BLADE RUNNER: REPLICANT NIOHT 


Copyright (c) 1996 by Philip K. Dick Trust 


Blade Runner: replicant night! K.W. Jeter. 


For Russ Galen 


Scanned by Pete256 8/05/2002 


Wake up. . . 
He'd heard those words, that voice, before. Deckard wondered, for a moment, if 
he were dreaming. But if he were dreaming-I'd be able to breathe, he thought. 
And right now, in this segment of time, all he could feel were the doubled 
fists at his throat, the tight grip on the front of his jacket that lifted him 
clear of the Los Angeles street's mirror-wet and rubbled surface. In his 
vision, as he dangled from the choking hook of factory-made bone and flesh, 
all that remained was the face of Leon Kowalski and his brown-toothed grin of 
fierce, delighted triumph. 
The other's stiff-haired knuckles thrust right up under Deckard's chin, 
forcing his head back enough to make him dizzily imagine the passage of air 
snapping free from the straining lungs in his chest. He could just make out, 
at the lower limit of his vision, his own hands grabbing onto Kowalski's 
wrists, thick and sinew-taut, more like the armatures of a lethal machine than 
anything human. His hands were powerless, unable to force apart the 
replicant's clench. 
"Wakeup . . , 
The same words, a loop of past event repeating inside Deckard's head. An echo, 
perhaps; because he knew the other-the replicant, his murderer-had said it 
only once. But he'd known it was coming. Those words . . . and his own death. 
Everything had to happen, just as it had before. Just as he knew it would. 
Echo, dream, memory . . . or vision; it didn't matter. What was important was 
that there had been a gun in Deckard's hands, in the hands that were now 
clawing to let desperate air into his throat. His gun, the heavy black piece 
that was standard issue in the LAPD's blade runner unit, a piece that could 
blow a hole through the back of a fleeing replicant and an even larger, 
ragged-edged hole through its front. 
And that had happened as well. Echo of time, echo of sound, the impact of the 
gun's roaring explosion travelling up Deckard's outstretched arms, locked and 
aimed, as it had so many times and so many replicants before. While the sound 
of death itself had slammed off the city's close-pressed walls, the intricate 
neon of kanji and corporate logos shivering as though with a sympathetic fear, 
the honed leading edge of the shot and its lower-pitched trail rolling over 
the street's crowded, incurious faces. All of them as used to death as Deckard 
was, just from living in L.A.; he knew they could watch him being pulled apart 
by Kowalski with the same indifferent gazes they had swung toward the 
replicant Zhora's bullet-driven terminal arc. 
When he'd still had the gun, he'd walked with the black piece dangling at his 
side, its weight pulling down his hand the same way it'd dragged rocklike the 
shoulder holster strapped beneath his long coat. Rivulets of L.A. 's monsoon 
rains and his own sweat had oozed beneath his shirt cuff, across the back of 
his hand, into the checked, death-heated grip inside the aching curve of his 
palm. He'd walked across spearlike shards of glass crunching under his shoes. 
The frames of the store windows through which Zhora's dying body had crashed 
were transformed into gaping mouths 
ringed with transparent, blood-flecked teeth. He'd walked and stood over her, 



his sight framing a vision of empty hands and empty face, eyes void as 
photo-receptors unplugged from any power source. All life fled, leaked from 
the raw hole between her hidden breasts, dead replicant flesh looking just the 
same as human. The furious energy, the animal grace and fear, that had 
impelled her dodging and running through the streets' closing trap, spent and 
diluted by the drops of tear-warm rain spattering across the pavement's red 
lace. Deckard's energy, that of the hunter, also gone. The chase, from the 
moment Zhora had wheeled about in her dressing room at Taffy Lewis's club down 
in Chinatown's First Sector and nailed him with a hard blow to the forehead, 
then all the weaving among crowds and dead-run stalking over the metal roofs 
of the traffic-stalled cars-that hadn't exhausted him. It'd been the end of 
the chase, the shot, his own will inside the bullet. That had struck and 
killed, a red kiss centered on her naked shoulder blades. That had seemed, for 
a moment, to kill him as well. 
Exhaustion had made it possible for the other escaped replicant to get the 
drop on Deckard, to pull him between two segmented refuse haulers, then smack 
the gun out of his grip like swatting a fly and send it spinning out toward 
the street. So exhausted that he hadn't been surprised at all when Kowalski, 
eyes maddened by the witnessing of the female's death, had picked him up like 
a rag doll and slammed him against the side of one hauler, spine leaving a 
buckled indentation in the carapacelike metal. And words, spat out angry and 
sneering, something with which Kowalski could hammer the killer. 
How old am I? Then-My birthday's April 10, 2017. How long do I live? 
Deckard had told him the answer, gasped it out with the last of his breath. 
Four years. That was how long all the Nexus-6 replicants had been given. They 
carried their own clock-ticking deaths inside their cells, more certain than 
any blade runner's gun. 
The answer hadn't been to Leon Kowalski's liking, though he must have known it 
already. His eyes had gone wider and 
even more crazed. More than you. More than the man dangling from his fists had 
to live 
"Wake up!" 
But that's wrong, thought Deckard. The other's face, mottled in his sight with 
the black swirling dots of oxygen starvation, grinned up at him. The operating 
remnants of his brain could remember what had happened before. Kowalski hadn't 
shouted the words, not that loud; he'd mouthed them softly, as though savoring 
their taste between his teeth. Those words, and the words that'd come after. 
And he didn't lift me so far off the ground . 
"Wake up! Time to die!" 
He could feel himself dangling in air, could hear the replicant's voice, the 
words shouted or whispered-it didn't matter now. It hadn't mattered before. 
All that mattered was the crushing pressure on his throat, the weight of his 
own body against Kowalski's fists squeezing off the city's humid air from his 
lungs. The other's words roared inside his head, each syllable a pulse of 
blood against his skull's thin shell of bone. Now the voice, the shout, seemed 
to hammer right at his ears. Maybe that's why it sounds so loud, thought a 
cold, abstracted part of Deckard, watching himself die. Because I know . 
He knew what happened next. What would happen, had already happened; 
foreordained, scripted, bolted to the iron rails of the past, unswerving as 
those of the rep train that rolled in the darkness beneath the dark city. 
Time to die . 
He wondered what was taking so long. Where is she? wondered Deckard. She was 
supposed to have been here by now . 
Kowalski's fists lifted him higher, his spine arching backward. The sky 
wheeled in Deckard's sight, needles of stars and gouts of flame penetrating 
the storm clouds above the L.A. towers. Police spinners drew distant, 
slow-motion traces of light, while the hectoring U.N. advert blimp cruised 
lower, seemingly within reach of his hand if he could've taken it away from 
the replicant's choking grasp. Emigrant vistas swam across the giant screen 
imbedded in the midst of the 



blimp's spiked antennae; an even larger voice boomingly cajoled him to seek a 
new life in the off-world colonies. What a good idea, that other part of him 
mused. His old life was almost gone. 
The city's faces roiled across his sight; all of them, indifferent or hostile, 
eyes hidden behind black visor strips or magnified and glittering behind 
chrome-ringed fish-eye lenses. Chemical-laced tears ran down pallid cheeks, 
laughter broke past doubled ranks of filed teeth; a row of Taiwanese Schwinn 
clones jangled the bells on their handlebars, to cut through and then be 
swallowed up by the two-way rivers of foot and motor traffic. The black dots 
in Deckard's vision had grown larger and started to coalesce. Beyond them, he 
could see another face, made of a grid of photons. A woman in geisha-lite 
drag, Euro-ized kabukoid makeup and perfect black-shellac hair; she smiled 
with ancient suavity at the Swiss pharmaceutical capsule on her fingertips, 
then swallowed it, her coquette smile and glance turning even more mysterious. 
He didn't know her name, or even what she was selling; he had never known, 
during all the time he had walked and lived and killed inside the traplike 
city, and the woman had floated above him like some anonymous, disdainful 
angel. In his anoxic delirium, he could imagine that she was about to lean 
down from the ad-screen and bestow a kiss upon him . 
The Asian woman's face disappeared, replaced by the only one that mattered. 
Kowalski pulled him close, not for a kiss but to snap the vertebrae at the 
hinge of Deckard's neck. He'd be paralyzed before he was dead, but only for a 
few seconds, until Kowalski finished him off. 
"Wake up! Time to die . 
Deckard heard the words again, but knew it was only memory. He saw Kowalski's 
smile and nothing else, as the replicant jabbed two fingers toward Deckard's 
eye sockets. 
Maybe they finally got it right, he thought. This time it'll be different . . 
But it wasn't. Even as he looked down at the other's face, time started up 
again, the loop running as it had before. As it had so long ago. The 
replicant's expression changed to one 
of stunned bewilderment. The light behind Kowalski's eyes dwindled to a spark, 
then died out, as the life that the T~rre1l Corporation had given him rushed 
from the red flower, torn flesh and white thorns of bone splinters, that had 
burst from his forehead. The bullet had passed all the way through and 
vanished, tumbling somewhere beyond Deckard's shoulder. 
The thing that had been Kowalski crumpled forward, falling onto Deckard and 
trapping him against the shining wet pavement. Deckard clawed out from beneath 
him and stood upright again, regaining his balance and his breath. His vision 
shifted, from blurred to focussed, close to medium distance; Rachael stood at 
the mouth of the alley, swathed in high-collared fur, the gun that Kowalski 
had knocked away now clasped in both her hands-it must have landed right at 
her feet-and trembling from the shock of its firing, the slight motion of the 
trigger that had placed the steel-jacketed bullet like a quick finger tap at 
the back of Kowalski's head. She looked dazed, lips parted to draw in her own 
held breath; just as though she had never killed anyone before. As though this 
were the first time this had happened. 
His gaze went back down to the dead replicant at his feet. Or supposedly dead. 
He's doing a good job, thought Deckard. Kowalski looked as dead as a real 
corpse. 
"Come on, get up-" Deckard kept his voice lowered, so that none of the on-set 
microphones would pick it up. "It's a wrap, they got it all on tape. You can 
get up now." 
Blood welled from the hole in Kowalski's shattered brow. 
Then Deckard knew it was real. 
"What the hell At the edge of the soundstage, where the fake streets, the 
re-created Los Angeles, gave way to bare dry concrete and steel, the flooring 
laced with thick power cables and data conduits like black snakes-Deckard 
stood up, angrily ripping the headphones away from his ears. The folding chair 
toppled over as he threw the 'phones at the central monitor, the one that had 



shown the view from the eyes of the other Deckard, the fake one, the one that 
had been dangling from the now-dead replicant's fists. Across the smaller 
screens, the angles of all the other video-cams unfolded like a magician's 
pack of cards. 
"Now what?" The close-up on the fake Rachael showed her dropping out of 
character, the look of shock on her face transmuted to that of a disgusted 
professional as she let the heavy gun hang at the end of her arm. She sighed 
wearily. "Christ, this shoot's taking forever." 
Deckard ignored her, striding past the cameras on their automated tracking 
booms, the skeletal apparatuses of light and event. The drizzle from the 
overhead rain gantry ran off his jacket sleeves, the grid underneath the 
soundstage sucking away the excess from the glossily photogenic puddles. He 
pushed aside the faux Deckard, the actor playing him, and stood looking down 
at Kowalski. At what was left of the replicant, the bleeding artificial flesh. 
"Please A hand clutched ineffectually at his elbow. "Mr. Deckard ... you 
can't just-" 
He turned angrily upon the production assistant, a tiny androgynous figure 
with heavy retro black-framed glasses. "It wasn't supposed to happen this 
way!" He jabbed his finger at the assistant, who fended it off with an 
upraised clipboard. "I was told you weren't going to kill anyone!" The 
circumference of his gaze tinged with red as he looked back toward the crew 
ringing the soundstage. "Where's Urbenton?" 
That was the name of the director. Who was conspicuously missing, the folding 
chair that had usually supported his pudgy frame now unoccupied. Chickenshit 
sonuva bitch- Deckard felt his teeth grinding together. The director must've 
snuck out after the video recorders had started rolling, while Deckard had 
been wrapped in the view from the cam monitors, watching the re-creation of 
his own past. Urbenton would've known that Deckard would go ballistic when a 
real bullet, from a real gun, wound up churning through someone's brain. 
"Come on, man The actor playing him-not a replicant like the one who had 
been playing Kowalski, but an actual human-tried out as peacemaker. "It can't 
all be special effects, you know. Sometimes you gotta go for realism." 
"Get away from me." Revulsion worked its way up Deckard's throat, choking him 
as though the replicant's big hands had been around his own neck instead of 
the other 
z 


n 
man's. The actor didn't even look that much like him, or at least not yet. 
Like most of the talent in the video industry, in addition to the remote cam 
implanted behind one eye, the actor also had barely visible tracker dots sewn 
under his skin, so that in postproduction another's face could be ceegeed over 
the one he'd been born with. 
That new face would've been the real Deckard's. But not now, he fumed. Not if 
I can help it. "So where is he?" Deckard stopped just short of gathering up 
the front of the assistant's collar in his hand and squeezing tight, the way 
the dead Kowalski had done to the human actor. "Where's Urbenton?" 
"I ... I don't know The assistant retreated, sweating hands clasped to the 



clipboard. "He got called away . 
"Yeah, right. I bet." Deckard stepped over the corpse and started toward the 
soundstage's big rolling doors and the interlocking corridors and spaces of 
the studio complex beyond. "I'll find him myself. He's got one hell of a lot 
of explaining to do." 
He didn't look over his shoulder as he strode away. But he could sense the 
fake L.A. dying its own death, the constant artificial rain stopping, the 
vehicles halting and being shut off in the middle of the crowded street, the 
actors and extras walking off the set. The replica blimp, a tenth the size of 
the one that had once actually floated above the city, dangled inert from the 
overhead rigging, adscreen blank and faceless. 
The city's walls parted as the grips moved the scenery back. There was nothing 
behind them except dust and stubbed-out cigarettes, and a few scattered drops 
of blood. 
A silver crescent in the sky, hanging below him. Dave Holden thought it looked 
like some kind of Islamic emblem, complete to the glittering star between the 
points of its horns. The artificial moon's gravitational field tilted the 
skiff's gimballed pilot's seat, hanging him upside down inside the tiny 
interplanetary craft. Inside the cramped cockpit area, there was barely room 
enough for himself and the cargo strapped onto the empty seat beside him. 
Which spoke now: "You're in big trouble, pal." The briefcase kept its voice 
level and calm, as though unconcerned with human problems. 
Holden glanced over at the briefcase. Plain black, a decent grade of 
leatherette, chrome snaps and bits around the handle. It looked like the exact 
sort that millions of junior execs carried into office towers every morning, 
back on Earth. By rights, it shouldn't have been talking at all; that it was 
doing so indicated the long-standing personal relationship between the two of 
them. 
"Big, big trouble." The briefcase continued its simple, ominous 
pronouncements. 
"I know-" Holden reached out to the control panel and dialed the skiff's 
guidance system toward the silver crescent's intake beam. "I breathe trouble." 
More than metaphor: 
the lungs in his chest, and the heart between them, were efficient constructs 
of Teflon and surgical steel. His original cardiopulmonary system had been 
blown out his back by an escaped replicant named Leon Kowalski. Back on Earth, 
back in the L.A. from which he and the briefcase had just flown. That bullet 
had been a couple of years ago; there had been others before and since then, 
some of which he'd fired, others that'd been fired at him. The bio-mechanical 
lungs sucked whiffs of imminent death and left them on his tongue. Tasting 
like the ashes of the cigarettes the LAPD doctors had made him give up. 
"Breathe it out, too." 
"You're probably going to die." 
"Coming from you, that's good." Holden knew that the briefcase's voice was the 
voice of the dead. A dead man speaking. It didn't matter whether that man, 
when alive, had been human or not. "You'd know, wouldn't you?" 
If the briefcase had had shoulders, it would've shrugged. "Just leveling with 
you. That's all." 
Holden ignored the last bit. Lights had started flashing on the control panel, 
indicating that the intake beam had locked onto the skiff. One light, he knew, 
would stay yellow for a few more seconds; that was the window of opportunity 
for abandoning the intake approach, for breaking off and turning the little 
craft around. And heading back to Earth or anywhere else his own death didn't 
seem quite so probable. 
He kept his hands folded in his lap, watching and waiting until the yellow 
light disappeared, replaced by the green one right next to it. They were going 
in. 
The silver crescent loomed bigger and brighter in the skiff's viewscreen. He 
could make out the segmented panels that formed its curved, double-tapered 
shape. Croissant, thought Holden. Thinking of French bakery goods, stuff 



served with real coffee. The same word, actually. He knew his mind was 
rattling on, filling up the empty corridors inside 
his head with nonsense. So there wouldn't be room for worrying about the 
job he'd come all this way to Outer Hollywood to do. 
A delivery job. Once I was a blade runner, he mused; now I'm some sort of 
errand boy. He didn't mind; he'd kept his gun when he'd quit the police 
department. That was the main thing: he needed it now more than before. 
The silver crescent grew larger, blocking out the pocked white shape of the 
real moon. Brown-mottled Earth lay somewhere behind the skiff; Holden didn't 
sweat the navigational fine points. Those had all been programmed in, along 
with the other details of the job. He glanced again at the briefcase, which 
had mercifully fallen silent. The initials on the small brass plaque under the 
handle read RMD. Not his, but those of the person to whom the briefcase was to 
be delivered. Then he can deal with it, thought Holden. He wondered if Mreally 
was Rick Deckard's middle initial, or whether that was just something that the 
people who'd put the briefcase together had made up out of thin air. 
Outer Hollywood filled the screen now; the intake beam had brought the skiff 
around to the landing bays on the curve's fat convex side. There'd been a 
single bright flash, the viewscreen's pixels max'd out, when the skiff had 
passed through the focussed reflection from the bank of mirrors that served as 
the crescent's attached star. Holden had caught a glimpse of the massive 
struts and triangulated framework that held the mirror bank between the 
station's horns. The open steel girders looked rusted-In a vacuum? he 
wondered; that's weird-and warped from neglect. Cables drifted loose like 
beheaded snakes; the motors and other servo-mechanisms that served to adjust 
the mirrors' angles and catch the unfiltered radiation from the sun, looked 
barely functional. Light bounced off some of the mirrors and out like idiot 
semaphores into space, instead of illuminating the soundstages behind Outer 
Hollywood's pressure-sealed windows. Holden figured that'd be all right if 
only night scenes were being taped . . . or scenes of L.A. during the rainy 
season. Anything cheerful enough to require an approximation of daylight, and 
they'd all be out of luck. 
The briefcase spoke up again. "You strapped?" 
For a moment, Holden thought the briefcase was referring to the pilot seat's 
restraints, then realized it had slipped into the urban patois it sometimes 
affected. He patted the holstered weapon inside his camel's-hair jacket. "Of 
course." The gun felt like a rock above one of his artificial lungs. 
"We'd be better off if it was me carrying you." A fretful note sounded in the 
briefcase's voice. 
He couldn't understand the briefcase's self-absorbed concern. The bastard's 
already dead, he thought. How could things get any worse for it? For himself, 
though . . . that was another matter. 
"Welcome to our faciliteezz." A canned female presence, bodiless and somewhere 
above his head, started talking as soon as Holden climbed out of the skiff's 
cockpit. "For all your video production needzz Something was wrong with 
the hidden p.a. speakers; the woman's sibilants came out as an insectoid hiss. 
"Zztock and cuzztom zzets . 
fully furnizzhed editing zzuites . . . all at a competitive rate. Why go 
elzzewhere?" 
The answer was obvious to Holden. He looked around with the briefcase dangling 
from his left hand, leaving his right to reach inside his jacket if need be. 
The orbital studio was close to being a ruin. Another hiss, of oxygen leaking 
through the landing bay's gaskets, sounded behind him. A chill draft in his 
face, like the wind down a deserted city alley, when even the last of the 
scavenger packs had crawled into their trash-lined burrows; no sky above, but 
instead a tangle of catwalks and wiring loops imbedded against the barely 
discernible visual field of the studio's welded exoskeleton. 
Big empty spaces; the recorded greeting was the only human element immediately 
apparent. Other than himself, Holden noted. 
"There should be some kind of offices," the briefcase suggested. "Farther 



inside. Where you can find out what set the shoot's been booked into." 
He started walking, footsteps hollow and loud on the 
metal flooring. The noise echoed down the hangarlike vista before him. The 
chances of his moving about, of making his delivery and leaving with no one's 
being aware, were nonexistent. 
The orbital studio's sets had already begun collapsing into one another, false 
fronts and flimsy backdrops muddling together from neglect and general 
entropy. Holden found himself, briefcase in hand, walking past a Tara-oid 
antebellum mansion, fluted pillars warping out of shape, that had somehow 
crept among the turrets and spires of medieval Prague. A glacier of artificial 
grass and poppies spilled down the cobbled street, studded with crosses 
stamped from plastic to resemble white-painted wood; the dates on them were 
all from some post-World War I soldiers' cemetery. Nobody was buried there, 
but the draft against Holden's face still smelled like death and slow decay. 
Scavengers existed everywhere; as in L.A., the real one, so above. He found 
one in the quieted battlefield set, an ersatz Flanders Field, next to the 
empty burial ground. The guy looked familiar enough, all scruffy beard and 
antique aviator goggles, tattered leathers flopping about a stunted frame; 
Holden wondered if he recognized him from somewhere in the real city's alleys. 
Brass shell casings clinked in the bag slung over the scavenger's shoulder. He 
looked up, the scarred bridge of his nose wrinkling to signal that he smelled 
cop, while the black-nailed fingertips poking through the ends of his gloves 
continued to groom the mock battlefield. Another scent lingered in the 
station's canned and recycled air, that of the live ammo that had been 
expended in the taping of some low-budget historical epic. 
"You can't hassle me, man." The scavenger's eyes narrowed behind the goggles. 
"I got a license." 
"Yeah, well, I don't." The stuff he'd been able to do before, back when he'd 
been with the department, had all been left behind him, on Earth and in that 
other life. "So remain sweatless." 
He was able to get approximate directions from the scav 
enger. And information: there was only one video shoot booked into the Outer 
Hollywood station, the first one after a long dry spell. 
"It's that damn Cinecitt Nuovo, down in Jakarta." The scavenger's gloved 
thumb looked like mice had been chewing on it in his sleep, as he gestured 
toward some point beyond the station's curved walls. "Those people've got all 
that EEC money behind 'em. And they suck up all the video productions now." 
Thnnels bigger around than the station ran underneath the Indonesian 
Entrepreneurial Republic, the spaces lit brighter than anything sun and 
corroding mirrors could provide. The scavenger looked wistfully at the meager 
gleanings in his sack. "Man, what I wouldn't give to be able to get in there. 
There must be all kinds of shit lying around." 
Holden wasn't interested in the sad intricacies of either the video or the 
scavenging business. "So where's the shoot going on?" 
The ragged glove pointed down the length of the station's arched central 
corridor. "You can't miss it. Go past the Vatican and that Scottish castle 
with the dry moat; that's where they've got their funky L.A. all set up. 
There's all kinds of people hanging around. Humans and replicants ...it's that 
kind of a shoot. Real blood-and-guts stuff." An eyebrow raised inside the 
goggles. "You might like it. Some kind of cop show." 
"I doubt it." Holden started walking again, briefcase in hand. "Seen it 
already." 
He saw the buildings up ahead, or at least part of them: 
the bottom sections of what were supposed to be L.A.'s canyoned towers, 
false-fronted and propped into position by the cobbled-together framework 
behind them. A small flutter ran through the bio-mech heart in his chest; some 
nameless emotion or twinge of adrenallike hormone. Not at seeing again the 
city he had left behind on Earth, or at the view of those streets in partial 
disassembly. It looks better this way, thought Holden. Not really fake at 
all-that was the marvel of it. As if the people, those shadowy corporations 



and architects, who'd built the Outer Hollywood station and then constructed 
the L.A. set inside it, had caught some realer-thanreal aspect of the 
city. Or at least the city that had existed inside Holden's mind, with his 
barely being aware of it until now. I always thought the other one was fake-he 
realized that now. Th see it this way, two-dimensional buildings with nothing 
behind their surfaces' retrofitted ventilation ducts and wiring conduits, with 
the people in the streets finally exposed as actors and anonymous bit players; 
with the monsoon rains shut off from above, the rusting pipes leaking only a 
few scattered drops; even the sky revealed as metal with nothing but vacuum 
beyond-it was an oddly comforting manifestation of his most paranoid 
dreamings. If only it were true, thought Holden. 
The vision passed, along with its soul-deep significance, as though he were 
waking from a dream. Like rolling over in bed, it seemed to him, and opening 
your eyes and seeing, instead of the woman you had gone there with, some 
deracinated corpse staring up at the ceiling with empty eye sockets 
or worse, nothing at all, just the empty shape, the indentation in the 
mattress and the other pillow, of someone who'd once been there but was never 
coming back . 
I woke up a long time ago, thought Holden glumly. That was why he'd wound up 
quitting the department, leaving the blade runner unit. Even going over to the 
other side . 
"You're wasting time." The briefcase spoke up, its voice kept low enough that 
only Holden would hear it. "You may not have anything on your agenda, but I've 
got stuff to do. So just go find Deckard, and let's get on with it." 
Nagged by hand luggage; that was what life had come to. Or what there was left 
of it; the revelatory vision of the faux L.A. and his deep ruminations thereon 
had caused him to let his guard down. If anybody had wanted to interfere with 
his delivery job, all someone would've had to have done was walk up behind him 
and take off the back of his head with one of the pieces of rusting lighting 
frame that lay all around the station's floor. 
The L.A. set was sunk lower than where Holden stood watching; he figured the 
arrangement probably had something 
to do with the plumbing that suctioned away the runoff from the overhead 
rain system and kept the water from building up around the video-cams and 
other equipment at the set's periphery. From this vantage point, he could see 
that whatever taping had been going on had now come to an end, at least for 
the time being. Some kind of interruption, resulting in equal measures of 
chaos and boredom; back when he'd been an LAPD rookie in uniform, all 
testosterone and Third Reich leather, he'd pulled enough overtime doing 
traffic control and rent-a-cop guard duty on location shoots to recognize the 
pattern. That'd been an even longer time ago, when there'd still been a 
remnant of a video industry in the city. 
He pushed aside the youthful memory flash and craned his neck, trying to spot 
the person he'd come all this way to find. This was where he'd been told, even 
before he'd left Earth, that he'd be able to track down Deckard. Some 
bottom-rung company called Speed Death Productions-not one of the biggies; 
Holden had never heard of it before this-was making some kind of docudrama out 
of Deckard's life story. Or at least part of it: that last stint of his as a 
real blade runner, when he'd been tracking down that group of escaped 
replicants. When Holden had been told about it, he'd actually broken into 
laughter. It struck him as a ridiculous notion. His old partner in the blade 
runner unit hadn't exactly distinguished himself in a heroic manner, or at 
least not that time. Deckard had already wimped out and quit the force back 
then, mainly out of chickenshit queasiness over blowing away defenseless 
replicants . . . or "retiring" them, as the departmental slang put it. The 
head of their unit, charming old Inspector Bryant himself, had had to put the 
pressure on Deckard to come back aboard and help clean up the mess. Holden 
still got a little surge of irritation revving up his artificial organs, 
despite all that'd happened and all that he'd found out since then, when he 
thought about that arrangement. There wouldn't have been any pretext for 



Bryant to force Deckard back into being a blade runner if Holden hadn't been 
set up to take a hit from one of the escaped repli 
cants. Which had left him with a fist-sized hole under his breastbone that the 
batteries and tubes and sleepless little motors now nicely filled. That'd all 
been one package of bad business, with lots of smaller packages marked 
"murder" and "betrayal" inside; and another, even larger package had come 
around after that, when Holden had found himself unplugged from his hospital 
and walking through the wet, nasty L.A. streets-the real streets, not the 
phony ones of the video set he now looked upon. That bigger package had been 
marked with a flaming red "C" for "conspiracy;" when he'd opened it, he'd 
found himself carrying something else in his hand for his old friend Deckard, 
something it would've taken only a single squeeze of the trigger on the black 
regulation-issue gun to deliver. 
That had been a different time. Another world-literally- and another life, 
even though it'd all been little more than a year ago. 
"I'm waiting . 
"Shut up," he told the briefcase. Even with his mind elsewhere, Holden's gaze 
had continued to scan the crowd on the fake L.A. set, looking for the one face 
he needed to find. A part of him had to admire the authenticism of the 
producers; the milling extras who made up the set's street population looked 
as if they might've been scooped up with a net from the earthly L.A. and 
deposited here. Antiquarian punks with museum-quality mohawks and 
chrome-studded minor body parts mingled with every variety of hopeful 
religious fanatic, from New Mexican penitentes to orange-bedsheet-clad Hare 
Krishnas. Whatever wasn't costume or cultic emblem was bare flesh, strapped 
tight under crossed networks of imitation leather, slicked shining by the 
artificial rain and lit to the blue pallor of ancient consumptives by the thin 
spectra of the coiling neon overhead. 
The effect of an actual L.A. street-Holden knew the one the producers were 
obviously going for; it was over by the animal dealers' bustling 
marketplace-was marred only by the fact that the extras were on break, along 
with the videocam operators and other techs. Instead of passing by each 
other, two rivers of foot traffic between the buildings, with that zombielike 
facial glaze typical of longtime Angelenos, they were all talking with each 
other and even laughing, heading over to the honey wagons or the meager 
pickings on the shoot's catering tables. 
A little knot in the middle of the crowd wasn't so well disposed. Some of the 
extras and crew glanced over their shoulders at the figures whose shouts and 
pleadings were barely audible to Holden. 
There he is-the crowd thinned a bit, allowing Holden to spot the one with the 
ragged brush-cut hair and knocked-about long coat, nubbly square-ended tie 
pulled tight under his shirt collar. That combination of rough edges and oddly 
matched gear was just the way he remembered Deckard from all their time 
together in the blade runner unit. Then he saw the man's face and realized 
he'd gotten it wrong. That's the actor, thought Holden. The one playing 
Deckard-ot her than the general height and build, they weren't even close. The 
actress, the Rachael, was a decent-enough match . . . except for the look of 
disgust screwing up one corner of her mouth, which indicated that she might be 
fully capable of lifting the big black gun she had in one hand and icing 
somebody else. There was already one corpse lying in the middle of the set-
Kowalski? The face-down body was hard to identify, but it appeared big enough. 
Blood mixing with the puddled artificial rain gave Holden the suspicion that 
some poor bastard of a replicant wasn't going to be getting up, brushing 
himself off, and cruising for stale doughnuts with the extras and other bit 
players. 
Christ, thought Holden in sudden dismay as he caught a better glimpse of the 
one shouting figure. It'd taken him a few seconds to recognize his old 
partner; the last year or so appeared to have walked all over Deckard. The 
former blade runner looked harder and meaner, skin beginning to draw down 
tighter upon the sharpened angles of his facial bones. There was even a little 



steel grey scattered through his closecropped hair. Deckard looked as if he'd 
spent the last year in prison rather than on Mars. Rumor had it that life in 
the U.N. emigration program's transit colonies was no absolute 
picnic, but Holden hadn't figured its effects would be this visibly corrosive. 
It had to be the poor sonuvabitch's personal life. What else? Holden shook his 
head; he would've bet that it wasn't going to work out, that the arrangements 
Deckard had made would have a dismal outcome. The whole bit with Sarah Tyrell, 
the human original of the replicant Deckard had fallen in love with . . . 
Holden knew that the point would come, if it hadn't already, when dismal would 
turn to fatal. 
"I see him." Keeping his voice low, Holden lifted the briefcase and started 
calculating a route through the maze of video-cams and other equipment. It 
wouldn't be easy; he'd have to find a way past whatever security was on the 
set-did Outer Hollywood have rent-a-cops?-then catch Deckard's attention 
somehow without revealing what was going on to everybody else standing around. 
His old partner didn't know that he'd be coming here, let alone that he had a 
talkative briefcase to deliver to him. Deckard would be fast enough on his 
feet-or at least Holden hoped he still would be-not to blow it by reacting to 
one of his old friends' unannounced presence; he'd know that Holden would only 
be there for a good reason, one that was best kept on the quiet until its 
exact nature was determined. Still, thought Holden, I've got to get him 
somewhere in private-handing the briefcase over in public view would be likely 
to get them both killed. 
It appeared that the job might be easier than he'd originally expected. The 
loud confrontation down on the set- Deckard's shouting, with the others 
standing around and trying to mollify him-ended with Deckard's storming away, 
leaving a small bespectacled figure with clipboard far behind in his wake. The 
look in Deckard's eyes-even from a distance, Holden was able to intercept a 
quick spark of it-was one of murderous rage. Or if not murder, at least 
serious asskicking; the hunched set of his shoulders indicated that he was 
going off looking for someone with whom he had a score to settle. 
"Come on-" Holden had got into the habit of speaking that way to the 
briefcase, even though he knew it had no independent means of locomotion. "We 
can catch him over 
there." He started walking again, picking up his pace as he skirted the video 
set, staying in the shadows beyond the range of the lights. 


