K. W. Jeter - Bladerunner 02 - The Edge of Human

VIP免费
2024-12-19 0 0 398.17KB 132 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
eVersion 2.0 - see revision notes at end of text
Blade Runner 2
The Edge of Human
by
H. W. Jeter
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
After.....
Living and unliving things are exchanging properties . . .
Philip K. Dick
A Scanner Darkly
Los Angeles - August, 2020
1.....
When every murder seems the same, it's time to quit.
"That's good advice," Bryant told himself. "I'll drink to that." A hard swallow, and jellied
gasoline spread across his ulcer; he could barely breathe as he set the small glass back down
on the desk and poured another shot. "That's why I went to a desk job."
The sticky-backed slip of paper, with its words of wisdom, floated at his vision's limit.
He had pulled open the bottom drawer to fetch the square bottle out, and the past had clung
to it like his own half-shed snakeskin. Every brilliant thought, 3 A.M. illumination,
unacted-upon suicide note, he'd pitched in there. Until the drawer held a shifting dune of
yellow scraps, the residuum of his entire goddamn cop career, that plus enough cash in the
pension plan to blow his nose on. The drawer's slips of paper, some carefully folded, some
wadded up, were an exact replica of the contents of his skull; if the police department's shrinks
ever looked inside either one, they'd ship him out on a permanent psychiatric leave so fast . . .
"Bastards." Between one thought and another, the glass had drained itself again, without
him noticing. Bryant dug a finger into the loose wattle of his throat and tugged his necktie
loose. The station's oxygen, soured with pheromones of fear and despair, trickled into his
lungs. The fan on top of the filing cabinet struggled to move the dust heavy air.
Under his feet, through the soles of his dumb-ass cop shoes, the earth shivered. In an
unlit tunnel, the rep train slid along its iron rails, carrying its silent, watchful cargo to another
darkness. He tilted the bottle, liquid brown splashing over the glass's rim.
"You drink too much."
Bryant knew that wasn't his own voice. None of the voices inside him would ever have
said anything that stupid. He squinted to bring the distant side of the office into focus. By the
fall of shadow across cheekbone he recognized the other person.
"I drink," Bryant answered, "because I must. I'm dehydrated."
That was true at least. He'd come back into the cathedral cavern of the station from a
department funeral, standing under the battering sun while one of their own had been dropped
into an empty rectangle of earth. That stupid sonuvabitch Gaff had finally managed to talk a
bullet into his gut, big enough that he could've been buried in two boxes. A double row of the
department's ceremonial honor guard had lifted their silver-lensed faces to the sky, fired,
reholstered their weapons, turned on their shining boot heels, and marched away. He had felt
blood-warm sweat crawling under his collar.
He'd stood looking down at the brass plate in the raw dirt and dead-yellow grass after
everybody else had left. The inscription under Gaff's name was in that infuriating affected
cityspeak. That was when he'd really been sorry about the heat wringing him dry: otherwise,
he could've whipped it out and written his own name across the steaming metal. He'd never
liked Gaff.
The other person in the office inhaled, exhaled smoke; the slowly pivoting fan smeared it
into blue haze. "If whiskey were water, you could've swam to China by now." A thin smile
moved behind the cigarette.
"Tell you what. You can help save me. From drowning." He brought the second glass
from the drawer, set it beside his own, filled it; he watched as the other person drew it back
beyond the desk lamp's reach. "It's a bad habit to drink alone."
"Then you should try to keep your friends longer."
"I never had any." Bryant's turn to smile, all nicotine teeth and too-bright eyes. "Just the
poor bastards who work for me." Another fiery swallow. "And blade runners are too far along
the Curve to be anybody's friend."
A smile even colder than his. "That's their excuse, too."
He looked away from the other, toward the pitched blinds covering the office's windows.
