detectives who didn’t get a chance to make a report before they took a bullet. It’s even happened to a few blade runners. Just part of the hazards of the job.”
“You’d better get your head straightened out, Deckard.” The personality and mind implanted inside the briefcase audibly bristled. “First thing, jettison the notion that I’m part of some LAPD operation. I’m not, and neither was Dave Holden.”
“Oh?” Deckard tapped the edge of the glass. “What happened? He quit the force?”
“That’s exactly right. He walked.”
Deckard snorted. “Hard to believe.”
“Why? You did the same. Once.”
“That was different.”
“You give yourself too much credit, Deckard.” Batty’s voice sneered at him.
“For uniqueness. Think you’re the only ex-cop who got that way from a bad conscience?”
Deckard nodded, even though he knew the briefcase couldn’t see him. “The only one I ever knew.”
“That’s because you were always such a loner. If you blade runners had ever hung out together, instead of always scheming against each other in department politics, you might’ve had a chance.”
Deckard said nothing. The voice coming out of the briefcase had touched a nerve, a line into his memory and all that had happened back in L.A. He’d told himself that he wasn’t going to think about that stuff anymore, that there wasn’t any point to it. The whole anti-blade runner conspiracy riff that he’d gotten wind of from Holden and Batty when he’d still been walking around as a human being. All of which might have been true, with conspiracies wrapped inside larger ones, legions of endless night . . .
He didn’t care. Not anymore; he’d had his fill, even before he’d been sucked into Sarah Tyrell’s private conspiracy, her queen-and-pawns maneuvering, all to destroy the Tyrell Corporation, everything that her hated uncle had created. Eldon
Tyrell’s works turned to ashes, his memory locked inside that dark space inside Sarah’s skull, where she was still a child and he was the king of the only world she knew. Deckard had had a glimpse in there, and he didn’t want to see any more. Enough that Sarah’s vengeance-driven scheming had robbed him as well, of those last carefully measured hours he could have spent with Rachael.
The real Rachael, or as much real as any replicant could be. Which as far as Deckard was concerned, was more real than the human original could be; even when Sarah had tried to pass herself off as Rachael, he had known the truth before she had slipped up, long before the emigrant ship had left Earth. That Rachael was already dead, and that Sarah could never be her, even though she was identical in every way but one. And that one thing wasn’t part of her, but was located inside him, so deep she could never reach it.
“These are things you need to deal with, Deckard.”
Batty’s words had broken the course of his thoughts; it took him a moment to adjust. “What things?”
“If there’s still an operational conspiracy against the blade runners, then your ass is still on the line. You can’t hide. Your cover’s blown. Everybody knows where you are. How do you think Holden and I were able to track you down so easily?”
“Big deal.” Deckard shrugged. “You had contacts. Probably with the video people—that Urbenton guy. When they had the video ready for release, they were planning on doing a whole publicity trip that they’d had me signed on as technical adviser during the taping. That’s what they were paying me for. My name. So it wasn’t going to be a secret for very long. Holden must’ve caught a leak from the production, that’s all.”
“A couple of minutes ago,” the briefcase said dryly, “you were figuring that Holden must’ve still been working for the LAPD. You really think that the department gets its information from camera operators who can’t keep their mouths shut? Come on—you know they don’t work that way. Admit it-this has got all the smell of high-level spookiness.”
“Maybe.”
“No ‘maybe’ about it, Deckard.” Batty’s voice tightened, wirelike. “You know it already. Holden wasn’t LAPD, at least not when he showed up there at Outer Hollywood. He was as quit as you are. That’s why you took me when you left the station to come back to this rattrap. If you’d really thought that I was part of a police operation of any kind, you would’ve booted this fine-quality briefcase right out of the skiff’s waste chute somewhere in transit. I’d be talking to myself out in the cold, cold vacuum right now. At least until my batteries ran down.”
He’s right, thought Deckard. That mind, with all of its mercenary hit man sharps, was still there, intact. Batty, boxed or not, could read right into his soul and see what was written there.
“I was curious.” Deckard could hear his own flat, defensive words. “I just wanted to see what this whole game was about. That’s why I took you with me.”
“Yeah, right. And risk having me turn out to be a homing device, so the authorities could track where you went as soon as you left the station? You could pull my other leg, if I had any.”
“All right . . . all right.” For a long moment, Deckard remained silent, then reached for the glass. He held it to his mouth but didn’t drink, only inhaled the acrid fumes. Then he pushed the chair back and stood up, carrying the glass to the sink and pouring it out. The brown liquid sluiced through the scabbed dishes and down the reluctant drain.
He couldn’t afford to go under the alcohol tide, not now. He’d brought something else back with him, besides the briefcase. Fear; the unease gnawing at his synapses, the twitch of rigid neck muscle and crawl of prickling skin, the mute awareness of something closing in on him, its teeth not yet revealed.
That sense had begun rising along his spine as he’d looked down at the corpse of Dave Holden at his feet . . .
“Go ahead,” Deckard said as he sat back down. He’d carried the briefcase here, hoping for answers. “I’ll accept that you’re not part of some police operation. So start talking. Who sent you?”
“Who sent me?” The one-cornered smile returned to Batty’s voice. “Or who sent Holden?”
“The two of you.” Deckard leaned back in the chair, legs sprawled under the table. “Together—your little buddy team. If it wasn’t LAPD . . . I can’t figure it being the U.N. Their security agencies wouldn’t bother tracking me down at the Outer Hollywood station. They’d nail me here. Everything on Mars is a U.N. operation, except for the cable monopoly, and they’re in each other’s pockets.”
“Work on it, Deckard. Who else out there has got an interest in replicants and the people who go around hunting them down?”
“The replicants themselves.” He shrugged. “That’s all.”
“The only problem with that theory,” said the briefcase, “is that replicants-escaped replicants, especially, on the run—they don’t have any resources. They’re just hiding out, staying low for as long as they can, trying to keep alive. What kind of operation could they put together? You think they could’ve managed to get me scraped off that freeway wall where you left me, get my cerebral contents transferred into this thing, and send Holden out to deliver me to you?”
“Probably not.”
“You got that one right. But there are others, aren’t there? Others who are, shall we say, concerned about the replicants and what happens to them. Concerned in ways besides just wanting to kill them off. For Christ’s sake, Deckard, you ran into them yourself, back in L.A. You must have.”
“All right, I know who you’re talking about.” Deckard gave a dismissive gesture with one hand. “The sympathizers. The rep-symps.” He shook his head.
“You gotta be joking, Batty. That bunch of losers? Street corner evangelists tub thumpers.”
“There’s more to them,” said Batty, “than just that.”
“Sure-some of them are loose-cannon terrorists. Getting themselves blown away by the police—for what? For the sake of shooting down some obnoxious U.N. advertising blimp?” Deckard had seen that for himself when he’d been on the run in L.A.’s maze of streets. His first exposure to the rep-symp phenomenon; he’d heard more about them since then. “So these head cases can dig up a few military surplus mortar rounds and hit a floating viewscreen. I’m not impressed.”
“Stop being such a dumb cop.” The voice turned harsher. “Get with the program, Deckard. The rep-symps you saw on the street—the screamers, the terrorists, the religious types out in the sideways zone-those are all the fringe elements. The fact that you see those people running around at all should’ve told you something. It should’ve been the tip-off that there would be others that you don’t see, ones whose brains aren’t cracked. Ones who’ve got their agenda going in a whole different way. You ran into one of those as well—that guy Isidore at the Van Nuys Pet
