EdgeOfHuman

by Unknown

No -- he closed his eyes, sorting things out. And it's not Sarah, either. The woman was Sarah's mother, Ruth. The mother of Rachael, too, in a way. They all looked just the same, twins, triplets. The only difference was that Ruth had had her dark hair cut short, just enough left for a little fringe at the back of her neck. A practical cut, just right for climbing aboard the Salander 3 -- that was what the clipping was about -- and setting off Prox-ward with her husband Anson Tyrell and their marmalade cat. And maybe the first few cells of their human daughter, already growing in Ruth's womb. The couple looked radiant and happy, in that bright world of the past. To find what they were looking for, another world out in the stars . . .

  "Why did they come back?" Voice a wondering murmur, as Deckard studied the clipping. No answer there. "Why'd they come back to this world? This one sucks." He would've said that even if there hadn't been people, cops like he'd been, prowling through the city, looking for his death.

  "I don't know." Isidore's voice came from behind him. "Nobody does. It's a mystery. Maybe Sarah knows. Maybe you should ask her about it sometime. If you ever guh-get the chuh-chance again."

  He glanced over his shoulder. There wasn't time for anything more to be said. He heard the footsteps now, then the office's door opening. The dark-uniformed man, the one who'd piloted the spinner that had brought him here, looked in.

  "Mr. Deckard's leaving now." Isidore petted the mechanical cat on the desk, not looking up at either of the men, as though suddenly hit with an obscure shame. "Show him the way, please."

  "Happy to." The pilot locked a grip on Deckard's arm, pulled and then shoved, taking him out the door, pushing him past the wire cages.

  Only a couple of minutes later he found himself outside a bigger and heavier door, steel studded with bolts. At street level, the sound of the Van Nuys Pet Hospital's freight dock slamming shut echoed through the narrow canyon of the surrounding buildings.

  Fine Mojave dust drifted across his shoes, an oven wind piling up miniature dunes in the empty streets' gutters.

  Deckard tilted his head back, looking up at the sun, letting its glare hammer into his eyes, unblinking tears shimmering toward steam

  A distant black speck moved across the sun's fire.

  Holden could see the luminous green line running across the face of the monitor. A humpbacked snake -- That's my pulse, he thought. It looked a million miles away, though he knew he just had to raise his hand to touch it. The black attaché case was strapped to his chest with a web of surgical tape. In the spinner's cockpit, he managed weakly to raise the sheer tonnage of his head from the seat's padding.

  "What . . ." Tongue dry and thick, but without a stiff plastic air hose jammed down his throat. All the necessary tubing seemed to be down at his chest. "What's going . . ." A tiny ball fluttered in a transparent valve with each word he breathed. "On . . ."

  The man in the other seat, hands on the spinner's controls, turned and looked at him. And smiled. "You blacked out there for a while." He leaned over and checked the readings on the attaché case's dials. "Seem to be doing okay, though. Know who you are?"

  "Who . . ." The question puzzled him. Plus the smiling man's face -- he'd seen him before, but he didn't know when or where. Crazy-looking smile -- crazy meaning insane, or at least on the border of it -- and a shock of white hair, spiky cropped. But the face was older, more wrinkled and lined than he thought he remembered it. What did that mean? "Who . . . am I . . ."

  "Your name, pal. What's your name?"

  "Oh . . ." Not so hard, especially now that the drugs they'd been giving him in the hospital had started to wear off. The hoses in his chest stung; he had to fight an irrational urge to pull them out. "My name . . ." Deep breath, the little ball dancing higher. "Holden . . . Dave Holden . . . "

  "Very good." The smiling man reached over and tapped a finger against his forehead.

  "They didn't screw with anything up here, at least."

  It had started to seem that way. With more pain, more clarity, as though the hard sun, dimmed by the cockpit's photochromic glass, was burning off a heavy fog bank. He knew he'd been there, in the hospital, hooked up to those, bigger machines, for a long time. A year? Maybe more -- as though he could now look down at the fog bank, wide as an ocean, the freight spinner having flown above both it and the tops of the L.A. towers.

  At the farthest edge of the fog bank was his last unclouded memory. The last one before the woozy haze of the hospital ward.

