Replicant Night

by K. W. Jeter

  "You're the one who's not real." The child's mood had quickly changed to sullen. "I never saw you before. I've been here a long, long time, all by myself. Then you show up and you start saying awful things." She glared darkly at Sarah. "Where did you come from anyhow?"

  "From far, far away." One of Sarah's hands made a vague gesture toward the ship's walls and everything that lay beyond. "From someplace where there's light and time and all sorts of useful things."

  "No..." The girl studied Sarah, then reached out and grabbed her hand, more roughly than she had taken it before. She peered intently at Sarah's palm, the veins and sinews of her wrist. The girl shook her head, the braid brushing against her shoulders. "You came from here." She sounded puzzled. "I can tell. You're made of the same stuff. As me." The sharp gaze moved up to Sarah's face. "But you weren't here before. I don't get it."

  She's right, mused Sarah. I am from here. This had been where she had been born, though then it had been out among the stars instead of at the bottom of Scapa Flow. Not that it makes any difference-Sarah looked around at the stacked crates and the silvery walls behind them. The ventilation's breeze carried scrubbed and filtered molecules to her lungs, the same canned air she had been born breathing. Like coming home, she thought.

  "Maybe that's what I should do." Sarah spoke aloud, almost forgetting the other perceived presence standing next to her. "I should just forget about all that other stuff-"

  "What other stuff?" The child had noticed the drift of attention, and tugged on Sarah's hand.

  "Everything else. Up there." She gestured with a toss of her head. "Out in that other world, the one you don't know anything about." How could she? Sarah reminded herself. She doesn't even exist. "Perhaps it'd be a good idea to just forget about that world."

  "You made it sound kind of nice." Puzzled again, the girl stared at her. "Light and stuff. It's dark a lot here."

  "It's dark a lot up there, too." Sarah couldn't keep a trace of bitterness from filtering into her voice. "Believe me; I'd know." A long hallway lined with doors ran down the length of her memories to that vanishing point beyond which it was useless to go. She kept all the doors carefully locked, though she knew exactly what was behind each one of them. And sometimes the locks didn't work, and the doors opened, whether she wanted them to or not. "And ... you've got enough here. To see your way." She wondered whether the Salander 3's batteries would ever run down, or whether the ship was sufficiently mired in time that the lights would stay on forever, whether the ventilation system would go on sighing through the corridors. Maybe not; there were probably some laws of physics that would be contravened thereby. She didn't care; she wouldn't even mind living in the dark down here, breathing whatever stale air remained, over and over again. Perhaps this was what she had been looking for, why she had let Wycliffe and Zwingli convince her to come down here. A return to the womb . . . or to the grave. She didn't care which. "You've got plenty," she whispered, eyes closed. "More than enough of what you need..."

  "Well ... I don't want to stay here." The voice of the little girl made a sour announcement. "It sucks."

  "Why do you say that?" Sarah opened her eyes. "Wouldn't you like to stay here forever? As long as I did, too?" She tried to give the child a friendly smile. "We could have little tea parties, just the two of us. And we could sleep in the same bed, if you wanted. All warm." The ocean could cradle them to their dreams, supposed Sarah. If there were any need for dreams in a place like this. "Wouldn't that be nice?"

  "No." The little girl scowled, face darkening as though the shadows had crept out from behind the boxes on either side. "It's creepy and scary down here. I've been scared the whole time I can remember. Which is always."

  "Why? What's to be scared of?"

  "There's others down here." The Rachael child's voice dropped to a whisper. "Others who aren't nice."

  "I thought you were the only one-until I came here." The way the little girl spoke had raised chill, prickling flesh on Sarah's arms. "That's why you were so lonely."

  "You sure don't know very much." The brooding, apprehensive look hadn't vanished from the girl's face. "Don't you know? That you can be alone even when there's other things around you?"

  The emphasized word made Sarah wonder. She had said things, not people-what did that mean?

  "Look. I don't need to be lectured by some piece of my own subconscious. Especially about the nature of being alone-"

  "Shh! Be quiet!" The Rachael child grabbed Sarah's arm with both hands, squeezing tight. "There they are! Don't you hear them?"

