by K. W. Jeter
"That's why it's called the real world," said Deckard. "And this isn't." He gestured toward the other man. "In the real world, you didn't have legs. Not anymore."
"Yeah." Sebastian nodded slowly. "I had to get rid of them out there." His expression brightened. "But here- 'cause this is my world-I figured I should have 'em again. And I was right! They come in real handy."
"Should've given yourself a second pair of arms. Be even more convenient."
"Oh, they told me I could do that if I wanted-"
"Who's 'they'?" Deckard peered closer at the short-statured image.
A matter-of-fact response came from Sebastian. "The repsymps. When they did this for me. You know, what they call 'dehydrated'? Only it's not dehydrated at all; that's just a slang term. Same way with being a deity; I don't feel like one." He smiled shyly. "I just feel like myself. The fact that they were able to do me over, to take what was left of me and turn it into a polymerized sensorial override encapsulate- that's the technical term for the process-it doesn't change anything. Real or not."
Deckard gazed around the overstuffed room, then back to his host. "There's one big difference here," he said quietly. "You don't have to die here. The way you were on the outside."
"Well, I could if I wanted to. Anything's possible." Sebastian placed a hand against the front of his coveralls. "I could make this whole body go away. I mean, it could just crumple up and blow out the window like dust. But He looked across the silent dolls and toys. "There's enough of me left in all this-it's all me, actually-so I guess I'd still be here. In spirit, kinda." Sebastian frowned, as though trying to puzzle the situation out. "Like that old bit-did you ever hear about it when you were a kid?-about splitting an apple and finding God in the seed. So maybe I am some kind of deity, like all those genuine name-brand ones that you get in those little packets. Huh."
Deckard felt sorry for him, the same as he had long ago, in the real world. "Yeah, maybe you are."
"You shoulda seen it, though, when I first got here and I was joking around and stuff." The moist eyes glittered with excitement. "I made myself ten feet tall! Always wanted to be." A forefinger pointed up. "Hit my head on the ceiling, though, so it wasn't really practical. Guess I coulda made the room bigger, though-but then it wouldn't have been the same as before. And that was the way I wanted it. Just the same. And with my little friends, too." He shouted past Deckard. "Hey, Colonel! And Squeaker-come on out here. We've got company."
A glance over his shoulder, and Deckard saw two even smaller figures, an ornately uniformed teddy bear and a long-nosed toy soldier, waddle-marching from one of the other rooms. The bear's button eyes fixed on Deckard with evident suspicion; the soldier's spine went rigid, as though the automaton was considering its courses of action.
"Now, come on, fellas. Be nice." Sebastian waggled his finger, stained with black grease, at them. "Mr. Decker isn't going to do anything to hurt us. He can't, anyway, even if he wanted to. Least, I don't think he can." The watery eyes peered at him. "Can you?"
Deckard shook his head. "No. Not anymore."
The toy companions weren't convinced; the bear emitted a soft growl. "Foo," said the soldier. "He's not a nice man."
"I'm sure, Colonel, he's as nice as he can be. Mr. Decker hasn't had as easy a life as we have. As I have." Tilting his head to one side, Sebastian regarded his guest thoughtfully. "He doesn't have real good friends like I do. He's all alone. Aren't you?"
"Not alone enough." Time might not be ticking along in this room-like everything else, that might have been left outside in the real world-but Deckard knew that there was at least one other person waiting for him somewhere. Unfinished business, his mutual fate with Sarah Tyrell still to be worked out. "But I can deal with it."
A shrug from Sebastian. "Suit yourself. That's your pocket universe. The one inside your head."
"What about you?" The other's low-rent holiness had irritated Deckard, bringing out a mean streak he didn't feel like concealing. "Your little buddies really enough company for you?"
"Sure-" Sebastian looked suddenly nervous, picking up on the edge of hostility in the dust-moted air. "They always were. They had to be."
"What about Pris?" Deckard felt his own thin smile appear. "Where's she?"
