Edge Of Human

4

"What's your plan?" Andersson — if that was really his name — glanced over from the spinner's controls.

Deckard shrugged. "I've got my methods." The spinner swooped in low enough to the Olvera Street souk that Deckard could see the animal dealers packing up their wares, business done for the night. The zooid merchandise had to be gotten under tarps before the day's heat fried their synaptic circuits; the rarer and more expensive real animals needed water and temp-controlled cages to survive. "I think I've hunted down enough replicants to remember how it's done."

He kept his eyelids lowered partway. When he'd seen the city again, as Sarah Tyrell's agents had taken him in to his meeting with her, gouts of fire had flared into the dark sky, subterranean gases ignited as they seeped up through the trembling earth beneath L.A. Now those shouting torches were lost in the sun's advancing glare.

"This replicant — number six — might be different." The other man apparently knew all about the job Deckard had taken on. "Harder than you're ready for."

Deckard ignored the comment. The sooner he was down in the city's streets, the sooner he could wrap up this sorry business. And head north again. "Where we going?" He looked out the side of the spinner's canopy, watching a herd of artificial emu being herded down a back alley. The marketplace died, bit by bit, as the multilingual neon signs were switched off.

"You'll see." Andersson reached forward and flicked on the landing prep switches. "Soon enough."

One neon sign, the biggest, stayed lit. He remembered it always being on, no matter the time or weather, looming over the district's transactions like a silent blessing. Only the size of the letters competed with the cruising U.N. blimp, with its flat-panel screen and booming exhortations to leave the planet, and all the rest of the city's tidal wave of ad slam.

VAN NUYS PET HOSPITAL. Pink letters, with a shiver of blue around their edges. And a cartoon puppy face, shifting every two seconds from sad and injured to happy and bandaged. He'd always figured that every resurrection should be so easy.

The spinner dropped toward the landing deck atop the building. "Why we going here?" asked Deckard. "You got a kitten with ear mites or something?"

"No-" Andersson took his hands from the controls, the descent locked on auto. He smiled humorlessly. "Orders from Miss Tyrell. You've got an appointment."

Deckard let himself be hustled into the elevator. even before the other two spinners touched down. He'd come this far without putting up a fight; no point in starting one now. He watched as the man beside him punched in a security code. The elevator doors slid together; the tiny space sank into the faint but unmistakable odors of disinfectant and animal droppings.

Panel lights charted the descent into the building's midsection. When the doors opened, he found himself gazing into the spectacled eyes of a smaller man, lab-coated, drooping tabby asleep in the cradle of his arms.

"Should I stick around, Mr. Isidore?" Andersson held the elevator door from reclosing.

"No… I don't think that'll be nuh-necessary." Scratching behind the tabby's ears, the gnomish figure tilted his head, brow wrinkling. "I'm sure our guh-guh-guest will behave himself."

"I have a choice?"

"Well…" Isidore mulled, frowned. "Probably nuh-not."

"Don't," whispered Andersson into Deckard's ear, "do anything stupid." He stepped back into the elevator, hit the buttons, and disappeared behind the stainless-steel doors.

"Not to worry." The tabby stirred and yawned. "They're puh-paid to act like thuh-that. It's all an act. You should nuh-know."

Deckard followed the man. "Sometimes it's not an act."

"Oh, yes…" Isidore glanced over his shoulder. "You know that tuh-tuh-too. That's when people — and other things — thuh-that's when they get hurt." He held the tabby closer against his chest, as though protecting it.

The concrete-floored space narrowed to a corridor lined with cages, stacked three or four deep, and larger kennels. The air beneath the bare fluorescents was laced with mingled animal scents. As Isidore passed by, the small creatures — cats, rabbits, toy breeds of dogs, a few guinea pigs — pressed against the wire doors, mewing or yapping for the man's attention.

Deckard turned his head, getting a closer look. Some of the animals in the cages weren't animals. Not real ones.

A partially disassembled simulacrum suckled a row of squirming kittens; its white fur had been peeled back to reveal the polyethylene tubes and webbing beneath aluminum ribs; the optic sensors in its skull gazed out with maternal placidity. A wasp-waisted greyhound danced quivering excitement, front paws flurrying at the kennel gate; all four legs were abstract steel and miniature hydraulic cylinders.

A headless rabbit bumped against a water dish. Its mate — flesh and blood as far as Deckard could tell — nuzzled against its flank.

"Wuh-what's wrong?" Isidore had caught a hiss of inhaled breath behind him.

"These things give me the creeps."

"Really?" Isidore stopped in his tracks. He looked amazed; even the tabby in his arms blinked open its eyes. " Why?"

"They're not real." He had seen plenty of fake animals before, out in the dealers' souk, and they'd never bothered him. But those had had their skins and pelts intact. These, with their electromechanical innards exposed, flaunted a raw nakedness.

"Guh-gosh." It seemed to come as news to Isidore. He looked down at the tabby for a moment. "I guess I duh-don't see it thuh-that wuh-wuh-way. They all seem real to me. I mean… you can tuh-touch them." Leaning toward Deckard, lifting the tabby closer to him. "Here."

He scratched the cat's head, getting an audible purr in response. It might have been real. Or well made, well programmed.

