EdgeOfHuman Read online

  Holden shrugged. "I never minded it."

  "You know, that's funny, when you think about it-" Batty's eyes glistened in full enjoyment mode. "The whole business of being a blade runner drains the human nature out of the people who do it. People like you. And at the same time, the replicants you're tracking down are trying to be human. Don't you think that's hilarious? The hunter is continuously in the process of turning into a mirror image of the very thing he's hunting. And vice versa. That's what makes it so great . . . from sort of an ironic point of view." He shook his head, still smiling. "I love this universe."

  "You would." Holden found it easy to resist the other's happy mood. "Right up your alley, obviously."

  "Yes, well, the system does work, in its own grinding, soul-destroying way. That's why it's so valuable to have the blade runners be replicants themselves. You know that whole bit-Bryant probably told you about it-about these Nexus-6 replicants having only a four-year life span, as a safeguard against their getting away and on their own? That's nothing new. The blade runner replicants have always been built that way. Four years is just about the optimum time that a blade runner can stay on the Curve and operate at max efficiency, before the burnout starts setting in. You got that four-year window of opportunity, you stuff 'em with some implanted memories so they'll think they're human, give some basic hunting and tracking skills . . . bam, you got'em right at the peak of the Curve. And then even better-they crap out and die before they go weird on you and become dangerous. Haul the bodies away, bring over some new units of the same models from the Tyrell Corporation, program 'em the same way you did the previous ones, and you're off and running. It's a great system." He shrugged, in a pretense of embarrassed apology. "Except. of course, you die. Over and over, actually. But you're usually not aware of that part, so that's okay."

  Holden glared at the other. A chill, deeper and more exhausted than before, had started to settle into his bones.

  "Like I said before . . ." He turned away from the corpse with hi face; it was getting on his nerves. "This is all great talk, but you haven't proven anything. There are other explanations possible for all this. You really haven't shown me any reason to give up believing that I'm the human templant for any Dave Holden replicants. There's no proof"

  "There can't be." Batty pulled the sheet back over the dead body. "Not the way you want. That's another problem with you blade runners-you've got it in your head that the difference between human and replicant can be demonstrated. You take it as an article of faith-you couldn't do your job otherwise-that the Voigt-Kampff machine and the empathy tests show who's human and who's not. But at the same time, you've already admitted that we could put the machine on each other, run the tests, and the results would be completely meaningless." He turned an intense, unsmiling gaze on Holden, "You gotta think about what that means. There's a lot of implications. Take that Roy Batty replicant, that copy of me, that you and then Rick Deckard were assigned to retire. Suppose either one of you had managed to catch it, put the Voigt-Kampff machine on it, and run the tests. Would it have flunked because it was a replicant or because it was such a good copy of the human original? If I couldn't pass the empathy tests; and I'm the original, and the copy of me doesn't pass either, then what's the difference between us? The whole premise of the blade runners-the whole methodology by which they operate in this world, going around saying this person's human and this one's not-that whole thing is bogus. Fallacious. It doesn't work because it can't work." Batty glanced down at the shrouded corpse. "Maybe what you should ask yourself is how much of this you've known to be true all along. And you just chose to ignore it because it would've gotten in your way too much."

  He didn't care about that. All this arguing about who or what was human and who or what was not, and how you could tell or could never tell-his brain was starting to ache from the convoluted, seemingly endless labor of picking his way through the branching corridors. A maze, thought Holden. That's what it is. The basic mental pattern of the clever psychotic. Contagion the danger; Holden knew he had to be careful. In his weakened state, still getting over the effects of having an entire new heart-and-lung set shoved into his chest, it'd be easy to get sucked into Batty's ideational construct. If nothing else, it showed why the Roy Batty replicant had become the leader of the band of escaped replicants: the original was a natural scoutmaster, an organizer of fun and games. Play hard, die hard.

