“But if what you’re saying is true Deckard no longer doubted it. “Then they’re not replicants anymore. They’re the human ones out there.”
“Matter of semantics, isn’t it? It’s all in how you define the word.” Marley’s hand gestured lazily toward Deckard. “Now you, given your background-being a blade runner and all that—you just naturally tend to think that anything that passes a Voigt-Kampff test is human, and anything that doesn’t isn’t. And maybe you’re right. But what it means is that the U.N. emigration program has been successful, but not in the way they intended. There is a human presence in the outer colonies, way out there in the stars, but it’s not us; it’s not the things that used to be human beings. It’s those other ones, that were the replicants. They’re the humans now.”
“Why . . . why is it happening?”
“There’s different explanations.” Marley shrugged. “Little hard to get a definitive answer right now; the U.N. authorities want to keep a lid on what’s going on, and the replicants are busy fighting for their lives and their freedom. All that sort of thing. But there’s basically two schools of thought on the issue. One is more or less scientific, having to do with a hypothesized morphogenetic field centered on Earth itself, a field that determines, in addition to the genetic code carried in our DNA, the essential characteristics of the human species. The outer colonies are beyond the range of that morphogenetic field. Once that happens, there’s slippage for both humans and replicants. Their outward physical appearance might not change, but other things will happen, like the shift in fertility and the empathic faculty.”
Another shrug. “As good a theory as any.”
Cold, abandoned vistas opened inside Deckard’s thoughts. “I knew,” he murmured to himself, “we should never have left home.” He found himself inside a seedy bar in the Martian emigrant colony, wrapped in darkness, an image with his name but not his face on the scattered video monitors, an image in a long coat like the one he used to wear, moving through neon-laced streets and endlessly deep shadows, none of which were real but all a simulation, far from home, far from L.A. And this isn’t even as far as those other ones went, he mused. They went so far, and got so lost, that they even lost themselves.
He wondered what they were like now, those things with human faces that used to be human. A bleak memory came to him of riding back into the colony on the shuttle filled with the native mine workers, the grown-up children that had been born here on Mars. And of feeling alone among them, more alone than he had ever felt, even in L.A., where aloneness had pretty much defined the human condition in the thickest of crowds. The stage beyond alone, that of disconnected; he had looked around the shuttle and seen faces like his, human faces, but had felt no kinship with them. In turn, their unfathomable gazes had swept past him with no spark of recognition. They’d changed just by coming this far. Not so much evolved, which implied some better state, but at least adapted. They’d shed their skins, all the excess baggage that came with being human; they didn’t need that stuff anymore.
“Maybe nobody does.”
“What was that?” Marley leaned toward him, trying to catch his whisper.
“Nothing. Just thinking.” He let the uncheering vision drain away, like water poured on the red desert sands. “You said there was some other explanation.
What’s that one?”
“Simple enough. There are some more mystical types who believe that being human isn’t an inherent, genetically based condition at all. Humans don’t decide who’s human and who’s not; that’s taken care of by something outside them. Way outside.” Marley looked uncomfortable, as though he were speaking of things not meant to be revealed. “There’s supposedly an aspect of God that’s called the Eye of Compassion . . . and it can only see suffering; it’s blind to everything else. And those things that it sees, the suffering ones, those are what are fully human. Anything else is . . . something less. So there may have been a time when the things that we consider to be human may actually have been that way . . . but not anymore. The Eye doesn’t see us; you and I, Deckard, we’re part of that which causes suffering. The ones who used to be the replicants—the ones we made—they suffer at our hands. They suffer, and the Eye of Compassion sees them and judges them to be human. They become human.
It’s the gaze of the Eye-its ability to empathize with other creatures—that determines who’s human. It’s nothing we do. There’s nothing we can do about it.” He gave a nervous shrug. “Anyway . . . that’s what some people think.”
“More human than human—”
“What was that?” Marley peered at him. “What did you say?”
Deckard had closed his eyes while listening to the other man. He opened them, then slowly shook his head. “Nothing. Nothing important. I was just thinking of that slogan that the Tyrell Corporation had. ‘More human than human.’ ” A grim half smile appeared on Deckard’s face. “Eldon Tyrell didn’t know how true that would be.”
For a few moments of silence, Marley studied him. “You know, though. You know it’s true, don’t you?”
He made no reply. He looked at the image of himself on the nearest monitor; that Deckard had a gun raised in one hand and was picking his way carefully over a field of shattered glass. “I don’t care,” he said at last. He looked back around to the other man. “Human is as human does, I suppose. It doesn’t make all that much difference to me. There was a replicant that I fell in love with, and it didn’t matter to me if she was human or not. Like you said—I’m not the one who decides about that sort of thing.”
“That might be, Deckard. But there are still other things that you do have to decide about. That nobody but you can decide.” Marley tapped a finger against the briefcase. “Like what you’re going to do with this thing. Whether you’re going to go ahead and try to carry it out to the replicant insurgents. Or whether you’re going to bag that whole notion, because you know what kind of a weapon it is.”
