it.”
Deckard shook his head. “I’m not looking for that kind of redemption.”
“Obviously. Got your own agenda, don’t you? So here’s why you should do the job, why you should carry me on out to the insurrection.” The briefcase was silent for a few seconds, then spoke again, softer. “Because that’s the way you were heading. Isn’t it? Out there. To the stars. Or to put it another way . . . as far from Earth as you could get. And you were taking Sarah Tyrell with you. That’s the plan. I’m right, aren’t I?”
No need for an answer, or even an attempt at denial. “How do you know that?”
“Come on, Deckard. I’m not the only one plotting your trajectory. Do you really think you got away scot-free, that you got even this far without other people knowing what you were up to? Your little disguise-this whole Mr. and Mrs. Niemand trip-how many people do you think you fooled with that? Your cover was blown before you even lifted off from the San Pedro docks. If you got away here to Mars, it’s because the U.N. and the LAPD wanted you to get away. Probably just to see who you might hook up with, who you’re working for—you know how they like to keep track of people. They got some long leashes that they string people out with—and that’s what you’ve been on. Not just with the po-lice, but with the rep-symps as well. They’ve got enough connections in the right places to have kept tabs on you.”
“They’re not the ones I’m worried about.”
“Of course not—they’re the ones who want to keep you alive, at least long enough for you to do this little job for them. The police, though—they might be just about ready to reel you in. Now that they know you’ve got me and all the dangerous information I’ve got inside.”
Deckard reached down and tapped a finger on the briefcase. “In which case, I should just get rid of you. Since you’re not exactly a good thing to keep around.”
“You know it doesn’t work that way, Deckard. The cops never let anyone off the hook. The only way off is with a bullet. The mere fact that you came into contact with me—that’s enough reason for them to figure you’re better off dead rather than running around, stirring up more trouble for them.”
One more thing the briefcase was right about. “Even so—if they’re going to be hot on my ass, I should still dump you rather than drag you around with me and have you slow me down.”
“That would be one way of handling the situation.” Batty’s voice was unfazed.
“But it’d be the stupid way. You don’t have a chance on your own, Deckard. You need me. And the other things inside me, besides the Isidore data. If you’re going to track Sarah Tyrell down, find out where the hell she’s gone off to-believe me, I’ve got some notions on that score—and take her off with you to the colonies. Though why you’d want to is beyond me . . . but hey, that’s your business. Work out your obsessions however you want, pal. But frankly, it’s just one more sign of how fried your brain is. Whereas mine-at least in this condensed form—is working overtime. You got the legs, the moves, Deckard—you can get around—but I’ve got the smarts. I know stuff. And I can figure out the rest.”
Got me there, thought Deckard. The cop skills that he’d had for so long, the sniffing and analyzing abilities that had made it possible for him to survive in L.A—he wasn’t sure of those anymore. He had the sick feeling that he was only alive and breathing on sufferance, just as long as the invisible forces watching him were amused to let him be. The leash to which he was attached had a collar that could be tightened to the choke point at any moment.
And if that happened—if his own death moved from possibility to probability to actuality—then all the planning and scheming that had gotten him this far had been for nothing. Not his plans for himself—nothing like that had ever mattered—but for Sarah. What had to be done with her. That promise Deckard had made to himself, deep in that empty space where the image of Rachael had once resided .
He’d already decided what he was going to do. Or had had it decided for him.
It didn’t matter.
Deckard sat down in the empty chair and pulled it up to the table. He rested his face in his hands for a long moment, fingertips pressing at the corners of his eyes. Then he leaned back and regarded the briefcase again.
“What was that you said?” Some of Batty’s words had puzzled him. “Something about . . . the other things inside you .
“They put them in,” said the briefcase. “The rep-symps did. When they loaded in the encrypted Isidore data. Just one other thing, really. Something they thought you might be able to use.”
“Like what?”
“Check it out for yourself.” With two sharp metallic clicks, the briefcase’s chrome locks snapped open. “Go on. You have to open my lid—I can’t do that myself.”
Deckard reached one hand over and tilted the briefcase’s lid back. He pulled the briefcase toward him so he could see its contents.
It was empty. Nothing inside—or so Deckard thought, until the hovel’s dim light allowed him to spot the one small, flat rectangle in the center of the briefcase’s faux watered-silk lining.
He picked up the object, his broken fingernails sliding under its edge. It weighed hardly anything; it might have been empty. Rubbing the slick paper surfaces under his thumb, he detected a loose, shifting substance filling, like dust, one end of the packet.
That was what it reminded Deckard of—a seed packet. From some childhood memory, deeply buried and dimly recalled, of his mother or an aunt, and a tiny garden, holes dug in black earth beneath a yellow sun, a trickle of water from a green, snakelike hose . . .
But not a seed packet. Or not exactly so; the right size and shape, perhaps three by five inches. But the contents would be different. He had seen things just like this right here on Mars, in the darkest, narrowest reaches of the emigrant colony’s illicit markets. Back where the most desperate, the ones with the least to lose and the most to find, went in search of a transcendent commerce. To find God, or something like Him.
The packet that Deckard held was blank, at least on the side he could see. He turned the packet over and found one word. A name, in simple black letters—SEBASTIAN.
“Everything that is buried,” said Wycliffe, “must be watched.”
“ ‘Or with his claws, he’ll dig it up again.’ ” Hands deep in the pockets of the fur-collared coat, Sarah still felt the cathedral’s chill seeping from the ancient walls into her bones.
“What?” Both of the die-hard Tyrell loyalists appeared puzzled. “Who’s ‘he’?”
“Never mind.” She shook her head. “Nobody—it’s just a quote. A scrambled literary allusion.” She knew she was dealing with corporate creatures—neither one of them had probably ever read anything other than the Tyrell employees’ manual. “Just go on. Tell me all about it.”
From farther away, up by the abandoned altar at the end of the cathedral’s stone nave, came the sound of a chugging power generator. It had been started up, with much tugging and fussing at the cobwebbed controls, by Wycliffe and Zwingli right after the yacht had settled into the bare fields at the edge of the little town. Or what used to be a town, Sarah corrected herself. The word town implied the presence of people, and there were none here anymore. Just the three of them now, strangers on any land not roofed by money. The bare incandescent bulbs, laced along a dangling black cord at the cathedral’s peaked ceiling, flickered and swayed in the ice-crystal wind needling from outside. Small black waves dashed against the shingle of the protected harbor.
“These are all the monitoring devices.” Wycliffe had already pulled back the rotted tarpaulins that had covered the gauges and dials. Spiders and larger creatures scurried away, across the circles of broken or dust- clouded glass.
He tapped a finger against one device, and a thin black needle jumped and quivered; a row of blue LEDs blinked and ran out a row of numbers, a date twenty years in the past. “They’re not on the generator—they’re kept charged by the field polarity, out in the Flow.”
It struck Sarah as odd that a place of such stillness should be called that.
The correct name being Scapa Flow—the body of North Sea water encircled by the Orkney Islands. North to the Shetlands, south to the Scottish mainland, all depopulated as here; a long way to reach any of the densely imploding, expanding urban centers that had sucked up everything that moved on two legs.
Or on wheels; the cobbled streets of Kirkwall, the little town at the Flow’s edge, were littered with motorized wheelchairs, toppled onto their sides and left to rust, toggle switches and control sticks mired in the grey, puddling rain. Sad relics, as if the feeblest of Time’s carriages had ceased functioning, their spoked wheels frozen by the same non-Time that brooded beneath the water’s surface.
The diehards’ ship, at the end of its journey from the Martian emigrant colony, had come in low to the west.
