Authors: K. W. Jeter
Toys; he remembered them from that time when he had tracked Pris and the replicant Batty to this spot. There had been a pocket universe for Sebastian even then, a little world that he had created for himself, and this place was it. His refuge, a child's refuge, from the hurtful, bustling world of grown-ups, everybody bigger than him, everybody who wasn't dying from a galloping progeria, the accelerated decrepitude that had turned him into a wrinkled, fading nonadult. L.A. wasn't a city for children; no wonder Sebastian had been dying in it. If he hadn't built this hiding place for himself, his small corpse would have been trampled in the streets.
Past the candles guttering in their branched silver settings, Deckard saw torn, gauzy curtains drifting in an unfelt breeze, their ragged ends trailing across the nearest mannequins and stuffed animals. Whatever contents of Sebastian's head hadn't spilled out to reenvision the L.A. street and the decaying building were exposed here, like some soft, babyish army. Glass eyes stared at nothing or were reflected in gilt mirrors with ornate frames, the inert photo-receptors switched off or robbed of batteries. When Pris, on the run with the escaped replicants she had thought she was one of, had disguised herself as one of Sebastian's mechanical creations, a leotarded bridal doll with a veil draped over her strawlike hair, she had finally achieved the nonhuman apotheosis her cracked brain had been seeking all along. To be a thing, a killing thing or a loved one; it didn't matter.
One of the mannequins stirred, fat clown of ambiguous gender; it croaked out a woman's laugh as the rubbery wattled neck shook, white-painted face tilting back. Stubby fingers pawed the air like pale anemones brought up from ocean shallows.
Deckard halted in the center of the room, forcing his breath to a measured pace, pushing back an emergent claustrophobia. The place would've seemed uncomfortably close, crammed with too much junk-disassembled tube radios and thrift shop antiques and patzer chess pieces, all the hobby collectibles of a perpetually dying, too-clever child-even if there hadn't been unpleasant memories filling up the unoccupied areas. He'd come close to getting killed here, twice in rapid succession, first by crazy Pris, then by the even loonier replicant Batty; the human original he'd met up with later, the one whose cerebral contents were stored in the talking briefcase, had been a piece of cake by comparison.
His fingers ached, not just for the want of a soothing gun-not that the real weapon had been much use here, the real here-but from old wounds; the replicant Batty had broken fingers as easily as snapping twigs. The fingers had healed badly, aching when provoked by shifts in weather or the pressure of memory.
The laughing clown's barking noise suddenly shrilled up another octave, the rubber hands jerking even more spasmodically above the fright-wigged head. Deckard stepped away from the device, watching as a shudder of ill-meshed gearing ran through its frame. The clown suddenly froze, the garish face paralyzed in a rictus of manic hilarity; the room's silence congealed once more as a wisp of black, burntrubber smoke trailed out of the parted mouth.
Another face appeared, popping up from behind the stricken clown. "Oh ... hi." The black cloth covering the device's workings was draped over Sebastian's shoulders; his moist-eyed gaze, still set in the wrinkled flesh of his aging disease, blinked at Deckard. "I didn't hear you come in. I was busy working on this old thing, trying to get it running again." He laid a wrinkled, protective hand on the clown's shoulder. "It's a real keeper; used to be in an old amusement park and stuff."
"No, it didn't." Deckard shook his head. "It's not even real. Nothing here is."
"Well ... yes and no." Grease marked Sebastian's hands; he rubbed them against his trousers. "Real in the what's-it, uh, Platonic sense." With an extended forefinger, he poked at one of the clown's eyes, getting its line of vision to match the other. "This is the
idea
of the physical manifestation, of what came from the amusement park. Ideas are real things, too." Sebastian's voice went on the defensive. "Just as much as all that stuff . . . you know . . . out there." He nodded toward the room's high, arched window, but it was clear that he meant someplace farther away than the visible street. "Where you just came from."
"That's why it's called the real world," said Deckard. "And this isn't." He gestured toward the other man. "In the real world, you didn't have legs. Not anymore."
"Yeah." Sebastian nodded slowly. "I had to get rid of them out there." His expression brightened. "But here- 'cause this is
my
world-I figured I should have 'em again. And I was right! They come in real handy."
