Replicant Night (14 page)

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. The real Rachael, or as much real as any replicant could be. Which as far as Deckard was concerned, was more real than the human original could be; even when Sarah had tried to pass herself off as Rachael, he had known the truth before she had slipped up, long before the emigrant ship had left Earth. That Rachael was already dead, and that Sarah could never be her, even though she was identical in every way but one. And that one thing wasn't part of her, but was located inside him, so deep she could never reach it.

"These are things you need to deal with, Deckard."

Batty's words had broken the course of his thoughts; it took him a moment to adjust. "What things?"

"If there's still an operational conspiracy against the blade runners, then your ass is still on the line. You can't hide. Your cover's blown. Everybody knows where you are. How do you think Holden and I were able to track you down so easily?"

"Big deal." Deckard shrugged. "You had contacts. Probably with the video people-that Urbenton guy. When they had the video ready for release, they were planning on doing a whole publicity trip that they'd had me signed on as technical adviser during the taping. That's what they were paying me for. My name. So it wasn't going to be a secret for very long. Holden must've caught a leak from the production, that's all."

"A couple of minutes ago," the briefcase said dryly, "you were figuring that Holden must've still been working for the LAPD. You really think that the department gets its information from camera operators who can't keep their mouths shut? Come on-you know they don't work that way. Admit it-this has got all the smell of high-level spookiness."

"Maybe."

"No 'maybe' about it, Deckard." Batty's voice tightened, wirelike. "You know it already. Holden wasn't LAPD, at least not when he showed up there at Outer Hollywood. He was as quit as you are. That's why you took me when you left the station to come back to this rattrap. If you'd really thought that I was part of a police operation of any kind, you would've booted this fine-quality briefcase right out of the skiff's waste chute somewhere in transit. I'd be talking to myself out in the cold, cold vacuum right now. At least until my batteries ran down."

He's right
, thought Deckard. That mind, with all of its mercenary hit man sharps, was still there, intact. Batty, boxed or not, could read right into his soul and see what was written there.

"I was curious." Deckard could hear his own flat, defensive words. "I just wanted to see what this whole game was about. That's why I took you with me."

"Yeah, right. And risk having me turn out to be a homing device, so the authorities could track where you went as soon as you left the station? You could pull my other leg, if I had any."

"All right ... all right." For a long moment, Deckard remained silent, then reached for the glass. He held it to his mouth but didn't drink, only inhaled the acrid fumes. Then he pushed the chair back and stood up, carrying the glass to the sink and pouring it out. The brown liquid sluiced through the scabbed dishes and down the reluctant drain.

He couldn't afford to go under the alcohol tide, not now. He'd brought something else back with him, besides the briefcase. Fear; the unease gnawing at his synapses, the twitch of rigid neck muscle and crawl of prickling skin, the mute awareness of something closing in on him, its teeth not yet revealed. That sense had begun rising along his spine as he'd looked down at the corpse of Dave Holden at his feet...

"Go ahead," Deckard said as he sat back down. He'd carried the briefcase here, hoping for answers. "I'll accept that you're not part of some police operation. So start talking. Who sent you?"

"Who sent
me
?" The one-cornered smile returned to Batty's voice. "Or who sent Holden?"

"The two of you." Deckard leaned back in the chair, legs sprawled under the table. "Together-your little buddy team. If it wasn't LAPD . . . I can't figure it being the U.N. Their security agencies wouldn't bother tracking me down at the Outer Hollywood station. They'd nail me here. Everything on Mars is a U.N. operation, except for the cable monopoly, and they're in each other's pockets."

"Work on it, Deckard. Who else out there has got an interest in replicants and the people who go around hunting them down?"

"The replicants themselves." He shrugged. "That's all."

"The only problem with that theory," said the briefcase, "is that replicants-escaped replicants, especially, on the run- they don't have any resources. They're just hiding out, staying low for as long as they can, trying to keep alive. What kind of operation could they put together? You think they could've managed to get me scraped off that freeway wall where you left me, get my cerebral contents transferred into this thing, and send Holden out to deliver me to you?"

"Probably not."

"You got that one right. But there are others, aren't there? Others who are, shall we say,
concerned
about the replicants and what happens to them. Concerned in ways besides just wanting to kill them off. For Christ's sake, Deckard, you ran into them yourself, back in L.A. You must have."

"All right, I know who you're talking about." Deckard gave a dismissive gesture with one hand. "The sympathizers. The rep-symps." He shook his head. "You gotta be joking, Batty. That bunch of losers? Street corner evangelists... tub thumpers."