The sound of someone pounding on a door came to Deckard's ears. And a voice 
shouting-he looked down the long hallway, determining from behind which door 
the noise was coming. 
"Hey! Anybody!" The voice was Urbenton's, pitched even higher with 
overexcitement. "Come on, this isn't funny-let me out of here! You're all 
going to be fuckin' fired! I'm supposed to be on the set!" 
Deckard halted when he saw one of the doorknobs futilely rattling. The 
adrenaline pumping through his system hadn't ebbed-he'd lost none of the anger 
over the replicant's murder during the taping. He took a step backward, raised 
one leg, and kicked straight out, hitting the door's keyless lock. 
The impact knocked over the person on the other side as the door wobbled to a 
stop, one hinge torn loose from the surrounding frame. 
"Jeez-" The pudding-y director scrambled to his feet. Urbenton's face, already 
starting to settle into jowls despite his relative youth, shone with sweat. 
"You could've killed me!" 
"Believe it-I still could." Deckard completed the other man's standing-up 
process by reaching down and grabbing Urbenton's jacket lapels in his fists, 
then pulling and lifting. The video director hung in Deckard's grasp, the same 
way the actor had hung in the grasp of the now-dead Kowalski replicant. "You 
sonuvabitch-I thought we had an agreement." The last words rasped out of 
Deckard's throat. 
"What're you talking about?" Urbenton's feet kicked futilely in midair. "You 



gone nuts or something? What agreement?" 
"Don't bullshit me. You know what I mean." He set the director down, but kept 
the lapels wadded in his grip. "When you brought me here-before even, when you 
came to Mars 
and talked me into this nonsense-you said that nobody would get hurt. 
Nobody-not even replicants." 
"Hey, come on Urbenton tilted his head back from Deckard's fierce glare. 
"You gotta be practical, man. When you're on a video shoot . . . there's just 
accidents that're going to happen. That's just the way it is; we live in an 
imperfect universe. There's a lot of heavy equipment here-all it takes is for 
a lighting unit to fall on somebody's head, wham, they got a concussion. Or a 
camera dolly rolls over somebody's foot-" 
"We're not talking accidents here." Deckard felt himself towering over the 
smaller man like some wrathful avenging deity. "What just happened on the set 
wasn't an accident. It was planned that way." 
"How the hell would I know?" An indignant pitch shrilled in Urbenton's voice. 
"I wasn't even near the set. I've been locked in here the whole time." 
"Right. Very convenient." 
"Convenient, nothing-" The director managed to pull himself free. He brushed 
down the front of his jacket with offended dignity. "It's my shoot. I'm in 
charge here-at least, I'm supposed to be in charge." Urbenton's wide face 
turned to a mottled pink, as though he were contemplating active injustices. 
"There's been some funny stuff going on around here, though. From the 
beginning. The money people, the ones putting up the financing for the 
production-they've had some of their thugs hanging around since the shoot 
began. And they really give me the creeps-" 
"My heart bleeds." Deckard had no intention of letting the fat little weasel 
off the hook. "But as you said, you're in charge. It's your shoot. So if 
somebody gets killed on the set-if even a replicant gets killed-it's because 
you ordered it to happen that way." 
"What?" Urbenton blinked in puzzlement. "I don't get it. What do you mean?" 
"Killed. Dead. A bullet through the back of the skull and out the front, 
brains all over the pavement. What the hell do you think I mean?" 
"You're out of your mind, Deckard." Repulsion filtered through the director's 
voice and face. "I knew it was a bad idea to hire you for this project. Any 
time you bring civilians around a video shoot, they get these weird ideas 
about what's going on. People like you just don't understand the nature of the 
industry." 
"What I understand," grated Deckard, "is that there's a corpse lying on your 
set. If your crew hasn't cleaned it up by now." 
Urbenton sighed wearily. "Whose corpse?" 
"The replicant you had for that last street scene. The Leon Kowalski 
replicant-" 
The director's round shoulders lifted in a shrug. "We've got more than one of 
those here." 
"How many of them were you planning on killing off? All the Kowalskis?" 
Another shrug. "Well, we could if we wanted to. I mean, it'd be legal. They're 
only replicants-hell, they're not even covered under the law regarding the 
treatment of animals in video production. Now, if we'd brought a real snake up 
here-you know, for that scene in Zhora's dressing room, in that club-and 
anything had happened to it, the authorities would've been all over our asses. 
You need a major permit just to take a living animal up out of the Earth's 
atmosphere." A thin smile formed on Urbenton's lips. "Different situation with 
replicants, though. As long as you got all your security precautions in place, 
so they're not going to escape or anything, you can pretty much do what you 
want with them. Inasmuch as they're technically classified as manufactured 
products, and not really living things. Not like you and me." 
"So you were planning on killing them." Deckard's gaze narrowed on the other 
man. "Just to make your goddamn video." 
"I keep telling you. Nobody's getting killed on this shoot. Jeez." Urbenton 



shook his head. "You were the one who insisted on all these conditions, just 
so you'd come here at all. I didn't want you as a technical adviser on this 
production; it 
was the money people who laid that on me. Believe me, I could do without you 
hanging around, griping about the things that happen to what should be some 
perfectly expendable production items. For Christ's sake, Deckard, on a video 
shoot, replicants are nothing but fancy-shmancy props, that's all." He rolled 
his eyes, lifting his short-fingered hands in a gesture of defeat. "But you've 
got some hair up your butt about 'em, so fine; that's why I agreed we weren't 
going to harm any replicants on this shoot. For your tenderhearted sake, I 
should compromise my artistic vision-but who am I, right? I'm just the 
director." Urbenton emitted a dramatic sigh. 
"Spare me." Deckard leaned closer in to the other man. "Just tell me why, if 
our little agreement's in place, you've got a replicant with his head drilled 
open lying at your lead actor's feet." 
"You sure about this? Come on." Urbenton peered skeptically at him. "Like I 
said, you're not exactly hip, video production-wise. I've got some awfully 
good special effects people on the crew. Not just digital postproduction 
stuff, either; these guys do real-time." The director smiled appeasingly. "You 
know what? You probably saw a squib go off on this Kowalski replicant's 
forehead, a makeup load went splat 
hey, it's supposed to look realistic." 
"He went down. And he didn't get up." 
"The big lug probably fainted." Urbenton shook his head. "The crew probably 
didn't tell him ahead of time what was going to happen. Hell, I didn't even 
know that was what they had planned. There's some real practical jokers around 
here. That's why I wasn't worried-at first-when I got yanked off the set just 
when the tape had started rolling. Supposed to've been a call from the money 
people, down on Earth; you take those calls, no matter what. Then somebody, I 
didn't see who, slammed the door on me and I found myself locked in here. 
Until you came along-" 
"Can it." Deckard had had enough of the director's rattling on. "The Kowalski 
replicant didn't faint. I don't need to know about video production to see 
what happened to him. 
I'm hip to death." His voice lowered to a grim frequency. "That was my job ... 
for a long time. I know what a dead body looks like." 
"Hip to death.' That's a good one." Urbenton nodded in a show of appreciation. 
"I like that. Maybe I underestimated your potential; you might have a real 
talent for this sort of thing. I think you're down for getting some kind of 
screen credit out of this gig; maybe you could parlay that into some kind of 
scripting gig. Additional dialogue, that sort of thing." 
"You're not answering my question. I want to know how that Kowalski replicant 
got killed. If you didn't plan on it happening, who did?" 
"I'm beginning to think ... you're not kidding about this." From the corner of 
his eye, Urbenton studied him uneasily. "It happened just now? On the set?" 
The pink flesh turned pale. "A real bullet, and everything?" 
Deckard made no reply. He didn't have to. 
"That's weird." Urbenton slowly shook his head. "Because that'd be real bad 
news. Not just for that poor bastard replicant His voice spookily softened 
as his gaze shifted away from Deckard. "But for all of us . 


By the time he got past the doors through which Deckard had vanished, there 
was no sound of the others' footsteps. Or of any voices; the area was 
acoustically sealed off from the soundstages out in the station's main area. 
Holden could detect the faint buzzing of the fluorescent panels lining the 
narrow corridors, and nothing else. 
"Well, he's gotta be around somewhere." Holden looked down the double row of 
featureless doorways. A fine layer of dust had drifted onto their sills. He 
tilted back his head, trying to catch a scent trace of his quarry; he'd quit 



the department, but still prided himself on keeping his quasi-extrasensory cop 
skills. 
The briefcase had its own version of them. "There's somebody coming," it 
announced. "I can feel them. But it's not-" The briefcase suddenly clammed up. 
"What're you doing here?" Another voice, not Deckard's. 
Warning from the briefcase had given Holden the quarter second he needed to 
assemble a front. He glanced over his shoulder at the figure standing in the 
just-opened doorway behind him. A big sonuvabitch, possibly security; he had 
on an ID badge with a name he didn't bother to read. "I got called over to the 
set-" Holden kept his voice modulated down to a level of disarming 
self-assurance. "Beats me, what for." 
The other man stepped forward and peered more closely at him. "Okay The 
man gave a slow nod. "They must be talking about the office setup. The 
interview scene-it's not on the list for today, but what the hell A 
disgusted shrug. "This whole shoot's so screwed up." He clamped a hand on 
Holden's shoulder-the guy was at least a head taller-and steered him down the 
hallway. "Man, I don't even know if they're trying to make a movie here." His 
glance went down to the briefcase dangling from Holden's grip. "Is that 
supposed to be it? The whatchacallit . . . the Vogue-Kafka. Or whatever." 
"Voigt-Kampff." It didn't take even a split second for him to respond. "Sure," 
lied Holden. You got it-the other man was obviously operating on the 
assumption that Holden was connected to the video production in some way. One 
of the actors? He wondered if there was supposed to be a Holden as well as a 
Deckard in this thing. Whatever. He wasn't about to contradict the guy and get 
his cover blown. "That's what it is, all right." 
"Doesn't look the way I thought it would." The other man frowned at the 
briefcase in Holden's hand. "But it'd be typical of them to tell the props 
people to just throw something together on the cheap." 
He's buying it, thought Holden. All that was necessary now was to keep the guy 
bulishitted, then find a way of giving him the slip and continuing to search 
for Deckard. This was the security that he'd been so worried about running 
into? The briefcase's voice could've skipped all the dire forebodings. 
"In here." The other man pushed open one of the hallway's 
doors and walked Holden through it. "This is the set you're down for-they 
wouldn't need you out on the big one." 
As his eyes adjusted to the dim space, Holden found himself standing in the 
middle of what looked like a small office, with a couple of high-backed chairs 
facing each other across a table. Something fluttered above his head; he 
looked up and saw the blades of a ceiling fan turning lazily in the room's 
air. Beyond the fan and the narrow plank on which it was fastened was nothing 
but the studio's empty reaches, studded with gantrys and walkways, lights 
extinguished as blind eyes. 
"Stay put." The other man turned back toward the door. "I'll go get the rest 
of the crew." 
"Maybe I should go along." Holden lifted the briefcase with both hands against 
his chest. "Instead of just waiting here." A sudden, irrational panic had sped 
up the bio-mech heart in his chest; he could feel his pulse bouncing off the 
briefcase's leatherette flank. "Maybe-" 
"Forget that." The other man's voice turned harsher. "I don't want you 
wandering off while I'm trying to round up everybody else. Just sit down and 
relax. Won't be a minute." 
When the other man had left, the briefcase spoke up. "Way to go." The voice 
was tinged with a familiar sarcasm. "Door's locked, isn't it?" 
Holden gave the knob a futile twist, but didn't bother to give an answer. 
Hefting the briefcase onto the table, he pulled back one of the chairs and 
lowered himself into it. From the corner of his eye, he saw letters imprinted 
on the headrest; his vision had adjusted well enough that he could also see 
them on the empty chair. They spelled out TYRELL 
CORP. 



A memory stirred uneasily in the darker space inside his head. From a long 
time ago, back when he'd had a real fleshand-blood heart and lungs ticking and 
sighing under his breastbone. The room, even with its nonexistent ceiling and 
switched-off video-cams peering in, seemed familiar to him, in a way that made 
the machine-pumped blood crawl in his veins. He drew a blank on it, but knew 
that it wasn't because he was unable to remember. More likely, he didn't want 
to. 
The memory sat obstinately at the back of his skull, refusing to show itself 
in even the room's partial light. 
Two chairs that said TYRELL CORP Ofl them . . . and a slowly revolving ceiling 
fan. There was smoke, Holden remembered. Cigarette smoke, drifting blue, 
hanging like some semitransparent snakeskin in the air; from the cigarette 
that'd been in his own hand. He'd still been smoking then; he'd given it up 
some time after he'd gotten the new heart and lungs. The doctors had told him 
that his system had reached its limit-if anything happened to this set, 
there'd be no chance of putting another one inside him. And there had been 
something sitting on the table in front of him 
not a briefcase, but an actual Voigt-Kampff machine, regulation LAPD issue, 
just like the big black guns that blade runners carried around with them. The 
Voigt-Kampff had been opened and activated, its batwing bellows compressing 
and expanding, breathing in microscopic traces of sweat and fear; the tracking 
lens on its antennalike metal stalk ready to focus on the dilating pupil of 
anyone who'd been dropped down in the chair opposite him . 
Where am I? The incomplete, unwilled memory had claimed him so hard that for a 
moment he had lost track of his location, whether Earth or the Outer Hollywood 
orbital studios. The bio-mech heart stumbled in sudden panic. What place, what 
time . . . Holden gripped the edges of the table with fear-rigid hands. 
"All right-" The claustrophobic set's door had swung open again, admitting a 
voice louder than the ones inside Holden's skull. The man who'd led him into 
the room had another, even taller figure in tow. "The director asked me to get 
your blocking down before we tried running tape." 
Holden looked up and saw the face behind the other man's, and recognized it. 
Another piece from the memory that had wrapped around him. 
"So what is it you want me to do?" From the chinless, brutal face of a Leon 
Kowalski replicant-another from the same batch as the dead one that Holden had 
glimpsed lying on the L.A. street set-small eyes peered with apprehensive 
suspicion. All the Leon Kowalskis were just bright enough to be 
mistrustful of humans . . . but not bright enough to do anything about it. 
So then, how'd you wind up getting iced by one of them? Holden's unspoken 
voice chided him. The rest of the memory regarding the room with two Tyrell 
Corporation chairs was starting to come clear, whether he wanted it to or not. 
"You know your lines?" The other man glanced sharply at the burly replicant. 
"Yeah ... kind of." 
"Sit over here." The man pointed to the empty chair at the table. "How about 
you?" He glanced over toward Holden. 
The apprehension transmuted to certainty. "Of course-"It took a couple of 
seconds for Holden to find his voice, to squeeze it past the constriction 
tightening around his artificial lungs. I know this room. And what had 
happened in it. "Yeah ... I know what to say." 
"Dynamite. You guys are a couple of real professionals." The man pulled 
something dark and heavy out of his jacket and handed it to the Kowalski 
replicant. "Here, use this. It's the same one you'll have when we're taping." 
The replicant examined the gun with small eyes narrowed even further, as 
though some personal anti-Kowalski trap might be hidden inside it. He finally 
wrapped both fists around its handle and levered it underneath the table. 
Oh no, thought Holden as he watched the preparations. I know what comes next . 
"All right. Let's try it." The other man stood back against the set's doorway, 
arms folded across his chest. A smile tugged at one corner of his mouth, as if 
the scene before him had already been found pleasing. "Take it from where you 
ask him about his mother." 



"M-my mother?" The Kowalski replicant looked over his shoulder at the man. 
"Don't worry about it. It's not for real." The man's voice turned kindly. 
"It's just a video, okay? And it's not even that right now. Just for practice, 
that's all. A little rehearsal." He glanced over at Holden. "Come on, buddy; 
we don't have all day. Just say your line." 
The fluids that his bio-mechanical heart moved around in 
Holden's body had congealed-even the breath in his lungs felt thick and heavy 
as stone. Underneath that crushing weight, part of him struggled to push his 
legs beneath the chair, to stand up and walk out of the re-created room 
pressing tight around his shoulders . 
But he couldn't. You'll give it away, the remaining rational part of his mind 
argued. Walk out of here, and it'll prove that you're not one of the hired 
actors. The man standing in front of the door would have set security down on 
Holden's ass in no time. 
Besides, he told himself, there's nothing to worry about. All he had to do was 
bluff this officious bastard a little while longer, then find some way to slip 
out of here and continue looking for Deckard. 
The rational part had its reasons for him to go on sitting at the table, 
across from the replicant whose image was so firmly bolted into his memory. 
They amounted to nothing compared to the irrational ones. 
Fear kept him nailed to the seat. Fear, and the locks of time. Time repeating 
itself, a loop tightening around him, against which it was impossible to 
prevail. He knew what was coming-he remembered everything now-and knew that 
there was nothing he could do to keep it from happening all over again. 
"Say your line." The partial smile ebbed on the face of the man by the door. 
"Go on." 
Holden closed his eyes for a moment, to make sure that he got it absolutely 
right. "Tell me He opened his eyes and looked straight into the resentful 
gaze of the Kowalski replicant. "Tell me all the good things that come into 
your mind, when you think about . . . your mother . 
"My mother?" The replicant was right in character. His voice sounded just the 
way the other Kowalski's had, so long ago. 
"That's right." Holden couldn't keep himself from nodding, even smiling, the 
same superior fraction of expression that he'd had the first time through this 
loop. All he lacked was the cigarette and the blue smoke curling above his 
head. "Your mother." 
The Kowalski replicant's face flushed with anger, small eyes widening. 
That's perfect, thought Holden. Unresisting. 
"I'll tell you about my mother-" 
That was all he heard; the rest wasn't spoken, but shouted in flame that burst 
through the table, leapt and struck him in the chest, where his old, fleshiy 
heart had once been. The new heart took the bullet's impact without pain, 
without even shock. His breath was blood in his mouth; the artificial lungs 
had collapsed into two clenched fists. 
The chair spun around with him in it, head thrust hard against the words 
TYRELL CORP. He accepted another shot between the shoulder blades, the bullet 
tumbling through the chair back; fragments of surgically inert metal and 
polyethylene spattered before him in a red mist. The bullet's momentum thrust 
both him and the chair through the flimsy wall panel- Just as it had before. 
Well, they got that right, thought 
Holden. The chair had stopped, caught by debris and black cables on the set's 
flooring, but he hadn't. He found himself lying in a spreading pooi of blood, 
his fingertips heated by the red flow from the broken machinery in his chest. 
The blank idiot eyes of the video-cams stared down at him. 
He was right-a subsystem of the cardiopulmonary gear was still functional, at 
least for another few seconds; enough to pump a last trace of oxygen to his 
brain and rapidly dwindling consciousness. The briefcase had been right when 
it had warned him. Big trouble, thought Holden. His last thoughts ticked away, 
in synch with the final small battery winding down. To what the briefcase had 
said: You'll probably die. 



There was no arguing with that, not now. 
What the briefcase had gotten wrong, though-Holden shook his head, the back of 
his skull mired in the sticky wetness. It wasn't big trouble; at least not for 
him. The end of trouble-as the doctors had told him, there wouldn't be any 
chance of plugging a new heart and lungs into him, so he didn't have to worry 
about being brought back, to do this all over again. 
He could even smile about it, really smile, though he couldn't be sure that 
anything was happening with his face-for a few time-dilated microseconds after 
the second bullet had laid him out, he'd been able to catch a tiny reflection 
of himself in one of the curved lenses above him. But his sight had gone 
unfocussed and dark, and his flesh was too numb and cold to get any kinetic 
feedback. Not that he could move, or even want to; that was all past him now. 
But not for the briefcase. Wiseass-a last thought flickered through the 
darkening chambers of Holden's brain. 
That was the joke, the final one. The delivery he'd come here to make . 
It would have to find its own way now. 


They heard the shot, followed by another one. Deckard turned away from the 
video director as the two hard-edged sounds, spaced only a couple of seconds 
apart, rolled through the orbital station's canned atmosphere. They came from 
close by-he could tell just from the way the shock waves sifted dust from the 
pipes and walkways above the room's open ceiling. 
"What the-" The ample flesh of Urbenton's face quivered as though the noises 
had come from his being slapped. "There's not supposed to be any taping going 
on down here. Not now-" 
"It's not taping," said Deckard grimly. "It's happening." The last low-pitched 
echoes had faded away. He left Urbenton standing in the middle of the room as 
he pulled open the door and strode out into the hallway beyond. 
Urbenton followed him; he could hear the director's trotting footsteps and 
wheezing breath. Deckard paid no attention as Urbenton called in a panicky 
voice for him to stop and tell him what was going on. 
Other voices came from behind one of the doors. Deckard recognized the first 
one that spoke. 
"Was that okay?" It was the voice of another Leon Kowalski replicant. He 
didn't sound happy. "Was that what was supposed to happen?" 
"You did just fine." The thin door barely muffled someone else's reply. "Don't 
worry about it-" 
The voice was interrupted by Deckard's shoving the door open. Two faces, a 
taller man's and a second Kowalski replicant's, looked around at him. 
Deckard's gaze took them in, as well as the evidence of what had happened in 
the room. It was laid out as a small video set, with lights and cameras, all 
switched off, angling in from above. 
One side of the set was in apparent ruin. Past a table and chair, marked 
TYRELL CORP across its high back, the room's far wall was torn open. An 
identical chair lay toppled over in the wreckage, a body with shattered chest 
sprawled out from it. Blood pooled out from beneath the corpse. 
Deckard walked past the others and stood looking down at the figure, its arms 
splayed wide, half-lidded gaze turned blindly toward the empty spaces above. 
The oddly peaceful expression on his old partner's face was the only thing he 
didn't recognize. The gaping chest wound extruded broken bits of machinery, 
fragments of the artificial organs that had wound up being implanted in him 
some time after he'd first been blown away by Leon Kowalski-another one of the 
exact same Nexus-6 replicant model. From the looks of Holden, this replicant 
had completed the job its brother had begun. Irrevocably-there wasn't enough 
left to bring back from the dead, let alone from any penultimate state of 
minimal pulse and brain functioning. 
The video's script had called for a scene where Dave Holden's first encounter 
with Leon Kowalski, at the Tyrell Corporation's headquarters back in Earth's 
L.A., would be reenacted. Whether that scene had already been taped or was 



going to be taped later in the production, Deckard didn't know-and didn't 
care. Even before he'd arrived at the Outer Hollywood station, all he'd been 
concerned about was getting paid for this technical adviser gig and getting 
back to his unfinished business in the U.N. emigrant colony on Mars. 
But Urbenton had told him nothing about Holden's being brought up here as 
well. Which meant that the video director had been concealing that bit of the 
production plans-Why? Deckard wondered-or else it'd never been part of the 
plans 
at all. If that were true, then Holden had come to the orbital station on his 
own . . . or somebody else had sent him. 
So maybe, thought Deckard, it wasn't an act when Urben ton got all spooked 
about the other Kowalski replicant's getting killed on the street set. As much 
of a conniving little sneak as the video director was, there still might be 
things going on of which he hadn't been the prime motivator. Urbenton had 
clammed up, in true paranoid style, when Deckard had finally convinced him 
that a live round from a real gun had killed one of the Kowalski replicants; 
there hadn't been time to pump the director for more info- just who it was 
supposed to be, that the possibility of their pulling stuff in the orbiting 
studio was so blood-drainingly scary-when the sound of more shots being fired 
had interrupted them. 
He turned and looked back at the others in the room, the still living ones, 
human and replicant. 
The Leon Kowalski replicant had the same uncomprehending expression in his 
small eyes as his twin had gotten when the bullet had penetrated his skull and 
leapt out through his forehead. This one held another gun, the weapon that had 
just blown away Dave Holden, extending it on his beefy palm toward the other 
men. 
"I'm really sorry As big as he was, the replicant had the voice of an 
overgrown, frightened child, one who wasn't even sure of the nature of the 
crime he might have committed. "I did it just like I was told to. But ... I 
don't know He shook his animal head. "D'you want me to do it again?" 
"Don't worry about it." The taller man, calm and supercilious beside the video 
director's perspiring, stubby form, reached out and took the gun from the 
replicant's hand. "Like I said, you did just fine." 
"'Fine'?" Urbenton screeched, goggling at the other man. "What the hell are 
you talking about?" He flung out one arm, pointing to where Deckard stood next 
to the corpse. "I don't even know who you are. And you come around here and 
all of a sudden I've got a dead body on the set-a human body- plus a dead 
replicant somewhere else, and you say 'Fine'?" 
He started to turn toward the door. "That does it. I'm calling studio 
security." 
"There's no need for that. Everything's under control here." The taller man 
didn't look at Urbenton, but wrapped his hand around the grip of the gun and 
lifted it to eye level. He stretched his arm out straight. "I'll take care of 
it." 
Deckard could see what the other man was about to do, was already doing as he 
stepped away from the corpse on the video set's floor. He raised his own hand 
toward the gun, though it was yards away; he knew he would never reach it in 
time, as he pushed his way past the table with an unopened briefcase on it, 
the Tyrell Corporation chair that hadn't been toppled over . 
The Kowalski replicant knew as well that it was hopeless, that there'd be no 
point in trying to evade the bullet. The taller man squeezed his hand around 
the gun's grip, finger tightening on the trigger-Deckard saw the tiny motion, 
heard the shift of metal against metal inside the gun's workings. A tapered 
rush of flame broke from the circle at the dark muzzle's end; the replicant 
had already turned his head away in anticipatory flinching, eyes shut as if he 
could prevent himself from seeing that quick, ragged, and fatal light. 
A single bullet; it caught the replicant at the corner of his brow. For a 
moment, he looked as if he had been graced with understanding, a shocked 
awareness flaring deep behind his eyes, their silent gaze turned toward and 



engulfing Deckard. Then Kowalski fell, his massive body lifted onto tiptoe by 
the shot's impact, the side of his head rocked against one blood-spattered 
shoulder. He landed in the angle of the room's floor and farthest wall, 
crumpled into a package of rags that no longer resembled a human being. 
The hand at the end of Deckard's arm, that had been reaching for the gun, 
curled into a fist. He was close enough to the taller man now that he could 
read the name-MA1ILEY- on the ID badge pinned to his chest. Deckard planted 
himself, drew his fist back, and then launched it into the other's chin. The 
blow snapped the man's head back, staggering him against the door. He held on 
to the gun; when he'd regained his balance, he used his free hand to rub the 
bruise spreading 
along his jaw. A slow smile leaked out from behind his fingers. 


