Replicant Night Read online

  "Coming from you, that's good." Holden knew that the briefcase's voice was the voice of the dead. A dead man speaking. It didn't matter whether that man, when alive, had been human or not. "You'd know, wouldn't you?"

  If the briefcase had had shoulders, it would've shrugged. "Just leveling with you. That's all."

  Holden ignored the last bit. Lights had started flashing on the control panel, indicating that the intake beam had locked onto the skiff. One light, he knew, would stay yellow for a few more seconds; that was the window of opportunity for abandoning the intake approach, for breaking off and turning the little craft around. And heading back to Earth or anywhere else his own death didn't seem quite so probable.

  He kept his hands folded in his lap, watching and waiting until the yellow light disappeared, replaced by the green one right next to it. They were going in.

  The silver crescent loomed bigger and brighter in the skiff's viewscreen. He could make out the segmented panels that formed its curved, double-tapered shape. Croissant, thought Holden. Thinking of French bakery goods, stuff served with real coffee. The same word, actually. He knew his mind was rattling on, filling up the empty corridors inside his head with nonsense. So there wouldn't be room for worrying about the job he'd come all this way to Outer Hollywood to do.

  A delivery job. Once I was a blade runner, he mused; now I'm some sort of errand boy. He didn't mind; he'd kept his gun when he'd quit the police department. That was the main thing: he needed it now more than before.

  The silver crescent grew larger, blocking out the pocked white shape of the real moon. Brown-mottled Earth lay somewhere behind the skiff; Holden didn't sweat the navigational fine points. Those had all been programmed in, along with the other details of the job. He glanced again at the briefcase, which had mercifully fallen silent. The initials on the small brass plaque under the handle read RMD. Not his, but those of the person to whom the briefcase was to be delivered. Then he can deal with it, thought Holden. He wondered if M really was Rick Deckard's middle initial, or whether that was just something that the people who'd put the briefcase together had made up out of thin air.

  Outer Hollywood filled the screen now; the intake beam had brought the skiff around to the landing bays on the curve's fat convex side. There'd been a single bright flash, the viewscreen's pixels max'd out, when the skiff had passed through the focussed reflection from the bank of mirrors that served as the crescent's attached star. Holden had caught a glimpse of the massive struts and triangulated framework that held the mirror bank between the station's horns. The open steel girders looked rusted-In a vacuum? he wondered; that's weird-and warped from neglect. Cables drifted loose like beheaded snakes; the motors and other servo-mechanisms that served to adjust the mirrors' angles and catch the unfiltered radiation from the sun, looked barely functional. Light bounced off some of the mirrors and out like idiot semaphores into space, instead of illuminating the soundstages behind Outer Hollywood's pressure-sealed windows. Holden figured that'd be all right if only night scenes were being taped . . . or scenes of L.A. during the rainy season. Anything cheerful enough to require an approximation of daylight, and they'd all be out of luck.

  The briefcase spoke up again. "You strapped?"

  For a moment, Holden thought the briefcase was referring to the pilot seat's restraints, then realized it had slipped into the urban patois it sometimes affected. He patted the holstered weapon inside his camel's-hair jacket. "Of course." The gun felt like a rock above one of his artificial lungs.

  "We'd be better off if it was me carrying you." A fretful note sounded in the briefcase's voice.

  He couldn't understand the briefcase's self-absorbed concern. The bastard's already dead, he thought. How could things get any worse for it? For himself, though . . . that was another matter.

  "Welcome to our faciliteezz." A canned female presence, bodiless and somewhere above his head, started talking as soon as Holden climbed out of the skiff's cockpit. "For all your video production needzz Something was wrong with the hidden p.a. speakers; the woman's sibilants came out as an insectoid hiss. "Zztock and cuzztom zzets ... fully furnizzhed editing zzuites . . . all at a competitive rate. Why go elzzewhere?"

  The answer was obvious to Holden. He looked around with the briefcase dangling from his left hand, leaving his right to reach inside his jacket if need be. The orbital studio was close to being a ruin. Another hiss, of oxygen leaking through the landing bay's gaskets, sounded behind him. A chill draft in his face, like the wind down a deserted city alley, when even the last of the scavenger packs had crawled into their trash-lined burrows; no sky above, but instead a tangle of catwalks and wiring loops imbedded against the barely discernible visual field of the studio's welded exoskeleton.

