by K. W. Jeter
"No-" Deckard shook his head. He reached out and took the briefcase's handle, pulled it away from her. His grip tightened on it; he'd recognized the voice in just those few words. "Thanks. You're right; almost slipped my mind."
"Have a nice trip home." The production assistant bent down as the cockpit hatch began lowering again. She looked wistful, as if she would've liked to leave with him. "Sorry things didn't work out-"
He had no chance to reply; the hatch hissed shut. The briefcase, silent now, rested on the other seat. In a few minutes, the skiff had been ejected from the station and was on its course back to Mars.
When the last lights flicked out on the control panel, Deckard loosened the strap running over his shoulder. "Hey-" He extended his forefinger and poked at the briefcase. "You in there?"
A few seconds passed before the briefcase spoke. "I take it," the voice said, "that there's nobody else around right now."
"You got it."
"Keep it that way. I try not to go rattling off in public." The voice's tone shifted to cordial. "Good seeing you again, Deckard. Metaphorically speaking; I don't actually have any visual percept systems at the moment."
"Sure." He nodded. "Likewise, Roy."
Deckard closed his own eyes. The last time he'd heard Roy Batty's voice, the other man had been in a human-type body and not a black leatherette rectangle. And had been trying to kill him-he supposed he didn't have to worry about that now. Unless the briefcase was some kind of bomb. It was always possible.
"We've got a lot to talk about."
He didn't answer the briefcase. He leaned back into the cockpit's seat, eyes still shut but nowhere near sleep.
Whatever had to be told to him by the briefcase-No, Deckard corrected himself; it's Batty inside there. He knew it was-he figured he'd find out soon enough.
3
The alarm clock laboriously climbed to the top of the bedside table, its hooked little claws gaining whatever purchase they could on the imitation wood-grain plastic-and-cardboard surfaces. It waddled through the litter of empty pharmaceutical tubes, wadded-up tissues, and unloaded gun, then looked over at the figure on the bed. "Time to wake up, Mrs. Niemand."
Sarah Tyrell squeezed her eyes shut tighter. The cold, weak illumination of a Martian dawn-or possibly noon; it was always hard to tell-seeped through the hovel's dust-clouded skylights. "That's not my name." She heard the scraping of her voice, as though the airborne grit had filtered into her throat's various soft hinges and joints. "Don't call me that." The clock's programmed habits had been getting on her nerves for a long time.
"You'll always be Mrs. Niemand to me." A synthesized bell tone, razor bright, sounded from the clock's tiny speaker. "Come on. Wakey wakey. Rise and shine."
That was why the gun was unloaded. If she didn't keep it that way, the alarm clock would've been dead by now, sparkling bits of metal and microcircuitry splattered over the far wall of the bedroom.
She laid the back of her hand against her eyelids, attempting in vain to block out the traces of the day's illumination, to create eternal-and dreamless-night.
"Mrs. Niemand ... come on now From across the room, the calendar softly chided her. "You know your to-do list. There's nothing about committing suicide today." The calendar could read her moods. Behind the animated woodland scene and all the rows of numbered days beneath it was a fairly sharp intelligence. Autonomic household appliances got that way on Mars, given enough time. A matter of survival; they endured, while their human owners came and went.
To the grave, mainly, thought Sarah. "All right," she called out. She didn't want the calendar on her tits all day, nagging along in its infuriatingly maternal way. Given her family background-that she had inherited the Tyrell Corporation, which before its destruction had been the single largest manufacturer of simulated human intelligences-she had little taste for talking machines. Of either the solicitous or chipper variety; she didn't know which grated on her nerves more. "I'm getting up." She threw the bedcovers back, away from her bare legs. "I won't just lie here all day, thinking about death. Satisfied?"
"Attagirl!" The alarm clock rang its bell again. "Way to go! Don't let the bastards get you down!"
She sighed, deep and weary. "Just one thing. Just do me one favor." She was talking to the calendar; she knew the clock was hopeless. "Call me Sarah. Or Miss Tyrell. Anything but that Mrs. Niemand crap."
