by K. W. Jeter
He slipped the bullet into his jacket pocket and unfolded the scrap of paper that had been beneath it.
Deckard-The scrawl was Sarah's handwriting, the big ego-driven letters she'd never lost. I'll see you later.
The mute bullet had said as much. A warning, the cold kiss she'd greet him with the next time they met. He crumpled the paper into a wad in his fist, then tossed it into the rubble in the bedroom's corner.
"Off into the ozone?" Batty's voice curled mockingly. The briefcase sat in the middle of the hovel's front room, where Deckard had left it. "They like to do that. Take it from me; I know. They just leave."
He stepped over the briefcase and closed the door. "Not your problem, is it?" He brushed away the dangling strips of peeled tape. "You should mind your own business."
"Ah, but you see-your problems are mine, too." An invisible shrug. "You and I ... we just have so much in common, Deckard."
"I doubt it." He crossed to the hovel's tiny kitchenette. "You're in a box." Leaning over the sink crowded with moldering dishes, Deckard rooted through the top cupboard. "I've still got flesh to worry about." He found the square-sided bottle he wanted, pulled it out, and unscrewed the cap. "So the answers to my problems are different. Like this one."
"That smells like scotch. Or something close to it."
He rinsed out a usable glass and poured a two-finger shot into it. "They make it here." He tossed back the first fiery swallow, gritting his teeth as it rolled acid down his throat. "So it's not anything. Except grain alcohol and food coloring."
"Sounds grim. I'll pass. Even if I could drink."
"Good call." Deckard emptied the glass, feeling his gut contract with the hard liquid shock. He poured another and sat down at the kitchenette table with it, pushing aside more crusted dishes and fog-clouded glasses to make room for his elbows. He laid his head down on his forearms and closed his eyes. Exhaled liquor fumes cut the stale cloy of the hovel in his nostrils, an odor of sweat and pent-up anger that could never leak away through the poorly taped seams.
He knew that he could fall asleep if he let himself; the fatigue would wash over him, an ocean with its leading edge tinged brown by the bottle's contents. He also knew that it would do no good, that it would last only a few minutes at best, the same as it had in the skiff's cramped egg coming back from the Outer Hollywood station. A moment of darkness, then dreaming, then waking, with the border blurred between those two states; the way he used to raise his head and open his eyes, back in his apartment in Los Angeles, with an empty glass smelling of real scotch in one hand, the fingers of his other sunk into a silent chord on the piano's yellowed keys. Looking up at the faces in the old frayededged, black-and-white photos that had drifted across the music rest like dead leaves; looking at them and, for a few seconds, wondering who they were. Until he remembered again . .
"All right." Deckard took a deep breath, opened his eyes, and straightened up in the chair. With his forefinger, he pushed the glass and its murky contents away from himself. The room was small enough that he could twist around, reach back, and pick up the briefcase by its handle from where he had left it sitting in the middle of the floor. He swung the briefcase up onto the table, laying it flat in the space he'd cleared. "Let's hear it. You got something to tell me about, now's the time."
She found out their names. Or what passed for them.
"I'm Wycliffe," the more talkative one said. He leaned his elbows back on the yacht's control panel. "He's Zwingli."
"Right. I'm sure." Sarah Tyrell regarded the two men, her erstwhile kidnappers. Or employees-the distinctions were getting a little confused. Maybe disciples, she thought. That fervent light still glowed way inside their eyes. If not her disciples, then Eldon Tyrell's; the two men had done what they could to mold themselves into copies of her late uncle. Within the limits of the possible: they looked like children playing at a grim Halloween. "What were your real names?"
Both men appeared puzzled for a moment, exchanging worried glances before turning to look at her again. "But those are our real names. They'd have to be. The Tyrell Corporation gave them to us."
That raised another consideration. Standing in the middle of the cockpit area, with stars and luminous emptiness shifting about on the viewscreens, Mars no longer even visible from here, Sarah wondered if she were the only human thing on board. "You two wouldn't be replicants, would you?" She studied them more closely. "I mean, it's all right if you are."
Wycliffe shook his head. "No-" Voice flat and emphatic. "Replicants aren't given the kind of security clearances we have."
