“Not just some stupid old cat.”
“Ah. Yes . . . exactly so.” Wycliffe attempted a feeble smile. “I must have been . . . anticipating what you were about to tell us.”
“I don’t think so.” She lifted the lid of the ornate box on the small table beside the chair, and watched her hand run a fingertip across the cigarettes’ silky paper, before turning her gaze back to the two men. “I think you knew very well that my father didn’t stop with the cat. When he had his psychotic breakdown, somewhere between here and the Proxima system—he didn’t go just a little bit crazy. He went all the way.”
“There were . . . some indications . . . about that.”
Sarah slapped the box lid down. “Gentlemen—I found more than indications. I found my mother’s body. Or what was left of it. Perhaps, for my father, the cat had just been a little warm-up, a practice session to get ready for the main event. Which was my mother.” One fingertip ticked against the box lid. “And myself.”
“That would seem to be . . . consistent.” Wycliffe’s hands folded around each other. “With the fragmentary reports of those who went aboard the Salander 3 when it returned to Earth.” He gave a single nod. “It’s fortunate, of course, that Anson Tyrell didn’t manage to fulfill his deranged agenda.”
“Oh, I agree.” She made no attempt to disguise her sarcasm. “I doubt that even when I was an infant I would have enjoyed those particular attentions of my father. You see, I’ve been inside his head; that’s what the Salander 3 is now.
With all that toxic past locked up and unchanging inside it—it’s like that Jungian definition of the psychotic condition as that state when no new thing ever enters into a person’s thoughts. Just the same thing over and over again, like an endless tape loop. And that thing in my father’s case was murder. And blood, lots of it; more than what’s inside a cat, or what was inside my mother.” Sarah’s voice grated rawer and tighter. “An ocean of it. That must’ve been what the inside of his head looked like before he died. Just big hollow spaces like the ones inside the Salander 3, washed with blood.”
“Was . . . was your mother Zwingli’s words came out in a stammer. “Had he done the same thing to her? Like he did to the cat?”
“No.” A shake of the head. “That didn’t happen. From what I could tell . . . he slashed her throat. And then . . .”
Her own words came slower and slower, close to halting. “He stopped there.”
“That’s not the whole story.” The Rachael child spoke up, her voice hard with scorn. “She’s not telling it right!” Gripping the arms of the wing chair, the little girl looked around at Wycliffe and Zwingli in turn. “And she even saw what happened. She saw it!”
Wycliffe turned from the child back toward Sarah. “Miss Tyrell . . . what did you see? What happened?”
The tape loop inside her head, that segment of the longburied past that had wormed its way into her own memories, became visible once more as she closed her eyes. It would never go away. Once seen, it was as unending as it had been in the hulk of the Salander 3.
“What happened.” She spoke without raising her eyelids to admit the lounge’s softly filtered light; even that was too much for her now. “I saw her-my mother; Ruth Tyrell, whatever you want to call her. It doesn’t matter. She was running, too; she was running with the baby in her arms. Because she knew what he wanted to do.”
“That’s the real story.” From somewhere outside Sarah, the little girl’s voice spoke again, approvingly this time. “That’s what really happened. I know, because the nanny told me. Because when I saw those things happening over and over again, they scared me. I wanted to know, so I wouldn’t be scared anymore.
So the nanny told me who they were.”
Sarah waited until the child was finished speaking, without even wondering if the two men could hear those words or not. “The infant . . . that was me.” She spoke slowly, trying to get everything exactly right, as if that could help somehow. “And then . . . and then he caught her. He caught up with my mother.
His wife. Ruth and Anson Her voice trailed away.
“Go on, Miss Tyrell. We have to know everything.”
“There’s not much more, is there?” She sighed and shook her head, opening her eyes to look up at the radiant ceiling. “My father knew his way around the Salander 3 better than my mother did, so there was really no place for her to hide. Plus she had the baby—she had me-with her. Plus . . . you can’t ever get away from the really bad things. Whether they exist or not. Eventually, they catch up with you. The way my father caught up with her.”