Through their narrow apertures -- not the L.A. night, stifling in airless heat -- the darker
spaces of the police station's ground floor were visible. When he'd come back from the
funeral, thirsting and radiating contempt for the department's goddamn primitive blood rituals
-- When I buy it, he'd fiercely mused, they can just throw what's left of me in the dumpsters
out back -- he'd walked by members of the elite squads, tall and sweatless in their jackboots
and black-polished gear. He'd felt like a rumpled bug next to them, their hard-edged gaze
setting a needle's point between his shoulder blades. Pinned beneath the contempt of the
fiercely beautiful, he'd scuttled into the decaying security of his office and moved his drinking
schedule up an hour's notch.
Goddamn stormtroopers -- they were all gone now, black leather angels drawn upward
through the police station's spiral of floors by the setting sun. In this season the dry winds
rolling over the horizon brought the night temperature down to the mid-nineties; that was low
enough for the city's life to creep out of its holes, and the patrol units to fan out across the sky.
To watch and descend . . .
"It was raining then." Bryant murmured the words against the rim of his glass. "I
remember . . ." L.A.'s monsoons, the storm chain across the Pacific, Bangkok its terminal link.
Memory flash like ball lightning: he could see himself turning back toward the spinner as diluted
blood threaded into the gutters, leaving that poor bastard standing there. The watchcam's tape
had caught his words: Drink some for me, pal. That was his standard advice to everyone.
There'd been somebody else watching as well, across the street, the rain a shifting curtain
before her. He'd glanced in the spinner's mirror and sighted her; he could've had Gaff turn the
spinner around; he could've gone back and killed her himself. But he hadn't. He'd wanted
Deckard to do it.
That'd been a long time ago, when it'd been raining. "Not that long . . ." A whisper, as he
set the empty glass down on the desk. His vision shifted from memory to the dim,
high-ceilinged space beyond the blinds. Abandoned now, locked down, sealed tight . . .
Another thought troubled Bryant, an itch inside his skull. He swiveled the chair around.
"How did you get in here?"
"There are ways." The person in the shadows regarded the glass held in one hand. "There
are always ways. You know that."
"Yeah, I guess so." It'd been the wrong question. "But why? Why'd you come here? I
never expected to see you here again."
"I brought you something."
He watched as the glass, its contents barely sipped, was set down beside his own. The
other person leaned back in the chair, reaching inside the jacket and bringing out a handful of
black metal. His breath stopped in his throat when he saw what it was.
There wasn't time for another breath. The shot echoed in the office, loud enough to
clatter the blinds' knife edges against each other.
The bullet struck his heart full-on, lifting him from his chair, splaying his arms, stretching
his throat taut as his head snapped backward. He saw a red spatter write over the acoustic
tiles' map of stained islands.
What a surprise, thought Bryant. The chair toppled over, spilling him onto the office's
floor, where he marveled at this new darkness that washed over him. The last seconds of
consciousness became elastic, stretched out as he'd always been told they would. But I
should've . . . I should've known . . .
He saw the other's face float above him, making sure that he was dead. Or as good as.
A yellow scrap of paper, with something that had once seemed important on it, drifted against
his numbed fingertips.
The blinds had stopped rattling, the shot's echo fading in the empty reaches of the police
station. From far away, Bryant heard the office door pulled open, the other's footsteps
departing.
His mouth welled with blood he couldn't swallow. His last thought was that he wished he
could shout, to call after the one who was already gone . . .
So he could say how truly grateful he was.
2.....
A razor of light cut the sky.
Deckard looked up through the interlaced branches, the dense weave of the forest. In
silence; whatever had left the hair-thin wound in the night, fire leaking through, was too far
away to hear. He tracked its progress beneath the stars' cold points: from south to north,
banking east. From L.A., then; where else?
The long spark faded, leaving a red trail more inside his own eye than in the upper
atmosphere. He kept looking, head tilted back, as he knelt down to scoop more of the fallen
wood into the bundle he already held against his chest. Whoever was up there had throttled
the engines back from long -- to short-range; that was why the light streak had cut off so
abruptly. The spinner could descend anywhere within a hundred kilometers from this point.
Getting one arm around the bundle, he stood up, turning slowly and listening, though he
knew the vehicle would be right on top of him before he heard it. With his other hand, he
reached inside his jacket and touched the grip of the gun he found there.
