Replicant Night

by K. W. Jeter

  The temptation to throw the metal box away-just another encumbrance, when Deckard had enough on his mind already-rose in him. He could just pitch it onto the rest of the trash and junk that formed the alley's bottom strata, and not miss it. The box, first aid kit or whatever it was, or had been, felt virtually weightless-he gave it an experimental shake and heard some even smaller objects rattling around inside. Prying the lid open, Deckard found a couple of small brown vials, antiseptic liquids that had dried up despite their seals; a plastic bottle of aspirin with nothing but white dust inside; a few once-sterile bandages, now suspiciously stained with age. A paper label had been inexpertly glued to the inside of the lid; if it had had instructions or words of medical advice, they had long since faded away.

  I should've let the guy have it, thought Deckard. Instead of getting into a hassle with the twitchy stim-deprived case who'd been trying to lift the little metal box from him. Then it would have been his problem, about what to do with it.

  Deckard cocked his wrist, preparing to flip the ancient first aid kit into the farther reaches of the alley, then hesitated. For some reason, Sebastian had wanted him to have it, had hurried to shove it into his hands when the pocket universe had started to fade away. And the box had come with him when Deckard had fallen back into this world. If nothing else, it made for a strange, sad remembrance of the age-wrinkled figure and his retinue of somber toys.

  He tucked the box into his jacket pocket and stood up. The empty vials rattled against the metal, an erratic, hollow rhythm as Deckard headed for the colony's streets that had people in them. Cop instincts shifting to criminal: if anybody was looking for him, it would be easier to hide in a crowd than out in the open.

  The door of the hovel was unlocked; the knob turned in his hand without resistance. It had taken him another half hour, pushing and shoving his way, head down, through the thickest part of the milling pack, to get to the Niemand residence; the last dozen or so yards, where there had been no one about except for a few total burnouts rooting blindly through the accumulated debris, had been the most nervous-making for him. He knew that if any kind of trap had been laid, it would be right here on his own front step. The old instincts, hard to root out as the sinews along his bones, had again moved his fingers under his jacket, searching for the gun he'd carried in his other life; his hand came out as empty as it had on the neon-lit street of Sebastian's private universe.

  Darkness inside; he pushed the door open, enough to reach in and flip the switch on the wall. In the hovel's cramped spaces, everything looked as it had before he'd left, minus himself sitting at the table, slumped unconscious. The briefcase was still there, handle turned toward the door; he could see his initials on the small metal plate beneath. And the various paraphernalia, the graduated beaker and glass rod, the packet torn open with a few granules of the white powder spilled out, the spoon from the kitchen area . . . a tableau that might have been of more interest to a drug enforcement agency, if any had stuck their heads inside the hovel.

  He shut the door behind himself. As soon as he had, he knew there was someone else there with him; he could sense the minute disturbance in the trapped air, different from the leakage through the ceilings' and walls' multiple patches and caulking. Deckard halted, listening, hearing nothing; then stepped quickly around the table, taking the couple of paces to the bedroom door and shoving it open.

  "Mr. Niemand-thank goodness you're home!" The calendar on the wall spoke in its flutey, overexcited voice. "Terrible things have happened while you were away! Murder and ruin!"

  Deckard ignored the calendar. In the fall of light from the room behind him, he saw a figure lying on the bed. Smoke from a strong tobacco, more expensive than anything available in the colony's black market, drifted as a thin grey wraith to his nostrils. The figure on the bed brought the cigarette to her lips and inhaled; the small glow of fire drew the familiar angles and shadows of Sarah Tyrell's face. She didn't even bother to look at him, but went on gazing abstractedly up at the water-stained ceiling, her dark hair unbound and spread across the pillow.

  "You're home," said Deckard. He sat down on the edge of the bed. "Where'd you go?"

  "Far, far away..." Ash drifted, unnoticed by her, across the back of her hand and onto the blanket. "You'd be amazed, probably, if you knew."

