Replicant Night

by K. W. Jeter

  He left her sitting at the table again, surrounded by the mutely uncomforting dolls. The Rachael child folded her arms across the thick, leather-bound book and laid her head down, concealing her face from him. Deckard stepped out to the open corridor beyond and quietly pulled the door shut behind himself.

  18

  The last time-the first time Deckard had been in this building, in its original form back in L.A-he'd had to climb laboriously to its roof, his scrabbling progress through the crumbling, waterlogged plaster and sagging beams impeded by a hastily bandaged hand, the fingers that the Batty replicant had broken aching and useless. Fear had driven him then; he'd been trying to escape death. This time, he was walking toward it. I'll take the stairs, he thought wryly.

  A shaft of utility stairs at the back of the building-it was undoubtedly the same route that Sarah had already taken. In the damp air, as Deckard craned his neck to look upward, he caught a trace of perfume, one of the opiated floral scents that his mind and senses had learned to associate first with Rachael, then with Sarah. The invisible molecules were tinged with something more acrid but just as distinctive and evocative: cigarette smoke, something dark and expensive, suited to the taste of a Tyrell heir. He looked down and spotted, on the landing's rough concrete, silken white paper and brown shreds of tobacco ground out cold by her shoe.

  The metal steps echoed in the narrow space, loud enough to evoke a shiver in the video camera lenses that peeked out at him from their clefts in the unfinished walls. Up ahead, above him, Deckard saw a rust-mottled door left open, creaking on its hinges as the fan-driven storm winds swung it back and forth. He stopped, rain spattering in his face as he tried to catch sight of anyone waiting in the darkness. Nothing; he grasped the cold pipe rail and continued climbing.

  "Sarah?" He pushed the door all the way back-the metal clanged against the side of the hatchway structure-and stepped out onto the roof. Warm rivulets trickled down his throat as he called out again. "Where are you?"

  No answer came. Deckard walked farther from the door, leaving the stairs and his escape behind him. Looking up, he saw no stars but the broader points of the lights in the studio's truss-work rigging; only a few meters away, as though-in a child's notion of the world-he had climbed all the way to the dark heavens, the universe's weld-stitched limit. The lights' spectra had been shifted down to an icy blue, colder than the streets' veins of neon; shadows fluttered across him like the wings of unseen, untouched 'birds as staggered ranks of archaic wind turbines, blades long and scimitar-curved, rotated in the damp breeze coming from the edges of the set.

  He worked his way through the windmills, avoiding the scything arms, coming at last to the roof's raised parapet. His hands, grasping the crumbled brick and thick tatters of asphalt sheeting, looked as bloodless as a corpse's flesh. They hardly seemed to belong to him at all; the uncanny sensation passed through him as though he were looking at someone else, someone who had slid inside his body and face. The hands, and the body that leaned its insubstantial weight into them, might have been those of the actor who bad played him in the video he had seen; the disoriented feeling increased, setting him even farther away. For a dizzying moment, Deckard wondered if he were still watching the video, the artificial world into which his own life had been transformed.

  Squeezing his eyes shut, his hands gripping even tighter on the fragile stone, he tried to make himself feel real again. Or as real as possible. I've become my own ghost, thought Deckard. A dead thing that watches and mourns the past; he'd felt that way before, when he'd sat beside a glass-lidded coffin, leaning forward with his chin on his doubled fists, looking at the sleeping, dying woman he'd loved. Keeping his vigil through one sleepless night after another, time seeping away beneath the real stars, the rain swallowed by earth and the dead leaves beneath the trees. It might as well have been his own face he'd seen beneath the glass, in a video monitor rather than a coffin. He had died, or as good as, even before Rachael had; he'd just had the privilege of witnessing his own death, over and over, in one cold world after another.

  The bleak meditation didn't end, but became familiar enough, an old wound, that he could function once more. Deckard opened his eyes and looked over his shoulder at the elaborate rooftop set. They did a good job, he had to admit. Urbenton and his crew of technicians, the people who had constructed the set-in the thin, fragmented light, he could see how close they had come to the original, how much the fake was indistinguishable from the genuine. The turbines spun in place, like idiot dervishes on edge, over a buckling field speckled with pigeon shit-had they scraped up the droppings from an actual L.A. building roof and shipped them here, or was there a flock of birds kept on hand in some remote aviary zone of the station? It all smelled real enough, a blending of monsoon steam and guanoid archaeology, that at least some of Deckard's senses were fooled.

  He looked back over the parapet at the imitation city that surrounded the building. All the little tricks of the video trade had been used, from foreshortened perspectives to banks of fiber optics for a vista of pinpoint lights stretching to an imaginary horizon; other whole sections were blank or covered with chroma-key backdrops, for digitized mattes to be ceegeed in during postproduction. The miniature city seemed caught between different levels of reality, at some muddled point halfway on the line from dream to something that could be touched. In some way, that made the dark nocturnal city he saw now as real as the L.A. he remembered on Earth. Realer than real, thought Deckard. A night made of the same stuff as the replicants, dreams and fears and a desperate longing to exist. He had lived in that inchoate city, had been part of it, but-he knew now-hadn't belonged in it. It's their world. He nodded slowly, rain trickling across the backs of his hands. Their night as well, in which he was just a shadow, a thing that wouldn't even be remembered when the sun came up.

