child ignored the acid comment, rubbing the side of her face against Sarah’s sleeve. “You’re not even really here, and you pulled this one off.”
Once ashore, Wycliffe and Zwingli skipped the cathedral, even though it was closer. With the rain lashing at their backs, they led Sarah and the Rachael child back to the shadow corporation’s interplanetary yacht. The breaks in the storm clouds let the stars’ cold light through, enough to pick out the rocky edges of the trail. Ahead of them, the running lights and docking signals of the yacht glinted and blinked in sequence along the ovoid shape’s circumference.
Thank God, thought Sarah as the gangway irised open. All she wanted now was another shower and a change of clothes. She had glanced down at herself as she and the others had trudged away from the little boat pulled up on the Flow’s pebbly shore. The palms of her hands were still stained with blood from when she had tripped and fallen, running from all that she had seen and feared inside the Salander 3; the rain hadn’t managed to wash it away. Nor had it taken the blood from the patch along one leg or the side where she had landed hard against her rib cage; there had been so much blood inside the ship that it had seemed to imbed itself in every fabric of her being, like the canned and recirculated air drawn into her lungs.
A half hour later, Sarah found herself wondering how many of the black undertaker suits Wycliffe and Zwingli had aboard the shadow corporation craft.
While she had been in the master suite’s facilities, looking down through billows of gratefully received steam at the trickles of red sluicing off her body, thinning pink as they ran down the drain near her bare feet, the two men had managed to transform themselves back into the muted—and dry-personae in which she had first seen them. With the thick bathrobe pulled around herself, the Tyrell Corporation logo monogrammed over her breast, she sat down in the ship’s central lounge, taking the largest and plushest of the chairs available. The two men had remained standing—she wondered how long they had been waiting for her to reappear—but one other figure was already there, sitting with her legs tucked up under her in one of the lesser wing chairs.
With large grave eyes, the image of the little girl watched and waited.
“You’re still here?” Sarah had extracted a cigarette from the enameled case on the nearest small table. She lit the cigarette, inhaled, then let the grey smoke be carried away by the yacht’s ventilation, so much quieter and unobtrusive than the ancient system she’d encountered at the bottom of Scapa Flow. “I thought-well, perhaps I hoped—that you’d have gone away by now.” The hot shower, taking away the chill that the storm winds had driven into her bones, had seemed so therapeutic that a diminishing of hallucinations had not seemed entirely unlikely. “You know . . . this could become quite tiresome.
You’re not really needed anymore.”
“I’m not going away.” The little girl’s face darkened with her stubborn defiance. “And you can’t make me.”
“We’ll see about that.” Sarah regarded the glowing tip of the cigarette.
“There are ways. These things can always be accomplished. One way or another.”
She’d have to look into it-when there was time. Or if. A fatalistic calm had settled over her, part fatigue, part resigned acknowledgment of the meshing of the universe’s gears. “Even if, say, psychotherapy didn’t work. Drugs might.
Or surgery, perhaps.” She nodded slowly, as though contemplating the possibility. Though it was technically easier to get material in and out of the brains of replicants—the whole system of control through implantation of false memories was a Tyrell Corporation development—it could be done, to a limited degree, with humans as well. Sarah imagined that a sufficiently skilled neurosurgeon could root around inside her skull with his microscalpels and tiny electrified probes and root out whatever lump of grey matter contained the little girl’s image.
Or there might be even simpler ways. The ultimate sur gery: “I could just kill myself.” Sarah enunciated the words clearly, with no hesitation attached to them. She had considered the option enough times to render it free of pain. “Then you would disappear, wouldn’t you? If I blew a hole in the side of my head, you could just flutter out and be gone.”
“Miss Tyrell . . . for heaven’s sake.” Wycliffe had turned pale. “Don’t say things like that.”
“Why? Will it blow up the franchise or something?” When all else had failed, there was still some sadistic pleasure to be gotten out of needling the die-hard loyalists. “I nearly forgot. Without me, your chances of resurrecting the Tyrell Corporation are just about zero. A suicide would ball up your plans, wouldn’t it? All this work for nothing.”
“It’s more than that,” insisted Wycliffe. “There’s a certain matter of . . . personal loyalty.”
“He’s right.” Zwingli added his voice to the statement. “Since there really is no difference between you and the corporation. That makes it sort of a liege-vassal relationship.”
“It didn’t sound like that out there on the Flow.” Sarah nodded toward one of the viewports, through which the storm-lashed waters could be seen. “You weren’t exactly taking orders from me when I told you to leave behind this .
She gestured in the direction of Rachael. “Child . . . apparition, or whatever .
. . that you claim to see.”
“I’m not,” announced Rachael sullenly, “an apparition. I know what that word means.”
“Miss Tyrell. If it would do any good—” Wycliffe sounded desperate. “We’d be happy to pretend we don’t see any child sitting here with us. You could order us to do that.”
“What child?” asked Zwingli helpfully. He watched Sarah for an approving reaction.
“But it really wouldn’t change anything.” Hands spread apart, Wycliffe hunched up his shoulders. “We’d still see her. And since she did come with you out of the Salander 3, it’s vitally important that we get whatever information we can from her. Whether she’s an apparition or not.”
“You people must be crazy.” The Rachael child turned a withering look on all of them. Sitting back in the wing chair, she folded her arms across her chest.
“An apparition is something that doesn’t exist. The nanny told me all about it. Because there were plenty of apparitions down there. I was told to be very careful about them. Because even if they don’t exist, they can still hurt you.”
“Truer words,” said Sarah dryly, “were never spoken.” She flicked grey ash onto the lounge’s carpet. “Though in this case, I’m not much worried.”
“Perhaps we could settle this later.” Wycliffe looked both fretful and conciliatory. “When you’re not quite so worn out from your efforts, Miss Tyrell—”
“You mean, when I’m not feeling cranky. About you two claiming you can see my hallucinations.” She was still wondering—or worse, coming to conclusions-about what they were trying to accomplish with that bit.
“Whatever. But there really is some time pressure here, Miss Tyrell. We’d like to debrief you about what you encountered down in the Salander 3 while the memories are still fresh—”
She laughed, holding the half-drawn cigarette off to one side. “They’re not exactly the kind that fade. Believe me.”
“Every detail,” persisted Wycliffe, “might be important. If the Tyrell Corporation is to be brought back to what it was before. We need to know.”
“Sometimes . . . I think I must be working for you. Instead of the other way around.”
Wycliffe stiffened to his full funereal height. “We are all in the service of the Tyrell Corporation.”
“Really.” She smiled as she regarded him. Pompous twit—though she supposed it was ever thus with religious fanatics. No sense of humor at all. A good thing for him that he hadn’t been the one to enter the scuttled Salander 3. He wouldn’t have made it back out alive, or with even as much sanity as she’d retained intact. Because that moment had come, while she had been down there, with all the mass of the ocean on top of her and the even more crushing and airless weight of the past sealed around, that it had seemed at last like a joke, a hard and cruel one, but a joke nevertheless. That she had gone all that way, a complete round-trip to the place and frozen time of her infancy, just so the one who would have killed her so long ago could have another chance at her . . .
It must’ve seemed so very accommodating of me, thought Sarah. She breathed out smoke, tilting her head back and watching the insubstantial, disappearing shape it made. All the murderous ghosts of the past; if they dreamed, it would have to be of death. They couldn’t die themselves, not while the past endured unbroken, sealed tight within its bottle, away from the real world and real time. But as the little girl had said: Even if they don’t exist, they can still hurt you.
“Miss Tyrell?” Wycliffe’s voice poked at the edge of her awareness.
