seconds of consciousness became elastic, stretched out as he'd always been told they would. But I should've… I should've known…
He saw the other's face float above him, making sure that he was dead. Or as good as. A yellow scrap of paper, with something that had once seemed important on it, drifted against his numbed fingertips.
The blinds had stopped rattling, the shot's echo fading in the empty reaches of the police station. From far away, Bryant heard the office door pulled open, the other's footsteps departing.
His mouth welled with blood he couldn't swallow. His last thought was that he wished he could shout, to call after the one who was already gone…
So he could say how truly grateful he was.
2
A razor of light
cut the sky.
Deckard looked up through the interlaced branches, the dense weave of the forest. In silence; whatever had left the hair-thin wound in the night, fire leaking through, was too far away to hear. He tracked its progress beneath the stars' cold points: from south to north, banking east. From L.A., then; where else?
The long spark faded, leaving a red trail more inside his own eye than in the upper atmosphere. He kept looking, head tilted back, as he knelt down to scoop more of the fallen wood into the bundle he already held against his chest. Whoever was up there had throttled the engines back from long- to short-range; that was why the light streak had cut off so abruptly. The spinner could descend anywhere within a hundred kilometers from this point.
Getting one arm around the bundle, he stood up, turning slowly and listening, though he knew the vehicle would be right on top of him before he heard it. With his other hand, he reached inside his jacket and touched the grip of the gun he found there.
Silence, except for the smaller creatures that crept through the mat of dead leaves and pine needles beneath his feet. Once more, he glanced at the bare night sky, then began the slow uphill trudge toward the cabin.
"Honey, I'm home."
It was a bad joke; the silence inside was the same as out. Why don't you put the gun to your head? That'd be just as funny. He pushed the plank door closed with his heel, and dumped the bundle into the corner by the rusting stove. He'd let the fire go out hours back; while he'd slept, his exhaled breath had formed ice on the one small window. He'd uncurled himself from the nest of blankets on the floor — he always slept next to the black coffin, as though he could wrap his arm around her shoulders and bring her close to himself, hold her without killing her, merge his wordless dreaming with hers while the clock hands scraped away the last minutes of her life.
But instead he slept alone except for his own hand pressed against the machine's cold metal, as though he could feel through the layers of microcircuitry the glaciated pulse of her heart, hear the sighing breaths that took hours to complete…
Once, nearly a year ago, he'd pulled the cabin's rickety wooden chair beside the coffin, sat and watched the imperceptible motion of her breast, rising with the microscopic pace of her oxygen intake. Holding himself as still as possible, leaning forward with his chin braced against his doubled fists, so he could detect through the coffin's glass lid the slow workings of her semilife. When he'd sat back, one full cycle of her respiration later, shadows had filled both the room and the hollow space between his lungs…
He got the fire in the stove lit, adjusted the dampers, and stood up. For a moment he warmed his hands, spine hunched inside the long coat that had served him well enough in the city but was completely inadequate up here. He rubbed the forest's chill from his bloodless fingers, then glanced over his shoulder. She was still sleeping, and dying, as he'd left her. As she would be until he woke her up, not with a kiss, but a minute adjustment inside the coffin's control panel.
"There — " He spoke aloud. "That's better." Not to hear his own voice in the silence, but to remember hers. What it had sounded like. What it would sound like, the next time. On the window glass the crystals of ice melted into cold tears.
"Let's see how you're doing." Yeah, you're a riot, all right. His hands had unstiffened enough that he could take care of her, the only way that was left to him. He knelt down beside the black coffin, the way he had in front of the woodstove; the pair of low trestles that he'd hammered together raised the device off the cabin's unswept floor. With his fingernail he pried back the panel's edge. "Running a little high on the metabolics.." He'd become so familiar with the workings, the revealed gauges and readouts, that he could monitor them without bringing over the kerosene lantern from the table. "It's all right," he murmured. As though leaning down in absolute darkness to find a kiss. "I'll take care of them for you." With one fingertip, he brought the LED numbers to what they should be, then closed the panel.
On the wall above the coffin, he'd hung a calendar that'd been left behind by the cabin's previous occupants, whoever they'd been. When he and Rachael had come to this place, there hadn't even been spiders in the ancient webs along the ceiling. The calendar was way out-of-date, two decades old, a faded holo shot of the millennium's celebratory riots in New York's Times Square. It didn't matter; all he used it for was to mark off the days, the interval that the still-rational part of his head had ordained, until the next time he'd wake her up.
At first it'd been every month, her long sleep broken for a full day, twenty-fours of conscious life, time together. Real time; everything else was waiting, for him even more than her. At least she could sleep through her dying. He didn't have even that luxury.
