K. Jeter: Edge Of Human

"Don't bother translating. I know the words." A hard edge crept under her voice. "And I don't mind the cold."

"Yeah, well, maybe that's one of the advantages of being dead. Or close to. Everything gets put into perspective." He dropped her hand and reached back inside his coat. The lump of metal was as cold as her fingers had been, real or hallucinated. He couldn't keep his own voice from sounding bitter. "We got a date, then. If we don't freeze to death out here, when the sun comes up we can review our options." Deckard extracted the gun and held it out, flat on his palm, toward her. He spoke the words that had been silent in his head before. "Why wait?"

"You poor, stupid son of a bitch. You're pathetic." She slapped the gun from his hand, sending it spinning into the darkness. "Why do you blade runners always wind up so ready to off yourselves?" The voice's edge sharpened to a withering contempt.

The gun was lost somewhere in the forest's mat of rotting leaves. So she must be real, he thought. He would never have gone so crazy as to have thrown the gun away himself. You lost your final option if you did that.

"It's the Curve." He looked back around at her. "What they call the Wambaugh Curve. That's why. You land far enough along it, and you start thinking suicide's a good idea. Unless you got a reason not to."

"Cop mysticism. Spare me." She shook her head. "You were burned out a long time ago." She peered more closely at him. "So what was your reason?"

"You were, Rachael." The absent gun still seemed to weigh against his chest. "Even before I met you."

"How sweet." She reached up and laid her hand against his cheek; if he'd turned his head only slightly, he could've kissed her palm. "Come on — " She drew the hand away. "Let's go up to the cabin." Walking toward the distant yellow spot of the lamp, she glanced over her shoulder and the furlike collar of her coat. "Oh… and you're wrong, by the way. I'm not Rachael."

"What?" He stared after her. "What're you talking about?"

"I'm Sarah." The bare trace of her smile, the tilt of her head, indicated an obscure victory. "I'm the real one."

He watched her turn and start walking again. A moment later he followed after.

"This is a spooky thing, isn't it?" She looked up from the coffin and toward him. "Don't you think so?"

"I suppose." Standing by the woodstove, Deckard glanced over his shoulder. Past her, through the cabin's small window, he could see outside the dark bulk of the spinner the woman had piloted here. He'd been right about the trace of light he'd spotted in the night sky; its simple fiery word had been meant for him. Now he rubbed his hands, trying to get the stove's warmth deeper inside than his skin. "You live with the dead, you get used to things like that."

"Not quite dead." When Sarah had entered the cabin, she'd walked over to the bulky device, knelt down by the low wooden trestles, and ran an expert scrutiny over the (control panel's dials and gauges before standing back up. "Looks like you've been taking pretty good care of her. These transport sleep modules aren't all that easy to run."

"It came with a manual."

"Did it?" She nodded, impressed. "You must've hired yourself some fine thieves." She placed her hands flat against the glass lid and gazed down at the mirrorlike image of her own face. "Ones that good usually don't come cheap."

"There were some old debts owed to me." He'd watched her, not sure what he felt at seeing a woman who looked like Rachael but wasn't. "From being in the business, you might say." Or was she? He didn't know yet.

Sarah continued gazing at the sleeping woman inside I he coffin. "New life," she murmured, brushing her hand 'cross the glass, as though tenderly stroking a sister's I 'row. " 'New life the dead receive..' "

He recognized the line. Not from any opera. " 'The mournful broken hearts rejoice.. " One of his own aunts, the church-going one, had used to sing it. He had a memory of her naive, awkward soprano voice, floating from a kitchen window, and from the choir at his mother's funeral service. " 'The humble poor believe.' "

"Very good." She looked over at him. "Charles Wesley-O, for a thousand tongues to sing. Most people don't know any eighteenth-century hymns. Raised Protestant?"

A shake of the head. "Not raised much of anything. Just like most people."

"I suppose I got an overdose of it, from all those church boarding schools I was shuffled off to for so long. Most of my life, actually." She tilted her head to one side and smiled. "But then… that makes for a difference, doesn't it? Between me… and her." A sidelong glance down to the black coffin. "Your beloved Rachael wouldn't have known any Methodist hymn tunes, would she? The memory implant they gave her — that part of it at least, it was all Roman Catholic, wasn't it?"

He nodded. "Heavy Latin. Tridentine. The old stuff."

"One of my uncle's clever little ideas. He wanted her to have some deep notion of guilt and redemption — so he could control her more easily, I imagine. Doesn't seem to have worked." Sarah studied her double for a moment longer. "There were all sorts of concoctions inside her head, weren't there? I know about most of them. Including a brother for her that never existed." She watched her fingernail tap softly on the glass. "Really — it's just as well that I'm an only child."

He said nothing. He'd had a long time to get used to the notion of someone believing that her implanted memories were real.

"Is that what you were hoping for? New life? Some cure for Rachael, some way of getting around that hard cutoff point, the four-year life span that was built into these Nexus-6 replicants?"

"No. I think we were both pretty well past that." He shrugged. "I'm not sure what we wanted. I knew that replicants are shipped from the Tyrell Corporation in these transport modules, so they'd arrive at the off-world colonies without most of their life spans being used up. I figured… why not? Just to make it seem longer, that she'd be with me. That's all."

"I know what the modules are used for; you don't have to tell me." Sarah brushed her hand against her skirt, as though there had been dust on the coffin lid. "You realize, of course, that your being in possession of this device is a felony." The woman who had called herself Sarah regarded him with the same half smile, one that he had seen a long time before on Rachael's face. "You're not licensed for it. Plus, after all, it is Tyrell Corporation property."

"What's that to you?"

The smile that had been unamused before shifted and became even less. "Listen, Deckard — if it's Tyrell property, then it's my property. Don't you know who I am?"

"Sure." He gave a shrug. "You're some other replicant; probably out of the same Nexus-6 batch as her." A nod toward the coffin. "The Rachael batch. They must've sent you up here, figured that seeing you would fuck with my head."

"Did it?"

"Not much." He kept his voice flat, leeched emotionless. "I may not be a blade runner anymore, but I've still got some of my professional attitude left. I'm way past being surprised. By anything." Deckard studied his own hand, reddened by the woodstove's heat, before looking at her again. "You've got some problems, though. They must've programmed you for delusions of grandeur. Tyrell property doesn't belong to you. You belong to the corporation."

"Your problem is that you don't listen." Ice at the center of her glare. "Didn't you hear what I said? I'm the real one. I'm Sarah Tyrell. The niece of Eldon Tyrell — remember him? You should. You and all the rest of the LAPD's blade runners were about zero use in keeping every escaped replicant on the planet from just walking in and out of Tyrell headquarters. If you'd been doing your job, my uncle would still be alive."