Replicant Night

by K. W. Jeter

  "It doesn't work that way, Miss Tyrell. It can't."

  "Why not?" Still plaintive, still hoping, though she knew what the answer would be.

  "We all have to subordinate our desires-and our fears-to the greater work." The true-believer tone sounded in Wycliffe's voice again, low and fervent. "For the sake of that which is larger than all of us. For the sake of the Tyrell Corporation. So that it can be once again. As it was. And as it always shall be."

  She supposed she could tell them the truth. For all the good it would do-she could tell them that it had been her, the culmination of all her planning and scheming, her unsubordinated desires, that had reduced the Tyrell Corporation to ashy ruins. They'd either believe her or they wouldn't. And it would make no difference. Everything would happen the way it had to, the way it had been laid out by a dead man. How did I think, she wondered, how did I ever think I could kill him? When Eldon Tyrell was still alive inside her head and in the past that never ended? And there, where they're taking me...

  "Don't worry," came Wycliffe's voice. She couldn't see him, or the map, or the faux tapestries hung on the ship's bulkheads. Her eyes had filled with tears, a child's tears. One fell onto the paper ocean and seeped away, with any others that might have struck there, long ago. "Please don't worry, Miss Tyrell." He was trying to be soothing, to give some small comfort, all that was possible. "We'll be there with you. You can count on us."

  "Thanks." Sarah meant it, without guile or sarcasm. "That means a lot to me."

  They left her, with the map still unfolded on the reproduction bureau plat. Wiping her eyes clear, Sarah stood for a while longer, looking at it and not seeing it. Then she went back to the wing chair and curled up in its protection, legs tucked beneath her. She laid her head against the upholstered angle beside her. At some point, while the yacht moved on toward its destination, to that place where the waters rolled over the deeply buried past, she slept. And dreamed, and remembered...

  Which were exactly the same thing.

  6

  "Patience was never much of a virtue with you, Deckard." The briefcase sat surrounded by moldering rubble, scummed coffee cups, stubs of ersatz tobacco disintegrating within. "I don't know how you ever got to be a cop. You act cold-you always did-but you know what? You're not."

  "I'll take that as a compliment." Deckard reached for the brown glass. "If you'll spare me any more crap."

  The briefcase laughed. "That's how you should take it. Since there aren't going to be any others. Compliments, I mean. You look like hell, Deckard. I don't even have eyes, and I can tell that. I can hear it in your voice. The ravages of a guilty conscience, I suppose."

  Deckard shrugged. "I wouldn't have killed you, except I had to." Another sip. "You were trying to kill me, remember?"

  "Oh, that. Forget about it," said Batty's voice. "These things happen.

  Besides, it was poor old Holden who fired the shot; technically, he gets the credit for the hit. The department may even have given him a bonus for taking me out- he never told me for sure, though. Hard guy to get to know. Even when he's toting you around by the handle. Genuine cold."

  "Even colder now."

  "Yeah..." The briefcase emitted a sigh. "Poor bastard. And him walking around with that latest heart-and-lung implant, all that cranking machinery, that the LAPD surgeons had put inside him..." Batty's voice went silent for a moment, then came back, softer and musing. "You know, I was starting to feel a little sympathy for Holden before he got iced back there at Outer Hollywood. Sort of a kinship, if you know what I mean. Here I am, stuck in this box-implanted, right? inside a device-and Holden had a box inside his chest stuffed full of little gizmos. Keeping him alive, the same way this one does for me, sort of. So what was the essential difference?"

  Deckard didn't even bother to shrug. "None," he said. "That I can think of. Especially since you're both working for the LAPD. Or were, in Holden's case."

  "Pardon me?" Batty's voice kicked back up in volume. "What the hell did you say?"

  "Come on." Anger more than alcohol unleashed Deckard's tongue. "Let's not screw around, all right? I didn't carry you back here all the way from Outer Hollywood just so you could feed me a line of bullshit. This is a police operation- what else could it be? I've seen these box jobs before; this is how the department preserves anybody who's been iced before they've finished extracting information from him. Standard operating procedure-the department's tech surgeons scrape up the body, the way they must've scraped you up from that broken-up old freeway where I left you, they do a deep core retrieval from whatever cellular activity is left in the brain and spine, then download it into a storage unit. Like this briefcase you're sitting in."

