hurt, cut instead of cutting, the ones who weren’t alive anymore. Crazy .
She stood back from the wall, as far away from it as possible, in the middle of the lightless corridor. Far enough away that she could read what it said, the edge of the distant glow picking out the wet letters, the one word, the name, as a slow line trickled from the bottom curve of the S to the floor.
SARAH
Her own name. As big and crazy as possible; not in a bathroom mirror this time—in this time—but filling a whole wall, each letter standing higher than herself. Written a long time ago, by the measurement of the world outside, up above, where the grey waves rolled beneath the mounting storm clouds. Written just now, in the now that never ended, could never end, inside the Salander 3.
The voice of the ship’s computer whispered inside her head, a tape loop of what it had told her, warned her about, as she had walked away from the light.
Maybe you should go home, little girl. You don’t belong here .
She should have taken the computer’s advice. It had only been trying to protect her, just as it always had. I should’ve listened; too late now, Sarah knew. She had come this far; there could be no leaving until she had gone all the way to the end.
With a shudder arcing down her spine, she turned away from the red-scrawled name on the wall. As she looked down the corridor again, a light appeared, a tiny, flickering thing. Not at the height of her gaze, but lower; she had to shield her eyes for a moment from what might have been a flashlight beam turned straight at her.
The beam shifted away, toward the floor; Sarah lowered her hand. Light shimmered on liquid. The thought came to her that the ship was slowly flooding with water; the sealing mechanisms had broken loose, jarred by nothing but her footsteps, or the hatch to the shaft behind her hadn’t closed properly, letting the Flow’s waters seep in. A dark expanse stretched in front of her, covering the floor; the breath of the ship’s ventilation system stirred a shimmering ripple across the surface.
But it wasn’t seawater; she had known that as well, and couldn’t deny it to herself, when the red trickle from the word on the wall reached the bottom of the wall. The red line, running down from the big smeared S of her name, merged with the dark pool and was the same color, the same substance, black in darkness, red in her knowing.
The glow from the flashlight, or the lantern or whatever it was, reflected from the small lake of blood, faintly illuminating the figure on the other side. She could see the person now.
“Hello,” spoke the child, in a child’s unafraid, curious voice. “Did you just get here?”
Sarah said nothing, then slowly shook her head. “No,” she managed to say.
“Perhaps. I don’t know.”
“I don’t know, either.”
The light wavered across the surface of the blood, sending the child’s shadow fluttering behind her. Sarah’s eyes made their final adjustment to the dark, revealing a little more of the image across from her. A little girl, perhaps ten years old, no more than that; dark hair falling to her thin shoulders, dark, serious eyes. A beautiful child who would grow more beautiful. No, Sarah reminded herself. Would have grown. Someplace where time moved.
“But The girl looked up shyly, through her long black lashes. “You can stay here if you want to. I don’t mind.”
Sarah felt her heart tightening under her breast; a pulse would have shattered it to pieces. Not real, thought Sarah. She closed her eyes, taking the child from her vision for a moment. She’s a ghost. That was the toxic effect of this place. The past didn’t die and go away, as it should. You see things. That didn’t exist, except in memory and the past.
“I’ll stay,” said Sarah. “For a little while, at least.”
The little girl couldn’t keep from smiling. “What’s your name?”
“It’s Sarah. That’s all.”
A puzzled look shaded the girl’s eyes. “Like that?” She glanced over her shoulder to the bloodied wall, then back to the girl. “That’s right.” She nodded. “What’s yours?” The same shy smile appeared. “It’s Rachael,” said the image of the little girl. “My name’s Rachael.”
A Spanish-language double bill was playing at the Million Dollar Theater. The same movies had been playing there forever, or seemingly so; the management never changed the plastic letters on the marquee. They just let the red plastic letters fall off one by one, hitting the rain-soaked sidewalk and lying there like cryptic messages underneath the sizzling broken neon. The hot blue colors ran crazy on the wet street, reflected in every puddle and gutter, upside down and backwards-who could tell?—and legible as the fire-tinged storm clouds rolling across the L.A. night sky.
