Replicant Night

by K. W. Jeter

  "Hey!" The short, round video director grabbed at her arm, trying to pull her back. "You can't do that-"

  She shook Urbenton off and kept walking.

  The predictions had been right; the extraction procedure was happening so fast that Sarah managed to see only the last bit of action. She had no qualms about being around the U.N's elite squad members; they reminded her, in their wordless, cold-eyed efficiency, of some of the men who had worked for her when she took over the Tyrell Corporation. They set about their jobs, and did them, and then melted back into the shadows, minus whichever of their number had crossed over and become corpses.

  Standing in the bar's doorway, looking down the short flight of steps that led in, Sarah could see overturned tables and chairs, the few unnecessary figures of the other patrons shoved up and huddling against the walls, the ceiling-mounted video screens either smashed or still displaying the end sequence of Deckard's reenacted travails in Los Angeles. And at the far end of the space, the targets, the whole reason for her bargain with Urbenton and his backers.

  A last flurry, which she was able to witness over the dark-uniformed shoulders. Deckard, sitting at one side of a booth, had pulled a gun out of his jacket, the same weapon he had taken from her back at the hovel. Before he could level it and fire, the other man-she had been told he would be there, and for whom he was working-reached over and wrested the gun away from Deckard. The other man had a more urgent agenda, one that he had a chance of accomplishing; he emptied the gun's clip into the briefcase lying on the table. At that close range, the elongated bursts from the gun's muzzle touched the briefcase's imitation leather like quick tongues of fire; the heavy slugs ripped the briefcase into tattered shreds, suspended for a moment in the air beyond the table's edges. A cry, not of pain but furious rage, sounded from the fragments before they fell in twisting, charred scraps across the glass-littered floor.

  That was all that the man sitting across from Deckard accomplished. The U.N. troopers had their orders; the man was driven backward by the assault rifles' bullets, his chest shattered to the spine. Deckard had scrambled from the booth, reaching to grab the barrel of the nearest gun. The trooper expertly turned the rifle around, catching Deckard across the angle of the jaw, the hard blow sending him sprawling and unconscious. Another storm trooper reached into the booth and grasped the wrist of the little girl cowering there, then yanked her out into the open.

  The operation was over, silence filling the debris-strewn bar. "Let's go," said Urbenton, taking Sarah by the elbow and drawing her back from the doorway. "Nothing else is going to happen here." The troopers behind them swung their rifles, clearing a path to the ground vehicle that would take them out to the emigrant colony's landing field.

  "You should have killed him," Sarah said when she and the video director were back aboard the shadow corporation's yacht. She had kept her silence until then. "When you had the chance."

  "But that wasn't the deal we made." Urbenton glanced up at her, then returned to fussing with the intercom buttons on the lounge's desk. "You accepted my help-all the assistance we needed to pull this off-but you knew there were conditions attached. You should just be grateful that the authorities owed me a favor for going along with them on that video they just broadcast here."

  She sat back in the wing chair, her favorite one. "You sound like you're not even interested in having Deckard killed."

  "I'm not, particularly. I just think it'll make a great tape when it happens. A really neat show, even better than this last one I did." His broad fingertip jabbed at another button. "And I just want to rev up the image, that's all. The right set, the right feel it'll be wonderful." Another voice spoke up, unprompted by any of Urbenton's poking at the intercom controls. When it finished and clicked off, he turned toward Sarah. "That's it," he announced. "They've got the little girl aboard. We're ready to go."

  Finally, she thought. She could feel it deep inside herself, the end time coming at last. She didn't care if Urbenton and all the rest of them went on acting and talking as if they could also perceive her hallucinations; it didn't matter.

  She didn't even care which L.A. they were heading toward. Just as long as she knew that-soon enough-Deckard would be there as well.

  17

  He took the gun with him even though he knew that Marley had fired off every round that had been loaded inside it. The weapon might still come in handy, despite feeling so much lighter.

  "You're back here?" The man on the other side of the counter sneered at Deckard. "I thought you didn't care for our services. Figured we'd pretty much lost you as a customer."

