by K. W. Jeter
"It didn't sound like that out there on the Flow." Sarah nodded toward one of the viewports, through which the storm-lashed waters could be seen. "You weren't exactly taking orders from me when I told you to leave behind this .
She gestured in the direction of Rachael. "Child ... apparition, or whatever... that you claim to see."
"I'm not," announced Rachael sullenly, "an apparition. I know what that word means."
"Miss Tyrell. If it would do any good-" Wycliffe sounded desperate. "We'd be happy to pretend we don't see any child sitting here with us. You could order us to do that."
"What child?" asked Zwingli helpfully. He watched Sarah for an approving reaction.
"But it really wouldn't change anything." Hands spread apart, Wycliffe hunched up his shoulders. "We'd still see her. And since she did come with you out of the Salander 3, it's vitally important that we get whatever information we can from her. Whether she's an apparition or not."
"You people must be crazy." The Rachael child turned a withering look on all of them. Sitting back in the wing chair, she folded her arms across her chest. "An apparition is something that doesn't exist. The nanny told me all about it. Because there were plenty of apparitions down there. I was told to be very careful about them. Because even if they don't exist, they can still hurt you."
"Truer words," said Sarah dryly, "were never spoken." She flicked grey ash onto the lounge's carpet. "Though in this case, I'm not much worried."
"Perhaps we could settle this later." Wycliffe looked both fretful and conciliatory. "When you're not quite so worn out from your efforts, Miss Tyrell-"
"You mean, when I'm not feeling cranky. About you two claiming you can see my hallucinations." She was still wondering-or worse, coming to conclusions-about what they were trying to accomplish with that bit.
"Whatever. But there really is some time pressure here, Miss Tyrell. We'd like to debrief you about what you encountered down in the Salander 3 while the memories are still fresh-"
She laughed, holding the half-drawn cigarette off to one side. "They're not exactly the kind that fade. Believe me."
"Every detail," persisted Wycliffe, "might be important. If the Tyrell Corporation is to be brought back to what it was before. We need to know."
"Sometimes ... I think I must be working for you. Instead of the other way around."
Wycliffe stiffened to his full funereal height. "We are all in the service of the Tyrell Corporation."
"Really." She smiled as she regarded him. Pompous twit- though she supposed it was ever thus with religious fanatics. No sense of humor at all. A good thing for him that he hadn't been the one to enter the scuttled Salander 3. He wouldn't have made it back out alive, or with even as much sanity as she'd retained intact. Because that moment had come, while she had been down there, with all the mass of the ocean on top of her and the even more crushing and airless weight of the past sealed around, that it had seemed at last like a joke, a hard and cruel one, but a joke nevertheless. That she had gone all that way, a complete round-trip to the place and frozen time of her infancy, just so the one who would have killed her so long ago could have another chance at her...
It must've seemed so very accommodating of me, thought Sarah. She breathed out smoke, tilting her head back and watching the insubstantial, disappearing shape it made. All the murderous ghosts of the past; if they dreamed, it would have to be of death. They couldn't die themselves, not while the past endured unbroken, sealed tight within its bottle, away from the real world and real time. But as the little girl had said: Even if they don't exist, they can still hurt you.
"Miss Tyrell?" Wycliffe's voice poked at the edge of her awareness.
She brought herself the rest of the way back from the Salander 3's world, the replica of it inside her head. "Very well." Sarah ground out the cigarette stub in the green-veined malachite bowl beside her. "What do you want to know?" A smile below half-lidded eyes, directed in turn at Zwingli and Wycliffe. "What do you want me to tell you?"
"You don't have to tell us anything other than the truth." Wycliffe appeared as if he had won some obscure debating point. "What you saw. What happened to you. Everything that happened down there."
Kill them all, thought Sarah. Her eyelids went all the way closed. And let God sort them out.
She heard the child's voice, piping up: "There were bad things. The ones that're always there. That's what she saw."
"Yes," said Sarah, nodding. She opened her eyes and gazed at the two men watching her. "That's what I saw. The things that are always there." Her thin smile became laughter that she couldn't help from tearing her throat. "Excuse me. But it's really very funny."
