Authors: K. W. Jeter
"Of course not. You've got important business to take care of. Still..." Sebastian turned back to the silent and motionless clown mannequin. He lifted the black cloth covering its mechanical innards; from one of his coverall pockets, he took a yellow-handled screwdriver and poked at the meshing gears. "Like I said, I
know
why. Or to put it another way, kinda, it's because of what I don't know. About Pris." He extracted some small part from the workings and studied it between his thumb and forefinger. "I mean, I know all about something like this. And all the other stuff I got." Still holding the metal piece, Sebastian gestured toward the room's contents. "And the building, and the street outside, and the whole city even . . . I know what those
are
. So I've got 'em the right way inside my head, and so I could make 'em be here, the way they were before, out there. You know, in the real world. But with Pris He leaned close to the clown's workings, screwing the little part back into place. "I thought I knew what she was. But maybe I was wrong."
Deckard said nothing. For a moment, the room and all the empty spaces around it were silent, except for the touch of rain upon the window glass and the corridors' pools of dark water.
"Do you think, Mr. Decker, that that's possible?" Sebastian's gaze, sharper beneath the constant moistness, like a knife under blurry water, fastened onto him. "You think I could've got it all wrong?"
"I'm glad you're here," said the little girl. She reached up and took Sarah's hand, and gave her a shy, pretty smile. "I was getting kind of lonely. All by myself..."
Poor little thing
, thought Sarah.
She's not even real
. The notion of ghosts and shadows, and all other unreal things, suffering from loneliness, the same way she always had, now weighted her down with an inescapable sadness. If this little girl-or the little girl that she saw, a temporary incarnation of memory and the past that was all jumbled up inside the
Salander 3
-if she could feel lonely, then loneliness was some sort of universal constant, like gravity or the speed of light. Everything in the world, this one or any other, was made, at least in part, of it.
The little girl's dark hair, dark as Sarah's own, was pulled back into a long braid tied with a red ribbon at the end. The girl-the image, the ghost, the hallucination-didn't draw away as Sarah felt the ribbon's thin substance between her fingertips. The ribbon felt real enough, and even touched by the passage of time; it looked old, faded and frayed, the gossamer threads coming loose at the edges.
"Did you do that?" Sarah spoke gently to the little girl, as though any harsh word might have dispersed her from even this illusory existence, like a hand brushed through a curl of smoke. "Or did somebody here fix your hair for you?"
"I can do it." The girl spoke with affronted dignity. "If I want to. But usually I let the nanny do it."
"The nanny? What nanny?"
"You know." The girl, still holding Sarah's hand, used a nod of her head to indicate the corridor walls and hidden machinery of the ship. "The things that take care of you. That's their
job
. But they don't have to do so much for me anymore-I'm not a baby now. But it makes them happy if they can do things, so sometimes I let them."
Sarah knew what the girl was talking about. The
Salander 3
's computer was still silent, as though they had left its voice behind them as they had walked farther through the ship's interior. But she could sense the pseudo-life imbedded in the structure of the vessel, the flow of electrons, the activation of solenoids, the meshing of gears; all the tiny functions that had been programmed into the lifeless metal and silicon. That had, she knew, kept her alive as well; that had been her nursemaid all the way back to Earth, so many years ago. When the
Salander 3
had turned back from its voyage to the Proxima system, and had returned with two human corpses and one living child as its only passengers-the computer and its most delicate manipulators hadn't tied any red ribbons, but it had done everything necessary to preserve the real life that had been left in its charge.
Their steps, hers and the little girl's, had led them farther into the
Salander 3
; Sarah had wanted to get away from the pool of blood near which she had found her illusory companion. The girl had seemed to pick up on Sarah's queasiness; she had led the way, her hand in Sarah's hand, past the entrances of other corridor branches, down which had been visible other scrawled markings on the walls in the same wet red that looked black in the overhead fluorescents' partial spectrum. Only when they reached a section of the ship that had escaped whatever violence had rolled through the other enclosed spaces-it seemed to be some kind of storage area; crates and boxes with stenciled lettering lined the sides-had Sarah been able to draw her breath and speak again.
