“We can’t go back to the very beginning—that’s too far.” Wycliffe’s voice continued at the edge of her thoughts. “There’s nothing left. It’s lost. But this much we can do. We can go this far. To whatever happened . . . then. In there.” He nodded toward the grey water and the vessels hidden beneath the surface. “But you’re the only one who can go there and find out. The secrets, the mysteries. All that we need to know.”
This is what I get—she supposed it served her right. She had envied the dead and had tried to become one of them. Deckard had loved—and still loved—the replicant with Sarah’s face. Rachael had already become one of the dead, the termination of her four-year life span postponed just a little bit. Not that it mattered, finally. For either herself or Rachael. The dead were the only ones who escaped. For the living, there was only the past and the future, the same thing in either direction, and equally painful. It was stupid of me to even try.
Standing behind her, Wycliffe was still wrapped up in his explanations, the rationale behind their journey to this bleak spot. “We don’t even know why.”
His voice spoke in a child’s baffled tone. “The Tyrell Corporation sunk an awful lot of its operating capital into the Salander 3 expedition. And we don’t even know what they were looking for out in the Proxima system. What they were trying to achieve, what they thought Anson Tyrell was going to find out there.”
“Not in the files, was it?” Sarah knew; she’d looked herself. “That information was deleted; erased, extinguished. And you know, don’t you, who must have done that.”
Both men nodded. “Dr. Tyrell,” Wycliffe morosely said. “Eldon Tyrell. Your uncle.”
“Eldon Tyrell did a lot of things that you don’t know about.” She heard her own voice darken in tone. “Some of them . . . you don’t want to know about.”
Sarah looked over her shoulder and saw the two die-hard loyalists appearing uncomfortable, exchanging glances from behind their square-framed lenses at each other.
“Those kinds of things . . .”
Zwingli spoke up. “That might be personal information. Family secrets. That we don’t need to know about. To bring the Tyrell Corporation back into existence.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” said Sarah. “There’s no such thing as personal with the Tyrell Corporation. There never was. Or to put it another way . . . everything is personal. When my uncle was alive, the company was just the contents of his head, made big.”
“And then it was yours.” A softly uttered reminder from Wycliffe. “Your company. And your . . . personal matters.”
Head turned, Sarah regarded the man, seeking any clue as to just exactly and how much he and his partner were aware of. Maybe I was wrong, she mused. Maybe they weren’t quite as stupid as they looked. She’d have to be careful-her own reminder, this time.
“But all that came later.” Wycliffe spoke, letting his steady gaze meet hers.
“We need to find out what happened a long time ago. On the Salander 3.”
“That was really the turning point,” added Zwingli. “If you study the history of the Tyrell Corporation. What can be pieced together from the files and the other records. After the failure of the Salander 3 mission, and the deaths of An-son and Ruth Tyrell—your parents’ deaths—then things were never the same.
That was when the company’s Los Angeles headquarters became such a fortress. A fortress that your uncle retreated into. And the Tyrell Corporation grew both in power and secrecy.”
“You’re telling me things I already know.” Sarah turned from the Flow’s shore to face the two men. “I’ve gone over the files as well.”
“Ah, but it’s not just what’s in the files—or what Dr. Tyrell left there.”
Wycliffe looked smug, pleased with the workings of his brain. “Some of the connections you need to make”
Those happened outside the company. In the rest of the world. The Salander 3 expedition, that you were born during—that was the last exploratory voyage outside the solar system. After the Salander 3 came back, without even having reached its destination, the U.N. launched its off-world colonization program.
Within a couple of years, the U.N. was sending the first groups of human settlers out to the stars. And the Tyrell Corporation had the exclusive franchise on supplying replicants to the colonization program. That’s when the money started to happen, in a big way.” The man’s eyes glittered behind the square glasses. “It’s what enabled Dr. Tyrell to establish a monopoly on all aspects of replicant technology. With the money he was getting from the U.N., he was able to either buy up any patents that he didn’t already own or drive the other companies out of business. For all intents and purposes, from that point on, Tyrell was the replicant business. The company had no competition, and the U.N. went along with whatever prices Dr. Tyrell decided to set. The Tyrell Corporation was the sole supplier for the one essential element to the colonization program.”
