Edge Of Human b-2

by K. W. Jeter

  "What?" He stared after her. "What're you talking about?"

  "I'm Sarah." The bare trace of her smile, the tilt of her head, indicated an obscure victory. "I'm the real one."

  He watched her turn and start walking again. A moment later he followed after.

  "This is a spooky thing, isn't it?" She looked up from the coffin and toward him. "Don't you think so?"

  "I suppose." Standing by the woodstove, Deckard glanced over his shoulder. Past her, through the cabin's small window, he could see outside the dark bulk of the spinner the woman had piloted here. He'd been right about the trace of light he'd spotted in the night sky; its simple fiery word had been meant for him. Now he rubbed his hands, trying to get the stove's warmth deeper inside than his skin. "You live with the dead, you get used to things like that."

  "Not quite dead." When Sarah had entered the cabin, she'd walked over to the bulky device, knelt down by the low wooden trestles, and ran an expert scrutiny over the (control panel's dials and gauges before standing back up. "Looks like you've been taking pretty good care of her. These transport sleep modules aren't all that easy to run."

  "It came with a manual."

  "Did it?" She nodded, impressed. "You must've hired yourself some fine thieves." She placed her hands flat against the glass lid and gazed down at the mirrorlike image of her own face. "Ones that good usually don't come cheap."

  "There were some old debts owed to me." He'd watched her, not sure what he felt at seeing a woman who looked like Rachael but wasn't. "From being in the business, you might say." Or was she? He didn't know yet.

  Sarah continued gazing at the sleeping woman inside I he coffin. "New life," she murmured, brushing her hand 'cross the glass, as though tenderly stroking a sister's I 'row. " 'New life the dead receive..' "

  He recognized the line. Not from any opera. " 'The mournful broken hearts rejoice.. " One of his own aunts, the church-going one, had used to sing it. He had a memory of her naive, awkward soprano voice, floating from a kitchen window, and from the choir at his mother's funeral service. " 'The humble poor believe.' "

  "Very good." She looked over at him. "Charles Wesley-O, for a thousand tongues to sing. Most people don't know any eighteenth-century hymns. Raised Protestant?"

  A shake of the head. "Not raised much of anything. Just like most people."

  "I suppose I got an overdose of it, from all those church boarding schools I was shuffled off to for so long. Most of my life, actually." She tilted her head to one side and smiled. "But then… that makes for a difference, doesn't it? Between me… and her." A sidelong glance down to the black coffin. "Your beloved Rachael wouldn't have known any Methodist hymn tunes, would she? The memory implant they gave her — that part of it at least, it was all Roman Catholic, wasn't it?"

  He nodded. "Heavy Latin. Tridentine. The old stuff."

  "One of my uncle's clever little ideas. He wanted her to have some deep notion of guilt and redemption — so he could control her more easily, I imagine. Doesn't seem to have worked." Sarah studied her double for a moment longer. "There were all sorts of concoctions inside her head, weren't there? I know about most of them. Including a brother for her that never existed." She watched her fingernail tap softly on the glass. "Really — it's just as well that I'm an only child."

  He said nothing. He'd had a long time to get used to the notion of someone believing that her implanted memories were real.

  "Is that what you were hoping for? New life? Some cure for Rachael, some way of getting around that hard cutoff point, the four-year life span that was built into these Nexus-6 replicants?"

  "No. I think we were both pretty well past that." He shrugged. "I'm not sure what we wanted. I knew that replicants are shipped from the Tyrell Corporation in these transport modules, so they'd arrive at the off-world colonies without most of their life spans being used up. I figured… why not? Just to make it seem longer, that she'd be with me. That's all."

  "I know what the modules are used for; you don't have to tell me." Sarah brushed her hand against her skirt, as though there had been dust on the coffin lid. "You realize, of course, that your being in possession of this device is a felony." The woman who had called herself Sarah regarded him with the same half smile, one that he had seen a long time before on Rachael's face. "You're not licensed for it. Plus, after all, it is Tyrell Corporation property."

