by K. W. Jeter
She stood back from the wall, as far away from it as possible, in the middle of the lightless corridor. Far enough away that she could read what it said, the edge of the distant glow picking out the wet letters, the one word, the name, as a slow line trickled from the bottom curve of the S to the floor.
SARAH
Her own name. As big and crazy as possible; not in a bathroom mirror this time-in this time-but filling a whole wall, each letter standing higher than herself. Written a long time ago, by the measurement of the world outside, up above, where the grey waves rolled beneath the mounting storm clouds. Written just now, in the now that never ended, could never end, inside the Salander 3.
The voice of the ship's computer whispered inside her head, a tape loop of what it had told her, warned her about, as she had walked away from the light. Maybe you should go home, little girl. You don't belong here...
She should have taken the computer's advice. It had only been trying to protect her, just as it always had. I should've listened; too late now, Sarah knew. She had come this far; there could be no leaving until she had gone all the way to the end.
With a shudder arcing down her spine, she turned away from the red-scrawled name on the wall. As she looked down the corridor again, a light appeared, a tiny, flickering thing. Not at the height of her gaze, but lower; she had to shield her eyes for a moment from what might have been a flashlight beam turned straight at her.
The beam shifted away, toward the floor; Sarah lowered her hand. Light shimmered on liquid. The thought came to her that the ship was slowly flooding with water; the sealing mechanisms had broken loose, jarred by nothing but her footsteps, or the hatch to the shaft behind her hadn't closed properly, letting the Flow's waters seep in. A dark expanse stretched in front of her, covering the floor; the breath of the ship's ventilation system stirred a shimmering ripple across the surface.
But it wasn't seawater; she had known that as well, and couldn't deny it to herself, when the red trickle from the word on the wall reached the bottom of the wall. The red line, running down from the big smeared S of her name, merged with the dark pool and was the same color, the same substance, black in darkness, red in her knowing.
The glow from the flashlight, or the lantern or whatever it was, reflected from the small lake of blood, faintly illuminating the figure on the other side. She could see the person now.
"Hello," spoke the child, in a child's unafraid, curious voice. "Did you just get here?"
Sarah said nothing, then slowly shook her head. "No," she managed to say. "Perhaps. I don't know."
"I don't know, either."
The light wavered across the surface of the blood, sending the child's shadow fluttering behind her. Sarah's eyes made their final adjustment to the dark, revealing a little more of the image across from her. A little girl, perhaps ten years old, no more than that; dark hair falling to her thin shoulders, dark, serious eyes. A beautiful child who would grow more beautiful. No, Sarah reminded herself. Would have grown. Someplace where time moved.
"But..." The girl looked up shyly, through her long black lashes. "You can stay here if you want to. I don't mind."
Sarah felt her heart tightening under her breast; a pulse would have shattered it to pieces. Not real, thought Sarah. She closed her eyes, taking the child from her vision for a moment. She's a ghost. That was the toxic effect of this place. The past didn't die and go away, as it should. You see things. That didn't exist, except in memory and the past.
"I'll stay," said Sarah. "For a little while, at least."
The little girl couldn't keep from smiling. "What's your name?"
"It's Sarah. That's all."
A puzzled look shaded the girl's eyes. "Like that?"
She glanced over her shoulder to the bloodied wall, then back to the girl. "That's right." She nodded. "What's yours?"
The same shy smile appeared. "It's Rachael," said the image of the little girl. "My name's Rachael."
10
A Spanish-language double bill was playing at the Million Dollar Theater. The same movies had been playing there forever, or seemingly so; the management never changed the plastic letters on the marquee. They just let the red plastic letters fall off one by one, hitting the rain-soaked sidewalk and lying there like cryptic messages underneath the sizzling broken neon. The hot blue colors ran crazy on the wet street, reflected in every puddle and gutter, upside down and backwards-who could tell?-and legible as the fire-tinged storm clouds rolling across the L.A. night sky.