  Describe . . . only the good things that come into your mind about . . . your mother. That was his own voice, the last thing he'd spoken aloud in that other world. Where'd that been? He concentrated, caught: at the Tyrell Corporation headquarters. In a room with two chairs, an overhead fan that'd barely stirred the stale, overprocessed air, and a table with a Voigt-Kampff machine sitting on it, the bellows inhaling and exhaling at the same speed as the attaché case strapped to his chest now. And another voice, thick, stupid, and resentful: My mother? Lemme tell you about my mother . . .

  The rest of that memory track was not good. The doctors had had to bring him out of a narcotized stupor -- that was when he'd first sighted all the machines ranked around his bed, and the tubes and hoses going in where just about everything under his rib cage had once been -- so he could be debriefed by a sick-looking crew of investigators from the department . . .

  Now he remembered. That was when he'd seen this guy before. Not smiling in the picture they'd shown him, but still -- it was him. The same one.

  "Wait . . . a minute . . ." He could hear the machinery in the attaché case revving up, to keep pace with the self-generated adrenaline suddenly trickling into his veins. "Who . . . are you . . ."

  The man turned his smile, even bigger and crazier, back around at him. "My name's Roy," he said, an inflection of almost childlike delight. A good joke. "I'm Roy Batty."

  "Oh . . . shit . . ." Holden scrabbled blindly beside himself, trying to find the cockpit's exit latch. It didn't matter that the spinner was hundreds of meters above the city. Everything that he'd been told about this particular replicant, the strongest and most murderous of all the escaped Nexus-6 models, flashed through his mind. But it's supposed to be dead, he thought in panicked confusion.

  "Come on--" The smiling figure grabbed Holden and dragged him back into the seat. "You're not going anywhere. Except with me."

  Helpless, he watched as Batty adjusted one of the dials inside the attaché case. His pulse slowed, whether he wanted it to or not. Black spots swarmed in front of his eyes, until Batty tweaked the knob a fraction the other way.

  "There." Smiling, both hands back on the spinner's controls. "Just relax, Dave. I'm taking you someplace special. Someplace . . . you'll like."

  The ball floated in the valve, trembling with each assisted breath. He closed his eyes, not wanting to see the hoses latched to his chest. Or anything else.

  Beneath the yellow L.A. sky, the spinner flew on.

  6

  From one of the bureau plat's drawers, Sarah Tyrell took out the small tight-cell phone she had known would be there. Turning to gaze out at the strata of smoke and haze obscuring the afternoon sun, she flipped the phone open and pressed the TALK button. A synthesized trill, rising and falling in pitch, sounded at her ear, as the beam sought out and locked on to a secured channel from one of the low-orbit satellites over L.A. Punching in the numbers, then waiting, she idly let her hand prowl through the rest of the drawer's contents, the scarlet ovals of her nails clicking against paper clips and the remote, a Francis Harache gold snuff box, the cheap and nasty folding knife. Somewhere across town, another phone was ringing in sync with the one at her ear.

  Then answered. "Speak if you want to." A man's voice.

  "You know who it is." Sarah leaned back, the ridge of the chair's low back cutting under her shoulder blades. "I was just wondering how things went. With our guest."

  "Huh. I imagine Deckard's just fine. Wherever the hell he is right now."

  She was used to Andersso
n's general charmlessness. She had picked him -- not just for this job, but for others as well -- for his efficiency. He had been in charge of locating Deckard, up in the Oregon wilds, then bringing him back, even piloting the spinner that had carried Deckard home to Los Angeles. The man's other machinelike virtue was that of silence, of keeping his mouth shut.

  From the office's high window, she could see across the city's sprawling maze. Deckard was down there, in there now. "Didn't you tag, him? So we could trace where he goes?" ,

  "Wouldn't have been much point in doing that." He sounded bored and competent. "Somebody like him, he knows his business. If we put a tag on him, he'd find it and flush it. Next thing you know, we're running a trace through some sewer line and out to the ocean, and he's a hundred miles inland. Waste of time."

  She felt a small knife's edge of apprehension, a flutter of the pulse beneath her ribs. She hadn't brought Deckard all this way, back into the world he'd tried to escape, just to lose track of him.