"You suh-see? It must be real." Isidore managed to open one of the empty cages and off-loaded the tabby into it. "There you go, tuh-Tiger." The cat complained for a moment, then curled nose to tail and closed its eyes. "Come on. My office's juh-just over here. I'll close the door… so you won't huh-have to see anything you don't want to." The gaze behind the glasses narrowed, then he turned and started walking again.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Oh… nothing…" Turning a key in a lock, Isidore directed a thin smile at him.

"Juh-just that I wouldn't have thought you'd be so… suh-sensitive." He stepped through the doorway. "Given your domestic arrangements and all."

"Got a point." Deckard walked into a low-ceilinged, windowless cubicle, walls covered with freebie calendars and thumb-tacked photos of pets and their owners; satisfied clients, he figured. "Except Rachael's all in one piece. That's the difference." He had to remember to keep cool, to get through whatever drill he'd been brought down here for. So he could get back to the sleeping, dying, waiting woman up north.

"Please… sit duh-down." The other man dropped himself into a swivel chair behind a desk covered with mounds of papers and empty foam cups. "Really… I do wuh-want you to be comfortable. We have a lot to talk about."

"This says your name's Hannibal Sloat." Sitting, he'd picked up the cheap wooden plaque from the desk. He held it by one end. "You or somebody else?"

"Mr. Sloat was my boss. A luh-luh-long tuh-time ago. Then he died." Isidore looked around at the office's moulting walls, then pointed. "That's him up there."

He turned his head and saw a hard-copy newspaper clipping, browned with age, stuck to the wall. In the low-rez photo, a fat man with pockmarked skin held a dangling cat out to a couple, the woman stroking the animal with one delicate hand, the man turning a slightly embarrassed smile toward the camera. Deckard shifted around in the chair. "Nice guy?"

"Oh, sure. Real nuh-nice. In his will… he left me the puh-pet hospital." He brought his gaze back down to Deckard's. "He left me.. everything. Really." The swivel chair seemed to have grown larger, as though it were capable of swallowing him up, as he folded his hands in his lap. "It's a big responsibility."

"What is? Giving distemper shots? Lube job on a replica Pekingese, maybe. Doesn't seem like anything you couldn't handle."

"Thuh-that's what I used to think. There wasn't any thuh-thing more to the job than that.

Even when old Mr. Sloat was still uh-uh-live and I was working for him. That's what I thought the Van Nuys Pet Hospital's buh-business was. Like you said — shu-shots and ruh-ruh-pairs."

"So if it's not that…" Deckard set the plaque down on the desk's corner. "Then what is it?"

"Well… you'd probably say we duh-deal in fuh-fakes. Like out in the souk. Fuh-phony goldfish, and kuh-kuh-cats and dogs and stuff. That you can't tell from the real thing. I mean… the living thing. What yuh-you'd call the living thing."

"Don't you? I thought that's where the money is. That's what people like. The fakes. The real ones… they just make a mess. It's just easier dealing with the simulations."

The other nodded slowly, wisps of silky white hair drifting over his pink scalp. "I guess that's what somebody who spent so much time as a buh-blade runner wuh-would think. You had your own wuh-way of dealing with those… suh-suh-simulations. Didn't you?"

He studied the lab-coated figure on the other side of the desk. "Look — is this why I was brought here? So you could rag on my moral condition, or something? You needn't have bothered." He put his hands against the chair's arms, as though he were about to push himself upright and walk out of the office. "You know so much about blade runners… you ever hear of something they call the Curve?"

"Maybe." Isidore shrugged, nervous. "Some kind of… kuh-cop tuh-talk."

"The Wambaugh Curve." Strange to be talking about it out loud. It'd always been something that everyone in the LAPD knew about, could feel sitting under the breastbone like a ball of lead, but never spoke of. Another ticket to the department shrinks; where if they found you were too badly screwed up, they'd take away your gun and the answer to all your problems. "The index of self-loathing. Blade runners get it worse, and faster, than other cops. Comes with the territory."

Isidore's eyes looked wet and sympathetic behind the glasses. "Then what happens?"

"Depends." Once the dissection had begun, it was easy to sink the scalpel in deeper. "Upon where you are on the Curve." He'd used to think about these matters late at night in his flat, sunk deep in the overstuffed leather couch, one of the pleasantly expensive things that his bounty money had brought him. In the lonely splendor that'd followed his divorce, with a bottle of twenty-five-year-old single malt from the Orkney Islands close at hand, that sweetly tasted of smoke and dirt and money as well. Nobody ever said that blade-running sucked on the paycheck scale. Sometimes he'd sat there, brooding or anesthetized, with replicant blood still spattered across his chest. One time, he'd lifted his glass and had seen the drops of red written across the back of his hand. And had sipped and closed his eyes, and not felt a thing. "Eventually… the Curve gets steep enough, you fall off. I did."

"And then you weren't a blade runner anymore."

Seconds passed before he could say anything. "No… He shook his head. "I guess I wasn't."

"Too buh-bad." Steel under Isidore's voice, a thin needle of it. "A little late, for all the ones you killed."

Deckard gave him a hard stare. "Listen, pal-" A weapon in the eyes. "I was just doing my job."

"I knew you'd say that." No flinch, no stammer. "It's what they all say. All the murderers."

The cop on guard duty actually lifted his rifle across his chest. The next move would bring it down into firing position, full auto rock 'n' roll. "You got security clearance for this floor?" A mean look underneath the SWAT team cap.

