Replicant Night (19 page)

"And then it was yours." A softly uttered reminder from Wycliffe. "Your company. And your ... personal matters."

Head turned, Sarah regarded the man, seeking any clue as to just exactly and how much he and his partner were aware of.
Maybe I was wrong
, she mused. Maybe they weren't quite as stupid as they looked. She'd have to be careful-her own reminder, this time.

"But all that came later." Wycliffe spoke, letting his steady gaze meet hers. "We need to find out what happened a long time ago. On the
Salander 3
."

"That was really the turning point," added Zwingli. "If you study the history of the Tyrell Corporation. What can be pieced together from the files and the other records. After the failure of the
Salander 3
mission, and the deaths of An-son and Ruth Tyrell-your parents' deaths-then things were never the same. That was when the company's Los Angeles headquarters became such a fortress. A fortress that your uncle retreated into. And the Tyrell Corporation grew both in power and secrecy."

"You're telling me things I already know." Sarah turned from the Flow's shore to face the two men. "I've gone over the files as well."

"Ah, but it's not just what's in the files-or what Dr. Tyrell left there." Wycliffe looked smug, pleased with the workings of his brain. "Some of the connections you need to make... those happened outside the company. In the rest of the world. The
Salander 3
expedition, that you were born during-that was the last exploratory voyage outside the solar system. After the
Salander 3
came back, without even having reached its destination, the U.N. launched its off-world colonization program. Within a couple of years, the U.N. was sending the first groups of human settlers out to the stars.
And
the Tyrell Corporation had the exclusive franchise on supplying replicants to the colonization program. That's when the money started to happen, in a big way." The man's eyes glittered behind the square glasses. "It's what enabled Dr. Tyrell to establish a monopoly on all aspects of replicant technology. With the money he was getting from the U.N., he was able to either buy up any patents that he didn't already own or drive the other companies out of business. For all intents and purposes, from that point on, Tyrell was the replicant business. The company had no competition, and the U.N. went along with whatever prices Dr. Tyrell decided to set. The Tyrell Corporation was the sole supplier for the one essential element to the colonization program."

"Bad move on the U.N's part." Sarah gave a shrug. "Just goes to show that those people don't know how businesses are run. You never let somebody get a hand on your throat that way."

"Perhaps." The smug look didn't vanish from Wycliffe's face. "Unless the U.N. didn't mind paying that price; they didn't mind giving the Tyrell Corporation such an expensive monopoly. That might all have been part of the deal that had been set up between the U.N. and Dr. Tyrell. The company gets the franchise on supplying replicants to the colonists and the U.N. gets the colonization program. What Dr. Tyrell gave the U.N. as his part of the bargain made the program possible, so the U.N. could go ahead with it." The smugness shifted into a self-satisfied smile. "And that's where the
Salander 3
comes in."

"Really?" Sarah raised an eyebrow. "That's your theory? The
Salander 3
expedition-my father and my mother- found something out that the Tyrell Corporation sold to the U.N-some information, perhaps, about what was out there in the stars. And that was worth enough to the U.N. for them to hand over the replicant monopoly. Interesting conjecture."

"Perhaps it wasn't information, Miss Tyrell. Perhaps it was something even more valuable to the U.N. and its program. Perhaps it was the
suppression
of information."

Silence, marred only by the passage of wind over Scapa Flow's waters, as she considered the other's words.
But that would mean
...

"Exactly," said Wycliffe, as though he had discerned the currents of her thinking. "It would mean that Dr. Tyrell did whatever was necessary to suppress the information that the
Salander 3
expedition had discovered. That the expedition had been aborted and brought back to Earth on his orders. And that those who possessed the information-your parents-were... shall we say?... suppressed as well."

"Murdered." A homicidal spark flared in Sarah's heart at hearing more of the man's dancing, evasive words. "That's what you mean."

"Of course it is." Both of the men gazed owlishly back at her. "You'll have to excuse our efforts at being diplomatic. But this is Wycliffe spread his hands apart. "A delicate subject. A not-very-pleasant possibility."

"You should've thought of it yourself," muttered Zwingli. "The fact you didn't-that says a lot."

