Replicant Night (2 page)

"Please..." A hand clutched ineffectually at his elbow. "Mr. Deckard ... you can't just-"

He turned angrily upon the production assistant, a tiny androgynous figure with heavy retro black-framed glasses. "It wasn't supposed to happen this way!" He jabbed his finger at the assistant, who fended it off with an upraised clipboard. "I was told you weren't going to kill anyone!" The circumference of his gaze tinged with red as he looked back toward the crew ringing the soundstage. "Where's Urbenton?"

That was the name of the director. Who was conspicuously missing, the folding chair that had usually supported his pudgy frame now unoccupied.
Chickenshit sonuvabitch
- Deckard felt his teeth grinding together. The director must've snuck out after the video recorders had started rolling, while Deckard had been wrapped in the view from the cam monitors, watching the re-creation of his own past. Urbenton would've known that Deckard would go ballistic when a real bullet, from a real gun, wound up churning through someone's brain.

"Come on, man..." The actor playing him-not a replicant like the one who had been playing Kowalski, but an actual human-tried out as peacemaker. "It can't all be special effects, you know. Sometimes you gotta go for
realism
."

"Get away from me." Revulsion worked its way up Deckard's throat, choking him as though the replicant's big hands had been around his own neck instead of the other man's. The actor didn't even look that much like him, or at least not yet. Like most of the talent in the video industry, in addition to the remote cam implanted behind one eye, the actor also had barely visible tracker dots sewn under his skin, so that in postproduction another's face could be ceegeed over the one he'd been born with.

That new face would've been the real Deckard's.
But not now
, he fumed.
Not if I can help it.
"So where is he?" Deckard stopped just short of gathering up the front of the assistant's collar in his hand and squeezing tight, the way the dead Kowalski had done to the human actor. "Where's Urbenton?"

"I ... I don't know..." The assistant retreated, sweating hands clasped to the clipboard. "He got called away ..."

"Yeah, right. I bet." Deckard stepped over the corpse and started toward the soundstage's big rolling doors and the interlocking corridors and spaces of the studio complex beyond. "I'll find him myself. He's got one hell of a lot of explaining to do."

He didn't look over his shoulder as he strode away. But he could sense the fake L.A. dying its own death, the constant artificial rain stopping, the vehicles halting and being shut off in the middle of the crowded street, the actors and extras walking off the set. The replica blimp, a tenth the size of the one that had once actually floated above the city, dangled inert from the overhead rigging, adscreen blank and faceless.

The city's walls parted as the grips moved the scenery back. There was nothing behind them except dust and stubbed-out cigarettes, and a few scattered drops of blood.

A silver crescent in the sky, hanging below him. Dave Holden thought it looked like some kind of Islamic emblem, complete to the glittering star between the points of its horns. The artificial moon's gravitational field tilted the skiff's gimballed pilot's seat, hanging him upside down inside the tiny interplanetary craft. Inside the cramped cockpit area, there was barely room enough for himself and the cargo strapped onto the empty seat beside him.

Which spoke now: "You're in big trouble, pal." The briefcase kept its voice level and calm, as though unconcerned with human problems.

Holden glanced over at the briefcase. Plain black, a decent grade of leatherette, chrome snaps and bits around the handle. It looked like the exact sort that millions of junior execs carried into office towers every morning, back on Earth. By rights, it shouldn't have been talking at all; that it was doing so indicated the long-standing personal relationship between the two of them.

"Big,
big
trouble." The briefcase continued its simple, ominous pronouncements.

"I know-" Holden reached out to the control panel and dialed the skiff's guidance system toward the silver crescent's intake beam. "I
breathe
trouble." More than metaphor: the lungs in his chest, and the heart between them, were efficient constructs of Teflon and surgical steel. His original cardiopulmonary system had been blown out his back by an escaped replicant named Leon Kowalski. Back on Earth, back in the L.A. from which he and the briefcase had just flown. That bullet had been a couple of years ago; there had been others before and since then, some of which he'd fired, others that'd been fired at him. The bio-mechanical lungs sucked whiffs of imminent death and left them on his tongue. Tasting like the ashes of the cigarettes the LAPD doctors had made him give up. "Breathe it out, too."

"You're probably going to die."

