and glance turning even more mysterious.
He didn’t know her name, or even what she was selling; he had never known, during all the time he had walked and lived and killed inside the traplike city, and the woman had floated above him like some anonymous, disdainful angel. In his anoxic delirium, he could imagine that she was about to lean down from the ad-screen and bestow a kiss upon him .
The Asian woman’s face disappeared, replaced by the only one that mattered.
Kowalski pulled him close, not for a kiss but to snap the vertebrae at the hinge of Deckard’s neck. He’d be paralyzed before he was dead, but only for a few seconds, until Kowalski finished him off.
“Wake up! Time to die!”
Deckard heard the words again, but knew it was only memory. He saw Kowalski’s smile and nothing else, as the replicant jabbed two fingers toward Deckard’s eye sockets.
Maybe they finally got it right, he thought. This time it’ll be different . . .
But it wasn’t. Even as he looked down at the other’s face, time started up again, the loop running as it had before. As it had so long ago. The replicant’s expression changed to one of stunned bewilderment. The light behind Kowalski’s eyes dwindled to a spark, then died out, as the life that the Tyrrell Corporation had given him rushed from the red flower, torn flesh and white thorns of bone splinters, that had burst from his forehead. The bullet had passed all the way through and vanished, tumbling somewhere beyond Deckard’s shoulder.
The thing that had been Kowalski crumpled forward, falling onto Deckard and trapping him against the shining wet pavement. Deckard clawed out from beneath him and stood upright again, regaining his balance and his breath. His vision shifted, from blurred to focussed, close to medium distance; Rachael stood at the mouth of the alley, swathed in high-collared fur, the gun that Kowalski had knocked away now clasped in both her hands—it must have landed right at her feet—and trembling from the shock of its firing, the slight motion of the trigger that had placed the steel-jacketed bullet like a quick finger tap at the back of Kowalski’s head. She looked dazed, lips parted to draw in her own held breath; just as though she had never killed anyone before. As though this were the first time this had happened.
His gaze went back down to the dead replicant at his feet. Or supposedly dead.
He’s doing a good job, thought Deckard. Kowalski looked as dead as a real corpse.
“Come on, get up—” Deckard kept his voice lowered, so that none of the on-set microphones would pick it up. “It’s a wrap, they got it all on tape. You can get up now.”
Blood welled from the hole in Kowalski’s shattered brow.
Then Deckard knew it was real.
“What the hell!” At the edge of the soundstage, where the fake streets, the re-created Los Angeles, gave way to bare dry concrete and steel, the flooring laced with thick power cables and data conduits like black snakes —Deckard stood up, angrily ripping the headphones away from his ears. The folding chair toppled over as he threw the ’phones at the central monitor, the one that had shown the view from the eyes of the other Deckard, the fake one, the one that had been dangling from the now-dead replicant’s fists. Across the smaller screens, the angles of all the other video-cams unfolded like a magician’s pack of cards.
“Now what?” The close-up on the fake Rachael showed her dropping out of character, the look of shock on her face transmuted to that of a disgusted professional as she let the heavy gun hang at the end of her arm. She sighed wearily. “Christ, this shoot’s taking forever.”
Deckard ignored her, striding past the cameras on their automated tracking booms, the skeletal apparatuses of light and event. The drizzle from the overhead rain gantry ran off his jacket sleeves, the grid underneath the soundstage sucking away the excess from the glossily photogenic puddles. He pushed aside the faux Deckard, the actor playing him, and stood looking down at Kowalski. At what was left of the replicant, the bleeding artificial flesh.
“Please A hand clutched ineffectually at his elbow. “Mr. Deckard . . . you can’t just—”
He turned angrily upon the production assistant, a tiny androgynous figure with heavy retro black-framed glasses. “It wasn’t supposed to happen this way!” He jabbed his finger at the assistant, who fended it off with an upraised clipboard. “I was told you weren’t going to kill anyone!” The circumference of his gaze tinged with red as he looked back toward the crew ringing the soundstage. “Where’s Urbenton?”