  Deckard didn't feel like getting into another argument with the man; the last one, when he'd brought the skiff back to the rental yard upon his return from the Outer Hollywood station, had been pointless enough. He dug into his pocket and brought out all the cash he had, a hot sweaty clump of scrip, and dumped it on the counter. "Just give me the same one I had before," he said. "If it's fueled up and ready to go."

  Leaning his weight against the counter's front, Deckard didn't bother watching as the other man sorted through the bills. He felt tired and bruised, the physical aftermath of the attack on the bar where he'd been sitting and listening to the late Marley. The front of his jacket was still spotted with Marley's blood, memorial evidence of the assault rifle bullets that had poured into the booth. I got off light, thought Deckard as he looked down at himself. His jaw ached from the rifle butt blow he'd taken from the U.N. storm trooper; when he'd come to on the floor of the bar, it'd taken a few minutes for a spell of blurred double vision to clear, at least enough for him to stumble out onto the emigrant colony's streets.

  "You're short," announced the man behind the rental yard's counter. He stirred the bills about with his greasy forefinger. "There's not enough here for the deposit."

  Deckard brought himself up from his bleak thoughts and levelled his gaze at the man. "Then I'll take it on credit."

  The man's laugh barked out. "We don't do that."

  Wearily, Deckard sighed and reached inside his jacket. "Yes, you do." He placed the cold muzzle end of the gun against the man's forehead.

  A few minutes later, as the skiff was passing through the orbits of Phobos and Deimos-the rental yard man had told him to just keep the little craft, to not even bother returning-Deckard pressed his aching body back into the cockpit seat and assessed his situation. There's a limit to what you can do with an empty gun, he told himself. Especially since, where he was going, they would likely know that it was empty, that he was essentially unarmed. In some ways, it didn't even matter; he wasn't sure why he was going at all.

  Just to get killed-that was the likeliest answer to come to him. Could there be a better reason? Before he had lost consciousness, lying on the floor of the bar, Deckard had caught a glimpse of the figure standing in the doorway, past the U.N. storm troopers taking care of business. Even without that sighting, he would have known that Sarah Tyrell was the prime motivator of all that happened. A dramatic touch, typical of her; she might have arranged for the lighting to be as perfect as that, spilling past her into the bar's darkness, silhouetting her like some shadowed angel, merciless and unavoidable.

  One other glimpse, sighted as he had rolled onto his back, the last of his awareness pouring out through the hole that the rifle butt blow had knocked in his world-he had even reached up, a futile hand swamped by the black wave engulfing him. Reached up to stop the men pulling the Rachael child out of the booth, taking her away...

  That was all he had seen. The memory of it rushed through his aching skull as soon as he had been able to lift his head from the bar's floor. Deckard had brushed bits of glass from his face as he'd worked himself into a sitting position and looked around the empty space. He'd been alone, patrons and bartender having wisely fled. The presence of the dead had been with him, both in Marley's corpse, slumped across the blood-mired table, and the briefcase, torn to mute fragments. Deckard had prodded the largest remaining piece, a corner wi
th one lid-hinge still attached, and had gotten no response. Whatever part of Roy Batty, the human original, had been imbedded in the briefcase was gone now, dispersed to atoms as cold and fine as the white powder scattered irretrievably from the empty Sebastian packet. The walls of the bar had seemed to recede as Deckard had dropped the dead rubbish from his hands, as though the dimly lit space had grown as hollow as the one inside his chest.

  Before he had gotten to his feet, balancing himself with one hand against the booth's table, he had found one other thing in the wreckage. Obviously left for him, placed right at his fingertips-Deckard had reached down and picked up the white rectangle of a business card, flipping it over to see the words SPEED DEATH PRODUCTIONS and Urbenton's name below that.

  I'm doing just what they want me to, thought Deckard as he gazed out the skiff's cockpit at the stars wheeling by. The gears meshing around him were pushed by both the living and the dead, with no great distinction made between those categories. Even the dead Marley had conspired, in his way, to limit all possibilities for action to one inevitable line. Quick thinking on Marley's part: when the U.N. storm troopers had burst into the bar, he had used the gun to eliminate the briefcase itself, and thus any chance of Deckard's accomplishing the job he'd accepted. There'd be no carrying of Batty and whatever other information had been encoded into the box-Isidore's list of disguised replicants or memetic bomb; no telling now-to the insurgents in the outer colonies. Before he'd died, Marley might have had the comfort of knowing that his own job, the one of stopping Deckard's delivery of the briefcase, had been pulled off.

