EdgeOfHuman Read online

"Tell you what." The cigarette had been smoked down close to his knuckles while he'd been listening to Batty. He stubbed it out against the arm of the chair. "Suppose I accept for the time being this story you've been giving me. I'll accept-provisionally-that you're the templant for any Roy Batty replicants. That you're human."

  "Oh, thanks." A wry smirk settled on Batty's face. "What, you want me to prove it to you? There's probably an old Voigt-Kampff machine sitting on a shelf out here. You could run an empathy test on me, if it'd make you feel better."

  Holden shook his head. "I couldn't get any worthwhile results off somebody like you.

  Too much of a professional gloss-you probably know all the questions and answers already. There's no baseline I could establish for your involuntary response times." He picked up the lighter and ran his thumb across its smooth plastic surface. "Don't sweat it; as I said, I'm accepting for the time being that you're human. Why not? The only problem is, that still doesn't explain much." He flicked the lighter and regarded Batty over the thin, wavering flame. "Such as-why'd you bust me out of the hospital? And why'd you bring me here?"

  "Here's easy." Batty's hand gestured toward the building's walls. "I've got friends out here. I've had a long time to build up favors that people owe me-I cashed in a few to get you your new lungs. But actually, it works both ways. Not everybody in the LAPD is as dumb as you blade runners. There's some of them who'd like to know what the hell's going on. And that's what I'm helping them find out."

  "'Going on-"' He snapped off the flame. "What're you talking about?"

  "You haven't got a clue, do you?" The pitying gaze again. "Wake up and smell the synapses burning, Holden. How do you think you wound up getting blown away by that Kowalski replicant? I mean, other than by your being less than brilliant. And what do you think's been happening to all the other blade runners? You know how many of your pals have landed in the boneyard? Even before you did your stint in the hospital."

  "I don't keep count of stuff like that." Holden shrugged. "It happens."

  "Yeah, well, it's been happening a lot, buddy. The only smart one in your crew was that guy Deckard. At least he had the sense to take off before he could be set up to take a hit." He pointed his finger. "A hit like the one you took."

  "Bullshit. I never took any hit. Kowalski got the drop on me, that's all."

  "He got the drop on you, all right-in a secured area of the Tyrell Corporation headquarters. Hey, I know what the security measures are like over there; I was a consultant on most of them. Do you have any idea of how many metal detectors and alarm systems Kowalski would've had to pass through with that gun? It's impossible. Somebody had to have either passed him the gun in the secured area, right before you started to interview him, or they switched off the detectors. Either one of those things would've had to be done by somebody with clearance right up at the top level."

  "That's guesswork." Holden shifted uneasily in the chair. "You have any proof?"

  "Oh . . . bits and pieces." The smile radiated smug selfassurance. "You had a recorder running when you were giving the test to Kowalski. I've heard that tape-one of my pals in the department smuggled a copy out to me. Very dramatic . . . especially the part where you take it in the chest. But the best part isn't even anything you or the Kowalski replicant said. You can hear it in the background of the tape, from the p.a. voice: Attention . . . we have a B-1 security alert. Know what that means? That's the Tyrell Corporation's internal code for detected tampering with the security grid. All the time you were talking with Kowalski, the people over in the admin offices were running around, trying to figure out where the rip in the net was. Of course, by the time they did find out, you were lying on your back, wearing a hole a small dog could walk through."

  "An alarm went off. Big deal." Holden shrugged. "If it'd meant anything-if it'd had some connection with my getting shot-the police would've checked it out."

  "Sure. Unless the police were in on it already."

  "Now," said Holden, "you're talking conspiracy. And this is where it all falls apart.

  Because it would've been Inspector Bryant who handled any such investigation. And you know, I worked for Bryant a long time. I can assure you-he wouldn't take kindly to somebody setting up any of his men. Bryant's got a blade runner heart. Anybody screws with his operation, Bryant would bust 'em wide open." Holden leaned back in the chair. "That's something you could bank on."

