With the little girl. I had a talk with her.”
“How sweet.” Sarah stepped forward into the partial light filtering down from above. The skin of her face and throat looked cold, bloodless. “I suppose that was a good thing for you to do. Whether she’s real or not. Actually . . . I don’t care anymore.” The gun in her hand glinted as though a piece of the dark had frozen. “It’s not important, is it?”
“Maybe not.” His heart had ticked faster for a moment at seeing a weapon in someone else’s hand, knowing that he didn’t have one. “It all depends. On what you want.”
“Ah.” She nodded and smiled. “That’s true. I used to want things. Different things.” With cruel playfulness, Sarah raised the gun to eye level, arm straight, and looked down the barrel at him. “And now . . . just one thing.
Guess what it is.”
“I’ve got a pretty good idea.” Inside him, his pulse had slowed back down as a resigned calm moved through his blood. Whatever was going to happen, he had prepared himself for it. “I wouldn’t have come here if I didn’t know.”
The face of the woman he loved studied him over the gun’s black metal. “You’re not really human, are you, Deckard?” Rachael’s face, Sarah wearing it like a mask, though it had been hers to begin with. “If you ever were, you’ve managed to get over it. Like I have. So it’s not just a cop thing, having ice water going in and out of your heart. It’s just something that happens to people like us.”
He nodded in agreement. “The Eye of Compassion .
“What was that?”
“Nothing,” answered Deckard. “Something . . . somebody told me about. We’re not the ones who decide who’s human and who’s not.” He looked over to the faked skyline surrounding the building, then back to her. “There’s nothing we can do about it.”
“Yes, there is. There always is.” No trace of irony or sarcasm sounded in the woman’s voice. “You shouldn’t give up hope like that.” Her hand squeezed the gun, tight and trembling. “You can always kill. That works. Especially if you do it to the things you love. Then . . . then you have a chance.”
“A chance of what? Of being human?”
“No Sarah gave a shake of her head. “Of not caring anymore. So when you die-when you take care of yourself finally—it’s not so hard.”
The voice of madness, speaking the same words inside his head—Deckard listened to her and knew that it would be easy to agree. Or to go even further, deeper into one’s own madness; the temptation always existed in him to accept only what he saw, what part of him wanted to see and believe. That it really was Rachael standing in front of him, alive again, unchanged. That the other woman with the same face, the one named Sarah, was as irreal as she had thought the child waiting downstairs inside the building was. A memory, a bad dream, a hallucination. If that were the case, he wouldn’t have any problem with her pointing a gun at him and pulling the trigger. That was a small price to pay for seeing Rachael again, if only for the moment between the firing of the bullet and its entry into his deluded heart.
He had closed his eyes, though he could still see her-remembering was enough for that. Easier as well, to mentally edit out the infinitesimal differences—the coldness at the dark centers of her eyes, a hard curl at one corner of her mouth—that made her Sarah instead of Rachael. It didn’t help much; when Deckard opened his eyes again, the sight of the woman sent a sharp-pointed blow through him, more painful than if she had actually squeezed the trigger of the gun.
“Is that what you’re going to do?” He’d watched as the momentary tremor left her upraised hand. “Kill yourself, too?”
“Why not?” Sarah’s eyes almost seemed to be looking for sympathy from him.
“Why should you be the only one to get lucky?”
Deckard continued to watch as she strode forward, all the way to the building’s edge. She turned and leaned back against the parapet a carefully judged distance away from him, just far enough that there was no chance of his being able to grab the gun before she fired.
“You know Sarah mused aloud. “The illusion kind of breaks down here.” She glanced over her shoulder, toward the street below. “It’s not really very high up at all, is it?” Her gaze turned to him. “Not like the real one, back in Los Angeles. I’ve seen that one; I’ve been there.” Head cocked to one side, she smiled coyly at him. “When I was first finding out all about you, Deckard; I went and looked at the places you’d been, where things happened to you.” She nodded toward the drop on the parapet’s other side. “You must’ve been pretty scared, back then; if you’d fallen from the real one, they would’ve had to have picked you up from the pavement with a sponge. Whereas here Sarah gave an unimpressed shrug. “Hardly enough to kill someone. You might actually even survive.”
“Maybe.” Deckard looked over the edge behind him. She was right; the illusion of the city’s reality was dispelled from this angle. The machinery and interlaced cables of the set were detectable, like the secret workings of the world revealed by a paranoid vision come true. “Is that the deal you made with Urbenton? He always wants the best footage he can get. So a shot of me falling . . . I imagine that would be just about perfect. He could re-edit the video he did about me, put in a new ending, one where I die. Maybe that would suit both him and the people he’s working for.”
“Oh, it would. You’re exactly right on that one.” Sarah nodded, as though admiring his take on the situation. “That’s pretty much the U.N.’s little agenda. The first version of the video—the one you saw—that was only shown in the Martian emigrant colony.” She pointed toward him with the gun. “They’d love to do another version for broadcast on Earth that would really prove just how dangerous escaped replicants are. In case there might be anyone starting to feel sorry for them. Urbenton could always fake your getting killed, do it with special effects, all the different tricks they have for that sort of thing—but there’s nothing quite as convincing as reality, is there? No matter how much you have to fake it. Plus, this way, there’s no living blade runner named Rick Deckard turning up later to embarrass everyone. The little details . . . like your not being killed by the fall but from a bullet Sarah gave another shrug. “Urbenton can fix that up in postproduction. Or not. That’s his business, not mine.” She studied the gun in her own hand for a moment, then looked at Deckard again. “I’ll have kept my part of the bargain.”
“You’re a person of your word. In your own way.”
“I try to be.” Sarah spoke with no more irony than before. “I’ve only lied when I had to. When there was something I had to have. And what did it get me?” She shook her head. “Nothing. I learned my lesson.” Her voice turned bitter. “I should’ve just stayed what I was. Not tried to be something else.
Like your precious Rachael. It’s just no good—the dead get all the breaks in this world.”
The artificial rain had lessened a bit. Deckard looked up to where the clouds and stars should have been, letting the drops wash down his face and throat.
“But do you know?” The words were soft, almost a whisper. “Do you know who you are?”
“Come on.” Her response was sour, irritated. “I’m not in the mood for the usual mind games, Deckard. I’m tired of playing even my own. So it’s not likely I’m going to fall for yours. If that’s what you’re going to try, then I’ll just stop wasting time and kill you now. There’s a limit to how sentimental I get.”
He said nothing. Instead, he reached inside his jacket and took out the thin, flat rectangle of the photograph, the one that had been given to him by the dead man back on Mars. Deckard held it by one corner and gazed at the long-past scene it revealed. Then he held the photo out to Sarah.