"Should've given yourself a second pair of arms. Be even more convenient."
"Oh, they told me I could do that if I wanted-"
"Who's 'they'?" Deckard peered closer at the short-statured image.
A matter-of-fact response came from Sebastian. "The repsymps. When they did this for me. You know, what they call 'dehydrated'? Only it's not dehydrated at all; that's just a slang term. Same way with being a deity; I don't
feel
like one." He smiled shyly. "I just feel like myself. The fact that they were able to do me over, to take what was left of me and turn it into a polymerized sensorial override encapsulate- that's the technical term for the process-it doesn't change anything. Real or not."
Deckard gazed around the overstuffed room, then back to his host. "There's one big difference here," he said quietly. "You don't have to die here. The way you were on the outside."
"Well, I could if I wanted to. Anything's possible." Sebastian placed a hand against the front of his coveralls. "I could make this whole body go away. I mean, it could just crumple up and blow out the window like dust. But He looked across the silent dolls and toys. "There's enough of me left in all this-it's all me, actually-so I guess I'd still be here. In spirit, kinda." Sebastian frowned, as though trying to puzzle the situation out. "Like that old bit-did you ever hear about it when you were a kid?-about splitting an apple and finding God in the seed. So maybe I am some kind of deity, like all those genuine name-brand ones that you get in those little packets. Huh."
Deckard felt sorry for him, the same as he had long ago, in the real world. "Yeah, maybe you are."
"You shoulda seen it, though, when I first got here and I was joking around and stuff." The moist eyes glittered with excitement. "I made myself ten feet tall! Always wanted to be." A forefinger pointed up. "Hit my head on the ceiling, though, so it wasn't really practical. Guess I coulda made the room bigger, though-but then it wouldn't have been the same as before. And that was the way I wanted it. Just the same. And with my little friends, too." He shouted past Deckard. "Hey, Colonel! And Squeaker-come on out here. We've got company."
A glance over his shoulder, and Deckard saw two even smaller figures, an ornately uniformed teddy bear and a long-nosed toy soldier, waddle-marching from one of the other rooms. The bear's button eyes fixed on Deckard with evident suspicion; the soldier's spine went rigid, as though the automaton was considering its courses of action.
"Now, come on, fellas. Be nice." Sebastian waggled his finger, stained with black grease, at them. "Mr. Decker isn't going to do anything to hurt us. He can't, anyway, even if he wanted to. Least, I don't think he can." The watery eyes peered at him. "Can you?"
Deckard shook his head. "No. Not anymore."
The toy companions weren't convinced; the bear emitted a soft growl. "Foo," said the soldier. "He's not a nice man."
"I'm sure, Colonel, he's as nice as he can be. Mr. Decker hasn't had as easy a life as we have. As
I
have." Tilting his head to one side, Sebastian regarded his guest thoughtfully. "He doesn't have real good friends like I do. He's all alone. Aren't you?"
"Not alone enough." Time might not be ticking along in this room-like everything else, that might have been left outside in the real world-but Deckard knew that there was at least one other person waiting for him somewhere. Unfinished business, his mutual fate with Sarah Tyrell still to be worked out. "But I can deal with it."
A shrug from Sebastian. "Suit yourself. That's
your
pocket universe. The one inside your head."
"What about you?" The other's low-rent holiness had irritated Deckard, bringing out a mean streak he didn't feel like concealing. "Your little buddies really enough company for you?"
"Sure-" Sebastian looked suddenly nervous, picking up on the edge of hostility in the dust-moted air. "They always were. They had to be."
"What about Pris?" Deckard felt his own thin smile appear. "Where's she?"
The childlike innocence flashed out of Sebastian's face, as though the switch on one of his mechanical toys had been thrown. Replaced by something both hotter and darker, that could be seen like black-enameled metal at the center of the man's eyes. "That's not any of your business, Mr. Decker." His hard, annihilating stare could have bored holes through real-world skin and flesh. "You don't have any right to ask about that."
"Just a simple question." Deckard's turn to give a shrug. "You don't have to answer. It's
your
world, remember."