"Coming from you, that's good." Holden knew that the briefcase's voice was the voice of the dead. A dead man speaking. It didn't matter whether that man, when alive, had been human or not. "You'd know, wouldn't you?"

If the briefcase had had shoulders, it would've shrugged. "Just leveling with you. That's all."

Holden ignored the last bit. Lights had started flashing on the control panel, indicating that the intake beam had locked onto the skiff. One light, he knew, would stay yellow for a few more seconds; that was the window of opportunity for abandoning the intake approach, for breaking off and turning the little craft around. And heading back to Earth or anywhere else his own death didn't seem quite so probable.

He kept his hands folded in his lap, watching and waiting until the yellow light disappeared, replaced by the green one right next to it. They were going in.

The silver crescent loomed bigger and brighter in the skiff's viewscreen. He could make out the segmented panels that formed its curved, double-tapered shape.
Croissant
, thought Holden. Thinking of French bakery goods, stuff served with real coffee. The same word, actually. He knew his mind was rattling on, filling up the empty corridors inside his head with nonsense. So there wouldn't be room for worrying about the job he'd come all this way to Outer Hollywood to do.

A delivery job.
Once I was a blade runner
, he mused;
now I'm some sort of errand boy
. He didn't mind; he'd kept his gun when he'd quit the police department. That was the main thing: he needed it now more than before.

The silver crescent grew larger, blocking out the pocked white shape of the real moon. Brown-mottled Earth lay somewhere behind the skiff; Holden didn't sweat the navigational fine points. Those had all been programmed in, along with the other details of the job. He glanced again at the briefcase, which had mercifully fallen silent. The initials on the small brass plaque under the handle read RMD. Not his, but those of the person to whom the briefcase was to be delivered.
Then he can deal with it
, thought Holden. He wondered if
M
really was Rick Deckard's middle initial, or whether that was just something that the people who'd put the briefcase together had made up out of thin air.

Outer Hollywood filled the screen now; the intake beam had brought the skiff around to the landing bays on the curve's fat convex side. There'd been a single bright flash, the viewscreen's pixels max'd out, when the skiff had passed through the focussed reflection from the bank of mirrors that served as the crescent's attached star. Holden had caught a glimpse of the massive struts and triangulated framework that held the mirror bank between the station's horns. The open steel girders looked rusted-
In a vacuum?
he wondered;
that's weird
-and warped from neglect. Cables drifted loose like beheaded snakes; the motors and other servo-mechanisms that served to adjust the mirrors' angles and catch the unfiltered radiation from the sun, looked barely functional. Light bounced off some of the mirrors and out like idiot semaphores into space, instead of illuminating the soundstages behind Outer Hollywood's pressure-sealed windows. Holden figured that'd be all right if only night scenes were being taped . . . or scenes of L.A. during the rainy season. Anything cheerful enough to require an approximation of daylight, and they'd all be out of luck.

The briefcase spoke up again. "You strapped?"

For a moment, Holden thought the briefcase was referring to the pilot seat's restraints, then realized it had slipped into the urban patois it sometimes affected. He patted the holstered weapon inside his camel's-hair jacket. "Of course." The gun felt like a rock above one of his artificial lungs.

"We'd be better off if it was
me
carrying
you
." A fretful note sounded in the briefcase's voice.

He couldn't understand the briefcase's self-absorbed concern.
The bastard's already dead
, he thought. How could things get any worse for it? For himself, though . . . that was another matter.

"Welcome to our faciliteezz." A canned female presence, bodiless and somewhere above his head, started talking as soon as Holden climbed out of the skiff's cockpit. "For all your video production needzz Something was wrong with the hidden p.a. speakers; the woman's sibilants came out as an insectoid hiss. "Zztock and cuzztom zzets ... fully furnizzhed editing zzuites . . . all at a competitive rate. Why go elzzewhere?"

The answer was obvious to Holden. He looked around with the briefcase dangling from his left hand, leaving his right to reach inside his jacket if need be. The orbital studio was close to being a ruin. Another hiss, of oxygen leaking through the landing bay's gaskets, sounded behind him. A chill draft in his face, like the wind down a deserted city alley, when even the last of the scavenger packs had crawled into their trash-lined burrows; no sky above, but instead a tangle of catwalks and wiring loops imbedded against the barely discernible visual field of the studio's welded exoskeleton.

Big empty spaces; the recorded greeting was the only human element immediately apparent. Other than himself, Holden noted.

