“What’s that supposed to be?” She leaned back, regarding the object with suspicion. “Something you and your repsymp friends faked up?”
“No—” He shook his head. “This is the real thing. Go on, take it.”
Keeping the gun levelled at him, Sarah reached out and grasped the photograph between her own thumb and forefinger. She turned it around and studied it. “I don’t get it,” she announced after a few seconds. Her brow creased. “Who is it?”
“Come on, Sarah. You know.” He tried to make his words as gentle as possible.
“You’ve seen them before. You’ve seen other pictures. They’re your parents.”
She said nothing. Deckard watched her staring at the photo. The image it contained was in his head as well, engraved there from the moment he had first seen it. And Marley’s voice, telling him what it meant; those were fused together, insoluble. He knew what Sarah was looking at: a photo of a bed, the sheets and covers all white, a woman sitting up with the pillows mounded behind her; the woman was smiling, as was the man standing beside the bed, leaning down to get his face close to hers, the two of them looking into the lens of the camera. It must have been mounted on a tripod or a high shelf; the remote control was just visible in the man’s grasp, his thumb pressing down the button that had flicked the camera’s shutter.
The two people were Ruth and Anson Tyrell—the same two people, the couple, that Deckard had seen in another old photograph, a newspaper clipping on the wall of a cramped, cluttered office at the Van Nuys Pet Hospital, back in the real L.A. on Earth. A moment of the past, a frozen section of time, caught and preserved; those people had been alive once, and then they had become memories.
“When The expression on Sarah’s face grew more troubled. “When was this taken?”
“You can figure it out,” said Deckard. He made no move from the parapet he leaned against, but pointed to the photo in the woman’s hand. “Look at what he’s wearing.” That was also the same as it had been in the clipping on Isidore’s office wall. “Look at the emblem on the breast pocket. That’s the jumpsuit from the expedition. The picture was taken on board the Salander 3.”
He could tell, just from watching, that the meaning of the photograph was becoming clear for her. Bit by bit, as though the image was gradually moving into focus, the past it held becoming real once again.
“This wasn’t on Earth.” Sarah raised the photograph higher, a few drops of rain spattering against its empty white backing. “This must have been when they were still on their way to the Proxima system .
“That’s right.” Deckard nodded. “Before . . . those other things happened.”
In the artificial night, the glow from the lights suspended above was enough for her to make out all the details of the old photograph. There were more than just the two people, the adults, Ruth and Anson Tyrell, held in the image.
“If that’s my parents Sarah spoke slowly, wonderingly. “Then . . . that must be me.” She used the tip of the gun’s muzzle to point. “One of those .
That was what he had wanted her to see. What she needed to see. The photo’s image was just as clear in Deckard’s thoughts, as clear as it had been when Marley had taken it from the hiding place in the Salander 3’s first aid kit and had shown it to him.
There were two infants cradled against the new mother’s breast, one nestled in the crook of each arm. “Your mother had twins,” said Deckard simply. In that faraway time, on board the galleon, somewhere between Earth and the stars, Ruth Tyrell had looked exhausted but happy, smiling at the camera. In the photograph, Anson Tyrell had the traditional dazed grin. “Your father delivered them with the help of the Salander 3’s built-in medical circuits.”
“Twins Sarah’s voice was a murmur. “There were two of us .
Deckard didn’t stir from his position at the building’s edge. “Twin female infants.” He repeated verbatim what Marley had told him. “Two healthy baby girls. You and your sister. Sarah . . . and Rachael She looked up at Deckard when he spoke the second name. “My sister?” Sarah shook her head in disbelief. “That’s impossible.”
“It’s true,” said Deckard. “And there’s proof. The little girl downstairs, inside this building-her name really is Rachael. She’s not a hallucination.
She’s your twin sister.”
“Oh, of course.” Sarah gave a quick, sharp laugh. “Even though she’s-what?-ten years old? There’s a problem with that, Deckard. I’m sure you can see it.”
“There’s no problem. You and the little girl were born at the same time . . . or a few minutes apart. You’re twins. But you know that bad things happened aboard the Salander 3; you know because you saw them when you went there again. After you and Rachael were born, something happened. To your father. And then a lot of bad things happened. Your mother managed to save not only you but your twin sister, Rachael, as well. But your mother died in the process—she was killed by the man who loved her. Insane when he killed her; sane—or close enough-when he killed himself.”
“Still a problem, Deckard. Even if everything you say is true—” Sarah held the photo in one hand and the gun, still trained on him, in the other. “There was only one child taken off the Salander 3 when it returned to Earth. And that was me.”
“That’s right.” He returned her level gaze, straight into Sarah’s eyes. “Your sister was left on board the Salander 3. In the sleep transport chamber that was part of the ship’s equipment.” When Marley had told him, he’d had a vision of the infant, a small, helpless thing inside the glass-lidded coffin, another of the suspended-animation devices like the one his own Rachael had slept and died in. “That was where your mother hid her to save her from your father. You were still in your mother’s arms when your father killed her. Then the ship’s autonomic circuits took care of you on the voyage back to Earth. And all the while, your twin sister, Rachael, slept on inside the transport chamber. Slept and didn’t age—even after the Salander 3 had returned home and you were taken from it. You’re right; only one child was taken from the ship. Your twin sister, Rachael, was either overlooked where she was sleeping inside the transport chamber—the Tyrell Corporation employees who went aboard might not have searched very thoroughly, given the things they found when they went in—or she might’ve been deliberately left there. Either on Eldon Tyrell’s orders or someone else’s; I don’t know. That part’s still a mystery. Just like it’s a mystery as to who took your sister, Rachael, out of the transport chamber ten years ago and left her there for the Salander 3’s autonomic circuits to rear. That might’ve been done on your uncle’s orders as well.” Deckard could hear a grating edge in his own voice. “He’d already started to let some of his-shall we say?-personal obsessions take over his thinking. That’s what led him to have another Rachael created, a replicant based on you.” An invisible knife carved away another section of Deckard’s heart as he found himself speaking so coldly of the origins of the woman with whom he’d fallen in love. “Maybe Eldon Tyrell was too impatient to wait for the real Rachael, the child still inside the Salander 3, to grow up. So he found another way to get what he wanted.”
“Don’t be too hard on him.” Sarah looked at the photo again. “I hated him and I wasn’t sorry to hear that he was dead—but I’ve got a right to feel that way.
You don’t. My uncle was just another poor bastard who loved something too much. He must’ve loved Ruth . . . a great deal.” Her voice went softer. “But he couldn’t have her. Because she loved his brother, Anson, my father. And she went off with him. Far, far away Sarah slowly shook her head. “And that’s what made him do the things he did, with me and with Rachael, the replicant he created. Because he loved her. He loved Ruth.”