The childlike innocence flashed out of Sebastian's face, as though the switch on one of his mechanical toys had been thrown. Replaced by something both hotter and darker, that could be seen like black-enameled metal at the center of the man's eyes. "That's not any of your business, Mr. Decker." His hard, annihilating stare could have bored holes through real-world skin and flesh. "You don't have any right to ask about that."
"Just a simple question." Deckard's turn to give a shrug. "You don't have to answer. It's your world, remember."
That world trembled in sympathetic connection to its creator. Plaster dust sifted from a network of cracks that suddenly shot like negative lightning across the water-stained ceiling. The crystal attachments to the candelabra and unlit chandeliers rattled, as though the fault lines beneath the real L.A. had been duplicated here.
"Stop!" Another voice shrilled from the opposite side of the room. "Stop that!" The toy soldier shook his tiny fists in the air, as high as the point on his spiked helmet. "Let him alone!" Beside the soldier, the uniformed teddy bear stamped its feet, anger sufficient to have caused this earth's tremors. "Wicked, wicked, wicked!"
"No, fellas ... don't..." Face wet with tears, Sebastian held one palm outward as he sank into a carved wooden chair. "It's all right ..."
The teddy bear attacked first, the tassels of its epaulets shaking as it locked stubby arms around Deckard's leg, the round face nuzzling a muffled growl against the long coat's lower edge. Deckard peeled the animated creature from himself, hoisting it up just long enough to pitch it against the approaching toy soldier. Both of Sebastian's automatons sprawled into a corner; the soldier burst into whimpers of frustration.
"Don't hurt them..." Leaning forward, Sebastian grabbed hold of Deckard's sleeve. "It's not their fault. They're just doing what I programmed them to do. They're just trying to protect me..."
Deckard looked down at the weeping man. "From what?" An old, deeply buried cop circuit linked inside Deckard's brain, producing the almost shamefully cruel satisfaction that came with doing the job well. This might have been Sebastian's world, his little private pocket universe, but Sebastian didn't control it any longer. I do, thought Deckard. Things had to be broken before the things they concealed could be seen, out in the open. Now he could find out what he needed to know. "Protecting you from what?"
Sebastian took a deep, shuddering breath, drawing himself upright. "Oh ... everything, I guess. I don't know." He made a visible effort to calm himself down, the fragile body parts drawn together by an invisible string. "Nothing, really." His trembling fingers wiped the last tears from his eyes. He looked up at Deckard. "I mean that. From nothing. She's not here."
"Pris? Why not?"
"I just don't know..." Sebastian morosely shook his head. "I tried to make her be here-you know, the way I made Colonel Fuzzy and Squeaker Hussar just be the way they were before." He pointed to the bear and the toy soldier, who had sullenly withdrawn into a corner of the room. "I should've been able to do that. This is my world, isn't it? The rep-symps put me here, they made me a dehydrated deity, they gave me all this . . . I should be able to have what I want, shouldn't I?"
"I suppose so." Deckard nodded. "Whatever you want."
"But I just couldn't make it be that way. I tried and tried, but it just wouldn't happen. That's really why I didn't change anything, why I kept it all the way it was before. Look-" Sebastian jumped up from the chair, ran to one of the tall windows and yanked its gauzy curtain to one side. "I got that right, didn't I?" His finger stabbed toward the dark, rain-drizzled urban landscape below. "That's the street, isn't it? Just the way it was."
Another slow nod from Deckard.
"And all this. The building and everything." The small man tu
rned around in the center of the room, hands upraised to indicate all its contents and the spaces beyond. "I know I got all this right. I lived here so long, not here but out there, out in the real world-this was my world. I just had to make it all over again. And I did."
Deckard watched him and listened. He felt even sorrier for the poor little bastard. He's finding out. The same things that Deckard had found out, had learned and written on the charred scroll of his heart. There were some things you couldn't bring back. You could grieve for them, and that was all.
"But Pris..." Sebastian looked puzzled, as if he was about to start crying again. "When I got done, she still wasn't here. She was supposed to be-I made it that way- but she wasn't."