Silence, except for the smaller creatures that crept through the mat of dead leaves and
pine needles beneath his feet. Once more, he glanced at the bare night sky, then began the
slow uphill trudge toward the cabin.
"Honey, I'm home."
It was a bad joke; the silence inside was the same as out. Why don't you put the gun to
your head? That'd be just as funny. He pushed the plank door closed with his heel, and
dumped the bundle into the corner by the rusting stove. He'd let the fire go out hours back;
while he'd slept, his exhaled breath had formed ice on the one small window. He'd uncurled
himself from the nest of blankets on the floor -- he always slept next to the black coffin, as
though he could wrap his arm around her shoulders and bring her close to himself, hold her
without killing her, merge his wordless dreaming with hers while the clock hands scraped away
the last minutes of her life.
But instead he slept alone except for his own hand pressed against the machine's cold
metal, as though he could feel through the layers of microcircuitry the glaciated pulse of her
heart, hear the sighing breaths that took hours to complete . . .
Once, nearly a year ago, he'd pulled the cabin's rickety wooden chair beside the coffin,
sat and watched the imperceptible motion of her breast, rising with the microscopic pace of
her oxygen intake. Holding himself as still as possible, leaning forward with his chin braced
against his doubled fists, so he could detect through the coffin's glass lid the slow workings of
her semilife. When he'd sat back, one full cycle of her respiration later, shadows had filled both
the room and the hollow space between his lungs . . .
He got the fire in the stove lit, adjusted the dampers, and stood up. For a moment he
warmed his hands, spine hunched inside the long coat that had served him well enough in the
city but was completely inadequate up here. He rubbed the forest's chill from his bloodless
fingers, then glanced over his shoulder. She was still sleeping, and dying, as he'd left her. As
she would be until he woke her up, not with a kiss, but a minute adjustment inside the coffin's
control panel.
"There--" He spoke aloud. "That's better." Not to hear his own voice in the silence, but
to remember hers. What it had sounded like. What it would sound like, the next time. On the
window glass the crystals of ice melted into cold tears.
"Let's see how you're doing." Yeah, you're a riot, all right. His hands had unstiffened
enough that he could take care of her, the only way that was left to him. He knelt down beside
the black coffin, the way he had in front of the woodstove; the pair of low trestles that he'd
hammered together raised the device off the cabin's unswept floor. With his fingernail he pried
back the panel's edge. "Running a little high on the metabolics . . ." He'd become so familiar
with the workings, the revealed gauges and readouts, that he could monitor them without
bringing over the kerosene lantern from the table. "It's all right," he murmured. As though
leaning down in absolute darkness to find a kiss. "I'll take care of them for you." With one
fingertip, he brought the LED numbers to what they should be, then closed the panel.
On the wall above the coffin, he'd hung a calendar that'd been left behind by the cabin's
previous occupants, whoever they'd been. When he and Rachael had come to this place, there
hadn't even been spiders in the ancient webs along the ceiling. The calendar was way
out-of-date, two decades old, a faded holo shot of the millennium's celebratory riots in New
York's Times Square. It didn't matter; all he used it for was to mark off the days, the interval
that the still-rational part of his head had ordained, until the next time he'd wake her up.
At first it'd been every month, her long sleep broken for a full day, twenty-fours of
conscious life, time together. Real time; everything else was waiting, for him even more than
her. At least she could sleep through her dying. He didn't have even that luxury.
Now it was every two months, for twelve hours. A decision they'd made together, the
grim economy of her death. No, he thought. Mine.
He stood back up. The calendar's numbers, black beneath the X's he'd scrawled with a
half-charred scrap from the woodstove, stood in neat graveyard rows on the curling page.
Two and a half weeks until the next time they could be together.
Restless, he walked outside the cabin again. In the narrow cathedral of trees he touched
the gun inside his jacket. And wondered why he didn't just end it now.
"I know what's on your mind." A voice spoke from behind him.
He felt another's hand touch his shoulder. He didn't dare look around. Because he knew
the voice.
Her voice.
