Replicant night br-3

by Kevin Wayne Jeter

  Like falling in love. Sarah closed her eyes. And thought of Deckard. That was a mistake, she mused grimly. That was what she got for even trying to be human. Better to have stayed a Tyrell, right to the ice-crystaled ventricles of her heart. A family tradition: a Voigt-Kampff machine slapped onto her uncle would have frozen up and died like a broken-winged bird in an Arctic wind. So much for empathy as a way of determining who’s human and who’s not.

  A reproduction of the antique bureau plat from the Tyrell Corporation’s demolished headquarters had been installed next to the wing chair. Sarah sat forward and pulled open the central door. The real bureau plat-now also reduced to ashes, driven into L.A.’s concrete and rubble by the monsoon rains—had had several useful things in it; the repro desk had only the remote control for the opposite wall’s viewscreen. That was enough; she leaned back and thumbed through the displayed menus until the phony cityscape had been replaced by a real-time view from the trailing opticals. Mars was already a red dot, everything on it even less from this distance. Including that bastard Deckard-her thumb rested on the remote’s Off button, poised for obliteration.

  She hesitated, one moment merging with the next. Prolonging the sensation she felt: not pleasure—she was beyond that—but a certain satisfaction. Not with the present, but what was to come.

  “I was a fool.” Sarah spoke aloud, her words echoing against the hard metal bulkheads underneath the ersatz tapestries and wall hangings. Not necessarily for falling in love with him—for wanting the same thing that Rachael, the replicant with her face, could have so easily—but for thinking that she could get back at him while stuck in a shabby little hovel in one of the Martian emigrant colonies. Money a weapon; revenge facilitated by all the power of the Tyrell Corporation. Even in this, its shadow form. The appearance at the hovel’s doorstep of the die-hard true believers, Wycliffe and Zwingli, had been the answer to the prayer she hadn’t even spoken inside her own head yet.

  She had screwed people over both with and without money, the difference being that money and power made the screwing deeper and longer-lasting. Even terminal. “Whatever works,” she murmured.

  Her thumb pressed down and the image disappeared, replaced by blank wall.

  Sarah stood up from the wing chair and tossed the remote back onto the bureau plat repro.

  An hour or so later, when she came back into the lounge area, the two men were waiting for her. They both looked fidgety and nervous, as though their impersonations of the late Eldon Tyrell were wearing through.

  “What can I do for you, gentlemen?” Sarah rubbed the thick white towel through her hair, then draped it along her neck. In the wing chair, she crossed her legs, letting the Tyrell-logo’d bathrobe part just enough to show the pale flesh above her knee. “Nothing too important, I hope. I’m still getting . . . used to things. Again.”

  While they organized their reply, she slit open the pack of illicit tobacco cigarettes she had found in the master sleeping quarters. Golden Wood Dove, her favorite, from the farthest and least accessible of all the Kampuchean warlord protectorates. Expensive, obtainable only through the U.N.’s own diplomatic courier pouches—the shadow corporation’s contacts must be well in order. Along with their research: in the bedroom’s closets, she had found a reasonable approximation of at least part of the wardrobe she’d had back in Los Angeles, sized down to reflect the weight she had lost on the emigrant colony’s starvation diet.

  “Miss Tyrell—” As before, Wycliffe was the pair’s spokesman. “There’s a lot we need to talk about.”

  She tilted her head back and watched the ship’s air-circulation system draw away her exhaled blue smoke. “You’ve already talked.” She lowered her cool, level gaze to theirs. “What more do you have to say?”

  “But . . . you don’t even know where we’re going.”

  “Where we’re taking you to,” chimed in Zwingli.

  “Does it matter?” Sarah gave an unconcerned shrug. “Back to Earth, presumably; that seems to be the direction in which we’re heading.” She pulled the edge of the robe back over her knee. “Los Angeles, perhaps? Is that where this little shadow corporation operates from?”

  “No—” Wycliffe shook his head; a moment later, so did his partner. “There’s nothing there. At least as regards the Tyrell Corporation.” His expression lapsed into mournfulness. “It’s all gone. The headquarters complex . . . the pyramid .

