Replicant Night

by K. W. Jeter

  Wycliffe appeared uneasy, embarrassed. "Well I'm sure Dr. Tyrell was still thinking about this matter. Before his untimely demise. There were a lot of things he would've taken care of . . . if there had been time."

  She glared at the man without speaking. There was no more time for Eldon Tyrell-the replicant who'd killed him had drained him of time by cracking his head like an egg and letting the razor-bright sparks of his mind pour out through his red eye sockets-and she was glad of it. Her uncle's unfinished business had probably included her as well.

  "Plenty of time here," said Sarah. She gestured toward the dials. "By the looks of things."

  The man beside her nodded. "That's what I meant when I said that everything buried had to be watched. The machines-the monitors-they did the watching. Even if everybody else, everybody human, had forgotten."

  With her knuckle, Sarah rapped against one of the circular dials until the glass cracked and splintered. She picked out the triangular shards, then used one fingernail to scratch at the black pointer beneath. It was painted on, fixed at one number along the dial's rim.

  "These are fake." She looked at Wycliffe beside her as she rubbed the black paint flecks from under her nail. She gestured toward the other dials and gauges, the banks of monitoring equipment, the lights and numbers glowing in the cathedral's dim space. "They all are, aren't they?"

  "Well ... possibly..." Bony shoulders hunched beneath Wycliffe's jacket. He held out his large-knuckled hands and tilted them from side to side. "When this installation was set up to watch over the scuttled transports, there was some . . . um . . . stage-setting done. To make it look impressive to the other consortium members. Dr. Tyrell didn't want them jumping ship, so to speak."

  "So really, there's been no monitoring here at all. That's the deal, isn't it?" Sarah let her gaze narrow upon the man. "The interstellar transports that were dumped here-anything could have been going on with them. With the depleted drive units and their toxic effects. They might, in fact, have reached some kind of critical mass-the temporal aberra tions in the field might not just be toxic. They could very well be lethal." She let one corner of her mouth lift in a parody of a smile. "If you want me to go down there, that might be the same as killing me. You might as well shoot me now and get it over with. You must admit-that seems a little inconsistent with people making claims about how they have my best interests at heart. Or even just the interests of the Tyrell Corporation."

  Wycliffe said nothing, turning his face away from her as though in shame. I'm right, thought Sarah. Not that it was any comfort to her. The truth never was.

  "Miss Tyrell ... please..." The softer voice of Zwingli came from a few paces away. "Please don't be mad at us. There really is nothing else we can do. It has to be this way."

  "I've heard that one before." Inside my own head, she thought grimly. As well as from these two, when they'd been putting the pressure on her back at the hovel on Mars. Sarah supposed they were as locked into their fates as she was. "It's all right," she said finally. "I don't mind. It's pretty much what comes with the territory, isn't it? When you're Tyrell blood."

  Neither man said anything. Outside, the ice-flecked wind picked at the cathedral's raftered bones. Sarah could hear, past the low electric hum of the fake monitoring equipment, the grey waves lapping at the village's shore. In a storm, she supposed, the seawater might roll against the abandoned doors, pour through the empty houses...

  Somehow, without even noticing, she had walked out of St. Magnus's Cathedral all the way to the edge of the Flow. She found herself, once her bleak thoughts and memories had faded, gazing out at the water, its surface a darker shade of the steel-textured clouds above. She sensed another's presence, Wycliffe standing behind her.

  "So exactly what is the way I'm supposed to get down there?" Sarah didn't glance over her shoulder at the man. She gave a single nod toward the water. "Down to the Salander 3, I mean. Jump in, hold my breath, and swim?"

  A slight motion in the chill air; she knew that was Wycliffe stiffening, his spine pulled tight by the mention of the ancient interstellar transport's name. A name that he and the other man had yet to speak aloud, that was even more weighted with dire meaning than the words Scapa Flow. At the corner of her eye, she saw his gloved hand extend and point.

