EdgeOfHuman

by Unknown

  Close to her, he watched as she let the coat fall away from her shoulders, revealing her naked arms, a thin gold circle dangling at one wrist. A scent of skin-warmed orchid breathed itself into his nostrils; he could taste it at the back of his throat. Sarah knelt down before him, touching him for a moment at his hips to balance herself. With her knees against the floor's rough planks, she reached behind her neck and undid her hair. With a shake of her head, it came loose, dark and soft against the paleness of her throat.

  "You see?" This close, her voice could be a whisper. She raised herself a little bit, just enough so she could lean across the coffin's glass lid, both hands against the smooth surface. She brought her face down against one arm, turning to look up at him. "It's perfect, isn't it?"

  He could see her face and Rachael's at the same time, separated by only a few inches. Sarah's gaze pierced him, held him; beneath the glass, the sleeping, dying woman with the same face, eyes closed, lips slightly parted to release an hours-long breath. Both women's hair was the same color, the same substance, across the coffin's pillow or the unmarked glass. He looked down, the world around him collapsed to a space even smaller than the cabin.

  "I wanted to know . . ." Sarah turned the side of her face against the glass, so she could look at her own image beneath. "It sounded so strange . . . that you could love something . . . that wasn't real. What could that be like . . ." She raised her head, her gaze catching onto his again. "Not for you. For her."

  "I don't know." Deckard slowly shook his head. "She never told me."

  "Well . . . there's a lot you don't know." Sarah stood up, reaching down to brush the floor's dust from the edge of her skirt. She picked up her coat and folded it around herself. The same chill as before touched her voice. "That's really why I came here -- to tell you that. There's a lot you don't know yet. But you're going to find out."

  She walked past him, pulling open the cabin's door and stepping out into the darkness without even glancing back over her shoulder at him.

  From the small window, he watched her spinner rise into the night sky. It hung suspended for a moment, giving him a glimpse of Sarah at the controls, then swiveled around and disappeared under the pinpoint stars, heading south. Toward L.A.

  Other lights were moving up there. He looked up, counting two traces, then a third, coming his way. They must've been waiting, thought Deckard. Then she called them in.

  A rational part of his head was almost glad the gun had been lost, knocked from his hand out in the woods. Otherwise, he might have been tempted to do something stupid with it. Like try to put up a fight.

  He was sitting in the cabin's single chair when the agents, in their grey, insignia-less SWAT suits, shoved open the door.

  "Deckard?" The leader -- there were half a dozen behind him, sheer overkill -- aimed an assault rifle's short barrel toward his chest. All the men had buzz cuts and hard, machinelike faces; they could've been LAPD elites, but he didn't recognize any of them. Before he could answer, the leader smiled and pointed the weapon toward the ceiling. "Good. You're being smart."

  He sighed. These gung ho types had always given him a cramp. "What did you expect?"

  "You're coming with us, Deckard."

  "Can't." He tilted his head to indicate the coffin beside him. "I've got to take care of her."

  "She'll keep." Two of the other agents had stepped behind the chair, yanking him from it by his arms pulled to the small of his back. "This won't take long."

  The spinners were unmarked as well. "Are you guys Tyrell?" He studied the team's leader as the canopy swung down into place. On the man's breast pocket was a name, tag that read ANDERSSON.

  "You don't need that information." The leader hit the cockpit's PURGE button. The ground fell away.

  Deckard leaned back, turning his head to watch the other spinners pull into flanking position. "Where we going?"

  "Don't be stupid." The leader didn't take his eyes from the controls. "You know."

  He did know. His hands drew into fists. "Why?"

  A sharp glance. "You know that, too." And a sneer. "You left too much unfinished business there. That's why." Deckard closed his eyes. He was going home. To L.A.

  3

  "How 's the patient doing?"

  The nurse looked back over one of his broad shoulders at the questioner. A man in an identical set of green scrubs, sterile disposable wraps over his shoes, smiled at him. "Who're you talking about?" asked the nurse. He didn't recognize the guy; either new staff or from a sector of the hospital that he didn't get to on his rounds.

