“Mr. Niemand?” The calendar’s reedy voice tapped at the edge of his thoughts.
He’d give anything. Even the plans he’d made, the decisions and vows he’d sealed down into his heart, about what he’d do with Sarah Tyrell. Her fate, and his. Even that .
The calendar tried again, using his real name. “Mr. Deckard? Hello?”
A slow nod, the drawing in of his breath, as he refocussed on the calendar and the flat, meaningless picture on its surface. “All right,” he said. “So who was it she went with?”
“I wouldn’t know. She didn’t tell me that, either.” The calendar had an innate dislike for details not being filled in. “There were two of them—I could tell that much. They were talking in the other room, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. I just have this little directional microphone built in, you know. Now, if I had the intercom option, if you’d paid to have that feature activated, then the advantages would be—”
“Yeah, right.” Deckard interrupted the sales pitch. A longstanding peeve of his was the way these low-rent domestic appliances were always whining for upgrades. “How long ago did all this happen? When did Sarah leave with these men?”
“You should ask the clock. That’s more its department—”
“The clock’s dead.” Deckard didn’t mind saying so. “So you tell me. When did they leave?”
“Um . . .” A fearful quaver sounded in the calendar’s voice. “The clock? She did that, didn’t she?” The calendar made an audible effort to pull itself together. “I guess . . . it was about, maybe six hours ago. That Mrs. Niemand—I mean Sarah—that she left with those two men. Gosh . . .”
Its voice faded, then picked up again. “If it’s any help, she left a note. Over there on the table.”
Deckard walked over and picked up the bullet that had also been left for him.
He rolled it between his fingers, then weighed it in his palm. A wordless message, or one that didn’t need words to get its meaning across. Sarah had probably bought it, and the necessary gun as well, down in the black- market stalls, where just about anything could be acquired. Thus, she must’ve iced the nagging clock; on her way out, Deckard figured, with whoever these two men had been. This one, he thought, looking down at the bright, tapered metal, was meant for me. The kind of homecoming surprise he’d been expecting for a while now; his caution at the hovel’s front door had been mainly due to not wanting a hole the size of a baby’s fist plowed through his forehead.
He slipped the bullet into his jacket pocket and unfolded the scrap of paper that had been beneath it.
Deckard— the scrawl was Sarah’s handwriting, the big ego-driven letters she’d never lost. I’ll see you later.
The mute bullet had said as much. A warning, the cold kiss she’d greet him with the next time they met. He crumpled the paper into a wad in his fist, then tossed it into the rubble in the bedroom’s corner.
“Off into the ozone?” Batty’s voice curled mockingly. The briefcase sat in the middle of the hovel’s front room, where Deckard had left it. “They like to do that. Take it from me; I know. They just leave.”
He stepped over the briefcase and closed the door. “Not your problem, is it?”
He brushed away the dangling strips of peeled tape. “You should mind your own business.”
“Ah, but you see—your problems are mine, too.” An invisible shrug. “You and I . . . we just have so much in common, Deckard.”
“I doubt it.” He crossed to the hovel’s tiny kitchenette.
“You’re in a box.” Leaning over the sink crowded with moldering dishes, Deckard rooted through the top cupboard. “I’ve still got flesh to worry about.” He found the square-sided bottle he wanted, pulled it out, and unscrewed the cap. “So the answers to my problems are different. Like this one.”
“That smells like scotch. Or something close to it.”
He rinsed out a usable glass and poured a two-finger shot into it. “They make it here.” He tossed back the first fiery swallow, gritting his teeth as it rolled acid down his throat. “So it’s not anything. Except grain alcohol and food coloring.”
“Sounds grim. I’ll pass. Even if I could drink.”
“Good call.” Deckard emptied the glass, feeling his gut contract with the hard liquid shock. He poured another and sat down at the kitchenette table with it, pushing aside more crusted dishes and fog-clouded glasses to make room for his elbows. He laid his head down on his forearms and closed his eyes. Exhaled liquor fumes cut the stale cloy of the hovel in his nostrils, an odor of sweat and pent-up anger that could never leak away through the poorly taped seams.