  "What's that to you?"

  The smile that had been unamused before shifted and became even less. "Listen, Deckard — if it's Tyrell property, then it's my property. Don't you know who I am?"

  "Sure." He gave a shrug. "You're some other replicant; probably out of the same Nexus-6 batch as her." A nod toward the coffin. "The Rachael batch. They must've sent you up here, figured that seeing you would fuck with my head."

  "Did it?"

  "Not much." He kept his voice flat, leeched emotionless. "I may not be a blade runner anymore, but I've still got some of my professional attitude left. I'm way past being surprised. By anything." Deckard studied his own hand, reddened by the woodstove's heat, before looking at her again. "You've got some problems, though. They must've programmed you for delusions of grandeur. Tyrell property doesn't belong to you. You belong to the corporation."

  "Your problem is that you don't listen." Ice at the center of her glare. "Didn't you hear what I said? I'm the real one. I'm Sarah Tyrell. The niece of Eldon Tyrell — remember him? You should. You and all the rest of the LAPD's blade runners were about zero use in keeping every escaped replicant on the planet from just walking in and out of Tyrell headquarters. If you'd been doing your job, my uncle would still be alive."

  "That's one of the reasons I quit. I didn't think keeping Tyrells alive should've been part of the job description." Facing her was like standing at the cabin's open door during a hard winter storm. "You're Eldon Tyrell's niece, huh?"

  "As I said."

  "The corporation should've sent you out with a better lie." He shook his head, almost feeling sorry for her, whatever she was. "Don't you think I pulled the department's file on the Tyrell family? I did that a long time ago, even before I left L.A. Eldon Tyrell had no nieces, nephews, kids of his own; nothing. Nada. He was the last of the line. Thank God."

  Her smile appeared again. "The police files have a hole in them. I was born off-world; there wouldn't be any record of me in the files, unless my uncle had wanted it to be there. And he had a thing for family privacy."

  "Good for him. But the files include colony births. You could've been popped anywhere from Mars to the Outreaches, and you'd be in there."

  She half sat upon the edge of the coffin, the high-collared and expensive-looking coat falling open. "I wasn't born in any of the colonies." One hand brushed a fragment of blackened leaf from the synthetic fur. "But in transit. And not a U.N. ship. Private."

  "Impossible. There hasn't been a private spaceflight since…"

  "That's right." She knew — he could see it — that she had him then. "Since the Salander 3. The last one before the U.N. clampdown on corporate interstellar travel. The last one, and it was a Tyrell operation. That's where I was born. On Tyrell Corporation property — inside it, actually — and way beyond U.N. jurisdiction."

  "The Salander 3…" He nodded slowly, mulling the formation over, trying to dredge up from little-used memory whatever he knew about it. The dates seemed right, just far enough back so that somebody could've been born aboard the craft and have grown into an adult by now. That wasn't the problem.

  Private-sector travel beyond the Earth's atmosphere had been forbidden by the U.N. authorities for a reason. And the Salander 3 had been it. A failed expedition to the Prox system, failed despite the billions that the Tyrell Corporation had poured into the effort… and that was about the limit of public knowledge, eroded even further by collective memory failure. But the police files on the matter weren't my better. Once, when he'd first started retiring escaped replicants for a living, he'd poked through the department's on-line files, looking
for anything that'd help give him a handle on his walking, thinking prey. A search keyed on Tyrell gave him days' worth of the department's internal memos and reports, the corporation's own press releases, product schematics, research papers from their bio-engineering labs.. the works. Punching in Salander 3 had mired him in one screen after another of ACCESS DENIED and AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY flags, password requests way beyond his rank. He'd already been savvy enough about how the department worked to know that prying off a lid weighed down with that many alarms and padlocks would get him nothing but hex marks in his own personnel file.

