EdgeOfHuman (15 page)

"How you feeling? You feeling okay?" Batty had rocked forward in the metal chair. He examined a small remote control in one hand. "The doctors said these settings were about right, for your body weight and everything. You lost some muscle mass while you were flopped down in the hospital for so long. The works we implanted will automatically adjust for when you start getting back in shape. Probably give you a little more blood flow then, I guess."

Holden pushed the necktie aside and undid a couple of the shirt buttons. His bare chest was no longer an open, gutted wound; no tubes or hoses sticking out, either. An intricate map of scars and black stitches overlaid his pallid white skin.

"Don't go poking too much at those. They're not too fragile -- I made 'em use the heavy-duty sutures -- but you don't want to get them infected."

Holden traced his fingertip down one of the vertical lines. A dull twinge of pain, as though wired to tissue deep inside him. Plus either the faint sense or hallucination of muted ticking and sucking noises buried underneath the reconstructed flesh and bone.

"What's going on?" He looked up at Batty. "What's been done to me?"

"What, you worried about the bill or something? Jeez." Batty shook his head in amazement. "It's paid for, okay? You've been given a new lease on life, buddy. Free, gratis,
por nada
. So don't sweat it. Enjoy it, already."

"Implants . . ." He laid his hand fiat against his stitched chest, feeling against his palm the hum and surge of the machinery inside him. "A complete set . . . heart and lungs . . ." He took a deep breath, a last trace of spider-silk lifting from his brain. At the back of his throat was a taste of plastic and stainless steel.

"State of the art. None finer." Batty held up the remote. "I told the people here to use the best parts they could get None of those pulls they've taken out of other jobs and had sitting in a bucket somewhere."

"But they told me . . . at the hospital . . ." A tone of wonder in his voice. "They told me one time, when they brought me around, that they couldn't do implants. The damage was too great . . ."

"So? They lied to you. Simple."

Nothing cleared up by that. "Why would they lie? The doctors, and Bryant and everybody . . . it doesn't make sense."

Batty's smile rose, thin and all-knowing. "Makes sense . . . depending upon who you figure your friends are. Your
real
friends."

The spooky hint of conspiracy in Batty's voice set him thinking. "Could I see that?" He held out his hand for the remote control.

"Sure."

Only a couple of buttons on the device. "This switches everything off? Switches
me
off?"Holden didn't wait for an answer. He put the remote down on the floor and crushed it with his heel. A sound of splintering plastic and microchips, followed by a surge in his heartbeat, which then settled back down.

"Way to go!" Batty tilted his head back and laughed. The flimsy prefab walls trembled with his hilarity. "I'm sure they got another one of those things around here somewhere, but I admire your attitude. A couple, what, maybe four hours ago, you were at death's door . . . literally. That fuckin' hospital. Man, people go to places like that just to punch out. And they help you do it. Now here you are-" He gestured expansively toward Holden. "Feeling like your old self, I bet. Miracles of modern science. You got nothing to complain about."

Holden turned his head toward an uncurtained window. He'd seen that it was still dark outside, but he hadn't known what night this was, the same one in which Batty had snatched him out of the hospital, or one weeks or months later. "Your people here work fast." He looked back toward Batty.

"They're good at what they do. Get a lot of practice, I suppose."

Inside himself, he sensed the continuous operation of the bio-machines -- the new parts of his body, the conglomeration of Teflon and inert alloys and efficient little motors that he'd absorbed, incorporated into the Dave Holden gestalt. He'd been raised from the dead. The suit and tie, the neat, machinelike precision of these outward manifestations, also part of that. He had been dead in the hospital, dead before he got there, dead as soon as he'd been a messy piece of meat bleeding around a smoking hole at its center. That weak, sloppy thing in the hospital bed, leaking fluids, pinned naked by plastic tubes and hoses-that hadn't been him, the real Dave Holden.