That world trembled in sympathetic connection to its creator. Plaster dust sifted from a network of cracks that suddenly shot like negative lightning across the water-stained ceiling. The crystal attachments to the candelabra and unlit chandeliers rattled, as though the fault lines beneath the real L.A. had been duplicated here.
"Stop!" Another voice shrilled from the opposite side of the room. "Stop that!" The toy soldier shook his tiny fists in the air, as high as the point on his spiked helmet. "Let him alone!" Beside the soldier, the uniformed teddy bear stamped its feet, anger sufficient to have caused this earth's tremors. "Wicked, wicked, wicked!"
"No, fellas ... don't..." Face wet with tears, Sebastian held one palm outward as he sank into a carved wooden chair. "It's all right ..."
The teddy bear attacked first, the tassels of its epaulets shaking as it locked stubby arms around Deckard's leg, the round face nuzzling a muffled growl against the long coat's lower edge. Deckard peeled the animated creature from himself, hoisting it up just long enough to pitch it against the approaching toy soldier. Both of Sebastian's automatons sprawled into a corner; the soldier burst into whimpers of frustration.
"Don't hurt them..." Leaning forward, Sebastian grabbed hold of Deckard's sleeve. "It's not their fault. They're just doing what I programmed them to do. They're just trying to protect me..."
Deckard looked down at the weeping man. "From what?" An old, deeply buried cop circuit linked inside Deckard's brain, producing the almost shamefully cruel satisfaction that came with doing the job well. This might have been Sebastian's world, his little private pocket universe, but Sebastian didn't control it any longer.
I do
, thought Deckard. Things had to be broken before the things they concealed could be seen, out in the open. Now he could find out what he needed to know. "Protecting you from what?"
Sebastian took a deep, shuddering breath, drawing himself upright. "Oh ... everything, I guess. I don't know." He made a visible effort to calm himself down, the fragile body parts drawn together by an invisible string. "Nothing, really." His trembling fingers wiped the last tears from his eyes. He looked up at Deckard. "I mean that. From
nothing
. She's not here."
"Pris? Why not?"
"I just don't know..." Sebastian morosely shook his head. "I tried to make her be here-you know, the way I made Colonel Fuzzy and Squeaker Hussar just be the way they were before." He pointed to the bear and the toy soldier, who had sullenly withdrawn into a corner of the room. "I
should've
been able to do that. This is my world, isn't it? The rep-symps put me here, they made me a dehydrated deity, they gave me all this . . . I should be able to have what I want, shouldn't I?"
"I suppose so." Deckard nodded. "Whatever you want."
"But I just couldn't make it
be
that way. I tried and tried, but it just wouldn't happen. That's really why I didn't change anything, why I kept it all the way it was before. Look-" Sebastian jumped up from the chair, ran to one of the tall windows and yanked its gauzy curtain to one side. "I got that right, didn't I?" His finger stabbed toward the dark, rain-drizzled urban landscape below. "That's the street, isn't it? Just the way it was."
Another slow nod from Deckard.
"And all this. The building and everything." The small man turned around in the center of the room, hands upraised to indicate all its contents and the spaces beyond. "I
know
I got all this right. I lived here so long, not here but out there, out in the real world-this was my world. I just had to make it all over again. And I did."
Deckard watched him and listened. He felt even sorrier for the poor little bastard.
He's finding out
. The same things that Deckard had found out, had learned and written on the charred scroll of his heart. There were some things you couldn't bring back. You could grieve for them, and that was all.
"But Pris..." Sebastian looked puzzled, as if he was about to start crying again. "When I got done, she still wasn't here. She was supposed to be-I made it that way- but she wasn't."
Deckard knew why Sebastian, the deity of this pocket universe, had failed. He wondered if he should tell him.
"I tried and tried-"
"Look," said Deckard. "It's not going to happen. Why don't you just give up on that? You've got your memories. Those'll have to do."
A big sigh from Sebastian rendered him even smaller and more fragile. "I know. I know you're right." His shoulders slumped in desolation. He looked hollowed out, insubstantial, as though the contents of his skin had been converted to loose atoms and exhaled; another night breeze coming through the windows might have blown him away entirely. "There's a reason for it. Why she's not here."
"You don't have to talk about this if you don't want to. That's not why I came here."