Edge Of Human

14

"Come on, fellas." He gazed around at the empty rooms, the spaces that were silent now but had held as much of a real life as he'd ever known. "We should be just about all packed up now." He and the others, the companions left to him, had done what they could to clean up the blood smeared on the angle of the walls and the remainder of the mess caused by his true love's death. Her second one, Sebastian reminded himself. That made him even sadder, thinking that poor little Pris had had to go through all that twice. It wasn't fair; she'd never hurt anyone, or at least not much.

Right now, he didn't even know where she was. He hadn't had the heart to pull the batteries from Pris's braindamaged corpse, shut off the various switches and relays that had kept her moving feebly around. She must've crept away, he thought sadly. Out into the zone's rubble, to lie down with the other broken and unfunctional things, debris among debris. Whatever blind spark that had remained inside her would die out in the ashes and rags and splintered, scrappy bones of the world.

Colonel Fuzzy and Squeaker Hussar came back over to where they had left him in the sideways apartment. They bent down low, their faces coming close to his; he had to turn his own slightly away, to avoid getting poked in the eye by Squeaker's elongated nose. He knew what they were doing. With every sense organ he'd built into them — mainly optical, though the teddy bear's round, fleece-lined ears were more finely tuned than a human's, and Squeaker actually did have some extra olfactory receptors built into that thing-they were trying to assess what condition he was in, physically and mentally. They knew some great tragedy had occurred, devastating every fiber of his being. He felt as though the one appendage he couldn't sacrifice, his heart, had been scooped out of his frail chest. Squeaker and the Colonel were aware that death had visited them in their home, she'd come swaggering in on spike heels, and with a big noise had removed one of their number, from the world of the living to that other place where all one's batteries were run down flat and the light behind one's button eyes went out. They were worried and fearful that that was where he was going, too.

"It's okay." Sebastian reached up and scratched behind the teddy bear's ears. Squeaker was less given to intimate body contact; he knew that for him to come this near, the circuits inside the spiked helmet must be in a considerable state of distress. "You don't have to worry about me. I'll be fine."

He had to wonder where they'd gotten that behavior from; it wasn't anything he'd programmed into them. From the beginning, they were supposed to have been jolly little fellows, happy creations, rays of sunshine in his gloomy life. He'd wired in logic paths by which the teddy bear and the toy soldier were able to learn new aspects of their environment and modify their behaviors based on that data-a basic feedback loop-but all this tenderhearted fussing and crooning was something different. Or was it? He'd have to think about that, when they got to wherever they were going to next.

Squeaker helped strap him into the papoose carrier on Colonel Fuzzy's back. Food and batteries and other survival necessities had already been piled into the drag sling they used for scavenging the welfare drops.

"Wait a minute, fellas. I gotta leave a message."

The teddy bear, impatient to start traveling before dark set in, stamped its feet. "Just hold your horses," soothed Sebastian. "This'll only take a minute."

He had the colonel back up toward the biggest bare wall in the apartment. That would make a nice canvas, he'd decided; those other folks were so busy and rushed, coming and going and killing other people, that he didn't want to risk having his words overlooked. Using the black spray can from a Chaka Signature Model Li'l Graffitster Kit, part of the art supplies that'd come in a drop several months ago, he carefully spelled out what he had to say.

DEAR MR. DECKER… That was what he'd overheard the woman calling the man.

Biting down on his tongue, Sebastian sprayed out the next words.

MY FRIENDS AND I ARE MOVING ON. THERE ARE TOO MANY PAINFUL MEMORIES

FOR US TO STAY HERE. That was putting it mildly. He flinched every time the tape ran through his thoughts again, of poor Pris flying through the air with her head shot open. THANKS FOR NOT KILLING US AS WELL. As soon as he saw those blurry-edged words on the wall, he regretted them. The logic seemed a little whacked; people should try not to kill you, just as a matter of course. There wasn't time to do the

message over; the teddy bear was getting restive. He hurried to finish up. I HOPE YOU FIND WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR. VERY BEST REGARDS, SEBASTIAN.

That would have to do; the spray can was nearly exhausted. He'd gotten some of the black paint on his single hand; tossing the can aside, he rubbed the smear against his coveralls with its pinned-up sleeve and trouser legs.

"Okay, okay. We're ready to leave now." He jounced up and down in the papoose carrier as Colonel Fuzzy hurried for the door. "Take it easy, you're gonna shake my head off!"

