taken. In the damp air, as Deckard craned his neck to look upward, he caught a trace of perfume, one of the opiated floral scents that his mind and senses had learned to associate first with Rachael, then with Sarah. The invisible molecules were tinged with something more acrid but just as distinctive and evocative: cigarette smoke, something dark and expensive, suited to the taste of a Tyrell heir. He looked down and spotted, on the landing’s rough concrete, silken white paper and brown shreds of tobacco ground out cold by her shoe.
The metal steps echoed in the narrow space, loud enough to evoke a shiver in the video camera lenses that peeked out at him from their clefts in the unfinished walls. Up ahead, above him, Deckard saw a rust-mottled door left open, creaking on its hinges as the fan-driven storm winds swung it back and forth. He stopped, rain spattering in his face as he tried to catch sight of anyone waiting in the darkness. Nothing; he grasped the cold pipe rail and continued climbing.
“Sarah?” He pushed the door all the way back—the metal clanged against the side of the hatchway structure—and stepped out onto the roof. Warm rivulets trickled down his throat as he called out again. “Where are you?”
No answer came. Deckard walked farther from the door, leaving the stairs and his escape behind him. Looking up, he saw no stars but the broader points of the lights in the studio’s truss-work rigging; only a few meters away, as though—in a child’s notion of the world—he had climbed all the way to the dark heavens, the universe’s weld-stitched limit. The lights’ spectra had been shifted down to an icy blue, colder than the streets’ veins of neon; shadows fluttered across him like the wings of unseen, untouched ’birds as staggered ranks of archaic wind turbines, blades long and scimitar-curved, rotated in the damp breeze coming from the edges of the set.
He worked his way through the windmills, avoiding the scything arms, coming at last to the roof’s raised parapet. His hands, grasping the crumbled brick and thick tatters of asphalt sheeting, looked as bloodless as a corpse’s flesh.
They hardly seemed to belong to him at all; the uncanny sensation passed through him as though he were looking at someone else, someone who had slid inside his body and face. The hands, and the body that leaned its insubstantial weight into them, might have been those of the actor who bad played him in the video he had seen; the disoriented feeling increased, setting him even farther away. For a dizzying moment, Deckard wondered if he were still watching the video, the artificial world into which his own life had been transformed.
Squeezing his eyes shut, his hands gripping even tighter on the fragile stone, he tried to make himself feel real again. Or as real as possible. I’ve become my own ghost, thought Deckard. A dead thing that watches and mourns the past; he’d felt that way before, when he’d sat beside a glass-lidded coffin, leaning forward with his chin on his doubled fists, looking at the sleeping, dying woman he’d loved. Keeping his vigil through one sleepless night after another, time seeping away beneath the real stars, the rain swallowed by earth and the dead leaves beneath the trees. It might as well have been his own face he’d seen beneath the glass, in a video monitor rather than a coffin. He had died, or as good as, even before Rachael had; he’d just had the privilege of witnessing his own death, over and over, in one cold world after another.
The bleak meditation didn’t end, but became familiar enough, an old wound, that he could function once more. Deckard opened his eyes and looked over his shoulder at the elaborate rooftop set. They did a good job, he had to admit.
Urbenton and his crew of technicians, the people who had constructed the set—in the thin, fragmented light, he could see how close they had come to the original, how much the fake was indistinguishable from the genuine. The turbines spun in place, like idiot dervishes on edge, over a buckling field speckled with pigeon shit—had they scraped up the droppings from an actual L.A. building roof and shipped them here, or was there a flock of birds kept on hand in some remote aviary zone of the station? It all smelled real enough, a blending of monsoon steam and guanoid archaeology, that at least some of Deckard’s senses were fooled.
