K. W. Jeter - Bladerunner 01 - Replicant Night

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BLADE RUNNER: REPLICANT NIOHT

Blade Runner: replicant night! K.W. Jeter.

For Russ Galen

Scanned by Pete256 8/05/2002

Wake up. . .

He'd heard those words, that voice, before. Deckard wondered, for a moment, if

he were dreaming. But if he were dreaming-I'd be able to breathe, he thought.

And right now, in this segment of time, all he could feel were the doubled

fists at his throat, the tight grip on the front of his jacket that lifted him

clear of the Los Angeles street's mirror-wet and rubbled surface. In his

vision, as he dangled from the choking hook of factory-made bone and flesh,

all that remained was the face of Leon Kowalski and his brown-toothed grin of

fierce, delighted triumph.

The other's stiff-haired knuckles thrust right up under Deckard's chin,

forcing his head back enough to make him dizzily imagine the passage of air

snapping free from the straining lungs in his chest. He could just make out,

at the lower limit of his vision, his own hands grabbing onto Kowalski's

wrists, thick and sinew-taut, more like the armatures of a lethal machine than

anything human. His hands were powerless, unable to force apart the

replicant's clench.

"Wakeup . . ,

The same words, a loop of past event repeating inside Deckard's head. An echo,

perhaps; because he knew the other-the replicant, his murderer-had said it

only once. But he'd known it was coming. Those words . . . and his own death.

Everything had to happen, just as it had before. Just as he knew it would.

Echo, dream, memory . . . or vision; it didn't matter. What was important was

that there had been a gun in Deckard's hands, in the hands that were now

clawing to let desperate air into his throat. His gun, the heavy black piece

that was standard issue in the LAPD's blade runner unit, a piece that could

blow a hole through the back of a fleeing replicant and an even larger,

ragged-edged hole through its front.

And that had happened as well. Echo of time, echo of sound, the impact of the

gun's roaring explosion travelling up Deckard's outstretched arms, locked and

aimed, as it had so many times and so many replicants before. While the sound

of death itself had slammed off the city's close-pressed walls, the intricate

neon of kanji and corporate logos shivering as though with a sympathetic fear,

the honed leading edge of the shot and its lower-pitched trail rolling over

the street's crowded, incurious faces. All of them as used to death as Deckard

was, just from living in L.A.; he knew they could watch him being pulled apart

by Kowalski with the same indifferent gazes they had swung toward the

replicant Zhora's bullet-driven terminal arc.

When he'd still had the gun, he'd walked with the black piece dangling at his

side, its weight pulling down his hand the same way it'd dragged rocklike the

shoulder holster strapped beneath his long coat. Rivulets of L.A. 's monsoon

rains and his own sweat had oozed beneath his shirt cuff, across the back of

his hand, into the checked, death-heated grip inside the aching curve of his

palm. He'd walked across spearlike shards of glass crunching under his shoes.

The frames of the store windows through which Zhora's dying body had crashed

were transformed into gaping mouths

ringed with transparent, blood-flecked teeth. He'd walked and stood over her,

his sight framing a vision of empty hands and empty face, eyes void as

photo-receptors unplugged from any power source. All life fled, leaked from

the raw hole between her hidden breasts, dead replicant flesh looking just the

same as human. The furious energy, the animal grace and fear, that had

impelled her dodging and running through the streets' closing trap, spent and

diluted by the drops of tear-warm rain spattering across the pavement's red

lace. Deckard's energy, that of the hunter, also gone. The chase, from the

moment Zhora had wheeled about in her dressing room at Taffy Lewis's club down

in Chinatown's First Sector and nailed him with a hard blow to the forehead,

then all the weaving among crowds and dead-run stalking over the metal roofs

of the traffic-stalled cars-that hadn't exhausted him. It'd been the end of

the chase, the shot, his own will inside the bullet. That had struck and

killed, a red kiss centered on her naked shoulder blades. That had seemed, for

a moment, to kill him as well.

