Edge Of Human b-2

by K. W. Jeter

  "If you really want my opinion, I'd say you should rethink just what it is you're going for," he said. "This martyrdom thing, and all." Sebastian wished that he and his companions had just circled around the fires and continued on their way, instead of poking their noses in here. "I just don't see where it gets you anything." Except in your crackpot heads, he thought to himself. "Bringing the heat down on yourselves is not something you should care to have happen. Or any kind of bad shit. Suffering's not all that great; believe me, I should know."

  The assembled people glanced at one another. Significant glances, indicating a measure of worry about the strangers that had wandered into their midst.

  "Listen to me." Sebastian heard his own voice, louder and more fervent. As though he were the one testifying now. "I know what I'm talking about. Suffering sucks. I just lost the woman I love-again, for the second time. She was shot right in front of me. And she was a replicant, too; or at least she'd been one-'

  The bearded leader peered closer at him. "Yes," he said after a moment's inspection, during which Colonel Fuzzy had hissed and drawn back. "I can see that you speak the truth." He laid a wrinkled, cordite-smelling hand on top of Sebastian's head. "You have the aspect of the blessed about you. Suffering has given you that. You are nearly human, yourself."

  "Well… thanks. I guess." What the hell was this old doozer talking about?

  "But there is more for you to suffer." The leader raised his hand in a gesture of benediction. "For you to complete your journey."

  "Rats." He didn't even know where he was going.

  "Come with me. I have something to give you."

  Mounted on the back of the teddy bear, Sebastian followed after the old man. Squeaker trailed behind, glancing over his shoulder at the other people, his elongated nose twitching with suspicion.

  "You can't stay with us." At the flickering limit of the fires' glow, the old man rummaged through a duffel bag he'd drawn out of a military-surplus canvas tent. "You have your own destiny. But this might help you. It's a holy relic." He turned and laid a rectangular object in Sebastian's hand.

  Something metal, lightweight aluminum, with a few dents and scratches, indicators of age. Smaller things, of metal and possibly glass, rattled inside as Sebastian turned it around. He held it up so the faint orangish light hit it. On the box's lid was a prominent mark in the form of a red cross. "It's a first-aid kit." That could be helpful, actually; he didn't have one in the supplies they'd dragged along with them.

  "Look closer."

  He did, nose almost touching the metal. Smaller words, stamped into the surface. Sebastian spelled them out. "Salamander… no, that's not right." Sebastian squinted. "Salander. That's it. Salander 3." He supposed it was the name of the ship that the kit had come from. It sounded vaguely familiar. Maybe a star ship, one of the old explorer types that'd gone out past the limits of the solar system.

  The old man nodded. "I was there… when it came back to us. Bearing its message. Written in the eyes of its dead." The grey-streaked beard lifted from the front of the jumpsuit, as he raised his eyes to the night sky. "They were the first to know. What all shall know someday. They traveled, and returned. They saw. And brought back the message…"

  "What message?"

  For a moment, it seemed as if the leader hadn't heard him. "Of our damnation," he spoke at last. "Or our salvation." He turned a wan smile on the figures before him. "We're still not quite sure yet."

  Maybe you should work on that, thought Sebastian. He didn't look up at the old man, but concentrated on fiddling with the metal box.

  "There is one who knows…" The bearded leader's voice drifted into deep musing. "One who should know, who must know… but may not even know that she does."

  "That doesn't sound too smart." The box's catch was rusted tight; Sebastian frowned at it.

  "She was but a child," the old man spoke softly, "when the revelations were made. A child in the stars, a little girl… poor thing." He shook his head. "The things she must have seen, that she could not understand. Perhaps it was best that she couldn't. Her mother and her father… I helped carry their coffins from the ship. They died from too much knowledge. Too much of the light."

  "Knowledge, huh?" Sebastian wedged the box against the rim of the papoose carrier and jabbed his thumb at it. "What about?"

