for self-preservation.
The other aberration on the basic instinct directs the behavior toward the organism’s own offspring. You following me? The organism—the replicant-murders his own children. It’s like a breakdown in an extended immune system, one that extends beyond the replicant’s own skin. The primitive drive is inverted, so that the individual attacks and destroys the very thing it’s supposed to protect.”
“I don’t get it,” said Deckard. “If that’s the behavior that’s programmed into the replicants, then there’s no contest. There’s no way that they can win any kind of struggle against the U.N.’s colonists. Because they’ll destroy themselves; they’ll reproduce, but they’ll murder their own children. It’s all over for them. They’re a biological dead end.”
“Not quite. The ‘stepfather syndrome’ behavior is built into them, but it’s buried. It’s not activated unless it’s triggered. That’s where you come in, Deckard. You and the little job you agreed to undertake for the cops and the U.N. security forces that had managed to inifitrate the rep-symp underground. You’re carrying the trigger right here in this briefcase. The data that’s been imbedded in it isn’t any list of disguised replicants on Earth; that was just the cover story to get you to agree to the job. What the people who put this together did was encode the memetic bomb, the trigger to activate the buried behavior pattern, and stick it in here, in this box. Then they wrapped it up, like putting a bow on a birthday present, by imbedding Roy Batty’s cerebral contents in there-more to goad you into taking on the delivery job than to actually help you get there. Because in reality, you don’t need any help; there’s no real effort being made by the authorities to stop you. The U.N. and the police, all of them—they want you to get there. You delivering that briefcase to the replicant insurgents is what their big plan is all about. You’d be showing up on the replicants’ doorstep with the trigger to the bomb that’s already wired into them. The buried behavior pattern would be activated, and there’d be nothing they could do to stop it. And that’d be the end of the replicants. When they die, there’d be no replicant children to replace them.”
“This is crap,” growled Batty’s voice. “Don’t listen to this jerk. He’s just playing with your mind, Deckard. He’s the one who’s working for the authorities.”
“I’m afraid our friend here protests too much.” Marley rapped his knuckles on the briefcase’s lid. “He’s hardly a disinterested party in this whole affair, is he? Since his whole existence is bound up with what the two of you have been told about his contents. And why you should go ahead and deliver them.”
“There’s someone else,” said Deckard. “Batty’s not the only one. There was someone else who convinced me I should do it.”
“Ah, yes. Our transcendent authority in these matters.” Marley nodded. “The good Sebastian, who’s gone from this mortal realm to a higher if slightly smaller one. It only goes to show that even a deity, albeit a dehydrated one, can be wrong.”
“You knew I went to see him? In his little pocket universe?”
“Of course.” Marley gave a casual shrug. “The people I’m working for—the real rep-symps-know all kinds of things. The other rep-symps may have been infiltrated and taken over by the police, but it doesn’t end there. My bunch has its contacts and moles on the other side. They know what kind of data was imbedded in the briefcase, and what else they put in it. And what they instructed Batty to tell you so you’d go off and get convinced by Sebastian about your holy mission. Your delivery job. The problem is, Sebastian can tell you only what he himself believes to be true; he’s not omniscient, at least as far as this world goes.”
If he couldn’t believe Sebastian—and Deckard had to admit that could be the case, that the little genetic engineer, even in his new transfigured incarnation, could’ve been lied to and misled—the question became, once more, a matter of trusting anyone at all. This Marley character had at least the advantage of a certain cold logic on his side to carry his arguments. They’ve made it easy for me, thought Deckard. He glanced over at the video monitor.
All it would have taken, a simple thing, was to have let the director Urbenton go ahead and dub Deckard’s face onto the actor playing him. A standard production technique. And then I would’ve been a marked man. Anybody in the emigrant colony could have recognized him and turned him in, if the authorities had, in fact, been hunting him down. But instead .
