voice, to squeeze it past the constriction tightening around his artificial lungs. I know this room. And what had happened in it. “Yeah . . . I know what to say.”
“Dynamite. You guys are a couple of real professionals.” The man pulled something dark and heavy out of his jacket and handed it to the Kowalski replicant. “Here, use this. It’s the same one you’ll have when we’re taping.”
The replicant examined the gun with small eyes narrowed even further, as though some personal anti- Kowalski trap might be hidden inside it. He finally wrapped both fists around its handle and levered it underneath the table.
Oh no, thought Holden as he watched the preparations. I know what comes next .
“All right. Let’s try it.” The other man stood back against the set’s doorway, arms folded across his chest. A smile tugged at one corner of his mouth, as if the scene before him had already been found pleasing. “Take it from where you ask him about his mother.”
“M-my mother?” The Kowalski replicant looked over his shoulder at the man.
“Don’t worry about it. It’s not for real.” The man’s voice turned kindly.
“It’s just a video, okay? And it’s not even that right now. Just for practice, that’s all. A little rehearsal.” He glanced over at Holden. “Come on, buddy; we don’t have all day. Just say your line.”
The fluids that his bio-mechanical heart moved around in Holden’s body had congealed—even the breath in his lungs felt thick and heavy as stone. Underneath that crushing weight, part of him struggled to push his legs beneath the chair, to stand up and walk out of the re-created room pressing tight around his shoulders .
But he couldn’t. You’ll give it away, the remaining rational part of his mind argued. Walk out of here, and it’ll prove that you’re not one of the hired actors. The man standing in front of the door would have set security down on Holden’s ass in no time.
Besides, he told himself, there’s nothing to worry about. All he had to do was bluff this officious bastard a little while longer, then find some way to slip out of here and continue looking for Deckard.
The rational part had its reasons for him to go on sitting at the table, across from the replicant whose image was so firmly bolted into his memory.
They amounted to nothing compared to the irrational ones.
Fear kept him nailed to the seat. Fear, and the locks of time. Time repeating itself, a loop tightening around him, against which it was impossible to prevail. He knew what was coming—he remembered everything now—and knew that there was nothing he could do to keep it from happening all over again.
“Say your line.” The partial smile ebbed on the face of the man by the door.
“Go on.”
Holden closed his eyes for a moment, to make sure that he got it absolutely right. “Tell me He opened his eyes and looked straight into the resentful gaze of the Kowalski replicant. “Tell me all the good things that come into your mind, when you think about . . . your mother .
“My mother?” The replicant was right in character. His voice sounded just the way the other Kowalski’s had, so long ago.
“That’s right.” Holden couldn’t keep himself from nodding, even smiling, the same superior fraction of expression that he’d had the first time through this loop. All he lacked was the cigarette and the blue smoke curling above his head. “Your mother.”
The Kowalski replicant’s face flushed with anger, small eyes widening.
That’s perfect, thought Holden. Unresisting.
“I’ll tell you about my mother—”
That was all he heard; the rest wasn’t spoken, but shouted in flame that burst through the table, leapt and struck him in the chest, where his old, fleshiy heart had once been. The new heart took the bullet’s impact without pain, without even shock. His breath was blood in his mouth; the artificial lungs had collapsed into two clenched fists.
The chair spun around with him in it, head thrust hard against the words TYRELL CORP. He accepted another shot between the shoulder blades, the bullet tumbling through the chair back; fragments of surgically inert metal and polyethylene spattered before him in a red mist. The bullet’s momentum thrust both him and the chair through the flimsy wall panel— Just as it had before.
Well, they got that right, thought
Holden. The chair had stopped, caught by debris and black cables on the set’s flooring, but he hadn’t. He found himself lying in a spreading pooi of blood, his fingertips heated by the red flow from the broken machinery in his chest.
The blank idiot eyes of the video-cams stared down at him.
He was right—a subsystem of the cardiopulmonary gear was still functional, at least for another few seconds; enough to pump a last trace of oxygen to his brain and rapidly dwindling consciousness. The briefcase had been right when it had warned him. Big trouble, thought Holden. His last thoughts ticked away, in synch with the final small battery winding down. To what the briefcase had said: You’ll probably die.
There was no arguing with that, not now.
What the briefcase had gotten wrong, though—Holden shook his head, the back of his skull mired in the sticky wetness. It wasn’t big trouble; at least not for him. The end of trouble—as the doctors had told him, there wouldn’t be any chance of plugging a new heart and lungs into him, so he didn’t have to worry about being brought back, to do this all over again.
He could even smile about it, really smile, though he couldn’t be sure that anything was happening with his face—for a few time-dilated microseconds after the second bullet had laid him out, he’d been able to catch a tiny reflection of himself in one of the curved lenses above him. But his sight had gone unfocussed and dark, and his flesh was too numb and cold to get any kinetic feedback. Not that he could move, or even want to; that was all past him now.
But not for the briefcase. Wiseass—a last thought flickered through the darkening chambers of Holden’s brain.
That was the joke, the final one. The delivery he’d come here to make .
It would have to find its own way now.
They heard the shot, followed by another one. Deckard turned away from the video director as the two hard-edged sounds, spaced only a couple of seconds apart, rolled through the orbital station’s canned atmosphere. They came from close by—he could tell just from the way the shock waves sifted dust from the pipes and walkways above the room’s open ceiling.
“What the—” The ample flesh of Urbenton’s face quivered as though the noises had come from his being slapped. “There’s not supposed to be any taping going on down here. Not now—”
“It’s not taping,” said Deckard grimly. “It’s happening.” The last low-pitched echoes had faded away. He left Urbenton standing in the middle of the room as he pulled open the door and strode out into the hallway beyond.
Urbenton followed him; he could hear the director’s trotting footsteps and wheezing breath. Deckard paid no attention as Urbenton called in a panicky voice for him to stop and tell him what was going on.
Other voices came from behind one of the doors. Deckard recognized the first one that spoke.
“Was that okay?” It was the voice of another Leon Kowalski replicant. He didn’t sound happy. “Was that what was supposed to happen?”
“You did just fine.” The thin door barely muffled someone else’s reply. “Don’t worry about it—”
The voice was interrupted by Deckard’s shoving the door open. Two faces, a taller man’s and a second Kowalski replicant’s, looked around at him.
Deckard’s gaze took them in, as well as the evidence of what had happened in the room. It was laid out as a small video set, with lights and cameras, all switched off, angling in from above.
One side of the set was in apparent ruin. Past a table and chair, marked TYRELL CORP across its high back, the room’s far wall was torn open. An identical chair lay toppled over in the wreckage, a body with shattered chest sprawled out from it. Blood pooled out from beneath the corpse.
Deckard walked past the others and stood looking down at the figure, its arms splayed wide, half-lidded gaze turned blindly toward the empty spaces above.
