Deckard crossed the room and looked down at the other man. “Can you . . .” He gestured at the body. “You know . . . put her back together?”
“Don’t be stupid—” Sebastian gulped back his sobs, enough to speak. “Look. Her brain . . . it’s all tore up. I can’t fix that. Nobody can.” He leaned the side of his face against what remained of hers. “She’s dead. All dead.” His tears mingled with her drying blood. A blind gaze swept across the room, a spark of red showing far inside the unfocused eyes. The corpse’s clawlike fingers scrabbled at the wall beneath, as though some residual life force had dribbled out of one of its batteries.
“How touching.” Sarah’s voice, her cold words. Glancing over his shoulder, Deckard saw her returning the dark bulk of the gun to her coat pocket. “Perhaps now we could get back to business.”
He stood in front of her. “It recognized you. Didn’t it?” He peered into her eyes, as though trying to catch some betraying response without benefit of a Voigt-Kampff machine.
“What was that about? When it saw you, it knew who you were.”
“I doubt it.” No blush response, no flutter of the pupil. “It probably thought I was Rachael. It must’ve thought it had spotted another replicant like itself.”
No. Like she’d thought herself to be. He’d started to correct Sarah, to remind her of what she already knew-that Pris had been human—but had stopped himself from speaking. The distinctions were blurring again. He’d killed, murdered a human being named Pris, who’d convinced herself that she was a replicant; if he’d had a chance to run the empathy tests on her, she probably would’ve failed them. What had she been after Sebastian had kept a spark going in her addled brain, made her capable of moving again? Alive or dead, human or replicant? He didn’t know. He supposed he had arrived at that state Isidore had talked about, back at the Van Nuys Pet Hospital. Of not even being able to see the difference anymore.
Other thoughts remained unspoken, barely formed. If it’d been Rachael, not Sarah, that the Pris-thing had recognized . . . where would that have been from? Maybe some memory of the assembly line at the Tyrell Corporation’s headquarters, all the Nexus-6 models, the Prisses and the Zhoras and the Roy Battys, all warehoused together before being shipped off-world.
That was wrong, he knew immediately; there had never been any Pris model repheants. Only in her mind. Maybe it’d been out there, thought Deckard, in the 17.N. colonies. Maybe Pris had managed to convince other human beings that she was a replicant, and had served time along with a Rachael model in a sanctioned military brothel. The image made him squeeze his eyes shut tight, as though he could blot it out from his own brain. It might not be true, anyway; hadn’t Sarah told him that Rachael hadn’t been a production model, but a one-off, a single creation for Eldon Tyrell’s purposes? She could’ve been lying about that; there was no way of knowing. . . .
Out of the darkness behind his eyelids, a memory flash. Not that long ago-i saw her. He saw her again now, the face in the rep train, that other darkness beneath the central police station. Huddled with the other replieants, the discards of the industrial process that had created them. Weeping with a terror that’d had no way of expressing itself except the trembling of her naked shoulders, the tears leaking salt into the corners of her mouth. So there were others like her, like Rachael. There had to be. If what he’d seen was true, and not just some fevered vision drawn from his own exhaustion and fear.
“So what’s it going to be, Deckard?” A knife or Sarah’s voice. “Shall we talk?”
He opened his eyes. And looked at her. Or at Rachael, or the one who had wept behind the locked gates of the rep train’s rattling freight car. The memory overlays faded, one veil after another. Until he saw clearly again.
“No . . .” A sigh, indicator of the weariness that had wrapped itself around him again. “I don’t have time. I’ve got a job to do.” Behind him, he sensed Sebastian’s and the others’ presence, the various living and not-living forms, the dead tucked close in its lover’s embrace.
“We don’t have anything to talk about.”
“You’re wrong. We have everything to talk about. At last.” She regarded him with the same fiat, level gaze. “I’m trying to make it easier for you, Deckard. I want you to come with me, right now. Outside, to my spinner. As charming as the hospitality here has been, I’d really prefer to have our little discussion elsewhere.”
“Why should I?”
“Because you don’t have a choice.” Head tilted against her coat’s fur collar, Sarah Tyrell regarded him. “You come with me now, or I leave by myself. And I notify the police of where you’re hiding out. I could do it from the phone in the spinner—it wouldn’t be more than a few minutes until they got here.” She glanced at the figures on the other side of the room. “I imagine they’ll clean up the rest of this mess here as well.”
“Come on.” He returned her gaze with distaste. “This poor bastard hasn’t done anything.”
“That doesn’t matter. He can be picked up and screwed with until he might as well be guilty. You know how it works, Deckard; you’ve done the same. Of course, if you don’t want that to happen . . .”
She had him, and he knew it. The time when he would’ve been able to tell her to go to hell, when the threat of bad shit happening to other people wouldn’t have mattered to himthat was long past. She’s trading on that fact, thought Deckard. He could almost admire the accuracy of her perception. She knew that he’d already become less of a blade runner . . . and more of a human being. Which made him, to her, more exploitable.
“All right.” He glanced over at Sebastian, then decided against saying anything to him.
There wasn’t anything. He thrust his hands deep into the pockets of the long coat. “Let’s go.”
Holden had rummaged through the freight spinner’s cockpit until he’d found what he wanted, needed, had known would be there. The gun had been the first find, and the best; it’d come in handy talking with that idiot bastard Deckard.
I should’ve killed him, thought Holden. Right then and there. That had been his original intention; disgust at what a pussy Deckard was being had overwhelmed him, though. Plus, there’d been others inside the safe-house apartment, like that sawed-off Sebastian, riding around on the back of his wind-up teddy bear. Who knew whether the little basket case might be packing something? Holden shook his head; he knew he’d still have to be extra cautious, at least until he got his full strength back.
And his regular gun. The one he’d found in the freight spinner was all right for now. It was smaller and didn’t weigh as much as the big black cannon that served as standard blade runner equipment. Which was a good thing; he’d started to feel a little weak and breathless, as though the implanted heart-and-lungs set was crapping out under the load he’d been putting it through.
All this running around, adrenaline jazz, couldn’t be good for a man in his condition. His old gun would’ve pulled him over like an anvil strapped to his shoulders.
The other handy thing he’d found, underneath the pilot’s seat, was a pair of Zeiss binoculars with resolutionenhanced optic-feedback circuits. The help screens at the upper right corner of the vision field had all been in German, but he’d still managed to get the device up and running. And focused on the toppled building that contained the safe-house apartment.