EdgeOfHuman

by Unknown

  At the edge of the artificial light, struck more by the stars and moon, a razor-wire fence penned a flock of abandoned police vehicles, spinners and heavier cruisers with scorched flame-out marks along their engine exhausts, cockpits shattered or drilled with a line of spiderwebbed holes from high-caliber automatic weapons fire.

  "This the one?"

  Holden looked above himself and saw an unshaven face. A hand with black fingernails took a half-smoked cigarette away from the face's mouth; grey ash drifted down and was sucked into one of the black attaché case's air intakes.

  Either another doctor or some kind of butcher -- the unshaven man had on a long white coat spattered with dried bloodstains. Holden wasn't sure which possibility filled him with greater foreboding.

  Batty reached over and plucked away the cigarette. "Show the poor bastard some consideration." A red arc, then a burst of sparks as the stub hit the ground.

  "They're all poor bastards." No show of annoyance; the unshaven man appeared beyond the expenditure of energy that would take. "All right, let's get him in and do it. No sense standing around out here." His nicotine-stained fingers began flicking off the controls on the black attaché case.

  "Hey . . ." Panic set in as Holden heard the attaché's machinery wheezing toward silence, the small clicking and gulping noises slowing, then stopping. "Wait . . . a minute . . ." A grey veil began thickening before his vision; despite the heat of the desert air, his face and hands suddenly felt cold. Numbing fingers groped for the switches and buttons above his chest, but the gurney's straps kept him from reaching them. The tiny ball dropped in the valve, the hoses and tubes drooping limp and uninflated.

  "Quit worrying." The unshaven doctor or butcher fumbled a cigarette pack out of the pocket of his white coat, lit up another. "You got at least three minutes or so before any real brain damage starts setting in." Dragged deep, coughed, then gestured to what appeared to be a couple of assistants standing around. "Yo, guys, get over and give me a hand with this one. Come on, let's get to work."

  "Hang in there, pal." Batty's deranged smile floated in the mist above. "See you on the other side,"

  They rolled him into the largest and oldest-looking of the prefab buildings. Holden managed to read the sign above the building's doorway as he disappeared inside. RECLAMATION CENTER. Of course, like the mechanics picking apart the old spinners on the field of night. Now he understood. There must still be a few good parts inside him.

  He closed his eyes.

  Deckard waited until the sun went down.

  Too easily spotted, caught, even in the last few hours of daylight. He knew he needed not just darkness but crowds, the streets full of L.A.'s shoving, jostling nocturnal life. Everyone that the oppressive heat drove indoors, like desert animals sheltering beneath the flat, cool undersides of rocks -- he could hide among them, move like a knife through garishly illuminated water, the flickering neon's toxic colors turning his face into a mask the same as the others wore.

  Didn't even try to get away from the Van Nuys Pet Hospital -- soon as the thuggish Andersson had booted him out on the freight dock, with a shove that had sent him stumbling, the metal door slammed behind him and he looked around for the nearest alley. The sun's angle had shifted far enough to make the one at the side of the building into a shadowed cleft, trash dumpsters and discarded boxes forming the tunnel into which he crawled. Glitter-eyed rodents, disturbed at their inspection of a decamped squatter's rags and meager treasures, hissed and threw bits of clawed-up asphalt at him. As Deckard crawled farther into the nest, light and heat nipping like a leashed dog at the soles of his boots, the small animals retreated, squatting on a crumbling brick ledge, old-womanish paws folded across their grey bellies, glaring at him.

  Even in the shadows, out of the direct hit of the sun, the day's heat was enough to start him sweating under his clothes. The Santa Ana wind, sifting red dust through the alley, scraped the moisture off his limbs, sucked it from his mouth, leaving his tongue swollen arid and his eyes gritting in their sockets. He shucked off his coat, wedging its empty shoulders into the sides of the narrow space to make a shield against both the remains of the afternoon's light and anyone's random detection.

