Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (21 page)

“Your ear is cut,” Rachael said. “What a shame.”

Rick said, “Did you really think I wouldn’t call you? As you said?”

“I told you,” Rachael said, “that without me one of the Nexus-6s would get you before you got it.”

“You were wrong.”

“But you are calling. Anyhow. Do you want me to come down there to San Francisco?”

“Tonight,” he said.

“Oh, it’s too late. I’ll come tomorrow; it’s an hour trip.”

“I have been told I have to get them tonight.” He paused and then said, “Out of the original eight, three are left.”

“You sound like you’ve had a just awful time.”

“If you don’t fly down here tonight,” he said, “I’ll go after them alone and I won’t be able to retire them. I just bought a goat,” he added. “With the bounty money from the three I did get.”

“You humans.” Rachael laughed. “Goats smell terrible.”

“Only male goats. I read it in the book of instructions that came with it.”

“You really are tired,” Rachael said. “You look dazed. Are you sure you know what you’re doing, trying for three more Nexus-6s the same day? No one has ever retired six androids in one day.”

“Franklin Powers,” Rick said. “About a year ago, in Chicago. He retired seven.”

“The obsolete McMillan Y-4 variety,” Rachael said. “This is something else.” She pondered. “Rick, I can’t do it. I haven’t even had dinner.”

“I need you,” he said. Otherwise I’m going to die, he said to himself. I know it; Mercer knew it; I think you know it, too. And I’m wasting my time appealing to you, he reflected. An android can’t be appealed to; there’s nothing in there to reach.

Rachael said, “I’m sorry, Rick, but I can’t do it tonight. It’ll have to be tomorrow.”

“Android vengeance,” Rick said.

“What?”

“Because I tripped you up on the Voigt-Kampff scale.”

“Do you think that?” Wide-eyed, she said, “
Really?
”

“Good-bye,” he said, and started to hang up.

“Listen,” Rachael said rapidly. “You’re not using your head.”

“It seems that way to you because you Nexus-6 types are cleverer than humans.”

“No, I really don’t understand,” Rachael sighed. “I can tell that you don’t want to do this job tonight—maybe not at all. Are you sure you want me to make it possible for you to retire the three remaining androids? Or do you want me to persuade you not to try?”

“Come down here,” he said, “and we’ll rent a hotel room.”

“Why?”

“Something I heard today,” he said hoarsely. “About situations involving human men and android women. Come down here to San Francisco tonight and I’ll give up on the remaining andys. We’ll do something else.”

She eyed him, then abruptly said, “Okay, I’ll fly down. Where should I meet you?”

“At the St. Francis. It’s the only halfway decent hotel still in operation in the Bay Area.”

“And you won’t do anything until I get there.”

“I’ll sit in the hotel room,” he said, “and watch Buster Friendly on TV. His guest for the last three days has been Amanda Werner. I like her; I could watch her the rest of my life. She has breasts that smile.” He hung up then and sat for a time, his mind vacant. At last the cold of the car roused him; he switched on the ignition key and a moment later headed in the direction of downtown San Francisco. And the St. Francis Hotel.

16

In the sumptuous and enormous hotel room Rick Deckard sat reading the typed carbon sheets on the two androids Roy and Irmgard Baty. In these two cases telescopic snapshots had been included, fuzzy 3-D color prints which he could barely make out. The woman, he decided, looks attractive. Roy Baty, however, is something different. Something worse.

A pharmacist on Mars, he read. Or at least the android had made use of that cover. In actuality it had probably been a manual laborer, a field hand, with aspirations for something better. Do androids dream? Rick asked himself. Evidently; that’s why they occasionally kill their employers and flee here. A better life, without servitude. Like Luba Luft; singing
Don Giovanni
and
Le Nozze
instead of toiling across the face of a barren rock-strewn field. On a fundamentally uninhabitable colony world.

Roy Baty (the poop sheet informed him) has an aggressive, assertive air of ersatz authority. Given to mystical preoccupations, this android proposed the group escape attempt, underwriting it ideologically with a pretentious fiction as to the sacredness of so-called android “life.” In addition, this android stole, and experimented with, various mind-fusing drugs, claiming when caught that it hoped to promote in androids a group experience similar to that of Mercerism, which it pointed out remains unavailable to androids.

