Replicant Night (32 page)

Around them, in the silent room and the world outside the hovel's thinly fabricated walls, time had started up again; Deckard could feel his heart once more moving through its paces. Something had happened, he knew; a door had opened to some other time, and this child had stepped through.
It's her
, thought Deckard.
She's not lying. Rachael...

He could see it in the child's face. In the darkness of her hair, bound behind her; in the open, unashamed eyes; in the calm self-possession that radiated through every posture and motion of the small frame. He had loved, kissed and held in his embrace, slept with an adult Rachael, if a replicant that would live only four years total could be called an adult; she had been created that way, her childhood a false memory stolen from the human woman Sarah Tyrell and implanted inside her head. He had never seen Rachael as a child, except for a moment, a dehydrated slice of time; in the photos that she had brought to his apartment, that she had shown to him in a futile attempt to prove that she was human. Those had been photos of Sarah, he knew, or else total fabrications, bad-faith evidence concocted in Eldon Tyrell's workshops, as phony as the ones that the replicant Kowalski had been obsessed with. There was no need for Deckard to have seen those old photographs, the ones that the adult Rachael's trembling hand had thrust toward him, to recognize the child now sitting a few feet away. He could have closed his eyes, or kept the room in absolute darkness, not even seen the child's eyes and face, and he would have known that Rachael-not the woman he'd loved, as a woman, but some aspect of her-was there with him.

From his own memory, Deckard pulled up another question to ask the child. Something that he'd been told, reminded of, in the Van Nuys Pet Hospital, that sanctuary for escaped replicants where Isidore busied himself converting them into creatures that could pass for fully human. There had been another photo there, an old news clipping on the wall of Isidore's office that he had looked at and wondered about. Because the woman in that ancient photo had looked so much like Rachael.

"Tell me something." He leaned forward, bringing his gaze level and just inches away from the little girl's eyes. "Was your mother's name Ruth?"

The girl's face lit up. "Yes! It was!" She did a quick, excited bounce in the chair. "That's what the nanny told me her name was. It was Ruth."

He angled his head to one side. "What nanny?"

"Well ... not like a proper nanny. Like in the storybooks and the videos." The child named Rachael gave an embarrassed shrug. "That wasn't real; not like me and you. It was just the computer, and the machines and stuff, that took care of me. 'Cause there weren't any real people . . . at least until she came along." The child gestured toward the door-and Sarah, in the hovel's other room. "There were just ghosts and things that looked like people-they were all dead, though. So the nanny had to tell me all about stuff." She looked closer at him. "Do you understand?"

"Sure." Deckard nodded. He had an idea of what she was talking about. "This place, with the nanny and the ghosts- did it have a name? Was it called the
Salander 3?
"

"That's it!" The little girl looked excited and pleased, as though finding herself on another human being's wavelength. She suddenly looked puzzled, forehead creasing. "How do you know that? You weren't there."

"Oh ... I know all sorts of things." More flashes from the time he'd spent with Isidore, and even before that, rummaging through what was left of the LAPD's ancient files on the Tyrell Corporation. There had been all sorts of fragmentary data, bits and pieces transferred one way or another into the personal memory bank he carried around inside his head.
The problem
isn't in knowing things, mused Deckard.
It's understanding them
.

Like how did this little girl come to be here? She didn't look to be more than ten years old, if that-the mix of a somber adult quality, a wary regard of the things happening around her, and those kid reactions, when he'd guessed her mother's name, made it hard to precisely fix her age. Deckard suspected that if he asked her that simple question, the reply would be that she didn't know. How could she? Something had gone wrong with the flow of time itself for the girl to exist at all. If she really was the daughter of Ruth Tyrell- he tried to remember the father's name, having to concentrate on the memory of the old newspaper clipping, before coming up with the name Anson, the brother of Eldon Tyrell-if that was true, and right now he felt sure it was, then it meant that the girl had somehow been born after her parents had died on the
Salander 3
's aborted mission to the Proxima system.