  In his pocket was the book of matches that he'd used to ignite the woodstove, in the cabin up in Oregon. He struck one now, using its flaring glow to investigate the small space. It smelled of the dirt and sweat of the previous inhabitant. Who must've been a throwback literate, an enthusiast: tucked into the grime-crusted bed of rags were several old-style analogue books, nothing but antlike crawls of ink words on yellowing, damp-swollen pages, dead without any sparking digital enhancements. The covers -- there were only a few -- showed blond women whose half-lidded gazes were like weapons, mouths like bright wounds, and men with bruised, unshaven faces. The book pages crumbled as Deckard shoved the relics away.

  He searched through the rubble, another match held aloft, looking for anything of use.

  The previous inhabitant's Registered Homeless card -- the thumbnail photo depicted a suffering saint, Christ-like hair tangled down to his shoulders. Dead, too. The Welfare Department's monitor implant must've caught the man's last heartbeat; two cartoon X's had appeared in the transparent lamination over the man's eyes, making the card useless for anyone else. The digits on the ration microchip had ticked back to zero as well. Deckard tossed the thin rectangle away.

  Something handier, which the sanitation trucks had left behind when they'd hauled off the body: a simple steel rod, just about the length of his own forearm. Good heft in his fist, with enough whip to make a good skull-cracker. The match had burnt out, but he could read with the ball of his thumb the embossed warning. FOR SELF-DEFENSE PURPOSES ONLY. AGGRESSIVE OR PREDATORY USE PUNISHABLE BY LOSS OF BENEFITS. The rod was standard issue for the city's street people, along with the Sally Anne sleeping bags that usually got ripped off first thing.

  Now he didn't feel so naked. Deckard laid the steel rod on the asphalt beside himself, close at hand. He clasped his arms around his knees, lowering his head and waiting for the last daylight visible through his coat to fade. He'd already started putting his plans together.

  The sounds of something moving -- something bigger than the disgruntled rodents -- snapped him awake, out of the pit of nervous exhaustion into which he'd fallen. His head jerked back, one hand shot down to grab and raise the steel rod. Using the metal's tip, he pulled back one edge of the flimsy barrier he'd made from his own coat; leaning against the brick wall, the rodents above scampering farther away, he sighted down the length of the alley.

  Enough sleep residue blurred his vision, that his first irrational thought was that a ghost was walking toward him. A figure all in white -- the sun had set, though most of its stifling heat remained in the air, so the image seemed to supply its own pale radiance. Drawing back, keeping himself hid, Deckard rubbed his eyes with his free hand. Then he could see a man inhabiting the white outfit, some kind of retro-tropical suit number.

  "Charlie?" The white-suited man stopped halfway down the alley, straining to peer ahead of him. He had a small bundle tucked under one arm. "You home, buddy? Got something for ya." He displayed the bundle, wrapped in paper and string, on the tips of his fingers. "Thinking of you . . ."

  The name on the Homeless Reg card had been Charlie something. With the steel rod, Deckard pulled the coat farther back, like a curtain.

  "There you are." A gold-toothed smile as the white suit ambled forward. "Speak up, next time. I coulda walked right by ya--"

  Close enough now. Deckard reached out, the dropped steel rod clanking on the alley's littered floor, and grabbed the man, elegant tie and collar points wadded in his fist. The little bundle's string and wrappings burst open as it flew in a startled arc and hit the ground. More of the tattered books spilled across the rubble.

  "Hey, buddy . . ."The summer-weight dandy managed to gasp a few words, his face reddening above his collar. His feet dangled free of the alley. "Ease up, will ya . . ."
r />   "Nice and quiet." Deckard kept the knot of the man's tie inside his fist, knuckles tilting the pointed chin back. "Let's talk real softly." With the sun gone, the evening parade had begun out on the streets. Nobody passing by had glanced down the alley yet. "Got that?"

  "Yeah, sure . . ." Both of his hands gripped Deckard's wrist, as though praying in midair.

  "I got it, buddy, I got it . . ." A screeching but obedient whisper. "Whatever you want . . . is fine with me . . ."

  He eased his grasp, letting the other man settle on tiptoes. "I'm glad." In sinister fashion, he fingered the white lapel. "Nice jacket."

  "Huh? Where's Charlie?"

  "Indisposed. You should've made an appointment." The other man was so skinny, he could've either broken him in two or tied him in a knot. But the white suit's jacket was loose enough, fiaglike through the shoulders; it'd be the right size. "Here." Deckard let go of the man's necktie, reached past him, and tugged his own long, dark coat from the brick niche he'd anchored it into. "Make you a trade."

