same as when he’d seen it last, in the real world, in the real L.A. Complete with the fat-bellied swirling columns that had been grafted onto the original structure in an ill-advised attempt to evoke some kind of pseudo-Arabic multiculturalism, and that had only resulted in the same kind of bastard kitsch the city had always been known for. The other added ornamentation was the wadded-up trash in the entranceway, the same rain-soaked pile of unidentifiable rubbish that the wet windsstacked up against every Angeleno doorway. He picked his way through the mess, greasy food wrappers tangling against his ankles, then drifting away to the empty, glistening street.
That was the other fake thing. Even more so than the sets up in the Outer Hollywood station; at least there, extras had crowded the action, simulating the restless urban population. Here, in Sebastian’s pocket universe, the streets were devoid of any human, or close-to-human, activity. As depopulated as this zone had been in the real L.A., there had still been some life stirring about, even if only dwarf scavengers climbing over his police spinner, trying to unbolt the roof-mounted air filters. If this place was Sebastian’s show, he’d made it a private one. Believers only, thought Deckard.
Or at least just communicants. The little guy had obviously never had much use for other people, or at least not for anything other than the autonomic toy friends he’d manufactured for himself. And Pris; but that’d been true love.
Deckard shoved the building’s front door with the fiat of his hand; it swung into darkness. The colored light from the movie theater marquee seeped past him, picking out small details-brass handrails still recognizable under layers of dirt and tarnish, rain puddling and spilling from one open floor to the next—in the cavernous space. He stepped inside, letting the door fall shut behind him, sealing out the street sector of the hallucinated world.
He stood in the middle of the space looking upward. What he saw produced a partial smile, one constructed of both irony and grudging admiration. Too perfect, thought Deckard. Through the building’s broken roof, past the levels of iron-grilled walkways, beams of shifting light penetrated the darkness like the radiance of magnified stars falling from the fixed spheres in which this little world was enclosed. The lights came from the blimp, the old U.N. advertising vessel with its billboard viewscreen and spiky antennae, looking as though it were some kind of sea creature that had inflated itself enough to rise up in the air.
Squinting against the slants of light, Deckard could just barely see the blimp’s shape cruising in absurd majesty above the building and the surrounding streets, the Euro-hybrid geisha face on the viewscreen smiling with a mute guardian angel’s uncommunicable wisdom. Sebastian had brought that back as well, another fixture for his pocket universe; in the real world, the real L.A., the blimp was gone, taken out by a mortar round from rep-symp fringe terrorists. Deckard himself had seen the blimp go down in flames, a latter-day Hindenburg, something even the most blase or stoned L.A. citizens had had their attention caught by. A nonevent for Sebastian, though; he’d already been living out in the sideways zone’s wasteland, with his patched-together Pris, so he’d missed all that. This urban concoction was the L.A. that Sebastian had known before he’d left.
Rain from the building’s leaking roof sluiced down the brass handrail that Deckard grasped. As he looked up the flight of stairs, their treads rotted to creaking sponges, his other hand moved inside his coat. From force of habit, old ingrained cop ways, as well as from the memory of when he’d been here in long-ago reality. His fingers were searching for his gun, that great black metal weight, a hammer as big and effective as a cannon; they found nothing but lint and a rip in his shirt, through which his sweat-moist flesh could be felt. He drew his hand back out, empty. He would’ve felt better with even a hallucinated weapon in his grasp, but he wasn’t surprised that such things had been edited out of Sebastian’s universe.
The last traces of the other world, the hovel where his real body was sitting without consciousness, blindly watched over by the talking briefcase, had faded away. This world had locked in tight; he could feel the wet steps yielding beneath, the rail’s cold metal chill against his palm. The smell of rust and crumbling plaster, the stink of decades-old pigeon shit, mired in his breathing. A mist-smeared shaft of light from the blimp above the building crossed over his face, then cut a diagonal through the empty lobby he’d left behind.
“Sebastian!” He called out, voice loud in the building’s silence, as he mounted to the floor where the genetic engineer had kept his suite of rooms. Deckard looked down the open walkway to the tall double doors, one of them pushed slightly ajar. No answering voice came. From somewhere past the doors, a wavering light fell, as though from a lit candelabra. “Anybody there?”
