“You’re probably going to die.”
“Coming from you, that’s good.” Holden knew that the briefcase’s voice was the voice of the dead. A dead man speaking. It didn’t matter whether that man, when alive, had been human or not. “You’d know, wouldn’t you?”
If the briefcase had had shoulders, it would’ve shrugged. “Just leveling with you. That’s all.”
Holden ignored the last bit. Lights had started flashing on the control panel, indicating that the intake beam had locked onto the skiff. One light, he knew, would stay yellow for a few more seconds; that was the window of opportunity for abandoning the intake approach, for breaking off and turning the little craft around. And heading back to Earth or anywhere else his own death didn’t seem quite so probable.
He kept his hands folded in his lap, watching and waiting until the yellow light disappeared, replaced by the green one right next to it. They were going in.
The silver crescent loomed bigger and brighter in the skiff’s viewscreen. He could make out the segmented panels that formed its curved, double-tapered shape. Croissant, thought Holden. Thinking of French bakery goods, stuff served with real coffee. The same word, actually. He knew his mind was rattling on, filling up the empty corridors inside his head with nonsense. So there wouldn’t be room for worrying about the job he’d come all this way to Outer Hollywood to do.
A delivery job. Once I was a blade runner, he mused; now I’m some sort of errand boy. He didn’t mind; he’d kept his gun when he’d quit the police department. That was the main thing: he needed it now more than before.
The silver crescent grew larger, blocking out the pocked white shape of the real moon. Brown-mottled Earth lay somewhere behind the skiff; Holden didn’t sweat the navigational fine points. Those had all been programmed in, along with the other details of the job. He glanced again at the briefcase, which had mercifully fallen silent. The initials on the small brass plaque under the handle read RMD. Not his, but those of the person to whom the briefcase was to be delivered. Then he can deal with it, thought Holden. He wondered if Mreally was Rick Deckard’s middle initial, or whether that was just something that the people who’d put the briefcase together had made up out of thin air.
Outer Hollywood filled the screen now; the intake beam had brought the skiff around to the landing bays on the curve’s fat convex side. There’d been a single bright flash, the viewscreen’s pixels max’d out, when the skiff had passed through the focussed reflection from the bank of mirrors that served as the crescent’s attached star. Holden had caught a glimpse of the massive struts and triangulated framework that held the mirror bank between the station’s horns. The open steel girders looked rusted— In a vacuum? he wondered; that’s weird—and warped from neglect. Cables drifted loose like beheaded snakes; the motors and other servo-mechanisms that served to adjust the mirrors’ angles and catch the unfiltered radiation from the sun, looked barely functional. Light bounced off some of the mirrors and out like idiot semaphores into space, instead of illuminating the soundstages behind Outer Hollywood’s pressure-sealed windows. Holden figured that’d be all right if only night scenes were being taped . . . or scenes of L.A. during the rainy season. Anything cheerful enough to require an approximation of daylight, and they’d all be out of luck.
The briefcase spoke up again. “You strapped?”
For a moment, Holden thought the briefcase was referring to the pilot seat’s restraints, then realized it had slipped into the urban patois it sometimes affected. He patted the holstered weapon inside his camel’s-hair jacket. “Of course.” The gun felt like a rock above one of his artificial lungs.
“We’d be better off if it was me carrying you.” A fretful note sounded in the briefcase’s voice.
He couldn’t understand the briefcase’s self-absorbed concern. The bastard’s already dead, he thought. How could things get any worse for it? For himself, though . . . that was another matter.
“Welcome to our faciliteezz.” A canned female presence, bodiless and somewhere above his head, started talking as soon as Holden climbed out of the skiff’s cockpit. “For all your video production needzz Something was wrong with the hidden p.a. speakers; the woman’s sibilants came out as an insectoid hiss.
“Zztock and cuzztom zzets fully furnizzhed editing zzuites . . . all at a competitive rate. Why go elzzewhere?”