Outside, the three friends headed east, their shadows racing before them. Sebastian glanced over his shoulder as the teddy bear marched along. In the distance he could just make out the skyline of Los Angeles, the sunset bleeding red light around the dark towers. He supposed things had worked out fifty-fifty for him in this corner of the universe. He'd found true love, his heart's desire, but had had it taken away from him again. Still, he thought. Least I had it for a little while.

He turned away, setting his cheek against the back of the teddy bear's head. Closing his eyes but not sleeping. Not for a long while.

Darkness and life; both had begun again, the city moving into the nocturnal portion of its cycle. When everything comes crawling out, thought Holden, looking down from the freight spinner's cockpit at the lights carpeting the earth.

He'd decided, when he'd left the sideways zone, upon the general outline of his course of action. Circumstances-his own failing strength; the overtaxed artificial heart and lungs inside his chest had begun to sputter and wheeze alarmingly, complete with fuzzy-edged blackout dots hitting his sight like negative snowflakes-dictated that he needed assistance. Not later, when events had settled out, but now. So they would be determined as he wished, as an active agent in the historical process, or at least this little part of it, and not some breathing vegetable strapped by tubes to a hospital bed.

A terrible vision had come to him as the freight spinner completed another circle above LA's downtown core, of his bio-mechanical innards reaching their stress limit and going into some half-powered, partially shut-down mode, just enough to keep him alive in the pilot's seat, but not conscious. Even worse off than he'd been in the hospital. No longer human, a thing kept alive by pumps and artificially inflated bladders, wearing his face and his clothes, riding around forever in the sky on the course he'd set when his brain had still been functioning. Through the rotation of day and night, the progress of the seasons, the manifestations of dry and monsoon beating against the transparent cockpit dome, the curved glass shielding his blank, unseeing eyes…

Well, not exactly forever, thought Holden with glum relief. He supposed the police would have eventually shot the freight spinner out of the sky, just for violating air-space regulations. Or else they would've let it go on, and it would've eventually run out of fuel, plunging down into the streets. He could just see some by-the-manual uniformed cop with one jackboot up on a fender-high piece of the wreckage, writing out a ticket for parking in a restricted zone.

The night had settled in complete, the somberly violet line at the horizon, the last vestige of sun slicing extinguished beneath the cliff front of mounting clouds. Dark enough now for him to move further into the specifics of the plan upon which he'd decided. If he needed assistance, to keep from either dying or blacking out, there was only one place he could go, one person to whom he could turn. The police department, either on an official basis or by getting hold of his old friends and acquaintances on the force, was out of the question. No telling how rotted out the whole structure of the central station was with conspiracy; anybody he talked to there could be one of the bastards who'd determined, for their own malevolent reasons, that the only good blade runner was a dead one. And as for Deckard, who was presumably as much a target as anyone else… that was a no-go as well. For a lot of reasons, some of which Holden had spent the time up in the air mulling over.

He reached out to the control panel and switched off the freight spinner's autopilot. Another looping circuit had been completed, bringing him back over the dense, poorly lit warrens of the city's Los Feliz district. Holden took over the freight spinner's manual controls, steering it down toward the building in which his ex-partner had once lived.

On the building's rooftop landing deck, he sat frozen in the pilot's seat, a layer of perspiration forming between his palms and the rudder's inert metal. Go on, one part of him nagged all the rest. What're you waiting for? Don't crap out now. He ascribed the knot of fear festering in his gut to the malfunctioning of his new lungs, the brain they fed reacting to partial oxygen deprivation with innate animal terror. But he knew that the cowardly body was in league with his own cold rationality. He'd left Roy Batty in the apartment below, handcuffed to the pipe behind the toilet; just replaying the tape in his head, of Batty cursing and flailing around at the limit of the short chain, like some baleful genetic cross between a bull and an enraged hornet, sent a squirt of adrenaline through his heart's polyethylene valves. And now he was going to go back in there and tell Batty that the two of them should be pals again? Good luck, whispered a lobe of doubt.

"Might as well get it over with." His own voice, speaking out loud. Holden opened the freight spinner's cockpit and climbed out.

In the apartment, a puzzle: the handcuffs were there, bright chrome dangling beneath white porcelain, but Roy Batty was gone. Holden stood up from his kneeling inspection of the cuffs, seeing his own puzzled face in the mirror above the sink. The fluorescent tube's partial spectrum gave the skin of his cheeks and brow an even more death approaching, cheesy appearance.

