Authors: K. W. Jeter
"All right; that's it." Sarah made a cutoff gesture with one hand. "I've really had enough of this." The boat pitched in the water, rising to the crest of another wave and dropping again, banging against the edge of the platform. She had to raise her voice even louder to make her words audible against the rush of the wind. "I don't know if this is part of some little plan of yours, or what. But I'm not in the mood for it. You want to claim that you see a little girl there, fine; go ahead. But you're not convincing me that you see her. Because I know she's not real-"
"But, Miss Tyrell Wycliffe gestured toward the shaft's doorway. "She's right there!"
She looked where he pointed and saw the Rachael child, just as she had known she would. The child's image-and the sound of her breathing, even the scent of her dark hair, everything that worked to make the hallucination seem real-had come up with Sarah from the
Salander 3
, all the way along the storm-buffeted shaft to the surface of Scapa Flow. The child had said nothing, but had gazed up at Sarah with her big and sad dark eyes, seemingly aware that some change was coming in her existence. Or nonexistence, as Sarah had had to remind herself. Whatever part of her subconscious was responsible, in league with the influx of material from the ship's bottled-up past, it was certainly doing a thorough job. The illusory child hadn't remained as Sarah had perceived her down below, but had taken on the aspect of being caught out in a gale from the North Atlantic: her clothes, soaked through, clung to her small body as her wet hair tangled across her brow, the braid even heavier and darker against her neck. The water that had trickled down her legs and from her ankles had collected in a pool around her feet, shimmered by the gusts of wind.
"Look. Just drop it, all right?" Sarah spoke fiercely, drawing her arms tight around her body. "I'm cold and wet and tired. And believe me, I've seen enough of things that don't exist. Including this little girl-which you can't see, unless you're as crazy as I am. All right? So let's get back to shore. Immediately."
"We're not going to leave her here." An obstinate expression formed on Wycliffe's face. "We can't."
"I'm
ordering
you to. How's that?" Sarah shook her head in exasperation. "We can play whatever games you want to later on."
Wycliffe made no reply. The waves had slackened a bit, enough for him to loosen one hand's grip on the platform's edge and extend it toward the image of the little girl. "Come on," he said to the nonexistent child. "I've got you..."
A few seconds later, the apparition who called herself Rachael was in the boat, next to Sarah. A few feet away, Wycliffe stationed himself in the prow, watching as the wind and rain whipped into his face, as though he was concerned that Sarah might do some impossible harm to the child. The boat moved away from the triangular platform as Zwingli applied himself to the oars.
"Some loyalists," she said darkly. "I thought you were supposed to do what I told you to. Both of you."
"I'm sure that..." Wycliffe shrugged uncomfortably. "That you'll agree that this was the right thing to do. When you've had a chance to reconsider."
"I doubt it." Beside her, the Rachael child pressed closer, trying to get warm; she tucked Sarah's hand into both of hers, snuggling into the woman's ribs. "Well. I hope you're satisfied." Sarah looked down at the image. The child ignored the acid comment, rubbing the side of her face against Sarah's sleeve. "You're not even really here, and you pulled this one off."
Once ashore, Wycliffe and Zwingli skipped the cathedral, even though it was closer. With the rain lashing at their backs, they led Sarah and the Rachael child back to the shadow corporation's interplanetary yacht. The breaks in the storm clouds let the stars' cold light through, enough to pick out the rocky edges of the trail. Ahead of them, the running lights and docking signals of the yacht glinted and blinked in sequence along the ovoid shape's circumference.
Thank God
, thought Sarah as the gangway irised open. All she wanted now was another shower and a change of clothes. She had glanced down at herself as she and the others had trudged away from the little boat pulled up on the Flow's pebbly shore. The palms of her hands were still stained with blood from when she had tripped and fallen, running from all that she had seen and feared inside the
Salander 3
; the rain hadn't managed to wash it away. Nor had it taken the blood from the patch along one leg or the side where she had landed hard against her rib cage; there had been so much blood inside the ship that it had seemed to imbed itself in every fabric of her being, like the canned and recirculated air drawn into her lungs.
