corner of her mouth—that made her Sarah instead of Rachael. It didn’t help much; when Deckard opened his eyes again, the sight of the woman sent a sharp-pointed blow through him, more painful than if she had actually squeezed the trigger of the gun.
“Is that what you’re going to do?” He’d watched as the momentary tremor left her upraised hand. “Kill yourself, too?”
“Why not?” Sarah’s eyes almost seemed to be looking for sympathy from him.
“Why should you be the only one to get lucky?”
Deckard continued to watch as she strode forward, all the way to the building’s edge. She turned and leaned back against the parapet a carefully judged distance away from him, just far enough that there was no chance of his being able to grab the gun before she fired.
“You know Sarah mused aloud. “The illusion kind of breaks down here.” She glanced over her shoulder, toward the street below. “It’s not really very high up at all, is it?” Her gaze turned to him. “Not like the real one, back in Los Angeles. I’ve seen that one; I’ve been there.” Head cocked to one side, she smiled coyly at him. “When I was first finding out all about you, Deckard; I went and looked at the places you’d been, where things happened to you.” She nodded toward the drop on the parapet’s other side. “You must’ve been pretty scared, back then; if you’d fallen from the real one, they would’ve had to have picked you up from the pavement with a sponge. Whereas here Sarah gave an unimpressed shrug. “Hardly enough to kill someone. You might actually even survive.”
“Maybe.” Deckard looked over the edge behind him. She was right; the illusion of the city’s reality was dispelled from this angle. The machinery and interlaced cables of the set were detectable, like the secret workings of the world revealed by a paranoid vision come true. “Is that the deal you made with Urbenton? He always wants the best footage he can get. So a shot of me falling . . . I imagine that would be just about perfect. He could re-edit the video he did about me, put in a new ending, one where I die. Maybe that would suit both him and the people he’s working for.”
“Oh, it would. You’re exactly right on that one.” Sarah nodded, as though admiring his take on the situation. “That’s pretty much the U.N.’s little agenda. The first version of the video—the one you saw—that was only shown in the Martian emigrant colony.” She pointed toward him with the gun. “They’d love to do another version for broadcast on Earth that would really prove just how dangerous escaped replicants are. In case there might be anyone starting to feel sorry for them. Urbenton could always fake your getting killed, do it with special effects, all the different tricks they have for that sort of thing—but there’s nothing quite as convincing as reality, is there? No matter how much you have to fake it. Plus, this way, there’s no living blade runner named Rick Deckard turning up later to embarrass everyone. The little details . . . like your not being killed by the fall but from a bullet Sarah gave another shrug. “Urbenton can fix that up in postproduction. Or not. That’s his business, not mine.” She studied the gun in her own hand for a moment, then looked at Deckard again. “I’ll have kept my part of the bargain.”
“You’re a person of your word. In your own way.”
“I try to be.” Sarah spoke with no more irony than before. “I’ve only lied when I had to. When there was something I had to have. And what did it get me?” She shook her head. “Nothing. I learned my lesson.” Her voice turned bitter. “I should’ve just stayed what I was. Not tried to be something else.
Like your precious Rachael. It’s just no good—the dead get all the breaks in this world.”
The artificial rain had lessened a bit. Deckard looked up to where the clouds and stars should have been, letting the drops wash down his face and throat.
“But do you know?” The words were soft, almost a whisper. “Do you know who you are?”
“Come on.” Her response was sour, irritated. “I’m not in the mood for the usual mind games, Deckard. I’m tired of playing even my own. So it’s not likely I’m going to fall for yours. If that’s what you’re going to try, then I’ll just stop wasting time and kill you now. There’s a limit to how sentimental I get.”
He said nothing. Instead, he reached inside his jacket and took out the thin, flat rectangle of the photograph, the one that had been given to him by the dead man back on Mars. Deckard held it by one corner and gazed at the long-past scene it revealed. Then he held the photo out to Sarah.
“What’s that supposed to be?” She leaned back, regarding the object with suspicion. “Something you and your repsymp friends faked up?”