  "The cardiopulmonary case up on the eighty-third floor." The man indicated the floor immediately above them with a tilt of his head and a quick upward glance. "How's he getting along?"

  "Okay, I guess." The nurse shrugged. "I mean . . . he can breathe. As long as nobody unplugs him." More to it than that: inside the equipment-laden cart, the chrome assemblage he'd pushed up to the elevator doors, was a ten-milliliter jar filled with red sputum that he'd just suctioned out of the doped-up patient's bronchial tubes. If that little chore wasn't done every couple of hours, the poor bastard with the fist-sized hole shot through his chest could still strangle to death, no matter how many high-tech pumps and hoses were hooked up to him. "Why you want to know?"

  The other's turn to shrug. "Just curious." The smile remained switched on, accompanied by sharp-focused eyes that didn't smile at all. "Seems like a lot of fuss -- you know? Locking off the whole floor and everything. And all those cops standing around." The man did a mock shudder, while his gaze narrowed, from stilettos to probing needles. "Creepy, huh? Who is that fellow, anyway?"

  "Beats me." The nurse thumbed the elevator call button again, glancing up at the blank number panel above the doors. Like a lot of things in the hospital, it didn't work, or never had. "Just meat on major life support, far as I'm concerned." Grinding noises echoed in the shaft, and the elevator doors finally drew open, revealing a space littered with broken syringes and scraps of red-soaked bandages. "Not my business." He pushed the equipment cart in, stepped behind it, glass crunching under his feet, turned, and hit another button. "And guess what -- it's not your business, either." Another grind as the doors slid toward each other.

  The guy with all the questions reached out, his white-knuckled hand grabbing the dented stainless steel of one door, not just stopping it, but forcing it back into its vertical slot. He leaned inside the elevator, glare alone fierce enough to back the nurse and the equipment cart into the corner. Then he smiled again.

  "You're right." He nodded slowly, pleasantly. "It's not any of my business at all. You just remember that." He let go of the door and stepped back. He was still smiling when the doors closed all the way and the elevator started down.

  Talk about creepy -- the nurse pushed himself away from the equipment cart. The hospital administration would hire just about anybody, it seemed.

  Colonel Fuzzy and Squeaker Hussar marched across the sideways world, carrying their fretful burden with them.

  "Careful -- you're gonna drop me!" Sebastian wrapped the crook of his arm tighter around the colonel's neck. In thin starlight, steel and Teflon showed through where the teddy bear's brown woolly coat had worn away. "C'mon, Calm. I put you together better'n this!"

  Shiny button eyes looked back around at Sebastian; the raggedy uniformed teddy bear snarled, neck twisted, chrome fangs revealed in its snub muzzle. He knew that Colonel Fuzzy always got crotchety when its gut-load of batteries started to run down. Sure better've been some fresh ones in this drop, he worried. It would be tricky enough to deactivate the teddy bear -- he'd long ago had to wire in a self-defense drive, for Colonel Fuzzy to have a chance of surviving out here on the sideways. The colonel had claws longer and sharper than a real bear's, and it wasn't fun trying to get past them to the shutdown relay underneath the faded Napoleonic jacket. It would be even less fun to have the lighter, faster but weaker Squeaker carry him back to their nest.

  As the animated teddy bear p
lodded forward again, Sebastian hitched himself around in the leather-strapped papoose carrier, looking back the way the three of them had come. This was all new territory, someplace he and the collonel and the hussar had never been before, or at least not since they'd all fled from the canyons of downtown L.A., where the buildings still stood upright. He'd had his own legs back then, otherwise he'd never have made it.

  There were some sections around this zone where the fallen office towers weren't lying perfectly flat on the ground, but were cracked up at various difficult angles. Most of the windows, that at noontime shone up at the hammering sun like smooth, white-hot anvils, had been shatterproof tensile laminates, so there weren't many chances of dropping inside and finding a route through the cockeyed law offices and depopulated bankers' suites. If. Colonel Fuzzy had to be taken off-line, Squeaker wouldn't be much help in getting across that slick, tilted terrain. He didn't relish the prospect of crawling all the way home, using just his own remaining hand and arm to pull himself along.

