Edge Of Human

6

From one of the bureau plat's drawers, Sarah Tyrell took out the small tight-cell phone she had known would be there. Turning to gaze out at the strata of smoke and haze obscuring the afternoon sun, she flipped the phone open and pressed the TALK button. A synthesized trill, rising and falling in pitch, sounded at her ear, as the beam sought out and locked on to a secured channel from one of the low-orbit satellites over L.A. Punching in the numbers, then waiting, she idly let her hand prowl through the rest of the drawer's contents, the scarlet ovals of her nails clicking against paper clips and the remote, a Francis Harache gold snuff box, the cheap and nasty folding knife. Somewhere across town, another phone was ringing in sync with the one at her ear.

Then answered. "Speak if you want to." A man's voice.

"You know who it is." Sarah leaned back, the ridge of the chair's low back cutting under her shoulder blades. "I was just wondering how things went. With our guest."

"Huh. I imagine Deckard's just fine. Wherever the hell he is right now."

She was used to Andersson's general charmlessness. She had picked him — not just for this job, but for others as well — for his efficiency. He had been in charge of locating Deckard, up in the Oregon wilds, then bringing him back, even piloting the spinner that had carried Deckard home to Los Angeles. The man's other machinelike virtue was that of silence, of keeping his mouth shut.

From the office's high window, she could see across the city's sprawling maze. Deckard was down there, in there now. "Didn't you tag, him? So we could trace where he goes?",

"Wouldn't have been much point in doing that." He sounded bored and competent. "Somebody like him, he knows his business. If we put a tag on him, he'd find it and flush it. Next thing you know, we're running a trace through some sewer line and out to the ocean, and he's a hundred miles inland. Waste of time."

She felt a small knife's edge of apprehension, a flutter of the pulse beneath her ribs. She hadn't brought Deckard all this way, back into the world he'd tried to escape, just to lose track of him.

"What if he doesn't turn up again? What if he just… disappears?"

"He'll turn up. He has to. If he's going to survive."

In the few moments of silence, as she mulled over what the man had just told her, she could hear faint sounds. Not here, in what had been her uncle's office, but over in the Van Nuys Pet Hospital. The sounds were animal cries, real or fake. She knew that Andersson had a little corner for himself, tucked at the end of the rows of cages and kennels, where he transacted his own business. Away from Isidore, who might be distressed to overhear some of the things that were going on.

Which reminded her. Other things to be taken care of. "How did their little conversation go? I mean Deckard and Isidore."

"Pretty much what you expected. That's the great thing about ideologues. People who really believe stuff. You can depend on them. Isidore raked him over the coals for quite a while; Deckard didn't look so good when I finally booted him out of here. I'll send you the tapes; maybe you'll find 'em amusing."

She knew that he had wired Isidore's office, that cramped little cubicle. It smelled like a small zoo, mixed with machine oil and scorched plastic insulation — she'd been there one time, checking out the pet hospital's owner, getting an intuitive readout on him. She imagined that Isidore knew as well about the bug that had been planted; he wasn't that much of a fool, that disconnected from reality. Clever enough, actually, to make no attempt to remove the bug. Or, as Andersson said, ideological in nature, nothing to hide — at least from her. Perhaps he'd thought his lectures and stuttering rants would change her mind, settle into her heart. It could happen.

But not now. "Isidore's done a lot for us, hasn't he?" She extended her hand, touching the window's glass, sensing a fraction of the day's heat through it. The sky reddened from sulphur yellow as the sun moved slowly toward the horizon. "Quite a lot."

A moment's hesitation before Andersson's reply. "I suppose so."

Redder light leaked through the flesh of her fingertips. "I wonder

… if there's really much more he can do for us."

"Are you trying to tell me something?" Andersson's voice again, breaking into the silence.

"Do I have to tell you?"

"No…" He was probably giving a slight shake of his head. "I don't think so.",

"Good." The office and the bedchamber beyond had fallen further into shadow. "And when you're done…

He said nothing. Waiting.

"Why don't you come by here." She killed the connection and put the phone back in the bureau plat's drawer.

On her way out she stopped at the foot of her uncle's bed. That was hers as well — if she wanted it.

A handful of silk, shimmering against her fingertips as she lifted the edge of the sheet. But with a musty smell, as though it had absorbed a scent of age from the bedchamber's trapped air. She'd decided to have one of her personal staff come in and strip the bed, change everything for new.

Then changed her mind. She saw something she hadn't noticed before, a spatter of blood, small dots the color of the larger stain on the floor, a line diagonal up to the pillows.

