Replicant Night

by K. W. Jeter

  Desperate because Ruth had known-as her daughter, Sarah, had known, when she had seen the madness in her long-dead father's eyes-that the child, the infant in her mother's arms, had been the true target of his wrath. He'd murdered his wife, drawn the knife across her white throat, only to get at his own child...

  "But he didn't." Sarah spoke her thoughts aloud. She didn't care whether anyone else heard them. "For a moment... he wasn't crazy. And that was all it took. He must have heard what she said to him, what Ruth had said." Sarah, watching from the dark corridor, hadn't been able to make out the words her mother had spoken. Words in a ghost's mouth; perhaps they hadn't even been words at all but just some inarticulate cry. Or articulate enough. For that brief section of the past, the past that had happened so long ago and so far from Earth, one sixth of the way to the Proxima system; for just that long, a matter of a few seconds, Anson Tyrell had been sane again; whatever gripped him had relaxed its hold, letting a horrified rationality possess him once more.

  He had his dead wife at his feet, the blood still running from her opened throat and pooling around the two of them, forming a redly shining mirror in which he looked down and saw his own unrecognizable face. And saw the knife in his upraised hand, which he might not even have known was there, he'd been that crazy. And saw his face in that smaller red mirror, the one smeared on the blade's bright metal; and recognized.

  That was how it had appeared to Sarah, watching the ghosts. Who were so locked into the past that she would have seemed like a ghost to them if she had stepped out of the dark corridor. If they had been able to see her at all. Sarah's time, that she was locked into and that she carried around with her as though it were some invisible diving bell, had separated out from the time held in the Salander 3, like the markings of trace elements divided by their specific gravity. Those elements, her time and the ghosts' time, had been swirled together for a little while, when she had first descended and entered the transport. So that the elements had bumped up against each other, become visible to each other, the dead looking at the living, or at least the not-so-dead. Her dead father had been able to see her, had probably thought she was one more part of the craziness sparking away inside his head. Would he have been able to do more than just look at her and say crazy, murderous things? She didn't know; that had been when she had turned and ran, snatching up the Rachael child by the hand and pulling her along after herself, not caring that the child was even less real than her dead father.

  "And then your father killed himself."

  She didn't know which of the men had spoken. "That's right." She supposed that was something else of which they had been aware all along, another little fragment left in the company records, transcribed from one of the employees who had gone aboard the returned Salander 3. What else they found: the two corpses with slashed throats, the knife still in Anson Tyrell's hand. "When he was sane again, and he could see what he had done. He used the same knife on himself." That kind of grief, she knew, being another sort of insanity. Or else it was being really, truly sane at last. It all had the same results. "He didn't worry about the infant lying in the pooi of blood, wailing away and kicking its little feet. He knew that the Salander 3's computer and all its built-in autonomic machinery would take care of me. Better than he would be able to; that's what it was designed for. Especially since he had no way of knowing how long he would stay sane. The craziness had come over him like a storm, and it had passed, but it might come again. Better to let the ship bathe and feed and comfort his child."

  "And bring it back to Earth," said Wycliffe. "Bring you back. The Salander 3's return program wouldn't have kicked in while your father was still alive. The computer only went into autopilot when it could no longer detect any adult human presences aboard."

  There was some small comfort to be had from that. Sarah felt cold and empty, the hard bravado she had been displaying now worn thin, as though the warmth of the yacht's lounge had failed to reach the bones chilled by the ocean's storm. Still, she thought as she gazed at the elaborate marquetry of the cigarette box's lid and did not see it. Still... he was trying to protect me the only way he could. From all the bad, crazy things. From himself.

  "But ... we don't know why he did it. What could have caused Anson Tyrell to go mad."

  Sarah looked up and saw the two men in conference, heads leaning toward each other, voices lowered but not to whispers, as though they had simply put her presence out of their minds for a moment. Between them, seated in the wing chair, her hallucination of the Rachael child looked up at them, following their conversation like a tennis spectator.

  "That's true," replied Zwingli. He nodded thoughtfully. "We have more details ... but not really any more information. Not that we can use."