She halted, turning the little girl to face her. "Tell me," said Sarah. "And you have to tell me the truth, the real truth." She knelt down, so that her gaze was on the same level as the girl's. "Is your name really Rachael?"
"Of course." The girl gazed back at her, somber and unblinking. "What else would it be?"
Sarah didn't answer. The girl's image stepped from a mere optical perception to something else, which moved through other dark corridors, the ones inside her own memories. She knew what the girl reminded her of: one of the photographs that had been inside her uncle's desk, the ornately carved and gilded
bureau plat
in his vast and lofty-ceilinged office suite in L.A., that she had inherited along with every other object belonging to the Tyrell Corporation. The photograph had been of herself, taken when she had been about the same age, ten years old or so, as the girl who stood before her now. She couldn't remember when the photo had been taken, though she supposed it had been in Zurich, in the expensive, conventlike boarding school where her uncle had lodged his orphan niece as soon as she'd been old enough for it; the girl in the picture had been wearing the stiff-collared uniform that had itched so badly through her thin white stockings.
There had been something else in that old photograph. Her hair had been pulled back, the same as this little girl's, but without a ribbon of any color, or else it just hadn't been caught by the camera.
And bangs
, thought Sarah; she'd had bangs when she'd been ten years old, combed down to a half inch above her eyebrows. Whereas this little girl had hers parted at one temple, then brushed slanting across her forehead. That was different; but the face . . . the face was the same. Sarah could see that, calling up the photograph in her memory and comparing it with the child in front of her. The same dark eyes, the same incipient beauty, the fragile pale-ness. And something else, deeper and more hidden, yet obvious to see. That sadness, even when the little girl smiled, even when that vanished Sarah in the old photograph had smiled, shy and hesitant. Exactly the same.
That proves it
, thought Sarah. It didn't make her any happier to know that the little girl she knelt before and in whose dark eyes she saw her own grown-up face mirrored was a ghost, a hallucination, a temporal anomaly. Something that the toxic effects of the
Salander 3
's depleted interstellar drives had conjured up out of the jumbled past held inside the curved metal.
Or out of my head
-that must be what the little girl's name meant.
Rachael
. Where else would she have gotten it? Straight out of Sarah's own memories and desires; Sarah had even called herself Rachael, had tried to be Rachael, back when she had thought she could replace, the original for the copy, the replicant that Deckard had loved.
I'm going crazy down here
, thought Sarah.
Or crazier
. Wycliffe and Zwingli had told her it was a poisonous environment; they hadn't been lying. She had the proof of that in front of her eyes, or in the trenches of her misfiring central nervous system, wherever a hallucination like this could be said to exist at all.
Sarah stood up. "Your name's not Rachael," she said coldly.
The little girl frowned. "Yes, it is. I know my own name."
"Your name is..." She took a deep breath, fighting against a wave of fatigue that had suddenly risen inside her. "Nothing. Nothing at all."
"That's silly. How can somebody be called
nothing
?"
"It's easy. If she doesn't exist."
"Speak for yourself," the child said with an adult's dignity. "I know
I
exist. What's
your
problem?"
"Let's not go into that now." She rubbed the corner of her brow. "Your name's Sarah. Just the same as mine."
The girl laughed scornfully. "That's just stupid. How can we both have the same name?"
"Because you and I are the same person." She wondered why she was trying to explain this to an illusion. "In a way, that is. You're part of me. You're just something that came out of my head. You're not real, except to the degree you're something that my subconscious put together out of my memories."
"
You're
the one who's not real." The child's mood had quickly changed to sullen. "I never saw you before. I've been here a long,
long
time, all by myself. Then you show up and you start saying awful things." She glared darkly at Sarah. "Where did you come from anyhow?"
"From far, far away." One of Sarah's hands made a vague gesture toward the ship's walls and everything that lay beyond. "From someplace where there's light and time and all sorts of useful things."
