With his arms still folded on his chest, Deckard opened one eye wider to gaze upon the briefcase beside him. “And that’s why you’re here? Dave Holden brought you out just so you could tell me about these ‘important things’?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
Deckard let the eyelid sink shut, as though of its own weight. “Like I said—I don’t want to hear it.”
Silence held in the skiff’s cockpit. For a few seconds, Deckard heard only the motion of his own blood sliding through his veins, the tick of random air molecules at his eardrums. Then the cockpit’s other inhabitant spoke again.
“You’re a cool customer, Deckard—you know that?” Whatever parts of Batty had been encoded and placed inside the briefcase, his snake-twisting mind and sharp-eyed perceptions, now sounded impressed despite himself. “Nothing fazes you. You’ve reached some kind of weird point where nothing surprises you anymore, but you’re still walking around as if you’re alive somehow. That’s a hell of an achievement.”
Deckard shifted in the thinly padded seat, trying to find some comfort for his bones and muscles. “What am I supposed to be so surprised about?”
“For Christ’s sake, Deckard—I’m in a fucking box. With a handle and two chrome-plated locks and a decent grade of simulated leather on the exterior.” Annoyance permeated the briefcase’s speech. “Shit—you mean you didn’t notice?”
“I noticed.” Deckard couldn’t keep a thin smile from lifting one corner of his mouth. “Actually, I prefer you this way.”
“Yeah, well, it doesn’t suit me at all. They should’ve left me at least one leg and a foot, so I could kick your sorry ass.” The disgust in Batty’s voice shifted to its former perplexed condition. “Don’t you wonder how this all came about? The last time you saw me, I was dead. I even got shown photographs of how I looked, hanging upside-down on that busted-up freeway. Seeing your own corpse is one of those transformative experiences —”
“Thought you didn’t have eyes.”
“There’s a jack for an optical scanner inside here. Along with some other stuff like that. Besides, why should you care how I saw it? That’s not important, Deckard. What you should be worrying about is why all of this is being done. Why drag my corpse off, why download my skull contents into this contraption—the whole trip. Hey, it’s all for your benefit, pal. Or at least most of it. If you can’t display gratitude, you could at least show some curiosity.”
“I don’t have to,” Deckard said dryly. “I’m sure you’re going to tell me all about it, whether I want to hear it or not.”
He’d been telling the truth to Batty. Deckard could let an unsoothing but necessary sleep claim him, where he pushed back in the skiff’s pilot seat, with little regret. That his old nemesis, a nightmarish figure all glistening with rain and smeared blood over taut muscle and sinew, could come back from the dead in the form of an articulate briefcase-what was there to be surprised about? Stranger things had already happened. Once before, he’d thought Roy Batty was safely dead, only to find out otherwise—or rather, to find out that one Batty was dead, and another, claiming to be the human original from which the replicant had been made, was trying to kill him. And coming close to accomplishing that goal. If it hadn’t been for Dave Holden, who put a highcaliber slug between Batty’s eyes, Deckard knew that it would’ve been his own corpse draped over the side of one of L.A.’s ruined freeways.
And now Holden was dead, with his former partner from the LAPD’s blade runner unit fairly sure that he at least wouldn’t be coming around again. The corpse on the floor back at the Outer Hollywood studio had appeared more than final; Holden’s blanked-out eyes had looked as if they had gazed at last upon and into some soul-quieting vista of peace. Maybe, thought Deckard, that’s what he saw when he looked down the barrel of the Kowalski replicant’s gun. Fire and thunder, and then the silence beyond .
“Oh, you’ll find out soon enough.” Batty’s voice seemed to come from miles away, a distance bound by the cockpit’s tiny space. “You don’t have to worry about that.”
That was a mystery almost worth puzzling out. Deckard let the black behind his eyelids deepen and swallow him up. The briefcase with Batty’s personality wired in and Deckard’s initials below the handle—that’s what the now-dead Holden had been carrying, had come all that way from Earth to deliver to him.
There’d been a time when Batty and Holden had been working together, trying to kill Deckard, claiming that he was another escaped replicant; that was how wrapped up in craziness the two of them had gotten. Then they’d had their big falling-out, from which only one of them had survived . . . or so it’d seemed at the time .
Something had hooked the two of them back together, Holden and Batty, or whatever was left of him inside the briefcase. Something that probably wasn’t good news.
It was too much for Deckard to try to figure out now, at this point of his exhaustion. As long as the briefcase was quietly sulking to itself, he might as well try to find sleep.
Deckard found himself half wondering, half dreaming, of what reception was in store for him on Mars, how Sarah would welcome him home from his long, futile venturing.
A knock at the door.
“Oh, boy!” The alarm clock danced on top of the bedside table. “Daddy’s home!”
“Christ—” Sarah laid the back of her hand across her eyes, trying to block out what was left of the day’s illumination and any other sensory data coming into her nervous system. As much as she had been expecting, even—in a perverse fashion—looking forward, to this moment, it had still crept up on her without warning. Until now.
“I bet that’s him! I bet that’s him, all right!”
She wished again that she had spent the money for the third bullet. “Just shut the hell up.” Her brain felt both sandfilled and fuzzy from the cumulative toxins of troubled sleep. Sarah pulled herself into a sitting position on the edge of the grey mattress, then watched as the apparent separate entity of her hand fumbled inside the table’s single drawer.
“Mrs. Niemand . . . excuse me.” From the opposite wall of the bedroom, the calendar had caught sight of the bright metal cylinders tumbling in Sarah’s palm. “But what exactly are you doing?”
Brass glinted at her fingertips, though the bullets’ tapered points were dull leaden in color. “None of your business.” She slipped the bullets into the gun from the table, then closed up the chamber. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Humanity is my business, Mrs. Niemand. Though that was said in other contexts, it applies in this situation as well.”
“I don’t need the literary allusions.” Sarah shifted the gun to her left hand and used her right to smooth her dark, disordered hair back from her brow.
Some previous tenants of the hovel, who had either killed themselves or managed to get shipped off the planet while the starbound emigration vessels were still running, had shelled out for the appliances to be hooked up to the library trunk feed. The penurious Niemands had canceled the service, but the calendar had the rudiments of a university education soaked up in its off-line banks. And didn’t mind showing it off, all of which had added to the general hell of Sarah’s existence. Maybe four, she thought. I should’ve bought four bullets.
The knock at the door sounded again, blows hard enough to shake the hovel’s thin plastic walls. A rain of soft, sneeze-provoking dust drifted down upon the bed.
“Come on!” The alarm clock shrilled even more excitedly. “Let’s go see!”
Sarah placed the muzzle of the gun against the clock’s face, at the exact center from which the two black hands radiated. “Let’s be real quiet.” She pushed the clock back across the table. “So Daddy and Mommy can have a little quality time together. All right?”
“Okay,” squeaked the clock. It cowered back against the wall.
“Mrs. Niemand!” The calendar fluttered its pages at her as she walked past. “I implore you-don’t do anything you’ll regret later.”
“There’s not going to be a later.” The gun’s weight dangled at the end of her arm. “So regret’s not a problem.”
“Sarah!” Using her real name, the calendar cried after her. “Please . . . don’t.”
In the front part of the hovel, a space barely wider than what her outstretched arms could have reached across, the percussion on the door was even louder. Enough to start peeling some of the web of silvery duct tape and glue-tacky patches away from the torn seams and other leak points. The hovel shivered and hissed as though