He spread his hands on his knees, studied as though for the first time.
Like scalpels
, he mused. Not just the hands, but everything about him. A cutting instrument, sterile out of the autoclave. Putting the blade in blade runner. Thatwas why he'd been so good at his job, at hunting down and retiring replicants: he'd out-machined them. He'd beaten out all the other blade runners as well, like that whiner Deckard; he'd gone all the way around the Curve and come out the other side. Come out as something . . . other than human. Until Kowalski . . .

"You still stewing about that? Getting blown away by some big moron?" Batty had read his thoughts, as though his eyes were gauges like those on the big machines he'd been hooked up to. "Get over it." Shrugged, smiling. "Or don't."

"No . . ." Holden slowly shook his head. "I'm just . . . wondering." He noticed a pack of cigarettes and a lighter sitting out on a table between them; whether they were Batty's or for him, he didn't know. "You mind?" He leaned forward and took the pack.

An expression of mild distaste. "You know you'll have to change your filter -- the one inside you -- twice as often, if you start that up again."

"It's worth it." He leaned back and exhaled, then studied the drift of blue smoke above him. The nicotine seeping into his machine-aerated blood made him feel even more efficient and confident, as though all the tiny valves inside had been fed drops of lubricating oil. His old self. "Definitely."

"Whatever." Batty's smile returned. "So what was it you were wondering?"

He knew he had to be cautious. The one more thing he would have liked to have had restored to him was his big black hammer of a weapon. He could see the bulge and the lopsided tug of weight inside the black leather jacket that indicated Batty was packing.

"Oh . . ." Holden glanced around at the buckling prefab walls. A collection of photos torn from magazines, nudes and tropical vistas, all equally unlikely, rustled in the hot dry wind seeping in through the seams. "You know. Like what the hell is this place?"

"Didn't you see the sign when they wheeled you in? It's the Reclamation Center."

"Never heard of it."

"Of course not," said Batty. "It wouldn't be a top-secret police installation if some schmuck like you knew about it."

"Looks to me like they're just pulling parts off some old trashed-out police vehicles." He tilted his head toward the window with its view of the wrecking yard beyond the fence. "What's so top secret about that?"

"Are you kidding?" Batty emitted a sharp barking laugh. "You know what happens to your appropriations money if the state or the feds find out you're recycling your rolling stock? Shit-they'll cut you off without a
dime
. Besides . . ." A shrug. "Keep something like this secret, makes it that much easier to keep the other stuff they do here under wraps. Stuff like cramming a nice new set of pumping gear inside you." He jabbed an index finger toward Holden. "You gotta admit, the folks out here have taken good care of you."

"The people at the hospital -- where I was before -- they were supposed to be taking care of me."

"That's true." Batty's smile grew wider, wicked with delight. "Like I said, a lot depends upon knowing who your real friends are."

He mulled that over for a moment. "It was the police department that put me in that ward. When I got shot . . .'

"Yeah, well, there's police . . . and then there's other police. You gotta cover your action, buddy, all around the table-if you're going to stay in this game."

Holden narrowed his gaze, studying the figure sitting opposite him. "Maybe so. What I'd like to know is . . . what kind of police have replicants working for them?"

A shake of the head. "None that I know of. That's not what police
do
. As a general rule, police are pretty much
death
on replicants."

"Then what're you doing here?"

"Huh?" Batty's smile faded. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Come on." Holden felt a little surge of excitement, a dangerous pulse. "Tell me -- do these people here know that you're a replicant? Or have you pulled it off?"

"
I'm
a replicant?" Batty looked genuinely puzzled, eyes widening. Then he started laughing, uproariously this time, face reddening in bright contrast to his spiked crop of white hair, tears wetting the wrinkled corners of his eyelids. "That's good." He could barely get the words out. "That is . . . so good." The prefab walls rattled with his laughter.

"What's so funny?" All the hilarity was getting on Holden's nerves.

"That you'd think . . ." Batty pushed himself back in the chair with a hand against his chest, making a visible effort to sober himself up. "Sorry. It's that I just realized what you've been thinking. What must've been going around in your head all along, or at least since I showed up. You think I'm a replicant, right? A Roy Batty replicant." He wiped his eyes with his fingertips. "That's good. That's a really good one."

"Did you catch any of that action over on Alvarado? Where the blimp went down?"