Christ, thought Rick Deckard. This is a fake. A real good fake, better than the sets and stages and all the other phony rigging at the Outer Hollywood studios. As real-looking as it'd ever gotten there-with accurate rain piped over and drizzling down on walkable streets colored with the same intricate lights and electricity-still, all you'd had to do was look past the camera lenses and the show was over, illusion shattered. This false Los Angeles was a better job-dehydrated deities lived up to their advance billing, as far as he was concerned; no wonder people got into them-but it was still just as much a fake as any other. Perhaps even as much as the real one back on Earth.
He looked up at the garish marquee as he walked down the center of the empty street. The effects of downing the beaker loaded with the colloidal suspension, activated by a spoonful of the Sebastian packet's contents, were still setting in on him. For a few minutes-though it was hard to gauge the passage of time in a place that didn't exist-he had been able to see both the hovel's interior, with the tap still dripping into the kitchen-area sink and the briefcase with Batty's voice lying on the table, and the lineaments of this pocket universe, like two photo transparencies laid on top of each other. He'd even been able to see himself, his legs sprawled out, his hand resting on the table beside the empty beaker he'd just slapped down, as another perception of his body, standing not sitting, wearing the long pseudo-trenchcoat he'd always affected in L.A., had disorientingly faded into his consciousness. The Deckard body sitting in the hovel on Mars had faded out, the first thing in that other universe to go. The one in the pocket universe had tilted his head back, getting the grey-tinged rain in his face and seeing past the roiling clouds to sectors of hard-edged needle-tip stars, with gouts of flame bursting beneath them. Deckard figured the stars were as fixed in place as the heavy, dark clouds, indicators of this L.A. 's eternal night.
Dicking around with time like that was the main indicator of the pocket universe's fake status. A night that never ended-though the real L.A. had often felt like that to him- and little anachronisms. Right down to the Million Dollar's marquee above his head; that was a fragment from the past, something vanished from the real world. This whole tenblock sector of the city's decaying downtown had been levelled by urban-renewal terrorists to drive out the last squatter tribes some time after Deckard and Sarah had gone off-planet; news footage of the mini-nuked buildings had shown up on the Martian cable's nightly clown-wrap. Even on the tiny video screen in the hovel, he'd been able to recognize the old movie palace's curling ornaments, lifeless and unlit in the rubble.
The news clip hadn't shown the old Bradbury Building, across from the transplanted theater, or what had been left of it-Deckard had assumed that even if there'd been no explosive charges planted there, the concussion from the surrounding blasts would've knocked the structure over; the place had been falling into plaster dust and splintering support beams when he'd been inside it. All the old intricate wrought-iron balustrades and open stairwells, the clanking antique of an elevator and its cage, the grand fabric of early twentieth-century business enterprise fallen on hard times- the building had looked like some kind of vertical mausoleum when he'd tracked the last of his quarry in there, the replicant Batty and the psychotic would-be replicant Pris. He'd gotten the shit kicked out of himself there as well, by Pris and the nonhuman Batty in turn. But as somebody else had said an even longer time ago, the race wasn't always to the swift; they had died and he was still alive, both in this world and the other one, the
real one.
Though he didn't feel too swift at the moment; a wave of nausea rolled up in his throat, the hallucinated city street blurring and thinning to insubstantiality for a few seconds. The colloidal suspension, the deity stirred from a dry powder to a potentiated liquid, was still asserting its hold on his central nervous system. His perceptions, what his flesh and mortal eyes were gazing upon inside the hovel, were being overridden by . . . what Sebastian saw. After all, thought Deckard. It's his world. Whatever he was now.
Deckard turned away from the movie theater and toward the building directly across the street. It looked the same as when he'd seen it last, in the real world, in the real L.A. Complete with the fat-bellied swirling columns that had been grafted onto the original structure in an ill-advised attempt to evoke some kind of pseudo-Arabic multiculturalism, and that had only resulted in the same kind of bastard kitsch the city had always been known for. The other added ornamentation was the wadded-up trash in the entranceway, the same rain-soaked pile of unidentifiable rubbish that the wet windsstacked up against every Angeleno doorway. He picked his way through the mess, greasy food wrappers tangling against his ankles, then drifting away to the empty, glistening street.
