by K. W. Jeter
"You sound like a cop," said Sarah disgustedly. "Always ready for the interrogation, aren't you? Maybe you'd like to take me down to the station and slap me around a while. That'd probably seem like old times, wouldn't it? Oops, sorry-" She held one hand up. "I forgot. With blade runners, it's shoot first and don't even bother asking questions later. Right?"
"Knock it off." The needle of her words had gotten under his skin, as intended. "Look. I went away, I came back, and you're not here. I go away again-" That was what he figured his time in Sebastian's pocket universe amounted to. "I come back, you're here. Great; whatever. But things have changed. There's a kid sitting right here-" He pointed to the Rachael child. "I see her, you see her ... she's real. I don't want to hear any crap about hallucinations. I just want to know how you got to Earth, how you got into the Salander 3, wherever the hell it is now, and why you brought this girl back with you." His voice had hardened with his growing anger. "How about that for right?"
"Don't try to bully me, Deckard." With one hand, Sarah pushed herself away from the door frame. She stood looking at him with her hands planted on her hips. "I don't even want to talk to you, let alone listen to you. You're just making it easier for me to go through with what I've already decided to do. Not that I was going to find it hard to do it."
A great weariness settled on Deckard's shoulders, his own fatigue meeting all the sense of lost hope and futility that Sarah Tyrell's mere presence evoked in him. A bad marriage, he thought, just as if the aliases of Mr. and Mrs. Niemand had been the names of real people. There had been a time, when he had first taken Sarah from Earth, when he had believed he could accomplish something by welding his fate to hers. Even if it had been no more than moving her so far away from any sources of power that she could wreak no more harm to humans or replicants. But you can't fight crazy people-he told himself that once more, something he had known from the beginning. They're always crazier than you are sane. When he looked into Sarah's eyes, past the memory image of the Rachael he'd loved, he saw the black hole of madness that could consume all reason and desire and life itself, a place that could give nothing back to the living, imploding as it were with the dense gravity of its own obsessions. He should have known-he had known-that it was hopeless to fight against something like that.
"All right," he said, pulling his bent spine upright. "Whatever it is you've set your mind on, go ahead. I've got other business to take care of." There was still the briefcase sitting on the hovel's table, the one that spoke with the voice of Roy Batty and that had Isidore's list of disguised replicants encoded somewhere inside. Whatever else had happened in Sebastian's pocket universe, he'd at least been convinced of that much. Both Batty and the rep-symps who'd put the dehydrated deity packet inside the briefcase had been right: he would believe Sebastian when he would believe no one else. Not because of the little genetic engineer's transmogrification, his new enhanced status as a small-scale god, but simply because Sebastian was incapable of lying. A nature as simple as his didn't change, from this world to any other. Deckard looked up at the woman in the doorway. "I've got things to do."
Sarah laughed. "Like what?"
"You don't need to know." Somehow, he had to find a way to carry the briefcase to the replicant insurgents, out in the stars. Belief in the briefcase's contents and the acceptance of his mission were locked together for him now; he had no choice.
The mission would have been hard enough to pull off even if the U.N. were still sending new emigrants to its far colonies... but possible. The shutdown of the emigration program, the absolute bottleneck here on Mars, was compounded for him. They're looking for me, thought Deckard glumly. The people who'd already killed Dave Holden, the first courier attached to the briefcase, they might be right outside the hovel, right now, watching and waiting, the only mystery being why they didn't just move in and ice him immediately. Maybe they were showboats, the breed of cops who liked to kill in public, where everybody could see; that was the kind of display that could get someone promoted to the blade runner unit. He supposed that some grunt climbing to the ranks of the elite over his ventilated corpse would be an ironic justice. But one I want to avoid, Deckard reminded himself.
"What about me?" The Rachael child spoke up, as though she had been able to read his milling thoughts. "You said you promised..."