The account had a pathetic quality. A rough, cold android, hoping to undergo an experience from which, due to a deliberately built-in defect, it remained excluded. But he could not work up much concern for Roy Baty; he caught, from Dave’s jottings, a repellent quality hanging about this particular android. Baty had tried to force the fusion experience into existence for itself—and then, when that fell through, it had engineered the killing of a variety of human beings…followed by the flight to Earth. And now, especially as of today, the chipping away of the original eight androids until only the three remained. And they, the outstanding members of the illegal group, were also doomed, since if he failed to get them, someone else would. Time and tide, he thought. The cycle of life. Ending in this, the last twilight. Before the silence of death. He perceived in this a micro-universe, complete.

The door of the hotel room banged open. “What a flight,” Rachael Rosen said breathlessly, entering in a long fish-scale coat with matching bra and shorts; she carried, besides her big, ornate, mail-pouch purse, a paper bag. “This is a
nice
room.” She examined her wristwatch. “Less than an hour; I made good time. Here.” She held out the paper bag. “I bought a bottle. Bourbon.”

Rick said, “The worst of the eight is still alive. The one who organized them.” He held the poop sheet on Roy Baty toward her; Rachael set down the paper bag and accepted the carbon sheet.

“You’ve located this one?” she asked, after reading.

“I have a conapt number. Out in the suburbs where possibly a couple of deteriorated specials, antheads and chickenheads, hang out and go through their versions of living.”

Rachael held out her hand. “Let’s see about the others.”

“Both females.” He passed her the sheets, one dealing with Irmgard Baty, the other an android calling itself Pris Stratton.

Glancing at the final sheet Rachael said, “Oh—” She tossed the sheets down, moved over to the window of the room to look out at downtown San Francisco. “I think you’re going to get thrown by the last one. Maybe not; maybe you don’t care.” She had turned pale and her voice shook. All at once she had become exceptionally unsteady.

“Exactly what are you muttering about?” He retrieved the sheets, studied them, wondering which part had upset Rachael.

“Let’s open the bourbon.” Rachael carried the paper bag into the bathroom, got two glasses, returned; she still seemed distracted and uncertain—and preoccupied. He sensed the rapid flight of her hidden thoughts: the transitions showed on her frowning, tense face. “Can you get this open?” she asked. “It’s worth a fortune, you realize. It’s not synthetic; it’s from before the war, made from genuine mash.”

Taking the bottle, he opened it, poured bourbon in the two tumblers. “Tell me what’s the matter,” he said.

Rachael said, “On the phone you told me if I flew down here tonight you’d give up on the remaining three andys. ‘We’ll do something else,’ you said. But here we are—”

“Tell me what upset you,” he said.

Facing him defiantly, Rachael said, “Tell me what we’re going to do instead of fussing and fretting around about those last three Nexus-6 andys.” She unbuttoned her coat, carried it to the closet, and hung it up. This gave him his first chance to have a good long look at her.

Rachael’s proportions, he noticed once again, were odd; with her heavy mass of dark hair, her head seemed large, and because of her diminutive breasts, her body assumed a lank, almost childlike stance. But her great eyes, with their elaborate lashes, could only be those of a grown woman; there the resemblance to adolescence ended. Rachael rested very slightly on the fore-part of her feet, and her arms, as they hung, bent at the joint: the stance, he reflected, of a wary hunter of perhaps the Cro-Magnon persuasion. The race of tall hunters, he said to himself. No excess flesh, a flat belly, small behind and smaller bosom—Rachael had been modeled on the Celtic type of build, anachronistic and attractive. Below the brief shorts her legs, slender, had a neutral, nonsexual quality, not much rounded off in nubile curves. The total impression was good, however. Although definitely that of a girl, not a woman. Except for the restless, shrewd eyes.

