The drawback being, as she knew from the old memos she had seen in the Tyrell Corporation files, that the first-generation interstellar drive units became depleted, lost their propulsive function, as the layers of undissipated temporal energy accumulated. Screwing around with Time itself had its price; within the transports’ little encased worlds, past and present became confused, impossible to sort out. Then there would be no forgetting; that saving mental grace, the only thing that made sanity possible, would be gone.
Toxicity, madness, death. Better to sink the contaminated machinery into a dark, wet hole, the only place whose own temporal anomalies had a chance of matching these newly created ones .
“But I got out.” Sarah spoke her thoughts aloud. She looked back over her shoulder at the two men. “Before it—the past—before it could contaminate me. Before it could kill me. I was only three years old when the Salander 3 returned to Earth.” That child, that long-vanished incarnation of herself, had been the only living thing aboard the transport when the autonomic piloting systems had brought it back to this world; when the Salander 3’s doors had been unsealed and the Tyrell Corporation’s employees had gone in, they had found only the little girl named Sarah—and the corpses of her parents.
Family history, deep and dark as the currents of the ocean surrounding Scapa Flow. Little things that hadn’t been in the old memoranda, the company’s official archives, but that she had found out anyway as she had been growing up. The way children always find out things, by overhearing whispers . . . and even more tellingly, by hearing the silences that the adults clicked into when they knew she was in the room.
That was how she had found out what had happened to them. The faces she knew, recognized from the digitized press clippings in the company files. Anson and Ruth Tyrell; there had been a photo of the two of them with-an oddly human, sentimentalizing touch—a long-haired marmalade cat in the woman’s arms, a pet that was going to accompany them on their exploratory voyage to the Proxima system. The two people in the photo had been smiling, full of an eager confidence—Sarah had calculated that her mother had become pregnant either shortly before the photograph had been taken or just after, when the interstellar transport had left Earth orbit. Her parents had been unaware of their fate, the fate of the Salander 3. The transport had turned back a sixth of the way to Proxima, the clever relays and circuits wired into its computers doing the best they could, ferrying back the dead and the living, two adult corpses and an infant tended by machines, nursed on synthesized breast milk.
Her second birth had come three years later, when the Tyrell Corporation employees had unsealed the transport’s main hatch and one of them had led her out by the hand—there was no way Sarah could remember that. Just more of what she had been told, and had overheard, and had dug out of the company archives.
And what happened to the cat? she wondered, not for the first time. The poor thing—Sarah gazed out at the uncommunicative water, feeling the chill seep closer to her core. She supposed that was another mystery, the answer to which was down there with all the others, in the hulk of the Salander 3 itself.
“That’s why you want me to go down there, isn’t it?” She managed to bestow a bare fragment of a smile upon the two men. “To find out what happened to that silly cat.”
They showed no sign of puzzlement at her words. “You have to go down there,” said Wycliffe, “to save—to restore—the Tyrell Corporation.”
“Something went wrong Zwingli gazed out across the Flow. “A long time ago . . .”
“At the beginning.” Wycliffe nodded slowly. “It had to have been then. When Dr. Tyrell and his brother created the corporation. Somehow, everything that happened since then including the destruction of the Tyrell Corporation . the seeds were planted right back at the start of it all.”
She envied the dead-this also, not for the first time. They’ve got it easy, thought Sarah. The two Tyrell brothers and the wife of one of them-all the bad things that fate had had in store, they had already gotten through. And gone on to whatever place there was that had no time, neither past nor dreaded future. She knew she wasn’t that lucky . . . or at least not yet. The past was waiting for her, just a few minutes ahead, when she would go down into the remains of the Salander 3, her first home. Which, in some way, she had never left.
“We can’t go back to the very beginning—that’s too far.” Wycliffe’s voice continued at the edge of her thoughts. “There’s nothing left. It’s lost. But this much we can do. We can go this far. To whatever happened . . . then. In there.” He nodded toward the grey water and the vessels hidden beneath the surface. “But you’re the only one who can go there and find out. The secrets, the mysteries. All that we need to know.”
This is what I get—she supposed it served her right. She had envied the dead and had tried to become one of them. Deckard had loved—and still loved—the replicant with Sarah’s face. Rachael had already become one of the dead, the termination of her four-year life span postponed just a little bit. Not that it mattered, finally. For either herself or Rachael. The dead were the only ones who escaped. For the living, there was only the past and the future, the same thing in either direction, and equally painful. It was stupid of me to even try.
Standing behind her, Wycliffe was still wrapped up in his explanations, the rationale behind their journey to this bleak spot. “We don’t even know why.”
His voice spoke in a child’s baffled tone. “The Tyrell Corporation sunk an awful lot of its operating capital into the Salander 3 expedition. And we don’t even know what they were looking for out in the Proxima system. What they were trying to achieve, what they thought Anson Tyrell was going to find out there.”
“Not in the files, was it?” Sarah knew; she’d looked herself. “That information was deleted; erased, extinguished. And you know, don’t you, who must have done that.”
Both men nodded. “Dr. Tyrell,” Wycliffe morosely said. “Eldon Tyrell. Your uncle.”
“Eldon Tyrell did a lot of things that you don’t know about.” She heard her own voice darken in tone. “Some of them . . . you don’t want to know about.”
Sarah looked over her shoulder and saw the two die-hard loyalists appearing uncomfortable, exchanging glances from behind their square-framed lenses at each other.
“Those kinds of things . . .”
Zwingli spoke up. “That might be personal information. Family secrets. That we don’t need to know about. To bring the Tyrell Corporation back into existence.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” said Sarah. “There’s no such thing as personal with the Tyrell Corporation. There never was. Or to put it another way . . . everything is personal. When my uncle was alive, the company was just the contents of his head, made big.”
“And then it was yours.” A softly uttered reminder from Wycliffe. “Your company. And your . . . personal matters.”
Head turned, Sarah regarded the man, seeking any clue as to just exactly and how much he and his partner were aware of. Maybe I was wrong, she mused. Maybe they weren’t quite as stupid as they looked. She’d have to be careful-her own reminder, this time.
“But all that came later.” Wycliffe spoke, letting his steady gaze meet hers.
“We need to find out what happened a long time ago. On the Salander 3.”
“That was really the turning point,” added Zwingli. “If you study the history of the Tyrell Corporation. What can be pieced together from the files and the other records. After the failure of the Salander 3 mission, and the deaths of An-son and Ruth Tyrell—your parents’ deaths—then things were never the same.