Hospital.”
“Yeah, I remember him. But he was a loner, a one-man operation—”
“That’s what you think. For Christ’s sake, Deckard, use your head.” Disgust tinged Batty’s voice. “Isidore was working right in the center of L.A., disguising escaped replicants as humans-disguising them so well that your big- deal blade runner unit didn’t have a chance of catching them—and he was getting away with it. If your girlfriend Sarah Tyrell hadn’t sent her pet hit man out to take care of him, Isidore would still be in operation.”
The girlfriend crack nettled Deckard, but he kept himself from rising to the bait. “That doesn’t prove Isidore wasn’t working alone. Or that he had some kind of high-level connections covering his ass.” Deckard shrugged. “Maybe he was just lucky—or at least he was until the end.”
For a few seconds, the briefcase was silent; then it emitted a low, mocking fragment of laughter. “Come on, Deckard—there’s no such thing as luck. If something happens, it’s for a reason. If Isidore was getting away with disguising replicants as human, and he was doing it right in the face of the LAPD, you can bet he had some powerful friends on his side. People who’re just as concerned about what happens to escaped replicants as Isidore was.” Batty’s smile threaded through his voice again. “People . . . maybe . . . who are right there in the police department itself.”
“They’d have to be.” Deckard wished he hadn’t poured his drink into the sink; now he felt like he could use it. The way his old boss Bryant had used booze shots, both for himself and anybody he’d brief in his shabby, dust- smelling office. To fuzz the edges of reality a bit, just enough to let new, spooky possibilities come sneaking into everyone’s cortex. “The repsymps, huh?”
“You got it.” The voice emerged from the briefcase with a note of triumph.
“The replicant sympathizers aren’t just a few isolated crackpots sparking off their remaining brain cells. They’ve penetrated every level of government-right into the police force itself. They may not be the only conspiracy going on, but the rep-symps are in there pitching.”
“Something doesn’t add up.” Deckard laid one hand flat on the table. “The replicants who’ve managed to escape and get to Earth—if Isidore and his whole Van Nuys Pet Hospital operation, if it was so good at disguising replicants as human, so they couldn’t be detected even with Voigt-Kampff machines-why would it be just the rep- symps who are looking out for their interests? Why wouldn’t the replicants themselves be in on all these high-level conspiracies? If they can pass as human, they should be able to infiltrate the police department as well as anybody else.”
“The replicants are in on the conspiracies.” Batty spoke with simple matter-of-factness. “The rep-symps—the important ones—and the replicants are in constant communication with each other. But not on Earth. There’s things going on in the outer colonies, out in the stars, that hardly anyone on Earth knows about—because the U.N. and the police don’t want them to know.”
“Like what?” The hand, fingers spread, remained motionless on the table.
“Rebellion. Slaves against masters. What else? History always repeats itself—it had to happen, given the way humans have treated the replicants out there.”
“How bad is it? The rebellion, I mean. If there really is one going on.”
“Depends upon whether you’re a replicant or a human colonist.” The smile in Batty’s voice turned even more unpleasant. “Let’s just say that the humans may have the guns, but the replicants—they’ve got the numbers.”
Deckard found the last remark unimpressive. “Numbers don’t mean anything.
Except the number of bullets needed.”
“Come on,” chided the briefcase. “Why should you be so skeptical? You blind or something? Look around—you know what the situation is around here. You and all the rest of the would-be emigrants—you’re bottled up here like ants in a Mason jar. Why do you think no one’s been allowed to travel on and outward in the last half a dozen years? The U.N. just keeps stacking people up in these hovels, letting them go stim-crazy, eating themselves up out of sheer fucking boredom. The clamp’s on, the bottleneck’s there, because the U.N. can’t let emigrants go on to the outer colonies. The replicants control the territory.
Otherwise, the U.N. would just go ahead and shoot you and all the rest of the wanna-be emigrants out there, let you take the consequences. Which would be death. And why would the U.N. care about that?” The briefcase’s voice indicated another invisible shrug. “The whole point of the emigration plan is to get people off Earth—if they wind up corpses in the process, that’s no big deal.”
