apprehending its own demise. Sarah wondered what Deckard was going on about, pounding on the door with that much force. He’s that happy about being home? Maybe he had finally flipped out, gone all the way around the bend of that dark corridor that’d always been there inside his head; some bad retro-TV fantasy of domestic bliss had wormed its way into his thoughts and taken over. Some vision of Mr. Niemand coming back here after a long, hard day at work, to be greeted by Mrs. N in a lace-edged kitchen apron and heels, bearing a cold stainless-steel pitcher of gin and vermouth—the life their great-great-grandparents had lived, at least inside their sitcom fantasies.
“Take it easy!” More strips of sealant tape dangled loose, trailing like thick party streamers from the hovel’s low ceiling. “You’re going to knock the place over—” A muffled voice came from the other side of the door, but Sarah couldn’t make out what he’d said. She batted another sticky section of tape away from her face and reached for the door’s knob.
In the sliver of time it took to turn the knob and pull the wobbling front door open, Sarah had entertained the notion of going with Deckard’s anticipatory fantasy . . . or at least stringing him along with it for a few minutes. She could act as though there were, in fact, some measure of affection between them; she could even try once more to be Rachael, his long-dead and long-remembered love. The pretending wouldn’t be unpleasant; there was still a room inside her head in which her own desire for all of that was still kept, like an ancient white wedding dress, never used and carefully folded between sheets of tissue paper.
It’s what the bastard deserves, thought Sarah as her fingertips touched the doorknob. To be jerked around the way she had been, by a forged-iron chain bolted to the heart. To be led to believe one thing, even for a second, then be slammed up against the even more unyielding steel wall of reality .
In her other hand, the one dangling by her side as she reached to pull open the door, she had the perfect representation of what reality had come to mean for her. Loaded and cocked; she had already decided she didn’t want to even try to screw around with Deckard’s head anymore. There would be no Rachel-like homecoming kiss for him. If there were any irrational hopes left inside the sonuvabitch that would rise upon his seeing the human original of the replicant face for which he’d fallen, they’d be dashed by the very next thing he’d see. A circle of cold metal, with a darker black space at its center—Sarah’s hand was already lifting the gun into position as she stepped back from the door swinging open toward her.
Two faces looked in at her. Two men, neither of them Rick Deckard. The eyes behind their matching square- rimmed glasses widened as they focussed on the gun she was holding a few inches from their foreheads.
“Urn . . . is this the Niemand residence?” The man to the left swallowed nervously. The two of them didn’t appear to be twins, but looked as if they were trying to be. “If it’s not, we’re sorry .
“Maybe this is a bad time.” Beads of sweat had welled up on the other’s brow; tiny images of the gun floated in the wet mirrors. “Maybe we could come back . . . some other time.”
Sarah let the gun lower of its own weight. She leaned against the side of the doorway; the hovel swayed and audibly creaked. “My apologies, gentlemen.”
Beyond the pair, the dimly lit corridors of the U.N. emigrant colony were visible, the rounded angles filled with rubble trembling in the airloss breezes. “I just woke up.”
One of the men tried an uneasy smile. “You were expecting someone else?”
“My husband, actually.”
The two men exchanged glances, their heads pivoting a fraction of an inch toward each other, as though linked by some simple, invisible mechanism. The same unseen gear turned their owlish gazes back to Sarah.
“Mrs. Niemand—” The one on the left spoke with somber intonation. “We can tell that you lead a tragic life.”
In the corridor leading toward the emigrant colony’s center, beneath the banks of flickering or grey-dead fluorescent tubes, devolved human figures moved, scuttling furtively with their last meager, pawnable treasures clutched to their chests, heading for the ragtag booths and alleys of the black-market district. Even farther down the scale, appearing hardly human at all, were the creeping forms of those who had completely fallen out of the colony’s hard-screw economy, those who’d come to the frayed end of their money and possessions and had been cut off from the cable monopoly’s feed. Faces devoid of reason as any vegetable lifted and swiveled toward the scene at the Niemand hovel’s front door, idiot eyes and other receptors searching for any sensory input. Red stigmata flecked the angles of the stimulus-lorn heads, with the same markings repeated on the corridor’s dented walls. Every muscle near the softly keening mouths twitched with the constant hunger of misfired synapses.