She let the silk drift away from her hand, falling gentle upon the bed. When it was quite still again, she turned and walked toward the doors.

Smile and smile and smile… and be what? Dave Holden didn't know anything about the man sitting next to him in the cockpit. All that he did know, all that his brain could process, fueled by the blood re-oxygenated by the pumping and gasping attache case strapped to his chest, was that he was in deep, deep shit.

Then again, thought Holden, I was dying anyway. There in that hospital. He wondered if the figure beside him — not smiling now, but concentrating on the freight spinner's controls, taking it in for a landing somewhere at the city's unlit fringe — had spiked one of the blood tubes with a philosophically oriented chemical. A good deal of his initial fear had faded away, replaced by an odd curiosity as to what his fate was going to be.

Batty was dead; they'd told him that, Bryant and a couple of his other old pals from the blade runner unit. They'd come to the side of Holden's chrome-railed bed with their hats in their hands, wedging themselves into the small space between one gurgling machine and the next; the doctors had turned down the fentanyl drip enough to bring him into semiconsciousness, in which he'd been able to hear Bryant telling him that the group of escaped replicants, the batch he'd been assigned to, had all been successfully retired. As if he cared.

For its own reasons, the department gave him partial credit for the track-down, even though all he'd managed to do was inhale a hollow point through his breastbone, from that lump Kowalski. Bad for the morale of the rest of the squad, to let one of their number get his lungs blown out and not put a little something extra in his paycheck. The hospital visit had been when Bryant, the whiskey breath seeping through his brown teeth even stronger than usual, had shown him the morgue shots of the dead replicants. Including Roy Batty, who'd been the leader of their violent little band — even through a narcotic haze, the image of that unmistakable face, with its shock of white hair and gaze still coming in loony from the other side of the marble slab, had made a deep impression on him. Unforgettable.

"Hey — how about turning on some lights?" That was Batty, speaking into the spinner's comm mike. Holden had watched in silence as, Batty had tuned in a narrow-beam radio link with some identified ground station; the frequency numbers on the control panel looked way off any band with which he was familiar. "If I have to bring this thing in blind, I'm going to feel like kicking someone's ass afterward."

Holden looked out the side of the cockpit. At darkness, far beyond the reach of L.A.'s lit-up sprawl. How far had they gone? Up ahead, through the transparent curve, he could discern a jagged silhouette along the horizon, mountains outlined by stars and the moon's soft glaze.

Some other blue light, not the moon, spilled across the bleak landscape, blinking on and off. Holden brought his gaze around — it took some effort; he could feel himself tiring — and saw a landing rectangle outlined by the bright flashes. "There you go-" A voice crackled from the speaker on the control panel. "Make it quick, willya? We're getting sand in our boots, hanging around waiting on you."

"Where…" His own voice came out a feeble whisper. The effort of speaking, on top of just staying conscious and lifting his head from the seat's padded rest to look around, had come close to exhausting him again. The dials on the black attache case, visible beneath the web of surgical tape that bound it to him, jittered as the device kicked more oxygen into his body. "Where… is this…" Getting out the last couple of words had brought black spots dancing in front of his eyes.

Batty's disquieting smile swung in his direction. He reached over and made a small adjustment on one of the attache case's valves. "As I told you before. Someplace special." The smile widened, deepening the lines on the weathered face. "It's someplace you were always going to wind up."

No lock-on from the ground station, as far as he could see; Batty was taking the spinner down manually, centering the vehicle motionless above the blue lights, then hitting a straight vertical descent. The spinner's undercarriage hit the ground hard enough to bounce Holden in his seat, the attache case against the hollowed spaces of his chest.

"Sorry about that." Batty started flicking off the engine controls. "These freight jobbies are a bitch to maneuver."

"That's… that's okay," whispered Holden painfully. Maybe it wasn't too late to try ingratiating himself with the folks who ran the afterlife. "I'm sure… you're doing your best…"

Batty glanced over at him. And smiled. "You haven't seen my best yet,"

That worried him. He could hear the cargo space's door unsealing and, beyond, the sound of rolling wheels and running feet.

"Take it easy with this guy." Batty supervised Holden's unloading and being strapped onto a gurney. "I didn't bust him out and bring him all the way here, just so you could drop him on the ground like a carton of eggs."

"Whatever." A bored-looking younger man, whitecoated, scribbled something on a clipboard, then looked up. "You need a receipt on this?" He lifted one corner of a pink duplicating form.

