“Let’s just say Wycliffe’s voice was as bitter as his expression. “Not all Tyrell Corporation employees had the same degree of loyalty. Some of the more remote branches of the company sold out to the U.N. security agencies. Or they tried to.” One corner of his mouth curled into an ugly smirk. “They would have, if the shadow corporation hadn’t gotten to them first.”
“We took care of business,” said Zwingli. “Ours and theirs.”
“I bet you did.” If Sarah hadn’t been convinced before that these two were left over from the old Tyrell Corporation, she was now. The culture inside the L.A. headquarters building had been nurtured by her uncle into a magnified form of his own personality. Inside that pyramid, the way to get ahead had been through murder, or at least a display of one’s willingness along those lines. All in the service of the Tyrell Corporation as manifested by Eldon Tyrell. “So Zurich’s not on the grand tour anymore, I take it.”
Both men nodded their heads.
She waited, but neither of them said anything more. They stood and gazed at her with an apparent lack of sexual appetite that she found offensive.
“Gentlemen—it’s not that long a trip between Mars and Earth. Not aboard one of these yachts.” Sarah took a long drag on the cigarette, taking it halfway down its length. She held out her hand to regard the glowing ember. “And my patience is even shorter.” She looked back at the men. “So why don’t you just tell me where we’re going?”
They looked frightened, as though some moment they’d been dreading since birth had finally arrived. “It’s Wycliffe’s pale, large-knuckled hands tugged at each other. “It’s not that easy . . .”
“Jesus Christ.” It struck her once more that the pair’s impersonations of the late Eldon Tyrell hadn’t penetrated past the skin. Her uncle at least had had the courage of the selfabsorbed. “Show me, then.”
Wycliffe appeared relieved by the suggestion. He dug through the inside pocket of his coat and extracted a folding map, so old that the creases had turned to lines of soft white fur. He spread it out on the bureau plat, hands patting the paper smooth.
“You can’t use the screen?” She pointed to the far wall of the lounge.
“Instead of that thing?”
“This . . . belonged to Dr. Tyrell.” Wycliffe looked up from his insectoid crouch over the map. One hand hovered a quarter inch above its surface. “His personal copy.”
“What, he gave it to you?”
Wycliffe shook his head. “No—he kept it here. With his other things.”
“Fine. Whatever.” Sarah stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray that Zwingli had scurried to fetch for her. “Acquire your sacred relics however you want.”
She got up and stood beside Wycliffe, looking down at the map. “Now-can you point? Can you do that much for me?”
He laid a fingertip on a spot in the upper left corner.
A map of western Europe—that much had been readily discernible, even through the rectangular grid of the fold marks and tears. This thing looks a million years old, thought Sarah. Perhaps her uncle had had it when he’d been a boy, when the world had been flat and the only things that looked human actually were. Sarah leaned closer over the bureau plat.
The British Isles, but not England. Farther north than that. Her heart had paused between one beat and the next, a moment frozen between life and its continuance, when she discerned the exact place on the map. North of the Scottish mainland, far beyond Cape Wrath, beyond Thurso at the very tip; into the North Sea, where the currents ran as cold as the pulse that now moved slowly through her veins. She knew where Wycliffe was pointing; she had always known. And why the two men had been reluctant to speak the words, the name.
“You see?” Wycliffe spoke softly, his voice all kindness, sympathy. “Right there. That’s where we’re going.”
She saw, she knew; a place she had never been to. But she knew what was there.
Waiting for her in that little spiral of islands. Scraps of land, treeless and rock-laden, protecting another body of seawater from the greater, darker ocean surrounding it. A place that most people didn’t even know existed; that they had forgotten, if they had ever known. Lucky them, Sarah thought.
Memory was a disadvantage, a means of control. Her uncle had known that, had used it; the replicants he had created, the false memories he had implanted in their skulls. How much better it would have been for those poor bastards if they had been able to forget, if they had never known. How much better for me-some of the memories in the dead Rachael’s skull had been her own. Some of them were things that she would have rather forgotten. And the others—the bits and bleeding scraps that Eldon Tyrell hadn’t seen fit to take and implant in her double’s mind, that he had wanted to keep a secret, big and dark, between himself and his niece—those were even more worth forgetting. If they could have been. That’s the trouble with the past, thought Sarah, closing her eyes for a moment. It was divided between the things you could never know and all the things you wished you could forget.
“Do we have to?” She heard her own voice, sounding like a child’s. The one who had never died and never forgotten. She opened her eyes and looked at the man standing next to her. “Go there, I mean. Why do we have to?”
“We don’t have any choice,” said Wycliffe. A few feet away, Zwingli nodded in agreement. “Neither do you. These things have to be done.”
“But technically I’m your boss.” Sarah attempted a last-ditch argument. “I’m in charge. I am the Tyrell Corporation—you said so yourself. Without me . . . there’s nothing.” Her voice rose in desperation. “You’re supposed to do what I say. I could tell you no. I’d forbid you to take me there.”
“It doesn’t work that way, Miss Tyrell. It can’t.”
“Why not?” Still plaintive, still hoping, though she knew what the answer would be.
“We all have to subordinate our desires—and our fears—to the greater work.”
The true-believer tone sounded in Wycliffe’s voice again, low and fervent.
“For the sake of that which is larger than all of us. For the sake of the Tyrell Corporation. So that it can be once again. As it was. And as it always shall be.”
She supposed she could tell them the truth. For all the good it would do—she could tell them that it had been her, the culmination of all her planning and scheming, her unsubordinated desires, that had reduced the Tyrell Corporation to ashy ruins. They’d either believe her or they wouldn’t. And it would make no difference. Everything would happen the way it had to, the way it had been laid out by a dead man. How did I think, she wondered, how did I ever think I could kill him? When Eldon Tyrell was still alive inside her head and in the past that never ended? And there, where they’re taking me.
“Don’t worry,” came Wycliffe’s voice. She couldn’t see him, or the map, or the faux tapestries hung on the ship’s bulkheads. Her eyes had filled with tears, a child’s tears. One fell onto the paper ocean and seeped away, with any others that might have struck there, long ago. “Please don’t worry, Miss Tyrell.” He was trying to be soothing, to give some small comfort, all that was possible. “We’ll be there with you. You can count on us.”
“Thanks.” Sarah meant it, without guile or sarcasm. “That means a lot to me.”
They left her, with the map still unfolded on the reproduction bureau plat.
Wiping her eyes clear, Sarah stood for a while longer, looking at it and not seeing it. Then she went back to the wing chair and curled up in its protection, legs tucked beneath her. She laid her head against the upholstered angle beside her. At some point, while the yacht moved on toward its destination, to that place where the waters rolled over the deeply buried past, she slept. And dreamed, and remembered . . .