EdgeOfHuman (2 page)

Once, nearly a year ago, he'd pulled the cabin's rickety wooden chair beside the coffin, sat and watched the imperceptible motion of her breast, rising with the microscopic pace of her oxygen intake. Holding himself as still as possible, leaning forward with his chin braced against his doubled fists, so he could detect through the coffin's glass lid the slow workings of her semilife. When he'd sat back, one full cycle of her respiration later, shadows had filled both the room and the hollow space between his lungs . . .

He got the fire in the stove lit, adjusted the dampers, and stood up. For a moment he warmed his hands, spine hunched inside the long coat that had served him well enough in the city but was completely inadequate up here. He rubbed the forest's chill from his bloodless fingers, then glanced over his shoulder. She was still sleeping, and dying, as he'd left her. As she would be until he woke her up, not with a kiss, but a minute adjustment inside the coffin's control panel.

"There -- " He spoke aloud. "That's better." Not to hear his own voice in the silence, but to remember hers. What it had sounded like. What it would sound like, the next time. On the window glass the crystals of ice melted into cold tears.

"Let's see how you're doing."
Yeah, you're a riot, all right.
His hands had unstiffened enough that he could take care of her, the only way that was left to him. He knelt down beside the black coffin, the way he had in front of the woodstove; the pair of low trestles that he'd hammered together raised the device off the cabin's unswept floor. With his fingernail he pried back the panel's edge. "Running a little high on the metabolics . ." He'd become so familiar with the workings, the revealed gauges and readouts, that he could monitor them without bringing over the kerosene lantern from the table. "It's all right," he murmured. As though leaning down in absolute darkness to find a kiss. "I'll take care of them for you." With one fingertip, he brought the LED numbers to what they should be, then closed the panel.

On the wall above the coffin, he'd hung a calendar that'd been left behind by the cabin's previous occupants, whoever they'd been. When he and Rachael had come to this place, there hadn't even been spiders in the ancient webs along the ceiling. The calendar was way out-of-date, two decades old, a faded holo shot of the millennium's celebratory riots in New York's Times Square. It didn't matter; all he used it for was to mark off the days, the interval that the still-rational part of his head had ordained, until the next time he'd wake her up.

At first it'd been every month, her long sleep broken for a full day, twenty-fours of conscious life, time together. Real time; everything else was waiting, for him even more than her. At least she could sleep through her dying. He didn't have even that luxury.

Now it was every two months, for twelve hours. A decision they'd made together, the grim economy of her death.
No
, he thought.
Mine
.

He stood back up. The calendar's numbers, black beneath the X's he'd scrawled with a half-charred scrap from the woodstove, stood in neat graveyard rows on the curling page. Two and a half weeks until the next time they could be together.

Restless, he walked outside the cabin again. In the narrow cathedral of trees he touched the gun inside his jacket. And wondered why he didn't just end it now.

"I know what's on your mind." A voice spoke from behind him.

He felt another's hand touch his shoulder. He didn't dare look around. Because he knew the voice.

Her voice.

"I bet you do," replied Deckard. Weariness swept over him, a last defeat. He'd hoped he'd be dead before he got to the point where he began to hallucinate. In the moon's shadows the small creatures scurried away through the dead leaves, as though in holy dread. "Since you're just something inside my head, anyway."

"Am I?" A soft whisper, as he felt the hand -- her hand -- brush the side of his neck. "How do you know?"

He sighed. This would be the absolute dead end of his luck, to wind up arguing logic with his own hallucinations. "Because," he said, still not turning around. "Because you sound just like Rachael. And she's already lying in her coffin, as good as dead."

"Then look at me. You don't have to be afraid."

The hand's touch dropped away from his neck. He turned, slowly, first bringing his gaze around. To see her; to complete the hallucination. He saw Rachael standing there beside him in the darkness, her skin paled beyond death by the moon's partial spectrum. Her dark hair was swept back, the precise arrangement he remembered from the first time he had ever seen her, in another life, a world far and different from this one; the way she had worn her hair then, walking across the deep-shadowed spaces of the Tyrell Corporation's offices.

