Wycliffe appeared uneasy, embarrassed. “Well I’m sure Dr. Tyrell was still thinking about this matter. Before his untimely demise. There were a lot of things he would’ve taken care of . . . if there had been time.”
She glared at the man without speaking. There was no more time for Eldon Tyrell—the replicant who’d killed him had drained him of time by cracking his head like an egg and letting the razor-bright sparks of his mind pour out through his red eye sockets—and she was glad of it. Her uncle’s unfinished business had probably included her as well.
“Plenty of time here,” said Sarah. She gestured toward the dials. “By the looks of things.”
The man beside her nodded. “That’s what I meant when I said that everything buried had to be watched. The machines—the monitors—they did the watching. Even if everybody else, everybody human, had forgotten.”
With her knuckle, Sarah rapped against one of the circular dials until the glass cracked and splintered. She picked out the triangular shards, then used one fingernail to scratch at the black pointer beneath. It was painted on, fixed at one number along the dial’s rim.
“These are fake.” She looked at Wycliffe beside her as she rubbed the black paint flecks from under her nail. She gestured toward the other dials and gauges, the banks of monitoring equipment, the lights and numbers glowing in the cathedral’s dim space. “They all are, aren’t they?”
“Well . . . possibly . . .” Bony shoulders hunched beneath Wycliffe’s jacket. He held out his large-knuckled hands and tilted them from side to side. “When this installation was set up to watch over the scuttled transports, there was some . . . um . . . stage-setting done. To make it look impressive to the other consortium members. Dr. Tyrell didn’t want them jumping ship, so to speak.”
“So really, there’s been no monitoring here at all. That’s the deal, isn’t it?” Sarah let her gaze narrow upon the man. “The interstellar transports that were dumped here-anything could have been going on with them. With the depleted drive units and their toxic effects. They might, in fact, have reached some kind of critical mass—the temporal aberra tions in the field might not just be toxic. They could very well be lethal.”
She let one corner of her mouth lift in a parody of a smile. “If you want me to go down there, that might be the same as killing me. You might as well shoot me now and get it over with. You must admit—that seems a little inconsistent with people making claims about how they have my best interests at heart. Or even just the interests of the Tyrell Corporation.”
Wycliffe said nothing, turning his face away from her as though in shame. I’m right, thought Sarah. Not that it was any comfort to her. The truth never was.
“Miss Tyrell . . . please The softer voice of Zwingli came from a few paces away. “Please don’t be mad at us. There really is nothing else we can do. It has to be this way.”
“I’ve heard that one before.” Inside my own head, she thought grimly. As well as from these two, when they’d been putting the pressure on her back at the hovel on Mars. Sarah supposed they were as locked into their fates as she was.
“It’s all right,” she said finally. “I don’t mind. It’s pretty much what comes with the territory, isn’t it? When you’re Tyrell blood.”
Neither man said anything. Outside, the ice-flecked wind picked at the cathedral’s raftered bones. Sarah could hear, past the low electric hum of the fake monitoring equipment, the grey waves lapping at the village’s shore. In a storm, she supposed, the seawater might roll against the abandoned doors, pour through the empty houses .
Somehow, without even noticing, she had walked out of St. Magnus’s Cathedral all the way to the edge of the Flow. She found herself, once her bleak thoughts and memories had faded, gazing out at the water, its surface a darker shade of the steel-textured clouds above. She sensed another’s presence, Wycliffe standing behind her.
“So exactly what is the way I’m supposed to get down there?” Sarah didn’t glance over her shoulder at the man. She gave a single nod toward the water.
“Down to the Salander 3, I mean. Jump in, hold my breath, and swim?”
A slight motion in the chill air; she knew that was Wycliffe stiffening, his spine pulled tight by the mention of the ancient interstellar transport’s name. A name that he and the other man had yet to speak aloud, that was even more weighted with dire meaning than the words Scapa Flow. At the corner of her eye, she saw his gloved hand extend and point.
“There’s no need for that, Miss Tyrell.” Wycliffe’s index finger aimed toward a small triangular structure floating in the distance, so small that Sarah hadn’t spotted it before. “There’s a pressurized shaft extending down to the .
. . to your destination. The shadow corporation-well, Zwingli and myself, actually—had it installed before we went out and contacted you. And brought you here.”
“I see.” Sarah glanced back at him. “That was thoughtful of you.”
“Of course.” A thin smile moved across Wycliffe’s thin-lipped visage. “We really are thinking only of your comfort.”
“Sure you are.” She shook her head, feeling how cold and hard her face had become, as though the ice in the wind had penetrated her flesh and seeped into the veins beneath. “If that were the case, you wouldn’t even want me to go down there.” She took a sadistic pleasure in speaking the transport’s name again. “To the Salander 3.”
Zwingli had come out from the old cathedral and joined them by the shore of the Flow; Sarah could sense his presence, and the silent exchange between the two men, the glance passed between them.
“Miss Tyrell . . . we’ve gone over this before. It’s the only way.” One of them spoke; she wasn’t sure which. The voice fluttered and was taken away by the wind. Probably Wycliffe, the default spokesman for the pair. “If the Tyrell Corporation is to be restored—if it is to come out of the shadows and be what it was before, and even more than that—then this must be done. By you; no one else can do it. It is, after all, your past that we’re talking about here.
That must be confronted and brought into the light.”
Her past. All of it, she told herself. Right back to the beginning—she had been born aboard the Salander 3. Far from here . . . far from Earth itself.
That past, her past, was a world unto itself, sleeping beneath Scapa Flow’s waters.
“I know The wind had invisibly peeled away her skin, exposing the flesh and scraped bones beneath; that was what it felt like. Sarah had to take her hand out of the coat’s pocket and hold it out in front of herself, like some white, fragile artifact, to dispel the illusion. If that’s what it was.”
There were ghosts down there in the old interstellar transports; that was the essential toxic effect of the first-generation drive units. The technology, the relatively crude way of getting from one point to another, from Earth to the stars, had worked by generating perturbations in the time field surrounding the transports, enabling them to achieve faster—than-light velocities, as though being sucked from one zone of artificially high temporal potential to a lower one. Falling through time, infinite distances converted thereto, the churning machines holding on to each moment of the present, elongating them like some vacillating Faustian bargain.