Replicant Night

by K. W. Jeter

  Deckard regarded the other man. "What do you know about the data in the briefcase?"

  "Not much. Just that it's important that the insurgents get it. If they're going to have a chance of winning and being free and all. Or even being allowed to live."

  "The U.N. would wipe them out? Exterminate them?"

  Sebastian nodded vigorously. "You bet. In a second, if they could. And they might be able to-things really aren't going that well for the insurgents. At least, that's what I picked up from the rep-symps. So there's a lot at stake in getting you to carry that briefcase out to the replicants. In some ways. He let go of Deckard's arm at the same time his voice dropped. "There's a lot more at stake than just the fate of the replicants out in the colonies and their rebellion. That's just . . . just the least little bit of it!" A fervent gleam appeared in Sebastian's eyes. "It's not just the replicants; it's humans it's everybody..."

  The sudden intensity of the other's voice pushed Deckard back. "What're you talking about?"

  "They told me you weren't supposed to know..." Sebastian squeezed his pale hands together. "I wasn't supposed to tell you..."

  "About what?"

  "I promised them I wouldn't tell ... but..." The little man was growing more visibly agitated by the second. "Like I said, I owe you one. I owe you everything..." Sebastian's voice suddenly began to grow fainter and fainter. "It's like this. The stuff the rep-symps didn't want me to tell you-it's all about the difference between humans and replicants. If there is any-remember what Dr. Tyrell used to say?" The voice had diminished to the level of a whisper. "The Tyrell Corporation motto? 'More human than human.' He didn't know how true that was..."

  "Hey-what're you doing?" Deckard had leaned closer to the other man, trying to hear the words being spoken. "Sebastian-" He realized that he could see through the other's image; the details of the scattered toys and dolls, even the cracked plaster of the far wall, had begun to show. Layers of transparency: each object, Sebastian object, seemed to be turning to clouded glass, or mist contained in the outlines of what had been solid. "You're fading out on me-"

  "Huh?" Sebastian's gaze refocussed as he pulled himself from his monologue. His partial image looked as though he was shouting, but the sound that emerged was barely audible. "Mr. Decker-where are you going? You can't go now-"

  Deckard reached for the other's arm, as though he could drag Sebastian back into perceived reality. His fist closed on nothing. Sebastian's image wavered and grew fainter.

  "It's not me, Mr. Decker-it's you!" Sebastian's faraway voice became more frantic. "The stuff you took, that activated colloidal suspension stuff-it's wearing off. It's going out of your system; you're not here anymore-"

  "Goddamn-" A wave of vertigo rolled over him. The indistinct walls and ceiling had exchanged places.

  From somewhere above him, Sebastian's voice called out. "Wait! There's still things I gotta tell you!" The ghostly form grabbed an object from the table and hurriedly thrust it toward Deckard's hands. "Here-take this-"

  A small metal box; it felt light and hollow, but real, against Deckard's palms as the rest of Sebastian's pocket universe lost its substance. He suddenly found himself toppling backward, balance lost as the floor beneath him thinned out of existence.

  Distance and direction vanished with all the other aspects of that world. He fell into the rapidly enfolding dark.

  13

  "Miss Tyrell! Over here!" A voice came out of the darkness, the words barely distinguishable against the howl of the wind and the lashing of the rain. "We're coming-"

  The water, salt of the Flow mixed with ice crystals driven from the dark roil of clouds above, stung beneath Sarah's eyelids. She shielded her face with one hand, holding on to the edge of the shaft's doorway with the other. The triangular structure bucked on the surface of the water, storm waves lifting and dropping the platform beneath her feet. The shaft itself, leading down to the Salander 3, strained with the violent motion as though it might snap free, like a rope stretched to its breaking point. All the way up from the sea-buried ship, as the tiny elevator had carried her toward light and air, she had wondered if that would happen. If it does, she had told herself, I'll drown like a bug in a soda straw.

