“I noticed.” Deckard couldn’t keep a thin smile from lifting one corner of his mouth. “Actually, I prefer you this way.”
“Yeah, well, it doesn’t suit me at all. They should’ve left me at least one leg and a foot, so I could kick your sorry ass.” The disgust in Batty’s voice shifted to its former perplexed condition. “Don’t you wonder how this all came about? The last time you saw me, I was dead. I even got shown photographs of how I looked, hanging upside-down on that busted-up freeway. Seeing your own corpse is one of those transformative experiences—”
“Thought you didn’t have eyes.”
“There’s a jack for an optical scanner inside here. Along with some other stuff like that. Besides, why should you care how I saw it? That’s not important, Deckard. What you should be worrying about is why all of this is being done. Why drag my corpse off, why download my skull contents into this contraption—the whole trip. Hey, it’s all for your benefit, pal. Or at least most of it. If you can’t display gratitude, you could at least show some curiosity.”
“I don’t have to,” Deckard said dryly. “I’m sure you’re going to tell me all about it, whether I want to hear it or not.”
He’d been telling the truth to Batty. Deckard could let an unsoothing but necessary sleep claim him, where he pushed back in the skiff’s pilot seat, with little regret. That his old nemesis, a nightmarish figure all glistening with rain and smeared blood over taut muscle and sinew, could come back from the dead in the form of an articulate briefcase-what was there to be surprised about? Stranger things had already happened. Once before, he’d thought Roy Batty was safely dead, only to find out otherwise—or rather, to find out that one Batty was dead, and another, claiming to be the human original from which the replicant had been made, was trying to kill him. And coming close to accomplishing that goal. If it hadn’t been for Dave Holden, who put a highcaliber slug between Batty’s eyes, Deckard knew that it would’ve been his own corpse draped over the side of one of L.A.’s ruined freeways.
And now Holden was dead, with his former partner from the LAPD’s blade runner unit fairly sure that he at least wouldn’t be coming around again. The corpse on the floor back at the Outer Hollywood studio had appeared more than final; Holden’s blanked-out eyes had looked as if they had gazed at last upon and into some soul-quieting vista of peace. Maybe, thought Deckard, that’s what he saw when he looked down the barrel of the Kowalski replicant’s gun. Fire and thunder, and then the silence beyond .
“Oh, you’ll find out soon enough.” Batty’s voice seemed to come from miles away, a distance bound by the cockpit’s tiny space. “You don’t have to worry about that.”
That was a mystery almost worth puzzling out. Deckard let the black behind his eyelids deepen and swallow him up. The briefcase with Batty’s personality wired in and Deckard’s initials below the handle—that’s what the now-dead Holden had been carrying, had come all that way from Earth to deliver to him.
There’d been a time when Batty and Holden had been working together, trying to kill Deckard, claiming that he was another escaped replicant; that was how wrapped up in craziness the two of them had gotten. Then they’d had their big falling-out, from which only one of them had survived . . . or so it’d seemed at the time .
Something had hooked the two of them back together, Holden and Batty, or whatever was left of him inside the briefcase. Something that probably wasn’t good news.
It was too much for Deckard to try to figure out now, at this point of his exhaustion. As long as the briefcase was quietly sulking to itself, he might as well try to find sleep.
Deckard found himself half wondering, half dreaming, of what reception was in store for him on Mars, how Sarah would welcome him home from his long, futile venturing.
A knock at the door.
“Oh, boy!” The alarm clock danced on top of the bedside table. “Daddy’s home!”
“Christ—” Sarah laid the back of her hand across her eyes, trying to block out what was left of the day’s illumination and any other sensory data coming into her nervous system. As much as she had been expecting, even—in a perverse fashion—looking forward, to this moment, it had still crept up on her without warning. Until now.
“I bet that’s him! I bet that’s him, all right!”
She wished again that she had spent the money for the third bullet. “Just shut the hell up.” Her brain felt both sandfilled and fuzzy from the cumulative toxins of troubled sleep. Sarah pulled herself into a sitting position on the edge of the grey mattress, then watched as the apparent separate entity of her hand fumbled inside the table’s single drawer.
