Replicant Night

by K. W. Jeter

  "Bottoms up," said the briefcase.

  The blue ionic discharge had died out, leaving clear liquid again; Deckard supposed that meant the colloidal activation was complete. A deity of some kind-hard to imagine it actually being that pathetic double amputee-existed in the beaker. Or so it was to be believed. Deckard picked up the container and took a sip.

  Bitter on his tongue; he managed to swallow. In his throat, he felt nothing, as though the liquid had already seeped into his tissues, heading for the first connections with his spine and brain.

  He drained the rest at one go, placing the empty beaker on the table. Then he leaned back in the chair and waited.

  It didn't take long.

  9

  She opened the door, a metal door like others through which she had gone in her life...

  And stepped into the past.

  I've been here, thought Sarah Tyrell. The smell of ocean water, the salt of invisible tears, drifted through the canned atmosphere. A snake of water, a leak curling underneath one of the rubber-flanged seals, threaded down the corridor extending in front of her. The metal door closed behind her with a sigh, its security mechanisms sealing her with the interstellar ship's world. A world she didn't recognize from memory but from dreams. Long, slow, empty dreams, from which she had always awakened trembling, gazing up at the nightbound ceilings, blue light of moon and stars like ice upon the skin of a frightened child.

  There were no stars here. No skies but the rust-streaked silver metal above, that could almost be touched by her fingertips if she reached as high as she could. If there was any memory of that, it would be as a child's remembering. It must've looked like a real sky to me-as far away as any of the Earth on which her parents had been born, cloudless and unmarked by time and the enveloping ocean's decay. Even when her father had carried her in his arms, taking his infant daughter from one part of the Salander 3 to another- surely he had done that, he must have carried her; Sarah didn't remember, but she believed, or tried to-even then, what would that child of the past have known about any world, any sky, other than this one?

  The real sky, that grey realm of storms and ice-honed winds, was far above her and the waves rolling over the Salander 3's hull. Her faithful and demanding retinue, Wycliffe and Zwingli, were probably back on the shore of Scapa Flow by now, the deserted town and looming cathedral at their backs as they shared a thermos of coffee and waited for her to reemerge. Or if night came on-a relativistic darkening in a zone as northern as the Orkneys-without her returning back from underneath the waters, the two men would likely retreat to the warmth and safety of the interplanetary yacht in which they'd brought her to this place.

  And what if I don't come back up? The thought had occurred to her, even as the two men had rowed her across the Flow in a tiny, primitive low-tech wooden boat, probably something they had found abandoned on the shore. Out to the triangular opening of the shaft by which she would descend to the Salander 3 and the past-she had watched them inexpertly manning the oars, splashing more than actual rowing, yet still somehow managing to make progress against the wind feathering the tops of the low waves. The last she had seen of them-perhaps the last she would see-they had been bobbing in the little boat, looking down at her as the shaft's hatch had irised shut, sealing her in darkness until sensors had registered a human presence and flipped on a faint dotted line extending down toward the Flow's depths and the scuttled ships layered over the rocks. She supposed that if she didn't come back, bearing all the secrets of the past in her seaweed-festooned arms-if the past swallowed her whole, the way it had always threatened to, and didn't let her go-then the two die-hard loyalists would likely move on to Plan B for resurrecting the Tyrell Corporation. She could imagine them winging their way off-planet, a whole Mutt-and-Jeff routine in the cockpit area of the yacht: Well, Mr. Wycliffe, going into the past didn't seem to accomplish much. No, Mr. Zwingli, it sure as hell didn't...

  Meanwhile, she'd be dead or worse, scuttled at the bottom of the Flow along with the Imperial German Navy from the end of the First World War. The little cage inside the shaft had gone on falling, through fathoms and decades, until it had hit the bottom with a soft thump, and the metal doors had opened to the interior of the Salander 3.

