Authors: K. W. Jeter
The vision passed, along with its soul-deep significance, as though he were waking from a dream. Like rolling over in bed, it seemed to him, and opening your eyes and seeing, instead of the woman you had gone there with, some deracinated corpse staring up at the ceiling with empty eye sockets or worse, nothing at all, just the empty shape, the indentation in the mattress and the other pillow, of someone who'd once been there but was never coming back ...
I woke up a long time ago
, thought Holden glumly. That was why he'd wound up quitting the department, leaving the blade runner unit. Even going over to the other side ...
"You're wasting time." The briefcase spoke up, its voice kept low enough that only Holden would hear it. "You may not have anything on your agenda, but I've got stuff to do. So just go find Deckard, and let's get on with it."
Nagged by hand luggage; that was what life had come to. Or what there was left of it; the revelatory vision of the faux L.A. and his deep ruminations thereon had caused him to let his guard down. If anybody had wanted to interfere with his delivery job, all someone would've had to have done was walk up behind him and take off the back of his head with one of the pieces of rusting lighting frame that lay all around the station's floor.
The L.A. set was sunk lower than where Holden stood watching; he figured the arrangement probably had something to do with the plumbing that suctioned away the runoff from the overhead rain system and kept the water from building up around the video-cams and other equipment at the set's periphery. From this vantage point, he could see that whatever taping had been going on had now come to an end, at least for the time being. Some kind of interruption, resulting in equal measures of chaos and boredom; back when he'd been an LAPD rookie in uniform, all testosterone and Third Reich leather, he'd pulled enough overtime doing traffic control and rent-a-cop guard duty on location shoots to recognize the pattern. That'd been an even longer time ago, when there'd still been a remnant of a video industry in the city.
He pushed aside the youthful memory flash and craned his neck, trying to spot the person he'd come all this way to find. This was where he'd been told, even before he'd left Earth, that he'd be able to track down Deckard. Some bottom-rung company called Speed Death Productions-not one of the biggies; Holden had never heard of it before this-was making some kind of docudrama out of Deckard's life story. Or at least part of it: that last stint of his as a real blade runner, when he'd been tracking down that group of escaped replicants. When Holden had been told about it, he'd actually broken into laughter. It struck him as a ridiculous notion. His old partner in the blade runner unit hadn't exactly distinguished himself in a heroic manner, or at least not that time. Deckard had already wimped out and quit the force back then, mainly out of chickenshit queasiness over blowing away defenseless replicants . . . or "retiring" them, as the departmental slang put it. The head of their unit, charming old Inspector Bryant himself, had had to put the pressure on Deckard to come back aboard and help clean up the mess. Holden still got a little surge of irritation revving up his artificial organs, despite all that'd happened and all that he'd found out since then, when he thought about that arrangement. There wouldn't have been any pretext for Bryant to force Deckard back into being a blade runner if Holden hadn't been set up to take a hit from one of the escaped replicants. Which had left him with a fist-sized hole under his breastbone that the batteries and tubes and sleepless little motors now nicely filled. That'd all been one package of bad business, with lots of smaller packages marked "murder" and "betrayal" inside; and another, even larger package had come around after that, when Holden had found himself unplugged from his hospital and walking through the wet, nasty L.A. streets-the real streets, not the phony ones of the video set he now looked upon. That bigger package had been marked with a flaming red "C" for "conspiracy;" when he'd opened it, he'd found himself carrying something else in his hand for his old friend Deckard, something it would've taken only a single squeeze of the trigger on the black regulation-issue gun to deliver.
That had been a different time. Another world-literally- and another life, even though it'd all been little more than a year ago.
"I'm waiting ..."
