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  "True . . ." Isidore nodded slowly. "As you say, not everybody has the nerves for hiding. For staying hidden. You and the rest of the blade runners must be proud of having made yourselves into such objects of fear. Tuh-terrorists, really. But this is something that old Mr.Sloat knew all about. And knew what to do about it, too. And I've done the same as he did. There's more than just the blush response that can be fixed on an escaped replicant. There's the memory; that can be fixed as well."

  "Now I know you're bullshitting me. False memories in replicants are implanted at their incept dates. When the replicants are created. The phony memories are part of them from the beginning."

  "You're wrong, Deckard. Or puh-partly so. The incept date is when the Tyrell Corporation shoves in whatever false memories they want their replicants to have. But it's not the only time it can be done. The neural access pathway is hard-wired into the replicants' neocortices. In fact, the bandwidth of the data channel is one of the design features of the Nexus-6 line; I could show you the schematics. It was so the corporation could cram more stuff into their heads before they sent them off the assembly lines. But the access to the memory areas is still there, like a door without even a lock on it. You juh-just have to know where to look for it. And then use it."

  "And that's what you did. Supposedly."

  "Oh, yeah." A look of dreamy triumph moved behind Isidore's glasses. "No 'supposedly' about it. It's my job. I'm very good at it. And when I'm done . . ." His gaze sharpened once more. "Some of the people you thought were humans, they were actually replicants and they didn't even know it. You'd be surprised to learn who they were. And are."

  The room seemed suddenly smaller, as though the walls had snugged up against his shoulders. "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "Like I said, Deckard . . ." The other's voice was as smooth and piercing as a hypodermic. "You'd be surprised. Very, very surprised."

  5

  As the search party topped the last big rise, a fifty-floor office tower now laid out on the ground like a cubist obsidian snake, the first smoky flush of dawn crept over the horizon.Gonna be a hot one -- Sebastian could already feel the sun's blistering kiss on his face. Until the monsoons came back, every one was a hot one.

  Up above, stars were still set in blackness, the atmosphere scoured raw by the Santa Ana winds rolling over the desert. During the trek back, three lines of fire, evenly spaced, had cut across the sky. From the north and veering downtown -- he'd twisted around to watch the distant spinners, wondering who the hell was in them. Somebody important, he'd figured. But none of his business. He'd laid his check against the back of Fuzzy's head, conserving his own dwindled strength.

  When they reached home, he made his two pals wait out in the corridor. He crawled over the frame of the nest's tilted doorway. his one hand pulling him laboriously forward. "Hey, Pris? Sweetheart? I got something special for you." With a string knotted around his wrist, he dragged behind him one of the candy boxes from the welfare bundle. "Where are you, honey?"

  His eyes took a long time adjusting to the room's darkness; the metallic curtains stapled over the windows, including the one that the building's fall had turned into a skylight, shut out all but a thin trace of the advancing light. In the corner a mop of dead-white hair rustled. A face, more wrinkled and deracinated than even Sebastian's ancient one, lifted from bent knees clutched to flattened girl-chest. Eye sockets, blind but for thermal scans, turned toward the legless, one-armed supplicant.

  "Look--" He knew Pris, or what was left of her, couldn't look, not really. But acting like she or it could was good enough. Under these circumstances. Sebastian reeled the box into his hand, then held it out. "I brought you this--"

  An inaudible shriek, leathery jaw hinges yanked wide, as the Pris-thing sprung from its crouch. Its bone hand slapped the box from Sebastian's grasp; the chocolate-covered cherries spattered gooey wounds across the inverted walls and ceiling. A rattling hiss, a remnant scream, came from its throat as it reached down, grabbed, and threw him across the room.

  "Yes . . ." Tears of pain and joy filled his eyes. From where he'd landed, he watched as that which he loved jerked in spastic tantrum, arms flailing pinwheels as it lurched away. He nodded slowly. "Yes . . . I love you, too."

  The teddy bear and the hussar peeked over the doorway's edge at him. Then clambered down to lift up and tend to his ancient, partial body.

