EdgeOfHuman (24 page)

Then firing; the gun's recoil traveling hard into his chest, then rolling onward, its palpable echo diminishing at the base of his spine, the gun lowering of its own dead weight. The last had been the female Zhora, one of that last batch of escaped replicants-and the first of their number that he'd retired. He could still see the flight of her body, its energy combined with the bullet's thrust, crashing through one plate-glass window after another. Until it had come to rest, blood mingling with the rain, the bright shards like melting crystals of ice at his feet as he'd looked down at her. At what it'd become, a dead thing, its quick life over . . .

Deckard pushed the memory loop out of his brain. Thinking about stuff like that only led to grief. To bitter meditations about what he'd become. He'd quit the job, quit being a blade runner, before that time. When he'd realized that he didn't hate his job . . . but liked it too much.

With thoughts carefully stilled, Deckard went on clambering through the rubble. The small bit of luck he'd had in getting across the sideways world lasted for the rest of his journey: he spotted no one, human or less so, though he heard some scurrying noises at various distances, indicating some of the more timid inhabitants fleeing his approach. He also managed not to get lost himself amid the sector's jumble and clutter, even though he was translating a bird's-eye knowledge of the route into progress on foot. The fallen freeway served as a landmark-he knew that if he kept it to his right and counted off ten up-ended off ramps, he'd arrive more or less at his destination.

Which was right in front of him, at last; Deckard managed to get a sigh of relief through his panting for breath. He stumbled toward the multi-storied apartment building, an early-period Gehry knockoff.

The corridors inside the building were unlit tunnels, oriented wider than high. Some rudimentary electrical service still existed in the zone, remnants of some of the pirate utility grids that had flourished around the turn of the century. He hoped that no one had tapped out the conduit that served the safe house's security functions; it'd been a while since he'd had to use the place.

He found the door, a rectangle on its long side, a number in the low hundreds barely visible beneath layers of spray paint. A
placa
demon, fuzzy-edged batwings and Day-Glo fangs, still decorated the inverted hallway. Deckard knelt down to the small metal grid a few inches from the plugged keyhole.

"It's me." He tried to keep his voice as level and free of stress tremors as possible.

"Come on, open up."

A red LED flashed on behind the grid. "Do I know you?" A canned voice, the emotionless female that resided on most small-device chips. "Please don't violate me. Go away and leave me alone."

He didn't have time to deal with a recalcitrant lock; squeezing his eyes shut in frustration, he banged his fist against the grid. "Open up or I'll take you apart, so help me God." He'd use his fingernails for screwdrivers, if he had to.

"Shame on you."

His forehead came to rest just above the tiny holes. "You want more samples? Fine." He scrabbled through his near-depleted brain for something more to say, to trigger the lock's recognition mode. "Four score and . . . something years ago . . ." He couldn't remember the rest. "Um. Say you're walking along in the desert, and you see a tortoise. You see a tortoise and . . .

A sharp click sounded inside the grid. He barely caught himself from falling into the room on the other side of the door as it popped open.

He closed the door behind himself, leaning a hand for balance against the wall that had once been a floor. Even darker in here, the windows boarded over and sealed tight. Deckard could make out a few familiar furnishings, remnants of lives led when the building had still stood upright: an overstuffed couch beside a row of framed Keane paintings, footsteps imprinted across the big-eyed waifs, an overhead light fixture that now dangled into one of the inverted corners; through the doorway into the apartment's kitchen could be seen a disconnected refrigerator lying on its avocado-green flank, the magnet-studded door flopped open.

In this small pocket of security-when it'd originally been set up as a safe house, the exterior walls had been injected with both thermal and acoustic sensor-tracker foils-he felt a measure of tension drain out of his cramped shoulders. But only for a moment. He looked down, his eyes having adjusted to the darkness, and saw a miniature Prussian soldier, with a clown's rouged cheeks and an elongated nose, tip broken off, gazing back up at him. The little soldier's eyes went wide in frightened realization.

"I know you!" Its voice was pitched comically high. "I saw you before!" It spun on the heel of its cavalry boot and ran toward the apartment's bedroom door. "Sebastian! Sebastian! There's a man here-a bad man! A killer! Sebastian!"

