by K. W. Jeter
The camera angle shifted, cutting to one directly over the Kowalski replicant's shoulder. Deckard saw his own face struggling for breath against the massive knot of the white-knuckled fist under his chin. They dubbed it in, he realized. The video unreeling on the screen was what Urbenton had originally intended, the computer-generated simulation of Deckard's face over that of the actor playing him.
Time to die...
Kowalski's line, the echo from real time and Deckard's memory, had already been spoken. On the other side of the viewscreen, he watched as the replicant's blunt fingers rose toward his double's eye sockets. He braced himself for the sound of the gunshot, the bullet that would shatter Kowalski's forehead from behind, dropping the dead replicant to the ground...
There was no shot. No gun roared from the mouth of that other alley, the one inside the viewscreen's doubly false world. The scene played on to the end that left its Deckard a bloody-faced corpse sprawled at Kowalski's feet. From outside that world, Deckard had watched his own death with a mixture of fear and awe. For a moment, he wondered which side of the viewscreen was real, whether the dead thing with his face was the one who'd lived and died in L.A., and the one watching was its substanceless ghost. He looked down at his own hands, almost expecting to see the alley's rubbish-strewn ground through them, as though they were made of mist and rain.
He heard the gunshot then, not at the mouth of the view-screen's alley but the narrow space in which he stood. It shouted from behind him, the muzzle blast tinging his shadow with fire. At the same moment, the viewscreen shattered with the bullet's impact. The other alley, with its Deckard corpse and blood-handed Kowalski, broke into darkness and shards of whirling glass. He flinched, turning his shoulder against the razor-edged storm, shielding his face with his upraised hands as the fragments bit at his wrists.
In a few seconds, the shards had finished tumbling to the ground with the quick, high-pitched notes of breaking ice. Deckard lowered his hands; in front of him was the metal frame of the viewscreen, bent and twisted by the bullet's explosion. Scattered around it were the cables and debris of the workings, now reduced to dull, unrecognizable scraps of silicon and unlit phosphors. The world that had been contained in the screen was gone, replaced by the one in which Deckard stood, the simulation of an alley in Los Angeles. No corpse, his own or Kowalski's, lay on the rain-soaked concrete this time.
He turned, knowing what he would see behind him. Standing there, as Rachael had stood so long ago, her coat's high collar brushing against her bound hair-Sarah Tyrell lowered the gun she held in both hands. The neon of the empty cityscape silhouetted her form, enough light leaking past to show the coldness of her gaze, the slight lift to one corner of her mouth.
"That's not right," said Deckard. "If you want to get it just the way it was. Rachael didn't smile after she shot Kowalski. It wasn't so easy for her."
Sarah let the gun dangle at her side. "We don't need an exact re-creation."
She regarded him through half-lidded eyes. "Why don't we just say that ... we're rewriting history. Changing things to the way they should have been." With the gun, she gestured down the alley's length, as if the other figures were still visible there. "After all-consider how much simpler things would've been, for so many people, if Rachael hadn't come out and found you, and saved you. Then Her gaze shifted back to him. "Whatever else happened . . . you would've been dead before I'd ever had a chance to meet you." An undertone of regret sounded in her voice. "Simpler ... but I wouldn't have wanted it that way..."
From the front of his shirt, Deckard brushed away a few more bits of glass. "Where's the girl?" That was his most important business. "Where did you take her?"
"The girl?" Sarah looked puzzled for a moment, then nodded. "Now I remember ... they left her with me. Urbenton and the others; they thought you wouldn't come otherwise. But that's not true, is it?" She smiled knowingly. "You would've come here . . . just for me."
"That's true." The backs of Deckard's hands were spotted with blood where the shards of the viewscreen had struck him. "I wouldn't have missed it. For anything." He watched a red drop fall from the tip of his little finger, then looked back up at Sarah. "But I just want to know that she's safe. Where is she?"
"Oh ... she's safe enough." Sarah looked unconcerned. "As safe as anything can be in this world." She raised the gun, bringing it up at the end of her straightened arm. "You should be more worried about yourself." The black muzzle pointed directly at him. "You're the one who's not quite safe."