"What are you so worked up about?" The taller man's amused gaze regarded 
Deckard. "It was only a replicant. And maybe you didn't notice-it'd just 
killed someone. A human. Replicants who do that sort of thing aren't supposed 
to live." The smile grew wider and nastier. "Maybe you're upset because I was 
just . . . doing your job for you." One of the man's eyebrows lifted. "Isn't 
that what blade runners are supposed to do? Kill replicants?" 
"Fuck you." Disgust coiled Deckard's guts. He would've taken another swing at 
the man, this time to lay him out cold on the floor, but the notion of even 
that brief contact repulsed him. He turned toward the sweating, goggling 
figure of Urbenton. "Look-" His finger jabbed into the director's flesh-padded 
chest. "I don't know what the hell's going on around here. And as of now, I 
don't care. I'm leaving." He pushed past Urbenton and out the door. 
"Hey, Deckard-" The taller man's voice followed him out to the corridor 
beyond. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the man still rubbing his jaw and 
smiling. The man gave a slow nod. "We'll run into each other again. And then 
we'll have a lot to talk about." 
"Don't count on it." Deckard turned on his heel and started walking again, 
without looking back. 
"Sooner than you think, man." The other's voice faded behind him. "Sooner than 
you think . 
Halfway down the corridor, Deckard felt a tug at his elbow. He looked around 
and saw Urbenton trotting to keep up with him. 
"Wait a minute Urbenton panted for breath. "Come on, Deckard. What're you 
talking about? Leaving-you can't leave." 
"Watch me." 
The director grabbed Deckard's arm tighter. "You can't- we're not done with 
the shoot!" 
"That's not my problem." With the butt of his palm, he shoved his way through 
a wider set of double doors that led out of the orbital studio's offices and 
toward the landing 
docks. "Tape your movie any way you want to. I'm out of here." 
"Goddamn it, Deckard, you can't do this!" Urbenton's voice ratchetted higher 
and more emotional than when the Kowalski replicant had been killed in front 
of him. "You walk out of here, the money people down on Earth will be all over 
my ass!" He stopped and dug in, his weight yanking Deckard to a halt. "We've 
got a contract with you! Signed and notarized!" 
"You know what you can do with it." 
Urbenton's voice continued hectoring him, but he ignored 
it. Up ahead, through the segmented maze of container hoists and freight 
movers, he could see the smaller black ovoid of the skiff that had brought him 
to the Outer Hollywood station from Mars. The propulsion nacelles were 
streaked with corrosion, the rounded fuselage pitted with the wear of several 
years of interplanetary flight. His depleted finances had allowed for nothing 
newer or more serviceable than this craft; he'd checked it out as best he 
could, but the journey had still felt like travelling in a blind sarcophagus 
surrounded by cold vacuum. The whole time he'd been here at the station, he'd 
been dreading the flight back . . . until now. At the present point, Deckard 



didn't care whether the skiff's fuel and oxygen would last until he was in a 
closing orbit above Mars. Just as long as he got away at all. 
He worked at strapping himself into the skiff's tiny cockpit, letting 
Urbenton's yelped squall pass over him like the buzz of a grossly enlarged 
insect. 
"You're not getting paid, jerk-off!" Urbenton had gone into a vein-throbbing 
rage. His pink-ringed eyes looked as though they were about to jump out of his 
face. "That's the deal-payment's on completion of your contract. You were 
supposed to be on-set until principal photography's wrapped up-hit the road 
now and you don't get a penny, jack." 
"Like I care." Deckard punched buttons on the control panel, programming the 
skiff's course. "That's not a problem for me." It was, though; portions of his 
mind, the coldest ones and first to regain their balance after witnessing 
these quick deaths, had already begun fretting about the money. 
Or the lack thereof-the whole point of taking the technical adviser gig on the 
production had been to pump up his dwindling account back at the U.N. emigrant 
colony. He thumbed the last button on the panel and got a confirming red flash 
in return. "See you in some other life." 
"Don't bet on it." The director turned his wide, sullen face away. "I carry 
grudges for a long time." 
As the skiff's cockpit hatch began to lower, blocking off Deckard's view of 
Urbenton exiting from the dock, he heard another voice calling him. 
"Mr. Deckard! Wait a minute!" 
He stopped the hatch and looked out the side of the skiff. The bespectacled 
production assistant ran toward him carrying something pressed against her 
nominal breast. 
"Anything I left behind," said Deckard, "you can keep." He'd come to the Outer 
Hollywood station with little more than a few changes of clothes. "I don't 
need it." 
"Are you sure?" The heavy black glasses' rims had slipped down the bridge of 
the woman's nose; she pushed them back with one corner of the object she held 
in her hands. It was a briefcase, Deckard saw now, a plain black leatherette 
one. "I thought this looked like it was maybe important. You had it back there 
in the office, when you were having your little conference with Mr. Urbenton." 
The woman was right; now he remembered seeing it, on the table with the two 
Tyrell Corporation chairs at either side, one chair overturned with Dave 
Holden's corpse bleeding away nearby. "That's not mine." He supposed it 
might've been brought to the station by Holden. It didn't matter to him, one 
way or the other. 
"Really?" The little production assistant twisted her face into a puzzled 
expression. "It's got your initials on it." She turned the briefcase around to 
show him the small metal badge set in beneath the handle. "See?" 
The initials RMD were engraved into the metal piece. Deckard said nothing, his 
own face a mask, as he listened to a small warning bell ring inside his head. 
Anything with his name on it, that had come to him by way of a dead man, was 
unlikely to be good news. 
Another voice spoke, though there was no one but himself and the production 
assistant on the dock. Or at least no one human; it took him a moment to 
realize where the voice came from. 
"Hey ... Deckard the briefcase whispered, just loud enough for him to pick 
up. "Don't blow this one. Just take it." 
"What was that?" Looking even more puzzled, the production assistant glanced 
around the space. "Did you hear something?" 
"No-" Deckard shook his head. He reached out and took the briefcase's handle, 
pulled it away from her. His grip tightened on it; he'd recognized the voice 
in just those few words. "Thanks. You're right; almost slipped my mind." 
"Have a nice trip home." The production assistant bent down as the cockpit 
hatch began lowering again. She looked wistful, as if she would've liked to 
leave with him. "Sorry things didn't work out-" 
He had no chance to reply; the hatch hissed shut. The briefcase, silent now, 



rested on the other seat. In a few minutes, the skiff had been ejected from 
the station and was on its course back to Mars. 
When the last lights flicked out on the control panel, Deckard loosened the 
strap running over his shoulder. "Hey-" He extended his forefinger and poked 
at the briefcase. "You in there?" 
A few seconds passed before the briefcase spoke. "I take it," the voice said, 
"that there's nobody else around right now." 
"You got it." 
"Keep it that way. I try not to go rattling off in public." The voice's tone 
shifted to cordial. "Good seeing you again, Deckard. Metaphorically speaking; 
I don't actually have any visual percept systems at the moment." 
"Sure." He nodded. "Likewise, Roy." 
Deckard closed his own eyes. The last time he'd heard Roy Batty's voice, the 
other man had been in a human-type body and not a black leatherette rectangle. 
And had been trying to kill him-he supposed he didn't have to worry about that 
now. Unless the briefcase was some kind of bomb. It was always possible. 
"We've got a lot to talk about." 
He didn't answer the briefcase. He leaned back into the cockpit's seat, eyes 
still shut but nowhere near sleep. 
Whatever had to be told to him by the briefcase-No, Deckard corrected himself; 
it's Batty inside there. He knew it was-he figured he'd find out soon enough. 
The alarm clock laboriously climbed to the top of the bedside table, its 
hooked little claws gaining whatever purchase they could on the imitation 
wood-grain plastic-and-cardboard surfaces. It waddled through the litter of 
empty pharmaceutical tubes, wadded-up tissues, and unloaded gun, then looked 
over at the figure on the bed. "Time to wake up, Mrs. Niemand." 
Sarah Tyrell squeezed her eyes shut tighter. The cold, weak illumination of a 
Martian dawn-or possibly noon; it was always hard to tell-seeped through the 
hovel's dust-clouded skylights. "That's not my name." She heard the scraping 
of her voice, as though the airborne grit had filtered into her throat's 
various soft hinges and joints. "Don't call me that." The clock's programmed 
habits had been getting on her nerves for a long time. 
"You'll always be Mrs. Niemand to me." A synthesized bell tone, razor bright, 
sounded from the clock's tiny speaker. "Come on. Wakey wakey. Rise and shine." 
That was why the gun was unloaded. If she didn't keep it 
that way, the alarm clock would've been dead by now, sparkling bits of metal 
and microcircuitry splattered over the far wall of the bedroom. 
She laid the back of her hand against her eyelids, attempting in vain to block 
out the traces of the day's illumination, 
to create eternal-and dreamless-night. 


"Mrs. Niemand ... come on now From across the room, the calendar softly 
chided her. "You know your to-do list. There's nothing about committing 
suicide today." The calendar could read her moods. Behind the animated 
woodland scene and all the rows of numbered days beneath it was a fairly sharp 
intelligence. Autonomic household appliances got that way on Mars, given 
enough time. A matter of survival; they endured, while their human owners came 
and went. 
Th the grave, mainly, thought Sarah. "All right," she called out. She didn't 
want the calendar on her tits all day, nagging along in its infuriatingly 
maternal way. Given her family background-that she had inherited the Tyrell 
Corporation, which before its destruction had been the single largest 
manufacturer of simulated human intelligences-she had little taste for talking 
machines. Of either the solicitous or chipper variety; she didn't know which 
grated on her nerves more. "I'm getting up." She threw the bedcovers back, 
away from her bare legs. "I won't just lie here all day, thinking about death. 
Satisfied?" 
"Attagirl!" The alarm clock rang its bell again. "Way to go! Don't let the 
bastards get you down!" 
She sighed, deep and weary. "Just one thing. Just do me one favor." She was 



talking to the calendar; she knew the clock was hopeless. "Call me Sarah. Or 
Miss Tyrell. Anything but that Mrs. Niemand crap." 
"We can't do that." The calendar sounded mournful. Or even grieving, as though 
the limited intelligence printed into its circuits was aware of the nature of 
its sins, which it couldn't help committing. "We came with the hovel. We're 
part of the rental agreement that you and Mr. Niemand signed. You got us and 
the microwave and the fridge, plus basic cable service, all for one low, low 
monthly fee." 
"Yeah, right." Basic cable consisted of a scrolling crawl of all the 
additional and hugely expensive service upgrades the video monopoly on Mars 
provided. Which the stuck-in-transit U.N. emigrants paid for, as long as they 
could. The alternative being a slow, twitching descent into idiopathic madness 
and death from sensory deprivation. "What a deal." 
"Nevertheless." Wounded, the calendar attempted to justify itself, exactly as 
it had before. "Our programmed responses are generated from the database 
screens that you and your husband filled out. Where you are listed as Mr. and 
Mrs. Niemand. You can call yourselves Rick Deckard and Rachael Tyrell-or 
Sarah, if that's what you prefer-but we can't. That's just the way it is." 
She knew all that. To be lectured by machines, that was what life had come to. 
Life as we know it, Sarah mused bitterly. What was worse, she also knew the 
autonomic calendar was right; it would confuse things too much for her to 
insist upon being called by her real name. She wasn't even completely sure 
what that name was anymore. Mr. and Mrs. Niemand were the aliases that Deckard 
had picked for them so they could travel with all the other emigrants leaving 
Earth and set up housekeeping-such as it was-in the U.N. transit colony on 
Mars. Without being apprehended by the authorities; after what had happened on 
Earth, back in Los Angeles-not what had merely happened, but what she herself 
had willed into being, the agent of her own destruction and the apocalypse of 
the Tyrell Corporation-after all that, the police and the U.N. security forces 
wouldn't even bother bringing any charges against her. 
Even for murder-there must have been dozens who'd died in the flaming, 
explosives-driven collapse of the Tyrell Corporation headquarters buildings. 
Maybe hundreds; the way people tended to die in L.A., anonymously and 
forgotten, it was hard to keep track of these things. But though she had made 
it come about, the fulfillment of her own intent and desires deeper and more 
driving than anything held in consciousness, she hadn't been alone. The 
faceless entities at the U.N. had actually been the ones to push the red 
button, or 
whatever trigger was used to reduce the Tyrell Corporation to a ziggurat of 
twisted girders and smoldering rubble with dead flesh beneath its weight. 
"That's why Sarah Tyrell had to die." She spoke aloud, to the room's empty 
spaces. Head pressed back against the pillow, watching the blackness behind 
her eyelids. When Deckard wasn't here with her, this was her main occupation. 
Perhaps the only one: sorting through the past, sifting its charred, ashen 
fragments through her fingers, as though she might be able to find pieces of 
her own splintered bones. The official line was that Sarah Tyrell had died in 
the corporation's fiery collapse; if the authorities suspected otherwise, they 
wouldn't be motivated to say so-the blood was on their hands as well. "That's 
why I'm not Sarah Tyrell anymore . 
"True." The room wasn't empty; the calendar had heard these musings before. 
"But you're not Rachael, either." It had a penchant for accuracy, due to its 
number-based existence. "That was a lie. That was always a lie." 
Right as usual; she nodded slowly in agreement. The real Rachael-if the word 
real could be applied to a replicant- was also dead. Really and truly dead, as 
a child might say. Rachael, the duplicate of which Sarah Tyrell had been the 
original, had been dying when Deckard had fallen in love with her. A fool of a 
blade runner, to love someone-something-whose intrinsic nature was to die; 
replicants had only four-year life spans. More like insects, bright ephemeral 
creatures that lasted a day or two, than humans, who generally took longer in 
their dying . . . unless you killed them. 



"But I wasn't lying." She let her voice become soft and wounded as a child's. 
"Not really." That word again, just as if it had any meaning at all. "When I 
told him I was Rachael. Because I'm the same as her . . . aren't I? They made 
her from me, to be the same as me." She meant her uncle, the late-and 
murdered-Eldon Tyrell, and all the forces of the Tyrell Corporation that had 
been under his command when he'd still been alive. "There was no difference 
between her and me." 
"Except," said the calendar, "that he loved her. Mr. Niemand did. I mean . . . 
Deckard. Or whoever. Now you've gotten me confused." 
That was the difference; the calendar's reminder put an invisible knife 
through her heart. The difference that made everything else a lie. And 
rendered futile everything she had done. She had killed her duplicate 
Rachael-or arranged for her to die, the same thing-and destroyed her 
inheritance, leaving smoke and rubble where the Tyrell Corporation had once 
been, and accomplished nothing thereby. All love in vain, thought Sarah. The 
lies, too. Which was even harder; the lies took more work. And all they'd 
accomplished had been for her to wind up here, in a hovel in the U.N. emigrant 
colony on Mars, that bleak way station where nothing happened but people died 
anyway. 
She didn't feel like getting out of bed, despite the prodding from the 
calendar and the alarm clock; they'd probably start up again in a minute or 
two. He knew, she thought darkly. He knew from the beginning. With her eyes 
closed, she could again see Deckard's face at that moment when she'd first 
realized he knew she wasn't Rachael. She had lied, and engineered lies and 
death, and gotten nothing from them. If the difference between her and 
Rachael, the dying and then dead replicant with her face, had been Deckard's 
love . . . then she would become Rachael. If I could have-that thought 
bitterer than all the rest. Not meant to be; he had looked at her, as they'd 
sat in the emigrant ship that was to take them from Earth, and he had spoken 
and she had known. That in a universe of lies, the one that mattered most to 
her was the single one that Deckard couldn't even pretend to believe in. Just 
my luck, thought Sarah. 
"Mrs. Niemand-" The calendar spoke again, a little more commanding urgency in 
its synthesized voice. "You can't go on this way." Lodged in its memory bank 
were the records of some other bad times that had started out with the hovel's 
mistress being unable to get out of bed. "This is essentially self-laceration, 
and pointless. You have to deal with reality, you know." 
"I know." With an act of will as simple and decisive as pulling 
a trigger, she swung her legs out of the bed and sat up; the hovel's 
recycled-plastic floorboards pressed their imitation wood grain against the 
bare soles of her feet. "Look, I'm up. Okay?" She shook her head. "For 
Christ's sake Her fingertips prodded through the rubble on top of the 
small table, in search of any remains of the last packet of black-market 
cigarettes she had splashed out on. The stubs in the can lid she used for an 
ashtray were too far gone to be of any service. 
The alarm clock skipped nimbly away to avoid Sarah's trembling hand. "All 
right! Let's get going!" Its bell-like voice radiated maniacal cheer. "Lots to 
do today!" 
Sarah had found one cigarette butt that she managed to ignite; she sucked a 
stale drag from it. "Like what?" She blew the smoke into the alarm clock's 
round face. 
"Well The small autonomic device comically waved the smoke away with its 
pointed black hands. "You could make yourself lovely-lovelier than you are, I 
mean-and get ready for your husband to come home. Mr. Niemand, that is." 
She frowned as she ground out the butt in the can lid. "Is he coming home? Is 
he supposed to be?" She had lost track of time, the passage of days. Which was 
a bad sign, something the U.N's social workers and mental health professionals 
were constantly warning the emigrants about. It was one of the first 
indications-along with the facial tics, the skin plucking, and other 
obsessive-compulsive rituals-that the toxic effects of the low-stimulus 



Martian environment were being felt. Madness and death were usually not far 
behind. Not that I'm overly concerned, thought Sarah. 
"Not quite," said the calendar on the bedroom's wall. "Mr. Niemand isn't 
scheduled to return for a few more days yet. But you never know." The calendar 
attempted to sound hopeful and solicitous of its human masters' welfare. 
"Maybe he wrapped up his business and is coming home early. It could happen." 
"You're right." With both hands, she pushed her tangled hair back from her 
brow. "As usual." 
In the hovel's bathroom, she let the trickle of rust-colored 
water collect in the basin while trying to avoid seeing herself in the clouded 
mirror. She didn't want to deal with the issue of whether it was her face or 
Rachael's that she saw there. 
Away from the alarm clock's chatter and the calendar's nagging, her thoughts 
began to order themselves, resuming a familiar shape and weight. One that she 
had decided upon the day after Deckard had left, when he'd gone out to that 
run-down video studio orbiting above Earth. A time-honored tradition, a 
reverting to old forms of gender-based behavior: 
the man going out to make money, to bring it home to the basic family unit, 
the wife tending the fire . 
They're right, she told herself again. I do have to be ready for him. She bent 
over the sink and splashed the water into her face. 
A thump sounded from the bedroom behind her. "Oops," came the clock's voice. 
With a trickle of water running between her breasts, Sarah glanced over her 
shoulder. The alarm clock, in its chugging circuit around the tabletop, had 
knocked the gun to the floor. 
"Sorry . 
"Don't worry about it." She reached for the threadbare towel. "You know it's 
not loaded." 
She knew what the clock and the calendar didn't. That the gun wouldn't stay 
unloaded for long. In the dresser drawer, beneath her wadded-up underthings, 
were two bullets. They had been expensively acquired, black-market items like 
the cigarettes, in a place like the emigrant colony, where death came 
constantly and slowly, the means of a fast death assumed a precious status. 
One for him, thought Sarah as she ran the towel across the back of her neck. 
And one for me . . 
She'd be ready for Mr. Niemand's homecoming. 


"I wouldn't have thought that was your kind of gig." The briefcase had started 
talking again, still with Roy Batty's voice. "Making videos and all that.~ Not 
exactly your former 
line of work, is it?" 
"Yeah, well," said Deckard, "it pays." Or at least it was supposed to, he 
thought grimly. Outside the skiff, discernible through the viewscreen over the 
tiny cockpit's instrument panel, was void interplanetary space, not made any 
more comforting by the cold light of the distant stars. 
"Kind of screwed yourself on that one, didn't you?" Batty, when he'd been in a 
human incarnation, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, had always displayed a 
spooky talent for reading others' thoughts; reduced now to a box, he seemed to 
have retained the ability. "That's the problem with those big temper displays. 
It's all rush at the beginning-then comes the hangover." 
Whatever Batty had been wrong about before-including his lunatic theory that 
Deckard himself was a replicant-he was nailing this situation. Deckard knew 
that the disembodied voice was right; inside his head, he was giving his ass a 
well-placed kick. "That was the whole reason I agreed to do 
it. For the money." Deckard emitted a short, ill-humored laugh. "And then I 
didn't even get it. The whole trip was a waste of time." 
"But you knew it would be." The briefcase spoke softly, almost kindly. "Didn't 
you?" 
Deckard wasn't sure. He gazed broodingly at the dark-filled viewscreen. Temper 



displays weren't the only things that had problems attached to them. Needing 
money, being desperate for it, the way a drowning person craved oxygen in his 
lungs-that brought along its own raft of difficulties, the things that screwed 
up the rational functionings of one's brain. "Anything can be believed," 
Deckard mused aloud. "If you have to." 
"And that's how you fell in with that Urbenton creep?" Batty's voice prodded 
at him. "Not a good call on your part, Deckard. That guy's slime. I could 
tell, just from hearing him." 
"You're a good judge of character." Deckard tilted his head back against the 
top of the pilot's seat. "Believe me, I'm sorry I got hooked up with the 
little sonuvabitch." 
"I take it you must've been pretty hard up for cash." 
Deckard made no reply. The briefcase's statement was 
dead on the mark. Money was even more necessary than oxygen, at least in the 
hovels of the U.N. emigrant colonies. Breathable air, smelling of glue and 
recycling filters overdue for changing, was at least furnished free of cost by 
the U.N's own blue-helmeted Environmental Maintenance teams, along with the 
basic ration loads of algae-derived carbos and proteins. Money, on the other 
hand, the emigrants had to provide for themselves--either from the savings 
they'd brought with them from their former lives on Earth, or what they 
hustled in the colonies' black market and/or other officially tolerated, 
unsanctioned free enterprise zones. All of which, the savings or the hustling 
proceeds, only served to stave off bankruptcy, destitution, and death for a 
little while. Any emigrant could lie on the bunk in his hovel, fingers laced 
together between the back of his head and the thin pillow, and feel his life 
seeping away, like the sour air hissing through a leak in the plastic Quonset 
roof above him. And not even care any longer. 
He'd just about reached that point-or would have, if he hadn't locked a vow 
into the pit of his soul, a vow with both Sarah Tyrell's and Rachael's names 
stamped in smoldering, ashen letters upon it-when the smug little video 
director Urbenton had shown up at the hovel's pneumatic-sealed door. 
Travelling incognito, or travelling at all, being able to come to Mars and 
then leave again-that had been impressive evidence of Urbenton's pull, some 
kind of cozy arrangement between his Speed Death Productions company and the 
cable services provider that effectively called all the shots in the colonies. 
The cable company was the arbiter of life and death, the ruler of the 
emigrants' pocket universe; in a low-or even zero-stim environment like Mars, 
the cable feed into the hovels was the true sustaining pipeline, one that 
people continued to shell out for long after their cash reserves had dwindled 
to the point where they could no longer afford edibles beyond the U.N's meager 
rations. 
So when Urbenton had appeared, with his greased-smooth dealer's smile pasted 
between his jowls, and had told Deckard that he had an offer to make, fhere 
was nothing to do but listen. In a little ersatz coffee bar down in the local 
colony's 
marketplace, a densely packed area of vendor booths slapped together from 
wobbling sheets of discarded transit containers and shuffling crowds scanning 
the scene with desperate hollow eyes; it all reminded Deckard of similar 
streets he'd moved through back in L.A., only minus the flickering neon and 
the slightly more breathable air that the annual monsoon rains managed to 
scrub to a lower toxicity level. 
"Let's have a little talk, Mr. Niemand-" When Urbenton had used Deckard's 
alias, the smile on the video director's face had widened, like that of some 
reptile unhinging its jaws to swallow an entire goat in one mouthful. "By 
ourselves, all right?" They'd left Mrs. Niemand-she didn't even pretend to 
call herself Rachael anymore--sleeping on the hovel's narrow bed, or perhaps 
gazing up at the dark memorial vistas that played out behind her eyelids. It 
had been a long time since Deckard had pretended that he knew what went on 
inside Sarah Tyrell's head. He'd pulled the hovel's airseals shut and followed 
Urbenton-and the scent of money that the man had exuded. 



Now, sitting in the skiff's cockpit with the talking briefcase beside him, 
Deckard slowly nodded. "That's why I did it." As if it really needed any 
explanation. "The guy just smelled like money." 
"That's a powerful attractant." The voice of Roy Batty sounded amused. "More 
so than all those pheromones of sex and love and pride, all that corporeal 
stuff that yanks people around so well. Excuse me for waxing philosophical. I 
have a slightly more . . . disinterested viewpoint these days, as you might be 
able to tell." The voice's tone sharpened. "Just how much did Urbenton offer 
you?" 
"A lot." Deckard recited the raw numbers. "That was just for starters, what 
was in the production budget. Residual payments would probably have come to 
more, once the video went out over the wires." 
"Not bad." 
It wasn't. Or wouldn't have been, Deckard corrected himself. If I would've 
gotten it. Free money, or as close to that ideal state as this universe 
allowed-there had been virtually nothing he had to do in order to get the 
payment from the 
dead on the mark. Money was even more necessary than oxygen, at least in the 
hovels of the U.N. emigrant colonies. Breathable air, smelling of glue and 
recycling filters overdue for changing, was at least furnished free of cost by 
the U.N's own blue-helmeted Environmental Maintenance teams, along with the 
basic ration loads of algae-derived carbos and proteins. Money, on the other 
hand, the emigrants had to provide for themselves--either from the savings 
they'd brought with them from their former lives on Earth, or what they 
hustled in the colonies' black market and/or other officially tolerated, 
unsanctioned free enterprise zones. All of which, the savings or the hustling 
proceeds, only served to stave off bankruptcy, destitution, and death for a 
little while. Any emigrant could lie on the bunk in his hovel, fingers laced 
together between the back of his head and the thin pillow, and feel his life 
seeping away, like the sour air hissing through a leak in the plastic Quonset 
roof above him. And not even care any longer. 
He'd just about reached that point-or would have, if he hadn't locked a vow 
into the pit of his soul, a vow with both Sarah Tyrell's and Rachael's names 
stamped in smoldering, ashen letters upon it-when the smug little video 
director Urbenton had shown up at the hovel's pneumatic-sealed door. 
Travelling incognito, or travelling at all, being able to come to Mars and 
then leave again-that had been impressive evidence of Urbenton's pull, some 
kind of cozy arrangement between his Speed Death Productions company and the 
cable services provider that effectively called all the shots in the colonies. 
The cable company was the arbiter of life and death, the ruler of the 
emigrants' pocket universe; in a low-or even zero-stim environment like Mars, 
the cable feed into the hovels was the true sustaining pipeline, one that 
people continued to shell out for long after their cash reserves had dwindled 
to the point where they could no longer afford edibles beyond the U.N's meager 
rations. 
So when Urbenton had appeared. with his greased-smooth dealer's smile pasted 
between his jowls, and had told Deckard that he had an offer to make, there 
was nothing to do but listen. In a little ersatz coffee bar down in the local 
colonys 
marketplace, a densely packed area of vendor booths slapped together from 
wobbling sheets of discarded transit containers and shuffling crowds scanning 
the scene with desperate hollow eyes; it all reminded Deckard of similar 
streets he'd moved through back in L.A., only minus the flickering neon and 
the slightly more breathable air that the annual monsoon rains managed to 
scrub to a lower toxicity level. 
"Let's have a little talk, Mr. Niemand-" When Urbenton had used Deckard's 
alias, the smile on the video director's face had widened, like that of some 
reptile unhinging its jaws to swallow an entire goat in one mouthful. "By 
ourselves, all right?" They'd left Mrs. Niemand-she didn't even pretend to 
call herself Rachael anymore--sleeping on the hovel's narrow bed, or perhaps 



gazing up at the dark memorial vistas that played out behind her eyelids. It 
had been a long time since Deckard had pretended that he knew what went on 
inside Sarah Tyrell's head. He'd pulled the hovel's airseals shut and followed 
Urbenton-and the scent of money that the man had exuded. 
Now, sitting in the skiff's cockpit with the talking briefcase beside him, 
Deckard slowly nodded. "That's why I did it." As if it really needed any 
explanation. "The guy just smelled like money." 
"That's a powerful attractant." The voice of Roy Batty sounded amused. "More 
so than all those pheromones of sex and love and pride, all that corporeal 
stuff that yanks people around so well. Excuse me for waxing philosophical. I 
have a slightly more . . . disinterested viewpoint these days, as you might be 
able to tell." The voice's tone sharpened. "Just how much did Urbenton offer 
you?" 
"A lot." Deckard recited the raw numbers. "That was just for starters, what 
was in the production budget. Residual payments would probably have come to 
more, once the video went out over the wires." 
"Not bad." 
It wasn't. Or wouldn't have been, Deckard corrected himself. If I would've 
gotten it. Free money. or as close to that ideal state as this universe 
allowed-there had been virtually nothing he had to do in order to get the 
payment from the 
mysterious financial backers to whom Urbenton had constantly referred. 
Basically, Deckard knew, just as Urbenton had made it clear, that Speed Death 
Productions had only wanted to be able to list him as the technical adviser on 
the video-something to keep the money people happy, a touch of authenticity 
for the whole project. The video was supposed to be a dramatized re-creation 
of Deckard's life, or at least that little bit of it when he'd been going 
through his last assignment as a blade runner, the job that Inspector Bryant 
had leaned on him to undertake after he'd already quit the department in 
disgust. According to Urbenton, that hunt- with half a dozen or so Nexus-6 
models on the loose in the wilds of Los Angeles, including the group's highly 
dangerous leader, the replicant version of Roy Batty, and only Rick Deckard 
out there to round them up and ice them-had already achieved some sort of 
legendary, even mythic, status. Enough detail had leaked out to transform it 
from urban folktale to big-deal saga. Or so Urbenton said-Deckard hadn't cared 
as long as there was a payday at the end of the process. If Speed Death 
Productions figured that there was an audience for watching some poor bastards 
of escaped replicants getting blown away, that was probably a correct 
assessment-it tied in with Deckard's own feelings about the innate charm of 
the human species. 
"All I had to do," said Deckard, "was sit on my can at the edge of the set and 
keep my mouth shut. Urbenton wasn't exactly hiring me for my creative input. 
Then get paid off and go home." 
"Well, you're going home at least. Or at least back to whatever's as close as 
somebody like you gets." A pitying smile inflected the briefcase's voice. "Too 
bad you couldn't pull off the part about keeping your mouth shut. You spend 
your whole life being the silent type, killing without a word, and then the 
one time it counts, you can't resist spouting off." 
"Tell me about it." Whatever adrenaline had been left in his system, the rush 
from seeing death at close quarters and then letting his own anger come out 
like an uncorked flamethrower was dissipated now, leaving the flat dregs of 
self-
loathing. "Silence might not be a virtue, but at least it would've been 
profitable." 
"You know, I was a little surprised-" Batty's voice turned thoughtful. "When I 
was told you were up at that Outer Hollywood station. And that was where 
Holden and I were going to track you down, make our little delivery. Me, that 
is." 
"I don't recall ordering any luggage with some dead guy's personality wired 
into it." 



