Holden relaxed a bit. He’d managed to push the other man into a mellower portion of whatever manic cycle he. operated on. Like a mollified wolf, it struck him. Important to not display any fear, to show the wild animal who was really in charge.
“Now that we know,” said Holden, “who the sixth replicant is, we just have to calculate what we’re going to do about it . . .”
He leaned forward, as Batty did the same from the piano bench, bringing their heads closer together. Breathing together; a back part of his mind recalled that that was what the word conspiracy meant.
Fires at night put some people in a holiday mood. Or some creatures, he corrected himself. The one below him had actually broken into a little stubby-legged jig, more enthusiasm than dance skill, at the sight up ahead, flickering incendiary glow and sparks threading through mounting columns of smoke.
“Whoa!” Sebastian clung to the teddy bear’s neck, to keep himself from being jounced out of the papoose carrier. “Steady on there, will ya? You’re going to make me seasick.”
Squeaker Hussar had spotted the fires as well. “What’s that? What’s that?” He jumped up and down, pointing. “What the heckety-heck is that, Sebastian?”
“I don’t rightly know.” A pirate-style brass telescope was packed somewhere in the gear that the animated teddy bear and the toy soldier had been dragging along between them. Out here in the dark, he didn’t feel like rooting around for it. “People, I guess.” He let himself slip back down into the papoose carrier. “A lot of ’em, actually. I can see their shadows and all.”
“Hmmm . . .” Subdued, Squeaker tilted his nose into the air, as though trying to sniff out the nature of the unseen others. “Gotta think!”
The toy soldier didn’t really think, not on a deep analytical level—Sebastian hadn’t programmed him for that—but he did a good imitation of the process, something he’d probably picked up from observing his maker. Sebastian knew he’d have to do the thinking for all three of them, as he’d always done before. Not that i ever did such a good job at it. Maybe it was time to give Squeaker and Colonel Fuzzy a crack at these necessary tasks. Once, just a little while ago, he’d done the thinking for a group of four, counting in Pris; though even when she’d been alive, really alive, she hadn’t been the sort of girl for whom thinking had been a preferred mode of making one’s way through the rigors of existence. And all that his thinking had accomplished, at least for her, had been death, utter and final. And his own, inasmuch as he was now a one-limbed, withered husklike thing; the core of his life having been extinguished along with Pris’s feverish, constantly scanning red eyes. A toy soldier with a Pinocchio nose couldn’t screw it up any worse.
He waited, but Squeaker didn’t say anything more. Colonel Fuzzy looked over its shoulder at him, the expression held in its button eyes apprehensive.
“Okay . . .” He sighed, aware that they were depending upon him. “Let’s figure it out. Out here, at night, the things you gotta be afraid of are the ones you can’t see Right?” The teddy bear and the toy soldier nodded. “These folks, whoever they are—” He pointed to the radiant distance with his one hand. “They don’t seem to care if we see ’em. I mean, they built those fires and stuff. So it seems only logical that we shouldn’t be afraid of them. You follow?”
“Maybe they’re savages!” Eyes wide, Squeaker had already spooked himself.
“Cannibubbles!”
“Oh, shoot. That’s only in bad movies. Post-apocalypse tootie-frootie jive.” Sebastian had found his own logic convincing enough. He urged Colonel Fuzzy forward. “Come on, let’s go check ’em out. Maybe they got a barbecue going. Welfare weenies and marshmallows-you guys like that, don’t you?” They didn’t actually eat, but they enjoyed using their ceremonial dress swords to hold things in the flames.
That notion motivated his companions. They left their supplies, food and water and batteries, tucked into a crevice they’d he able to find later. Clambering over the flank of a Neutra-derived retail pavilion, they made their way toward the fires.
Even before they could clearly make out the human figures, they heard the single raised voice, loud and stentorian. Colonel Fuzzy’s round ears twitched at either side of his head; Squeaker looked genuinely perplexed. “Sounds like church!”
The toy soldier’s notions were derived from old televangelical broadcasts, but he was right; it did sound like that. Sebastian couldn’t make out the words, not until they had actually come through the line of wavering shadows and near enough to feel the heat of the fires against their own faces.
“ ‘With this wisdom, enlightened disciples will be able to master every inordinate desire!’ ”
A man dressed in a white jumpsuit-one of the sleeves was torn, and there were black char marks across the front, as though he’d wandered too close to the fire, or been in some kind of explosion-stood on a box, reading from a battered old paperback book. “ ‘Every kind of living creature, whether hatched from an egg, grown in a womb, evolved or brought forth by metamorphosis, whether it has form or knowing, whether it possesses or lacks natural feeling-from this constantly shifting state of existence, I command you to seek deliverance! ’”
The man’s voice grew stronger and more fervent. “ ‘Then you shall be released from the sentient world, a world without number or limit. In reality, no sentient world even exists; for in the minds of enlightened disciples, such arbitrary notions have ceased . . .’ ”
Perhaps a couple dozen other people stood around in a circle, listening; regular, full-size humans, not like what he’d become. They were all a little on the ragged side; in this territory, it was impossible to stay exactly spiff. A few curious faces turned toward Sebastian and his diminutive pals.
“Sorry.” He raised an apologetic hand above the teddy bear’s head. “Don’t let me interrupt you.” The sermon, if that’s what it was, had ended; he didn’t know whether it was supposed to have or not. “Just go ahead.”
The man stepped down from the box and walked over toward them. He looked to be some kind of spiritual leader; he had the sort of craggy, God-haunted face for it, complete with a straggly, greying beard, also slightly singed.
“Have you come to roust us?” The evidently holy man leaned down to peer into Sebastian’s face. “Perhaps you are an advance scout of the law-enforcement agencies, specifically those in charge of stamping out heresies such as represented by our little group. Would that be the case?”
“Um, no . . .” He shrank back from the other’s piercing gaze. “We’re more like private-individual types.”
“I see.” The man straightened back up. A number of the others had collected behind him, following the discourse. A sigh came from their leader. “In some ways-many ways-that’s a pity. Inasmuch as the doctrines of our faith invite martyrdom. The final sacrament, as it were. Without which, many of our activities, if not all, seem to be in vain.”
“Well . . .” He didn’t know what to say. “You gotta hang in there, I suppose.”
“Easy for you to say. Come here.” The bearded leader took one of Colonel Fuzzy’s mittenlike paws, as though it were an actual extension of Sebastian’s body, and led him toward the center of the circle of fires. Where the rest of the people were-he shifted uneasily in the papoose carrier, aware of having become the focus of their attention. “That is the purpose of our gatherings out in the open air, in fields and pastures as it were. Similar to the early freethinkers, those who had rejected the wicked doctrines of the ruling elites, Of their time. Though, of course, wickedness is an eternal thing, the great deceiver merely shifting from behind one mask to another.”