He knew that he could fall asleep if he let himself; the fatigue would wash over him, an ocean with its leading edge tinged brown by the bottle’s contents. He also knew that it would do no good, that it would last only a few minutes at best, the same as it had in the skiff’s cramped egg coming back from the Outer Hollywood station. A moment of darkness, then dreaming, then waking, with the border blurred between those two states; the way he used to raise his head and open his eyes, back in his apartment in Los Angeles, with an empty glass smelling of real scotch in one hand, the fingers of his other sunk into a silent chord on the piano’s yellowed keys. Looking up at the faces in the old frayededged, black-and-white photos that had drifted across the music rest like dead leaves; looking at them and, for a few seconds, wondering who they were. Until he remembered again . . .
“All right.” Deckard took a deep breath, opened his eyes, and straightened up in the chair. With his forefinger, he pushed the glass and its murky contents away from himself.
The room was small enough that he could twist around, reach back, and pick up the briefcase by its handle from where he had left it sitting in the middle of the floor. He swung the briefcase up onto the table, laying it flat in the space he’d cleared. “Let’s hear it. You got something to tell me about, now’s the time.”
She found out their names. Or what passed for them.
“I’m Wycliffe,” the more talkative one said. He leaned his elbows back on the yacht’s control panel. “He’s Zwingli.”
“Right. I’m sure.” Sarah Tyrell regarded the two men, her erstwhile kidnappers. Or employees—the distinctions were getting a little confused.
Maybe disciples, she thought. That fervent light still glowed way inside their eyes. If not her disciples, then Eldon Tyrell’s; the two men had done what they could to mold themselves into copies of her late uncle. Within the limits of the possible: they looked like children playing at a grim Halloween. “What were your real names?”
Both men appeared puzzled for a moment, exchanging worried glances before turning to look at her again. “But those are our real names. They’d have to be. The Tyrell Corporation gave them to us.”
That raised another consideration. Standing in the middle of the cockpit area, with stars and luminous emptiness shifting about on the viewscreens, Mars no longer even visible from here, Sarah wondered if she were the only human thing on board. “You two wouldn’t be replicants, would you?” She studied them more closely. “I mean, it’s all right if you are.”
Wycliffe shook his head. “No—” Voice flat and emphatic. “Replicants aren’t given the kind of security clearances we have.”
“We’re very high level,” said Zwingli. “In the shadow corporation. You can trust us.”
“Really.” That amused her more than anything had in a long time. “How . . . charming. To think that I’d even want to.”
She left them in their perplexity and walked back to the center of the yacht. They all just want to be loved, thought Sarah. It was as if the Tyrell Corporation had never ended, or had been re-created in miniature inside this little hermetically sealed world. All familiar to her, from the time she had been notified of her inheritance to the moment when she had brought it down into ruins of fire and twisted metal. Her uncle had created an ass-kissing corporate culture, one where underlings like Wycliffe and Zwingli expected and even thrived on kicks to the teeth. I should be nicer to them—that would have really screwed with their heads.
The furnishings of the yacht-an interplanetary model, small by the standards of the fleet that the Tyrell Corporation had kept—were familiar to her as well. Every inch of the executive quarters was slathered with the same degree of nouveau ostentation that Eldon Tyrell’s private rooms and office suite had shown. Expensive enough to imitate taste, too expensive to achieve it; all the fakery that money could buy. Fakes of fakes, in this case; Sarah recognized bits and pieces, imitations of the actual objects that had been consumed in the corporate inferno. Right down to the rococo pillars, foreshortened and perspective-cheating and thus crammed into the lounge’s closer space.
Window-sized viewscreen panels stretched to the ceiling; layered pixels shifted slowly through a rez-max’d view of an intricate urbscape. Elevated angle, as though from the great arched windows of the office that had been
