EdgeOfHuman (23 page)

She looked out now across the landing deck's parapet, that vision overlaying the solid, slanting towers. Fire and force, this world she owned riven by its own private apocalypse. The explosions would start at the base of the structures and continue upward, following the Wagnerian sequence of the programming that had been built into them from the beginning . . .

Brennt das Holz heilig brünstig und hell, sengt die Glut sehrend den glänzenden Saal. . .

"'If the wood catches fire,'" she murmured, eyes closed, "'and solemnly, brightly burns, then the flames will destroy the glorious hall . . .'"

Wagner had that much right, at least. Not
programming
; she knew that was a stupid word for it. Fate was the true word.

Der ewigen Götter Ende dämmert ewig da auf . . .

"'The eternal gods' last day then dawns . . . '

Sarah opened her eyes. The vision had faded, leaving the parallelogram towers of the Tyrell Corporation still standing.

She turned away and headed for the elevator, to go back down inside the building's heart.

He'd made his decision. Or, at least, the next step in his rapidly evolving plans.

What do I need this loony sonuvabitch around for?
Dave Holden glanced over at Batty, sitting beside him in the cockpit of the freight spinner. They were flying west, returning from the Reclamation Center out in the desert, to the sprawl of the city. The same harsh sunlight that darkened the curved glass's photochrome membrane heated the brown stew of pollutants hanging in the air above L.A.; he could see it up ahead, like an old, frayed edge wool blanket spread over the simmering buildings. Batty's hands moved across the controls, manually piloting the craft. When he was busy doing something, he didn't look quite so maniacal. But that didn't change the situation.

The question didn't need an answer -- Holden had decided that part a while back. But there were other questions that did.

"So, uh, exactly what is
your
interest in all this?"

"I told you." Batty turned his cracked smile on him again. "The sixth replicant. The one that's still missing."

"What about it?" The smile still had the capacity for making him nervous. "You just want to shake its hand or something? Get an autograph?"

"Don't want anything from it. Except to find it and kill it. And take back the evidence to the people who hired me that I've completed this little job for them."

"And who's that?"

"Can't tell you." Batty's eyes shifted. "It's . . . a secret."

"Bullshit." His inner radar, his honed blade runner senses, flashed on the other's momentary unease. "I can tell you're soamming me." He peered closer at Batty. "You don't know who hired you, do you?"

"Well . . . I got my suspicions about it." Batty gave a minute adjustment to one of the controls. "Might be the LAPD, Or it could be a gov agency. Possibly the feds, maybe even the U.N. -- bad replicant business can call down some pretty high-level heat. Whoever it is, they're working outside the official channels, so we're talking cover-up. Ultraspook stuff; I got the job details and my up-front money through a double-blind courier service, no trace possible on who sent them my way."

"How'd they find you? In the yellow pages?"
Probably under Cannons, Loose -
- the thought gave Holden a twist of smug amusement.

"The fact they found me at all just proves these guys're up there. Man, I'd pretty much figured if I was going to be retired against my will, then I was going to be retired all the way-I'd taken every dime I'd saved up, from when those bastards over at the Tyrell Corporation had been still paying me my royalties on their line of Roy Batty replicants, and I'd dug myself in tight into a nice, safe little conapt in one of the Cracow ex-pat zones. I was gonna do nothing but drink gin and listen to Mahler's Second for the rest of my life." He shook his head. "You know, I don't have to kill people to have a good time."

"But it helps."

Batty shrugged. "Speak for yourself. I didn't need to take this job--"

"You did, though." Holden's turn to show a thin smile. "So now you gotta go through with it. If these people you're talking about are such heavyweights, they wouldn't like you crapping out on them."

"Tell me about it." His face appearing suddenly older, expression glum. "I've worked these kinds of gigs before. Perform or die's the general rule. Even so," muttered Batty, "I got half a mind to pull the plug on the whole operation. Dealing with an ungrateful little jerk like you-"

"What'd I do?"

"It's what you
didn't
do." Glum to resentful. "I arrange for a whole new heart and lungs to get slapped inside you, and you don't even say thanks."