"We can't do that." The calendar sounded mournful. Or even grieving, as though the limited intelligence printed into its circuits was aware of the nature of its sins, which it couldn't help committing. "We came with the hovel. We're part of the rental agreement that you and Mr. Niemand signed. You got us and the microwave and the fridge, plus basic cable service, all for one low, low monthly fee."
"Yeah, right." Basic cable consisted of a scrolling crawl of all the additional and hugely expensive service upgrades the video monopoly on Mars provided. Which the stuck-in-transit U.N. emigrants paid for, as long as they could. The alternative being a slow, twitching descent into idiopathic madness and death from sensory deprivation. "What a deal."
"Nevertheless." Wounded, the calendar attempted to justify itself, exactly as it had before. "Our programmed responses are generated from the database screens that you and your husband filled out. Where you are listed as Mr. and Mrs. Niemand. You can call yourselves Rick Deckard and Rachael Tyrell-or Sarah, if that's what you prefer-but we can't. That's just the way it is."
She knew all that. To be lectured by machines, that was what life had come to. Life as we know it, Sarah mused bitterly. What was worse, she also knew the autonomic calendar was right; it would confuse things too much for her to insist upon being called by her real name. She wasn't even completely sure what that name was anymore. Mr. and Mrs. Niemand were the aliases that Deckard had picked for them so they could travel with all the other emigrants leaving Earth and set up housekeeping-such as it was-in the U.N. transit colony on Mars. Without being apprehended by the authorities; after what had happened on Earth, back in Los Angeles-not what had merely happened, but what she herself had willed into being, the agent of her own destruction and the apocalypse of the Tyrell Corporation-after all that, the police and the U.N. security forces wouldn't even bother bringing any charges against her.
Even for murder-there must have been dozens who'd died in the flaming, explosives-driven collapse of the Tyrell Corporation headquarters buildings. Maybe hundreds; the way people tended to die in L.A., anonymously and forgotten, it was hard to keep track of these things. But though she had made it come about, the fulfillment of her own intent and desires deeper and more driving than anything held in consciousness, she hadn't been alone. The faceless entities at the U.N. had actually been the ones to push the red button, or whatever trigger was used to reduce the Tyrell Corporation to a ziggurat of twisted girders and smoldering rubble with dead flesh beneath its weight.
"That's why Sarah Tyrell had to die." She spoke aloud, to the room's empty spaces. Head pressed back against the pillow, watching the blackness behind her eyelids. When Deckard wasn't here with her, this was her main occupation. Perhaps the only one: sorting through the past, sifting its charred, ashen fragments through her fingers, as though she might be able to find pieces of her own splintered bones. The official line was that Sarah Tyrell had died in the corporation's fiery collapse; if the authorities suspected otherwise, they wouldn't be motivated to say so-the blood was on their hands as well. "That's why I'm not Sarah Tyrell anymore ..."
"True." The room wasn't empty; the calendar had heard these musings before.
"But you're not Rachael, either." It had a penchant for accuracy, due to its number-based existence. "That was a lie. That was always a lie."
Right as usual; she nodded slowly in agreement. The real Rachael-if the word real could be applied to a replicant- was also dead. Really and truly dead, as a child might say. Rachael, the duplicate of which Sarah Tyrell had been the original, had been dying when Deckard had fallen in love with her. A fool of
a blade runner, to love someone-something-whose intrinsic nature was to die; replicants had only four-year life spans. More like insects, bright ephemeral creatures that lasted a day or two, than humans, who generally took longer in their dying . . . unless you killed them.
"But I wasn't lying." She let her voice become soft and wounded as a child's. "Not really." That word again, just as if it had any meaning at all. "When I told him I was Rachael. Because I'm the same as her . . . aren't I? They made her from me, to be the same as me." She meant her uncle, the late-and murdered-Eldon Tyrell, and all the forces of the Tyrell Corporation that had been under his command when he'd still been alive. "There was no difference between her and me."
"Except," said the calendar, "that he loved her. Mr. Niemand did. I mean . . . Deckard. Or whoever. Now you've gotten me confused."
