soon enough.
“Don’t fade away on my account.” Sarah glanced over her shoulder at the image of the little girl. “Stick around as long as you like.”
He woke up and wondered where the hell he was.
For a moment, Deckard thought he was back in L.A. Or that he’d never left it and that everything that had happened anywhere else had been a dream, the kind you snap out of like falling off a cliff or the edge of one of the tallest buildings. Covered in night sweat, heart pounding inside your chest, fingers scrabbling at anything that would provide a second’s hold.
An alley; he could tell that much, as full consciousness seeped back into his head. Narrow, cramped, and dark, at the bottom of thickly grimed and graffiti-scrawled walls with no windows. A damp cushion of rubble beneath him, moldering urban decay that had been swept or pushed or just blown by the wind into these forgotten dead-end niches; the sweet, rank smell of garbage and other human castoffs filled Deckard’s nostrils. His own stink as well, as though he had been lying there for some undetermined amount of time; he ran a hand across his chin and found the stiff, short bristles of a two-day beard.
There had been an alley like this back in L.A., lots of them, most of which he’d been in during his blade runner days. Often with an escaped replicant at the terminus, at that point where there was no place left to run to. Where all they had left was to press their spines against the buildings’ steaming bricks and retrofitted exhaust shafts and wait for the shadowed figure to approach and lift the big black gun in his hand, aim, and fire, that roar of light the last thing their manufactured eyes would ever see. Deckard knew he didn’t have a gun on him—he couldn’t sense that weight tugging anywhere in his begrimed clothes—so he felt sure he hadn’t fallen back into that soul-killing time.
The Outer Hollywood studios? He pushed himself up into a sitting position, scanning the area for more clues. Maybe he’d found himself in that perfectly reconstructed L.A., the faux cityscape orbiting above Earth’s brown atmosphere. A few seconds was enough to convince him otherwise. No extras, thought Deckard, looking out to the alley’s mouth. So it couldn’t be Outer Hollywood—the money had always been spent there on a crowd of pedestrians, expertly gotten up like the real L.A.’s packed and cultish street life. The area he could see now, out beyond this alley, was empty, at least for the time being.
“Hey. Hey, buddy . . . let me help you with that.”
Deckard heard the voice at his ear, a ragged, whispering sound. And felt the other’s presence, whoever it was, close enough to touch. My cop skills must be all shot to hell, he couldn’t help thinking ruefully. He’d let somebody get right next to him without any instinctive defenses’ being triggered.
A hand fumbled at the place where Deckard’s own hands were crossed over the front of his jacket, holding on to some light object like a souvenir from his forgotten dreaming. It felt like thin metal, a box of some kind, light enough to be empty; his thumbs felt the ridge where the lid snapped tight. The other person’s hands tugged at the little box, trying to slip it out from under Deckard’s grasp. That pushed him to full awake; his eyes snapped all the way open, catching sight of a grizzled, cadaverous face close to his. One hand left the box and backhanded the stranger, knuckles spattering blood out of the gap-toothed mouth.
“Jeez . . . you didn’t have to do that The other man scuttled a few feet away and then crouched, wiping the red from his face, yellowed eyes sulkily watching Deckard. “You want to be left alone, just say so .
The alley had to be on Mars, in the back reaches of the emigrant colony; the ineffectual roller had the twitching, jittery look of someone just starting to fall under the effects of acute stimulus deprivation. The skin under the rags and dirt seeped raw from the man’s broken fingernails’ plucking at his own flesh. Deckard drew himself up farther, leaning his back against the wall behind him. He looked down at the box in his hands-chipped white enamel on thin metal, with a faded red cross in the lid’s center—and tried to remember what it signified. Inside his head, the blurred components of a dream moved toward each other, linking up one by one.
Now I got it—a picture had formed, a little wrinkled face with weepy eyes. It grew clearer; Deckard saw the rest, not a dream but memory. Not entirely real, but real enough; something that had actually happened. A room with earthquake cracks running through the plaster, even across the high ceiling, the white dust sifting over toys and dolls, big ones, a frozen ballerina and a fat, silently laughing clown. The face of an aging child wasn’t one of those, but a human’s face; or what had been a human, Deckard corrected himself. Now a deity in his own little pocket universe. Which is where he’d just been, and from which he’d fallen out of . . . how long ago?