  Batty had listened, nodding slowly, his smile growing thin and subtle. "You know . . . you may not be a genius, Dave, but you got a persistent little mind. That's kinda admirable. I can do business with you." He stood up, winging his arms back to work out a kink in his spine. "Come on, I got something to show you." He gestured with one hand as he headed for the door. "Come on-you'll really get off on this."

  Outside, Holden followed him across the bare, packed sand of the Reclamation Center compound. This far away from the city, the stars shot down hard pinpricks of diamond light, unobscured by any smoldering haze. The day's heat radiated up from the ground, as though the path led over buried coals.

  "Right in here." Batty had stopped in front of what looked to be a shack made of corrugated steel, rust stains weeping from the fasteners along the seams. He fished a ring of keys from his jacket pocket and pulled a padlock open. "Don't be afraid of the dark."

  Holding his hands out to either side, as though for balance, Holden stood waiting in the middle of the narrow space. A radiance bluer than the stars suddenly fell across him. He turned and spotted Batty silhouetted by a video monitor. As his eyes adjusted, he saw the rest of the gear mounting to the bare metal ceiling, monitors still unlit, racks of butch military electronics.

  "Check this out." Batty flipped switches, adjusted dials. A blue spark zapped his fingertips. "Damn. I told them to put a humidifier in here . . ." An image swam into focus on the monitor. "Know what this is?"

  "Of course." He recognized the log-on screen. "It's the LAPD data banks."

  "Sure as shit. We got a direct trunk line into the system here, hard-wired cable fifty feet down, staggered repeater circuits. Can't get better picture quality inside the station. Now watch this." From the key ring, Batty took a plastic card with a hole punched in one corner, a magnetic strip down the side. He ran it through a slot reader. "Voilà."

  "Christ . . ." What he saw rocked Holden back on his heels. The access level had rolled back to a string of four zeroes. As far as he knew, the chief of police had a level of zero-zero-zero-one.

  "Don't try to get this away from me." Batty snapped the card back onto the key ring. "It's coded to my sweat genotype."

  He watched as Batty voice-commanded through one directory branch after another. The guy seemed to know what he was doing.

  "Here's what I wanted you to see."

  ID scans, stocking-capped heads going through 360-degree rotations. First, the Roy Batty replicant, then a young blond, strange-looking woman, then an older-looking brunette. Then Kowalski; an involuntary flinch response went off in Holden's gut. Beneath each scan were lines of information, sub-type classifications and the like.

  "So?" Holden glanced away from the screen, over toward Batty. "The department's keeping its files updated. What did you expect them to be doing?"

  "You're not tracking, pal." With his fingernail, Batty tapped the corner of the screen.

  "Look at the date. That's when this information-including the photo scans-was logged into the system." Smile. "Take a good look."

  He sighed. "If it makes you happy . . ." Holden looked at the monitor again.

  Simple digits. 2019 for the year, last year; 24 for the day. And in between those, 10 for the month. That'd make it, thought Holden, a week before Halloween. That seemed appropriate. Old pagan holiday, trick or treat . . .

  "October," he said aloud. The realization came to him, perfect and clear. "This information was in the system in October."

  "That's right." Nothing funny in Batty's thin smile. "And Bryant sent you out to the Tyrell Corporation h
eadquarters the first week of November 2019. He sent you out there, without showing you these ID scans."

  "He told me . . ." As though from a distance, Holden heard his own voice, barely audible.

  "He told me that there weren't any scans or photos of the escaped replicants. He told me that the off-world authorities didn't have any . . . that the data couldn't be sent . . . something like that. And I'd have to go out there with the Voigt-Kampff machine and run the empathy tests on all of Tyrell's new employees . . . to find which ones were the replicants . . .

  "Look at the access record." Batty called up another screen. His finger tapped the glass again. "Bryant pulled these scan files out of the police department data banks three times before he gave you the assignment. He even printed out hard copies. The photos of the escaped replicants-by which you would've been able to recognize them without running any tests-were probably sitting in one of his desk drawers the whole time, the last time he talked to you in his office."

  "But that would mean . . ." The pieces had linked up inside his head. It just took time to speak of them. "But that would mean Bryant sent me out there . . . to the Tyrell headquarters . . . to get killed."