“You’re asking me to believe a lot,” said Deckard. “Not that everybody I run into hasn’t been doing the same. But this ‘stepfather syndrome’ business—this memetic bomb that I’m supposed to be carrying—that seems pretty extreme. Why should I believe you on this one? Got any proof?”
“Mere evidence isn’t enough for you.” The smile appeared on Marley’s face again. “Or logic, what you can figure out about what’s happening around you—”
“It’s not that.” Deckard didn’t bother with a smile. “I just don’t trust murderers.”
One of Marley’s eyebrows rose. “So not even yourself?”
“Especially not myself.”
“All right,” said Marley, exuding an affable calm. “You want proof? Or at least as much as can be gotten in this fallible universe.
Fine—you’ve been carrying it around with you.”
“The briefcase?” Deckard laid his hand on it. “I thought that was the whole problem, not the answer.”
“Well, maybe you’ve packed a few extra things inside. Things that might sort out the situation a little bit.” Marley pulled the briefcase out from beneath Deckard’s palm and turned it around toward himself.
“Get your hands off me—”
Marley ignored the protest that came in Batty’s voice. His thumbs pushed back the latch buttons on either side of the handle; a second later, he had thrown the lid back, exposing the lined interior.
“Not a lot in here.” He glanced up at Deckard. “You could’ve made better use of it, you know. Thrown in a change of clothes or something. No matter—there’s enough. At least for right now.”
Leaning back against the booth’s padding, Deckard watched as the other man examined the briefcase. A rectangular packet, one end torn off and then folded down to preserve the contents, was held up before him.
“You held on to this?” Marley looked at the name SEBASTIAN on the packet.
“Thought it might come in handy, I guess. Just in case you wanted to talk to him again. Though what more he could tell you, I have no idea. Still, maybe you could just keep it as a little souvenir of your travels.” He laid the packet down on the booth’s table. The briefcase’s lid blocked Deckard’s view of the other man’s hands rummaging inside. “Or perhaps you just wanted to keep the original package all together, with all the bits and pieces-since the collaborator rep-symps, the ones the cops have taken over, put this in here, you might as well keep it the way it came to you. But this is something new.”
Marley held up another object. “I know what was in here originally, and this wasn’t part of it. You just put this in here since you got back from Sebastian’s pocket universe.”
Deckard looked across the table and saw a square of white-enameled metal in Marley’s hand. The other man turned it slightly, revealing the broad red cross on the small box’s lid. The old first aid kit-ancient, perhaps, considering how battered and scuffed it appeared. He had almost forgotten about it; when he had left the hovel, tugging the Rachael child along with him by one hand, the briefcase in the other, he had stopped when he had felt the little metal box slipping out of his jacket. He had popped open the briefcase and thrown the box in there for safekeeping, not even trying to figure out why he was hanging on to it at all instead of pitching it away as a worthless piece of junk.
“You do remember, don’t you? Where you got this?” Marley held the white metal box up in front of his smile. “It wasn’t that long ago.”
“What do you know about that?” The question of just how extensive the other man’s sources of information were troubled Deckard again. “You weren’t there when it happened.”
“No,” admitted Marley. “But I knew Sebastian had this. It’s a pretty important little item, even if it doesn’t look it. So it’s worth keeping track of. If Sebastian had it, and now you do, chances are good that you got it from him.
Logical, huh? And I’m right, aren’t I?”
A nod from Deckard. “So what’s so important about it?”
“Well, why don’t we take a look?” Marley gave a playful wink. “Shouldn’t be too hard for a couple of geniuses like us to figure out. Let’s see With his thumb, he pried open the lid; rust in the hinge joint creaked as the flat metal was prodded back by one fingertip. “Not too promising, if you’re looking for the secrets of the universe.” He glanced up at Deckard. “Old bandages and dried-up disinfectant.” The fingertip now pushed around the box’s antique-looking contents. “How about these aspirin?” When he pried the lid off one of the tiny bottles, the decayed vinegar smell