  That some kind of atmospheric turbulence was pounding Scapa Flow had been no surprise to her. The clouds had been gathering, growing more ominous and heavy-laden, when she had first stepped onto the Orkney mainland, in sight of the old stone cathedral stuffed with its bogus monitoring equipment. And if the storm's fury had been unleashed while she was locked away in a little bubble of stilled time, that made sense as well. Given what Sarah had witnessed, the things she had seen, the past made visible and tangible-given all that, it would have been little wonder to her if this world's sun and moon had crashed together, with wormwood and the stars tumbling into the ocean like hot coals.

  "Just hold on!" The call came from the boat careening on the Flow's dark, churning surface. She could just barely make out the silhouette of Wycliffe standing braced at the prow, while Zwingli behind him manned the oars. "We'll be there in a second!" A wave mounting as high as Wycliffe's chest slammed into the boat, nearly toppling him overboard. Zwingli's frantic rowing clawed helplessly at the raucous water.

  Just my luck, thought Sarah; the phrase had become the obvious refrain to the events around her. I would've been safer back down below. She knew that wasn't strictly true; as it was, she had barely escaped from the Salander 3 with her sanity intact. There was no way she wanted to see those things again; once had been more than enough.

  The foam-crested waves struck the platform, a hammer seemingly more solid than liquid. Her fingers gripped tighter to the doorway as the impact tore at her, then passed, the shaft's tension snapping it down into the trough that came after.

  "Here! Catch this!" Wycliffe had mounted into the boat's prow again, a heavy rope coiled around his arm, one end of the rope fastened near Zwingli. He managed to synchronize his throw with the Flow's swell; a knot and ioop sailed through the rain.

  Sarah took one hand away from the shaft's entrance; her hand missed the rope, but she pinned it against her side with her arm. It slithered like a coarse, wet snake, but she hung on to it, gripping and maintaining her balance as the platform rolled and tilted beneath her. She looped the rope over the projection of the doorway's broad hinge, just above her shoulder, then used her weight to draw the line taut to the boat.

  "That's it-" A crevice had opened up in the storm clouds overhead, enough to let a thin sliver of moonlight onto Wycliffe's face. Rain coursed across his brow and eye sockets, then into his open mouth as his chest labored with the unfamiliar exertion. His fanatic loyalty to the Tyrell Corporation and its human emblem was all that kept him standing in the small boat, his hands tugging at the rope. Behind him, Zwingli had pulled the oars alongside himself, turning where he knelt and grasping his partner around the waist, securing him against the next wave to hit.

  The boat swung around and hit the edge of the platform broadside. Wycliffe leaned down and forward, catching the raised metal lip with his fingers, straining to hold the boat tight against the force of the water drawing it back. "Miss Tyrell-" His drenched face looked up at her. "You must-" The words came out as gasps. "Jump-"

  She let go of the rope, getting to her knees and then half falling, half scrambling into the boat. A smaller wave tilted it; her back struck the other side, sending a quick stab of pain up her spine.

  "Are you all right?" Zwingli had grabbed her forearm and pulled her next to him.

  Sarah nodded. "I'm fine." She pushed her sodden hair away from her face. "Let's go-"

  "Wait a minute-" Kneeling at the prow, Wycliffe still grasped the rope in one hand; the knot at the far end had snagged against the hinge of the shaft's doorway. "There's somebody else there. Look!"

  A glance over her shoulder, and through the sheets of rain Sarah was able to make out the small figure standing just inside the entrance to the shaft, clinging to the edge. The little girl's f
ace was filled with both awe and terror at her glimpse of the outside world's unlimited size and violence.

  "Who's that?" Wycliffe looked back at Sarah. "Who came up with you?"

  "Wait a minute." She turned her gaze from the child to the man at the boat's prow. "What are you talking about? Are you trying to tell me . . . that you see her, too?"

  "Right there." A puzzled expression crossed Wycliffe's face before he pointed to the doorway. "Of course I see her; she's right there."

