She turned to run, to escape from the space’s narrowing confines, to get anywhere that blood, hallucinated or real, was not seeping tidelike toward her feet. Another hand caught hers; the child had reached up and caught hold, clinging to Sarah’s wrist.
The child wasn’t real, either; she knew that. But she didn’t shake the illusory grasp from herself. She swiftly knelt down and gathered the child under the arms, pulling her upright. With her own arm pressing the small form tightly against her side, Sarah hurried for the doorway at the opposite end of the corridor, away from the man standing in the middle of the expanding pool of blood.
A glance over her shoulder; Sarah glimpsed the red hand closing on nothing, on the empty space where she had been standing. She had recognized the face, though she had seen it before only when she had been an infant; she had brought it back from that past almost beyond memory, and from the old photographs in the Tyrell Corporation’s archives— The face was that of her father. The features darkened with rage, as red and trembling as the image’s clenched fist. Pushing the child in front of herself, Sarah ran into the darkness, toward any dark but the one in which she had seen her own face reflected.
Anything’s possible.” Deckard shrugged, feeling uncomfortable. The other man—or whatever Sebastian was now—had figured it out, at least partway, but there was no need to confirm his suspicions. If Sebastian’s beloved Pris had been replicant or human, what did it matter? “I’ve been fooled by things. And people. I thought they were one way, and they turned out to be something else.
It happens.”
“I suppose so.” Sebastian made a few more tinkering adjustments to the clown’s gears. “You’re probably right,” he said, nodding slowly. “You’ve got more experience along those lines than I do. ’Cause of your being a cop, a blade runner, and everything. That’s your job, isn’t it? To go around and find things that are pretending to be one way-like human—and they’re really just replicants. And then you-what was the word?—you eliminate ’em or something.”
“Retire.” Deckard glanced over his shoulder at the teddy bear and toy soldier, who were still huddling sullenly in the corner. “I don’t do that anymore.”
“But still . . . it must’ve done things to your head. Changed it. Permanently. So that’s how you see things. Nothing is what it seems to be. Everything’s lying.” Sebastian’s voice turned bitter. “Everyone.”
“Maybe so. But that’s my problem. Doesn’t have to be yours.”
“Sure.” Bitterness shifted to self-laceration. “I could just go on being a fool. An idiot. That’s what everybody thinks of me anyway. Even the rep-symps, when they put me in this place. They just figured I could do a job for them.
Same as when I was working for Dr. Tyrell. You just do what you’re told, and maybe they’ll let you alone for a little while. With your silly little toys and slit.”
“Take it easy,” said Deckard. He’d seen processes like this before. The small man, or the image or perceptual incarnation or whatever he’d become, was undergoing a complete collapse. Which didn’t fit into his own plans. “It’s not that bad—”
“Yeah, that’s easy for you to say. You don’t care.” Sebastian gave him a venomous look. “You’re trained not to, aren’t you? Like all cops. That’s just the world you live in. Not that this one’s any different.” He pulled out the screwdriver and tucked it back into his coveralls. His eyes had become rimmed with red, as though blood were leaking into the perpetual tears. Letting the black cloth drape over the clown mannequin’s workings again, Sebastian ifipped some hidden switch. The device came to pseudo-life again, the head tilting back and the pudgy arms rising.
The clown’s high-pitched mechanical laugh grated on Deckard’s nerves. “Shut that thing off.”
“Why? Is it bothering you, Mr. Decker?” A vindictive gleam showed in Sebastian’s glare. “But you’ve got ways of taking care of things that you don’t like. Why don’t you just blow it away, like you used to? Oops, sorry; I forgot. You don’t have your gun with you—I didn’t give you one when you showed up here. Well, it’s too late now.” Sebastian’s voice had risen in pitch, competing with the noise from the mannequin shaking back and forth with its own laughter. “Maybe you can toss it out the window—that should do it, I imagine. Or you can tear it apart with your bare hands. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
From the corner of his eye, Deckard saw other motion in the room. The clown’s laughter, growing louder and more abrasive, seemed to have set off the rest of Sebastian’s collection of toys. Things haltingly stirred to life, a ballerina with empty eye sockets elevating itself en pointe, a sawn-off oem-media dell’arte Punchinello grinning with malice and shaking a bell-cuffed fist at unseen enemies. The ornate howdah on the back of a miniature elephant collided with the chessboard’s corner, scattering the white and black pieces across the floor. In an ornate Victorian birdcage, a mechanical nightingale trilled, its wire-and-silk feathers moulting onto layers of age-yellowed antimacassars and cracked circuit boards.
The touch of claustrophobia that Deckard had fought off before now reasserted itself, stronger and tighter; he could feel the cold sweat of panic encasing his skin. Too many things, both dead and animated, pressing around him; with his forearm, he shoved away a tottering, slack-limbed Oz scarecrow that had thrust its idiot smile into his face. The rag-garbed creature fell onto its back, waving its arms around and shedding plastic straw. Deckard edged away from it and the other toys, his cop instincts driving him toward anyplace where he could see what was coming toward him.
“All right—” He held up his hands, palms outward, as though trying to ward off the chaos welling up in the room. “Okay, just settle down.” His words were directed at Sebastian. The little bastard’s doing all this. They were Sebastian’s toys, his creations. “Just shut ’em off.”
“Why? Don’t you want to have any fun?” A malevolent delight suffused Sebastian’s face. He no longer appeared childlike, a decrepit infant; his withered skin was that of an old man, a sexless, ageless being. “You’re my guest. You should enjoy yourself.”
For a second, Deckard had a flash of another wrinkled visage, another cruel, time-scorched entity. One that had gazed upon him from behind square-rimmed glasses, an owlish regard that had weighed and judged more keenly than any Voigt-Kampff machine.
That had been in another high-ceilinged room, even emptier of any human presence .
The image of Eldon Tyrell’s face vanished as Deckard forcibly pushed it out of his head. “That’s it.” The miniature elephant bumped against his shin, and he angrily kicked it away. “You can stop all this crap now. I’ve had enough.”
“Oh, I don’t think so. Not yet. We’re just starting.”
“Just! Starting!” Behind Deckard, the toy soldier had scrambled to its feet and marched out of the corner, followed by the uniformed teddy bear. The soldier’s elongated nose quivered with a feverish excitement. “Fun!”
A sudden gust of wind blew out the nearest row of tall windows, scattering crystals of glass through the room; Deckard raised his arm, protecting his eyes from the razor-edged shards, blue-tinted in the luminous night that flooded past the tattered curtains. The candelabras and other wavering lights were extinguished, collapsing all the room’s shadows into darkness.
The floor buckled, gaps splitting between the scarred wooden planks, carpets sliding into rumpled corrugations beneath the sideboards and high-backed chairs. Paintings framed in tarnished gilt fell from the walls, canvases ripped through as they were impaled upon the stiff-fingered hands of mannequins undergoing spasticlike seizures. A pegboard the length of an entire wall section, covered with soldering irons and needle-nose pliers, folded and tore loose from its mounting bolts. It toppled across a banquet table like a two-dimensional bat feasting on the silver bowls filled with dusty wax fruit.