"Shut up," he told the briefcase. Even with his mind elsewhere, Holden's gaze had continued to scan the crowd on the fake L.A. set, looking for the one face he needed to find. A part of him had to admire the authenticism of the producers; the milling extras who made up the set's street population looked as if they might've been scooped up with a net from the earthly L.A. and deposited here. Antiquarian punks with museum-quality mohawks and chrome-studded minor body parts mingled with every variety of hopeful religious fanatic, from New Mexican
penitentes
to orange-bedsheet-clad Hare Krishnas. Whatever wasn't costume or cultic emblem was bare flesh, strapped tight under crossed networks of imitation leather, slicked shining by the artificial rain and lit to the blue pallor of ancient consumptives by the thin spectra of the coiling neon overhead.
The effect of an actual L.A. street-Holden knew the one the producers were obviously going for; it was over by the animal dealers' bustling marketplace-was marred only by the fact that the extras were on break, along with the videocam operators and other techs. Instead of passing by each other, two rivers of foot traffic between the buildings, with that zombielike facial glaze typical of longtime Angelenos, they were all talking with each other and even laughing, heading over to the honey wagons or the meager pickings on the shoot's catering tables.
A little knot in the middle of the crowd wasn't so well disposed. Some of the extras and crew glanced over their shoulders at the figures whose shouts and pleadings were barely audible to Holden.
There he is
-the crowd thinned a bit, allowing Holden to spot the one with the ragged brush-cut hair and knocked-about long coat, nubbly square-ended tie pulled tight under his shirt collar. That combination of rough edges and oddly matched gear was just the way he remembered Deckard from all their time together in the blade runner unit. Then he saw the man's face and realized he'd gotten it wrong. That's the actor, thought Holden.
The one playing Deckard
-other than the general height and build, they weren't even close. The actress, the Rachael, was a decent-enough match . . . except for the look of disgust screwing up one corner of her mouth, which indicated that she might be fully capable of lifting the big black gun she had in one hand and icing somebody else. There was already one corpse lying in the middle of the set-Kowalski? The face-down body was hard to identify, but it appeared big enough. Blood mixing with the puddled artificial rain gave Holden the suspicion that some poor bastard of a replicant wasn't going to be getting up, brushing himself off, and cruising for stale doughnuts with the extras and other bit players.
Christ
, thought Holden in sudden dismay as he caught a better glimpse of the one shouting figure. It'd taken him a few seconds to recognize his old partner; the last year or so appeared to have walked all over Deckard. The former blade runner looked harder and meaner, skin beginning to draw down tighter upon the sharpened angles of his facial bones. There was even a little steel grey scattered through his closecropped hair. Deckard looked as if he'd spent the last year in prison rather than on Mars. Rumor had it that life in the U.N. emigration program's transit colonies was no absolute picnic, but Holden hadn't figured its effects would be this visibly corrosive. It had to be the poor sonuvabitch's personal life. What else? Holden shook his head; he would've bet that it wasn't going to work out, that the arrangements Deckard had made would have a dismal outcome. The whole bit with Sarah Tyrell, the human original of the replicant Deckard had fallen in love with . . . Holden knew that the point would come, if it hadn't already, when
dismal
would turn to
fatal
.
"I see him." Keeping his voice low, Holden lifted the briefcase and started calculating a route through the maze of video-cams and other equipment. It wouldn't be easy; he'd have to find a way past whatever security was on the set-did Outer Hollywood have rent-a-cops?-then catch Deckard's attention somehow without revealing what was going on to everybody else standing around. His old partner didn't know that he'd be coming here, let alone that he had a talkative briefcase to deliver to him. Deckard would be fast enough on his feet-or at least Holden hoped he still would be-not to blow it by reacting to one of his old friends' unannounced presence; he'd know that Holden would only be there for a good reason, one that was best kept on the quiet until its exact nature was determined.
Still
, thought Holden,
I've got to get him somewhere in private
-handing the briefcase over in public view would be likely to get them both killed.
It appeared that the job might be easier than he'd originally expected. The loud confrontation down on the set- Deckard's shouting, with the others standing around and trying to mollify him-ended with Deckard's storming away, leaving a small bespectacled figure with clipboard far behind in his wake. The look in Deckard's eyes-even from a distance, Holden was able to intercept a quick spark of it-was one of murderous rage. Or if not murder, at least serious asskicking; the hunched set of his shoulders indicated that he was going off looking for someone with whom he had a score to settle.