“But I don’t know.” He looked hard at the man across from him. “I’ve heard a lot of talk from you about what’s happened to the humans and the replicants out in the stars. And maybe I even believe some of it. But even if it’s true that the replicants have started becoming human—that they live as long as humans, and they have children like humans—that doesn’t tell me anything about what’s inside this box. And about why it should be so deadly to the replicants.”
“That’s right.” Batty’s voice broke into the conversation, coming from the briefcase. “Remember that, Deckard. This guy hasn’t proven anything. All you know for sure is that he wants to stop you. Just like the U.N. security forces and all the other cops in the universe would like to stop you. He’s just got a fancier line.”
“Yeah,” agreed Deckard, “he does talk a good line. Which makes him a funny kind of cop. I’m used to the kind that solves problems with a bullet.” He studied the other man, looking for the clue he needed. “That was the kind of cop I was. And let’s face it, Marley—you’re not exactly squeamish about that sort of thing yourself. You didn’t have any trouble over killing that Kowalski replicant when you thought you had to. So why are you being so careful with me?”
“I’m not being careful at all.” Marley smiled at him. “I don’t care about you at all. I’m just thorough, that’s all. I’ve got a job to take care of, same as you. So I’ve got my orders, and they specifically said to leave you alive.
Since I’m working for the rep-symps—the real rep-symps, not the phony-ass U.N. collaborators who set you up—I figure they must know what they want.
Otherwise, I would’ve taken care of this whole problem my own way. The same way I took care of that Kowalski replicant back at Outer Hollywood.” The smile became wider and meaner. “You know, you cop types are right: a bullet really is the best way. Simple and effective. If I weren’t operating under restrictions, you would never even have seen what hit you, and that briefcase would be dismantled to atoms. And I’d be long gone from here.”
“Hey!
Screw you, pal!” Batty’s miffed voice sounded again. “I’d kick your ass—if I could get to it.”
Both men ignored the angry words. “So what is the deal?” Deckard pointed to the briefcase. “All that stuff you were talking about a memetic bomb. Some kind of data, pure information. That the U.N. security forces want to get piped to the insurgents. What kind of data would cause that much damage, to make all this worthwhile?”
“You got to remember,” said Marley. “The Tyrell Corporation had all sorts of clever ideas. Eldon Tyrell had a knack for looking ahead and imagining the worst possibilities. Like the replicants’ getting out from under his and the U.N.’s control. So they built in things like the four-year life span. But that wasn’t the only fail-safe mechanism that Tyrell designed into the replicants. There’s another one that’s specifically re lated to the whole reproductive issue. The only reason it works is that it’s a variation on a deeply buried mammalian instinct, some dark coding that’s in the primitive layers of the human nervous system. Which is, after all, the basis for the replicant nervous system, so it’s in there as well. All that Eldon Tyrell did was to invert part of it, design his own little twist into the replicants.” Marley took a deep breath before going on. “The original instinctive behavior is the one by which adult male animals are driven to kill the offspring of other adult males of the same species, thus increasing the ratio of their own offspring in the breeding group; it’s sometimes called the ‘stepfather syndrome.’ Just one of those ugly parts of genetically directed behavior where the gene’s own survival and propagation are the only things important to it. Morality doesn’t enter into the equation. What Eldon Tyrell did with the replicants he designed was to program in a pair of aberrations to that basic, primitive instinct. The first was to make it much stronger, to the point of being a homicidal obsession; the child-murdering behavior takes over the entire organism, overriding even its own instincts for self-preservation.
The other aberration on the basic instinct directs the behavior toward the organism’s own offspring. You following me? The organism—the replicant-murders his own children. It’s like a breakdown in an extended immune system, one that extends beyond the replicant’s own skin. The primitive drive is inverted, so that the individual attacks and destroys the very thing it’s supposed to protect.”
“I don’t get it,” said Deckard. “If that’s the behavior that’s programmed into the replicants, then there’s no contest. There’s no way that they can win any kind of struggle against the U.N.’s colonists. Because they’ll destroy themselves; they’ll reproduce, but they’ll murder their own children. It’s all over for them. They’re a biological dead end.”
“Not quite. The ‘stepfather syndrome’ behavior is built into them, but it’s buried. It’s not activated unless it’s triggered. That’s where you come in, Deckard. You and the little job you agreed to undertake for the cops and the U.N. security forces that had managed to inifitrate the rep-symp underground. You’re carrying the trigger right here in this briefcase. The data that’s been imbedded in it isn’t any list of disguised replicants on Earth; that was just the cover story to get you to agree to the job. What the people who put this together did was encode the memetic bomb, the trigger to activate the buried behavior pattern, and stick it in here, in this box. Then they wrapped it up, like putting a bow on a birthday present, by imbedding Roy Batty’s cerebral contents in there-more to goad you into taking on the delivery job than to actually help you get there. Because in reality, you don’t need any help; there’s no real effort being made by the authorities to stop you. The U.N. and the police, all of them—they want you to get there. You delivering that briefcase to the replicant insurgents is what their big plan is all about. You’d be showing up on the replicants’ doorstep with the trigger to the bomb that’s already wired into them. The buried behavior pattern would be activated, and there’d be nothing they could do to stop it. And that’d be the end of the replicants. When they die, there’d be no replicant children to replace them.”