  "Probably so." He let his shoulders slump forward, his forearms against his knees, tiredness stepping along the chain of his bowed spine. The clock on the little bedside table was gone, its metal and plastic bits scattered outside. No great loss; he'd hated the clock and its idiot chatter as much as Sarah had.

  Clockless and shadowed, the room seemed to exist outside of time. From the corner of his eye, he could see her without effort. Overlays of memory slid beneath the thinning smoke. They looked so much alike, this face and that other; identical, as Eldon Tyrell had meant for them to be. He had no need to close his eyes in this darkness; he could see the other one, the one he'd loved, the dead one. Deckard had to make a dead thing out of himself, something without desire, to keep from lying down beside her. Taking her in his arms, bringing his face to hers, smoke and kiss and the presence of her body, alive and real and an illusion. He wouldn't have cared...

  The calendar on the wall sensed the deep reverie into which he had fallen.

  "Mr. Niemand," it whispered, as though fearful of intruding. "There's something you should know."

  He didn't look up from his own hands dangling empty before him. A slow nod and sigh. "What's that?"

  "There's somebody else here. I mean, besides you and Mrs. Niemand."

  Deckard raised his head, taking a slow scan across the room. He stopped when he encountered another pair of eyes gazing back at him. "Who are you?"

  A little girl, with dark hair drawn back into a braid, regarded him somberly. "Don't you know?" She sat on one of the chairs from the kitchen area table that had been dragged into the bedroom's corner. The girl tossed her head so that the braid fell across one shoulder. "She knows."

  He looked over at Sarah, lying on the bed. "What the hell's going on? Who's this?"

  "Oh, for Christ's sake." Sarah emitted a groan of disgust. She kneaded her brow with one hand. "Don't you start with that." Pushing herself up against the wall behind the bed, she fixed an angry glare upon him. "You know there isn't anyone there. Don't pretend you see someone."

  For a moment longer, Deckard gazed into the dark centers of the woman's eyes, then turned back toward the presence in the room.

  The girl shrugged and shook her head. "That's the way she's been talking. She didn't believe those other two men, either, when they said they saw me." The girl lifted her chin in obstinate defiance. "She doesn't think I'm real. But I am."

  Deckard nodded. "She has her little ways." He looked back at Sarah. "Where'd she come from? Why did you bring her here?"

  "Now I'm really pissed off." In swift, angry motion, Sarah swung her legs over the side of the bed; she jabbed her cigarette out against the table as if she could drive it through the imitation wood like a nail. "You know goddamn well where she comes from. She comes from whatever weird little scheme you and those die-hard Tyrell Corporation loyalists must have cooked up together. I don't know what kind of twisted gaslight agenda you people thought you could get rolling." She turned a fierce, annihilating glare upon him. "Maybe you wanted to drive me even crazier than I already am. Though why you'd want to bother is beyond me. I'm already at the limit." Her words came through gritted teeth. "I can see her, but I'm supposed to; she's my hallucination."

  He resisted the temptation to go over and grab Sarah by both shoulders and rock some sense into her. "Look," said Deckard, setting a hand flat on the bed. "I'm not going to go into details now, but I just came from someplace that doesn't exist. Not the way that real things exist. So I know the difference. There's a girl sitting in this room with us, and I want to know what she's doing here. That's all."

  The radiation that lasered out from beneath Sarah's eyelids went up another notch
in lethality. "Fuck you, Deckard." She stood up and strode past him, out to the front part of the hovel.

  "All right." Every encounter with Sarah Tyrell left him feeling exhausted, not the least of which came from the cognitive warpage of seeing the face of the woman he'd loved looking back at him with utter contempt and hatred. He leaned forward and placed his hand gently on top of the little girl's. "So you'll have to tell me. What's your name?"

  "You know..."

  "No, I don't." Deckard tried to smile as gently as possible. "I really don't."

  "I'm Rachael." She looked straight back into his eyes. "My name's Rachael"

  He felt the room go still around him, around the two of them, himself and the grave, dark-haired little girl. A moment of stopped time, as though the world itself had held its breath, caught the way his was, next to his heart.