  "That way in which things change, in which they become other than what they were." The old man lifted his rheumy gaze toward the sky. "That which was human shall not be. And that which was not…" His voice sank to a whisper, before he turned and looked again at Sebastian with a wan smile. "It's all very confusing. Perhaps she will remember one day… those things she saw as a child. The revelations. That which she has forgotten. And then she will tell us of them."

  Sebastian didn't bother asking who she might be. He had finally managed to pry the first-aid kit's lid open. The various little bottles and ampules, simple disinfectants and antibiotics, looked dried-up and innocuous; he supposed there wasn't much risk in carrying the thing around. And he didn't want to hurt the old man's feelings. "Um, thanks." He snapped the lid shut and held up the box. "For this, and all."

  "Go in peace."

  Back where they had left their things, he had Squeaker stow the box away in the wrapped-up supplies. The repsymps' distant fires had died down, leaving Squeaker to redo the bungee cords by starlight.

  And not much of it. Sebastian looked up and saw the blunt fingers of silver-tinged clouds moving eastward. He wondered what that meant.

  15

  "I'll need transportation." Deckard tilted his head toward the vehicle they'd left on the Tyrell Corporation's landing deck. "Your spinner will do."

  "All right." Sarah gave him a knowledgeable smile. "After all.. you can't just go walking around on the streets, can you? As we've learned."

  He turned away from the view of the city's lights spread out below the headquarters complex. "You're the one who put me out there. You knew that was what that Isidore person would do." He studied her reaction. "I can't figure out why you'd want that to happen."

  Her smile deepened. "Let's just say that we both learned something. That we might not have, otherwise. You survived, didn't you? So now I can be certain that finding our missing replicant won't be beyond you." Sarah's manner became brusque, businesslike. "Go ahead and take the spinner-I figured you'd need it, so I had it… prepared for you. Don't try to leave, to get out of the city. That wouldn't be advisable. The spinner has a perimeter choke. A circle with its center here." She didn't need to make a gesture; Deckard knew she meant the Tyrell Corporation headquarters itself. "Try going farther and you'll get a red warning light on the instrument panel. Keep going, and you'll fall from the sky in little flaming pieces."

  It had been pretty much what he'd expected. Why should she trust him? A small, irrational hope flicked off inside him. If the spinner had had no spatial limit, he would've hotfooted it straight north. To Rachael, sleeping and dying and waiting for him. Screw L.A. and Sarah Tyrell and any missing sixth replicant.

  "Don't worry," said Deckard. "I'll return all your company property to you in good shape. Except for the sixth replicant. It might be a little beat-up when I dump it at your feet."

  "Really?" She raised an eyebrow. "I'm glad to see you showing such

  … enthusiasm for your job." Sarah turned away and began walking toward the elevator that would carry her down into the corporation's bowels. She stopped and glanced over her shoulder. "I'll be waiting. I had you coded through the security systems. So you can come straight in… when you're ready."

  He called after her. "Is that it? I thought you wanted to talk about something."

  "Please…" She pressed the control and the silvery doors parted. "Let me have a few pretenses, Deckard. I just wanted to see you. That's all." Sarah stepped inside the elevator and with the palm of her hand kept its doors from closing. "You were on my mind. Perhaps I just wanted to find out if I were on yours." She pulled her hand away; the doors slid shut, and
she was gone.

  A moment later Deckard traversed the night sky, the bright pinprick carpet of the city's lights rolling below him. To either side, police spinners shot by on their own errands, either not picking him up on their radars or getting a VIP readout on their computer screens high enough to keep them sailing past.

  The city's towers were well behind him. Deckard looked out the side of the spinner's cockpit and down, and saw darkness, more complete than the cloud-mottled sky. The sideways world, with its fallen buildings and edge-tipped empty freeway, seemed to be within the spinner's circle. That made it easier; he still needed some place where he could pull his act together, think everything through-as he'd been doing before Sarah Tyrell had shown up and spirited him away, for no good reason other than to lay the spinner on him. Off in the distance, a red glow shone, a flickering apparition; somewhere else in the zone, a fire apparently had broken out.

