Edge Of Human b-2

by K. W. Jeter

  "Very nice." Sarah spoke from behind him. He glanced over his shoulder and saw her leaning back against the bedroom wall, arms folded across her breasts, a judgmental smile. "Is this the man I fell in love with? The other I, that is. Rachael. Is this the way she first saw you?"

  "I don't know. Maybe she did." He picked up the last of the things he'd taken out of the closet. "Maybe she didn't see anything at all. Just a cop." His hands worked the rough wool necktie under his collar, then started fumbling the knot together. He could feel Sarah watching him. "Why did you come here?"

  She regarded him for a moment. "I thought I should check up on you. Deckard. See how you were doing."

  That was the problem with working for other people. She probably wanted the head of her sixth replicant on a stick. "How'd you find this place?"

  "It was easy. Your old friend Holden-he has a nice new heart-and-lung set pumping away inside his chest. The unit was manufactured by one of the Tyrell Corporation's medical subsidiaries; there's a lot of crossover work between manufacturing replicants and human prosthetics." A smile. "We knew for whom that particular one was intended. They're all custom jobs; they have to be. So a miniature transmitter was put in it, way down inside where the valves go clickityclick. Anywhere Dave Holden goes, we know about it. I know about it. That's all that matters. That's why I wasn't worried about being able to find you again. No matter where you got to. I figured Holden would always be able to find you. Blade runners know each other, don't they? Your minds work the same way."

  "Maybe," said Deckard. "Up to a certain point. But I didn't go with him-did I? He had business with me, too. An offer; like being partners again. But I didn't pick up on it."

  "Why not?"

  "Nothing I was interested in. Besides-" A shrug. "I already have a job."

  "Oh?" Sarah raised an eyebrow. "I appreciate your loyalty. But then… you're motivated. Aren't you?"

  Something caught his eye. He turned his gaze away from her and saw that it was the broken mirror inside what had been the apartment's bathroom. He could see his own splintered, fragmented reflection, an image that'd been cut up, pieces scrambled together, then sorted out and poorly reassembled.

  His brooding was interrupted by a sudden noise, a hissing intake of breath, pitched high and loud enough to be a cry of dismay. At the same time, something grabbed his arm, two hands squeezing tight into the heavier fabric of the coat's sleeve. He looked beside him and saw Sarah, drawing behind him as though for protection, an expression of loathing and disgust on her face.

  "What the hell is that?" She took one of her hands away from his arm and pointed.

  In the bedroom doorway, the rectangular opening turned on its side, crouched Pris. Or what remained of her, what her lover Sebastian had been able to salvage. The emaciated figure, flensed to the bare minimum inside the ragged leotard, balanced itself with one bony hand against the door frame; the red eyes, dots of fire beneath the uncontrolled shock of white hair, had already scanned across the bedroom space. And fastened onto the other female creature held by it.

  "Don't worry." Deckard watched as the Pris-thing unfolded itself spiderlike into the bedroom. "It won't hurt you." The head stayed low, the stare of the red eyes sweeping to either side as it cautiously advanced, as though looking for any possible threat, before returning to Sarah.

  "You're right about that." Her other hand let go of his arm, and she began rummaging in the deep pockets of her own coat for something.

  "Pris! Pris!" Sebastian's piping voice echoed down the hallway outside. "Don't go in there! Leave those folks alone-"

  Beside him, Sarah raised her arms, both hands locked together. He saw what she had pulled out of her coat, the black metal filling her doubled grip.

  At the same time the Pris-thing rose up in front of Sarah, spine telescoping like a machine rearing into place. The hissing breath changed into a gasp of wondering surprise, eyes widening to reveal more of the fiery lenses inside the skull. A trembling arm, a skeletal hand reaching its white fingertips toward the face of the woman, drawn back by instinctive aversion. Its mouth opened wider, a word, a name, struggling to bridge some fragile synapse and emerge onto the rattling leather tongue…

  He tried to stop Sarah, to grab her arm and pull it away, but he was too late. The smallest motion of one of her fingers was all that was required. The recoil pulsed through her braced stance, pushing her back against his side for a moment. Muzzle flash eclipsed the Pris-thing's ravaged face, only inches away from the black hole at the end of the gun. Even before the afterimage had begun to fade from his sight, he could see the lightweight creature hoisted by the bullet's impact, desiccated splinters spraying from the shattered cheekbones and brow, the spinal column arching into a bow as its shoulders were flung back onto a bed of empty air.

