A pitying expression came into her eyes. “I don’t have any other.”
The calendar on the wall rustled its pages. “I don’t think she’s lying, Mr.
Niemand.”
“No . . . I don’t think she is, either.” He didn’t look up at the calendar and its photogenic scene of a vanished wilderness. “That’s not the problem.”
Deckard’s gaze was still held by the unblinking regard of the child. Sometimes people lied and sometimes they didn’t; sometimes they simply believed things that weren’t true. “What’s your last name?”
She shook her head, the thick dark braid swinging behind her. “I don’t know.
Nobody ever told me that.”
“Who are your parents?”
A cloud passed behind her eyes. “They’re dead. They’ve been dead a long, long time.”
Around them, in the silent room and the world outside the hovel’s thinly fabricated walls, time had started up again; Deckard could feel his heart once more moving through its paces. Something had happened, he knew; a door had opened to some other time, and this child had stepped through. It’s her, thought Deckard. She’s not lying. Rachael .
He could see it in the child’s face. In the darkness of her hair, bound behind her; in the open, unashamed eyes; in the calm self-possession that radiated through every posture and motion of the small frame. He had loved, kissed and held in his embrace, slept with an adult Rachael, if a replicant that would live only four years total could be called an adult; she had been created that way, her childhood a false memory stolen from the human woman Sarah Tyrell and implanted inside her head. He had never seen Rachael as a child, except for a moment, a dehydrated slice of time; in the photos that she had brought to his apartment, that she had shown to him in a futile attempt to prove that she was human. Those had been photos of Sarah, he knew, or else total fabrications, bad- faith evidence concocted in Eldon Tyrell’s workshops, as phony as the ones that the replicant Kowalski had been obsessed with. There was no need for Deckard to have seen those old photographs, the ones that the adult Rachael’s trembling hand had thrust toward him, to recognize the child now sitting a few feet away. He could have closed his eyes, or kept the room in absolute darkness, not even seen the child’s eyes and face, and he would have known that Rachael—not the woman he’d loved, as a woman, but some aspect of her—was there with him.
From his own memory, Deckard pulled up another question to ask the child.
Something that he’d been told, reminded of, in the Van Nuys Pet Hospital, that sanctuary for escaped replicants where Isidore busied himself converting them into creatures that could pass for fully human. There had been another photo there, an old news clipping on the wall of Isidore’s office that he had looked at and wondered about. Because the woman in that ancient photo had looked so much like Rachael.
“Tell me something.” He leaned forward, bringing his gaze level and just inches away from the little girl’s eyes. “Was your mother’s name Ruth?”
The girl’s face lit up. “Yes! It was!” She did a quick, excited bounce in the chair. “That’s what the nanny told me her name was. It was Ruth.”
He angled his head to one side. “What nanny?”
“Well . . . not like a proper nanny. Like in the storybooks and the videos.” The child named Rachael gave an embarrassed shrug. “That wasn’t real; not like me and you. It was just the computer, and the machines and stuff, that took care of me. ’Cause there weren’t any real people . . . at least until she came along.” The child gestured toward the door—and Sarah, in the hovel’s other room. “There were just ghosts and things that looked like people —they were all dead, though. So the nanny had to tell me all about stuff.” She looked closer at him. “Do you understand?”
“Sure.” Deckard nodded. He had an idea of what she was talking about. “This place, with the nanny and the ghosts—did it have a name? Was it called the Salander 3?”
“That’s it!” The little girl looked excited and pleased, as though finding herself on another human being’s wavelength. She suddenly looked puzzled, forehead creasing. “How do you know that? You weren’t there.”
“Oh . . . I know all sorts of things.” More flashes from the time he’d spent with Isidore, and even before that, rummaging through what was left of the LAPD’s ancient files on the Tyrell Corporation. There had been all sorts of fragmentary data, bits and pieces transferred one way or another into the personal memory bank he carried around inside his head. The problem isn’t in knowing things, mused Deckard. It’s understanding them.
