“Mr. Niemand—thank goodness you’re home!” The calendar on the wall spoke in its flutey, overexcited voice. “Terrible things have happened while you were away! Murder and ruin!”
Deckard ignored the calendar. In the fall of light from the room behind him, he saw a figure lying on the bed. Smoke from a strong tobacco, more expensive than anything available in the colony’s black market, drifted as a thin grey wraith to his nostrils. The figure on the bed brought the cigarette to her lips and inhaled; the small glow of fire drew the familiar angles and shadows of Sarah Tyrell’s face. She didn’t even bother to look at him, but went on gazing abstractedly up at the water-stained ceiling, her dark hair unbound and spread across the pillow.
“You’re home,” said Deckard. He sat down on the edge of the bed. “Where’d you go?”
“Far, far away Ash drifted, unnoticed by her, across the back of her hand and onto the blanket. “You’d be amazed, probably, if you knew.”
“Probably so.” He let his shoulders slump forward, his forearms against his knees, tiredness stepping along the chain of his bowed spine. The clock on the little bedside table was gone, its metal and plastic bits scattered outside.
No great loss; he’d hated the clock and its idiot chatter as much as Sarah had.
Clockless and shadowed, the room seemed to exist outside of time. From the corner of his eye, he could see her without effort. Overlays of memory slid beneath the thinning smoke. They looked so much alike, this face and that other; identical, as Eldon Tyrell had meant for them to be. He had no need to close his eyes in this darkness; he could see the other one, the one he’d loved, the dead one. Deckard had to make a dead thing out of himself, something without desire, to keep from lying down beside her. Taking her in his arms, bringing his face to hers, smoke and kiss and the presence of her body, alive and real and an illusion. He wouldn’t have cared .
The calendar on the wall sensed the deep reverie into which he had fallen.
“Mr. Niemand,” it whispered, as though fearful of intruding. “There’s something you should know.”
He didn’t look up from his own hands dangling empty before him. A slow nod and sigh. “What’s that?”
“There’s somebody else here. I mean, besides you and Mrs. Niemand.”
Deckard raised his head, taking a slow scan across the room. He stopped when he encountered another pair of eyes gazing back at him. “Who are you?”
A little girl, with dark hair drawn back into a braid, regarded him somberly.
“Don’t you know?” She sat on one of the chairs from the kitchen area table that had been dragged into the bedroom’s corner. The girl tossed her head so that the braid fell across one shoulder. “She knows.”
He looked over at Sarah, lying on the bed. “What the hell’s going on? Who’s this?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” Sarah emitted a groan of disgust. She kneaded her brow with one hand. “Don’t you start with that.” Pushing herself up against the wall behind the bed, she fixed an angry glare upon him. “You know there isn’t anyone there. Don’t pretend you see someone.”
For a moment longer, Deckard gazed into the dark centers of the woman’s eyes, then turned back toward the presence in the room.
The girl shrugged and shook her head. “That’s the way she’s been talking. She didn’t believe those other two men, either, when they said they saw me.” The girl lifted her chin in obstinate defiance. “She doesn’t think I’m real. But I am.”
Deckard nodded. “She has her little ways.” He looked back at Sarah. “Where’d she come from? Why did you bring her here?”
“Now I’m really pissed off.” In swift, angry motion, Sarah swung her legs over the side of the bed; she jabbed her cigarette out against the table as if she could drive it through the imitation wood like a nail. “You know goddamn well where she comes from. She comes from whatever weird little scheme you and those die-hard Tyrell Corporation loyalists must have cooked up together. I don’t know what kind of twisted gaslight agenda you people thought you could get rolling.” She turned a fierce, annihilating glare upon him. “Maybe you wanted to drive me even crazier than I already am. Though why you’d want to bother is beyond me. I’m already at the limit.” Her words came through gritted teeth. “I can see her, but I’m supposed to; she’s my hallucination.”
He resisted the temptation to go over and grab Sarah by both shoulders and rock some sense into her. “Look,” said Deckard, setting a hand flat on the bed. “I’m not going to go into details now, but I just came from someplace that doesn’t exist. Not the way that real things exist. So I know the difference. There’s a girl sitting in this room with us, and I want to know what she’s doing here. That’s all.”
The radiation that lasered out from beneath Sarah’s eyelids went up another notch in lethality. “Fuck you, Deckard.” She stood up and strode past him, out to the front part of the hovel.
“All right.” Every encounter with Sarah Tyrell left him feeling exhausted, not the least of which came from the cognitive warpage of seeing the face of the woman he’d loved looking back at him with utter contempt and hatred. He leaned forward and placed his hand gently on top of the little girl’s. “So you’ll have to tell me. What’s your name?”
“You know.”
“No, I don’t.” Deckard tried to smile as gently as possible. “I really don’t.”
“I’m Rachael.” She looked straight back into his eyes. “My name’s Rachael He felt the room go still around him, around the two of them, himself and the grave, dark-haired little girl. A moment of stopped time, as though the world itself had held its breath, caught the way his was, next to his heart.
“Is this some kind of a joke?” He spoke without anger, all harshness filtered out of his voice. The child’s hand, a thing of warmth and flesh and skin, was tangible beneath his palm. “I won’t be mad—I won’t be mad at you—if it is. Did somebody tell you to say that?”
“Of course not.” She looked offended. “It’s my name. It’s my real, real name.”
A pitying expression came into her eyes. “I don’t have any other.”
The calendar on the wall rustled its pages. “I don’t think she’s lying, Mr.
Niemand.”
“No . . . I don’t think she is, either.” He didn’t look up at the calendar and its photogenic scene of a vanished wilderness. “That’s not the problem.”
Deckard’s gaze was still held by the unblinking regard of the child. Sometimes people lied and sometimes they didn’t; sometimes they simply believed things that weren’t true. “What’s your last name?”
She shook her head, the thick dark braid swinging behind her. “I don’t know.
Nobody ever told me that.”
“Who are your parents?”
A cloud passed behind her eyes. “They’re dead. They’ve been dead a long, long time.”
Around them, in the silent room and the world outside the hovel’s thinly fabricated walls, time had started up again; Deckard could feel his heart once more moving through its paces. Something had happened, he knew; a door had opened to some other time, and this child had stepped through. It’s her, thought Deckard. She’s not lying. Rachael .
He could see it in the child’s face. In the darkness of her hair, bound behind her; in the open, unashamed eyes; in the calm self-possession that radiated through every posture and motion of the small frame. He had loved, kissed and held in his embrace, slept with an adult Rachael, if a replicant that would live only four years total could be called an adult; she had been created that way, her childhood a false memory stolen from the human woman Sarah Tyrell and implanted inside her head. He had never seen Rachael as a child, except for a moment, a dehydrated slice of time; in the photos that she had brought to his apartment, that she had shown to him in a futile attempt to prove that she was human. Those had been photos of Sarah, he knew, or else total fabrications, bad-faith evidence concocted in Eldon Tyrell’s workshops, as phony as the ones that the replicant Kowalski had been obsessed with. There was no need for Deckard to have seen those old photographs, the ones that the adult Rachael’s trembling hand had thrust toward him, to recognize the child now sitting a few feet away. He could have closed his eyes, or kept the room in absolute darkness, not even seen the child’s eyes and face, and he would have known that Rachael—not the woman he’d loved, as a woman, but some aspect of her—was there with him.