"Precisely." Lanky, black-sleeved arms folded themselves across Wycliffe's chest. "This smacks of avoidance on your part. Which seems odd, given your rather obvious antipathy toward your uncle."

"You know ... you might be right." Sarah slowly nodded.
It just goes to show
, she thought.
You can never hate some people enough
. There was always more.

She looked away from the two die-hard loyalists and back toward the dark waters mirroring the steel-clouded sky. The answers were there, beneath the small waves that lapped across the stones toward her feet.

Her uncle hadn't been able to suppress everything. The past remained, captured and bottled and buried away from the light. Waiting for her.

"All right," Sarah said aloud. "I'll go down there. And see what I find."

"Thank you, Miss Tyrell." The voice came from behind her; she didn't know which of them it was. "That's all we're asking of you."

As if that weren't enough. She tugged the fur-collared coat closer around herself, futilely trying to ward off the cold winds.

"I've seen you around here before," said the man inside the booth. The ramshackle stall, tucked into one of the darkest corners of the emigrant colony's convoluted marketplace, surrounded him like a scuttling sea creature's protective carapace. "Coming and going, on your little mundane, unimportant errands. The things that you thought were so important. But now you've seen the light."

There would have been a time for Deckard, back when he'd been a cop in L.A., when he would've reached across the space between this person and himself and grabbed the guy's throat and squeezed until veins had stood out like twisting blue snakes. Right now, he let it go.

"Kind of in a hurry," said Deckard. Behind him, he could feel the crush and push of the dense paths and de facto alleyways, the tight presence of other human bodies that always tripped a memory flash of that distant city. "Maybe you could just sell me what I need-what I came here for-and we could skip the conversation."

"You think it's as easy as that? Shows what you know." The man behind the counter had fierce eyes set in deep circles of black, as though his contemplation of the divine was slowly blinding him to any other world. "You come to your senses and decide to go looking for that which you should've sought all along-it's not going to be a 'kind of in a hurry' process. Narrow is the gate, and long and hard the road beyond it. You don't buy grace, you
earn
it."

The temptation of his old police ways tingled again in Deckard's hands. He glanced for a moment back over his shoulder; there were too many people here, too many watching eyes, for him to throttle the man into submission. He couldn't risk alerting the colony's authorities about what he was trying to do; the place was crawling with snitches and narks. He'd left the briefcase sitting on the kitchen-area table back at the hovel, there being no place to hide it that anyone else couldn't have found in five minutes' worth of tearing the flimsy structure to bits. The nagging voice, coming from the briefcase, had told him to fetch the necessary items as fast as possible; even the disembodied Batty felt the time pressure clamping down on them.

Just my luck
, thought Deckard. This particular booth in the marketplace appeared to be the only one trafficking in dehydrated deities at the moment. Every other time he'd shoved his shoulder-first way through the crowd, there had seemed to be dozens of the technically illegal but officially tolerated outlets. Another glance around, to the limit of what could be seen under the banks of dead or jittering fluorescents, showed gaps in the merchant stalls, the tiny businesses shut down, eliminated, and not yet replaced by the next wave of hustling or evangelism. The emigrant colony's police force, or the larger and more efficient squads of the cable monopoly's rent-a-cops, must have swept through in the last couple of days-either to restore public decency or, more likely, to keep their captive audience hooked to the video wire rather than fuguing off into religious visionary trips.

Maybe this low-level entrepreneur had upped his
mordida
, his payoff bribe, before the hammer had come down. Or else he'd brewed up the contents of a packet from his stock and had been lights-out under the stall's counter, walking and talking with some Old Testament prophet or bo tree-sitting with a wide-faced Buddha, and had conveniently missed all the action.

"Look-" The cheap fiberboard flexed beneath Deckard's hands as he leaned toward the other man's face. "I really don't have a lot of time. Not in this world or the next." He kept his voice low, using a quick nod to indicate the packets fastened to the stall's interior. They were all the same small, flat rectangular shape as the one he'd found inside the talking briefcase; they varied in color, from monochrome to shimmering, eye-aching full-spectrum assaults. "But if you're selling, I'm buying. Got it?"