He got away, thought Holden. He must have, though there was no indication of how. The building was constructed so shabbily-parts of it, those that looked like concrete, actually were embossed styrofoam — that even an old man like Batty could possibly have yanked the plumbing free from the bathroom wall. But he surely wouldn't have bothered putting the pipe back into place, mortaring it with toothpaste and soap. Plus, the handcuffs would've still been dangling from Batty's wrist, not there on the pipe.

Turning the mystery over in his thoughts, Holden flicked off the bathroom light and wandered out into the apartment's corridor. Immediately he was slammed up against the wall, the impact against his spine sufficient to knock the air from his lungs, the new heart twitching through a spasm of rapid fibrillation.

"You stupid sonuvabitch. I oughtta kill you." Batty's face, its crevices reddened with a fierce energy, pushed itself nose-to-nose with Holden's. "Matter of fact, I'm planning on it. I hope that doesn't come as a surprise to you."

He got his hands onto Batty's wrists, trying to pull them far enough away from his throat to suck in air. A detached fragment of his mind noted that the handcuffs were gone. "Wait… wait a minute.. " He gasped out the words as his feet dangled clear of the hallway's floor. "I have… to talk with you…"

"No, you don't." Batty pushed him up higher against the wall. "You and I have talked plenty already. I'm so on your pitiful wavelength, I don't have to talk to you anymore. I knew you were going to come back here, looking for me. Once you figured out that you're too screwed up to get by on your own." A shark's grin floated into Holden's fuzzed vision. "So you see. I know what you're going to say before you do."

A thread of oxygen flowed down his throat. The other man was tiring, not visibly so, but detectable by the slight weakening of his arms, the weight dragging them down. The black spots in front of Holden's eyes, that had interposed a drifting polka-dotted veil between his face and Batty's, faded a little.

"Look… it's important… ' The words scraped through his constricted larynx. "I wouldn't have come back here… if I just needed help…"

"Yeah, right." Batty followed the words with a scornful grunt.

"Really… I figured it out…" He tugged at the other's wrists. "I figured out… who the sixth replicant is… "

Batty tilted his head to one side, studying the pinned figure in front of him. "What're you talking about?"

"Put me down… and I'll tell you…"

Through narrowed eyes, Batty regarded him for a moment longer. "All right." He lowered Holden to the floor, letting go of the front of his shirt. Batty stood back, arms folded across his chest. "This better be good."

Holden doubled over, gasping to fill his lungs, head level with his artificial heart to increase the passage of blood between the two organs. Weakly, he straightened back up, balancing himself against the wall with one hand. He stumbled toward the apartment's living room, with Batty following after.

"It's simple. Really." He flopped down into one of Deckard's overstuffed chairs. With his foot, he nudged aside the toppled piano bench, so he could stretch out his legs. "Once you think about it." The numbness in his limbs had changed to prickling as his circulation rattled back to normal. Or what passed for that. "The sixth replicant

… the one that's still missing. It's Deckard."

"You idiot." Batty looked down at him with contempt. "I'm the one who told you that." He sat down heavily on the padded bench, his elbows knocking two atonal chords from the piano as he leaned back against the keyboard. Disgusted, he shook his head. "Jesus Christ. I can't believe this. If you've been worrying about whether that new pump of yours is starving your brain of oxygen-and you should be; I can hear it wheezing all the way over here then you don't have to worry anymore. Your brain's obviously gone to mush."

Unruffled, Holden smoothed his hands out along the rounded arms of the chair. He managed a smile. "Sure you said something about Deckard being the sixth replicant. But I know how your mind works. You'd never have made it as a blade runner. You're too sloppy. The whole modus operandi of someone like you is to kill someone else, and then if it turns out to have been the wrong person, do another. Until you finally get it right." He paused for a moment, to regain his breath. "Blade runners, on the other hand, try to be a little more precise about who we kill."

"Piss off."

He knew he'd nailed him. Holden leaned forward, relishing the small measure of control he'd gained, the shift of power between himself and the other man. "There; you see?" It'd been worth coming back here, taking the risk, just to screw with Batty's mind. In the best way possible, by feeding his own words back to him. But with a difference. "You know I'm right. When you said Deckard was the sixth replicant, that was just an idea you had. You didn't know for sure. Did you?"

Batty shifted uncomfortably on the piano bench, but made no reply.

