base of the Tyrell ziggurat and slanting towers .
All gone now. Sarah watched the smoke twist and thin and disappear. L.A. remained, forever imploding inside the furious mass of its mottled citizens, glitter-eyed thieves and murderers and worse, locked in their scythe-led dance with the black-leather cops and blade runners and worse, all held in the masked, emotionless gaze of those urban tribespeople who’d cut themselves so far out of the loop that they might as well have been observers from another world, another time centuries forward or back. An Asian grace, jingling fleets of Chinese bicycles cutting through the neon-lit sheets of rain, ignoring the diluting blood and broken glass at the weary assassin’s feet. Sarah knew that was the discreet charm of L.A—you could go about your business, even if it meant killing people, or the things that looked just like people, and everyone else on the street would mind their own affairs. Even when the Tyrell Corporation headquarters had self-destructed, in the apocalypse that she herself had engineered and brought to pass, there had probably been streets full of faces that had glanced up for only a moment at the fire turning the night sky’s rain to steam; then they had returned to scurrying and pushing and shoving toward their own dark, unknowable desires.
“Miss Tyrell?” The man’s voice came from behind her, cutting through the deep reverie, the vision of that other world and time, into which she had fallen.
“There really is no use denying it. We know who you are.”
A certain pleasure came from hearing her own true name spoken again. By anyone other than Deckard, in whose mouth it was something close to a curse, a prison sentence she could never outlive.
Sarah looked over her shoulder at the two men, giving them the coldest edge of her half smile. “So what agency are you from?” She raised an eyebrow. “The local authorities?” There were police in the emigrant colonies, but they worked almost entirely for the cable monopoly, terrorizing deadbeat subscribers and rooting out illegal taps on the wire. “Or perhaps you’re from Earth. U.N.?” That was a possibility—the colonies were laced with informants ratting on each other to the intelligence clearinghouse back in Geneva.
“Perhaps LAPD—it wouldn’t surprise me.” The point of her smile sharpened.
“Though I should remind you—there’s no extradition allowed between Earth and Mars. Per the U.N.’s emigration authority. So if you were planning on taking me back with you, to face whatever charges you might have against me, you’re somewhat out of luck.”
The more talkative man gave what was meant to be a smile both reciprocal and pleasant, but that came off eerily forced, a mannerism whose performance he had studied. “We didn’t come to extradite you, Miss Tyrell.”
For a moment, she doubted if they were any kind of police at all. They must be some kind of amateurs, thought Sarah. After lighting the cigarette, she had picked up the gun again from where she had set it down; it even had the right number of bullets to take care of both of the men. Unless they had some kind of major backup standing around near the hovel, these two might just as well have marched into their own coffins.
“All right,” she said. The gun made a convenient pointer to direct toward each of the men in turn. “If you’re not police, then what the hell are you?”
“Don’t you know?” The same man peered at her, the expression on his face one of both puzzlement and a disappointment bordering on sheer heartbreak. “Can’t you tell just by looking at us?”
She frowned. “I never saw either one of you before.”
“You might have. But you probably wouldn’t remember, or even have noticed. You wouldn’t have had to.”
The disquieting feeling she had gotten before, when she had studied the men’s appearance out on the hovel’s doorstep, arose in her again. She felt the pressure of the two pairs of eyes, slightly magnified and distorted behind the square glasses .
That’s it. Sarah nodded slowly to herself. The glasses. She knew as well that it hadn’t been a lapse of memory—a failure to remember—but her own silent, unspoken will shutting out that image of another face, older than either of these two men, wrinkled like parchment or thin, ancient leather. With a gaze that had been grossly enlarged by lenses of exactly the same shape, clear squares bordered in heavy black; so that the eyes had appeared like high-resolution, full-color video screens, that watched and judged and cruelly absorbed all who fell within their scan. That was the memory that the two men’s appearance had triggered but some defensive portion of her brain had shut out, lest it wound her again. The memory of her uncle’s gaze, the glass-shrouded eyes of Eldon Tyrell.