  "That's an old joke." Deckard actually felt sorry for the little man on the other side of the desk. Another cat had wangled its way onto Isidore's lap; this one was without flesh on its steel bones. "Sarah Tyrell had me brought all the way over here just so you could run that creaky number on me?"

  Isidore petted the mechanical cat, as if unaware of the difference between it and the tabby he'd held before. The contraption purred and closed its eyes in contentment; or at least polyethylene membranes slid down over the glass replications. One of Isidore's forefingers scratched where the cat's ears should've been. "I don't run any nuh-numbers. On anybody."

  "Yeah, right." Deckard shook his head in disgust. "What's with all the heavy hinting, then?All that stuff about how surprised I'd be to find out who's really a replicant passing as human.Passing because the person doesn't even know he's really a replicant. And then you give me the big, significant look. Shit." He fixed the other man with his own hard glare. "You think that isn't one of the first things a blade runner starts thinking about? Hey, maybe I'm one of these replicants. Maybe the cops set mechanical cats to catch mechanical rats. It'd be just like them -- believe me, blade runners know the LAPD's mind-set better than you civilians do. And since we're too familiar with the empathy tests to use them on ourselves -- then we have to come up with some other way of knowing for sure that we're not replicants."'

  "And wuh-what's that?"

  "It's the Curve. It's always the Curve. That whole 'index of self-loathing' trip." He could feel his own eyes narrowing, as though he were contemplating the soul underneath his breastbone. "Blade runners wind up so sick of themselves eventually -- realizing they were replicants would be a relief. But that never happens. Loathe thyself -- blade runners pretty much have the ultimate in self-knowledge. So don't bother trying any of these retread mind games on me."

  "Well . . . it duh-doesn't matter, anyway." Isidore shrugged. "Whether you're really human or not . . . that's the least of your worries now."

  "Right now, I'm not worried about anything except retiring some escaped replicant. And then getting back to where I was before I got yanked back down here. Up north. Somebody's waiting for me there." At the back of his mind, all the while this weird person had been haranguing him: the black coffin in which he'd left Rachael sleeping, dying. It could run for itself, awhile at least, but soon enough it would need his loving hand moving underneath the control panel's metal skirt. "You're big on moral condemnation, pal, but let's face it, it's kind of wasted on me. I've already got enough to spare. So why don't you just tell me what it is that I should be so worried about?" He nodded toward the door. "Then maybe you won't mind if I just walk out of here."

  "You know, duh-duh-Deckard . . ." In Isidore's lap, the steel-skeletoned cat raised its head, gaze parallel and equal to the one above. "Like most things about you, your whole load of self-loathing is pretty much a shun-shuck. As long as your skin's intact, you don't really care what happens to anyone else. So that's why I know this is going to be right up your alley." He leaned forward, the cat held tight against his chest. "This job you've taken on -- there's always one more job, isn't there? -- it's not going to be so easy."

  "Skip the warning. I've had one already."

  Isidore went on. "You're not going to be able to just wuh-walk out of here and start hunting. You screwed up, Deckard. Big time. From before. Tell me: what's the final -- the ultimate -- absolutely accurate way of determining whether somebody's a human or a replicant?"

  The fierce quiet in the other's voice had pushed him back into his chair. "Postmortem," he said finally. "Bone marrow analysis
. Takes a while--"

  "I know how long it tuh-takes. And it's also how I know you screwed up. Because I've seen the postmortem bone marrow results. There was one replicant you retired . . . who wasn't a replicant. And killing a human isn't called retirement, Deckard. It's called murder."

  "Bullshit." He returned the other's glare, but felt a molecule-thick layer of moisture form between his palms and the chair's arms. "Which one are you talking about?"

  "Not which one, Deckard. But who. Wuh-we're talking about human buh-beings here; get your language straight. The girl who called herself Pris. Remember her? Blond, athletic . . .probably a little kuh-ruh-crazy." Isidore nodded slowly, stroking the mechanical cat. "She had her problems, guh-guh-God knows. But she was human. Really human. The bone marrow analysis proved it. Of course, that was after you'd already kuh-killed her."