  "That's a problem." Behind the square-rimmed glasses, Wycliffe's eyes seemed to focus on his own deep considerations. "To have come all this way .

  "Yes..." As though in a slightly distorted mirror, Zwingli's gaze looked the same, complete to the spectacles exactly like those of the late Eldon Tyrell. "It seems a shame..."

  Wycliffe remained silent, lips pursed in thought.

  "Do you really suppose we could? I mean, ask her to do that..."

  "Ask me to do what?" Sarah heard her own voice cut across the yacht's lounge. "What are you two talking about?"

  "We wouldn't ask it of you, Miss Tyrell..." Wycliffe raised and spread his hands. "If it weren't so absolutely critical to our mission..."

  "That's right." Zwingli nodded vigorously. "We're really only thinking about the ultimate fate of the Tyrell Corporation."

  "I bet." A bitter taste formed on Sarah's tongue. "You want me to go back down there. Back down to the Salander 3. I didn't bring back enough information with me on that last trip. Not enough to suit you, at any rate."

  "As I said." Wycliffe made an attempt at looking apologetic. "Only because it's so crucial. That's the only reason. You understand that, don't you?"

  "Oh, I understand all right." Sarah stood up from the chair. She pulled the robe tighter around herself, grabbing the dangling ends of the belt and cinching it hard at her waist. "And as you also said-" She could feel the stiffer embroidery of the company logo against her skin, just above her heartbeat. "Without the Tyrell Corporation, I'm nothing. So I really don't have much choice in the matter."

  "That's rather a ... harsh way of looking at it-"

  "Stuff it. You're supposed to be working for me. And I don't need your lectures." Sarah held out her hand, palm upward. "You promised me something. Back on Mars. And I haven't gotten it yet."

  Wycliffe looked puzzled. "Promised you what?"

  "A gun. Another one, to replace the one I had."

  The two men exchanged nervous glances.

  "Don't worry about it, for Christ's sake." Sarah shook her head in disgust. "It'll be all right-"

  "Miss Tyrell ... that might not be such a good idea. Not right now..."

  She glared at Wycliffe. "You mean, not after I've been talking about killing myself."

  "Well..."

  "Look, you want me to go back down there? Then give me the gun. Because I'm not going to go down there without it."

  A faint smile showed on Zwingli's face. "A gun wouldn't help you. Not there. Not with those kinds of things."

  "I don't care about that." Sarah kept her hand extended in the same position.

  "Give me the gun. Or you can kiss off getting anything more from the Salander 3."

  Wycliffe's owlish gaze regarded her for a few moments longer. Then he turned and walked over to the cabinets at the far end of the lounge, extracting a ring of keys from his pocket as he went. He came back with a large black object in one hand. "Here you are," he said stiffly. "As you requested."

  She examined the gun, turning it from side to side. It was bigger and heavier than the one she'd had back on Mars. That should do. "How do I know that it's loaded?" Sarah held it at arm's length, sighting along her wrist and down the weapon's massive barrel. "Or that it works at a
ll? Maybe it's a dummy, just some prop you got ready for me."

  A sigh from Wycliffe. "It's loaded. We keep them that way."

  "I need to test it. Before I go back down there."

  He glanced toward one of the lounge's dark-filled viewports. "Perhaps when the storm is over. In the morning; then you could go outside with it-"

  "No." Sarah shook her head. "I don't have to go outside." Arm still extended, she swiveled the gun around. "Not at all."

  The bullet caught Wycliffe in his chest, sending him aloft, arms spread wide, as though he were falling back onto some invisible bed just behind him. He landed in a crumpled mass at Zwingli's feet. The other man looked down at his partner's corpse, then back up at Sarah, eyes wider behind the square glasses than they had ever been before.

  This is too easy. The echo from the first shot was still rolling around the space as she pulled the trigger once more. They must have wanted it this way. She didn't care whether they had or not.

  "Gosh." The Rachael child had gotten out of the wing chair and had gone over to look at the two bodies, one lying on top of the other. The Eldon Tyrell memorial glasses gazed blankly at the lounge's ceiling. "What's going to happen now?" Unfazed, the child looked over at Sarah.