  Just beyond the knife blade of steel and concrete that ran a diagonal through the sideways world was the familiar aspect of the safe-house apartment's toppled building. He brought the spinner down low, hovering and then descending vertical into the small cleared space beside it. Once he'd gotten out, boots crunching into the cement fragments and bits of rusted metal that constituted the zone's surface layer, he activated all the spinner's security devices, sealing the cockpit down tight. Parts scavengers were always active at this dark hour, along with randomly motivated vandal types; he didn't want to come back out here and find his transportation stripped. He pocketed the small remote that Sarah had given him, and headed into the unlit apartment building.

  The safe-house apartment still smelled like death, an odor that connected with receptors off the olfactory net. A reverse seepage into the walls, like electrical service shut off for failure to pay the bill. That was more or less what'd happened to Pris; not even retired, that bad-faith euphemism, but forcibly unplugged. All the batteries removed, or a new one put in the socket above her eyes, a cold shiny one that sucked up pseudo-life rather than bestowing it. That image weighed on Deckard's thoughts; it made him feel as if he'd spent his whole blade runner career as more of a sinister electrician than anything else.

  Former blade runner, he reminded himself as he straightened back up after ducking beneath the apartment's front doorway. That hadn't changed, despite his having been recruited for one more job. He reached behind himself and lifted the door closed. The resistance to becoming a murderer again was even more final than when Bryant had put the pressure on him. Plus there wasn't a big open-ended prospect ahead, of searching and killing and searching and killing, until he'd gone through the whole list of escaped replicants. There was only the one to deal with. And I already know, thought Deckard, standing still to let his eyes adjust to the darkness. Who it is.

  He stepped through the apartment, hand outstretched to find any of the generator-powered lights. That little geek Sebastian and his friends. had moved everything around; Deckard supposed they had as much right to do it as anyone. He halted, as the sound of something beside his own breathing and stumbling progress hit his ears.

  "You make this too easy." He recognized the voice-it hadn't been that long ago-but had no chance to reply. Another sound, that of something hard and narrow whipping through the air; he doubled over in pain when the object hit him in the gut. Another poke knocked him off his feet.

  The lights came on. He found himself, as he gasped for breath, looking up at Dave Holden, standing above him, the leg from the kitchen table in his hands. "Goddamn it…" Deckard managed to squeeze the words out. "What the hell… was that for…"

  "That was for jerking me around for so long." Holden put the end of the table leg against Deckard's shoulder, pinning him back down to the wall beneath. "Not just the last time I was out here talking to you, but all the times before as well." He jabbed the table leg harder. "You must've been laughing your ass off, when I walked out of here before."

  Getting onto his knees, Deckard knocked the table leg away with the back of his hand. "I don't know what the hell you're talking about."

  "Oh? You will." Taking a step backward, Holden called out over his shoulder. "Hey, come on out here. I've had my fun." He brought his smug gaze around to Deckard. "This is going to trip you out, buddy. A real blast from your past."

  As he stood up, Deckard could hear someone else emerging from the farther sections of the safe-house apartment. That could be a problem, dealing with two people; he would've been able to take Holden, with or without the table leg between them. His ex-partner looked as frail as he'd had during their last confrontation, with the bio-mechanical heart in his chest audibly clicking and laboring to perform its functions. Whoever it was that'd come out here with Holden, the person had given him a shot of confidence; smiling, Holden threw away his crude but minimally effective weapon.

  "Say hello." Holden tilted his head toward the doorway at the other side of the room. "I think you know each other. In a way, at least."

  Deckard glanced away from him, in the direction indicated…

  And felt the world drop out from beneath himself.

  "Jesus Christ-" A shock wave of adrenaline pulsed through him, drawing his spine rigid. Deckard's startled brain spun gearless for a moment.

  Ducking underneath the side of the door, a dead thing stepped through, finishing the zipping up of his fly. "Visitors always come around, you know, when you're indisposed." Roy Batty straightened up and flashed his manic smile, eyes bright. "Hey, it's good to see you, too."