"Are you all right?" Zwingli spoke, sounding genuinely concerned. "Can I get you something?"
"No, no; it's all right." Sarah gestured with one hand. "It just struck me that I solved the mystery..."
"Mystery?" From inside his jacket, Wycliffe had taken out a small notepad. He glanced up from the few words he had scribbled. "What mystery is that?"
"Is there more than one?" She brushed a tear away from the corner of her eye. "The cat, of course. I found out what happened to the cat."
"Cat?" The stylus remained poised on the notes.
"The one that my parents took with them. The official pet of the Salander 3 expedition. You must've seen it, in the old news photos, in the company files. A big, fluffy marmalade cat."
"Ginjer," said the image of the little girl, sitting forward in the wing chair. "That's what it's name was. That was what my mother called it. The nanny told me so."
"Miss Tyrell ... when I said that everything could be important, I might have misspoken." Wycliffe tapped the stylus on the notepad. "The cat-and yes, I do remember seeing it in the old photos-that actually might not be critical to our mission. If the cat is alive and well down there, that's wonderful, but really-"
"Hardly alive." Sarah glared at the man. "And it probably wasn't too well when it died. Though that probably didn't take too long, from the looks of what I found." Her voice turned flat and grim. "It wasn't that big a cat when it was alive. When Anson and Ruth Tyrell took it aboard, and they all went sailing off toward the Proxima system. But it's amazing how large an area an ordinary domestic house cat can cover . . . when somebody puts their mind to it." She looked down at her hands, which she had spent so much time scrubbing clean in the shower, long after the red marks had swirled down the drain. "And somebody did."
"Miss Tyrell..."
"Be quiet," she snapped. "You wanted to know everything. You don't get to pick and choose now." Sarah let her voice drop to a whisper. "We were running ... the little girl and I. Because we were scared. Because we had seen the bad things; they had come right out and spoken to us, they had told us what they wanted to do. That's why we were scared. And it was dark-there are some very dark places down there-and I tripped and fell. I had Rachael by the hand; she was running to keep up with me, and then she almost fell, too."
"But I didn't," said the girl.
"That's right. You didn't." Sarah nodded. "Because you knew." For a moment, she wondered how a piece of her own subconscious could know something that she herself wouldn't have been able to know. But she let the thought pass away. "You knew your way around; you knew what else was down there. I didn't; that's why I fell. On the cat. Or what was left of it."
She paused, looking from one man's face to the other's, gauging their reactions. Why they should be so queasy about the death of a cat that had happened over two decades ago-she supposed their reaction was due to the closeness of detail. The deaths of so many people in the apocalypse of the Tyrell Corporation's L.A. headquarters-hundreds? Thousands? She had never bothered to find out the exact number-they didn't matter.
"The person who did it," continued Sarah, "must have been very thorough. From the evidence. It's one thing to just make a mess-anyone can do that-but to have a certain artistic sense . . . that's almost as admirable as it is evil." Under her breastbone was a cold, hard st
one where her heart should be; Sarah knew that she wouldn't be able to speak like this, otherwise. I wouldn't even be able to live. Not anymore. "I don't suppose the cat would have suffered too long-it wouldn't have been able to. It would have to have died at some point early on in the process. So it wasn't done for the cat's sake . . . or at least no more so than was necessary."
"For whom, then?" Wycliffe's voice was nearly as soft as hers. "And who did it?"
"Who did it? My father, of course. Anson Tyrell." A shake of her head, as though chiding the one who had spoken. "And don't pretend that comes as so much of a shock to you. I have a feeling that you both knew-perhaps the whole shadow corporation knows-just what happened aboard the Salander 3. About my father's insanity and his homicidal rampage. You all knew; perhaps you were the ones who erased any mention of it from the company files. So that I wouldn't know."
Wycliffe and Zwingli exchanged glances with each other, but said nothing.
That was enough for Sarah to know that she had surmised correctly. "Don't worry about it," she said, amused by the flicker of panic she had seen in the men's eyes. "I'm sure you and the others did it for the absolute highest of reasons."
"It was ... to protect you." Zwingli blurted out the words. "Really."
