Edge Of Human

2

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.' "

"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."

"That's one of the reasons I quit. I didn't think keeping Tyrells alive should've been part of the job description." Facing her was like standing at the cabin's open door during a hard winter storm. "You're Eldon Tyrell's niece, huh?"

"As I said."

"The corporation should've sent you out with a better lie." He shook his head, almost feeling sorry for her, whatever she was. "Don't you think I pulled the department's file on the Tyrell family? I did that a long time ago, even before I left L.A. Eldon Tyrell had no nieces, nephews, kids of his own; nothing. Nada. He was the last of the line. Thank God."

Her smile appeared again. "The police files have a hole in them. I was born off-world; there wouldn't be any record of me in the files, unless my uncle had wanted it to be there. And he had a thing for family privacy."

"Good for him. But the files include colony births. You could've been popped anywhere from Mars to the Outreaches, and you'd be in there."

She half sat upon the edge of the coffin, the high-collared and expensive-looking coat falling open. "I wasn't born in any of the colonies." One hand brushed a fragment of blackened leaf from the synthetic fur. "But in transit. And not a U.N. ship. Private."

"Impossible. There hasn't been a private spaceflight since…"

"That's right." She knew — he could see it — that she had him then. "Since the Salander 3. The last one before the U.N. clampdown on corporate interstellar travel. The last one, and it was a Tyrell operation. That's where I was born. On Tyrell Corporation property — inside it, actually — and way beyond U.N. jurisdiction."

"The Salander 3…" He nodded slowly, mulling the formation over, trying to dredge up from little-used memory whatever he knew about it. The dates seemed right, just far enough back so that somebody could've been born aboard the craft and have grown into an adult by now. That wasn't the problem.

Private-sector travel beyond the Earth's atmosphere had been forbidden by the U.N. authorities for a reason. And the Salander 3 had been it. A failed expedition to the Prox system, failed despite the billions that the Tyrell Corporation had poured into the effort… and that was about the limit of public knowledge, eroded even further by collective memory failure. But the police files on the matter weren't my better. Once, when he'd first started retiring escaped replicants for a living, he'd poked through the department's on-line files, looking for anything that'd help give him a handle on his walking, thinking prey. A search keyed on Tyrell gave him days' worth of the department's internal memos and reports, the corporation's own press releases, product schematics, research papers from their bio-engineering labs.. the works. Punching in Salander 3 had mired him in one screen after another of ACCESS DENIED and AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY flags, password requests way beyond his rank. He'd already been savvy enough about how the department worked to know that prying off a lid weighed down with that many alarms and padlocks would get him nothing but hex marks in his own personnel file.

Going off-line and into the basement morgue of hard-copy printouts had been even spookier. He could remember standing beside a battered metal cabinet, beneath low sizzling fluorescents, water dripping from a broken pipe to the already inch-deep concrete; standing there with a thin sheaf of dog-eared manila folders, all with some variation of Salander 3 at the top edge, all of them empty except for yellowed routing slips signed by long-retired secretarial staff, ghosts with initials…

The memory flash rolled through his head, dark and jagged as photo-reverse lightning. Standing in the deepest department basement, dust sifting onto his shoulders from the vibration of the rep train hurtling through its own unlit tunnels, past the endless rows of tottering cabinets and the walls cryptically stained with black rot.. The files had been pulled from on high, from the top government levels, like God reaching down into the affairs of men. And never returned; maybe they'd all been asked the day after the one marked on the routing slips. That's what it'd be like to die, he'd thought then and now, or at least the old comforting notion of the process. You ascended, leaving your empty manila folder behind on the ground, but you didn't return, not ever.

"Where'd you go? Where are you?"

He kept his eyes closed, walking around in those echoing rooms inside his head. A little more poking around online had brought him a few scraps: a low-rez news photo of the Salander 3's mission leaders, Anson Tyrell and his wife Ruth, setting out with big smiles for Proxima.. and six years later, the day after the Salander 3 had come limping hack to the docking terminals out at San Pedro, the notice of the cremation service for them. You didn't need cop savvy to get suspicious about that one. There wasn't a cover-up deep enough to keep corpses frozen between here and Prox from giving off the decayed smell of murder.

And now he was standing here, decades and what might is well have been a world away, with their grown-up orphan child in front of him.

"Listen, Deckard — I don't have time for you to go fading out on me. There's never time for that."

Her voice, the same as Rachael's but with a tighter and harder edge, stung him back into present time. He saw her still standing beside the black coffin. "So you're the daughter of Anson Tyrell — is that it?"

"Very good. You're up on your Tyrell genealogies. And since Eldon Tyrell was his only brother, and no other family besides me — that means I am Tyrell now." Sarah's gaze set level into his. "I inherited the world's largest privately held corporation. The whole thing. Not bad."

"But before that — while your uncle was still alive — he used you for.. what's it called?" The specific word was stuck back in his memory and wouldn't come out. "The template?"

"Templant. The term of art in the Tyrell labs is templant. As in replicant. And you're right — that's what my uncle used me for. The source model for your Rachael." On her face, eyes narrowed, the partial smile was a knife wound even thinner. "And his."

More spooky things, the creepy business of the dead — he could hear them in her voice. "Were there others?"

"Besides her?" She looked down past her hand on the coffin's glass lid, at the face of the sleeping, dying woman inside, then back up to him. She shook her head. "Just the one. Rachael wasn't what you'd call a production-line number. More of a custom job, if you know what I mean. For my uncle Eldon."

He knew. He'd suspected as much, way back then in the city, when he'd gone to the Tyre11 corporate headquarters and talked to the man. There'd been that sick jitter in the pillared office suite's atmosphere, a tension shimmer that cops, like dogs, could catch at the limit of their hearing. And Eldon Tyrell's smile, possessive and sated, the corners of his mouth pulled upward as if by invisible fishhooks. Every silent thing about him had given away the game.