He knew there had to be. As empty as the building felt, with its vacant spaces and nailed-down shadows, there was still another human presence inside it. Or something slightly different from human, something embedded in the walls and pockmarked floor tiles. You’re walking around in his head, Deckard told himself. Or as good as. Remember that.
At the double doors, halfway down the walkway, the silence was broken by a drip of rain into the puddle that had formed in front of the sill. The water rippled like a softly broken mirror as Deckard stepped into its center and pushed one of the doors all the way open. Flickering candlelight brushed against his face as he gazed across the high-ceilinged room within.
Toys; he remembered them from that time when he had tracked Pris and the replicant Batty to this spot. There had been a pocket universe for Sebastian even then, a little world that he had created for himself, and this place was it. His refuge, a child’s refuge, from the hurtful, bustling world of grown-ups, everybody bigger than him, everybody who wasn’t dying from a galloping progeria, the accelerated decrepitude that had turned him into a wrinkled, fading nonadult. L.A. wasn’t a city for children; no wonder Sebastian had been dying in it. If he hadn’t built this hiding place for himself, his small corpse would have been trampled in the streets.
Past the candles guttering in their branched silver settings, Deckard saw torn, gauzy curtains drifting in an unfelt breeze, their ragged ends trailing across the nearest mannequins and stuffed animals. Whatever contents of Sebastian’s head hadn’t spilled out to reenvision the L.A. street and the decaying building were exposed here, like some soft, babyish army. Glass eyes stared at nothing or were reflected in gilt mirrors with ornate frames, the inert photo-receptors switched off or robbed of batteries. When Pris, on the run with the escaped replicants she had thought she was one of, had disguised herself as one of Sebastian’s mechanical creations, a leotarded bridal doll with a veil draped over her strawlike hair, she had finally achieved the nonhuman apotheosis her cracked brain had been seeking all along. To be a thing, a killing thing or a loved one; it didn’t matter.
One of the mannequins stirred, fat clown of ambiguous gender; it croaked out a woman’s laugh as the rubbery wattled neck shook, white-painted face tilting back. Stubby fingers pawed the air like pale anemones brought up from ocean shallows.
Deckard halted in the center of the room, forcing his breath to a measured pace, pushing back an emergent claustrophobia. The place would’ve seemed uncomfortably close, crammed with too much junk-disassembled tube radios and thrift shop antiques and patzer chess pieces, all the hobby collectibles of a perpetually dying, too-clever child—even if there hadn’t been unpleasant memories filling up the unoccupied areas. He’d come close to getting killed here, twice in rapid succession, first by crazy Pris, then by the even loonier replicant Batty; the human original he’d met up with later, the one whose cerebral contents were stored in the talking briefcase, had been a piece of cake by comparison.
His fingers ached, not just for the want of a soothing gun—not that the real weapon had been much use here, the real here—but from old wounds; the replicant Batty had broken fingers as easily as snapping twigs. The fingers had healed badly, aching when provoked by shifts in weather or the pressure of memory.
The laughing clown’s barking noise suddenly shrilled up another octave, the rubber hands jerking even more spasmodically above the fright-wigged head.
Deckard stepped away from the device, watching as a shudder of ill-meshed gearing ran through its frame. The clown suddenly froze, the garish face paralyzed in a rictus of manic hilarity; the room’s silence congealed once more as a wisp of black, burntrubber smoke trailed out of the parted mouth.
Another face appeared, popping up from behind the stricken clown. “Oh . . . hi.”
The black cloth covering the device’s workings was draped over Sebastian’s shoulders; his moist-eyed gaze, still set in the wrinkled flesh of his aging disease, blinked at Deckard. “I didn’t hear you come in. I was busy working on this old thing, trying to get it running again.” He laid a wrinkled, protective hand on the clown’s shoulder. “It’s a real keeper; used to be in an old amusement park and stuff.”
“No, it didn’t.” Deckard shook his head. “It’s not even real. Nothing here is.”
“Well . . . yes and no.” Grease marked Sebastian’s hands; he rubbed them against his trousers. “Real in the what’s-it, uh, Platonic sense.” With an extended forefinger, he poked at one of the clown’s eyes, getting its line of vision to match the other. “This is the idea of the physical manifestation, of what came from the amusement park.