  She set the gun down on the small table, then extracted a cigarette from the ornate box. "I've got other business to take care of." Sarah slipped the lighter into the robe's pocket. "Far from here." Tilting her head back, she exhaled smoke. "Unfinished business."

  "Can I come with you?"

  A shrug. It didn't matter to her. The little girl didn't really exist, and, for all practical purposes, the two die-hard loyalists had stopped existing as well. She was alone.

  "Sure." She turned and started back to the master suite, to finish dressing before going up and setting the yacht's course. Back to Mars. And Deckard. She wondered idly how he'd react when he saw her again. I'll know soon enough. "Don't fade away on my account." Sarah glanced over her shoulder at the image of the little girl. "Stick around as long as you like..."

  14

  He woke up and wondered where the hell he was.

  For a moment, Deckard thought he was back in L.A. Or that he'd never left it and that everything that had happened anywhere else had been a dream, the kind you snap out of like falling off a cliff or the edge of one of the tallest buildings. Covered in night sweat, heart pounding inside your chest, fingers scrabbling at anything that would provide a second's hold.

  An alley; he could tell that much, as full consciousness seeped back into his head. Narrow, cramped, and dark, at the bottom of thickly grimed and graffiti-scrawled walls with no windows. A damp cushion of rubble beneath him, moldering urban decay that had been swept or pushed or just blown by the wind into these forgotten dead-end niches; the sweet, rank smell of garbage and other human castoffs filled Deckard's nostrils. His own stink as well, as though he had been lying there for some undetermined amount of time; he ran a hand across his chin and found the stiff, short bristles of a two-day beard.

  There had been an alley like this back in L.A., lots of them, most of which he'd been in during his blade runner days. Often with an escaped replicant at the terminus, at that point where there was no place left to run to. Where all they had left was to press their spines against the buildings' steaming bricks and retrofitted exhaust shafts and wait for the shadowed figure to approach and lift the big black gun in his hand, aim, and fire, that roar of light the last thing their manufactured eyes would ever see. Deckard knew he didn't have a gun on him-he couldn't sense that weight tugging anywhere in his begrimed clothes-so he felt sure he hadn't fallen back into that soul-killing time.

  The Outer Hollywood studios? He pushed himself up into a sitting position, scanning the area for more clues. Maybe he'd found himself in that perfectly reconstructed L.A., the faux cityscape orbiting above Earth's brown atmosphere. A few seconds was enough to convince him otherwise. No extras, thought Deckard, looking out to the alley's mouth. So it couldn't be Outer Hollywood-the money had always been spent there on a crowd of pedestrians, expertly gotten up like the real L.A.'s packed and cultish street life. The area he could see now, out beyond this alley, was empty, at least for the time being.

  "Hey. Hey, buddy ... let me help you with that..."

  Deckard heard the voice at his ear, a ragged, whispering sound. And felt the other's presence, whoever it was, close enough to touch. My cop skills must be all shot to hell, he couldn't help thinking ruefully. He'd let somebody get right next to him without any instinctive defenses' being triggered.

  A hand fumbled at the place where Deckard's own hands were crossed over the front of his jacket, holding on to some light object like a souvenir from his forgotten dreaming. It felt like thin metal, a box of some kind, light enough to be empty; his thumbs felt the ridge where the lid snapped tight. The other person's hands tugged at the little box, trying to slip it out from under Deckard's grasp. That pushed him to full awake; his eyes snapped all the way open, catching sight of a grizzled, cadaverous face close to his. One hand left the box and backhanded the stranger, knuckles spattering blood out of the gap-toothed mouth.

  "Jeez ... you didn't have to do that..." The other man scuttled a few feet away and then crouched, wiping the red from his face, yellowed eyes sulkily watching Deckard. "You want to be left alone, just say so..."

  The alley had to be on Mars, in the back reaches of the emigrant colony; the ineffectual roller had the twitching, jittery look of someone just starting to fall under the effects of acute stimulus deprivation. The skin under the rags and dirt seeped raw from the man's broken fingernails' plucking at his own flesh. Deckard drew himself up farther, leaning his back against the wall behind him. He looked down at the box in his hands-chipped white enamel on thin metal, with a faded red cross in the lid's center-and tried to remember what it signified. Inside his head, the blurred components of a dream moved toward each other, linking up one by one.