"'A receipt…'" Batty rolled his eyes. "Fuck me."

"It's the regulations," said the younger man.

"Maybe instead, I should just pull your underbrained head off and stuff it down your trousers."

"Hey. Don't want the receipt, just gotta say so." He used the clipboard to gesture toward another couple of men standing around. "You guys wanna help get this case into surgery?" He leaned down and patted Holden on one straprestrained arm. "Good luck, pal." A stage whisper.

"Take a hike." Batty let the other men push the gurney as he walked alongside.

Hell, or whatever part of the afterlife he'd landed in. looked fairly ramshackle to Holden. A sprawling compound of rusting Quonset huts, windblown sand dunes mounting up the curved sides; other shabby prefab cubes made of tilt-up foam-core walls, the structural glue leaking out from the seams, as though melting in the night's dry heat; everything dusted with the same fine grit that eventually wound up in the streets of L.A. Turning his head to the side on the gurney's thin pillow, Holden watched the unimpressive and barely functional architecture roll by, lit by the sickly radiance of sodium-vapor globes strung along the tops of tarred wooden poles.

At the edge of the artificial light, struck more by the stars and moon, a razor-wire fence penned a flock of abandoned police vehicles, spinners and heavier cruisers with scorched flame-out marks along their engine exhausts, cockpits shattered or drilled with a line of spiderwebbed holes from high-caliber automatic weapons fire.

"This the one?"

Holden looked above himself and saw an unshaven face. A hand with black fingernails took a half-smoked cigarette away from the face's mouth; grey ash drifted down and was sucked into one of the black attache case's air intakes.

Either another doctor or some kind of butcher — the unshaven man had on a long white coat spattered with dried bloodstains. Holden wasn't sure which possibility filled him with greater foreboding.

Batty reached over and plucked away the cigarette. "Show the poor bastard some consideration." A red arc, then a burst of sparks as the stub hit the ground.

"They're all poor bastards." No show of annoyance; the unshaven man appeared beyond the expenditure of energy that would take. "All right, let's get him in and do it. No sense standing around out here." His nicotine-stained fingers began flicking off the controls on the black attache case.

"Hey…" Panic set in as Holden heard the attache's machinery wheezing toward silence, the small clicking and gulping noises slowing, then stopping. "Wait… a minute…" A grey veil began thickening before his vision; despite the heat of the desert air, his face and hands suddenly felt cold. Numbing fingers groped for the switches and buttons above his chest, but the gurney's straps kept him from reaching them. The tiny ball dropped in the valve, the hoses and tubes drooping limp and uninflated.

"Quit worrying." The unshaven doctor or butcher fumbled a cigarette pack out of the pocket of his white coat, lit up another. "You got at least three minutes or so before any real brain damage starts setting in." Dragged deep, coughed, then gestured to what appeared to be a couple of assistants standing around. "Yo, guys, get over and give me a hand with this one. Come on, let's get to work."

"Hang in there, pal." Batty's deranged smile floated in the mist above. "See you on the other side,"

They rolled him into the largest and oldest-looking of the prefab buildings. Holden managed to read the sign above the building's doorway as he disappeared inside. RECLAMATION CENTER. Of course, like the mechanics picking apart the old spinners on the field of night. Now he understood. There must still be a few good parts inside him.

He closed his eyes.

Deckard waited until the sun went down.

Too easily spotted, caught, even in the last few hours of daylight. He knew he needed not just darkness but crowds, the streets full of L.A.'s shoving, jostling nocturnal life. Everyone that the oppressive heat drove indoors, like desert animals sheltering beneath the flat, cool undersides of rocks — he could hide among them, move like a knife through garishly illuminated water, the flickering neon's toxic colors turning his face into a mask the same as the others wore.

Didn't even try to get away from the Van Nuys Pet Hospital — soon as the thuggish Andersson had booted him out on the freight dock, with a shove that had sent him stumbling, the metal door slammed behind him and he looked around for the nearest alley. The sun's angle had shifted far enough to make the one at the side of the building into a shadowed cleft, trash dumpsters and discarded boxes forming the tunnel into which he crawled. Glitter-eyed rodents, disturbed at their inspection of a decamped squatter's rags and meager treasures, hissed and threw bits of clawed-up asphalt at him. As Deckard crawled farther into the nest, light and heat nipping like a leashed dog at the soles of his boots, the small animals retreated, squatting on a crumbling brick ledge, old-womanish paws folded across their grey bellies, glaring at him.

