upraised to indicate all its contents and the spaces beyond. “I know I got all this right. I lived here so long, not here but out there, out in the real world-this was my world. I just had to make it all over again. And I did.”
Deckard watched him and listened. He felt even sorrier for the poor little bastard. He’s finding out. The same things that Deckard had found out, had learned and written on the charred scroll of his heart. There were some things you couldn’t bring back. You could grieve for them, and that was all.
“But Pris Sebastian looked puzzled, as if he was about to start crying again. “When I got done, she still wasn’t here. She was supposed to be—I made it that way—but she wasn’t.”
Deckard knew why Sebastian, the deity of this pocket universe, had failed. He wondered if he should tell him.
“I tried and tried—”
“Look,” said Deckard. “It’s not going to happen. Why don’t you just give up on that? You’ve got your memories. Those’ll have to do.”
A big sigh from Sebastian rendered him even smaller and more fragile. “I know.
I know you’re right.” His shoulders slumped in desolation. He looked hollowed out, insubstantial, as though the contents of his skin had been converted to loose atoms and exhaled; another night breeze coming through the windows might have blown him away entirely. “There’s a reason for it. Why she’s not here.”
“You don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to. That’s not why I came here.”
“Of course not. You’ve got important business to take care of.” Still Sebastian turned back to the silent and motionless clown mannequin. He lifted the black cloth covering its mechanical innards; from one of his coverall pockets, he took a yellow-handled screwdriver and poked at the meshing gears.
“Like I said, I know why. Or to put it another way, kinda, it’s because of what I don’t know. About Pris.” He extracted some small part from the workings and studied it between his thumb and forefinger. “I mean, I know all about something like this. And all the other stuff I got.” Still holding the metal piece, Sebastian gestured toward the room’s contents. “And the building, and the street outside, and the whole city even . . . I know what those are. So I’ve got ’em the right way inside my head, and so I could make ’em be here, the way they were before, out there. You know, in the real world. But with Pris He leaned close to the clown’s workings, screwing the little part back into place. “I thought I knew what she was. But maybe I was wrong.”
Deckard said nothing. For a moment, the room and all the empty spaces around it were silent, except for the touch of rain upon the window glass and the corridors’ pools of dark water.
“Do you think, Mr. Decker, that that’s possible?” Sebastian’s gaze, sharper beneath the constant moistness, like a knife under blurry water, fastened onto him. “You think I could’ve got it all wrong?”
“I’m glad you’re here,” said the little girl. She reached up and took Sarah’s hand, and gave her a shy, pretty smile. “I was getting kind of lonely. All by myself .
Poor little thing, thought Sarah. She’s not even real. The notion of ghosts and shadows, and all other unreal things, suffering from loneliness, the same way she always had, now weighted her down with an inescapable sadness. If this little girl—or the little girl that she saw, a temporary incarnation of memory and the past that was all jumbled up inside the Salander 3—if she could feel lonely, then loneliness was some sort of universal constant, like gravity or the speed of light. Everything in the world, this one or any other, was made, at least in part, of it.
The little girl’s dark hair, dark as Sarah’s own, was pulled back into a long braid tied with a red ribbon at the end. The girl—the image, the ghost, the hallucination—didn’t draw away as Sarah felt the ribbon’s thin substance between her fingertips. The ribbon felt real enough, and even touched by the passage of time; it looked old, faded and frayed, the gossamer threads coming loose at the edges.
“Did you do that?” Sarah spoke gently to the little girl, as though any harsh word might have dispersed her from even this illusory existence, like a hand brushed through a curl of smoke. “Or did somebody here fix your hair for you?”
“I can do it.” The girl spoke with affronted dignity. “If I want to. But usually I let the nanny do it.”
“The nanny? What nanny?”
“You know.” The girl, still holding Sarah’s hand, used a nod of her head to indicate the corridor walls and hidden machinery of the ship. “The things that take care of you. That’s their job. But they don’t have to do so much for me anymore—I’m not a baby now. But it makes them happy if they can do things, so sometimes I let them.”