Christ, thought Rick Deckard. This is a fake. A real good fake, better than the sets and stages and all the other phony rigging at the Outer Hollywood studios. As real-looking as it’d ever gotten there-with accurate rain piped over and drizzling down on walkable streets colored with the same intricate lights and electricity-still, all you’d had to do was look past the camera lenses and the show was over, illusion shattered. This false Los Angeles was a better job—dehydrated deities lived up to their advance billing, as far as he was concerned; no wonder people got into them—but it was still just as much a fake as any other. Perhaps even as much as the real one back on Earth.
He looked up at the garish marquee as he walked down the center of the empty street. The effects of downing the beaker loaded with the colloidal suspension, activated by a spoonful of the Sebastian packet’s contents, were still setting in on him. For a few minutes—though it was hard to gauge the passage of time in a place that didn’t exist—he had been able to see both the hovel’s interior, with the tap still dripping into the kitchen-area sink and the briefcase with Batty’s voice lying on the table, and the lineaments of this pocket universe, like two photo transparencies laid on top of each other.
He’d even been able to see himself, his legs sprawled out, his hand resting on the table beside the empty beaker he’d just slapped down, as another perception of his body, standing not sitting, wearing the long pseudo- trenchcoat he’d always affected in L.A., had disorientingly faded into his consciousness. The Deckard body sitting in the hovel on Mars had faded out, the first thing in that other universe to go. The one in the pocket universe had tilted his head back, getting the grey-tinged rain in his face and seeing past the roiling clouds to sectors of hard- edged needle-tip stars, with gouts of flame bursting beneath them. Deckard figured the stars were as fixed in place as the heavy, dark clouds, indicators of this L.A.’s eternal night.
Dicking around with time like that was the main indicator of the pocket universe’s fake status. A night that never ended—though the real L.A. had often felt like that to him—and little anachronisms. Right down to the Million Dollar’s marquee above his head; that was a fragment from the past, something vanished from the real world. This whole tenblock sector of the city’s decaying downtown had been levelled by urban-renewal terrorists to drive out the last squatter tribes some time after Deckard and Sarah had gone off-planet; news footage of the mini-nuked buildings had shown up on the Martian cable’s nightly clown-wrap. Even on the tiny video screen in the hovel, he’d been able to recognize the old movie palace’s curling ornaments, lifeless and unlit in the rubble.
The news clip hadn’t shown the old Bradbury Building, across from the transplanted theater, or what had been left of it—Deckard had assumed that even if there’d been no explosive charges planted there, the concussion from the surrounding blasts would’ve knocked the structure over; the place had been falling into plaster dust and splintering support beams when he’d been inside it. All the old intricate wrought-iron balustrades and open stairwells, the clanking antique of an elevator and its cage, the grand fabric of early twentieth-century business enterprise fallen on hard times—the building had looked like some kind of vertical mausoleum when he’d tracked the last of his quarry in there, the replicant Batty and the psychotic would-be replicant Pris. He’d gotten the shit kicked out of himself there as well, by Pris and the nonhuman Batty in turn. But as somebody else had said an even longer time ago, the race wasn’t always to the swift; they had died and he was still alive, both in this world and the other one, the real one.
Though he didn’t feel too swift at the moment; a wave of nausea rolled up in his throat, the hallucinated city street blurring and thinning to insubstantiality for a few seconds. The colloidal suspension, the deity stirred from a dry powder to a potentiated liquid, was still asserting its hold on his central nervous system. His perceptions, what his flesh and mortal eyes were gazing upon inside the hovel, were being overridden by . . . what Sebastian saw. After all, thought Deckard. It’s his world. Whatever he was now.
Deckard turned away from the movie theater and toward the building directly across the street. It looked the