Even in the shadows, out of the direct hit of the sun, the day's heat was enough to start him sweating under his clothes. The Santa Ana wind, sifting red dust through the alley, scraped the moisture off his limbs, sucked it from his mouth, leaving his tongue swollen arid and his eyes gritting in their sockets. He shucked off his coat, wedging its empty shoulders into the sides of the narrow space to make a shield against both the remains of the afternoon's light and anyone's random detection.

In his pocket was the book of matches that he'd used to ignite the woodstove, in the cabin up in Oregon. He struck one now, using its flaring glow to investigate the small space. It smelled of the dirt and sweat of the previous inhabitant. Who must've been a throwback literate, an enthusiast: tucked into the grime-crusted bed of rags were several old-style analogue books, nothing but antlike crawls of ink words on yellowing, damp-swollen pages, dead without any sparking digital enhancements. The covers — there were only a few — showed blond women whose half-lidded gazes were like weapons, mouths like bright wounds, and men with bruised, unshaven faces. The book pages crumbled as Deckard shoved the relics away.

He searched through the rubble, another match held aloft, looking for anything of use.

The previous inhabitant's Registered Homeless card — the thumbnail photo depicted a suffering saint, Christ-like hair tangled down to his shoulders. Dead, too. The Welfare Department's monitor implant must've caught the man's last heartbeat; two cartoon X's had appeared in the transparent lamination over the man's eyes, making the card useless for anyone else. The digits on the ration microchip had ticked back to zero as well. Deckard tossed the thin rectangle away.

Something handier, which the sanitation trucks had left behind when they'd hauled off the body: a simple steel rod, just about the length of his own forearm. Good heft in his fist, with enough whip to make a good

skull-cracker. The match had burnt out, but he could read with the ball of his thumb the embossed warning.

FOR SELF-DEFENSE PURPOSES ONLY. AGGRESSIVE OR PREDATORY USE PUNISHABLE BY LOSS OF BENEFITS.

The rod was standard issue for the city's street people, along with the Sally Anne sleeping bags that usually got ripped off first thing.

Now he didn't feel so naked. Deckard laid the steel rod on the asphalt beside himself, close at hand. He clasped his arms around his knees, lowering his head and waiting for the last daylight visible through his coat to fade. He'd already started putting his plans together.

The sounds of something moving — something bigger than the disgruntled rodents — snapped him awake, out of the pit of nervous exhaustion into which he'd fallen. His head jerked back, one hand shot down to grab and raise the steel rod. Using the metal's tip, he pulled back one edge of the flimsy barrier he'd made from his own coat; leaning against the brick wall, the rodents above scampering farther away, he sighted down the length of the alley.

Enough sleep residue blurred his vision, that his first irrational thought was that a ghost was walking toward him. A figure all in white — the sun had set, though most of its stifling heat remained in the air, so the image seemed to supply its own pale radiance. Drawing back, keeping himself hid, Deckard rubbed his eyes with his free hand. Then he could see a man inhabiting the white outfit, some kind of retro-tropical suit number.

"Charlie?" The white-suited man stopped halfway down the alley, straining to peer ahead of him. He had a small bundle tucked under one arm. "You home, buddy? Got something for ya." He displayed the bundle, wrapped in paper and string, on the tips of his fingers. "Thinking of you…"

The name on the Homeless Reg card had been Charlie something. With the steel rod, Deckard pulled the coat farther back, like a curtain.

"There you are." A gold-toothed smile as the white suit ambled forward. "Speak up, next time. I coulda walked right by ya-"

Close enough now. Deckard reached out, the dropped steel rod clanking on the alley's littered floor, and grabbed the man, elegant tie and collar points wadded in his fist. The little bundle's string and wrappings burst open as it flew in a startled arc and hit the ground. More of the tattered books spilled across the rubble.

"Hey, buddy…"The summer-weight dandy managed to gasp a few words, his face reddening above his collar. His feet dangled free of the alley. "Ease up, will ya…"

"Nice and quiet." Deckard kept the knot of the man's tie inside his fist, knuckles tilting the pointed chin back. "Let's talk real softly." With the sun gone, the evening parade had begun out on the streets. Nobody passing by had glanced down the alley yet. "Got that?"

"Yeah, sure…" Both of his hands gripped Deckard's wrist, as though praying in midair.

"I got it, buddy, I got it…" A screeching but obedient whisper. "Whatever you want… is fine with me…"

He eased his grasp, letting the other man settle on tiptoes. "I'm glad." In sinister fashion, he fingered the white lapel. "Nice jacket."