  “Yes, I know.” She sighed. “I’m sure it was the site of your happiest days.

  Get over it.” Sarah flicked away the cigarette’s ash. “Zurich, then. Or somewhere close by. I seem to recall that as being the branch office for most of our overseas operations.”

  Wycliffe’s eyes narrowed into slits. “We don’t talk about Zurich. Not inside the shadow corporation, that is.”

  “Those sonsabitches.” Zwingli’s face had hardened into an identical angry mask. “Turncoats.”

  “Let’s just say Wycliffe’s voice was as bitter as his expression. “Not all Tyrell Corporation employees had the same degree of loyalty. Some of the more remote branches of the company sold out to the U.N. security agencies. Or they tried to.” One corner of his mouth curled into an ugly smirk. “They would have, if the shadow corporation hadn’t gotten to them first.”

  “We took care of business,” said Zwingli. “Ours and theirs.”

  “I bet you did.” If Sarah hadn’t been convinced before that these two were left over from the old Tyrell Corporation, she was now. The culture inside the L.A. headquarters building had been nurtured by her uncle into a magnified form of his own personality. Inside that pyramid, the way to get ahead had been through murder, or at least a display of one’s willingness along those lines. All in the service of the Tyrell Corporation as manifested by Eldon Tyrell. “So Zurich’s not on the grand tour anymore, I take it.”

  Both men nodded their heads.

  She waited, but neither of them said anything more. They stood and gazed at her with an apparent lack of sexual appetite that she found offensive.

  “Gentlemen—it’s not that long a trip between Mars and Earth. Not aboard one of these yachts.” Sarah took a long drag on the cigarette, taking it halfway down its length. She held out her hand to regard the glowing ember. “And my patience is even shorter.” She looked back at the men. “So why don’t you just tell me where we’re going?”

  They looked frightened, as though some moment they’d been dreading since birth had finally arrived. “It’s Wycliffe’s pale, large-knuckled hands tugged at each other. “It’s not that easy . . .”

  “Jesus Christ.” It struck her once more that the pair’s impersonations of the late Eldon Tyrell hadn’t penetrated past the skin. Her uncle at least had had the courage of the selfabsorbed. “Show me, then.”

  Wycliffe appeared relieved by the suggestion. He dug through the inside pocket of his coat and extracted a folding map, so old that the creases had turned to lines of soft white fur. He spread it out on the bureau plat, hands patting the paper smooth.

  “You can’t use the screen?” She pointed to the far wall of the lounge.

  “Instead of that thing?”

  “This . . . belonged to Dr. Tyrell.” Wycliffe looked up from his insectoid crouch over the map. One hand hovered a quarter inch above its surface. “His personal copy.”

  “What, he gave it to you?”

  Wycliffe shook his head. “No—he kept it here. With his other things.”

  “Fine. Whatever.” Sarah stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray that Zwingli had scurried to fetch for her. “Acquire your sacred relics however you want.”

  She got up and stood beside Wycliffe, looking down at the map. “Now-can you point? Can you do that much for me?”

  He laid a fingertip on a spot in the upper left corner.

  A map of western Europe—that much had been readily discernible, even through the rectangular grid of the fold marks and tears. This thing looks a million years old, thought Sarah. Perhaps her uncle had had
it when he’d been a boy, when the world had been flat and the only things that looked human actually were. Sarah leaned closer over the bureau plat.

  The British Isles, but not England. Farther north than that. Her heart had paused between one beat and the next, a moment frozen between life and its continuance, when she discerned the exact place on the map. North of the Scottish mainland, far beyond Cape Wrath, beyond Thurso at the very tip; into the North Sea, where the currents ran as cold as the pulse that now moved slowly through her veins. She knew where Wycliffe was pointing; she had always known. And why the two men had been reluctant to speak the words, the name.

  “You see?” Wycliffe spoke softly, his voice all kindness, sympathy. “Right there. That’s where we’re going.”

  She saw, she knew; a place she had never been to. But she knew what was there.