  "There's no need for that, Miss Tyrell." Wycliffe's index finger aimed toward a small triangular structure floating in the distance, so small that Sarah hadn't spotted it before. "There's a pressurized shaft extending down to the... to your destination. The shadow corporation-well, Zwingli and myself, actually-had it installed before we went out and contacted you. And brought you here."

  "I see." Sarah glanced back at him. "That was thoughtful of you."

  "Of course." A thin smile moved across Wycliffe's thin-lipped visage. "We really are thinking only of your comfort."

  "Sure you are." She shook her head, feeling how cold and hard her face had become, as though the ice in the wind had penetrated her flesh and seeped into the veins beneath. "If that were the case, you wouldn't even want me to go down there." She took a sadistic pleasure in speaking the transport's name again. "To the Salander 3."

  Zwingli had come out from the old cathedral and joined them by the shore of the Flow; Sarah could sense his presence, and the silent exchange between the two men, the glance passed between them.

  "Miss Tyrell ... we've gone over this before. It's the only way." One of them spoke; she wasn't sure which. The voice fluttered and was taken away by the wind. Probably Wycliffe, the default spokesman for the pair. "If the Tyrell Corporation is to be restored-if it is to come out of the shadows and be what it was before, and even more than that-then this must be done. By you; no one else can do it. It is, after all, your past that we're talking about here. That must be confronted and brought into the light."

  Her past. All of it, she told herself. Right back to the beginning-she had been born aboard the Salander 3. Far from here... far from Earth itself. That past, her past, was a world unto itself, sleeping beneath Scapa Flow's waters.

  "I know The wind had invisibly peeled away her skin, exposing the flesh and scraped bones beneath; that was what it felt like. Sarah had to take her hand out of the coat's pocket and hold it out in front of herself, like some white, fragile artifact, to dispel the illusion. If that's what it was...

  There were ghosts down there in the old interstellar transports; that was the essential toxic effect of the first-generation drive units. The technology, the relatively crude way of getting from one point to another, from Earth to the stars, had worked by generating perturbations in the time field surrounding the transports, enabling them to achieve faster-than-light velocities, as though being sucked from one zone of artificially high temporal potential to a lower one. Falling through time, infinite distances converted thereto, the churning machines holding on to each moment of the present, elongating them like some vacillating Faustian bargain.

  The drawback being, as she knew from the old memos she had seen in the Tyrell Corporation files, that the first-generation interstellar drive units became depleted, lost their propulsive function, as the layers of undissipated temporal energy accumulated. Screwing around with Time itself had its price; within the transports' little encased worlds, past and present became confused, impossible to sort out. Then there would be no forgetting; that saving mental grace, the only thing that made sanity possible, would be gone. Toxicity, madness, death. Better to sink the contaminated machinery into a dark, wet hole, the only place whose own temporal anomalies had a chance of matching these newly created ones.

  "But I got out." Sarah spoke her thoughts aloud. She looked back over her shoulder at the two men. "Before it- the past-before it could contaminate me. Before it could kill me. I was only three years old when the Salander 3 returned to Earth." That child, that long-vanished incarnation of herself, had been the only living thing aboard the transport when the autonomic piloting systems had brought it back to this world; when the Salander 3 's doors had been
unsealed and the Tyrell Corporation's employees had gone in, they had found only the little girl named Sarah-and the corpses of her parents.

  Family history, deep and dark as the currents of the ocean surrounding Scapa Flow. Little things that hadn't been in the old memoranda, the company's official archives, but that she had found out anyway as she had been growing up. The way children always find out things, by overhearing whispers . . . and even more tellingly, by hearing the silences that the adults clicked into when they knew she was in the room.