"Christ . . . give me a break." Holden shook his head. "All right, you have my sincerest appreciation. Satisfied?" He looked ahead to the city approaching on the horizon, then around to Batty again. "Not as if it was all selfless altruism on your part, though, is it? You had some reason for busting me out of the hospital and all."

"True. That's what pisses me off. I need you."

Holden raised an eyebrow. "For what?"

"Come on." A big sigh from Batty. "I've been out of the game for a while now. When I took you out of that hospital, that was the first time I'd been in L.A. in years. It's a whole lot bigger and uglier than when I left it. I need somebody who knows his way around. Otherwise, that sixth replicant could be hiding out in there, and I'd have fuck-all chance of finding it."

"Oh, sure." He gave a snort of disbelief. "So buy a map, already."

"It's not just the lay of the land, pal. It's the connections. You got'em and I don't. When I took off from L.A., I cut all my ties, all my sources of info, my whole network. I expect that most of the people I used to deal with are dead now, anyway. Places where they were at, things they were into -- longevity's not much of an issue there." A shrug. "Wouldn't be such a problem if I'd done anything to replace them. But I. don't have time to do that. Replicant number six has gotten a real jump on getting himself safely out of sight. I can't screw around any longer finding it-I need somebody who's already got their systems up and running. Blade runner-type systems. That's you, Dave. That's why you're here."

He didn't say anything in reply. If Batty wanted to believe he was so valuable, he wasn't going to do anything to dissuade him from the notion. A mixed bag regarding the state of his own connections, though. He'd been flat on his back, zoned out on the hospital's IV drip, for the better part of a year; that was a long time to be off the scene, especially in L.A. Batty didn't have a clue about how fast things changed now, compared to his day. Plus he was on the lam himself-his old boss Bryant, and God knew how many other people, had put him on ice for their own reasons, and they weren't likely to be too overjoyed about finding him walking around again.
Though maybe that's a positive
, mused Holden.
If I got taken out by a conspiracy against the blade runners, the rest of them will be on my side
. They'd have to be, for reasons of their own survival.
At least the smart ones will be
, he thought. Which meant that Batty's assessment was correct; he did have resources that he could call upon. The best kind, right inside the LAPD itself, right under the noses of Bryant and the others who'd set him up.

The residue of doubt evaporated, leaving the hard stratum of a blade runner's self-confidence. He still had the edge that came with being human. The spinner had reached the L.A. suburbs, sections of a maze homogenous with that of the city's tight, imploding center. Somewhere in there was the answer, walking around with someone else's face. Whose?

I'll find out soon enough
. Holden glanced over again at the figure beside him. The same question went through his mind, assessing how much further use he had for Batty. Or whether he'd be better off without him, going out on the hunt alone.

"All right," said Holden. "I'll help you out. After all . . . it's only fair."

Batty looked up from the spinner's controls. "We got a little partnership going, then."

"Oh . . . we sure do." And smiled right back at him.

Deckard knew where he was going. He just didn't know how to get there.

It'd been easier when he'd been able to fly straight to the safe-house apartment in an unmarked spinner, at night with the tracking lights switched off, engines throttled back to near silence.
That was when I was a blade runner
, thought Deckard.
A real one
. With all the perks and privileges that accrued thereby. Now he had to creep along on the ground like a civilian or, worse yet, a hunted thing. Whatever transformation Sarah Tyrell promised him had been completed some time ago.

The stolen cop uniform was so torn and shredded as to be unrecognizable as such. His bruises and abraded skin, wounds crusted with dried blood, showed through the ragged gaps. As he climbed over the floes of concrete rubble and twisted rebar, the palms of his hands left small red marks.

At the crest of one long upward pull, Deckard stopped to catch his breath, the dry-heated air scalding the interior of his throat. An exact ninety-degree angle of marble and steel, once vertical and now laid out along the ground, marked where one of the zone's towers had fallen. Some of the buildings had pancaked fiat during the long-ago seismic upheavals, but most had toppled over lengthways, riding out the earth's whip-crack motion. A knife of freeway cleaved the zone, the lane-divider dots writing empty, absurd graffiti along the roadbed turned to wall.