"Hey, hey… don't sweat it, man." The figure in the hospital's green scrubs raised his empty hands. An easy smile, but cold eyes. "I hit the wrong button, got off on the wrong floor. That's all." He slowly lowered his hands. "No need to uncork the artillery, pal."

"Wrong button, huh?" The guard kept his finger on the trigger. At this range, he didn't need the sharpshooter tags under the LAPD shoulder insignia. He could've set the muzzle's hollow eye right on the breastbone beneath the hospital staff outfit. "Well, why don't you turn around, get back into the elevator, and push the right button this time. That way, you won't get into trouble."

"What's the deal, anyway?" The smiling man raised up on his toes, scanning over the guard's head to the open unit where the floor's sole patient lay surrounded by gurgling machines, a half-dozen doctors and nurses who seemed to be more like technicians and electronics geeks. Softly bleeping dots drew spiked trails on a bank of video monitors. "This guy some kind of VIP?" Beyond the bed and the body, windows reached to the ceiling, overlooking the city. "Been here a long time, hasn't he?" The magmalike L.A. sun battered the towers, the glare washing out the viewscreen of the U.N. blimp as it cruised by, making its constant pitch for off-world emigration.

"You ask a lot of questions." Cool enough to show nothing more than his index finger tightening on the crook of metal; small shiny things clicked ready inside the rifle. "Not a good idea."

"Peace, brother." Hands went up again, palms exposed, the smile floating between them. "You keep on doing your job, and I'll go do mine." Inside the man's skull, behind the cold eyes, a single unvoiced word: Jerk. A couple meters beyond the guard stood the open frame of a metal detector; he could see that it'd been switched off, probably to keep it from being triggered by the equipment carts that rolled in and out of the unit. It wouldn't have mattered to him if he'd had to step through the thing, still smiling, to find out what he needed to know; the small, efficient gun hidden at the small of his back was sheathed in enough microprocessor-controlled evasion polymers to slip past a goddamn radar station. It was the lazy unprofessionalism that irked him. These putzes were amateurs, all black-leather and chrome-eyed swagger, and sloppy on the details. Typical.

He reached behind himself and hit the elevator call button. Already there; the doors slid open and he stepped back, hands still up for a joke, the smile still on his face. He gave a little wave through the narrowing slit. "'Bye now."

Leaning back as the elevator descended, he let the smile creep up into his eyes. Behind them were no words, just a map, the exact layout of the unit, the guards, the machines and doctors, and the man on the hospital bed, who had a hole where his heart and lungs used to be.

He got off on the next floor down. No guards on this floor; he collected his gear, bigger and more rawly industrial-looking than the hospital's usual chrome equipment carts, from an unused storage closet and wheeled it into the maternity ward. He began unfolding the heavy bracing struts, the pronged steel feet digging into the scuffed rubberoid flooring.

"What the hell are you doing?" Some kind of nursing supervisor came bustling toward him, waving a clipboard. "You can't put that thing in here! Whatever it is."

The smiling man turned toward the woman. "Oh, I think I can." Farther along the ward, on all sides, an audience of pregnant women watched the altercation. They all looked huge and imminent, lying on closely spaced beds and gurneys, raising their heads just enough to look over their rounded abdomens to see what the noise was; their passive faces, medicated or endorphined, radiated a Buddhistic calm. "Besides-" His smile grew larger, though less reassuring. "I won't be here long."

"I'm calling security." The nursing supervisor turned and strode toward the central station.

"That's not a good idea." He interrupted his setup procedure, reaching behind himself and taking the gun out from beneath the scrub shirt. A click of metal was enough to stop the woman in her tracks, her eyes widening as she looked over her shoulder and saw the small black hole pointed at a spot just below the front edge of her white starched cap. "Why should we bother them?" He backed her up against the counter of the central station, the gun's muzzle then just an inch away from her forehead. With his other hand, he reached past the younger, even more terrified nurse sitting behind the counter, picked the phone up, and yanked its cord free from the wall below. "Since there's really no problem here, anyway. Unless you make one." His smile broadened as he took the gun away from the supervisor's face and used it to point toward the station's other chair. "Have a seat."

He walked back toward the bulky device squatting in the middle of the maternity ward's floor. The eyes of all the pregnant women had latched on to him; a couple of the less tranquilized had started to weep softly, pulling up the thin sheets of the gurneys and trying to hide behind them. "Ladies… you're beautiful just the way you are." He held the gun by his own head, pointing it toward the speckled acoustic ceiling. "Just stay like this. Real quiet." He turned, sweeping the beam of his smile across them. "And then we'll always have this moment together. Won't we?"

The mothers-to-be stayed frozen in place, just as he wanted them. He glanced over his shoulder at the women back at the nursing station. "I'm keeping an eye on you, too." With one hand he pulled out the last of the device's struts and jacked it into place. "So just relax. This'll only take a moment."

In the breast pocket of his green scrub shirt was a remote with two red, unmarked buttons on one side. Taking a pace back, he fished the metal box out. This was serious enough business to erase the smile for a moment. He hit the top button with his thumb.

A two-second delay gave him enough time to turn his face away, ears shielded with his upraised hands, remote in one and gun in the other. The shock wave from the blast rolled over his back like a heated ocean wave, with enough force to send him stumbling a few steps before he caught his balance.

The silence that followed was broken by the muffled sobs of the pregnant women sirening into full-out wails. That and the patter of atomized structural material, falling in a rain of white dust and charred metal across his shoulders.