  "Let's get out of here." Batty laid a hand on Holden's shoulder, steered him toward the morgue's door. "This can't be all that cheerful for you. I mean, finding out you're a replicant and all-that must be hell on your self-image. I know I'd take it hard. Plus seeing some corpse who's the exact same thing as you . . . sort of." He gave a little shudder. "The symbolism is really kind of morbid, you know?"

  10

  Shift change over, banks of grey steel lockers closed, the wooden benches between them polished to a smooth luster by generations of bare cop buttocks and the black serge of uniform trousers; in the close atmosphere hung the scent of sweat and fungicide. He knew that smell, could remember it from his own tours of duty before he'd promoted up and out. With each panting breath pulled into his lungs, Deckard ran further into his own past, one that he'd rather have forgotten. His shoulders barely cleared the narrow space, the black uniform's sleeves torn by collision with hinges and corners of metal.

  "There! Take him down!"

  He heard the shout and the clatter of jackboots hitting the bottom of the stairs behind him. Without a glance over his shoulder, he dived with arms reaching out straight, the weight of the gun gripped tight in his fist. He hit the bare, damp concrete as a line of automatic rifle fire stitched across the locker doors. Still sliding, he rolled onto his back, getting his other hand onto the gun and firing blind, the recoil from three rapid shots pushing him along another couple of feet.

  At least one shot had struck flesh; he heard a gasp of shock as the auto fire went wild, raking the locker room's ceiling and bursting the light fixtures into sparks and glass splinters. In darkness, he scrambled to his feet, staying low and close to the metal doors to his left. His hunched shadow leapt in front of him, outlined by each red muzzle flash back at the stairs.

  His own boots splashed into water a quarter-inch deep. That and the humid air in his nostrils told him he'd reached the showers. Deckard reached to one side and touched wet tile; he steadied himself, breath laboring, as his eyes adjusted to the dim illumination from the one bulb left unbroken. His mind raced, trying to dredge from memory a way out of the sub-basement levels below the police station.

  "You're not going anywhere, dickhead-"

  Before he could lift the gun, a forearm slammed into his throat, the impact lifting him from his feet and pinning him against the wall. The back of his skull cracked against a chrome shower nozzle. His dropped gun splashed in the thin water, as his hands clawed futilely at the bare, hard-muscled skin pressing under his chin.

  Fragmented light glinted in the eyes and silhouetted the cop's naked torso, soap residue webbed across his chest and arms, hair plastered dark and shining on his broad neck. He must've already been in the showers when the pursuit had exploded into sight at the far end of the locker room, then stayed silent and waiting.

  "You're the one they're looking for-" A black constellation spun across Deckard's vision as the cop grinned and jerked him higher against the slick wall. "Aren't you?"

  He couldn't push away the throttling arm. His hands let go and scrabbled at the tiles behind him. A blunt-edged X filled one palm; elbow digging into his own ribs, he twisted the handle.

  The cop howled as the scalding water shot from the nozzle and into his face. Deckard felt the heat drip across his ear and the side of his jaw, but only for a second-moist oxygen rushed into his lungs as he fell, back sliding against the tiles. In front of him, the naked cop knelt with both hands pressed against the raw, red pulp of his flesh. The water arced over his back, steam billowing as it sprayed onto the floor.

  Deck
ard spotted the gun lying a few feet away; he launched himself forward, scooping up the weapon. A roar of pain and rage echoed off the walls as the cop grabbed him by the front of the uniform and pulled him upright. He brought the edge of his brow against the cop's chest; with one push, Deckard took him to the wall, hard enough to loosen the other's grip for a moment. Long enough to lean back and raise the gun, the black muzzle against the cop's breastbone. He squeezed the trigger.

  The tiles cracked, the wall behind crumbling from the impact of the cop's spine and shoulders. Concrete rubble sluiced over Deckard's arms as the exposed pipes bent and snapped. The gun was knocked loose from his grip, as the cop's dead hands let go of him.

  The corpse sprawled at his feet, the pooled water transformed into a dark red lake.