  "Then I wouldn't be working for the department, would I?" Batty's voice tightened. "Since these box jobs, as you call them, are something they do to people who've been offed by the cops."

  "Cops get 'em, too," said Deckard wearily. "Killed in the line of duty-especially if it happens to investigators or detectives who didn't get a chance to make a report before they took a bullet. It's even happened to a few blade runners. Just part of the hazards of the job."

  "You'd better get your head straightened out, Deckard." The personality and mind implanted inside the briefcase audibly bristled. "First thing, jettison the notion that I'm part of some LAPD operation. I'm not, and neither was Dave Holden."

  "Oh?" Deckard tapped the edge of the glass. "What happened? He quit the force?"

  "That's exactly right. He walked."

  Deckard snorted. "Hard to believe."

  "Why? You did the same. Once."

  "That was different."

  "You give yourself too much credit, Deckard." Batty's voice sneered at him. "For uniqueness. Think you're the only ex-cop who got that way from a bad conscience?"

  Deckard nodded, even though he knew the briefcase couldn't see him. "The only one I ever knew."

  "That's because you were always such a loner. If you blade runners had ever hung out together, instead of always scheming against each other in department politics, you might've had a chance."

  Deckard said nothing. The voice coming out of the briefcase had touched a nerve, a line into his memory and all that had happened back in L.A. He'd told himself that he wasn't going to think about that stuff anymore, that there wasn't any point to it. The whole anti-blade runner conspiracy riff that he'd gotten wind of from Holden and Batty when he'd still been walking around as a human being. All of which might have been true, with conspiracies wrapped inside larger ones, legions of endless night...

  He didn't care. Not anymore; he'd had his fill, even before he'd been sucked into Sarah Tyrell's private conspiracy, her queen-and-pawns maneuvering, all to destroy the Tyrell Corporation, everything that her hated uncle had created. Eldon Tyrell's works turned to ashes, his memory locked inside that dark space inside Sarah's skull, where she was still a child and he was the king of the only world she knew. Deckard had had a glimpse in there, and he didn't want to see any more. Enough that Sarah's vengeance-driven scheming had robbed him as well, of those last carefully measured hours he could have spent with Rachael. The real Rachael, or as much real as any replicant could be. Which as far as Deckard was concerned, was more real than the human original could be; even when Sarah had tried to pass herself off as Rachael, he had known the truth before she had slipped up, long before the emigrant ship had left Earth. That Rachael was already dead, and that Sarah could never be her, even though she was identical in every way but one. And that one thing wasn't part of her, but was located inside him, so deep she could never reach it.

  "These are things you need to deal with, Deckard."

  Batty's words had broken the course of his thoughts; it took him a moment to adjust. "What things?"

  "If there's still an operational conspiracy against the blade runners, then your ass is still on the line. You can't hide. Your cover's blown. Everybody knows where you are. How do you think Holden and I were able to track you down so easily?"


  "Big deal." Deckard shrugged. "You had contacts. Probably with the video people-that Urbenton guy. When they had the video ready for release, they were planning on doing a whole publicity trip that they'd had me signed on as technical adviser during the taping. That's what they were paying me for. My name. So it wasn't going to be a secret for very long. Holden must've caught a leak from the production, that's all."

  "A couple of minutes ago," the briefcase said dryly, "you were figuring that Holden must've still been working for the LAPD. You really think that the department gets its information from camera operators who can't keep their mouths shut? Come on-you know they don't work that way. Admit it-this has got all the smell of high-level spookiness."

  "Maybe."

  "No 'maybe' about it, Deckard." Batty's voice tightened, wirelike. "You know it already. Holden wasn't LAPD, at least not when he showed up there at Outer Hollywood. He was as quit as you are. That's why you took me when you left the station to come back to this rattrap. If you'd really thought that I was part of a police operation of any kind, you would've booted this fine-quality briefcase right out of the skiff's waste chute somewhere in transit. I'd be talking to myself out in the cold, cold vacuum right now. At least until my batteries ran down."