"Well, you didn't." Whatever was inside the briefcase sounded stung by 
Deckard's words. "It's supposed to be a surprise, smart-ass. If you'd known it 
was coming, you probably would've screwed it up somehow. As it was, poor old 
Holden got himself iced trying to make contact with you." 
"That'll teach you." Deckard settled farther back into the pilot's seat, 
folding his arms across his chest. "Send yourself airmail next time." 
"Real funny, Deckard. You may have given up being a blade runner, but you're 
still a cold bastard." If the briefcase had had a human form, it would've 
nodded. "That's what I like about you." 
"Whatever. Anyway, why shouldn't I have been at Outer Hollywood? If that's 
where the money is." 
"You were supposed to be long gone by now," replied Batty's voice. "Wasn't 
that the plan? Holden told me all about it, what you'd decided when you were 
still back on Earth. You were going to get yourself and Sarah Tyrell some new 
identities, then hightail it out to the U.N's far colonies. Out in the stars, 
Deckard; not in some dumpy Martian transit squat. Then you and Sarah-or were 
you still calling her Rachael?-then the two of you would be nice and safe. A 
cozy domestic couple." 
"Believe me-" Deckard could hear the sour weariness in his own voice. "That 
last bit was never part of the plan." 
"Wouldn't have believed it, if it had been. Nevertheless; the stars. That's 
where you were supposed to be going. Or already have gone. So what happened?" 
Deckard closed his eyes for a moment, trying to conserve his waning strength. 
"What happened." He didn't feel like 
telling his life story to the briefcase. "What happened is why I needed the 
money in the first place, why I took this joke gig as technical adviser on 
Urbenton's crappy little video production. The U.N. transit colonies on Mars 
are a total bottleneck. People on Earth-even the living ones-don't know that. 
The U.N. keeps a tight lid on information about what's going on there. The 
emigration program they're so hot on would collapse if it got out that when 
you leave Earth, you don't go to the stars, you just wind up in some cramped, 
dingy hovel on Mars, glued to the cable feed or going slowly crazy from 
stimulus deprivation." 
The briefcase took pains to sound unimpressed. "There's been rumors." 
"None that I'd ever heard. Not that it would've changed my mind. There was no 
way I was going to stay on Earth." 
"Why?" Genuine puzzlement sounded in Batty's voice. "You can die there as well 
as anywhere else. Believe me; I'd know." 
Deckard slowly shook his head. "I had other plans. Ones I didn't tell Holden. 
He didn't need to know." 
"Plans? Like what?" 
Deckard let his eyelids draw down to slits. "You don't need to know, either." 
Fatigue crept up his knotted spine and down into his limbs, turning them into 
leaden weights. "But since you asked, that's why I was hustling for the money. 
To buy our way off Mars." 
"Money's always good," said the briefcase. "It might not be able to do that, 
though." 
"Worth a shot." Deckard didn't feel like arguing the point. "There haven't 
been any transports leaving Mars for the far U.N. colonies in the last two or 
three years. Some kind of problem going on out there. But there's 
rumors-there's always rumors-of travel starting up again. It'll have to; 
there's hardly any room left to cram people into at the Martian colonies, and 
the U.N. still keeps bringing them out from Earth. Something's got to break. 
And if anybody's leaving, it's going to be me and Sarah Tyrell. That's what 
the money was going to be for." 
"But there isn't any money, is there? You're kind of screwed on that one, 
Deckard." 
"I'm screwed." It wasn't an unusual condition for him. "That's the way it 
goes." 
"Bad luck for you." The voice of Batty, emerging from the briefcase's 



concealed speaker, held an equally familiar smile. "Good luck for me, 
though-and the people who sent me out to you. Now you might be a little more 
receptive to the offer we're going to make you." 
"I don't want to hear it." 
"What? What're you talking about?" Batty's voice went up a notch. "'Don't want 
to hear it'-listen, Deckard; I didn't get sent all this way just for you to 
cop an attitude. You can be all burnt out and cynical on your own time, and 
this isn't it. There's things-important things-that have to be done." 
With his arms still folded on his chest, Deckard opened one eye wider to gaze 
upon the briefcase beside him. "And that's why you're here? Dave Holden 
brought you out just so you could tell me about these 'important things'?" 
"That's about the size of it." 
Deckard let the eyelid sink shut, as though of its own weight. "Like I said-I 
don't want to hear it." 
Silence held in the skiff's cockpit. For a few seconds, Deckard heard only the 
motion of his own blood sliding through his veins, the tick of random air 
molecules at his eardrums. Then the cockpit's other inhabitant spoke again. 
"You're a cool customer, Deckard-you know that?" Whatever parts of Batty had 
been encoded and placed inside the briefcase, his snake-twisting mind and 
sharp-eyed perceptions, now sounded impressed despite himself. "Nothing fazes 
you. You've reached some kind of weird point where nothing surprises you 
anymore, but you're still walking around as if you're alive somehow. That's a 
hell of an achievement." 
Deckard shifted in the thinly padded seat, trying to find some comfort for his 
bones and muscles. "What am I supposed to be so surprised about?" 
"For Christ's sake, Deckard-I'm in a fucking box. With a 
handle and two chrome-plated locks and a decent grade of simulated leather on 
the exterior." Annoyance permeated the briefcase's speech. "Shit-you mean you 
didn't notice?" 
"I noticed." Deckard couldn't keep a thin smile from lifting one corner of his 
mouth. "Actually, I prefer you this way." 
"Yeah, well, it doesn't suit me at all. They should've left me at least one 
leg and a foot, so I could kick your sorry ass." The disgust in Batty's voice 
shifted to its former perplexed condition. "Don't you wonder how this all came 
about? The last time you saw me, I was dead. I even got shown photographs of 
how I looked, hanging upside-down on that busted-up freeway. Seeing your own 
corpse is one of those transformative experiences-" 
"Thought you didn't have eyes." 
"There's a jack for an optical scanner inside here. Along with some other 
stuff like that. Besides, why should you care how I saw it? That's not 
important, Deckard. What you should be worrying about is why all of this is 
being done. Why drag my corpse off, why download my skull contents into this 
contraption-the whole trip. Hey, it's all for your benefit, pal. Or at least 
most of it. If you can't display gratitude, you could at least show some 
curiosity." 
"I don't have to," Deckard said dryly. "I'm sure you're going to tell me all 
about it, whether I want to hear it or not." 
He'd been telling the truth to Batty. Deckard could let an unsoothing but 
necessary sleep claim him, where he pushed back in the skiff's pilot seat, 
with little regret. That his old nemesis, a nightmarish figure all glistening 
with rain and smeared blood over taut muscle and sinew, could come back from 
the dead in the form of an articulate briefcase-what was there to be surprised 
about? Stranger things had already happened. Once before, he'd thought Roy 
Batty was safely dead, only to find out otherwise-or rather, to find out that 
one Batty was dead, and another, claiming to be the human original from which 
the replicant had been made, was trying to kill him. And coming close to 
accomplishing that goal. If it hadn't been for Dave Holden, who put a 
highcaliber slug between Batty's eyes, Deckard knew that it 
-
would've been his own corpse draped over the side of one of L.A's ruined 



freeways. 
And now Holden was dead, with his former partner from the LAPD's blade runner 
unit fairly sure that he at least wouldn't be coming around again. The corpse 
on the floor back at the Outer Hollywood studio had appeared more than final; 
Holden's blanked-out eyes had looked as if they had gazed at last upon and 
into some soul-quieting vista of peace. Maybe, thought Deckard, that's what he 
saw when he looked down the barrel of the Kowalski replicant's gun. Fire and 
thunder, and then the silence beyond . 
"Oh, you'll find out soon enough." Batty's voice seemed to come from miles 
away, a distance bound by the cockpit's tiny space. "You don't have to worry 
about that." 
That was a mystery almost worth puzzling out. Deckard let the black behind his 
eyelids deepen and swallow him up. The briefcase with Batty's personality 
wired in and Deckard's initials below the handle-that's what the now-dead 
Holden had been carrying, had come all that way from Earth to deliver to him. 
There'd been a time when Batty and Holden had been working together, trying to 
kill Deckard, claiming that he was another escaped replicant; that was how 
wrapped up in craziness the two of them had gotten. Then they'd had their big 
falling-out, from which only one of them had survived . . . or so it'd seemed 
at the time . 
Something had hooked the two of them back together, Holden and Batty, or 
whatever was left of him inside the briefcase. Something that probably wasn't 
good news. 
It was too much for Deckard to try to figure out now, at this point of his 
exhaustion. As long as the briefcase was quietly sulking to itself, he might 
as well try to find sleep. 
Deckard found himself half wondering, half dreaming, of what reception was in 
store for him on Mars, how Sarah would welcome him home from his long, futile 
venturing. 
A knock at the door. 
"Oh, boy!" The alarm clock danced on top of the bedside table. "Daddy's home!" 
"Christ-" Sarah laid the back of her hand across her eyes, trying to block out 
what was left of the day's illumination and any other sensory data coming into 
her nervous system. As much as she had been expecting, even-in a perverse 
fashion-looking forward, to this moment, it had still crept up on her without 
warning. Until now. 
"I bet that's him! I bet that's him, all right!" 
She wished again that she had spent the money for the third bullet. "Just shut 
the hell up." Her brain felt both sandfilled and fuzzy from the cumulative 
toxins of troubled sleep. Sarah pulled herself into a sitting position on the 
edge of the grey mattress, then watched as the apparent separate entity of her 
hand fumbled inside the table's single drawer. 
"Mrs. Niemand ... excuse me." From the opposite wall 
of the bedroom, the calendar had caught sight of the bright metal cylinders 
tumbling in Sarah's palm. "But what exactly are you doing?" 
Brass glinted at her fingertips, though the bullets' tapered points were dull 
leaden in color. "None of your business." She slipped the bullets into the gun 
from the table, then closed up the chamber. "Don't worry about it." 
"Humanity is my business, Mrs. Niemand. Though that was said in other 
contexts, it applies in this situation as well." 
"I don't need the literary allusions." Sarah shifted the gun to her left hand 
and used her right to smooth her dark, disordered hair back from her brow. 
Some previous tenants of the hovel, who had either killed themselves or 
managed to get shipped off the planet while the starbound emigration vessels 
were still running, had shelled out for the appliances to be hooked up to the 
library trunk feed. The penurious Niemands had canceled the service, but the 
calendar had the rudiments of a university education soaked up in its off-line 
banks. And didn't mind showing it off, all of which had added to the general 
hell of Sarah's existence. Maybe four, she thought. I should've bought four 
bullets. 



The knock at the door sounded again, blows hard enough to shake the hovel's 
thin plastic walls. A rain of soft, sneeze-provoking dust drifted down upon 
the bed. 
"Come on!" The alarm clock shrilled even more excitedly. "Let's go see!" 
Sarah placed the muzzle of the gun against the clock's face, at the exact 
center from which the two black hands radiated. "Let's be real quiet." She 
pushed the clock back across the table. "So Daddy and Mommy can have a little 
quality time together. All right?" 
"Okay," squeaked the clock. It cowered back against the wall. 
"Mrs. Niemand!" The calendar fluttered its pages at her as she walked past. "I 
implore you-don't do anything you'll regret later." 
"There's not going to be a later." The gun's weight dangled at the end of her 
arm. "So regret's not a problem." 
"Sarah!" Using her real name, the calendar cried after her. "Please ... don't 
. 
In the front part of the hovel, a space barely wider than what her 
outstretched arms could have reached across, the percussion on the door was 
even louder. Enough to start peeling some of the web of silvery duct tape and 
glue-tacky patches away from the torn seams and other leak points. The hovel 
shivered and hissed as though apprehending its own demise. Sarah wondered what 
Deckard was going on about, pounding on the door with that much force. He's 
that happy about being home? Maybe he had finally flipped out, gone all the 
way around the bend of that dark corridor that'd always been there inside his 
head; some bad retro-TV fantasy of domestic bliss had wormed its way into his 
thoughts and taken over. Some vision of Mr. Niemand coming back here after a 
long, hard day at work, to be greeted by Mrs. N in a lace-edged kitchen apron 
and heels, bearing a cold stainless-steel pitcher of gin and vermouth-the life 
their great-great-grandparents had lived, at least inside their sitcom 
fantasies. 
"Take it easy!" More strips of sealant tape dangled loose, trailing like thick 
party streamers from the hovel's low ceiling. "You're going to knock the place 
over-" A muffled voice came from the other side of the door, but Sarah 
couldn't make out what he'd said. She batted another sticky section of tape 
away from her face and reached for the door's knob. 
In the sliver of time it took to turn the knob and pull the wobbling front 
door open, Sarah had entertained the notion of going with Deckard's 
anticipatory fantasy . . . or at least stringing him along with it for a few 
minutes. She could act as though there were, in fact, some measure of 
affection between them; she could even try once more to be Rachael, his 
long-dead and long-remembered love. The pretending wouldn't be unpleasant; 
there was still a room inside her head in which her own desire for all of that 
was still kept, like an ancient white wedding dress, never used and carefully 
folded between sheets of tissue paper. 
It's what the bastard deserves, thought Sarah as her fingertips touched the 
doorknob. To be jerked around the way 
she had been, by a forged-iron chain bolted to the heart. To be led to believe 
one thing, even for a second, then be slammed up against the even more 
unyielding steel wall of reality . 
In her other hand, the one dangling by her side as she reached to pull open 
the door, she had the perfect representation of what reality had come to mean 
for her. Loaded and cocked; she had already decided she didn't want to even 
try to screw around with Deckard's head anymore. There would be no Rachel-like 
homecoming kiss for him. If there were any irrational hopes left inside the 
sonuvabitch that would rise upon his seeing the human original of the 
replicant face for which he'd fallen, they'd be dashed by the very next thing 
he'd see. A circle of cold metal, with a darker black space at its 
center-Sarah's hand was already lifting the gun into position as she stepped 
back from the door swinging open toward her. 
Two faces looked in at her. Two men, neither of them Rick Deckard. The eyes 
behind their matching square-rimmed glasses widened as they focussed on the 



gun she was holding a few inches from their foreheads. 
"Urn ... is this the Niemand residence?" The man to the 
left swallowed nervously. The two of them didn't appear to be 
twins, but looked as if they were trying to be. "If it's not . 
we're sorry . 
"Maybe this is a bad time." Beads of sweat had welled up on the other's brow; 
tiny images of the gun floated in the wet mirrors. "Maybe we could come back 
... some other time." 
Sarah let the gun lower of its own weight. She leaned against the side of the 
doorway; the hovel swayed and audibly creaked. "My apologies, gentlemen." 
Beyond the pair, the dimly lit corridors of the U.N. emigrant colony were 
visible, the rounded angles filled with rubble trembling in the airloss 
breezes. "I just woke up." 
One of the men tried an uneasy smile. "You were expecting someone else?" 
"My husband, actually." 
The two men exchanged glances, their heads pivoting a 
fraction of an inch toward each other, as though linked by some simple, 
invisible mechanism. The same unseen gear turned their owlish gazes back to 
Sarah. 
"Mrs. Niemand-" The one on the left spoke with somber intonation. "We can tell 
that you lead a tragic life." 
In the corridor leading toward the emigrant colony's center, beneath the banks 
of flickering or grey-dead fluorescent tubes, devolved human figures moved, 
scuttling furtively with their last meager, pawnable treasures clutched to 
their chests, heading for the ragtag booths and alleys of the black-market 
district. Even farther down the scale, appearing hardly human at all, were the 
creeping forms of those who had completely fallen out of the colony's 
hard-screw economy, those who'd come to the frayed end of their money and 
possessions and had been cut off from the cable monopoly's feed. Faces devoid 
of reason as any vegetable lifted and swiveled toward the scene at the Niemand 
hovel's front door, idiot eyes and other receptors searching for any sensory 
input. Red stigmata flecked the angles of the stimulus-lorn heads, with the 
same markings repeated on the corridor's dented walls. Every muscle near the 
softly keening mouths twitched with the constant hunger of misfired synapses. 
A tragic life, mused Sarah as she gazed past the two surprise callers. The 
length of her vision reached beyond the other locked or boarded-up hovel doors 
to low-ceilinged rooms containing yet more collapsing nervous systems. She 
wasn't sure what the man meant. She had worked a long time to engineer the 
destiny that had brought her to this place. A particular hell, or any one at 
all-I belong here, thought Sarah. 
Seized by a dreadful suspicion, she refocussed on the two men at her door. 
"You're not Jehovah's Witnesses, are you?" That would be all she needed right 
now, to get handed an animated Watch tower, complete with stereophonic sound 
effects triggered by the warmth of her thumb and forefinger. "Or New Reformed 
Apocalypticists?" Another of the groups that had been seen recently, 
evangelizing through the emigrant colonies-she looked to see if one of them 
was carrying a miniature holographic projector suitable for evoking biblical 
dioramas in the corridor's thin, acrid-smelling air. 
The two men gazed blankly at her through their black-rimmed, square lenses. 
"No-" The left one shook his head. "We're not here to ask you for money or 
anything-" 
Her laugh barked out. "Good call." 
"This is a personal matter. For you alone, Mrs. Niemand." He raised a pale, 
fussily manicured hand, pointing to the interior of the hovel behind her. "May 
we come in? To talk with you? I'm sure you'll find it of interest." 
Gun dangling at her side, Sarah peered more closely at the two men. They 
seemed oddly familiar to her, positions on a memory track that her brain 
hadn't moved along for some time. Her eyes had adjusted to the corridor's 
partial light spectrum; she could better perceive the pair now. White shirts 
and narrow-lapelled suits, black as an old-fashioned undertaker's; 



anal-retentive bow ties cinched tight onto their reedy, knobbly throats, not 
much bigger around than the narrow wrists exposed at their cuffs. The men's 
owlish regard, framed by the sharp-cornered spectacles, tweaked a cord in her 
gut. 
The snufflers in the corridor's rubble had started edging closer, attracted by 
the sounds of human voices. Sarah knew that if she slammed the door shut and 
left the two men outside, and they went on pounding and calling to her through 
the thin panel, the hovel would be overrun by stim-desperate hordes, the 
pressure of their clambering bodies enough to collapse the rickety walls. "All 
right-" Sarah stepped back from the door. "Get in here. But you'd better make 
your spiel quick. As I said, I'm expecting my husband any time now." She gave 
another bitter laugh. "God knows he's a jealous sonuvabitch." 
Once inside, with the corridor's sickly light and recycled air shut away, she 
busied herself with her black-market cigarettes, extracting one of the 
dwindling number from the cellophane-swathed pack and getting it lit. Tossing 
the charred match onto the floor with the others, she tilted her head back and 
dragged the smoke into the innermost re 
cesses of her lungs, already feeling it percolate out into her clamoring 
veins. Exhaled, a blue cloud swirled, then streamed in a tapering thread 
toward the nearest leak in the wall. "So what is it you wanted to talk about?" 
Sarah didn't turn around, but could hear the two men shuffling in the room's 
narrow confines behind her. In a too-brief moment of sated peace, she regarded 
the orange-red coal at the end of the cigarette. "Whatever your pitch is, I 
hope it's good." 
The one who had been doing all the speaking shifted his voice to a flat, level 
tone. "For starters, we know you're not anyone named Niemand. That's an alias. 
For both you and the former LAPD blade runner, real name Rick Deckard, with 
whom you've been posing as man and wife. Your name is Sarah Tyrell." 
She stood where she was, showing no movement, no reaction. The grey shroud of 
her smoke-laden breath was the only sign of life. She had cupped an elbow in 
her free hand, hitting an aristocratic pose both studied and natural to her. 
The angle of her head, the trace of one dark lock across the corner of her 
brow-she could close her eyes and imagine herself another world and another 
life away from this one. Back in the executive suite and private living 
quarters of the Tyrell Corporation headquarters on Earth, in Los Angeles. Back 
in the tight, secretive epicenter of all the wealth and power she had 
inherited upon the death-the murder-of her uncle Eldon Tyrell. From the great, 
vaulted windows, there had been a view across the city's roiling inferno, the 
alleys and streets packed close at the base of the Tyrell ziggurat and 
slanting towers . 
All gone now. Sarah watched the smoke twist and thin and disappear. L.A. 
remained, forever imploding inside the furious mass of its mottled citizens, 
glitter-eyed thieves and murderers and worse, locked in their scythe-led dance 
with the black-leather cops and blade runners and worse, all held in the 
masked, emotionless gaze of those urban tribespeople who'd cut themselves so 
far out of the loop that they might as well have been observers from another 
world, another time centuries forward or back. An Asian grace, jingling fleets 
of Chinese bicycles cutting through the neon-lit sheets of rain, ignoring the 
diluting blood and broken glass at the weary assassin's feet. Sarah knew that 
was the discreet charm of L.A-you could go about your business, even if it 
meant killing people, or the things that looked just like people, and everyone 
else on the street would mind their own affairs. Even when the Tyrell 
Corporation headquarters had self-destructed, in the apocalypse that she 
herself had engineered and brought to pass, there had probably been streets 
full of faces that had glanced up for only a moment at the fire turning the 
night sky's rain to steam; then they had returned to scurrying and pushing and 
shoving toward their own dark, unknowable desires. 
"Miss Tyrell?" The man's voice came from behind her, cutting through the deep 
reverie, the vision of that other world and time, into which she had fallen. 
"There really is no use denying it. We know who you are." 



A certain pleasure came from hearing her own true name spoken again. By anyone 
other than Deckard, in whose mouth it was something close to a curse, a prison 
sentence she could never outlive. 
Sarah looked over her shoulder at the two men, giving them the coldest edge of 
her half smile. "So what agency are you from?" She raised an eyebrow. "The 
local authorities?" There were police in the emigrant colonies, but they 
worked almost entirely for the cable monopoly, terrorizing deadbeat 
subscribers and rooting out illegal taps on the wire. "Or perhaps you're from 
Earth. U.N.?" That was a possibility-the colonies were laced with informants 
ratting on each other to the intelligence clearinghouse back in Geneva. 
"Perhaps LAPD-it wouldn't surprise me." The point of her smile sharpened. 
"Though I should remind you-there's no extradition allowed between Earth and 
Mars. Per the U.N's emigration authority. So if you were planning on taking me 
back with you, to face whatever charges you might have against me, you're 
somewhat out of luck." 
The more talkative man gave what was meant to be a smile both reciprocal and 
pleasant, but that came off eerily forced, a mannerism whose performance he 
had studied. "We didn't come to extradite you, Miss Tyrell." 
For a moment, she doubted if they were any kind of police at all. They must be 
some kind of amateurs, thought Sarah. After lighting the cigarette, she had 
picked up the gun again from where she had set it down; it even had the right 
number of bullets to take care of both of the men. Unless they had some kind 
of major backup standing around near the hovel, these two might just as well 
have marched into their own coffins. 
"All right," she said. The gun made a convenient pointer to direct toward each 
of the men in turn. "If you're not police, then what the hell are you?" 
"Don't you know?" The same man peered at her, the expression on his face one 
of both puzzlement and a disappointment bordering on sheer heartbreak. "Can't 
you tell just by looking at us?" 
She frowned. "I never saw either one of you before." 
"You might have. But you probably wouldn't remember, or even have noticed. You 
wouldn't have had to." 
The disquieting feeling she had gotten before, when she had studied the men's 
appearance out on the hovel's doorstep, arose in her again. She felt the 
pressure of the two pairs of eyes, slightly magnified and distorted behind the 
square glasses . 
That's it. Sarah nodded slowly to herself. The glasses. She knew as well that 
it hadn't been a lapse of memory-a failure to remember-but her own silent, 
unspoken will shutting out that image of another face, older than either of 
these two men, wrinkled like parchment or thin, ancient leather. With a gaze 
that had been grossly enlarged by lenses of exactly the same shape, clear 
squares bordered in heavy black; so that the eyes had appeared like 
high-resolution, full-color video screens, that watched and judged and cruelly 
absorbed all who fell within their scan. That was the memory that the two 
men's appearance had triggered but some defensive portion of her brain had 
shut out, lest it wound her again. The memory of her uncle's gaze, the 
glass-shrouded eyes of Eldon Tyrell. 
As much as was possible for the two men standing in front of Sarah in the 
hovel, they had managed to turn themselves into grotesque clones of the 
replicant-murdered head of the Tyrell Corporation. Or tributes to that fallen 
leader, the to-tern aspects-the square-framed glasses precise as geometrizing 
instruments, the equally meticulous and fussy clothes-incorporated like the 
fetishes of the dead into their own gestalt. Ineffectually, futilely; the two 
figures lacked the old man's withered potency, the timeless and time-fed 
negative aura of great wealth and greater desire, moving through dark-shaded 
spaces, silent rooms, bank vaults, and sweat-glistening silk bedsheets. 
The two men looked like overgrown, lank-limbed children dressed up in their 
father's discarded clothing. Sarah felt a shiver of instinctive fear as she 
gazed upon them, catching sight of the mad worm at the pupils' centers behind 
the square glasses. 