Deckard knew why Sebastian, the deity of this pocket universe, had failed. He wondered if he should tell him.
"I tried and tried-"
"Look," said Deckard. "It's not going to happen. Why don't you just give up on that? You've got your memories. Those'll have to do."
A big sigh from Sebastian rendered him even smaller and more fragile. "I know. I know you're right." His shoulders slumped in desolation. He looked hollowed out, insubstantial, as though the contents of his skin had been converted to loose atoms and exhaled; another night breeze coming through the windows might have blown him away entirely. "There's a reason for it. Why she's not here."
"You don't have to talk about this if you don't want to. That's not why I came here."
"Of course not. You've got important business to take care of. Still..." Sebastian turned back to the silent and motionless clown mannequin. He lifted the black cloth covering its mechanical innards; from one of his coverall pockets, he took a yellow-handled screwdriver and poked at the meshing gears. "Like I said, I know why. Or to put it another way, kinda, it's because of what I don't know. About Pris." He extracted some small part from the workings and studied it between his thumb and forefinger. "I mean, I know all about something like this. And all the other stuff I got." Still holding the metal piece, Sebastian gestured toward the room's contents. "And the building, and the street outside, and the whole city even . . . I know what those are. So I've got 'em the right way inside my head, and so I could make 'em be here, the way they were before, out there. You know, in the real world. But with Pris He leaned close to the clown's workings, screwing the little part back into place. "I thought I knew what she was. But maybe I was wrong."
Deckard said nothing. For a moment, the room and all the empty spaces around it were silent, except for the touch of rain upon the window glass and the corridors' pools of dark water.
"Do you think, Mr. Decker, that that's possible?" Sebastian's gaze, sharper beneath the constant moistness, like a knife under blurry water, fastened onto him. "You think I could've got it all wrong?"
11
"I'm glad you're here," said the little girl. She reached up and took Sarah's hand, and gave her a shy, pretty smile. "I was getting kind of lonely. All by myself..."
Poor little thing, thought Sarah. She's not even real. The notion of ghosts and shadows, and all other unreal things, suffering from loneliness, the same way she always had, now weighted her down with an inescapable sadness. If this little girl-or the little girl that she saw, a temporary incarnation of memory and the past that was all jumbled up inside the Salander 3-if she could feel lonely, then loneliness was some sort of universal constant, like gravity or the speed of light. Everything in the world, this one or any other, was made, at least in part, of it.
The little girl's dark hair, dark as Sarah's own, was pulled back into a long braid tied with a red ribbon at the end. The girl-the image, the ghost, the hallucination-didn't draw away as Sarah felt the ribbon's thin substance between her fingertips. The ribbon felt real enough, and even touched by the passage of time; it looked old, faded and frayed, the gossamer threads coming loose at the edges.
"Did you do that?" Sarah spoke gently to the little girl, as though any harsh word might have dispersed her from even this illusory existence, like a hand brushed through a curl of smoke. "Or did somebody here fix your hair for you?"
"I can do it." The girl spoke with affronted dignity. "If I want to. But usually I let the nanny do it."
"The nanny? What nanny?"
"You know." The girl, still holding Sarah's hand, used a nod of her head to indicate the corridor walls and hidden machinery of the ship. "The things that take care of you. That's their job. But they don't have to do so much for me anymore-I'm not a baby now. But it makes them happy if they can do things, so sometimes I let them."
Sarah knew what the girl was talking about. The Salander 3's computer was still silent, as though they had left its voice behind them as they had walked farther through the ship's interior. But she could sense the pseudo-life imbedded in the structure of the vessel, the flow of electrons, the activation of solenoids, the meshing of gears; all the tiny functions that had been programmed into the lifeless metal and silicon. That had, she knew, kept her alive as well; that had been her nursemaid all the way back to Earth, so many years ago. When the Salander 3 had turned back from its voyage to the Proxima system, and had returned with two human corpses and one living child as its only passengers-the computer and its most delicate manipulators hadn't tied any red ribbons, but it had done everything necessary to preserve the real life that had been left in its charge.