Sarah knew what the girl was talking about. The Salander 3’s computer was still silent, as though they had left its voice behind them as they had walked farther through the ship’s interior. But she could sense the pseudo-life imbedded in the structure of the vessel, the flow of electrons, the activation of solenoids, the meshing of gears; all the tiny functions that had been programmed into the lifeless metal and silicon. That had, she knew, kept her alive as well; that had been her nursemaid all the way back to Earth, so many years ago. When the Salander 3 had turned back from its voyage to the Proxima system, and had returned with two human corpses and one living child as its only passengers—the computer and its most delicate manipulators hadn’t tied any red ribbons, but it had done everything necessary to preserve the real life that had been left in its charge.
Their steps, hers and the little girl’s, had led them farther into the Salander 3; Sarah had wanted to get away from the pool of blood near which she had found her illusory companion. The girl had seemed to pick up on Sarah’s queasiness; she had led the way, her hand in Sarah’s hand, past the entrances of other corridor branches, down which had been visible other scrawled markings on the walls in the same wet red that looked black in the overhead fluorescents’ partial spectrum. Only when they reached a section of the ship that had escaped whatever violence had rolled through the other enclosed spaces—it seemed to be some kind of storage area; crates and boxes with stenciled lettering lined the sides—had Sarah been able to draw her breath and speak again.
She halted, turning the little girl to face her. “Tell me,” said Sarah. “And you have to tell me the truth, the real truth.” She knelt down, so that her gaze was on the same level as the girl’s. “Is your name really Rachael?”
“Of course.” The girl gazed back at her, somber and unblinking. “What else would it be?”
Sarah didn’t answer. The girl’s image stepped from a mere optical perception to something else, which moved through other dark corridors, the ones inside her own memories. She knew what the girl reminded her of: one of the photographs that had been inside her uncle’s desk, the ornately carved and gilded bureau plat in his vast and lofty-ceilinged office suite in L.A., that she had inherited along with every other object belonging to the Tyrell Corporation. The photograph had been of herself, taken when she had been about the same age, ten years old or so, as the girl who stood before her now. She couldn’t remember when the photo had been taken, though she supposed it had been in Zurich, in the expensive, conventlike boarding school where her uncle had lodged his orphan niece as soon as she’d been old enough for it; the girl in the picture had been wearing the stiff-collared uniform that had itched so badly through her thin white stockings.
There had been something else in that old photograph. Her hair had been pulled back, the same as this little girl’s, but without a ribbon of any color, or else it just hadn’t been caught by the camera. And bangs, thought Sarah; she’d had bangs when she’d been ten years old, combed down to a half inch above her eyebrows. Whereas this little girl had hers parted at one temple, then brushed slanting across her forehead. That was different; but the face . . . the face was the same. Sarah could see that, calling up the photograph in her memory and comparing it with the child in front of her. The same dark eyes, the same incipient beauty, the fragile pale-ness. And something else, deeper and more hidden, yet obvious to see. That sadness, even when the little girl smiled, even when that vanished Sarah in the old photograph had smiled, shy and hesitant. Exactly the same.
That proves it, thought Sarah. It didn’t make her any happier to know that the little girl she knelt before and in whose dark eyes she saw her own grown-up face mirrored was a ghost, a hallucination, a temporal anomaly. Something that the toxic effects of the Salander 3’s depleted interstellar drives had conjured up out of the jumbled past held inside the curved metal. Or out of my head—that must be what the little girl’s name meant. Rachael. Where else would she have gotten it? Straight out of Sarah’s own memories and desires; Sarah had even called herself Rachael, had tried to be Rachael, back when she had thought she could replace, the original for the copy, the replicant that Deckard had loved. Fm going crazy down here, thought Sarah. Or crazier.
Wycliffe and Zwingli had told her it was a poisonous environment; they hadn’t been lying. She had the proof of that in front of her eyes, or in the trenches of her misfiring central nervous system, wherever a hallucination like this could be said to exist at all.
Sarah stood up. “Your name’s not Rachael,” she said coldly.