  Sarah walked farther into the ship, toward the corridor's branching junction. At the limit of her hearing, the sound of motors switching on, somewhere deep in the craft's innards; air stirred and brushed against her face as the programmed ventilation systems came to life. The workings of her birthplace, the mechanical womb that had enclosed the softer one of her mother, switched on as she passed by the triggering sensors, each measuring and recording the blood warmth of her presence.

  "Do we know you?" A voice spoke softly from above her.

  She glanced up at a round speaker grille set between luminescent panels. She smiled, wondering where the optics were that focussed on the slight movement of her facial muscles. "I don't think so."

  "It's very puzzling," continued the ship's autonomic computer. "I feel as though I should pick you up in my arms-if I had arms-and rock you to sleep."

  "I'm sure that would be very pleasant." She wasn't being sarcastic; the desire rose in her to rest her head against the shining corridor wall and close her eyes, drifting to sleep.

  "There's a genotype file on you in my data banks." The computer was still trying to puzzle it out. "That is, there's a file that you match." The ventilation flow in the corridor reversed for a second, as though the machinery behind the walls had taken another sniff at her. "But you don't match it somehow. You're too big."

  The fussy, worrying voice reminded her of another one; it took a moment for Sarah to remember. The calendar, she thought; the one that had hung on the wall of the hovel, out on Mars, that she'd lived in with Deckard. Or existed, at least. It'd had the same solicitous manner programmed into its numbered pages. The ship's computer had the advantage of being effectively invisible; she didn't have to look at tacky postcard photos of rural Oregon.

  "I'm all grown up," said Sarah. She gazed around the empty corridor. "Since you saw me last. That's why. That's why I'm different and the same."

  "Oh no, child-that can't be." The voice softly chided her. "For you to be different ... different from what you were... or are" The computer displayed the same limited grasp of difficult concepts that she remembered the calendar struggling with. "That would mean that time had passed. Has passed. And that's just wrong, sweetheart. No time has passed. All my clocks and chronos, they all say the same thing, the same as they always have. Since we came back, I mean. No time, no time-nothing has passed. We don't do that here."

  She felt sorry for the computer, and by extension, the whole ship. It was doing the best it could. If its maternal instincts were only electrons moving along wires and through silicon, they still exceeded what could be found in most humans.

  "I wasn't here." Sarah tried to explain. It delayed having to go farther down the dimly lit corridor and finding . . . she didn't know what. "I went outside you. I was taken out. Don't you remember?" She had seen the photos in the company archives, and the ones that her uncle had kept in the bottom drawer of the intricately wrought table beside his canopied bed, so she could describe what had happened back then. "The men came, and the nurse, and they took me away. When you-when we-came back here to Earth. I was just a child then. That's how you remember me. That's the file you have."

  "Oh, sweetheart-I don't think I would've forgotten that. You were such a pretty little thing." The ship's computer lapsed into its own fond reel of memories. "Both of you were..."

  The last words puzzled Sarah. "What do you mean? Both what?"

  No answer; silence rolled down the corridor, a wave upon an unseen ocean.

  Yet not perfect. In the distance, somewhere inside the Salander 3, the sound of footsteps. Impact upon metal, then echoes, even softer. Someone walking; it felt as though it were along the knots of her spine, beneath her prickling flesh.

  "Very funny," said Sarah. "Th
at's a good joke. You don't have to try so hard to amuse me." No reply came from the speaker grille above her head. "I'm a big girl now."

  The little noises had faded away. The recirculated air sighed through the vents.

  "Maybe..." The voice of the ship's computer whispered, as though the round speaker grille had come up next to her ear in a cold metal kiss. "Maybe you should go home, little girl. You don't belong here. Not anymore. This isn't your home .

  "Yes, it is." Sarah's voice broke inside her throat. With something close to astonishment, she touched her face and found a tear rolling down her cheek, as though the surrounding salt ocean had broken through some seal within her. "It is." The words sounded like a child's, scared and clinging. "I don't have anywhere else to go."

  The footsteps sounded again, the soft echo floating by her ear. Closer, perhaps in the darkness at the end of the corridor.