"Come on-" Holden had got into the habit of speaking that way to the briefcase, even though he knew it had no independent means of locomotion. "We can catch him over there." He started walking again, picking up his pace as he skirted the video set, staying in the shadows beyond the range of the lights.
The sound of someone pounding on a door came to Deckard's ears. And a voice shouting-he looked down the long hallway, determining from behind which door the noise was coming.
"Hey! Anybody!" The voice was Urbenton's, pitched even higher with overexcitement. "Come on, this isn't funny-let me out of here!
You're all going to be fuckin' fired!
I'm supposed to be on the set!"
Deckard halted when he saw one of the doorknobs futilely rattling. The adrenaline pumping through his system hadn't ebbed-he'd lost none of the anger over the replicant's murder during the taping. He took a step backward, raised one leg, and kicked straight out, hitting the door's keyless lock.
The impact knocked over the person on the other side as the door wobbled to a stop, one hinge torn loose from the surrounding frame.
"Jeez-" The pudding-y director scrambled to his feet. Urbenton's face, already starting to settle into jowls despite his relative youth, shone with sweat. "You could've killed me!"
"Believe it-I still could." Deckard completed the other man's standing-up process by reaching down and grabbing Urbenton's jacket lapels in his fists, then pulling and lifting. The video director hung in Deckard's grasp, the same way the actor had hung in the grasp of the now-dead Kowalski replicant. "You sonuvabitch-I thought we had an agreement." The last words rasped out of Deckard's throat.
"What're you talking about?" Urbenton's feet kicked futilely in midair. "You gone nuts or something? What agreement?"
"Don't bullshit me. You know what I mean." He set the director down, but kept the lapels wadded in his grip. "When you brought me here-
before
even, when you came to Mars and talked me into this nonsense-you said that nobody would get hurt.
Nobody
-not even replicants."
"Hey, come on Urbenton tilted his head back from Deckard's fierce glare. "You gotta be practical, man. When you're on a video shoot . . . there's just accidents that're going to happen. That's just the way it is; we live in an imperfect universe. There's a lot of heavy equipment here-all it takes is for a lighting unit to fall on somebody's head, wham, they got a concussion. Or a camera dolly rolls over somebody's foot-"
"We're not talking
accidents
here." Deckard felt himself towering over the smaller man like some wrathful avenging deity. "What just happened on the set wasn't an accident. It was planned that way."
"How the hell would I know?" An indignant pitch shrilled in Urbenton's voice. "I wasn't even
near
the set. I've been locked in here the whole time."
"Right. Very convenient."
"Convenient, nothing-" The director managed to pull himself free. He brushed down the front of his jacket with offended dignity. "It's my shoot. I'm in charge here-at least, I'm
supposed
to be in charge." Urbenton's wide face turned to a mottled pink, as though he were contemplating active injustices. "There's been some funny stuff going on around here, though. From the beginning. The money people, the ones putting up the financing for the production-they've had some of their thugs hanging around since the shoot began. And they
really
give me the creeps-"
"My heart bleeds." Deckard had no intention of letting the fat little weasel off the hook. "But as you said, you're in charge. It's your shoot. So if somebody gets killed on the set-if even a
replicant
gets killed-it's because you ordered it to happen that way."
"What?" Urbenton blinked in puzzlement. "I don't get it. What do you mean?"
"Killed. Dead. A bullet through the back of the skull and out the front, brains all over the pavement. What the hell do you think I mean?"
"You're out of your mind, Deckard." Repulsion filtered through the director's voice and face. "I knew it was a bad idea to hire you for this project. Any time you bring civilians around a video shoot, they get these weird ideas about what's going on. People like you just don't understand the nature of the industry."
"What I understand," grated Deckard, "is that there's a corpse lying on your set. If your crew hasn't cleaned it up by now."
Urbenton sighed wearily. "Whose corpse?"
"The replicant you had for that last street scene. The Leon Kowalski replicant-"