"That's right, sweetheart. I promised." And now this complication. Whatever he had to pull off to ferry the briefcase and Isidore's data to the insurgents, it would have to be done with the little girl in tow. And I don't even know where she came from or how she got here. Still-"I'm not leaving you behind."
"True," said Sarah from the room's doorway. "That's because you're not going anywhere, Deckard. That's what I came back here to tell you."
He looked back around at her, but another voice broke in before he could speak.
"Mr. Niemand-be careful," said the wall calendar. "She's got a gun. A new one."
The calendar was telling the truth. The evidence was in Sarah's hand, pulled from her coat pocket. The black metal hung suspended a short distance from Deckard's face; the muzzle's hole looked as deep and dark and fatal as the centers of the woman's eyes.
He allowed one eyebrow to rise. "That's what it's come to?" Deckard was really only surprised that it had taken this long.
"Oh... it's always been this way." Sarah's gun hand displayed no wavering. "I just didn't know it until recently."
"Well, it's always good to know what you want." Right now, he wanted to keep her talking while he figured out what to do. She knew how to use the gun; he was aware that she could pull the trigger without flinching. No chance of making a sudden grab for the weapon; Sarah stood a carefully judged distance from him, just far enough away that a quick lunge was out of the question, especially from his sitting position. And just close enough that she could unload the gun's clip right into his chest, grouping the entrance holes into a pattern tight as her fist. "So..." A trickle of sweat ran down one side of his neck. "What finally decided you?"
Sarah tilted her head back, keeping her narrowed gaze and the gun aimed at him. "This little act of yours, this thing you've cooked up with the shadow corporation, the die-hard Tyrell Corporation loyalists-"
"I don't know what you're talking about. What shadow corporation?"
"That's good, Deckard. That's real good." One corner of her mouth lifted in a humorless smile. "You're a real professional. An actor-you're going to keep your part rolling right up to the very end."
"I'm not acting." He gave a shrug. "I just don't know what the hell you're going on about."
"Deckard ... there was probably a time when I would've believed you about that." A slow shake of the head; her expression changed to one of sad regret. "I would've liked to have believed you. It might have made things easier in some ways. But it's too late for that." A twitch of the gun's muzzle indicated the little girl across from him. "This business-this performance-of sitting here and talking and acting as if you can see somebody else here with us. A child who says her name is Rachael." She took a deep breath and expelled it through clenched teeth, an audible hiss. "Those other two- Wycliffe and Zwingli; I bet you know their names-that was how they were going on as well. Before I took care of them. Trying to make me think they could see my hallucinations; trying to make me think what I saw was real. You sonsabitches must've thought you were really being clever."
"Never heard of anybody named that. At least not outside the history books." Deckard spread his hands apart. "Besides-even if these people, whoever they are, and I were in on some big conspiracy against you, what would we accomplish by pretending we could see things that don't exist? I don't get it."
"Why should I try to figure it out? Perhaps you're just sick individuals." Sarah's face darkened with anger. "Sicker when you put your heads together. Perhaps you're all just crazy." The same thin, ugly nonsmile appeared. "Perhaps even as crazy as I am."
He saw an opening. "You think so? I'm not joking around now." Deckard kept his voic
e low and serious. "But did you ever really consider that possibility? You know, that I might be as crazy as you are. And not just that. But crazy in the same way."
Without saying anything, Sarah regarded him over the top of the gun. The muzzle dropped a quarter inch, no more.
"Think about it." Deckard pressed on, trying to expand the tiny fracture he'd created. "Wouldn't I have to be? You know how contagious insanity is; it spreads from person to person. From you to me. After the things we've been through together, how could it be any other way?"
"Shut up." The gun jerked back into position as Sarah visibly tensed. "I don't want to listen to you. It's just another one of your con jobs, the stuff cops will say to get themselves out of a tight place. I just didn't think you'd be quite so good at it anymore."
He decided to backtrack, to come at her from another angle. Work fast, he told himself. Even without a clock in the room, he knew that time was running out, the moment approaching when she would realize she had been stalled, the moment when she'd pull the gun's trigger.