A half hour later, Sarah found herself wondering how many of the black undertaker suits Wycliffe and Zwingli had aboard the shadow corporation craft. While she had been in the master suite's facilities, looking down through billows of gratefully received steam at the trickles of red sluicing off her body, thinning pink as they ran down the drain near her bare feet, the two men had managed to transform themselves back into the muted-and dry-personae in which she had first seen them. With the thick bathrobe pulled around herself, the Tyrell Corporation logo monogrammed over her breast, she sat down in the ship's central lounge, taking the largest and plushest of the chairs available. The two men had remained standing-she wondered how long they had been waiting for her to reappear-but one other figure was already there, sitting with her legs tucked up under her in one of the lesser wing chairs. With large grave eyes, the image of the little girl watched and waited.
"You're still here?" Sarah had extracted a cigarette from the enameled case on the nearest small table. She lit the cigarette, inhaled, then let the grey smoke be carried away by the yacht's ventilation, so much quieter and unobtrusive than the ancient system she'd encountered at the bottom of Scapa Flow. "I thought-well, perhaps I hoped-that you'd have gone away by now." The hot shower, taking away the chill that the storm winds had driven into her bones, had seemed so therapeutic that a diminishing of hallucinations had not seemed entirely unlikely. "You know ... this could become quite tiresome. You're not really needed anymore."
"I'm not going away." The little girl's face darkened with her stubborn defiance. "And you can't make me."
"We'll see about that." Sarah regarded the glowing tip of the cigarette. "There are ways. These things can always be accomplished. One way or another." She'd have to look into it-when there was time. Or if. A fatalistic calm had settled over her, part fatigue, part resigned acknowledgment of the meshing of the universe's gears. "Even if, say, psychotherapy didn't work. Drugs might. Or surgery, perhaps." She nodded slowly, as though contemplating the possibility. Though it was technically easier to get material in and out of the brains of replicants-the whole system of control through implantation of false memories was a Tyrell Corporation development-it could be done, to a limited degree, with humans as well. Sarah imagined that a sufficiently skilled neurosurgeon could root around inside her skull with his microscalpels and tiny electrified probes and root out whatever lump of grey matter contained the little girl's image.
Or there might be even simpler ways. The ultimate sur gery: "I could just kill myself." Sarah enunciated the words clearly, with no hesitation attached to them. She had considered the option enough times to render it free of pain. "Then you
would
disappear, wouldn't you? If I blew a hole in the side of my head, you could just flutter out and be gone."
"Miss Tyrell ... for heaven's sake." Wycliffe had turned pale. "Don't say things like that."
"Why? Will it blow up the franchise or something?" When all else had failed, there was still some sadistic pleasure to be gotten out of needling the die-hard loyalists. "I nearly forgot. Without me, your chances of resurrecting the Tyrell Corporation are just about zero. A suicide would ball up your plans, wouldn't it? All this work for nothing."
"It's more than that," insisted Wycliffe. "There's a certain matter of ... personal loyalty."
"He's right." Zwingli added his voice to the statement. "Since there really is no difference between you and the corporation. That makes it sort of a liege-vassal relationship."
"It didn't sound like that out there on the Flow." Sarah nodded toward one of the viewports, through which the storm-lashed waters could be seen. "You weren't exactly taking orders from me when I told you to leave behind this .
She gestured in the direction of Rachael. "Child ... apparition, or whatever... that you claim to see."
"I'm not," announced Rachael sullenly, "an apparition. I know what that word means."
"Miss Tyrell. If it would do any good-" Wycliffe sounded desperate. "We'd be happy to pretend we don't see any child sitting here with us. You could order us to do that."
"What child?" asked Zwingli helpfully. He watched Sarah for an approving reaction.
"But it really wouldn't change anything." Hands spread apart, Wycliffe hunched up his shoulders. "We'd still see her. And since she did come with you out of the
Salander 3
, it's vitally important that we get whatever information we can from her. Whether she's an apparition or not."