As much as was possible for the two men standing in front of Sarah in the hovel, they had managed to turn themselves into grotesque clones of the replicant-murdered head of the Tyrell Corporation. Or tributes to that fallen leader, the to-tern aspects—the square-framed glasses precise as geometrizing instruments, the equally meticulous and fussy clothes-incorporated like the fetishes of the dead into their own gestalt. Ineffectually, futilely; the two figures lacked the old man’s withered potency, the timeless and time-fed negative aura of great wealth and greater desire, moving through dark-shaded spaces, silent rooms, bank vaults, and sweat-glistening silk bedsheets.
The two men looked like overgrown, lank-limbed children dressed up in their father’s discarded clothing. Sarah felt a shiver of instinctive fear as she gazed upon them, catching sight of the mad worm at the pupils’ centers behind the square glasses.
Held for a moment longer by the fear-of the two living men and the dead one—she could not speak.
“We’re not from the police,” said the one who’d spoken before. “We’re from the Tyrell Corporation.”
Her flash of anger banished any other emotion. “There is no Tyrell Corporation.” Her voice lashed out, the cutting tip of her own sharpened tongue. “Not anymore.”
They exchanged another glance, then turned their magnified and now sorrowful gazes upon her again. The other one spoke: “We were afraid that was what you believed. That you didn’t know.”
Strips of sealant tape drifted like slow seaweed in the hovel’s hissing drafts. Sarah batted away the nearest tendril with the muzzle of the gun.
“Know what?”
Behind the square-framed glasses, the men’s eyes lit up with simultaneous enthusiasm. “That the Tyrell Corporation wasn’t destroyed. It survives. It still exists. As it always has and always will.”
The fervor in the man’s voice amused Sarah. “And this is what you came here to tell me.” She could feel her own smile turning gentle, tolerant. “That there’s a few faithful employees such as yourself-true believers—and you’re somehow keeping the flame alive. Really She shook her head. “That’s very touching.
How many show up at the staff meetings? A couple dozen?”
The more talkative one glowered sulkily at her. “It’s not just a few of us, Miss Tyrell. We’re not fools.”
“That’s right,” said his partner. “This is bigger than that. Much bigger. We represent the other Tyrell Corporation—the shadow company that already existed before the one that you knew was destroyed.”
She made no reply. Because she knew that the men, the mysterious callers who had appeared on her doorstep, were speaking the truth. There had been intimations, things whispered and things left unspoken, referred to by only a nod and a partial, omniscient smile on the face of her uncle, all referring to that other Tyrell Corporation, the shadow of the one whose light-studded Aztec pyramid had loomed over the dense sprawl of Los Angeles. Shadow being the operative word; an entity made of darkness that moved in darkness and did dark things. Darker than what Eldon Tyrell and the corporation that acted out in the open did—which would take some effort, Sarah knew. She was familiar enough with all the conspiracies and clandestine operations, the pulling of strings fine as the strands of a spider’s web, a silken net that covered all of Earth and the worlds beyond. That was what she had inherited, what the death of the only other living Tyrell had left to her. And what she had destroyed, had turned to ashes as cold as those in the alabaster urn with Eldon Tyrell’s name engraved on the side. She had annihilated the works of his hands, the vision that had been held in the cold fish eyes behind the square-rimmed spectacles; the hole left in the heart, the center, of L.A. had probably already been filled in by now, the charred ruins of the Tyrell Corporation headquarters carted off or incorporated into a new squatter ghetto.
So if these two, thought Sarah Tyrell, are from the shadow corporation . . .
There was no need to put words to the remainder of what had awoken and moved inside her skull. The two men standing in the center of the hovel looked like geeks, pathetic imitations of their dead boss. That was what made them dangerous, convinced her of what they claimed to be. Just as the late Eldon Tyrell, they had no need of pumped-up appearances, the visible aspects of power and threat. They lived in the dark spaces between the world’s daylight manifestations, operated there, and went about their secret errands, continuing to pull the delicate spider
