DEAR MR. DECKER . . . That was what he’d overheard the woman calling the man.
Biting down on his tongue, Sebastian sprayed out the next words. MY FRIENDS AND I ARE MOVING ON. THERE ARE TOO MANY PAINFUL MEMORIES FOR US TO STAY HERE.
That was putting it mildly. He flinched every time the tape ran through his thoughts again, of poor Pris flying through the air with her head shot open. THANKS FOR NOT KILLING US AS WELL. As soon as he saw those blurry-edged words on the wall, he regretted them.
The logic seemed a little whacked; people should try not to kill you, just as a matter of course.
There wasn’t time to do the message over; the teddy bear was getting restive. He hurried to finish up.
I HOPE YOU FIND WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR. VERY BEST REGARDS, SEBASTIAN.
That would have to do; the spray can was nearly exhausted. He’d gotten some of the black paint on his single hand; tossing the can aside, he rubbed the smear against his coveralls with its pinned-up sleeve and trouser legs.
“Okay, okay. We’re ready to leave now.” He jounced up and down in the papoose carrier as Colonel Fuzzy hurried for the door. “Take it easy, you’re gonna shake my head off!”
Outside, the three friends headed east, their shadows racing before them. Sebastian glanced over his shoulder as the teddy bear marched along. In the distance he could just make out the skyline of Los Angeles, the sunset bleeding red light around the dark towers. He supposed things had worked out fifty-fifty for him in this corner of the universe.
He’d found true love, his heart’s desire, but had had it taken away from him again. Still, he thought. Least i had it for a little while.
He turned away, setting his cheek against the back of the teddy bear’s head. Closing his eyes but not sleeping. Not for a long while.
Darkness and life; both had begun again, the city moving into the nocturnal portion of its cycle. When everything comes crawling out, thought Holden, looking down from the freight spinner’s cockpit at the lights carpeting the earth.
He’d decided, when he’d left the sideways zone, upon the general outline of his course of action. Circumstances-his own failing strength; the overtaxed artificial heart and lungs inside his chest had begun to sputter and wheeze alarmingly, complete with fuzzy-edged blackout dots hitting his sight like negative snowflakes-dictated that he needed assistance. Not later, when events had settled out, but now. So they would be determined as he wished, as an active agent in the historical process, or at least this little part of it, and not some breathing vegetable strapped by tubes to a hospital bed.
A terrible vision had come to him as the freight spinner completed another circle above LA’s downtown core, of his bio-mechanical innards reaching their stress limit and going into some half-powered, partially shut-down mode, just enough to keep him alive in the pilot’s seat, but not conscious. Even worse off than he’d been in the hospital. No longer human, a thing kept alive by pumps and artificially inflated bladders, wearing his face and his clothes, riding around forever in the sky on the course he’d set when his brain had still been functioning.
Through the rotation of day and night, the progress of the seasons, the manifestations of dry and monsoon beating against the transparent cockpit dome, the curved glass shielding his blank, unseeing eyes. . . .
Well, not exactly forever, thought Holden with glum relief. He supposed the police would have eventually shot the freight spinner out of the sky, just for violating air-space regulations.
Or else they would’ve let it go on, and it would’ve eventually run out of fuel, plunging down into the streets. He could just see some by-the-manual uniformed cop with one jackboot up on a fender-high piece of the wreckage, writing out a ticket for parking in a restricted zone.
The night had settled in complete, the somberly violet line at the horizon, the last vestige of sun slicing extinguished beneath the cliff front of mounting clouds. Dark enough now for him to move further into the specifics of the plan upon which he’d decided. If he needed assistance, to keep from either dying or blacking out, there was only one place he could go, one person to whom he could turn. The police department, either on an official basis or by getting hold of his old friends and acquaintances on the force, was out of the question. No telling how rotted out the whole structure of the central station was with conspiracy; anybody he talked to there could be one of the bastards who’d determined, for their own malevolent reasons, that the only good blade runner was a dead one. And as for Deckard, who was presumably as much a target as anyone else . . . that was a no-go as well. For a lot of reasons, some of which Holden had spent the time up in the air mulling over.
He reached out to the control panel and switched off the freight spinner’s autopilot.
Another looping circuit had been completed, bringing him back over the dense, poorly lit warrens of the city’s Los Feliz district. Holden took over the freight spinner’s manual controls, steering it down toward the building in which his ex-partner had once lived.
On the building’s rooftop landing deck, he sat frozen in the pilot’s seat, a layer of perspiration forming between his palms and the rudder’s inert metal. Go on, one part of him nagged all the rest. What’re you waiting for? Don’t crap out now. He ascribed the knot of fear festering in his gut to the malfunctioning of his new lungs, the brain they fed reacting to partial oxygen deprivation with innate animal terror. But he knew that the cowardly body was in league with his own cold rationality. He’d left Roy Batty in the apartment below, handcuffed to the pipe behind the toilet; just replaying the tape in his head, of Batty cursing and flailing around at the limit of the short chain, like some baleful genetic cross between a bull and an enraged hornet, sent a squirt of adrenaline through his heart’s polyethylene valves. And now he was going to go back in there and tell Batty that the two of them should be pals again? Good luck, whispered a lobe of doubt.
“Might as well get it over with.” His own voice, speaking out loud. Holden opened the freight spinner’s cockpit and climbed out.
In the apartment, a puzzle: the handcuffs were there, bright chrome dangling beneath white porcelain, but Roy Batty was gone. Holden stood up from his kneeling inspection of the cuffs, seeing his own puzzled face in the mirror above the sink. The fluorescent tube’s partial spectrum gave the skin of his cheeks and brow an even more deathapproaching, cheesy appearance.
He got away, thought Holden. He must have, though there was no indication of how. The building was constructed so shabbily-parts of it, those that looked like concrete, actually were embossed styrofoam-that even an old man like Batty could possibly have yanked the plumbing free from the bathroom wall. But he surely wouldn’t have bothered putting the pipe back into place, mortaring it with toothpaste and soap. Plus, the handcuffs would’ve still been dangling from Batty’s wrist, not there on the pipe.
Turning the mystery over in his thoughts, Holden flicked off the bathroom light and wandered out into the apartment’s corridor. Immediately he was slammed up against the wall, the impact against his spine sufficient to knock the air from his lungs, the new heart twitching through a spasm of rapid fibrillation.
“You stupid sonuvabitch. I oughtta kill you.” Batty’s face, its crevices reddened with a fierce energy, pushed itself nose-to-nose with Holden’s. “Matter of fact, I’m planning on it. I hope that doesn’t come as a surprise to you.”