"I bet you do," replied Deckard. Weariness swept over him, a last defeat. He'd hoped
he'd be dead before he got to the point where he began to hallucinate. In the moon's shadows
the small creatures scurried away through the dead leaves, as though in holy dread. "Since
you're just something inside my head, anyway."
"Am I?" A soft whisper, as he felt the hand -- her hand -- brush the side of his neck.
"How do you know?"
He sighed. This would be the absolute dead end of his luck, to wind up arguing logic with
his own hallucinations. "Because," he said, still not turning around. "Because you sound just
like Rachael. And she's already lying in her coffin, as good as dead."
"Then look at me. You don't have to be afraid."
The hand's touch dropped away from his neck. He turned, slowly, first bringing his gaze
around. To see her; to complete the hallucination. He saw Rachael standing there beside him in
the darkness, her skin paled beyond death by the moon's partial spectrum. Her dark hair was
swept back, the precise arrangement he remembered from the first time he had ever seen her,
in another life, a world far and different from this one; the way she had worn her hair then,
walking across the deep-shadowed spaces of the Tyrell Corporation's offices.
"What do you see?" she asked.
"I see you, Rachael. That's how I know I've lost it. My mind." Grief and loneliness had
won, had walked through and left open all the small doors inside his head, the doors torn from
their hinges. So that there were no divisions anymore, between what he wished for and what
he perceived. "This is what's called being insane," he told the image he saw standing before
him. "I don't care. You win."
A sad smile lifted a corner of the image's mouth. The image of the woman he loved. "Is
there no possibility?" The image of Rachael touched his hand, fingertips cold against his skin.
"That I could be real?"
"Oh, sure." The thought didn't cheer him. "I could be screwing up some other way." His
eyes and other senses lying to him, traitor thoughts. "Maybe you really are here -- but where I
lost it was back in the cabin, when I was taking care of you. I thought I kept the controls set
for you to go on sleeping -- but maybe that's where I was hallucinating." A theory good as
any. "Maybe I really set it so you'd wake up again. And you did, and here you are." He found
himself wishing it were true. That she had woken up in the empty cabin, bound her hair the
way she used to wear it, then came and found him out here in the dark. "It'd be nice if you
were real. We could stay out here and look at the stars . . . all night long." He took her hand in
his. "But . . che gelida manina." He used to pick that one out by ear on the piano in his flat,
back in L.A.; everybody's first opera tune. "'Your little hand is frozen.'"
"Don't bother translating. I know the words." A hard edge crept under her voice. "And I
don't mind the cold."
"Yeah, well, maybe that's one of the advantages of being dead. Or close to. Everything
gets put into perspective." He dropped her hand and reached back inside his coat. The lump
of metal was as cold as her fingers had been, real or hallucinated. He couldn't keep his own
voice from sounding bitter. "We got a date, then. If we don't freeze to death out here, when
the sun comes up we can review our options." Deckard extracted the gun and held it out, fiat
on his palm, toward her. He spoke the words that had been silent in his head before. "Why
wait?"
"You poor, stupid son of a bitch. You're pathetic." She slapped the gun from his hand,
sending it spinning into the darkness. "Why do you blade runners always wind up so ready to
off yourselves?" The voice's edge sharpened to a withering contempt.
The gun was lost somewhere in the forest's mat of rotting leaves. So she must be real, he
thought. He would never have gone so crazy as to have thrown the gun away himself. You lost
your final option if you did that.
"It's the Curve." He looked back around at her. "What they call the Wambaugh Curve.
That's why. You land far enough along it, and you start thinking suicide's a good idea. Unless
you got a reason not to."
"Cop mysticism. Spare me." She shook her head. "You were burned out a long time
ago." She peered more closely at him. "So what was your reason?"
"You were, Rachael." The absent gun still seemed to weigh against his chest. "Even
before I met you."
"How sweet." She reached up and laid her hand against his cheek; if he'd turned his head
only slightly, he could've kissed her palm. "Come on--" She drew the hand away. "Let's go up
to the cabin." Walking toward the distant yellow spot of the lamp, she glanced over her
shoulder and the furlike collar of her coat. "Oh . . . and you're wrong, by the way. I'm not
Rachael."