“No—” He shook his head. “This is the real thing. Go on, take it.”
Keeping the gun levelled at him, Sarah reached out and grasped the photograph between her own thumb and forefinger. She turned it around and studied it. “I don’t get it,” she announced after a few seconds. Her brow creased. “Who is it?”
“Come on, Sarah. You know.” He tried to make his words as gentle as possible.
“You’ve seen them before. You’ve seen other pictures. They’re your parents.”
She said nothing. Deckard watched her staring at the photo. The image it contained was in his head as well, engraved there from the moment he had first seen it. And Marley’s voice, telling him what it meant; those were fused together, insoluble. He knew what Sarah was looking at: a photo of a bed, the sheets and covers all white, a woman sitting up with the pillows mounded behind her; the woman was smiling, as was the man standing beside the bed, leaning down to get his face close to hers, the two of them looking into the lens of the camera. It must have been mounted on a tripod or a high shelf; the remote control was just visible in the man’s grasp, his thumb pressing down the button that had flicked the camera’s shutter.
The two people were Ruth and Anson Tyrell—the same two people, the couple, that Deckard had seen in another old photograph, a newspaper clipping on the wall of a cramped, cluttered office at the Van Nuys Pet Hospital, back in the real L.A. on Earth. A moment of the past, a frozen section of time, caught and preserved; those people had been alive once, and then they had become memories.
“When The expression on Sarah’s face grew more troubled. “When was this taken?”
“You can figure it out,” said Deckard. He made no move from the parapet he leaned against, but pointed to the photo in the woman’s hand. “Look at what he’s wearing.” That was also the same as it had been in the clipping on Isidore’s office wall. “Look at the emblem on the breast pocket. That’s the jumpsuit from the expedition. The picture was taken on board the Salander 3.”
He could tell, just from watching, that the meaning of the photograph was becoming clear for her. Bit by bit, as though the image was gradually moving into focus, the past it held becoming real once again.
“This wasn’t on Earth.” Sarah raised the photograph higher, a few drops of rain spattering against its empty white backing. “This must have been when they were still on their way to the Proxima system .
“That’s right.” Deckard nodded. “Before . . . those other things happened.”
In the artificial night, the glow from the lights suspended above was enough for her to make out all the details of the old photograph. There were more than just the two people, the adults, Ruth and Anson Tyrell, held in the image.
“If that’s my parents Sarah spoke slowly, wonderingly. “Then . . . that must be me.” She used the tip of the gun’s muzzle to point. “One of those .
That was what he had wanted her to see. What she needed to see. The photo’s image was just as clear in Deckard’s thoughts, as clear as it had been when Marley had taken it from the hiding place in the Salander 3’s first aid kit and had shown it to him.
There were two infants cradled against the new mother’s breast, one nestled in the crook of each arm. “Your mother had twins,” said Deckard simply. In that faraway time, on board the galleon, somewhere between Earth and the stars, Ruth Tyrell had looked exhausted but happy, smiling at the camera. In the photograph, Anson Tyrell had the traditional dazed grin. “Your father delivered them with the help of the Salander 3’s built-in medical circuits.”
“Twins Sarah’s voice was a murmur. “There were two of us .
Deckard didn’t stir from his position at the building’s edge. “Twin female infants.” He repeated verbatim what Marley had told him. “Two healthy baby girls. You and your sister. Sarah . . . and Rachael She looked up at Deckard when he spoke the second name. “My sister?” Sarah shook her head in disbelief. “That’s impossible.”
“It’s true,” said Deckard. “And there’s proof. The little girl downstairs, inside this building-her name really is Rachael. She’s not a hallucination.
She’s your twin sister.”
“Oh, of course.” Sarah gave a quick, sharp laugh. “Even though she’s-what?-ten years old? There’s a problem with that, Deckard. I’m sure you can see it.”
“There’s no problem. You and the little girl were born at the same time . . . or a few minutes apart. You’re