"Tell me something," said Deckard. "After you kill me... what're you going to do with her?" He nodded toward the little girl across from himself. "Anything?"
Sarah gave a noncommittal shrug. "Hadn't thought about it. Perhaps I'll try shooting her as well."
The Rachael child shrank back in the chair, her eyes wide and apprehensive.
"Doesn't seem like that would accomplish much. If she's not even real."
"True," admitted Sarah. "But it might get her out of my head. It doesn't matter, anyway, if it works or not. Since I'm already planning on killing myself. That should do the trick."
The hovel's bedroom had become a little world of madness, with Sarah as the gatekeeper, the black staff of her office weighing in one hand. For a moment, Deckard considered whether he might have spoken more truly than he'd intended. Maybe I am as crazy as her. A sure sign of that condition, when you could talk calmly about death, about desiring and willing it, in a strange parody of rationality.
"What if I'm not conning you, though?" Deckard kept himself still, unthreatening. "I'm not in any conspiracy against you; I don't know these two men you've been talking about. And I can prove it."
"Really?" A sneer passed across Sarah's face. "How?"
"You say I don't see her." He pointed a thumb toward the Rachael child. "That I can't; she's a hallucination. Your hallucination. So ask her to tell you something." Sarah eyed him with suspicion for a moment, then glanced over at the girl.
"When we were inside the Salander 3 . . . when I found you there . . . what was on the floor between us?"
"That's easy," said the girl. "There was a big pooi of blood. It was so big you could see yourself in it, like a mirror. That's what you said."
"'A big pool of blood,'" repeated Deckard. He looked up and caught Sarah's gaze, fastening tight upon it. "'It was so big you could see yourself in it, like a mirror.'" He spoke the words dryly, in a matter-of-fact tone. "'That's what you said.' That's what the girl here just said."
"Impossible..." Sarah's expression changed to one of puzzlement. "You shouldn't have been able to hear her say that. She doesn't exist. Except in my head..."
"But I did hear her. So she's in my head, too. Isn't she?"
The gun dropped lower as Sarah tried to figure out the puzzle. "She's not real... she isn't really here . . . but you heard her..."
He was aware of the child watching them both. Maybe she's the only sane one here, thought Deckard.
A genuine smile, one of realization, appeared on Sarah's face. "Then you're right," she said. "You are crazy. Just like me."
"Just like you."
With her free hand, Sarah rubbed one corner of her brow. "That's so strange. You know ... it comes as rather a relief. It's like when I went into the Salander 3. And I found her." She nodded toward the girl. "I didn't feel quite so alone. It didn't matter whether she was real or not."
"You're not alone." Make her believe it-Deckard softened his voice, the way one would speak to a lover. "You and I-we really are in this together. Whether we wanted it to be that way or not."
"Is that true, Deckard?" She gazed at him in wonder. "Is it?"
He pulled something up from memory, his memory and hers. "Do you know what you had me say, a long time ago? Do you remember that? It was what you knew I'd said to her, that other Rachael..."
A slow nod as that tiny fragment of the past became clear to her once more. "I wanted you to say those things to me. The way you'd said them to her."
The past that had been his and Rachael's, that had become his and Sarah's. He spoke the words again. "Do you trust me?"
Gun in hand, Sarah closed her eyes, hearing him this time, and in that other time, and in that time stolen from the woman he'd loved. "I trust you," she said softly.
Deckard knew he had her now. The gun still hung in the air between them, her finger on the black trigger's curve, but not for much longer. "Say ... I want you." More words from the past. "Say it."
"I want you..."
He stood up and reached toward her, not to take the gun out of her trembling hand but to take her in his arms, press her close to himself. The way he had taken Rachael and brought her lips to his, felt her heartbeat trip and accelerate, in sync with his own. In this time, the gun was caught between them, her hand trapped against his chest, the black metal like a second shared heart, one with no pulse, no time, nothing but the death they had both raced toward. Deckard kissed her, and for that moment she wasn't Sarah, she was Rachael. Memory, the past, madness-all folded around him and he didn't care.