"No..." The girl studied Sarah, then reached out and grabbed her hand, more roughly than she had taken it before. She peered intently at Sarah's palm, the veins and sinews of her wrist. The girl shook her head, the braid brushing against her shoulders. "You came from
here
." She sounded puzzled. "I can tell. You're made of the same stuff. As me." The sharp gaze moved up to Sarah's face. "But you weren't here before. I don't get it."
She's right
, mused Sarah.
I am from here
. This had been where she had been born, though then it had been out among the stars instead of at the bottom of Scapa Flow.
Not that it makes any difference
-Sarah looked around at the stacked crates and the silvery walls behind them. The ventilation's breeze carried scrubbed and filtered molecules to her lungs, the same canned air she had been born breathing.
Like coming home
, she thought.
"Maybe that's what I should do." Sarah spoke aloud, almost forgetting the other perceived presence standing next to her. "I should just forget about all that other stuff-"
"What other stuff?" The child had noticed the drift of attention, and tugged on Sarah's hand.
"Everything else. Up there." She gestured with a toss of her head. "Out in that other world, the one you don't know anything about."
How could she?
Sarah reminded herself.
She doesn't even exist.
"Perhaps it'd be a good idea to just forget about that world."
"You made it sound kind of nice." Puzzled again, the girl stared at her. "Light and stuff. It's dark a lot here."
"It's dark a lot up there, too." Sarah couldn't keep a trace of bitterness from filtering into her voice. "Believe me; I'd know." A long hallway lined with doors ran down the length of her memories to that vanishing point beyond which it was useless to go. She kept all the doors carefully locked, though she knew exactly what was behind each one of them. And sometimes the locks didn't work, and the doors opened, whether she wanted them to or not. "And ... you've got enough here. To see your way." She wondered whether the
Salander 3
's batteries would ever run down, or whether the ship was sufficiently mired in time that the lights would stay on forever, whether the ventilation system would go on sighing through the corridors. Maybe not; there were probably some laws of physics that would be contravened thereby. She didn't care; she wouldn't even mind living in the dark down here, breathing whatever stale air remained, over and over again. Perhaps this was what she had been looking for, why she had let Wycliffe and Zwingli convince her to come down here. A return to the womb . . . or to the grave. She didn't care which. "You've got plenty," she whispered, eyes closed. "More than enough of what you need..."
"Well ...
I
don't want to stay here." The voice of the little girl made a sour announcement. "It sucks."
"Why do you say that?" Sarah opened her eyes. "Wouldn't you like to stay here forever? As long as I did, too?" She tried to give the child a friendly smile. "We could have little tea parties, just the two of us. And we could sleep in the same bed, if you wanted. All warm." The ocean could cradle them to their dreams, supposed Sarah. If there were any need for dreams in a place like this. "Wouldn't that be nice?"
"No." The little girl scowled, face darkening as though the shadows had crept out from behind the boxes on either side. "It's creepy and scary down here. I've been scared the whole time I can remember. Which is
always
."
"Why? What's to be scared of?"
"There's others down here." The Rachael child's voice dropped to a whisper. "Others who aren't nice."
"I thought you were the only one-until I came here." The way the little girl spoke had raised chill, prickling flesh on Sarah's arms. "That's why you were so lonely."
"You sure don't know very much." The brooding, apprehensive look hadn't vanished from the girl's face. "Don't you know? That you can be alone even when there's other
things
around you?"
The emphasized word made Sarah wonder. She had said
things
, not
people
-what did that mean?
"Look. I don't need to be lectured by some piece of my own subconscious. Especially about the nature of being alone-"
"Shh! Be quiet!" The Rachael child grabbed Sarah's arm with both hands, squeezing tight. "There they are! Don't you hear them?"
"Who? What?" The child's evident terror jolted Sarah's spine rigid. She looked over her shoulder, in the direction from which she and the Rachael child had come. "I don't-"