  Please, dear God, he prayed as he rode on the surly teddy bear's back. Let there be batteries. That's all I'm asking, at least for right now.

  "Sebastian! Over here!" Squeaker's high grackle voice came from beyond rubble and twisted rebar. "I found it, I found it!"

  Without any prodding, the colonel picked up its speed, claws of mitten hands scrabbling at the broken concrete rising before it. As they crested the ridge, Sebastian pushed himself higher on the colonel's shoulder, scanning to where the hussar was jumping up and down and pointing. A soft-edged star, bright international orange, radiated from the welfare bundle's impact point.

  "Careful, fellas -- lemme check it out first." The teddy bear had half run, half slid down beside its animated comrade-in-arms; both their sets of miniature legs stamped impatiently on the building's horizontal wall. Colonel Fuzzy emitted a deep tracheal whine as Sebastian dug out the segments of his poker stick and screwed them together. "Don't wanna get anybody hurt, now . . ."

  He extended the chrome bug feeler over the teddy bear's shoulder and prodded the lumpish parcels spilling out of the crumpled container. Couldn't be too careful; the grinchier gov agencies had been seeding the sideways zones with booby traps. A box of nori sheets could go off with a bang, leaving a scavenger sliced to ribbons by razor-edged repub manifestos and five-year plans. The poker stick's tip rooted farther inside the container but tripped no flash circuits.

  "Come on, Sebastian -- " Frustration dance; Squeaker Hussar's broken-off nose, shorter now than the spike on top of his helmet, yearned toward the welfare bundle. Its bright human-doll eyes widened. "We been waiting and waiting -- "

  "All right, all right. You guys get your tiny asses blown up some day, it's not gonna be my fault." He retracted the poker stick, began disassembling and stowing it beside him in the papoose carrier. "Okay, let's go see what we found."

  Luck, in the form of shrink-wrapped D-cells and, even better, Czech war-surplus industrials, the big square kind that would've filled both his hands if he still had the left one. He'd converted both Fuzzy and Squeaker to run on just about anything that packed a charge, when he'd cut himself off from the Tyrell Corporation's supply line. These would do just fine.

  "What else we got?" Sebastian raised himself up on his forearm; the colonel had taken him out of the papoose carrier and laid him on the wall, the better for it to go rooting inside the container. It and the hussar were in there now, tossing out the packs of batteries, Spam cans, chocolate-covered cherries, off-world emigration forms. "You little pixies." He laughed: both Fuzzy and Squeaker had emerged with a chain of freeze-dried Thuringer sausages looped around their necks in a lover's knot. "Quit clowning around, and let's pack up."

  They hauled their booty homeward -- he'd hooked up one of the big Czech batteries to the alligator clips inside Fuzzy's moth-pecked chest, so the teddy bear was strong enough to carry him and help the hussar drag the sledge-bag along behind them. The colonel wasn't cranky now; through its shoulder blades, Sebastian could feel the contented purr of gears and solenoids.

  When Sarah Tyrell had come back from Zurich -- less than a year ago, when the people who now worked for her had come and told her the news -- she had ordered them to seal off the suite, the entire floor, where her uncle had worked and lived. And died. Thus turning it into a little museum, a monument to Eldon Tyrell's memory, a place where the past had been captured and bottled up. And from where the past couldn't escape, couldn't get out and hurt her anymore.

  Now she broke the seal. The elevator creeping up the angled side of the building halted; a disembodied voice spoke. "Access to this sector is denied to all Tyrell Corporation personnel and other individuals. No clearance status is currently available for this sector. Please exit and return to your authorized work area. Corporate security has been notified."

  "It's okay." She spoke aloud, to no one; she was alone in the elevator. "It's me. Override the access protocols." She wasn't sure how much of a voice sample the computers needed to recognize her. "Umm . . . Godiam, fugace e rapido, è il gaudio dell'amore, è un fior che nasce e muore, nè più si può goder." The words came out of a recent memory track; she had just been lying in bed in her own suite in the Tyrell Corporation headquarters, blue smoke drifting overhead, listening to the classic old Sills Traviata. Her favorite; she still couldn't handle the Callas chips. All that screaming was too much like the voices inside her own head.

