EdgeOfHuman (7 page)

"This replicant -- number six -- might be different." The other man apparently knew all about the job Deckard had taken on. "Harder than you're ready for."

Deckard ignored the comment. The sooner he was down in the city's streets, the sooner he could wrap up this sorry business. And head north again. "Where we going?" He looked out the side of the spinner's canopy, watching a herd of artificial emu being herded down a back alley. The marketplace died, bit by bit, as the multilingual neon signs were switched off.

"You'll see." Andersson reached forward and flicked on the landing prep switches. "Soon enough."

One neon sign, the biggest, stayed lit. He remembered it always being on, no matter the time or weather, looming over the district's transactions like a silent blessing. Only the size of the letters competed with the cruising U.N. blimp, with its flat-panel screen and booming exhortations to leave the planet, and all the rest of the city's tidal wave of ad slam.

VAN NUYS PET HOSPITAL. Pink letters, with a shiver of blue around their edges. And a cartoon puppy face, shifting every two seconds from sad and injured to happy and bandaged. He'd always figured that every resurrection should be so easy.

The spinner dropped toward the landing deck atop the building. "Why we going here?" asked Deckard. "You got a kitten with ear mites or something?"

"No--" Andersson took his hands from the controls, the descent locked on auto. He smiled humorlessly. "Orders from Miss Tyrell. You've got an appointment."

Deckard let himself be hustled into the elevator. even before the other two spinners touched down. He'd come this far without putting up a fight; no point in starting one now. He watched as the man beside him punched in a security code. The elevator doors slid together; the tiny space sank into the faint but unmistakable odors of disinfectant and animal droppings.

Panel lights charted the descent into the building's midsection. When the doors opened, he found himself gazing into the spectacled eyes of a smaller man, lab-coated, drooping tabby asleep in the cradle of his arms.

"Should I stick around, Mr. Isidore?" Andersson held the elevator door from reclosing.

"No . . . I don't think that'll be nuh-necessary." Scratching behind the tabby's ears, the gnomish figure tilted his head, brow wrinkling. "I'm sure our guh-guh-guest will behave himself."

"I have a choice?"

"Well . . ." Isidore mulled, frowned. "Probably nuh-not."

"Don't," whispered Andersson into Deckard's ear, "do anything stupid." He stepped back into the elevator, hit the buttons, and disappeared behind the stainless-steel doors.

"Not to worry." The tabby stirred and yawned. "They're puh-paid to act like thuh-that. It's all an act.
You
should nuh-know."

Deckard followed the man. "Sometimes it's not an act."

"Oh, yes . . ." Isidore glanced over his shoulder. "You know that tuh-tuh-too. That's when people -- and other things -- thuh-that's when they get hurt." He held the tabby closer against his chest, as though protecting it.

The concrete-floored space narrowed to a corridor lined with cages, stacked three or four deep, and larger kennels. The air beneath the bare fluorescents was laced with mingled animal scents. As Isidore passed by, the small creatures -- cats, rabbits, toy breeds of dogs, a few guinea pigs -- pressed against the wire doors, mewing or yapping for the man's attention.

Deckard turned his head, getting a closer look. Some of the animals in the cages weren't animals. Not real ones.

A partially disassembled simulacrum suckled a row of squirming kittens; its white fur had been peeled back to reveal the polyethylene tubes and webbing beneath aluminum ribs; the optic sensors in its skull gazed out with maternal placidity. A wasp-waisted greyhound danced quivering excitement, front paws flurrying at the kennel gate; all four legs were abstract steel and miniature hydraulic cylinders.

A headless rabbit bumped against a water dish. Its mate -- flesh and blood as far as Deckard could tell -- nuzzled against its flank.

"Wuh-what's wrong?" Isidore had caught a hiss of inhaled breath behind him.

"These things give me the creeps."

"
Really?
" Isidore stopped in his tracks. He looked amazed; even the tabby in his arms blinked open its eyes. " Why?"

"They're not real." He had seen plenty of fake animals before, out in the dealers' souk, and they'd never bothered him. But those had had their skins and pelts intact. These, with their electromechanical innards exposed, flaunted a raw nakedness.

"Guh-gosh." It seemed to come as news to Isidore. He looked down at the tabby for a moment. "I guess I duh-don't see it thuh-that wuh-wuh-way. They all seem real to me. I mean . . . you can tuh-touch them." Leaning toward Deckard, lifting the tabby closer to him. "Here."