“Mrs. Niemand . . . excuse me.” From the opposite wall of the bedroom, the calendar had caught sight of the bright metal cylinders tumbling in Sarah’s palm. “But what exactly are you doing?”
Brass glinted at her fingertips, though the bullets’ tapered points were dull leaden in color. “None of your business.” She slipped the bullets into the gun from the table, then closed up the chamber. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Humanity is my business, Mrs. Niemand. Though that was said in other contexts, it applies in this situation as well.”
“I don’t need the literary allusions.” Sarah shifted the gun to her left hand and used her right to smooth her dark, disordered hair back from her brow.
Some previous tenants of the hovel, who had either killed themselves or managed to get shipped off the planet while the starbound emigration vessels were still running, had shelled out for the appliances to be hooked up to the library trunk feed. The penurious Niemands had canceled the service, but the calendar had the rudiments of a university education soaked up in its off-line banks. And didn’t mind showing it off, all of which had added to the general hell of Sarah’s existence. Maybe four, she thought. I should’ve bought four bullets.
The knock at the door sounded again, blows hard enough to shake the hovel’s thin plastic walls. A rain of soft, sneeze-provoking dust drifted down upon the bed.
“Come on!” The alarm clock shrilled even more excitedly. “Let’s go see!”
Sarah placed the muzzle of the gun against the clock’s face, at the exact center from which the two black hands radiated. “Let’s be real quiet.” She pushed the clock back across the table. “So Daddy and Mommy can have a little quality time together. All right?”
“Okay,” squeaked the clock. It cowered back against the wall.
“Mrs. Niemand!” The calendar fluttered its pages at her as she walked past. “I implore you-don’t do anything you’ll regret later.”
“There’s not going to be a later.” The gun’s weight dangled at the end of her arm. “So regret’s not a problem.”
“Sarah!” Using her real name, the calendar cried after her. “Please . . . don’t.”
In the front part of the hovel, a space barely wider than what her outstretched arms could have reached across, the percussion on the door was even louder. Enough to start peeling some of the web of silvery duct tape and glue-tacky patches away from the torn seams and other leak points. The hovel shivered and hissed as though apprehending its own demise. Sarah wondered what Deckard was going on about, pounding on the door with that much force. He’s that happy about being home? Maybe he had finally flipped out, gone all the way around the bend of that dark corridor that’d always been there inside his head; some bad retro-TV fantasy of domestic bliss had wormed its way into his thoughts and taken over. Some vision of Mr. Niemand coming back here after a long, hard day at work, to be greeted by Mrs. N in a lace-edged kitchen apron and heels, bearing a cold stainless-steel pitcher of gin and vermouth—the life their great-great-grandparents had lived, at least inside their sitcom fantasies.
“Take it easy!” More strips of sealant tape dangled loose, trailing like thick party streamers from the hovel’s low ceiling. “You’re going to knock the place over—” A muffled voice came from the other side of the door, but Sarah couldn’t make out what he’d said. She batted
another sticky section of tape away from her face and reached for the door’s knob.
In the sliver of time it took to turn the knob and pull the wobbling front door open, Sarah had entertained the notion of going with Deckard’s anticipatory fantasy . . . or at least stringing him along with it for a few minutes. She could act as though there were, in fact, some measure of affection between them; she could even try once more to be Rachael, his long-dead and long-remembered love. The pretending wouldn’t be unpleasant; there was still a room inside her head in which her own desire for all of that was still kept, like an ancient white wedding dress, never used and carefully folded between sheets of tissue paper.
It’s what the bastard deserves, thought Sarah as her fingertips touched the doorknob. To be jerked around the way she had been, by a forged-iron chain bolted to the heart. To be led to believe one thing, even for a second, then be slammed up against the even more unyielding steel wall of reality .
