Brass shell casings clinked in the bag slung over the scavenger’s shoulder. He looked up, the scarred bridge of his nose wrinkling to signal that he smelled cop, while the black-nailed fingertips poking through the ends of his gloves continued to groom the mock battlefield. Another scent lingered in the station’s canned and recycled air, that of the live ammo that had been expended in the taping of some low-budget historical epic.
“You can’t hassle me, man.” The scavenger’s eyes narrowed behind the goggles.
“I got a license.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t.” The stuff he’d been able to do before, back when he’d been with the department, had all been left behind him, on Earth and in that other life. “So remain sweatless.”
He was able to get approximate directions from the scav enger. And information: there was only one video shoot booked into the Outer Hollywood station, the first one after a long dry spell.
“It’s that damn Cinecittâ Nuovo, down in Jakarta.” The scavenger’s gloved thumb looked like mice had been chewing on it in his sleep, as he gestured toward some point beyond the station’s curved walls. “Those people’ve got all that EEC money behind ’em. And they suck up all the video productions now.”
Thnnels bigger around than the station ran underneath the Indonesian Entrepreneurial Republic, the spaces lit brighter than anything sun and corroding mirrors could provide. The scavenger looked wistfully at the meager gleanings in his sack. “Man, what I wouldn’t give to be able to get in there.
There must be all kinds of shit lying around.”
Holden wasn’t interested in the sad intricacies of either the video or the scavenging business. “So where’s the shoot going on?”
The ragged glove pointed down the length of the station’s arched central corridor. “You can’t miss it. Go past the Vatican and that Scottish castle with the dry moat; that’s where they’ve got their funky L.A. all set up.
There’s all kinds of people hanging around. Humans and replicants . . . it’s that kind of a shoot. Real blood-and-guts stuff.” An eyebrow raised inside the goggles. “You might like it. Some kind of cop show.”
“I doubt it.” Holden started walking again, briefcase in hand. “Seen it already.”
He saw the buildings up ahead, or at least part of them: the bottom sections of what were supposed to be L.A.’s canyoned towers, false-fronted and propped into position by the cobbled-together framework behind them. A small flutter ran through the bio-mech heart in his chest; some nameless emotion or twinge of adrenallike hormone. Not at seeing again the city he had left behind on Earth, or at the view of those streets in partial disassembly. It looks better this way, thought Holden. Not really fake at all—that was the marvel of it. As if the people, those shadowy corporations and architects, who’d built the Outer Hollywood station and then constructed the L.A. set inside it, had caught some realer—thanreal aspect of the city. Or at least the city that had existed inside Holden’s mind, with his barely being aware of it until now. I always thought the other one was fake—he realized that now. Th see it this way, two-dimensional buildings with nothing behind their surfaces’ retrofitted ventilation ducts and wiring conduits, with the people in the streets finally exposed as actors and anonymous bit players; with the monsoon rains shut off from above, the rusting pipes leaking only a few scattered drops; even the sky revealed as metal with nothing but vacuum beyond—it was an oddly comforting manifestation of his most paranoid dreamings. If only it were true, thought Holden.
The vision passed, along with its soul-deep significance, as though he were waking from a dream. Like rolling over in bed, it seemed to him, and opening your eyes and seeing, instead of the woman you had gone there with, some deracinated corpse staring up at the ceiling with empty eye sockets or worse, nothing at all, just the empty shape, the indentation in the mattress and the other pillow, of someone who’d once been there but was never coming back .
I woke up a long time ago, thought Holden glumly. That was why he’d wound up quitting the department, leaving the blade runner unit. Even going over to the other side .
“You’re wasting time.” The briefcase spoke up, its voice kept low enough that only Holden would hear it. “You may not have anything on your agenda, but I’ve got stuff to do. So just go find Deckard, and let’s get on with it.”
Nagged by hand luggage; that was what life had come to. Or what there was left of it; the revelatory vision of the faux L.A. and his deep ruminations thereon had caused him to let his guard down. If anybody had wanted to interfere with his delivery job, all someone would’ve had to have done was walk up behind him and take off the back of his head with one of the pieces of rusting lighting frame that lay all around the station’s floor.
The L.A. set was sunk lower than where Holden stood watching; he figured the arrangement probably had something to do with the plumbing that suctioned away the runoff from the overhead rain system and kept the water from building up around the video-cams and other equipment at the set’s periphery. From this vantage point, he could see that whatever taping had been going on had now come to an end, at least for the time being. Some kind of interruption, resulting in equal measures of chaos and boredom; back when he’d been an LAPD rookie in uniform, all testosterone and Third Reich leather, he’d pulled enough overtime doing traffic control and rent-a-cop guard duty on location shoots to recognize the pattern. That’d been an even longer time ago, when there’d still been a remnant of a video industry in the city.
He pushed aside the youthful memory flash and craned his neck, trying to spot the person he’d come all this way to find. This was where he’d been told, even before he’d left Earth, that he’d be able to track down Deckard. Some bottom-rung company called Speed Death Productions—not one of the biggies; Holden had never heard of it before this—was making some kind of docudrama out of Deckard’s life story. Or at least part of it: that last stint of his as a real blade runner, when he’d been tracking down that group of escaped replicants. When Holden had been told about it, he’d actually broken into laughter. It struck him as a ridiculous notion. His old partner in the blade runner unit hadn’t exactly distinguished himself in a heroic manner, or at least not that time. Deckard had already wimped out and quit the force back then, mainly out of chickenshit queasiness over blowing away defenseless replicants . . . or “retiring” them, as the departmental slang put it. The head of their unit, charming old Inspector Bryant himself, had had to put the pressure on Deckard to come back aboard and help clean up the mess. Holden still got a little surge of irritation revving up his artificial organs, despite all that’d happened and all that he’d found out since then, when he thought about that arrangement. There wouldn’t have been any pretext for Bryant to force Deckard back into being a blade runner if Holden hadn’t been set up to take a hit from one of the escaped repli cants. Which had left him with a fist-sized hole under his breastbone that the batteries and tubes and sleepless little motors now nicely filled. That’d all been one package of bad business, with lots of smaller packages marked
“murder” and “betrayal” inside; and another, even larger package had come around after that, when Holden had found himself unplugged from his hospital and walking through the wet, nasty L.A. streets—the real streets, not the phony ones of the video set he now looked upon. That bigger package had been marked with a flaming red “C” for “conspiracy;” when he’d opened it, he’d found himself carrying something else in his hand for his old friend Deckard, something it would’ve taken only a single squeeze of the trigger on the black regulation-issue gun to deliver.