Before Deckard could react, the door sprang open, its knob whacking the surface on which he stood. Something flew out, knocking the little soldier aside. Something that spun and twisted, and struck him full in the chest before he could get out of its screaming trajectory.

He landed on his back, with a pair of what felt like hands gripping tight around his throat. A white-haired wraith knelt on his chest, its teeth clenched and eyes radiating a murderous fury. He recognized it, even though when he'd seen it before it'd had the face of a young woman, and now wore the skeletal mask of deracinated leather. Its wrists felt like corded bones in his hands as he struggled against its throttling hold.

"Pris!" Another voice, from somewhere else in the tilted room. "Don't do that! You'll hurt him!"

At the edge of his sight, drowning in a red haze, Deckard saw a man with the face of a wrinkled baby, strapped to the back of an animated teddy bear. The man tugged with a single hand at the crazed figure's arm, its tattered leotard tearing open farther. Deckard felt himself falling away from the visions of combined nightmare and memory, the cutoff of his own breath turning red to black.

"I'm real sorry about that." Fussy and nervous, a voice that suited the man, or what was left of him. "Sometimes Pris just goes off that way-even with me. She's got like you know? -- a hair-trigger temperament. That probably indicates some sort of deep-seated anger inside her."

"You could say." Lying on a bare mattress inside the safe-house apartment, Deckard watched as Sebastian-a bio-engineer who'd formerly freelanced for the Tyrell Corporation; he remembered the police file on the guy-busied himself making coffee. A complicated process: the teddy bear, eyes tarnished as the buttons on its nineteenth-century waistcoat, had to back up to the sideways-mounted sink, while the triple amputee in the papoose carrier used the end of the counter as a flat surface for the grinder and French press. "Maybe she remembers me." Deckard rubbed his bruised throat. "Maybe she remembers me blowing her away. That might do it."

"Gee . . . I don't know." Sebastian struggled to press the plunger down. "I can't exactly be sure what Pris
does
remember." Black coffee grounds were scattered all over, from the spilled bag of expensive welfare-drop rations. "Sometimes I wonder if she remembers
me
. And I'm the best friend she ever had-even when she was alive." He finished pouring, then held out the cup on a cracked Meissen dessert plate. "Squeaker, would you take this over to our guest?"

The miniature soldier, the spike-helmeted figure that Deckard had first encountered in the safe-house apartment, grudgingly brought the coffee to him. It gazed balefully past its stretched nose, still regarding him with suspicion; the soldier's memory seemed unimpaired, at least. Deckard pushed himself into a sitting position and took the cup. "How much of her cerebral functioning were you able to save?"

"Oh, most of it, actually." Sebastian sipped from a demitasse. He appeared ancient as a baby bird, almost incapable of feeding itself, the skin of his hand and face translucent, crumpled parchment. "But those Nexus-6 circuits are real fiddly. It's basically an unstable design, with a lot of kludges and work-arounds. I warned Mr. Tyrell about putting 'em out on the market; I told him there'd be trouble. You start havin' to do recalls and boom, your profit margin's all shot to heck. Just the return shipping costs alone, from the off-world colonies . . ." A shudder ran through the abbreviated torso in the papoose carrier. "You can't just stick a postage stamp on 'em and send 'em home, you know."

"That's true." The coffee was hot and bitter on Deckard's tongue. "They tend to get into trouble."

"Yeah . . ." Sebastian took another sip. "But like I said, it's mainly the flaws in the Nexus-6 design. They're susceptible to having visions and stuff. Nearly as bad as real humans."

"Whatever." Didn't seem a point worth discussing. Through the doorway into the even dimmer back sections of the apartment, the mobile scarecrow that'd been the replicant Pris sulked and glared at him, its eyes two red embers somewhere below its albino fright-wig. His skin still prickled tense at the sight of her, a response triggered by the memory of her nearly killing him, riding his shoulders and slamming her fists into the sides of his skull, then twisting his head around like a broken doll's. "You must've moved fast, to get your hands on her at all." The last he'd seen of her, before this encounter in the safe-house apartment, she'd been flopping around on her back, spitting and shrieking in her death throes, the bullet from his gun having torn open her midsection.