  Big empty spaces; the recorded greeting was the only human element immediately apparent. Other than himself, Holden noted.

  "There should be some kind of offices," the briefcase suggested. "Farther inside. Where you can find out what set the shoot's been booked into."

  He started walking, footsteps hollow and loud on the metal flooring. The noise echoed down the hangarlike vista before him. The chances of his moving about, of making his delivery and leaving with no one's being aware, were nonexistent.

  The orbital studio's sets had already begun collapsing into one another, false fronts and flimsy backdrops muddling together from neglect and general entropy. Holden found himself, briefcase in hand, walking past a Tara-oid antebellum mansion, fluted pillars warping out of shape, that had somehow crept among the turrets and spires of medieval Prague. A glacier of artificial grass and poppies spilled down the cobbled street, studded with crosses stamped from plastic to resemble white-painted wood; the dates on them were all from some post-World War I soldiers' cemetery. Nobody was buried there, but the draft against Holden's face still smelled like death and slow decay.

  Scavengers existed everywhere; as in L.A., the real one, so above. He found one in the quieted battlefield set, an ersatz Flanders Field, next to the empty burial ground. The guy looked familiar enough, all scruffy beard and antique aviator goggles, tattered leathers flopping about a stunted frame; Holden wondered if he recognized him from somewhere in the real city's alleys.

  Brass shell casings clinked in the bag slung over the scavenger's shoulder. He looked up, the scarred bridge of his nose wrinkling to signal that he smelled cop, while the black-nailed fingertips poking through the ends of his gloves continued to groom the mock battlefield. Another scent lingered in the station's canned and recycled air, that of the live ammo that had been expended in the taping of some low-budget historical epic.

  "You can't hassle me, man." The scavenger's eyes narrowed behind the goggles. "I got a license."

  "Yeah, well, I don't." The stuff he'd been able to do before, back when he'd been with the department, had all been left behind him, on Earth and in that other life. "So remain sweatless."

  He was able to get approximate directions from the scavenger. And information: there was only one video shoot booked into the Outer Hollywood station, the first one after a long dry spell.

  "It's that damn Cinecittà Nuovo, down in Jakarta." The scavenger's gloved thumb looked like mice had been chewing on it in his sleep, as he gestured toward some point beyond the station's curved walls. "Those people've got all that EEC money behind 'em. And they suck up all the video productions now." Tunnels bigger around than the station ran underneath the Indonesian Entrepreneurial Republic, the spaces lit brighter than anything sun and corroding mirrors could provide. The scavenger looked wistfully at the meager gleanings in his sack. "Man, what I wouldn't give to be able to get in there. There must be all kinds of shit lying around."

  Holden wasn't interested in the sad intricacies of either the video or the scavenging business. "So where's the shoot going on?"

  The ragged glove pointed down the length of the station's arched central corridor. "You can't miss it. Go past the Vatican and that Scottish castle with the dry moat; that's where t
hey've got their funky L.A. all set up. There's all kinds of people hanging around. Humans and replicants ...it's that kind of a shoot. Real blood-and-guts stuff." An eyebrow raised inside the goggles. "You might like it. Some kind of cop show."

  "I doubt it." Holden started walking again, briefcase in hand. "Seen it already."

  He saw the buildings up ahead, or at least part of them: the bottom sections of what were supposed to be L.A.'s canyoned towers, false-fronted and propped into position by the cobbled-together framework behind them. A small flutter ran through the bio-mech heart in his chest; some nameless emotion or twinge of adrenallike hormone. Not at seeing again the city he had left behind on Earth, or at the view of those streets in partial disassembly. It looks better this way, thought Holden. Not really fake at all-that was the marvel of it. As if the people, those shadowy corporations and architects, who'd built the Outer Hollywood station and then constructed the L.A. set inside it, had caught some realer-thanreal aspect of the city. Or at least the city that had existed inside Holden's mind, with his barely being aware of it until now. I always thought the other one was fake-he realized that now. Th see it this way, two-dimensional buildings with nothing behind their surfaces' retrofitted ventilation ducts and wiring conduits, with the people in the streets finally exposed as actors and anonymous bit players; with the monsoon rains shut off from above, the rusting pipes leaking only a few scattered drops; even the sky revealed as metal with nothing but vacuum beyond-it was an oddly comforting manifestation of his most paranoid dreamings. If only it were true, thought Holden.

  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 har
d 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.