Nothing but silence surrounded her. They were all waiting for her to go on.
Those poor ghosts, thought Sarah. For a few seconds, she wasn’t sure who she meant. The people here, in the richly appointed lounge of the shadow corporation’s interplanetary yacht—they didn’t seem any more real to her than the figures she had seen down at the bottom of Scapa Flow, acting out their endless time-stilled rituals of fear and madness and death. They might not even know they’re dead. She supposed that statement might apply to the ones here as well. In a way, the only one that did appear real to her was the hallucinated Rachael child. At least that one had come out of her head, up from her unlit subconscious, the same way Sarah herself had come up from the sunken ship. So she’s at least as real as I am. That wasn’t saying much. Maybe just a little bit real, perhaps.
As if on cue, the child spoke again. “He cut her throat.” A simple announcement. “That’s what he did. He had a knife and he cut her throat. Just like that.” The girl made a quick swooping gesture, one hand holding an invisible blade. “And she died.”
Sarah didn’t wait for the two men to ask what happened next. “And then,” she said, “so did he. My father died.” The tape loop inside her head had run to its end and started over, one moment of the past welded inexorably to its antecedent. “He had his dead wife at his feet and a wailing infant lying in the pool of blood on the floor.” She had watched all that, with the hallucinated Rachael child close beside her, the two of them pulled back into the shadows of one of the ship’s unlit corridors, as the ghosts locked in time had gone through their rituals in the light, as though they were the ones who existed outside of memory. There was something else that she didn’t speak of, not because she didn’t want Wycliffe and Zwingli to know; it was just too painful to try to find the words. That her mother had died shielding her, protecting the infant in her arms. Even when the crazed figure with the knife had taken her mother down to her knees, his other hand twisting her hair tight into his fist, drawing her throat taut and vulnerable; even then, Ruth Tyrell hadn’t screamed, but had gasped out a plea, not for her own life but for the smaller one she’d held desperately against her breast.
Desperate because Ruth had known—as her daughter, Sarah, had known, when she had seen the madness in her long-dead father’s eyes—that the child, the infant in her mother’s arms, had been the true target of his wrath. He’d murdered his wife, drawn the knife across her white throat, only to get at his own child . . .
“But he didn’t.” Sarah spoke her thoughts aloud. She didn’t care whether anyone else heard them. “For a moment he wasn’t crazy. And that was all it took. He must have heard what she said to him, what Ruth had said.” Sarah, watching from the dark corridor, hadn’t been able to make out the words her mother had spoken. Words in a ghost’s mouth; perhaps they hadn’t even been words at all but just some inarticulate cry. Or articulate enough. For that brief section of the past, the past that had happened so long ago and so far from Earth, one sixth of the way to the Proxima system; for just that long, a matter of a few seconds, Anson Tyrell had been sane again; whatever gripped him had relaxed its hold, letting a horrified rationality possess him once more.
He had his dead wife at his feet, the blood still running from her opened throat and pooling around the two of them, forming a redly shining mirror in which he looked down and saw his own unrecognizable face. And saw the knife in his upraised hand, which he might not even have known was there, he’d been that crazy. And saw his face in that smaller red mirror, the one smeared on the blade’s bright metal; and recognized.
That was how it had appeared to Sarah, watching the ghosts. Who were so locked into the past that she would have seemed like a ghost to them if she had stepped out of the dark corridor. If they had been able to see her at all.
Sarah’s time, that she was locked into and that she carried around with her as though it were some invisible diving bell, had separated out from the time held in the Salander 3, like the markings of trace elements divided by their specific gravity. Those elements, her time and the ghosts’ time, had been swirled together for a little while, when she had first descended and entered the transport. So that the elements had bumped up against each other, become visible to each other, the dead looking at the living, or at least the not-so-dead. Her dead father had been able to see her, had probably thought she was one more part of the craziness sparking away inside his head. Would he have been able to do more than just look at her and say crazy, murderous things? She didn’t know; that had