"What do you see?" she asked.

"I see you, Rachael. That's how I know I've lost it. My mind." Grief and loneliness had won, had walked through and left open all the small doors inside his head, the doors torn from their hinges. So that there were no divisions anymore, between what he wished for and what he perceived. "This is what's called
being insane
," he told the image he saw standing before him. "I don't care. You win."

A sad smile lifted a corner of the image's mouth. The image of the woman he loved. "Is there no possibility?" The image of Rachael touched his hand, fingertips cold against his skin. "That I could be real?"

"Oh, sure." The thought didn't cheer him. "I could be screwing up some other way." His eyes and other senses lying to him, traitor thoughts. "Maybe you really are here -- but where I lost it was back in the cabin, when I was taking care of you. I thought I kept the controls set for you to go on sleeping -- but maybe that's where I was hallucinating." A theory good as any. "Maybe I really set it so you'd wake up again. And you did, and here you are." He found himself wishing it were true. That she had woken up in the empty cabin, bound her hair the way she used to wear it, then came and found him out here in the dark. "It'd be nice if you were real. We could stay out here and look at the stars . . . all night long." He took her hand in his. "But . . .
che gelida manina
." He used to pick that one out by ear on the piano in his flat, back in L.A.; everybody's first opera tune. " 'Your little hand is frozen.' "

"Don't bother translating. I know the words." A hard edge crept under her voice. "And I don't mind the cold."

"Yeah, well, maybe that's one of the advantages of being dead. Or close to. Everything gets put into perspective." He dropped her hand and reached back inside his coat. The lump of metal was as cold as her fingers had been, real or hallucinated. He couldn't keep his own voice from sounding bitter. "We got a date, then. If we don't freeze to death out here, when the sun comes up we can review our options." Deckard extracted the gun and held it out, flat on his palm, toward her. He spoke the words that had been silent in his head before. "Why wait?"

"You poor, stupid son of a bitch. You're pathetic." She slapped the gun from his hand, sending it spinning into the darkness. "Why do you blade runners always wind up so ready to off yourselves?" The voice's edge sharpened to a withering contempt.

The gun was lost somewhere in the forest's mat of rotting leaves.
So she must be real
, he thought. He would never have gone so crazy as to have thrown the gun away himself. You lost your final option if you did that.

"It's the Curve." He looked back around at her. "What they call the Wambaugh Curve. That's why. You land far enough along it, and you start thinking suicide's a good idea. Unless you got a reason not to."

"Cop mysticism. Spare me." She shook her head. "You were burned out a long time ago." She peered more closely at him. "So what was your reason?"

"You were, Rachael." The absent gun still seemed to weigh against his chest. "Even before I met you."

"How sweet." She reached up and laid her hand against his cheek; if he'd turned his head only slightly, he could've kissed her palm. "Come on -- " She drew the hand away. "Let's go up to the cabin." Walking toward the distant yellow spot of the lamp, she glanced over her shoulder and the furlike collar of her coat. "Oh . . . and you're wrong, by the way. I'm not Rachael."

"What?" He stared after her. "What're you talking about?"

"I'm Sarah." The bare trace of her smile, the tilt of her head, indicated an obscure victory. "I'm the real one."

He watched her turn and start walking again. A moment later he followed after.

"This is a spooky thing, isn't it?" She looked up from the coffin and toward him. "Don't you think so?"

"I suppose." Standing by the woodstove, Deckard glanced over his shoulder. Past her, through the cabin's small window, he could see outside the dark bulk of the spinner the woman had piloted here. He'd been right about the trace of light he'd spotted in the night sky; its simple fiery word had been meant for him. Now he rubbed his hands, trying to get the stove's warmth deeper inside than his skin. "You live with the dead, you get used to things like that."

"Not quite dead." When Sarah had entered the cabin, she'd walked over to the bulky device, knelt down by the low wooden trestles, and ran an expert scrutiny over the (control panel's dials and gauges before standing back up. "Looks like you've been taking pretty good care of her. These transport sleep modules aren't all that easy to run."

"It came with a manual."

