Authors: K. W. Jeter
"Miss Tyrell ... when I said that everything could be important, I might have misspoken." Wycliffe tapped the stylus on the notepad. "The cat-and yes, I do remember seeing it in the old photos-that actually might not be critical to our mission. If the cat is alive and well down there, that's wonderful, but really-"
"Hardly alive." Sarah glared at the man. "And it probably wasn't too well when it died. Though that probably didn't take too long, from the looks of what I found." Her voice turned flat and grim. "It wasn't that big a cat when it was alive. When Anson and Ruth Tyrell took it aboard, and they all went sailing off toward the Proxima system. But it's amazing how large an area an ordinary domestic house cat can cover . . . when somebody puts their mind to it." She looked down at her hands, which she had spent so much time scrubbing clean in the shower, long after the red marks had swirled down the drain. "And somebody did."
"Miss Tyrell..."
"Be quiet," she snapped. "You wanted to know everything. You don't get to pick and choose now." Sarah let her voice drop to a whisper. "We were running ... the little girl and I. Because we were scared. Because we had seen the bad things; they had come right out and spoken to us, they had told us what they wanted to do. That's why we were scared. And it was dark-there are some very dark places down there-and I tripped and fell. I had Rachael by the hand; she was running to keep up with me, and then she almost fell, too."
"But I didn't," said the girl.
"That's right. You didn't." Sarah nodded. "Because you knew." For a moment, she wondered how a piece of her own subconscious could know something that she herself wouldn't have been able to know. But she let the thought pass away. "You knew your way around; you knew what else was down there. I didn't; that's why I fell. On the cat. Or what was left of it."
She paused, looking from one man's face to the other's, gauging their reactions. Why they should be so queasy about the death of a cat that had happened over two decades ago-she supposed their reaction was due to the closeness of detail. The deaths of so many people in the apocalypse of the Tyrell Corporation's L.A. headquarters-hundreds? Thousands? She had never bothered to find out the exact number-they didn't matter.
"The person who did it," continued Sarah, "must have been very thorough. From the evidence. It's one thing to just make a mess-anyone can do that-but to have a certain artistic sense . . . that's almost as admirable as it is evil." Under her breastbone was a cold, hard stone where her heart should be; Sarah knew that she wouldn't be able to speak like this, otherwise.
I wouldn't even be able to live. Not anymore.
"I don't suppose the cat would have suffered too long-it wouldn't have been able to. It would have to have died at some point early on in the process. So it wasn't done for the cat's sake . . . or at least no more so than was necessary."
"For whom, then?" Wycliffe's voice was nearly as soft as hers. "And who did it?"
"Who did it? My father, of course. Anson Tyrell." A shake of her head, as though chiding the one who had spoken. "And don't pretend that comes as so much of a shock to you. I have a feeling that you both knew-perhaps the whole shadow corporation knows-just what happened aboard the
Salander 3
. About my father's insanity and his homicidal rampage. You all knew; perhaps you were the ones who erased any mention of it from the company files. So that I wouldn't know."
Wycliffe and Zwingli exchanged glances with each other, but said nothing.
That was enough for Sarah to know that she had surmised correctly. "Don't worry about it," she said, amused by the flicker of panic she had seen in the men's eyes. "I'm sure you and the others did it for the absolute highest of reasons."
"It was ... to protect you." Zwingli blurted out the words. "Really."
"Of course it was. If I didn't know what had happened when I was just an infant in my mother's arms-all those things of which I was supposedly too young to have formed memories-then I wouldn't have bad dreams, would I? How thoughtful of you. And naturally, I wouldn't be quite so resistant to your plans for resurrecting the Tyrell Corporation as I might have been if I already knew what was in the
Salander 3
. You might not have been able to talk me into going down there."
"That's not quite fair," said Wycliffe. "As you've said before, without you there is no Tyrell Corporation. The opposite can be said as well:
you
don't exist, or you can't for much longer, unless the corporation comes back from the shadows. Any subterfuge was as much for your benefit as ours. And as it happens, there are only the slightest, fragmentary records of what might have happened during the
Salander 3
's final expedition. A few transcripts of statements made by the company employees who went aboard the ship after it had returned to Earth-and most of those had been severely edited or destroyed before anyone from the shadow corporation would have had a chance to access them."