  "Is this some kind of a joke?" He spoke without anger, all harshness filtered out of his voice. The child's hand, a thing of warmth and flesh and skin, was tangible beneath his palm. "I won't be mad-I won't be mad at you-if it is. Did somebody tell you to say that?"

  "Of course not." She looked offended. "It's my name. It's my real, real name." A pitying expression came into her eyes. "I don't have any other."

  The calendar on the wall rustled its pages. "I don't think she's lying, Mr. Niemand."

  "No ... I don't think she is, either." He didn't look up at the calendar and its photogenic scene of a vanished wilderness. "That's not the problem." Deckard's gaze was still held by the unblinking regard of the child. Sometimes people lied and sometimes they didn't; sometimes they simply believed things that weren't true. "What's your last name?"

  She shook her head, the thick dark braid swinging behind her. "I don't know. Nobody ever told me that."

  "Who are your parents?"

  A cloud passed behind her eyes. "They're dead. They've been dead a long, long time."

  Around them, in the silent room and the world outside the hovel's thinly fabricated walls, time had started up again; Deckard could feel his heart once more moving through its paces. Something had happened, he knew; a door had opened to some other time, and this child had stepped through. It's her, thought Deckard. She's not lying. Rachael...

  He could see it in the child's face. In the darkness of her hair, bound behind her; in the open, unashamed eyes; in the calm self-possession that radiated through every posture and motion of the small frame. He had loved, kissed and held in his embrace, slept with an adult Rachael, if a replicant that would live only four years total could be called an adult; she had been created that way, her childhood a false memory stolen from the human woman Sarah Tyrell and implanted inside her head. He had never seen Rachael as a child, except for a moment, a dehydrated slice of time; in the photos that she had brought to his apartment, that she had shown to him in a futile attempt to prove that she was human. Those had been photos of Sarah, he knew, or else total fabrications, bad-faith evidence concocted in Eldon Tyrell's workshops, as phony as the ones that the replicant Kowalski had been obsessed with. There was no need for Deckard to have seen those old photographs, the ones that the adult Rachael's trembling hand had thrust toward him, to recognize the child now sitting a few feet away. He could have closed his eyes, or kept the room in absolute darkness, not even seen the child's eyes and face, and he would have known that Rachael-not the woman he'd loved, as a woman, but some aspect of her-was there with him.

  From his own memory, Deckard pulled up another question to ask the child. Something that he'd been told, reminded of, in the Van Nuys Pet Hospital, that sanctuary for escaped replicants where Isidore busied himself converting them into creatures that could pass for fully human. There had been another photo there, an old news clipping on the wall of Isidore's office that he had looked at and wondered about. Because the woman in that ancient photo had looked so much like Rachael.

  "Tell me something." He leaned forward, bringing his gaze level and just inches away from the little girl's eyes. "Was your mother's name Ruth?"

  The girl's face lit up. "Yes! It was!" She did a quick, excited bounce in the chair. "That's what the nanny told me her name was. It was Ruth."

  He angled his head to one side. "What nanny?"

  "Well ... not like a proper nanny. Like in the storybooks and the videos." The child named Rachael gave an embarrassed shrug. "That wasn't real; not like me and you. It was just the computer, and the machines and stuff, that took care of me. 'Cause there weren't any real people . . . at least until she came along." The child gestured toward the door-and Sarah, in the hovel's other room. "There were just ghosts and things that looked like people-they were all dead, though. So the nanny had to tell me all about stuff." She looked closer at him. "Do you understand?"

  "Sure." Deckard nodded. He had an idea of what she was talking about. "This place, with the nanny and the ghosts- did it have a name? Was it called the Salander 3?"

  "That's it!" The little girl looked excited and pleased, as though finding herself on another human being's wavelength. She suddenly looked puzzled, forehead creasing. "How do you know that? You weren't there."

