“Take it easy,” said Deckard. He’d seen processes like this before. The small man, or the image or perceptual incarnation or whatever he’d become, was undergoing a complete collapse. Which didn’t fit into his own plans. “It’s not that bad—”
“Yeah, that’s easy for you to say. You don’t care.” Sebastian gave him a venomous look. “You’re trained not to, aren’t you? Like all cops. That’s just the world you live in. Not that this one’s any different.” He pulled out the screwdriver and tucked it back into his coveralls. His eyes had become rimmed with red, as though blood were leaking into the perpetual tears. Letting the black cloth drape over the clown mannequin’s workings again, Sebastian ifipped some hidden switch. The device came to pseudo-life again, the head tilting back and the pudgy arms rising.
The clown’s high-pitched mechanical laugh grated on Deckard’s nerves. “Shut that thing off.”
“Why? Is it bothering you, Mr. Decker?” A vindictive gleam showed in Sebastian’s glare. “But you’ve got ways of taking care of things that you don’t like. Why don’t you just blow it away, like you used to? Oops, sorry; I forgot. You don’t have your gun with you—I didn’t give you one when you showed up here. Well, it’s too late now.” Sebastian’s voice had risen in pitch, competing with the noise from the mannequin shaking back and forth with its own laughter. “Maybe you can toss it out the window—that should do it, I imagine. Or you can tear it apart with your bare hands. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
From the corner of his eye, Deckard saw other motion in the room. The clown’s laughter, growing louder and more abrasive, seemed to have set off the rest of Sebastian’s collection of toys. Things haltingly stirred to life, a ballerina with empty eye sockets elevating itself en pointe, a sawn-off oem-media dell’arte Punchinello grinning with malice and shaking a bell-cuffed fist at unseen enemies. The ornate howdah on the back of a miniature elephant collided with the chessboard’s corner, scattering the white and black pieces across the floor. In an ornate Victorian birdcage, a mechanical nightingale trilled, its wire-and-silk feathers moulting onto layers of age-yellowed antimacassars and cracked circuit boards.
The touch of claustrophobia that Deckard had fought off before now reasserted itself, stronger and tighter; he could feel the cold sweat of panic encasing his skin. Too many things, both dead and animated, pressing around him; with his forearm, he shoved away a tottering, slack-limbed Oz scarecrow that had thrust its idiot smile into his face. The rag-garbed creature fell onto its back, waving its arms around and shedding plastic straw. Deckard edged away from it and the other toys, his cop instincts driving him toward anyplace where he could see what was coming toward him.
“All right—” He held up his hands, palms outward, as though trying to ward off the chaos welling up in the room. “Okay, just settle down.” His words were directed at Sebastian. The little bastard’s doing all this. They were Sebastian’s toys, his creations. “Just shut ’em off.”
“Why? Don’t you want to have any fun?” A malevolent delight suffused Sebastian’s face. He no longer appeared childlike, a decrepit infant; his withered skin was that of an old man, a sexless, ageless being. “You’re my guest. You should enjoy yourself.”
For a second, Deckard had a flash of another wrinkled visage, another cruel, time-scorched entity. One that had gazed upon him from behind square-rimmed glasses, an owlish regard that had weighed and judged more keenly than any Voigt-Kampff machine.
That had been in another high-ceilinged room, even emptier of any human presence .
The image of Eldon Tyrell’s face vanished as Deckard forcibly pushed it out of his head. “That’s it.” The miniature elephant bumped against his shin, and he angrily kicked it away. “You can stop all this crap now. I’ve had enough.”
“Oh, I don’t think so. Not yet. We’re just starting.”
“Just! Starting!” Behind Deckard, the toy soldier had scrambled to its feet and marched out of the corner, followed by the uniformed teddy bear. The soldier’s elongated nose quivered with a feverish excitement. “Fun!”
A sudden gust of wind blew out the nearest row of tall windows, scattering crystals of glass through the room; Deckard raised his arm, protecting his eyes from the razor-edged shards, blue-tinted in the luminous night that flooded past the tattered curtains. The candelabras and other wavering lights were extinguished, collapsing all the room’s shadows into darkness.
