The wraithlike creature, red-eyed and with a blazing corona of white hair, had heard its name spoken, the name it had answered to when alive. It slid into the apartment's kitchen, keeping its back close to the walls and a wary gaze on Deckard. It stepped next to the animated teddy bear, bending down to be as near as possible to Sebastian, its dried-leather face touching his wrinkled, babyish one. Its idiot eyes remained locked on the figure on the other side of the room.
'You see?' Sebastian couldn't keep from bragging about his own cleverness. 'It wasn't easy, but I managed to keep the important parts going-she knows who I am and stuff.' With his one hand, he tenderly stroked the white hair. 'She really is inside here. Even though I had to strip out a lot of the soft tissue from the rest of the body.' He spoke matter-of-factly, as though describing the repair of a broken radio. 'I had a lot of my tools and spare parts with me already, so I was able to get the sensor-activator relays and the muscle-surrogate motors wired in without too much trouble. But she's still pretty much a high-maintenance item; she can't really take care of herself. She needs me. So when I was done getting her up and running, I did what I had to, on myself.'
He looked down at his own body, what was left of it, in the papoose carrier. 'The doctors back in the city had told me that this pseudo-progeria I got-accelerated old age, you know? — that it could be slowed down, even halted for a while, by reducing the demands on the core system. It's mainly a progressive collapse of the circulatory and nervous systems. So I had to whittle away at myself, the way I did on Pris. I figured all I really needed was one hand-as long as I had my little pals to help me get around.' He patted the teddy bear on its woolly head; it looked over the epaulet on its shoulder and gave him a steel-toothed smile. 'We get along all right, don't we, Colonel?'
'Did it work?' Deckard used the empty cup to point to him. 'I mean
… on your condition.'
'Don't really know.' Strapped to the back of his buttoneyed companion, Sebastian gave a lopsided shrug. 'But I'm still here, aren't I? Surrounded by the folks who love me.' The other of his creations, the miniature soldier with the spike helmet and long nose, had come into the kitchen and pressed itself close to him, forming a family tableau. 'That's all that matters, isn't it?'
He supposed it was. There was nothing he could say to contradict the other man. Carved down to a one- armed torso, with a couple of toy dwarfs for companions, and the female creature he was in love with reduced to a murderous skeleton-Deckard envied him. Loving the dead, loving the bits and pieces left behind, even just memory-maybe that was what defined human. For the dead, he wondered, or for us? Deckard didn't know.
For a moment, as he had watched Sebastian with the resurrected Pris, a dim spark of hope had flickered inside him. Maybe Sebastian could do the same for Rachael; not keep her from death, but bring her back in some altered but still recognizable form. Just as quickly, the spark had turned to a cold cinder. Even if it were possible, he knew it was nothing that he wanted, nothing that he could endure. Better to have your memories, and your grief, than to be haunted by an animated corpse wearing a mask of the beloved's emptied flesh. The poor bastard, he thought as he regarded Sebastian. The little man, or what remained of him, didn't even know how screwed up he was. Just as if some crucial perception of reality had been cut away, along with his other limbs. Just things he'd found he could live without.
Though maybe… he could get me off the murder rap. Deckard mused as he sipped the last of the cold coffee. Maybe he could take the Pris-thing, the animated corpse, to the authorities and say that he hadn't killed any human, after all; here it was, still walking around. Or she was, sort of. He discarded the idea. The Pris-thing wouldn't be a very convincing demonstration of his innocence. One look at her, or it-at what she'd become-and they would just take him out and shoot him, throw his body out in the street. From sheer disgust.
He abandoned any more speculations. Deckard supposed it didn't matter, anyway. All that he knew, or cared about, was that he was still a long way from the one whom he loved. And who was dying.
'Here's the deal.' The freight spinner swooped in low over the towers of L.A. 'First, we find Deckard. We grab him and-'
'What, we have to go all the way up to Oregon?' Holden looked over at Batty in dismay. 'What kind of plan is that?'
'Oregon?' The spinner's controls shifted beneath Batty's hand. 'What're you talking about?'
He shook his head. More evidence that he was dealing with somebody on the verge of senility. 'That's where Deckard went,' he explained patiently. 'Bryant told me that, while'I was still in the hospital.'
'That was then. I'm talking about now.' Batty looked down at the city. 'Right now, Deckard's here in L.A.'
'Bullshit. Why would he come back?'
'He didn't come back, he was brought back. By persons unknown; probably not a police operation. One of my buddies back there at the Reclamation Center heard it on the departmental grapevine and clued me in. Deckard was hauled out of whatever little hiding place he had up north and flown in here.'
Holden studied the figure beside him in the cockpit. 'Who's got him now?'
'Nobody.' The spinner had been put into a big-loop holding pattern; Batty leaned back from the controls. 'He either got away or he was let go. One way or the other, we have to find him.'
'Why?'
'I thought you were smarter than that.' The thin edge of the smile returned to Batty's face. 'Haven't you figured it out? Deckard is the sixth replicant. The missing one.'
Holden was tempted to say 'Bullshit' again, but a thread of doubt slipped into his thoughts. What if Batty was right? 'You better give me your logic on this.'
'It's simple.' Batty's smile broadened. 'What's the one kind of replicant that a blade runner replicant-such as yourself-couldn't be assigned to track down and retire? Another blade runner replicant. It would give the whole game away. If you found yourself face-to-face with your own double, or the double of somebody else that you'd always thought was also a human blade runner… come on.' Batty tapped a finger against his brow. 'You wouldn't have to be a genius to start figuring out that something funny was going on. You'd start asking questions, or keeping 'em inside your head, and pretty soon the people in charge are going to run out of bogus answers to fob off on you. Then you're dangerous; that's when they have to pull the plug on smart-ass little replicants who've learned too much.'
He might be part right, thought Holden. Even if Batty's completely cracked regarding my human status… he could still be right about Deckard. That struck him as completely plausible the more he mulled it over. He'd never liked the other blade runner; he'd always found Deckard to be cold and disagreeable, with an irritating batch of moral poses about their jobs. He should've quit the force sooner rather than go as long as he had, bitching about it the whole time.
Or Batty was completely wrong. Deckard and I might both be human — that idea had some attractive qualities to it. Simplicity, for one; he could see that as soon as somebody started doubting outward appearances, the surface levels of reality, then that person had entered an infinitely expanding maze, where nothing was really what it seemed to be. That was how people wound up in the same lunatic condition as Batty. Who was probably one step away from thinking that he himself was a replicant. Of course, if he is, thought Holden, then
…
He shut off that line with a tight mental clamp. Right now, it didn't matter. Capitalizing on what Batty had just told him was the primary objective he had to keep in view.
'If Deckard's in L.A., then finding him is no problem.' Holden filtered an easy confidence into his voice. 'I know where he'd go.',
'Yeah?' Brightening, the other reached for the spinner's controls. 'Lay it on me.'
He gave Batty the directions; a moment later they were hovering over what had once been the city's Los Feliz district.
'Aw, man.' Batty shook his head in disgust. 'This is your big brain wave? You figured Deckard would just go back to his old apartment? Nobody's that stupid. Look, you can see the police have already been here and checked out the area.'
Holden glanced out the side of the cockpit and saw yellow strips of POLICE INVESTIGATION-DO NOT CROSS strips, now torn and trampled into the windblown dust by the ground vehicles that had converged on the apartment building, then left. 'So?' He shrugged. 'The police-those grunt cops-they don't know what I know about Deckard, He and I were like brothers. Blade runners.'
'Spare me.'