  Going off-line and into the basement morgue of hard-copy printouts had been even spookier. He could remember standing beside a battered metal cabinet, beneath low sizzling fluorescents, water dripping from a broken pipe to the already inch-deep concrete; standing there with a thin sheaf of dog-eared manila folders, all with some variation of Salander 3 at the top edge, all of them empty except for yellowed routing slips signed by long-retired secretarial staff, ghosts with initials…

  The memory flash rolled through his head, dark and jagged as photo-reverse lightning. Standing in the deepest department basement, dust sifting onto his shoulders from the vibration of the rep train hurtling through its own unlit tunnels, past the endless rows of tottering cabinets and the walls cryptically stained with black rot.. The files had been pulled from on high, from the top government levels, like God reaching down into the affairs of men. And never returned; maybe they'd all been asked the day after the one marked on the routing slips. That's what it'd be like to die, he'd thought then and now, or at least the old comforting notion of the process. You ascended, leaving your empty manila folder behind on the ground, but you didn't return, not ever.

  "Where'd you go? Where are you?"

  He kept his eyes closed, walking around in those echoing rooms inside his head. A little more poking around online had brought him a few scraps: a low-rez news photo of the Salander 3's mission leaders, Anson Tyrell and his wife Ruth, setting out with big smiles for Proxima.. and six years later, the day after the Salander 3 had come limping hack to the docking terminals out at San Pedro, the notice of the cremation service for them. You didn't need cop savvy to get suspicious about that one. There wasn't a cover-up deep enough to keep corpses frozen between here and Prox from giving off the decayed smell of murder.

  And now he was standing here, decades and what might is well have been a world away, with their grown-up orphan child in front of him.

  "Listen, Deckard — I don't have time for you to go fading out on me. There's never time for that."

  Her voice, the same as Rachael's but with a tighter and harder edge, stung him back into present time. He saw her still standing beside the black coffin. "So you're the daughter of Anson Tyrell — is that it?"

  "Very good. You're up on your Tyrell genealogies. And since Eldon Tyrell was his only brother, and no other family besides me — that means I am Tyrell now." Sarah's gaze set level into his. "I inherited the world's largest privately held corporation. The whole thing. Not bad."

  "But before that — while your uncle was still alive — he used you for.. what's it called?" The specific word was stuck back in his memory and wouldn't come out. "The template?"

  "Templant. The term of art in the Tyrell labs is templant. As in replicant. And you're right — that's what my uncle used me for. The source model for your Rachael." On her face, eyes narrowed, the partial smile was a knife wound even thinner. "And his."

  More spooky things, the creepy business of the dead — he could hear them in her voice. "Were there others?"

  "Besides her?" She looked down past her hand on the coffin's glass lid, at the face of the sleeping, dying woman inside, then back up to him. She shook her head. "Just the one. Rachael wasn't what you'd call a production-line number. More of a custom job, if you know what I mean. For my uncle Eldon."

  He knew. He'd suspected as much, way back then in the city, when he'd gone to the Tyre11 corporate headquarters and talked to the man. There'd been that sick jitter in the pillared office suite's atmosphere, a tension shimmer that cops, like dogs, could catch at the limit of their hearing. And Eldon Tyrell's smile, possessive and sated, the corners of his mouth pulled upward as if by invisible fishhooks. Every silent thing about him had given away the game.

  "I wouldn't have thought that'd be something a person like you would go along with. Being a templant."

  "Really, Deckard." She sounded almost pitying. "Not as if I had an option in the matter, is it? When my uncle was alive, you would've been right: I was Tyre11 property. Meaning his. Besides, what would the alternative have been? Not being a templant — and then there wouldn't have been any Rachael. There would've been just me. And him."

  He'd known all these things, or some of them at least, though Rachael hadn't told him. He'd known instead from her silence, from the way she would sometimes stiffen in his arms, turning her face away from his. Away from any man's face.

  "Maybe.. maybe having a replicant of you made… maybe that was his way of showing that he did love you. After all."

  "Oh, he loved somebody all right." Her voice and gaze acidic. "It just wasn't me."

  The forest's silence seeped through the walls, congealing around every object, living or dead. He decided he didn't want to hear any more about this woman personal problems. He just wasn't sure he'd have that choice.