  Through the clouds of steam, he could see the shadowed, indistinct figures of the other cops racing through the locker room's narrow aisles. A darker space had appeared behind the burst pipes and shattered tiles; he braced his shoulder against the concaved section of wall and pushed. He nearly fell as the cement gave way and he stumbled coughing through a burst of white dust. Hot pipes singed his hands as he groped his way through the maze of plumbing.

  A quick glance over his shoulder-he spotted. the shapes of his pursuers clustered around the ragged opening, the first of them climbing through, brushing aside a tangle of plaster-clotted rebar and the splinters of ancient wooden beams.

  Deckard tasted salt seeping into the corners of his mouth, his face sopping with blood and water the exact same temperature. He ducked his head beneath the belly of a sewage conduit and ran as best he could, empty hands clawing a blind passage before him.

  Holden had retreated into his head, letting his entropy-laden body get steered outside by the other man.

  "Looks like it's going to be another hot one." Outside the Reclamation Center's medical unit, standing in the ragged circle of cigarette butts the doctor had left strewn on the sandy ground, Batty pointed to the horizon. The first coloring of dawn, a purplish-red smear along the tops of the distant mountain range, had crept into the cloudless sky. "Man, everybody bitches about the monsoon season when it's here, but when it's gone, you'd do just about anything to get rained on for twenty-four hours at a clip."

  Subterranean heat rose up through Holden's legs. The desert hadn't finished radiating the thermal load it'd absorbed from the day before, and now more would be pounded into it by the sun lifting overhead. Where he gazed past the razor-wired fence, an incipient Santa Ana wind sifted dry dust through the sparse clumps of withered brush.

  Everybody says that, he thought. All the time. One hot one after another. Someday the cycle wouldn't be broken by the onset of the yearly rains. The heat would go on building up, cumulative, until the sands melted into glass, perfectly smooth and reflective, bouncing a fierce glare back into the sky. Same thing would happen in the city, the streets turning to a black tar lava flow, then hardening to obsidian mirrors. We could see ourselves that way, all the time-he could picture it. Everyone looking down and wondering whether the image looking back at them, in that world of permanent night, was human or something else . . .

  I should sit down-he felt as old as Batty looked. Or lie down, take the load off his new heart. The doctor was right; if he wasn't careful, the whole setup could give way, like an overstressed motor. And he couldn't allow that to happen, not until he'd moved his own agenda along. He'd have to husband his strength, calculating all of his resources and endurance, to accomplish what he'd have to do.

  He glanced from the corner of his eye at Batty. The other-human or replicant; he still wasn't sure-stood silent. The quiet gave Holden the opportunity to start putting together his list of the people who'd screwed him over.

  Bryant was on the list, of course. He nodded slowly, gazing toward the red-shaded sunrise. If nothing else, Batty had convinced him of that part, that the head of the blade runner unit had set him up to get blown away by the replicant Kowalski. Why, he didn't know. All of Batty's big talk of high-level anti-blade runner conspiracies hadn't impressed him.

  Cops had simpler ways of determining who to go after. Mainly the application of that ancient maxim, Cui bono? Who'd benefited from his taking a hit?

  The answer came with minimal pondering. Deckard . . . my old pal. That sonuvabitch. Deckard had taken over the assignment, to track down the escaped replicants; that was a nice fat bunch of bonuses for retiring each one. Maybe that whole business of his quitting the department had been a ruse, something cooked up between Deckard and Bryant, to make Holden believe that he finally had a clear field, his old rival in the blade runner unit off the scene. Maybe a little kickback arrangement, Bryant and Deckard splitting the bonuses? That was possible as well. Who knew why people did evil shit? Maybe the tests should be redesigned, that determined who was human or not. None of that empathy nonsense. Instead . . . Would you have any problem sticking a knife in your friend's back? No? Congratulations -- you have all the essential qualities of treachery, ingratitude, and two-facedness that marks a real human being. Collect your ID and ammo discount card at Window Five. That would work.