Exhaustion had made it possible for the other escaped replicant to get the

drop on Deckard, to pull him between two segmented refuse haulers, then smack

the gun out of his grip like swatting a fly and send it spinning out toward

the street. So exhausted that he hadn't been surprised at all when Kowalski,

eyes maddened by the witnessing of the female's death, had picked him up like

a rag doll and slammed him against the side of one hauler, spine leaving a

buckled indentation in the carapacelike metal. And words, spat out angry and

sneering, something with which Kowalski could hammer the killer.

How old am I? Then-My birthday's April 10, 2017. How long do I live?

Deckard had told him the answer, gasped it out with the last of his breath.

Four years. That was how long all the Nexus-6 replicants had been given. They

carried their own clock-ticking deaths inside their cells, more certain than

any blade runner's gun.

The answer hadn't been to Leon Kowalski's liking, though he must have known it

already. His eyes had gone wider and

even more crazed. More than you. More than the man dangling from his fists had

to live

"Wake up!"

But that's wrong, thought Deckard. The other's face, mottled in his sight with

the black swirling dots of oxygen starvation, grinned up at him. The operating

remnants of his brain could remember what had happened before. Kowalski hadn't

shouted the words, not that loud; he'd mouthed them softly, as though savoring

their taste between his teeth. Those words, and the words that'd come after.

And he didn't lift me so far off the ground .

"Wake up! Time to die!"

He could feel himself dangling in air, could hear the replicant's voice, the

words shouted or whispered-it didn't matter now. It hadn't mattered before.

All that mattered was the crushing pressure on his throat, the weight of his

own body against Kowalski's fists squeezing off the city's humid air from his

lungs. The other's words roared inside his head, each syllable a pulse of

blood against his skull's thin shell of bone. Now the voice, the shout, seemed

to hammer right at his ears. Maybe that's why it sounds so loud, thought a

cold, abstracted part of Deckard, watching himself die. Because I know .

He knew what happened next. What would happen, had already happened;

foreordained, scripted, bolted to the iron rails of the past, unswerving as

those of the rep train that rolled in the darkness beneath the dark city.

Time to die .

He wondered what was taking so long. Where is she? wondered Deckard. She was

supposed to have been here by now .

Kowalski's fists lifted him higher, his spine arching backward. The sky

wheeled in Deckard's sight, needles of stars and gouts of flame penetrating

the storm clouds above the L.A. towers. Police spinners drew distant,

slow-motion traces of light, while the hectoring U.N. advert blimp cruised

lower, seemingly within reach of his hand if he could've taken it away from

the replicant's choking grasp. Emigrant vistas swam across the giant screen

imbedded in the midst of the

blimp's spiked antennae; an even larger voice boomingly cajoled him to seek a

new life in the off-world colonies. What a good idea, that other part of him

mused. His old life was almost gone.

The city's faces roiled across his sight; all of them, indifferent or hostile,

eyes hidden behind black visor strips or magnified and glittering behind

chrome-ringed fish-eye lenses. Chemical-laced tears ran down pallid cheeks,

laughter broke past doubled ranks of filed teeth; a row of Taiwanese Schwinn

clones jangled the bells on their handlebars, to cut through and then be

swallowed up by the two-way rivers of foot and motor traffic. The black dots

in Deckard's vision had grown larger and started to coalesce. Beyond them, he

could see another face, made of a grid of photons. A woman in geisha-lite

drag, Euro-ized kabukoid makeup and perfect black-shellac hair; she smiled

with ancient suavity at the Swiss pharmaceutical capsule on her fingertips,

then swallowed it, her coquette smile and glance turning even more mysterious.

He didn't know her name, or even what she was selling; he had never known,

during all the time he had walked and lived and killed inside the traplike

city, and the woman had floated above him like some anonymous, disdainful

angel. In his anoxic delirium, he could imagine that she was about to lean

down from the ad-screen and bestow a kiss upon him .

The Asian woman's face disappeared, replaced by the only one that mattered.

Kowalski pulled him close, not for a kiss but to snap the vertebrae at the

hinge of Deckard's neck. He'd be paralyzed before he was dead, but only for a

few seconds, until Kowalski finished him off.