And what did all the rest of it mean? Deckard tried to sort through the pieces as he studied the girl's face. He could see the other Rachael, the one she would grow up to be, already present there, as though an embryo, or more accurately, a flower that had only begun to show the color of its petals. No sexual feeling was triggered in him by the girl, though everything about her-the color of her eyes, the lift of chin and shape of cheekbone, even the barely perceptible fragrance of her dark hair-reminded him of the adult Rachael who had slept in his arms. A sadness-tinged wonder, rather, at the girl's appearance; she could have been the child that Rachael and he would have had together, if replicants could bear children. One more thing of which Eldon Tyrell had deprived them. But that was what the girl looked like; a convoluted genetic inheritance, yet breeding true, from the smiling beauty of Ruth caught in the old news clipping photo... and how much farther back? Perhaps the woman that Anson Tyrell had married, had tried to take with him to the stars, had been part of a long line of heartbreakers, not so much beautiful-though Rachael had been that, and Sarah Tyrell was, even now-as some other quality, almost invisible but still real, that laid a fingertip on men's hearts, stilling the pulse like a soft, effective bullet.

She'll also be that way
, thought Deckard as he looked at the child sitting in front of him, waiting for him to speak again.
Not for me
. For him, there would only be Rachael, the one he'd loved and had taken from him.
For someone else
...

"What's going to happen now?" With the slightest tilt of her head, the Rachael child indicated the bedroom's doorway. A shadow passed through the light from the other part of the hovel. "She doesn't seem to like me very much." A note of worry sounded in the girl's voice. "And I don't have anywhere else to go. I don't know my way around here, like I did back home."

"Well... it'll be all right." Deckard squeezed the girl's hand. "Nothing bad will happen to you. I promise."

"What a performance." The air temperature in the hovel seemed to drop several degrees as a bitterness-laden voice spoke from the doorway. Deckard looked up and saw Sarah standing there, leaning against the plastic door frame, arms folded across her breasts. "I really have to hand it to you." She slowly shook her head, her glare daggering straight into his eyes. "Who would have thought you were such a consummate performer? I should've learned by now not to put anything past you."

"Oh, oh." The calendar, sensing trouble to come, whispered from behind its image of snow and trees. "I don't think-"

"Be quiet." Deckard hadn't taken his own gaze away from Sarah. "What're you talking about?"

"Your little show here." With a sharp flick of one hand, she gestured toward him and the girl. "I could almost believe that you really do see her. The same as I can."

He didn't feel like arguing the point with her any further. "You went off-planet-didn't you? You must have." That had to be the case, though Deckard had no idea yet of how it could have been accomplished. But the
Salander 3
, the interstellar transport upon which Ruth and Anson Tyrell had headed for the Prox system, wasn't here on Mars. If it existed anywhere, it would have to be back on Earth, sandbagged somewhere to keep the notoriously toxic effects of the old-style propulsion units from leaking out. "Where did you go? Who took you?"

"You sound like a cop," said Sarah disgustedly. "Always ready for the interrogation, aren't you? Maybe you'd like to take me down to the station and slap me around a while. That'd probably seem like old times, wouldn't it? Oops, sorry-" She held one hand up. "I forgot. With blade runners, it's shoot first and don't even bother asking questions later. Right?"

"Knock it off." The needle of her words had gotten under his skin, as intended. "Look. I went away, I came back, and you're not here. I go away again-" That was what he figured his time in Sebastian's pocket universe amounted to. "I come back, you're here. Great; whatever. But things have changed. There's a kid sitting right here-" He pointed to the Rachael child. "I see her, you see her ... she's real. I don't want to hear any crap about hallucinations. I just want to know how you got to Earth, how you got into the
Salander 3
, wherever the hell it is now, and why you brought this girl back with you." His voice had hardened with his growing anger. "How about that for right?"

"Don't try to bully me, Deckard." With one hand, Sarah pushed herself away from the door frame. She stood looking at him with her hands planted on her hips. "I don't even want to
talk
to you, let alone listen to you. You're just making it easier for me to go through with what I've already decided to do. Not that I was going to find it hard to do it."