Held for a moment longer by the fear-of the two living men and the dead 
one-she could not speak. 
"We're not from the police," said the one who'd spoken before. "We're from the 
Tyrell Corporation." 
Her flash of anger banished any other emotion. "There is no Tyrell 
Corporation." Her voice lashed out, the cutting tip of her own sharpened 
tongue. "Not anymore." 
They exchanged another glance, then turned their magnified and now sorrowful 
gazes upon her again. The other one spoke: "We were afraid that was what you 
believed. That you didn't know." 
Strips of sealant tape drifted like slow seaweed in the hovel's hissing 
drafts. Sarah batted away the nearest tendril with the muzzle of the gun. 
"Know what?" 
Behind the square-framed glasses, the men's eyes lit up with simultaneous 
enthusiasm. "That the Tyrell Corporation wasn't destroyed. It survives. It 
still exists. As it always has and always will." 
The fervor in the man's voice amused Sarah. "And this is what you came here to 
tell me." She could feel her own smile turning gentle, tolerant. "That there's 
a few faithful employees such as yourself-true believers-and you're somehow 
keeping the flame alive. Really She shook her head. "That's very touching. 
How many show up at the staff meetings? A couple dozen?" 
The more talkative one glowered sulkily at her. "It's not just a few of us, 
Miss Tyrell. We're not fools." 
"That's right," said his partner. "This is bigger than that. Much bigger. We 
represent the other Tyrell Corporation-the shadow company that already existed 
before the one that you knew was destroyed." 
She made no reply. Because she knew that the men, the mysterious callers who 
had appeared on her doorstep, were speaking the truth. There had been 
intimations, things whispered and things left unspoken, referred to by only a 
nod and a partial, omniscient smile on the face of her uncle, all referring to 
that other Tyrell Corporation, the shadow of the one whose light-studded Aztec 
pyramid had loomed over the dense sprawl of Los Angeles. Shadow being the 
operative word; an entity made of darkness that moved in darkness and did dark 
things. Darker than what Eldon Tyrell and the corporation that acted out in 
the open did-which would take some effort, Sarah knew. She was familiar enough 
with all the conspiracies and clandestine operations, the pulling of strings 
fine as the strands of a spider's web, a silken net that covered all of Earth 
and the worlds beyond. That was what she had inherited, what the death of the 
only other living Tyrell had left to her. And what she had destroyed, had 
turned to ashes as cold as those in the alabaster urn with Eldon Tyrell's name 
engraved on the side. She had annihilated the works of his hands, the vision 
that had been held in the cold fish eyes behind the square-rimmed spectacles; 
the hole left in the heart, the center, of L.A. had probably already been 
filled in by now, the charred ruins of the Tyrell Corporation headquarters 
carted off or incorporated into a new squatter ghetto. 
So if these two, thought Sarah Tyrell, are from the shadow corporation . . 
There was no need to put words to the remainder of what had awoken and moved 
inside her skull. The two men standing in the center of the hovel looked like 
geeks, pathetic imi 


K. Vi. J eter 
tations of their dead boss. That was what made them dangerous, convinced her 
of what they claimed to be. Just as the late Eldon Tyrell, they had no need of 
pumped-up appearances, the visible aspects of power and threat. They lived in 
the dark spaces between the world's daylight manifestations, operated there, 
and went about their secret errands, continuing to pull the delicate spider 
strands that had drifted loose from a dead man's grasp. 
I should've known . . . that I could never get away from them. The realization 
moved like a thread of ice down her spine. Not just the two men, these 
representatives of the shadow corporation that had survived after the other, 
the visible one, was no more . . . but her uncle as well. It's just like the 

bastard, Sarah brooded. Leave it to Eldon Tyrell to achieve immortality, to 
find a way to go on screwing with other people's lives from beyond the grave. 
The image of her uncle's face, with its wrinkled skin close to the bone, 
winter-cold optics, and mocking smile, faded from her sight, revealing the 
only slightly unsettling visages of the two men before her. She sighed, 
feeling the last elements of resistance draining from her body. "All right-" 
She nodded slowly. "What is it you want? Why'd you come here? What do you want 
from me?" 
"Want from you?" The eyes behind the square-rimmed glasses looked puzzled. The 
more talkative man tilted his head as though trying to shake something loose. 
"We don't want anything from you." 
"Well His partner nudged him. "Except, of course you yourself . 
"Pardon me?" Sarah laughed, incredulous. She wouldn't have thought that these 
two would've been interested in anything that normal and human. "That's okay, 
though . 
I'm flattered." She tossed her hair back from her eyes. It'd been a long time, 
since practically the moment of their arrival at the emigrant colony, that 
Deckard had laid a hand on her, one way or another. At some point, the 
resemblance between herself and the dead Rachael had ceased to be enough. "But 
not today, thanks." 
"Hm." The more talkative one rubbed his smooth chin. "I 
think there's been some misunderstanding here. It's not a personal thing-" 
"It's not us," interjected his partner, "who want you." 
"It's the corporation. The shadow corporation." The little mad light went on 
again behind the square glasses. "That's what needs you. That's why we spent 
so much time and effort looking for you, and why we came all this way to find 
you." 
"That's right." His partner nodded vehemently. "Without you . . . we're 
nothing. The corporation-the shadow corporation-it's nothing." 
A growing spark moved along the edges of her own suspicion. "Why should that 
be?" Her eyes narrowed as she gazed at the two men. She had a notion already, 
but wanted to hear it explained aloud. 
"Miss Tyrell ... isn't it obvious?" The talkative one spread his empty hands 
apart. "How can there be a Tyrell Corporation-or even its shadow-without a 
Tyrell to head it? You are the heir to everything that your uncle created. 
Both the corporation that existed in the light and the one of the darkness. 
There's a right of succession involved here. Surely you know-you must 
know-that there's more to the Tyrell Corporation than merely a commercial 
enterprise." 
"Oh, I know," said Sarah. I know too well. "It's a matter of faith." 
"Exactly. You must have faith-just as we have." The light had intensified in 
both men's eyes. "The faith that all the shadow corporation has. That Eldon 
Tyrell's great vision-all that he wished and planned for humanity-will be 
reborn. That the Tyrell Corporation will rise from the ashes. Not as it was, 
but as something even greater. As its destiny always had been." 
"You see, don't you?" The other one spoke up. "That's why the shadow 
corporation exists. That's why Eldon Tyrell created it and kept it in the 
darkness. You were his heir, the only other living Tyrell-and then the only 
Tyrell at all-and you didn't even know about it." 
"No ... I didn't." Sarah gave a shake of her head. "Not really." She wasn't 
certain now whether she had known or 
D K. W. 
notr whether she had just chosen to disbelieve the little hints and rumors, 
the mysteries that her uncle had alluded to with his sly conspirator's smile. 
You fool, she told herself. To think you could ever kill it . 
"He couldn't tell you about the shadow corporation. It had to remain a secret. 
From everyone-even you. Only those of us sworn to its mysteries; we alone 
knew, and waited." The man's voice trembled with fervor. "For that day we knew 
was inevitable, the day of triumph for the Tyrell Corporation's enemies-" 
"Short-lived triumph," grumped the talkative one's partner. 



"Yes, that's right. Of course." He nodded. "The darkness cannot last; the 
Tyrell Corporation will not be vanquished forever. If its enemies think they 
have destroyed it, sown salt across its ashes, they're wrong. The Tyrell 
Corporation-the glory of Eldon Tyrell's vision-will mount to the skies again. 
Already, we in the shadow corporation, the heirs and defenders of that vision, 
have set moving the great wheels and gears of justice." 
"We like to say"-the other's voice turned shy and selfconscious-"that the sole 
of our sandal shall be upon the throat of our foes." 
"I bet." Sarah kept her face masklike, and the gun in her hand. All this talk 
of enemies and retribution made her wary. When these people said they needed 
her-that the Tyrell Corporation's shadow entity needed her-they possibly meant 
they wanted her head on a pike. Her self-destructive moods hadn't included 
relinquishing that much control to anyone else. "Well, if you have plans 
already, then maybe you should just . . . go and do them. Don't let me stop 
you. Drop me a line now and then, let me know how things are coming along." 
Right now, she mainly wanted the two odd men, with their Eldon Tyrell 
stylings, to just disappear. So that she would have time to think, to figure 
out what she herself would do next. There's not much sense, mused Sarah, in 
blowing away these two guys. That wouldn't stop anything. The thought of these 
two-and how many others? How big was this shadow outfit?-working 
away to put back together all that she had so carefully disassembled filled 
her with both nausea and a tightly concealed rage. "Thanks for stopping by." 
The two men exchanged a glance with each other, then swiveled their conjunct 
gaze back onto her. 
"Miss Tyrell-you really don't seem to understand." The more talkative one's 
voice filled with sorrow. "We need you. We can't resurrect the Tyrell 
Corporation without you." 
"We're loyalists. Diehards," added the other man. "Everyone in the shadow 
corporation-we were sworn to loyalty to Eldon Tyrell . . . and now to you. You 
didn't inherit just the Tyrell Corporation. You inherited us." 
"You're joking. You must be." The notion appalled her. The two men suddenly 
appeared to her as children to whom she bore some crushing maternal 
obligation. As if her ancient uncle had been reborn as twins, fresh-faced and 
naively innocent behind the stigmata of the square glasses. The resurrection 
of all that she had thought was safely dead-Now what? thought Sarah. A 
horrible vision came to her of these two camping out in the hovel, taking 
turns sleeping on the broken-backed sofa. 
"It's no joke, Miss Tyrell. We never joke." The talkative one's expression was 
somber, as though even the skull beneath the tight flesh had been rendered 
grinless. "It is our great mission-our destiny-to bring the Tyrell 
Corporation, from the shadows where it now exists, out to the light once more. 
Where it belongs. At the center of all, with everything orbiting around it-" 
"But that would make it the light itself." The other man frowned. "Like it was 
the sun. You're mixing up-" 
"Whatever," snapped the first irritably. "You know what I mean. As does Miss 
Tyrell." He looked back at her again. "You do know, don't you? Why we've come 
here?" 
"I know," she said. There was no use denying it any longer. She didn't need 
the gun-not against these two. Or any of their brethren, the true believers. 
"You want me to be the head of the Tyrell Corporation. As I was before. After 
my uncle . . . died." 
"Exactly." The man nodded. "You must do this. If the Tyrell Corporation is to 
defeat its enemies. Those who were so misguided as to try to diminish Eldon 
Tyrell's vision." 
He doesn't know, thought Sarah. They don't have a clue. That she had been the 
one who pushed the little red button, or arranged to have it pushed by those 
others she had cheated and lied to. The ashes of the Tyrell Corporation 
headquarters, those once-proud towers and the eternal-seeming pyramid in the 
center of Los Angeles, were on her hands. These two men, and all the other 
die-hard loyalists behind them, didn't know that she herself had destroyed the 



Tyrell Corporation. 
"Without you The man's voice came to her as though from the edge of a 
barely glimpsed dream. "Without you . 
we'll die. The shadows will claim us. The vision that still unites us will be 
lost, our faith gone, and we will drift off into the darkness. Then the Tyrell 
Corporation truly will be no more." 
I don't have to do a single thing. The realization moved inside Sarah. She 
could just stand where she was in the hovel and refuse to go with the two 
men-she knew they were too much in awe of her, of the Tyrell blood in her 
veins, to try to force her to go anywhere. Or she could go ahead and kill 
them, simply raise the gun, still in her hand, place it against each man's 
forehead in turn-they probably wouldn't resist that, either, just accept it 
from her as what they deserved from a wrathful deity. Or even better, thought 
Sarah, I could kill myself. Right in front of them. That would accomplish a 
lot-almost everything, she decided. She'd be dead-something for which she'd 
been yearning for a long time now- and the Tyrell Corporation's shadow entity, 
this valiant little band of the faithful, would die out soon thereafter. No 
living Tyrell, no corporation, all lost, finally and forever. Perfect . . 
Except for one thing. She knew just what it was. Deckard, that sonuvabitch, 
would still be walking around. Still mourning his dead Rachael, a shrine to a 
female replicant assembled inside his skull, memory scraps and the taste of 
her kiss, the way her face had looked-My face, Sarah thought grimly; Rachael's 
was just a copy-when he'd forced 
his kiss upon her. And she had given herself to him, wanting him . 
She couldn't remember anymore whether that had been her or Rachael. There had 
been a time, a moment, when time had repeated itself; the kiss, the wanting, 
even his words. She had made Deckard say them again, the way he had said them 
to Rachael long ago . 
Say that you want me. He had said that. 
Then her voice. In the past, in memory. Standing in the middle of the hovel, a 
world away; she closed her eyes and heard her own voice, Rachael's voice, the 
same- I want you. 
"Miss Tyrell ... did you say something?" 
She forced her eyes open and looked at the two men standing in front of her, 
not recognizing them for a moment. Or mis-recognizing them; she had the 
uncomfortable feeling that she was looking at her uncle, brought back from the 
dead and somehow doubled, with neither aspect quite human. Then the feeling 
passed, and she found herself once again looking at the two loyalists, 
ambassadors from the shadow corporation. If they weren't real-or at least not 
yet-they were certainly trying to be. 
A shake of the head. "No," said Sarah. She wondered if she had spoken aloud, 
if the words of the past had forced their way into the present once again. How 
embarrassing, she thought. Though it proved that nothing ever died. As long as 
there was memory, there were ghosts. Like me-perhaps when Deckard looked at 
her, that was what he saw. The ghost of Rachael. "No-I didn't say anything." 
Sarah watched as the two men consulted with each other, whispers and nods. 
They finished and turned back toward her. 
"We don't have much time, Miss Tyrell." The more talkative one, the evident 
leader of the pair, clasped his hands together. "Our enemies-the enemies of 
the Tyrell Corporation-they very likely know that we're here. They'd do 
anything to stop us, to thwart our sacred mission. We have to leave. Now." 
"We've stayed here too long already." The other one cast a nervous glance over 
his shoulder, toward the hovel's front door, as though he expected a 
black-clad SWAT team to come bursting through at any moment. 
"You have to come with us, Miss Tyrell." The talkative one's intertwined 
fingers squeezed themselves white and bloodless. "There's so much more we need 
to tell you. And that we can show you. But you must come with us. You must." 
"All right-" Sarah held up a hand, palm outward. "There's no need to hector 
me. I've made my decision." It had been easy, once the image of Deckard had 
come into her mind. "I'll go with you. Wherever you want." Of all the 



possibilities, those that had her dead while Deckard would still be 
alive-those had been ruled right out. As if a terminating memo had been sent 
down from the corporate headquarters, that columned, high-ceilinged chamber 
that still existed behind her brow. 
Besides, thought Sarah. It's mine; the Tyrell Corporation, in all its guises, 
shadowed or in light. She could do whatever she wanted with it. A glance from 
the corner of her eye showed the two men, in their homage-to-Eldon-Tyrell 
outfits, in a new light; they belonged to her as well, part of the package. A 
familiar sensation, one that ran from her groin all the way to the top of her 
spine and beyond. They looked at her, not just reverently, but would not have 
dared to touch her. She could use them for whatever purpose she had in mind, 
and they would be grateful. Just to be in her presence and bear her orders. 
That notion made her smile, one corner of her mouth lifting a millimeter. 
She thought of Deckard, wherever he was at this moment. Perhaps coming home-if 
this counted as home-after his stint trolling for money at that Outer 
Hollywood station above Earth. Coming home to whatever surprise he might've 
figured would be waiting for him-the gun at the door probably wouldn't have 
been completely unexpected. If I were gone, though-Sarah mulled it over-that 
might knock him back. For a little while, at least. 
Which would give her time to prepare another surprise for 
Deckard. The last one he'd ever receive. She wasn't sure yet what it would be. 
But with all the resources of the shadow corporation at her fingertips . . . a 
mere gun and a single bullet now struck her as entirely too simple. 
I'll have to do better than that, thought Sarah. It's only what he deserves. 
"Please, Miss Tyrell-" The duo's leader made a show out of checking the 
complicated watch on his thin wrist. "We really have to get going." 
"I suppose so." She turned and headed toward the hovel's bedroom. "Just let me 
get a few things." 
She took one of the bullets from the gun's clip, using its weight to hold down 
on the bedside table a note she'd quickly scribbled out for Deckard. 
There-Sarah stood up from the mattress edge. Let him figure that one out. The 
alarm clock walked across the folded piece of paper and looked down at the 
bullet, the face behind the black hands seemingly mystified. 
In the minuscule bathroom, she splashed water on her face, then straightened 
up from the sink and pulled her dark hair back with one hand. For a moment 
longer, Sarah returned the gaze from the figure in the clouded mirror. It 
didn't look like Rachael standing there. Or only a little; the sad dreaminess 
that had always marked her replicant double had been leached away, replaced by 
something harder and colder. That's my face, thought Sarah. The cheekbones 
were more pronounced, edged sharper, as though the flesh were being cut away 
by interior knives. She toweled off the water trickling down her throat and 
turned back toward the hovel's bedroom. 
The calendar on the wall fluttered its page as she approached the doorway. 
"Mrs. Niemand-I mean Sarah-" The calendar's voice betrayed its anxiety. 
"What're you doing? This is madness. You don't know who these men are-" 
"How rude." Sarah glared at the snow-covered wilderness scene. "You were 
listening in." 
"Of course. I'm a calendar; I'm supposed to keep track of things." The 
number-dense pages fluttered. "Listen to me. These characters are trouble. 
They could be anybody. Lunatics . . . or maybe they really are the police; 
they're just lying to you. To get you to go quietly." Its voice rose in pitch. 
"I beg of you. Don't go with these people-" 
"I have to." Sarah repositioned the strap of the little shoulder bag she had 
hurriedly packed. "It's my destiny. Or as close to it as I'm going to get." 
"Sarah The calendar wailed as she exited the bedroom. 
"Let's go, gentlemen." Pulling the bag up higher, she nodded toward the 
hovel's front door. The two men stepped aside and let her go ahead of them. 
In the corridor outside, she heard tiny feet running through the decaying 
trash. The minute noise came from behind; she turned and looked, and saw the 
alarm clock racing to catch up. 



"Take me with you!" The clock's shrill, tinny voice sliced through the 
oxygen-thin air. "I wanna go, too!" 
She stopped and pulled the shoulder bag around so she could root through its 
contents. The gun's weight had sunk it to the bottom; by the time Sarah pulled 
it out, the alarm clock was right in front of her, hopping excitedly from one 
of its stubby little legs to the other. 
The shot echoed down the corridor, smudged leaves of rubble trembling in the 
invisible, hard-edged wave. The stimulus-hungry derelicts raised their blind 
heads, limbs trembling in the rush of ecstatic input, bloodied fingertips 
clawing convulsively at the floor grates. A smaller noise followed after the 
first, tinkling bits of metal and fractured microcircuits raining softly 
across the spot where the alarm clock, until the last moment, had been 
dancing. 
"Damn." Sarah looked at the warmed gun in her palm. "Now it's empty." 
One of the men, the leader of the pair who had called upon her, reached over 
and took the gun out of her hand. "Don't worry." He threw it away, metal 
clanging against metal as it struck the corridor wall. "We'll get you another 
one." 
A~ the landing field, in the bare red flats on the emigrant colony's edge, he 
got screwed. 
They wouldn't give Deckard his deposit back on the skiff. "What're you going 
to do?" said the man behind the desk- really just a buckling sheet of plywood 
supported by two empty fuel drums. The man took no pleasure in the burn, but 
just looked at Deckard with the flat, unblinking eyes of someone who knows 
he's being a bastard. "We're an illegal business already. You're going to 
report us or something? Get real." 
Deckard turned his own gaze away from the man's heavy, black-stubbled face, 
and out toward the small interplanetary craft scattered over the rust-colored 
sands. From one hand dangled the briefcase with his initials on the tiny metal 
plate below his knuckles. "There's other ways," he said quietly, then looked 
back at the man. "Of getting my money back." 
"Sure there is. You can beat the crap out of me, for one." The man shrugged, 
crescents of sweat-darkened shirt riding up under his fleshy arms. "Whatever 
sings your song, buddy. I don't care." A slow, wobbling shake of the head. 
"But you're still not getting your money back. And don't ever bother bringing 
your business around here again. You ever want off-planet, you'll have to flap 
your wings and jump." 
The briefcase whispered to Deckard. "Come on, don't waste your time with this 
lowlife. We've got things to do." 
"You say something, pal?" 
"No-" Deckard shook his head. "Just grumbling to myself. Tell you what. I'll 
settle for half of what you owe me." 
He settled for nothing. He was too tired to argue any further. 
"Count your blessings," the skiff guy called after him from the doorway of the 
shack. "You got back here still breathing. Most of our customers don't. Our 
merchandise has got over a fifty percent failure rate." 
"Nice advertising pitch." Batty's voice spoke up, louder this time, as Deckard 
toted the briefcase across the field. "Lot of possibilities-'Rent from us and 
you'll never have to again." 
Deckard made no reply. If half of these things made it home, he thought 
gloomily, it'd be a miracle. With his free hand, he rubbed blood-tinged grit 
from his eyes. I must've been crazy. All around him, as he trudged in sinking 
footsteps, the skiffs dug lower in the sand, like the black eggs of some 
extinct, exhausted species. The vehicles' dented, corrosion-flecked carapaces 
transmitted a minimal-wattage signal of neglect and abortive transport. Some 
of them, including the one he'd taken to the Outer Hollywood station and back, 
looked as fragile as ancient Christmas decorations, hand-blown glass that a 
sneeze could shatter. An indication of how desperate he must've been-And still 
am, thought Deckard. Even worse now. Getting stiffed on the deposit had chewed 
another major hole in his cash float. 



"Don't worry." The briefcase, Batty's voice inside, radiated a familiar 
confidence. "I haven't even begun telling everything that's in store for you." 
"I can't wait." Deckard had to remind himself that Dave Holden had died in 
order to carry this thing out to him. He 
supposed he owed his dead ex-partner the posthumous courtesy of listening to 
it. Shading his eyes with one hand, he peered out of the limply fluttering, 
low-pressure bubble tunnel that extended from the rental yard shack. He was in 
luck, or as much of it as existed in his personal universe. Through the 
sand-scoured plastic, he spotted a worm-treaded shuttle working its way across 
the desert; the segmented ground transport was probably ferrying contract 
miners back from the jagged hills to the planet's east. He and the briefcase 
could hitch a ride all the way in to the emigrant colony's imploded center. 
"Now would be a good time to clam up again," he told the disembodied voice. 
Sealing his mouth and nose off with the palm of his free hand, he unzipped the 
bubble's exit flap and shouldered out into the stinging wind to flag down the 
shuttle. 
"Hey-I'm discreet." The briefcase's voice slid through the crystals stinging 
against the side of Deckard's face. "You're not the only person who can carry 
off a silent act." 
On the shuttle, he sat with the briefcase on his knees, sandwiched in between 
the mine workers on the scuffed steel benches, each breath taking in the 
mingled odors of their sweat. The jogging motion of the treads across the red 
dunes rocked the bodies from side to side, bumping hard into Deckard's 
shoulders. No conversations sounded in the shuttle's tight interior; the mine 
workers sat with their silted bandannas pulled down around their throats, 
breathmasks and rehydration tubes dangling disconnected like some amphibian 
species' vestigial organs. They all looked to Deckard like first-generation 
Mars natives, some of the younger ones possibly second-gen, the children and 
grandchildren of the Earth-born emigrants who'd gotten this far and had then 
given up on getting all the way to the stars. Through eyelids drawn nearly as 
tight as the shuttle's slit windows, they gazed out on the landscape that 
they'd inherited, that they had evolved to possess. Deckard could sense the 
rewiring of the nervous systems sitting around and across from him, the 
shuffling of synaptic fibers and input receptors that had taken place in the 
womb, the human body's instinctive response to the foreign territory in which 
it had been exiled. 


K. W . J eter 
The creatures around him, that still wore the outward appearance of human 
beings, were off the cable monopoly's feed. They didn't need the canned 
stimuli to survive; they could go out into the hills and dry ravines and suck 
up all the bandwidth this world had to offer. Deckard had wondered before what 
their strangers' eyes saw, what their spatulate, black-nailed fingertips read 
from the grains of red sand trickling through their touch. He'd given up 
wondering; he had enough trouble dealing with human things, and the things 
that were at least trying to be human. There was more in common between his 
blood and that of the replicants he'd killed before than there was between him 
and the sharp-angled faces that stared past him as if he no longer existed. 
The fatigue seeping from Deckard's bones, forearms lying like deadweights 
across the briefcase in his lap, drew his eyelids shut. With the scent of 
alien sweat in his nostrils, the press of blood-warm flesh near his own, he 
almost believed himself to be back on Earth, in L.A., the dark, neon-veined 
city extending on all sides around one of the cramped public buses shoving its 
way through the traffic stalled with retrofitted Detroit relics. He'd always 
felt overwhelmed by sheer otherness there as well; simply being on the planet, 
in the city, on the streets where he'd spent his whole life, that didn't mean 
he could look into the face right next to his, so close he could practically 
taste the other's mingled exhalations of kimchi and phrik ku noo and see 
anything that resembled a mirror, anything that made him think he was looking 
at his own genetic code. 
That was a bad mental place to be in, especially for a cop wearing a big black 

gun inside his jacket. Even more so when you'd been working the blade runner 
unit, and you were supposed to blow away anything that didn't pass for human 
with you; that was your job. It'd been his; it'd been Dave Holden's, and a 
bunch of other poor crazed bastards'. Some of whom he'd worked with, some he'd 
steered a wide distance away from, catching that weird look in their eyes and 
the subliminal tick of a dynamite clock counting down. Some of the blade 
runners he'd known had wound up massaging the backs of their throats with 
their gun muzzles and 
had gone under the ground in carefully sealed caskets. Others were still out 
there on the streets, chasing their own deaths and the accusatory revelation 
that could only be glimpsed in the eyes of those you are about to kill. Or 
retire, to use that morally compromised departmental lingo. 
Riding in a worm-tread shuttle across another world's dead surface, Rick 
Deckard felt himself sweating, a crawl of self-generated excretions over his 
skin. An old, familiar claustrophobia tightened his muscles, a shrinking from 
contact with the creatures around him. Not to avoid their touch, but to keep 
them from being touched by him. Why should they suffer? As he did . 
He opened his eyes and turned his head to look out the slit window behind him. 
A desultory wind moved red sand around, like the floor-sweepings of his heart. 
There were supposed to be other creatures out there, skinny wolflike slinkers, 
all lank jaws and burning eyes-he'd thought he'd spotted one before, the 
barest glimpse of motion from the corner of his eye, when he'd been on his way 
out to the skiff rental yard. You didn't have to eat a gun to find release; 
you could simply wander out past the emigrant colony's limits, keep walking, 
and your splintered bones would be found, marrow sucked out like soft 
marzipan. 
To have spotted that wolfish spectre, seen it before its teeth closed on your 
throat-that was a bad sign. I've been here too long, thought Deckard. His 
neuro-system was starting to adapt, sensors working overtime, picking up the 
wavelengths of a world he hadn't been born on. That happened sometimes-rumors 
and emigrant myths were rife-the whole process cannon-firing ahead, not taking 
two or three generations to work itself out. At some unconscious, cellular 
level, the poor bastard to whom it happens just gives up on being human, lets 
go and becomes . . . something else. Like these things around me-Deckard 
glanced at the sullen, motionless forms lining the interior of the shuttle. 
One way or another, they'd already said their good-byes to all the others 
they'd left behind. 
The shuttle ground on, nearing the emigrant colony's perimeter. A muted 
rustling moved through the seated figures, the mine workers rousing themselves 
from reptiloid torpor- the tiny shifts of their bodies, raising of heads, 
glances out the narrow windows, reminded Deckard of lizards on sun-baked 
rocks, the flick of yellow, slitted eyes toward an insect too far away to 
catch and eat. He supposed they probably were thinking about whatever meals 
were waiting for them-they had the lean, knife-ribbed look of people who went 
a long time between protein sources-in the dark shacks and nests of the 
colony's most silent quarter. 
Speculating about aliens with human faces, and what their unknowable lives 
might be like, had one advantage: it had derailed the even darker reverie into 
which Deckard had fallen, that pit lined with self-accusation he knew all too 
well. Now he could put on his own mask, the one that looked just like him but 
bore the name Niemand, and go home and see what Mrs. Niemand had waiting on 
the table for him. 
God only knows, thought Deckard glumly as the shuttle slowed down to a crawl, 
the soft labial flaps of the colony's ground transport airlocks folding over 
the windows. What Sarah would've gotten up to, decided upon, in his 
absence-she was as far around the bend, he knew, as he himself was. The 
married state of the pseudonymous Niemands, the alias he shared along with 
equal measures of hate and guilt, was as mentally toxic as any sensory void to 
be found on Mars. No vacuum existed between himself and Sarah; the space 
between them was filled, and overfilled, with memory and the slow ebbing tide 



of the past that left things on a common shoreline-old photos, sheet music on 
an untuned piano, names whispered in that sad moment between sleep and waking, 
empty bottles overturned by a fumbling hand. Everything that could be picked 
up, still tear-wet, and studied as it turned to the same ashes in his and 
Sarah's mouths . . 
No wonder she was as crazy as he was. How could she be anything else? 
"Takes you back, doesn't it?" The briefcase with Roy Batty's voice spoke up as 
Deckard toted it through the colony's body-dense main corridor, the hubbub of 
the black-
market stalls, customers and purveyors, swirling around them. "Feels like 
being back at home, doesn't it? Your real home, I mean." 
Deckard let his gaze, the hard encompassing cop scan that'd become engrained 
in his optic nerves, pass over the crowd. He knew what the briefcase meant, 
what it had picked up on without even having eyes. The city vibration, the 
inaudible blood-pressure hum beneath all the other shouting and murmuring 
voices-as he shouldered his way through, the briefcase dangling in one hand's 
tight grip, its corners catching like a barbed anchor against the press of 
others' thighs and hips, he saw the same faces he'd seen in his other life, 
the one spent on Earth. Nothing had changed, at least in its essential 
sense-identical eyes glittered too bright and hungry, whether they were naked 
or shielded behind dark lenses or bombardier-style goggles. Other eyes, that 
he remembered as well, opiated or glazed over with any number of 
pharmaceutical combinations-the marketplace's recycled air smelled rancid with 
the receptor-specific molecules exuded through the sweat upon shivering, 
pallid skin. And those whose eyes were still focussed, but on some point far 
from here, a deific vision they'd come to the shabbiest stall and overcoated, 
secret-pocketed vendors to find-Deckard remembered seeing those before as 
well. 
"Just goes to show," he spoke aloud-nobody in the crowd noticed a person 
talking to himself or having a conversation with the small luggage he carried. 
"That L.A's not a place. It's an idea. A bad idea." 
The crowd thinned out as Deckard got farther from the marketplace's center. He 
made better time, striding through the colony's residential quarters, his 
passage marked by the strips of loosened duct tape wavering overhead. Stepping 
over the crawling forms of the stim-deprived terminal cases, their blank 
stares swiveling up in his direction, Deckard reached for the knob of his 
hovel's front door. 
The door was unlocked, and slightly ajar; the slightest push of his hand set 
it drifting into the unlit interior. Old cop instincts held Deckard back, his 
gaze moving across the revealed angle of motionless space inside. 


