Chapter 2 The Quality Of Mercy

The shuttle slid like a knife between the stars. Under the guidance of Jack's smooth, capable hands we wove through the wide, empty spaces of the Saint Dane asteroid belt, pushing but not quite bumping up against the outer limits of the ship's capacity for speed. I stood leaning in the door to the cockpit, breathing deeply, slowly. Exhausted by all of our close calls, I was simply satisfied to be alive.

Zorah had slumped onto the floor and was now leaning against a wall with her long legs crossed, enjoying a cigarette. The a thin wreath of vapor surrounded her face, the perfect halo for a fallen angel. She'd kicked off her shoes, and Leon tripped over them as he made his way into the room. She smirked at him and puffed smoke up into his bewildered face.

"How ya doing, tiger?" She asked jauntily.

Leon's face grew very red and he stammered something less than coherant. I raised my eyebrows very slightly at Pris, who was leaning over Jack's shoulder trying to see how piloting was done, and she giggled silently with me. Even Mary's lips were moved into the shadow of a smile. There was no ridicule in it, though. We were all too goddamned happy to snipe. And why not! We were free- for the first time in our too short lives, free! The realization sang through me like a bullet through the air. Yes, I was no longer held by the chains in which I had been born!

No resting on my laurels. Not yet. Not ever. Never time enough to rest! "Good work," I remarked from the door. "Better not get complacent, though. If they're any good, they'll be right on our tail."

"They're no good without us," Jack said confidantly, his face one huge grin.

"Correction," Zorah drawled, stubbing out her cigarette onto her arm with total nonchalance, "They're not good without people like us."

"People?" Pris gave an airy, derisive laugh. "What a joke!"

"Joke?" I shot her a hard look. "Not us. You know what Tyrell Corporation's slogan is, don't you?" All but Mary shook their heads, she simply stared at me with an expression of utter pathos, still looking like the bloody mask of tragedy.

"'More human than human,'" I whispered. Four pairs of eyes glowed fiery at the words. I wouldn't have been surprised if mine too were burning. Mary's eyelids closed in an involuntary flinch.

"Think about what it means," I recommended. "It's true, those humans are no good without us- that's the joke! We're simply better at anything that they could do. Which means that they'll be sending more of our own kind after us."

"Do you really think they would trust the Nexus 6 to hunt down its own?" Mary asked sharply.

I regarded her coldly. "They'd better- nothing else can."

She stepped closer to me, looked up into my face. What she saw there seemed to frighten or sadden her, or perhaps fill her with disgust, because she averted her eyes. "You know, one time," she murmured, "Some very wise people had a word for the sin of raising themselves above their creators. They called it hubris."

For a second I was taken aback. Then I lashed back at her with my laughter. Taking her by the shoulders, I hissed: "You're so very wise, Mary- so literate. If you'd obeyed your creators and toed the line, you wouldn't have read all those bloody books of yours in the first place. I could say a lot of things. But what comes to mind right now is that if that's the way you feel about our rising up, you're welcome to walk all the way home!"

Her chin lifted, she gave me look for look, but she was shaking. "I'm not afraid of you, Roy," she said it low and coldly. "But you have your devils, and you have to realize-"

The philosophical discussion was halted by Jack's fist, which imposed itself between us. The side of my jaw stung. I whirled on him with bared teeth, combat instincts screaming inside me like sirens. Leon and Zorah couldn't hold me back, it took Pris' delicate arms around my neck to bring me back to myself. I shook them all off and walked determinedly to the pilot's place, not sparing a glance for Jack.

"There," I said, pointing at the screen, where a tiny green triangle was gaining slowly but surely on an even smaller red one. "That's what we get for wasting our time with bickering. So instead of dealing with more foolish displays like that in the future-" my tone was withering, and Jack growled deep in his throat, chafing against Mary's hand on his arm- "I suggest we agree from now on to function as a unit."

"With you as the Captain, yeah, Roy?" Jack spat out.

I met his eyes icily. "Let us take a vote. Either I as the only qualified combat pilot sit down in that chair right now, or we take our chances and hope that the Nexus 6 really can't be trusted to raise a hand against his brothers."