"Huh? Where's Charlie?"

"Indisposed. You should've made an appointment." The other man was so skinny, he could've either broken him in two or tied him in a knot. But the white suit's jacket was loose enough, fiaglike through the shoulders; it'd be the right size. "Here." Deckard let go of the man's necktie, reached past him, and tugged his own long, dark coat from the brick niche he'd anchored it into. "Make you a trade."

"What? A trade?" He looked with puzzlement, then distaste, at the coat laid across his trembling hands. Not in good condition to begin with, it'd picked up some of the smell and general schmutz of the alley. "For this?"

"That'd be the easy way." Deckard reached down, picked up the steel rod, laid the other end lightly into his palm. "There are others."

"Deal!" He shed the jacket as easily as walking out of a soft white room.

The tie was some flimsy, iridescent stuff-Deckard took that as well. Looping it without a knot as he strode away from the mouth of the alley, pushing his way through the crowd that had already assembled into the city's nocturnal life. Keeping one hand inside a trouser pocket, Deckard kept a tight hold on the steel rod tucked down his leg, its other end notching above his kneecap with each step he took.

Wind picked up, as though punching in for its shift supervising hell. Deckard felt the familiar hot kiss against his face, as he had every dry season he'd lived throughsurvived, dehydrated-in L.A. The gutters had filled with a fine red dust blown in from the desert, an iron-oxide color beneath the twists and lines of neon flickering into life, like a predictive vision of the dunes of Mars. If the city's trucks didn't vacuum out the streets every twenty-four hoursone of the huge container vehicles was already bumbling down the side of the asphalt, slowly squeezing past and through the shuffling ranks of pedestrians and the inching vans and old rehab'd cars with their roof-mounted radiator filters-then the whole place would wind up looking like the rolling vistas outside the pressurized windows of the colony hovels. Why bother to emigrate? Give in to the nagging of the U.N. blimp hovering overhead, with its video screen full of high-pressure, high-volume inducements, and you'd wind up staring out at much the same gritty mess, without even the hope of pulling through until the monsoon season rolled around again. Behind the windshield of the vacuum truck, the driver's bored eyes, visible above a sterile white breath mask, watched as the prehensile, wide-nostrilled mechanical snout sucked the curbs temporarily bare.

There were more masks on the street, covqring maybe one in three of the night's faces. Some masks improvised and cruder than the government-issue kind, others haute couture variants, from deranged silk organza wedding veils complete with tiny artificial orange blossoms, severely retro thirties side-perched pillboxes with falling black-dotted sweeps, to orthodox or mutated Islamic masks, rough nomadic Berber head wraps for men or androgen-pumped butchoi, delicate bell-laced gold for deeptrad women or kohl-eyed femmes.

A pack of prescavenger dwarfs, the aggressively mercantile kind that didn't wait for bits and scraps to be discarded before beginning the recycling process, wore vintage military gas masks, protecting themselves not only from the wind's dust but also the gasoline and freon fumes of the mech units they yanked and unbolted from the vulnerable traffic-stalled vehicles. Bomber goggles warded off the sulphuric Mace sprays from the drivers who came scrambling out from behind steering wheels when they heard the patter of tiny feet on their roofs. Hands in toddler-sized leather gloves flipped bird at the full-sized humans as the dwarfs tugged their oil-leaking trophies into the side lanes and mobile offices of the gypsy parts dealers who operated there.

Deckard caught a miniaturized glimpse of himself in the obsidian shades of someone, male or female, that the crowd's eddying currents bumped him right into. He backed off a step-hard to do, swimming against the tideand saw the white jacket, a little tight across the shoulders, and his own face, masked by an apprehensive caution.

"What's your problem, mac?" A smoke-rasped voice, a man's, sounded from the lipsticked mouth below the shades. "New in town, sailor, or what?" A vocoder on a thin velvet choker took her voice down a couple of octaves. "Even if you're buying, I'm not selling, so why don't you stop hogging the sidewalk and let a lady get past?"

"Sorry." He managed to insert himself, shoulder first, into the traffic flow to one side. The last thing he wanted was a public altercation that would bring attention from the police koban on the corner. For all he knew, the uniformed cop inside the little surveillance booth had a photo poster of him tacked to the wall, right next to the direct line phone to the LAPD's central station.

Giving him a smile, the other person moved on. Gone, swallowed behind the backs of the crowd.

