K. Jeter - Edge Of Human

"It's simple." Batty's smile broadened. "What's the one kind of replicant that a blade runner replicant-such as yourself-couldn't be assigned to track down and retire? Another blade runner replicant. It would give the whole game away. If you found yourself face-to-face with your own double, or the double of somebody else that you'd always thought was also a human blade runner… come on." Batty tapped a finger against his brow. "You wouldn't have to be a genius to start figuring out that something funny was going on. You'd start asking questions, or keeping 'em inside your head, and pretty soon the people in charge are going to run out of bogus answers to fob off on you. Then you're dangerous; that's when they have to pull the plug on smart-ass little replicants who've learned too much."

He might be part right, thought Holden. Even if Batty's completely cracked regarding my human status… he could still be right about Deckard. That struck him as completely plausible the more he mulled it over. He'd never liked the other blade runner; he'd always found Deckard to be cold and disagreeable, with an irritating batch of moral poses about their jobs. He should've quit the force sooner rather than go as long as he had, bitching about it the whole time.

Or Batty was completely wrong. Deckard and I might both be human — that idea had some attractive qualities to it. Simplicity, for one; he could see that as soon as somebody started doubting outward appearances, the surface levels of reality, then that person had entered an infinitely expanding maze, where nothing was really what it seemed to be. That was how people wound up in the same lunatic condition as Batty. Who was probably one step away from thinking that he himself was a replicant. Of course, if he is, thought Holden, then

…

He shut off that line with a tight mental clamp. Right now, it didn't matter. Capitalizing on what Batty had just told him was the primary objective he had to keep in view.

"If Deckard's in L.A., then finding him is no problem." Holden filtered an easy confidence into his voice. "I know where he'd go.",

"Yeah?" Brightening, the other reached for the spinner's controls. "Lay it on me."

He gave Batty the directions; a moment later they were hovering over what had once been the city's Los Feliz district.

"Aw, man." Batty shook his head in disgust. "This is your big brain wave? You figured Deckard would just go back to his old apartment? Nobody's that stupid. Look, you can see the police have already been here and checked out the area."

Holden glanced out the side of the cockpit and saw yellow strips of POLICE INVESTIGATION-DO NOT CROSS strips, now torn and trampled into the windblown dust by the ground vehicles that had converged on the apartment building, then left. "So?" He shrugged. "The police-those grunt cops-they don't know what I know about Deckard, He and I were like brothers. Blade runners."

"Spare me."

"Just take this thing down. You'll see."

The locks on Deckard's front door had been punched through, the tempered steel beneath the numbers 9732 dented and wrenched back. Took Batty a few minutes to fiddle the police seal without triggering an alarm signal to LAPD headquarters. He shoved the door open, and he and Holden stepped inside from the unlit, silent corridor.

"What'd I tell you?" Batty scanned across the search wreckage that lapped up against the replicas of Frank Lloyd Wright's original faux Mayan wall panels. "There's nobody here. If there had been, the cops would've tweezed him out a long time ago."

Holden said nothing, but walked farther into the apartment. He knew his way around; he'd been here a couple of times before, from a period predating his and Deckard's mutual agreement that two blade runners sitting and drinking in the same room was a bad idea.

The piano bench had been knocked over by the cops who'd ransacked the place. Old brown-edged sheet music lay scattered across the floor, along with the photographs, framed and unframed, from that distant world of the past. Sweet-faced women gazed up with somber understanding from the black-and-white depths.

He found what he'd figured would still be there, what Deckard had shown him once, fastened to the underside of the bench with a strip of wide packing tape. He pulled it free and gripped it tight in his fist.

"Whattya got there?" Batty had had his back turned, but had heard the ripping sound.

"Hey-what's that?"

Holden ignored him. He walked toward the bathroom at the rear of the apartment. "I'll show you in a minute."

"You'll show me right now."

He could hear Batty following him. Without switching on the light, he knelt down and snapped one end of the object, Deckard's spare set of handcuffs, onto the metal pipe behind the toilet. He stood back up as Batty appeared in the doorway. "Look right here," said Holden, pointing.

Batty stepped past him, bending down and peering to see. In one quick move Holden stepped back and grabbed the other man's head with both hands. He brought his knee up sharp into Batty's face, knocking him back with a spray of blood from the nose. Dazed, Batty lolled back-without resistance as Holden lifted him upright by the padded collar of his jacket. A hard punch to the stomach dropped Batty to the floor.

He found himself panting and dizzy, the bio-mechanical heart in his chest racing from the sudden flurry of exertion, the new lungs laboring for breath. Taking a step back, out of Batty's reach, he watched as the other man groggily shook his head, blood streaming to his chin. As though a switch had been thrown in his brain, from impaired to full functioning, Batty suddenly snapped into motion, springing from the bathroom floor and instantly being jerked back by the handcuffs fastened to his wrist and the toilet pipe.

"You sonuvabitch!" Kneeling, his face reddening with fury, Batty clawed his free hand a few inches short of where Holden stood. "Get these things off me! Right now!"

"Sorry…" Holden retreated to the hallway of Deckard's apartment. "Can't do that. I've got a private appointment to get to." He turned away, striding toward the front of the apartment and the door out to the building's corridor.

"Holden!" Behind him, Batty thrashed and shouted, voice echoing in the bathroom's tiled confines. "I'll fix your ass-"

He could still hear the other man screaming violent curses as he slammed the front door shut. Despite the pounding of the machines inside himself, he broke into a quick trot for the elevator. He didn't know how long the cuffs would hold Batty; the man had looked enraged enough to pull the pipe right out of the wall. Holden punched the ground-floor button and leaned against the elevator's inside wall, a squadron of black spots swarming in front of his eyes.

A couple of minutes later he was aloft in the freight spinner, banking it in a tight curve, then accelerating in a straight line. To where Deckard would actually have gone to hole up.

As the spinner climbed above the city, Holden could see a flash of hot sunlight reflected from the ocean off to the west. At the horizon, a dark mass of clouds had begun to form.

They heard the door being broken in. The teddy bear raised its head as though sniffing the air for the source of the commotion; the spike-helmeted soldier moved in front of Sebastian, a defensive barrier against whatever might come through the kitchen doorway.

From instinct, Deckard reached for a weapon at his hip-and found nothing. Turning, he pulled open one of the counter drawers and extracted from it a paring knife with a cracked handle.

The sounds of someone moving through the front part of the apartment, a passage made more difficult by the rooms being tilted onto their sides-a figure appeared at the doorway, bending down to look in on them.

"Holden…" Surprised, Deckard nearly dropped the knife he held. "What're you doing here?"