Replicant Night

by K. W. Jeter

  "Twins..." Sarah's voice was a murmur. "There were two of us..."

  Deckard didn't stir from his position at the building's edge. "Twin female infants." He repeated verbatim what Marley had told him. "Two healthy baby girls. You and your sister. Sarah . . . and Rachael"

  She looked up at Deckard when he spoke the second name. "My sister?" Sarah shook her head in disbelief. "That's impossible."

  "It's true," said Deckard. "And there's proof. The little girl downstairs, inside this building-her name really is Rachael. She's not a hallucination. She's your twin sister."

  "Oh, of course." Sarah gave a quick, sharp laugh. "Even though she's-what?-ten years old? There's a problem with that, Deckard. I'm sure you can see it."

  "There's no problem. You and the little girl were born at the same time... or a few minutes apart. You're twins. But you know that bad things happened aboard the Salander 3; you know because you saw them when you went there again. After you and Rachael were born, something happened. To your father. And then a lot of bad things happened. Your mother managed to save not only you but your twin sister, Rachael, as well. But your mother died in the process-she was killed by the man who loved her. Insane when he killed her; sane-or close enough-when he killed himself."

  "Still a problem, Deckard. Even if everything you say is true-" Sarah held the photo in one hand and the gun, still trained on him, in the other. "There was only one child taken off the Salander 3 when it returned to Earth. And that was me."

  "That's right." He returned her level gaze, straight into Sarah's eyes. "Your sister was left on board the Salander 3. In the sleep transport chamber that was part of the ship's equipment." When Marley had told him, he'd had a vision of the infant, a small, helpless thing inside the glass-lidded coffin, another of the suspended-animation devices like the one his own Rachael had slept and died in. "That was where your mother hid her to save her from your father. You were still in your mother's arms when your father killed her. Then the ship's autonomic circuits took care of you on the voyage back to Earth. And all the while, your twin sister, Rachael, slept on inside the transport chamber. Slept and didn't age- even after the Salander 3 had returned home and you were taken from it. You're right; only one child was taken from the ship. Your twin sister, Rachael, was either overlooked where she was sleeping inside the transport chamber-the Tyrell Corporation employees who went aboard might not have searched very thoroughly, given the things they found when they went in-or she might've been deliberately left there. Either on Eldon Tyrell's orders or someone else's; I don't know. That part's still a mystery. Just like it's a mystery as to who took your sister, Rachael, out of the transport chamber ten years ago and left her there for the Salander 3's autonomic circuits to rear. That might've been done on your uncle's orders as well." Deckard could hear a grating edge in his own voice. "He'd already started to let some of his-shall we say?-personal obsessions take over his thinking. That's what led him to have another Rachael created, a replicant based on you." An invisible knife carved away another section of Deckard's heart as he found himself speaking so coldly of the origins of the woman with whom he'd fallen in love. "Maybe Eldon Tyrell was too impatient to wait for the real Rachael, the child still inside the Salander 3, to grow up. So he found another way to get what he wanted."

  "Don't be too hard on him." Sarah looked at the photo again. "I hated him and I wasn't sorry to hear that he was dead-but I've got a right to feel that way. You don't. My uncle was just another poor bastard who loved something too much. He must've loved Ruth . . . a great deal." Her voice went softer. "But he couldn't have her. Because she loved his brother, Anson, my father. And she went off with him. Far, far away Sarah slowly shook her head. "And that's what made him do the things he did, with me and with Rachael, the replicant he created. Because he loved her. He loved Ruth."

  "Pygmalion." One word was all that Deckard spoke.

  "What do you mean?"

  There were still things that she needed to know. And that he had to tell her. "An old, old story," said Deckard. "About someone who fell in love with his own creation."

  Sarah's gaze narrowed above the gun. "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "It's simple." With one hand, Deckard brushed rain from the side of his face.

  "When the Salander 3 left Earth, heading out on its mission to the Proxima system . . . there were no humans aboard it. Ruth and Anson Tyrell-the parents of you and your twin sister, Rachael-they weren't humans. They were replicants."