  "Go anywhere, child. Anywhere but here..."

  The realization had welled up inside her from spaces just as dark, deep and hidden. The ocean rolled above, locking her tight within this little bubble at the center of the universe. It is here, thought Sarah. It has to be. If it wasn't, she was lost. More than she had ever dreamed or feared possible.

  Now she knew why she had come here. Why she had let the two men with the eyes of her uncle talk her into it-if they had known, they wouldn't have even bothered to. No argument or attempt at convincing needed; all she'd had to do was realize what some part of her had always known, that the day was coming when she'd be here in this place, this little world, again. That part knew because it had never left.

  "I won't go away," said Sarah. She looked upward, as though she could find the computer's face. It didn't have one; all she saw was the blank, curving metal that lined the ship's corridor. "You can't make me."

  "No one can." The voice from the overhead speaker sounded mired in the awareness of grief. "It's too late. Even where there's no time, it's always too late." The voice shifted, as though becoming part of a machine again. "Very well. Suit yourself. I won't try to stop you."

  Silence, as though the Salander 3's computer had shut itself off, the circuitry going dead, the wires empty of whatever time-free consciousness had lived in them. Silence encased in silence; the approaching storm winds that stroked the waves of Scapa Flow had stilled themselves. That was what it felt like to Sarah, buried beneath the waters. The subtle motions of the currents had stopped rocking the ship's hull, leaving it without tremor on the decayed hulks beneath it.

  In that tomb quiet, she knew she should have been able to hear the beat of her own heart, tapping under bone and flesh-but she couldn't. She laid a hand on her breast, fingers slipping below the edges of her coat. Nothing, even when her fingertips touched the bare skin at the base of her throat; nothing but the cold chill that her body temperature had been brought down to, as though seeking equilibrium with the ocean.

  Sarah held out her hand, palm upward, far enough to expose her pale wrist. The thin blue snake of her pulse was motionless as well, stopped in the moment between one beat and the next.

  Time; plenty of it, and none. That was what Wycliffe and Zwingli had told her she would find, and what she'd known she would. The toxicity of the depleted interstellar drives, the cumulative effects of the ship's journey to the stars, building up in the hull and everything it held even before the aborted expedition to the Proxima system; time had built up here and couldn't be dissipated.

  And what, wondered Sarah, is so toxic about that? She stood in the Salander 3's central corridor, the doorway to the surface of that other world, the one where things moved and happened in time, sealed behind her. The way they had talked about it, not just Wycliffe and Zwingli but everyone else, all the memos in the Tyrell Corporation files; toxic to lethal, poison to death. It had suddenly struck her that perhaps they were wrong, always had been. That here was eternal life, a resurrection that didn't even need to be disinterred from its grave. All you had to do to find it . . . was to die.

  Another silence, another memory, rose inside her. Far from here: a cabin, not more than a falling-down shack, in a forest silvered by moonlight. With a black, glass-lidded coffin inside it, and inside that, a woman either sleeping or dying or both. A woman with Sarah's face. That's why I envied her, thought Sarah. Rachael had already died-the last little drawn-out fragments of her curtailed life hardly mattered- and had entered that world where there was no time, just memory. Deckard's memory, as he sat beside the black coffin and gazed upon that which he loved, that which he'd been fated to love, nailed down to that iron track of his desires. As long as he remembered Rachael-and that was all he'd had left to do then-she'd never die.

  Another world, another time; Sarah tried to push it away from her thoughts. For a moment, she'd been there, the shadow of an owl passing across her face, masking the stars that had glittered hard in the cold night air. And another part of that same time, that memory: when she had told him to say to her what he had said to Rachael, long before.

  Say that you want me...

  The memory didn't fade so much as it dissipated, like a scrap of paper ignited and crumbling to black ash. Leaving her inside the Salander 3 again, the cold metal walls close around her. The darkness at the end of the corridor still lay ahead.