He scratched the cat's head, getting an audible purr in response. It might have been real. Or well made, well programmed.

"You suh-see? It must be real." Isidore managed to open one of the empty cages and off-loaded the tabby into it. "There you go, tuh-Tiger." The cat complained for a moment, then curled nose to tail and closed its eyes. "Come on. My office's juh-just over here. I'll close the door . . . so you won't huh-have to see anything you don't want to." The gaze behind the glasses narrowed, then he turned and started walking again.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Oh . . . nothing . . ." Turning a key in a lock, Isidore directed a thin smile at him.

"Juh-just that I wouldn't have thought you'd be so . . . suh-sensitive." He stepped through the doorway. "Given your domestic arrangements and all."

"Got a point." Deckard walked into a low-ceilinged, windowless cubicle, walls covered with freebie calendars and thumb-tacked photos of pets and their owners; satisfied clients, he figured. "Except Rachael's all in one piece. That's the difference." He had to remember to keep cool, to get through whatever drill he'd been brought down here for. So he could get back to the sleeping, dying, waiting woman up north.

"Please . . . sit duh-down." The other man dropped himself into a swivel chair behind a desk covered with mounds of papers and empty foam cups. "Really . . . I do wuh-want you to be comfortable. We have a lot to talk about."

"This says your name's Hannibal Sloat." Sitting, he'd picked up the cheap wooden plaque from the desk. He held it by one end. "You or somebody else?"

"Mr. Sloat was my boss. A luh-luh-long tuh-time ago. Then he died." Isidore looked around at the office's moulting walls, then pointed. "That's him up there."

He turned his head and saw a hard-copy newspaper clipping, browned with age, stuck to the wall. In the low-rez photo, a fat man with pockmarked skin held a dangling cat out to a couple, the woman stroking the animal with one delicate hand, the man turning a slightly embarrassed smile toward the camera. Deckard shifted around in the chair. "Nice guy?"

"Oh, sure. Real nuh-nice. In his will . . . he left me the puh-pet hospital." He brought his gaze back down to Deckard's. "He left me . . . everything. Really." The swivel chair seemed to have grown larger, as though it were capable of swallowing him up, as he folded his hands in his lap. "It's a big responsibility."

"What is? Giving distemper shots? Lube job on a replica Pekingese, maybe. Doesn't seem like anything you couldn't handle."

"Thuh-that's what I used to think. There wasn't any thuh-thing more to the job than that.

Even when old Mr. Sloat was still uh-uh-live and I was working for him. That's what I thought the Van Nuys Pet Hospital's buh-business was. Like you said -- shu-shots and ruh-ruh-pairs."

"So if it's not that . . ." Deckard set the plaque down on the desk's corner. "Then what is it?"

"Well . . . you'd probably say we duh-deal in fuh-fakes. Like out in the souk. Fuh-phony goldfish, and kuh-kuh-cats and dogs and stuff. That you can't tell from the real thing. I mean . . . the living thing. What yuh-you'd call the living thing."

"Don't you? I thought that's where the money is. That's what people like. The fakes. The real ones . . . they just make a mess. It's just easier dealing with the simulations."

The other nodded slowly, wisps of silky white hair drifting over his pink scalp. "I guess that's what somebody who spent so much time as a buh-blade runner wuh-would think. You had your own wuh-way of dealing with those . . . suh-suh-simulations. Didn't you?"

He studied the lab-coated figure on the other side of the desk. "Look -- is this why I was brought here? So you could rag on my moral condition, or something? You needn't have bothered." He put his hands against the chair's arms, as though he were about to push himself upright and walk out of the office. "You know so much about blade runners . . . you ever hear of something they call the Curve?"

"Maybe." Isidore shrugged, nervous. "Some kind of . . . kuh-cop tuh-talk."

"The Wambaugh Curve." Strange to be talking about it out loud. It'd always been something that everyone in the LAPD knew about, could feel sitting under the breastbone like a ball of lead, but never spoke of. Another ticket to the department shrinks; where if they found you were too badly screwed up, they'd take away your gun and the answer to all your problems. "The index of self-loathing. Blade runners get it worse, and faster, than other cops. Comes with the territory."