Their steps, hers and the little girl's, had led them farther into the Salander 3; Sarah had wanted to get away from the pool of blood near which she had found her illusory companion. The girl had seemed to pick up on Sarah's queasiness; she had led the way, her hand in Sarah's hand, past the entrances of other corridor branches, down which had been visible other scrawled markings on the walls in the same wet red that looked black in the overhead fluorescents' partial spectrum. Only when they reached a section of the ship that had escaped whatever violence had rolled through the other enclosed spaces-it seemed to be some kind of storage area; crates and boxes with stenciled lettering lined the sides-had Sarah been able to draw her breath and speak again.
She halted, turning the little girl to face her. "Tell me," said Sarah. "And you have to tell me the truth, the real truth." She knelt down, so that her gaze was on the same level as the girl's. "Is your name really Rachael?"
"Of course." The girl gazed back at her, somber and unblinking. "What else would it be?"
Sarah didn't answer. The girl's image stepped from a mere optical perception to something else, which moved through other dark corridors, the ones inside her own memories. She knew what the girl reminded her of: one of the photographs that had been inside her uncle's desk, the ornately carved and gilded bureau plat in his vast and lofty-ceilinged office suite in L.A., that she had inherited along with every other object belonging to the Tyrell Corporation. The photograph had been of herself, taken when she had been about the same age, ten years old or so, as the girl who stood before her now. She couldn't remember when the photo had been taken, though she supposed it had been in Zurich, in the expensive, conventlike boarding school where her uncle had lodged his orphan niece as soon as she'd been old enough for it; the girl in the picture had been wearing the stiff-collared uniform that had itched so badly through her thin white stockings.
There had been something else in that old photograph. Her hair had been pulled back, the same as this little girl's, but without a ribbon of any color, or else it just hadn't been caught by the camera. And bangs, thought Sarah; she'd had bangs when she'd been ten years old, combed down to a half inch above her eyebrows. Whereas this little girl had hers parted at one temple, then brushed slanting across her forehead. That was different; but the face . . . the face was the same. Sarah could see that, calling up the photograph in her memory and comparing it with the child in front of her. The same dark eyes, the same incipient beauty, the fragile pale-ness. And something else, deeper and more hidden, yet obvious to see. That sadness, even when the little girl smiled, even when that vanished Sarah in the old photograph had smiled, shy and hesitant.
Exactly the same.
That proves it, thought Sarah. It didn't make her any happier to know that the little girl she knelt before and in whose dark eyes she saw her own grown-up face mirrored was a ghost, a hallucination, a temporal anomaly. Something that the toxic effects of the Salander 3's depleted interstellar drives had conjured up out of the jumbled past held inside the curved metal. Or out of my head-that must be what the little girl's name meant. Rachael. Where else would she have gotten it? Straight out of Sarah's own memories and desires; Sarah had even called herself Rachael, had tried to be Rachael, back when she had thought she could replace, the original for the copy, the replicant that Deckard had loved. I'm going crazy down here, thought Sarah. Or crazier. Wycliffe and Zwingli had told her it was a poisonous environment; they hadn't been lying. She had the proof of that in front of her eyes, or in the trenches of her misfiring central nervous system, wherever a hallucination like this could be said to exist at all.
Sarah stood up. "Your name's not Rachael," she said coldly.
The little girl frowned. "Yes, it is. I know my own name."
"Your name is..." She took a deep breath, fighting against a wave of fatigue that had suddenly risen inside her. "Nothing. Nothing at all."
"That's silly. How can somebody be called nothing?"
"It's easy. If she doesn't exist."
"Speak for yourself," the child said with an adult's dignity. "I know I exist. What's your problem?"
"Let's not go into that now." She rubbed the corner of her brow. "Your name's Sarah. Just the same as mine."
The girl laughed scornfully. "That's just stupid. How can we both have the same name?"
"Because you and I are the same person." She wondered why she was trying to explain this to an illusion. "In a way, that is. You're part of me. You're just something that came out of my head. You're not real, except to the degree you're something that my subconscious put together out of my memories."