"Whereas I can say that Deckard is the sixth replicant — and I can prove it." He leaned back into the deep upholstery. In triumph.

"Go ahead." Batty had reassembled his own composure. "I'm listening."

"There's a safe-house apartment, out in the sideways world-you know, all that toppled-over seismic zone-that Deckard and myself and some of the other guys in the blade runner unit set up. Without any departmental connection; we used it for stakeouts, remote operations, all that sort of thing. That's where I knew Deckard would go. And I was right." Holden forced down a deep breath. "After I took care of you, I went out there and found him, talked to him-"

"You should've plugged him. And if you were so friggin' smart, you wouldn't have left me where I could get hold of dental floss and a razor blade. Those handcuffs ain't shit, when you know what you're doing."

Holden rolled past the comment. "At any rate, I didn't get very far with him. I'd figured that between the two of us, he and I could locate the sixth replicant and retire it but Deckard wouldn't buy into that plan. Turned me down flat. So I left… but I didn't go away. I kept an eye on the place, from outside. And sure enough, Holden had a visitor. A woman-"

"Oh?" Batty raised an eyebrow. "Young, dark-haired? Expensive-looking?"

"Pretty much." He nodded. "I figured that it was the one who owns the Tyrell Corporation now-"

"Sarah Tyrell. Good guess."

"They were both inside the safe-house apartment for a while, then there was a gunshot. Then both Deckard and the woman came out, climbed into a Tyrell Corporation spinner, and flew off. The person who didn't come out of the apartment was this little weird guy, who was also there. Used to be one of the corporation's top bio-engineers, name of Sebastian."

"Yeah, I know about him. Big involvement in the design of the Nexus-6 models. I met him when they were putting together the prototypes for the Roy Batty replicant model."

"That's my whole point." The artificial heart in Holden's chest revved with excitement.

"Deckard and this Sarah Tyrell iced one of the few people-hell, maybe the only one left-who could identify the Nexus-6 replicants. Why would they do that, unless they wanted to make sure that there wasn't anybody around who could put the finger on the missing sixth replicant? And who'd be more concerned about that then the sixth replicant itself? So it has to be Deckard. All that stuff about him having run off up north, that was all a ruse, an alibi to make it look like he wasn't on the scene down here. But he was, and he was busy taking care of anybody who could identify him. Like Bryant. It's obvious-Deckard killed the one guy who'd seen the original escape report from the off-world authorities, after Bryant had already purged the info on him from the police files. Just goes to show what a thorough bastard Deckard is; he's not leaving any loose ends."

Batty musingly stroked his chin. "Why didn't Deckard kill you? Out at this safe-house apartment."

"Because I had a gun, and he didn't-at that time. The Tyrell woman must've brought out the one they shot Sebastian with."

"Huh." Slowly Batty nodded. "That makes sense, I guess." He gave a shrug. "Look, I'm glad you've come around to my way of thinking about this-"

"'Thinking,' hell."

"All right, all right." Batty held both his palms outward. "I admit I operate more on instinct than reason-so sue me. But what you've come up with just confirms what I'd felt was the case about Deckard. So it must be true, right?"

Holden relaxed a bit. He'd managed to push the other man into a mellower portion of whatever manic cycle he. operated on. Like a mollified wolf, it struck him. Important to not display any fear, to show the wild animal who was really in charge.

"Now that we know," said Holden, "who the sixth replicant is, we just have to calculate what we're going to do about it…"

He leaned forward, as Batty did the same from the piano bench, bringing their heads closer together. Breathing together; a back part of his mind recalled that that was what the word conspiracy meant.

Fires at night put some people in a holiday mood. Or some creatures, he corrected himself. The one below him had actually broken into a little stubby-legged jig, more enthusiasm than dance skill, at the sight up ahead, flickering incendiary glow and sparks threading through mounting columns of smoke.

"Whoa!" Sebastian clung to the teddy bear's neck, to keep himself from being jounced out of the papoose carrier. "Steady on there, will ya? You're going to make me seasick."

Squeaker Hussar had spotted the fires as well. "What's that? What's that?" He jumped up and down, pointing. "What the heckety-heck is that, Sebastian?"

"I don't rightly know." A pirate-style brass telescope was packed somewhere in the gear that the animated teddy bear and the toy soldier had been dragging along between them. Out here in the dark, he didn't feel like rooting around for it. "People, I guess." He let himself slip back down into the papoose carrier. "A lot of 'em, actually. I can see their shadows and all."