"What?" He stared after her. "What're you talking about?"
"I'm Sarah." The bare trace of her smile, the tilt of her head, indicated an obscure victory.
"I'm the real one."
He watched her turn and start walking again. A moment later he followed after.
"This is a spooky thing, isn't it?" She looked up from the coffin and toward him. "Don't
you think so?"
"I suppose." Standing by the woodstove, Deckard glanced over his shoulder. Past her,
through the cabin's small window, he could see outside the dark bulk of the spinner the woman
had piloted here. He'd been right about the trace of light he'd spotted in the night sky; its
simple fiery word had been meant for him. Now he rubbed his hands, trying to get the stove's
warmth deeper inside than his skin. "You live with the dead, you get used to things like that."
"Not quite dead." When Sarah had entered the cabin, she'd walked over to the bulky
device, knelt down by the low wooden trestles, and ran an expert scrutiny over the control
panel's dials and gauges before standing back up. "Looks like you've been taking pretty good
care of her. These transport sleep modules aren't all that easy to run."
"It came with a manual."
"Did it?" She nodded, impressed. "You must've hired yourself some fine thieves." She
placed her hands flat against the glass lid and gazed down at the mirrorlike image of her own
face. "Ones that good usually don't come cheap."
"There were some old debts owed to me." He'd watched her, not sure what he felt at
seeing a woman who looked like Rachael but wasn't. "From being in the business, you might
say." Or was she? He didn't know yet.
Sarah continued gazing at the sleeping woman inside the coffin. "New life," she
murmured, brushing her hand across the glass, as though tenderly stroking a sister's brow.
"'New life the dead receive . . .'"
He recognized the line. Not from any opera. "'The mournful broken hearts rejoice . . .'"
One of his own aunts, the church-going one, had used to sing it. He had a memory of her
naive, awkward soprano voice, floating from a kitchen window, and from the choir at his
mother's funeral service. "'The humble poor believe.'"
"Very good." She looked over at him. "Charles Wesley -- O, for a thousand tongues to
sing. Most people don't know any eighteenth-century hymns. Raised Protestant?"
A shake of the head. "Not raised much of anything. Just like most people."
"I suppose I got an overdose of it, from all those church boarding schools I was shuffled
off to for so long. Most of my life, actually." She tilted her head to one side and smiled. "But
then . . . that makes for a difference, doesn't it? Between me . . . and her." A sidelong glance
down to the black coffin. "Your beloved Rachael wouldn't have known any Methodist hymn
tunes, would she? The memory implant they gave her -- that part of it at least, it was all
Roman Catholic, wasn't it?"
He nodded. "Heavy Latin. Tridentine. The old stuff."
"One of my uncle's clever little ideas. He wanted her to have some deep notion of guilt
and redemption -- so he could control her more easily, I imagine. Doesn't seem to have
worked." Sarah studied her double for a moment longer. "There were all sorts of concoctions
inside her head, weren't there? I know about most of them. Including a brother for her that
never existed." She watched her fingernail tap softly on the glass. "Really -- it's just as well that
I'm an only child."
He said nothing. He'd had a long time to get used to the notion of someone believing that
her implanted memories were real.
"Is that what you were hoping for? New life? Some cure for Rachael, some way of
getting around that hard cutoff point, the four-year life span that was built into these Nexus-6
replicants?"
"No. I think we were both pretty well past that." He shrugged. "I'm not sure what we
wanted. I knew that replicants are shipped from the Tyrell Corporation in these transport
modules, so they'd arrive at the off-world colonies without most of their life spans being used
up. I figured . . . why not? Just to make it seem longer, that she'd be with me. That's all."
"I know what the modules are used for; you don't have to tell me." Sarah brushed her
hand against her skirt, as though there had been dust on the coffin lid. "You realize, of course,
that your being in possession of this device is a felony." The woman who had called herself
Sarah regarded him with the same half smile, one that he had seen a long time before on
Rachel's face. "You're not licensed for it. Plus, after all, it is Tyrell Corporation property."
