The last words puzzled Sarah. “What do you mean? Both what?”
No answer; silence rolled down the corridor, a wave upon an unseen ocean.
Yet not perfect. In the distance, somewhere inside the Salander 3, the sound of footsteps. Impact upon metal, then echoes, even softer. Someone walking; it felt as though it were along the knots of her spine, beneath her prickling flesh.
“Very funny,” said Sarah. “That’s a good joke. You don’t have to try so hard to amuse me.” No reply came from the speaker grille above her head. “I’m a big girl now.”
The little noises had faded away. The recirculated air sighed through the vents.
“Maybe The voice of the ship’s computer whispered, as though the round speaker grille had come up next to her ear in a cold metal kiss. “Maybe you should go home, little girl. You don’t belong here. Not anymore. This isn’t your home.”
“Yes, it is.” Sarah’s voice broke inside her throat. With something close to astonishment, she touched her face and found a tear rolling down her cheek, as though the surrounding salt ocean had broken through some seal within her. “It is.” The words sounded like a child’s, scared and clinging. “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
The footsteps sounded again, the soft echo floating by her ear. Closer, perhaps in the darkness at the end of the corridor.
“Go anywhere, child. Anywhere but here . . .”
The realization had welled up inside her from spaces just as dark, deep and hidden. The ocean rolled above, locking her tight within this little bubble at the center of the universe. It is here, thought Sarah. It has to be. If it wasn’t, she was lost. More than she had ever dreamed or feared possible.
Now she knew why she had come here. Why she had let the two men with the eyes of her uncle talk her into it—if they had known, they wouldn’t have even bothered to. No argument or attempt at convincing needed; all she’d had to do was realize what some part of her had always known, that the day was coming when she’d be here in this place, this little world, again.
That part knew because it had never left.
“I won’t go away,” said Sarah. She looked upward, as though she could find the computer’s face. It didn’t have one; all she saw was the blank, curving metal that lined the ship’s corridor. “You can’t make me.”
“No one can.” The voice from the overhead speaker sounded mired in the awareness of grief. “It’s too late. Even where there’s no time, it’s always too late.” The voice shifted, as though becoming part of a machine again.
“Very well. Suit yourself. I won’t try to stop you.”
Silence, as though the Salander 3’s computer had shut itself off, the circuitry going dead, the wires empty of whatever time-free consciousness had lived in them. Silence encased in silence; the approaching storm winds that stroked the waves of Scapa Flow had stilled themselves. That was what it felt like to Sarah, buried beneath the waters. The subtle motions of the currents had stopped rocking the ship’s hull, leaving it without tremor on the decayed hulks beneath it.
In that tomb quiet, she knew she should have been able to hear the beat of her own heart, tapping under bone and flesh—but she couldn’t. She laid a hand on her breast, fingers slipping below the edges of her coat. Nothing, even when her fingertips touched the bare skin at the base of her throat; nothing but the cold chill that her body temperature had been brought down to, as though seeking equilibrium with the ocean.
Sarah held out her hand, palm upward, far enough to expose her pale wrist. The thin blue snake of her pulse was motionless as well, stopped in the moment between one beat and the next.
Time; plenty of it, and none. That was what Wycliffe and Zwingli had told her she would find, and what she’d known she would. The toxicity of the depleted interstellar drives, the cumulative effects of the ship’s journey to the stars, building up in the hull and everything it held even before the aborted expedition to the Proxima system; time had built up here and couldn’t be dissipated.
And what, wondered Sarah, is so toxic about that? She stood in the Salander 3’s central corridor, the doorway to the surface of that other world, the one where things moved and happened in time, sealed behind her. The way they had talked about it, not just Wycliffe and Zwingli but everyone else, all the memos in the Tyrell Corporation files; toxic to lethal, poison to death. It had suddenly struck her that perhaps they were wrong, always had been. That here was eternal life, a resurrection that didn’t even need to be disinterred from its grave. All you had to do to find it . . . was to die.
Another silence, another memory, rose inside her. Far from here: a cabin, not more than a falling-down shack, in a forest silvered by moonlight. With a black, glass-lidded coffin inside it, and inside that, a woman either sleeping or dying or both. A woman with Sarah’s face. That’s why I envied her, thought Sarah. Rachael had already died—the last little drawn-out fragments of her curtailed life hardly mattered—and had entered that world where there was no time, just memory. Deckard’s memory, as he sat beside the black coffin and gazed upon that which he loved, that which he’d been fated to love, nailed down to that iron track of his desires. As long as he remembered Rachael—and that was all he’d had left to do then—she’d never die.
Another world, another time; Sarah tried to push it away from her thoughts.
For a moment, she’d been there, the shadow of an owl passing across her face, masking the stars that had glittered hard in the cold night air. And another part of that same time, that memory: when she had told him to say to her what he had said to Rachael, long before.
Say that you want me.
The memory didn’t fade so much as it dissipated, like a scrap of paper ignited and crumbling to black ash. Leaving her inside the Salander 3 again, the cold metal walls close around her. The darkness at the end of the corridor still lay ahead.
She walked past where the last of the luminescent panels had flickered and gone out. How that could have happened, she wasn’t sure of; a strict logic would have taken that to indicate the passage of time, the ship’s component parts’ aging and wearing out. A thin shard of plastic crackled beneath her footstep; she reached down and picked it up. Enough light filtered down the corridor from where she had entered to show that what she held was a fragment of the same translucent covering from the fixtures recessed overhead. She reached up, standing on tiptoe; her outstretched fingertips caught hold of a larger, sharper piece, one of several radiating from the plastic’s center. The panel, and the rest extending down the corridor, had been shattered, rendered useless; as her vision adjusted to her dim surroundings, she could make out the repeated damage.
Somebody did that, Sarah told herself. On purpose. It had to have been done before the ship had landed back on Earth. The light behind her was a retrofit, something that had been installed when the shaft to the surface had been hooked up. From what Wycliffe and Zwingli had told her, that was as far as anyone had gone into the Salander 3 since that long-ago day when the dead bodies of her parents had been carried out. She found it hard to believe that any of the Tyrell Corporation’s employees had also had the time and inclination then for this kind of vandalism. So it happened out there, thought Sarah. Way out there. On the way to the Proxima system, or on the way back from the Salander 3’s aborted mission. Something had happened that was fit only for the dark. Somebody had wanted it that way, lights out, darkness within that greater darkness between the stars. There had only been two people, Ruth and Anson Tyrell, aboard the Salander 3 when it had left Earth.
And one human presence, Sarah herself, a child, when it had returned. That tended to reduce the number of possible suspects.