  She walked past where the last of the luminescent panels had flickered and gone out. How that could have happened, she wasn't sure of; a strict logic would have taken that to indicate the passage of time, the ship's component parts' aging and wearing out. A thin shard of plastic crackled beneath her footstep; she reached down and picked it up. Enough light filtered down the corridor from where she had entered to show that what she held was a fragment of the same translucent covering from the fixtures recessed overhead. She reached up, standing on tiptoe; her outstretched fingertips caught hold of a larger, sharper piece, one of several radiating from the plastic's center. The panel, and the rest extending down the corridor, had been shattered, rendered useless; as her vision adjusted to her dim surroundings, she could make out the repeated damage.

  Somebody did that, Sarah told herself. On purpose. It had to have been done before the ship had landed back on Earth. The light behind her was a retrofit, something that had been installed when the shaft to the surface had been hooked up. From what Wycliffe and Zwingli had told her, that was as far as anyone had gone into the Salander 3 since that long-ago day when the dead bodies of her parents had been carried out. She found it hard to believe that any of the Tyrell Corporation's employees had also had the time and inclination then for this kind of vandalism. So it happened out there, thought Sarah. Way out there. On the way to the Proxima system, or on the way back from the Salander 3's aborted mission. Something had happened that was fit only for the dark. Somebody had wanted it that way, lights out, darkness within that greater darkness between the stars. There had only been two people, Ruth and Anson Tyrell, aboard the Salander 3 when it had left Earth. And one human presence, Sarah herself, a child, when it had returned. That tended to reduce the number of possible suspects.

  Unless the cat did it, she thought wryly. That furry creature in her mother's arms in the old newspaper photo. The notion produced a partial, humorless smile on her face. When pets go bad...

  The protection of irony wore thin and vanished; she couldn't keep up that defense. Fear-driven nausea tightened her gut, dizzying her. She had to lean her shoulder against the corridor's wall to keep from falling.

  Something wet seeped through the sleeve of her coat, touching her arm inside. She barely felt it. Something as soft as the touch of another person's fingertip, even the same temperature, warm as the substance within her own veins. Sarah pushed herself back from the wall, her palm miring in the fluid thick upon it.

  She looked at her hand. And saw blood.

  Ink-black in the corridor's partial light; knowing what it was filled in the redness. Her thumb smeared it across her fingertips; spreading them apart revealed the larger, irregular blot filling her palm. For a moment, she wond
ered if it might be her own blood, if she had cut herself accidentally on the broken plastic she had picked up, the sharp-edged fragment from the smashed overhead lights. She could have wounded herself and not even known it; she would've preferred that to any other possibility.

  Not wanting to, she turned slowly to one side. Dreading, Sarah forced herself to look at the corridor's wall, to try to see what was there.

  Words, a message. Big red letters, black . . . in the darkness, she could no longer tell the difference. Enough light trickled down the corridor, slid beneath her flinching eyelids and back to the farthest spaces inside her skull-enough to make out the ragged shapes of the letters, the scrawl reaching up higher than her own hand could reach, to the angle of metal above.

  This is craziness. Her own words, unspoken voice, to herself. She knew that; everyone did. You found words written in blood, in big smeary letters on the wall, when there were crazy people around. Bad crazy people, the kind that hurt other people. And worse. Sometimes it was the crazy people's own blood-another memory trip flashed through her head in a millisecond, a buried one that kept coming back into the light where she didn't want it, a memory that ended with her watching herself, standing just outside in true schizoid fashion, as she had written her name in red exactly like this on the mirror over a green-veined marble bathroom sink with golden faucets, her wrists dripping into pinkly darkening water. That memory ended in blackout, as that other Sarah she'd watched had fallen, hand smearing across the bloodied mirror, as her uncle's doctors and security guards had been breaking down the door. Crazy. But she still knew that most times, the blood had been inside those other people, the ones who got hurt, cut instead of cutting, the ones who weren't alive anymore. Crazy...