  The other voice, the computer's, made no reply. The only signal was the resumption of the elevator's progress up the building's face. A few moments later the doors slid open; she stepped out and into what had been her uncle's private domain.

  She had been here before. Once, for a few minutes upon her arrival back in L.A., just long enough to glance around, then turn to her retinue of corporate flunkies and give her orders. To have the entire floor mothballed, just the way it'd been when Eldon Tyrell had been found murdered. Minus his body, of course; that had already been removed, then cremated, the ashes presented to her in some tribalistic changing-of-the-guard ceremony, as she'd stood black-veiled on a raised platform in front of the corporation's assembled employees. She'd carried back to her private quarters the little urn with her uncle's name on it. Every day since then the level of grey dust inside had grown slightly higher with each flick of her cigarette against the urn's open rim. She kept it handy on her bedside table for just that purpose.

  In the great high-ceilinged rooms, the air smelled stale and confined, despite the building's elaborate circulation and filtering systems. Something had been trapped in there that no mechanical breath could expel. Not just the past of a year ago, his death, but the past of many years before, and many small, cumulative deaths. Those had been hers.

  In that familiar bedchamber, she had seen the glow of sacramental ranks of candles on her own skin, turning to ruby a small stain of her own blood. Now the candles were all guttered puddles of wax, black seeds of wick at their centers, a white cascade, glistening frozen upon the sheets' rumpled silk. The imprint of her uncle's back and shoulders was still visible in the pillows stacked against the massive headboard. That had been the place of his late-night meditations, his brain ticking into the hours when only the Vladivostok and Beijing exchanges were active, the distant game boards where he could shift the pawns of cash and holdings into even sharper, more advantageous positions.

  That game went on without him. Another one was over, played out to checkmate. As Sarah walked across the dim bedchamber, her toe had struck a chess piece, the black queen. The other pieces were scattered across the floor; the board had been knocked over by the corpse's fall. She wondered who had won, her uncle or his opponent. Hard to imagine him losing.

  In the faint luminance spilling toward her from the other rooms, something else was visible at her feet. A black continent from a map without boundaries, big enough for an eyeless face to lie against as it had spread wetly past his cooling hands. The stain on the floor had been red then, but less than a year's time had darkene
d it. She stepped across it, the sharp points of her heels tapping as though on a thin layer of shellac. On the other side, she stopped and looked back at the empty bedchamber. Candle wax, cold sheets, and toppled chess pieces. She liked the room better this way, dead and safe.

  A voice whispered to her, from somewhere above. “Transaction left incomplete. Awaiting further instructions. Do you wish to resume trading?"

  Her uncle's brokerage program, dumb and without initiative, capable only of following the orders it received. Given the late hour of his death, that was what he would've been doing when the replicant, with its brushed-back shock of white hair -- she'd seen pictures -- and crazy smile, had walked into the bedchamber. The brokerage program's soft voice was a painless memory for her, or at least one on the other side of pain, from all those other nights when he hadn't been murdered but she had wished him to be. Her breath against one of the silken pillows, the program murmuring numbers far away . . .

  "Please respond." A desperate undertone to the program's voice. "There have been inquiries regarding this account. Awaiting instructions."

  She remembered why she had come here. Unfinished business. To take possession -- not enough to assume control of the Tyrell Corporation, to make it her own. Other stages in the process were necessary, each to be walked through in turn.

  This would be one of the last. With only a few more beyond it.

  "Instructions as follows." She knew that the brokerage program would respond to her words now. It was on the same voice-ID circuit as the door security. "Terminate all portfolio activities. Close down all accounts. Cash out and deposit all proceeds in personal account, Tyrell, Sarah."

  The program sounded fretful. "Active account is in the name Tyrell, Eldon."

  "As I said. That account is closed."

  A few seconds later the program signed off and deactivated itself, going into its stasis with something close to gratitude. A slightly different bodyless voice read off a balance statement, which meant nothing to her. At the level of the heir to the Tyrell Corporation, money was an abstract force, like gravity. No one noticed it until it was gone.