"I wouldn't have thought that'd be something a person like you would go along with. Being a templant."

"Really, Deckard." She sounded almost pitying. "Not as if I had an option in the matter, is it? When my uncle was alive, you would've been right: I was Tyre11 property. Meaning his. Besides, what would the alternative have been? Not being a templant — and then there wouldn't have been any Rachael. There would've been just me. And him."

He'd known all these things, or some of them at least, though Rachael hadn't told him. He'd known instead from her silence, from the way she would sometimes stiffen in his arms, turning her face away from his. Away from any man's face.

"Maybe.. maybe having a replicant of you made… maybe that was his way of showing that he did love you. After all."

"Oh, he loved somebody all right." Her voice and gaze acidic. "It just wasn't me."

The forest's silence seeped through the walls, congealing around every object, living or dead. He decided he didn't want to hear any more about this woman personal problems. He just wasn't sure he'd have that choice.

"How'd you track us down?"

"It was easy. After you made your mistake." She tapped a fingernail against the glass lid. "You'd pretty well disappeared, until you had this transport module stolen. For a cop, that wasn't a brilliant move. Did you really think your thief pals wouldn't be working for the corporation as well? They sold your ass to us two minutes after delivery had been made."

Bound to happen, but he hadn't cared; just something else that there'd been no choice about. Either have the module stolen and brought to what had been their hiding place, or watch Rachael die, the remains of her four-year replicant life span dwindling the way snow melts on the ground.

"That why you came here?" He pointed to the black coffin. "Want your property back? How about doing me a favor and letting me keep it for a few more months. It's not that much longer."

"Keep it forever, for all I care. Bury her in it, if you want." She glanced down for a moment at her own sleeping race. "That's not why I wanted to find you." Her voice was softer, the sharp edge retracted. "I was in Zurich when… everything happened. One of my uncle's little minions flew out and told me that he was dead. I went back to Los Angeles and found out the rest. There were tapes. And people who told me things. They told me about you. About you… and her." She regarded him for a moment, then stepped forward and took his hand, drawing him back with her toward the coffin. "Come here."

Close to her, he watched as she let the coat fall away from her shoulders, revealing her naked arms, a thin gold circle dangling at one wrist. A scent of skin-warmed orchid breathed itself into his nostrils; he could taste it at the back of his throat. Sarah knelt down before him, touching him for a moment at his hips to balance herself. With her knees against the floor's rough planks, she reached behind her neck and undid her hair. With a shake of her head, it came loose, dark and soft against the paleness of her throat.

"You see?" This close, her voice could be a whisper. She raised herself a little bit, just enough so she could lean across the coffin's glass lid, both hands against the smooth surface. She brought her face down against one arm, turning to look up at him. "It's perfect, isn't it?"

He could see her face and Rachael's at the same time, separated by only a few inches. Sarah's gaze pierced him, held him; beneath the glass, the sleeping, dying woman with the same face, eyes closed, lips slightly parted to release an hours-long breath. Both women's hair was the same color, the same substance, across the coffin's pillow or the unmarked glass. He looked down, the world around him collapsed to a space even smaller than the cabin.

"I wanted to know…" Sarah turned the side of her face against the glass, so she could look at her own image beneath. "It sounded so strange… that you could love something… that wasn't real. What could that be like…" She raised her head, her gaze catching onto his again. "Not for you. For her."

"I don't know." Deckard slowly shook his head. "She never told me."

"Well… there's a lot you don't know." Sarah stood up, reaching down to brush the floor's dust from the edge of her skirt. She picked up her coat and folded it around herself. The same chill as before touched her voice. "That's really why I came here — to tell you that. There's a lot you don't know yet. But you're going to find out."

She walked past him, pulling open the cabin's door and stepping out into the darkness without even glancing back over her shoulder at him.

From the small window, he watched her spinner rise into the night sky. It hung suspended for a moment, giving him a glimpse of Sarah at the controls, then swiveled around and disappeared under the pinpoint stars, heading south. Toward L.A.

Other lights were moving up there. He looked up, counting two traces, then a third, coming his way. They must've been waiting, thought Deckard. Then she called them in.

A rational part of his head was almost glad the gun had been lost, knocked from his hand out in the woods. Otherwise, he might have been tempted to do something stupid with it. Like try to put up a fight.

He was sitting in the cabin's single chair when the agents, in their grey, insignia-less SWAT suits, shoved open the door.

"Deckard?" The leader — there were half a dozen behind him, sheer overkill — aimed an assault rifle's short barrel toward his chest. All the men had buzz cuts and hard, machinelike faces; they could've been LAPD elites, but he didn't recognize any of them. Before he could answer, the leader smiled and pointed the weapon toward the ceiling. "Good. You're being smart."

He sighed. These gung ho types had always given him a cramp. "What did you expect?"

"You're coming with us, Deckard."

"Can't." He tilted his head to indicate the coffin beside him. "I've got to take care of her."

"She'll keep." Two of the other agents had stepped behind the chair, yanking him from it by his arms pulled to the small of his back. "This won't take long."

The spinners were unmarked as well. "Are you guys Tyrell?" He studied the team's leader as the canopy swung down into place. On the man's breast pocket was a name, tag that read ANDERSSON.

"You don't need that information." The leader hit the cockpit's PURGE button. The ground fell away.

Deckard leaned back, turning his head to watch the other spinners pull into flanking position. "Where we going?"

"Don't be stupid." The leader didn't take his eyes from the controls. "You know."

He did know. His hands drew into fists. "Why?"

A sharp glance. "You know that, too." And a sneer. "You left too much unfinished business there. That's why." Deckard closed his eyes. He was going home. To L.A.