"You have to give my uncle credit for his thoroughness, all right." Sarah felt her face hardening. "God forbid anything should besmirch the Tyrell Corporation's public image."
"Eldon Tyrell might have had motivations beyond that." Wycliffe shrugged and spread his large-jointed hands apart. "If things are as you found them inside the
Salander 3
-and we have no reason to doubt you on that score-then it might not have been for the company's sake that Dr. Tyrell acted as he did in suppressing this information. It might have been for the family name."
"Oh? And there's a difference?" Sarah raised one eyebrow. "Between the family and the corporation?"
"Not much, admittedly. Let us say, then, for your father's sake. And the way he was remembered. Anson Tyrell wasn't a psychotic murderer when he left on the
Salander 3
's expedition; whatever happened to him aboard the ship, it happened
out there
." One of Wycliffe's bony fingers pointed upward, to the night sky beyond the yacht's contained spaces. "Something happened that made him do what he did."
"You said 'murderer.' That was the word you used." Sarah's narrowed gaze fastened onto the man. "People don't say 'murderer' when they're talking about a cat getting eviscerated and hung around a room like a Christmas garland." One of her hands balled into a fist, knuckles as white as those she had seen through the blood smeared on her father's hand. "Perhaps 'psychotic'-that's easy enough. But not the other."
Wycliffe's mouth opened, but snapped shut again before any words came out.
"I caught you out on that one," said Sarah with grim satisfaction. "I haven't told you yet about the other things I saw down there-"
"The
really
bad things," chimed in the little girl sitting in the wing chair.
"Not just some stupid old cat."
"Ah. Yes ... exactly so." Wycliffe attempted a feeble smile. "I must have been ... anticipating what you were about to tell us."
"I don't think so." She lifted the lid of the ornate box on the small table beside the chair, and watched her hand run a fingertip across the cigarettes' silky paper, before turning her gaze back to the two men. "I think you knew very well that my father didn't stop with the cat. When he had his psychotic breakdown, somewhere between here and the Proxima system-he didn't go just a little bit crazy. He went all the way."
"There were ... some indications . . . about that."
Sarah slapped the box lid down. "Gentlemen-I found more than indications. I found my mother's body. Or what was left of it. Perhaps, for my father, the cat had just been a little warm-up, a practice session to get ready for the main event. Which was my mother." One fingertip ticked against the box lid. "And myself."
"That would seem to be ... consistent." Wycliffe's hands folded around each other. "With the fragmentary reports of those who went aboard the
Salander 3
when it returned to Earth." He gave a single nod. "It's fortunate, of course, that Anson Tyrell didn't manage to fulfill his deranged agenda."
"Oh, I agree." She made no attempt to disguise her sarcasm. "I doubt that even when I was an infant I would have enjoyed those particular attentions of my father. You see, I've been inside his head; that's what the
Salander 3
is now. With all that toxic past locked up and unchanging inside it-it's like that Jungian definition of the psychotic condition as that state when no new thing ever enters into a person's thoughts. Just the same thing over and over again, like an endless tape loop. And that thing in my father's case was murder. And blood, lots of it; more than what's inside a cat, or what was inside my mother." Sarah's voice grated rawer and tighter. "An ocean of it. That must've been what the inside of his head looked like before he died. Just big hollow spaces like the ones inside the
Salander 3
, washed with blood."
"Was ... was your mother..." Zwingli's words came out in a stammer. "Had he done the same thing to her? Like he did to the cat?"
"No." A shake of the head. "That didn't happen. From what I could tell ... he slashed her throat. And then..." Her own words came slower and slower, close to halting. "He stopped there."
"That's not the whole story." The Rachael child spoke up, her voice hard with scorn. "She's not telling it right!" Gripping the arms of the wing chair, the little girl looked around at Wycliffe and Zwingli in turn. "And she even saw what happened. She
saw
it!"
Wycliffe turned from the child back toward Sarah. "Miss Tyrell . . . what did you see? What happened?"
The tape loop inside her head, that segment of the longburied past that had wormed its way into her own memories, became visible once more as she closed her eyes. It would never go away. Once seen, it was as unending as it had been in the hulk of the
Salander 3
.