"Did it?" She nodded, impressed. "You must've hired yourself some fine thieves." She placed her hands flat against the glass lid and gazed down at the mirrorlike image of her own face. "Ones that good usually don't come cheap."

"There were some old debts owed to me." He'd watched her, not sure what he felt at seeing a woman who looked like Rachael but wasn't. "From being in the business, you might say." Or was she? He didn't know yet.

Sarah continued gazing at the sleeping woman inside I he coffin. "New life," she murmured, brushing her hand 'cross the glass, as though tenderly stroking a sister's I 'row. " 'New life the dead receive . .' "

He recognized the line. Not from any opera. " 'The mournful broken hearts rejoice . . " One of his own aunts, the church-going one, had used to sing it. He had a memory of her naive, awkward soprano voice, floating from a kitchen window, and from the choir at his mother's funeral service. " 'The humble poor believe.' "

"Very good." She looked over at him. "Charles Wesley-
O, for a thousand tongues to sing.
Most people don't know any eighteenth-century hymns. Raised Protestant?"

A shake of the head. "Not raised much of anything. Just like most people."

"I suppose I got an overdose of it, from all those church boarding schools I was shuffled off to for so long. Most of my life, actually." She tilted her head to one side and smiled. "But then . . . that makes for a difference, doesn't it? Between me . . . and her." A sidelong glance down to the black coffin. "Your beloved Rachael wouldn't have known any Methodist hymn tunes, would she? The memory implant they gave her -- that part of it at least, it was all Roman Catholic, wasn't it?"

He nodded. "Heavy Latin. Tridentine. The old stuff."

"One of my uncle's clever little ideas. He wanted her to have some deep notion of guilt and redemption -- so he could control her more easily, I imagine. Doesn't seem to have worked." Sarah studied her double for a moment longer. "There were all sorts of concoctions inside her head, weren't there? I know about most of them. Including a brother for her that never existed." She watched her fingernail tap softly on the glass. "Really -- it's just as well that I'm an only child."

He said nothing. He'd had a long time to get used to the notion of someone believing that her implanted memories were real.

"Is that what you were hoping for? New life? Some cure for Rachael, some way of getting around that hard cutoff point, the four-year life span that was built into these Nexus-6 replicants?"

"No. I think we were both pretty well past that." He shrugged. "I'm not sure what we wanted. I knew that replicants are shipped from the Tyrell Corporation in these transport modules, so they'd arrive at the off-world colonies without most of their life spans being used up. I figured . . . why not? Just to make it seem longer, that she'd be with me. That's all."

"I know what the modules are used for; you don't have to tell
me
." Sarah brushed her hand against her skirt, as though there had been dust on the coffin lid. "You realize, of course, that your being in possession of this device is a felony." The woman who had called herself Sarah regarded him with the same half smile, one that he had seen a long time before on Rachael's face. "You're not licensed for it. Plus, after all, it
is
Tyrell Corporation property."

"What's that to you?"

The smile that had been unamused before shifted and became even less. "Listen, Deckard -- if it's Tyrell property, then it's
my
property. Don't you know who I am?"

"Sure." He gave a shrug. "You're some other replicant; probably out of the same Nexus-6 batch as her." A nod toward the coffin. "The Rachael batch. They must've sent you up here, figured that seeing you would fuck with my head."

"Did it?"

"Not much." He kept his voice flat, leeched emotionless. "I may not be a blade runner anymore, but I've still got some of my professional attitude left. I'm way past being surprised. By anything." Deckard studied his own hand, reddened by the woodstove's heat, before looking at her again. "You've got some problems, though. They must've programmed you for delusions of grandeur. Tyrell property doesn't belong to you.
You
belong to the corporation."

"Your problem is that you don't listen." Ice at the center of her glare. "Didn't you hear what I said?
I'm the real one
. I'm Sarah Tyrell. The niece of Eldon Tyrell -- remember him? You should. You and all the rest of the LAPD's blade runners were about zero use in keeping every escaped replicant on the planet from just walking in and out of Tyrell headquarters. If you'd been doing your job, my uncle would still be alive."