In her other hand, the one dangling by her side as she reached to pull open the door, she had the perfect representation of what reality had come to mean for her. Loaded and cocked; she had already decided she didn’t want to even try to screw around with Deckard’s head anymore. There would be no Rachel-like homecoming kiss for him. If there were any irrational hopes left inside the sonuvabitch that would rise upon his seeing the human original of the replicant face for which he’d fallen, they’d be dashed by the very next thing he’d see. A circle of cold metal, with a darker black space at its center—Sarah’s hand was already lifting the gun into position as she stepped back from the door swinging open toward her.
Two faces looked in at her. Two men, neither of them Rick Deckard. The eyes behind their matching square-rimmed glasses widened as they focussed on the gun she was holding a few inches from their foreheads.
“Urn . . . is this the Niemand residence?” The man to the left swallowed nervously. The two of them didn’t appear to be twins, but looked as if they were trying to be. “If it’s not, we’re sorry .
“Maybe this is a bad time.” Beads of sweat had welled up on the other’s brow; tiny images of the gun floated in the wet mirrors. “Maybe we could come back . . . some other time.”
Sarah let the gun lower of its own weight. She leaned against the side of the doorway; the hovel swayed and audibly creaked. “My apologies, gentlemen.”
Beyond the pair, the dimly lit corridors of the U.N. emigrant colony were visible, the rounded angles filled with rubble trembling in the airloss breezes. “I just woke up.”
One of the men tried an uneasy smile. “You were expecting someone else?”
“My husband, actually.”
The two men exchanged glances, their heads pivoting a fraction of an inch toward each other, as though linked by some simple, invisible mechanism. The same unseen gear turned their owlish gazes back to Sarah.
“Mrs. Niemand—” The one on the left spoke with somber intonation. “We can tell that you lead a tragic life.”
In the corridor leading toward the emigrant colony’s center, beneath the banks of flickering or grey-dead fluorescent tubes, devolved human figures moved, scuttling furtively with their last meager, pawnable treasures clutched to their chests, heading for the ragtag booths and alleys of the black-market district. Even farther down the scale, appearing hardly human at all, were the creeping forms of those who had completely fallen out of the colony’s hard-screw economy, those who’d come to the frayed end of their money and possessions and had been cut off from the cable monopoly’s feed. Faces devoid of reason as any vegetable lifted and swiveled toward the scene at the Niemand hovel’s front door, idiot eyes and other receptors searching for any sensory input. Red stigmata flecked the angles of the stimulus-lorn heads, with the same markings repeated on the corridor’s dented walls. Every muscle near the softly keening mouths twitched with the constant hunger of misfired synapses.
A tragic life, mused Sarah as she gazed past the two surprise callers. The length of her vision reached beyond the other locked or boarded-up hovel doors to low-ceilinged rooms containing yet more collapsing nervous systems. She wasn’t sure what the man meant. She had worked a long time to engineer the destiny that had brought her to this place. A particular hell, or any one at all—I belong here, thought Sarah.
Seized by a dreadful suspicion, she refocussed on the two men at her door.
“You’re not Jehovah’s Witnesses, are you?” That would be all she needed right now, to get handed an animated Watch tower, complete with stereophonic sound effects triggered by the warmth of her thumb and forefinger. “Or New Reformed Apocalypticists?” Another of the groups that had been seen recently, evangelizing through the emigrant colonies—she looked to see if one of them was carrying a miniature holographic projector suitable for evoking biblical dioramas in the corridor’s thin, acrid-smelling air.
The two men gazed blankly at her through their black-rimmed, square lenses.
“No—” The left one shook his head. “We’re not here to ask you for money or anything—”
Her laugh barked out. “Good call.”
“This is a personal matter. For you alone, Mrs. Niemand.” He raised a pale, fussily manicured hand, pointing to the interior of the hovel behind her. “May we come in? To talk with you? I’m sure you’ll find it of interest.”