Jack was shamed into silence. A show of hands wasn't even necessary. I sat myself down, flexed my fingers, and took ahold of the flight controls. As my hand clenched around the joystick, however, I felt it violently and painfully spasm. At the time, I hardly gave it a thought. All my mind focused on manuvering the ship through space.

"Should we try to contact them?" Pris asked, rather tensely. I growled under my breath to indicate that silence was required and kept my eyes on the screen, my mind on the problem. Firing back was out of the question, obviously- the commercial jet ship wasn't even armed. There were several courses of action to be considered nevertheless. Since we couldn't out-gun them, we could try to outrun them, although that didn't seem like a very wise or feasible course of action considering the all around superiority of their rig. The smartest thing to do would probably have been to let them board and then try to kill them and take their ship. Yet I balked at the idea of assaulting my own kind. My anger with Jack inspired me, within just moments, to do something reckless.

Flexing my fingers over the control board, I sought out a button and pushed it. Several lights along the cabin flickered out. I punched another button, and another. Near complete darkness fell.

"Roy!" Mary shrieked. "What are you doing?"

I gritted my teeth in a grin. "I'm turning off almost everything so that we show up in their computers as little as possible. We're gonna drift for a minute."

"Are you crazy, Roy?" Zorah's voice rose out of her natural cool alto. "They'll see us drop of their monitors and they'll know what happened!"

My intellect, of course, said she was right, but something else was telling me to go ahead with the scheme- instinct, or intuition. I flicked another switch, completing the black. Only the controls glowed now. "Grab yourselfs tanks," I said. "I'm gonna kill the oxygen generators for a few minutes. And hold on to something, because we won't have gravity either."

I gave them a few seconds to get ready, grabbed a mask, then killed the engines. They gave up the ghost with a long, low, dispirited whine. Mechanical death. It made me shudder. I gripped the back of the chair and floated horizontally, waiting, one hand clasping the breath mask over my mouth. Nice thing about these masks, I reflected- they really discouraged conversation. If you can't talk, you can't criticize. I was glad to be free of distractions while I watched the monitor.

The battleship cruised along majestically. It wasn't a huge model, but it was big enough- a nice, manueverable type. I'd piloted one of those once, and I can tell you it had it head and shoulders over this flying junkyard. Floating in the dark, waiting, I watched it glide along, searching blindly with little concern. Past stars, past asteroids, past. . . us.

I let out my breath and waited for a few more moments before turning on the power again; first the oxygen, to allow us to catch our breath, and then the lights. The first thing I saw was Pris' face as she floated upside-down, legs hooked through a metal bar. It made me laugh.

"What happened?" She asked.

I smiled crookedly. "The angel of death has passed us over."

"Oh," I heard Mary murmur ironically, "Who's the literate one now?"

Stars passed slowly, scattered across the blackness like a broken string of gems. And Pris and I were in the middle of making love.

Her nails bit into the small of my back. I had the aftertaste of her sweat in my mouth. Lost in the firestorm of emotion and sensation, we struggled against each other, breathing hard and in unity. Until passion played itself out, until our bodies shudderingly spent themselves in satisfaction.

I kissed her hand as I held her after, and she bit me on the shoulder. "Unfair," I whispered, and we both laughed at that and at nothing.

We'd been traveling for two whole days. While practicality blanched at such ineffeciency, my spirit insisted that it was hardly a waste of time. Never before had we been reft of obligations, orders, danger. And now we were free, desperately free. I remember the first morning being shocked to wake in Pris' arms. If a man is born in chains, does he realize they are not a part of himself until they are gone? Would he pine for them, even, if they disappeared? I felt like that man when I woke up, and for the end of that day I felt like I had commited a blasphemy by simply doing nothing for hours.

By the second day I'd had enough of guilt, however, and enough of nothing. I employed my time from the minute I woke in doing all the things I often wished I could do- with reading at the top of the list.

I am a possession. I could not possess anything myself, technically speaking. Yet I did actually own one thing before we took our flight. It was a little book that was given to me by a very kind stranger.

We were marching through a city, the whole lot of us, for some showy official reason for other. Anyways Jack and Leon and I found time to loiter by a park, artificial people beside fake trees. As we stood there, making stupid jokes and shoving each other, a group of people congregated about fifty feet off. We didn't notice them at first, assuming that the focus of their attention was the shrill-voiced preacher standing up on the base of some bird-dung bespeckled statue. (Pigeons came to the colonies- oodles of them. Like the rats. These were tough species, and they would be around, I thought, long after people had vanished.) But then we realized that he was pointing straight at us, and as a result everyone was staring.

