“This . . . belonged to Dr. Tyrell.” Wycliffe looked up from his insectoid crouch over the map. One hand hovered a quarter inch above its surface. “His personal copy.”
“What, he gave it to you?”
Wycliffe shook his head. “No—he kept it here. With his other things.”
“Fine. Whatever.” Sarah stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray that Zwingli had scurried to fetch for her. “Acquire your sacred relics however you want.”
She got up and stood beside Wycliffe, looking down at the map. “Now-can you point? Can you do that much for me?”
He laid a fingertip on a spot in the upper left corner.
A map of western Europe—that much had been readily discernible, even through the rectangular grid of the fold marks and tears. This thing looks a million years old, thought Sarah. Perhaps her uncle had had it when he’d been a boy, when the world had been flat and the only things that looked human actually were. Sarah leaned closer over the bureau plat.
The British Isles, but not England. Farther north than that. Her heart had paused between one beat and the next, a moment frozen between life and its continuance, when she discerned the exact place on the map. North of the Scottish mainland, far beyond Cape Wrath, beyond Thurso at the very tip; into the North Sea, where the currents ran as cold as the pulse that now moved slowly through her veins. She knew where Wycliffe was pointing; she had always known. And why the two men had been reluctant to speak the words, the name.
“You see?” Wycliffe spoke softly, his voice all kindness, sympathy. “Right there. That’s where we’re going.”
She saw, she knew; a place she had never been to. But she knew what was there.
Waiting for her in that little spiral of islands. Scraps of land, treeless and rock-laden, protecting another body of seawater from the greater, darker ocean surrounding it. A place that most people didn’t even know existed; that they had forgotten, if they had ever known. Lucky them, Sarah thought.
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
