“Miss Tyrell . . . please The softer voice of Zwingli came from a few paces away. “Please don’t be mad at us. There really is nothing else we can do. It has to be this way.”
“I’ve heard that one before.” Inside my own head, she thought grimly. As well as from these two, when they’d been putting the pressure on her back at the hovel on Mars. Sarah supposed they were as locked into their fates as she was.
“It’s all right,” she said finally. “I don’t mind. It’s pretty much what comes with the territory, isn’t it? When you’re Tyrell blood.”
Neither man said anything. Outside, the ice-flecked wind picked at the cathedral’s raftered bones. Sarah could hear, past the low electric hum of the fake monitoring equipment, the grey waves lapping at the village’s shore. In a storm, she supposed, the seawater might roll against the abandoned doors, pour through the empty houses .
Somehow, without even noticing, she had walked out of St. Magnus’s Cathedral all the way to the edge of the Flow. She found herself, once her bleak thoughts and memories had faded, gazing out at the water, its surface a darker shade of the steel-textured clouds above. She sensed another’s presence, Wycliffe standing behind her.
“So exactly what is the way I’m supposed to get down there?” Sarah didn’t glance over her shoulder at the man. She gave a single nod toward the water.
“Down to the Salander 3, I mean. Jump in, hold my breath, and swim?”
A slight motion in the chill air; she knew that was Wycliffe stiffening, his spine pulled tight by the mention of the ancient interstellar transport’s name. A name that he and the other man had yet to speak aloud, that was even more weighted with dire meaning than the words Scapa Flow. At the corner of her eye, she saw his gloved hand extend and point.
“There’s no need for that, Miss Tyrell.” Wycliffe’s index finger aimed toward a small triangular structure floating in the distance, so small that Sarah hadn’t spotted it before. “There’s a pressurized shaft extending down to the .
. . to your destination. The shadow corporation-well, Zwingli and myself, actually—had it installed before we went out and contacted you. And brought you here.”
“I see.” Sarah glanced back at him. “That was thoughtful of you.”
“Of course.” A thin smile moved across Wycliffe’s thin-lipped visage. “We really are thinking only of your comfort.”
“Sure you are.” She shook her head, feeling how cold and hard her face had become, as though the ice in the wind had penetrated her flesh and seeped into the veins beneath. “If that were the case, you wouldn’t even want me to go down there.” She took a sadistic pleasure in speaking the transport’s name again. “To the Salander 3.”
Zwingli had come out from the old cathedral and joined them by the shore of the Flow; Sarah could sense his presence, and the silent exchange between the two men, the glance passed between them.
“Miss Tyrell . . . we’ve gone over this before. It’s the only way.” One of them spoke; she wasn’t sure which. The voice fluttered and was taken away by the wind. Probably Wycliffe, the default spokesman for the pair. “If the Tyrell Corporation is to be restored—if it is to come out of the shadows and be what it was before, and even more than that—then this must be done. By you; no one else can do it. It is, after all, your past that we’re talking about here.
That must be confronted and brought into the light.”
Her past. All of it, she told herself. Right back to the beginning—she had been born aboard the Salander 3. Far from here . . . far from Earth itself.
That past, her past, was a world unto itself, sleeping beneath Scapa Flow’s waters.
“I know The wind had invisibly peeled away her skin, exposing the flesh and scraped bones beneath; that was what it felt like. Sarah had to take her hand out of the coat’s pocket and hold it out in front of herself, like some white, fragile artifact, to dispel the illusion. If that’s what it was.”
There were ghosts down there in the old interstellar transports; that was the essential toxic effect of the first-generation drive units. The technology, the relatively crude way of getting from one point to another, from Earth to the stars, had worked by generating perturbations in the time field surrounding the transports, enabling them to achieve faster—than-light velocities, as though being sucked from one zone of artificially high temporal potential to a lower one. Falling through time, infinite distances converted thereto, the churning machines holding on to each moment of the present, elongating them like some vacillating Faustian bargain.
The drawback being, as she knew from the old memos she had seen in the Tyrell Corporation files, that the first-generation interstellar drive units became depleted, lost their propulsive function, as the layers of undissipated temporal energy accumulated. Screwing around with Time itself had its price; within the transports’ little encased worlds, past and present became confused, impossible to sort out. Then there would be no forgetting; that saving mental grace, the only thing that made sanity possible, would be gone.
Toxicity, madness, death. Better to sink the contaminated machinery into a dark, wet hole, the only place whose own temporal anomalies had a chance of matching these newly created ones .
“But I got out.” Sarah spoke her thoughts aloud. She looked back over her shoulder at the two men. “Before it—the past—before it could contaminate me. Before it could kill me. I was only three years old when the Salander 3 returned to Earth.” That child, that long-vanished incarnation of herself, had been the only living thing aboard the transport when the autonomic piloting systems had brought it back to this world; when the Salander 3’s doors had been unsealed and the Tyrell Corporation’s employees had gone in, they had found only the little girl named Sarah —and the corpses of her parents.
Family history, deep and dark as the currents of the ocean surrounding Scapa Flow. Little things that hadn’t been in the old memoranda, the company’s official archives, but that she had found out anyway as she had been growing up. The way children always find out things, by overhearing whispers . . . and even more tellingly, by hearing the silences that the adults clicked into when they knew she was in the room.
That was how she had found out what had happened to them. The faces she knew, recognized from the digitized press clippings in the company files. Anson and Ruth Tyrell; there had been a photo of the two of them with-an oddly human, sentimentalizing touch—a long-haired marmalade cat in the woman’s arms, a pet that was going to accompany them on their exploratory voyage to the Proxima system. The two people in the photo had been smiling, full of an eager confidence—Sarah had calculated that her mother had become pregnant either shortly before the photograph had been taken or just after, when the interstellar transport had left Earth orbit. Her parents had been unaware of their fate, the fate of the Salander 3. The transport had turned back a sixth of the way to Proxima, the clever relays and circuits wired into its computers doing the best they could, ferrying back the dead and the living, two adult corpses and an infant tended by machines, nursed on synthesized breast milk.
Her second birth had come three years later, when the Tyrell Corporation employees had unsealed the transport’s main hatch and one of them had led her out by the hand—there was no way Sarah could remember that. Just more of what she had been told, and had overheard, and had dug out of the company archives.
And what happened to the cat? she wondered, not for the first time. The poor thing—Sarah gazed out at the uncommunicative water, feeling the chill seep closer to her core. She supposed that was another mystery, the answer to which was down there with all the others, in the hulk of the Salander 3 itself.
“That’s why you want me to go down there, isn’t it?” She managed to bestow a bare fragment of a smile upon the two men. “To find out what happened to that silly cat.”
They showed no sign of puzzlement at her words. “You have to go down there,” said Wycliffe, “to save—to restore—the Tyrell Corporation.”
“Something went wrong Zwingli gazed out across the Flow. “A long time ago . . .”
“At the beginning.” Wycliffe nodded slowly. “It had to have been then. When Dr. Tyrell and his brother created the corporation. Somehow, everything that happened since then including the destruction of the Tyrell Corporation . the seeds were planted right back at the start of it all.”
She envied the dead-this also, not for the first time. They’ve got it easy, thought Sarah. The two Tyrell brothers and the wife of one of them-all the bad things that fate had had in store, they had already gotten through. And gone on to whatever place there was that had no time, neither past nor dreaded future. She knew she wasn’t that lucky . . . or at least not yet. The past was waiting for her, just a few minutes ahead, when she would go down into the remains of the Salander 3, her first home. Which, in some way, she had never left.