Deckard reached over and grabbed the quivering man’s thin wrist, pulling him closer. “How long have I been here?”
“Huh?” The yellow eyes stared at him. Stringy muscles jumped beneath the man’s hollow cheeks. “What’re you talkin’ about?”
His temper flared higher as he yanked the man right into his own face. “How long have I been lying here in this alley?”
“Huh-how should I know? C’mon, fella-uh!” The pawlike hands shoved futilely at Deckard’s chest. “I don’t —”
“When did you first see me here? How long ago?”
“Maybe . . . maybe yesterday. Yeah—” The man gave a nod vigorous enough to rattle his whole body. “Yeah, there was a pile of stuff here when I went by, and that was yesterday, and then I came back to check it out . . . and it was you. Okay? So that’s how long you been here. Since yesterday. Let go of me, willya?”
Deckard released him with a hard thrust of his arm. “Take a hike.” The man scurried out toward the street, twitching slightly less from the input to his nervous system.
A day at least, lying in this alley—Deckard shook his head, trying to clear out the last of the fog. Even without having been unconscious, his time sense was screwed up, an aftereffect of being in Sebastian’s private universe. That was one of the well-known problems with getting involved with any of that dehydrated deity stuff: a true Rip van Winkle syndrome, only in reverse. He had probably spent less than an hour of perceived time in there, and years could’ve gone by out here in the real world; no way of telling how much time had elapsed before he’d fallen into the alley’s muck and trash.
The rest of his memories coalesced, sharper than the indistinct images and forms left by dreams. He could recall everything that had happened, from the moment he’d found himself walking along Sebastian’s re-created L.A. street, with the Million Dollar Theater’s neon glimmering off the rain-soaked pavement, all through the seismic fragility of the toy-stocked hideaway at the top of the Bradbury Building. I lied to the poor bastard, thought Deckard. He was in no condition to start feeling guilty about it. All he’d been trying to do was buy a little more of that false world’s time, enough for Sebastian to tell him the big secrets. So he’d conned the genetic engineer turned small- scale god, handed him that line about Pris’s being somewhere else at the fringes of that patched-together L.A., waiting for Sebastian to come find her.
What a shuck-maybe it was just as well that he’d dropped out of the pocket universe and back into this larger one before Sebastian had found out he’d been given the shaft again. The guy might have really gone to pieces, worse than just the building shaking into plaster atoms.
Something else had been there, that Deckard remembered: the little box, battered white metal with a red cross on the lid. Sebastian had forced it into Deckard’s hands, pressing it on him, excitedly going on about how important it was .
Deckard looked down at the object in his hands, the exact same one as he’d seen and held in the dehydrated deity’s pocket universe. Makes no sense, he thought. The box looked like the container for some sort of regulation first aid kit; it even had clips on the back for mounting on a wall or in a cabinet-ordinary enough, but it didn’t belong here. It’d been part of that other, smaller universe, the one that the transmogrified Sebastian had pulled together from the contents of his head. Everything Deckard had perceived there, from the snakelike glow of the theater marquee’s neon shimmering on the empty wet sidewalk to the maniacal laughter of the clown mannequin, had its existence in that world, not this one. Even the feel of the box’s lid, both enamel smooth and rougher where the rusted metal was exposed; by rights, it should have stayed back there in Sebastian’s illusory hideout. Deckard knew he should have woken up with hands empty, no matter what some tiny withered god had tried to put in them.
The temptation to throw the metal box away—just another encumbrance, when Deckard had enough on his mind already-rose in him. He could just pitch it onto the rest of the trash and junk that formed the alley’s bottom strata, and not miss it. The box, first aid kit or whatever it was, or had been, felt virtually weightless—he gave it an experimental shake and heard some even smaller objects rattling around inside. Prying the lid open, Deckard found
