twins. But you know that bad things happened aboard the Salander 3; you know because you saw them when you went there again. After you and Rachael were born, something happened. To your father. And then a lot of bad things happened. Your mother managed to save not only you but your twin sister, Rachael, as well. But your mother died in the process—she was killed by the man who loved her. Insane when he killed her; sane—or close enough- when he killed himself.”
“Still a problem, Deckard. Even if everything you say is true—” Sarah held the photo in one hand and the gun, still trained on him, in the other. “There was only one child taken off the Salander 3 when it returned to Earth. And that was me.”
“That’s right.” He returned her level gaze, straight into Sarah’s eyes. “Your sister was left on board the Salander 3. In the sleep transport chamber that was part of the ship’s equipment.” When Marley had told him, he’d had a vision of the infant, a small, helpless thing inside the glass-lidded coffin, another of the suspended-animation devices like the one his own Rachael had slept and died in. “That was where your mother hid her to save her from your father. You were still in your mother’s arms when your father killed her. Then the ship’s autonomic circuits took care of you on the voyage back to Earth. And all the while, your twin sister, Rachael, slept on inside the transport chamber. Slept and didn’t age—even after the Salander 3 had returned home and you were taken from it. You’re right; only one child was taken from the ship. Your twin sister, Rachael, was either overlooked where she was sleeping inside the transport chamber—the Tyrell Corporation employees who went aboard might not have searched very thoroughly, given the things they found when they went in—or she might’ve been deliberately left there. Either on Eldon Tyrell’s orders or someone else’s; I don’t know. That part’s still a mystery. Just like it’s a mystery as to who took your sister, Rachael, out of the transport chamber ten years ago and left her there for the Salander 3’s autonomic circuits to rear. That might’ve been done on your uncle’s orders as well.” Deckard could hear a grating edge in his own voice. “He’d already started to let some of his-shall we say?-personal obsessions take over his thinking. That’s what led him to have another Rachael created, a replicant based on you.” An invisible knife carved away another section of Deckard’s heart as he found himself speaking so coldly of the origins of the woman with whom he’d fallen in love. “Maybe Eldon Tyrell was too impatient to wait for the real Rachael, the child still inside the Salander 3, to grow up. So he found another way to get what he wanted.”
“Don’t be too hard on him.” Sarah looked at the photo again. “I hated him and I wasn’t sorry to hear that he was dead—but I’ve got a right to feel that way.
You don’t. My uncle was just another poor bastard who loved something too much. He must’ve loved Ruth . . . a great deal.” Her voice went softer. “But he couldn’t have her. Because she loved his brother, Anson, my father. And she went off with him. Far, far away Sarah slowly shook her head. “And that’s what made him do the things he did, with me and with Rachael, the replicant he created. Because he loved her. He loved Ruth.”
“Pygmalion.” One word was all that Deckard spoke.
“What do you mean?”
There were still things that she needed to know. And that he had to tell her.
“An old, old story,” said Deckard. “About someone who fell in love with his own creation.”
Sarah’s gaze narrowed above the gun. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“It’s simple.” With one hand, Deckard brushed rain from the side of his face.
“When the Sal ander 3 left Earth, heading out on its mission to the Proxima system . . . there were no humans aboard it. Ruth and Anson Tyrell—the parents of you and your twin sister, Rachael—they weren’t humans. They were replicants.”
A look of panic flitted behind Sarah’s widened eyes. “That’s . . . that’s impossible.”
“Nothing is impossible.” Deckard gazed at her sadly, as though regretting the need to speak of these things. “Especially not when it’s part of the Tyrell Corporation’s secret history. There’s stuff you just don’t know about. Eldon Tyrell did have a brother . . . but that brother died when he was a child. The Anson Tyrell that headed out to the Proxima system aboard the Salander 3 was a replicant, created in the Tyrell Corporation’s labs as a special, top-secret project. As was the female replicant they named Ruth. Neither one of them knew that they were replicants; like the adult Rachael-when I first met her at the Tyrell Corporation headquarters—they thought they were human. And they went on the Salander 3 still believing that. They were misled about their own nature, what kind of creatures they were, so it’s no surprise that they didn’t know the actual reason for the Salander 3’s so-called mission to the Proxima system.”