  "So do I," piped up Zwingli. He leaned forward, from where he crouched beside Sarah. "I can see her. Who is she?"

  Sarah laughed, head thrown back, throat exposed to the rain. Even after all that had happened down in the Salander 3, the things she had seen both before and after her father's murderous apparition had shown itself to her, it still struck that this was a weird place to be having a conversation like this. Stuck out on a boat, she thought, in the middle of a storm that's going to drown us all. And these two idiots want to debate the existence of an unreal thing, a total hallucination. The laugh died when another realization struck her; she gazed slit-eyed at the man beside her, then at the other one. She wondered what they were trying to pull, what scheme was being forwarded by their claim of seeing the little girl. She's my hallucination-they had no claim on the child.

  "All right; that's it." Sarah made a cutoff gesture with one hand. "I've really had enough of this." The boat pitched in the water, rising to the crest of another wave and dropping again, banging against the edge of the platform. She had to raise her voice even louder to make her words audible against the rush of the wind. "I don't know if this is part of some little plan of yours, or what. But I'm not in the mood for it. You want to claim that you see a little girl there, fine; go ahead. But you're not convincing me that you see her. Because I know she's not real-"

  "But, Miss Tyrell Wycliffe gestured toward the shaft's doorway. "She's right there!"

  She looked where he pointed and saw the Rachael child, just as she had known she would. The child's image-and the sound of her breathing, even the scent of her dark hair, everything that worked to make the hallucination seem real-had come up with Sarah from the Salander 3, all the way along the storm-buffeted shaft to the surface of Scapa Flow. The child had said nothing, but had gazed up at Sarah with her big and sad dark eyes, seemingly aware that some change was coming in her existence. Or nonexistence, as Sarah had had to remind herself. Whatever part of her subconscious was responsible, in league with the influx of material from the ship's bottled-up past, it was certainly doing a thorough job. The illusory child hadn't remained as Sarah had perceived her down below, but had taken on the aspect of being caught out in a gale from the North Atlantic: her clothes, soaked through, clung to her small body as her wet hair tangled across her brow, the braid even heavier and darker against her neck. The water that had trickled down her legs and from her ankles had collected in a pool around her feet, shimmered by the gusts of wind.

  "Look. Just drop it, all right?" Sarah spoke fiercely, drawing her arms tight around her body. "I'm cold and wet and tired. And believe me, I've seen enough of things that don't exist. Including this little girl-which you can't see, unless you're as crazy as I am. All right? So let's get back to shore. Immediately."

  "We're not going to leave her here." An obstinate expression formed on Wycliffe's face. "We can't."

  "I'm ordering you to. How's that?" Sarah shook her head in exasperation. "We can play whatever games you want to later on."

  Wycliffe made no reply. The waves had slackened a bit, enough for him to loosen one hand's grip on the platform's edge and extend it toward the image of the little girl. "Come on," he said to the nonexistent child. "I've got you..."

  A few seconds later, the apparition who called herself Rachael was in the boat, next to Sarah. A few feet away, Wycliffe stationed himself in the prow, watching as the wind and rain whipped into his face, as though he was concerned that Sarah might do some impossible harm to the child. The boat moved away from the triangular platform as Zwingli applied himself to the oars.

  "Some loyalists," she said darkly. "I thought you were supposed to do what I told you to. Both of you."

  "I'm sure that..." Wycliffe shrugged uncomfortably. "That you'll agree that this was the right thing to do. When you've had a chance to reconsider."

  "I doubt it." Beside her, the Rachael child pressed closer, trying to get warm; she tucked Sarah's hand into both of hers, snuggling into the woman's ribs. "Well. I hope you're satisfied." Sarah looked down at the image. The child ignored the acid comment, rubbing the side of her face against Sarah's sleeve. "You're not even really here, and you pulled this one off."