He walked, keeping pace with the rest, shoulders jostled with each passing collision. Passing the koban, face casually averted-from the corner of his eye, Deckard saw that the cop in the booth had already picked up the red phone, was shouting something, the words blanked by the glass barrier and the mumbling susurrus of the crowd's collective voice. His stomach clenched as he watched the cop's free hand raised in excited gesture. He kept his own limbs under rigid control, fighting down the impulse to run through the crowd, exposing his back to the first shot the cop would fire when he stepped out of the booth.

Take it easy. His own voice, inside his head. Maybe it's not you they're looking for, maybe it's something else entirely…

"A new world awaits you!"

It wasn't him. A big voice boomed from above, letting him off the hook.

"A new life!"

The cop pushed open the koban's narrow door, jumping outside of it and looking up at the sky, the red police phone still at his ear. Voice audible now, but unintelligible in its shouted excitement.

"A chance to start anew!"

Deckard stopped and looked up, along with all the rest of the street coming to a halt. He'd been so caught up watching the koban officer that he hadn't noticed the rounded shape filling the sky, a faceted moon larger and closer than any before.

"In the off-world colonies!" The voice, the words heard so many times before that they'd become part of the city's nocturnal background noise, shouted giant words. A distorted sonic wash rolled an invisible tsunami over the sea of uplifted faces, the hands raised and pointing. The U.N. blimp drifted lower in torpid slow motion, coming down between the buildings on either side of the street, so near that Deckard thought he could reach up and touch the surface of its bulging underside.

The massive viewscreen on the blimp's flank stuttered optic static, blistering chaotic haze sweeping through the pixels of a Martian irrigation scene. Touched-up canals wavered, a green field of soybeans rippled seismic; Deckard saw now that a quarter of the blimp's antenna-spiked skin was enveloped in flame, tangible heat on heat in the wind-raked sky. As he watched, a bright spark trailed smoke from an alley opposite, the dull whump of a mortar round rolling through the onlookers. The shot hit the blimp's ridged frame, concaving another section of the metallic fabric. A second's fraction more, and the hollow burst into a fiery mouth, black tatters for teeth around the edges.

Farther above, at the top of the highest city tower, a geisha face winked and smiled, as though in approval of the blimp's death. As though the taste on the magnified woman's tongue was a piece of the upward-gouting fire itself, the blimp heeling onto one side to display its wound, the orange ball of flame sweetly acrid as an umeboshi plum.

The whole street lit orange, the dawning of a new, harsher, and more beautiful day.

Fireball hitting first, decompressed hydrogen in oxygen's explosive embrace. A wave of flame in the shape of a churning sphere, the collapsing U.N. blimp barely visible behind the eye-burning glare. The flames' enormous hand flattened the street, rush of heat and expanding pressure knocking screaming human forms hard to the pavement, tumbling them with hair alight or silken veils incinerated against gasping breaths, eyelashes scorched away.

Deckard felt the soft, hot pulse. Enough meters away that he was only knocked back against the wall of the building beside him, impact with brick and metal jarring him dizzy for a moment. Neon serpents, kanji store signs, hissed a rain of sparks, glass tubing shock-broken, upon him and the others who'd been knocked off their feet. Bracing himself against the wall, Deckard pushed himself upright, the figures around him still on their hands and knees, trying to crawl away across the bright shrapnel of the shattered windows, or gaping at the inferno crash, now at ground zero.

The blimp's rudimentary skeleton, meridians of an ovoid globe, showed through the engulfing flames. Another mortar had been fired, but with no incendiary charge. Instead, a grappling hook, prongs snapping into a sharp-pointed iron flower, ran a cord from the blimp's wreckage, back to an anchor point in the alley on the other side of the street. Hunched against the blaze's thermal force, Deckard shielded his eyes with his hand, squinting at the action on the other end of the taut line.

More of the blimp's frame twisted and burst rivets free as the hulk collapsed with terminal grandeur into the street, the blunt nose fire-wrapped and gouging a ragged furrow into the concrete; the tail end's stubby fins clawed out a row of tenth-story windows before tearing loose and sailing aloft on the fire's updraft.

Another pair of iron hooks, looped overhead and hand-thrown by the figures in the alley, snagged the black frame, drawing it down tighter, as though the burning craft were an animal that might tear loose in its agony and vault into the smoke-clouded sky. Deckard could see the men, a half dozen or so gritting their teeth, clad in white fireproof Nomex suits, tugging at the lines, leaning back with their feet braced against the ash-strewn pavement.

