K. Jeter: Edge Of Human

So he could say how truly grateful he was.

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.' "