He sipped the bourbon; the power of it, the authoritative strong taste and scent, had become almost unfamiliar to him and he had trouble swallowing. Rachael, in contrast, had no difficulty with hers.

Seating herself on the bed, Rachael smoothed absently at the spread; her expression had now become one of moodiness. He set his glass down on the bedside table and arranged himself beside her. Under his gross weight the bed gave, and Rachael shifted her position.

“What is it?” he said. Reaching, he took hold of her hand; it felt cold, bony, slightly moist. “What upset you?”

“That last goddamn Nexus-6 type,” Rachael said, enunciating with effort, “is the same type as I am.” She stared down at the bedspread, found a thread, and began rolling it into a pellet. “Didn’t you notice the description? It’s of me, too. She may wear her hair differently and dress differently—she may even have bought a wig. But when you see her you’ll know what I mean.” She laughed sardonically. “It’s a good thing the association admitted I’m an andy; otherwise you’d probably have gone mad when you caught sight of Pris Stratton. Or thought she was me.”

“Why does that bother you so much?”

“Hell, I’ll be along when you
retire
her.”

“Maybe not. Maybe I won’t find her.”

Rachael said, “I know Nexus-6 psychology. That’s why I’m here; that’s why I can help you. They’re all holed up together, the last three of them. Clustered around the deranged one calling himself Roy Baty. He’ll be masterminding their crucial, all-out, final defense.” Her lips twisted. “Jesus,” she said.

“Cheer up,” he said; he cupped her sharp, small chin in the palm of his hand, lifted her head so that she had to face him. I wonder what it’s like to kiss an android, he said to himself. Leaning forward an inch, he kissed her dry lips. No reaction followed; Rachael remained impassive. As if unaffected. And yet he sensed otherwise. Or perhaps it was wishful thinking.

“I wish,” Rachael said, “that I had known that before I came. I never would have flown down here. I think you’re asking too much. You know what I have? Toward this Pris android?”

“Empathy,” he said.

“Something like that. Identification; there goes I. My god; maybe that’s what’ll happen. In the confusion you’ll retire me, not her. And she can go back to Seattle and live my life. I never felt this way before. We
are
machines, stamped out like bottle caps. It’s an illusion that I—I personally—really exist; I’m just representative of a type.” She shuddered.

He could not help being amused; Rachael had become so mawkishly morose. “Ants don’t feel like that,” he said, “and they’re physically identical.”

“Ants. They don’t feel period.”

“Identical human twins. They don’t—”

“But they identify with each other; I understand they have an empathic, special bond.” Rising, she got to the bourbon bottle, a little unsteadily; she refilled her glass and again drank swiftly. For a time she slouched about the room, brows knitted darkly, and then, as if sliding his way by chance, she settled back onto the bed; she swung her legs up and stretched out, leaning against the fat pillows. And sighed. “Forget the three andys.” Her voice filled with weariness. “I’m so worn out, from the trip I guess. And from all I learned today. I just want to sleep.” She shut her eyes. “If I die,” she murmured, “maybe I’ll be born again when the Rosen Association stamps out its next unit of my subtype.” She opened her eyes and glared at him ferociously. “Do you know,” she said, “why I really came here? Why Eldon and the other Rosens—the human ones—wanted me to go along with you?”

“To observe,” he said. “To detail exactly what the Nexus-6 does that gives it away on the Voigt-Kampff test.”

“On the test or otherwise. Everything that gives it a different quality. And then I report back and the association makes modifications of its zygote-bath DNS factors. And we then have the Nexus-7. And when that gets caught, we modify again and eventually the association has a type that can’t be distinguished.”

“Do you know of the Boneli Reflex-Arc Test?” he asked.

“We’re working on the spinal ganglia, too. Someday the Boneli test will fade into yesterday’s hoary shroud of spiritual oblivion.” She smiled innocuously—at variance with her words. At this point he could not discern her degree of seriousness. A topic of world-shaking importance, yet dealt with facetiously; an android trait, possibly, he thought. No emotional awareness, no feeling-sense of the actual
meaning
of what she said. Only the hollow, formal, intellectual definitions of the separate terms.