Before the merchant could reply-he'd backed up a step from Deckard on the other side of the counter, sensing at least the possibility of violence-another customer came up. A wraithlike figure, all starvation eyes and scab-picked shivering flesh, arose trembling at Deckard's elbow. "Do you..." A mouth studded with a few cracked and yellow teeth, beneath unattended running nostrils, quivered open. "Do you have any more of the ... the New Orthodox West Coast Fundamentalists?" The emaciated figure struggled to bring his scattered thoughts to words. "Specifically ... the Reformed Huffington Rite? The Santa Barbara branch?"

"Get out of here. You mooch." The stallkeeper glared at the creature. "This is a cash-only business. Nothing on credit. Not that I'd ever have given
you
any."

"I got money! Look!" A grubby fist unfolded, revealing wadded paper with pictures of famous dead people. "Not even scrip-real money!" The supplicant voice rose in pitch, a sympathetic vibration shivering the ragged man's body. "I can pay!"

Grumbling subaudibly, the stallkeeper turned, pawed through the thin packets stapled behind him, pulled one off, and slapped it on the counter. Distaste curled the corners of his mouth as he sorted out the grease-impregnated bills and octagonal coins. "You're a dollar short," announced the stallkeeper, as though that pleased him more than a simple sale would have. He snatched the packet away as the ragged man's shaking fingers reached for it.

"For Christ's sake-" Deckard reached into his own pocket and dug out a bill from his dwindling stash. He flicked it into the stallkeeper's hollow chest. "Give the guy what he wants, and let him get out of here." Worth it, just to get things moving.

A second later, the wraith had fled back into the churning crowd, the packet clutched to the visible bones beneath his throat. "All right," said the stallkeeper, turning his dark-ringed eyes back toward Deckard. All pretense of religious feeling had been stripped away, leaving the pure mercantile entity beneath. "What do you want? Buy it now and get what you can out of it, before you wind up like that asshole."

"It's not what I want." Deckard pulled out the rest of his money, enough to evoke a swift glance of interest from the other man. "It's what I need."

"Let me guess." In another life, another world, the person inside the stall could have been a tailor; the tape measure was at the center of his empty pupils. "Pentecostal? Got a wide selection here." He gestured at the packets surrounding him. "You'll have to supply your own snakes, or at least have 'em inside your brain, if you want to get into that Southern Degenerate thing." A shake of the stallkeeper's head. "Naw- you don't look the type to have even that much fun. Nothing Jewish line, either; you'd know how to deal with guilt, if that was the case. No d say Heavy Calvinist. You look like you're into predestination. Badly so." The man gave an ugly, knowing smile. "Like Weber said: 'Forced to follow his path alone to meet a destiny which had been decreed for him from eternity.'"

Deckard knew the rest of the quote. "'No one could help him.'" He nodded. "
From The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
."

"Good for you. I should give an educated man a discount, but . . . we've really got the spirit of capitalism here." The man fingered a couple of packets at the side of the stall. "How about Dutch Reformed? That should be a severe-enough God for you. Give you a good price-I'm trying to move this stock before it goes stale."

"No, thanks." Deckard shook his head. "I don't need anything like that."
Got enough of that kind of shit already
, he thought to himself,
without acquiring any more
. "No packets. I just need the supplies. Couple quarts colloidal suspension fluid, calibrated beaker, inert glass rod. That's all."

The stallkeeper gave him a hard look, eyes narrowed. "You got your deity already? The one you're going to use?" He didn't wait for an answer. "If you're going with some back-alley, home brew pile of dust, you're asking for trouble, man."

"Think so, huh?" Deckard let a partial smile show as he gazed around at the stall's wares. "This stuff you're peddling doesn't exactly look like it's FDA approved."

"Hey. There's standards in this business." The stallkeeper drew back, offended. "I'm here, and my competition's not, because I sell quality. I've got customers right up at the top, man, the very top. I go in the
front door
of the cable offices, I've got merchandise sticking out of my jacket pockets, and the guards don't even blink."