He looked back over the parapet at the imitation city that surrounded the building. All the little tricks of the video trade had been used, from foreshortened perspectives to banks of fiber optics for a vista of pinpoint lights stretching to an imaginary horizon; other whole sections were blank or covered with chroma-key backdrops, for digitized mattes to be ceegeed in during postproduction. The miniature city seemed caught between different levels of reality, at some muddled point halfway on the line from dream to something that could be touched. In some way, that made the dark nocturnal city he saw now as real as the L.A. he remembered on Earth. Realer than real, thought Deckard. A night made of the same stuff as the replicants, dreams and fears and a desperate longing to exist. He had lived in that inchoate city, had been part of it, but—he knew now-hadn’t belonged in it. It’s their world.
He nodded slowly, rain trickling across the backs of his hands. Their night as well, in which he was just a shadow, a thing that wouldn’t even be remembered when the sun came up.
“Hello, Deckard.” The voice—the one that he’d known he would hear-came from behind him. “I was waiting for you.”
From over his shoulder, he looked and saw Sarah standing a few yards from him, in the center of the roof’s area, the wind turbines spinning and stretching away into darkness. He turned and leaned back against the parapet, hands gripping its edge on either side. “I had some business to take care of first.
With the little girl. I had a talk with her.”
“How sweet.” Sarah stepped forward into the partial light filtering down from above. The skin of her face and throat looked cold, bloodless. “I suppose that was a good thing for you to do. Whether she’s real or not. Actually . . . I don’t care anymore.” The gun in her hand glinted as though a piece of the dark had frozen. “It’s not important, is it?”
“Maybe not.” His heart had ticked faster for a moment at seeing a weapon in someone else’s hand, knowing that he didn’t have one. “It all depends. On what you want.”
“Ah.” She nodded and smiled. “That’s true. I used to want things. Different things.” With cruel playfulness, Sarah raised the gun to eye level, arm straight, and looked down the barrel at him. “And now . . . just one thing.
Guess what it is.”
“I’ve got a pretty good idea.” Inside him, his pulse had slowed back down as a resigned calm moved through his blood. Whatever was going to happen, he had prepared himself for it. “I wouldn’t have come here if I didn’t know.”
The face of the woman he loved studied him over the gun’s black metal. “You’re not really human, are you, Deckard?” Rachael’s face, Sarah wearing it like a mask, though it had been hers to begin with. “If you ever were, you’ve managed to get over it. Like I have. So it’s not just a cop thing, having ice water going in and out of your heart. It’s just something that happens to people like us.”
He nodded in agreement. “The Eye of Compassion .
“What was that?”
“Nothing,” answered Deckard. “Something . . . somebody told me about. We’re not the ones who decide who’s human and who’s not.” He looked over to the faked skyline surrounding the building, then back to her. “There’s nothing we can do about it.”
“Yes, there is. There always is.” No trace of irony or sarcasm sounded in the woman’s voice. “You shouldn’t give up hope like that.” Her hand squeezed the gun, tight and trembling. “You can always kill. That works. Especially if you do it to the things you love. Then . . . then you have a chance.”
“A chance of what? Of being human?”
“No Sarah gave a shake of her head. “Of not caring anymore. So when you die-when you take care of yourself finally—it’s not so hard.”
The voice of madness, speaking the same words inside his head—Deckard listened to her and knew that it would be easy to agree. Or to go even further, deeper into one’s own madness; the temptation always existed in him to accept only what he saw, what part of him wanted to see and believe. That it really was Rachael standing in front of him, alive again, unchanged. That the other woman with the same face, the one named Sarah, was as irreal as she had thought the child waiting downstairs inside the building was. A memory, a bad dream, a hallucination. If that were the case, he wouldn’t have any problem with her pointing a gun at him and pulling the trigger. That was a small price to pay for seeing Rachael again, if only for the moment between the firing of the bullet and its entry into his deluded heart.
He had closed his eyes, though he could still see her-remembering was enough for that. Easier as well, to mentally edit out the infinitesimal differences—the coldness at the dark centers of her eyes, a hard curl at one