The answer was obvious to Holden. He looked around with the briefcase dangling from his left hand, leaving his right to reach inside his jacket if need be.
The orbital studio was close to being a ruin. Another hiss, of oxygen leaking through the landing bay’s gaskets, sounded behind him. A chill draft in his face, like the wind down a deserted city alley, when even the last of the scavenger packs had crawled into their trash-lined burrows; no sky above, but instead a tangle of catwalks and wiring loops imbedded against the barely discernible visual field of the studio’s welded exoskeleton.
Big empty spaces; the recorded greeting was the only human element immediately apparent. Other than himself, Holden noted.
“There should be some kind of offices,” the briefcase suggested. “Farther inside. Where you can find out what set the shoot’s been booked into.”
He started walking, footsteps hollow and loud on the metal flooring. The noise echoed down the hangarlike vista before him. The chances of his moving about, of making his delivery and leaving with no one’s being aware, were nonexistent.
The orbital studio’s sets had already begun collapsing into one another, false fronts and flimsy backdrops muddling together from neglect and general entropy. Holden found himself, briefcase in hand, walking past a Tara —old antebellum mansion, fluted pillars warping out of shape, that had somehow crept among the turrets and spires of medieval Prague. A glacier of artificial grass and poppies spilled down the cobbled street, studded with crosses stamped from plastic to resemble white-painted wood; the dates on them were all from some post-World War I soldiers’ cemetery. Nobody was buried there, but the draft against Holden’s face still smelled like death and slow decay.
Scavengers existed everywhere; as in L.A., the real one, so above. He found one in the quieted battlefield set, an ersatz Flanders Field, next to the empty burial ground. The guy looked familiar enough, all scruffy beard and antique aviator goggles, tattered leathers flopping about a stunted frame; Holden wondered if he recognized him from somewhere in the real city’s alleys.
Brass shell casings clinked in the bag slung over the scavenger’s shoulder. He looked up, the scarred bridge of his nose wrinkling to signal that he smelled cop, while the black-nailed fingertips poking through the ends of his gloves continued to groom the mock battlefield. Another scent lingered in the station’s canned and recycled air, that of the live ammo that had been expended in the taping of some low-budget historical epic.
“You can’t hassle me, man.” The scavenger’s eyes narrowed behind the goggles.
“I got a license.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t.” The stuff he’d been able to do before, back when he’d been with the department, had all been left behind him, on Earth and in that other life. “So remain sweatless.”
He was able to get approximate directions from the scav enger. And information: there was only one video shoot booked into the Outer Hollywood station, the first one after a long dry spell.
“It’s that damn Cinecitta Nuovo, down in Jakarta.” The scavenger’s gloved thumb looked like mice had been chewing on it in his sleep, as he gestured toward some point beyond the station’s curved walls. “Those people’ve got all that EEC money behind ’em. And they suck up all the video productions now.”
Thnnels bigger around than the station ran underneath the Indonesian Entrepreneurial Republic, the spaces lit brighter than anything sun and corroding mirrors could provide. The scavenger looked wistfully at the meager gleanings in his sack. “Man, what I wouldn’t give to be able to get in there.
There must be all kinds of shit lying around.”
Holden wasn’t interested in the sad intricacies of either the video or the scavenging business. “So where’s the shoot going on?”
The ragged glove pointed down the length of the station’s arched central corridor. “You can’t miss it. Go past the Vatican and that Scottish castle with the dry moat; that’s where they’ve got their funky L.A. all set up.
There’s all kinds of people hanging around. Humans and replicants . . . it’s that kind of a shoot. Real blood- and-guts stuff.” An eyebrow raised inside the goggles. “You might like it. Some kind of cop show.”
“I doubt it.” Holden started walking again, briefcase in hand. “Seen it already.”
He saw the buildings up ahead, or at least part of them: the bottom sections of what were supposed to be L.A.’s canyoned towers, false-fronted and propped into position by the cobbled-together framework behind them. A