A great weariness settled on Deckard's shoulders, his own fatigue meeting all the sense of lost hope and futility that Sarah Tyrell's mere presence evoked in him.
A bad marriage
, he thought, just as if the aliases of Mr. and Mrs. Niemand had been the names of real people. There had been a time, when he had first taken Sarah from Earth, when he had believed he could accomplish something by welding his fate to hers. Even if it had been no more than moving her so far away from any sources of power that she could wreak no more harm to humans or replicants.
But you can't fight crazy people
-he told himself that once more, something he had known from the beginning.
They're always crazier than you are sane
. When he looked into Sarah's eyes, past the memory image of the Rachael he'd loved, he saw the black hole of madness that could consume all reason and desire and life itself, a place that could give nothing back to the living, imploding as it were with the dense gravity of its own obsessions. He should have known-he had known-that it was hopeless to fight against something like that.

"All right," he said, pulling his bent spine upright. "Whatever it is you've set your mind on, go ahead. I've got other business to take care of." There was still the briefcase sitting on the hovel's table, the one that spoke with the voice of Roy Batty and that had Isidore's list of disguised replicants encoded somewhere inside. Whatever else had happened in Sebastian's pocket universe, he'd at least been convinced of that much. Both Batty and the rep-symps who'd put the dehydrated deity packet inside the briefcase had been right: he would believe Sebastian when he would believe no one else. Not because of the little genetic engineer's transmogrification, his new enhanced status as a small-scale god, but simply because Sebastian was incapable of lying. A nature as simple as his didn't change, from this world to any other. Deckard looked up at the woman in the doorway. "I've got things to do."

Sarah laughed. "Like what?"

"You don't need to know." Somehow, he had to find a way to carry the briefcase to the replicant insurgents, out in the stars. Belief in the briefcase's contents and the acceptance of his mission were locked together for him now; he had no choice.

The mission would have been hard enough to pull off even if the U.N. were still sending new emigrants to its far colonies... but possible. The shutdown of the emigration program, the absolute bottleneck here on Mars, was compounded for him.
They're looking for me
, thought Deckard glumly. The people who'd already killed Dave Holden, the first courier attached to the briefcase, they might be right outside the hovel, right now, watching and waiting, the only mystery being why they didn't just move in and ice him immediately. Maybe they were showboats, the breed of cops who liked to kill in public, where everybody could see; that was the kind of display that could get someone promoted to the blade runner unit. He supposed that some grunt climbing to the ranks of the elite over his ventilated corpse would be an ironic justice.
But one I want to avoid
, Deckard reminded himself.

"What about me?" The Rachael child spoke up, as though she had been able to read his milling thoughts. "You said you promised..."

"That's right, sweetheart. I promised." And now this complication. Whatever he had to pull off to ferry the briefcase and Isidore's data to the insurgents, it would have to be done with the little girl in tow.
And I don't even know where she came from or how she got here
. Still-"I'm not leaving you behind."

"True," said Sarah from the room's doorway. "That's because you're not going anywhere, Deckard. That's what I came back here to tell you."

He looked back around at her, but another voice broke in before he could speak.

"Mr. Niemand-be careful," said the wall calendar. "She's got a gun. A new one."

The calendar was telling the truth. The evidence was in Sarah's hand, pulled from her coat pocket. The black metal hung suspended a short distance from Deckard's face; the muzzle's hole looked as deep and dark and fatal as the centers of the woman's eyes.

He allowed one eyebrow to rise. "That's what it's come to?" Deckard was really only surprised that it had taken this long.

"Oh... it's always been this way." Sarah's gun hand displayed no wavering. "I just didn't know it until recently."

"Well, it's always good to know what you want." Right now, he wanted to keep her talking while he figured out what to do. She knew how to use the gun; he was aware that she could pull the trigger without flinching. No chance of making a sudden grab for the weapon; Sarah stood a carefully judged distance from him, just far enough away that a quick lunge was out of the question, especially from his sitting position. And just close enough that she could unload the gun's clip right into his chest, grouping the entrance holes into a pattern tight as her fist. "So..." A trickle of sweat ran down one side of his neck. "What finally decided you?"