A glance over his shoulder revealed unmarked sky, no pursuit from the air in sight. Holding on to the tumbled building's ridge, he shielded his eyes with one hand, scanning across the zone for any other indication that his laboring progress had been spotted. No one and nothing-either the cops who'd been on his tail at the central station had assumed he'd fallen under the wheels of the rep train, and were still searching the tunnel for his bits and pieces, or they'd put the chase on hold until he reemerged in a territory more to their liking. Clusters of serious-bad criminal types-Sawney Bean dysfunctional families, Dahmer-ized protein fetishists-were known to make the sideways world their turf; sending a squadron of fresh uniforms through here would be like parading a flock of leather-wrapped turkeys into a wolves' convention. It wasn't worth having a set of sharp-filed teeth ankle-biting through your jackboots, when the chances were good that the bones of the person you were looking for were already being gnawed somewhere else in the zone.

Using the building's broken windows as handholds, Deckard worked himself down the slope of the other side.
Just get there -
- a message not just to his fatigued limbs, but from one part of his brain to the other. More than exhaustion; the rep train and the nightmare vision it'd held, memories and faces, with the last one the most disturbing, had rattled him down to his soul. If he had one left.

He'd have to think about that later. Right now, the rest of Deckard's functioning cerebral sectors were mulling over his plan of attack, once he'd reached the safe-house apartment. There'd be little time to rest, and the job to do still in front of him. Hooking up with his old boss Bryant had turned out not only to be a wash, but worse than that; the task of finding the sixth escaped replicant was now compounded by even darker mysteries. Somebody had iced Bryant-what the hell did that mean?
Maybe
, thought Deckard,
the sixth replicant did it. Killed him.
The one whose ID data Bryant had purged from the police department files. As long as Bryant had still been alive, the coverup wasn't complete; there was still at least one person who knew who the sixth replicant was. With Bryant laid out cold, the data was purged from its final location, human memory itself . . .

All of which meant, Deckard knew, that the job of finding the sixth replicant was going to be that much harder. Bryant had been his only route into the department's records. The synthesized image of Bryant on the video monitor, with its glib real-time responses, might have been lying, stalling him, when it'd said that the sixth replicant's ID could still be drawn up from some locked-tight sector of the databases-no way of determining that now. And no way of getting back into the police station to try accessing the information; the cops would be on him in two seconds if he were stupid enough to show his face around there again.

What then?
Deckard brooded as he continued his laborious progress over the sideways world. Dig up an old Voigt-Kampff machine from the gear stashed at the safe-house apartment, and start running empathy tests on everyone in L.A.? That should only take a few centuries to complete.

One possibility had occurred to him. Of trying to establish some kind of direct comm link with the authorities in the off-world colonies, passing himself off as a high-level figure in the LAPD-maybe as Bryant, if the off-worlders didn't know about him being dead-and getting a repeat transmission of the original data about all of the escaped replicants. That'd be one way of getting number six's ID; the only problem was that it'd be nearly as difficult as bringing Bryant himself back from the dead and grilling him for the info. The off-world security agencies weren't exactly on the phone grid; the U.N. sat on every tight-beam transmission between Earth and the colonies. Even if he could engineer some way of tapping in and getting on-line to them, there'd still be the small matter of faking the police department reciprocity codes, convincing the off-worlders of some bullshit reason for sending the data again, the whole elaborate ruse-and doing it without alerting the cops about what he was doing and where he was doing it from.

He didn't like his chances about pulling all that off, but at the moment it was the only plan he had. Other than letting the word get out that he was back in town, and waiting for the sixth replicant to come looking for him, with murder on its mind. That was something else to think about.

Or too much to think about. Deckard gritted his teeth against the sting of the sun-baked rocks in his palms and the swirl of plans and possibilities inside his head. Enough to make him long for the time when it'd been easier, when he'd hated his job but still knew what to do. When he could stand with legs braced, squinting through the rain slashing at his eyes, bringing the heavy black gun up with both hands locked tight on its grip, arms extended, aiming as the city's crowds had parted before him like an ocean with faces . . .