Authors: K. W. Jeter
"Um ... is this the Niemand residence?" The man to the left swallowed nervously. The two of them didn't appear to be twins, but looked as if they were trying to be. "If it's not ... we're sorry ..."
"Maybe this is a bad time." Beads of sweat had welled up on the other's brow; tiny images of the gun floated in the wet mirrors. "Maybe we could come back ... some other time."
Sarah let the gun lower of its own weight. She leaned against the side of the doorway; the hovel swayed and audibly creaked. "My apologies, gentlemen." Beyond the pair, the dimly lit corridors of the U.N. emigrant colony were visible, the rounded angles filled with rubble trembling in the airless breezes. "I just woke up."
One of the men tried an uneasy smile. "You were expecting someone else?"
"My husband, actually."
The two men exchanged glances, their heads pivoting a fraction of an inch toward each other, as though linked by some simple, invisible mechanism. The same unseen gear turned their owlish gazes back to Sarah.
"Mrs. Niemand-" The one on the left spoke with somber intonation. "We can tell that you lead a tragic life."
In the corridor leading toward the emigrant colony's center, beneath the banks of flickering or grey-dead fluorescent tubes, devolved human figures moved, scuttling furtively with their last meager, pawnable treasures clutched to their chests, heading for the ragtag booths and alleys of the black-market district. Even farther down the scale, appearing hardly human at all, were the creeping forms of those who had completely fallen out of the colony's hard-screw economy, those who'd come to the frayed end of their money and possessions and had been cut off from the cable monopoly's feed. Faces devoid of reason as any vegetable lifted and swiveled toward the scene at the Niemand hovel's front door, idiot eyes and other receptors searching for any sensory input. Red stigmata flecked the angles of the stimulus-lorn heads, with the same markings repeated on the corridor's dented walls. Every muscle near the softly keening mouths twitched with the constant hunger of misfired synapses.
A tragic life
, mused Sarah as she gazed past the two surprise callers. The length of her vision reached beyond the other locked or boarded-up hovel doors to low-ceilinged rooms containing yet more collapsing nervous systems. She wasn't sure what the man meant. She had worked a long time to engineer the destiny that had brought her to this place. A particular hell, or any one at all-
I belong here
, thought Sarah.
Seized by a dreadful suspicion, she refocussed on the two men at her door. "You're not Jehovah's Witnesses, are you?" That would be all she needed right now, to get handed an animated
Watchtower
, complete with stereophonic sound effects triggered by the warmth of her thumb and forefinger. "Or New Reformed Apocalypticists?" Another of the groups that had been seen recently, evangelizing through the emigrant colonies-she looked to see if one of them was carrying a miniature holographic projector suitable for evoking biblical dioramas in the corridor's thin, acrid-smelling air.
The two men gazed blankly at her through their black-rimmed, square lenses. "No-" The left one shook his head. "We're not here to ask you for money or anything-"
Her laugh barked out. "Good call."
"This is a personal matter. For you alone, Mrs. Niemand." He raised a pale, fussily manicured hand, pointing to the interior of the hovel behind her. "May we come in? To talk with you? I'm sure you'll find it of interest."
Gun dangling at her side, Sarah peered more closely at the two men. They seemed oddly familiar to her, positions on a memory track that her brain hadn't moved along for some time. Her eyes had adjusted to the corridor's partial light spectrum; she could better perceive the pair now. White shirts and narrow-lapelled suits, black as an old-fashioned undertaker's; anal-retentive bow ties cinched tight onto their reedy, knobbly throats, not much bigger around than the narrow wrists exposed at their cuffs. The men's owlish regard, framed by the sharp-cornered spectacles, tweaked a cord in her gut.
The snufflers in the corridor's rubble had started edging closer, attracted by the sounds of human voices. Sarah knew that if she slammed the door shut and left the two men outside, and they went on pounding and calling to her through the thin panel, the hovel would be overrun by stim-desperate hordes, the pressure of their clambering bodies enough to collapse the rickety walls. "All right-" Sarah stepped back from the door. "Get in here. But you'd better make your spiel quick. As I said, I'm expecting my husband any time now." She gave another bitter laugh. "God knows he's a jealous sonuvabitch."
