He looked up at the garish marquee as he walked down the center of the empty street. The effects of downing the beaker loaded with the colloidal suspension, activated by a spoonful of the Sebastian packet’s contents, were still setting in on him. For a few minutes—though it was hard to gauge the passage of time in a place that didn’t exist—he had been able to see both the hovel’s interior, with the tap still dripping into the kitchen-area sink and the briefcase with Batty’s voice lying on the table, and the lineaments of this pocket universe, like two photo transparencies laid on top of each other.
He’d even been able to see himself, his legs sprawled out, his hand resting on the table beside the empty beaker he’d just slapped down, as another perception of his body, standing not sitting, wearing the long pseudo-trenchcoat he’d always affected in L.A., had disorientingly faded into his consciousness. The Deckard body sitting in the hovel on Mars had faded out, the first thing in that other universe to go. The one in the pocket universe had tilted his head back, getting the grey-tinged rain in his face and seeing past the roiling clouds to sectors of hard-edged needle-tip stars, with gouts of flame bursting beneath them. Deckard figured the stars were as fixed in place as the heavy, dark clouds, indicators of this L.A.’s eternal night.
Dicking around with time like that was the main indicator of the pocket universe’s fake status. A night that never ended—though the real L.A. had often felt like that to him—and little anachronisms. Right down to the Million Dollar’s marquee above his head; that was a fragment from the past, something vanished from the real world. This whole tenblock sector of the city’s decaying downtown had been levelled by urban-renewal terrorists to drive out the last squatter tribes some time after Deckard and Sarah had gone off-planet; news footage of the mini-nuked buildings had shown up on the Martian cable’s nightly clown-wrap. Even on the tiny video screen in the hovel, he’d been able to recognize the old movie palace’s curling ornaments, lifeless and unlit in the rubble.
The news clip hadn’t shown the old Bradbury Building, across from the transplanted theater, or what had been left of it—Deckard had assumed that even if there’d been no explosive charges planted there, the concussion from the surrounding blasts would’ve knocked the structure over; the place had been falling into plaster dust and splintering support beams when he’d been inside it. All the old intricate wrought-iron balustrades and open stairwells, the clanking antique of an elevator and its cage, the grand fabric of early twentieth-century business enterprise fallen on hard times—the building had looked like some kind of vertical mausoleum when he’d tracked the last of his quarry in there, the replicant Batty and the psychotic would-be replicant Pris. He’d gotten the shit kicked out of himself there as well, by Pris and the nonhuman Batty in turn. But as somebody else had said an even longer time ago, the race wasn’t always to the swift; they had died and he was still alive, both in this world and the other one, the real one.
Though he didn’t feel too swift at the moment; a wave of nausea rolled up in his throat, the hallucinated city street blurring and thinning to insubstantiality for a few seconds. The colloidal suspension, the deity stirred from a dry powder to a potentiated liquid, was still asserting its hold on his central nervous system. His perceptions, what his flesh and mortal eyes were gazing upon inside the hovel, were being overridden by . . . what Sebastian saw. After all, thought Deckard. It’s his world. Whatever he was now.
Deckard turned away from the movie theater and toward the building directly across the street. It looked the same as when he’d seen it last, in the real world, in the real L.A. Complete with the fat-bellied swirling columns that had been grafted onto the original structure in an ill-advised attempt to evoke some kind of pseudo-Arabic multiculturalism, and that had only resulted in the same kind of bastard kitsch the city had always been known for. The other added ornamentation was the wadded-up trash in the entranceway, the same rain-soaked pile of unidentifiable rubbish that the wet windsstacked up against every Angeleno doorway. He picked his way through the mess, greasy food wrappers tangling against his ankles, then drifting away to the empty, glistening street.
That was the other fake thing. Even more so than the sets up in the Outer Hollywood station; at least there, extras had crowded the action, simulating the restless urban population. Here, in Sebastian’s pocket universe, the streets were devoid of any human, or close-to-human, activity. As depopulated as this zone had been in the real L.A., there had still been some life stirring about, even if only dwarf scavengers climbing over his police spinner, trying to unbolt the roof-mounted air filters. If this place was Sebastian’s show, he’d made it a private one. Believers only, thought Deckard.
Or at least just communicants. The little guy had obviously never had much use for other people, or at least not for anything other than the autonomic toy friends he’d manufactured for himself. And Pris; but that’d been true love.
Deckard shoved the building’s front door with the fiat of his hand; it swung into darkness. The colored light from the movie theater marquee seeped past him, picking out small details-brass handrails still recognizable under layers of dirt and tarnish, rain puddling and spilling from one open floor to the next—in the cavernous space. He stepped inside, letting the door fall shut behind him, sealing out the street sector of the hallucinated world.
He stood in the middle of the space looking upward. What he saw produced a partial smile, one constructed of both irony and grudging admiration. Too perfect, thought Deckard. Through the building’s broken roof, past the levels of iron-grilled walkways, beams of shifting light penetrated the darkness like the radiance of magnified stars falling from the fixed spheres in which this little world was enclosed. The lights came from the blimp, the old U.N. advertising vessel with its billboard viewscreen and spiky antennae, looking as though it were some kind of sea creature that had inflated itself enough to rise up in the air.
Squinting against the slants of light, Deckard could just barely see the blimp’s shape cruising in absurd majesty above the building and the surrounding streets, the Euro-hybrid geisha face on the viewscreen smiling with a mute guardian angel’s uncommunicable wisdom. Sebastian had brought that back as well, another fixture for his pocket universe; in the real world, the real L.A., the blimp was gone, taken out by a mortar round from rep-symp fringe terrorists. Deckard himself had seen the blimp go down in flames, a latter-day Hindenburg, something even the most blasé or stoned L.A. citizens had had their attention caught by. A nonevent for Sebastian, though; he’d already been living out in the sideways zone’s wasteland, with his patched-together Pris, so he’d missed all that. This urban concoction was the L.A. that Sebastian had known before he’d left.
Rain from the building’s leaking roof sluiced down the brass handrail that Deckard grasped. As he looked up the flight of stairs, their treads rotted to creaking sponges, his other hand moved inside his coat. From force of habit, old ingrained cop ways, as well as from the memory of when he’d been here in long-ago reality. His fingers were searching for his gun, that great black metal weight, a hammer as big and effective as a cannon; they found nothing but lint and a rip in his shirt, through which his sweat-moist flesh could be felt. He drew his hand back out, empty. He would’ve felt better with even a hallucinated weapon in his grasp, but he wasn’t surprised that such things had been edited out of Sebastian’s universe.