Replicant Night

by K. W. Jeter

  "You should've thought of it yourself," muttered Zwingli. "The fact you didn't-that says a lot."

  "Precisely." Lanky, black-sleeved arms folded themselves across Wycliffe's chest. "This smacks of avoidance on your part. Which seems odd, given your rather obvious antipathy toward your uncle."

  "You know ... you might be right." Sarah slowly nodded. It just goes to show, she thought. You can never hate some people enough. There was always more.

  She looked away from the two die-hard loyalists and back toward the dark waters mirroring the steel-clouded sky. The answers were there, beneath the small waves that lapped across the stones toward her feet.

  Her uncle hadn't been able to suppress everything. The past remained, captured and bottled and buried away from the light. Waiting for her.

  "All right," Sarah said aloud. "I'll go down there. And see what I find."

  "Thank you, Miss Tyrell." The voice came from behind her; she didn't know which of them it was. "That's all we're asking of you."

  As if that weren't enough. She tugged the fur-collared coat closer around herself, futilely trying to ward off the cold winds.

  8

  "I've seen you around here before," said the man inside the booth. The ramshackle stall, tucked into one of the darkest corners of the emigrant colony's convoluted marketplace, surrounded him like a scuttling sea creature's protective carapace. "Coming and going, on your little mundane, unimportant errands. The things that you thought were so important. But now you've seen the light."

  There would have been a time for Deckard, back when he'd been a cop in L.A., when he would've reached across the space between this person and himself and grabbed the guy's throat and squeezed until veins had stood out like twisting blue snakes. Right now, he let it go.

  "Kind of in a hurry," said Deckard. Behind him, he could feel the crush and push of the dense paths and de facto alleyways, the tight presence of other human bodies that always tripped a memory flash of that distant city. "Maybe you could just sell me what I need-what I came here for-and we could skip the conversation."

  "You think it's as easy as that? Shows what you know." The man behind the counter had fierce eyes set in deep circles of black, as though his contemplation of the divine was slowly blinding him to any other world. "You come to your senses and decide to go looking for that which you should've sought all along-it's not going to be a 'kind of in a hurry' process. Narrow is the gate, and long and hard the road beyond it. You don't buy grace, you earn it."

  The temptation of his old police ways tingled again in Deckard's hands. He glanced for a moment back over his shoulder; there were too many people here, too many watching eyes, for him to throttle the man into submission. He couldn't risk alerting the colony's authorities about what he was trying to do; the place was crawling with snitches and narks. He'd left the briefcase sitting on the kitchen-area table back at the hovel, there being no place to hide it that anyone else couldn't have found in five minutes' worth of tearing the flimsy structure to bits. The nagging voice, coming from the briefcase, had told him to fetch the necessary items as fast as possible; even the disembodied Batty felt the time pressure clamping down on them.

  Just my luck, thought Deckard. This particular booth in the marketplace appeared to be the only one trafficking in dehydrated deities at the moment. Every other time he'd shoved his shoulder-first way through the crowd, there had seemed to be dozens of the technically illegal but officially tolerated outlets. Another glance around, to the limit of what could be seen under the banks of dead or jittering fluorescents, showed gaps in the merchant stalls, the tiny businesses shut down, eliminated, and not yet replaced by the next wave of hustling or evangelism. The emigrant colony's police force, or the larger and more efficient squads of the cable monopoly's rent-a-cops, must have swept through in the last couple of days-either to restore public decency or, more likely, to keep their captive audience hooked to the video wire rather than fuguing off into religious visionary trips.

  Maybe this low-level entrepreneur had upped his mordida, his payoff bribe, before the hammer had come down. Or else he'd brewed up the contents of a packet from his stock and had been lights-out under the stall's counter, walking and talking with some Old Testament prophet or bo tree-sitting with a wide-faced Buddha, and had conveniently missed all the action.

  "Look-" The cheap fiberboard flexed beneath Deckard's hands as he leaned toward the other man's face. "I really don't have a lot of time. Not in this world or the next." He kept his voice low, using a quick nod to indicate the packets fastened to the stall's interior. They were all the same small, flat rectangular shape as the one he'd found inside the talking briefcase; they varied in color, from monochrome to shimmering, eye-aching full-spectrum assaults. "But if you're selling, I'm buying. Got it?"

