She knew all that. To be lectured by machines, that was what life had come to.
Life as we know it, Sarah mused bitterly. What was worse, she also knew the autonomic calendar was right; it would confuse things too much for her to insist upon being called by her real name. She wasn’t even completely sure what that name was anymore. Mr. and Mrs. Niemand were the aliases that Deckard had picked for them so they could travel with all the other emigrants leaving Earth and set up housekeeping-such as it was—in the U.N. transit colony on Mars. Without being apprehended by the authorities; after what had happened on Earth, back in Los Angeles—not what had merely happened, but what she herself had willed into being, the agent of her own destruction and the apocalypse of the Tyrell Corporation-after all that, the police and the U.N. security forces wouldn’t even bother bringing any charges against her.
Even for murder—there must have been dozens who’d died in the flaming, explosives-driven collapse of the Tyrell Corporation headquarters buildings.
Maybe hundreds; the way people tended to die in L.A., anonymously and forgotten, it was hard to keep track of these things. But though she had made it come about, the fulfillment of her own intent and desires deeper and more driving than anything held in consciousness, she hadn’t been alone. The faceless entities at the U.N. had actually been the ones to push the red button, or whatever trigger was used to reduce the Tyrell Corporation to a ziggurat of twisted girders and smoldering rubble with dead flesh beneath its weight.
“That’s why Sarah Tyrell had to die.” She spoke aloud, to the room’s empty spaces. Head pressed back against the pillow, watching the blackness behind her eyelids. When Deckard wasn’t here with her, this was her main occupation.
Perhaps the only one: sorting through the past, sifting its charred, ashen fragments through her fingers, as though she might be able to find pieces of her own splintered bones. The official line was that Sarah Tyrell had died in the corporation’s fiery collapse; if the authorities suspected otherwise, they wouldn’t be motivated to say so—the blood was on their hands as well. “That’s why I’m not Sarah Tyrell anymore .
“True.” The room wasn’t empty; the calendar had heard these musings before.
“But you’re not Rachael, either.” It had a penchant for accuracy, due to its number-based existence. “That was a lie. That was always a lie.”
Right as usual; she nodded slowly in agreement. The real Rachael—if the word real could be applied to a replicant—was also dead. Really and truly dead, as a child might say. Rachael, the duplicate of which Sarah Tyrell had been the original, had been dying when Deckard had fallen in love with her. A fool of a blade runner, to love someone-something-whose intrinsic nature was to die; replicants had only four-year life spans. More like insects, bright ephemeral creatures that lasted a day or two, than humans, who generally took longer in their dying . . . unless you killed them.
“But I wasn’t lying.” She let her voice become soft and wounded as a child’s.
“Not really.” That word again, just as if it had any meaning at all. “When I told him I was Rachael. Because I’m the same as her . . . aren’t I? They made her from me, to be the same as me.” She meant her uncle, the late— and murdered—Eldon Tyrell, and all the forces of the Tyrell Corporation that had been under his command when he’d still been alive. “There was no difference between her and me.”
“Except,” said the calendar, “that he loved her. Mr. Niemand did. I mean . . .
Deckard. Or whoever. Now you’ve gotten me confused.”
That was the difference; the calendar’s reminder put an invisible knife through her heart. The difference that made everything else a lie. And rendered futile everything she had done. She had killed her duplicate Rachael—or arranged for her to die, the same thing—and destroyed her inheritance, leaving smoke and rubble where the Tyrell Corporation had once been, and accomplished nothing thereby. All love in vain, thought Sarah. The lies, too. Which was even harder; the lies took more work. And all they’d accomplished had been for her to wind up here, in a hovel in the U.N. emigrant colony on Mars, that bleak way station where nothing happened but people died anyway.