  "Hello, Deckard." The voice-the one that he'd known he would hear-came from behind him. "I was waiting for you."

  From over his shoulder, he looked and saw Sarah standing a few yards from him, in the center of the roof's area, the wind turbines spinning and stretching away into darkness. He turned and leaned back against the parapet, hands gripping its edge on either side. "I had some business to take care of first. With the little girl. I had a talk with her."

  "How sweet." Sarah stepped forward into the partial light filtering down from above. The skin of her face and throat looked cold, bloodless. "I suppose that was a good thing for you to do. Whether she's real or not. Actually . . . I don't care anymore." The gun in her hand glinted as though a piece of the dark had frozen. "It's not important, is it?"

  "Maybe not." His heart had ticked faster for a moment at seeing a weapon in someone else's hand, knowing that he didn't have one. "It all depends. On what you want."

  "Ah." She nodded and smiled. "That's true. I used to want things. Different things." With cruel playfulness, Sarah raised the gun to eye level, arm straight, and looked down the barrel at him. "And now ... just one thing. Guess what it is."

  "I've got a pretty good idea." Inside him, his pulse had slowed back down as a resigned calm moved through his blood. Whatever was going to happen, he had prepared himself for it. "I wouldn't have come here if I didn't know."

  The face of the woman he loved studied him over the gun's black metal. "You're not really human, are you, Deckard?" Rachael's face, Sarah wearing it like a mask, though it had been hers to begin with. "If you ever were, you've managed to get over it. Like I have. So it's not just a cop thing, having ice water going in and out of your heart. It's just something that happens to people like us."

  He nodded in agreement. "The Eye of Compassion..."

  "What was that?"

  "Nothing," answered Deckard. "Something ... somebody told me about. We're not the ones who decide who's human and who's not." He looked over to the faked skyline surrounding the building, then back to her. "There's nothing we can do about it."

  "Yes, there is. There always is." No trace of irony or sarcasm sounded in the
woman's voice. "You shouldn't give up hope like that." Her hand squeezed the gun, tight and trembling. "You can always kill. That works. Especially if you do it to the things you love. Then . . . then you have a chance."

  "A chance of what? Of being human?"

  "No..." Sarah gave a shake of her head. "Of not caring anymore. So when you die-when you take care of yourself finally-it's not so hard."

  The voice of madness, speaking the same words inside his head-Deckard listened to her and knew that it would be easy to agree. Or to go even further, deeper into one's own madness; the temptation always existed in him to accept only what he saw, what part of him wanted to see and believe. That it really was Rachael standing in front of him, alive again, unchanged. That the other woman with the same face, the one named Sarah, was as irreal as she had thought the child waiting downstairs inside the building was. A memory, a bad dream, a hallucination. If that were the case, he wouldn't have any problem with her pointing a gun at him and pulling the trigger. That was a small price to pay for seeing Rachael again, if only for the moment between the firing of the bullet and its entry into his deluded heart.

  He had closed his eyes, though he could still see her-remembering was enough for that. Easier as well, to mentally edit out the infinitesimal differences-the coldness at the dark centers of her eyes, a hard curl at one corner of her mouth-that made her Sarah instead of Rachael. It didn't help much; when Deckard opened his eyes again, the sight of the woman sent a sharp-pointed blow through him, more painful than if she had actually squeezed the trigger of the gun.

  "Is that what you're going to do?" He'd watched as the momentary tremor left her upraised hand. "Kill yourself, too?"

  "Why not..." Sarah's eyes almost seemed to be looking for sympathy from him. "Why should you be the only one to get lucky?"

  Deckard continued to watch as she strode forward, all the way to the building's edge. She turned and leaned back against the parapet a carefully judged distance away from him, just far enough that there was no chance of his being able to grab the gun before she fired.

  "You know..." Sarah mused aloud. "The illusion kind of breaks down here." She glanced over her shoulder, toward the street below. "It's not really very high up at all, is it?" Her gaze turned to him. "Not like the real one, back in Los Angeles. I've seen that one; I've been there." Head cocked to one side, she smiled coyly at him. "When I was first finding out all about you, Deckard; I went and looked at the places you'd been, where things happened to you." She nodded toward the drop on the parapet's other side. "You must've been pretty scared, back then; if you'd fallen from the real one, they would've had to have picked you up from the pavement with a sponge. Whereas here Sarah gave an unimpressed shrug. "Hardly enough to kill someone. You might actually even survive."

  "Maybe." Deckard looked over the edge behind him. She was right; the illusion of the city's reality was dispelled from this angle. The machinery and interlaced cables of the set were detectable, like the secret workings of the world revealed by a paranoid vision come true. "Is that the deal you made with Urbenton? He always wants the ~best footage he can get. So a shot of me falling . . . I imagine that would be just about perfect. He could re-edit the video he did about me, put in a new ending, one where I die. Maybe that would suit both him and the people he's working for."