  "That's impossible." Deckard gripped the sweating chair arms harder. "She had to be a replicant. I didn't need to run an empathy test on her. She . . ." For a moment his thoughts scurried away from his grasp, his pulse ticking upward in his throat. "She matched the ID that I was given. And she was . . . strong. Like replicants are. You didn't see that. She nearly killed me."

  "Strong, huh?" The other man gave a quick, sharp laugh. "You mean stronger than you. Some woman kicks your ass, so she must not be human. And you kill her. Ruh-really, Deckard. How do you think that's going to sound in court?"

  "But the ID . . . the video I was shown . . ."

  "A puh-picture." Isidore's voice went soft and sad. "You killed her because of a picture.Isn't that why you were issued a Voigt-Kampff machine? Told to run empathy tests? So you wuh-wouldn't be just running wild out there on the streets, shooting anyone that looked like a replicant to you. So you'd be sure who was human and what wasn't." He watched his own hand rubbing the round metal ball of the cat's skull. "That is, of course, if you're inclined to making that little distinction."

  Silence. He couldn't make any reply. Deckard knew, in the pit of his gut, that the man on the other side of the battered desk was telling the truth. About the bone marrow analysis, about human or not . . . about everything.

  "Who . . ." He knew now that that was the right word. And not what. "Who was she?"

  "Like I said, duh-Deckard. She was a human. Beyond the blood marrow results, there isn't much more that I've been able to find out about her. Name really was Pris. That much was true. Born off-world, probably in one of the U.N.'s Martian colonies. They don't like to talk about it, but there's a fairly huh-high rate of muh-muh-mental breakdown out in those warrens. It's a good place to go nuts. And plenty of them do. There are others, the same as poor Pris was. They don't wuh-wuh-want to be human anymore. They're wanna-bes. They cross the line; they start hanging out with replicants, they act like them . . . and then they cross another line. In their heads. Instead of replicants who think, who believe, who know they're human . . . people like poor dead Pris, they're humans who've come to think, to know that they're replicants. A psychotic break. With full-blown somatic conversions -- they even take on the physical attributes of replicants. Increased strength, duh-damage resistance, the whole bit. They make a game out of picking up red-hot metal bare-handed, without getting hurt. That's how far their cracked minds can go to prove they're replicants and not human. The process is completed when, like Pris, they escape from the off-world colonies and come to Earth. Where they'll be killed. By people like you." Isidore closed his eyes for a moment, the mechanical cat doing the same. "Then they're not wanna-bes anymore. Then they're wanna-dies."

  Now he knew the exact reason for the sweat. What he had to be worried about. "But . . . she tried to kill me first . . ."

  "Self-defense. She's going about her own business here in L.A., some flipped-out cop shows up with a gun, starts tearing the place up . . . hey, she was just trying to pruh-protect herself. Humans have the right to do that."

  The thoughts in his head squirmed, trying to find a way out. "Yeah, but . . . she was already guilty of murder. The escape from off-world . . . people died in that . . ."

  Isidore shrugged. "There's no evidence that Pris did any of the kuh-kuh-killing. And even if she had, it doesn't chuh-change things for you. Cops -- even blade runners -- are supposed to arrest people -- humans -- and bring 'em in. Not blow 'em away before they get a trial. What, you're going to stand up in court and say you had a right to execute suspects before they're found guilty? Good luck on that one. Judges really huh-hate out-of-control cops. They won't even take you out of the courtroom; the judge'll just hike up his black robe and stand on your thuh-ruh-throat until you stop moving."

  "You're wrong." The smug tone in the other man's voice infuriated him. "The LAPD looks out for its own. There are ways. The department will cover for me. They do the investigating, remember? They can take whatever evidence they've got, make it look any way they want. Or they can lose it, bury it down in Internal Affairs, so deep it'll never come back up." The fury tinged his own voice. "I was doing my job -- yeah, that's no excuse. But there's no way the department's going to let a fellow cop take a rap . . . like that . . ." Fury drained, his words faded. He'd just remembered something.

