Edge Of Human b-2

by K. W. Jeter

  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…"

  "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, prot
ecting 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.

  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.

  Another pair of iron hooks, looped overhead and hand-thrown by the figures in the alley, snagged the black frame, drawing it down tighter, as though the burning craft were an animal that might tear loose in its agony and vault into the smoke-clouded sky. Deckard could see the men, a half dozen or so gritting their teeth, clad in white fireproof Nomex suits, tugging at the lines, leaning back with their feet braced against the ash-strewn pavement.

  The lower edge of the blimp's billboard-sized viewscreen hit the ground with a sharp jolt, evoking a last flicker of life from it. The visual programming went into skittering fast-forward mode.

  The voice of the images screamed. No longer seductive, cajoling: "A new life!" Pitch whipping higher, as though in sudden fear: "New life! Chance! New!" Into the idiot ultrasonic, trembling the shards of glass left in the buildings' window frames: "Start anew!"

  One of the attackers ran out from the alley, line and grappling hook circling over his head and uplifted hand. The dead and still living who'd been caught in the explosion sprawled at his feet as he let go, the hook singing toward the center of the tilted viewscreen. The pronged metal hit square the rapid play of colored photons. They flew apart, the rigid membrane that had trapped them now dissolving into razor bits, the circuitry beneath arcing into overload and meltdown. Deckard spun away, shielding his face with his arm, the fragments of glass and hot-tipped wires falling across his shoulders like hail.

  "It's all lies!"

  Another voice, amplified but not the one that had boomed, then screamed from the crashing blimp. He turned back to the street, the infinitesimal bell-like percussion of glass fragments chiming across the now-vacated street. One of the mortar crew-maybe the one who'd run out with the last grappling hook; he couldn't tell-had leapt onto one of the bent metal struts, the dying flames silhouetting his insulated form. The man had black carbon streaks across his wild-eyed face, a bullhorn in his thick-
gloved hand.

  "They're telling you lies!" Shouting through the flared horn, voice snapping its echo against the surrounding towers. "It's always been lies!"

  Deckard stepped away from the wall behind him, to the curb and then down to the debris-filled street. Scraps of the blimp's fabric, still burning and exuding oily black smoke, spotted the asphalt. Distant sirens, approaching at ground level and in the sky, cut through the cries and shouts of the crowd that had packed the space only a few minutes before.

  "You have to listen!" The voice coming out of the bullhorn had a fanatic's, a believer's, trembling edge. "Not to me… but to them!" Even from where Deckard stood, a mad illumination shone visible in the man's gaze. "They've come back… to tell us!" The man turned, holding on to an upright strut of the blimp's frame for balance, aiming the bullhorn's trajectory across all the angles of the street. "They know the truth! They've been shown the light! The light of the stars!"

  From the corner of his eye, Deckard saw other motion. The koban booth had been toppled over in the explosion, pinning the uniformed cop. Face bloodied, the cop had now managed to get out from underneath and was struggling to get to his feet. He'd already drawn the heavy black gun from his belt.

  "Humans! Jesus Christ doesn't love you anymore!" An aching whine of feedback tagged along with the words shrieking out of the bullhorn. "The eye of compassion has moved on! It sees only suffering! The eye of compassion no longer sees you-"

  Deckard turned from the sight of the ranting figure, the blimp's smoldering ruins a pulpit, and saw the uniformed cop aiming the gun, arms outstretched, one hand folded over the other.