  "What if he doesn't turn up again? What if he just . . . disappears?"

  "He'll turn up. He has to. If he's going to survive."

  In the few moments of silence, as she mulled over what the man had just told her, she could hear faint sounds. Not here, in what had been her uncle's office, but over in the Van Nuys Pet Hospital. The sounds were animal cries, real or fake. She knew that Andersson had a little corner for himself, tucked at the end of the rows of cages and kennels, where he transacted his own business. Away from Isidore, who might be distressed to overhear some of the things that were going on.

  Which reminded her. Other things to be taken care of. "How did their little conversation go? I mean Deckard and Isidore."

  "Pretty much what you expected. That's the great thing about ideologues. People who really believe stuff. You can depend on them. Isidore raked him over the coals for quite a while; Deckard didn't look so good when I finally booted him out of here. I'll send you the tapes; maybe you'll find 'em amusing."

  She knew that he had wired Isidore's office, that cramped little cubicle. It smelled like a small zoo, mixed with machine oil and scorched plastic insulation -- she'd been there one time, checking out the pet hospital's owner, getting an intuitive readout on him. She imagined that Isidore knew as well about the bug that had been planted; he wasn't that much of a fool, that disconnected from reality. Clever enough, actually, to make no attempt to remove the bug. Or, as Andersson said, ideological in nature, nothing to hide -- at least from her. Perhaps he'd thought his lectures and stuttering rants would change her mind, settle into her heart. It could happen.

  But not now. "Isidore's done a lot for us, hasn't he?" She extended her hand, touching the window's glass, sensing a fraction of the day's heat through it. The sky reddened from sulphur yellow as the sun moved slowly toward the horizon. "Quite a lot."

  A moment's hesitation before Andersson's reply. "I suppose so."

  Redder light leaked through the flesh of her fingertips. "I wonder . . . if there's really much more he can do for us."

  "Are you trying to tell me something?" Andersson's voice again, breaking into the silence.

  "Do I have to tell you?"

  "No . . ." He was probably giving a slight shake of his head. "I don't think so." ,

  "Good." The office and the bedchamber beyond had fallen further into shadow. "And when you're done . . .

  He said nothing. Waiting.

  "Why don't you come by here." She killed the connection and put the phone back in the bureau plat's drawer.

  On her way out she stopped at the foot of her uncle's bed. That was hers as well -- if she wanted it.

  A handful of silk, shimmering against her fingertips as she lifted the edge of the sheet. But with a musty smell, as though it had absorbed a scent of age from the bedchamber's trapped air. She'd decided to have one of her personal staff come in and strip the bed, change everything for new .

  Then changed her mind. She saw something she hadn't noticed before, a spatter of blood, small dots the color of the larger stain on the floor, a line diagonal up to the pillows.

  She let the silk drift away from her hand, falling gentle upon the bed. When it was quite still again, she turned and walked toward the doors.

  Smile and smile and smile . . . and be what? Dave Holden didn't know anything about the man sitting next to him in the cockpit. All that he did know, all that his brain could process, fueled by the blood re-oxygenated by the pumping and gasping attaché case strapped to his chest, was that he was in deep, deep shit.

  Then again, thought Holden, I was dying anyway. There in that hospital. He wondered if the figure beside him -- not smiling now, but concentrating on the freight spinner's controls, taking it in for a landing somewhere at the city's unlit fringe -- had spiked one of the blood tubes with a philosophically oriented chemical. A good deal of his initial fear had faded away, replaced by an odd curiosity as to what his fate was going to be.

  Batty was dead; they'd told him that, Bryant and a couple of his other old pals from the blade runner unit. They'd come to the side of Holden's chrome-railed bed with their hats in their hands, wedging themselves into the small space between one gurgling machine and the next; the doctors had turned down the fentanyl drip enough to bring him into semiconsciousness, in which he'd been able to hear Bryant telling him that the group of escaped replicants, the batch he'd been assigned to, had all been successfully retired. As if he cared.