That was the other fake thing. Even more so than the sets up in the Outer Hollywood station; at least there, extras had crowded the action, simulating the restless urban population. Here, in Sebastian's pocket universe, the streets were devoid of any human, or close-to-human, activity. As depopulated as this zone had been in the real L.A., there had still been some life stirring about, even if only dwarf scavengers climbing over his police spinner, trying to unbolt the roof-mounted air filters. If this place was Sebastian's show, he'd made it a private one. Believers only, thought Deckard. Or at least just communicants. The little guy had obviously never had much use for other people, or at least not for anything other than the autonomic toy friends he'd manufactured for himself. And Pris; but that'd been true love.
Deckard shoved the building's front door with the fiat of his hand; it swung into darkness. The colored light from the movie theater marquee seeped past him, picking out small details-brass handrails still recognizable under layers of dirt and tarnish, rain puddling and spilling from one open floor to the next-in the cavernous space. He stepped inside, letting the door fall shut behind him, sealing out the street sector of the hallucinated world.
He stood in the middle of the space looking upward. What he saw produced a partial smile, one constructed of both irony and grudging admiration. Too perfect, thought Deckard. Through the building's broken roof, past the levels of iron-grilled walkways, beams of shifting light penetrated the darkness like the radiance of magnified stars falling from the fixed spheres in which this little world was enclosed. The lights came from the blimp, the old U.N. advertising vessel with its billboard viewscreen and spiky antennae, looking as though it were some kind of sea creature that had inflated itself enough to rise up in the air.
Squinting against the slants of light, Deckard could just barely see the blimp's shape cruising in absurd majesty above the building and the surrounding streets, the Euro-hybrid geisha face on the viewscreen smiling with a mute guardian angel's uncommunicable wisdom. Sebastian had brought that back as well, another fixture for his pocket universe; in the real world, the real L.A., the blimp was gone, taken out by a mortar round from rep-symp fringe terrorists. Deckard himself had seen the blimp go down in flames, a latter-day Hindenburg, something even the most blasé or stoned L.A. citizens had had their attention caught by. A nonevent for Sebastian, though; he'd already been living out in the sideways zone's wasteland, with his patched-together Pris, so he'd missed all that. This urban concoction was the L.A. that Sebastian had known before he'd left.
Rain from the building's leaking roof sluiced down the brass handrail that Deckard grasped. As he looked up the flight of stairs, their treads rotted to creaking sponges, his other hand moved inside his coat. From force of habit, old ingrained cop ways, as well as from the memory of when he'd been here in long-ago reality. His fingers were searching for his gun, that great black metal weight, a hammer as big and effective as a cannon; they found nothing but lint and a rip in his shirt, through which his sweat-moist flesh could be felt. He drew his hand back out, empty. He would've felt better with even a hallucinated weapon in his grasp, but he wasn't surprised that such things had been edited out of Sebastian's universe.
The last traces of the other world, the hovel where his real body was sitting without consciousness, blindly watched over by the talking briefcase, had faded away. This world had locked in tight; he could feel the wet steps yielding beneath, the rail's cold metal chill against his palm. The smell of rust and crumbling plaster, the stink of decades-old pigeon shit, mired in his breathing. A mist-smeared shaft of light from the blimp above the building crossed over his face, then cut a diagonal through the empty lobby he'd left behind.
"Sebastian!" He called out, voice loud in the building's silence, as he mounted to the floor where the genetic engineer had kept his suite of rooms. Deckard looked down the open walkway to the tall double doors, one of them pushed slightly ajar. No answering voice came. From somewhere past the doors, a wavering light fell, as though from a lit candelabra. "Anybody there?"
He knew there had to be. As empty as the building felt, with its vacant spaces and nailed-down shadows, there was still another human presence inside it. Or something slightly different from human, something imbedded in the walls and pockmarked floor tiles. You 're walking around in his head, Deckard told himself. Or as good as. Remember that.