"We're very high level," said Zwingli. "In the shadow corporation. You can trust us."
"Really." That amused her more than anything had in a long time. "How ... charming. To think that I'd even want to."
She left them in their perplexity and walked back to the center of the yacht. They all just want to be loved, thought Sarah. It was as if the Tyrell Corporation had never ended, or had been re-created in miniature inside this little hermetically sealed world. All familiar to her, from the time she had been notified of her inheritance to the moment when she had brought it down into ruins of fire and twisted metal. Her uncle had created an ass-kissing corporate culture, one where underlings like Wycliffe and Zwingli expected and even thrived on kicks to the teeth. I should be nicer to them-that would have really screwed with their heads.
The furnishings of the yacht-an interplanetary model, small by the standards of the fleet that the Tyrell Corporation had kept-were familiar to her as well. Every inch of the executive quarters was slathered with the same degree of nouveau ostentation that Eldon Tyrell's private rooms and office suite had shown. Expensive enough to imitate taste, too expensive to achieve it; all the fakery that money could buy. Fakes of fakes, in this case; Sarah recognized bits and pieces, imitations of the actual objects that had been consumed in the corporate inferno. Right down to the rococo pillars, foreshortened and perspective-cheating and thus crammed into the lounge's closer space. Window-sized viewscreen panels stretched to the ceiling; layered pixels shifted slowly through a rez-max'd view of an intricate urbscape. Elevated angle, as though from the great arched windows of the office that had been her uncle's, then hers, then ashes; Los Angeles, all smoke and darkness even beneath its hammering sun, rolling out to the panel's faux horizon. The yacht must have been set up for Eldon Tyrell's personal use; that would've been his preference, to travel between planets and yet seemingly not move at all, the view remaining as that seen from the center of his empire. Or perhaps-a sad notion-this was what the obsequious duo up in the cockpit had thought she would like. The past, or at least a piece of it, frozen and sliced like a laboratory specimen and put up here for the cold microscope of her eye to fasten upon.
They don't know-people like them, minions and underlings; it wasn't their job to know. Or even their nature; Sarah knew that she could tell them, let them in on the big secret, that she herself, the recipient of their servile adorations, had destroyed all they held most sacred, the Tyrell Corporation itself-and they wouldn't believe her. Or they would believe and not believe at the same time, mere contradiction being no impediment to true faith. Especially for these believers, carrying on the great Tyrell cause, toiling in the shadows; when the corporation had existed in the light, it had dealt in artificiality. Lies, really-Sarah had found it harder and harder to distinguish those from truth, from reality, whatever those might have been.
"More human than human," the Tyrell Corporation's advertising slogan; what the hell could that mean? Sarah shook her head as she lowered herself back into the padded embrace of a reproduction eighteenth-century wing chair. The statement had always annoyed her; it was like saying "More real than real." The leather sank beneath her weight, the ship's simulated gravity gentle, unnoticeable as a kiss while sleeping. Was there a scale of realness, of humanness, upon which different things could be at different points? And did the points shift? A notion she found amusing-she rather liked the idea of becoming progressively less human.
All the human parts of her nature had only caused her grief...
Like falling in love. Sarah closed her eyes. And thought of Deckard. That was a mistake, she mused grimly. That was what she got for even trying to be human. Better to have stayed a Tyrell, right to the ice-crystaled ventricles of her heart. A family tradition: a Voigt-Kampff machine slapped onto her uncle would have frozen up and died like a broken-winged bird in an Arctic wind. So much for empathy as a way of determining who's human and who's not.
A reproduction of the antique bureau plat from the Tyrell Corporation's demolished headquarters had been installed next to the wing chair. Sarah sat forward and pulled open the central door. The real bureau plat-now also reduced to ashes, driven into L.A. 's concrete and rubble by the monsoon rains-had had several useful things in it; the repro desk had only the remote control for the opposite wall's viewscreen. That was enough; she leaned back and thumbed through the displayed menus until the phony cityscape had been replaced by a real-time view from the trailing opticals. Mars was already a red dot, everything on it even less from this distance. Including that bastard Deckard-her thumb rested on the remote's Off button, poised for obliteration.