  Waiting for her in that little spiral of islands. Scraps of land, treeless and rock-laden, protecting another body of seawater from the greater, darker ocean surrounding it. A place that most people didn’t even know existed; that they had forgotten, if they had ever known. Lucky them, Sarah thought.

  Memory was a disadvantage, a means of control. Her uncle had known that, had used it; the replicants he had created, the false memories he had implanted in their skulls. How much better it would have been for those poor bastards if they had been able to forget, if they had never known. How much better for me-some of the memories in the dead Rachael’s skull had been her own. Some of them were things that she would have rather forgotten. And the others—the bits and bleeding scraps that Eldon Tyrell hadn’t seen fit to take and implant in her double’s mind, that he had wanted to keep a secret, big and dark, between himself and his niece—those were even more worth forgetting. If they could have been. That’s the trouble with the past, thought Sarah, closing her eyes for a moment. It was divided between the things you could never know and all the things you wished you could forget.

  “Do we have to?” She heard her own voice, sounding like a child’s. The one who had never died and never forgotten. She opened her eyes and looked at the man standing next to her. “Go there, I mean. Why do we have to?”

  “We don’t have any choice,” said Wycliffe. A few feet away, Zwingli nodded in agreement. “Neither do you. These things have to be done.”

  “But technically I’m your boss.” Sarah attempted a last-ditch argument. “I’m in charge. I am the Tyrell Corporation—you said so yourself. Without me . . . there’s nothing.” Her voice rose in desperation. “You’re supposed to do what I say. I could tell you no. I’d forbid you to take me there.”

  “It doesn’t work that way, Miss Tyrell. It can’t.”

  “Why not?” Still plaintive, still hoping, though she knew what the answer would be.

  “We all have to subordinate our desires—and our fears—to the greater work.”

  The true-believer tone sounded in Wycliffe’s voice again, low and fervent.

  “For the sake of that which is larger than all of us. For the sake of the Tyrell Corporation. So that it can be once again. As it was. And as it always shall be.”

  She supposed she could tell them the truth. For all the good it would do—she could tell them that it had been her, the culmination of all her planning and scheming, her unsubordinated desires, that had reduced the Tyrell Corporation to ashy ruins. They’d either believe her or they wouldn’t. And it would make no difference. Everything would happen the way it had to, the way it had been laid out by a dead man. How did I think, she wondered, how did I ever think I could kill him? When Eldon Tyrell was still alive inside her head and in the past that never ended? And there, where they’re taking me.

  “Don’t worry,” came Wycliffe’s voice. She couldn’t see him, or the map, or the faux tapestries hung on the ship’s bulkheads. Her eyes had filled with tears, a child’s tears. One fell onto the paper ocean and seeped away, with any others that might have struck there, long ago. “Please don’t worry, Miss Tyrell.” He was trying to be soothing, to give some small comfort, all that was possible. “We’ll be there with you. You can count on us.”

  “Thanks.” Sarah meant it, without guile or sarcasm. “That means a lot to me.”

  They left her, with the map still unfolded on the reproduction bureau plat.

  Wiping her eyes clear, Sarah stood for a while longer, looking at it and not seeing it. Then she went back to the wing chair and curled up in its protection, legs tucked beneath her. She laid her head against the upholstered angle beside her. At some point, while the yacht moved on toward its destination, to that place where the waters rolled over the deeply buried past, she slept. And dreamed, and remembered . . .

  Which were exactly the same thing.

  Patience was never much of a virtue with you, Deckard.” The briefcase sat surrounded by moldering rubble, scummed coffee cups, stubs of ersatz tobacco disintegrating within. “I don’t know how you ever got to be a cop. You act cold—you always did—but you know what? You’re not.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.” Deckard reached for the brown glass. “If you’ll spare me any more crap.”

  The briefcase laughed. “That’s how you should take it. Since there aren’t going to be any others. Compliments, I mean. You look like hell, Deckard. I don’t even have eyes, and I can tell that. I can hear it in your voice. The ravages of a guilty conscience, I suppose.”

  Deckard shrugged. “I wouldn’t have killed you, except I had to.” Another sip.

  “You were trying to kill me, remember?”

