swung their rifles, clearing a path to the ground vehicle that would take them out to the emigrant colony’s landing field.
“You should have killed him,” Sarah said when she and the video director were back aboard the shadow corporation’s yacht. She had kept her silence until then. “When you had the chance.”
“But that wasn’t the deal we made.” Urbenton glanced up at her, then returned to fussing with the intercom buttons on the lounge’s desk. “You accepted my help-all the assistance we needed to pull this off—but you knew there were conditions attached. You should just be grateful that the authorities owed me a favor for going along with them on that video they just broadcast here.”
She sat back in the wing chair, her favorite one. “You sound like you’re not even interested in having Deckard killed.”
“I’m not, particularly. I just think it’ll make a great tape when it happens. A really neat show, even better than this last one I did.” His broad fingertip jabbed at another button. “And I just want to rev up the image, that’s all. The right set, the right feel it’ll be wonderful.” Another voice spoke up, unprompted by any of Urbenton’s poking at the intercom controls.
When it finished and clicked off, he turned toward Sarah. “That’s it,” he announced. “They’ve got the little girl aboard. We’re ready to go.”
Finally, she thought. She could feel it deep inside herself, the end time coming at last. She didn’t care if Urbenton and all the rest of them went on acting and talking as if they could also perceive her hallucinations; it didn’t matter.
She didn’t even care which L.A. they were heading toward. Just as long as she knew that-soon enough— Deckard would be there as well.
He took the gun with him even though he knew that Marley had fired off every round that had been loaded inside it. The weapon might still come in handy, despite feeling so much lighter.
“You’re back here?” The man on the other side of the counter sneered at Deckard. “I thought you didn’t care for our services. Figured we’d pretty much lost you as a customer.”
Deckard didn’t feel like getting into another argument with the man; the last one, when he’d brought the skiff back to the rental yard upon his return from the Outer Hollywood station, had been pointless enough. He dug into his pocket and brought out all the cash he had, a hot sweaty clump of scrip, and dumped it on the counter. “Just give me the same one I had before,” he said. “If it’s fueled up and ready to go.”
Leaning his weight against the counter’s front, Deckard didn’t bother watching as the other man sorted through the bills. He felt tired and bruised, the physical aftermath of the attack on the bar where he’d been sitting and listening to the late Marley.
The front of his jacket was still spotted with Marley’s blood, memorial evidence of the assault rifle bullets that had poured into the booth. I got off light, thought Deckard as he looked down at himself. His jaw ached from the rifle butt blow he’d taken from the U.N. storm trooper; when he’d come to on the floor of the bar, it’d taken a few minutes for a spell of blurred double vision to clear, at least enough for him to stumble out onto the emigrant colony’s streets.
“You’re short,” announced the man behind the rental yard’s counter. He stirred the bills about with his greasy forefinger. “There’s not enough here for the deposit.”
Deckard brought himself up from his bleak thoughts and levelled his gaze at the man. “Then I’ll take it on credit.”
The man’s laugh barked out. “We don’t do that.”
Wearily, Deckard sighed and reached inside his jacket. “Yes, you do.” He placed the cold muzzle end of the gun against the man’s forehead.
A few minutes later, as the skiff was passing through the orbits of Phobos and Deimos—the rental yard man had told him to just keep the little craft, to not even bother returning—Deckard pressed his aching body back into the cockpit seat and assessed his situation. There’s a limit to what you can do with an empty gun, he told himself. Especially since, where he was going, they would likely know that it was empty, that he was essentially unarmed. In some ways, it didn’t even matter; he wasn’t sure why he was going at all.
Just to get killed—that was the likeliest answer to come to him. Could there be a better reason? Before he had lost consciousness, lying on the floor of the bar, Deckard had caught a glimpse of the figure standing in the doorway, past the U.N. storm troopers taking care of business. Even without that sighting, he would have known that Sarah Tyrell was the prime motivator of all that happened. A dramatic touch, typical of her; she might have arranged for the lighting to be as perfect as that, spilling past her into the bar’s darkness, silhouetting her like some shadowed angel, merciless and unavoidable.