She didn’t feel like getting out of bed, despite the prodding from the calendar and the alarm clock; they’d probably start up again in a minute or two. He knew, she thought darkly. He knew from the beginning. With her eyes closed, she could again see Deckard’s face at that moment when she’d first realized he knew she wasn’t Rachael. She had lied, and engineered lies and death, and gotten nothing from them. If the difference between her and Rachael, the dying and then dead replicant with her face, had been Deckard’s love . . . then she would become Rachael. If I could have—that thought bitterer than all the rest. Not meant to be; he had looked at her, as they’d sat in the emigrant ship that was to take them from Earth, and he had spoken and she had known. That in a universe of lies, the one that mattered most to her was the single one that Deckard couldn’t even pretend to believe in. Just my luck, thought Sarah.
“Mrs. Niemand—” The calendar spoke again, a little more commanding urgency in its synthesized voice. “You can’t go on this way.” Lodged in its memory bank were the records of some other bad times that had started out with the hovel’s mistress being unable to get out of bed. “This is essentially self-laceration, and pointless. You have to deal with reality, you know.”
“I know.” With an act of will as simple and decisive as pulling a trigger, she swung her legs out of the bed and sat up; the hovel’s recycled-plastic floorboards pressed their imitation wood grain against the bare soles of her feet. “Look, I’m up. Okay?” She shook her head. “For Christ’s sake Her fingertips prodded through the rubble on top of the small table, in search of any remains of the last packet of black-market cigarettes she had splashed out on. The stubs in the can lid she used for an ashtray were too far gone to be of any service.
The alarm clock skipped nimbly away to avoid Sarah’s trembling hand. “All right! Let’s get going!” Its bell-like voice radiated maniacal cheer. “Lots to do today!”
Sarah had found one cigarette butt that she managed to ignite; she sucked a stale drag from it. “Like what?” She blew the smoke into the alarm clock’s round face.
“Well The small autonomic device comically waved the smoke away with its pointed black hands. “You could make yourself lovely-lovelier than you are, I mean—and get ready for your husband to come home. Mr. Niemand, that is.”
She frowned as she ground out the butt in the can lid. “Is he coming home? Is he supposed to be?” She had lost track of time, the passage of days. Which was a bad sign, something the U.N.’s social workers and mental health professionals were constantly warning the emigrants about. It was one of the first indications-along with the facial tics, the skin plucking, and other obsessive-compulsive rituals—that the toxic effects of the low-stimulus Martian environment were being felt. Madness and death were usually not far behind. Not that I’m overly concerned, thought Sarah.
“Not quite,” said the calendar on the bedroom’s wall. “Mr. Niemand isn’t scheduled to return for a few more days yet. But you never know.” The calendar attempted to sound hopeful and solicitous of its human masters’ welfare.
“Maybe he wrapped up his business and is coming home early. It could happen.”
“You’re right.” With both hands, she pushed her tangled hair back from her brow. “As usual.”
In the hovel’s bathroom, she let the trickle of rust-colored water collect in the basin while trying to avoid seeing herself in the clouded mirror. She didn’t want to deal with the issue of whether it was her face or Rachael’s that she saw there.
Away from the alarm clock’s chatter and the calendar’s nagging, her thoughts began to order themselves, resuming a familiar shape and weight. One that she had decided upon the day after Deckard had left, when he’d gone out to that run-down video studio orbiting above Earth. A time-honored tradition, a reverting to old forms of gender-based behavior: the man going out to make money, to bring it home to the basic family unit, the wife tending the fire .
They’re right, she told herself again. I do have to be ready for him. She bent over the sink and splashed the water into her face.
A thump sounded from the bedroom behind her. “Oops,” came the clock’s voice.
With a trickle of water running between her breasts, Sarah glanced over her shoulder. The alarm clock, in its chugging circuit around the tabletop, had knocked the gun to the floor.
“Sorry . . .”
“Don’t worry about it.” She reached for the threadbare towel. “You know it’s not loaded.”
She knew what the clock and the calendar didn’t. That the gun wouldn’t stay unloaded for long. In the dresser drawer, beneath her wadded-up underthings, were two bullets. They had been expensively acquired,