She hesitated, one moment merging with the next. Prolonging the sensation she felt: not pleasure-she was beyond that-but a certain satisfaction. Not with the present, but what was to come.
"I was a fool." Sarah spoke aloud, her words echoing against the hard metal bulkheads underneath the ersatz tapestries and wall hangings. Not necessarily for falling in love with him-for wanting the same thing that Rachael, the replicant with her face, could have so easily-but for thinking that she could get back at him while stuck in a shabby little hovel in one of the Martian emigrant colonies. Money a weapon; revenge facilitated by all the power of the Tyrell Corporation. Even in this, its shadow form. The appearance at the hovel's doorstep of the die-hard true believers, Wycliffe and Zwingli, had been the answer to the prayer she hadn't even spoken inside her own head yet. She had screwed people over both with and without money, the difference being that money and power made the screwing deeper and longer-lasting. Even terminal. "Whatever works," she murmured.
Her thumb pressed down and the image disappeared, replaced by blank wall. Sarah stood up from the wing chair and tossed the remote back onto the bureau plat repro.
An hour or so later, when she came back into the lounge area, the two men were waiting for her. They both looked fidgety and nervous, as though their impersonations of the late Eldon Tyrell were wearing through.
"What can I do for you, gentlemen?" Sarah rubbed the thick white towel through her hair, then draped it along her neck. In the wing chair, she crossed her legs, letting the Tyrell-logo'd bathrobe part just enough to show the pale flesh above her knee. "Nothing too important, I hope. I'm still getting . . . used to things. Again."
While they organized their reply, she slit open the pack of illicit tobacco cigarettes she had found in the master sleeping quarters. Golden Wood Dove, her favorite, from the farthest and least accessible of all the Kampuchean warlord protectorates. Expensive, obtainable only through the U.N's own diplomatic courier pouches-the shadow corporation's contacts must be well in order. Along with their research: in the bedroom's closets, she had found a reasonable approximation of at least part of the wardrobe she'd had back in Los Angeles, sized down to reflect the weight she had lost on the emigrant colony's starvation diet.
"Miss Tyrell-" As before, Wycliffe was the pair's spokesman. "There's a lot we need to talk about."
She tilted her head back and watched the ship's air-circulation system draw away her exhaled blue smoke. "You've already talked." She lowered her cool, level gaze to theirs. "What more do you have to say?"
"But ... you don't even know where we're going."
"Where we're taking you to," chimed in Zwingli.
"Does it matter?" Sarah gave an unconcerned shrug. "Back to Earth, presumably; that seems to be the direction in which we're heading." She pulled the edge of the robe back over her knee. "Los Angeles, perhaps? Is that where this little shadow corporation operates from?"
"No-" Wycliffe shook his head; a moment later, so did his partner. "There's nothing there. At least as regards the Tyrell Corporation." His expression lapsed into mournfulness. "It's all gone. The headquarters complex ... the pyramid .
"Yes, I know." She sighed. "I'm sure it was the site of your happiest days. Get over it." Sarah flicked away the cigarette's ash. "Zurich, then. Or somewhere close by. I seem to recall that as being the branch office for most of our overseas operations."
Wycliffe's eyes narrowed into slits. "We don't talk about Zurich. Not inside the shadow corporation, that is."
"Those sonsabitches." Zwingli's face had hardened into an identical angry mask. "Turncoats."
"Let's just say..." Wycliffe's voice was as bitter as his expression. "Not all Tyrell Corporation employees had the same degree of loyalty. Some of the more remote branches of the company sold out to the U.N. security agencies. Or they tried to." One corner of his mouth curled into an ugly smirk. "They would have, if the shadow corporation hadn't gotten to them first."
"We took care of business," said Zwingli. "Ours and theirs."
"I bet you did." If Sarah hadn't been convinced before that these two were left over from the old Tyrell Corporation, she was now. The culture inside the L.A. headquarters building had been nurtured by her uncle into a magnified form of his own personality. Inside that pyramid, the way to get ahead had been through murder, or at least a display of one's willingness along those lines. All in the service of the Tyrell Corporation as manifested by Eldon Tyrell. "So Zurich's not on the grand tour anymore, I take it."