  In the doorway, Sebastian screamed. His single hand and forearm had lifted him higher onto the back of the teddy bear, so he'd been able to see everything that'd happened. The toy soldier shoved past the bear, then stood rooted in place, eyes and nose following the Pris-thing's trajectory as it slammed into the angle of two walls.

  Nausea rose in Deckard's throat. The last time Pris had died, when he had killed her, the body with its ripped-open gut had flopped and spasmed on the floor, shrieking not so much with pain as with the release of the fierce energy unspent. This time around, the twice-dead Pris lay crumpled like a rag doll, torso folded at the hinge of the lower back, disjointed hands sprawled behind, head bowed forward as though to reveal the red fissure beneath the albino golliwog hair. The red eyes had already dimmed to black dots, any remaining battery cells shorted out.

  "You didn't have to do that." The nausea had mutated to a heavy sadness, a stone in his chest, as he'd watched Sebastian crawl from the back of the kneeling teddy bear toward the broken corpse.

  Sarah turned a level gaze at him. "Yes, I did."

  On the other side of the room, Sebastian had reached the dead thing, had gathered it into the embrace of his single arm, and now rocked back and forth with it. Tears ran along the wrinkles of his face as an anguished keening issued from low in his throat. One of the teddy bear's paws stroked Sebastian's shoulder in a futile effort at comforting him. The toy soldier completed the pieta arrangement, the point of its antique helmet bending low over the corpse's blood-spattered feet.

  Deckard crossed the room and looked down at the other man. "Can you…" He gestured at the body. "You know… put her back together?"

  "Don't be stupid-" Sebastian gulped back his sobs, enough to speak. "Look. Her brain… it's all tore up. I can't fix that. Nobody can." He leaned the side of his face against what remained of hers. "She's dead. All dead." His tears mingled with her drying blood. A blind gaze swept across the room, a spark of red showing far inside the unfocused eyes. The corpse's clawlike fingers scrabbled at the wall beneath, as though some residual life force had dribbled out of one of its batteries.

  "How touching." Sarah's voice, her cold words. Glancing over his shoulder, Deckard saw her returning the dark bulk of the gun to her coat pocket. "Perhaps now we could get back to business."

  He stood in front of her. "It recognized you. Didn't it?" He peered into her eyes, as though trying to catch some betraying response without benefit of a Voigt-Kampff machine. "What was that about? When it saw you, it knew who you were."

  "I doubt it." No blush response, no flutter of the pupil. "It probably thought I was Rachael. It must've thought it had spotted another replicant like itself."

  No. Like she'd thought herself to be. He'd started to correct Sarah, to remind her of what she already knew-that Pris had been human-but had stopped himself from speaking. The distinctions were blurring again. He'd killed, murdered a human being named Pris, who'd convinced herself that she was a replicant; if he'd had a chance to run the empathy tests on her, she probably would've failed them. What had she been after Sebastian had kept a spark going in her addled brain, made her capable of moving again? Alive or dead, human or replicant? He didn't know.
He supposed he had arrived at that state Isidore had talked about, back at the Van Nuys Pet Hospital. Of not even being able to see the difference anymore.

  Other thoughts remained unspoken, barely formed. If it'd been Rachael, not Sarah, that the Pris-thing had recognized… where would that have been from? Maybe some memory of the assembly line at the Tyrell Corporation's headquarters, all the Nexus-6 models, the Prisses and the Zhoras and the Roy Battys, all warehoused together before being shipped off-world. That was wrong, he knew immediately; there had never been any Pris model replicants. Only in her mind. Maybe it'd been out there, thought Deckard, in the U.N. colonies. Maybe Pris had managed to convince other human beings that she was a replicant, and had served time along with a Rachael model in a sanctioned military brothel. The image made him squeeze his eyes shut tight, as though he could blot it out from his own brain. It might not be true, anyway; hadn't Sarah told him that Rachael hadn't been a production model, but a one-off, a single creation for Eldon Tyrell's purposes? She could've been lying about that; there was no way of knowing…

