A shake of the head. “No,” said Sarah. She wondered if she had spoken aloud, if the words of the past had forced their way into the present once again. How embarrassing, she thought. Though it proved that nothing ever died. As long as there was memory, there were ghosts. Like me—perhaps when Deckard looked at her, that was what he saw. The ghost of Rachael. “No—I didn’t say anything.”
Sarah watched as the two men consulted with each other, whispers and nods.
They finished and turned back toward her.
“We don’t have much time, Miss Tyrell.” The more talkative one, the evident leader of the pair, clasped his hands together. “Our enemies—the enemies of the Tyrell Corporation—they very likely know that we’re here. They’d do anything to stop us, to thwart our sacred mission. We have to leave. Now.”
“We’ve stayed here too long already.” The other one cast a nervous glance over his shoulder, toward the hovel’s front door, as though he expected a black-clad SWAT team to come bursting through at any moment.
“You have to come with us, Miss Tyrell.” The talkative one’s intertwined fingers squeezed themselves white and bloodless. “There’s so much more we need to tell you. And that we can show you. But you must come with us. You must.”
“All right—” Sarah held up a hand, palm outward. “There’s no need to hector me. I’ve made my decision.” It had been easy, once the image of Deckard had come into her mind. “I’ll go with you. Wherever you want.” Of all the possibilities, those that had her dead while Deckard would still be alive—those had been ruled right out. As if a terminating memo had been sent down from the corporate headquarters, that columned, high-ceilinged chamber that still existed behind her brow.
Besides, thought Sarah. It’s mine; the Tyrell Corporation, in all its guises, shadowed or in light. She could do whatever she wanted with it. A glance from the corner of her eye showed the two men, in their homage-to-Eldon-Tyrell outfits, in a new light; they belonged to her as well, part of the package. A familiar sensation, one that ran from her groin all the way to the top of her spine and beyond. They looked at her, not just reverently, but would not have dared to touch her. She could use them for whatever purpose she had in mind, and they would be grateful. Just to be in her presence and bear her orders.
That notion made her smile, one corner of her mouth lifting a millimeter.
She thought of Deckard, wherever he was at this moment. Perhaps coming home—if this counted as home—after his stint trolling for money at that Outer Hollywood station above Earth. Coming home to whatever surprise he might’ve figured would be waiting for him—the gun at the door probably wouldn’t have been completely unexpected. If I were gone, though-Sarah mulled it over—that might knock him back. For a little while, at least.
Which would give her time to prepare another surprise for Deckard. The last one he’d ever receive. She wasn’t sure yet what it would be.
But with all the resources of the shadow corporation at her fingertips . . . a mere gun and a single bullet now struck her as entirely too simple.
I’ll have to do better than that, thought Sarah. It’s only what he deserves.
“Please, Miss Tyrell—” The duo’s leader made a show out of checking the complicated watch on his thin wrist. “We really have to get going.”
“I suppose so.” She turned and headed toward the hovel’s bedroom. “Just let me get a few things.”
She took one of the bullets from the gun’s clip, using its weight to hold down on the bedside table a note she’d quickly scribbled out for Deckard.
There—Sarah stood up from the mattress edge. Let him figure that one out. The alarm clock walked across the folded piece of paper and looked down at the bullet, the face behind the black hands seemingly mystified.
In the minuscule bathroom, she splashed water on her face, then straightened up from the sink and pulled her dark hair back with one hand. For a moment longer, Sarah returned the gaze from the figure in the clouded mirror. It didn’t look like Rachael standing there. Or only a little; the sad dreaminess that had always marked her replicant double had been leached away, replaced by something harder and colder. That’s my face, thought Sarah. The cheekbones were more pronounced, edged sharper, as though the flesh were being cut away by interior knives. She toweled off the water trickling down her throat and turned back toward the hovel’s bedroom.
The calendar on the wall fluttered its page as she approached the doorway.
“Mrs. Niemand—I mean Sarah—” The calendar’s voice betrayed its anxiety.