Already in motion, he ran back to the device he'd wheeled into the ward. The thrust of the shaped explosive charges had dug the bracing struts another inch into the floor. He gazed up at the raw-edged hole that had been ripped through the ceiling above. Its center was filled by the hydraulic ram that had sprung like a jack-in-the-box from the device, the oil-glistening metal shoving aside the scorched, twisted girders.

Strapped to one side of the device was an attache case of chrome and molded black neoprene. flicking the remote back into his scrub shirt pocket, he pulled the case free and started climbing, the wrist of his gun hand catching the holds riveted to the side of the ram.

On the floor above, the hospital staff and security guards were still stunned by the blunt prow shape that had erupted in their midst. Jagged metal scraped along his spine as he emerged partway into the smoke and settling dust. A quick look around, with the case pulled through and flopped down onto the hole's buckled perimeter; he saw the heart-and-lung patient right where he'd planned on, the railed bed surrounded by the whispering machines. The monitor screens had flipped, the explosion having sent the beeping lines into sharp-pointed spasms and trilling alarms. Letting go of the case's handle but not the gun, he pushed himself up and onto the edge of the hole

The doctors and nurses, the ones left standing, had been shoved by the explosion against the walls. At least one had been hit by a bit of flying shrapnel; blood formed a bright net across his face and surgical gown before he collapsed onto his knees. The patient on the bed, at the edge of anesthetized consciousness, stirred feebly inside the web of hoses and tubes.

"Hey, buddy-" The smile returned to the man's face, his eyes brightening, as he called to the guard dragging himself toward the rifle that had landed a few feet away. The words were enough to stop the guard, his fingertips a fraction of an inch from the butt of the rifle. The hesitation was more than enough; the guard raised his head and the smiling man fired. One shoulder hit the rifle as the bullet's impact tugged the guard by his shattered skull along the floor.

He could hear the alarms shrieking somewhere else inside the hospital. Time dwindling now — he pulled the remote out of his shirt pocket and hit the second button.

In the vibrating sunlight outside the ward's high bank of windows, a brighter spark moved, metal struck by fire. As though it were a piece of the sun, fallen into an orbit low among the city's towers. It grew larger, closer, summoned by the tight beam from the remote in the man's hand.

Which he was done with — he tossed the small metal box aside. He scooped up the attache case by its black molded handle and strode quickly toward the bed.

"What…" Not even a whisper, not a sigh, but a few molecules of exhaled breath. The heart-and-lung patient's eyelids fluttered open. "What… are you doing…" A red bubble trembled in the cloudy plastic tube inserted in his trachea.

"Take it easy, pal." The man's hands were flying as he leaned over the bed. Yanking and pulling, tubes and ridged hoses flipped up from the heart-and-lung patient's blood spattered abdomen. "Just lie back and let me do the work." He'd laid the gun down on the nearest equipment cart, scooping up the sharp-edged tools and sterile white tape he'd known he'd find there. "Funny, that's what she said last night. Don't laugh, you'll bust a stitch."

Pure oxygen hissed as he jerked the largest hose from a Teflon socket at the breastbone's center; a wobbling bag of Ringer's solution burst on the floor like a prankster's water balloon as his elbow knocked over the IV-drip stand. He worked faster, the attache case open on the bed beside the patient. Security alarms shrieked in dissonant chorus outside the ward; he could sense through the floor the tremor of distant running. The quick, faint noise of ammo clips being shoved into place touched his ear; he didn't look up. He'd already measured the exact amount of time he needed. A spear of reflected sunlight hit his face. Glancing up, he saw the spinner, a modified light-cargo model, approaching the window bank. No one in the pilot seat; the program triggered by the push of the remote's button guided the spinner closer, the steel-reinforced nose gleaming a meter away from the glass, then less.

With a sweep of his forearm, he pushed the disconnected machines away. Another chrome rack toppled, sprawling the loose tubes, spastic octopus. With the roll of surgical tape he spliced the smaller lines from inside the attache case, snugging them tight to the implant connections that studded the patient's torso.

"Let's go-" He flipped the switch beneath a glass square set in the case's lid; a fiat green line coursed across the monitor. "Son of a bitch. Come on!" Smile into angry scowl; a fist struck the densely packed machinery; a miniature bellows sucked and gasped through a mesh filter, but the green line remained a perfect horizon. Both fists doubled, he struck the man on the bed, hitting the narrow target between the throat and the red-edged tubes hard enough to partway jackknife the man's knees toward his chest.

"Jesus…" An agonized whisper. One of the heart-and-lung patient's hands came free, from where it had been bound by the wrist to the bed's chrome rail; he feebly tried to fend off his attacker. "Jesus Christ… get away from me…"

The man above leaned down, sealing his mouth over the other's, a suction tube already prodded into the kiss. A hard exhale, and the patient's chest raised in response. From the attache case came a birdlike chirp, as the monitor's green line jittered, then caught in a two-stroke beat. The artificial pulse slowed, steadied as the man, smiling again, wiped his mouth and adjusted the knob for the adrenaline flow.

"I hope you're ready to travel-"

Words barely spoken, when the high bank of windows shattered, sparkling points of glass arcing across the ward. The segmented metal frame bent and twisted, bolts screeching out of the floor and walls as the nose of the freight spinner shoved its way inside the hospital building. The smiling man brushed glitter of broken glass from the heart-and-lung patient's raw, exposed chest; he reached a hand behind and raised the patient up, his other hand looping the surgical tape around, strapping the attache case and its nest of hoses tight against the body.

