shielding his face with his upraised hands as the fragments bit at his wrists.
In a few seconds, the shards had finished tumbling to the ground with the quick, high-pitched notes of breaking ice. Deckard lowered his hands; in front of him was the metal frame of the viewscreen, bent and twisted by the bullet’s explosion. Scattered around it were the cables and debris of the workings, now reduced to dull, unrecognizable scraps of silicon and unlit phosphors. The world that had been contained in the screen was gone, replaced by the one in which Deckard stood, the simulation of an alley in Los Angeles. No corpse, his own or Kowalski’s, lay on the rain-soaked concrete this time.
He turned, knowing what he would see behind him. Standing there, as Rachael had stood so long ago, her coat’s high collar brushing against her bound hair—Sarah Tyrell lowered the gun she held in both hands. The neon of the empty cityscape silhouetted her form, enough light leaking past to show the coldness of her gaze, the slight lift to one corner of her mouth.
“That’s not right,” said Deckard. “If you want to get it just the way it was.
Rachael didn’t smile after she shot Kowalski. It wasn’t so easy for her.”
Sarah let the gun dangle at her side. “We don’t need an exact re-creation.”
She regarded him through half-lidded eyes. “Why don’t we just say that . . . we’re rewriting history. Changing things to the way they should have been.”
With the gun, she gestured down the alley’s length, as if the other figures were still visible there. “After all- consider how much simpler things would’ve been, for so many people, if Rachael hadn’t come out and found you, and saved you. Then Her gaze shifted back to him. “Whatever else happened . . . you would’ve been dead before I’d ever had a chance to meet you.” An undertone of regret sounded in her voice. “Simpler . . . but I wouldn’t have wanted it that way .
From the front of his shirt, Deckard brushed away a few more bits of glass.
“Where’s the girl?” That was his most important business. “Where did you take her?”
“The girl?” Sarah looked puzzled for a moment, then nodded. “Now I remember . . . they left her with me. Urbenton and the others; they thought you wouldn’t come otherwise. But that’s not true, is it?” She smiled knowingly. “You would’ve come here . . . just for me.”
“That’s true.” The backs of Deckard’s hands were spotted with blood where the shards of the viewscreen had struck him. “I wouldn’t have missed it. For anything.” He watched a red drop fall from the tip of his little finger, then looked back up at Sarah. “But I just want to know that she’s safe. Where is she?”
“Oh . . . she’s safe enough.” Sarah looked unconcerned. “As safe as anything can be in this world.” She raised the gun, bringing it up at the end of her straightened arm. “You should be more worried about yourself.” The black muzzle pointed directly at him. “You’re the one who’s not quite safe.”
He didn’t bother taking the unloaded gun from inside his jacket; he knew she couldn’t be bluffed by it. Instead, Deckard looked up at the video cameras mounted in the rigging overhead. “What about all those?” Some of the lenses were focussed on him, others on Sarah, with a few drawn back to take in the whole scene. “You must have cut some kind of deal with Urbenton. To provide him with the kind of footage he likes.” He pointed to the gun levelled at himself. “Is this going to do it?”
“You’re good, Deckard.” She nodded in appreciation. The fur of her coat’s collar was spiked with raindrops, like miniature jewels. “That’s the cop in you-always analyzing the situation.” The gun lowered in her hand. “You’re right, though. They wanted more—Urbenton and the rest of them. They set this all up She gestured toward the lights and the tracking video cameras.
“Just for the two of us. There’s just some things that special effects and computer-generated images can’t really do.” A shrug. “No substitute for live action, is there?”
Deckard shook his head. “No—there isn’t.”
“Or death, either. It’s so unsatisfying when that’s faked. It’s like . . . what was it the replicant said to you? I read it in the script. ‘Like an itch you can never scratch.’ ” Sarah smiled at him. “That’s why I’m so glad you could make it here, Deckard. We’ve been through so much together—it would be a shame not to do it right when we’re just about at the end.”
“Oh . . . I agree.” He wondered how he was going to get the gun away from her.