  "You got it, Deckard." Triumph and pity. "You fell into your old mind-set, didn't you? Just enough to forget that you quit the department. You're not a cop anymore. You turned your back on the department and walked away. Ran all the way up north, to that little hiding place you found. The LAPD doesn't owe you a thing now. I know enough about how their heads work. Not only are they not going to cover for you -- they'll throw you to the courts just to make themselves look good. That's how it goes, Deckard. When they find out you're back here in the city, the cops are going to hunt you down like wolves on a rabbit. Even if you don't wind up executed -- either out on the street or from the court -- you won't be heading up north again. Not anytime soon, that is. You'll be in a max lockup for a long, long while."

  The sweat had turned to ice under his hands. He looked down at them, seeing them as if they belonged to someone else, someone already dead. "Do they know?" He looked back up at Isidore. "That I'm in the city?"

  "I didn't tell the police about you. But they know. Somebody else tuh-told them."

  "Who? It must've been her . . . Sarah Tyrell."

  Isidore shook his head. "No -- she had you buh-brought here so I could warn you. Not to juh-just go waltzing out onto the streets and get yourself blown away."

  It didn't matter. The only thing that did matter was far away from here. "Now what happens?"

  "I don't know. That's up to you, Deckard. Duh-dying seems to be your likeliest option."

  "You could help me get away."

  A thin smile and a shake of the head. "I don't know anything about how to do that. It's not exactly my area of expertise. Someone leaves here, I don't have any way of helping them after that."

  He glanced around the small room's walls. "But the police don't know I'm here. In your pet hospital. Or they would've found me already." Like wolves on a rabbit -- his former associates in the department wouldn't waste any time. "You could let me hide out here. Until I figure out what to do."

  "No--" This shake was more emphatic. "If they don't know you're here now, they soon will. And I can't risk that. I've got other ruh-responsibilities. Your skin isn't one of them."

  "So all that other stuff was just talk." Bitter in his voice, like acid curling under his tongue. "All your big concern about living things. Whether they're human or not. I guess that doesn't extend to blade runners."

  "Should it?" Isidore's hand moved gently beneath the mechanical cat's throat. "The creatures I help -- replicant, human, whatever -- they didn't ask for the bad shit that happens to them. You duh-did. The hunter can't complain when he becomes the hunted. Now you're going to find out what it fuh-fuh-feels like. To be running for your life. To be afraid."

  To live in fear. He heard another voice, an old memory track, inside his head. That's what it is . . . to be a slave . . .

  "I've already been there,"
said Deckard, "I'm not going to learn anything new."

  "What a shame. It's such a good ah-ah-opportunity." Isidore set the mechanical cat down on the desktop, gave the creature a final pat on its shining head. It purred louder. "But then again . . . maybe you will. Learn something, that is. Like how to be a human." He reached out and pressed a small button set into the side of the desk. "I make things real. As much as they can be. You've never been real. Now's your chance."

  Deckard knew what the button was for. One of the thugs who'd brought him here -- the heavy footsteps were probably coming down the hallway, heading for the office's door.

  As though the chair were a trap, already sprung -- he couldn't keep himself sitting. He stood up, jittery adrenaline in his veins. On the wall -- he found himself staring at the pictures of dead Hannibal Sloat, the old photograph and the yellowed bit of newspaper. Fat and with hair in the photo, bald and fatter in the clipping. Time had walked through that low-resolution world.

  He wasn't looking at dead Sloat, the founder of the Van Nuys Pet Hospital. This close, nose a few inches from the wall, he could make out the other people in the clipping shot. The caption underneath was something about a cat named Ginjer -- maybe a real one -- getting ready to go to the stars: . . . complete checkup before embarking for the Proxima system . . .

  The grumpy-looking animal dangled from the dead man's hands. The other man in the newspaper photo could've been anybody; Deckard didn't recognize him.

  The woman in the old clipping was Rachael.