"You people must be crazy." The Rachael child turned a withering look on all of them. Sitting back in the wing chair, she folded her arms across her chest. "An apparition is something that doesn't exist. The nanny told me all about it. Because there were plenty of apparitions down there. I was told to be
very careful
about them. Because even if they don't exist, they can still hurt you."
"Truer words," said Sarah dryly, "were never spoken." She flicked grey ash onto the lounge's carpet. "Though in this case, I'm not much worried."
"Perhaps we could settle this later." Wycliffe looked both fretful and conciliatory. "When you're not quite so worn out from your efforts, Miss Tyrell-"
"You mean, when I'm not feeling cranky. About you two claiming you can see my hallucinations." She was still wondering-or worse, coming to conclusions-about what they were trying to accomplish with that bit.
"Whatever. But there really is some time pressure here, Miss Tyrell. We'd like to debrief you about what you encountered down in the
Salander 3
while the memories are still fresh-"
She laughed, holding the half-drawn cigarette off to one side. "They're not exactly the kind that fade. Believe me."
"Every detail," persisted Wycliffe, "might be important. If the Tyrell Corporation is to be brought back to what it was before. We need to know."
"Sometimes ... I think I must be working for you. Instead of the other way around."
Wycliffe stiffened to his full funereal height. "We are all in the service of the Tyrell Corporation."
"Really." She smiled as she regarded him.
Pompous twit
- though she supposed it was ever thus with religious fanatics.
No sense of humor at all
. A good thing for him that he hadn't been the one to enter the scuttled
Salander 3
. He wouldn't have made it back out alive, or with even as much sanity as she'd retained intact. Because that moment had come, while she had been down there, with all the mass of the ocean on top of her and the even more crushing and airless weight of the past sealed around, that it had seemed at last like a joke, a hard and cruel one, but a joke nevertheless. That she had gone all that way, a complete round-trip to the place and frozen time of her infancy, just so the one who would have killed her so long ago could have another chance at her...
It must've seemed so very accommodating of me
, thought Sarah. She breathed out smoke, tilting her head back and watching the insubstantial, disappearing shape it made. All the murderous ghosts of the past; if they dreamed, it would have to be of death. They couldn't die themselves, not while the past endured unbroken, sealed tight within its bottle, away from the real world and real time. But as the little girl had said:
Even if they don't exist, they can still hurt you.
"Miss Tyrell?" Wycliffe's voice poked at the edge of her awareness.
She brought herself the rest of the way back from the
Salander 3
's world, the replica of it inside her head. "Very well." Sarah ground out the cigarette stub in the green-veined malachite bowl beside her. "What do you want to know?" A smile below half-lidded eyes, directed in turn at Zwingli and Wycliffe. "What do you want me to tell you?"
"You don't have to tell us anything other than the truth." Wycliffe appeared as if he had won some obscure debating point. "What you saw. What happened to you. Everything that happened down there."
Kill them all
, thought Sarah. Her eyelids went all the way closed.
And let God sort them out
.
She heard the child's voice, piping up: "There were bad things. The ones that're always there. That's what she saw."
"Yes," said Sarah, nodding. She opened her eyes and gazed at the two men watching her. "That's what I saw. The things that are always there." Her thin smile became laughter that she couldn't help from tearing her throat. "Excuse me. But it's really very funny."
"Are you all right?" Zwingli spoke, sounding genuinely concerned. "Can I get you something?"
"No, no; it's all right." Sarah gestured with one hand. "It just struck me that I solved the mystery..."
"Mystery?" From inside his jacket, Wycliffe had taken out a small notepad. He glanced up from the few words he had scribbled. "What mystery is that?"
"Is there more than one?" She brushed a tear away from the corner of her eye. "The cat, of course. I found out what happened to the cat."
"Cat?" The stylus remained poised on the notes.
"The one that my parents took with them. The official pet of the
Salander 3
expedition. You must've seen it, in the old news photos, in the company files. A big, fluffy marmalade cat."
"Ginjer," said the image of the little girl, sitting forward in the wing chair. "That's what it's name was. That was what my mother called it. The nanny told me so."