  A look of panic flitted behind Sarah's widened eyes. "That's ... that's impossible."

  "Nothing is impossible." Deckard gazed at her sadly, as though regretting the need to speak of these things. "Especially not when it's part of the Tyrell Corporation's secret history. There's stuff you just don't know about. Eldon Tyrell did have a brother . . . but that brother died when he was a child. The Anson Tyrell that headed out to the Proxima system aboard the Salander 3 was a replicant, created in the Tyrell Corporation's labs as a special, top-secret project. As was the female replicant they named Ruth. Neither one of them knew that they were replicants; like the adult Rachael-when I first met her at the Tyrell Corporation headquarters-they thought they were human. And they went on the Salander 3 still believing that. They were misled about their own nature, what kind of creatures they were, so it's no surprise that they didn't know the actual reason for the Salander 3's so-called mission to the Proxima system."

  "Which was? According to you, I mean."

  He shook his head. "It's not just according to me. I didn't figure out all this stuff-I wouldn't have been able to."

  "Somebody told you this?" A cold fury narrowed Sarah's gaze. "Who?"

  "Nobody you can touch. He's dead now." Deckard could still hear the other man's voice inside his head, the secrets that Marley had imparted to him. All the secrets of the world that Sarah Tyrell lived in, the world that she could never escape, no matter how she tried. The secrets that she had never known, that her uncle had never told her, that Eldon Tyrell had done his best to make certain she never found out. Deckard could see Marley leaning across the table in the bar's little booth, looking straight into his eyes . . . and seeing reality there. That all the words Marley spoke, all the connected bits of what had been purged from the Tyrell Corporation archives, were true. Eldon Tyrell had tried to murder the past, to make it cease to be . . . but he'd failed.

  The past still existed. The record of it, the history of the Salander 3 expedition-Eldon Tyrell had been able to do whatever he wanted with his corporation's archives, but even he hadn't been able to touch the U.N's top-secret databases. The rep-symps that Marley had worked for had managed to infiltrate the U.N's emigration agency, and they had found the truth, the evidence of that which they had already come to suspect.

  Marley had told him . . . and now Deckard spoke the same words to the woman standing in front of him.

  "The Salander 3 was never meant to reach the Prox system." He watched Sarah's reaction to what he told her. "It didn't need to for Eldon Tyrell to find out what he wanted to know." The things that Marley had told him back in the bar in the Martian emigrant colony-Deckard recited them now, a well-memorized lesson. "All that the mission needed to accomplish was to get beyond the reach of the Earth's morphogenetic field. That's what keeps humans-and replicants-the way they are. On Earth, replicants don't reproduce; they don't have children. They can't; it's physiologically impossible. But what the Salander 3's mission showed was that all that changes out in the stars. There had been indications of this before, but Eldon Tyrell required proof. And he got it." Deckard nodded toward the figure before him. "You're the proof that the Salander 3 returned with. You and your twin sister, Rachael. The little girl down below us. The ship came back with the first two replicant children. The children born to the replicants that Eldon Tyrell had sent out there."

  Rain had darkened Sarah's hair, a shining black curve having come loose from where it'd been bound and now trailing alongside her throat. "That can
't be The gun in her hand was studded with drops of water, like domed black sequins. "You're lying..."

  He pointed to the photograph in her other hand. "There's the proof. That what I'm saying is true."

  Her dark eyes flared in anger. "This is nothing!" Sarah flung the picture away; it landed facedown on the wet roof. "I don't know where you got that thing, and I don't care-"

  "I got it," said Deckard, "from your mother. From the replicant Ruth Tyrell. In a way, that is; she had hidden it back aboard the Salander 3. Inside one of the first aid kits on the ship; she just had time to do that before she was hunted down and killed by your father."

  "Really?" Sarah looked scornful. "And why would she want to do that?"