  "Oh, it would. You're exactly right on that one." Sarah nodded, as though admiring his take on the situation. "That's pretty much the U.N's little agenda. The first version of the video-the one you saw-that was only shown in the Martian emigrant colony." She pointed toward him with the gun. "They'd love to do another version for broadcast on Earth that would really prove just how dangerous escaped replicants are. In case there might be anyone starting to feel sorry for them. Urbenton could always fake your getting killed, do it with special effects, all the different tricks they have for that sort of thing-but there's nothing quite as convincing as reality, is there? No matter how much you have to fake it. Plus, this way, there's no living blade runner named Rick Deckard turning up later to embarrass everyone. The little details... like your not being killed by the fall but from a bullet..." Sarah gave another shrug. "Urbenton can fix that up in postproduction. Or not. That's his business, not mine." She studied the gun in her own hand for a moment, then looked at Deckard again. "I'll have kept my part of the bargain."

  "You're a person of your word. In your own way."

  "I try to be." Sarah spoke with no more irony than before. "I've only lied when I had to. When there was something I had to have. And what did it get me?" She shook her head. "Nothing. I learned my lesson." Her voice turned bitter. "I should've just stayed what I was. Not tried to be something else. Like your precious Rachael. It's just no good-the dead get all the breaks in this world."

  The artificial rain had lessened a bit. Deckard looked up to where the clouds and stars should have been, letting the drops wash down his face and throat. "But do you know?" The words were soft, almost a whisper. "Do you know who you are?"

  "Come on." Her response was sour, irritated. "I'm not in the mood for the usual mind games, Deckard. I'm tired of playing even my own. So it's not likely I'm going to fall for yours. If that's what you're going to try, then I'll just stop wasting time and kill you now. There's a limit to how sentimental I get."

  He said nothing. Instead, he reached inside his jacket and took out the thin, flat rectangle of the photograph, the one that had been given to him by the dead man back on Mars. Deckard held it by one corner and gazed at the long-past scene it revealed. Then he held the photo out to Sarah.

  "What's that supposed to be?" She leaned back, regarding the object with suspicion. "Something you and your repsymp friends faked up?"

  "No-" He shook his head. "This is the real thing. Go on, take it."

  Keeping the gun levelled at him, Sarah reached out and grasped the photograph between her own thumb and forefinger. She turned it around and studied it. "I don't get it," she announced after a few seconds. Her brow creased. "Who is it?"

  "Come on, Sarah. You know." He tried to make his words as gentle as possible. "You've seen them before. You've seen other pictures. They're your parents."

  She said nothing. Deckard watched her staring at the photo. The image it contained was in his head as well, engraved there from the moment he had first seen it. And Marley's voice, telling him what it meant; those were fused together, insoluble. He knew what Sarah was looking at: a photo of a bed, the sheets and covers all white, a woman sitting up with the pillows mounded behind her; the woman was smiling, as was the man standing beside the bed, leaning down to get his face close to hers, the two of them looking into the lens of the camera. It must have been mounted on a tripod or a high shelf; the remote control was just visible in the man's grasp, his thumb pressing down the button that had flicked the camera's shutter.

  The two people were Ruth and Anson Tyrell-the same two people, the couple, that Deckard had seen in another old photograph, a newspaper clipping on the wall of a cramped, cluttered office at the Van Nuys Pet Hospital, back in the real L.A. on Earth. A moment of the past, a frozen section of time, caught and preserved; those people had been alive once, and then they had become memories.

  "When..." The expression on Sarah's face grew more troubled. "When was this taken?"

  "You can figure it out," said Deckard. He made no move from the parapet he leaned against, but pointed to the photo in the woman's hand. "Look at what he's wearing." That was also the same as it had been in the clipping on Isidore's office wall. "Look at the emblem on the breast pocket. That's the jumpsuit from the expedition. The picture was taken on board the Salander 3."

  He could tell, just from watching, that the meaning of the photograph was becoming clear for her. Bit by bit, as though the image was gradually moving into focus, the past it held becoming real once again.

  "This wasn't on Earth." Sarah raised the photograph higher, a few drops of rain spattering against its empty white backing. "This must have been when they were still o
n their way to the Proxima system..."

  "That's right." Deckard nodded. "Before ... those other things happened."

  In the artificial night, the glow from the lights suspended above was enough for her to make out all the details of the old photograph. There were more than just the two people, the adults, Ruth and Anson Tyrell, held in the image.

  "If that's my parents..." Sarah spoke slowly, wonderingly. "Then ... that must be me." She used the tip of the gun's muzzle to point. "One of those..."

  That was what he had wanted her to see. What she needed to see. The photo's image was just as clear in Deckard's thoughts, as clear as it had been when Marley had taken it from the hiding place in the Salander 3's first aid kit and had shown it to him.

  There were two infants cradled against the new mother's breast, one nestled in the crook of each arm. "Your mother had twins," said Deckard simply. In that faraway time, on board the galleon, somewhere between Earth and the stars, Ruth Tyrell had looked exhausted but happy, smiling at the camera. In the photograph, Anson Tyrell had the traditional dazed grin. "Your father delivered them with the help of the Salander 3's built-in medical circuits."