“Bad move on the U.N.’s part.” Sarah gave a shrug. “Just goes to show that those people don’t know how businesses are run. You never let somebody get a hand on your throat that way.”
“Perhaps.” The smug look didn’t vanish from Wycliffe’s face. “Unless the U.N. didn’t mind paying that price; they didn’t mind giving the Tyrell Corporation such an expensive monopoly. That might all have been part of the deal that had been set up between the U.N. and Dr. Tyrell. The company gets the franchise on supplying replicants to the colonists and the U.N. gets the colonization program. What Dr. Tyrell gave the U.N. as his part of the bargain made the program possible, so the U.N. could go ahead with it.” The smugness shifted into a self-satisfied smile. “And that’s where the Salander 3 comes in.”
“Really?” Sarah raised an eyebrow. “That’s your theory? The Salander 3 expedition-my father and my mother—found something out that the Tyrell Corporation sold to the U.N-some information, perhaps, about what was out there in the stars. And that was worth enough to the U.N. for them to hand over the replicant monopoly. Interesting conjecture.”
“Perhaps it wasn’t information, Miss Tyrell. Perhaps it was something even more valuable to the U.N. and its program. Perhaps it was the suppression of information.”
Silence, marred only by the passage of wind over Scapa Flow’s waters, as she considered the other’s words. But that would mean .
“Exactly,” said Wycliffe, as though he had discerned the currents of her thinking. “It would mean that Dr. Tyrell did whatever was necessary to suppress the information that the Salander 3 expedition had discovered. That the expedition had been aborted and brought back to Earth on his orders. And that those who possessed the information—your parents—were . . . shall we say? . . . suppressed as well.”
“Murdered.” A homicidal spark flared in Sarah’s heart at hearing more of the man’s dancing, evasive words. “That’s what you mean.”
“Of course it is.” Both of the men gazed owlishly back at her. “You’ll have to excuse our efforts at being diplomatic. But this is Wycliffe spread his hands apart. “A delicate subject. A not-very-pleasant possibility.”
“You should’ve thought of it yourself,” muttered Zwingli. “The fact you didn’t—that says a lot.”
“Precisely.” Lanky, black-sleeved arms folded themselves across Wycliffe’s chest. “This smacks of avoidance on your part. Which seems odd, given your rather obvious antipathy toward your uncle.”
“You know . . . you might be right.” Sarah slowly nodded. It just goes to show, she thought. You can never hate some people enough. There was always more.
She looked away from the two die-hard loyalists and back toward the dark waters mirroring the steel-clouded sky. The answers were there, beneath the small waves that lapped across the stones toward her feet.
Her uncle hadn’t been able to suppress everything. The past remained, captured and bottled and buried away from the light. Waiting for her.
“All right,” Sarah said aloud. “I’ll go down there. And see what I find.”
“Thank you, Miss Tyrell.” The voice came from behind her; she didn’t know which of them it was. “That’s all we’re asking of you.”
As if that weren’t enough. She tugged the fur-collared coat closer around herself, futilely trying to ward off the cold winds.
“I’ve seen you around here before,” said the man inside the booth. The ramshackle stall, tucked into one of the darkest corners of the emigrant colony’s convoluted marketplace, surrounded him like a scuttling sea creature’s protective carapace. “Coming and going, on your little mundane, unimportant errands. The things that you thought were so important. But now you’ve seen the light.”
There would have been a time for Deckard, back when he’d been a cop in L.A., when he would’ve reached across the space between this person and himself and grabbed the guy’s throat and squeezed until veins had stood