There would be another advantage, as well, that Deckard could see. We wouldn’t talk, he thought. Not if we were all dead. In that way, the replicants, the rebellion, would still be doing the U.N.’s work for it. Slaughtered emigrants wouldn’t be getting any word back to Earth, to families or strangers, about what had gone wrong with all the big plans for humanity’s future out in the stars. Better to have corpses littering the alien turf rather than disgruntled returnees coming back and letting everyone know that their promised slaves had gotten murderously uppity.
“Figure it out.” The briefcase’s voice continued hectoring him. “If the U.N. could regain control of the outer colonies, then they could continue funneling emigrants to any destination they wanted, rather than letting them stack up here. But to do that, to get that control again, the U.N. would need to have its own off-world military problems squared away—and they can’t do that.
They’re screwed; the U.N. depended too much on beefing up the ranks with replicant soldiers, like the ones for which they used me for the templant-Nexus-6 Roy Batty models, like that one you were assigned to track down in L.A. Only it just about wound up handing you your ass, didn’t it, Deckard?”
The briefcase barked another quick, humorless laugh. “That’s the problem with the Tyrell Corporation’s having put out such a good product. Even if the Batty replicants aren’t quite as tough and smart as the human original-me, at least when I was still walking around inside a body—they’re still pretty mean customers. If the U.N. thought it could put together an off-world military force out of pieces like that, and there wouldn’t be a price to pay, they must’ve been dreaming.”
Deckard slowly nodded; he could get behind that. Dreaming, he mused. That was what most of life had become, for himself and-apparently-everyone else. Lost in it, so that the difference between this world and any other was harder and harder to make out. For Sarah as well, thought Deckard. More for her, perhaps, than anyone else. He had sensed that a long time ago, in the decaying little cabin in the woods, the hiding place to which he and Rachael had fled; when he had seen Sarah look down at her replicant double-at Rachael sleeping in the black coffin of the transport module extending her rapidly dwindling life span—he had detected the envy radiated by Sarah as she had laid her hand on the cold glass, inches away from the mirror image of her own face. Envy of the sleeping, the dreaming, the dying; envy of the dead and the loved. So much so that Sarah had fallen into her own dreaming, a world in which she could at last become Rachael. The real, the original, trying to evolve into the unreal, the double, the shadow . . . the realer than real.
And if somebody as smart, as survival-oriented as Sarah Tyrell could fall into the dreaming trap, then why not everybody else? Right up to the faceless scheming bureaucrats of the U.N.—Deckard couldn’t see why they should be immune. What a stupid idea, he thought, shaking his head. Create another race, smarter and stronger and possibly even meaner than human beings, then figure they’ll do just fine as slaves, tugging their forelocks and singing choruses of “Ol’ Man Ribber” in whatever cotton fields baked under alien suns. There weren’t enough bullets in enough blade runners’ guns to keep that kind of payback from working its way to Earth.
“You know,” Deckard’s nod grew even slower and deeper. “I could almost believe all this.”
“Why would a briefcase lie to you?” The inaudible shrug sounded again in Batty’s voice. “The condition I’m in, I’ve pretty much transcended all mortal desires.”
“So tell me something else.” Deckard leaned the knots of his spine against the chair. Every muscle in his body had tensed. He felt the trap closing in on him—the sharp points of its teeth were just beginning to show. “Give me the rest of the spiel. The rep-symps—the real ones, not the head cases—they scraped your corpse off the freeway ruins, cracked your skull like a raw egg, and downloaded you into this thing. That’s about the size of it, right? That’s the line you’ve been giving me.”
“You know it. First time anybody’s gotten this much of a handle on me.”
“Big question.” Deckard studied the briefcase as though it had a face whose secrets he could read out. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“The rep-symps want you in a box, that’s their business. But why have Dave Holden bring you to me? What