"Hold on!" Glass crunched underfoot as he shoved the wheeled bed toward the spinner, now motionless in the gaping architectural wound.

Rifle fire behind him — he glanced over his shoulder and saw the bright muzzle flashes, the crouching figures of an LAPD security team, more of them darting from the bank of elevators as the doors slid open, the dark-uniformed men running head down and with guns in hand, taking up positions around the ward's narrow entrance. A bullet clanged and ricocheted from one of the bed's curved metal bars; others slammed into the surrounding walls. The ruptured floor, with the entry device's battering ram still rearing up into the space, and the knocked-aside medical equipment formed a partial barricade between the man and the new arrivals on the scene, momentarily shielding him from a direct line of attack.

He reached to the small of his back for his own gun, found nothing, remembered that he had left it sitting on top of the main respiratory-assist machine, at the edge of the nest of tubes and hoses from which he'd yanked the bed. He could see the gun now, a small black shape on top of shiny chrome. Too far away to reach, especially with a sharp horizontal rain of hollow points lacing the room — he swung back toward the shattered windows, watching across the prostrate form of the heart-and-lung patient as the freight spinner outside rotated, bringing its open cargo-bay door toward the jagged teeth of glass. The glaring sunlight hit his face like a furnace's hot flood.

One of the spinner's flanged air intakes caught on a bent, broken section of the windows' steel frame. The thrust engines whined higher in pitch, as the autopilot program shoved the vehicle against the obstruction. The cargo-bay opening stayed where it was, nearly two meters away from the ripped edge of the hospital building.

Through the echoing clamor of the rifle fire, he could hear the security team shifting position, moving closer into the ward. He took a few steps backward, drawing the hospital bed with him, then bracing his hands against the lowest rail on one side.

"No…" The heart-and-lung patient had seen what the other man was getting ready to do. "You can't… im… possible…"

"Shut up." He pushed the bed full force, digging in and picking up speed, head lowered bull-like and muscles straining beneath the green scrubs. A second later the rolling bed had hit the rim of the floor-level window frame; momentum tilted the bed over and sent it flying toward the spinner outside, the cargo bay as the exact center of the target. His own momentum and a final diving launch carried him after.

He landed on the patient, who moaned and tried to push him away with weak, narcotized arms. One of the hospital bed's wheels had caught against the sill of the bay door; the chrome frame and mattress fell outside the spinner, scraping against the hospital exterior as it spiraled down toward the city streets below.

Bullets hit and bounced inside the bare-ribbed cargo space. Inside the hospital, the security team had come out to the open, sprinting across the ward's broken field, firing as they ran.

He scrambled off the heart-and-lung patient; still on his knees, he lunged past the cockpit's empty seats and hit the autopilot's override button on the control panel. A slap of his hand against the thrust levers — the spinner surged forward, a forearm slung around the pilot seat's headrest keeping him from being flung back into the cargo space.

Through the cockpit's glass curve, he spotted the steel hook of the broken window frame digging farther into the engine's air scoop. Enough to tilt the spinner at a forty-five-degree angle as it fought against the crude grapple. A metal hail hammered small dents into the side panels.

Over his shoulder he saw the heart-and-lung patient sliding helplessly toward the open bay door. Hanging on to the pilot seat, he reached back and managed to claw a handful of the billowing sheets into his fist. Shock and fear had cut through the patient's anesthetizing drugs; fully conscious, eyes nearly as wide as his gaping mouth, he stared behind and below himself, at the dizzying emptiness of air and the threadlike street rotating hundreds of meters down at the hospital tower's base.

With the sheet as a taut sling, the other man yanked the heart-and-lung patient up toward himself. With a push of his arm, he managed to get the patient stuffed awkwardly into the other cockpit seat. The gauges and monitor screen on the attache case strapped to the patient's chest shrieked and danced in alarm.

A twist of the rudder pulled the spinner free of the window frame strut, the pent-up thrust sending the vehicle arcing toward the cloudless sky. The security team, arrayed in the gap in the hospital's outside wall, continued to fire as they dwindled away, the bullets rattling against the cargo-bay door as it slid shut.

"Uhh…" The heart-and-lung patient was beyond words now. His pale hands fluttered against the attache case, the pulsing machinery that kept him alive. "Uh… uhh…"

"Knock it off." The other man, smile not yet returned to his face, looked over in annoyance at the heart-and-lung patient. His own hands continued punching a flight pattern into the spinner's on-board computer. "You're making me nervous."

Sun flashed off the spinner's metal, pure white and dazzling, as it sped through and away from the city's upper reaches.

"That's what they've always said."

Deckard looked at the lab-coated figure on the other side of the desk. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"The suh-same old shit." Something almost like pity moved behind the thick lenses of Isidore's glasses. He shook his head in disgust. "Anytime people wuh-want to get themselves off the huh-hook, that's the kuh-kuh-kind of thing they say. 'I was doing my job. They told me to do it.'" His mocking voice didn't stumble. "It was a kruh-creaky old line at Nurembuh-berg."

"Yeah, well, maybe it was true there, too."

"Oh, guh-good one, Deckard." The head of the Van Nuys Pet Hospital pressed his hands fiat against the desk, leaning forward with his suddenly sharper gaze. "Great reh-rhetorical tuh-tactic, all right. You can duh-defend yourself and the Third Reich, all at the same tuh-time."