“What’re you doing? This is madness. You don’t know who these men are—”
“How rude.” Sarah glared at the snow-covered wilderness scene. “You were listening in.”
“Of course. I’m a calendar; I’m supposed to keep track of things.” The number-dense pages fluttered. “Listen to me. These characters are trouble.
They could be anybody. Lunatics . . . or maybe they really are the police; they’re just lying to you. To get you to go quietly.” Its voice rose in pitch.
“I beg of you. Don’t go with these people—”
“I have to.” Sarah repositioned the strap of the little shoulder bag she had hurriedly packed. “It’s my destiny. Or as close to it as I’m going to get.”
“Sarah.” The calendar wailed as she exited the bedroom.
“Let’s go, gentlemen.” Pulling the bag up higher, she nodded toward the hovel’s front door. The two men stepped aside and let her go ahead of them.
In the corridor outside, she heard tiny feet running through the decaying trash. The minute noise came from behind; she turned and looked, and saw the alarm clock racing to catch up.
“Take me with you!” The clock’s shrill, tinny voice sliced through the oxygen-thin air. “I wanna go, too!”
She stopped and pulled the shoulder bag around so she could root through its contents. The gun’s weight had sunk it to the bottom; by the time Sarah pulled it out, the alarm clock was right in front of her, hopping excitedly from one of its stubby little legs to the other.
The shot echoed down the corridor, smudged leaves of rubble trembling in the invisible, hard-edged wave. The stimulus-hungry derelicts raised their blind heads, limbs trembling in the rush of ecstatic input, bloodied fingertips clawing convulsively at the floor grates. A smaller noise followed after the first, tinkling bits of metal and fractured microcircuits raining softly across the spot where the alarm clock, until the last moment, had been dancing.
“Damn.” Sarah looked at the warmed gun in her palm. “Now it’s empty.”
One of the men, the leader of the pair who had called upon her, reached over and took the gun out of her hand. “Don’t worry.” He threw it away, metal clanging against metal as it struck the corridor wall. “We’ll get you another one.”
As the landing field, in the bare red flats on the emigrant colony’s edge, he got screwed.
They wouldn’t give Deckard his deposit back on the skiff. “What’re you going to do?” said the man behind the desk—really just a buckling sheet of plywood supported by two empty fuel drums. The man took no pleasure in the burn, but just looked at Deckard with the flat, unblinking eyes of someone who knows he’s being a bastard. “We’re an illegal business already. You’re going to report us or something? Get real.”
Deckard turned his own gaze away from the man’s heavy, black-stubbled face, and out toward the small interplanetary craft scattered over the rust-colored sands. From one hand dangled the briefcase with his initials on the tiny metal plate below his knuckles. “There’s other ways,” he said quietly, then looked back at the man. “Of getting my money back.”
“Sure there is. You can beat the crap out of me, for one.” The man shrugged, crescents of sweat-darkened shirt riding up under his fleshy arms. “Whatever sings your song, buddy. I don’t care.” A slow, wobbling shake of the head.
“But you’re still not getting your money back. And don’t ever bother bringing your business
around here again. You ever want off-planet, you’ll have to flap your wings and jump.”
The briefcase whispered to Deckard. “Come on, don’t waste your time with this lowlife. We’ve got things to do.”
“You say something, pal?”
“No—” Deckard shook his head. “Just grumbling to myself. Tell you what. I’ll settle for half of what you owe me.”
He settled for nothing. He was too tired to argue any further.
“Count your blessings,” the skiff guy called after him from the doorway of the shack. “You got back here still breathing. Most of our customers don’t. Our merchandise has got over a fifty percent failure rate.”
“Nice advertising pitch.” Batty’s voice spoke up, louder this time, as Deckard toted the briefcase across the field. “Lot of possibilities—’Rent from us and you’ll never have to again.”