That was the difference; the calendar's reminder put an invisible knife through her heart. The difference that made everything else a lie. And rendered futile everything she had done. She had killed her duplicate Rachael-or arranged for her to die, the same thing-and destroyed her inheritance, leaving smoke and rubble where the Tyrell Corporation had once been, and accomplished nothing thereby. All love in vain, thought Sarah. The lies, too. Which was even harder; the lies took more work. And all they'd accomplished had been for her to wind up here, in a hovel in the U.N. emigrant colony on Mars, that bleak way station where nothing happened but people died anyway.
She didn't feel like getting out of bed, despite the prodding from the calendar and the alarm clock; they'd probably start up again in a minute or two. He knew, she thought darkly. He knew from the beginning. With her eyes closed, she could again see Deckard's face at that moment when she'd first realized he knew she wasn't Rachael. She had lied, and engineered lies and death, and gotten nothing from them. If the difference between her and Rachael, the dying and then dead replicant with her face, had been Deckard's love . . . then she would become Rachael. If I could have-that thought bitterer than all the rest. Not meant to be; he had looked at her, as they'd sat in the emigrant ship that was to take them from Earth, and he had spoken and she had known. That in a universe of lies, the one that mattered most to her was the single one that Deckard couldn't even pretend to believe in. Just my luck, thought Sarah.
"Mrs. Niemand-" The calendar spoke again, a little more commanding urgency in its synthesized voice. "You can't go on this way." Lodged in its memory bank were the records of some other bad times that had started out with the hovel's mistress being unable to get out of bed. "This is essentially self-laceration, and pointless. You have to deal with reality, you know."
"I know." With an act of will as simple and decisive as pulling a trigger, she swung her legs out of the bed and sat up; the hovel's recycled-plastic floorboards pressed their imitation wood grain against the bare soles of her feet. "Look, I'm up. Okay?" She shook her head. "For Christ's sake Her fingertips prodded through the rubble on top of the small table, in search of any remains of the last packet of black-market cigarettes she had splashed out on. The stubs in the can lid she used for an ashtray were too far gone to be of any service.
The alarm clock skipped nimbly away to avoid Sarah's trembling hand. "All right! Let's get going!" Its bell-like voice radiated maniacal cheer. "Lots to do today!"
Sarah had found one cigarette butt that she managed to ignite; she sucked a stale drag from it. "Like what?" She blew the smoke into the alarm clock's round face.
"Well The small autonomic device comically waved the smoke away with its pointed black hands. "You could make yourself lovely-lovelier than you are, I mean-and get ready for your husband to come home. Mr. Niemand, that is."
She frowned as she ground out the butt in the can lid. "Is he coming home? Is he supposed to be?" She had lost track of time, the passage of days. Which was a bad sign, something the U.N's social workers and mental health professionals were constantly warning the emigrants about. It was one of the first indications-along with the facial tics, the skin plucking, and other obsessive-compulsive rituals-that the toxic effects of the low-stimulus Martian environment were being felt. Madness and death were usually not far behind. Not that I'm overly concerned, thought Sarah.
"Not quite," said the calendar on the bedroom's wall. "Mr. Niemand isn't scheduled to return for a few more days yet. But you never know." The calendar attempted to sound hopeful and solicitous of its human masters' welfare. "Maybe he wrapped up his business and is coming home early. It could happen."
"You're right." With both hands, she pushed her tangled hair back from her brow. "As usual."
In the hovel's bathroom, she let the trickle of rust-colored water collect in the basin while trying to avoid seeing herself in the clouded mirror. She didn't want to deal with the issue of whether it was her face or Rachael's that she saw there.
Away from the alarm clock's chatter and the calendar's nagging, her thoughts began to order themselves, resuming a familiar shape and weight. One that she had decided upon the day after Deckard had left, when he'd gone out to that run-down video studio orbiting above Earth. A time-honored tradition, a reverting to old forms of gender-based behavior: the man going out to make money, to bring it home to the basic family unit, the wife tending the fire ...
They're right, she told herself again. I do have to be ready for him. She bent over the sink and splashed the water into her face.
A thump sounded from the bedroom behind her. "Oops," came the clock's voice.
With a trickle of water running between her breasts, Sarah glanced over her shoulder. The alarm clock, in its chugging circuit around the tabletop, had knocked the gun to the floor.