  Before the merchant could reply-he'd backed up a step from Deckard on the other side of the counter, sensing at least the possibility of violence-another customer came up. A wraithlike figure, all starvation eyes and scab-picked shivering flesh, arose trembling at Deckard's elbow. "Do you..." A mouth studded with a few cracked and yellow teeth, beneath unattended running nostrils, quivered open. "Do you have any more of the ... the New Orthodox West Coast Fundamentalists?" The emaciated figure struggled to bring his scattered thoughts to words. "Specifically ... the Reformed Huffington Rite? The Santa Barbara branch?"

  "Get out of here. You mooch." The stallkeeper glared at the creature. "This is a cash-only business. Nothing on credit. Not that I'd ever have given you any."

  "I got money! Look!" A grubby fist unfolded, revealing wadded paper with pictures of famous dead people. "Not even scrip-real money!" The supplicant voice rose in pitch, a sympathetic vibration shivering the ragged man's body. "I can pay!"

  Grumbling subaudibly, the stallkeeper turned, pawed through the thin packets stapled behind him, pulled one off, and slapped it on the counter. Distaste curled the corners of his mouth as he sorted out the grease-impregnated bills and octagonal coins. "You're a dollar short," announced the stallkeeper, as though that pleased him more than a simple sale would have. He snatched the packet away as the ragged man's shaking fingers reached for it.

  "For Christ's sake-" Deckard reached into his own pocket and dug out a bill from his dwindling stash. He flicked it into the stallkeeper's hollow chest. "Give the guy what he wants, and let him get out of here." Worth it, just to get things moving.

  A second later, the wraith had fled back into the churning crowd, the packet clutched to the visible bones beneath his throat. "All right," said the stallkeeper, turning his dark-ringed eyes back toward Deckard. All pretense of religious feeling had been stripped away, leaving the pure mercantile entity beneath. "What do you want? Buy it now and get what you can out of it, before you wind up like that asshole."

  "It's not what I want." Deckard pulled out the rest of his money, enough to evoke a swift glance of interest from the other man. "It's what I need."

  "Let me guess." In another life, another world, the person inside the stall could have been a tailor; the tape measure was at the center of his empty pupils. "Pentecostal? Got a wide selection here." He gestured at the packets surrounding him. "You'll have to supply your own snakes, or at least have 'em inside your brain, if you want to get into that Southern Degenerate thing." A shake of the stallkeeper's head. "Naw- you don't look the type to have even that much fun. Nothing Jewish line, either; you'd know how to deal with guilt, if that was the case. No d say Heavy Calvinist. You look like you're into predestination. Badly so." The man gave an ugly, knowing smile. "Like Weber said: 'Forced to follow his path alone to meet a destiny which had been decreed for him from eternity.'"

  Deckard knew the rest of the quote. "'No one could help him.'" He nodded. "From The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism."

  "Good for you. I should give an educated man a discount, but . . . we've really got the spirit of capitalism here." The man fingered a couple of packets at the side of the stall. "How about Dutch Reformed? Th
at should be a severe-enough God for you. Give you a good price-I'm trying to move this stock before it goes stale."

  "No, thanks." Deckard shook his head. "I don't need anything like that." Got enough of that kind of shit already, he thought to himself, without acquiring any more. "No packets. I just need the supplies. Couple quarts colloidal suspension fluid, calibrated beaker, inert glass rod. That's all."

  The stallkeeper gave him a hard look, eyes narrowed. "You got your deity already? The one you're going to use?" He didn't wait for an answer. "If you're going with some back-alley, home brew pile of dust, you're asking for trouble, man."

  "Think so, huh?" Deckard let a partial smile show as he gazed around at the stall's wares. "This stuff you're peddling doesn't exactly look like it's FDA approved."

  "Hey. There's standards in this business." The stallkeeper drew back, offended. "I'm here, and my competition's not, because I sell quality. I've got customers right up at the top, man, the very top. I go in the front door of the cable offices, I've got merchandise sticking out of my jacket pockets, and the guards don't even blink."