One other glimpse, sighted as he had rolled onto his back, the last of his awareness pouring out through the hole that the rifle butt blow had knocked in his world—he had even reached up, a futile hand swamped by the black wave engulfing him. Reached up to stop the men pulling the Rachael child out of the booth, taking her away .
That was all he had seen. The memory of it rushed through his aching skull as soon as he had been able to lift his head from the bar’s floor. Deckard had brushed bits of glass from his face as he’d worked himself into a sitting position and looked around the empty space. He’d been alone, patrons and bartender having wisely fled. The presence of the dead had been with him, both in Marley’s corpse, slumped across the blood-mired table, and the briefcase, torn to mute fragments. Deckard had prodded the largest remaining piece, a corner with one lid-hinge still attached, and had gotten no response. Whatever part of Roy Batty, the human original, had been imbedded in the briefcase was gone now, dispersed to atoms as cold and fine as the white powder scattered irretrievably from the empty Sebastian packet. The walls of the bar had seemed to recede as Deckard had dropped the dead rubbish from his hands, as though the dimly lit space had grown as hollow as the one inside his chest.
Before he had gotten to his feet, balancing himself with one hand against the booth’s table, he had found one other thing in the wreckage. Obviously left for him, placed right at his fingertips—Deckard had reached down and picked up the white rectangle of a business card, flipping it over to see the words SPEED DEATH PRODUCTIONS and Urbenton’s name below that.
Fm doing just what they want me to, thought Deckard as he gazed out the skiff’s cockpit at the stars wheeling by. The gears meshing around him were pushed by both the living and the dead, with no great distinction made between those categories. Even the dead Marley had conspired, in his way, to limit all possibilities for action to one inevitable line. Quick thinking on Marley’s part: when the U.N. storm troopers had burst into the bar, he had used the gun to eliminate the briefcase itself, and thus any chance of Deckard’s accomplishing the job he’d accepted. There’d be no carrying of Batty and whatever other information had been encoded into the box—Isidore’s list of disguised replicants or memetic bomb; no telling now—to the insurgents in the outer colonies. Before he’d died, Marley might have had the comfort of knowing that his own job, the one of stopping Deckard’s delivery of the briefcase, had been pulled off.
Which left the teeth of the other gears. Sarah Tyrell and Urbenton, and the forces aligned with them, had correctly read Deckard’s mind, had predicted what he would do when he regained consciousness and found both the Rachael child missing and the simple card indicating where she had gone. Urbenton’s card; the only address on it was a contact point in care of the studios at the Outer Hollywood station. That was Urbenton’s world, the one in which he comfortably operated. That was the destination to which Deckard had programmed the skiff, as inevitably as the tape unrolling on some distant video monitor.
They knew he would come there, gun loaded or not, whether his chances of survival were at zero or any point above. Not just for the little girl, the child named Rachael, but for Sarah as well. Wherever she went, he would have to go there, inevitably. Her destiny had become so intertwined with his that there was no escaping. I should’ve killed her when I had the chance—Deckard gazed out of the cockpit without even seeing the stars. Too late for regrets now; he had waited too long, his hand stayed by memory of another woman’s face, the one he had loved, identical in every aspect to Sarah. The great plan that he’d had, that he’d conceived all the way back on Earth so long ago, had been the excuse for not putting the muzzle of a gun against her temple and pulling the trigger. Deckard knew that now. I should’ve killed her, but I couldn’t have.
Things had changed, though; he wondered if they had changed enough. Maybe he could do it now, despite her mirror resemblance to the dead Rachael. If Ihave to, he decided at last. If that was what Sarah was counting on, his inability to kill anything that looked so much like the woman who had slept in a glass-lidded coffin and who now slept and woke only in the sealed chambers of his remembering, then she might have a surprise coming to