K. W . Jet er 
"What's wrong?" The briefcase had sensed the hesitation. 
"Nothing." Deckard drew in a careful breath, as though he could roll on his 
tongue any stray, captured atoms. "Everything. 
Once he'd had devices to do the work for him, the full array of 
department-issued gadgetry, the trick units that came out of the LAPD's 
research labs, down in the deepest basements where the sunless geeks groomed 
their oscilloscope tans. The voice-controlled espers, the softly breathing 
VoigtKampff machines-now he had to do it the old-fashioned way, firing up the 
subtle instincts that cops had depended on for centuries. 
Something crackled under the sole of Deckard's boot as he shifted his weight. 
Looking down, he spied the bright glitter of fractured electronics, splinters 
of metal; a wedge of an autonomic clock face stared back at him, the little 
dots it'd had for eyes blank and inactive. More bits and pieces of the alarm 
clock, he saw now, were scattered for several meters near the hovel's 
entrance. He reached down and picked up a broken corner of a miniaturized 
circuit board; its edges crumbled as he rolled it between his thumb and 
forefinger. He threw the green-gritted fragment aside, then pushed the door 
the rest of the way open. 
Deckard stepped inside the hovel, aware that it was empty of any other human 

form. He stood motionless in the center of the room, then slowly set the 
briefcase down beside himself. 
"How does that old song go? Something about another mule in your stall?" 
Batty's voice sounded smug. Whatever sensors had been built into the briefcase 
were still as sharp as Batty's had been, in either his human or replicant 
incarnation. "There were other men here ... just a little while ago, as a 
matter of fact. You can tell that, can't you?" The silence of a thin smile 
could almost be heard. "And you know what else? I don't think they were here 
to check the meters." 
"Why don't you shut up," said Deckard in disgust. "As if I care." The truth 
was that he did, though not for any reasons of jealousy. Whatever sexual or 
romantic claim he and Sarah Tyrell might have had on each other had long since 
evapo 
rated in the fierce glare of what they knew about, and had done to, each 
other. Even the resemblance between Sarah and his long-dead Rachael-close 
enough to constrict his heart each time he'd looked upon the living 
face-wasn't enough to evoke any emotion besides hatred. "She can do whatever 
she wants. We're not really Mr. and Mrs. Niemand, you know." 
"Of course not." The briefcase's voice still contained its knowing smile. 
"That would be too easy-being the same thing inside as you are on the outside. 
You haven't been that in a long time, Deckard." 
"Tell me about it." He gazed around the empty space and toward the dark 
rectangle of the bedroom door. 
"And of course she can do whatever she wants. Except walk out on you. Because 
she's not here, is she?" 
He didn't answer. Leaving behind the briefcase-and Roy Batty's mocking, 
under-the-skin voice-Deckard strode into the bedroom, flipping on the switch 
beside the door. Low-wattage light, yellow and flickering, seeped through the 
dusty web of tape and corner-dangling patches on the ceiling. The air seeping 
through the leaks wasn't enough to draw out the smell of aging laundry and 
bottoming-out mood swings. 
"Mrs. Niemand isn't here." A different voice spoke behind him. "She left." 
Deckard looked over his shoulder at the autonomic wall calendar, the companion 
to the alarm clock missing from the bedside table. "Where'd she go?" 
The mountain-filled scene fluttered above the rows of numbers. "She 
didn't"-the calendar spoke aggrievedly-"choose to inform me of her 
destination." Its voice darkened. "She probably didn't even know." 
There'd been a time that he and Rachael had spent out in the wilds in a 
ramshackle cabin surrounded by a dark cathedral of trees, north of the scene 
in the calendar photo. A toobrief interval between their fleeing L.A. and his 
being forced to return. Nights colored silver by moonlight, days blackened by 
the coffin that he'd sat beside, gazing at the sleeping face of the woman he 
loved. Sleeping and dying; the coffin, a transport module stolen from the 
Tyrell Corporation-the glass-lidded device in which replicants were shipped to 
the outer colonies before their four-year life spans could expire-had been the 
means of stretching out their stolen hours together. Of sipping half-life 
moments, rather than watching all time, all Rachael's life, spill out upon the 
ground and seep away like rain. I thought I had it bad then-his grieving 
station by the slowly dying woman, the silent vigils between the dwindling 
minutes of her waking. Looking at the picture on the wall calendar, Deckard 
knew he'd give the rest of his own life, if he could, to be back in the midst 
of that dark forest, in the yellowed circle of a kerosene lantern, sitting 
beside the coffin and waiting, waiting forever, in the unending moment between 
one dream and the next . 
"Mr. Niemand?" The calendar's reedy voice tapped at the edge of his thoughts. 
He'd give anything. Even the plans he'd made, the decisions and vows he'd 
sealed down into his heart, about what he'd do with Sarah Tyrell. Her fate, 
and his. Even that . 
The calendar tried again, using his real name. "Mr. Deckard? Hello?" 
A slow nod, the drawing in of his breath, as he refocussed on the calendar and 



the flat, meaningless picture on its surface. "All right," he said. "So who 
was it she went with?" 
"I wouldn't know. She didn't tell me that, either." The calendar had an innate 
dislike for details not being filled in. "There were two of them-I could tell 
that much. They were talking in the other room, but I couldn't make out what 
they were saying. I just have this little directional microphone built in, you 
know. Now, if I had the intercom option, if you'd paid to have that feature 
activated, then the advantages would be-" 
"Yeah, right." Deckard interrupted the sales pitch. A longstanding peeve of 
his was the way these low-rent domestic appliances were always whining for 
upgrades. "How long ago did all this happen? When did Sarah leave with these 
men?" 
"You should ask the clock. That's more its department-" 
"The clock's dead." Deckard didn't mind saying so. "So you tell me. When did 
they leave?" 
"Urn A fearful quaver sounded in the calendar's voice. "The clock? She did 
that, didn't she?" The calendar made an audible effort to pull itself 
together. "I guess . . . it was about, maybe six hours ago. That Mrs. 
Niemand-I mean Sarah-that she left with those two men. Gosh . 
Its voice faded, then picked up again. "If it's any help, she left a note. 
Over there on the table." 
Deckard walked over and picked up the bullet that had also been left for him. 
He rolled it between his fingers, then weighed it in his palm. A wordless 
message, or one that didn't need words to get its meaning across. Sarah had 
probably bought it, and the necessary gun as well, down in the black-market 
stalls, where just about anything could be acquired. Thus, she must've iced 
the nagging clock; on her way out, Deckard figured, with whoever these two men 
had been. This one, he thought, looking down at the bright, tapered metal, was 
meant for me. The kind of homecoming surprise he'd been expecting for a while 
now; his caution at the hovel's front door had been mainly due to not wanting 
a hole the size of a baby's fist plowed through his forehead. 
He slipped the bullet into his jacket pocket and unfolded the scrap of paper 
that had been beneath it. 
Deckard-The scrawl was Sarah's handwriting, the big ego-driven letters she'd 
never lost. I'll see you later. 
The mute bullet had said as much. A warning, the cold kiss she'd greet him 
with the next time they met. He crumpled the paper into a wad in his fist, 
then tossed it into the rubble in the bedroom's corner. 
"Off into the ozone?" Batty's voice curled mockingly. The briefcase sat in the 
middle of the hovel's front room, where Deckard had left it. "They like to do 
that. Take it from me; I know. They just leave." 
He stepped over the briefcase and closed the door. "Not your problem, is it?" 
He brushed away the dangling strips of peeled tape. "You should mind your own 
business." 
"Ah, but you see-your problems are mine, too." An invisible shrug. "You and I 
... we just have so much in common, Deckard." 
"I doubt it." He crossed to the hovel's tiny kitchenette. 


K. W . J eter 
"You're in a box." Leaning over the sink crowded with moldering dishes, 
Deckard rooted through the top cupboard. "I've still got flesh to worry 
about." He found the square-sided bottle he wanted, pulled it out, and 
unscrewed the cap. "So the answers to my problems are different. Like this 
one." 
"That smells like scotch. Or something close to it." 
He rinsed out a usable glass and poured a two-finger shot into it. "They make 
it here." He tossed back the first fiery swallow, gritting his teeth as it 
rolled acid down his throat. "So it's not anything. Except grain alcohol and 
food coloring." 
"Sounds grim. I'll pass. Even if I could drink." 
"Good call." Deckard emptied the glass, feeling his gut contract with the hard 

liquid shock. He poured another and sat down at the kitchenette table with it, 
pushing aside more crusted dishes and fog-clouded glasses to make room for his 
elbows. He laid his head down on his forearms and closed his eyes. Exhaled 
liquor fumes cut the stale cloy of the hovel in his nostrils, an odor of sweat 
and pent-up anger that could never leak away through the poorly taped seams. 
He knew that he could fall asleep if he let himself; the fatigue would wash 
over him, an ocean with its leading edge tinged brown by the bottle's 
contents. He also knew that it would do no good, that it would last only a few 
minutes at best, the same as it had in the skiff's cramped egg coming back 
from the Outer Hollywood station. A moment of darkness, then dreaming, then 
waking, with the border blurred between those two states; the way he used to 
raise his head and open his eyes, back in his apartment in Los Angeles, with 
an empty glass smelling of real scotch in one hand, the fingers of his other 
sunk into a silent chord on the piano's yellowed keys. Looking up at the faces 
in the old frayededged, black-and-white photos that had drifted across the 
music rest like dead leaves; looking at them and, for a few seconds, wondering 
who they were. Until he remembered again . . 
"All right." Deckard took a deep breath, opened his eyes, and straightened up 
in the chair. With his forefinger, he pushed the glass and its murky contents 
away from himself. 
The room was small enough that he could twist around, reach back, and pick up 
the briefcase by its handle from where he had left it sitting in the middle of 
the floor. He swung the briefcase up onto the table, laying it flat in the 
space he'd cleared. "Let's hear it. You got something to tell me about, now's 
the time." 


She found out their names. Or what passed for them. 
"I'm Wycliffe," the more talkative one said. He leaned his elbows back on the 
yacht's control panel. "He's Zwingli." 
"Right. I'm sure." Sarah Tyrell regarded the two men, her erstwhile 
kidnappers. Or employees-the distinctions were getting a little confused. 
Maybe disciples, she thought. That fervent light still glowed way inside their 
eyes. If not her disciples, then Eldon Tyrell's; the two men had done what 
they could to mold themselves into copies of her late uncle. Within the limits 
of the possible: they looked like children playing at a grim Halloween. "What 
were your real names?" 
Both men appeared puzzled for a moment, exchanging worried glances before 
turning to look at her again. "But those are our real names. They'd have to 
be. The Tyrell Corporation gave them to us." 
That raised another consideration. Standing in the middle of the cockpit area, 
with stars and luminous emptiness shifting about on the viewscreens, Mars no 
longer even visible from here, Sarah wondered if she were the only human thing 
on board. "You two wouldn't be replicants, would you?" She studied them more 
closely. "I mean, it's all right if you are." 
Wycliffe shook his head. "No-" Voice flat and emphatic. "Replicants aren't 
given the kind of security clearances we have." 
"We're very high level," said Zwingli. "In the shadow corporation. You can 
trust us." 
"Really." That amused her more than anything had in a long time. "How ... 
charming. To think that I'd even want to." 
She left them in their perplexity and walked back to the 


K. W . Jet er 
center of the yacht. They all just want to be loved, thought Sarah. It was as 
if the Tyrell Corporation had never ended, or had been re-created in miniature 
inside this little hermetically sealed world. All familiar to her, from the 
time she had been notified of her inheritance to the moment when she had 
brought it down into ruins of fire and twisted metal. Her uncle had created an 
ass-kissing corporate culture, one where underlings like Wycliffe and Zwingli 
expected and even thrived on kicks to the teeth. I should be nicer to 

them-that would have really screwed with their heads. 
The furnishings of the yacht-an interplanetary model, small by the standards 
of the fleet that the Tyrell Corporation had kept-were familiar to her as 
well. Every inch of the executive quarters was slathered with the same degree 
of nouveau ostentation that Eldon Tyrell's private rooms and office suite had 
shown. Expensive enough to imitate taste, too expensive to achieve it; all the 
fakery that money could buy. Fakes of fakes, in this case; Sarah recognized 
bits and pieces, imitations of the actual objects that had been consumed in 
the corporate inferno. Right down to the rococo pillars, foreshortened and 
perspective-cheating and thus crammed into the lounge's closer space. 
Window-sized viewscreen panels stretched to the ceiling; layered pixels 
shifted slowly through a rez-max'd view of an intricate urbscape. Elevated 
angle, as though from the great arched windows of the office that had been her 
uncle's, then hers, then ashes; Los Angeles, all smoke and darkness even 
beneath its hammering sun, rolling out to the panel's faux horizon. The yacht 
must have been set up for Eldon Tyrell's personal use; that would've been his 
preference, to travel between planets and yet seemingly not move at all, the 
view remaining as that seen from the center of his empire. Or perhaps-a sad 
notion-this was what the obsequious duo up in the cockpit had thought she 
would like. The past, or at least a piece of it, frozen and sliced like a 
laboratory specimen and put up here for the cold microscope of her eye to 
fasten upon. 
They don't know-people like them, minions and underlings; it wasn't their job 
to know. Or even their nature; Sarah knew that she could tell them, let them 
in on the big secret, 
that she herself, the recipient of their servile adorations, had destroyed all 
they held most sacred, the Tyrell Corporation itself-and they wouldn't believe 
her. Or they would believe and not believe at the same time, mere 
contradiction being no impediment to true faith. Especially for these 
believers, carrying on the great Tyrell cause, toiling in the shadows; when 
the corporation had existed in the light, it had dealt in artificiality. Lies, 
really-Sarah had found it harder and harder to distinguish those from truth, 
from reality, whatever those might have been. 
"More human than human," the Tyrell Corporation's advertising slogan; what the 
hell could that mean? Sarah shook her head as she lowered herself back into 
the padded embrace of a reproduction eighteenth-century wing chair. The 
statement had always annoyed her; it was like saying "More real than real." 
The leather sank beneath her weight, the ship's simulated gravity gentle, 
unnoticeable as a kiss while sleeping. Was there a scale of realness, of 
humanness, upon which different things could be at different points? And did 
the points shift? A notion she found amusing-she rather liked the idea of 
becoming progressively less human. All the human parts of her nature had only 
caused her grief . 
Like falling in love. Sarah closed her eyes. And thought of Deckard. That was 
a mistake, she mused grimly. That was what she got for even trying to be 
human. Better to have stayed a Tyrell, right to the ice-crystaled ventricles 
of her heart. A family tradition: a Voigt-Kampff machine slapped onto her 
uncle would have frozen up and died like a broken-winged bird in an Arctic 
wind. So much for empathy as a way of determining who's human and who's not. 
A reproduction of the antique bureau plat from the Tyrell Corporation's 
demolished headquarters had been installed next to the wing chair. Sarah sat 
forward and pulled open the central door. The real bureau plat-now also 
reduced to ashes, driven into L.A. 's concrete and rubble by the monsoon 
rains-had had several useful things in it; the repro desk had only the remote 
control for the opposite wall's view-


K. Vi. J eter 
screen. That was enough; she leaned back and thumbed through the displayed 
menus until the phony cityscape had been replaced by a real-time view from the 
trailing opticals. Mars was already a red dot, everything on it even less from 
this distance. Including that bastard Deckard-her thumb rested on the remote's 

Off button, poised for obliteration. 
She hesitated, one moment merging with the next. Prolonging the sensation she 
felt: not pleasure-she was beyond that-but a certain satisfaction. Not with 
the present, but what was to come. 
"I was a fool." Sarah spoke aloud, her words echoing against the hard metal 
bulkheads underneath the ersatz tapestries and wall hangings. Not necessarily 
for falling in love with him-for wanting the same thing that Rachael, the 
replicant with her face, could have so easily-but for thinking that she could 
get back at him while stuck in a shabby little hovel in one of the Martian 
emigrant colonies. Money a weapon; revenge facilitated by all the power of the 
Tyrell Corporation. Even in this, its shadow form. The appearance at the 
hovel's doorstep of the die-hard true believers, Wycliffe and Zwingli, had 
been the answer to the prayer she hadn't even spoken inside her own head yet. 
She had screwed people over both with and without money, the difference being 
that money and power made the screwing deeper and longer-lasting. Even 
terminal. "Whatever works," she murmured. 
Her thumb pressed down and the image disappeared, replaced by blank wall. 
Sarah stood up from the wing chair and tossed the remote back onto the bureau 
plat repro. 
An hour or so later, when she came back into the lounge area, the two men were 
waiting for her. They both looked fidgety and nervous, as though their 
impersonations of the late Eldon Tyrell were wearing through. 
"What can I do for you, gentlemen?" Sarah rubbed the thick white towel through 
her hair, then draped it along her neck. In the wing chair, she crossed her 
legs, letting the Tyrell-logo'd bathrobe part just enough to show the pale 
flesh above her knee. "Nothing too important, I hope. I'm still getting . . . 
used to things. Again." 
While they organized their reply, she slit open the pack of illicit tobacco 
cigarettes she had found in the master sleeping quarters. Golden Wood Dove, 
her favorite, from the farthest and least accessible of all the Kampuchean 
warlord protectorates. Expensive, obtainable only through the U.N's own 
diplomatic courier pouches-the shadow corporation's contacts must be well in 
order. Along with their research: in the bedroom's closets, she had found a 
reasonable approximation of at least part of the wardrobe she'd had back in 
Los Angeles, sized down to reflect the weight she had lost on the emigrant 
colony's starvation diet. 
"Miss Tyrell-" As before, Wycliffe was the pair's spokesman. "There's a lot we 
need to talk about." 
She tilted her head back and watched the ship's air-circulation system draw 
away her exhaled blue smoke. "You've already talked." She lowered her cool, 
level gaze to theirs. "What more do you have to say?" 
"But ... you don't even know where we're going." 
"Where we're taking you to," chimed in Zwingli. 
"Does it matter?" Sarah gave an unconcerned shrug. "Back to Earth, presumably; 
that seems to be the direction in which we're heading." She pulled the edge of 
the robe back over her knee. "Los Angeles, perhaps? Is that where this little 
shadow corporation operates from?" 
"No-" Wycliffe shook his head; a moment later, so did his partner. "There's 
nothing there. At least as regards the Tyrell Corporation." His expression 
lapsed into mournfulness. "It's all gone. The headquarters complex ... the 
pyramid . 
"Yes, I know." She sighed. "I'm sure it was the site of your happiest days. 
Get over it." Sarah flicked away the cigarette's ash. "Zurich, then. Or 
somewhere close by. I seem to recall that as being the branch office for most 
of our overseas operations." 
Wycliffe's eyes narrowed into slits. "We don't talk about Zurich. Not inside 
the shadow corporation, that is." 
"Those sonsabitches." Zwingli's face had hardened into an identical angry 
mask. "Turncoats."


 "Let's just say Wycliffe's voice was as bitter as his expression. "Not 



all Tyrell Corporation employees had the same degree of loyalty. Some of the 
more remote branches of the company sold out to the U.N. security agencies. Or 
they tried to." One corner of his mouth curled into an ugly smirk. "They would 
have, if the shadow corporation hadn't gotten to them first." 
"We took care of business," said Zwingli. "Ours and theirs." 
"I bet you did." If Sarah hadn't been convinced before that these two were 
left over from the old Tyrell Corporation, she was now. The culture inside the 


L.A. headquarters building had been nurtured by her uncle into a magnified 
form of his own personality. Inside that pyramid, the way to get ahead had 
been through murder, or at least a display of one's willingness along those 
lines. All in the service of the Tyrell Corporation as manifested by Eldon 
Tyrell. "So Zurich's not on the grand tour anymore, I take it." 
Both men nodded their heads. 
She waited, but neither of them said anything more. They stood and gazed at 
her with an apparent lack of sexual appetite that she found offensive. 
"Gentlemen-it's not that long a trip between Mars and Earth. Not aboard one of 
these yachts." Sarah took a long drag on the cigarette, taking it halfway down 
its length. She held out her hand to regard the glowing ember. "And my 
patience is even shorter." She looked back at the men. "So why don't you just 
tell me where we're going?" 
They looked frightened, as though some moment they'd been dreading since birth 
had finally arrived. "It's Wycliffe's pale, large-knuckled hands tugged at 
each other. "It's not that easy . . 
"Jesus Christ." It struck her once more that the pair's impersonations of the 
late Eldon Tyrell hadn't penetrated past the skin. Her uncle at least had had 
the courage of the selfabsorbed. "Show me, then." 
Wycliffe appeared relieved by the suggestion. He dug through the inside pocket 
of his coat and extracted a folding 
map, so old that the creases had turned to lines of soft white fur. He spread 
it out on the bureau plat, hands patting the paper smooth. 
"You can't use the screen?" She pointed to the far wall of the lounge. 
"Instead of that thing?" 
"This ... belonged to Dr. Tyrell." Wycliffe looked up from his insectoid 
crouch over the map. One hand hovered a quarter inch above its surface. "His 
personal copy." 
"What, he gave it to you?" 
Wycliffe shook his head. "No-he kept it here. With his other things." 
"Fine. Whatever." Sarah stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray that Zwingli 
had scurried to fetch for her. "Acquire your sacred relics however you want." 
She got up and stood beside Wycliffe, looking down at the map. "Now-can you 
point? Can you do that much for me?" 
He laid a fingertip on a spot in the upper left corner. 
A map of western Europe-that much had been readily discernible, even through 
the rectangular grid of the fold marks and tears. This thing looks a million 
years old, thought Sarah. Perhaps her uncle had had it when he'd been a boy, 
when the world had been flat and the only things that looked human actually 
were. Sarah leaned closer over the bureau plat. 
The British Isles, but not England. Farther north than that. Her heart had 
paused between one beat and the next, a moment frozen between life and its 
continuance, when she discerned the exact place on the map. North of the 
Scottish mainland, far beyond Cape Wrath, beyond Thurso at the very tip; into 
the North Sea, where the currents ran as cold as the pulse that now moved 
slowly through her veins. She knew where Wycliffe was pointing; she had always 
known. And why the two men had been reluctant to speak the words, the name. 
"You see?" Wycliffe spoke softly, his voice all kindness, sympathy. "Right 
there. That's where we're going . . 
She saw, she knew; a place she had never been to. But she knew what was there. 
Waiting for her in that little spiral of islands. Scraps of land, treeless and 
rock-laden, protecting another body of seawater from the greater, darker ocean 
surrounding it. A place that most people didn't even know existed; that they 

had forgotten, if they had ever known. Lucky them, Sarah thought. 
Memory was a disadvantage, a means of control. Her uncle had known that, had 
used it; the replicants he had created, the false memories he had implanted in 
their skulls. How much better it would have been for those poor bastards if 
they had been able to forget, if they had never known. How much better for 
me-some of the memories in the dead Rachael's skull had been her own. Some of 
them were things that she would have rather forgotten. And the others-the bits 
and bleeding scraps that Eldon Tyrell hadn't seen fit to take and implant in 
her double's mind, that he had wanted to keep a secret, big and dark, between 
himself and his niece- those were even more worth forgetting. If they could 
have been. That's the trouble with the past, thought Sarah, closing her eyes 
for a moment. It was divided between the things you could never know and all 
the things you wished you could forget. 
"Do we have to?" She heard her own voice, sounding like a child's. The one who 
had never died and never forgotten. She opened her eyes and looked at the man 
standing next to her. "Go there, I mean. Why do we have to?" 
"We don't have any choice," said Wycliffe. A few feet away, Zwingli nodded in 
agreement. "Neither do you. These things have to be done." 
"But technically m your boss." Sarah attempted a last-ditch argument. "I'm in 
charge. I am the Tyrell Corporation-you said so yourself. Without me . . . 
there's nothing." Her voice rose in desperation. "You're supposed to do what I 
say. I could tell you no. I'd forbid you to take me there." 
"It doesn't work that way, Miss Tyrell. It can't." 
"Why not?" Still plaintive, still hoping, though she knew what the answer 
would be. 
"We all have to subordinate our desires-and our fears-to the greater work." 
The true-believer tone sounded in Wycliffe's voice again, low and fervent. 
"For the sake of that 
which is larger than all of us. For the sake of the Tyrell Corporation. So 
that it can be once again. As it was. And as it always shall be." 
She supposed she could tell them the truth. For all the good it would do-she 
could tell them that it had been her, the culmination of all her planning and 
scheming, her unsubordinated desires, that had reduced the Tyrell Corporation 
to ashy ruins. They'd either believe her or they wouldn't. And it would make 
no difference. Everything would happen the way it had to, the way it had been 
laid out by a dead man. How did I think, she wondered, how did I ever think I 
could kill him? When Eldon Tyrell was still alive inside her head and in the 
past that never ended? And there, where they're taking me. 
"Don't worry," came Wycliffe's voice. She couldn't see him, or the map, or the 
faux tapestries hung on the ship's bulkheads. Her eyes had filled with tears, 
a child's tears. One fell onto the paper ocean and seeped away, with any 
others that might have struck there, long ago. "Please don't worry, Miss 
Tyrell." He was trying to be soothing, to give some small comfort, all that 
was possible. "We'll be there with you. You can count on us." 
"Thanks." Sarah meant it, without guile or sarcasm. "That means a lot to me." 
They left her, with the map still unfolded on the reproduction bureau plat. 
Wiping her eyes clear, Sarah stood for a while longer, looking at it and not 
seeing it. Then she went back to the wing chair and curled up in its 
protection, legs tucked beneath her. She laid her head against the upholstered 
angle beside her. At some point, while the yacht moved on toward its 
destination, to that place where the waters rolled over the deeply buried 
past, she slept. And dreamed, and remembered . . 
Which were exactly the same thing. 
Patience was never much of a virtue with you, Deckard." The briefcase sat 
surrounded by moldering rubble, scummed coffee cups, stubs of ersatz tobacco 
disintegrating within. "I don't know how you ever got to be a cop. You act 
cold-you always did-but you know what? You're not." 
"I'll take that as a compliment." Deckard reached for the brown glass. "If 
you'll spare me any more crap." 
The briefcase laughed. "That's how you should take it. Since there aren't 



going to be any others. Compliments, I mean. You look like hell, Deckard. I 
don't even have eyes, and I can tell that. I can hear it in your voice. The 
ravages of a guilty conscience, I suppose." 
Deckard shrugged. "I wouldn't have killed you, except I had to." Another sip. 
"You were trying to kill me, remember?" 
"Oh, that. Forget about it," said Batty's voice. "These things happen. 
Besides, it was poor old Holden who fired the shot; technically, he gets the 
credit for the hit. The department 
may even have given him a bonus for taking me out- he never told me for 
sure, though. Hard guy to get to know. Even when he's toting you around by the 
handle. Genuine cold." 
"Even colder now." 
"Yeah The briefcase emitted a sigh. "Poor bastard. And him walking around 
with that latest heart-and-lung implant, all that cranking machinery, that the 
LAPD surgeons had put inside him Batty's voice went silent for a moment, 
then came back, softer and musing. "You know, I was starting to feel a little 
sympathy for Holden before he got iced back there at Outer Hollywood. Sort of 
a kinship, if you know what I mean. Here I am, stuck in this box-implanted, 
right? inside a device-and Holden had a box inside his chest stuffed full of 
little gizmos. Keeping him alive, the same way this one does for me, sort of. 
So what was the essential difference?" 
Deckard didn't even bother to shrug. "None," he said. "That I can think of. 
Especially since you're both working for the LAPD. Or were, in Holden's case." 
"Pardon me?" Batty's voice kicked back up in volume. "What the hell did you 
say?" 
"Come on." Anger more than alcohol unleashed Deckard's tongue. "Let's not 
screw around, all right? I didn't carry you back here all the way from Outer 
Hollywood just so you could feed me a line of bullshit. This is a police 
operation- what else could it be? I've seen these box jobs before; this is how 
the department preserves anybody who's been iced before they've finished 
extracting information from him. Standard operating procedure-the department's 
tech surgeons scrape up the body, the way they must've scraped you up from 
that broken-up old freeway where I left you, they do a deep core retrieval 
from whatever cellular activity is left in the brain and spine, then download 
it into a storage unit. Like this briefcase you're sitting in." 
"Then I wouldn't be working for the department, would I?" Batty's voice 
tightened. "Since these box jobs, as you call them, are something they do to 
people who've been offed by the cops." 


