He’s right, thought Deckard. That mind, with all of its mercenary hit man sharps, was still there, intact. Batty, boxed or not, could read right into his soul and see what was written there.
“I was curious.” Deckard could hear his own flat, defensive words. “I just wanted to see what this whole game was about. That’s why I took you with me.”
“Yeah, right. And risk having me turn out to be a homing device, so the authorities could track where you went as soon as you left the station? You could pull my other leg, if I had any.”
“All right . . . all right.” For a long moment, Deckard remained silent, then reached for the glass. He held it to his mouth but didn’t drink, only inhaled the acrid fumes. Then he pushed the chair back and stood up, carrying the glass to the sink and pouring it out. The brown liquid sluiced through the scabbed dishes and down the reluctant drain.
He couldn’t afford to go under the alcohol tide, not now. He’d brought something else back with him, besides the briefcase. Fear; the unease gnawing at his synapses, the twitch of rigid neck muscle and crawl of prickling skin, the mute awareness of something closing in on him, its teeth not yet revealed.
That sense had begun rising along his spine as he’d looked down at the corpse of Dave Holden at his feet . . .
“Go ahead,” Deckard said as he sat back down. He’d carried the briefcase here, hoping for answers. “I’ll accept that you’re not part of some police operation. So start talking. Who sent you?”
“Who sent me?” The one-cornered smile returned to Batty’s voice. “Or who sent Holden?”
“The two of you.” Deckard leaned back in the chair, legs sprawled under the table. “Together—your little buddy team. If it wasn’t LAPD . . . I can’t figure it being the U.N. Their security agencies wouldn’t bother tracking me down at the Outer Hollywood station. They’d nail me here. Everything on Mars is a U.N. operation, except for the cable monopoly, and they’re in each other’s pockets.”
“Work on it, Deckard. Who else out there has got an interest in replicants and the people who go around hunting them down?”
“The replicants themselves.” He shrugged. “That’s all.”
“The only problem with that theory,” said the briefcase, “is that replicants-escaped replicants, especially, on the run—they don’t have any resources. They’re just hiding out, staying low for as long as they can, trying to keep alive. What kind of operation could they put together? You think they could’ve managed to get me scraped off that freeway wall where you left me, get my cerebral contents transferred into this thing, and send Holden out to deliver me to you?”
“Probably not.”
“You got that one right. But there are others, aren’t there? Others who are, shall we say, concerned about the replicants and what happens to them. Concerned in ways besides just wanting to kill them off. For Christ’s sake, Deckard, you ran into them yourself, back in L.A. You must have.”
“All right, I know who you’re talking about.” Deckard gave a dismissive gesture with one hand. “The sympathizers. The rep-symps.” He shook his head.
“You gotta be joking, Batty. That bunch of losers? Street corner evangelists tub thumpers.”
“There’s more to them,” said Batty, “than just that.”
“Sure-some of them are loose-cannon terrorists. Getting themselves blown away by the police—for what? For the sake of shooting down some obnoxious U.N. advertising blimp?” Deckard had seen that for himself when he’d been on the run in L.A.’s maze of streets. His first exposure to the rep-symp phenomenon; he’d heard more about them since then. “So these head cases can dig up a few military surplus mortar rounds and hit a floating viewscreen. I’m not impressed.”
“Stop being such a dumb cop.” The voice turned harsher. “Get with the program, Deckard. The rep-symps you saw on the street—the screamers, the terrorists, the religious types out in the sideways zone-those are all the fringe elements. The fact that you see those people running around at all should’ve told you something. It should’ve been the tip-off that there would be others that you don’t see, ones whose brains aren’t cracked. Ones who’ve got their agenda going in a whole different way. You ran into one of those as well—that guy Isidore at the Van Nuys Pet Hospital.”
“Yeah, I remember him. But he was a loner, a one-man operation—”
“That’s what you think. For Christ’s sake, Deckard, use your head.” Disgust tinged Batty’s voice. “Isidore was working right in the center of L.A., disguising escaped replicants as humans-disguising them so well that your big-deal blade runner unit didn’t have a chance of catching them—and he was getting away with it. If your girlfriend Sarah Tyrell hadn’t sent her pet hit man out to take care of him, Isidore would still be in operation.”
The girlfriend crack nettled Deckard, but he kept himself from rising to the bait. “That doesn’t prove Isidore wasn’t working alone. Or that he had some kind of high-level connections covering his ass.” Deckard shrugged. “Maybe he was just lucky—or at least he was until the end.”
For a few seconds, the briefcase was silent; then it emitted a low, mocking fragment of laughter. “Come on, Deckard—there’s no such thing as luck. If something happens, it’s for a reason. If Isidore was getting away with disguising replicants as human, and he was doing it right in the face of the LAPD, you can bet he had some powerful friends on his side. People who’re just as concerned about what happens to escaped replicants as Isidore was.” Batty’s smile threaded through his voice again. “People . . . maybe . . . who are right there in the police department itself.”
“They’d have to be.” Deckard wished he hadn’t poured his drink into the sink; now he felt like he could use it. The way his old boss Bryant had used booze shots, both for himself and anybody he’d brief in his shabby, dust-smelling office. To fuzz the edges of reality a bit, just enough to let new, spooky possibilities come sneaking into everyone’s cortex. “The repsymps, huh?”
“You got it.” The voice emerged from the briefcase with a note of triumph.
“The replicant sympathizers aren’t just a few isolated crackpots sparking off their remaining brain cells. They’ve penetrated every level of government-right into the police force itself. They may not be the only conspiracy going on, but the rep-symps are in there pitching.”
“Something doesn’t add up.” Deckard laid one hand flat on the table. “The replicants who’ve managed to escape and get to Earth—if Isidore and his whole Van Nuys Pet Hospital operation, if it was so good at disguising replicants as human, so they couldn’t be detected even with Voigt-Kampff machines-why would it be just the rep-symps who are looking out for their interests? Why wouldn’t the replicants themselves be in on all these high-level conspiracies? If they can pass as human, they should be able to infiltrate the police department as well as anybody else.”
“The replicants are in on the conspiracies.” Batty spoke with simple matter-of-factness. “The rep-symps—the important ones—and the replicants are in constant communication with each other. But not on Earth. There’s things going on in the outer colonies, out in the stars, that hardly anyone on Earth knows about—because the U.N. and the police don’t want them to know.”
“Like what?” The hand, fingers spread, remained motionless on the table.
“Rebellion. Slaves against masters. What else? History always repeats itself—it had to happen, given the way humans have treated the replicants out there.”
“How bad is it? The rebellion, I mean. If there really is one going on.”
“Depends upon whether you’re a replicant or a human colonist.” The smile in Batty’s voice turned even more unpleasant. “Let’s just say that the humans may have the guns, but the replicants—they’ve got the numbers.”