At the double doors, halfway down the walkway, the silence was broken by a drip of rain into the puddle that had formed in front of the sill. The water rippled like a softly broken mirror as Deckard stepped into its center and pushed one of the doors all the way open. Flickering candlelight brushed against his face as he gazed across the high-ceilinged room within.
Toys; he remembered them from that time when he had tracked Pris and the replicant Batty to this spot. There had been a pocket universe for Sebastian even then, a little world that he had created for himself, and this place was it. His refuge, a child's refuge, from the hurtful, bustling world of grown-ups, everybody bigger than him, everybody who wasn't dying from a galloping progeria, the accelerated decrepitude that had turned him into a wrinkled, fading nonadult. L.A. wasn't a city for children; no wonder Sebastian had been dying in it. If he hadn't built this hiding place for himself, his small corpse would have been trampled in the streets.
Past the candles guttering in their branched silver settings, Deckard saw torn, gauzy curtains drifting in an unfelt breeze, their ragged ends trailing across the nearest mannequins and stuffed animals. Whatever contents of Sebastian's head hadn't spilled out to reenvision the L.A. street and the decaying building were exposed here, like some soft, babyish army. Glass eyes stared at nothing or were reflected in gilt mirrors with ornate frames, the inert photo-receptors switched off or robbed of batteries. When Pris, on the run with the escaped replicants she had thought she was one of, had disguised herself as one of Sebastian's mechanical creations, a leotarded bridal doll with a veil draped over her strawlike hair, she had finally achieved the nonhuman apotheosis her cracked brain had been seeking all along. To be a thing, a killing thing or a loved one; it didn't matter.
One of the mannequins stirred, fat clown of ambiguous gender; it croaked out a woman's laugh as the rubbery wattled neck shook, white-painted face tilting back. Stubby fingers pawed the air like pale anemones brought up from ocean shallows.
Deckard halted in the center of the room, forcing his breath to a measured pace, pushing back an emergent claustrophobia. The place would've seemed uncomfortably close, crammed with too much junk-disassembled tube radios and thrift shop antiques and patzer chess pieces, all the hobby collectibles of a perpetually dying, too-clever child-even if there hadn't been unpleasant memories filling up the unoccupied areas. He'd come close to getting killed here, twice in rapid successio
n, first by crazy Pris, then by the even loonier replicant Batty; the human original he'd met up with later, the one whose cerebral contents were stored in the talking briefcase, had been a piece of cake by comparison.
His fingers ached, not just for the want of a soothing gun-not that the real weapon had been much use here, the real here-but from old wounds; the replicant Batty had broken fingers as easily as snapping twigs. The fingers had healed badly, aching when provoked by shifts in weather or the pressure of memory.
The laughing clown's barking noise suddenly shrilled up another octave, the rubber hands jerking even more spasmodically above the fright-wigged head. Deckard stepped away from the device, watching as a shudder of ill-meshed gearing ran through its frame. The clown suddenly froze, the garish face paralyzed in a rictus of manic hilarity; the room's silence congealed once more as a wisp of black, burntrubber smoke trailed out of the parted mouth.
Another face appeared, popping up from behind the stricken clown. "Oh ... hi." The black cloth covering the device's workings was draped over Sebastian's shoulders; his moist-eyed gaze, still set in the wrinkled flesh of his aging disease, blinked at Deckard. "I didn't hear you come in. I was busy working on this old thing, trying to get it running again." He laid a wrinkled, protective hand on the clown's shoulder. "It's a real keeper; used to be in an old amusement park and stuff."
"No, it didn't." Deckard shook his head. "It's not even real. Nothing here is."
"Well ... yes and no." Grease marked Sebastian's hands; he rubbed them against his trousers. "Real in the what's-it, uh, Platonic sense." With an extended forefinger, he poked at one of the clown's eyes, getting its line of vision to match the other. "This is the idea of the physical manifestation, of what came from the amusement park. Ideas are real things, too." Sebastian's voice went on the defensive. "Just as much as all that stuff . . . you know . . . out there." He nodded toward the room's high, arched window, but it was clear that he meant someplace farther away than the visible street. "Where you just came from."