He didn't bother taking the unloaded gun from inside his jacket; he knew she couldn't be bluffed by it. Instead, Deckard looked up at the video cameras mounted in the rigging overhead. "What about all those?" Some of the lenses were focussed on him, others on Sarah, with a few drawn back to take in the whole scene. "You must have cut some kind of deal with Urbenton. To provide him with the kind of footage he likes." He pointed to the gun levelled at himself. "Is this going to do it?"
"You're good, Deckard." She nodded in appreciation. The fur of her coat's collar was spiked with raindrops, like miniature jewels. "That's the cop in you-always analyzing the situation." The gun lowered in her hand. "You're right, though. They wanted more-Urbenton and the rest of them. They set this all up..." She gestured toward the lights and the tracking video cameras. "Just for the two of us. There's just some things that special effects and computer-generated images can't really do." A shrug. "No substitute for live action, is there?"
Deckard shook his head. "No-there isn't."
"Or death, either. It's so unsatisfying when that's faked. It's like . . . what was it the replicant said to you? I read it in the script. 'Like an itch you can never scratch.'" Sarah smiled at him. "That's why I'm so glad you could make it here, Deckard. We've been through so much together-it would be a shame not to do it right when we're just about at the end."
"Oh ... I agree." He wondered how he was going to get the gun away from her. If she had been crazy before, she was worse now. But not stupid-Sarah had carefully kept enough distance between them so that he didn't have a chance of suddenly lunging toward her, grabbing her arm and twisting it behind her until she dropped the weapon. She'd drill him before he got halfway to her, and he'd land at her feet with the back of his skull at the closed end of the alley. "Maybe we should go somewhere and talk about it."
"We'll talk, all right. But not just now." Sarah turned away from him, then coyly glanced over her shoulder. "I think you'll know where to find me."
He watched her walking away, out into the empty street, the pools of rain reflecting her image like polished obsidian. A bank of video cameras watched as well, the glistening lenses turning on their pivot mounts to follow her, until she had disappeared from view.
His guess was right. Even before Deckard got to the entryway of the set's replica of the Bradbury Building, he saw the footprints shining wetly in the protected space between the ornate columns; small, a woman's, with no attempt having been made to erase them. It had to be Sarah; no one else was aboard the station, Outer Hollywood having been vacated by the watchers of his progress. He supposed that Urbenton was safely tucked inside some transport in the same orbit, viewing at long distance the results of his production arrangements. As Deckard had sloshed from one rainy zone of the L.A. set to the next, the certainty of being isolated in this small world had increased, as though the city itself had been emptied of every face except his own.
Behind him, the artificial rains lashed the street, the marquee of the Million Dollar Theater shedding its plastic letters one by one, the winds spelling out some obscure noun in the pooling waters. Deckard pushed the creaking door into a cathedrallike dark, then stepped after it. The cameras focussed on his back went dead, like birds in winter, as the ones inside the building were roused by his presence.
Shafts of clouded light swerved through the elaborate set's interior as he gripped the stair rail and looked upward. No U.N. blimp moved outside-there wouldn't have been clearance for even a simulation bene
ath the rigging's pipes and struts-but a carefully synchronized array of lights achieved the same effect. It's not even as real, thought Deckard, as Sebastian's world. In that little pocket universe, at least, there had been something like a sky and distance between one point and any other; there would have been miles for the genetic engineer turned deity to have travelled before he found his heart's desire. But here, in this false L.A., everything had been compressed and squeezed down to its essentials, the way the insane obliterated all but the pieces of their obsessions. As Deckard mounted the steps, cold wrought iron sliding under his palm, he wondered if it was his head or Sarah's that he had entered, the thin trails of light revealing the wreckage of her hopes or his own.