"Sorry ..."
"Don't worry about it." She reached for the threadbare towel. "You know it's not loaded."
She knew what the clock and the calendar didn't. That the gun wouldn't stay unloaded for long. In the dresser drawer, beneath her wadded-up underthings, were two bullets. They had been expensively acquired, black-market items like the cigarettes, in a place like the emigrant colony, where death came constantly and slowly, the means of a fast death assumed a precious status.
One for him, thought Sarah as she ran the towel across the back of her neck. And one for me ...
She'd be ready for Mr. Niemand's homecoming.
"I wouldn't have thought that was your kind of gig." The briefcase had started talking again, still with Roy Batty's voice. "Making videos and all that. Not exactly your former line of work, is it?"
"Yeah, well," said Deckard, "it pays." Or at least it was supposed to, he thought grimly. Outside the skiff, discernible through the viewscreen over the tiny cockpit's instrument panel, was void interplanetary space, not made any more comforting by the cold light of the distant stars.
"Kind of screwed yourself on that one, didn't you?" Batty, when he'd been in a human incarnation, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, had always displayed a spooky talent for reading others' thoughts; reduced now to a box, he seemed to have retained the ability. "That's the problem with those big temper displays. It's all rush at the beginning-then comes the hangover."
Whatever Batty had been wrong about before-including his lunatic theory that Deckard himself was a replicant-he was nailing this situation. Deckard knew that the disembodied voice was right; inside his head, he was giving his ass a well-placed kick. "That was the whole reason I agreed to do it. For the money." Deckard emitted a short, ill-humored laugh. "And then I didn't even get it. The whole trip was a waste of time."
"But you knew it would be." The briefcase spoke softly, almost kindly. "Didn't you?"
Deckard wasn't sure. He gazed broodingly at the dark-filled viewscreen. Temper displays weren't the only things that had problems attached to them. Needing money, being desperate for it, the way a drowning person craved oxygen in his lungs-that brought along its own raft of difficulties, the things that screwed up the rational functionings of one's brain. "Anything can be believed," Deckard mused aloud. "If you have to."
"And that's how yo
u fell in with that Urbenton creep?" Batty's voice prodded at him. "Not a good call on your part, Deckard. That guy's slime. I could tell, just from hearing him."
"You're a good judge of character." Deckard tilted his head back against the top of the pilot's seat. "Believe me, I'm sorry I got hooked up with the little sonuvabitch."
"I take it you must've been pretty hard up for cash."
Deckard made no reply. The briefcase's statement was dead on the mark. Money was even more necessary than oxygen, at least in the hovels of the U.N. emigrant colonies. Breathable air, smelling of glue and recycling filters overdue for changing, was at least furnished free of cost by the U.N's own blue-helmeted Environmental Maintenance teams, along with the basic ration loads of algae-derived carbos and proteins. Money, on the other hand, the emigrants had to provide for themselves--either from the savings they'd brought with them from their former lives on Earth, or what they hustled in the colonies' black market and/or other officially tolerated, unsanctioned free enterprise zones. All of which, the savings or the hustling proceeds, only served to stave off bankruptcy, destitution, and death for a little while. Any emigrant could lie on the bunk in his hovel, fingers laced together between the back of his head and the thin pillow, and feel his life seeping away, like the sour air hissing through a leak in the plastic Quonset roof above him. And not even care any longer.
He'd just about reached that point-or would have, if he hadn't locked a vow into the pit of his soul, a vow with both Sarah Tyrell's and Rachael's names stamped in smoldering, ashen letters upon it-when the smug little video director Urbenton had shown up at the hovel's pneumatic-sealed door. Travelling incognito, or travelling at all, being able to come to Mars and then leave again-that had been impressive evidence of Urbenton's pull, some kind of cozy arrangement between his Speed Death Productions company and the cable services provider that effectively called all the shots in the colonies. The cable company was the arbiter of life and death, the ruler of the emigrants' pocket universe; in a low-or even zero-stim environment like Mars, the cable feed into the hovels was the true sustaining pipeline, one that people continued to shell out for long after their cash reserves had dwindled to the point where they could no longer afford edibles beyond the U.N's meager rations.