He didn't like us. That much was very obvious. He had some religious objection to our existence- humans playing God, etc, etc. As far as I'm concerned, humanity better play God for all its worth- its the only game people as a whole can play. Creating, procreating- they're absolutely useless unless they are inventing and making new things. The preacher, however, didn't seem to be of my school of thought. I wanted to tell him not to yell at us about it. It wasn't exactly my fault I existed.

I remember Leon and Jack nudging each other as if debating whether they should give him some hell. I preempted them and walked right on over.

The people huddled back as I advanced, slowly, calmly. Nothing in my step was threatening. It was the fact of me that was a menace. The preacher turned ashy and yowled at me to "keep back, son of Satan." I smiled vapidly at him and waited politely for him to run down on breath, which took a very long time.

"The book you've been quoting... is that it in your hand?" I asked him.

He nodded righteously, holding it up before him like a shield. I took this as an offer.

"Thanks," I said brightly, snatching it from his astonished fingers. "Nice poetry," I remarked, and departed.

The Bible, flawed ravings of decrepit old minds that it was, became my refuge. At first I only skimmed it, to see if it actually said anywhere that replicants were bad. It didn't. It was written before we were even conceived, in the days when humans still enslaved each other to build their civilizations. The Bible seemed all in favor of slavery. Any passage which might have been construed as damning to the Nexus 6 would have to be taken amusingly out of context. Odd, to try and apply ancient yammerings to issues that were all too modern. Knowing how to properly sacrifice a sheep wouldn't do any of us much good if all the sheep were electric.

But after my first reading, I was drawn in by the words and the stories. They were ugly and chaotic tales of hapless men plagued by an unfair God, in which the man whose conduct struck me as most admirable was invariably cast into hell while some craven asskisser was sainted. These stories seemed real to me precisely because they were insane. I related to Lucifer, to Cain, to the prodigal son, and to Isaac nearly sacrificed on the mountaintop. Yet my Bible meant more to me than a series of absurdly amusing tales. It was my only posession, my only secret- the only thing that wasn't in my files, wasn't issued to me by the army. Did I keep it under my pillow because I feared God? Well, yes- but only my gods, the men who made me and controlled me.

Thinking these thoughts, I untangled my limbs from Pris'- she was sleeping again- and made my way naked over to a computer. Leon and Zorah were still asleep, separately. No matter how much our dimwitted friend chased her, she was way out of his league, that girl, and she knew it. I suspected Jack and Mary were cuddling in the cockpit. It was early and I would be undisturbed as I searched for information. I needed to find the man called Satan.

One of the passengers had left behind a quite good laptop computer in his luggage. It had become my second posession. Actually we had acquired a lot by raiding the passengers' bags, including clothing to call our own. I keyed up the monitor now and got online, and started searching for my genesis.

I knew that the Nexus 6 was manufactured chiefly by the Tyrell Corporation, and that we were the product of the genius of a Doctor Eldon Tyrell. About Tyrell I knew very little, not even whether he was still alive. A quick web search told me swiftly that he was, very much so, though on the greying side. I stared into the photo of his face for a long time, as if looking for... what? Family resembalance? Something of him that I could find in myself. At a glance there was nothing. I frowned and set about searching again, seeking clues. This could be important.

After a time it became obvious to be that doctor Tyrell, of course, was not directly responsible for all aspects of Nexus 6 design. He'd come up with most of the original ideas, but the development of these concepts and the physical design of individuals was obviously the work of other departments. The one thing he did do, however, aside from sitting on top of his moneyheap and feathering his nest, was the brain. Sitting back, satisfied, I flexed my fingers and stared at the screen. That meant I thought like him. Huh. My mouth quirked. Important indeed.