A tragic life, mused Sarah as she gazed past the two surprise callers. The length of her vision reached beyond the other locked or boarded-up hovel doors to low-ceilinged rooms containing yet more collapsing nervous systems. She wasn’t sure what the man meant. She had worked a long time to engineer the destiny that had brought her to this place. A particular hell, or any one at all—I belong here, thought Sarah.
Seized by a dreadful suspicion, she refocussed on the two men at her door.
“You’re not Jehovah’s Witnesses, are you?” That would be all she needed right now, to get handed an animated Watch tower, complete with stereophonic sound effects triggered by the warmth of her thumb and forefinger. “Or New Reformed Apocalypticists?” Another of the groups that had been seen recently, evangelizing through the emigrant colonies—she looked to see if one of them was carrying a miniature holographic projector suitable for evoking biblical dioramas in the corridor’s thin, acrid-smelling air.
The two men gazed blankly at her through their black-rimmed, square lenses.
“No—” The left one shook his head. “We’re not here to ask you for money or anything—”
Her laugh barked out. “Good call.”
“This is a personal matter. For you alone, Mrs. Niemand.” He raised a pale, fussily manicured hand, pointing to the interior of the hovel behind her. “May we come in? To talk with you? I’m sure you’ll find it of interest.”
Gun dangling at her side, Sarah peered more closely at the two men. They seemed oddly familiar to her, positions on a memory track that her brain hadn’t moved along for some time. Her eyes had adjusted to the corridor’s partial light spectrum; she could better perceive the pair now. White shirts and narrow-lapelled suits, black as an old-fashioned undertaker’s; anal-retentive bow ties cinched tight onto their reedy, knobbly throats, not much bigger around than the narrow wrists exposed at their cuffs. The men’s owlish regard, framed by the sharp- cornered spectacles, tweaked a cord in her gut.
The snufflers in the corridor’s rubble had started edging closer, attracted by the sounds of human voices. Sarah knew that if she slammed the door shut and left the two men outside, and they went on pounding and calling to her through the thin panel, the hovel would be overrun by stim-desperate hordes, the pressure of their clambering bodies enough to collapse the rickety walls. “All right—” Sarah stepped back from the door. “Get in here. But you’d better make your spiel quick. As I said, I’m expecting my husband any time now.” She gave another bitter laugh. “God knows he’s a jealous sonuvabitch.”
Once inside, with the corridor’s sickly light and recycled air shut away, she busied herself with her black- market cigarettes, extracting one of the dwindling number from the cellophane-swathed pack and getting it lit. Tossing the charred match onto the floor with the others, she tilted her head back and dragged the smoke into the innermost recesses of her lungs, already feeling it percolate out into her clamoring veins. Exhaled, a blue cloud swirled, then streamed in a tapering thread toward the nearest leak in the wall. “So what is it you wanted to talk about?”
Sarah didn’t turn around, but could hear the two men shuffling in the room’s narrow confines behind her. In a too-brief moment of sated peace, she regarded the orange-red coal at the end of the cigarette. “Whatever your pitch is, I hope it’s good.”
The one who had been doing all the speaking shifted his voice to a flat, level tone. “For starters, we know you’re not anyone named Niemand. That’s an alias.
For both you and the former LAPD blade runner, real name Rick Deckard, with whom you’ve been posing as man and wife. Your name is Sarah Tyrell.”
She stood where she was, showing no movement, no reaction. The grey shroud of her smoke-laden breath was the only sign of life. She had cupped an elbow in her free hand, hitting an aristocratic pose both studied and natural to her.
The angle of her head, the trace of one dark lock across the corner of her brow—she could close her eyes and imagine herself another world and another life away from this one. Back in the executive suite and private living quarters of the Tyrell Corporation headquarters on Earth, in Los Angeles. Back in the tight, secretive epicenter of all the wealth and power she had inherited upon the death—the murder-of her uncle Eldon Tyrell. From the great, vaulted windows, there had been a view across the city’s roiling inferno, the alleys and streets packed close at the
