"Bladerunner 03 - Replicant Night" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jeter K. W)

When the other man had left, the briefcase spoke up. "Way to go." The voice was tinged with a familiar sarcasm. "Door's locked, isn't it?"
Holden gave the knob a futile twist, but didn't bother to give an answer. Hefting the briefcase onto the table, he pulled back one of the chairs and lowered himself into it. From the corner of his eye, he saw letters imprinted on the headrest; his vision had adjusted well enough that he could also see them on the empty chair. They spelled out TYRELL
CORP.

A memory stirred uneasily in the darker space inside his head. From a long time ago, back when he'd had a real fleshand-blood heart and lungs ticking and sighing under his breastbone. The room, even with its nonexistent ceiling and switched-off video-cams peering in, seemed familiar to him, in a way that made the machine-pumped blood crawl in his veins. He drew a blank on it, but knew that it wasn't because he was unable to remember. More likely, he didn't want to.
The memory sat obstinately at the back of his skull, refusing to show itself in even the room's partial light.
Two chairs that said TYRELL CORP Ofl them . . . and a slowly revolving ceiling fan. There was smoke, Holden remembered. Cigarette smoke, drifting blue, hanging like some semitransparent snakeskin in the air; from the cigarette that'd been in his own hand. He'd still been smoking then; he'd given it up some time after he'd gotten the new heart and lungs. The doctors had told him that his system had reached its limit-if anything happened to this set, there'd be no chance of putting another one inside him. And there had been something sitting on the table in front of him
not a briefcase, but an actual Voigt-Kampff machine, regulation LAPD issue, just like the big black guns that blade runners carried around with them. The Voigt-Kampff had been opened and activated, its batwing bellows compressing and expanding, breathing in microscopic traces of sweat and fear; the tracking lens on its antennalike metal stalk ready to focus on the dilating pupil of anyone who'd been dropped down in the chair opposite him .
Where am I? The incomplete, unwilled memory had claimed him so hard that for a moment he had lost track of his location, whether Earth or the Outer Hollywood orbital studios. The bio-mech heart stumbled in sudden panic. What place, what time . . . Holden gripped the edges of the table with fear-rigid hands.
"All right-" The claustrophobic set's door had swung open again, admitting a voice louder than the ones inside Holden's skull. The man who'd led him into the room had another, even taller figure in tow. "The director asked me to get your blocking down before we tried running tape."
Holden looked up and saw the face behind the other man's, and recognized it. Another piece from the memory that had wrapped around him.
"So what is it you want me to do?" From the chinless, brutal face of a Leon Kowalski replicant-another from the same batch as the dead one that Holden had glimpsed lying on the L.A. street set-small eyes peered with apprehensive suspicion. All the Leon Kowalskis were just bright enough to be
mistrustful of humans . . . but not bright enough to do anything about it.
So then, how'd you wind up getting iced by one of them? Holden's unspoken voice chided him. The rest of the memory regarding the room with two Tyrell Corporation chairs was starting to come clear, whether he wanted it to or not.
"You know your lines?" The other man glanced sharply at the burly replicant.
"Yeah ... kind of."
"Sit over here." The man pointed to the empty chair at the table. "How about you?" He glanced over toward Holden.
The apprehension transmuted to certainty. "Of course-"It took a couple of seconds for Holden to find his voice, to squeeze it past the constriction tightening around his artificial lungs. I know this room. And what had happened in it. "Yeah ... I know what to say."
"Dynamite. You guys are a couple of real professionals." The man pulled something dark and heavy out of his jacket and handed it to the Kowalski replicant. "Here, use this. It's the same one you'll have when we're taping."
The replicant examined the gun with small eyes narrowed even further, as though some personal anti-Kowalski trap might be hidden inside it. He finally wrapped both fists around its handle and levered it underneath the table.
Oh no, thought Holden as he watched the preparations. I know what comes next .
"All right. Let's try it." The other man stood back against the set's doorway, arms folded across his chest. A smile tugged at one corner of his mouth, as if the scene before him had already been found pleasing. "Take it from where you ask him about his mother."
"M-my mother?" The Kowalski replicant looked over his shoulder at the man.
"Don't worry about it. It's not for real." The man's voice turned kindly. "It's just a video, okay? And it's not even that right now. Just for practice, that's all. A little rehearsal." He glanced over at Holden. "Come on, buddy; we don't have all day. Just say your line."