"What's that to you?"
The smile that had been unamused before shifted and became even less. "Listen,
Deckard -- if it's Tyrell property, then it's my property. Don't you know who I am?"
"Sure." He gave a shrug. "You're some other replicant; probably out of the same
Nexus-6 batch as her." A nod toward the coffin. "The Rachael batch. They must've sent you
up here, figured that seeing you would fuck with my head."
"Did it?"
"Not much." He kept his voice flat, leeched emotionless. "I may not be a blade runner
anymore, but I've still got some of my professional attitude left. I'm way past being surprised.
By anything." Deckard studied his own hand, reddened by the woodstove's heat, before
looking at her again. "You've got some problems, though. They must've programmed you for
delusions of grandeur. Tyrell property doesn't belong to you. You belong to the corporation."
"Your problem is that you don't listen." Ice at the center of her glare. "Didn't you hear
what I said? I'm the real one. I'm Sarah Tyrell. The niece of Eldon Tyrell -- remember him?
You should. You and all the rest of the LAPD's blade runners were about zero use in keeping
every escaped replicant on the planet from just walking in and out of Tyrell headquarters. If
you'd been doing your job, my uncle would still be alive."
"That's one of the reasons I quit. I didn't think keeping Tyrells alive should've been part
of the job description." Facing her was like standing at the cabin's open door during a hard
winter storm. "You're Eldon Tyrell's niece, huh?"
"As I said."
"The corporation should've sent you out with a better lie." He shook his head, almost
feeling sorry for her, whatever she was. "Don't you think I pulled the department's file on the
Tyrell family? I did that a long time ago, even before I left L.A. Eldon Tyrell had no nieces,
nephews, kids of his own; nothing. Nada. He was the last of the line. Thank God."
Her smile appeared again. "The police files have a hole in them. I was born off-world;
there wouldn't be any record of me in the files, unless my uncle had wanted it to be there. And
he had a thing for family privacy."
"Good for, him. But the files include colony births. You could've been popped anywhere
from Mars to the Outreaches, and you'd be in there."
She half sat upon the edge of the coffin, the high-collared and expensive-looking coat
falling open. "I wasn't born in any of the colonies." One hand brushed a fragment of blackened
leaf from the synthetic fur. "But in transit. And not a U.N. ship. Private."
"Impossible. There hasn't been a private spaceflight since . . ."
"That's right." She knew -- he could see it -- that she had him then. "Since the Salander
3. The last one before the U.N. clampdown on corporate interstellar travel. The last one, and
it was a Tyrell operation. That's where I was born. On Tyrell Corporation property -- inside it,
actually -- and way beyond U.N. jurisdiction."
"The Salander 3 . . ." He nodded slowly, mulling the information over, trying to dredge up
from little-used memory whatever he knew about it. The dates seemed right, just far enough
back so that somebody could've been born aboard the craft and have grown into an adult by
now. That wasn't the problem.
Private-sector travel beyond the Earth's atmosphere had been forbidden by the U.N.
authorities for a reason. And the Salander 3 had been it. A failed expedition to the Prox
system, failed despite the billions that the Tyrell Corporation had poured into the effort . . . and
that was about the limit of public knowledge, eroded even further by collective memory failure.
But the police files on the matter weren't any better. Once, when he'd first started retiring
escaped replicants for a living, he'd poked through the department's on-line files, looking for
anything that'd help give him a handle on his walking, thinking prey. A search keyed on Tyrell
gave him days' worth of the department's internal memos and reports, the corporation's own
press releases, product schematics, research papers from their bioengineering labs . . . the
works. Punching in Salander 3 had mired him in one screen after another of ACCESS
DENIED and AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY flags, password requests way beyond
his rank. He'd already been savvy enough about how the department worked to know that
prying off a lid weighed down with that many alarms and padlocks would get him nothing but
hex marks in his own personnel file.