  Which left the teeth of the other gears. Sarah Tyrell and Urbenton, and the forces aligned with them, had correctly read Deckard's mind, had predicted what he would do when he regained consciousness and found both the Rachael child missing and the simple card indicating where she had gone. Urbenton's card; the only address on it was a contact point in care of the studios at the Outer Hollywood station. That was Urbenton's world, the one in which he comfortably operated. That was the destination to which Deckard had programmed the skiff, as inevitably as the tape unrolling on some distant video monitor.

  They knew he would come there, gun loaded or not, whether his chances of survival were at zero or any point above. Not just for the little girl, the child named Rachael, but for Sarah as well. Wherever she went, he would have to go there, inevitably. Her destiny had become so intertwined with his that there was no escaping. I should've killed her when I had the chance-Deckard gazed out of the cockpit without even seeing the stars. Too late for regrets now; he had waited too long, his hand stayed by memory of another woman's face, the one he had loved, identical in every aspect to Sarah. The great plan that he'd had, that he'd conceived all the way back on Earth so long ago, had been the excuse for not putting the muzzle of a gun against her temple and pulling the trigger. Deckard knew that now. I should've killed her, but I couldn't have.

  Things had changed, though; he wondered if they had changed enough. Maybe he could do it now, despite her mirror resemblance to the dead Rachael. If Ihave to, he decided at last. If that was what Sarah was counting on, his inability to kill anything that looked so much like the woman who had slept in a glass-lidded coffin and who now slept and woke only in the sealed chambers of his remembering, then she might have a surprise coming to her.

  They all might. In his hand, when he'd come to, had been the last thing that Marley had given him, the ancient photo that had been hidden inside the lid of the Salander 3 first aid kit. That photograph was now safely tucked inside his jacket. And in another compartment of his memory were Marley's words, explaining what the photograph showed, what the image meant . . . everything. As much as the others knew, the strings that Sarah and Urbenton and the ones behind them could pull, there were still some things that they didn't know. And that he did.

  Deckard laid his fingertips against the lapel of his jacket, feeling underneath the thin, still substance of the photo, warmed by his skin and pulse. He figured the time was coming, and soon enough; at the front of the cockpit, the miniature lunar sphere of the Outer Hollywood station was rapidly approaching. A ripple passed across the stars as the skiff's drive units modulated down into uncompressed space.

  The hissing of snakes was merely the station's docking gates sealing behind the skiff, followed by the cockpit unlatching. Deckard emerged from the craft into near-total darkness; a few LEDs glimmered on the control panel mounted on a nearby bulkhead, and the skiff's own running lights sent his blue-edged shadow merging with the emptiness.

  His footsteps rang against the metal flooring as he headed toward a faintly recalled passageway. No point in trying to conceal his presence or his movement toward the station's center; they knew he was here. Or not, depending upon whether anyone else was; the last time he'd been at Outer Hollywood, the girdered substructure had vibrated with the activity going on in the various soundstages and studios; the recirculated air had carried the subliminal molecules of the techs' and extras' sweat and exhaled breath. This time, as soon as Deckard had stepped down from the skiff, he'd perceived the station as empty and dead, as though abandoned by all the human and close-to-human forms that had been here before.

  He resisted the urge to call out, to attempt provoking a response. No need; reaching the limits of the station's landing dock, he laid his hand on the rim of the barely perceived doorway, and pseudo-life creaked into action. A beam of light flared on and swung toward him, striking him full in the face. Even as Deckard winced and shielded his eyes, another section of machinery stirred at his presence. He saw the glistening eye of a camera lens, suspended a few meters above, as it tracked and focussed upon him. The device's aperture irised farther open, then narrowed, as though the overlapping blades were biting down upon his curved reflection.