  Now I got it-a picture had formed, a little wrinkled face with weepy eyes. It grew clearer; Deckard saw the rest, not a dream but memory. Not entirely real, but real enough; something that had actually happened. A room with earthquake cracks running through the plaster, even across the high ceiling, the white dust sifting over toys and dolls, big ones, a frozen ballerina and a fat, silently laughing clown. The face of an aging child wasn't one of those, but a human's face; or what had been a human, Deckard corrected himself. Now a deity in his own little pocket universe. Which is where he'd just been, and from which he'd fallen out of . . . how long ago?

  Deckard reached over and grabbed the quivering man's thin wrist, pulling him closer. "How long have I been here?"

  "Huh?" The yellow eyes stared at him. Stringy muscles jumped beneath the man's hollow cheeks. "What're you talkin' about?"

  His temper flared higher as he yanked the man right into his own face. "How long have I been lying here in this alley?"

  "Huh-how should I know? C'mon, fella-uh!" The pawlike hands shoved futilely at Deckard's chest. "I don't-"

  "When did you first see me here? How long ago?"

  "Maybe ... maybe yesterday. Yeah-" The man gave a nod vigorous enough to rattle his whole body. "Yeah, there was a pile of stuff here when I went by, and that was yesterday, and then I came back to check it out . . . and it was you. Okay? So that's how long you been here. Since yesterday. Let go of me, willya?"

  Deckard released him with a hard thrust of his arm. "Take a hike." The man scurried out toward the street, twitching slightly less from the input to his nervous system.

  A day at least, lying in this alley-Deckard shook his head, trying to clear out the last of the fog. Even without having been unconscious, his time sense was screwed up, an aftereffect of being in Sebastian's private universe. That was one of the well-known problems with getting involved with any of that dehydrated deity stuff: a true Rip van Winkle syndrome, only in reverse. He had probably spent less than an hour of perceived time in there, and years could've gone by out here in the r
eal world; no way of telling how much time had elapsed before he'd fallen into the alley's muck and trash.

  The rest of his memories coalesced, sharper than the indistinct images and forms left by dreams. He could recall everything that had happened, from the moment he'd found himself walking along Sebastian's re-created L.A. street, with the Million Dollar Theater's neon glimmering off the rain-soaked pavement, all through the seismic fragility of the toy-stocked hideaway at the top of the Bradbury Building. I lied to the poor bastard, thought Deckard. He was in no condition to start feeling guilty about it. All he'd been trying to do was buy a little more of that false world's time, enough for Sebastian to tell him the big secrets. So he'd conned the genetic engineer turned small-scale god, handed him that line about Pris's being somewhere else at the fringes of that patched-together L.A., waiting for Sebastian to come find her. What a shuck-maybe it was just as well that he'd dropped out of the pocket universe and back into this larger one before Sebastian had found out he'd been given the shaft again. The guy might have really gone to pieces, worse than just the building shaking into plaster atoms.

  Something else had been there, that Deckard remembered: the little box, battered white metal with a red cross on the lid. Sebastian had forced it into Deckard's hands, pressing it on him, excitedly going on about how important it was...

  Deckard looked down at the object in his hands, the exact same one as he'd seen and held in the dehydrated deity's pocket universe. Makes no sense, he thought. The box looked like the container for some sort of regulation first aid kit; it even had clips on the back for mounting on a wall or in a cabinet-ordinary enough, but it didn't belong here. It'd been part of that other, smaller universe, the one that the transmogrified Sebastian had pulled together from the contents of his head. Everything Deckard had perceived there, from the snakelike glow of the theater marquee's neon shimmering on the empty wet sidewalk to the maniacal laughter of the clown mannequin, had its existence in that world, not this one. Even the feel of the box's lid, both enamel smooth and rougher where the rusted metal was exposed; by rights, it should have stayed back there in Sebastian's illusory hideout. Deckard knew he should have woken up with hands empty, no matter what some tiny withered god had tried to put in them.