The fluids that his bio-mechanical heart moved around in
Holden's body had congealed-even the breath in his lungs felt thick and heavy as stone. Underneath that crushing weight, part of him struggled to push his legs beneath the chair, to stand up and walk out of the re-created room pressing tight around his shoulders .
But he couldn't. You'll give it away, the remaining rational part of his mind argued. Walk out of here, and it'll prove that you're not one of the hired actors. The man standing in front of the door would have set security down on Holden's ass in no time.
Besides, he told himself, there's nothing to worry about. All he had to do was bluff this officious bastard a little while longer, then find some way to slip out of here and continue looking for Deckard.
The rational part had its reasons for him to go on sitting at the table, across from the replicant whose image was so firmly bolted into his memory. They amounted to nothing compared to the irrational ones.
Fear kept him nailed to the seat. Fear, and the locks of time. Time repeating itself, a loop tightening around him, against which it was impossible to prevail. He knew what was coming-he remembered everything now-and knew that there was nothing he could do to keep it from happening all over again.
"Say your line." The partial smile ebbed on the face of the man by the door. "Go on."
Holden closed his eyes for a moment, to make sure that he got it absolutely right. "Tell me He opened his eyes and looked straight into the resentful gaze of the Kowalski replicant. "Tell me all the good things that come into your mind, when you think about . . . your mother .
"My mother?" The replicant was right in character. His voice sounded just the way the other Kowalski's had, so long ago.
"That's right." Holden couldn't keep himself from nodding, even smiling, the same superior fraction of expression that he'd had the first time through this loop. All he lacked was the cigarette and the blue smoke curling above his head. "Your mother."
The Kowalski replicant's face flushed with anger, small eyes widening.
That's perfect, thought Holden. Unresisting.
"I'll tell you about my mother-"
That was all he heard; the rest wasn't spoken, but shouted in flame that burst through the table, leapt and struck him in the chest, where his old, fleshiy heart had once been. The new heart took the bullet's impact without pain, without even shock. His breath was blood in his mouth; the artificial lungs had collapsed into two clenched fists.
The chair spun around with him in it, head thrust hard against the words TYRELL CORP. He accepted another shot between the shoulder blades, the bullet tumbling through the chair back; fragments of surgically inert metal and polyethylene spattered before him in a red mist. The bullet's momentum thrust both him and the chair through the flimsy wall panel- Just as it had before. Well, they got that right, thought
Holden. The chair had stopped, caught by debris and black cables on the set's flooring, but he hadn't. He found himself lying in a spreading pooi of blood, his fingertips heated by the red flow from the broken machinery in his chest. The blank idiot eyes of the video-cams stared down at him.
He was right-a subsystem of the cardiopulmonary gear was still functional, at least for another few seconds; enough to pump a last trace of oxygen to his brain and rapidly dwindling consciousness. The briefcase had been right when it had warned him. Big trouble, thought Holden. His last thoughts ticked away, in synch with the final small battery winding down. To what the briefcase had said: You'll probably die.
There was no arguing with that, not now.
What the briefcase had gotten wrong, though-Holden shook his head, the back of his skull mired in the sticky wetness. It wasn't big trouble; at least not for him. The end of trouble-as the doctors had told him, there wouldn't be any chance of plugging a new heart and lungs into him, so he didn't have to worry about being brought back, to do this all over again.
He could even smile about it, really smile, though he couldn't be sure that anything was happening with his face-for a few time-dilated microseconds after the second bullet had laid him out, he'd been able to catch a tiny reflection of himself in one of the curved lenses above him. But his sight had gone unfocussed and dark, and his flesh was too numb and cold to get any kinetic feedback. Not that he could move, or even want to; that was all past him now.
But not for the briefcase. Wiseass-a last thought flickered through the darkening chambers of Holden's brain.
That was the joke, the final one. The delivery he'd come here to make .
It would have to find its own way now.


They heard the shot, followed by another one. Deckard turned away from the video director as the two hard-edged sounds, spaced only a couple of seconds apart, rolled through the orbital station's canned atmosphere. They came from close by-he could tell just from the way the shock waves sifted dust from the pipes and walkways above the room's open ceiling.