"Hmmm…" Subdued, Squeaker tilted his nose into the air, as though trying to sniff out the nature of the unseen others. "Gotta think!"

The toy soldier didn't really think, not on a deep analytical level-Sebastian hadn't programmed him for that-but he did a good imitation of the process, something he'd probably picked up from observing his maker. Sebastian knew he'd have to do the thinking for all three of them, as he'd always done before. Not that I ever did such a good job at it. Maybe it was time to give Squeaker and Colonel Fuzzy a crack at these necessary tasks. Once, just a little while ago, he'd done the thinking for a group of four, counting in Pris; though even when she'd been alive, really alive, she hadn't been the sort of girl for whom thinking had been a preferred mode of making one's way through the rigors of existence. And all that his thinking had accomplished, at least for her, had been death, utter and final. And his own, inasmuch as he was now a one-limbed, withered husk-like thing; the core of his life having been extinguished along with Pris's feverish, constantly scanning red eyes. A toy soldier with a Pinocchio nose couldn't screw it up any worse.

He waited, but Squeaker didn't say anything more. Colonel Fuzzy looked over its shoulder at him, the expression held in its button eyes apprehensive.

"Okay…" He sighed, aware that they were depending upon him. "Let's figure it out. Out here, at night, the things you gotta be afraid of are the ones you can't see Right?" The teddy bear and the toy soldier nodded. "These folks, whoever they are-" He pointed to the radiant distance with his one hand. "They don't seem to care if we see 'em. I mean, they built those fires and stuff. So it seems only logical that we shouldn't be afraid of them. You follow?"

"Maybe they're savages!" Eyes wide, Squeaker had already spooked himself. "Cannibubbles!"

"Oh, shoot. That's only in bad movies. Post-apocalypse tootie-frootie jive." Sebastian had found his own logic convincing enough. He urged Colonel Fuzzy forward. "Come on, let's go check 'em out. Maybe they got a barbecue going. Welfare weenies and marshmallows-you guys like that, don't you?" They didn't actually eat, but they enjoyed using their ceremonial dress swords to hold things in the flames.

That notion motivated his companions. They left their supplies, food and water and batteries, tucked into a crevice they'd be able to find later. Clambering over the flank of a Neutra-derived retail pavilion, they made their way toward the fires.

Even before they could clearly make out the human figures, they heard the single raised voice, loud and stentorian. Colonel Fuzzy's round ears twitched at either side of his head; Squeaker looked genuinely perplexed. "Sounds like church!"

The toy soldier's notions were derived from old televangelical broadcasts, but he was right; it did sound like that. Sebastian couldn't make out the words, not until they had actually come through the line of wavering shadows and near enough to feel the heat of the fires against their own faces.

"'With this wisdom, enlightened disciples will be able to master every inordinate desire!'" A man dressed in a white jumpsuit-one of the sleeves was torn, and there were black char marks across the front, as though he'd wandered too close to the fire, or been in some kind of explosion-stood on a box, reading from a battered old paperback book. "'Every kind of living creature, whether hatched from an egg, grown in a womb, evolved or brought forth by metamorphosis, whether it has form or knowing, whether it possesses or lacks natural feeling-from this constantly shifting state of existence, I command you to seek deliverance!"' The man's voice grew stronger and more fervent. "'Then you shall be released from the sentient world, a world without number or limit. In reality, no sentient world even exists; for in the minds of enlightened disciples, such arbitrary notions have ceased… '"

Perhaps a couple dozen other people stood around in a circle, listening; regular, full-size humans, not like what he'd become. They were all a little on the ragged side; in this territory, it was impossible to stay exactly spiff. A few curious faces turned toward Sebastian and his diminutive pals.

"Sorry." He raised an apologetic hand above the teddy bear's head. "Don't let me interrupt you." The sermon, if that's what it was, had ended; he didn't know whether it was supposed to have or not. "Just go ahead."

The man stepped down from the box and walked over toward them. He looked to be some kind of spiritual leader; he had the sort of craggy, God-haunted face for it, complete with a straggly, greying beard, also slightly singed.

"Have you come to roust us?" The evidently holy man leaned down to peer into Sebastian's face. "Perhaps you are an advance scout of the law-enforcement agencies, specifically those in charge of stamping out heresies such as represented by our little group. Would that be the case?"

"Um, no…" He shrank back from the other's piercing gaze. "We're more like private-individual types."

