“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 Rachel’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 information 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 any 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 bioengineering 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 ashed 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.