"What happened." She spoke without raising her eyelids to admit the lounge's softly filtered light; even that was too much for her now. "I saw her-my mother; Ruth Tyrell, whatever you want to call her. It doesn't matter. She was running, too; she was running with the baby in her arms. Because she knew what he wanted to do."
"That's the real story." From somewhere outside Sarah, the little girl's voice spoke again, approvingly this time. "That's what really happened. I know, because the nanny told me. Because when I saw those things happening over and over again, they scared me. I wanted to know, so I wouldn't be scared anymore. So the nanny told me who they were."
Sarah waited until the child was finished speaking, without even wondering if the two men could hear those words or not. "The infant ... that was me." She spoke slowly, trying to get everything exactly right, as if that could help somehow. "And then ... and then he caught her. He caught up with my mother. His wife. Ruth and Anson..." Her voice trailed away.
"Go on, Miss Tyrell. We have to know everything."
"There's not much more, is there?" She sighed and shook her head, opening her eyes to look up at the radiant ceiling. "My father knew his way around the
Salander 3
better than my mother did, so there was really no place for her to hide. Plus she had the baby-she had me-with her. Plus . . . you can't ever get away from the really bad things. Whether they exist or not. Eventually, they catch up with you. The way my father caught up with her."
Nothing but silence surrounded her. They were all waiting for her to go on.
Those poor ghosts
, thought Sarah. For a few seconds, she wasn't sure who she meant. The people here, in the richly appointed lounge of the shadow corporation's interplanetary yacht-they didn't seem any more real to her than the figures she had seen down at the bottom of Scapa Flow, acting out their endless time-stilled rituals of fear and madness and death.
They might not even know they're dead
. She supposed that statement might apply to the ones here as well. In a way, the only one that did appear real to her was the hallucinated Rachael child. At least that one had come out of her head, up from her unlit subconscious, the same way Sarah herself had come up from the sunken ship.
So she's at least as real as I am
. That wasn't saying much.
Or just a little bit real, perhaps
.
As if on cue, the child spoke again. "He cut her throat." A simple announcement. "That's what he did. He had a knife and he cut her throat. Just like
that
." The girl made a quick swooping gesture, one hand holding an invisible blade. "And she died."
Sarah didn't wait for the two men to ask what happened next. "And then," she said, "so did he. My father died." The tape loop inside her head had run to its end and started over, one moment of the past welded inexorably to its antecedent. "He had his dead wife at his feet and a wailing infant lying in the pool of blood on the floor." She had watched all that, with the hallucinated Rachael child close beside her, the two of them pulled back into the shadows of one of the ship's unlit corridors, as the ghosts locked in time had gone through their rituals in the light, as though they were the ones who existed outside of memory. There was something else that she didn't speak of, not because she didn't want Wycliffe and Zwingli to know; it was just too painful to try to find the words. That her mother had died shielding her, protecting the infant in her arms. Even when the crazed figure with the knife had taken her mother down to her knees, his other hand twisting her hair tight into his fist, drawing her throat taut and vulnerable; even then, Ruth Tyrell hadn't screamed, but had gasped out a plea, not for her own life but for the smaller one she'd held desperately against her breast.
Desperate because Ruth had known-as her daughter, Sarah, had known, when she had seen the madness in her long-dead father's eyes-that the child, the infant in her mother's arms, had been the true target of his wrath. He'd murdered his wife, drawn the knife across her white throat, only to get at his own child...
"But he didn't." Sarah spoke her thoughts aloud. She didn't care whether anyone else heard them. "For a moment... he wasn't crazy. And that was all it took. He must have heard what she said to him, what Ruth had said." Sarah, watching from the dark corridor, hadn't been able to make out the words her mother had spoken. Words in a ghost's mouth; perhaps they hadn't even been words at all but just some inarticulate cry. Or articulate enough. For that brief section of the past, the past that had happened so long ago and so far from Earth, one sixth of the way to the Proxima system; for just that long, a matter of a few seconds, Anson Tyrell had been sane again; whatever gripped him had relaxed its hold, letting a horrified rationality possess him once more.