He would have given anything, everything, for that moment to last.
The woman in his arms-Sarah, Rachael; he wasn't sure which-yielded to him. Perhaps she didn't know which one she was, the living or the dead. Madness, thought Deckard as he drew her to the bed, his arm around her shoulders, sitting her down beside him at the mattress's edge. He brushed her dark, tousled hair away from her brow; her face burned feverish as she leaned it into the cup of his palm.
For a few seconds they were alone in the room; the other, the child, forgotten.
"You're right," whispered Sarah. "You're as crazy as I am. You poor bastard..."
He nodded. "There's not much we can do about it."
"Nothing ... except..." She looked down at her hand, still gripping the gun resting in her lap. "Except what I'd already decided to do." Her unmasked, desperate gaze searched for some sign in his eyes. "That's right, isn't it? That's what you want, don't you?"
Deckard could almost feel sorry for her. "Sure." When he looked back at her now, he saw only Sarah Tyrell. The woman he'd loved was dead. A long time ago. "That's what I want."
"I knew it." An odd, broken happiness sounded in her voice. "I should've known it."
"Tell you what." He squeezed her shoulder, bringing her closer into his side. "I'll do it. It's easy for me; you know that it is. I'll kill you, and then I'll kill myself." He brought his head down to look straight into her eyes. "That'll work."
A coy smile appeared; she looked up through her eyelashes at him. "I trust you, Deckard ... but not that much. Besides . . . if I went first, then I wouldn't get to see you dead. And I wanted that, too."
"You can have whatever you want." Deckard brought his face closer to hers again. "You deserve it." As he kissed her, he brought his free hand between them, onto hers holding the gun. Her fingers had relaxed, loosening their grip on the cold metal. As he had hoped, known, they would.
In one swift arc, he grabbed the gun and pulled it away, sealing it in his own fist. The arc was completed when he leaned back from her, the gun's black weight swinging up and smashing across the angle of her chin. The impact rocked Sarah's head back, lifting her partway and throwing her back onto the bed, one empty hand reaching futilely toward him.
"Come on-" Deckard stood up and grabbed the Rachael child's hand, yanking her to her feet. He shoved the gun inside his jacket; it produced a hollow clank of metal against metal, the b
lunt muzzle rapping on the ancient first aid kit that he had brought back with him from Sebastian's pocket universe. Ignoring the sound, he pulled the girl toward the door. "We're getting out of here."
"Mr. Niemand!" A voice shrilled from the wall. "Now's your chance!" The calendar's pages fluttered. "Don't just leave her-kill her! Shoot her! She's a wicked person-she blew away the clock!"
He was already reaching inside his jacket, his hand closing around the gun, as he looked back toward the figure on the bed. It's right, his thoughts ran, don't be a fool, do it-
All he saw was the woman's tangle of dark hair, an angle of her face shadowed both by darkness and the overlay of his own memory.
"Goddamn." He shoved the gun deeper into his jacket. The chances were more than good, they were certain, that he'd regret this. "Let's go."
In the front part of the hovel, Deckard let go of the Rachael child's hand long enough to pop open the lid of the briefcase on the table. "What's going on?" asked Batty's voice. "I could hear you people talking-"
"Later." Deckard swept the Sebastian paraphernalia, the packet and other bits and pieces, into the briefcase, then snapped it closed. "Just shut up for now."
Briefcase in one hand, leading the Rachael child with the other, he emerged from the hovel. No hail of gunfire met him. That's a good sign, thought Deckard wryly. He set off at a fast pace, carrying his burdens with him.
15
"That sonuvabitch." She splashed cold water onto the bruise that had begun forming along one side of her jaw. Small, but darkly colorful; it looked like a smoky-red L.A. sunset as viewed from the top levels of the no-longer-existent Tyrell Corporation headquarters. "I knew I shouldn't have trusted him."