  Out of the darkness behind his eyelids, a memory flash. Not that long ago — I saw her. He saw her again now, the face in the rep train, that other darkness beneath the central police station. Huddled with the other replieants, the discards of the industrial process that had created them. Weeping with a terror that'd had no way of expressing itself except the trembling of her naked shoulders, the tears leaking salt into the corners of her mouth. So there were others like her, like Rachael. There had to be. If what he'd seen was true, and not just some fevered vision drawn from his own exhaustion and fear.

  "So what's it going to be, Deckard?" A knife or Sarah's voice. "Shall we talk?"

  He opened his eyes. And looked at her. Or at Rachael, or the one who had wept behind the locked gates of the rep train's rattling freight car. The memory overlays faded, one veil after another. Until he saw clearly again.

  "No…" A sigh, indicator of the weariness that had wrapped itself around him again. "I don't have time. I've got a job to do." Behind him, he sensed Sebastian's and the others' presence, the various living and not-living forms, the dead tucked close in its lover's embrace. "We don't have anything to talk about."

  "You're wrong. We have everything to talk about. At last." She regarded him with the same fiat, level gaze. "I'm trying to make it easier for you, Deckard. I want you to come with me, right now. Outside, to my spinner. As charming as the hospitality here has been, I'd really prefer to have our little discussion elsewhere."

  "Why should I?"

  "Because you don't have a choice." Head tilted against her coat's fur collar, Sarah Tyrell regarded him. "You come with me now, or I leave by myself. And I notify the police of where you're hiding out. I could do it from the phone in the spinner-it wouldn't be more than a few minutes until they got here." She glanced at the figures on the other side of the room. "I imagine they'll clean up the rest of this mess here as well."

  "Come on." He returned her gaze with distaste. "This poor bastard hasn't done anything."

  "That doesn't matter. He can be picked up and screwed with until he might as well be guilty. You know how it works, Deckard; you've done the same. Of course, if you don't want that to happen…

  She had him, and he knew it. The time when he would've been able to tell her to go to hell, when the threat of bad shit happening to other people wouldn't have mattered to him that was long past. She's trading on that fact, thought Deckard. He could almost admire the accuracy of her perception. She knew that he'd already become less of a blade runner… and more of a human being. Which made him, to her, more exploitable.

  "All right." He glanced over at Sebastian, then decided against saying anything to him. There wasn't anything. He thrust his hands deep into the pockets of the long coat. "Let's go."

  Holden had rummaged through the freight spinner's cockpit until he'd found what he wanted, needed, had known would be there. The gun had been the first find, and the best; it'd come in handy talking with that idiot bastard Deckard.

  I should've killed him, thought Holden. Right then and there. That had been his original intention; disgust at what a pussy Deckard was being had overwhelmed him, though. Plus, there'd been others inside the safe-house apartment, like that sawed-off Sebastian, riding around on the back of his wind-up teddy bear. Who knew whether the little basket case might be packing something? Holden shook his head; he knew he'd still have to be extra cautious, at least until he got his full strength back.

  And his regular gun. The one he'd found in the freight spinner was all right for now. It was smaller and didn't weigh as much as the big black cannon that served as standard blade runner equipment. Which was a good thing; he'd started to feel a little weak and breathless, as though the implanted heart-and-lungs set was crapping out under the load he'd been putting it through. All this running around, adrenaline jazz, couldn't be good for a man in his condition. His old gun would've pulled him over like an anvil strapped to his shoulders.

  The other handy thing he'd found, underneath the pilot's seat, was a pair of Zeiss binoculars with resolution-enhanced optic-feedback circuits. The help screens at the upper right corner of the vision field had all been in German, but he'd still managed to get the device up and running. And focused on the toppled building that contained the safe-house apartment.