Isidore's eyes looked wet and sympathetic behind the glasses. "Then what happens?"

"Depends." Once the dissection had begun, it was easy to sink the scalpel in deeper. "Upon where you are on the Curve." He'd used to think about these matters late at night in his flat, sunk deep in the overstuffed leather couch, one of the pleasantly expensive things that his bounty money had brought him. In the lonely splendor that'd followed his divorce, with a bottle of twenty-five-year-old single malt from the Orkney Islands close at hand, that sweetly tasted of smoke and dirt and money as well. Nobody ever said that blade-running sucked on the paycheck scale. Sometimes he'd sat there, brooding or anesthetized, with replicant blood still spattered across his chest. One time, he'd lifted his glass and had seen the drops of red written across the back of his hand. And had sipped and closed his eyes, and not felt a thing. "Eventually . . . the Curve gets steep enough, you fall off. I did."

"And then you weren't a blade runner anymore."

Seconds passed before he could say anything. "No . . . He shook his head. "I guess I wasn't."

"Too buh-bad." Steel under Isidore's voice, a thin needle of it. "A little late, for all the ones you killed."

Deckard gave him a hard stare. "Listen, pal--" A weapon in the eyes. "I was just doing my job."

"I knew you'd say that." No flinch, no stammer. "It's what they all say. All the murderers."

The cop on guard duty actually lifted his rifle across his chest. The next move would bring it down into firing position, full auto rock 'n' roll. "You got security clearance for this floor?" A mean look underneath the SWAT team cap.

"Hey, hey . . . don't sweat it, man." The figure in the hospital's green scrubs raised his empty hands. An easy smile, but cold eyes. "I hit the wrong button, got off on the wrong floor.That's all." He slowly lowered his hands. "No need to uncork the artillery, pal."

"Wrong button, huh?" The guard kept his finger on the trigger. At this range, he didn't need the sharpshooter tags under the LAPD shoulder insignia. He could've set the muzzle's hollow eye right on the breastbone beneath the hospital staff outfit. "Well, why don't you turn around, get back into the elevator, and push the right button this time. That way, you won't get into trouble."

"What's the deal, anyway?" The smiling man raised up on his toes, scanning over the guard's head to the open unit where the floor's sole patient lay surrounded by gurgling machines, a half-dozen doctors and nurses who seemed to be more like technicians and electronics geeks. Softly bleeping dots drew spiked trails on a bank of video monitors. "This guy some kind of VIP?" Beyond the bed and the body, windows reached to the ceiling, overlooking the city. "Been here a long time, hasn't he?" The magmalike L.A. sun battered the towers, the glare washing out the viewscreen of the U.N. blimp as it cruised by, making its constant pitch for off-world emigration.

"You ask a lot of questions." Cool enough to show nothing more than his index finger tightening on the crook of metal; small shiny things clicked ready inside the rifle. "Not a good idea."

"Peace, brother." Hands went up again, palms exposed, the smile floating between them. "You keep on doing your job, and I'll go do mine." Inside the man's skull, behind the cold eyes, a single unvoiced word:
Jerk
. A couple meters beyond the guard stood the open frame of a metal detector; he could see that it'd been switched off, probably to keep it from being triggered by the equipment carts that rolled in and out of the unit. It wouldn't have mattered to him if he'd had to step through the thing, still smiling, to find out what he needed to know; the small, efficient gun hidden at the small of his back was sheathed in enough microprocessor-controlled evasion polymers to slip past a goddamn radar station. It was the lazy unprofessionalism that irked him. These putzes were amateurs, all black-leather and chrome-eyed swagger, and sloppy on the details.
Typical
.

He reached behind himself and hit the elevator call button. Already there; the doors slid open and he stepped back, hands still up for a joke, the smile still on his face. He gave a little wave through the narrowing slit. "'Bye now."

Leaning back as the elevator descended, he let the smile creep up into his eyes. Behind them were no words, just a map, the exact layout of the unit, the guards, the machines and doctors, and the man on the hospital bed, who had a hole where his heart and lungs used to be.

He got off on the next floor down. No guards on this floor; he collected his gear, bigger and more rawly industrial-looking than the hospital's usual chrome equipment carts, from an unused storage closet and wheeled it into the maternity ward. He began unfolding the heavy bracing struts, the pronged steel feet digging into the scuffed rubberoid flooring.