  "Who? What?" The child's evident terror jolted Sarah's spine rigid. She looked over her shoulder, in the direction from which she and the Rachael child had come. "I don't-"

  Then she did. The sounds of footsteps, not the little girl's, as she heard when she had first entered the ship. But louder and heavier, echoing from the distance and down the Salander 3's metal corridors; what she would have thought to be a man's, except for the slowly ominous pace, as though lumbering under some heavy and unnatural burden.

  The child had pressed herself against Sarah, arms wrapped around her waist and hugging tight. Sarah grasped the thin shoulders and drew her even closer, as much for her own comfort as the child's. "Who is it?" She managed to pull her gaze away from the dark recesses of the corridor and down to the little girl. "Who's coming here?"

  "We better go. Come on-" The Rachael child had peeled herself away and was now tugging at Sarah's hand.

  "Wait-" The footsteps had grown louder. If that was what they were: the noises had turned to impacts upon the ship's metal decking sufficient to tremble the walls, the stacked boxes and crates shifting with each blow. Even the lights ifickered, as though the hidden wiring were being jostled loose from its connections; her shadow and the child's jittered nervously, as ancient dust sifted down from the joints between the overhead panels. "I have to see."

  "No! You don't want to!" The illusion's tugging hand became more insistent, pulling Sarah back a few steps. "Come on."

  It's nothing, she told herself. It can't be anything at all. Her own voice, strident inside her head, insisted upon that. Whatever was in the darkness at the other end of the corridor was nothing, a ghost or hallucination, a cobbled-together fragment of the dead past, as insubstantial as the image of the little girl yanking at her hand. What was there to be afraid of? This is what I came down here to find out, she told herself, her voice shouting above both the thunderous footsteps and the trembling of the blood in her veins. All the pleasant notions of childlike tea parties, of curling asleep and dreamless beneath the ocean waves, had vanished, scoured clear by the rush of adrenaline through her body.

  "Let's go!" screamed the child.

  Sarah angrily jerked her hand free from the image's grasp. "Go on, then!" Her shout tightened the cords in her throat. "Get out of here-I don't care. You want to leave, go ahead-you're not even real!"

  Tears coursed down from the girl's dark eyes. "I won't go without you..." The voice, the audible hallucination, could barely be heard against the other, greater one pounding through the Salander 3's corridors. It sounded now as if some unseen force was driving a sledgehammer into the walls, the metal deforming and shimmering from the distant and approaching violence. "I found you!" howled the Rachael child. "You were lost and I found you! I'm not going to let you go-"

  Face reddened with weeping, the child tried to grab Sarah's hand again. Sarah snatched it back, raising the hand almost to shoulder height, as though she were about to slap the image and drive it away from her. "Go away! I don't need you! Don't you understand? You don't exist-"

  The child had cowered away from the undelivered blow, her own arm brought up to her face to protect herself. She lost her balance as another impact, louder and more violent than all the ones before, shuddered through the space, rippling the floor beneath them. The child's image landed on its side, skidding a few feet before its neck and one shoulder twisted against the nearest stack of boxes. The back of the Rachael
child's head snapped against the container, hard enough to daze her, her eyelids fluttering at the point of losing consciousness.

  Sarah came close to falling, staying upright only by catching and bracing herself against the wall. The vibration of another impact travelled through her flesh and into the center of her bones. For a moment, the thought came to her that the Salander 3 might be shaken apart, seams tearing loose from one another, letting the Flow's icy waters come pouring in. Even if she could make her way back to where she'd entered the ship, it might do no good; a picture flashed through her mind of the shaft from the water's surface having been snapped loose from the sunken hull, drifting out of her reach. Wycliffe and Zwingli, bobbing around in their little boat, would look at each other through their square-rimmed glasses and know that something had gone wrong...

  Silence, broken only by her own panting and the softer breath of the Rachael child, filled the corridor. Sarah's stilled heartbeat was useless as a chronometer of perceived time; seconds or minutes, measured by the outside world, could have crawled by as she watched for whatever approached in the darkness before her.