Gun dangling at her side, Sarah peered more closely at the two men. They seemed oddly familiar to her, positions on a memory track that her brain hadn’t moved along for some time. Her eyes had adjusted to the corridor’s partial light spectrum; she could better perceive the pair now. White shirts and narrow-lapelled suits, black as an old-fashioned undertaker’s; anal-retentive bow ties cinched tight onto their reedy, knobbly throats, not much bigger around than the narrow wrists exposed at their cuffs. The men’s owlish regard, framed by the sharp-cornered spectacles, tweaked a cord in her gut.
The snufflers in the corridor’s rubble had started edging closer, attracted by the sounds of human voices. Sarah knew that if she slammed the door shut and left the two men outside, and they went on pounding and calling to her through the thin panel, the hovel would be overrun by stim-desperate hordes, the pressure of their clambering bodies enough to collapse the rickety walls. “All right—” Sarah stepped back from the door. “Get in here. But you’d better make your spiel quick. As I said, I’m expecting my husband any time now.” She gave another bitter laugh. “God knows he’s a jealous sonuvabitch.”
Once inside, with the corridor’s sickly light and recycled air shut away, she busied herself with her black-market cigarettes, extracting one of the dwindling number from the cellophane-swathed pack and getting it lit. Tossing the charred match onto the floor with the others, she tilted her head back and dragged the smoke into the innermost recesses of her lungs, already feeling it percolate out into her clamoring veins. Exhaled, a blue cloud swirled, then streamed in a tapering thread toward the nearest leak in the wall. “So what is it you wanted to talk about?”
Sarah didn’t turn around, but could hear the two men shuffling in the room’s narrow confines behind her. In a too-brief moment of sated peace, she regarded the orange-red coal at the end of the cigarette. “Whatever your pitch is, I hope it’s good.”
The one who had been doing all the speaking shifted his voice to a flat, level tone. “For starters, we know you’re not anyone named Niemand. That’s an alias.
For both you and the former LAPD blade runner, real name Rick Deckard, with whom you’ve been posing as man and wife. Your name is Sarah Tyrell.”
She stood where she was, showing no movement, no reaction. The grey shroud of her smoke-laden breath was the only sign of life. She had cupped an elbow in her free hand, hitting an aristocratic pose both studied and natural to her.
The angle of her head, the trace of one dark lock across the corner of her brow—she could close her eyes and imagine herself another world and another life away from this one. Back in the executive suite and private living quarters of the Tyrell Cor
poration headquarters on Earth, in Los Angeles. Back in the tight, secretive epicenter of all the wealth and power she had inherited upon the death—the murder-of her uncle Eldon Tyrell. From the great, vaulted windows, there had been a view across the city’s roiling inferno, the alleys and streets packed close at the base of the Tyrell ziggurat and slanting towers .
All gone now. Sarah watched the smoke twist and thin and disappear. L.A. remained, forever imploding inside the furious mass of its mottled citizens, glitter-eyed thieves and murderers and worse, locked in their scythe-led dance with the black-leather cops and blade runners and worse, all held in the masked, emotionless gaze of those urban tribespeople who’d cut themselves so far out of the loop that they might as well have been observers from another world, another time centuries forward or back. An Asian grace, jingling fleets of Chinese bicycles cutting through the neon-lit sheets of rain, ignoring the diluting blood and broken glass at the weary assassin’s feet. Sarah knew that was the discreet charm of L.A—you could go about your business, even if it meant killing people, or the things that looked just like people, and everyone else on the street would mind their own affairs. Even when the Tyrell Corporation headquarters had self-destructed, in the apocalypse that she herself had engineered and brought to pass, there had probably been streets full of faces that had glanced up for only a moment at the fire turning the night sky’s rain to steam; then they had returned to scurrying and pushing and shoving toward their own dark, unknowable desires.
“Miss Tyrell?” The man’s voice came from behind her, cutting through the deep reverie, the vision of that other world and time, into which she had fallen.
“There really is no use denying it. We know who you are.”
A certain pleasure came from hearing her own true name spoken again. By anyone other than Deckard, in whose mouth it was something close to a curse, a prison sentence she could never outlive.
Replicant night br-3 Page 7