"Give me a break." His turn to shake his head. "You brought me here for a lecture on ancient history? Forget it. The dead are buried, and the murderers' ashes were dumped at the side of the road."

"I'm impressed. You nuh-know your stuff."

"Enough of it." He leaned back in the chair. "So can I go now? Because if you just wanted to take the moral higher ground with me, you didn't have to bother. Like I said, I quit the job."

"But maybe," said Isidore, "the juh-juh-job didn't quit you."

He sighed. "Whatever."

"Because…" The other's voice went lower and softer. "Because you never really fuh-found anything wrong with the blade runner job itself. You just didn't like duh-doing it anymore. Like you said, you got too far out on the Curve."

The room, Isidore's office, filled with silence; the papers and old calendars on the wall hung motionless in tensed air. Deckard closed his eyes. "It was a job somebody had to do. They were dangerous."

"Huh-who were?"

"Come on. The replicants. They were made to be dangerous. Military issue… for those nasty little chores offworld. So they had to be taken care of. Retired."

"By somebody like you."

Deckard opened his eyes. "That's right."

"Fuh-funny, isn't it, that they never huh-hurt anybody who wasn't trying to hurt them first. There's no ruh-record of an escaped replicant killing a human… at least not here on Earth… except when it was buh-backed into a corner, with no other way out."

"Oh, yeah?" That brought a sharp laugh from Deckard. "Tell it to Eldon Tyrell."

"Thuh-thuh-that was duh-different. That was something puh-personal." Isidore's expression turned brooding. "Besides, Eldon Tyrell duh-deserved to die. He was a real sonuvabitch. Believe me, I nuh-know."

Deckard wasn't going to argue the point. Tyrell, when alive, had given him the creeps. Plus, everything he'd scoped out since — all the bleak shimmer he'd picked up from the man's niece Sarah — hadn't changed his mind.

"All right," said Deckard. "Maybe replicants are nothing but saints. Human, however, they're not."

"Is thuh-that you talking? Or the blade runner?"

"Take your pick."

"Buh-but you loved one. A replicant. Or you still do. You suh-suh-sleep with her. In your arms."

"Doesn't make her human." He could hear the coldness in his own voice. Not for Rachael, but for everything else in the world. "If she were human, she wouldn't be dying now. So you're right about Tyrell — that four-year life span was one of his bright ideas. The Nexus-6 replicants were his big chance to play God, and all he could think of to do was hard-wire death into their cells."

Isidore gazed sadly at him for a moment. "If that duh-didn't make her human — your loving her — then what would?"

"Nothing." He shook his head. "There's a difference. Between human and not. That's what the tests are all about. The Voigt-Kampff tests." He knew he sounded like a blade runner now. These were the articles of faith, the core beliefs of the job. "She couldn't pass the test the first time I gave it to her, out at the Tyrell Corporation headquarters." He wondered how much of this Isidore already knew. There was some kind of link between Isidore and Sarah Tyrell — he just didn't know yet what it was. "I spotted her then. It took a while, but I knew. That she was a replicant."

"Buh-but it wasn't just the vuh-Voigt-Kampff tests; that muh-muh-machine you guys haul around with yourselves. It was something else. Something inside you. That could suh-say, 'This one's human and this one's not.' That's the essential thing, isn't it? About being a buh-blade runner. That ability to muh-make the distinction between what's human and wuh-what's not. What just goes around and walks and talks and acts like a human."

He shifted in the chair, as though trying to avoid the probe of the other's words. "I suppose so."

"That's vuh-very interesting, Mr. Deckard." With a forefinger Isidore tapped one lens of his glasses. "You know, I see pruh-pretty well — at least, with these I do — but that's wuh-wuh-one thing I've never seen. This difference between human and not. Between the ruh-real and the fuh-fake. I don't think I could, even if I had one of your fuh-fuh-fancy Voigt-kuh-Kampff machines." He gave a tilt of his head toward the office's door. "It comes with the territory, I guh-guess. My territory, that is. Like out there with the animals. You said the fuh-phony ones gave you the creeps… the ones you could tell were phony, because they were broken or something. And for a minute there, I couldn't even tell what the huh-huh-hell you were talking about." He still looked perplexed. "I mean, I understand — I can tell the difference between one and the other — up here…" A finger tapped the side of his head. "But I can't tell the difference down here." The same finger prodded at the chest beneath the white lab coat. "But I guess that's fairly common, huh? Otherwise we wouldn't have Voigt-Kampff machines. Or blade runners."

The guy had started getting on Deckard's nerves. The soft sarcasm ignited a defensive spark inside his own chest. "You're forgetting something. The Voigt-Kampff machines, the tests, those blade runner skills… they all detect and measure something that actually exists. That's empathy. You know what that is?"

"I got an idea."

Deckard leaned forward, drilling his hard level gaze into Isidore's, "It's the ability to feel. To feel what another living creature feels. Humans have it. Replicants don't. Not to the same degree; not enough. That's what makes them dangerous."

One of Isidore's eyebrows lifted. "This empathy… Rachael duh-doesn't have it?"

The spark burned hotter inside him; he could've killed the man on the other side of the desk. "Maybe not," he said finally. "Or she wouldn't have let me fall in love with her. She'd have known better."