Deckard made no reply. If half of these things made it home, he thought gloomily, it’d be a miracle. With his free hand, he rubbed blood-tinged grit from his eyes. I must’ve been crazy. All around him, as he trudged in sinking footsteps, the skiffs dug lower in the sand, like the black eggs of some extinct, exhausted species. The vehicles’ dented, corrosion-flecked carapaces transmitted a minimal-wattage signal of neglect and abortive transport. Some of them, including the one he’d taken to the Outer Hollywood station and back, looked as fragile as ancient Christmas decorations, hand-blown glass that a sneeze could shatter. An indication of how desperate he must’ve been— And still am, thought Deckard. Even worse now. Getting stiffed on the deposit had chewed another major hole in his cash float.
“Don’t worry.” The briefcase, Batty’s voice inside, radiated a familiar confidence. “I haven’t even begun telling everything that’s in store for you.”
“I can’t wait.” Deckard had to remind himself that Dave Holden had died in order to carry this thing out to him. He supposed he owed his dead ex-partner the posthumous courtesy of listening to it. Shading his eyes with one hand, he peered out of the limply fluttering, low-pressure bubble tunnel that extended from the rental yard shack. He was in luck, or as much of it as existed in his personal universe. Through the sand-scoured plastic, he spotted a worm-treaded shuttle working its way across the desert; the segmented ground transport was probably ferrying contract miners back from the jagged hills to the planet’s east. He and the briefcase could hitch a ride all the way in to the emigrant colony’s imploded center.
“Now would be a good time to clam up again,” he told the disembodied voice.
Sealing his mouth and nose off with the palm of his free hand, he unzipped the bubble’s exit flap and shouldered out into the stinging wind to flag down the shuttle.
“Hey—I’m discreet.” The briefcase’s voice slid through the crystals stinging against the side of Deckard’s face. “You’re not the only person who can carry off a silent act.”
On the shuttle, he sat with the briefcase on his knees, sandwiched in between the mine workers on the scuffed steel benches, each breath taking in the mingled odors of their sweat. The jogging motion of the treads across the red dunes rocked the bodies from side to side, bumping hard into Deckard’s shoulders. No conversations sounded in the shuttle’s tight interior; the mine workers sat with their silted bandannas pulled down around their throats, breathmasks and rehydration tubes dangling disconnected like some amphibian species’ vestigial organs. They all looked to Deckard like first-generation Mars natives, some of the younger ones possibly second-gen, the children and grandchildren of the Earth-born emigrants who’d gotten this far and had then given up on getting all the way to the stars. Through eyelids drawn nearly as tight as the shuttle’s slit windows, they gazed out on the landscape that they’d inherited, that they had evolved to possess. Deckard could sense the rewiring of the nervous systems sitting around and across from him, the shuffling of synaptic fibers and input receptors that had taken place in the womb, the human body’s instinctive response to the foreign territory in which it had been exiled.
The creatures around him, that still wore the outward appearance of human beings, were off the cable monopoly’s feed. They didn’t need the canned stimuli to survive; they could go out into the hills and dry ravines and suck up all the bandwidth this world had to offer. Deckard had wondered before what their strangers’ eyes saw, what their spatulate, black-nailed fingertips read from the grains of red sand trickling through their touch. He’d given up wondering; he had enough trouble dealing with human things, and the things that were at least trying to be human. There was more in common between his blood and that of the replicants he’d killed before than there was between him and the sharp-angled faces that stared past him as if he no longer existed.
The fatigue seeping from Deckard’s bones, forearms lying like deadweights across the briefcase in his lap, drew his eyelids shut. With the scent of alien sweat in his nostrils, the press of blood-warm flesh near his own, he almost believed himself to be back on Earth, in L.A., the dark, neon-veined city extending on all sides around one of the cramped public buses shoving its way through the traffic stalled with retrofitted Detroit relics. He’d always felt overwhelmed by sheer otherness there as well; simply being on the planet, in the city, on the streets where he’d spent his whole life, that didn’t mean he could look into the face right next to his, so close he could practically taste the other’s mingled exhalations of kimchi and phrik ku noo and see anything that resembled a mirror, anything that made him think he was looking at his own genetic code.