Going off-line and into the basement morgue of hard copy printouts had been even
spookier. He could remember standing beside a battered metal cabinet, beneath low sizzling
fluorescents, water dripping from a broken pipe to the already inch-deep concrete; standing
there with a thin sheaf of dog-eared manila folders, all with some variation of Salander 3 at the
top edge, all of them empty except for yellowed routing slips signed by long-retired secretarial
staff, ghosts with initials . . .
The memory flash rolled through his head, dark and jagged as photo-reverse lightning.
Standing in the deepest department basement, dust sifting onto his shoulders from the vibration
of the rep train hurtling through its own unlit tunnels, past the endless rows of tottering cabinets
and the walls cryptically stained with black rot . . . The files had been pulled from on high,
from the top government levels, like God reaching down into the affairs of men. And never
returned; maybe they'd all been ashed the day after the one marked on the routing slips. That's
what it'd be like to die, he'd thought then and now, or at least the old comforting notion of the
process. You ascended, leaving your empty manila folder behind on the ground, but you didn't
return, not ever.
"Where'd you go? Where are you?"
He kept his eyes closed, walking around in those echoing rooms inside his head. A little
more poking around online had brought him a few scraps: a low-rez news photo of the
Salander 3's mission leaders, Anson Tyrell and his wife Ruth, setting out with big smiles for
Proxima . . . and six years later, the day after the Salander 3 had come limping back to the
docking terminals out at San Pedro, the notice of the cremation service for them. You didn't
need cop savvy to get suspicious about that one. There wasn't a cover-up deep enough to
keep corpses frozen between here and Prox from giving off the decayed smell of murder.
And now he was standing here, decades and what might as well have been a world
away, with their grown-up orphan child in front of him.
"Listen, Deckard -- I don't have time for you to go fading out on me. There's never time
for that."
Her voice, the same as Rachael's but with a tighter and harder edge, stung him back into
present time. He saw her still standing beside the black coffin. "So you're the daughter of
Anson Tyrell -- is that it?"
"Very good. You're up on your Tyrell genealogies. And since Eldon Tyrell was his only
brother, and no other family besides me -- that means I am Tyrell now." Sarah's gaze set level
into his. "I inherited the world's largest privately held corporation. The whole thing. Not bad."
"But before that -- while your uncle was still alive -- he used you for . . . what's it called?"
The specific word was stuck back in his memory and wouldn't come out. "The template?"
"Templant. The term of art in the Tyrell labs is templant. As in replicant. And you're right
-- that's what my uncle used me for. The source model for your Rachael." On her face, eyes
narrowed, the partial smile was a knife wound even thinner. "And his."
More spooky things, the creepy business of the dead -- he could hear them in her voice.
"Were there others?"
"Besides her?" She looked down past her hand on the coffin's glass lid, at the face of the
sleeping, dying woman inside, then back up to him. She shook her head. "Just the one.
Rachael wasn't what you'd call a production-line number. More of a custom job, if you know
what I mean. For my uncle Eldon."
He knew. He'd suspected as much, way back then in the city, when he'd gone to the
Tyrell corporate headquarters and talked to the man. There'd been that sick jitter in the
pillared office suite's atmosphere, a tension shimmer that cops, like dogs, could catch at the
limit of their hearing. And Eldon Tyrell's smile, possessive and sated, the corners of his mouth
pulled upward as if by invisible fishhooks. Every silent thing about him had given away the
game.
"I wouldn't have thought that'd be something a person like you would go along with.
Being a templant."
"Really, Deckard." She sounded almost pitying. "Not as if I had an option in the matter, is
it? When my uncle was alive, you would've been right: I was Tyrell property. Meaning his.
Besides, what would the alternative have been? Not being a templant -- and then there
wouldn't have been any Rachael. There would've been just me. And him."
He'd known all these things, or some of them at least, though Rachael hadn't told him.
He'd known instead from her silence, from the way she would sometimes stiffen in his arms,
turning her face away from his. Away from any man's face.
"Maybe . . . maybe having a replicant of you made . . . maybe that was his way of
showing that he did love you. After all."
"Oh, he loved somebody all right." Her voice and gaze acidic. "It just wasn't me."