  For its own reasons, the department gave him partial credit for the track-down, even though all he'd managed to do was inhale a hollow point through his breastbone, from that lump Kowalski. Bad for the morale of the rest of the squad, to let one of their number get his lungs blown out and not put a little something extra in his paycheck. The hospital visit had been when Bryant, the whiskey breath seeping through his brown teeth even stronger than usual, had shown him the morgue shots of the dead replicants. Including Roy Batty, who'd been the leader of their violent little band -- even through a narcotic haze, the image of that unmistakable face, with its shock of white hair and gaze still coming in loony from the other side of the marble slab, had made a deep impression on him. Unforgettable.

  "Hey -- how about turning on some lights?" That was Batty, speaking into the spinner's comm mike. Holden had watched in silence as ,Batty had tuned in a narrow-beam radio link with some identified ground station; the frequency numbers on the control panel looked way off any band with which he was familiar. "If I have to bring this thing in blind, I'm going to feel like kicking someone's ass afterward."

  Holden looked out the side of the cockpit. At darkness, far beyond the reach of L.A.'s lit-up sprawl. How far had they gone? Up ahead, through the transparent curve, he could discern a jagged silhouette along the horizon, mountains outlined by stars and the moon's soft glaze.

  Some other blue light, not the moon, spilled across the bleak landscape, blinking on and off. Holden brought his gaze around -- it took some effort; he could feel himself tiring -- and saw a landing rectangle outlined by the bright flashes. "There you go--" A voice crackled from the speaker on the control panel. "Make it quick, willya? We're getting sand in our boots, hanging around waiting on you."

  "Where . . ." His own voice came out a feeble whisper. The effort of speaking, on top of just staying conscious and lifting his head from the seat's padded rest to look around, had come close to exhausting him again. The dials on the black attaché case, visible beneath the web of surgical tape that bound it to him, jittered as the device kicked more oxygen into his body. "Where . . . is this . . ." Getting out the last couple of words had brought black spots dancing in front of his eyes.

  Batty's disquieting smile swung in his direction. He reached over and made a small adjustment on one of the attaché case's valves. "As I told you before. Someplace special." The smile widened, deepening the lines on the weathered face. "It's someplace you were always going to wind up."

  No lock-on from the ground station, as far as he could see; Batty was taking the
spinner down manually, centering the vehicle motionless above the blue lights, then hitting a straight vertical descent. The spinner's undercarriage hit the ground hard enough to bounce Holden in his seat, the attaché case against the hollowed spaces of his chest.

  "Sorry about that." Batty started flicking off the engine controls. "These freight jobbies are a bitch to maneuver."

  "That's . . . that's okay," whispered Holden painfully. Maybe it wasn't too late to try ingratiating himself with the folks who ran the afterlife. "I'm sure . . . you're doing your best . . ."

  Batty glanced over at him. And smiled. "You haven't seen my best yet,"

  That worried him. He could hear the cargo space's door unsealing and, beyond, the sound of rolling wheels and running feet.

  "Take it easy with this guy." Batty supervised Holden's unloading and being strapped onto a gurney. "I didn't bust him out and bring him all the way here, just so you could drop him on the ground like a carton of eggs."

  "Whatever." A bored-looking younger man, whitecoated, scribbled something on a clipboard, then looked up. "You need a receipt on this?" He lifted one corner of a pink duplicating form.

  "'A receipt . . .'" Batty rolled his eyes. "Fuck me."

  "It's the regulations," said the younger man.

  "Maybe instead, I should just pull your underbrained head off and stuff it down your trousers."

  "Hey. Don't want the receipt, just gotta say so." He used the clipboard to gesture toward another couple of men standing around. "You guys wanna help get this case into surgery?" He leaned down and patted Holden on one straprestrained arm. "Good luck, pal." A stage whisper.

  "Take a hike." Batty let the other men push the gurney as he walked alongside.

  Hell, or whatever part of the afterlife he'd landed in. looked fairly ramshackle to Holden. A sprawling compound of rusting Quonset huts, windblown sand dunes mounting up the curved sides; other shabby prefab cubes made of tilt-up foam-core walls, the structural glue leaking out from the seams, as though melting in the night's dry heat; everything dusted with the same fine grit that eventually wound up in the streets of L.A. Turning his head to the side on the gurney's thin pillow, Holden watched the unimpressive and barely functional architecture roll by, lit by the sickly radiance of sodium-vapor globes strung along the tops of tarred wooden poles.