"There should be some kind of offices," the briefcase suggested. "Farther inside. Where you can find out what set the shoot's been booked into."

He started walking, footsteps hollow and loud on the metal flooring. The noise echoed down the hangarlike vista before him. The chances of his moving about, of making his delivery and leaving with no one's being aware, were nonexistent.

The orbital studio's sets had already begun collapsing into one another, false fronts and flimsy backdrops muddling together from neglect and general entropy. Holden found himself, briefcase in hand, walking past a Tara-oid antebellum mansion, fluted pillars warping out of shape, that had somehow crept among the turrets and spires of medieval Prague. A glacier of artificial grass and poppies spilled down the cobbled street, studded with crosses stamped from plastic to resemble white-painted wood; the dates on them were all from some post-World War I soldiers' cemetery. Nobody was buried there, but the draft against Holden's face still smelled like death and slow decay.

Scavengers existed everywhere; as in L.A., the real one, so above. He found one in the quieted battlefield set, an ersatz Flanders Field, next to the empty burial ground. The guy looked familiar enough, all scruffy beard and antique aviator goggles, tattered leathers flopping about a stunted frame; Holden wondered if he recognized him from somewhere in the real city's alleys.

Brass shell casings clinked in the bag slung over the scavenger's shoulder. He looked up, the scarred bridge of his nose wrinkling to signal that he smelled cop, while the black-nailed fingertips poking through the ends of his gloves continued to groom the mock battlefield. Another scent lingered in the station's canned and recycled air, that of the live ammo that had been expended in the taping of some low-budget historical epic.

"You can't hassle me, man." The scavenger's eyes narrowed behind the goggles. "I got a license."

"Yeah, well, I don't." The stuff he'd been able to do before, back when he'd been with the department, had all been left behind him, on Earth and in that other life. "So remain sweatless."

He was able to get approximate directions from the scavenger. And information: there was only one video shoot booked into the Outer Hollywood station, the first one after a long dry spell.

"It's that damn
Cinecittà Nuovo
, down in Jakarta." The scavenger's gloved thumb looked like mice had been chewing on it in his sleep, as he gestured toward some point beyond the station's curved walls. "Those people've got all that EEC money behind 'em. And they suck up
all
the video productions now." Tunnels bigger around than the station ran underneath the Indonesian Entrepreneurial Republic, the spaces lit brighter than anything sun and corroding mirrors could provide. The scavenger looked wistfully at the meager gleanings in his sack. "Man, what I wouldn't give to be able to get in there. There must be all
kinds
of shit lying around."

Holden wasn't interested in the sad intricacies of either the video or the scavenging business. "So where's the shoot going on?"

The ragged glove pointed down the length of the station's arched central corridor. "You can't miss it. Go past the Vatican and that Scottish castle with the dry moat; that's where they've got their funky L.A. all set up. There's all kinds of people hanging around. Humans and replicants ...it's that kind of a shoot. Real blood-and-guts stuff." An eyebrow raised inside the goggles. "You might like it. Some kind of cop show."

"I doubt it." Holden started walking again, briefcase in hand. "Seen it already."

He saw the buildings up ahead, or at least part of them: the bottom sections of what were supposed to be L.A.'s canyoned towers, false-fronted and propped into position by the cobbled-together framework behind them. A small flutter ran through the bio-mech heart in his chest; some nameless emotion or twinge of adrenallike hormone. Not at seeing again the city he had left behind on Earth, or at the view of those streets in partial disassembly.
It looks better this way
, thought Holden.
Not really fake at all
-that was the marvel of it. As if the people, those shadowy corporations and architects, who'd built the Outer Hollywood station and then constructed the L.A. set inside it, had caught some realer-thanreal aspect of the city. Or at least the city that had existed inside Holden's mind, with his barely being aware of it until now.
I always thought the other one was fake
-he realized that now. Th see it this way, two-dimensional buildings with nothing behind their surfaces' retrofitted ventilation ducts and wiring conduits, with the people in the streets finally exposed as actors and anonymous bit players; with the monsoon rains shut off from above, the rusting pipes leaking only a few scattered drops; even the sky revealed as metal with nothing but vacuum beyond-it was an oddly comforting manifestation of his most paranoid dreamings.
If only it were true
, thought Holden.