  "I bet," said Deckard. It explained a lot. "Did you have a good time getting your competition cleared out of the marketplace?"

  "Loved it, pal. Made my day." The stalikeeper's deep-set eyes glittered. "And just to show what a nice guy I am, I only jacked up my prices ten percent. But for you, because you're such an asshole, it's twenty." He reached beneath the stall's counter and fetched out a plastic gallon jug; the contents sloshed in a slow gelatinous wave as he set it down. The beaker and glass rod were slapped down beside the container. "There you go, sport. Knock yourself out. You want to see God on some low-rent basis, it's your head's funeral, not mine."

  A minute later, his roll lighter-Deckard had never bought this kind of stuff before, so he didn't know whether he was getting absolutely screwed or not-he turned away from the stall, purchases hugged to his chest. Before he could bull his way into the crowd, the merchant called after him.

  "Hey-" The man held up a creased, much-used paper bag. "Don't be an idiot and just go walking with it where everybody can see. The next millennium hasn't arrived yet, pal."

  The briefcase harangued Deckard as soon as he walked in the door of the hovel. "Did you get it?" Batty's voice drilled insistent at his ear. "Did you get everything I told you to get?"

  Deckard set the bag on the table next to the briefcase. "I'm not so screwed up I can't handle a three-item shopping list." He pulled out the plastic jug and the other objects. "This is what you asked for, this is what I got."

  "Anybody see you?"

  He laughed. "Hundreds. Thousands. Not exactly a depopulated zone around here."

  "Come on." The briefcase sounded annoyed. "You know what I mean. Cops, the police, the authorities. People who shouldn't have seen you. Not if you want to take care of business without being interrupted."

  "We're all right-for the time being." Deckard didn't know if that was true or not. And didn't care. In some ways, it would be a relief if the hovel's front door were suddenly broken down by jackbooted storm troopers from the deepest basements of either the cable monopoly or the U.N's diplomatic headquarters. Then he wouldn't have to go ahead with what he'd already told the briefcase he would. "Don't sweat it. You're not the one who has to worry about what happens."

  "Only because the worst already has." Batty's voice prodded at him. "Let's get going."

  He'd already gotten his instructions, the measuring and pouring and mixing involved in the process, from the briefcase. The colloidal suspension poured out like transparent molasses, heavy and glistening. He thinned it out with a half cup of water from the kitchen tap, stirring the results with the glass rod. A reddish tinge, rust from the emigrant colony's decaying pipes, mingled with the faint ionic discharge of the colloid's activation.

  All through the back alleys and in the surrounding hovels, as well as in the crowded cities back on Earth, the same preparations were being made, all the differing communicants readying their sacraments, assembling the doorways through which they would pass to meet the God they had chosen. Back in L.A., Deckard had never been attracted to the whole dehydrated deity underground, or repelled by it, either; he'd developed enough cop glaze to favorably regard anything that kept the citizens off the streets, tucked away in their little rooms or dorm cribs, bodily inert while their central nervous systems were off in the ozone, walking with the King. Less trouble generated that way-usually; some of them came back with the light of fanaticism in their eyes, ready for a private jihad on anything that crossed their paths. Those types never got very far; religious obsessives- at least the murderous kind-did everything in public and found a snipered martyrdom preferable to reloading their own weapons. That was the kind of thing that made L.A. police work easy, even enjoyable at times.

  Deckard tapped the glass rod on the rim of the calibrated beaker. Already, as the less-viscous fluid settled, the flakes of rust were precipitating out, drifting to the bottom of the container like some obscure precious metal.

  From somewhere on the edge of his consciousness, Batty's voice intruded. "Nothing happens," the briefcase said dryly, "if you just sit there looking at it. The rest is in the little packet."

  "Right." Deckard picked up the thin rectangular shape, the same as yet different from the ones at the marketplace stall. The one word, the name SEBASTIAN, in large block letters-Not much of a clue there, he thought again. Or even instructions. "What, do I just dump the whole thing in?"

