“Ruh-really?” The cat, his favorite, the one without skin or flesh to cover its mechanical bones, slipped in through the open door and jumped up on the desk. “Luh-luh-like what?”
Isidore picked the cat up and held it against his chest. He stroked its steel, furless head and got a deep thrumming purr in response.
“Well, I’m not going to be working around here anymore. I’ve got other things to do.”
“I suh-see.” He nodded slowly. “That’s yuh-your puhruh-ruh-prerogative. After all, you weren’t ever really wuh-working for me. You were always working for her.” He watched his hand scratching behind the point where the mechanical cat’s ear would have been, if it’d had one. “I guh-guess I’ll have to reevaluate the suh-suh-situation, see what the pet hospital really nuh-needs. So I can make other arrangements.”
“You don’t have to do that.” Andersson looked at him with an almost tender regard. “The arrangements have already been made.”
“Oh.” He knew what that meant. And was confirmed in that knowledge when he watched the other man reach inside the jacket of his dark uniform. He knew what would be in the other’s hand even before he saw it. “You know, I thuh-thuh-thought this was going to happen. I was kind of wuh-waiting for it.”
“I’m kind of sorry about it, actually.” Andersson looked at the black weight of the gun in his own hand. “Not like I ever minded helping you out. But you know how it goes.”
“Sure.” Isidore felt sorry for him. “I understand.” He stood up from the desk, pushing the chair back, still cradling the cat against himself. “Wuh-would you muh-mind if I went out there?” He nodded toward the office’s door. “Where the animals are? I’d rather be out thuh-there . . . when you duh-do it.”
“Hey. No problem.”
A moment later he stood out in the pet hospital’s central corridor, looking down the rows of cages and kennels, listening to the barking and smaller noises that greeted his presence.
He’d been wondering if he’d be able, at this moment, to tell the difference between the real ones and the fakes. With a sense of relief, he found that he still drew a blank on that issue.
The mechanical cat in his arms meowed plaintively and rubbed its cold muzzle against his chin. Poor thing—it knew something was wrong, something was about to happen. “Here you go, baby.” Isidore leaned down to set the cat on the floor. “I don’t want you to get hurt.” It didn’t go away, but went on pressing its steel and plastic body against his ankles.
“I’m ready,” he announced. He didn’t look behind himself, though he could feel the infinitesimal disturbance in the corridor’s enclosed air, as Andersson raised the gun.
Then he flew. That was what it felt like, even as a blow so huge as to be painless struck him between the shoulder blades. Even as he lay between the rows of wire-fronted cages, tossed there by the bullet’s impact, he still felt suspended, caught in infinite motion. The concrete against his splayed-out hands felt soft as billowing clouds. But cold.
This must be what it’s like-he could barely hear his own thoughts. He knew he was already dead, inhabiting the last seconds of consciousness, because other sounds came to him, from far away, from right next to him.
All the cage and kennel doors sprang open, their latches triggered by the signal from the tiny device he’d implanted next to his own heart. He’d known a long time ago that this time was coming.
Any human creatures left inside the Van Nuys Pet Hospital would have to sort their own problems out. The nonhuman ones, the real and the fake, barking or whooping or emitting their shrill cries, fled toward the outer doors and windows that had also popped open. Isidore could just imagine a bright flurry of parrots wheeling above the crowded streets, the steel-legged greyhound and the terriers sprinting past the traffic-stalled vehicles. . . .
Blind, he distantly felt a few of the animals nuzzling his face, the mechanical cat climbing onto his chin and shrinking back from the ragged edges of the exit wound.
“It’s okay,” he whispered. He tried to raise his hand but couldn’t. “Don’t worry . . . about me . . .”
They started yowling before he was finished dying. And continued afterward.
“This . . . this is great.” The sense of happiness permeated Holden’s body, as though the bio-mechanical heart in his chest had accelerated to some more euphoric rhythm. His own smile came to his face as he gazed at the monitor screen, at the data he’d had Batty summon up again. The words and numbers formed themselves into a personal message for him. “You know what this means? It means I didn’t screw it up with Kowalski. I was set up; I walked into an engineered hit. There was no way i could avoid getting blown out by the replicant. The one person in the world I trusted—the guy whose job it was to look out for me, to keep my ass covered-he betrayed me.” Holden placed his palm against the screen, as though to absorb the warmth of its benedictive radiation. “I can’t tell you how good this makes me feel.”
“Mazel tov.” Batty shrugged. “Whatever—I’m happy for you. But you should remember, you’re not exactly out of the woods. As long as you were knocked out in a hospital bed, with a dope hose running into your veins, nobody was concerned about finishing the job on you. Maybe Bryant put out an order to keep you on life support, just because he has a sentimental streak. Or perhaps he would’ve liked to have pulled the plug on you, but couldn’t—or at least not yet. Not with you lying inside a hospital full of doctors and nurses who like to keep their little machines running. But when they hear that you’re up and walking, the contract on you becomes effective again. Especially since they can assume that someone like me has filled you in on all the stuff they didn’t want you to know.”
“ ‘They . . .” He pressed his hand harder against the screen, as though he could shatter the glass, reach in and pull out the information he needed. “Who are they? Who’s in on it, besides Bryant?”
“That’s a good one. Answer that, and you might have a chance of surviving. The big question is, how far up does this conspiracy go? Bryant didn’t come up with all this on his own. How many levels of the police hierarchy above him are involved? Does the conspiracy against the blade runners go further than that, like into the U.N.’s policy-making apparatus? Maybe the off-world colonies’ administrative offices are in on it-they’re the ones most likely to have fabricated the escape that brought the replicants down here to Earth. The only thing you can be sure of is that somebody with major clout doesn’t like blade runners.”
“Weird.” Holden shook his head. The little jolt of cheer he’d felt had faded now. The holes were filled with darkness, where the missing pieces of the puzzle should fit. “Why would they be doing something like this, anyway? We’re just doing our jobs-why try to kill us off?”
“Pal, it could be any one of a million reasons. Just goes to show what an innocent soul you are, that you’d even worry about why. You haven’t dealt with the people up at the top the way I have.” Batty’s voice and expression clouded with bitterness. “They’re just mean bastards. They don’t care about little people like you and me. Everything’s dollar signs with them. If they want to trim their budget, they do it by cutting it out of your hide.”
The last dregs of that happy sense, of knowing at last that what had happened to him wasn’t his fault, ebbed out of Holden’s soul. Another emotion replaced it, as in silence he studied the man standing next to him. Now it was his turn to feel pity. He could see more clearly now the lines engraved into Batty’s face, the deep creases as well as the finer net across the aged skin. Cheeks hollowed, eyes sunken in the dark crepe of their sockets; as if in the blue glow of the monitor, the man was visibly claimed by time, all the decades catching up with him. He’s right, thought Holden. He’s been doing this a long while. . . .