  "I don't know." He gazed down at his own rain-wet hands for a moment. "Maybe she had found out something. Maybe she suspected the truth about herself and about her children. There might have been a slip, something in the Salander 3's computers that had been inadvertently left there by Eldon Tyrell, some little clue about the ship's mission." Deckard shrugged. "Or maybe not. Maybe it was just something that Ruth knew . . . inside herself. And she knew she had to leave a message, some kind of proof. So that people would know what had happened. And they did. They found the photograph, then hid it again, even better. It became a little sacred object, a relic. A holy thing. But it wasn't really for them; that wasn't why Ruth hid it there. It was for you." He brought his gaze back to Sarah's eyes. "So you would know. Her daughters."

  The scornful expression had changed to one of desperation. "I still don't believe it. That photograph could've been faked-"

  "Maybe so. But the things that happened aboard the Salander 3-the things you saw when you went there again, when you saw the past-those things couldn't have been faked. It really happened-that your father killed Ruth, that he would have killed you and your sister, Rachael, as well, if she hadn't managed to protect you." Deckard folded his arms across his chest.

  "There's only one possible explanation for all of that. The replicant named Anson Tyrell wouldn't have gone insane-murderously insane-for no reason. But the reason he did had been programmed inside him. By Eldon Tyrell. As a fail-safe protection in case it turned out that replicants could be made capable of reproducing themselves. He wanted to make sure that that knowledge was suppressed, so he built into Anson's brain a whole destructive sequence, a 'stepfather syndrome' based on primitive behavior patterns. And it worked; your father would've killed both you and your sister, Rachael, if he had been able to get to you. As it turned out, it was still enough to destroy both your mother and your father. That was enough; Eldon Tyrell could cover up or get rid of the other evidence about what had happened out there, what it meant. The only thing he didn't do was go ahead and have the two children destroyed, the daughters of the replicants he'd sent out on the Salander 3. Maybe it was guilt, maybe it was something else . . . but he let you live. Rachael went on sleeping in the transit chamber on board the ship, and you became his niece. Even you believed it-and why shouldn't you have? You thought you were human; you thought you were the original, the template, for the replicant Rachael that Eldon Tyrell created later." Deckard tilted his head back, letting the rain strike his eyelids, then looked over at Sarah again. "You just didn't know that that Rachael, the adult one, was a copy of a copy. A replicant of a replicant. Just because she wasn't a human that doesn't mean you're one."

  Sarah's gaze had fastened upon her hand, the one holding the gun, as though she were seeing it for the first time. "Who She spoke falteringly. "Who told you ... all this...?

  "Does it matter?"

  "Whoever it was..." Her teeth clenched with anger. "They were lying."

  "Sarah..." Her name, his voice low, the syllables as kindly said as possible. "You know it's true. You might not have known all the details, but the truth... you knew that all along. At least from the time you went back to the Salander 3. And you found her. The little girl; your sister. The first Rachael. She was real, and you knew it. You knew you weren't crazy; you knew you weren't suffering from some hallucination. Yet you kept on saying that you were, saying that she wasn't real, she didn't exist. Even though you knew she did." He drew a deep breath, the damp air filling his lungs. "You wouldn't have done that if you hadn't realized what it meant that that child should be there at all. And you knew somehow-you felt it-that she was your sister. That she was the same as you."

  The words had had an impact on Sarah. She closed her eyes, swaying slightly where she stood, the gun's weight trembling in her hand. After a moment, she nodded slowly. "Yes..." Her voice was a whisper, barely audible. "I knew..."

  "You knew," said Deckard. "But you did not believe. Because you didn't want to."

  She said nothing. There was nothing more for her to say.

  "Now what do you want?" He watched, pitying her now.

  "I don't know." Sarah looked at the gun in her hand. "I suppose I could just go ahead and kill you." She sounded close to crying, a broken thing. "Since you don't love me. You never did."

  "I never did. I never could."

  She looked at him, eyes pleading. "Is that what I should do?"

  "Maybe." Deckard shrugged. He felt tired, at the end of his own words. "But if you do that ... remember..." He looked up at the video cameras watching them. "That's what they wanted you to do."

  "You're right." Sarah nodded, her gaze focussed on some deep interior vista. "That's what I've always done. I've never even known what I wanted." She looked up at him. "But now I do."