"I sure did." Sebastian nodded. "I loaded her up in my van, from the police morgue-I had a pass for doing that. They'd already done their tests on her, so I didn't think they'd mind anyway. Not that I was going to stick around and ask 'em. I figured there'd be an arrest warrant out for me pretty soon. 'Cause I snuck out of a police-custody hospital, my own self-they thought I was dead when I got found up in the Tyrell private suite, most likely since I look so decrepit and stuff, but I'd just kinda passed out, is all; they got my heart started up again, out in the ambulance. But I figured the police probably had me down as having helped Batty get in to kill old Mr. Tyrell. So I just took Pris's body and my little pals, and lit out for this zone. Where they wouldn't be able to find us."

"Good thinking. Accessory to murder's a hard rap in this town. Especially when the evidence is on tape."

"It's a bum rap, is what it is." An indignant expression settled across Sebastian's watery eyes. "I would never have hurt Mr. Tyrell; I know he wasn't a very nice man and all, but he was my friend. Sort of. That's why I tried to warn him. That something funny was going on." Sebastian's voice grew excited. "When Roy and I were coming up in the elevator, to Mr. Tyrell's personal suite-I was supposed to tell him that I'd figured out my next moves, in the chess game we'd been playing. Well, Roy'd figured 'em out; I just repeated what he told me. Only-I bet it's on the securitysystem tape-when I was supposed to say 'Checkmate,' instead of that I said, 'Checkmate, I think.' That's how I was trying to warn Mr. Tyrell that something was wrong, without letting on to Roy that I was doing it."

The words came out in a babbling rush. "You see, 'cause I didn't know it at the time," Sebastian went on, "but it was like a famous chess game that Mr. Tyrell'd set up-the one that's called the Immortal Game, between a coupla old-time grand masters, way long ago-Roy told me about it, when he showed me the moves I should make. All that chess stuff was part of his memory implant, some of what Mr. Tyrell himself had programmed inside Roy's head. I could never've figured 'em out on my own; Mr. Tyrell knew I couldn't play chess on his level. So when I said
I think
, he should've known I didn't get the moves out of a book, and that somebody else must've told me, and that person was probably with me right then, so he should've called the corporate security folks instead of letting us in, 'cause I knew Roy was up to no good-'

"Okay, okay, I believe you." Deckard held up a hand against the barrage of words. He actually had no idea what the other man was talking about. "Look, it doesn't matter. I didn't come out here to arrest you or anything."

"No?" Sebastian peered closer at him. "I thought maybe you were, because of Mr. Tyrell getting killed, and me breaking in here-I'm sorry about that. I only did it because I found this place with all the locks and everything working, and it didn't look like anybody was living here."

"Don't get into a sweat. You're welcome to it. Just someplace that I used when I was out in the field, hunting down replicants that might've slipped over into this zone. It's nothing special."

"'Hunting down replicants . . . '" Sebastian's eyes widened in sudden fright. "You didn't come around looking for Pris, did you? Just 'cause I . . . I
saved
her? She's already been dead once. You're not going to kill her again, are you?"

He doesn't know
, thought Deckard.
He still believes she was a replicant
. All that talk about the difficulties with the Nexus-6 neurocerebral wiring confirmed that Sebastian hadn't heard the results of the bone marrow analysis tests on Pris; he'd already cut himself out of any Tyrell Corporation-related loop by then. Hunkered down here in the sideways world, he'd have no way of knowing. And no way of finding out-the bone marrow tests were the only way of determining a physiological difference between a replicant and a human.

Weird how things worked out-in the safe-house apartment, Deckard had found himself in the company of the one person who didn't think he was guilty of murdering a human being. The one person who had the most right to think of him as a murderer.

"You must've loved her." He felt sympathy for the truncated man. "Very much. To . . .put her back together the way you have."

"No . . ." Sebastian shook his head. "I
love
her. Right now, the way she is. Nothing's changed. Not for us, at least. And I know, deep down, Pris loves me."

The wraithlike creature, red-eyed and with a blazing corona of white hair, had heard its name spoken, the name it had answered to when alive. It slid into the apartment's kitchen, keeping its back close to the walls and a wary gaze on Deckard. It stepped next to the animated teddy bear, bending down to be as near as possible to Sebastian, its dried-leather face touching his wrinkled, babyish one. Its idiot eyes remained locked on the figure on the other side of the room.