Now it was every two months, for twelve hours. A decision they'd made together, the grim economy of her death. No, he thought. Mine.
He stood back up. The calendar's numbers, black beneath the X's he'd scrawled with a half-charred scrap from the woodstove, stood in neat graveyard rows on the curling page. Two and a half weeks until the next time they could be together.
Restless, he walked outside the cabin again. In the narrow cathedral of trees he touched the gun inside his jacket. And wondered why he didn't just end it now.
"I know what's on your mind." A voice spoke from behind him.
He felt another's hand touch his shoulder. He didn't dare look around. Because he knew the voice.
Her voice.
"I bet you do," replied Deckard. Weariness swept over him, a last defeat. He'd hoped he'd be dead before he got to the point where he began to hallucinate. In the moon's shadows the small creatures scurried away through the dead leaves, as though in holy dread. "Since you're just something inside my head, anyway."
"Am I?" A soft whisper, as he felt the hand — her hand — brush the side of his neck. "How do you know?"
He sighed. This would be the absolute dead end of his luck, to wind up arguing logic with his own hallucinations. "Because," he said, still not turning around. "Because you sound just like Rachael. And she's already lying in her coffin, as good as dead."
"Then look at me. You don't have to be afraid."
The hand's touch dropped away from his neck. He turned, slowly, first bringing his gaze around. To see her; to complete the hallucination. He saw Rachael standing there beside him in the darkness, her skin paled beyond death by the moon's partial spectrum. Her dark hair was swept back, the precise arrangement he remembered from the first time he had ever seen her, in another life, a world far and different from this one; the way she had worn her hair then, walking across the deep-shadowed spaces of the Tyrell Corporation's offices.
"What do you see?" she asked.
"I see you, Rachael. That's how I know I've lost it. My mind." Grief and loneliness had won, had walked through and left open all the small doors inside his head, the doors torn from their hinges. So that there were no divisions anymore, between what he wished for and what he perceived. "This is what's called being insane," he told the image he saw standing before him. "I don't care. You win."
A sad smile lifted a corner of the image's mouth. The image of the woman he loved. "Is there no possibility?" The image of Rachael touched his hand, fingertips cold against his skin. "That I could be real?"
"Oh, sure." The thought didn't cheer him. "I could be screwing up some other way." His eyes and other senses lying to him, traitor thoughts. "Maybe you really are here — but where I lost it was back in the cabin, when I was taking care of you. I thought I kept the controls set for you to go on sleeping — but maybe that's where I was hallucinating." A theory good as any. "Maybe I really set it so you'd wake up again. And you did, and here you are." He found himself wishing it were true. That she had woken up in the empty cabin, bound her hair the way she used to wear it, then came and found him out here in the dark. "It'd be nice if you were real. We could stay out here and look at the stars… all night long." He took her hand in his. "But… che gelida manina." He used to pick that one out by ear on
the piano in his flat, back in L.A.; everybody's first opera tune. " 'Your little hand is frozen.' "
"Don't bother translating. I know the words." A hard edge crept under her voice. "And I don't mind the cold."
"Yeah, well, maybe that's one of the advantages of being dead. Or close to. Everything gets put into perspective." He dropped her hand and reached back inside his coat. The lump of metal was as cold as her fingers had been, real or hallucinated. He couldn't keep his own voice from sounding bitter. "We got a date, then. If we don't freeze to death out here, when the sun comes up we can review our options." Deckard extracted the gun and held it out, flat on his palm, toward her. He spoke the words that had been silent in his head before. "Why wait?"
"You poor, stupid son of a bitch. You're pathetic." She slapped the gun from his hand, sending it spinning into the darkness. "Why do you blade runners always wind up so ready to off yourselves?" The voice's edge sharpened to a withering contempt.
The gun was lost somewhere in the forest's mat of rotting leaves. So she must be real, he thought. He would never have gone so crazy as to have thrown the gun away himself. You lost your final option if you did that.
"It's the Curve." He looked back around at her. "What they call the Wambaugh Curve. That's why. You land far enough along it, and you start thinking suicide's a good idea. Unless you got a reason not to."
"Cop mysticism. Spare me." She shook her head. "You were burned out a long time ago." She peered more closely at him. "So what was your reason?"
"You were, Rachael." The absent gun still seemed to weigh against his chest. "Even before I met you."
"How sweet." She reached up and laid her hand against his cheek; if he'd turned his head only slightly, he could've kissed her palm. "Come on — " She drew the hand away. "Let's go up to the cabin." Walking toward the distant yellow spot of the lamp, she glanced over her shoulder and the furlike collar of her coat. "Oh… and you're wrong, by the way. I'm not Rachael."