The lower edge of the blimp's billboard-sized viewscreen hit the ground with a sharp jolt, evoking a last flicker of life from it. The visual programming went into skittering fast-forward mode.

The voice of the images screamed. No longer seductive, cajoling: "A new life!" Pitch whipping higher, as though in sudden fear: "New life! Chance! New!" Into the idiot ultrasonic, trembling the shards of glass left in the buildings' window frames: "Start anew!"

One of the attackers ran out from the alley, line and grappling hook circling over his head and uplifted hand. The dead and still living who'd been caught in the explosion sprawled at his feet as he let go, the hook singing toward the center of the tilted viewscreen. The pronged metal hit square the rapid play of colored photons. They flew apart, the rigid membrane that had trapped them now dissolving into razor bits, the circuitry beneath arcing into overload and meltdown. Deckard spun away, shielding his face with his arm, the fragments of glass and hot-tipped wires falling across his shoulders like hail.

"It's all lies!"

Another voice, amplified but not the one that had boomed, then screamed from the crashing blimp. He turned back to the street, the infinitesimal bell-like percussion of glass fragments chiming across the now-vacated street. One of the mortar crew-maybe the one who'd run out with the last grappling hook; he couldn't tell-had leapt onto one of the bent metal struts, the dying flames silhouetting his insulated form. The man had black carbon streaks across his wild-eyed face, a bullhorn in his thick-gloved hand.

"They're telling you lies!" Shouting through the flared horn, voice snapping its echo against the surrounding towers. "It's always been lies!"

Deckard stepped away from the wall behind him, to the curb and then down to the debris-filled street. Scraps of the blimp's fabric, still burning and exuding oily black smoke, spotted the asphalt. Distant sirens, approaching at ground level and in the sky, cut through the cries and shouts of the crowd that had packed the space only a few minutes before.

"You have to listen!" The voice coming out of the bullhorn had a fanatic's, a believer's, trembling edge. "Not to me… but to them!" Even from where Deckard stood, a mad illumination shone visible in the man's gaze. "They've come back… to tell us!" The man turned, holding on to an upright strut of the blimp's frame for balance, aiming the bullhorn's trajectory across all the angles of the street. "They know the truth! They've been shown the light! The light of the stars!"

From the corner of his eye, Deckard saw other motion. The koban booth had been toppled over in the explosion, pinning the uniformed cop. Face bloodied, the cop had now managed to get out from underneath and was struggling to get to his feet. He'd already drawn the heavy black gun from his belt.

"Humans! Jesus Christ doesn't love you anymore!" An aching whine of feedback tagged along with the words shrieking out of the bullhorn. "The eye of compassion has moved on! It sees only suffering! The eye of compassion no longer sees you-"

Deckard turned from the sight of the ranting figure, the blimp's smoldering ruins a pulpit, and saw the uniformed cop aiming the gun, arms outstretched, one hand folded over the other.

A red bloom appeared on the front of the ranting man's white Nomex jumpsuit. Silent now, he looked down. Then he crumpled, gloved hand letting go of the frame strut beside him, body folding around the splintered breastbone and falling to the flame-specked pavement.

"Hey!" With one hand braced against the metal weight on his leg, Deckard ran toward the cop. He ignored the black hole of the gun's snout swinging around in his direction. "They're over there! The ones who did it-" When the cop's shot had silenced the bullhorn, the rest of the crew in the alley had fled, abandoning the mortar behind them. Deckard pointed to another, closer space between the street's buildings. "I saw them go!"

He knew he had to work fast before the approaching LAPD spinners landed on the scene. The beams of their searchlights were already stabbing down from above, sweeping across the wreckage.

The cop, a net of blood over his face, still looked stunned. He let Deckard grab his arm and pull him toward the unlit space away from the street.

"Right back here-" In the buildings' shadow, he pushed the uniformed cop a step ahead of himself.

"Huh?" The cop raised his wobbling gun, aiming at nothing. "I don't see any-"

His words were cut off as Deckard brought the steel rod across his throat. Hands on either end, a knee braced hard against the small of the cop's back. A sharper tug and less than a minute of pressure on the windpipe, the cop dangling and struggling red-faced, then only dangling-he let go and the cop fell, palms and open mouth against the alley's heat-cracked cement.

He glanced over his shoulder as he bent above the unconscious cop. The police spinners had landed, their red and blue strobe flashers painting a luminous carnival across the building fronts and the downed U.N. blimp. Paramedic units hovered above, waiting for the SWAT teams to finish securing the area. The hands of the injured clutched at the black-uniformed knees, then were kicked aside as the officers established a perimeter with assault rifles leveled in all directions.