  “Oh, that. Forget about it,” said Batty’s voice. “These things happen.

  Besides, it was poor old Holden who fired the shot; technically, he gets the credit for the hit. The department may even have given him a bonus for taking me out—he never told me for sure, though. Hard guy to get to know. Even when he’s toting you around by the handle. Genuine cold.”

  “Even colder now.”

  “Yeah The briefcase emitted a sigh. “Poor bastard. And him walking around with that latest heart-and-lung implant, all that cranking machinery, that the LAPD surgeons had put inside him Batty’s voice went silent for a moment, then came back, softer and musing. “You know, I was starting to feel a little sympathy for Holden before he got iced back there at Outer Hollywood. Sort of a kinship, if you know what I mean. Here I am, stuck in this box-implanted, right? inside a device—and Holden had a box inside his chest stuffed full of little gizmos. Keeping him alive, the same way this one does for me, sort of.

  So what was the essential difference?”

  Deckard didn’t even bother to shrug. “None,” he said. “That I can think of.

  Especially since you’re both working for the LAPD. Or were, in Holden’s case.”

  “Pardon me?” Batty’s voice kicked back up in volume. “What the hell did you say?”

  “Come on.” Anger more than alcohol unleashed Deckard’s tongue. “Let’s not screw around, all right? I didn’t carry you back here all the way from Outer Hollywood just so you could feed me a line of bullshit. This is a police operation—what else could it be? I’ve seen these box jobs before; this is how the department preserves anybody who’s been iced before they’ve finished extracting information from him. Standard operating procedure—the department’s tech surgeons scrape up the body, the way they must’ve scraped you up from that broken-up old freeway where I left you, they do a deep core retrieval from whatever cellular activity is left in the brain and spine, then download it into a storage unit. Like this briefcase you’re sitting in.”

  “Then I wouldn’t be working for the department, would I?” Batty’s voice tightened. “Since these box jobs, as you call them, are something they do to people who’ve been offed by the cops.”

  “Cops get ’em, too,” said Deckard wearily. “Killed in the line of duty-especially if it happens to investigators or detectives who didn’t get a chance to make a report before they took a bullet. It’s even happened to a few blade runners. Just part of the hazards
of the job.”

  “You’d better get your head straightened out, Deckard.” The personality and mind implanted inside the briefcase audibly bristled. “First thing, jettison the notion that I’m part of some LAPD operation. I’m not, and neither was Dave Holden.”

  “Oh?” Deckard tapped the edge of the glass. “What happened? He quit the force?”

  “That’s exactly right. He walked.”

  Deckard snorted. “Hard to believe.”

  “Why? You did the same. Once.”

  “That was different.”

  “You give yourself too much credit, Deckard.” Batty’s voice sneered at him.

  “For uniqueness. Think you’re the only ex-cop who got that way from a bad conscience?”

  Deckard nodded, even though he knew the briefcase couldn’t see him. “The only one I ever knew.”

  “That’s because you were always such a loner. If you blade runners had ever hung out together, instead of always scheming against each other in department politics, you might’ve had a chance.”

  Deckard said nothing. The voice coming out of the briefcase had touched a nerve, a line into his memory and all that had happened back in L.A. He’d told himself that he wasn’t going to think about that stuff anymore, that there wasn’t any point to it. The whole anti-blade runner conspiracy riff that he’d gotten wind of from Holden and Batty when he’d still been walking around as a human being. All of which might have been true, with conspiracies wrapped inside larger ones, legions of endless night . . .

  He didn’t care. Not anymore; he’d had his fill, even before he’d been sucked into Sarah Tyrell’s private conspiracy, her queen-and-pawns maneuvering, all to destroy the Tyrell Corporation, everything that her hated uncle had created. Eldon

  Tyrell’s works turned to ashes, his memory locked inside that dark space inside Sarah’s skull, where she was still a child and he was the king of the only world she knew. Deckard had had a glimpse in there, and he didn’t want to see any more. Enough that Sarah’s vengeance-driven scheming had robbed him as well, of those last carefully measured hours he could have spent with Rachael.