  "No…" He took an involuntary step away from the smiling, hands reaching behind himself for balance. "You're dead… I know it. I saw it happen…" An entire memory reel fast-forwarded through his head, a jumble of water sluicing blood over rusted metal, then a scruffy white pigeon, a winged city rat, climbing into the sky from hands that had fallen open and would never close upon anything again. "You're dead, Batty…

  "Well, yes and no." Batty's image-Deckard wasn't sure yet whether it was real or an hallucination-gave a judicious shrug. "A copy of me is dead-hell, lots of copies are-but I'm not. The original has proven to be somewhat more durable."

  "That's the truth, Deckard," With his hands free of the table leg, Holden had dug into his jacket pocket and come up with the same gun he'd had before. "Or at least I think it is. For the time being. This guy's the templant for all the Roy Batty replicants. Including the one you met up with before."

  The explanation made sense, of a sort. Looking closer at the figure standing before him, Deckard could see that the man appeared older than the one that existed in his own memory banks. Both bio- and chronologically older, hands bonier, a little loose flesh around the tendons of his neck, lines that came with the passage of time set into his face. A Batty replicant would never have reached this stage; the built-in limitation of a four-year life span precluded it. Unless-he supposed it was a possibility-something had been done to prolong its existence past that hard cutoff point.

  Whether the Roy Batty in the tilted room was human or not-that wasn't something he was worried about now. The shark of again seeing that smiling face had passed. What concerned him was the gun in Holden's hand, and the cooperative air between the two men.

  "What's the deal?" He looked from one to the other. "I have a feeling you didn't come out here just to say hello."

  "That's the truth as well." Holden kept the gun pointed at him. "We're taking you in, Deckard. We're going to hand you over at the police station downtown."

  "On what? Administrative charges?" If these two didn't know about Pris having been human, and his being tagged for her murder, he wasn't going to tell them. He couldn't believe that these two loose cannons were in on the LAPD loop; maybe they could be bluffed. "So I made unauthorized use of a department spinner when I split town-that's not a hanging offense. They can reimburse themselves out of the money I left in the pension plan."

  "Can the bullshit." Holden shook his head in evident disgust. "Replicants don't have 401-k's."

  "What're you talking a
bout?"

  The two men shared glances and a smile between them, then looked back at Deckard.

  "You're a replicant. You know it, and now we know it. Retirement for you is a whole different sort of thing."

  "Actually, Roy, I'm not entirely sure how we should proceed here." With his free hand, Holden scratched his chin. "Why are we bothering to talk with this schmuck? He's a replicant-we've already established that-so why don't we just ice him now? We can drag his dead carcass into the station just as easily. Easier, as a matter of fact."

  "Don't be stupid." Batty looked annoyed. "It's not just that he's an escaped replicant here on Earth. He's the only lead we've got on the conspiracy against the blade runner unit. If we snuff him before we can shake him down for what he knows, how're we going to find out who was behind setting you up, and killing Bryant, and all the rest of that stuff?"

  "Oh, yeah. Right…" Holden appeared confused, his gaze wandering to some abstract point near the apartment's uppermost wall. His face and throat had drained white, as though whatever repair work the doctors might have done on him was now beginning to come apart. "Wait a minute."

  "We can't even take him in to the station until we find out more shit." Even more insistent, Batty's voice prodded the other. "We have to find out who in the police is tied up in this. Otherwise, we could be walking into there and handing him right over to the people he's been working with. Then they'd ice our asses."

  "I said, wait…" With his trembling, upraised hand, Holden tried to ward off the other's arguments.

  Deckard looked from one to the other. Geriatrics, he realized. Like having been captured by a mobile wing of the nearest old folks' home. "You people are completely screwed up." He took a quick couple of steps and picked up the wooden table leg that Holden had tossed aside. Before the other man could react, he turned around and knocked the gun from his hand. The partial impact was enough to send the enfeebled Holden sprawling.