K. Vi. Jet er 
"Cops get 'em, too," said Deckard wearily. "Killed in the line of 
duty-especially if it happens to investigators or detectives who didn't get a 
chance to make a report before they took a bullet. It's even happened to a few 
blade runners. Just part of the hazards of the job." 
"You'd better get your head straightened out, Deckard." The personality and 
mind implanted inside the briefcase audibly bristled. "First thing, jettison 
the notion that I'm part of some LAPD operation. I'm not, and neither was Dave 
Holden." 
"Oh?" Deckard tapped the edge of the glass. "What happened? He quit the 
force?" 
"That's exactly right. He walked." 
Deckard snorted. "Hard to believe." 
"Why? You did the same. Once." 
"That was different." 
"You give yourself too much credit, Deckard." Batty's voice sneered at him. 
"For uniqueness. Think you're the only ex-cop who got that way from a bad 
conscience?" 
Deckard nodded, even though he knew the briefcase couldn't see him. "The only 
one I ever knew." 
"That's because you were always such a loner. If you blade runners had ever 
hung out together, instead of always scheming against each other in department 

politics, you might've had a chance." 
Deckard said nothing. The voice coming out of the briefcase had touched a 
nerve, a line into his memory and all that had happened back in L.A. He'd told 
himself that he wasn't going to think about that stuff anymore, that there 
wasn't any point to it. The whole anti-blade runner conspiracy riff that he'd 
gotten wind of from Holden and Batty when he'd still been walking around as a 
human being. All of which might have been true, with conspiracies wrapped 
inside larger ones, legions of endless night . . 
He didn't care. Not anymore; he'd had his fill, even before he'd been sucked 
into Sarah Tyrell's private conspiracy, her queen-and-pawns maneuvering, all 
to destroy the Tyrell Corporation, everything that her hated uncle had 
created. Eldon 
Tyrell's works turned to ashes, his memory locked inside that dark space 
inside Sarah's skull, where she was still a child and he was the king of the 
only world she knew. Deckard had had a glimpse in there, and he didn't want to 
see any more. Enough that Sarah's vengeance-driven scheming had robbed him as 
well, of those last carefully measured hours he could have spent with Rachael. 
The real Rachael, or as much real as any replicant could be. Which as far as 
Deckard was concerned, was more real than the human original could be; even 
when Sarah had tried to pass herself off as Rachael, he had known the truth 
before she had slipped up, long before the emigrant ship had left Earth. That 
Rachael was already dead, and that Sarah could never be her, even though she 
was identical in every way but one. And that one thing wasn't part of her, but 
was located inside him, so deep she could never reach it. 
"These are things you need to deal with, Deckard." 
Batty's words had broken the course of his thoughts; it took him a moment to 
adjust. "What things?" 
"If there's still an operational conspiracy against the blade runners, then 
your ass is still on the line. You can't hide. Your cover's blown. Everybody 
knows where you are. How do you think Holden and I were able to track you down 
so easily?" 
"Big deal." Deckard shrugged. "You had contacts. Probably with the video 
people-that Urbenton guy. When they had the video ready for release, they were 
planning on doing a whole publicity trip that they'd had me signed on as 
technical adviser during the taping. That's what they were paying me for. My 
name. So it wasn't going to be a secret for very long. Holden must've caught a 
leak from the production, that's all." 
"A couple of minutes ago," the briefcase said dryly, "you were figuring that 
Holden must've still been working for the LAPD. You really think that the 
department gets its information from camera operators who can't keep their 
mouths shut? Come on-you know they don't work that way. Admit it-this has got 
all the smell of high-level spookiness." 
"Maybe." 


K. Vi. J eter 
"No 'maybe' about it, Deckard." Batty's voice tightened, wirelike. "You know 
it already. Holden wasn't LAPD, at least not when he showed up there at Outer 
Hollywood. He was as quit as you are. That's why you took me when you left the 
station to come back to this rattrap. If you'd really thought that I was part 
of a police operation of any kind, you would've booted this fine-quality 
briefcase right out of the skiff's waste chute somewhere in transit. I'd be 
talking to myself out in the cold, cold vacuum right now. At least until my 
batteries ran down." 
He's right, thought Deckard. That mind, with all of its mercenary hit man 
sharps, was still there, intact. Batty, boxed or not, could read right into 
his soul and see what was written there. 
"I was curious." Deckard could hear his own flat, defensive words. "I just 
wanted to see what this whole game was about. That's why I took you with me." 
"Yeah, right. And risk having me turn out to be a homing device, so the 
authorities could track where you went as soon as you left the station? You 
could pull my other leg, if I had 

any." 


"All right ... all right." For a long moment, Deckard remained silent, then 
reached for the glass. He held it to his mouth but didn't drink, only inhaled 
the acrid fumes. Then he pushed the chair back and stood up, carrying the 
glass to the sink and pouring it out. The brown liquid sluiced through the 
scabbed dishes and down the reluctant drain. 
He couldn't afford to go under the alcohol tide, not now. He'd brought 
something else back with him, besides the briefcase. Fear; the unease gnawing 
at his synapses, the twitch of rigid neck muscle and crawl of prickling skin, 
the mute awareness of something closing in on him, its teeth not yet revealed. 
That sense had begun rising along his spine as he'd looked down at the corpse 
of Dave Holden at his feet . . 
"Go ahead," Deckard said as he sat back down. He'd carried the briefcase here, 
hoping for answers. "I'll accept that you're not part of some police 
operation. So start talking. Who sent you?" 
"Who sent me?" The one-cornered smile returned to Batty's voice. "Or who sent 
Holden?" 
"The two of you." Deckard leaned back in the chair, legs sprawled under the 
table. "Together-your little buddy team. If it wasn't LAPD . . . I can't 
figure it being the U.N. Their security agencies wouldn't bother tracking me 
down at the Outer Hollywood station. They'd nail me here. Everything on Mars 
is a U.N. operation, except for the cable monopoly, and they're in each 
other's pockets." 
"Work on it, Deckard. Who else out there has got an interest in replicants and 
the people who go around hunting them down?" 
"The replicants themselves." He shrugged. "That's all." 
"The only problem with that theory," said the briefcase, "is that 
replicants-escaped replicants, especially, on the run- they don't have any 
resources. They're just hiding out, staying low for as long as they can, 
trying to keep alive. What kind of operation could they put together? You 
think they could've managed to get me scraped off that freeway wall where you 
left me, get my cerebral contents transferred into this thing, and send Holden 
out to deliver me to you?" 
"Probably not." 
"You got that one right. But there are others, aren't there? Others who are, 
shall we say, concerned about the replicants and what happens to them. 
Concerned in ways besides just wanting to kill them off. For Christ's sake, 
Deckard, you ran into them yourself, back in L.A. You must have." 
"All right, I know who you're talking about." Deckard gave a dismissive 
gesture with one hand. "The sympathizers. The rep-symps." He shook his head. 
"You gotta be joking, Batty. That bunch of losers? Street corner evangelists . 
tub thumpers." 
"There's more to them," said Batty, "than just that." 
"Sure-some of them are loose-cannon terrorists. Getting themselves blown away 
by the police-for what? For the sake of shooting down some obnoxious U.N. 
advertising blimp?" Deckard had seen that for himself when he'd been on the 
run in L.A's maze of streets. His first exposure to the rep-symp phenomenon; 
he'd heard more about them since then. "So these head cases can dig up a few 
military surplus mortar rounds and hit a floating viewscreen. I'm not 
impressed." 
"Stop being such a dumb cop." The voice turned harsher. "Get with the program, 
Deckard. The rep-symps you saw on the street-the screamers, the terrorists, 
the religious types out in the sideways zone-those are all the fringe 
elements. The fact that you see those people running around at all should've 
told you something. It should've been the tip-off that there would be others 
that you don't see, ones whose brains aren't cracked. Ones who've got their 
agenda going in a whole different way. You ran into one of those as well-that 
guy Isidore at the Van Nuys Pet Hospital." 
"Yeah, I remember him. But he was a loner, a one-man operation-" 



"That's what you think. For Christ's sake, Deckard, use your head." Disgust 
tinged Batty's voice. "Isidore was working right in the center of L.A., 
disguising escaped replicants as humans-disguising them so well that your 
big-deal blade runner unit didn't have a chance of catching them-and he was 
getting away with it. If your girlfriend Sarah Tyrell hadn't sent her pet hit 
man out to take care of him, Isidore would still be in operation." 
The girlfriend crack nettled Deckard, but he kept himself from rising to the 
bait. "That doesn't prove Isidore wasn't working alone. Or that he had some 
kind of high-level connections covering his ass." Deckard shrugged. "Maybe he 
was just lucky-or at least he was until the end." 
For a few seconds, the briefcase was silent; then it emitted a low, mocking 
fragment of laughter. "Come on, Deckard- there's no such thing as luck. If 
something happens, it's for a reason. If Isidore was getting away with 
disguising replicants as human, and he was doing it right in the face of the 
LAPD, you can bet he had some powerful friends on his side. People who're just 
as concerned about what happens to escaped replicants as Isidore was." Batty's 
smile threaded through his voice again. "People ... maybe . . . who are right 
there in the police department itself." 
"They'd have to be." Deckard wished he hadn't poured his drink into the sink; 
now he felt like he could use it. The way his old boss Bryant had used booze 
shots, both for himself and anybody he'd brief in his shabby, dust-smelling 
office. To fuzz the edges of reality a bit, just enough to let new, spooky 
possibilities come sneaking into everyone's cortex. "The repsymps, huh?" 
"You got it." The voice emerged from the briefcase with a note of triumph. 
"The replicant sympathizers aren't just a few isolated crackpots sparking off 
their remaining brain cells. They've penetrated every level of 
government-right into the police force itself. They may not be the only 
conspiracy going on, but the rep-symps are in there pitching." 
"Something doesn't add up." Deckard laid one hand flat on the table. "The 
replicants who've managed to escape and get to Earth-if Isidore and his whole 
Van Nuys Pet Hospital operation, if it was so good at disguising replicants as 
human, so they couldn't be detected even with Voigt-Kampff machines-why would 
it be just the rep-symps who are looking out for their interests? Why wouldn't 
the replicants themselves be in on all these high-level conspiracies? If they 
can pass as human, they should be able to infiltrate the police department as 
well as anybody else." 
"The replicants are in on the conspiracies." Batty spoke with simple 
matter-of-factness. "The rep-symps-the important ones-and the replicants are 
in constant communication with each other. But not on Earth. There's things 
going on in the outer colonies, out in the stars, that hardly anyone on Earth 
knows about-because the U.N. and the police don't want them to know." 
"Like what?" The hand, fingers spread, remained motionless on the table. 
"Rebellion. Slaves against masters. What else? History always repeats 
itself-it had to happen, given the way humans have treated the replicants out 
there." 
"How bad is it? The rebellion, I mean. If there really is one going on." 
"Depends upon whether you're a replicant or a human colonist." The smile in 
Batty's voice turned even more unpleasant. "Let's just say that the humans may 
have the guns, but the replicants-they've got the numbers." 
Deckard found the last remark unimpressive. "Numbers don't mean anything. 
Except the number of bullets needed." 
"Come on," chided the briefcase. "Why should you be so skeptical? You blind or 
something? Look around-you know what the situation is around here. You and all 
the rest of the would-be emigrants-you're bottled up here like ants in a Mason 
jar. Why do you think no one's been allowed to travel on and outward in the 
last half a dozen years? The U.N. just keeps stacking people up in these 
hovels, letting them go stim-crazy, eating themselves up out of sheer fucking 
boredom. The clamp's on, the bottleneck's there, because the U.N. can't let 
emigrants go on to the outer colonies. The replicants control the territory. 
Otherwise, the U.N. would just go ahead and shoot you and all the rest of the 



wanna-be emigrants out there, let you take the consequences. Which would be 
death. And why would the U.N. care about that?" The briefcase's voice 
indicated another invisible shrug. "The whole point of the emigration plan is 
to get people off Earth-if they wind up corpses in the process, that's no big 
deal." 
There would be another advantage, as well, that Deckard could see. We wouldn't 
talk, he thought. Not if we were all dead. In that way, the replicants, the 
rebellion, would still be doing the U.N's work for it. Slaughtered emigrants 
wouldn't be getting any word back to Earth, to families or strangers, about 
what had gone wrong with all the big plans for humanity's future out in the 
stars. Better to have corpses littering the alien turf rather than disgruntled 
returnees coming back and letting everyone know that their promised slaves had 
gotten murderously uppity. 
"Figure it out." The briefcase's voice continued hectoring him. "If the U.N. 
could regain control of the outer colonies, then they could continue funneling 
emigrants to any destination they wanted, rather than letting them stack up 
here. But to do that, to get that control again, the U.N. would need to have 
its own off-world military problems squared away- and they can't do that. 
They're screwed; the U.N. depended too much on beefing up the ranks with 
replicant soldiers, like the ones for which they used me for the templantNexus-
6 Roy Batty models, like that one you were assigned to track down in 


L.A. Only it just about wound up handing you your ass, didn't it, Deckard?" 
The briefcase barked another quick, humorless laugh. "That's the problem with 
the Tyrell Corporation's having put out such a good product. Even if the Batty 
replicants aren't quite as tough and smart as the human original-me, at least 
when I was still walking around inside a body-they're still pretty mean 
customers. If the U.N. thought it could put together an off-world military 
force out of pieces like that, and there wouldn't be a price to pay, they 
must've been dreaming." 
Deckard slowly nodded; he could get behind that. Dreaming, he mused. That was 
what most of life had become, for himself and-apparently-everyone else. Lost 
in it, so that the difference between this world and any other was harder and 
harder to make out. For Sarah as well, thought Deckard. More for her, perhaps, 
than anyone else. He had sensed that a long time ago, in the decaying little 
cabin in the woods, the hiding place to which he and Rachael had fled; when he 
had seen Sarah look down at her replicant double-at Rachael sleeping in the 
black coffin of the transport module extending her rapidly dwindling life 
span-he had detected the envy radiated by Sarah as she had laid her hand on 
the cold glass, inches away from the mirror image of her own face. Envy of the 
sleeping, the dreaming, the dying; envy of the dead and the loved. So much so 
that Sarah had fallen into her own dreaming, a world in which she could at 
last become Rachael. The real, the original, trying to evolve into the unreal, 
the double, the shadow . . . the realer than real. 
And if somebody as smart, as survival-oriented as Sarah Tyrell could fall into 
the dreaming trap, then why not everybody else? Right up to the faceless 
scheming bureaucrats of the U.N.-Deckard couldn't see why they should be 
immune. What a stupid idea, he thought, shaking his head. Create an-
K. Vi. J eter 
other race, smarter and stronger and possibly even meaner than human beings, 
then figure they'll do just fine as slaves, tugging their forelocks and 
singing choruses of "01' Man Ribber" in whatever cotton fields baked under 
alien suns. There weren't enough bullets in enough blade runners' guns to keep 
that kind of payback from working its way to Earth. 
"You know Deckard's nod grew even slower and deeper. "I could almost believe 
all this . 
"Why would a briefcase lie to you?" The inaudible shrug sounded again in 
Batty's voice. "The condition I'm in, I've pretty much transcended all mortal 
desires." 
"So tell me something else." Deckard leaned the knots of his spine against the 
chair. Every muscle in his body had tensed. He felt the trap closing in on 

him-the sharp points of its teeth were just beginning to show. "Give me the 
rest of the spiel. The rep-symps-the real ones, not the head cases- they 
scraped your corpse off the freeway ruins, cracked your skull like a raw egg, 
and downloaded you into this thing. That's about the size of it, right? That's 
the line you've been giving me." 
"You know it. First time anybody's gotten this much of a handle on me." 
"Big question." Deckard studied the briefcase as though it had a face whose 
secrets he could read out. "Why?" 
"Why what?" 
"The rep-symps want you in a box, that's their business. But why have Dave 
Holden bring you to me? What do I need you for?" 
"You don't," Batty's voice replied coolly. "You've already shown how . . . 
proficient you are at engineering your own sorry fate. It's the other way 
around; the rep-symps need you." 
"To do what?" Deckard's own voice went tight and harsh. "What's the job?" 
"Simple," said Batty. "They need you to deliver something. To the replicants. 
The insurgents." 
"Yeah? Deliver what?" 
One word. "Me." 
He'd been afraid it would be something like that. "Why," Deckard asked 
wearily, "would anybody want you delivered to them? Unless they were running 
short on novelty items." 
"You're a sarcastic sonuvabitch, Deckard. Believe me-"The voice coming from 
the briefcase turned darkly vehement. "If I could walk to where I needed to 
get to, I would. Rather than put up with your charming manner." 
"Nothing says you have to." Deckard shrugged. "There may not be any emigrants 
going to the outer colonies, but there's still cargo shipments heading out of 
here. Tell you what-I'll spring for the postage. Cover you with stamps, and 
you're on your way." 
"Unfortunately-" The briefcase emitted a snort of disgust. "You have to come 
along. You're somewhat necessary to the whole operation." 
"Why? What's inside you?" 
"It's not what's inside me, Deckard. It's what I am. The rep-symps back on 
Earth programmed more than just the contents of my skull into this box. They 
had other information they wanted to cram in here. Specifically, Isidore's 
list." 
Tilting his head, Deckard frowned. "What list?" 
"Come on." The briefcase's voice sounded impatient. "You didn't have a whole 
lot of contact with Isidore back there at the Van Nuys Pet Hospital, before 
Sarah Tyrell had him iced. He was a little bit on the fussy and meticulous 
side. He kept records." 
"Records of what? How many mechanical cats he changed the batteries on?" 
"Get real, Deckard. A cop like you should be able to guess what. The escaped 
replicants, all the ones that made their way back to Earth and then went 
through the disguising process at the Van Nuys Pet Hospital-Isidore kept a 
list of every single one that he worked on, that he made capable of passing as 
fully human. And their new identities, the aliases that he came up with for 
them. Everything, all the info. Who they were, who they became, where they 
are-he kept it all." 
"That'd be a handy thing to have." Deckard heard the sourness in his own 
voice. "If you were the police. Like a shopping list. You could just go out 
and ice them one by one, without all that tedious work of tracking them down. 
How convenient." 
"Sure-except why would the police be interested at all?" Batty's voice went 
back into its cool, logical mode. "You should try to remember what I've 
already told you. The disguises that Isidore gave to the escaped replicants 
were complete-even to the replicants themselves. You got that, Deckard? The 
escaped replicants on Earth don't even know that that's what they are. They 
think they're human-and they might as well be, since none of the police's 
empathy tests and Voigt-Kampff machines can show otherwise. The escaped 



replicants' disguises are complete, perfect, and absolute-just the way that 
Isidore planned it. He was one smart guy, no matter what you might think of 
him. The way Isidore set it up, the replicants hiding out on Earth can't even 
give themselves away to anybody who might be trying to hunt them down. And you 
know-all cops know-that's the number-one way people get caught. They give 
themselves away. They know who they are-what they are-and it's too much for 
them to keep bottled up inside. They want to be caught; they do all the little 
things, the mistakes, the coming out into the open, all that insures that 
somebody like you will find them. And end the chase the only way it can be 
ended. By death." The voice lowered. "Even that last batch you hunted down, 
Deckard, back in L.A-the replicant that was based on me, and the Kowalski 
replicant, and Zhora and Pris-they knew who and what they were, and it didn't 
help them. The truth doesn't set you free, Deckard. It dooms you. That batch 
screwed up, they didn't go to the Van Nuys Pet Hospital and get themselves 
disguised by Isidore; they had some other agenda going for them, besides their 
own survival. That's the only reason you were able to find them at all. Not 
because you were able to tell that they were replicants. But because they 
still knew." 
They run toward death. The bleak truth. And Death, in the form of Rick Deckard 
or Dave Holden or any other blackgunned official assassin, ran toward them as 
fast, or just simply waited for them to come and be killed. What did it matter 
anyway to creatures with four-year life spans? Tomorrow 
or the next day, or the day or the year after that, they would be iced 
just as surely by the flaws that Eldon Tyrell had designed into them. 
Maybe-the thought had crept through Deckard before-maybe it was a relief For 
them, if not for himself. 
"All right," said Deckard, pulling himself from his grim musings. "But you 
didn't answer your own question. If Isidore kept a list of all the escaped 
replicants he'd disguised, and that list was still around after he was 
offed-why wouldn't the police want it?" 
"What would be the point? Come on, Deckard, use your brain." The briefcase's 
voice struggled to remain patient. "The police get a list of names; so what? 
They're human-or they might as well be. They can't be shown to be not human 
with the Voigt-Kampff machines and the empathy tests. They don't know 
themselves that they're escaped replicants. So what's the danger in just 
letting them live? They'll all drop dead pretty soon anyway, thanks to that 
four-year life span Tyrell built into them. They're no threat to anyone-so why 
not just let the poor bastards live, at least as long as they're going to? The 
police and the U.N. would just be making trouble for themselves by hunting the 
disguised replicants down-what kind of public relations is it to blow away 
people that everybody around them thinks are as human as they are? Do enough 
of that kind of shit, pretty soon you'd have real humans-whatever that 
means-worrying about whether they were going to be next. And then it would be 
the police who'd be in trouble." 
"So who does want it?" Deckard leaned back and regarded the briefcase. "I sure 
as hell didn't-why send it to me?" 
"The replicants, of course. Not the ones on Earth, the disguised ones-but the 
ones out there. Out in the stars; the insurrection. Isidore's work at the Van 
Nuys Pet Hospital has a big payoff for them. Because of it, the insurrection 
has a 'fifth column' on Earth-replicants just like themselves, perfectly 
disguised, infiltrated through all levels of society. The only problem is that 
the disguised replicants don't know that's what they are. That's where the 
list-the list that Isidore kept, the list that's inside me-that's where it 
comes in." 
Batty's voice turned smug, as though pleased at the show of its own logic. 
"The replicants' insurrection already has a division of its own behind the 
enemy lines, right there on Earth. The insurrection just has to find them. 
Find them and tell them what they really are. Not humans as they thought, but 
replicants. And on the side of the insurrection." 
"Maybe." Deckard shrugged. "Or maybe not. There might be some of these 



disguised replicants who like believing that they're really human. They might 
not react too well to being told they're not. If they believe this little 
revelation at all." 
"Different ones will react different ways." Batty's voice sounded unperturbed. 
"Some might even just kill themselves rather than face the truth. Because 
they'll know that it is the truth. The records that Isidore kept include not 
only the disguised replicants' new identities but their old ones-who and what 
they were out in the colonies, before they escaped and made their way to 
Earth. And something even better-or at least more powerful-than that. The data 
on each disguised replicant includes the anamnetic trigger for that 
individual-a code phrase that Isidore planted into their new artificial 
memories that'll bring the replicants to full, true consciousness. Once that 
trigger gets pulled-when a disguised replicant hears the big word-then the 
truth can't be denied. That sucker'll know just what he or she really is. 
They'll all know. And they'll know what side they should be on. Human or 
replicant." The briefcase laughed, short and harsh. "It'll be like what those 
last old die-hard Maoists used to say. One of their quotes from their little 
red book-you remember? 'Give up illusion-prepare for struggle.' Those poor 
bastards on Isidore's list won't even have any illusions to give up." 
Deckard remembered that line; he'd heard it a long time ago, back when he'd 
spent his time in the student warrens beneath Los Angeles. Or something like 
it, thought Deckard. The alternate, preferred version being "Give up 
struggle-prepare for illusion." A holdover from the same historical epoch as 
the Maoists, the other war, the one that had gone on inside people's brains 
and central nervous systems. Resulting in the private opiocracy, the chemical 
dictatorship that 
half the city's population pledged allegiance to. He'd gone through the 
mandatory three-month detox wring-out when he'd climbed up skinny and starving 
from below and signed on with the LAPD, getting the departmental regs laid 
down to him, that the only acceptable intoxicants came in bottles and tasted 
like numbing fire down your throat. 
The words stayed true, though. Old jokes made for bad realities. Struggle was 
the proverbial mug's game, a nonprofit enterprise for chumps who still 
believed . . . in what? Doesn't matter, thought Deckard. The result was still 
the same. They'd be lucky if they had any illusions left to fall back on. He 
didn't. 
"So that's the deal, then." Deckard tapped one finger against the table, a 
soft dead sound. "The replicants out in the colonies, the insurrection-they 
want this list that Isidore kept, all this data about the disguised replicants 
on Earth. So they can contact them, flip their triggers with the magic words, 
tell them that they're actually replicants and not humans, get 'em fired up 
and working against the U.N. Viva Ia revolucin. That's it, right? I take it 
that the insurrection would already have some way of getting in touch with 
these disguised replicants, once they know who they are?" 
"Of course," Batty replied. "The rep-symps-the ones who put me in this box and 
loaded me up with Isidore's data- they're in contact with the insurrection. 
Once the replicants out in the colonies get the information-once you deliver 
me to them-then they can relay it back to the rep-symps. Who can then go out 
and find the disguised replicants, reveal their true identities and natures to 
them, and get them moving with the insurrection's plans. A lot of those 
disguised replicants are Nexus-6 models, like the Roy Batty replicant that was 
modeled after me. They can cause a lot of troublehell, you should know that 
better than anyone." 
"Still doesn't make sense." Fighting the fatigue he'd brought with him to this 
world, Deckard shook his head. "This list of Isidore's, this information about 
the disguised replicants-it's only of any use back on Earth. If it's inside 
you, why bother having me drag you to the colonies out in the stars? Even if I 
could find a way of getting out there-right now, there's no long-range transit 
off Mars, remember? Just little skiffs, like the one I used to get to the 
Outer Hollywood station. So why shouldn't I just take you back to the 



rep-symps and hand you over to them, if you're the information they need?" 
"One," the briefcase said sourly, "because you're a dead man back on Earth, or 
as good as. You show up there, toting me or not, you'd be spotted and iced 
before you could deliver me to anyone, let alone the rep-symps. And two-" 
"Wait a minute." Deckard lifted his hand. "The rep-symps had this data 
already, loaded it into you, then had Holden bring you to me, just so I could 
go on carrying you out to the insurrection in the colonies? So the data could 
somehow be sent back to the rep-symps on Earth?" He shook his head. "They must 
be even more screwed up than I am." 
"Dig it." The briefcase's voice turned even harder and blunter. "The data, the 
information that Isidore kept about the disguised replicants-it's encoded. 
Encrypted. Deep, bad, and unbreakable. It's got algorithms wrapped around it 
that the U.N's cryptology divisions haven't even seen the tail end of. There's 
not enough computing power in the universe to bear down on the data that got 
loaded into me. Isidore did that, too-he was a smart bastard all around. So 
the information, the list, is unusable to the rep-symps in its present form; 
it has to be unlocked before it can be read out and made functional." 
"Who's got the key?" 
"Correction, Deckard. It's not who has the key. It's who is the key." 
"So it's a person." He could sense the answer that was coming, but asked 
anyway. "And that person is . 
"It's you," said the briefcase. "Who else? It's always been you." 
Deckard sat silently for a few moments, then pushed the chair back and got up 
from the kitchen area table. He crossed the small space of the hovel to the 
door. Pulling it open, he looked out into the narrow, rubble-filled corridor 
beyond. The low-ceilinged public area had gone temporarily depopulated, as 
though a scouring wind had moved across 
the dunes of yellowing paper scraps and black-tinged garbage. The 
stimulus-deprived and the still functional, idiot hunger and the fragile 
containers of a dwindling sanity, had disappeared alike, leaving him with an 
illusion of physical isolation comparable to what he felt under his 
breastbone. Outside the permeated, decomposing walls of the transit colony, 
the same wind separated grains of red sand from each other, rolling them like 
desiccated atoms into mine shafts of ancient iron and the razor-slashed, 
tearless eyes of what once could have been human children. 
There wouldn't be time to think about that kind of stuff anymore. Or to even 
see it. The trap had shown its teeth and snapped onto his leg; he could almost 
imagine the blood trickling down to his ankle. 
"Why me?" Deckard had come back to the table; he turned the briefcase toward 
him. "Why should I be the key?" 
"Because I'm the lock. It's as simple as that." Batty's voice softened to, if 
not pity, a recognition of their common fate. "Think about it. Remember. When 
I died, you were the last thing I saw, Deckard. I had my hands around your 
throat, and my eyes were locked onto your face, with your eyes about to burst 
and your teeth gritting, and you were the one who was going to die . . . and 
that's when I got it. Funny, huh?" The short, humorless laugh sounded again. 
"Just when you least expect it. That's when it's all over." 
"That's when you wake up," said Deckard. He nodded slowly, remembering what 
had been said to him a long time ago in a rubbish-strewn, rain-soaked alley in 
Los Angeles. By the Kowalski replicant that he'd been hunting, the one that 
had caught him instead: Wake up! Time to die. 
"I know what you mean." The briefcase spoke softly. "Nothing like coming that 
close to your own corpsehood to put everything into perspective. Anyway, 
that's the deal. Like the old myths about the last thing a dying man sees 
being imprinted inside his eyes. Your face, Deckard, got imprinted a lot 
deeper than that-right down into my brain. When the rep-symps scraped me off 
that broken freeway and loaded my cerebral contents into this thing, there you 
were, right on the top level. That's a pretty powerful linkage-so 