  Something touched her, though not her skin; she sensed the presence rather than felt it. Sarah looked down and saw that the flooring on which she stood had changed, become glistening and wet. She saw her face in a red mirror, a thin film of blood that had seeped out of the dark, a soft, inexorable tide that mired around her shoes. Nausea welled inside her as she stepped back from the pool, leaving two red footprints that the larger redness swallowed, one after another.

  When another footstep sounded, just marring the corridor's breathing silence, Sarah looked up. A hand, clenched into a white-knuckled fist, left its shadow on the glistening floor. A man's fist, scarred and cut, as though breaking glass had chewed raw the skin over the bones. The small wounds oozed red, trickling one drop after another, or the same one over and over, that fell and broke the pooled blood into a rippled shimmer. Sarah's reflection shattered and recoalesced, as though there were no escape for it, either.

  The fist struck the wall across from Sarah, hard enough to dent the metal around it, straining the welds on all four sides of the panel. But she heard nothing; the impact took place in silence, the air seemingly unable to carry any more shock waves to her ears. Or else-the random thought tumbled inside her skull-my hallucinations have a limit. They know how much I can take.

  That limit, if there was one, shattered when the man's image stepped forward from the darkness into the light. His face was still shadowed, as boots that were already bloodied up to the knees stepped into the thin puddle that reached to the point where Sarah had retreated.

  She looked up into the man's face. Saw him, and recognized him from the overlapping layers of her own memory, at its farthest recesses, and from images that weren't memory but things on paper, scraps of the long-buried past. Sarah looked into the image's eyes and saw her mirror reflection there, two bright points locked in darkness into which the flickering glow of the ship's overhead panels could never extend; the reflections held fast, not scattering into fragments the way her face in the pool of blood had gone.

  Taking another slow step backward, Sarah watched as the man stepped forward, as though his motion was locked to hers, inseparable. Her gaze was held as well; from both his face, that she saw even clearer now that he had come full underneath the overhead panel's radiance, and her own doubled image. He took his fist away from the wall, its imprint left beneath a smear of red. Something as bright and wet glistened on his face. She saw now the stripes of blood and torn flesh, three vertical, parallel rows on each side, just below his eyes; the wounds might have been from someone else's nails, someone struggling futilely against the figure's advance and the closing of his hands upon a throat and the breath within.

  For a moment, the man's brow creased, a flicker of puzzlement passing across his sight. His upraised fist opened, the fingers pulling from the blood at the center of his palm. "Who are you?" His voice was a harsh, grating sound, a part of him that had become unused to speech. "You can't be... you're already dead. I already took care of you..."

  You're the one that's dead-Sarah wanted to shout out the words, but her own voice wouldn't move. She backed away from the figure-the man seemed to tower above her, his black hair scraping against the light panels so that he had to lower his head to the level of his shoulders to come any nearer.

  Her heel caught on something behind her; she was barely able to keep from falling. Her hand caught on one of the stacked boxes as she looked over her shoulder. The Rachael child lay on the corridor's flooring, back partway raised against one of the bottom crates. Her eyes drifted open, looking first up at Sarah, then widening in terror as she caught sight of the figure looming at the other end of the narrow space.

  Sarah's own will broke; the figure had come close enough that his red hand had started to reach for her, broad fingertips inches from the tangle of hair that had come loose and fallen across her neck. The face that looked back at her from the dark mirrors of his eyes had paled with the same fear that had wrapped around the child cringing behind her. If the image wasn't real, it was real enough. Enough to kill, the voice inside Sarah whispered.

  She turned to run, to escape from the space's narrowing confines, to get anywhere that blood, hallucinated or real, was not seeping tidelike toward her feet. Another hand caught hers; the child had reached up and caught hold, clinging to Sarah's wrist.

  The child wasn't real, either; she knew that. But she didn't shake the illusory grasp from herself. She swiftly knelt down and gathered the child under the arms, pulling her upright. With her own arm pressing the small form tightly against her side, Sarah hurried for the doorway at the opposite end of the corridor, away from the man standing in the middle of the expanding pool of blood.