The floor buckled, gaps splitting between the scarred wooden planks, carpets sliding into rumpled corrugations beneath the sideboards and high-backed chairs. Paintings framed in tarnished gilt fell from the walls, canvases ripped through as they were impaled upon the stiff-fingered hands of mannequins undergoing spasticlike seizures. A pegboard the length of an entire wall section, covered with soldering irons and needle-nose pliers, folded and tore loose from its mounting bolts. It toppled across a banquet table like a two-dimensional bat feasting on the silver bowls filled with dusty wax fruit.
Deckard stumbled back against the smallest table, feeling the chessboard skid beneath his hand, a knight piece digging into the palm; the room tilted as another seismic convulsion rocked the building. For a moment, as he was thrown toward the wall, he had a glimpse through a window ringed with broken-glass knives of the street below and the gaping chasm that had jagged down its center. The theater marquee burst into sparks, the neon curlicues snapping loose, raking blue tendrils across the sidewalk.
“Isn’t this fun?” Sebastian’s face had reddened into fury; he’d braced himself spread-legged in the middle of the room, riding out the successive impacts of the quake. “Come on—you got to admit it is!”
With the teddy bear wrapped around his leg, Deckard pushed himself away from the wall. He dove toward Sebastian as the bear’s toothless mouth managed to chew a dry hole through the fabric of his trousers. The impact knocked Sebastian off his feet, sending him and Deckard skidding through the rubble of chess pieces and hand tools. Still-warm candle wax smeared across Deckard’s cheek as he trapped Sebastian’s arms against his chest. The smaller man grimaced and spat, writhing futilely.
Outside, the U.N. blimp had floated lower, the light beams from among the spiked antennae slashing through the broken windows, pulling sections of the room into bright illumination, then back to hard-edged shade. Deckard got his knee onto the other man’s chest, pinning him to the floor.
Another light seeped through the room’s walls. Enough plaster had fallen to reveal the skeletal understructure of the building; beyond the broken laths and support beams, the image of a smaller area, the confines of a hovel on Mars, began filtering into Deckard’s perception. For a few disorienting seconds, he could see himself-his other self, the real one-sitting at the rickety table in the hovel’s kitchen area, head nodding with eyes closed as though in sleep or drug stupor, the briefcase silent now, waiting for him to come back from wherever he had gone .
More than vision: the quake rolling through the fabric of Sebastian’s private universe seemed to shake the dim outlines of the hovel on Mars. The empty beaker rolled from the table and shattered on the floor; shards of glass nicked across the back of Deckard’s hand. Blood welled between his fingers and onto the shoulder of the figure struggling beneath him.
The distraction had been enough for Sebastian to work one arm free; the butt of his palm shoved up against Deckard’s chin with a hysteric’s strength. Head pushed back, Deckard could just glimpse the infused life draining out of the toys and mannequins. The clown froze, paralyzed, laughter choked in its rubber-swaddled throat; the ballerina doll collapsed, the sequins across its meager breasts dulling to flakes of lead. Into the floor’s dark lightning cracks, the chess pieces rolled and disappeared, like crumbs swept from one of the overturned tables.
“Don’t fade out on me, you little sonuvabitch—” Deckard knocked Sebastian’s hand away from his face; with the same fist, he clouted the smaller man on the side of the head. “I’m not done . . . with you yet.” His own breath came panting with exertion; around him, he could feel the planes and corners of the room growing even less substantial, the illusion of their existence dissipating along with Sebastian’s will to maintain them. “Came here . . . to find out something . . .”
Deckard gritted his teeth, aiming another blow with the flat of his hand. “Not leaving . . . until I do .
“I don’t care,” sobbed the other man. Sebastian’s eyes squeezed shut, his wrinkled face looking even more like an aging infant’s. “Go ahead and kill me—I don’t care.”
“If I could, I would. Don’t tempt me into trying, though.” The uniformed teddy bear had let go of Deckard’s leg, toppling onto its back, button eyes staring lifelessly up at what remained of the ceiling. A few yards away, the bear’s comrade-in-arms had fallen face-downward, long nose skewed to one side, the point of its helmet broken off. “Just shut up and listen.” His brain raced in desperation, trying to figure out what to tell the weeping figure. “Look.