  Behind a low rise of concrete rubble, he'd stashed the freight spinner safely out of sight. Inside the apartment, his former partner Deckard probably thought he'd gone on, winging back into the center of L.A. His pissed-off-and-shouting behavior, that'd concluded their little conference, had been at least partially an act, designed to make Deckand believe that all he wanted to do was lay down as much distance as possible between the two of them. He wasn't through with Deckard yet, not by a long shot.' And from the looks of it, neither were some other people.

  No sooner had he gotten the freight spinner hidden than he'd spotted the next visitor. She must've been there all the time, waiting for me to leave — lying on his stomach, elbows braced against the ragged concrete edge, Holden trained the binoculars on the woman as she went into the sideways apartment building. Too late to get a glimpse of her face, but the sleek arrangement of her dark hair, and the fur coat-in this heat? It must've had one of those cryonic linings-all spoke of money. Like I'm surprised, he thought bitterly. It would be just like that weasel Deckard to have belatedly learned the art of selling out to the highest bidder.

  He'd searched through all the bins and equipment caches of the freight spinner's cockpit, looking for some kind of long-range microphone, something he could've used to eavesdrop on what was going on inside the safehouse apartment, but had come up empty-handed. It would've taken powerful, professional quality gear to get anything, he knew; when the place had been taken over for use by the blade runners, with no connection to the LAPD, they'd all chipped in to trick out the windows and exterior walls with sound-deadening insulation. So creeping up and laying his ear on the building wouldn't have done any good, either.

  They're up to something in there. Frustrated, Holden rolled onto his back, setting the binoculars on his chest and trying to get the mechanical heart's pulse back down by sheer force of will. It wasn't obliging. "Goddamn," he muttered aloud, glaring at the empty sky. He might've strained the equipment, perhaps irrevocably; he felt worse now than when he'd left the Reclamation Center out in the desert with Roy Batty. Miserable cheap gizmos-he wondered what bargain-basement gear the LAPD had requisitioned for cases like this. For all he knew that quack doctor-cum-garage mechanic had implanted a rusting tin can and a couple of balloons left over from some kid's birthday party.

  Taking deep breaths, he managed to get the black spots wandering in his sight-bad warning sign of anoxia, brain strangulation-to fade to grey and even disappear. Mostly. He turned back onto his elbows and swept the binoculars' view toward the other spinner, the one the woman, whoever she was, had arrived in. She'd left it in plain view on the other side of the apartment buil
ding.

  The bar code on the spinner's fuselage came into focus. He tripped the binoculars' reader function; a few seconds later the LED display flashed the minuscule words SECURED REGISTRATION; NO INFO AVAILABLE ON THIS VEHICLE. He wasn't surprised; a late-model, high-thrust job like this one had to belong to somebody who could buy the pull to keep it off the databases.

  Invariably a way; words of wisdom. Holden dialed in higher and higher rez levels, until he was looking right into the intake manifolds of the expensive after-market turbos that'd been mounted on the spinner. The sunlight slanted into the curved titanium mouths, just enough for the binoculars to pick out the manufacturer's serial numbers. Repeating the string to himself, he slithered back to the freight spinner and keyed up the control panel's computer. A moment later he had the info he'd wanted: the after-market gear had been purchased with the appropriate U.N. acquisition order by Ad Astra Transport Services. He didn't need to look them up; he knew that the company was the shipping wing of the Tyrell Corporation. Its logo, a tacky Soviet Realist image of a stylized male figure lifting a ribbon-tied package to an anonymous planetoid, was on the sides of all the container trucks taking sleep-frozen replicants to the San Pedro docks, for delivery to the off-world colonies.

  So, Tyrell… that's interesting. Holden tried to dredge up what he could from his own, pre-Kowalski memory banks. Eldon Tyrell was dead-Bryant had told him that while he'd been in the hospital, bubbling and gurgling away-but wasn't there a daughter or something, who would've been his heir? No, a niece: that was it. Maybe this was Ms. Tyrell, the new head of the replicant-manufacturing industry, who'd zipped out here in the company spinner to talk with Deckard. She'd known where Deckard was; so he must've gotten in touch with her and told her to meet him here, or she'd met him before. No way she would've been able to find the hiding place by herself.