The alarm clock skipped nimbly away to avoid Sarah’s trembling hand. “All right! Let’s get going!” Its bell-like voice radiated maniacal cheer. “Lots to do today!”
Sarah had found one cigarette butt that she managed to ignite; she sucked a stale drag from it. “Like what?” She blew the smoke into the alarm clock’s round face.
“Well The small autonomic device comically waved the smoke away with its pointed black hands. “You could make yourself lovely-lovelier than you are, I mean—and get ready for your husband to come home. Mr. Niemand, that is.”
She frowned as she ground out the butt in the can lid. “Is he coming home? Is he supposed to be?” She had lost track of time, the passage of days. Which was a bad sign, something the U.N.’s social workers and mental health professionals were constantly warning the emigrants about. It was one of the first indications-along with the facial tics, the skin plucking, and other obsessive-compulsive rituals—that the toxic effects of the low-stimulus Martian environment were being felt. Madness and death were usually not far behind. Not that I’m overly concerned, thought Sarah.
“Not quite,” said the calendar on the bedroom’s wall. “Mr. Niemand isn’t scheduled to return for a few more days yet. But you never know.” The calendar attempted to sound hopeful and solicitous of its human masters’ welfare.
“Maybe he wrapped up his business and is coming home early. It could happen.”
“You’re right.” With both hands, she pushed her tangled hair back from her brow. “As usual.”
In the hovel’s bathroom, she let the trickle of rust-colored water collect in the basin while trying to avoid seeing herself in the clouded mirror. She didn’t want to deal with the issue of whether it was her face or Rachael’s that she saw there.
Away from the alarm clock’s chatter and the calendar’s nagging, her thoughts began to order themselves, resuming a familiar shape and weight. One that she had decided upon the day after Deckard had left, when he’d gone out to that run-down video studio orbiting above Earth. A time-honored tradition, a reverting to old forms of gender-based behavior: the man going out to make money, to bring it home to the basic family unit, the wife tending the fire .
They’re right, she told herself again. I do have to be ready for him. She bent over the sink and splashed the water into her face.
A thump sounded from the bedroom behind her. “Oops,” came the clock’s voice.
With a trickle of water running between her breasts, Sarah glanced over her shoulder. The alarm clock, in its chugging circuit around the tabletop, had knocked the gun to the floor.
“Sorry . . .”
“Don’t worry about it.” She reached for the threadbare towel. “You know it’s not loaded.”
She knew what the clock and the calendar didn’t. That the gun wouldn’t stay unloaded for long. In the dresser drawer, beneath her wadded-up underthings, were two bullets. They had been expensively acquired, black-market items like the cigarettes, in a place like the emigrant colony, where death came constantly and slowly, the means of a fast death assumed a precious status.
One for him, thought Sarah as she ran the towel across the back of her neck.
And one for me . . .
She’d be ready for Mr. Niemand’s homecoming.
“I wouldn’t have thought that was your kind of gig.” The briefcase had started talking again, still with Roy Batty’s voice. “Making videos and all that . . . Not exactly your former line of work, is it?”
“Yeah, well,” said Deckard, “it pays.” Or at least it was supposed to, he thought grimly. Outside the skiff, discernible through the viewscreen over the tiny cockpit’s instrument panel, was void interplanetary space, not made any more comforting by the cold light of the distant stars.
“Kind of screwed yourself on that one, didn’t you?” Batty, when he’d been in a human incarnation, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, had always displayed a spooky talent for reading others’ thoughts; reduced now to a box, he seemed to have retained the ability. “That’s the problem with those big temper displays.
It’s all rush at the beginning—then comes the hangover.”
Whatever Batty had been wrong about before-including his lunatic theory that Deckard himself was a replicant—he was nailing this situation. Deckard knew that the disembodied voice was right; inside his head, he was giving his ass a well-placed kick. “That was the whole reason I agreed to do it. For the money.” Deckard emitted a short, ill-humored laugh. “And then I didn’t even get it. The whole trip was a waste of time.”
“But you knew it would be.” The briefcase spoke softly, almost kindly. “Didn’t you?”
Deckard wasn’t sure. He gazed broodingly at the dark-filled viewscreen. Temper displays weren’t the only things that had problems attached to them. Needing money, being desperate for it, the way a drowning person craved oxygen in his lungs—that brought along its own raft of difficulties, the things that screwed up the rational functionings of one’s brain. “Anything can be believed,”
Deckard mused aloud. “If you have to.”
“And that’s how you fell in with that Urbenton creep?” Batty’s voice prodded at him. “Not a good call on your part, Deckard. That guy’s slime. I could tell, just from hearing him.”
“You’re a good judge of character.” Deckard tilted his head back against the top of the pilot’s seat. “Believe me, I’m sorry I got hooked up with the little sonuvabitch.”
“I take it you must’ve been pretty hard up for cash.”
Deckard made no reply. The briefcase’s statement was dead on the mark. Money was even more necessary than oxygen, at least in the hovels of the U.N. emigrant colonies. Breathable air, smelling of glue and recycling filters overdue for changing, was at least furnished free of cost by the U.N.’s own blue-helmeted Environmental Maintenance teams, along with the basic ration loads of algae-derived carbos and proteins. Money, on the other hand, the emigrants had to provide for themselves—either from the savings they’d brought with them from their former lives on Earth, or what they hustled in the colonies’ black market and/or other officially tolerated, unsanctioned free enterprise zones. All of which, the savings or the hustling proceeds, only served to stave off bankruptcy, destitution, and death for a little while. Any emigrant could lie on the bunk in his hovel, fingers laced together between the back of his head and the thin pillow, and feel his life seeping away, like the sour air hissing through a leak in the plastic Quonset roof above him. And not even care any longer.
He’d just about reached that point—or would have, if he hadn’t locked a vow into the pit of his soul, a vow with both Sarah Tyrell’s and Rachael’s names stamped in smoldering, ashen letters upon it-when the smug little video director Urbenton had shown up at the hovel’s pneumatic-sealed door.
Travelling incognito, or travelling at all, being able to come to Mars and then leave again—that had been impressive evidence of Urbenton’s pull, some kind of cozy arrangement between his Speed Death Productions company and the cable services provider that effectively called all the shots in the colonies.
The cable company was the arbiter of life and death, the ruler of the emigrants’ pocket universe; in a low—or even zero-stim environment like Mars, the cable feed into the hovels was the true sustaining pipeline, one that people continued to shell out for long after their cash reserves had dwindled to the point where they could no longer afford edibles beyond the U.N.’s meager rations.