  "Oh ... I know all sorts of things." More flashes from the time he'd spent with Isidore, and even before that, rummaging through what was left of the LAPD's ancient files on the Tyrell Corporation. There had been all sorts of fragmentary data, bits and pieces transferred one way or another into the personal memory bank he carried around inside his head. The problem isn't in knowing things, mused Deckard. It's understanding them.

  Like how did this little girl come to be here? She didn't look to be more than ten years old, if that-the mix of a somber adult quality, a wary regard of the things happening around her, and those kid reactions, when he'd guessed her mother's name, made it hard to precisely fix her age. Deckard suspected that if he asked her that simple question, the reply would be that she didn't know. How could she? Something had gone wrong with the flow of time itself for the girl to exist at all. If she really was the daughter of Ruth Tyrell- he tried to remember the father's name, having to concentrate on the memory of the old newspaper clipping, before coming up with the name Anson, the brother of Eldon Tyrell-if that was true, and right now he felt sure it was, then it meant that the girl had somehow been born after her parents had died on the Salander 3's aborted mission to the Proxima system.

  And what did all the rest of it mean? Deckard tried to sort through the pieces as he studied the girl's face. He could see the other Rachael, the one she would grow up to be, already present there, as though an embryo, or more accurately, a flower that had only begun to show the color of its petals. No sexual feeling was triggered in him by the girl, though everything about her-the color of her eyes, the lift of chin and shape of cheekbone, even the barely perceptible fragrance of her dark hair-reminded him of the adult Rachael who had slept in his arms. A sadness-tinged wonder, rather, at the girl's appearance; she could have been the child that Rachael and he would have had together, if replicants could bear children. One more thing of which Eldon Tyrell had deprived them. But that was what the girl looked like; a convoluted genetic inheritance, yet breeding true, from the smiling beauty of Ruth caught in the old news clipping photo... and how much farther back? Perhaps the woman that Anson Tyrell had married, had tried to take with him to the stars, had been part of a long line of heartbreakers, not so much beautiful-though Rachael had been that, and Sarah Tyrell was, even now-as some other quality, almost invisible but still real, that laid a fingertip on men's hearts, stilling the pulse like a soft, effective bullet.

  She'll also be that way, thought Deckard as he looked at the child sitting in front of him, waiting for him to speak again. Not for me. For him, there would only be Rachael, the one he'd loved and had taken from him. For someone else...

  "What's going to happen now?" With the slightest tilt of her head, the Rachael child indicated the bedroom's doorway. A shadow passed through the light from the other part of the hovel. "She doesn't seem to like me very much." A note of worry sounde
d in the girl's voice. "And I don't have anywhere else to go. I don't know my way around here, like I did back home."

  "Well... it'll be all right." Deckard squeezed the girl's hand. "Nothing bad will happen to you. I promise."

  "What a performance." The air temperature in the hovel seemed to drop several degrees as a bitterness-laden voice spoke from the doorway. Deckard looked up and saw Sarah standing there, leaning against the plastic door frame, arms folded across her breasts. "I really have to hand it to you." She slowly shook her head, her glare daggering straight into his eyes. "Who would have thought you were such a consummate performer? I should've learned by now not to put anything past you."

  "Oh, oh." The calendar, sensing trouble to come, whispered from behind its image of snow and trees. "I don't think-"

  "Be quiet." Deckard hadn't taken his own gaze away from Sarah. "What're you talking about?"

  "Your little show here." With a sharp flick of one hand, she gestured toward him and the girl. "I could almost believe that you really do see her. The same as I can."

  He didn't feel like arguing the point with her any further. "You went off-planet-didn't you? You must have." That had to be the case, though Deckard had no idea yet of how it could have been accomplished. But the Salander 3, the interstellar transport upon which Ruth and Anson Tyrell had headed for the Prox system, wasn't here on Mars. If it existed anywhere, it would have to be back on Earth, sandbagged somewhere to keep the notoriously toxic effects of the old-style propulsion units from leaking out. "Where did you go? Who took you?"