That was a bad mental place to be in, especially for a cop wearing a big black gun inside his jacket. Even more so when you’d been working the blade runner unit, and you were supposed to blow away anything that didn’t pass for human with you; that was your job. It’d been his; it’d been Dave Holden’s, and a bunch of other poor crazed bastards’. Some of whom he’d worked with, some he’d steered a wide distance away from, catching that weird look in their eyes and the subliminal tick of a dynamite clock counting down. Some of the blade runners he’d known had wound up massaging the backs of their throats with their gun muzzles and had gone under the ground in carefully sealed caskets. Others were still out there on the streets, chasing their own deaths and the accusatory revelation that could only be glimpsed in the eyes of those you are about to kill. Or retire, to use that morally compromised departmental lingo.
Riding in a worm-tread shuttle across another world’s dead surface, Rick Deckard felt himself sweating, a crawl of self-generated excretions over his skin. An old, familiar claustrophobia tightened his muscles, a shrinking from contact with the creatures around him. Not to avoid their touch, but to keep them from being touched by him. Why should they suffer? As he did . . .
He opened his eyes and turned his head to look out the slit window behind him.
A desultory wind moved red sand around, like the floor-sweepings of his heart.
There were supposed to be other creatures out there, skinny wolflike slinkers, all lank jaws and burning eyes—he’d thought he’d spotted one before, the barest glimpse of motion from the corner of his eye, when he’d been on his way out to the skiff rental yard. You didn’t have to eat a gun to find release; you could simply wander out past the emigrant colony’s limits, keep walking, and your splintered bones would be found, marrow sucked out like soft marzipan.
To have spotted that wolfish spectre, seen it before its teeth closed on your throat—that was a bad sign. I’ve been here too long, thought Deckard. His neuro-system was starting to adapt, sensors working overtime, picking up the wavelengths of a world he hadn’t been born on. That happened sometimes-rumors and emigrant myths were rife—the whole process cannon-firing ahead, not taking two or three generations to work itself out. At some unconscious, cellular level, the poor bastard to whom it happens just gives up on being human, lets go and becomes . . . something else. Like these things around me—Deckard glanced at the sullen, motionless forms lining the interior of the shuttle.
One way or another, th
ey’d already said their good-byes to all the others they’d left behind.
The shuttle ground on, nearing the emigrant colony’s perimeter. A muted rustling moved through the seated figures, the mine workers rousing themselves from reptiloid torpor—the tiny shifts of their bodies, raising of heads, glances out the narrow windows, reminded Deckard of lizards on sun-baked rocks, the flick of yellow, slitted eyes toward an insect too far away to catch and eat. He supposed they probably were thinking about whatever meals were waiting for them—they had the lean, knife-ribbed look of people who went a long time between protein sources—in the dark shacks and nests of the colony’s most silent quarter.
Speculating about aliens with human faces, and what their unknowable lives might be like, had one advantage: it had derailed the even darker reverie into which Deckard had fallen, that pit lined with self-accusation he knew all too well. Now he could put on his own mask, the one that looked just like him but bore the name Niemand, and go home and see what Mrs. Niemand had waiting on the table for him.
God only knows, thought Deckard glumly as the shuttle slowed down to a crawl, the soft labial flaps of the colony’s ground transport airlocks folding over the windows. What Sarah would’ve gotten up to, decided upon, in his absence—she was as far around the bend, he knew, as he himself was. The married state of the pseudonymous Niemands, the alias he shared along with equal measures of hate and guilt, was as mentally toxic as any sensory void to be found on Mars. No vacuum existed between himself and Sarah; the space between them was filled, and overfilled, with memory and the slow ebbing tide of the past that left things on a common shoreline-old photos, sheet music on an untuned piano, names whispered in that sad moment between sleep and waking, empty bottles overturned by a fumbling hand. Everything that could be picked up, still tear-wet, and studied as it turned to the same ashes in his and Sarah’s mouths . . .
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