by K. W. Jeter
Sarah fixed her angry glare at her own reflection in the hovel's bathroom mirror. Angrier at herself than Deckard; she had known what kind of a schmuck he was, and she had still let herself be conned by him. I want you . . . The memory of those words in her mouth pooled salt on her tongue, tasting like the blood from the cut lip Deckard's blow had given her. The perfect image of a woman wronged; she looked at herself with contempt. I trust you . . . Typical, she knew. They'll say anything, get you to say anything, and then they're gone. Right after the fist is applied.
She emerged from the hovel's tiny bathroom, toweling her face, punishing herself with the wincing pain from the bruise. At least the chair near the bed was empty, the hallucination of the Rachael child vanished for the time being. Deckard, for whatever twisted reasons were in his head, had kept up the act of pretending that the little girl was real right up to the moment he was beyond the hovel's front door and out of earshot; she didn't even want to speculate why. Probably just to drive me crazier. As if that were possible.
"Mrs. Niemand ... you know, it's not too late." The calendar on the wall had spotted her; the hectoring voice had taken on an irritatingly superior tone. "There are still viable options."
"What?" She scowled at the calendar and its too-perfect scene of trees and distant mountains. "What're you talking about?"
"You can still kill yourself. These things can always be arranged. Just because Deckard is gone, that doesn't mean you have to change your own personal plans."
"Oh, I like that." Sarah shook her head in amazement. "Suicide as a viable option-that's good."
"Well, or therapy perhaps," the calendar said helpfully. "Some other kind of therapy, I mean. You were talking about that, remember? In regard to these hallucinations you feel you're suffering from. Now, in my opinion-and you can certainly take it for what it's worth-I feel that surgery would be your last option. That's a little extreme-"
"Just shut up." She reached over and ripped the calendar off the wall. "You traitorous bastard. Telling Deckard to go ahead and shoot me." She flung the calendar into the corner of the bedroom, where it landed with a fluttering squawk. "You're lucky I don't have a gun right now."
That was the problem. Out in the hovel's kitchen area, as she rummaged through the cupboard over the sink looking for the meager stash of coffee substitute, Sarah weighed her options. If I had the gun, she thought grimly, I probably would. Kill herself; she hadn't changed her mind about that. There was just no way that appealed to her as much as the finality of a bullet through the head. After being so tritely humiliated by Deckard, she didn't want to employ any less violent method, anything-like a drug overdose or a Plathian head-in-the-oven genuflection-that smacked of feminine frailty. After all this time, she had to admit that she was of the blood of Eldon Tyrell in more ways than one. If she could crack her own head open like an egg, she would have.
She brushed away a trace of white dust on the sink counter and spooned the ersatz coffee into a chipped-edge cup. Her jaw still ached, reminding her-as if she could forget-of Deckard. He probably enjoyed that. Even more than the hit, the mind trip, the getting her to believe that he was ready to die with her. Taming on the tap, she held her hand in the thin stream of rust-tinged water, waiting for it to heat up. Well, she thought, her Tyrell blood bringing her own decisions back into focus, if he doesn't want to go voluntarily, that's all right. She held the cup under the tap and watched it slowly fill. There are other ways.
Pulling a chair out from the table, she sat down with the fake coffee in front of her. It tasted like brackish plastic. I should've brought some real stuff back here from the yacht. There had been every indication that it'd been stuffed with the expensive pleasures of life, as one would expect from a part of the late Eldon Tyrell's private fleet. However bleak her situation might be otherwise, she wasn't without resources; she supposed she could find a way of unloading the yacht's contents-and the yacht itself-on the emigrant colony's black market. Perhaps she could track down some high-up exec in the Martian cable monopoly who'd give her a package deal for the whole thing, rather than having to dispose of it piece by piece; either way, it'd come to a good deal of operating capital, more than enough with which to buy Deckard's murder. She took another sip of the repellent black liquid, holding the cup between both hands. She didn't need to; the muscular tremors of her rage had died down, replaced by cold, nerveless calculation. And regret: she wished now that she hadn't gotten rid of Wycliffe and Zwingli. She could have used them. If nothing else, they had been hem only means of getting in touch with the rest of the shadow corporation; she imagined that theme were others dedicated to the Tyrell resurrection. And among those, former members of the security department, hard men and deadly. Those were the ones she really needed now. She didn't feel like waiting for them to show up at her doorstep, the way the first two die-hard loyalists had appeared. Another slow, meditative sip, her tongue almost numb to the taste; she'd have to think of some way of contacting the shadow corporation...