Once inside, with the corridor's sickly light and recycled air shut away, she busied herself with her black-market cigarettes, extracting one of the dwindling number from the cellophane-swathed pack and getting it lit. Tossing the charred match onto the floor with the others, she tilted her head back and dragged the smoke into the innermost recesses of her lungs, already feeling it percolate out into her clamoring veins. Exhaled, a blue cloud swirled, then streamed in a tapering thread toward the nearest leak in the wall. "So what is it you wanted to talk about?" Sarah didn't turn around, but could hear the two men shuffling in the room's narrow confines behind her. In a too-brief moment of sated peace, she regarded the orange-red coal at the end of the cigarette. "Whatever your pitch is, I hope it's good."
The one who had been doing all the speaking shifted his voice to a flat, level tone. "For starters, we know you're not anyone named Niemand. That's an alias. For both you and the former LAPD blade runner, real name Rick Deckard, with whom you've been posing as man and wife. Your name is Sarah Tyrell."
She stood where she was, showing no movement, no reaction. The grey shroud of her smoke-laden breath was the only sign of life. She had cupped an elbow in her free hand, hitting an aristocratic pose both studied and natural to her. The angle of her head, the trace of one dark lock across the corner of her brow-she could close her eyes and imagine herself another world and another life away from this one. Back in the executive suite and private living quarters of the Tyrell Corporation headquarters on Earth, in Los Angeles. Back in the tight, secretive epicenter of all the wealth and power she had inherited upon the death-the murder-of her uncle Eldon Tyrell. From the great, vaulted windows, there had been a view across the city's roiling inferno, the alleys and streets packed close at the base of the Tyrell ziggurat and slanting towers .
All gone now. Sarah watched the smoke twist and thin and disappear. L.A. remained, forever imploding inside the furious mass of its mottled citizens, glitter-eyed thieves and murderers and worse, locked in their scythe-led dance with the black-leather cops and blade runners and worse, all held in the masked, emotionless gaze of those urban tribespeople who'd cut themselves so far out of the loop that they might as well have been observers from another world, another time centuries forward or back. An Asian grace, jingling fleets of Chinese bicycles cutting through the neon-lit sheets of rain, ignoring the diluting blood and broken glass at the weary assassin's feet. Sarah knew that was the discreet charm of L.A-you could go about your business, even if it meant killing people, or the things that looked just like people, and everyone else on the street would mind their own affairs. Even when the Tyrell Corporation headquarters had self-destructed, in the apocalypse that she herself had engineered and brought to pass, there had probably been streets full of faces that had glanced up for only a moment at the fire turning the night sky's rain to steam; then they had returned to scurrying and pushing and shoving toward their own dark, unknowable desires.
"Miss Tyrell?" The man's voice came from behind her, cutting through the deep reverie, the vision of that other world and time, into which she had fallen. "There really is no use denying it. We know who you are."
A certain pleasure came from hearing her own true name spoken again. By anyone other than Deckard, in whose mouth it was something close to a curse, a prison sentence she could never outlive.
Sarah looked over her shoulder at the two men, giving them the coldest edge of her half smile. "So what agency are you from?" She raised an eyebrow. "The local authorities?" There were police in the emigrant colonies, but they worked almost entirely for the cable monopoly, terrorizing deadbeat subscribers and rooting out illegal taps on the wire. "Or perhaps you're from Earth. U.N.?" That was a possibility-the colonies were laced with informants ratting on each other to the intelligence clearinghouse back in Geneva. "Perhaps LAPD-it wouldn't surprise me." The point of her smile sharpened. "Though I should remind you-there's no extradition allowed between Earth and Mars. Per the U.N's emigration authority. So if you were planning on taking me back with you, to face whatever charges you might have against me, you're somewhat out of luck."
The more talkative man gave what was meant to be a smile both reciprocal and pleasant, but that came off eerily forced, a mannerism whose performance he had studied. "We didn't come to extradite you, Miss Tyrell."
For a moment, she doubted if they were any kind of police at all.
They must be some kind of amateurs
, thought Sarah. After lighting the cigarette, she had picked up the gun again from where she had set it down; it even had the right number of bullets to take care of both of the men. Unless they had some kind of major backup standing around near the hovel, these two might just as well have marched into their own coffins.
"All right," she said. The gun made a convenient pointer to direct toward each of the men in turn. "If you're not police, then what the hell are you?"
"Don't you know?" The same man peered at her, the expression on his face one of both puzzlement and a disappointment bordering on sheer heartbreak. "Can't you tell just by looking at us?"
She frowned. "I never saw either one of you before."