"I see." The man straightened back up. A number of the others had collected behind him, following the discourse. A sigh came from their leader. "In some ways-many ways-that's a pity. Inasmuch as the doctrines of our faith invite martyrdom. The final sacrament, as it were. Without which, many of our activities, if not all, seem to be in vain."

"Well…" He didn't know what to say. "You gotta hang in there, I suppose."

"Easy for you to say. Come here." The bearded leader took one of Colonel Fuzzy's mittenlike paws, as though it were an actual extension of Sebastian's body, and led him toward the center of the circle of fires. Where the rest of the people were-he shifted uneasily in the papoose carrier, aware of having become the focus of their attention. "That is the purpose of our gatherings out in the open air, in fields and pastures as it were. Similar to the early freethinkers, those who had rejected the wicked doctrines of the ruling elites, Of their time. Though, of course, wickedness is an eternal thing, the great deceiver merely shifting from behind one mask to another."

"Oh." With a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, Sebastian realized he had stumbled into a nest of lunatics. Just my luck, he thought glumly. When things started going bad for you, they went on that way for a long time. That was the real nature of the universe.

"The better to oppress the righteous." The leader sank into the ongoing currents of his own thoughts, though he continued to speak aloud. His frail shoulders slumped inside the white jumpsuit, like an insect folding itself into a semi-resting posture. "Though in reality, the Masked One, the deceiver and oppressor, does the righteous a service through its cruelty. A paradox. Inasmuch as it is only through the experience of oppression, of suffering, that one becomes human. Through suffering, one becomes the object of compassion. You know all this, don't you? That is how the one who sees only suffering, the Eye of Compassion, becomes aware of your existence; she sees no other thing, is blind to all except those who suffer."

The leader ran elongated, skeletal fingers through his beard, the undertones of his voice skewing toward the speculative. "Once, humans-humans such as us-suffered; that was the bread and salt of our existence. That was a long time ago. Now we have become that which causes suffering-not on an individual basis, but as a species; we have become one of the masks behind which the great deceiver and oppressor manifests itself in this universe. The question then becomes…" One of the others, a young man, hollow-checked and febrile, stood nearby, transcribing the leader's words into an old-fashioned manual steno pad. "Whether the Masked One, by causing suffering, acts as a necessary precursive agent of its compassionate opposite?" The bearded man looked round from the corner of his eye.

The glance, and its accompanying expectant silence, made Sebastian nervous. "I wouldn't know." He tightened the hold of his forearm around Colonel Fuzzy's shoulder.

"Are you sure," the leader inquired hopefully, "that you're not with the police?"

"Positive."

"Well… we shall 'hang in there,' as you advise. For the sake of those more human than us. Those blessed ones."

It suddenly dawned on him who these people were. Hell's bells, thought Sebastian. They're rep-symps. He'd heard rumors, before he'd first come out to the sideways world, that certain congregations of the true believers frequented the zone. Living a basically reclusive life, he hadn't encountered them before.

"Look, it seems to me that you're going about it all wrong." He could afford to be helpful; he had nothing against them. He let go of the teddy bear long enough to wave off the smoke that was getting into his nose and making him sneeze. "If you want to get busted by the police, you oughtta go where the police mainly are. It's no good being out in nowheresville. The cops probably don't even want to bother with you, long as you stay someplace like this. You should go into the city-"

"We've done that." A younger, darker-bearded version of the leader spoke up. He had fanatic eyes, whites showing all around the pupils. "We have our uses for the city." A dirty word, the way he spat it out. "And we have taken our message there. Not just in words, but in deed as well. We brought down in flames one of the voices of the deceiver, and upon its carcass we gave forth our testimony."

"Gosh." It sounded scary, even though he had no idea of what the man was exactly talking about. Though he was pretty sure it involved criminal activity of some kind; these people were religiously obsessive types, after all, capable of anything. Morally, if not in terms of actual accomplishment. He was beginning to have second thoughts about keeping company with them; the police might come all the way out here, to kick ass and take names, as the saying went. If they'd been sufficiently provoked.

"If you really want my opinion, I'd say you should rethink just what it is you're going for," he said. "This martyrdom thing, and all." Sebastian wished that he and his companions had just circled around the fires and continued on their way, instead of poking their noses in here. "I just don't see where it gets you anything." Except in your crackpot heads, he thought to himself. "Bringing the heat down on yourselves is not something you should care to have happen. Or any kind of bad shit. Suffering's not all that great; believe me, I should know."

