It made sense; or put another way, the video broadcast didn’t. This was their chance, thought Deckard, to make sure everybody knows what I look like. And it hadn’t happened. The corollary of the principle that, for him, everything happened for a reason—not paranoia but wisdom, a survivor’s assessment of how the universe worked —was that when things didn’t happen, that was also because somebody wanted it that way.
“Then that would mean Deckard slowly picked through his own words. “It would mean the authorities don’t want to stop me. They don’t want to catch me . . .”
“They want you to get away.” On the other side of the table, Marley regarded him with evident satisfaction, pleased with the impact his arguments had made.
“So the question you have to ask yourself now is . . . why?”
“Why do they want me to get away.” Deckard rubbed his mouth with a knuckle.
“They must have a reason.”
“It’s not you, pal.” Marley seemed to be taking pity on him. “If it’s any comfort to you-nobody’s ever considered you to be that important. So you needn’t bother building up your ego now. It’s what you’re carrying. The job you’ve undertaken. Got it?” He smiled. “It’s the briefcase. They want you to deliver it. Not the rep-symps, but the authorities. The police, the U.N. . . . all of them. The bad guys.”
“I told you!” Batty’s voice shouted louder from beneath the table. The briefcase vibrated against Deckard’s shin. “I told you this guy was trouble.
He’s messing with your mind. Don’t listen to him!”
The Rachael child leaned to one side in order to talk to the briefcase. “It’s okay,” she said in a soothing tone. “Nothing bad’s going to happen to you—”
“Christ,” spoke Batty disgustedly. “I don’t need this. You people are all screwing up big-time. Man, I wish I still had legs. I’d walk out of here right now and take my chances on my own. I’d let you all just sit here until you rotted away.”
“Shut up.” Deckard resisted the impulse to give the briefcase another kick.
“Problem is, the guy’s making sense.”
“That’s not a problem.” A smile and a shake of Marley’s head. “It’s your salvation, Deckard.”
“Goddamn it, don’t listen—”
Batty’s voice had gone up enough in volume to require action. Angrily, Deckard reached down and grabbed the handle, pulling the briefcase up and slamming it down hard on the table. He looked around to see if anyone in the place had noticed; as far as he could discern, the bartender and the patrons scattered among the tables were still watching the dimly lit adventures of the re-created Deckard in the video.
“Listen up,” said Deckard, laying his hand on top of the briefcase’s lid.
“You’re getting on my nerves. You keep yelling and carrying on, somebody’s bound to think that’s a little unusual. And I don’t really feel like attracting attention right now. Understand?”
“You’re the one who doesn’t understand.” Batty’s voice had turned sulky. “You got a job to do, and this asshole is getting in the way.”
“I don’t care what I agreed to do.” He pulled his hand back. “Just shut up and let me work this out, or so help me, I’ll leave you at the nearest pawnshop and I’ll take the two bucks I’ll get for you and spend it on aspirin. I’m not joking.”
The briefcase said nothing. It radiated a silent, sullen fury.
“Good call.” Marley nodded approvingly. “You’re the one in charge. Remember that—”
“Fine.” The anger boiling up in Deckard hadn’t abated. “I’m in charge? Then I want answers. I want to know what’s going on. Right now, without any more cute shit from you.”
“All right.” Marley laid both his large-boned hands on the table. “I’ll give you the short-and-sweet version, if you think your little mind can handle it. The briefcase here”—he tapped on it with one flngernail—“We not what you think it Is. It’s not what you’ve been told.”
“Yeah? So what Is it, then?”
Marley smelled coldly at him. “You’re carrying a bomb.”
Deckard sighed wearily. “The hell I am.” He had been hoping for something more plausible than that. “The authorities supposedly want me to carry this briefcase out to the replicant insurgents—because it’s some kind of bomb? Get real.”
“I am real.” Marley’s smile didn’t change. “This is as real as it gets.”
“Come on.” Deckard pointed to the briefcase. “How much damage could be accomplished with something this size? And it came to me virtually empty; even if it were packed with high explosives—Christ, even if it’d been shoved full of fissionable materials-how much of a bang do you think that would amount to?
Not enough to destroy a rebellion that’s spread across all the U.N. colonies out in the stars. You’re talking some big distances there, and a lot of replicants. If this so-called bomb killed thousands of them—even hundreds of thousands—that wouldn’t change anything.” He shook his head in disgust. “How about you figuring something out? Tell me-why would the authorities go to this much trouble just to enable me to carry one piddly bomb out there? Doesn’t make sense.”
“Oh . . . it might.” Marley shrugged. “Depends on what kind of bomb it is, doesn’t it? Problem with you cop types, all you can ever think of are things that go boom. Little boom, you kill one person; big boom, and you kill lots.
But that’s as far as your imagination goes. There are some things that don’t go boom at all, and they kill all the people you need to.”
“For Christ’s sake.” Batty’s voice came from the briefcase. “The guy’s a liar, and he’s not even a good one.”
Deckard ignored the disembodied words. “So you’d like me to believe that there’s some kind of biological agent in this thing. A virus, a bacterium . . . some kind of disease vector. And my taking it out to the insurgents would somehow introduce that disease into their population and wipe them out. Is that it?” He felt even more disgusted, considering the shallowness of the concocted story. “It doesn’t wash. That makes even less sense. One, replicant genetics are based upon their human originals, like the way the replicant Roy Batty was based upon the human Batty who got stuck in this box. So the replicant population is as genetically diverse as the human population, so the chance of coming up with a disease that would cut a wide enough swath through the insurgents is just about zero. And second, even if you could come up with a disease like that, some kind of superbug, it would almost certainly be just as deadly for the humans out there in the colonies. The U.N. authorities aren’t going to wipe out all their emigrants in order to take care of the insurgents—what would be the point?”
“You know, Deckard, you’re kind of a wordy bastard. For a cop, that is.”
“I get inspired,” he replied sourly, “when I think somebody’s trying to bulishit me. You want a third? I’ll give it to you for free. Replicants have four-year life spans. You don’t have to do anything to kill them off, let alone introduce some bio-engineered disease. If all the U.N. wanted to do was to eliminate them en masse, it would just have to outwait them, let ’em come to the ends of their own built-in ropes.”
“Very good.” Marley smiled and nodded in admiration. “Not bad arguments for somebody who’s under the kind of pressure you are. You make some big assumptions, though. You’re underestimating both how scared and how ruthless the U.N. can be. The insurgents have them in a panic; they’d happily kill off the entire human emigrant population if that’s what it took to knock the replicants down. They can always get more emigrants; how much rottener does life have to get on Earth before everybody’s lined up to go? There’s already a nice little bottleneck full of ’em right here on Mars, just waiting for their tickets out. And as for the business about the replicants and their four-year life spans Marley shook his head. “Maybe that’s not quite the issue that you think it is. But the main thing is that you’re just wrong. You’re wrong about what you think I’m trying to tell you. I never said the briefcase had some kind of disease agent inside it. You’re just jumping to your own conclusions way too fast, Deckard. Maybe you should learn to just sit back and listen for a change.”
“All right.” Deckard leaned his shoulder blades into the booth’s padding. “I’m listening.”
“When I said you were carrying a bomb, I didn’t mean the kind that goes boom, or something full of nasty little bacteria and viruses.” The smile had evaporated from Marley’s face. “I’m talking a memetic bomb. Pure information that changes what people do—in this case, what replicants do. When you were told that there was important data imbedded in the briefcase, that wasn’t a lie. That’s all there is inside it. And that’s enough. Enough to take care of the insurgent replicants.”