"Wake up! Time to die .

Deckard heard the words again, but knew it was only memory. He saw Kowalski's

smile and nothing else, as the replicant jabbed two fingers toward Deckard's

eye sockets.

Maybe they finally got it right, he thought. This time it'll be different . .

But it wasn't. Even as he looked down at the other's face, time started up

again, the loop running as it had before. As it had so long ago. The

replicant's expression changed to one

of stunned bewilderment. The light behind Kowalski's eyes dwindled to a spark,

then died out, as the life that the T~rre1l Corporation had given him rushed

from the red flower, torn flesh and white thorns of bone splinters, that had

burst from his forehead. The bullet had passed all the way through and

vanished, tumbling somewhere beyond Deckard's shoulder.

The thing that had been Kowalski crumpled forward, falling onto Deckard and

trapping him against the shining wet pavement. Deckard clawed out from beneath

him and stood upright again, regaining his balance and his breath. His vision

shifted, from blurred to focussed, close to medium distance; Rachael stood at

the mouth of the alley, swathed in high-collared fur, the gun that Kowalski

had knocked away now clasped in both her hands-it must have landed right at

her feet-and trembling from the shock of its firing, the slight motion of the

trigger that had placed the steel-jacketed bullet like a quick finger tap at

the back of Kowalski's head. She looked dazed, lips parted to draw in her own

held breath; just as though she had never killed anyone before. As though this

were the first time this had happened.

His gaze went back down to the dead replicant at his feet. Or supposedly dead.

He's doing a good job, thought Deckard. Kowalski looked as dead as a real

corpse.

"Come on, get up-" Deckard kept his voice lowered, so that none of the on-set

microphones would pick it up. "It's a wrap, they got it all on tape. You can

get up now."

Blood welled from the hole in Kowalski's shattered brow.

Then Deckard knew it was real.

"What the hell At the edge of the soundstage, where the fake streets, the

re-created Los Angeles, gave way to bare dry concrete and steel, the flooring

laced with thick power cables and data conduits like black snakes-Deckard

stood up, angrily ripping the headphones away from his ears. The folding chair

toppled over as he threw the 'phones at the central monitor, the one that had

shown the view from the eyes of the other Deckard, the fake one, the one that

had been dangling from the now-dead replicant's fists. Across the smaller

screens, the angles of all the other video-cams unfolded like a magician's

pack of cards.

"Now what?" The close-up on the fake Rachael showed her dropping out of

character, the look of shock on her face transmuted to that of a disgusted

professional as she let the heavy gun hang at the end of her arm. She sighed

wearily. "Christ, this shoot's taking forever."

Deckard ignored her, striding past the cameras on their automated tracking

booms, the skeletal apparatuses of light and event. The drizzle from the

overhead rain gantry ran off his jacket sleeves, the grid underneath the

soundstage sucking away the excess from the glossily photogenic puddles. He

pushed aside the faux Deckard, the actor playing him, and stood looking down

at Kowalski. At what was left of the replicant, the bleeding artificial flesh.

"Please A hand clutched ineffectually at his elbow. "Mr. Deckard ... you

can't just-"

He turned angrily upon the production assistant, a tiny androgynous figure

with heavy retro black-framed glasses. "It wasn't supposed to happen this

way!" He jabbed his finger at the assistant, who fended it off with an

upraised clipboard. "I was told you weren't going to kill anyone!" The

circumference of his gaze tinged with red as he looked back toward the crew

ringing the soundstage. "Where's Urbenton?"

That was the name of the director. Who was conspicuously missing, the folding

chair that had usually supported his pudgy frame now unoccupied. Chickenshit

sonuva bitch- Deckard felt his teeth grinding together. The director must've

snuck out after the video recorders had started rolling, while Deckard had

been wrapped in the view from the cam monitors, watching the re-creation of

his own past. Urbenton would've known that Deckard would go ballistic when a

real bullet, from a real gun, wound up churning through someone's brain.

