That was when the company’s Los Angeles headquarters became such a fortress. A fortress that your uncle retreated into. And the Tyrell Corporation grew both in power and secrecy.”
“You’re telling me things I already know.” Sarah turned from the Flow’s shore to face the two men. “I’ve gone over the files as well.”
“Ah, but it’s not just what’s in the files—or what Dr. Tyrell left there.”
Wycliffe looked smug, pleased with the workings of his brain. “Some of the connections you need to make”
Those happened outside the company. In the rest of the world. The Salander 3 expedition, that you were born during—that was the last exploratory voyage outside the solar system. After the Salander 3 came back, without even having reached its destination, the U.N. launched its off-world colonization program.
Within a couple of years, the U.N. was sending the first groups of human settlers out to the stars. And the Tyrell Corporation had the exclusive franchise on supplying replicants to the colonization program. That’s when the money started to happen, in a big way.” The man’s eyes glittered behind the square glasses. “It’s what enabled Dr. Tyrell to establish a monopoly on all aspects of replicant technology. With the money he was getting from the U.N., he was able to either buy up any patents that he didn’t already own or drive the other companies out of business. For all intents and purposes, from that point on, Tyrell was the replicant business. The company had no competition, and the U.N. went along with whatever prices Dr. Tyrell decided to set. The Tyrell Corporation was the sole supplier for the one essential element to the colonization program.”
“Bad move on the U.N.’s part.” Sarah gave a shrug. “Just goes to show that those people don’t know how businesses are run. You never let somebody get a hand on your throat that way.”
“Perhaps.” The smug look didn’t vanish from Wycliffe’s face. “Unless the U.N. didn’t mind paying that price; they didn’t mind giving the Tyrell Corporation such an expensive monopoly. That might all have been part of the deal that had been set up between the U.N. and Dr. Tyrell. The company gets the franchise on supplying replicants to the colonists and the U.N. gets the colonization program. What Dr. Tyrell gave the U.N. as his part of the bargain made the program possible, so the U.N. could go ahead with it.” The smugness shifted into a self-satisfied smile. “And that’s where the Salander 3 comes in.”
“Really?” Sarah raised an eyebrow. “That’s your theory? The Salander 3 expedition-my father and my mother—found something out that the Tyrell Corporation sold to the U.N-some information, perhaps, about what was out there in the stars. And that was worth enough to the U.N. for them to hand over the replicant monopoly. Interesting conjecture.”
“Perhaps it wasn’t information, Miss Tyrell. Perhaps it was something even more valuable to the U.N. and its program. Perhaps it was the suppression of information.”
Silence, marred only by the passage of wind over Scapa Flow’s waters, as she considered the other’s words. But that would mean .
“Exactly,” said Wycliffe, as though he had discerned the currents of her thinking. “It would mean that Dr. Tyrell did whatever was necessary to suppress the information that the Salander 3 expedition had discovered. That the expedition had been aborted and brought back to Earth on his orders. And that those who possessed the information—your parents—were . . . shall we say? . . . suppressed as well.”
“Murdered.” A homicidal spark flared in Sarah’s heart at hearing more of the man’s dancing, evasive words. “That’s what you mean.”
“Of course it is.” Both of the men gazed owlishly back at her. “You’ll have to excuse our efforts at being diplomatic. But this is Wycliffe spread his hands apart. “A delicate subject. A not-very-pleasant possibility.”
“You should’ve thought of it yourself,” muttered Zwingli. “The fact you didn’t—that says a lot.”
“Precisely.” Lanky, black-sleeved arms folded themselves across Wycliffe’s chest. “This smacks of avoidance on your part. Which seems odd, given your rather obvious antipathy toward your uncle.”
“You know . . . you might be right.” Sarah slowly nodded. It just goes to show, she thought. You can never hate some people enough. There was always more.
She looked away from the two die-hard loyalists and back toward the dark waters mirroring the steel-clouded sky. The answers were there, beneath the small waves that lapped across the stones toward her feet.
Her uncle hadn’t been able to suppress everything. The past remained, captured and bottled and buried away from the light. Waiting for her.
“All right,” Sarah said aloud. “I’ll go down there. And see what I find.”
“Thank you, Miss Tyrell.” The voice came from behind her; she didn’t know which of them it was. “That’s all we’re asking of you.”
As if that weren’t enough. She tugged the fur-collared coat closer around herself, futilely trying to ward off the cold winds.
“I’ve seen you around here before,” said the man inside the booth. The ramshackle stall, tucked into one of the darkest corners of the emigrant colony’s convoluted marketplace, surrounded him like a scuttling sea creature’s protective carapace. “Coming and going, on your little mundane, unimportant errands. The things that you thought were so important. But now you’ve seen the light.”
There would have been a time for Deckard, back when he’d been a cop in L.A., when he would’ve reached across the space between this person and himself and grabbed the guy’s throat and squeezed until veins had stood out like twisting blue snakes. Right now, he let it go.
“Kind of in a hurry,” said Deckard. Behind him, he could feel the crush and push of the dense paths and de facto alleyways, the tight presence of other human bodies that always tripped a memory flash of that distant city. “Maybe you could just sell me what I need-what I came here for—and we could skip the conversation.”
“You think it’s as easy as that? Shows what you know.” The man behind the counter had fierce eyes set in deep circles of black, as though his contemplation of the divine was slowly blinding him to any other world. “You come to your senses and decide to go looking for that which you should’ve sought all along—it’s not going to be a ‘kind of in a hurry’ process. Narrow is the gate, and long and hard the road beyond it. You don’t buy grace, you earn it.”
The temptation of his old police ways tingled again in Deckard’s hands. He glanced for a moment back over his shoulder; there were too many people here, too many watching eyes, for him to throttle the man into submission. He couldn’t risk alerting the colony’s authorities about what he was trying to do; the place was crawling with snitches and narks. He’d left the briefcase sitting on the kitchen-area table back at the hovel, there being no place to hide it that anyone else couldn’t have found in five minutes’ worth of tearing the flimsy structure to bits. The nagging voice, coming from the briefcase, had told him to fetch the necessary items as fast as possible; even the disembodied Batty felt the time pressure clamping down on them.
Just my luck, thought Deckard. This particular booth in the marketplace appeared to be the only one trafficking in dehydrated deities at the moment.
Every other time he’d shoved his shoulder-first way through the crowd, there had seemed to be dozens of the technically illegal but officially tolerated outlets. Another glance around, to the limit of what could be seen under the banks of dead or jittering fluorescents, showed gaps in the merchant stalls, the tiny businesses shut down, eliminated, and not yet replaced by the next wave of hustling or evangelism. The emigrant colony’s police force, or the larger and more efficient squads of the cable monopoly’s rent-a-cops, must have swept through in the last couple of days-either to restore public decency or, more likely, to keep their captive audience hooked to the video wire rather than fuguing off into religious visionary trips.