The forest's silence seeped through the walls, congealing around every object, living or
dead. He decided he didn't want to hear any more about this woman personal problems. He
just wasn't sure he'd have that choice.
"How'd you track us down?"
"It was easy. After you made your mistake." She tapped a fingernail against the glass lid.
"You'd pretty well disappeared, until you had this transport module stolen. For a cop, that
wasn't a brilliant move. Did you really think your thief pals wouldn't be working for the
corporation as well? They sold your ass to us two minutes after delivery had been made."
Bound to happen, but he hadn't cared; just something else that there'd been no choice
about. Either have the module stolen and brought to what had been their hiding place, or
watch Rachael die, the remains of her four-year replicant life span dwindling the way snow
melts on the ground.
"That why you came here?" He pointed to the black coffin. "Want your property back?
How about doing me a favor and letting me keep it for a few more months. It's not that much
longer."
"Keep it forever, for all I care. Bury her in it, if you want." She glanced down for a
moment at her own sleeping face. "That's not why I wanted to find you." Her voice was softer,
the sharp edge retracted. "I was in Zurich when . . . everything happened. One of my uncle's
little minions flew out and told me that he was dead. I went back to Los Angeles and found
out, the rest. There were tapes. And people who told me things. They told me about you.
About you . . . and her." She regarded him for a moment, then stepped forward and took his
hand, drawing him back with her toward the coffin. "Come here."
Close to her, he watched as she let the coat fall away from her shoulders, revealing her
naked arms, a thin gold circle dangling at one wrist. A scent of skin-warmed orchid breathed
itself into his nostrils; he could taste it at the back of his throat. Sarah knelt down before him,
touching him for a moment at his hips to balance herself. With her knees against the floor's
rough planks, she reached behind her neck and undid her hair. With a shake of her head, it
came loose, dark and soft against the paleness of her throat.
"You see?" This close, her voice could be a whisper. She raised herself a little bit, just
enough so she could lean across the coffin's glass lid, both hands against the smooth surface.
She brought her face down against one arm, turning to look up at him. "It's perfect, isn't it?"
He could see her face and Rachael's at the same time, separated by only a few inches.
Sarah's gaze pierced him, held him; beneath the glass, the sleeping, dying woman with the
same face, eyes closed, lips slightly parted to release an hours-long breath. Both women's hair
was the same color, the same substance, across the coffin's pillow or the unmarked glass. He
looked down, the world around him collapsed to a space even smaller than the cabin.
"I wanted to know . . ." Sarah turned the side of her face against the glass, so she could
look at her own image beneath. "It sounded so strange . . . that you could love something . . .
that wasn't real. What could that be like . . ." She raised her head, her gaze catching onto his
again. "Not for you. For her."
"I don't know." Deckard slowly shook his head. "She never told me."
"Well . . . there's a lot you don't know." Sarah stood up, reaching down to brush the
floor's dust from the edge of her skirt. She picked up her coat and folded it around herself.
The same chill as before touched her voice. "That's really why I came here -- to tell you that.
There's a lot you don't know yet. But you're going to find out."
She walked past him, pulling open the cabin's door and stepping out into the darkness
without even glancing back over her shoulder at him.
From the small window, he watched her spinner rise into the night sky. It hung suspended
for a moment, giving him a glimpse of Sarah at the controls, then swiveled around and
disappeared under the pinpoint stars, heading south. Toward L.A.
Other lights were moving up there. He looked up, counting two traces, then a third,
摘要：

eVersion2.0-seerevisionnotesatendoftextBladeRunner2TheEdgeofHumanbyH.W.Jeter12345678910111213141516After.....Livingandunlivingthingsareexchangingproperties...PhilipK.DickAScannerDarklyLosAngeles-August,20201.....Wheneverymurderseemsthesame,it'stimetoquit."That'sgoodadvice,"Bryanttoldhimself."I'lldri...

展开>> 收起<<
K. W. Jeter - Bladerunner 02 - The Edge of Human.pdf

共132页,预览27页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：132 页 大小：398.17KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-19

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 配电装置 动力学连接体 力的合成 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 132
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注