  "What? A trade?" He looked with puzzlement, then distaste, at the coat laid across his trembling hands. Not in good condition to begin with, it'd picked up some of the smell and general schmutz of the alley. "For this?"

  "That'd be the easy way." Deckard reached down, picked up the steel rod, laid the other end lightly into his palm. "There are others."

  "Deal!" He shed the jacket as easily as walking out of a soft white room.

  The tie was some flimsy, iridescent stuff-Deckard took that as well. Looping it without a knot as he strode away from the mouth of the alley, pushing his way through the crowd that had already assembled into the city's nocturnal life. Keeping one hand inside a trouser pocket, Deckard kept a tight hold on the steel rod tucked down his leg, its other end notching above his kneecap with each step he took.

  Wind picked up, as though punching in for its shift supervising hell. Deckard felt the familiar hot kiss against his face, as he had every dry season he'd lived throughsurvived, dehydrated-in L.A. The gutters had filled with a fine red dust blown in from the desert, an iron-oxide color beneath the twists and lines of neon flickering into life, like a predictive vision of the dunes of Mars. If the city's trucks didn't vacuum out the streets every twenty-four hoursone of the huge container vehicles was already bumbling down the side of the asphalt, slowly squeezing past and through the shuffling ranks of pedestrians and the inching vans and old rehab'd cars with their roof-mounted radiator filters-then the whole place would wind up looking like the rolling vistas outside the pressurized windows of the colony hovels. Why bother to emigrate? Give in to the nagging of the U.N. blimp hovering overhead, with its video screen full of high-pressure, high-volume inducements, and you'd wind up staring out at much the same gritty mess, without even the hope of pulling through until the monsoon season rolled around again. Behind the windshield of the vacuum truck, the driver's bored eyes, visible above a sterile white breath mask, watched as the prehensile, wide-nostrilled mechanical snout sucked the curbs temporarily bare.

  There were more masks on the street, covqring maybe one in three of the night's faces. Some masks improvised and cruder than the government-issue kind, others haute couture variants, from deranged silk organza wedding veils complete with tiny artificial orange blossoms, severely retro thirties side-perched pillboxes with falling black-dotted sweeps, to orthodox or mutated Islamic masks, rough nomadic Berber head wraps for men or androgen-pumped butchoi, delicate bell-laced gold for deeptrad women or kohl-eyed femmes.

  A pack of prescavenger dwarfs, the aggressively mercantile kind that didn't wait for bits and scraps to be discarded before beginning the recycling process, wore vintage military gas masks, protecting themselves not only from the wind's dust but also the gasoline and freon fumes of the mech units they yanked and unbolted from the vulnerable traffic-stalled vehicles. Bomber goggles warded off the sulphuric Mace sprays from the drivers who came scrambling out from behind steering wheels when they heard the patter of tiny feet on their roofs. Hands in toddler-sized leather gloves flipped bird at the full-sized humans as the dwarfs tugged their oil-leaking trophies into the side lanes and mobile offices of the gypsy parts dealers who operated there.

  Deckard caught a miniaturized glimpse of himself in the obsidian shades of someone, male or female, that the crowd's eddying currents bumped him right into. He backed off a step-hard to do, swimming against the tideand saw the white jacket, a little tight across the shoulders, and his own face, masked by an apprehensive caution.

  "What's your problem, mac?" A smoke-rasped voice, a man's, sounded from the lipsticked mouth below the shades. "New in town, sailor, or what?" A vocoder on a thin velvet choker took her voice down a couple of octaves. "Even if you're buying, I'm not selling, so why don't you stop hogging the sidewalk and let a lady get past?"

  "Sorry." He managed to insert himself, shoulder first, into the traffic flow to one side. The last thing he wanted was a public altercation that would bring attention from the police koban on the corner. For all he knew, the uniformed cop inside the little surveillance booth had a photo poster of him tacked to the wall, right next to the direct line phone to the LAPD's central station.

  Giving him a smile, the other person moved on. Gone, swallowed behind the backs of the crowd.