Took a while for Deckard to respond to the question, the hard voice right beside him. He leaned back against the wall of the elevator as it crept toward the base of the building. "A little bit."

"I got called in, all the way over from Slauson. Another ten minutes and I would've been off-shift, and the dispatchers could've radioed to the moon for my ass." The cop spoke with no inflection, all traces of emotion drained from the process of communicating.

"Yeah, they like jerking you around." Deckard kept his own voice at that dead, menacing tone, the words coming out with that slow, reptilian ease they all cultivated. He knew that for his apparent age there should be more stripes on this uniform's sleeve. A fierce Darwinian attitude operated among the department's rank-and-file; they ate their own weaker members, to keep themselves lean and mean. Surviving some of the shit that happened down in the locker rooms was the hardest part of the job. If he was going to pull off penetrating the LAPD's central station, he'd have to give off the same ugly gamma rays that these guys did.

He risked a glance up to the level indicator above the elevator's doors. There was another twenty floors to go. He'd managed to flag a lift from a county jail spinner, the big grey bus with the barred windows, that'd been returning to the police department's Kwik-Justice Kourts for another load of plea-bargained felons. His disguise, the patrol uniform he'd stripped off the cop he'd left in the alley, seemed to sail right past the pilot and the guard. The card and pass code had gotten him from the landing deck and into the building. A spark of hope had ignited inside his chest that he'd be able to get into the station, past all the other cops crawling all over it. And get to Bryant.

That was the only plan he had. And the only hope. Of getting out of L.A. alive and getting back to Rachael, asleep in her black coffin. Guarded by owls and all the little nocturnal forest creatures, like an old fairy tale.

God knew that Bryant owed him a favor-or more accurately, a whole string of them, from all the times he'd carried the bucket for Bryant, the blade runner unit, and the whole LAPD by extension. He'd pulled everybody's cojones off the chopping block on more occasions than he could count.

On some invisible clock, the hands pointed to payback time for all that loyalty he'd shown Bryant. He just hoped that the police inspector could read it as well. All he needed was information; that didn't seem like much.

"If you asked me . . ." A voice broke into Deckard's thoughts. "I'd say we should kill them all."

Then who would sort them out?
he wondered. He didn't know. He glanced over at the cop beside him in the elevator. For a few moments he'd gotten lost in his worried plotting. Not a good thing he knew he'd have to stay hyperalert if he was going to get in and out of this building.

The cop had relaxed, a bit of the anal-retentive steel going out of his spine; he rested his shoulder blades against the wall of the small space. Without taking off his glasses, he wearily rubbed his forehead with one black-gloved hand. A long shift, maybe a back-to-back. Calculating his overtime pay and brooding about whether it was worth the burnout.

Deckard almost felt sorry for the guy. At least with promoting to the blade runner unit, you got to set your own hours. This poor bastard wouldn't stand any chance of getting off patrol, if it got logged into his package, his personnel file, that he'd let a wanted man ride all the way down with him to the station's ground floor.

"Kill all who?" asked Deckard.

"Eh, those goddamn rep-symps." The cop's face set into a scowl. "They're so fond of friggin' replicants, then we should treat 'em the same way." He lifted his hand, stuck out his index finger to make a gun, then curled it into the invisible trigger. "Bam. Instant retirement."

The term
rep-symp
was a new one to Deckard. Replicant sympathizer? -- that seemed the likeliest. Some new development, while he'd been gone from L.A.?

The cop was waiting for him to say something, to make conversation. "Yeah-" He nodded. "Crazy bastards."

"Crazy's not the word for it." The cop's mouth twisted with loathing. "
Traitorous
is more like it. They got their own species they belong to. If they don't like being human, they shouldn't wait for somebody like us to come around and solve their problems for them. They got guns-shit, they got heavy artillery. Let 'em all suck off some nine-millimeter rounds; then they won't
be
human anymore. They'll be hamburger."

Deckard kept his face stone, his eyes the only thing moving as he glanced up again at the level indicator. Only a few more floors to go-the elevator had started to slow, braking to its coming halt.