A sharp, quick sound came from behind her. Someone had knocked on the hovel's front door.
That's too good, thought Sarah. She carefully set the cup down on the table. Either the universe, in its mysterious and infinite workings, had learned to read her mind, or her hallucinations had become even more convenient. All she had to do was ask for something and it would be provided. With only one catch to it...
She turned around in the chair, facing the door. "If you don't exist," she called out, "then go away. I don't need you."
A muffled response came through the thin fiberboard. "Hello?" The knob rattled, as though the person on the other side had tried it and found it locked. "Is there anybody home?"
If it were a hallucination, considered Sarah, I would've given it a key. She got up and went to the door, pulling it open.
The man on the hovel's doorstep was shorter than her, running to fat, as if compressed from a taller size. "You must be Sarah-" He smiled, blinking at her from behind ordinaryseeming lenses. If he was part of the shadow corporation, he hadn't adopted the same square black rims as the late Wycliffe and Zwingli had. "Sarah Tyrell? Am I right?"
It struck her that hallucinations shouldn't need introductions. Maybe he's real. "You could be." She put her hand against the door frame. "Depends on who you are."
"Miss Tyrell, my name is Urbenton. That's all I go by." His smile broadened, creating more elaborate details in his rounded cheeks. From his breast pocket, he extracted a business card and offered it to her. "That's how people know me."
She looked at the card, holding it by one corner. The man's name appeared beneath larger letters spelling out SPEED DEATH PRODUCTIONS, with a company logo of a stylized, sharp-edged skull with wings. "Charming." She tried to hand it back to him, but he refused it with an upraised palm.
"Keep it." The man radiated an oily unctuousness, as though his excess body fat were percolating into the air around him. "Just in case we can't come to an agreement right now, Miss Tyrell-"
"How do you know my name?" Sarah tilted her head, eyeing him with increasing suspicion. "My real name."
"I've got a lot of contacts," said Urbenton with a wink. "Contacts are important in my line of business. I'm a video director. Producer, too. I do it all
A memory fragment drifted through Sarah's head. The names, of both the man and his company, sounded vaguely familiar to her. Deckard had said something about them, a long time ago. Before he had left the planet the first time. Something about going to do a job for them. That's how he knows my name, she thought. Because of Deckard. She tucked the business card in her neckline. "What's that got to do with me?"
Urbenton glanced around the narrow, shadowed streets of the emigrant colony, then back to Sarah. "May I come in? So we can talk?"
"We're talking now." She folded her arms across her breasts. "As I said-what's that got to do with me?"
His smile appeared more forced. "Let's just say ... that maybe we can do business together. You and me."
&nb
sp; "Oh?" She raised a skeptical eyebrow. "Such as?"
"I have good reason to believe, Miss Tyrell, that you'd like to have a certain Rick Deckard taken care of. Murdered, as it were." The smile disappeared, replaced by a hard glitter in the man's eyes. "How would you like it if I made that possible for you?"
Sarah regarded the man for a few seconds, then stepped back, clearing the doorway. "Perhaps," she said, "you'd better come inside."
"This'll do. For now." He steered the child toward an opening beneath words outlined in flickering lightbulbs, half of which had gone permanently dead. "Let's go in here."
Behind the bar, an unshaven figure swabbing out glasses with a dirty towel; he spotted Deckard and the Rachael child as soon as they stepped into the dimly lit interior. "Hey-" The bartender pointed a black-nailed finger toward the little girl. "No minors."