  He walked, keeping pace with the rest, shoulders jostled with each passing collision.Passing the koban, face casually averted-from the corner of his eye, Deckard saw that the cop in the booth had already picked up the red phone, was shouting something, the words blanked by the glass barrier and the mumbling susurrus of the crowd's collective voice. His stomach clenched as he watched the cop's free hand raised in excited gesture. He kept his own limbs under rigid control, fighting down the impulse to run through the crowd, exposing his back to the first shot the cop would fire when he stepped out of the booth.

  Take it easy. His own voice, inside his head. Maybe it's not you they're looking for, maybe it's something else entirely . . .

  "A new world awaits you!"

  It wasn't him. A big voice boomed from above, letting him off the hook.

  "A new life!"

  The cop pushed open the koban's narrow door, jumping outside of it and looking up at the sky, the red police phone still at his ear. Voice audible now, but unintelligible in its shouted excitement.

  "A chance to start anew!"

  Deckard stopped and looked up, along with all the rest of the street coming to a halt. He'd been so caught up watching the koban officer that he hadn't noticed the rounded shape filling the sky, a faceted moon larger and closer than any before.

  "In the off-world colonies!" The voice, the words heard so many times before that they'd become part of the city's nocturnal background noise, shouted giant words. A distorted sonic wash rolled an invisible tsunami over the sea of uplifted faces, the hands raised and pointing. The U.N. blimp drifted lower in torpid slow motion, coming down between the buildings on either side of the street, so near that Deckard thought he could reach up and touch the surface of its bulging underside.

  The massive viewscreen on the blimp's flank stuttered optic static, blistering chaotic haze sweeping through the pixels of a Martian irrigation scene. Touched-up canals wavered, a green field of soybeans rippled seismic; Deckard saw now that a quarter of the blimp's antenna-spiked skin was enveloped in flame, tangible heat on heat in the wind-raked sky. As he watched, a bright spark trailed smoke from an alley opposite, the dull whump of a mortar round rolling through the onlookers. The shot hit the blimp's ridged frame, concaving another section of the metallic fabric. A second's fraction more, and the hollow burst into a fiery mouth, black tatters for teeth around the edges.

  Farther above, at the top of the highest city tower, a geisha face winked and smiled, as though in approval of the blimp's death. As though the taste on the magnified woman's tongue was a piece of the upward-gouting fire itself, the blimp heeling onto one side to display its wound, the orange ball of flame sweetly acrid as an umeboshi plum.r />
  The whole street lit orange, the dawning of a new, harsher, and more beautiful day.

  Fireball hitting first, decompressed hydrogen in oxygen's explosive embrace. A wave of flame in the shape of a churning sphere, the collapsing U.N. blimp barely visible behind the eye-burning glare. The flames' enormous hand flattened the street, rush of heat and expanding pressure knocking screaming human forms hard to the pavement, tumbling them with hair alight or silken veils incinerated against gasping breaths, eyelashes scorched away.

  Deckard felt the soft, hot pulse. Enough meters away that he was only knocked back against the wall of the building beside him, impact with brick and metal jarring him dizzy for a moment. Neon serpents, kanji store signs, hissed a rain of sparks, glass tubing shock-broken, upon him and the others who'd been knocked off their feet. Bracing himself against the wall, Deckard pushed himself upright, the figures around him still on their hands and knees, trying to crawl away across the bright shrapnel of the shattered windows, or gaping at the inferno crash, now at ground zero.

  The blimp's rudimentary skeleton, meridians of an ovoid globe, showed through the engulfing flames. Another mortar had been fired, but with no incendiary charge. Instead, a grappling hook, prongs snapping into a sharp-pointed iron flower, ran a cord from the blimp's wreckage, back to an anchor point in the alley on the other side of the street. Hunched against the blaze's thermal force, Deckard shielded his eyes with his hand, squinting at the action on the other end of the taut line.

  More of the blimp's frame twisted and burst rivets free as the hulk collapsed with terminal grandeur into the street, the blunt nose fire-wrapped and gouging a ragged furrow into the concrete; the tail end's stubby fins clawed out a row of tenth-story windows before tearing loose and sailing aloft on the fire's updraft.