A sigh, a shake of the head. "See how much you complicate things? With all this buh-business about what's fake and what's real. Your big-duh-deal Voigt-Kampff machines… what do they measure? Really measure. A millisecond's difference in pupil dilation times; a blush response that's one shade less puh-pink than the prescribed norm. You know what you were like, when you were running around being such a buh-bad-ass blade runner? Like a Rassenprufer; something else right out of the Third Reich." The stammer evaporated as Isidore's ire rose. "Remember what those were? Racial examiners. Going around Berlin with calipers and measuring people's noses, right out on the street. A millimeter too big, not quite the correct shape, and boom, you weren't defined as human anymore. Your ass was off to Auschwitz. At least the Nazis preferred doing their killing somewhere out of sight — guess that makes them a class act compared to you guys."

Deckard stayed silent, letting the other's words hit him in the face and drop away like the sharp crystals of an ice storm. He knew all this shit. It was in the books. He'd even thought about it, in those long night hours, shirt bloodied and bottle at hand. Until it couldn't be thought about anymore, not without falling off the Curve. And landing somewhere at the bottom, with his hand resting on the gun above his heart. thinking over and time for action. The last one possible…

"Look. I told you already." He felt a thin sheen of sweat on his palms, a nervous response to the other's threat. "I quit the job. Bryant — my old boss — he put the screws on me to go back and do it again. Maybe I should've told him to go fuck himself… but I didn't. I didn't have the guts. So sue me." He pushed himself back in the chair, his palms hard against the chair's arms. "But nobody ever heard me say that being a blade runner was a good job."

"It wasn't a good job, Deckard, because it was buh-buh-bullshit." Isidore wasn't letting him off the hook. "The empathy tests, the Voigt-Kampff machines… they're all crap. They don't even wuh-work. Have there ever been any false puh-positives? Subjects who had the tests run on them, who were identified as being replicants, only they weren't?"

He hesitated a second before answering. The same question, in different words, had been asked of him once before. He shook his head. "No."

"As I said, buh-buh-bullshit. What about the St. Paul incident?"

Gears meshed inside Deckard's head, trying to grind out an analysis of what this little man was up to. He knows too much — the St. Paul incident was more than top secret. After that mess had been cleaned up, the details hadn't even been recorded, so there would be no files to purge. Just the memories that the blade runners themselves carried around, locked behind their foreheads.

"St. Paul…" The words came slow out of his mouth. "St. Paul was an accident."

"I duh-don't think that's what they'd call it. If they could call it anything."

Those dead, or their ashes at any rate, were buried somewhere in Minnesota. Bad luck was as much a death-penalty crime as being an escaped replicant. During the peak of the winter flu season, a pharmacist in central St. Paul had handed out his remaining stock of an upper-respiratory humectant, once popular but pulled off the market by the Food and Drug Administration, to his family and friends. A member of the LAPD blade runner unit goes back to visit his folks for Christmas, gets drunk with an old high school girlfriend, runs the Voigt-Kampff tests on her for a joke. The over-the-counter flu medicine contains a mild CNS depressant, just enough to tweak down her iris fluctuations and blush response. The blade runner on vacation takes out his gun and blows her away. On a roll: he runs the Voigt-Kampff tests on everybody around him, including his aging Norman Rockwell — type parents, determines that he's surrounded by a nest of escaped replicants passing as human. In the next twelve hours, the only thing he stops for is to reload.

Bad luck, real bad shit. One of Deckard's old partners in the blade runner unit, the coldest of the bunch, had to go back there and pull the plug on the guy, who by that point was completely nuts and seeing escaped replicants everywhere. Extremely terminated; the loose-cannon blade runner's body was flown back to Los Angeles and buried with honors, without details. The lid was clamped down in St. Paul, with judicious application of the slush fund that Bryant administered out of the bottom drawer of his desk. Silence on the matter… at least until this Isidore character opened his mouth.

"How do you know about St. Paul?"

A smug expression settled on Isidore's face. "Mr. Deckard, it's my business to know about things like that. It's the buh-business of the Van Nuys Pet Hospital. The real business."

"Yeah? And what's that?"

Isidore glanced at the pictures tacked to the wall. "I didn't even ruh-really know, until old Mr. suh-Sloat died. I'd just worked for him before that, duh-doing what he told me to do, fixing up those busted animals — the fake ones, as yuh-you'd kuh-call them. But then when he was gone, and he'd left me everything…" He brought his gaze back around to Deckard.

"When he left me… the great task. The responsibility. What he had done, and what I had to do. That was when I found out the truth." Behind the round lenses, his eyes looked both wise and pitying. "You're a failure, Deckard. You were a failure before you quit being a blade runner. The whole blade runner shtick is a failure. You're suh-supposed to be keeping escaped replicants from running around on Earth, being 'dangerous,' as you like to think they are. Well, you buh-buh-blew it. You and all the rest of the blade runners. You didn't accomplish jack about tracking down replicants. And you know why? Because you can't do anything about it. You never could. Blade runners — shuh-shuh-sheesh. Buncha frauds, wasting taxpayers' muh-money. The LAPD should've pensioned you off, or put you back in uniform, made tuh-ruh-rub-traffic cops outta you. Something useful, at least. Because something like the St. Paul incident — and there've been others, ones you don't even know about — you know wuh-what something like that shows?"

He slouched down in the chair, hating the guy. "You're gonna tell me."

