“Now would be a good time to clam up again,” he told the disembodied voice.
Sealing his mouth and nose off with the palm of his free hand, he unzipped the bubble’s exit flap and shouldered out into the stinging wind to flag down the shuttle.
“Hey—I’m discreet.” The briefcase’s voice slid through the crystals stinging against the side of Deckard’s face. “You’re not the only person who can carry off a silent act.”
On the shuttle, he sat with the briefcase on his knees, sandwiched in between the mine workers on the scuffed steel benches, each breath taking in the mingled odors of their sweat. The jogging motion of the treads across the red dunes rocked the bodies from side to side, bumping hard into Deckard’s shoulders. No conversations sounded in the shuttle’s tight interior; the mine workers sat with their silted bandannas pulled down around their throats, breathmasks and rehydration tubes dangling disconnected like some amphibian species’ vestigial organs. They all looked to Deckard like first-generation Mars natives, some of the younger ones possibly second-gen, the children and grandchildren of the Earth-born emigrants who’d gotten this far and had then given up on getting all the way to the stars. Through eyelids drawn nearly as tight as the shuttle’s slit windows, they gazed out on the landscape that they’d inherited, that they had evolved to possess. Deckard could sense the rewiring of the nervous systems sitting around and across from him, the shuffling of synaptic fibers and input receptors that had taken place in the womb, the human body’s instinctive response to the foreign territory in which it had been exiled.
The creatures around him, that still wore the outward appearance of human beings, were off the cable monopoly’s feed. They didn’t need the canned stimuli to survive; they could go out into the hills and dry ravines and suck up all the bandwidth this world had to offer. Deckard had wondered before what their strangers’ eyes saw, what their spatulate, black-nailed fingertips read from the grains of red sand trickling through their touch. He’d given up wondering; he had enough trouble dealing with human things, and the things that were at least trying to be human. There was more in common between his blood and that of the replicants he’d killed before than there was between him and the sharp-angled faces that stared past him as if he no longer existed.
The fatigue seeping from Deckard’s bones, forearms lying like deadweights across the briefcase in his lap, drew his eyelids shut. With the scent of alien sweat in his nostrils, the press of blood-warm flesh near his own, he almost believed himself to be back on Earth, in L.A., the dark, neon-veined city extending on all sides around one of the cramped public buses shoving its way through the traffic stalled with retrofitted Detroit relics. He’d always felt overwhelmed by sheer otherness there as well; simply being on the planet, in the city, on the streets where he’d spent his whole life, that didn’t mean he could look into the face right next to his, so close he could practically taste the other’s mingled exhalations of kimchi and phrik ku noo and see anything that resembled a mirror, anything that made him think he was looking at his own genetic code.
That was a bad mental place to be in, especially for a cop wearing a big black gun inside his jacket. Even more so when you’d been working the blade runner unit, and you were supposed to blow away anything that didn’t pass for human with you; that was your job. It’d been his; it’d been Dave Holden’s, and a bunch of other poor crazed bastards’. Some of whom he’d worked with, some he’d steered a wide distance away from, catching that weird look in their eyes and the subliminal tick of a dynamite clock counting down. Some of the blade runners he’d known had wound up massaging the backs of their throats with their gun muzzles and had gone under the ground in carefully sealed caskets. Others were still out there on the streets, chasing their own deaths and the accusatory revelation that could only be glimpsed in the eyes of those you are about to kill. Or retire, to use that morally compromised departmental lingo.
Riding in a worm-tread shuttle across another world’s dead surface, Rick Deckard felt himself sweating, a crawl of self-generated excretions over his skin. An old, familiar claustrophobia tightened his muscles, a shrinking from contact with the creatures around him. Not to avoid their touch, but to keep them from being touched by him. Why should they suffer? As he did . . .
He opened his eyes and turned his head to look out the slit window behind him.
A desultory wind moved red sand around, like the floor-sweepings of his heart.
There were supposed to be other creatures out there, skinny wolflike slinkers, all lank jaws and burning eyes—he’d thought he’d spotted one before, the barest glimpse of motion from the corner of his eye, when he’d been on his way out to the skiff rental yard. You didn’t have to eat a gun to find release; you could simply wander out past the emigrant colony’s limits, keep walking, and your splintered bones would be found, marrow sucked out like soft marzipan.
To have spotted that wolfish spectre, seen it before its teeth closed on your throat—that was a bad sign. I’ve been here too long, thought Deckard. His neuro-system was starting to adapt, sensors working overtime, picking up the wavelengths of a world he hadn’t been born on. That happened sometimes-rumors and emigrant myths were rife—the whole process cannon-firing ahead, not taking two or three generations to work itself out. At some unconscious, cellular level, the poor bastard to whom it happens just gives up on being human, lets go and becomes . . . something else. Like these things around me—Deckard glanced at the sullen, motionless forms lining the interior of the shuttle.
One way or another, they’d already said their good-byes to all the others they’d left behind.
The shuttle ground on, nearing the emigrant colony’s perimeter. A muted rustling moved through the seated figures, the mine workers rousing themselves from reptiloid torpor—the tiny shifts of their bodies, raising of heads, glances out the narrow windows, reminded Deckard of lizards on sun-baked rocks, the flick of yellow, slitted eyes toward an insect too far away to catch and eat. He supposed they probably were thinking about whatever meals were waiting for them—they had the lean, knife-ribbed look of people who went a long time between protein sources—in the dark shacks and nests of the colony’s most silent quarter.
Speculating about aliens with human faces, and what their unknowable lives might be like, had one advantage: it had derailed the even darker reverie into which Deckard had fallen, that pit lined with self-accusation he knew all too well. Now he could put on his own mask, the one that looked just like him but bore the name Niemand, and go home and see what Mrs. Niemand had waiting on the table for him.
God only knows, thought Deckard glumly as the shuttle slowed down to a crawl, the soft labial flaps of the colony’s ground transport airlocks folding over the windows. What Sarah would’ve gotten up to, decided upon, in his absence—she was as far around the bend, he knew, as he himself was. The married state of the pseudonymous Niemands, the alias he shared along with equal measures of hate and guilt, was as mentally toxic as any sensory void to be found on Mars. No vacuum existed between himself and Sarah; the space between them was filled, and overfilled, with memory and the slow ebbing tide of the past that left things on a common shoreline-old photos, sheet music on an untuned piano, names whispered in that sad moment between sleep and waking, empty bottles overturned by a fumbling hand. Everything that could be picked up, still tear-wet, and studied as it turned to the same ashes in his and Sarah’s mouths . . .