At the end of the encircling corridor, with rain trickling down through the rafters and decaying plaster above him, with the unlit empty space traversed by the elevator's elongated vertical cage to one side, Deckard pushed open the door. The same door that he had opened in the past, in memory, in a real L.A., and in dreams and a pocket universe-it swung away from his hand, revealing the high-ceilinged room beyond. He almost expected the same things to happen as the first time, the two sawn-off friends of Sebastian's-the animated teddy bear and the spike-helmeted toy soldier-to march out and greet him.
Instead, Deckard saw the Rachael child sitting at the massive claw-footed table, her legs dangling at the front of the chair, its carved dark-oak back extending above her head. She didn't notice him when he first stepped inside the room; the braid of her dark hair draped over her shoulder as she bent her head over the sepia-toned illustrations in a Victorian gardener's manual. Between the pages a single rose had been pressed; she lifted the brown, ancient flower to her nose, trying to catch whatever scent still remained. That was when she spotted Deckard silently watching her.
"You're here." The Rachael child spoke calmly, flipping her ribbon-tied braid behind her back. She carefully laid the papery rose inside the book and closed the stiff leather covers. "I knew you would be. Eventually."
"Are you all right?" Cautiously, Deckard scanned the room as he stepped forward. It looked as it had when he'd been in Sebastian's private world, dusty and stuffed with wind-up dolls and mannequins. The laughing clown figure towered over one end of the table, its manic smile frozen on the stark white face. "Did anything happen to you?"
"I'm fine," announced the child. "Well I'm bored. This is a stupid place. Everything's broken, or it doesn't work." She poked the bride doll standing next to her chair; the organza veil fluttered as the doll fell over, its arms and delicately poised hands sticking up in the air. "But those people, the ones who brought me here . . . they didn't hurt me or anything. They were nice enough, I suppose."
"All right..." Deckard barely listened to what the girl said. The crash of the bride doll had echoed through the room, stirring the white powdery plaster that had settled on the toys and overstuffed furniture. As the dust settled, he tried to hear anything else moving nearby. Lenses glinted as the video cameras, more carefully hidden in this set than outside, swiveled silently on their mounts, tracking the slow turn of his head. "Is there anybody else here with you?" He glanced at the child from the corner of his eye. "Anyone at all?"
"That woman." The Rachael child laid her hands flat on the book. "You know, the one that looks like me. The one you call Sarah." An annoyed expression crossed the girl's face. "The one who didn't think I was real. She's here."
"Where?"
"Up there." She gave a single nod to indicate the room's ceiling and what lay above. "That's what she told me. She'd just gotten back here a little while ago; she'd been out in the rain and stuff, like you. See?" The girl pointed to one of the other chairs, where Sarah's high-collared coat had been tossed across the scrolled arms; the floor beneath was spotted with the raindrops shed by the fur. "She said she was going up there to wait for you."
"I bet." Deckard realized he was being a fool. He knew what he should do; he should just gather up the Rachael child and lead her out of the building and off the faux L.A. set entirely. The skiff was waiting at the station's loading dock, and it could carry both him and the little girl away from here. What was the point in going up and confronting Sarah, with her loaded gun and equally lethal madness? She was primed to blow him away, only delaying the moment for the perfect camera opportunity. Up on the building's roof- the set that had been put together by Urbenton's techs, the detailed reproduction of the one in L.A.-the two of them would again be under the multilensed eye of the video cameras and lights in the overhead rigging; much better, cinematically, than the relatively constricted setup here in the rooms beneath. That must've been part of the agreement, thought Deckard. To get me out where the best camera angles are. Completing the arc, a nice sense of structure on the director's part: to die where he hadn't died before, where he'd been saved from dying by the replicant with Roy Batty's face. "I'll just bet she wants me to go up there."
"That's what she said." The Rachael child gave a shrug. And a sharp-eyed gaze at Deckard. "You don't have to do it if you don't want to."
The little girl was eerily smart-for reasons that Deckard knew something of; back in the Martian emigrant colony, Marley had told him about the child's lonely, eccentric growing-up aboard the scuttled Salander 3, and more than that- but she was wrong now. He did have to do it, to go and meet Sarah on the rain-swept roof beneath the watching cameras.