“This is crap,” growled Batty’s voice. “Don’t listen to this jerk. He’s just playing with your mind, Deckard. He’s the one who’s working for the authorities.”
“I’m afraid our friend here protests too much.” Marley rapped his knuckles on the briefcase’s lid. “He’s hardly a disinterested party in this whole affair, is he? Since his whole existence is bound up with what the two of you have been told about his contents. And why you should go ahead and deliver them.”
“There’s someone else,” said Deckard. “Batty’s not the only one. There was someone else who convinced me I should do it.”
“Ah, yes. Our transcendent authority in these matters.” Marley nodded. “The good Sebastian, who’s gone from this mortal realm to a higher if slightly smaller one. It only goes to show that even a deity, albeit a dehydrated one, can be wrong.”
“You knew I went to see him? In his little pocket universe?”
“Of course.” Marley gave a casual shrug. “The people I’m working for—the real rep-symps-know all kinds of things. The other rep-symps may have been infiltrated and taken over by the police, but it doesn’t end there. My bunch has its contacts and moles on the other side. They know what kind of data was imbedded in the briefcase, and what else they put in it. And what they instructed Batty to tell you so you’d go off and get convinced by Sebastian about your holy mission. Your delivery job. The problem is, Sebastian can tell you only what he himself believes to be true; he’s not omniscient, at least as far as this world goes.”
If he couldn’t believe Sebastian—and Deckard had to admit that could be the case, that the little genetic engineer, even in his new transfigured incarnation, could’ve been lied to and misled—the question became, once more, a matter of trusting anyone at all. This Marley character had at least the advantage of a certain cold logic on his side to carry his arguments. They’ve made it easy for me, thought Deckard. He glanced over at the video monitor.
All it would have taken, a simple thing, was to have let the director Urbenton go ahead and dub Deckard’s face onto the actor playing him. A standard production technique. And then I would’ve been a marked man. Anybody in the emigrant colony could have recognized him and turned him in, if the authorities had, in fact, been hunting him down. But instead .
“You’re asking me to believe a lot,” said Deckard. “Not that everybody I run into hasn’t been doing the same. But this ‘stepfather syndrome’ business—this memetic bomb that I’m supposed to be carrying—that seems pretty extreme. Why should I believe you on this one? Got any proof?”
“Mere evidence isn’t enough for you.” The smile appeared on Marley’s face again. “Or logic, what you can figure out about what’s happening around you—”
“It’s not that.” Deckard didn’t bother with a smile. “I just don’t trust murderers.”
One of Marley’s eyebrows rose. “So not even yourself?”
“Especially not myself.”
“All right,” said Marley, exuding an affable calm. “You want proof? Or at least as much as can be gotten in this fallible universe.
Fine—you’ve been carrying it around with you.”
“The briefcase?” Deckard laid his hand on it. “I thought that was the whole problem, not the answer.”
“Well, maybe you’ve packed a few extra things inside. Things that might sort out the situation a little bit.” Marley pulled the briefcase out from beneath Deckard’s palm and turned it around toward himself.
“Get your hands off me—”
Marley ignored the protest that came in Batty’s voice. His thumbs pushed back the latch buttons on either side of the handle; a second later, he had thrown the lid back, exposing the lined interior.
“Not a lot in here.” He glanced up at Deckard. “You could’ve made better use of it, you know. Thrown in a change of clothes or something. No matter—there’s enough. At least for right now.”
Leaning back against the booth’s paddi
ng, Deckard watched as the other man examined the briefcase. A rectangular packet, one end torn off and then folded down to preserve the contents, was held up before him.
“You held on to this?” Marley looked at the name SEBASTIAN on the packet.
“Thought it might come in handy, I guess. Just in case you wanted to talk to him again. Though what more he could tell you, I have no idea. Still, maybe you could just keep it as a little souvenir of your travels.” He laid the packet down on the booth’s table. The briefcase’s lid blocked Deckard’s view of the other man’s hands rummaging inside. “Or perhaps you just wanted to keep the original package all together, with all the bits and pieces-since the collaborator rep-symps, the ones the cops have taken over, put this in here, you might as well keep it the way it came to you. But this is something new.”
Marley held up another object. “I know what was in here originally, and this wasn’t part of it. You just put this in here since you got back from Sebastian’s pocket universe.”
Deckard looked across the table and saw a square of white-enameled metal in Marley’s hand. The other man turned it slightly, revealing the broad red cross on the small box’s lid. The old first aid kit-ancient, perhaps, considering how battered and scuffed it appeared. He had almost forgotten about it; when he had left the hovel, tugging the Rachael child along with him by one hand, the briefcase in the other, he had stopped when he had felt the little metal box slipping out of his jacket. He had popped open the briefcase and thrown the box in there for safekeeping, not even trying to figure out why he was hanging on to it at all instead of pitching it away as a worthless piece of junk.
“You do remember, don’t you? Where you got this?” Marley held the white metal box up in front of his smile. “It wasn’t that long ago.”
“What do you know about that?” The question of just how extensive the other man’s sources of information were troubled Deckard again. “You weren’t there when it happened.”
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