  "Figure it out." Batty laid a hand on Holden's shoulder. His voice soft, almost kind. "If you were putting together a conspiracy to eliminate the blade runners-for whatever reason-who'd be better for it than the man in charge of them?"

  A tiny glimmer of light shone inside his skull. As Holden turned his gaze back toward the pure, empty glow of the monitor, he thought he'd started to understand.

  And a joy as pure flooded his soul.

  A smaller space, its own little world. As familiar to Deckard as the one he'd just walked across.

  With its own smells, even its own dust, residue of time past. Deckard closed the door behind himself. Through the glass pane, with Bryant's name showing in reverse on it, the fragmented light of the station's ground floor folded shadows across the desk and the file cabinets.

  He stood motionless, scoping out the room's darkness. Nobody had recognized him, stopped him as he'd made his way here from the bank of elevators. The virtue of machines, at least on this occasion, was their anonymity.

  The blinds over the office's windows kept anyone from seeing him in here, while still leaking through enough light for him to gradually make out the rat's-nest clutter with which the space was stuffed.

  "Bryant?" Keeping his voice low, he stepped into the center of the room. When he'd found the door unlocked, and had been able to slide right in with just a glance over his shoulder to make sure no one had been watching, he'd expected to find his old boss in here. Even though the desk lamp was switched off-he knew that Bryant often did his deepest brooding with the lights out and the scotch bottle close at hand. The inspector had been keeping night hours for so long that his skin, beneath his slob stubble and alcohol flush, was as pallid as a cave fish or a corpse. "You in here?" Deckard took another step closer to the desk.

  A blue glow fell across him. Shielding his eyes with one hand, he saw the blunt rectangle of a video monitor in front of him, the screen at the height where Bryant's face should have been. A short-legged tripod, monitor fastened to its top plate, sat in the chair behind the desk, a set of cables dangling from it and looped snakelike into a wall socket behind.

  "Hiya, pal." Bryant's jowly visage came into focus on the screen. His small eyes glinted through the low-rez mesh of a video transmission. "Good to see you again." Even in black-and-white, his smile's yellow-stained teeth were still apparent. "Thanks for stopping by."

  "What the hell's going on?" Deckard spotted a small video-cam on the desktop, geared to a motorized tracking pivot. A red dot from the device had fastened onto his chest; when he moved to one side, the camera followed his motion, keeping him in sight. "What's all this for?"

  "It's a friggin' pain in the butt, is what it is." As though the monitor were a tiny room in which he was trapped, Bryant leaned forward, short-sleeved elbows resting on a desktop somewhere else. The camera tracking him took a moment to refocus. "I'm in quarantine. Caught a bug-or at least I got exposed to one. One of those new jobbies that keep coming up from Belize." His wheezing voice came from a small intercom speaker on his desk. "I made the jackass mistake of helping make a collar in the flop palace behind my apartment building-hell, I was off-duty and everything. Supposed to've been catching my sleep rather than wrestling some disease-ridden, spickety wog bastard to the ground, like I was some young pup. Next thing you know, I got the department medics telling me there's antibodies the size of Buicks cruising my bloodstream." One of his big, hair-backed hands gestured toward the screen. "Hey, make yourself comfortable. Have a seat."

  Deckard pulled up the other chair and sat down, scanning through the narrow spaces between the blinds' slats; nobody outside appeared to have noticed anything going on in the office. He pushed the chair back a couple of inches, to avoid the monitor's glow washing across him. "I guess you heard I was in town."

  "I heard. News travels fast in a place like this. I mean, the docs got me stuck over here in the infirmary, doing everything by remote, and I still knew about it."

  He peered closer at the image on the screen. "Are you going to be all right?" Even in person, it would've been hard to determine if Bryant was well, sick, or dying. "You going to live through whatever this is?"

  "Hell, yes." Bryant shook his head. "Don't worry about me, pal. You're the one with his ass in a sling. Me, they've got so pumped with wonder drugs I could crap a pharmacy. They'll probably be letting me loose in a day or two."