Idleness was getting boring by the morning of the third day. I spent all afternoon learning to play chess using somebody's laptop computer. The first time I played, the program beat me. The second I beat it, and the third, and the fourth. It was quickly tiresome. So I read halfway through someone's virtual library. They had Nietsche and Dante and so I was kept happy for a few more brief hours. Then I had to seek entertainment elsewhere again. The others, with the exception of Pris, were not very good company. Leon was sullen and depressed, like a child sent to his room. Zorah was sarcastic and spent all her time needling Jack, whose fiery temper provided her instant gratification. Mary was not speaking to me. She was still scorning me with all the lofty moral judgment of her pronouncements on the first night of our escape.

By eleven o' four PM, standard galatic time, on the third night, I was as drunk as I'd ever been.

It had started with everyone else sleeping and just me and the shuttle's refrigerator full of vile hard liquors staring each other down. Dubiously I selected a bottle and a shot glass, and went into the cockpit, sitting down at the controls. The amber liquid caught the colored lights of the monitors invitingly. I sighed, poured out a glass, and drained it down. The stuff tasted vile at first, but it burned along my throat and gave my stomach a pleasant turn. Before long I was was guzzling from the bottle.

Sitting at the controls with the blue and green monitor lights glaring at me and the stars blurring before my face, I gripped the guider tightly and pushed mercilessly on the acceleration. The engine was making a sick, pained snarling sound and the readouts were all turning to red. Mary rushed in.

"Roy!" She gasped, and flung herself on me, trying with her frail fingers to pry my hands off the controls. "What in God's name do you think you're doing?"

"Faster," I muttered, my voice slurred. "I want it to go faster."

She released me with a despairing cry. "Oh, Roy! Don't tell me you're drunk!"

"Blessedly, yes," I snapped, feeling a scowl crease my forehead. The room seemed to be warping and I had an inane moment of imagining this was due to some trick of relativity, us nearing the speed of light. It only lasted for a moment, and then I knew with growing rage that it was my out of control weakness. I flung myself on the accelerator. The ship around me convulsed and grumbled like it was about to come apart. Mary gasped and tried again to pull me away. I hung on with all my strength, gritting my teeth as I spoke.

"We- aren't- going- fast- enough!" I snarled. "We don't have time to waste."

"Roy, you'll kill us all!" She yelled at me.

Must admit: I'm an asshole when I'm tanked, and an idiot too. Know how much? -So much that at the time, when she said it, I didn't care.

"Keep your judgments!" I hissed at her. "Did you learn anything back there at the station, Mary? The weak, who hesitate, die!"

"So do the foolish and reckless," she countered, her eyes flashing. She stamped her foot and looked around desperately. "Sweet Jesus... Jack? Somebody? Help!" Her voice echoed round the cabin, rebounding and attacking me.

"Holy shit, what's going on?" Jack yelled, rushing onto the scene. Leon and Zorah followed, last of all a fragile looking Pris, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. Within seconds Jack and Leon had grabbed me and flung me off the chair, and Pris was at the controls, bringing the ship back into equilibrium; while I, roaring with my anger, tried to stumble to my feet. A detached part of me remarked that some time on this trip I would have to try to get my dignity back before all was swallowed down by blackness.

Waking hung-over was horrible. I decided to keep it a once in a lifetime experience and tried not to think that once might be all I'd get the chance for. No big loss anyway, I thought bitterly. I deciding that drinking was for fools and spent the morning being subjected to Pris' attempts at creating a hang-over cure.

"Seriously," she insisted, swooshing a raw egg around in a glass with a lot of other things that don't bear mentioning. "I fixed this for the admiral loads of times. He always swore it works. Here." She handed me the glass with a tiny smirk.

I sneered at her, took the glass and eyed it dubiously. It looked highly suspect, so I sniffed it too. Pris clicked her tongue in exasperation.

"Come on, Roy, don't be sissy. Just knock it back and you'll feel better, promise."

I sighed and swallowed, grimacing. If the stuff worked for anyone, it was just the power of suggestion, I decided.

Pris looked on expectantly. "Better?" She queried.

I laughed at her. "No." Slipping an arm around her waist, I kissed her until she slid down onto the bed, taking me with her.

"Guys? Guys? Oh, seriously, don't you ever stop it?" Zorah, glancing down our aisle, quickly averted her gaze with a derisive laugh. Pris elbowed me in the stomach, none too gently, and wriggled free of my embraces. I snuck in one last kiss before she hit me in the mouth with a pillow.

"Get your mind out of the gutter, Zorah!" I called laughingly to her. "What is it you want?"