That was the name of the director. Who was conspicuously missing, the folding chair that had usually supported his pudgy frame now unoccupied. Chickenshit sonuva bitch—Deckard felt his teeth grinding together. The director must’ve snuck out after the video recorders had started rolling, while Deckard had been wrapped in the view from the cam monitors, watching the re-creation of his own past. Urbenton would’ve known that Deckard would go ballistic when a real bullet, from a real gun, wound up churning through someone’s brain.
“Come on, man The actor playing him—not a replicant like the one who had been playing Kowalski, but an actual human-tried out as peacemaker. “It can’t all be special effects, you know. Sometimes you gotta go for realism.”
“Get away from me.” Revulsion worked its way up Deckard’s throat, choking him as though the replicant’s big hands had been around his own neck instead of the other man’s. The actor didn’t even look that much like him, or at least not yet.
Like most of the talent in the video industry, in addition to the remote cam implanted behind one eye, the actor also had barely visible tracker dots sewn under his skin, so that in postproduction another’s face could be ceegeed over the one he’d been born with.
That new face would’ve been the real Deckard’s. But not now, he fumed. Not if I can help it. “So where is he?” Deckard stopped just short of gathering up the front of the assistant’s collar in his hand and squeezing tight, the way the dead Kowalski had done to the human actor. “Where’s Urbenton?”
“I . . . I don’t know The assistant retreated, sweating hands clasped to the clipboard. “He got called away.”
“Yeah, right. I bet.” Deckard stepped over the corpse and started toward the soundstage’s big rolling doors and the interlocking corridors and spaces of the studio complex beyond. “I’ll find him myself. He’s got one hell of a lot of explaining to do.”
He didn’t look over his shoulder as he strode away. But he could sense the fake L.A. dying its own death, the constant artificial rain stopping, the vehicles halting and being shut off in the middle of the crowded street, the actors and extras walking off the set. The replica blimp, a tenth the size of the one that had once actually floated above the city, dangled inert from the overhead rigging, adscreen blank and faceless.
The city’s walls parted as the grips moved the scenery back. There was nothing behind them except dust and stubbed-out cigarettes, and a few scattered drops of blood.
A silver crescent in the sky, hanging below him. Dave Holden thought it looked like some kind of Islamic emblem, complete to the glittering star between the points of its horns. The artificial moon’s gravitational field tilted the skiff’s gimballed pilot’s seat, hanging him upside down inside the tiny interplanetary craft. Inside the cramped cockpit area, there was barely room enough for himself and the cargo strapped onto the empty seat beside him.
Which spoke now: “You’re in big trouble, pal.” The briefcase kept its voice level and calm, as though unconcerned with human problems.
Holden glanced over at the briefcase. Plain black, a decent grade of leatherette, chrome snaps and bits around the handle. It looked like the exact sort that millions of junior execs carried into office towers every morning, back on Earth. By rights, it shouldn’t have been talking at all; that it was doing so indicated the long-standing personal relationship between the two of them.
“Big, big trouble.” The briefcase continued its simple, ominous pronouncements.
“I know—” Holden reached out to the control panel and dialed the skiff’s guidance system toward the silver crescent’s intake beam. “I breathe trouble.”
More than metaphor; the lungs in his chest, and the heart between them, were efficient constructs of Teflon and surgical steel. His original cardiopulmonary system had been blown out his back by an escaped replicant named Leon Kowalski. Back on Earth, back in the L.A. from which he and the briefcase had just flown. That bullet had been a couple of years ago; there had been others before and since then, some of which he’d fired, others that’d been fired at him. The bio-mechanical lungs sucked whiffs of imminent death and left them on his tongue. Tasting like the ashes of the cigarettes the LAPD doctors had made him give up.
“Breathe it out, too.”
