Which were exactly the same thing.
Patience was never much of a virtue with you, Deckard.” The briefcase sat surrounded by moldering rubble, scummed coffee cups, stubs of ersatz tobacco disintegrating within. “I don’t know how you ever got to be a cop. You act cold—you always did—but you know what? You’re not.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.” Deckard reached for the brown glass. “If you’ll spare me any more crap.”
The briefcase laughed. “That’s how you should take it. Since there aren’t going to be any others. Compliments, I mean. You look like hell, Deckard. I don’t even have eyes, and I can tell that. I can hear it in your voice. The ravages of a guilty conscience, I suppose.”
Deckard shrugged. “I wouldn’t have killed you, except I had to.” Another sip.
“You were trying to kill me, remember?”
“Oh, that. Forget about it,” said Batty’s voice. “These things happen.
Besides, it was poor old Holden who fired the shot; technically, he gets the credit for the hit. The department may even have given him a bonus for taking me out—he never told me for sure, though. Hard guy to get to know. Even when he’s toting you around by the handle. Genuine cold.”
“Even colder now.”
“Yeah The briefcase emitted a sigh. “Poor bastard. And him walking around with that latest heart-and-lung implant, all that cranking machinery, that the LAPD surgeons had put inside him Batty’s voice went silent for a moment, then came back, softer and musing. “You know, I was starting to feel a little sympathy for Holden before he got iced back there at Outer Hollywood. Sort of a kinship, if you know what I mean. Here I am, stuck in this box-implanted, right? inside a device—and Holden had a box inside his chest stuffed full of little gizmos. Keeping him alive, the same way this one does for me, sort of.
So what was the essential difference?”
Deckard didn’t even bother to shrug. “None,” he said. “That I can think of.
Especially since you’re both working for the LAPD. Or were, in Holden’s case.”
“Pardon me?” Batty’s voice kicked back up in volume. “What the hell did you say?”
“Come on.” Anger more than alcohol unleashed Deckard’s tongue. “Let’s not screw around, all right? I didn’t carry you back here all the way from Outer Hollywood just so you could feed me a line of bullshit. This is a police operation—what else could it be? I’ve seen these box jobs before; this is how the department preserves anybody who’s been iced before they’ve finished extracting information from him. Standard operating procedure—the department’s tech surgeons scrape up the body, the way they must’ve scraped you up from that broken-up old freeway where I left you, they do a deep core retrieval from whatever cellular activity is left in the brain and spine, then download it into a storage unit. Like this briefcase you’re sitting in.”
“Then I wouldn’t be working for the department, would I?” Batty’s voice tightened. “Since these box jobs, as you call them, are something they do to people who’ve been offed by the cops.”
“Cops get ’em, too,” said Deckard wearily. “Killed in the line of duty-especially if it happens to investigators or detectives who didn’t get a chance to make a report before they took a bullet. It’s even happened to a few blade runners. Just part of the hazards of the job.”
“You’d better get your head straightened out, Deckard.” The personality and mind implanted inside the briefcase audibly bristled. “First thing, jettison the notion that I’m part of some LAPD operation. I’m not, and neither was Dave Holden.”
“Oh?” Deckard tapped the edge of the glass. “What happened? He quit the force?”
“That’s exactly right. He walked.”
Deckard snorted. “Hard to believe.”
“Why? You did the same. Once.”
“That was different.”
“You give yourself too much credit, Deckard.” Batty’s voice sneered at him.
“For uniqueness. Think you’re the only ex-cop who got that way from a bad conscience?”
Deckard nodded, even though he knew the briefcase couldn’t see him. “The only one I ever knew.”
“That’s because you were always such a loner. If you blade runners had ever hung out together, instead of always scheming against each other in department politics, you might’ve had a chance.”
Deckard said nothing. The voice coming out of the briefcase had touched a nerve, a line into his memory and all that had happened back in L.A. He’d told himself that he wasn’t going to think about that stuff anymore, that there wasn’t any point to it. The whole anti-blade runner conspiracy riff that he’d gotten wind of from Holden and Batty when he’d still been walking around as a human being. All of which might have been true, with conspiracies wrapped inside larger ones, legions of endless night . . .
He didn’t care. Not anymore; he’d had his fill, even before he’d been sucked into Sarah Tyrell’s private conspiracy, her queen-and-pawns maneuvering, all to destroy the Tyrell Corporation, everything that her hated uncle had created. Eldon
Tyrell’s works turned to ashes, his memory locked inside that dark space inside Sarah’s skull, where she was still a child and he was the king of the only world she knew. Deckard had had a glimpse in there, and he didn’t want to see any more. Enough that Sarah’s vengeance-driven scheming had robbed him as well, of those last carefully measured hours he could have spent with Rachael.
The real Rachael, or as much real as any replicant could be. Which as far as Deckard was concerned, was more real than the human original could be; even when Sarah had tried to pass herself off as Rachael, he had known the truth before she had slipped up, long before the emigrant ship had left Earth. That Rachael was already dead, and that Sarah could never be her, even though she was identical in every way but one. And that one thing wasn’t part of her, but was located inside him, so deep she could never reach it.
“These are things you need to deal with, Deckard.”
Batty’s words had broken the course of his thoughts; it took him a moment to adjust. “What things?”
“If there’s still an operational conspiracy against the blade runners, then your ass is still on the line. You can’t hide. Your cover’s blown. Everybody knows where you are. How do you think Holden and I were able to track you down so easily?”
“Big deal.” Deckard shrugged. “You had contacts. Probably with the video people—that Urbenton guy. When they had the video ready for release, they were planning on doing a whole publicity trip that they’d had me signed on as technical adviser during the taping. That’s what they were paying me for. My name. So it wasn’t going to be a secret for very long. Holden must’ve caught a leak from the production, that’s all.”
“A couple of minutes ago,” the briefcase said dryly, “you were figuring that Holden must’ve still been working for the LAPD. You really think that the department gets its information from camera operators who can’t keep their mouths shut? Come on—you know they don’t work that way. Admit it-this has got all the smell of high-level spookiness.”
“Maybe.”
“No ‘maybe’ about it, Deckard.” Batty’s voice tightened, wirelike. “You know it already. Holden wasn’t LAPD, at least not when he showed up there at Outer Hollywood. He was as quit as you are. That’s why you took me when you left the station to come back to this rattrap. If you’d really thought that I was part of a police operation of any kind, you would’ve booted this fine-quality briefcase right out of the skiff’s waste chute somewhere in transit. I’d be talking to myself out in the cold, cold vacuum right now. At least until my batteries ran down.”