The assembled people glanced at one another. Significant glances, indicating a measure of worry about the strangers that had wandered into their midst.

"Listen to me." Sebastian heard his own voice, louder and more fervent. As though he were the one testifying now. "I know what I'm talking about. Suffering sucks. I just lost the woman I love-again, for the second time. She was shot right in front of me. And she was a replicant, too; or at least she'd been one-'

The bearded leader peered closer at him. "Yes," he said after a moment's inspection, during which Colonel Fuzzy had hissed and drawn back. "I can see that you speak the truth." He laid a wrinkled, cordite-smelling hand on top of Sebastian's head. "You have the aspect of the blessed about you. Suffering has given you that. You are nearly human, yourself."

"Well… thanks. I guess." What the hell was this old doozer talking about?

"But there is more for you to suffer." The leader raised his hand in a gesture of benediction. "For you to complete your journey."

"Rats." He didn't even know where he was going.

"Come with me. I have something to give you."

Mounted on the back of the teddy bear, Sebastian followed after the old man. Squeaker trailed behind, glancing over his shoulder at the other people, his elongated nose twitching with suspicion.

"You can't stay with us." At the flickering limit of the fires' glow, the old man rummaged through a duffel bag he'd drawn out of a military-surplus canvas tent. "You have your own destiny. But this might help you. It's a holy relic." He turned and laid a rectangular object in Sebastian's hand.

Something metal, lightweight aluminum, with a few dents and scratches, indicators of age. Smaller things, of metal and possibly glass, rattled inside as Sebastian turned it around. He held it up so the faint orangish light hit it. On the box's lid was a prominent mark in the form of a red cross. "It's a first-aid kit." That could be helpful, actually; he didn't have one in the supplies they'd dragged along with them.

"Look closer."

He did, nose almost touching the metal. Smaller words, stamped into the surface. Sebastian spelled them out. "Salamander… no, that's not right." Sebastian squinted. "Salander. That's it. Salander 3." He supposed it was the name of the ship that the kit had come from. It sounded vaguely familiar. Maybe a star ship, one of the old explorer types that'd gone out past the limits of the solar system.

The old man nodded. "I was there… when it came back to us. Bearing its message. Written in the eyes of its dead." The grey-streaked beard lifted from the front of the jumpsuit, as he raised his eyes to the night sky. "They were the first to know. What all shall know someday. They traveled, and returned. They saw. And brought back the message…"

"What message?"

For a moment, it seemed as if the leader hadn't heard him. "Of our damnation," he spoke at last. "Or our salvation." He turned a wan smile on the figures before him. "We're still not quite sure yet."

Maybe you should work on that, thought Sebastian. He didn't look up at the old man, but concentrated on fiddling with the metal box.

"There is one who knows…" The bearded leader's voice drifted into deep musing. "One who should know, who must know… but may not even know that she does."

"That doesn't sound too smart." The box's catch was rusted tight; Sebastian frowned at it.

"She was but a child," the old man spoke softly, "when the revelations were made. A child in the stars, a little girl… poor thing." He shook his head. "The things she must have seen, that she could not understand. Perhaps it was best that she couldn't. Her mother and her father… I helped carry their coffins from the ship. They died from too much knowledge. Too much of the light."

"Knowledge, huh?" Sebastian wedged the box against the rim of the papoose carrier and jabbed his thumb at it. "What about?"

"That way in which things change, in which they become other than what they were." The old man lifted his rheumy gaze toward the sky. "That which was human shall not be. And that which was not…" His voice sank to a whisper, before he turned and looked again at Sebastian with a wan smile. "It's all very confusing. Perhaps she will remember one day… those things she saw as a child. The revelations. That which she has forgotten. And then she will tell us of them."

Sebastian didn't bother asking who she might be. He had finally managed to pry the first-aid kit's lid open. The various little bottles and ampules, simple disinfectants and antibiotics, looked dried-up and innocuous; he supposed there wasn't much risk in carrying the thing around. And he didn't want to hurt the old man's feelings. "Um, thanks." He snapped the lid shut and held up the box. "For this, and all."

"Go in peace."

Back where they had left their things, he had Squeaker stow the box away in the wrapped-up supplies. The repsymps' distant fires had died down, leaving Squeaker to redo the bungee cords by starlight.

And not much of it. Sebastian looked up and saw the blunt fingers of silver-tinged clouds moving eastward. He wondered what that meant.