"That's why you're huh-here, Deckard. It's not just that there can be false positives on the Voigt-Kampff test. That blade runners have been icing humans — ruh-real humans — that flunked the test for one reason or another. It's also that wuh-once you admit that fallibility of the empathy-testing methodology, you admit the possibility of false negatives. Replicants who pass the test, who walk right by you because your big deal Voigt-Kampff machines tuh-tuh-told you they were human."

"A possibility." A shrug. "Big deal. Anything's possible. Doesn't mean it ever happened."

"Buh-but you see…" Isidore folded his hands together in his lap. "I can prove it's happened. That replicants can get past the empathy tests, your fancy-shuh-shmancy Voigt-Kampff machines. Even before the Nexus-6 models came on-line, they were getting puh-past. For years now — muh-maybe decades — there've been escaped replicants walking around on Earth. Right here in L.A., even. And there's nothing that you or any of the other blade runners can do about it. Because you can't find them."

"Metaphysics." He glared back at the other man. "Bullshit. You're talking religion. Articles of faith. Postulating an invisible entity — it exists but you can't see it. Nobody can. Replicants passing as human — they exist because you think they have to exist. Good luck proving that one."

"Nuh-nuh-not faith, Deckard. But reality. I've seen them, talked to them, wuh-watched them come and go…" Isidore's gaze shifted away, refocusing on the radiance of an inner vision. "Oh, much more than that. I know everything about them. Isn't that fuh-fuh-funny?" An expression of amazement. "I'm the person who couldn't ever see the difference, between human and not, between the fuh-fake and the real — you could see those things, but I couldn't. I was blind to them. And I won. The way I see things… it became real. From in here.. " He tapped the side of his head again. "To everywhere." The fingertip moved away from the skull. "I made it real."

He stayed silent, watching. A few minutes before he'd been sure that the other man was insane. Now he wasn't sure. Of anything.

The gaze of the enlightened, of those who know the truth, turned upon him once more.

"Don't you see, Deckard?" The voice soft and gentle, stammer evaporated. "That's what the business of the Van Nuys Pet Hospital was all along — or at least that's what it had become before old Mr. Sloat left it to me. His legacy. When I found out what he'd been doing — what we'd all been doing — I didn't have any choice. I had to go on with it."

He peered closer at the man. "With what?"

"Turning fakes — what you'd call fakes — into the real. That's what we'd started out doing, with the animals — building and repairing them so they couldn't be distinguished from the ones that'd been born that way. Doing it with animals is legal; Hannibal Sloat just took it the next logical step. The necessary step. The Van Nuys Pet Hospital is the last station on the underground railway for escaped replicants: when they get out of the off-world colonies and reach Earth, they come straight here. Right under the noses of the blade runners and all the rest of the LAPD; who'd ever think of raiding a pet hospital? Hm? And then when the escaped replicants get here… I fix them. And when I get done fixing them… they can pass an empathy test. I tweak their involuntary reaction times, their blush responses, their pupil fluctuations, so they can sail right past a Voigt-Kampff machine. And they do pass; they always pass." Isidore nodded slowly, as if he'd just thought of something. "So given that there've been some real humans who've flunked the empathy tests… I guess that makes my fixed-up replicants realer than real, huh?"

"If they exist at all." The other man's words had stung him, needled him back into a way of thinking, a way of being that he'd thought he'd given up completely. "If they existed… we would've caught them eventually. At least some of them." Deckard could hear an old brutality setting steel in his voice. "And it's got nothing to do with being a blade runner. It's about being a cop. And what cops know. You're talking conspiracy, buddy. Anytime you got that many in on something, some of them are gonna crack. They're not as strong as the others, they're not as good at hiding, at sweating it out when they know they're being hunted. All it takes is one, and then the whole game's up. And that's how we would've caught your fixed-up replicants. If they existed."

"True…" Isidore nodded slowly. "As you say, not everybody has the nerves for hiding. For staying hidden. You and the rest of the blade runners must be proud of having made yourselves into such objects of fear. Tuh-terrorists, really. But this is something that old Mr. Sloat knew all about. And knew what to do about it, too. And I've done the same as he did. There's more than just the blush response that can be fixed on an escaped replicant. There's the memory; that can be fixed as well."

"Now I know you're bullshitting me. False memories in replicants are implanted at their incept dates. When the replicants are created. The phony memories are part of them from the beginning."

"You're wrong, Deckard. Or puh-partly so. The incept date is when the Tyrell Corporation shoves in whatever false memories they want their replicants to have. But it's not the only time it can be done. The neural access pathway is hard-wired into the replicants' neocortices. In fact, the bandwidth of the data channel is one of the design features of the Nexus-6 line; I could show you the schematics. It was so the corporation could cram more stuff into their heads before they sent them off the assembly lines. But the access to the memory areas is still there, like a door without even a lock on it. You juh-just have to know where to look for it. And then use it."

"And that's what you did. Supposedly."

"Oh, yeah." A look of dreamy triumph moved behind Isidore's glasses. "No 'supposedly' about it. It's my job. I'm very good at it. And when I'm done…" His gaze sharpened once more. "Some of the people you thought were humans, they were actually replicants and they didn't even know it. You'd be surprised to learn who they were. And are."

The room seemed suddenly smaller, as though the walls had snugged up against his shoulders. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Like I said, Deckard…" The other's voice was as smooth and piercing as a hypodermic. "You'd be surprised. Very, very surprised."