  "Because I need you up and running. You owe me big time, Bryant." He spoke softly, urgently, aware of the footsteps and barely muffled voices of the cops walking by, just beyond the office's thin walls. "I bailed you out plenty of times. Now you gotta do it for me."

  "Well, well, well. What an interesting development." A sadistic delight radiated from the face on the monitor screen. "And I thought you were the guy who was all through with the blade runner unit. You gave the impression that you didn't like us anymore. Hurt my feelings, Deckard. Just about broke my heart-you were the best man on the squad. You always were. And then for you to just walk out on us, like you didn't even care . . ." The intercom speaker transmitted the sound of Bryant sucking his breath in through his discolored teeth. "Especially this last time. You walked a long ways, pal; I didn't expect to ever see you around these parts again."

  "If it'd been up to me, you wouldn't have."

  "That attitude's not winning any points with me. You want us to be friends again, then you should start acting friendly. Then maybe I'd feel like helping you out." Bryant reached off camera, his hand returning with a bottle and an empty glass. "Let's be friends." He poured out a shot. "Come on, you know I've got some of the good stuff there. And I hate to drink alone."

  He felt his brow dampening with sweat, the chair arms slick under his palms. Jerking me around, thought Deckard, anger stifled to a heated rock in his chest. Exactly the kind of little games Bryant had always liked to play. He didn't have any choice but to go along. Sitting on the corner of the desk was another bottle, the duplicate of the one Bryant had in his quarantine chamber, and a pair of glasses. One was still clean; he poured a brown finger and knocked back half of it. "There. Satisfied?" The alcohol burned along his throat. Bryant's notion of the good stuff was anything you could set a match to.

  "All right, all right; jeez. Prickly bastard." Bryant set his own empty glass down, his face heavy and brooding. "With the kind of enemies you got, you should cultivate your friends more. You could use 'em." He poured another shot, swirled it around in the glass, watching. "Fact of the matter is, I don't have a clue as to why anybody would want to haul your sorry ass back here. I sure didn't have anything to do with it." He took a sip. "And why the Tyrell Corporation's got such an interest in you . . . I mean, after your having screwed up and letting Eldon Tyrell get killed . . . it beats me. I've given up trying to figure out those people." Another. "Now the way I se
e it-"

  "For Christ's sake, Bryant!" Deckard's nerve and his voice cracked. "I don't have time for this. Now, are you going to help me out? Or are you just going to sit there in whatever plastic bubble they got you in, getting soused and mumbling to yourself?" His anger rose, even while he kept his voice down to a tense whisper. "Because I'm not going to stick around here, listening to your bullshit. Not while every cop in the city is parading by your office door."

  "Simmer down." Bryant knocked back the dregs. "I'll help you. I always have. Not that you ever seemed to appreciate it."

  "I didn't appreciate getting jerked around by you. Back when I came to work for you again. What's all this about there being one more escaped replicant on the loose? A sixth one."

  Bryant displayed his ugly smile. "Is that what the Tyrell Corporation's got you hunting for?"

  "So it's true, then." Deckard leaned forward. "There is another one. And you didn't want me to know about it. What was that all about?"

  "Look, uh . . . that's not important." On the monitor screen, Bryant's image shifted uncomfortably. "Like you said, you don't have time for screwing around. Why don't we just say that back then . . . I miscounted, or something. Things didn't work out quite the way I wanted them to."

  "All right -- Deckard could hear the tension and anger in his own voice. "Whatever the game was that you were playing, I don't need to hear about it. Right now, I need something from you. You either get me a spinner, fueled and with all clearances, so I can get the hell out of L.A.=

  "Can't do it, pal." Bryant's image shook its head. "I can't put in a transport requisition from where I'm sitting."

  "Fine. Then you call up the data that you purged out of the files-the stuff about that other escaped replicant. ID scan, name, description, the works."

  "That's kinda hard, too. I put all that in a secured file sector. Got some tight locks on it."

  "But it's there, right?" Deckard managed to keep his voice low. "So you can get it out.

  And that's what I need from you. Give me the data on the sixth replicant, and I'll take care of the rest."