Replicant night br-3
Page 34
“Is that what you’re going to do?” He’d watched as the momentary tremor left her upraised hand. “Kill yourself, too?”
“Why not?” Sarah’s eyes almost seemed to be looking for sympathy from him.
“Why should you be the only one to get lucky?”
Deckard continued to watch as she strode forward, all the way to the building’s edge. She turned and leaned back against the parapet a carefully judged distance away from him, just far enough that there was no chance of his being able to grab the gun before she fired.
“You know Sarah mused aloud. “The illusion kind of breaks down here.” She glanced over her shoulder, toward the street below. “It’s not really very high up at all, is it?” Her gaze turned to him. “Not like the real one, back in Los Angeles. I’ve seen that one; I’ve been there.” Head cocked to one side, she smiled coyly at him. “When I was first finding out all about you, Deckard; I went and looked at the places you’d been, where things happened to you.” She nodded toward the drop on the parapet’s other side. “You must’ve been pretty scared, back then; if you’d fallen from the real one, they would’ve had to have picked you up from the pavement with a sponge. Whereas here Sarah gave an unimpressed shrug. “Hardly enough to kill someone. You might actually even survive.”
“Maybe.” Deckard looked over the edge behind him. She was right; the illusion of the city’s reality was dispelled from this angle. The machinery and interlaced cables of the set were detectable, like the secret workings of the world revealed by a paranoid vision come true. “Is that the deal you made with Urbenton? He always wants the best footage he can get. So a shot of me falling . . . I imagine that would be just about perfect. He could re-edit the video he did about me, put in a new ending, one where I die. Maybe that would suit both him and the people he’s working for.”
“Oh, it would. You’re exactly right on that one.” Sarah nodded, as though admiring his take on the situation. “That’s pretty much the U.N.’s little agenda. The first version of the video—the one you saw—that was only shown in the Martian emigrant colony.” She pointed toward him with the gun. “They’d love to do another version for broadcast on Earth that would really prove just how dangerous escaped replicants are. In case there might be anyone starting to feel sorry for them. Urbenton could always fake your getting killed, do it with special effects, all the different tricks they have for that sort of thing—but there’s nothing quite as convincing as reality, is there? No matter how much you have to fake it. Plus, this way, there’s no living blade runner named Rick Deckard turning up later to embarrass everyone. The little details . . . like your not being killed by the fall but from a bullet Sarah gave another shrug. “Urbenton can fix that up in postproduction. Or not. That’s his business, not mine.” She studied the gun in her own hand for a moment, then looked at Deckard again. “I’ll have kept my part of the bargain.”
“You’re a person of your word. In your own way.”
“I try to be.” Sarah spoke with no more irony than before. “I’ve only lied when I had to. When there was something I had to have. And what did it get me?” She shook her head. “Nothing. I learned my lesson.” Her voice turned bitter. “I should’ve just stayed what I was. Not tried to be something else.
Like your precious Rachael. It’s just no good—the dead get all the breaks in this world.”
The artificial rain had lessened a bit. Deckard looked up to where the clouds and stars should have been, letting the drops wash down his face and throat.
“But do you know?” The words were soft, almost a whisper. “Do you know who you are?”
“Come on.” Her response was sour, irritated. “I’m not in the mood for the usual mind games, Deckard. I’m tired of playing even my own. So it’s not likely I’m going to fall for yours. If that’s what you’re going to try, then I’ll just stop wasting time and kill you now. There’s a limit to how sentimental I get.”
He said nothing. Instead, he reached inside his jacket and took out the thin, flat rectangle of the photograph, the one that had been given to him by the dead man back on Mars. Deckard held it by one corner and gazed at the long-past scene it revealed. Then he held the photo out to Sarah.
“What’s that supposed to be?” She leaned back, regarding the object with suspicion. “Something you and your repsymp friends faked up?”
“No—” He shook his head. “This is the real thing. Go on, take it.”
Keeping the gun levelled at him, Sarah reached out and grasped the photograph between her own thumb and forefinger. She turned it around and studied it. “I don’t get it,” she announced after a few seconds. Her brow creased. “Who is it?”
“Come on, Sarah. You know.” He tried to make his words as gentle as possible.
“You’ve seen them before. You’ve seen other pictures. They’re your parents.”
She said nothing. Deckard watched her staring at the photo. The image it contained was in his head as well, engraved there from the moment he had first seen it. And Marley’s voice, telling him what it meant; those were fused together, insoluble. He knew what Sarah was looking at: a photo of a bed, the sheets and covers all white, a woman sitting up with the pillows mounded behind her; the woman was smiling, as was the man standing beside the bed, leaning down to get his face close to hers, the two of them looking into the lens of the camera. It must have been mounted on a tripod or a high shelf; the remote control was just visible in the man’s grasp, his thumb pressing down the button that had flicked the camera’s shutter.
The two people were Ruth and Anson Tyrell—the same two people, the couple, that Deckard had seen in another old photograph, a newspaper clipping on the wall of a cramped, cluttered office at the Van Nuys Pet Hospital, back in the real L.A. on Earth. A moment of the past, a frozen section of time, caught and preserved; those people had been alive once, and then they had become memories.
“When The expression on Sarah’s face grew more troubled. “When was this taken?”
“You can figure it out,” said Deckard. He made no move from the parapet he leaned against, but pointed to the photo in the woman’s hand. “Look at what he’s wearing.” That was also the same as it had been in the clipping on Isidore’s office wall. “Look at the emblem on the breast pocket. That’s the jumpsuit from the expedition. The picture was taken on board the Salander 3.”
He could tell, just from watching, that the meaning of the photograph was becoming clear for her. Bit by bit, as though the image was gradually moving into focus, the past it held becoming real once again.
“This wasn’t on Earth.” Sarah raised the photograph higher, a few drops of rain spattering against its empty white backing. “This must have been when they were still on their way to the Proxima system .
“That’s right.” Deckard nodded. “Before . . . those other things happened.”
In the artificial night, the glow from the lights suspended above was enough for her to make out all the details of the old photograph. There were more than just the two people, the adults, Ruth and Anson Tyrell, held in the image.
“If that’s my parents Sarah spoke slowly, wonderingly. “Then . . . that must be me.” She used the tip of the gun’s muzzle to point. “One of those .
That was what he had wanted her to see. What she needed to see. The photo’s image was just as clear in Deckard’s thoughts, as clear as it had been when Marley had taken it from the hiding place in the Salander 3’s first aid kit and had shown it to him.
There were two infants cradled against the new mother’s breast, one nestled in the crook of each arm. “Your mother had twins,” said Deckard simply. In that faraway time, on board the galleon, somewhere between Earth and the stars, Ruth Tyrell had looked exhausted but happy, smiling at the camera. In the photograph, Anson Tyrell had the traditional dazed grin. “Your father delivered them with the help of the Salander 3’s built-in medical circuits.”
“Twins Sarah’s voice was a murmur. “There were two of us .
“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 Sal ander 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 ca
me 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 Sal ander 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.”