“Look—” With difficulty, he managed to push the child away from him. “You stay down here, and everything will be all right. I promise.” He wondered for a moment why she had formed such a sudden, dramatic attachment to him. There’s no one else, thought Deckard. The child was all alone in this universe, or in any other. Plus—it was impossible to tell—she might have sensed the fragments of his past, the memories of someone else named Rachael that the girl’s dark eyes and grave manner conjured up so painfully in him. Even if she didn’t understand yet how those things had come to be. Maybe she just felt sorry for him. “All right?” Deckard put his hands on her shoulders and leaned down to look straight into her eyes; the glimpse of them ran through his own heart like a dagger of silver and ice. “The bad things have already happened,” he told the girl. “Nothing else can go wrong,” he lied. “So don’t worry about me.”
He left her sitting at the table again, surrounded by the mutely uncomforting dolls. The Rachael child folded her arms across the thick, leather-bound book and laid her head down, concealing her face from him. Deckard stepped out to the open corridor beyond and quietly pulled the door shut behind himself.
The last time—the first time Deckard had been in this building, in fts original form back in L.A—he’d had to climb laboriously to its roof, his scrabbling progress through the crumbling, waterlogged plaster and sagging beams impeded by a hastily bandaged hand, the fingers that the Batty replicant had broken aching and useless. Fear had driven him then; he’d been trying to escape death. This time, he was walking toward it. I’ll take the stairs, he thought wryly.
A shaft of utility stairs at the back of the building—it was undoubtedly the same route that Sarah had already taken. In the damp air, as Deckard craned his neck to look upward, he caught a trace of perfume, one of the opiated floral scents that his mind and senses had learned to associate first with Rachael, then with Sarah. The invisible molecules were tinged with something more acrid but just as distinctive and evocative: cigarette smoke, something dark and expensive, suited to the taste of a Tyrell heir. He looked down and spotted, on the landing’s rough concrete, silken white paper and brown shreds of tobacco ground out cold by her shoe.
The metal steps echoed in the narrow space, loud enough to evoke a shiver in the video camera lenses that peeked out at him from their clefts in the unfinished walls. Up ahead, above him, Deckard saw a rust-mottled door left open, creaking on its hinges as the fan-driven storm winds swung it back and forth. He stopped, rain spattering in his face as he tried to catch sight of anyone waiting in the darkness. Nothing; he grasped the cold pipe rail and continued climbing.
“Sarah?” He pushed the door all the way back—the metal clanged against the side of the hatchway structure—and stepped out onto the roof. Warm rivulets trickled down his throat as he called out again. “Where are you?”
No answer came. Deckard walked farther from the door, leaving the stairs and his escape behind him. Looking up, he saw no stars but the broader points of the lights in the studio’s truss-work rigging; only a few meters away, as though—in a child’s notion of the world—he had climbed all the way to the dark heavens, the universe’s weld-stitched limit. The lights’ spectra had been shifted down to an icy blue, colder than the streets’ veins of neon; shadows fluttered across him like the wings of unseen, untouched ’birds as staggered ranks of archaic wind turbines, blades long and scimitar-curved, rotated in the damp breeze coming from the edges of the set.
He worked his way through the windmills, avoiding the scything arms, coming at last to the roof’s raised parapet. His hands, grasping the crumbled brick and thick tatters of asphalt sheeting, looked as bloodless as a corpse’s flesh.
They hardly seemed to belong to him at all; the uncanny sensation passed through him as though he were looking at someone else, someone who had slid inside his body and face. The hands, and the body that leaned its insubstantial weight into them, might have been those of the actor who bad played him in the video he had seen; the disoriented feeling increased, setting him even farther away. For a dizzying moment, Deckard wondered if he were still watching the video, the artificial world into which his own life had been transformed.
Squeezing his eyes shut, his hands gripping even tighter on the fragile stone, he tried to make himself feel real again. Or as real as possible. I’ve become my own ghost, thought Deckard. A dead thing that watches and mourns the past; he’d felt that way before, when he’d sat beside a glass-lidded coffin, leaning forward with his chin on his doubled fists, looking at the sleeping, dying woman he’d loved. Keeping his vigil through one sleepless night after another, time seeping away beneath the real stars, the rain swallowed by earth and the dead leaves beneath the trees. It might as well have been his own face he’d seen beneath the glass, in a video monitor rather than a coffin. He had died, or as good as, even before Rachael had; he’d just had the privilege of witnessing his own death, over and over, in one cold world after another.
The bleak meditation didn’t end, but became familiar enough, an old wound, that he could function once more. Deckard opened his eyes and looked over his shoulder at the elaborate rooftop set. They did a good job, he had to admit.
Urbenton and his crew of technicians, the people who had constructed the set—in the thin, fragmented light, he could see how close they had come to the original, how much the fake was indistinguishable from the genuine. The turbines spun in place, like idiot dervishes on edge, over a buckling field speckled with pigeon shit—had they scraped up the droppings from an actual L.A. building roof and shipped them here, or was there a flock of birds kept on hand in some remote aviary zone of the station? It all smelled real enough, a blending of monsoon steam and guanoid archaeology, that at least some of Deckard’s senses were fooled.
He looked back over the parapet at the imitation city that surrounded the building. All the little tricks of the video trade had been used, from foreshortened perspectives to banks of fiber optics for a vista of pinpoint lights stretching to an imaginary horizon; other whole sections were blank or covered with chroma-key backdrops, for digitized mattes to be ceegeed in during postproduction. The miniature city seemed caught between different levels of reality, at some muddled point halfway on the line from dream to something that could be touched. In some way, that made the dark nocturnal city he saw now as real as the L.A. he remembered on Earth. Realer than real, thought Deckard. A night made of the same stuff as the replicants, dreams and fears and a desperate longing to exist. He had lived in that inchoate city, had been part of it, but—he knew now-hadn’t belonged in it. It’s their world.
He nodded slowly, rain trickling across the backs of his hands. Their night as well, in which he was just a shadow, a thing that wouldn’t even be remembered when the sun came up.
“Hello, Deckard.” The voice—the one that he’d known he would hear-came from behind him. “I was waiting for you.”
From over his shoulder, he looked and saw Sarah standing a few yards from him, in the center of the roof’s area, the wind turbines spinning and stretching away into darkness. He turned and leaned back against the parapet, hands gripping its edge on either side. “I had some business to take care of first.