  He knew what she meant. He knew what would happen next. "Are you sure?"

  Sarah nodded. "It was always going to come to this. You win, Deckard."

  "No..." He shook his head. "You do. Because now you get what you want."

  "I suppose you're right." Exhaustion sounded in her voice, as though from the long journey it had taken to reach this place. She managed a smile, a fragile turn of her mouth. "Could you She lowered her hand, letting the gun drop to her side. "Could you kiss me? The way you kissed her?"

  No words. Deckard took her in his arms, feeling the warmth of her body through his own rain-soaked clothes. She turned her face, eyes closed, up to his.

  Time stopped. Memory took its place. But even that had to end.

  She was kind to him. She took care of herself.

  The gun fell to the rooftop, a black shape surrounded by a thin, rippling mirror. Even as the echo of the shot rolled against the studio walls, the night city's false horizon. She fell then, and was still beautiful. He looked down at the crumpled form, something that might have once been human. The blood from her shattered temple flowed and mingled with the pooled rain.

  Deckard looked up at the cameras. "How about that?" His furious shout battered the empty lenses. "Was that good enough? Did you get what you wanted?"

  As though in answer, the observing spark died inside all the video cameras. The artificial rain had already stopped; now the lights came up, dispelling the false night. The taping was over. Deckard stood in the center of the building set's roof, a dead woman at his feet, one that had the face of someone he'd loved, now wrapped in the same sleep, the one from which there was no waking. The one he envied.

  He still had a job to do. He left the gun where it lay, a few inches from Sarah Tyrell's hand, and walked back toward the stairs.

  The Rachael child had fallen asleep at the table, her head upon the old leather-bound book. Deckard touched her shoulder; she sat up, blinking and frowning. She rubbed her eyes with her knuckles. "I'm kind of hungry," she announced.

  "That's all right." Deckard took the child's hand and helped her from the high-backed chair. "We're going home."

  The girl looked up at him as he led her toward the door, past the silent toys. "Where's that?"

  "I don't know," said Deckard. "I guess we'll find out."

  After

  "Mr Niemand-your papers are a mess." The U.N. bureaucrat looked at the documents spread across his desk and shook his head. "Do you really think you can get off this pla
net with your affairs in this condition?"

  "I don't know," said Deckard. He leaned back in the uncomfortable chair that had been provided to him. "I don't much care, either."

  The bureaucrat glanced up at him with small eyes filled by officious hatred. "You have an attitude problem as well." All the authority of the U.N's emigration program sounded in the man's voice. "Don't you?"

  Deckard made no reply. The office, a tiny cubicle in the central administration building of the Martian emigrant colony, smelled like photocopy toner and the adrenaline of small-fry bullies. Deckard had no particular wish to be here at all; they had sent for him. The announcement of the resumption of travel to the far colonies had gone out a couple of weeks ago, but he hadn't bothered to make an application. Let them come find me, he'd decided.

  And they had. The uniformed security men had shown up at the hovel, asking for him by pseudonym. He'd told the Rachael child to wait for him, that he'd be back before too long; then he'd pulled the door shut and had gone off with the grim-faced men on either side of him.

  "Your original entry visa-" The bureaucrat flipped through a passport. "Shows that you came here with your wife." The mean little eyes raised from the leatherette-bound booklet. "Where's Mrs. Niemand?"

  Deckard didn't even bother to shrug. "Why don't we just say . . . that she and I had domestic troubles."

  The bureaucrat laid down the passport. "There's also nothing in the Niemand family documents about having a little girl with you. When you came to Mars, you were childless."

  This time, he shrugged. "The domestic troubles didn't start right away."

  "Obviously. From what our sources tell us, this child..." The small eyes glanced at another sheet of paper. "Reportedly named Rachael... is ten years old."

  "That sounds about right."

  "Mr. Niemand." The bureaucrat touched his fingertips together in a cage. "You haven't been on Mars for ten years."

  "Then it's a mystery, isn't it"-Deckard looked straight back into the man's eyes-"how these things come about."