  That was how she had found out what had happened to them. The faces she knew, recognized from the digitized press clippings in the company files. Anson and Ruth Tyrell; there had been a photo of the two of them with-an oddly human, sentimentalizing touch-a long-haired marmalade cat in the woman's arms, a pet that was going to accompany them on their exploratory voyage to the Proxima system. The two people in the photo had been smiling, full of an eager confidence-Sarah had calculated that her mother had become pregnant either shortly before the photograph had been taken or just after, when the interstellar transport had left Earth orbit. Her parents had been unaware of their fate, the fate of the Salander 3. The transport had turned back a sixth of the way to Proxima, the clever relays and circuits wired into its computers doing the best they could, ferrying back the dead and the living, two adult corpses and an infant tended by machines, nursed on synthesized breast milk. Her second birth had come three years later, when the Tyrell Corporation employees had unsealed the transport's main hatch and one of them had led her out by the hand- there was no way Sarah could remember that. Just more of what she had been told, and had overheard, and had dug out of the company archives.

  And what happened to the cat? she wondered, not for the first time. The poor thing-Sarah gazed out at the uncommunicative water, feeling the chill seep closer to her core. She supposed that was another mystery, the answer to which was down there with all the others, in the hulk of the Salander 3 itself.

  "That's why you want me to go down there, isn't it?" She managed to bestow a bare fragment of a smile upon the two men. "To find out what happened to that silly cat."

  They showed no sign of puzzlement at her words. "You have to go down there," said Wycliffe, "to save-to restore-the Tyrell Corporation."

  "Something went wrong..." Zwingli gazed out across the Flow. "A long time ago..."

  "At the beginning." Wycliffe nodded slowly. "It had to have been then. When Dr. Tyrell and his brother created the corporation. Somehow, everything that happened since then including the destruction of the Tyrell Corporation... the seeds were planted right back at the start of it all."

  She envied the dead-this also, not for the first time. They've got it easy, thought Sarah. The two Tyrell brothers and the wife of one of them-all the bad things that fate had had in store, they had already gotten through. And gone on to whatever place there was that had no time, neither past nor dreaded future. She knew she wasn't that lucky . . . or at least not yet. The past was waiting for her, just a few minutes ahead, when she would go down into the remains of the Salander 3, her first home. Which, in some way, she had never left.

  "We can't go back to the very beginning-that's too far." Wycliffe's voice continued at the edge of her thoughts. "There's nothing left. It's lost. But this much we can do. We can go this far. To whatever happened . . . then. In there." He nodded toward the grey water and the vessels hidden beneath the surface. "But you're the only one who can go there and find out. The secrets, the mysteries. All that we need to know."

  This is what I get-she supposed it served her right. She had envied the dead and had tried to become one of them. Deckard had loved-and still loved-the replicant with Sarah's face. Rachael had already become one of the dead, the termination of her four-year life span postponed just a little bit. Not that it mattered, finally. For either herself or Rachael. The dead were the only ones who escaped. For the living, there was only the past and the future, the same thing in either direction, and equally painful. It was stupid of me to even try.

  Standing behind her, Wycliffe was still wrapped up in his explanations, the rationale behind their journey to this bleak spot. "We don't even know why." His voice spoke in a child's baffled tone. "The Tyrell Corporation sunk an awful lot of its operating capital into the Salander 3 expedition. And we don't even know what they were looking for out in the Proxima system. What they were trying to achieve, what they thought Anson Tyrell was going to find out there."

  "Not in the files, was it?" Sarah knew; she'd looked herself. "That information was deleted; erased, extinguished. And you know, don't you, who must have done that."

  Both men nodded. "Dr. Tyrell," Wycliffe morosely said. "Eldon Tyrell. Your uncle."

  "Eldon Tyrell did a lot of things that you don't know about." She heard her own voice darken in tone. "Some of them . . . you don't want to know about." Sarah looked over her shoulder and saw the two die-hard loyalists appearing uncomfortable, exchanging glances from behind their square-framed lenses at each other.

  "Those kinds of things..." Zwingli spoke up. "That might be personal information. Family secrets. That we don't need to know about. To bring the Tyrell Corporation back into existence."

  "That's where you're wrong," said Sarah. "There's no such thing as personal with the Tyrell Corporation. There never was. Or to put it another way... everything is personal. When my uncle was alive, the company was just the contents of his head, made big."

  "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."