"Come on, man The actor playing him-not a replicant like the one who had

been playing Kowalski, but an actual human-tried out as peacemaker. "It can't

all be special effects, you know. Sometimes you gotta go for realism."

"Get away from me." Revulsion worked its way up Deckard's throat, choking him

as though the replicant's big hands had been around his own neck instead of

the other

man's. The actor didn't even look that much like him, or at least not yet.

Like most of the talent in the video industry, in addition to the remote cam

implanted behind one eye, the actor also had barely visible tracker dots sewn

under his skin, so that in postproduction another's face could be ceegeed over

the one he'd been born with.

That new face would've been the real Deckard's. But not now, he fumed. Not if

I can help it. "So where is he?" Deckard stopped just short of gathering up

the front of the assistant's collar in his hand and squeezing tight, the way

the dead Kowalski had done to the human actor. "Where's Urbenton?"

"I ... I don't know The assistant retreated, sweating hands clasped to the

clipboard. "He got called away .

"Yeah, right. I bet." Deckard stepped over the corpse and started toward the

soundstage's big rolling doors and the interlocking corridors and spaces of

the studio complex beyond. "I'll find him myself. He's got one hell of a lot

of explaining to do."

He didn't look over his shoulder as he strode away. But he could sense the

fake L.A. dying its own death, the constant artificial rain stopping, the

vehicles halting and being shut off in the middle of the crowded street, the

actors and extras walking off the set. The replica blimp, a tenth the size of

the one that had once actually floated above the city, dangled inert from the

overhead rigging, adscreen blank and faceless.

The city's walls parted as the grips moved the scenery back. There was nothing

behind them except dust and stubbed-out cigarettes, and a few scattered drops

of blood.

A silver crescent in the sky, hanging below him. Dave Holden thought it looked

like some kind of Islamic emblem, complete to the glittering star between the

points of its horns. The artificial moon's gravitational field tilted the

skiff's gimballed pilot's seat, hanging him upside down inside the tiny

interplanetary craft. Inside the cramped cockpit area, there was barely room

enough for himself and the cargo strapped onto the empty seat beside him.

Which spoke now: "You're in big trouble, pal." The briefcase kept its voice

level and calm, as though unconcerned with human problems.

Holden glanced over at the briefcase. Plain black, a decent grade of

leatherette, chrome snaps and bits around the handle. It looked like the exact

sort that millions of junior execs carried into office towers every morning,

back on Earth. By rights, it shouldn't have been talking at all; that it was

doing so indicated the long-standing personal relationship between the two of

them.

"Big, big trouble." The briefcase continued its simple, ominous

pronouncements.

"I know-" Holden reached out to the control panel and dialed the skiff's

guidance system toward the silver crescent's intake beam. "I breathe trouble."

More than metaphor:

the lungs in his chest, and the heart between them, were efficient constructs

of Teflon and surgical steel. His original cardiopulmonary system had been

blown out his back by an escaped replicant named Leon Kowalski. Back on Earth,

back in the L.A. from which he and the briefcase had just flown. That bullet

had been a couple of years ago; there had been others before and since then,

some of which he'd fired, others that'd been fired at him. The bio-mechanical

lungs sucked whiffs of imminent death and left them on his tongue. Tasting

like the ashes of the cigarettes the LAPD doctors had made him give up.

"Breathe it out, too."

"You're probably going to die."

"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 in-

side 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 Mreally

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 scav

enger. 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 Cinecittâ 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."

Thnnels 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 they'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 con-

structed 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 some-

thing 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 repli

cants. 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-ot her 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

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BLADERUNNER:REPLICANTNIOHTCopyright(c)1996byPhilipK.DickTrustBladeRunner:replicantnight!K.W.Jeter.ForRussGalenScannedbyPete2568/05/2002Wakeup...He'dheardthosewords,thatvoice,before.Deckardwondered,foramoment,ifheweredreaming.Butifheweredreaming-I'dbeabletobreathe,hethought.Andrightnow,inthissegmento...

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K. W. Jeter - Bladerunner 01 - Replicant Night

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