  He's right, thought Deckard. That mind, with all of its mercenary hit man sharps, was still there, intact. Batty, boxed or not, could read right into his soul and see what was written there.

  "I was curious." Deckard could hear his own flat, defensive words. "I just wanted to see what this whole game was about. That's why I took you with me."

  "Yeah, right. And risk having me turn out to be a homing device, so the authorities could track where you went as soon as you left the station? You could pull my other leg, if I had any."

  "All right ... all right." For a long moment, Deckard remained silent, then reached for the glass. He held it to his mouth but didn't drink, only inhaled the acrid fumes. Then he pushed the chair back and stood up, carrying the glass to the sink and pouring it out. The brown liquid sluiced through the scabbed dishes and down the reluctant drain.

  He couldn't afford to go under the alcohol tide, not now. He'd brought something else back with him, besides the briefcase. Fear; the unease gnawing at his synapses, the twitch of rigid neck muscle and crawl of prickling skin, the mute awareness of something closing in on him, its teeth not yet revealed. That sense had begun rising along his spine as he'd looked down at the corpse of Dave Holden at his feet...

  "Go ahead," Deckard said as he sat back down. He'd carried the briefcase here, hoping for answers. "I'll accept that you're not part of some police operation. So start talking. Who sent you?"

  "Who sent me?" The one-cornered smile returned to Batty's voice. "Or who sent Holden?"

  "The two of you." Deckard leaned back in the chair, legs sprawled under the table. "Together-your little buddy team. If it wasn't LAPD . . . I can't figure it being the U.N. Their security agencies wouldn't bother tracking me down at the Outer Hollywood station. They'd nail me here. Everything on Mars is a U.N. operation, except for the cable monopoly, and they're in each other's pockets."

  "Work on it, Deckard. Who else out there has got an interest in replicants and the people who go around hunting them down?"

  "The replicants themselves." He shrugged. "That's all."

  "The only problem with that theory," said the briefcase, "is that replicants-escaped replicants, especially, on the run- they don't have any resources. They're just hiding out, staying low for as long as they can, trying to keep alive. What kind of operation could they put together? You think they could've managed to get me scraped off that freeway wall where you left me, get my cerebral contents transferred into this thing, and send Holden out to deliver me to you?"

  "Probably not."

  "You got that one right. But there are others, aren't there? Others who are, shall we say, concerned about the replicants and what happens to them. Concerned in ways besides just wanting to kill them off. For Christ's sake, Deckard, you ran into them yourself, back in L.A. You must have."

  "All right, I know who you're talking about." Deckard gave a dismissive gesture with one hand. "The sympathizers. The rep-symps." He shook his head. "You gotta be joking, Batty. That bunch of losers? Street corner evangelists... tub thumpers."

  "There's more to them," said Batty, "than just that."

  "Sure-some of them are loose-cannon terrorists. Getting themselves blown away by the police-for what? For the sake of shooting down some obnoxious U.N. advertising blimp?" Deckard had seen that for himself when he'd been on the run in L.A's maze of streets. His first exposure to the rep-symp phenomenon; he'd heard more about them since then. "So these head cases can dig up a few military surplus mortar rounds and hit a floating viewscreen. I'm not impressed."

  "Stop being such a dumb cop." The voice turned harsher. "Get with the program, Deckard. The rep-symps you saw on the street-the screamers, the terrorists, the religious types out in the sideways zone-those are all the fringe elements. The fact that you see those people running around at all should've told you something. It should've been the tip-off that there would be others that you don't see, ones whose brains aren't cracked. Ones who've got their agenda going in a whole different way. You ran into one of those as well-that guy Isidore at the Van Nuys Pet Hospital."

  "Yeah, I remember him. But he was a loner, a one-man operation-"

  "That's what you think. For Christ's sake, Deckard, use your head." Disgust tinged Batty's voice. "Isidore was working right in the center of L.A., disguising escaped replicants as humans-disguising them so well that your big-deal blade runner unit didn't have a chance of catching them-and he was getting away with it. If your girlfriend Sarah Tyrell hadn't sent her pet hit man out to take care of him, Isidore would still be in operation."