If she had been crazy before, she was worse now. But not stupid—Sarah had carefully kept enough distance between them so that he didn’t have a chance of suddenly lunging toward her, grabbing her arm and twisting it behind her until she dropped the weapon. She’d drill him before he got halfway to her, and he’d land at her feet with the back of his skull at the closed end of the alley.
“Maybe we should go somewhere and talk about it.”
“We’ll talk, all right. But not just now.” Sarah turned away from him, then coyly glanced over her shoulder. “I think you’ll know where to find me.”
He watched her walking away, out into the empty street, the pools of rain reflecting her image like polished obsidian.
A bank of video cameras watched as well, the glistening lenses turning on their pivot mounts to follow her, until she had disappeared from view.
His guess was right. Even before Deckard got to the entryway of the set’s replica of the Bradbury Building, he saw the footprints shining wetly in the protected space between the ornate columns; small, a woman’s, with no attempt having been made to erase them. It had to be Sarah; no one else was aboard the station, Outer Hollywood having been vacated by the watchers of his progress.
He supposed that Urbenton was safely tucked inside some transport in the same orbit, viewing at long distance the results of his production arrangements. As Deckard had sloshed from one rainy zone of the L.A. set to the next, the certainty of being isolated in this small world had increased, as though the city itself had been emptied of every face except his own.
Behind him, the artificial rains lashed the street, the marquee of the Million Dollar Theater shedding its plastic letters one by one, the winds spelling out some obscure noun in the pooling waters. Deckard pushed the creaking door into a cathedrallike dark, then stepped after it. The cameras focussed on his back went dead, like birds in winter, as the ones inside the building were roused by his presence.
Shafts of clouded light swerved through the elaborate set’s interior as he gripped the stair rail and looked upward. No U.N. blimp moved outside—there wouldn’t have been clearance for even a simulation beneath the rigging’s pipes and struts—but a carefully synchronized array of lights achieved the same effect. It’s not even as real, thought Deckard, as Sebastian’s world. In that little pocket universe, at least, there had been something like a sky and distance between one point and any other; there would have been miles for the genetic engineer turned deity to have travelled before he found his heart’s desire. But here, in this false L.A., everything had been compressed and squeezed down to its essentials, the way the insane obliterated all but the pieces of their obsessions. As Deckard mounted the steps, cold wrought iron sliding under his palm, he wondered if it was his head or Sarah’s that he had entered, the thin trails of light revealing the wreckage of her hopes or his own.
At the end of the encircling corridor, with rain trickling down through the rafters and decaying plaster above him, with the unlit empty space traversed by the elevator’s elongated vertical cage to one side, Deckard pushed open the door. The same door that he had opened in the past, in memory, in a real L.A., and in dreams and a pocket universe—it swung away from his hand, revealing the high-ceilinged room beyond. He almost expected the same things to happen as the first time, the two sawn-off friends of Sebastian’s—the animated teddy bear and the spike-helmeted toy soldier—to march out and greet him.
Instead, Deckard saw the Rachael child sitting at the massive claw-footed table, her legs dangling at the front of the chair, its carved dark-oak back extending above her head. She didn’t notice him when he first stepped inside the room; the braid of her dark hair draped over her shoulder as she bent her head over the sepia-toned illustrations in a Victorian gardener’s manual.
Between the pages a single rose had been pressed; she lifted the brown, ancient flower to her nose, trying to catch whatever scent still remained.
That was when she spotted Deckard silently watching her.
“You’re here.” The Rachael child spoke calmly, flipping her ribbon-tied braid behind her back. She carefully laid the papery rose inside the book and closed the stiff leather covers. “I knew you would be. Eventually.”
“Are you all right?” Cautiously, Deckard scanned the room as he stepped forward. It looked as it had when he’d been in Sebastian’s private world, dusty and stuffed with wind-up dolls and mannequins. The laughing clown figure towered over one end of the table, its manic smile frozen on the stark white face. “Did anything happen to