"We could never get away," he said to the girl sitting at the table. "There'd be no place we could go ... that I could take you to. Not Earth, not Mars, not anywhere. No place that she wouldn't find us again. So I'd just have to do it eventually. And get it over with. Here or there; now or some other time. But it has to happen."
"I don't know about any of that." The Rachael child looked guilelessly at him. "That's not any of my business. But you have to do what you think is best."
"All right." Deckard nodded slowly. "That's just what I'll do." He took the gun out of his jacket and laid it on the table. "This isn't any good-it's not loaded. So forget about it; I just don't want to carry it around with me anymore. If anything happens . . . if I don't come back down, or if Sarah comes down without me, or if those other people come here..." He shrugged. "There's not really anything you can do. And you shouldn't have to."
"Should I go hide? If that's what happens?"
Deckard smiled at the girl. "Where do you think you'd go?"
"I don't know." The Rachael child gave another shrug. "Somewhere. There's a whole city out there." She pointed to one of the arched windows. "With people and stuff. I could find someplace where nobody would know where to look for me."
He glanced over his shoulder at the window, with the artificial rain beating against the glass, the gauzy curtain stirred by the drafts that had penetrated the meticulously constructed decay of the interior set. She believes it's real, thought Deckard. The ones who had brought her here- Urbenton and the others-had let the child go on with the notion that they had left her in the middle of a real city, the real Los Angeles. He didn't know if that had been cruel or kind on their parts, or whether it made any difference. The way the girl had been brought up, by the autonomic machinery of the Salander 3, the city outside these windows, such as it was, probably seemed as real as any other could have.
"No," said Deckard. "That's not a good idea. Don't try to hide. I don't think they'll hurt you. If I don't come back .
then just let them take you to where they want to. Maybe they'll take you back home. You know, where you came from. You could stay there a long time, and you'd be all right."
"But I don't want to." A tear had welled up and trembled at the Rachael child's dark lashes. "I don't want to go there. I'd rather stay with you." The high-backed chair toppled over with a crash as the girl pushed herself away from the table; she ran to him and hugged him around the waist, the side of her face against his jacket. "I'm going with you."
"No, you're not. You can't." The same protective, almost paternal feeling as before passed silently through Deckard's th
oughts. The girl looked so much like Rachael, the woman he'd loved; she could have been their daughter, a child that could never have happened. Not here, he mused. Maybe out there, in the stars. Perhaps Rachael would have been one of those that changed, became human; they could have had a life together...
Too late for that, he knew. Now there were only the bits and pieces of his own life to pick up and sort out, make something of. Something other than killing. That was why he'd quit being a blade runner a long time ago-but that hadn't been enough. That was why he'd agreed to take on the other job presented to him, the business of delivering the briefcase with Batty's voice and Isidore's list inside it; too late for that as well. Whether it had been salvation or death for the insurgent replicants-it didn't matter now.
The only things left to him were the little girl . . . and what Marley had told him about her. About who she really was. And the slim proof-not even that; evidence that had to be taken on faith as to what it meant-that Marley, two minutes away from death, had given him. Deckard touched the front of his jacket, a finger's width away from where he had been carrying the empty gun, and felt the thin stiff rectangle of the ancient photograph, the one that had been hidden in the Salander 3's first aid kit. That was all he had with which to confront Sarah; one way or another, it would be enough.
"Look-" With difficulty, he managed to push the child away from him. "You stay down here, and everything will be all right. I promise." He wondered for a moment why she had formed such a sudden, dramatic attachment to him. There's no one else, thought Deckard. The child was all alone in this universe, or in any other. Plus-it was impossible to tell-she might have sensed the fragments of his past, the memories of someone else named Rachael that the girl's dark eyes and grave manner conjured up so painfully in him. Even if she didn't understand yet how those things had come to be. Maybe she just felt sorry for him. "All right?" Deckard put his hands on her shoulders and leaned down to look straight into her eyes; the glimpse of them ran through his own heart like a dagger of silver and ice. "The bad things have already happened," he told the girl. "Nothing else can go wrong," he lied. "So don't worry about me."