  The girlfriend crack nettled Deckard, but he kept himself from rising to the bait. "That doesn't prove Isidore wasn't working alone. Or that he had some kind of high-level connections covering his ass." Deckard shrugged. "Maybe he was just lucky-or at least he was until the end."

  For a few seconds, the briefcase was silent; then it emitted a low, mocking fragment of laughter. "Come on, Deckard- there's no such thing as luck. If something happens, it's for a reason. If Isidore was getting away with disguising replicants as human, and he was doing it right in the face of the LAPD, you can bet he had some powerful friends on his side. People who're just as concerned about what happens to escaped replicants as Isidore was." Batty's smile threaded through his voice again. "People ... maybe . . . who are right there in the police department itself."

  "They'd have to be." Deckard wished he hadn't poured his drink into the sink; now he felt like he could use it. The way his old boss Bryant had used booze shots, both for himself and anybody he'd brief in his shabby, dust-smelling office. To fuzz the edges of reality a bit, just enough to let new, spooky possibilities come sneaking into everyone's cortex. "The repsymps, huh?"

  "You got it." The voice emerged from the briefcase with a note of triumph. "The replicant sympathizers aren't just a few isolated crackpots sparking off their remaining brain cells. They've penetrated every level of government-right into the police force itself. They may not be the only conspiracy going on, but the rep-symps are in there pitching."

  "Something doesn't add up." Deckard laid one hand flat on the table. "The replicants who've managed to escape and get to Earth-if Isidore and his whole Van Nuys Pet Hospital operation, if it was so good at disguising replicants as human, so they couldn't be detected even with Voigt-Kampff machines-why would it be just the rep-symps who are looking out for their interests? Why wouldn't the replicants themselves be in on all these high-level conspiracies? If they can pass as human, they should be able to infiltrate the police department as well as anybody else."

  "The replicants are in on the conspiracies." Batty spoke with simple matter-of-factness. "The rep-symps-the important ones-and the replicants are in constant communication with each other. But not on Earth
. There's things going on in the outer colonies, out in the stars, that hardly anyone on Earth knows about-because the U.N. and the police don't want them to know."

  "Like what?" The hand, fingers spread, remained motionless on the table.

  "Rebellion. Slaves against masters. What else? History always repeats itself-it had to happen, given the way humans have treated the replicants out there."

  "How bad is it? The rebellion, I mean. If there really is one going on."

  "Depends upon whether you're a replicant or a human colonist." The smile in Batty's voice turned even more unpleasant. "Let's just say that the humans may have the guns, but the replicants-they've got the numbers."

  Deckard found the last remark unimpressive. "Numbers don't mean anything. Except the number of bullets needed."

  "Come on," chided the briefcase. "Why should you be so skeptical? You blind or something? Look around-you know what the situation is around here. You and all the rest of the would-be emigrants-you're bottled up here like ants in a Mason jar. Why do you think no one's been allowed to travel on and outward in the last half a dozen years? The U.N. just keeps stacking people up in these hovels, letting them go stim-crazy, eating themselves up out of sheer fucking boredom. The clamp's on, the bottleneck's there, because the U.N. can't let emigrants go on to the outer colonies. The replicants control the territory. Otherwise, the U.N. would just go ahead and shoot you and all the rest of the wanna-be emigrants out there, let you take the consequences. Which would be death. And why would the U.N. care about that?" The briefcase's voice indicated another invisible shrug. "The whole point of the emigration plan is to get people off Earth-if they wind up corpses in the process, that's no big deal."

  There would be another advantage, as well, that Deckard could see. We wouldn't talk, he thought. Not if we were all dead. In that way, the replicants, the rebellion, would still be doing the U.N's work for it. Slaughtered emigrants wouldn't be getting any word back to Earth, to families or strangers, about what had gone wrong with all the big plans for humanity's future out in the stars. Better to have corpses littering the alien turf rather than disgruntled returnees coming back and letting everyone know that their promised slaves had gotten murderously uppity.