“Pygmalion.” One word was all that Deckard spoke.
“What do you mean?”
There were still things that she needed to know. And that he had to tell her.
“An old, old story,” said Deckard. “About someone who fell in love with his own creation.”
Sarah’s gaze narrowed above the gun. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“It’s simple.” With one hand, Deckard brushed rain from the side of his face.
“When the Sal ander 3 left Earth, heading out on its mission to the Proxima system . . . there were no humans aboard it. Ruth and Anson Tyrell—the parents of you and your twin sister, Rachael—they weren’t humans. They were replicants.”
A look of panic flitted behind Sarah’s widened eyes. “That’s . . . that’s impossible.”
“Nothing is impossible.” Deckard gazed at her sadly, as though regretting the need to speak of these things. “Especially not when it’s part of the Tyrell Corporation’s secret history. There’s stuff you just don’t know about. Eldon Tyrell did have a brother . . . but that brother died when he was a child. The Anson Tyrell that headed out to the Proxima system aboard the Salander 3 was a replicant, created in the Tyrell Corporation’s labs as a special, top-secret project. As was the female replicant they named Ruth. Neither one of them knew that they were replicants; like the adult Rachael-when I first met her at the Tyrell Corporation headquarters—they thought they were human. And they went on the Salander 3 still believing that. They were misled about their own nature, what kind of creatures they were, so it’s no surprise that they didn’t know the actual reason for the Salander 3’s so-called mission to the Proxima system.”
“Which was? According to you, I mean.”
He shook his head. “It’s not just according to me. I didn’t figure out all this stuff—I wouldn’t have been able to.”
“Somebody told you this?” A cold fury narrowed Sarah’s gaze. “Who?”
“Nobody you can touch. He’s dead now.” Deckard could still hear the other man’s voice inside his head, the secrets that Marley had imparted to him. All the secrets of the world that Sarah Tyrell lived in, the world that she could never escape, no matter how she tried. The secrets that she had never known, that her uncle had never told her, that Eldon Tyrell had done his best to make certain she never found out. Deckard could see Marley leaning across the table in the bar’s little booth, looking straight into his eyes . . . and seeing reality there. That all the words Marley spoke, all the connected bits of what had been purged from the Tyrell Corporation archives, were true. Eldon Tyrell had tried to murder the past, to make it cease to be . . . but he’d failed.
The past still existed. The record of it, the history of the Salander 3 expedition—Eldon Tyrell had been able to do whatever he wanted with his corporation’s archives, but even he hadn’t been able to touch the U.N.’s top-secret databases. The rep-symps that Marley had worked for had managed to infiltrate the U.N.’s emigration agency, and they had found the truth, the evidence of that which they had already come to suspect.
Marley had told him . . . and now Deckard spoke the same words to the woman standing in front of him.
“The Salander 3 was never meant to reach the Prox system.” He watched Sarah’s reaction to what he told her. “It didn’t need to for Eldon Tyrell to find out what he wanted to know.” The things that Marley had told him back in the bar in the Martian emigrant colony—Deckard recited them now, a well-memorized lesson. “All that the mission needed to accomplish was to get beyond the reach of the Earth’s morphogenetic field. That’s what keeps humans—and replicants—the way they are. On Earth, replicants don’t reproduce; they don’t have children. They can’t; it’s physiologically impossible. But what the Salander 3’s mission showed was that all that changes out in the stars. There had been indications of this before, but Eldon Tyrell required proof. And he got it.” Deckard nodded toward the figure before him. “You’re the proof that the Salander 3 returned with. You and your twin sister, Rachael. The little girl down below us. The ship came back with the first two replicant children. The children born to the replicants that Eldon Tyrell had sent out there.”
Rain had darkened Sarah’s hair, a shining black curve having come loose from where it’d been bound and now trailing alongside her throat. “That can’t be The gun in her hand was studded with drops of water, like domed black sequins. “You’re lying .
He pointed to the photograph in her other hand. “There’s the proof. That what I’m saying is true.”
Her dark eyes flared in anger. “This is nothing!” Sarah flung the picture away; it landed facedown on the wet roof. “I don’t know where you got that thing, and I don’t care—”
“I got it,” said Deckard, “from your mother. From the replicant Ruth Tyrell.
In a way, that is; she had hidden it back aboard the Sal ander 3. Inside one of the first aid kits on the ship; she just had time to do that before she was hunted down and killed by your father.”
“Really?” Sarah looked scornful. “And why would she want to do that?”
“I don’t know.” He gazed down at his own rain-wet hands for a moment. “Maybe she had found out something. Maybe she suspected the truth about herself and about her children. There might have been a slip, something in the Salander 3’s computers that had been inadvertently left there by Eldon Tyrell, some little clue about the ship’s mission.” Deckard shrugged. “Or maybe not. Maybe it was just something that Ruth knew . . . inside herself. And she knew she had to leave a message, some kind of proof. So that people would know what had happened. And they did. They found the photograph, then hid it again, even better. It became a little sacred object, a relic. A holy thing. But it wasn’t really for them; that wasn’t why Ruth hid it there. It was for you.” He brought his gaze back to Sarah’s eyes. “So you would know. Her daughters.”
The scornful expression had changed to one of desperation. “I still don’t believe it. That photograph could’ve been faked—”
“Maybe so. But the things that happened aboard the Salander 3—the things you saw when you went there again, when you saw the past-those things couldn’t have been faked. It really happened—that your father killed Ruth, that he would have killed you and your sister, Rachael, as well, if she hadn’t managed to protect you.” Deckard folded his arms across his chest.
“There’s only one possible explanation for all of that. The replicant named Anson Tyrell wouldn’t have gone insane-murderously insane—for no reason. But the reason he did had been programmed inside him. By Eldon Tyrell. As a fail-safe protection in case it turned out that replicants could be made capable of reproducing themselves. He wanted to make sure that that knowledge was suppressed, so he built into Anson’s brain a whole destructive sequence, a ‘stepfather syndrome’ based on primitive behavior patterns. And it worked; your father would’ve killed both you and your sister, Rachael, if he had been able to get to you. As it turned out, it was still enough to destroy both your mother and your father. That was enough; Eldon Tyrell could cover up or get rid of the other evidence about what had happened out there, what it meant. The only thing he didn’t do was go ahead and have the two children destroyed, the daughters of the replicants he’d sent out on the Salander 3. Maybe it was guilt, maybe it was something else . . . but he let you live. Rachael went on sleeping in the transit chamber on board the ship, and you became his niece. Even you believed it—and why shouldn’t you have? You thought you were human; you thought you were the original, the template, for the replicant Rachael that Eldon Tyrell created later.” Deckard tilted his head back, letting the rain strike his eyelids, then looked over at Sarah again. “You just didn’t know that that Rachael, the adult one, was a copy of a copy. A replicant of a replicant. Just because she wasn’t a human that doesn’t mean you’re one.”