  Once ashore, Wycliffe and Zwingli skipped the cathedral, even though it was closer. With the rain lashing at their backs, they led Sarah and the Rachael child back to the shadow corporation's interplanetary yacht. The breaks in the storm clouds let the stars' cold light through, enough to pick out the rocky edges of the trail. Ahead of them, the running lights and docking signals of the yacht glinted and blinked in sequence along the ovoid shape's circumference.

  Thank God, thought Sarah as the gangway irised open. All she wanted now was another shower and a change of clothes. She had glanced down at herself as she and the others had trudged away from the little boat pulled up on the Flow's pebbly shore. The palms of her hands were still stained with blood from when she had tripped and fallen, running from all that she had seen and feared inside the Salander 3; the rain hadn't managed to wash it away. Nor had it taken the blood from the patch along one leg or the side where she had landed hard against her rib cage; there had been so much blood inside the ship that it had seemed to imbed itself in every fabric of her being, like the canned and recirculated air drawn into her lungs.

  A half hour later, Sarah found herself wondering how many of the black undertaker suits Wycliffe and Zwingli had aboard the shadow corporation craft. While she had been in the master suite's facilities, looking down through billows of gratefully received steam at the trickles of red sluicing off her body, thinning pink as they ran down the drain near her bare feet, the two men had managed to transform themselves back into the muted-and dry-personae in which she had first seen them. With the thick bathrobe pulled around herself, the Tyrell Corporation logo monogrammed over her breast, she sat down in the ship's central lounge, taking the largest and plushest of the chairs available. The two men had remained standing-she wondered how long they had been waiting for her to reappear-but one other figure was already there, sitting with her legs tucked up under her in one of the lesser wing chairs. With large grave eyes, the image of the little girl watched and waited.

  "You're still here?" Sarah had extracted a cigarette from the enameled case on the nearest small table. She lit the cigarette, inhaled, then let the grey smoke be carried away by the yacht's ventilation, so much quieter and unobtrusive than the ancient system she'd encountered at the bottom of Scapa Flow. "I thought-well, perhaps I hoped-that you'd have gone away by now." The hot shower, taking away the chill that the storm winds had driven into her bones, had seemed so therapeutic that a diminishing of hallucinations had not seemed entirely unlikely. "You know ... this could become quite tiresome. You're not really needed anymore."

  "I'm not going away." The little girl's face darkened with her stubborn defiance. "And you can't make me."

  "We'll see about that." Sarah regarded the glowing tip of the cigarette. "There are ways. These things can always be accomplished. One way or another." She'd have to look into it-when there was time. Or if. A fatalistic calm had settled over her, part fatigue, part resigned acknowledgment of the meshing of the universe's gears. "Even if, say, psychotherapy didn't work. Drugs might. Or surgery, perhaps." She nodded slowly, as though contemplating the possibility. Though it was technically easier to get material in and out of the brains of replicants-the whole system of control through implantation of false memories was a Tyrell Corporation development-it could be done, to a limited degree, with hum
ans as well. Sarah imagined that a sufficiently skilled neurosurgeon could root around inside her skull with his microscalpels and tiny electrified probes and root out whatever lump of grey matter contained the little girl's image.

  Or there might be even simpler ways. The ultimate sur gery: "I could just kill myself." Sarah enunciated the words clearly, with no hesitation attached to them. She had considered the option enough times to render it free of pain. "Then you would disappear, wouldn't you? If I blew a hole in the side of my head, you could just flutter out and be gone."

  "Miss Tyrell ... for heaven's sake." Wycliffe had turned pale. "Don't say things like that."

  "Why? Will it blow up the franchise or something?" When all else had failed, there was still some sadistic pleasure to be gotten out of needling the die-hard loyalists. "I nearly forgot. Without me, your chances of resurrecting the Tyrell Corporation are just about zero. A suicide would ball up your plans, wouldn't it? All this work for nothing."

  "It's more than that," insisted Wycliffe. "There's a certain matter of ... personal loyalty."

  "He's right." Zwingli added his voice to the statement. "Since there really is no difference between you and the corporation. That makes it sort of a liege-vassal relationship."