  A few more lights came on ahead of him, not enough to dispel the darkness, but sufficient to divide it into crescent shadows and blind corners. In the metal struts above, cameras flexed and shifted like roosting birds, control cables and video mix-down feeds looped like the tendrils of a black neoprene jungle. All the blank, glassy optics turned toward him, some drawing back for wide-angle shots, others zooming in close upon his face. In the closest ones, Deckard could see himself, his own eyes turned into yet smaller mirrors in which the station's tracking network could be discerned.

  Nothing human behind the lenses; he could sense that they were on automatic, programmed to find and lock upon him, recording every step he took. With idiot concentration, they performed their appointed task, their wide, obsessive eyes staring at Deckard in perfect, rapt silence.

  As he stepped onto the outskirts of the faux L.A. sets, picking his way over the tangles of cables and massive, banyanlike tripod legs, a rumbling sound came from the unlit reaches above his head. He looked up and saw neither stars nor clouds; the video cameras swiveled beneath an interlinked net of white PVC piping. The first drops of water struck Deckard's brow; within seconds, a monsoon torrent swept over him and along the empty, simulated street, as the rainstorm from the metal disperser heads was whipped horizontal by the silvery rotating blades stationed around the set's edges.

  "That's good!" He couldn't keep himself from shouting, from tilting his head back so that the artificial rain-warm as his own blood, as though it had rolled all the way across deserts to the east-trickled under his collar and down his chest. "That's really good! I like that!" Deckard's voice boomed against unseen walls, beyond the false-fronted buildings next to him. The rain plastered his hair against his brow, pooled in the palms of his hands, dripped from the hem of his jacket. The wet skin of pavement shivered around him as the neon tubing at the corners and above the vacant shops' doorways sparked and flickered into blue and red life. One more switch had been thrown, a circuit completed, somewhere in this world's artificial heavens. "Bring it on!"

  As though in reply, the wind edged up to storm level, the puddled water at his feet driven into a sea of miniature waves before it was sucked away by the plumbing system
hidden in the gutters. Deckard came close to being knocked off his balance, staying upright only by grabbing a lamppost wrapped with sodden kanji posters; the paper's heavy ink smeared across his hands and the point of his shoulder. Above his head, a dragon's red tongue flickered, the serpentine grace of its illuminated coils an icy electric blue.

  She's here, thought Deckard. He scanned across the drenched cityscape to the enclosing reality of cameras and shuttered lights beyond. Everyone else-Urbenton and his crew-might have left Outer Hollywood, but Sarah Tyrell was still here. Deckard felt sure of her presence, as though some part of her had seeped into the fabric of the irreal Los Angeles. The lenses that watched him might as well have been her eyes, the steaming rain the fury of her kiss. He had wanted to confront her-he had been fated to-and now found himself embraced by her in a zone of no escaping.

  The rain slackened a bit; it could almost have been an invitation to him. Deckard pushed himself away from the lamppost and walked, with the false storm in his face, deeper into the city's artificial heart.

  "Wake up! Time to die..."

  He heard the voice before he saw the figures before him. Two men, or what could have been men; Deckard saw one of them only from the back, as the long-coated figure was lifted nearly off its feet by the other's fist bunched at the throat. Deckard recognized one of the Kowalski replicants, but couldn't tell which it was, or what segment of repeated time he had stumbled into. Then that must be me, thought Deckard; his gaze shifted to the one the replicant's fierce smile burned toward. A burst of visual static rolled across the images. Deckard reached out his hand; his palm and fingertips touched the smooth, cold glass of a high-rez viewscreen, billboard size, taller than himself. The Kowalski and Deckard inside the screen's illusion of depth were as big as in life, as in the reality on the other side. One world enfolded the other, each equally false; Deckard looked away from the image before him and saw the walls of the same alley, the high metal flank of the autonomic trash-collection vehicle against which he had been trapped by the first Kowalski, the one back in the real L.A. on Earth, all the details that had been re-created on the Outer Hollywood set. He looked back again at the giant viewscreen and saw, only slightly blurred by the magnified pixel lines, the same alley's confines, like a photocopy one generation further on.