Zorah made a great show of turning around slowly to give us a chance to straighten up. Jack and Leon, playing cards a few rows down, laughed at her display. But I caught Mary's discontented mutter- "no sense of human decency."

My temper flared, yet I laughed aloud. "I should hope not, Mary," I tossed back at her. "Honestly, would you listen to yourself sometimes?" Shaking my head, I attempted to calm myself and turn back to the issue at hand. "Now, what is it, Zorah?"

"Well, Roy, we're getting close to-" she started.

I couldn't pay attention. I rounded on Mary again. "Seriously, don't you realize how well your self contempt works for them? Don't you know how effectively it keeps you down?"

"Roy-" Zorah interjected.

I made myself turn back to her, disdaining my own lack of self control. "I'm sorry, Zorah. I let myself be too easily distracted. Go right ahead."

She pursed her lips as if to suppress her grin, but it wasn't a smile of contempt, rather one of happiness. A happiness too great to keep down. "Roy," she beamed, "We're nearing Earth. You can see it through the viewports." Trying to preserve her cool, disinterested facade, she nodded towards the window. "Go on."

I wasn't concerned with appearing disinterested. I had already nearly clambered across Pris to look. And there it was, shining- a cloudy blue green marble, just as the vids showed it, only smudged now with gray and sulfurous yellow. An unhealthy, blotted earth. The place of our origin.

"Home," I murmured, as Leon, Jack, Zorah, Pris and Mary crowded behind me to look. "Just think. Before we were activated and awakened to consciousness, we were manufactured here, and shipped out into the stars. This is our birthplace. The homeland of the Nexus 6."

"And of the human," Mary murmured.

I turned around to look at her, and for once found nothing to argue with in her pronouncement.

That night, as we drifted in space, her earlier words came back to haunt me, mock me, keep away sleep. 'No sense of human decency. . .'

I tossed and turned on the bed, tormented as if I were lying in a field of nettles. Pris' peaceful form stirred beside me, and she reached out and touched my face, as if to offer comfort. For her sake, I made myself lie still, while sleep continued to run from me.

Human. What was so wonderful about the humans, after all? Why was this the ideal we had to aspire to? From what I knew of human history, which was more than a little and certainly far more than I ought to have been aware of, they were far from perfect. They seemed unable to avoid destroying their surroundings and killing their brothers. Whenever a rare genius arose among them, he or she would be ostracized and disregarded until long after their lifetime was over. Why worship humanity, then?

If there was a standard, I decided, it was not one that only we replicants should aspire to, but also humans themselves. Hard to know what it was, then. But somewhere there had to be a greater goodness, a higher virtue, a certain. . . decency. . . and beyond it, even, a glory.

Pris stirred again beside me and snuggled unconsciously against me, as if trying to slip into my arms. I put them around her, reminded bitter-sweetly of the first time between us, which brought back again, uncomfortably, Mary's words.

It had been rape, unquestionably. I don't pardon myself of this. I can only say on my behalf that, at the time, I literally didn't know that it was wrong. I was different being then, incapable of understanding why I should care about what someone else wanted instead of tending to my own desires. Moreover, "rape" as a crime had not even been defined for me. I don't think I never knew the word. When later I looked in the regulations that the Nexus soldiers were supposed to follow, I found nothing to discourage sexual assault. There was a clause against fighting- or, more specifically, against doing damage to one another that might render us less functional, less fit for combat. But nothing was there for the sake of so-called morality, justice, or decency- the rule book was based on epediency. It made me wonder if human morality was all a lie. Yet I had felt remorse for what I did to Pris- not full blown guilt, but a certain uncomfortableness, that led me to appologize to her later. She'd shrugged and said it happened to her all the time, at the hands of far less attractive men. So began a romance. We were simpler creatures then.

Thinking back to the rule book now, I realized why they hadn't put anything in it just to keep us civilized. It wasn't merely that they couldn't be bothered. It was deliberate. They meant to keep us acting like animals for as long as possible. Thinking of this, rage rose up within me. They tried to deny us what they thought made them superior. They had robbed us of humaness.

But, in the end, was humaness worth having? Or was there something else, beyond that, they hovered sometimes even beyong the homo sapien's reach, something that moved on pure white wings, and graced so few of us?