"Of course it was. If I didn't know what had happened when I was just an infant in my mother's arms-all those things of which I was supposedly too young to have formed memories-then I wouldn't have bad dreams, would I? How thoughtful of you. And naturally, I wouldn't be quite so resistant to your plans for resurrecting the Tyrell Corporation as I might have been if I already knew what was in the Salander 3. You might not have been able to talk me into going down there."
"That's not quite fair," said Wycliffe. "As you've said before, without you there is no Tyrell Corporation. The opposite can be said as well: you don't exist, or you can't for much longer, unless the corporation comes back from the shadows. Any subterfuge was as much for your benefit as ours. And as it happens, there are only the slightest, fragmentary records of what might have happened during the Salander 3's final expedition. A few transcripts of statements made by the company employees who went aboard the ship after it had returned to Earth-and most of those had been severely edited or destroyed before anyone from the shadow corporation would have had a chance to access them."
"You have to give my uncle credit for his thoroughness, all right." Sarah felt her face hardening. "God forbid anything should besmirch the Tyrell Corporation's public image."
"Eldon Tyrell might have had motivations beyond that." Wycliffe shrugged and spread his large-jointed hands apart. "If things are as you found them inside the Salander 3-and we have no reason to doubt you on that score-then it might not have been for the company's sake that Dr. Tyrell acted as he did in suppressing this information. It might have been for the family name."
"Oh? And there's a difference?" Sarah raised one eyebrow. "Between the family and the corporation?"
"Not much, admittedly. Let us say, then, for your father's sake. And the way he was remembered. Anson Tyrell wasn't a psychotic murderer when he left on the Salander 3's expedition; whatever happened to him aboard the ship, it happened out there." One of Wycliffe's bony fingers pointed upward, to the night sky beyond the yacht's contained spaces. "Something happened that made him do what he did."
"You said 'murderer.' That was the word you used." Sarah's narrowed gaze fastened onto the man. "People don't say 'murderer' when they're talking about a cat getting eviscerated and hung around a room like a Christmas garland." One of her hands balled into a fist, knuckles as white as those she had seen through the blood smeared on her father's hand. "Perhaps 'psychotic'-that's easy enough. But not the other."
Wycliffe's mouth opened, but snapped shut again before any words came out.
"I caught you out on that one," said Sarah with grim satisfaction. "I haven't told you yet about the other things I saw down there-"
"The really bad things," chimed in the little girl sitting in the wing chair.
"Not just some stupid old cat."
"Ah. Yes ... exactly so." Wycliffe attempted a feeble smile. "I must have been ... anticipating what you were about to tell us."
"I don't think so." She lifted the lid of the ornate box on the small table beside the chair, and watched her hand run a fingertip across the cigarettes' silky paper, before turning her gaze back to the two men. "I think you knew very well that my father didn't stop with the cat. When he had his psychotic breakdown, somewhere between here and the Proxima system-he didn't go just a little bit crazy. He went all the way."
"There were ... some indications . . . about that."
Sarah slapped the box lid down. "Gentlemen-I found more than indications. I found my mother's body. Or what was left of it. Perhaps, for my father, the cat had just been a little warm-up, a practice session to get ready for the main event. Which was my mother." One fingertip ticked against the box lid. "And myself."
"That would seem to be ... consistent." Wycliffe's hands folded around each other. "With the fragmentary reports of those who went aboard the Salander 3 when it returned to Earth." He gave a single nod. "It's fortunate, of course, that Anson Tyrell didn't manage to fulfill his deranged agenda."
"Oh, I agree." She made no attempt to disguise her sarcasm. "I doubt that even when I was an infant I would have enjoyed those particular attentions of my father. You see, I've been inside his head; that's what the Salander 3 is now. With all that toxic past locked up and unchanging inside it-it's like that Jungian definition of the psychotic condition as that state when no new thing ever enters into a person's thoughts. Just the same thing over and over again, like an endless tape loop. And that thing in my father's case was murder. And blood, lots of it; more than what's inside a cat, or what was inside my mother." Sarah's voice grated rawer and tighter. "An ocean of it. That must've been what the inside of his head looked like before he died. Just big hollow spaces like the ones inside the Salander 3, washed with blood."
