Replicant Night Read Free Page B

casings clinked in the bag slung over the scavenger's shoulder. He looked up, the scarred bridge of his nose wrinkling to signal that he smelled cop, while the black-nailed fingertips poking through the ends of his gloves continued to groom the mock battlefield. Another scent lingered in the station's canned and recycled air, that of the live ammo that had been expended in the taping of some low-budget historical epic.
    "You can't hassle me, man." The scavenger's eyes narrowed behind the goggles. "I got a license."
    "Yeah, well, I don't." The stuff he'd been able to do before, back when he'd been with the department, had all been left behind him, on Earth and in that other life. "So remain sweatless."
    He was able to get approximate directions from the scavenger. And information: there was only one video shoot booked into the Outer Hollywood station, the first one after a long dry spell.
    "It's that damn Cinecittà Nuovo , down in Jakarta." The scavenger's gloved thumb looked like mice had been chewing on it in his sleep, as he gestured toward some point beyond the station's curved walls. "Those people've got all that EEC money behind 'em. And they suck up all the video productions now." Tunnels bigger around than the station ran underneath the Indonesian Entrepreneurial Republic, the spaces lit brighter than anything sun and corroding mirrors could provide. The scavenger looked wistfully at the meager gleanings in his sack. "Man, what I wouldn't give to be able to get in there. There must be all kinds of shit lying around."
    Holden wasn't interested in the sad intricacies of either the video or the scavenging business. "So where's the shoot going on?"
    The ragged glove pointed down the length of the station's arched central corridor. "You can't miss it. Go past the Vatican and that Scottish castle with the dry moat; that's where they've got their funky L.A. all set up. There's all kinds of people hanging around. Humans and replicants ...it's that kind of a shoot. Real blood-and-guts stuff." An eyebrow raised inside the goggles. "You might like it. Some kind of cop show."
    "I doubt it." Holden started walking again, briefcase in hand. "Seen it already."
    He saw the buildings up ahead, or at least part of them: the bottom sections of what were supposed to be L.A.'s canyoned towers, false-fronted and propped into position by the cobbled-together framework behind them. A small flutter ran through the bio-mech heart in his chest; some nameless emotion or twinge of adrenallike hormone. Not at seeing again the city he had left behind on Earth, or at the view of those streets in partial disassembly. It looks better this way , thought Holden. Not really fake at all -that was the marvel of it. As if the people, those shadowy corporations and architects, who'd built the Outer Hollywood station and then constructed the L.A. set inside it, had caught some realer-thanreal aspect of the city. Or at least the city that had existed inside Holden's mind, with his barely being aware of it until now. I always thought the other one was fake -he realized that now. Th see it this way, two-dimensional buildings with nothing behind their surfaces' retrofitted ventilation ducts and wiring conduits, with the people in the streets finally exposed as actors and anonymous bit players; with the monsoon rains shut off from above, the rusting pipes leaking only a few scattered drops; even the sky revealed as metal with nothing but vacuum beyond-it was an oddly comforting manifestation of his most paranoid dreamings. If only it were true , thought Holden.
    The vision passed, along with its soul-deep significance, as though he were waking from a dream. Like rolling over in bed, it seemed to him, and opening your eyes and seeing, instead of the woman you had gone there with, some deracinated corpse staring up at the ceiling with empty eye sockets or worse, nothing at all, just the empty shape, the indentation in the mattress and the other pillow, of someone