  A glance over her shoulder; Sarah glimpsed the red hand closing on nothing, on the empty space where she had been standing. She had recognized the face, though she had seen it before only when she had been an infant; she had brought it back from that past almost beyond memory, and from the old photographs in the Tyrell Corporation's archives-

  The face was that of her father. The features darkened with rage, as red and trembling as the image's clenched fist.

  Pushing the child in front of herself, Sarah ran into the darkness, toward any dark but the one in which she had seen her own face reflected.

  12

  "Anything's possible." Deckard shrugged, feeling uncomfortable. The other man-or whatever Sebastian was now- had figured it out, at least partway, but there was no need to confirm his suspicions. If Sebastian's beloved Pris had been replicant or human, what did it matter? "I've been fooled by things. And people. I thought they were one way, and they turned out to be something else. It happens."

  "I suppose so." Sebastian made a few more tinkering adjustments to the clown's gears. "You're probably right," he said, nodding slowly. "You've got more experience along those lines than I do. 'Cause of your being a cop, a blade runner, and everything. That's your job, isn't it? To go around and find things that are pretending to be one way-like human-and they're really just replicants. And then you-what was the word?-you eliminate 'em or something."

  "Retire." Deckard glanced over his shoulder at the teddy bear and toy soldier, who were still huddling sullenly in the corner. "I don't do that anymore."

  "But still ... it must've done things to your head. Changed it. Permanently. So that's how you see things. Nothing is what it seems to be. Everything's lying." Sebastian's voice turned bitter. "Everyone..."

  "Maybe so. But that's my problem. Doesn't have to be yours."

  "Sure." Bitterness shifted to self-laceration. "I could just go on being a fool. An idiot. That's what everybody thinks of me anyway. Even the rep-symps, when they put me in this place. They just figured I could do a job for them. Same as when I was working for Dr. Tyrell. You just do what you're told, and maybe they'll let you alone for a little while. With your silly little toys and slit."

 
"Take it easy," said Deckard. He'd seen processes like this before. The small man, or the image or perceptual incarnation or whatever he'd become, was undergoing a complete collapse. Which didn't fit into his own plans. "It's not that bad-"

  "Yeah, that's easy for you to say. You don't care." Sebastian gave him a venomous look. "You're trained not to, aren't you? Like all cops. That's just the world you live in. Not that this one's any different." He pulled out the screwdriver and tucked it back into his coveralls. His eyes had become rimmed with red, as though blood were leaking into the perpetual tears. Letting the black cloth drape over the clown mannequin's workings again, Sebastian ifipped some hidden switch. The device came to pseudo-life again, the head tilting back and the pudgy arms rising.

  The clown's high-pitched mechanical laugh grated on Deckard's nerves. "Shut that thing off."

  "Why? Is it bothering you, Mr. Decker?" A vindictive gleam showed in Sebastian's glare. "But you've got ways of taking care of things that you don't like. Why don't you just blow it away, like you used to? Oops, sorry; I forgot. You don't have your gun with you-I didn't give you one when you showed up here. Well, it's too late now." Sebastian's voice had risen in pitch, competing with the noise from the mannequin shaking back and forth with its own laughter. "Maybe you can toss it out the window-that should do it, I imagine. Or you can tear it apart with your bare hands. You'd like that, wouldn't you?"

  From the corner of his eye, Deckard saw other motion in the room. The clown's laughter, growing louder and more abrasive, seemed to have set off the rest of Sebastian's collection of toys. Things haltingly stirred to life, a ballerina with empty eye sockets elevating itself en pointe, a sawn-off commedia dell'arte Punchinello grinning with malice and shaking a bell-cuffed fist at unseen enemies. The ornate howdah on the back of a miniature elephant collided with the chessboard's corner, scattering the white and black pieces across the floor. In an ornate Victorian birdcage, a mechanical nightingale trilled, its wire-and-silk feathers moulting onto layers of age-yellowed antimacassars and cracked circuit boards.