"You might have. But you probably wouldn't remember, or even have noticed. You wouldn't have had to."
The disquieting feeling she had gotten before, when she had studied the men's appearance out on the hovel's doorstep, arose in her again. She felt the pressure of the two pairs of eyes, slightly magnified and distorted behind the square glasses .
That's it
. Sarah nodded slowly to herself.
The glasses
. She knew as well that it hadn't been a lapse of memory-a failure to remember-but her own silent, unspoken will shutting out that image of another face, older than either of these two men, wrinkled like parchment or thin, ancient leather. With a gaze that had been grossly enlarged by lenses of exactly the same shape, clear squares bordered in heavy black; so that the eyes had appeared like high-resolution, full-color video screens, that watched and judged and cruelly absorbed all who fell within their scan. That was the memory that the two men's appearance had triggered but some defensive portion of her brain had shut out, lest it wound her again. The memory of her uncle's gaze, the glass-shrouded eyes of Eldon Tyrell.
As much as was possible for the two men standing in front of Sarah in the hovel, they had managed to turn themselves into grotesque clones of the replicant-murdered head of the Tyrell Corporation. Or tributes to that fallen leader, the to-tern aspects-the square-framed glasses precise as geometrizing instruments, the equally meticulous and fussy clothes-incorporated like the fetishes of the dead into their own gestalt. Ineffectually, futilely; the two figures lacked the old man's withered potency, the timeless and time-fed negative aura of great wealth and greater desire, moving through dark-shaded spaces, silent rooms, bank vaults, and sweat-glistening silk bedsheets.
The two men looked like overgrown, lank-limbed children dressed up in their father's discarded clothing. Sarah felt a shiver of instinctive fear as she gazed upon them, catching sight of the mad worm at the pupils' centers behind the square glasses.
Held for a moment longer by the fear-of the two living men and the dead one-she could not speak.
"We're not from the police," said the one who'd spoken before. "We're from the Tyrell Corporation."
Her flash of anger banished any other emotion. "There is no Tyrell Corporation." Her voice lashed out, the cutting tip of her own sharpened tongue. "Not anymore."
They exchanged another glance, then turned their magnified and now sorrowful gazes upon her again. The other one spoke: "We were afraid that was what you believed. That you didn't know."
Strips of sealant tape drifted like slow seaweed in the hovel's hissing drafts. Sarah batted away the nearest tendril with the muzzle of the gun. "Know what?"
Behind the square-framed glasses, the men's eyes lit up with simultaneous enthusiasm. "That the Tyrell Corporation wasn't destroyed. It survives. It still exists. As it always has and always will."
The fervor in the man's voice amused Sarah. "And this is what you came here to tell me." She could feel her own smile turning gentle, tolerant. "That there's a few faithful employees such as yourself-true believers-and you're somehow keeping the flame alive. Really She shook her head. "That's very touching. How many show up at the staff meetings? A couple dozen?"
The more talkative one glowered sulkily at her. "It's not just a few of us, Miss Tyrell. We're not fools."
"That's right," said his partner. "This is bigger than that. Much bigger. We represent the
other
Tyrell Corporation-the shadow company that already existed before the one that you knew was destroyed."
She made no reply. Because she knew that the men, the mysterious callers who had appeared on her doorstep, were speaking the truth. There had been intimations, things whispered and things left unspoken, referred to by only a nod and a partial, omniscient smile on the face of her uncle, all referring to that other Tyrell Corporation, the shadow of the one whose light-studded Aztec pyramid had loomed over the dense sprawl of Los Angeles.
Shadow
being the operative word; an entity made of darkness that moved in darkness and did dark things. Darker than what Eldon Tyrell and the corporation that acted out in the open did-which would take some effort, Sarah knew. She was familiar enough with all the conspiracies and clandestine operations, the pulling of strings fine as the strands of a spider's web, a silken net that covered all of Earth and the worlds beyond. That was what she had inherited, what the death of the only other living Tyrell had left to her. And what she had destroyed, had turned to ashes as cold as those in the alabaster urn with Eldon Tyrell's name engraved on the side. She had annihilated the works of his hands, the vision that had been held in the cold fish eyes behind the square-rimmed spectacles; the hole left in the heart, the center, of L.A. had probably already been filled in by now, the charred ruins of the Tyrell Corporation headquarters carted off or incorporated into a new squatter ghetto.