  "Christ, no." The briefcase emitted an exasperated sigh. "Not unless you're mixing for a party or something-and then you'd need a beaker a lot larger than that; maybe a bathtub or something. No-you throw the whole packet in what you got there, you'll be at a toxic level. It'd strip the catecholamines out of your brain so fast-burn out all the neural receptor sites along the way as well-you'd wind up a vegetable. At least in this world; no way of telling where you'd be on the other side."

  "You sound like you believe in this kind of thing. Like it's true."

  "I don't believe," replied Batty. "I know. At least enough not to screw around. The rep-symps back down on Earth, the same ones who scraped me off that freeway where you left me and put me in this box . . . those people know what they're doing. They may be visionaries, but they still know what's going on. They wouldn't have put that packet inside me, and told me to lay it on you, if there weren't some serious force majeure to it."

  As with most things this version of Batty said, that one made sense as well. A lot of effort had been expended, with corpses attached, to get the briefcase and its contents here, in Deckard's hands. Even if his old partner, Dave Holden, hadn't gone through some big crisis of conscience, hadn't had the change of heart that would've put him working with the rep-symps-there wasn't any way that someone like that would have signed up on a pure chump mission. No matter what side he'd been on.

  "You know..." Deckard reached over to the packet on the table and picked it up between thumb and forefinger. "I'm taking an awful lot here on trust."

  "What choice do you have? It's like that old Chinese proverb: Safety is on the shore, but the pearl is in the ocean." A silent shrug. "You want answers, you have to go somewhere to find them. You're just lucky-you're holding that somewhere in your hand."

  Deckard didn't feel lucky. He wasn't sure he'd recognize the sensation, if it ever happened to him. You want answers? That was what the briefcase had promised him; that had been the whole reason for his little shopping expedition out to the colony's illicit marketplace. So he could come back here to the hovel he called home-as much as he'd ever called any place home, even back in L.A-and mix up a small batch of the dehydrated deity in the packet. The one with Sebastian's name on it.

  He asked what he had asked Batty before. "Why would Sebastian-if it's really him inside here-why would he know the answers?" Deckard remembered the little wizened genetic engineer as a decrepit childlike creature with no more control over his destiny than he had over his own rapidly aging bod
y. The last time he had seen Sebastian in the flesh, major parts of it had already been lost, limbs amputated in the attempt to keep the core functions going. Too bad, mused Deckard, that he couldn't take the knife and cut the stupid bits out of his heart as well. The poor little truncated bastard had been in love with Pris, or the remains of her, and hadn't even been aware that she wasn't a replicant, but a human the same as him, only crazier. Sebastian had set up housekeeping, out in the sideways zone at the edge of L.A., with the animated corpse he'd adored-and then he'd had even that much happiness taken away from him. A loser like that-a loser by fate, written right down into his own genetic code- didn't sound like a very promising candidate for deity status. "What the hell," asked Deckard aloud, "could somebody like that have figured out?"

  "I don't know." Batty's reply was a flat, simple statement. "I've never been in there ... where you're going. Those pocket universes, that whole dehydrated deity trip-I never did any of that, and now I can't. Not possible in my present condition. The activated colloidal suspensions only interface with organic human nervous systems. Leaves me out." The briefcase laughed. "Hey, I'd love to go in there myself, rather than counting on you. But as it is, you've got the only ticket."

  "All right," said Deckard. "Whatever." Thinking about fate, whatever Sebastian's had been, left him resigned to his own. He might as well get this stage-even if it was the final one-over with. "Let's do it."

  The Sebastian packet was still in Deckard's hand. He rapped the edge a couple of times against the table, to make sure the contents were all at the bottom, then tore the upper edge open.

  Batty must have heard the sound of ripping paper. "About a teaspoonful should suffice."

  Spoons he'd had already; Deckard rinsed one off in the kitchen sink and brought it back to the table. He measured out what the briefcase had instructed him to, then folded down the top of the packet.

  The powder in the spoon smelled like yeast, though he knew it wasn't. When it hit the watered-down fluid in the beaker, the minute grains sparked off more luminous ions; the faint blue light tinged his hand as he picked up the glass rod and stirred.