  Holden glanced over again at Batty. He was necessary for the time being; Holden knew he couldn't take care of everything he needed to, not in his present post-op condition. I'll go along with him for now, thought Holden. For as long as I need to.

  The other opened his eyes, bringing his sly gaze around. "You've had a busy night." Batty displayed his psychotic smile again. "Haven't you? All the things you've found out . . ."

  Right. He said nothing aloud. He'd already added Batty to the list of things to be taken care of. Whether Batty was human or not-that remained to be seen-he might be the only one who could make that whole pitch about Holden being a replicant. Whether it was true or not, it wasn't a good thing for somebody to be going around talking about.

  He'd decided. He smiled back at Batty. If he had to kill the guy to prove that he was human himself . . . or at least keep everyone thinking he was . . .

  He didn't have a problem with that.

  The space behind the police station's walls had narrowed, a gap through which Deckard had barely been able to squeeze himself, the rough concrete surfaces tearing open the front of the stolen uniform. He left a trail of watered blood on one of the massive pilings that had been sunk into the ground to support the weight of the multileveled structure rearing high above him. The dark gap chilled as it sloped farther underground; a draft smelling of stone and smoldering fires rose into his face and was drawn into his lungs with each straining breath.

  Suddenly the constricting pressures against his shoulders flared apart, the span widening beyond the reach of his raw-scraped hands. The gravel of broken concrete slipped from under his boots, pitching him forward. The only thing that kept him from falling was an angle of pipe that his flailing grasp found a few inches from his head; his fingers tightened upon it as he heard, past the hammering of his pulse, a few dislodged pebbles clatter upon another level beneath. A low rumble moved through the earth itself.

  He knew that his pursuers were still working their way down toward him; their muffled voices leaked through the gap, along with the noises of the equipment, hydraulic jacks and hissing acetylene torches, with which they cut a channel through the station's underpinnings. Only a matter of time until they caught up with him, the rat-like escape he'd made coming to an end in some corner of rock and buried steel girder.

  A dim glow rose from the space that had opened below, as the rumbling sound grew louder, taking on an insistent mechanical rhythm. Deckard could see now that he had broken through the roof of an arched tunnel, with a parallel ribbon of iron tracks running its length. Some past seismic event had torqued the police station's foundations enough to pry open the cleft through which he'd squirmed; bricks and ragged chunks of concrete lay scattered across the bed of one of the old railway tunnels that ran beneath the massive structure. The glow, rapidly becoming brighter, came from the engine of the rep train approaching arou
nd the tunnel's curve. The hot diesel smell, oily and stinging, struck him full in the face, as though the source of all Santa Ana winds had erupted from the earth's core.

  The sounds of his pursuers grew closer, perhaps only a few yards back along the gap through which he'd crawled. Those noises were drowned out by the rep train's noise and clatter, now directly beneath him. He squatted down, then got his legs out past the crumbling edge of the hole into the tunnel roof. He held on for a few seconds longer, until the dark shape of the engine was past; then he dropped, pushing himself away from the edge, diving with outstretched hands.

  With a jarring impact, he landed on top of one of the freight cars. He clawed for a hold on the wooden slats; through the gaps between them, he could see faces looking up at him. None of the human-like figures, pressed tight against each other inside the car, raised a voice; their blank gazes regarded him without emotion.

  He couldn't hold on. The rattling motion of the train peeled his fingertips, wet with his own blood, away from the slat to which he clung. A hard lurch jolted him loose; in the stink and din, his chest and stomach slipped across the freight car's roof. The rep train took another curve in the tunnel; the swaying motion was enough to throw him over the edge.

  One crooked arm caught itself in the angle between a vertical slat and slanting cross-beam. His back and shoulder slammed against the freight car's side, knocking the last of his breath from his aching lungs. The tunnel wall, jagged stone outcroppings and rusting stanchions, screamed a few inches away from his head as he fought with animal desperation to latch his free hand on to any part of the car.