Deckard left the girl a few steps away from him. With the briefcase dangling from one hand, he leaned an elbow on the bar. "Let me tell you something." He kept his voice low, face close to the bartender's. "I was just talking with somebody who claimed that there's no little girl at all. She's a hallucination."
An ugly smirk curdled the other man's lip. "Yeah, right. Now get her out of here."
Opening his jacket partway, Deckard displayed the black metal of the gun he'd taken from Sarah. "About that hallucination. Some very influential people think the same way."
The bartender's eyes shifted from the gun back up to Deckard's face. "There's a real nice booth in the back. Suitable for a party of one." He tried to smile. "Like yourself."
"Thanks." Deckard peeled a bill from the rapidly dimishing roll in his pocket and laid it on the bar. "I really value my privacy."
The establishment was dark enough, and so sparsely inhabited that he was able to steer the Rachael child to the back with little fear of being spotted. Once away from the bar and its pallid fluorescents behind the ranks of bottles, the only illumination came from the video screens hanging at strategic intervals from the ceiling. A flickering wash of blue tinted the isolated faces gazing up, their hands cradling the carefully nursed drinks that kept the patrons from being eighty-sixed out of the place. None of them looked around at Deckard and the girl slipping into the farthest booth; eyes remained on their stimulus fix from the cable monopoly. He stashed the briefcase beneath the table.
"Won't he call us in? That guy?" The Rachael child had easily figured out that Deckard was trying to keep them from being spotted by the emigrant colony's police. The evasive route that he had taken them on this far left little doubt. "You don't trust him, do you?"
"Of course not." Deckard didn't look at her, tucked into the darkest part of the booth and shielded by his own body. Eyes adjusting, he scanned the bar's interior for any suspicious indicators. He was grateful that Batty, the part of him imbedded in the briefcase, had heeded his warning about staying quiet in public. "But we don't need to worry just yet. The bartender'll keep a lid on it for a little while, just on the hope that I'll feed him some more money."
"Is a little while all we need?"
The child's voice was capable of unnerving him; she sounded on occasion like an adult asking questions with a child's sharpness. Deckard supposed that came from her unusual upbringing, whatever it had been, on the Salander 3. "I just need time to think," he said, glancing over at her. "If I get that, maybe we have a chance."
"Oh." The Rachael child mulled over his words, forehead creasing. "What're you going to do?"
"I said, time to think. Not talk."
He was rewarded with silence. Spreading his hands flat on the table, he leaned his head back against the booth's padded leatherette and closed his eyes.
"Not interested in the show, huh?"
Deckard's eyes snapped open at hearing, not the child's voice, but a man's. Even before he focussed on the figure that had slid in on the table's other side, his hand had darted inside his jacket and fastened onto the gun.
He wasn't quick enough. The other man was quicker, reaching across and seizing Deckard's wrist, pinning his hand beneath the jacket. "You don't have to do that." The other man smiled. "Think of all the commotion it'd make in here.
Nice quiet place like this." He squeezed the wrist tighter, numbing the fingertips on the gun's cold metal. "Perfect for a little conversation."
The Rachael child had shrunk back in the booth, watching the two men to either side of her.
"Yeah. It's lovely." The speed of the other man's movement indicated some kind of professional status; if not cop, then something equally deadly. Deckard nodded slowly. "Very intimate."
"I knew you'd agree." The thin smile had remained on the other man's face. "Now m going to let go of you, and then we can just sit here politely looking at each other without things getting all ugly between us. I'm going to do that, Deckard, because I know you really do want to talk to me. The bit with the gun lb just chalk that up as a nervous reaction on your part."
The other's hand still hadn't let go of Deckard's wrist. "I don't go in much for conversation."
"You will." The man loosened his grip slightly. "Because you either talk to me or you can forget about going much farther than this bar. Your ass is in the proverbial sling, Deckard. I can get it out."
Deckard was silent for a few moments, then nodded. "All right. Let's talk."
"You're a smart man, Deckard." He let go and sat back in the booth, folding his arms on the table. "Or smart enough."