Both men nodded their heads.
She waited, but neither of them said anything more. They stood and gazed at her with an apparent lack of sexual appetite that she found offensive.
"Gentlemen-it's not that long a trip between Mars and Earth. Not aboard one of these yachts." Sarah took a long drag on the cigarette, taking it halfway down its length. She held out her hand to regard the glowing ember. "And my patience is even shorter." She looked back at the men. "So why don't you just tell me where we're going?"
They looked frightened, as though some moment they'd been dreading since birth had finally arrived. "It's Wycliffe's pale, large-knuckled hands tugged at each other. "It's not that easy..."
"Jesus Christ." It struck her once more that the pair's impersonations of the late Eldon Tyrell hadn't penetrated past the skin. Her uncle at least had had the courage of the selfabsorbed. "Show me, then."
Wycliffe appeared relieved by the suggestion. He dug through the inside pocket of his coat and extracted a folding map, so old that the creases had turned to lines of soft white fur. He spread it out on the bureau plat, hands patting the paper smooth.
"You can't use the screen?" She pointed to the far wall of the lounge. "Instead of that thing?"
"This ... belonged to Dr. Tyrell." Wycliffe looked up from his insectoid crouch over the map. One hand hovered a quarter inch above its surface. "His personal copy."
"What, he gave it to you?"
Wycliffe shook his head. "No-he kept it here. With his other things."
"Fine. Whatever." Sarah stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray that Zwingli had scurried to fetch for her. "Acquire your sacred relics however you want." She got up and stood beside Wycliffe, looking down at the map. "Now-can you point? Can you do that much for me?"
He laid a fingertip on a spot in the upper left corner.
A map of western Europe-that much had been readily discernible, even through the rectangular grid of the fold marks and tears. This thing looks a million years old, thought Sarah. Perhaps her uncle had had it when he'd been a boy, when the world had been flat and the only things that looked human actually were. Sarah leaned closer over the bureau plat.
The British Isles, but not England. Farther north than that. Her heart had paused between one beat and the next, a moment frozen between life and its continu
ance, when she discerned the exact place on the map. North of the Scottish mainland, far beyond Cape Wrath, beyond Thurso at the very tip; into the North Sea, where the currents ran as cold as the pulse that now moved slowly through her veins. She knew where Wycliffe was pointing; she had always known. And why the two men had been reluctant to speak the words, the name. "You see?" Wycliffe spoke softly, his voice all kindness, sympathy. "Right there. That's where we're going..."
She saw, she knew; a place she had never been to. But she knew what was there. Waiting for her in that little spiral of islands. Scraps of land, treeless and rock-laden, protecting another body of seawater from the greater, darker ocean surrounding it. A place that most people didn't even know existed; that they had forgotten, if they had ever known. Lucky them, Sarah thought.
Memory was a disadvantage, a means of control. Her uncle had known that, had used it; the replicants he had created, the false memories he had implanted in their skulls. How much better it would have been for those poor bastards if they had been able to forget, if they had never known. How much better for me-some of the memories in the dead Rachael's skull had been her own. Some of them were things that she would have rather forgotten. And the others-the bits and bleeding scraps that Eldon Tyrell hadn't seen fit to take and implant in her double's mind, that he had wanted to keep a secret, big and dark, between himself and his niece- those were even more worth forgetting. If they could have been. That's the trouble with the past, thought Sarah, closing her eyes for a moment. It was divided between the things you could never know and all the things you wished you could forget.
"Do we have to?" She heard her own voice, sounding like a child's. The one who had never died and never forgotten. She opened her eyes and looked at the man standing next to her. "Go there, I mean. Why do we have to?"
"We don't have any choice," said Wycliffe. A few feet away, Zwingli nodded in agreement. "Neither do you. These things have to be done."
"But technically... I'm your boss." Sarah attempted a last-ditch argument. "I'm in charge. I am the Tyrell Corporation-you said so yourself. Without me ... there's nothing." Her voice rose in desperation. "You're supposed to do what I say. I could tell you no. I'd forbid you to take me there."