  "How'd you track us down?"

  "It was easy. After you made your mistake." She tapped a fingernail against the glass lid. "You'd pretty well disappeared, until you had this transport module stolen. For a cop, that wasn't a brilliant move. Did you really think your thief pals wouldn't be working for the corporation as well? They sold your ass to us two minutes after delivery had been made."

  Bound to happen, but he hadn't cared; just something else that there'd been no choice about. Either have the module stolen and brought to what had been their hiding place, or watch Rachael die, the remains of her four-year replicant life span dwindling the way snow melts on the ground.

  "That why you came here?" He pointed to the black coffin. "Want your property back? How about doing me a favor and letting me keep it for a few more months. It's not that much longer."

  "Keep it forever, for all I care. Bury her in it, if you want." She glanced down for a moment at her own sleeping race. "That's not why I wanted to find you." Her voice was softer, the sharp edge retracted. "I was in Zurich when… everything happened. One of my uncle's little minions flew out and told me that he was dead. I went back to Los Angeles and found out the rest. There were tapes. And people who told me things. They told me about you. About you… and her." She regarded him for a moment, then stepped forward and took his hand, drawing him back with her toward the coffin. "Come here."

  Close to her, he watched as she let the coat fall away from her shoulders, revealing her naked arms, a thin gold circle dangling at one wrist. A scent of skin-warmed orchid breathed itself into his nostrils; he could taste it at the back of his throat. Sarah knelt down before him, touching him for a moment at his hips to balance herself. With her knees against the floor's rough planks, she reached behind her neck and undid her hair. With a shake of her head, it came loose, dark and soft against the paleness of her throat.

  "You see?" This close, her voice could be a whisper. She raised herself a little bit, just enough so she could lean across the coffin's glass lid, both hands against the smooth surface. She brought her face down against one arm, turning to look up at him. "It's perfect, isn't it?"

  He could see her face and Rachael's at the same time, separated by only a few inches. Sarah's gaze pierced him, held him; beneath the glass, the sleeping, dying woman with the same face, eyes closed, lips slightly parted to release an hours-long breath. Both women's hair was the same color, the same substance, across the coffin's pillow or the unmarked glass. He looked down, the world around him collapsed to a space even smaller than the cabin.

  "I wanted to know…" Sarah turned the side of
her face against the glass, so she could look at her own image beneath. "It sounded so strange… that you could love something… that wasn't real. What could that be like…" She raised her head, her gaze catching onto his again. "Not for you. For her."

  "I don't know." Deckard slowly shook his head. "She never told me."

  "Well… there's a lot you don't know." Sarah stood up, reaching down to brush the floor's dust from the edge of her skirt. She picked up her coat and folded it around herself. The same chill as before touched her voice. "That's really why I came here — to tell you that. There's a lot you don't know yet. But you're going to find out."

  She walked past him, pulling open the cabin's door and stepping out into the darkness without even glancing back over her shoulder at him.

  From the small window, he watched her spinner rise into the night sky. It hung suspended for a moment, giving him a glimpse of Sarah at the controls, then swiveled around and disappeared under the pinpoint stars, heading south. Toward L.A.

  Other lights were moving up there. He looked up, counting two traces, then a third, coming his way. They must've been waiting, thought Deckard. Then she called them in.

  A rational part of his head was almost glad the gun had been lost, knocked from his hand out in the woods. Otherwise, he might have been tempted to do something stupid with it. Like try to put up a fight.

  He was sitting in the cabin's single chair when the agents, in their grey, insignia-less SWAT suits, shoved open the door.

  "Deckard?" The leader — there were half a dozen behind him, sheer overkill — aimed an assault rifle's short barrel toward his chest. All the men had buzz cuts and hard, machinelike faces; they could've been LAPD elites, but he didn't recognize any of them. Before he could answer, the leader smiled and pointed the weapon toward the ceiling. "Good. You're being smart."

  He sighed. These gung ho types had always given him a cramp. "What did you expect?"