"Who is this?" The Rachael child sounded annoyed as she scowled at the broad-shouldered figure.
Deckard didn't answer her, but looked closer at the other man, letting the angles of the face assemble and connect with one in his memory.
"I know you," said Deckard. "You were there at the Outer Hollywood station. I remember now-" The whole scene flashed through Deckard's mind, including the corpse of David Holden, laid out in a reproduction of the interview room at what had been the Tyrell Corporation headquarters in L.A. "You were the one who killed that Kowalski replicant right in front of me."
"That's right." The man looked pleased with himself, as though flattered by Deckard's recall. "There really wasn't time for proper introductions. The name's Marley." He extended his hand across the table again, as though to shake Deckard's. "Or at least that'll do for now."
Deckard looked at the hand in distaste. "You must be joking."
"Not about this." The man shrugged and pulled his hand back. "You're a tenderhearted soul, aren't you? It's not as if you hadn't ever killed any replicants."
"I never went around bragging about it."
"Ah ... I see. The money was enough for you." Marley appeared even more amused. "Well, Deckard, you don't have to like me. You just have to . . . shall we say? . . . do business with me."
The constant, self-assured smile irritated Deckard. "What kind of business?"
Marley didn't answer; he looked up to the nearest video screen. "You're right, you know; this isn't too interesting." Some kind of sporting event that involved oxygen masks and a medical triage staff at each end of the playing field was on. "That's all right, though." He turned the smile back toward Deckard. "There's something better coming on in a few minutes."
"I'm not interested in the cable schedule," grated Deckard. "Just tell me what you want from me."
"You've got it all wrong, pal. It's what you want from me. I spent a great deal of time and effort tracking you down, just so I could offer you my help."
Deckard didn't return the man's smile. "I don't need it."
"Oh, I think you might," said Marley. "You've got a big job ahead of you."
"What do you know about that?"
The other man shrugged. "Bits and pieces. Or maybe the whole thing. You're trying to put together some travel plans, aren't you? For you and the little girl here. And someone else. Or should I say some thing? I guess it depends on how you regard that briefcase you've been toting around. Is it human enough for you to think of it as a person?"
"Hey!" Batty's voice sounded f
rom beneath the table. "Fuck you, pal!"
Deckard gave the briefcase a kick. "Shut up. Let me handle this."
"You tell him," said Marley. "That old bastard's out of the loop now. He's luggage. Too bad you can't just wrap him up, stick the postage on, and mail him out to the far colonies."
"Who says that's where we're going?" Deckard wondered just how much the man sitting across from him was clued in on. "I could be taking him and the little girl anywhere. Maybe back to Earth, for all you know."
"But you're not." Marley's smile broadened. "And I do know. I know all about the job you've undertaken. I know that's what you're racking your brains over, trying to figure out how you're going to get off-planet with that thing, how you're going to deliver it to the replicant insurgents . . . the whole bit."
Deckard coldly regarded the other man. "You know an awful lot."
"More than you do. I know what's really in that briefcase." The smile faded, the man's face turning hard and serious. "And I know who the little girl really is."
"Somebody who knows things like that ... or somebody who even claims to Deckard looked straight back into the other man's eyes. "Chances are good it means that person's a cop. So who are you working for? U.N. security? LAPD?"
"I'm not with anybody like that." Marley glanced up at the video screen. "You should think of me as your friend. Like I said, I'm here to help you."
"And like I said, I don't want-"
"Hey, just hold on a bit." Marley held up his hand, palm outward. "We can talk some more in a little while. But this-" He pointed at the video screen a couple of yards away. "This is going to be a good program. I really want you to take a look at it. I think it's something you'll get a bang out of."
Beside him, the Rachael child had sat forward, trying to get a better viewing angle. Deckard looked over at the screen. The sports event, whatever it'd been, had apparently ended; the cable monopoly's logo, all swirling colors and state-of-the-art abstract graphics, danced and shivered its pixels. He knew it wasn't going to be a news show; there weren't any. The cable's feeds were all entertainment, or what passed for it in this captive market.