“Which was? According to you, I mean.”
He shook his head. “It’s not just according to me. I didn’t figure out all this stuff—I wouldn’t have been able to.”
“Somebody told you this?” A cold fury narrowed Sarah’s gaze. “Who?”
“Nobody you can touch. He’s dead now.” Deckard could still hear the other man’s voice inside his head, the secrets that Marley had imparted to him. All the secrets of the world that Sarah Tyrell lived in, the world that she could never escape, no matter how she tried. The secrets that she had never known, that her uncle had never told her, that Eldon Tyrell had done his best to make certain she never found out. Deckard could see Marley leaning across the table in the bar’s little booth, looking straight into his eyes . . . and seeing reality there. That all the words Marley spoke, all the connected bits of what had been purged from the Tyrell Corporation archives, were true. Eldon Tyrell had tried to murder the past, to make it cease to be . . . but he’d failed.
The past still existed. The record of it, the history of the Salander 3 expedition—Eldon Tyrell had been able to do whatever he wanted with his corporation’s archives, but even he hadn’t been able to touch the U.N.’s top-secret databases. The rep-symps that Marley had worked for had managed to infiltrate the U.N.’s emigration agency, and they had found the truth, the evidence of that which they had already come to suspect.
Marley had told him . . . and now Deckard spoke the same words to the woman standing in front of him.
“The Salander 3 was never meant to reach the Prox system.” He watched Sarah’s reaction to what he told her. “It didn’t need to for Eldon Tyrell to find out what he wanted to know.” The things that Marley had told him back in the bar in the Martian emigrant colony—Deckard recited them now, a well-memorized lesson. “All that the mission needed to accomplish was to get beyond the reach of the Earth’s morphogenetic field. That’s what keeps humans—and replicants—the way they are. On Earth, replicants don’t reproduce; they don’t have children. They can’t; it’s physiologically impossible. But what the Salander 3’s mission showed was that all that changes out in the stars. There had been indications of this before, but Eldon Tyrell required proof. And he got it.” Deckard nodded toward the figure before him. “You’re the proof that the Salander 3 returned with. You and your twin sister, Rachael. The little girl down below us. The ship came back with the first two replicant children. The children born to the replicants that Eldon Tyrell had sent out there.”
Rain had darkened Sarah’s hair, a shining black curve having come loose from where it’d been bound and now trailing alongside her throat. “That can’t be The gun in her hand was studded with drops of water, like domed black sequins. “You’re lying .
He pointed to the photograph in her other hand. “There’s the proof. That what I’m saying is true.”
Her dark eyes flared in anger. “This is nothing!” Sarah flung the picture away; it landed facedown on the wet roof. “I don’t know where you got that thing, and I don’t care—”
“I got it,” said Deckard, “from your mother. From the replicant Ruth Tyrell.
In a way, that is; she had hidden it back aboard the Sal ander 3. Inside one of the first aid kits on the ship; she just had time to do that before she was hunted down and killed by your father.”
“Really?” Sarah looked scornful. “And why would she want to do that?”
“I don’t know.” He gazed down at his own rain-wet hands for a moment. “Maybe she had found out something. Maybe she suspected the truth about herself and about her children. There might have been a slip, something in the Salander 3’s computers that had been inadvertently left there by Eldon Tyrell, some little clue about the ship’s mission.” Deckard shrugged. “Or maybe not. Maybe it was just something that Ruth knew . . . inside herself. And she knew she had to leave a message, some kind of proof. So that people would know what had happened. And they did. They found the photograph, then hid it again, even better. It became a little sacred object, a relic. A holy thing. But it wasn’t really for them; that wasn’t why Ruth hid it there. It was for you.” He brought his gaze back to Sarah’s eyes. “So you would know. Her daughters.”
The scornful expression had changed to one of desperation. “I still don’t believe it. That photograph could’ve been faked—”
“Maybe so. But the things that happened aboard the Salander 3—the things you saw when you went there