"Was ... was your mother..." Zwingli's words came out in a stammer. "Had he done the same thing to her? Like he did to the cat?"
"No." A shake of the head. "That didn't happen. From what I could tell ... he slashed her throat. And then..." Her own words came slower and slower, close to halting. "He stopped there."
"That's not the whole story." The Rachael child spoke up, her voice hard with scorn. "She's not telling it right!" Gripping the arms of the wing chair, the little girl looked around at Wycliffe and Zwingli in turn. "And she even saw what happened. She saw it!"
Wycliffe turned from the child back toward Sarah. "Miss Tyrell . . . what did you see? What happened?"
The tape loop inside her head, that segment of the longburied past that had wormed its way into her own memories, became visible once more as she closed her eyes. It would never go away. Once seen, it was as unending as it had been in the hulk of the Salander 3.
"What happened." She spoke without raising her eyelids to admit the lounge's softly filtered light; even that was too much for her now. "I saw her-my mother; Ruth Tyrell, whatever you want to call her. It doesn't matter. She was running, too; she was running with the baby in her arms. Because she knew what he wanted to do."
"That's the real story." From somewhere outside Sarah, the little girl's voice spoke again, approvingly this time. "That's what really happened. I know, because the nanny told me. Because when I saw those things happening over and over again, they scared me. I wanted to know, so I wouldn't be scared anymore. So the nanny told me who they were."
Sarah waited until the child was finished speaking, without even wondering if the two men could hear those words or not. "The infant ... that was me." She spoke slowly, trying to get everything exactly right, as if that could help somehow. "And then ... and then he caught her. He caught up with my mother. His wife. Ruth and Anson..." Her voice trailed away.
"Go on, Miss Tyrell. We have to know everything."
"There's not much more, is there?" She sighed and
shook her head, opening her eyes to look up at the radiant ceiling. "My father knew his way around the Salander 3 better than my mother did, so there was really no place for her to hide. Plus she had the baby-she had me-with her. Plus . . . you can't ever get away from the really bad things. Whether they exist or not. Eventually, they catch up with you. The way my father caught up with her."
Nothing but silence surrounded her. They were all waiting for her to go on.
Those poor ghosts, thought Sarah. For a few seconds, she wasn't sure who she meant. The people here, in the richly appointed lounge of the shadow corporation's interplanetary yacht-they didn't seem any more real to her than the figures she had seen down at the bottom of Scapa Flow, acting out their endless time-stilled rituals of fear and madness and death. They might not even know they're dead. She supposed that statement might apply to the ones here as well. In a way, the only one that did appear real to her was the hallucinated Rachael child. At least that one had come out of her head, up from her unlit subconscious, the same way Sarah herself had come up from the sunken ship. So she's at least as real as I am. That wasn't saying much. Or just a little bit real, perhaps.
As if on cue, the child spoke again. "He cut her throat." A simple announcement. "That's what he did. He had a knife and he cut her throat. Just like that." The girl made a quick swooping gesture, one hand holding an invisible blade. "And she died."
Sarah didn't wait for the two men to ask what happened next. "And then," she said, "so did he. My father died." The tape loop inside her head had run to its end and started over, one moment of the past welded inexorably to its antecedent. "He had his dead wife at his feet and a wailing infant lying in the pool of blood on the floor." She had watched all that, with the hallucinated Rachael child close beside her, the two of them pulled back into the shadows of one of the ship's unlit corridors, as the ghosts locked in time had gone through their rituals in the light, as though they were the ones who existed outside of memory. There was something else that she didn't speak of, not because she didn't want Wycliffe and Zwingli to know; it was just too painful to try to find the words. That her mother had died shielding her, protecting the infant in her arms. Even when the crazed figure with the knife had taken her mother down to her knees, his other hand twisting her hair tight into his fist, drawing her throat taut and vulnerable; even then, Ruth Tyrell hadn't screamed, but had gasped out a plea, not for her own life but for the smaller one she'd held desperately against her breast.