Hands as hooks under the cop's arms, Deckard dragged him farther into the darkness. It took only a few minutes to strip the LAPD uniform off the lolling body, put it on with all buckles and other pieces of leather and chrome snapped tight. He wadded up the white jacket and his own dirt-stained clothing and tossed them away.

The cop, vulnerable-looking in bare skin and boring underwear, started to move, eyes fluttering open. Deckard fished the cuffs from the uniform's belt and fastened the cop's wrists behind a convenient drainpipe. Before the cop could make a sound, Deckard had the miranda gag slapped over the other man's face, the oxygen-permeable membrane stifling even the whisper of his breathing.

Deckard finishing pulling on the gloves of thin black leather, the last bit of the jackbooted ensemble. He ignored the shucked cop's squirmings and malevolent glare, searching through the belt's other pouches until he found what he was looking for. A rectangle of grey plastic, credcard-sized, with a row of pressure-sensitive dots along one edge.

He knew better than to try his own activation code. The pass cards were all linked on a high-freq'd trans net; his old numbers would undoubtedly set off every alarm in the central station's tracking unit.

The cop's gun had landed a couple of feet away. He picked it up, then leaned down anti set its muzzle against the previous owner's forehead. "Let's be real quiet." With his other hand Deckard peeled back a corner of the gag. "Just whisper, okay?" The cop rolled his gaze toward the gun at his brow, then back to Deckard's face. "Just tell me your pass code."

"Get fucked."

"Wrong answer." He was familiar with the department's standard-issue small arms, from his own long-ago bullwalking days. Whereas this guy was young enough to be a rookie — why else would he have been stuffed into a cop-in-a-box koban? — and therefore breakable. Deckard pulled his crooked finger back just far enough to produce a nerve-racking click from inside the gun's machinery. "Try again."

No bravado this time. The cop rattled off a string of numbers, probably his own birth date; his face shone with a sudden tide of sweat. Deckard thumbed the code into the card.

Chameleon-like, it changed from dead grey to an iridescent, slowly fading red. It would work.

"Thanks." He made sure the gag was sealed tight around the cop's mouth. He held the gun against the wet forehead a moment longer. "You know. I really should do this…" The debate inside his own head went the other way. One, he didn't want to confirm that asshole Isidore's estimation of him as a murderer of actual humans-which hadn't been proven to his satisfaction, anyway. And two, as far as the LAPD was concerned, it was one thing to be a murderer, another to be a cop-killer. Whatever dragnet was under way for him now, it'd be nothing compared to what'd ensue if he gave himself a jacket like that. Even if he managed to get away, out of the city, they'd come after him just to ice his ass. A matter of group loyalty. He took the gun away from the cop's forehead, reholstered it. "You just stay nice and quiet, right here."

That might be awhile, at least long enough for him to accomplish what he needed to do, the next step in his nowcoalescing plan. Deckard scanned toward the mouth of the alley and the street beyond. The other cops who'd come swooping in looked to be busy, their investigation heading in the opposite direction, where the group who'd downed the U.N. blimp had disappeared; it'd likely be hours before they checked out this little pocket. He had no idea what all the commotion had been about-mortar rounds and bullhorns, for Christ's sake-but it'd all worked out to his benefit. Now he had about twice the chance he'd had before…

Which was still just about a notch above zero.

Keeping close to the brick wall, to avoid being spotted, he slid farther down an alley.

To a door, easily kicked in. He found himself standing at the top of a low run of stairs. The small, clicking echoes of mah-jongg tiles died away as a mixed group of Asian and Anglo faces swung his way.

"This strictly social club." An officious woman in a highcollared brocade dress fluttered before him. "All money on tables for decorative purposes only."

"Yeah, right." Around the edges of the basement room, it looked to be pai gow at vicious stakes. The whole world could've been coming to an end outside, and the gamblers wouldn't have looked up. Deckard strode through the lowceilinged space, scooping up a handful of cash from the center of one table, the usual policeman's tax, and pocketing it. That could come in handy as well. "Keep it that way."

Another flight of stairs took him up to the street on the other side of the building. The crowd was thinner here, a lot of it having headed over one block to gape across the yellow POLICE INVESTIGATION tapes at the fallen blimp and general disaster scene.

Head down, Deckard strode rapidly, the people on the street parting to either side, making way for him. At this clip, it wouldn't be long before he reached the central police station.