Like how did this little girl come to be here? She didn’t look to be more than ten years old, if that—the mix of a somber adult quality, a wary regard of the things happening around her, and those kid reactions, when he’d guessed her mother’s name, made it hard to precisely fix her age. Deckard suspected that if he asked her that simple question, the reply would be that she didn’t know.
How could she? Something had gone wrong with the flow of time itself for the girl to exist at all. If she really was the daughter of Ruth Tyrell—he tried to remember the father’s name, having to concentrate on the memory of the old newspaper clipping, before coming up with the name Anson, the brother of Eldon Tyrell—if that was true, and right now he felt sure it was, then it meant that the girl had somehow been born after her parents had died on the Salander 3’s aborted mission to the Proxima system.
And what did all the rest of it mean? Deckard tried to sort through the pieces as he studied the girl’s face. He could see the other Rachael, the one she would grow up to be, already present there, as though an embryo, or more accurately, a flower that had only begun to show the color of its petals. No sexual feeling was triggered in him by the girl, though everything about her—the color of her eyes, the lift of chin and shape of cheekbone, even the barely perceptible fragrance of her dark hair-reminded him of the adult Rachael who had slept in his arms. A sadness-tinged wonder, rather, at the girl’s appearance; she could have been the child that Rachael and he would have had together, if replicants could bear children. One more thing of which Eldon Tyrell had deprived them. But that was what the girl looked like; a convoluted genetic inheritance, yet breeding true, from the smiling beauty of Ruth caught in the old news clipping photo . . . and how much farther back? Perhaps the woman that Anson Tyrell had married, had tried to take with him to the stars, had been part of a long line of heartbreakers, not so much beautiful—though Rachael had been that, and Sarah Tyrell was, even now—as some other quality, almost invisible but still real, that laid a fingertip on men’s hearts, stilling the pulse like a soft, effective bullet.
She’ll also be that way, thought Deckard as he looked at the child sitting in front of him, waiting for him to speak again. Not for me. For him, there would only be Rachael, the one he’d loved and had taken from him. For someone else .
“What’s going to happen now?” With the slightest tilt of her head, the Rachael child indicated the bedroom’s doorway. A shadow passed through the light from the other part of the hovel. “She doesn’t seem to like me very much.” A note of worry sounded in the girl’s voice. “And I don’t have anywhere else to go. I don’t know my way around here, like I did back home.”
“Well it’ll be all right.” Deckard squeezed the girl’s hand. “Nothing bad will happen to you. I promise.”
“What a performance.” The air temperature in the hovel seemed to drop several degrees as a bitterness- laden voice spoke from the doorway. Deckard looked up and saw Sarah standing there, leaning against the plastic door frame, arms folded across her breasts. “I really have to hand it to you.” She slowly shook her head, her glare daggering straight into his eyes. “Who would have thought you were such a consummate performer? I should’ve learned by now not to put anything past you.”
“Oh, oh.” The calendar, sensing trouble to come, whis pered from behind its image of snow and trees. “I don’t think—”
“Be quiet.” Deckard hadn’t taken his own gaze away from Sarah. “What’re you talking about?”
“Your little show here.” With a sharp flick of one hand, she gestured toward him and the girl. “I could almost believe that you really do see her. The same as I can.”
He didn’t feel like arguing the point with her any further. “You went off-planet—didn’t you? You must have.” That had to be the case, though Deckard had no idea yet of how it could have been accomplished. But the Salander 3, the interstellar transport upon which Ruth and Anson Tyrell had headed for the Prox system, wasn’t here on Mars. If it existed anywhere, it would have to be back on Earth, sandbagged somewhere to keep the notoriously toxic effects of the old-style propulsion units from leaking out. “Where did you go? Who took you?”
“You sound like a cop,” said Sarah disgustedly. “Always ready for the interrogation, aren’t you? Maybe you’d like to take me down to the station and slap me around a while. That’d probably seem like old times, wouldn’t it?
Oops, sorry—” She held one hand up. “I forgot. With blade runners, it’s shoot first and don’t even bother
