The last traces of the other world, the hovel where his real body was sitting without consciousness, blindly watched over by the talking briefcase, had faded away. This world had locked in tight; he could feel the wet steps yielding beneath, the rail’s cold metal chill against his palm. The smell of rust and crumbling plaster, the stink of decades-old pigeon shit, mired in his breathing. A mist-smeared shaft of light from the blimp above the building crossed over his face, then cut a diagonal through the empty lobby he’d left behind.
“Sebastian!” He called out, voice loud in the building’s silence, as he mounted to the floor where the genetic engineer had kept his suite of rooms. Deckard looked down the open walkway to the tall double doors, one of them pushed slightly ajar. No answering voice came. From somewhere past the doors, a wavering light fell, as though from a lit candelabra. “Anybody there?”
He knew there had to be. As empty as the building felt, with its vacant spaces and nailed-down shadows, there was still another human presence inside it. Or something slightly different from human, something embedded in the walls and pockmarked floor tiles. You’re walking around in his head, Deckard told himself. Or as good as. Remember that.
At the double doors, halfway down the walkway, the silence was broken by a drip of rain into the puddle that had formed in front of the sill. The water rippled like a softly broken mirror as Deckard stepped into its center and pushed one of the doors all the way open. Flickering candlelight brushed against his face as he gazed across the high-ceilinged room within.
Toys; he remembered them from that time when he had tracked Pris and the replicant Batty to this spot. There had been a pocket universe for Sebastian even then, a little world that he had created for himself, and this place was it. His refuge, a child’s refuge, from the hurtful, bustling world of grown-ups, everybody bigger than him, everybody who wasn’t dying from a galloping progeria, the accelerated decrepitude that had turned him into a wrinkled, fading nonadult. L.A. wasn’t a city for children; no wonder Sebastian had been dying in it. If he hadn’t built this hiding place for himself, his small corpse would have been trampled in the streets.
Past the candles guttering in their branched silver settings, Deckard saw torn, gauzy curtains drifting in an unfelt breeze, their ragged ends trailing across the nearest mannequins and stuffed animals. Whatever contents of Sebastian’s head hadn’t spilled out to reenvision the L.A. street and the decaying building were exposed here, like some soft, babyish army. Glass eyes stared at nothing or were reflected in gilt mirrors with ornate frames, the inert photo-receptors switched off or robbed of batteries. When Pris, on the run with the escaped replicants she had thought she was one of, had disguised herself as one of Sebastian’s mechanical creations, a leotarded bridal doll with a veil draped over her strawlike hair, she had finally achieved the nonhuman apotheosis her cracked brain had been seeking all along. To be a thing, a killing thing or a loved one; it didn’t matter.
One of the mannequins stirred, fat clown of ambiguous gender; it croaked out a woman’s laugh as the rubbery wattled neck shook, white-painted face tilting back. Stubby fingers pawed the air like pale anemones brought up from ocean shallows.
Deckard halted in the center of the room, forcing his breath to a measured pace, pushing back an emergent claustrophobia. The place would’ve seemed uncomfortably close, crammed with too much junk-disassembled tube radios and thrift shop antiques and patzer chess pieces, all the hobby collectibles of a perpetually dying, too-clever child—even if there hadn’t been unpleasant memories filling up the unoccupied areas. He’d come close to getting killed here, twice in rapid succession, first by crazy Pris, then by the even loonier replicant Batty; the human original he’d met up with later, the one whose cerebral contents were stored in the talking briefcase, had been a piece of cake by comparison.
His fingers ached, not just for the want of a soothing gun—not that the real weapon had been much use here, the real here—but from old wounds; the replicant Batty had broken fingers as easily as snapping twigs. The fingers had healed badly, aching when provoked by shifts in weather or the pressure of memory.
The laughing clown’s barking noise suddenly shrilled up another octave, the rubber hands jerking even more spasmodically above the fright-wigged head.
Deckard stepped away from the device, watching as a shudder of ill-meshed gearing ran through its frame. The clown suddenly froze, the garish face paralyzed in a rictus of manic hilarity; the room’s silence congealed once more as a wisp of black, burntrubber smoke trailed out of the parted mouth.
Another face appeared, popping up from behind the stricken clown. “Oh . . . hi.”
The black cloth covering the device’s workings was draped over Sebastian’s shoulders; his moist-eyed gaze, still set in the wrinkled flesh of his aging disease, blinked at Deckard. “I didn’t hear you come in. I was busy working on this old thing, trying to get it running again.” He laid a wrinkled, protective hand on the clown’s shoulder. “It’s a real keeper; used to be in an old amusement park and stuff.”
“No, it didn’t.” Deckard shook his head. “It’s not even real. Nothing here is.”
“Well . . . yes and no.” Grease marked Sebastian’s hands; he rubbed them against his trousers. “Real in the what’s-it, uh, Platonic sense.” With an extended forefinger, he poked at one of the clown’s eyes, getting its line of vision to match the other. “This is the idea of the physical manifestation, of what came from the amusement park. Ideas are real things, too.” Sebastian’s voice went on the defensive. “Just as much as all that stuff . . . you know . . . out there.” He nodded toward the room’s high, arched window, but it was clear that he meant someplace farther away than the visible street. “Where you just came from.”
“That’s why it’s called the real world,” said Deckard. “And this isn’t.” He gestured toward the other man. “In the real world, you didn’t have legs. Not anymore.”
“Yeah.” Sebastian nodded slowly. “I had to get rid of them out there.” His expression brightened. “But here—’cause this is my world—I figured I should have ’em again. And I was right! They come in real handy.”
“Should’ve given yourself a second pair of arms. Be even more convenient.”
“Oh, they told me I could do that if I wanted—”
“Who’s ‘they’?” Deckard peered closer at the short-statured image.
A matter-of-fact response came from Sebastian. “The repsymps. When they did this for me. You know, what they call ‘dehydrated’? Only it’s not dehydrated at all; that’s just a slang term. Same way with being a deity; I don’t feel like one.” He smiled shyly. “I just feel like myself. The fact that they were able to do me over, to take what was left of me and turn it into a polymerized sensorial override encapsulate—that’s the technical term for the process—it doesn’t change anything. Real or not.”
Deckard gazed around the overstuffed room, then back to his host. “There’s one big difference here,” he said quietly. “You don’t have to die here. The way you were on the outside.”
“Well, I could if I wanted to. Anything’s possible.” Sebastian placed a hand against the front of his coveralls. “I could make this whole body go away. I mean, it could just crumple up and blow out the window like dust. But He looked across the silent dolls and toys. “There’s enough of me left in all this—it’s all me, actually—so I guess I’d still be here. In spirit, kinda.”