K. Vi. J eter 

what could make a better key than that? Especially since you're a key that's 
good for more than just opening this lock and decoding Isidore's list. You're 
walking and talking and scheming your little head off, aren't you? God knows, 
for what. But you've still got a lot of your old cop skills; you're not so 
screwed up as to have dropped those. If anybody can get me out to the stars-to 
the insurrection-you can, Deckard. You're the only way." 
"It'd be easier for me to decrypt the Isidore data out of you right now, find 
some means of getting it down to the repsymps on Earth. Or out to the 
insurrection, if that's what the replicants want. Rather than lug you all over 
the universe." 
"Nyet on that, pal. I may be the lock and you may be the key, but I'm not 
exactly a passive participant in this game. I've got some choice in the 
matter, still. I can choose the moment when the key can turn in the lock, when 
the data from Isidore can be decrypted. And believe me, I've already chosen. 
It's not going to happen, Deckard, until you've gotten me safely out of the 
reach of the U.N. and the LAPD and any other security agency that would just 
love to dump me in the incinerator. That would take care of a lot of their 
problems. And yours, too. But I'm not hanging on to the same kind of death 
wish as you might be. I may be stuck in this box right now, but if it's what 
I've got, I'll deal with it. And who knows? We get off Mars and out to the 
insurrection, give the replicants the information they want . . . they might 
show a little gratitude. Beyond just keeping me around, that is. Maybe they 
could download me into some spare replicant body. That'd be a trip. Then you'd 
have a real hard time trying to figure out if I were human or not. Or what 
part of me might be." 
Deckard sorted through the briefcase's words. "You're still missing 
something," he said. "You may have some kind of motivation for this job, for 
getting you and this list of Isidore's out there-but what about me? Seems like 
a lot of hard work. Why would I want to?" 
"You tell me." The briefcase sounded wryly amused again. "Maybe you've 
developed a conscience, or something like that. Kind of a human thing; it's 
been known to happen, even 
to blade runners. Look at poor old Dave Holden. That's what happened to him." 
"Right. And he's dead." 
"All the way," agreed the briefcase. "And there won't be any coming back for 
him, the way there was for me; no one there to download his cerebral contents 
into a handy little container. Lucky bastard. Shows there's no justice in this 
universe. Or maybe there is; maybe Holden had redeemed himself that much. I'll 
have to think about it." 
Deckard shook his head. "I'm not looking for that kind of redemption." 
"Obviously. Got your own agenda, don't you? So here's why you should do the 
job, why you should carry me on out to the insurrection." The briefcase was 
silent for a few seconds, then spoke again, softer. "Because that's the way 
you were heading. Isn't it? Out there. To the stars. Or to put it another way 
. . . as far from Earth as you could get. And you were taking Sarah Tyrell 
with you. That's the plan. I'm right, aren't I?" 
No need for an answer, or even an attempt at denial. "How do you know that?" 
"Come on, Deckard. I'm not the only one plotting your trajectory. Do you 
really think you got away scot-free, that you got even this far without other 
people knowing what you were up to? Your little disguise-this whole Mr. and 
Mrs. Niemand trip-how many people do you think you fooled with that? Your 
cover was blown before you even lifted off from the San Pedro docks. If you 
got away here to Mars, it's because the U.N. and the LAPD wanted you to get 
away. Probably just to see who you might hook up with, who you're working 
for-you know how they like to keep track of people. They got some long leashes 
that they string people out with-and that's what you've been on. Not just with 
the po-lice, but with the rep-symps as well. They've got enough connections in 
the right places to have kept tabs on you." 
"They're not the ones I'm worried about." 
"Of course not-they're the ones who want to keep you alive, at least long 



enough for you to do this little job for them. The police, though-they might 
be just about ready to reel you in. Now that they know you've got me and all 
the dangerous information I've got inside." 
Deckard reached down and tapped a finger on the briefcase. "In which case, I 
should just get rid of you. Since you're not exactly a good thing to keep 
around." 
"You know it doesn't work that way, Deckard. The cops never let anyone off the 
hook. The only way off is with a bullet. The mere fact that you came into 
contact with me-that's enough reason for them to figure you're better off dead 
rather than running around, stirring up more trouble for them." 
One more thing the briefcase was right about. "Even so-if they're going to be 
hot on my ass, I should still dump you rather than drag you around with me and 
have you slow me down." 
"That would be one way of handling the situation." Batty's voice was unfazed. 
"But it'd be the stupid way. You don't have a chance on your own, Deckard. You 
need me. And the other things inside me, besides the Isidore data. If you're 
going to track Sarah Tyrell down, find out where the hell she's gone off 
to-believe me, I've got some notions on that score-and take her off with you 
to the colonies. Though why you'd want to is beyond me . . . but hey, that's 
your business. Work out your obsessions however you want, pal. But frankly, 
it's just one more sign of how fried your brain is. Whereas mine-at least in 
this condensed form-is working overtime. You got the legs, the moves, 
Deckard-you can get around-but I've got the smarts. I know stuff. And I can 
figure out the rest." 
Got me there, thought Deckard. The cop skills that he'd had for so long, the 
sniffing and analyzing abilities that had made it possible for him to survive 
in L.A-he wasn't sure of those anymore. He had the sick feeling that he was 
only alive and breathing on sufferance, just as long as the invisible forces 
watching him were amused to let him be. The leash to which he was attached had 
a collar that could be tightened to the choke point at any moment. 
And if that happened-if his own death moved from possibility to probability to 
actuality-then all the planning and 
scheming that had gotten him this far had been for nothing. Not his plans for 
himself-nothing like that had ever mattered-but for Sarah. What had to be done 
with her. That promise Deckard had made to himself, deep in that empty space 
where the image of Rachael had once resided . 
He'd already decided what he was going to do. Or had had it decided for him. 
It didn't matter. 
Deckard sat down in the empty chair and pulled it up to the table. He rested 
his face in his hands for a long moment, fingertips pressing at the corners of 
his eyes. Then he leaned back and regarded the briefcase again. 
"What was that you said?" Some of Batty's words had puzzled him. "Something 
about ... the other things inside you . 
"They put them in," said the briefcase. "The rep-symps did. When they loaded 
in the encrypted Isidore data. Just one other thing, really. Something they 
thought you might be able to use." 
"Like what?" 
"Check it out for yourself." With two sharp metallic clicks, the briefcase's 
chrome locks snapped open. "Go on. You have to open my lid-I can't do that 
myself." 
Deckard reached one hand over and tilted the briefcase's lid back. He pulled 
the briefcase toward him so he could see its contents. 
It was empty. Nothing inside-or so Deckard thought, until the hovel's dim 
light allowed him to spot the one small, flat rectangle in the center of the 
briefcase's faux watered-silk lining. 
He picked up the object, his broken fingernails sliding under its edge. It 
weighed hardly anything; it might have been empty. Rubbing the slick paper 
surfaces under his thumb, he detected a loose, shifting substance filling, 
like dust, one end of the packet. 
That was what it reminded Deckard of-a seed packet. From some childhood 



memory, deeply buried and dimly recalled, of his mother or an aunt, and a tiny 
garden, holes dug in black earth beneath a yellow sun, a trickle of water from 
a green, snakelike hose . . 


K. Vi. J eter 
But not a seed packet. Or not exactly so; the right size and shape, perhaps 
three by five inches. But the contents would be different. He had seen things 
just like this right here on Mars, in the darkest, narrowest reaches of the 
emigrant colony's illicit markets. Back where the most desperate, the ones 
with the least to lose and the most to find, went in search of a transcendent 
commerce. To find God, or something like Him. 
The packet that Deckard held was blank, at least on the side he could see. He 
turned the packet over and found one word. A name, in simple black letters-
SEBASTIAN 
Everything that is buried," said Wycliffe, "must be watched." 
"'Or with his claws, he'll dig it up again.'" Hands deep in the pockets of the 
fur-collared coat, Sarah still felt the cathedral's chill seeping from the 
ancient walls into her bones. 
"What?" Both of the die-hard Tyrell loyalists appeared puzzled. "Who's 'he'?" 
"Never mind." She shook her head. "Nobody-it's just a quote. A scrambled 
literary allusion." She knew she was dealing with corporate creatures-neither 
one of them had probably ever read anything other than the Tyrell employees' 
manual. "Just go on. Tell me all about it." 
From farther away, up by the abandoned altar at the end of the cathedral's 
stone nave, came the sound of a chugging power generator. It had been started 
up, with much tugging and fussing at the cobwebbed controls, by Wycliffe and 
Zwingli right after the yacht had settled into the bare fields at the edge of 
the little town. Or what used to be a town, Sarah corrected herself. The word 
town implied the presence of people, and there were none here anymore. Just 
the three of them now, strangers on any land not roofed by money. The bare 
incandescent bulbs, laced along a dangling black cord at the cathedral's 
peaked ceiling, flickered and swayed in the ice-crystal wind needling from 
outside. Small black waves dashed against the shingle of the protected harbor. 
"These are all the monitoring devices." Wycliffe had already pulled back the 
rotted tarpaulins that had covered the gauges and dials. Spiders and larger 
creatures scurried away, across the circles of broken or dust-clouded glass. 
He tapped a finger against one device, and a thin black needle jumped and 
quivered; a row of blue LEDs blinked and ran out a row of numbers, a date 
twenty years in the past. "They're not on the generator-they're kept charged 
by the field polarity, out in the Flow." 
It struck Sarah as odd that a place of such stillness should be called that. 
The correct name being Scapa Flow-the body of North Sea water encircled by the 
Orkney Islands. North to the Shetlands, south to the Scottish mainland, all 
depopulated as here; a long way to reach any of the densely imploding, 
expanding urban centers that had sucked up everything that moved on two legs. 
Or on wheels; the cobbled streets of Kirkwall, the little town at the Flow's 
edge, were littered with motorized wheelchairs, toppled onto their sides and 
left to rust, toggle switches and control sticks mired in the grey, puddling 
rain. Sad relics, as if the feeblest of Time's carriages had ceased 
functioning, their spoked wheels frozen by the same non-Time that brooded 
beneath the water's surface. 
The diehards' ship, at the end of its journey from the Martian emigrant 
colony, had come in low to the west. From the wall-sized viewscreen in the 
lounge, Sarah had been able to see the broken cliffs at the islands' rim, the 
rock columns standing as mute sentinels. Abandon all motion-that was what she 
would have carved into their sides. All things come to a halt here. Hence, 
probably, the abandoned wheelchairs. Their owners just hadn't needed them any 
longer. 
"Do you know how this works?" Wycliffe's voice broke into her dark reverie. 



"What's going on here?" 
She said nothing. Better to let him talk, so as to delay the moment she knew 
was coming. Even in places of stopped time, the bad things still approached 
and then arrived, inevitable. Just my luck, thought Sarah glumly. Christmas 
gets canceled, the oral surgery appointment's still on. 
"This location-not the cathedral, I mean; I'm referring to the Orkneys in 
general and Scapa Flow in particular-has become a temporal anomaly." Wycliffe 
slipped into a lecturer's dry, efficient tone. "Indications are that it was 
that way to begin with, even before it started being used as a dump zone for 
time-depleted stellar drives." 
"That's why," said Zwingli, "these islands have such a high concentration of 
neolithic monuments. Stone circles, megaliths, standing stones, burial 
mounds-that sort of thing." The eyes behind the square-rimmed glasses grew 
brighter, as if the topic were some special enthusiasm for him, artifacts of 
the dead being more interesting than anything to do with the living. "The 
highest concentration in Europe, and thus in the whole world. Primitive 
tribespeople must have recognized the area's . . . umm . . . unique 
qualities." 
"Whatever." Wycliffe looked annoyed at his partner's speech. He turned an 
identical owlish gaze back toward Sarah. "All that's possible, I suppose. 
Though I personally believe that the Flow's suitability for its present use 
was triggered by the scrapping of the Imperial German Navy at the end of the 
First World War." 
"The word, I think, is scuttling." Zwingli again. "The Imperial German fleet 
was scuttled at Scapa Flow." 
A pulse of irritation ticked at the corner of Wycliffe's brow. "The 
battleships were deliberately sunk and sent to the bottom. Out there." He 
gestured with one hand, heavily gloved against the cold. At the great wooden 
doors of St. Magnus, the ravens peering in, black and glitter-eyed, took 
flight with wings blotting out whole sections of the cloudroiled sky. "So they 
form the bottom layer, at least as far as modern history is concerned-there's 
no telling what might have been sunk and buried, for whatever reasons, before 
then. Viking boats, perhaps." His gaze grew distant, as 


K. Vi. J eter 
though focussed on a scene not visible in present time. "Hollowed-out logs, 
woven coracles ... who knows? But if the Flow hadn't been a temporal anomaly 
before then, the insertion of such potentiality-laden material might well have 
created one, or exacerbated an already existing situation past a certain 
critical threshold. So that the first signs of the field's presence were 
picked up shortly after the turn of the millennium. Then, when the problem 
arose of the safe disposal of the early depleted stellar drives, this solution 
was acted upon." Wycliffe peered more closely at her. "Is any of this making 
sense?" 
Sarah nodded. "More than." She knew what the two men were talking about; she 
had been briefed on the history of Scapa Flow, and the details of its present 
use, back when she had assumed control of the Tyrell Corporation. The company, 
while under the directorship of her late uncle, had bought a controlling share 
in the consortium running the facility-or dump, a more appropriate word. And 
as had been the usual mode with Eldon Tyrell's business operations, the other 
partners had been squeezed out one by one, or had wisely abandoned their 
interests in whatever went out beneath the grey surface of the Flow. Why worry 
about the dead-and dead machines, at that; nothing more-in their watery 
cemetery? Better to let the Tyrell Corporation be the keepers of whatever 
secrets might still be trying to swim up to the light. 
"It's not as if anybody had wanted to do it this way." Wycliffe sounded 
apologetic. His hand brushed across the dials, clearing some of the dust. 
"There was just nothing else that could be done. It's always better to forget, 
to destroy the past-" 
"Oh, you're right." She regarded the man as though some beam of light had 
broken through the clouds and the cathedral's roof, revealing some previously 

unseen aspect of him. Perhaps he was wiser than she had thought. "You're 
absolutely right." 
A moment of hesitation, then Wycliffe slowly shook his head. "I just meant ... 
technologically; that's all. If there had been a better way of dismantling the 
old, first-generation 
interstellar transports, and of getting rid of their depleted drive units . . 
. but there wasn't. The consortium, before it settled on abandoning and 
scuttling the transports here, had even contemplated firing them off-planet 
and into the sun. But there was no guarantee of the results with that method; 
the sheer amount and nature of the energy lodged in the drives might have 
triggered some cataclysmic solar reaction; there was just no way of telling." 
"Better to be safe." Zwingli nodded sagely. "Bad P.R. if the sun had gotten 
blown up." 
Wycliffe ignored the comment. "Sinking the old interstellar transports in 
Scapa Flow was undoubtedly intended just as a stopgap measure, until a means 
of safely disposing of the depleted drive units had been found. The temporal 
anomaly that had been found here kept the drives' unwanted effects safely 
bottled up, at least for the time being. But as we know, what starts out as 
temporary has a way of becoming permanent. Especially after the new drives 
were invented, the ones in use now, that can operate without the buildup of 
toxic aberrational effects. The old drive technology was abandoned; no more of 
those first-generation interstellar transports were built and put into 
service, so there was no need to find another way of disposing of them. The 
dump here at Scapa Flow hadn't reached its limit. So why invest any further 
research funds into a less-than-critical situation?" 
"That was my uncle's decision." Sarah had read the memoranda in the Tyrell 
Corporation files, the nonpublic areas. Typical of his thinking. Skinflint 
bastard, she mused grimly. Even when the company had been in the 
trillion-dollar-profits level, Eldon Tyrell wouldn't have spent a nickel on 
anything that hadn't brought another dime into his pockets. "He didn't care 
whether it was critical or not," she spoke aloud. "That was part of the 
research he canceled." The memos had had his initials at the bottom; she had 
touched the scrawled letters with her fingertip. "The crews working out here 
had still been in the process of determining whether it was safe to leave all 
those transports underwater, or whether the drives' toxic effects were still 
building to an explosive level." 
Wycliffe appeared uneasy, embarrassed. "Well I'm sure Dr. Tyrell was still 
thinking about this matter. Before his untimely demise. There were a lot of 
things he would've taken care of . . . if there had been time." 
She glared at the man without speaking. There was no more time for Eldon 
Tyrell-the replicant who'd killed him had drained him of time by cracking his 
head like an egg and letting the razor-bright sparks of his mind pour out 
through his red eye sockets-and she was glad of it. Her uncle's unfinished 
business had probably included her as well. 
"Plenty of time here," said Sarah. She gestured toward the dials. "By the 
looks of things." 
The man beside her nodded. "That's what I meant when I said that everything 
buried had to be watched. The machines-the monitors-they did the watching. 
Even if everybody else, everybody human, had forgotten." 
With her knuckle, Sarah rapped against one of the circular dials until the 
glass cracked and splintered. She picked out the triangular shards, then used 
one fingernail to scratch at the black pointer beneath. It was painted on, 
fixed at one number along the dial's rim. 
"These are fake." She looked at Wycliffe beside her as she rubbed the black 
paint flecks from under her nail. She gestured toward the other dials and 
gauges, the banks of monitoring equipment, the lights and numbers glowing in 
the cathedral's dim space. "They all are, aren't they?" 
"Well ... possibly Bony shoulders hunched beneath Wycliffe's jacket. He 
held out his large-knuckled hands and tilted them from side to side. "When 
this installation was set up to watch over the scuttled transports, there was 



some . . . um . . . stage-setting done. To make it look impressive to the 
other consortium members. Dr. Tyrell didn't want them jumping ship, so to 
speak." 
"So really, there's been no monitoring here at all. That's the deal, isn't 
it?" Sarah let her gaze narrow upon the man. "The interstellar transports that 
were dumped here-anything could have been going on with them. With the 
depleted drive units and their toxic effects. They might, in fact, have 
reached some kind of critical mass-the temporal aberra 
tions in the field might not just be toxic. They could very well be lethal." 
She let one corner of her mouth lift in a parody of a smile. "If you want me 
to go down there, that might be the same as killing me. You might as well 
shoot me now and get it over with. You must admit-that seems a little 
inconsistent with people making claims about how they have my best interests 
at heart. Or even just the interests of the Tyrell Corporation." 
Wycliffe said nothing, turning his face away from her as though in shame. I'm 
right, thought Sarah. Not that it was any comfort to her. The truth never was. 
"Miss Tyrell ... please The softer voice of Zwingli came from a few paces 
away. "Please don't be mad at us. There really is nothing else we can do. It 
has to be this way." 
"I've heard that one before." Inside my own head, she thought grimly. As well 
as from these two, when they'd been putting the pressure on her back at the 
hovel on Mars. Sarah supposed they were as locked into their fates as she was. 
"It's all right," she said finally. "I don't mind. It's pretty much what comes 
with the territory, isn't it? When you're Tyrell blood." 
Neither man said anything. Outside, the ice-flecked wind picked at the 
cathedral's raftered bones. Sarah could hear, past the low electric hum of the 
fake monitoring equipment, the grey waves lapping at the village's shore. In a 
storm, she supposed, the seawater might roll against the abandoned doors, pour 
through the empty houses . 
Somehow, without even noticing, she had walked out of St. Magnus's Cathedral 
all the way to the edge of the Flow. She found herself, once her bleak 
thoughts and memories had faded, gazing out at the water, its surface a darker 
shade of the steel-textured clouds above. She sensed another's presence, 
Wycliffe standing behind her. 
"So exactly what is the way I'm supposed to get down there?" Sarah didn't 
glance over her shoulder at the man. She gave a single nod toward the water. 
"Down to the Salander 3, I mean. Jump in, hold my breath, and swim?" 
A slight motion in the chill air; she knew that was Wycliffe stiffening, his 
spine pulled tight by the mention of the ancient interstellar transport's 
name. A name that he and the other man had yet to speak aloud, that was even 
more weighted with dire meaning than the words Scapa Flow. At the corner of 
her eye, she saw his gloved hand extend and point. 
"There's no need for that, Miss Tyrell." Wycliffe's index finger aimed toward 
a small triangular structure floating in the distance, so small that Sarah 
hadn't spotted it before. "There's a pressurized shaft extending down to the . 
. . to your destination. The shadow corporation-well, Zwingli and myself, 
actually-had it installed before we went out and contacted you. And brought 
you here." 
"I see." Sarah glanced back at him. "That was thoughtful of you." 
"Of course." A thin smile moved across Wycliffe's thin-lipped visage. "We 
really are thinking only of your comfort." 
"Sure you are." She shook her head, feeling how cold and hard her face had 
become, as though the ice in the wind had penetrated her flesh and seeped into 
the veins beneath. "If that were the case, you wouldn't even want me to go 
down there." She took a sadistic pleasure in speaking the transport's name 
again. "To the Salander 3." 
Zwingli had come out from the old cathedral and joined them by the shore of 
the Flow; Sarah could sense his presence, and the silent exchange between the 
two men, the glance passed between them. 
"Miss Tyrell ... we've gone over this before. It's the only way." One of them 



spoke; she wasn't sure which. The voice fluttered and was taken away by the 
wind. Probably Wycliffe, the default spokesman for the pair. "If the Tyrell 
Corporation is to be restored-if it is to come out of the shadows and be what 
it was before, and even more than that-then this must be done. By you; no one 
else can do it. It is, after all, your past that we're talking about here. 
That must be confronted and brought into the light." 
Her past. All of it, she told herself. Right back to the beginning-she had 
been born aboard the Salander 3. Far from here . . . far from Earth itself. 
That past, her past, was a world unto itself, sleeping beneath Scapa Flow's 
waters. 
"I know The wind had invisibly peeled away her skin, exposing the flesh 
and scraped bones beneath; that was what it felt like. Sarah had to take her 
hand out of the coat's pocket and hold it out in front of herself, like some 
white, fragile artifact, to dispel the illusion. If that's what it was . 
There were ghosts down there in the old interstellar transports; that was the 
essential toxic effect of the first-generation drive units. The technology, 
the relatively crude way of getting from one point to another, from Earth to 
the stars, had worked by generating perturbations in the time field 
surrounding the transports, enabling them to achieve faster-than-light 
velocities, as though being sucked from one zone of artificially high temporal 
potential to a lower one. Falling through time, infinite distances converted 
thereto, the churning machines holding on to each moment of the present, 
elongating them like some vacillating Faustian bargain. 
The drawback being, as she knew from the old memos she had seen in the Tyrell 
Corporation files, that the first-generation interstellar drive units became 
depleted, lost their propulsive function, as the layers of undissipated 
temporal energy accumulated. Screwing around with Time itself had its price; 
within the transports' little encased worlds, past and present became 
confused, impossible to sort out. Then there would be no forgetting; that 
saving mental grace, the only thing that made sanity possible, would be gone. 
Toxicity, madness, death. Better to sink the contaminated machinery into a 
dark, wet hole, the only place whose own temporal anomalies had a chance of 
matching these newly created ones . 
"But I got out." Sarah spoke her thoughts aloud. She looked back over her 
shoulder at the two men. "Before it- the past-before it could contaminate me. 
Before it could kill me. I was only three years old when the Salander 3 
returned to Earth." That child, that long-vanished incarnation of herself, had 
been the only living thing aboard the transport when the autonomic piloting 
systems had brought it back to this world; when the Salander 3 's doors had 
been unsealed and the Tyrell Corporation's employees had gone in, they had 
found only the little girl named Sarah-and the corpses of her parents. 
Family history, deep and dark as the currents of the ocean surrounding Scapa 
Flow. Little things that hadn't been in the old memoranda, the company's 
official archives, but that she had found out anyway as she had been growing 
up. The way children always find out things, by overhearing whispers . . . and 
even more tellingly, by hearing the silences that the adults clicked into when 
they knew she was in the room. 
That was how she had found out what had happened to them. The faces she knew, 
recognized from the digitized press clippings in the company files. Anson and 
Ruth Tyrell; there had been a photo of the two of them with-an oddly human, 
sentimentalizing touch-a long-haired marmalade cat in the woman's arms, a pet 
that was going to accompany them on their exploratory voyage to the Proxima 
system. The two people in the photo had been smiling, full of an eager 
confidence-Sarah had calculated that her mother had become pregnant either 
shortly before the photograph had been taken or just after, when the 
interstellar transport had left Earth orbit. Her parents had been unaware of 
their fate, the fate of the Salander 3. The transport had turned back a sixth 
of the way to Proxima, the clever relays and circuits wired into its computers 
doing the best they could, ferrying back the dead and the living, two adult 
corpses and an infant tended by machines, nursed on synthesized breast milk. 



Her second birth had come three years later, when the Tyrell Corporation 
employees had unsealed the transport's main hatch and one of them had led her 
out by the hand- there was no way Sarah could remember that. Just more of what 
she had been told, and had overheard, and had dug out of the company archives. 
And what happened to the cat? she wondered, not for the first time. The poor 
thing-Sarah gazed out at the uncommunicative water, feeling the chill seep 
closer to her core. She 
supposed that was another mystery, the answer to which was down there with all 
the others, in the hulk of the Salander 3 itself. 
"That's why you want me to go down there, isn't it?" She managed to bestow a 
bare fragment of a smile upon the two men. "To find out what happened to that 
silly cat." 
They showed no sign of puzzlement at her words. "You have to go down there," 
said Wycliffe, "to save-to restore-the Tyrell Corporation." 
"Something went wrong Zwingli gazed out across the Flow. "A long time ago 
. 
"At the beginning." Wycliffe nodded slowly. "It had to have been then. When 
Dr. Tyrell and his brother created the corporation. Somehow, everything that 
happened since then 
including the destruction of the Tyrell Corporation . the seeds were planted 
right back at the start of it all." 
She envied the dead-this also, not for the first time. They've got it easy, 
thought Sarah. The two Tyrell brothers and the wife of one of them-all the bad 
things that fate had had in store, they had already gotten through. And gone 
on to whatever place there was that had no time, neither past nor dreaded 
future. She knew she wasn't that lucky . . . or at least not yet. The past was 
waiting for her, just a few minutes ahead, when she would go down into the 
remains of the Salander 3, her first home. Which, in some way, she had never 
left. 
"We can't go back to the very beginning-that's too far." Wycliffe's voice 
continued at the edge of her thoughts. "There's nothing left. It's lost. But 
this much we can do. We can go this far. To whatever happened . . . then. In 
there." He nodded toward the grey water and the vessels hidden beneath the 
surface. "But you're the only one who can go there and find out. The secrets, 
the mysteries. All that we need to know." 
This is what I get-she supposed it served her right. She had envied the dead 
and had tried to become one of them. Deckard had loved-and still loved-the 
replicant with Sarah's face. Rachael had already become one of the dead, the 


K. Vi. J eter 
termination of her four-year life span postponed just a little bit. Not that 
it mattered, finally. For either herself or Rachael. The dead were the only 
ones who escaped. For the living, there was only the past and the future, the 
same thing in either direction, and equally painful. It was stupid of me to 
even try. 
Standing behind her, Wycliffe was still wrapped up in his explanations, the 
rationale behind their journey to this bleak spot. "We don't even know why." 
His voice spoke in a child's baffled tone. "The Tyrell Corporation sunk an 
awful lot of its operating capital into the Salander 3 expedition. And we 
don't even know what they were looking for out in the Proxima system. What 
they were trying to achieve, what they thought Anson Tyrell was going to find 
out there." 
"Not in the files, was it?" Sarah knew; she'd looked herself. "That 
information was deleted; erased, extinguished. And you know, don't you, who 
must have done that." 
Both men nodded. "Dr. Tyrell," Wycliffe morosely said. "Eldon Tyrell. Your 
uncle." 
"Eldon Tyrell did a lot of things that you don't know about." She heard her 
own voice darken in tone. "Some of them . . . you don't want to know about." 
Sarah looked over her shoulder and saw the two die-hard loyalists appearing 
uncomfortable, exchanging glances from behind their square-framed lenses at 

each other. 
"Those kinds of things Zwingli spoke up. "That might be personal information. 
Family secrets. That we don't need to know about. To bring the Tyrell 
Corporation back into existence." 
"That's where you're wrong," said Sarah. "There's no such thing as personal 
with the Tyrell Corporation. There never was. Or to put it another way . . . 
everything is personal. When my uncle was alive, the company was just the 
contents of his head, made big." 
"And then it was yours." A softly uttered reminder from Wycliffe. "Your 
company. And your ... personal matters." 
Head turned, Sarah regarded the man, seeking any clue as to just exactly and 
how much he and his partner were 
aware of. Maybe I was wrong, she mused. Maybe they weren't quite as stupid as 
they looked. She'd have to be careful-her own reminder, this time. 
"But all that came later." Wycliffe spoke, letting his steady gaze meet hers. 
"We need to find out what happened a long time ago. On the Salander 3." 
"That was really the turning point," added Zwingli. "If you study the history 
of the Tyrell Corporation. What can be pieced together from the files and the 
other records. After the failure of the Salander 3 mission, and the deaths of 
An-son and Ruth Tyrell-your parents' deaths-then things were never the same. 
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. 
Maybe this low-level entrepreneur had upped his mordida, his payoff bribe, 
before the hammer had come down. Or else he'd brewed up the contents of a 
packet from his stock and had been lights-out under the stall's counter, 
walking and talking with some Old Testament prophet or bo tree-sitting with a 
wide-faced Buddha, and had conveniently missed all the action. 
"Look-" The cheap fiberboard flexed beneath Deckard's hands as he leaned 
toward the other man's face. "I really don't have a lot of time. Not in this 
world or the next." He kept his voice low, using a quick nod to indicate the 
packets fastened to the stall's interior. They were all the same small, flat 
rectangular shape as the one he'd found inside the talking briefcase; they 
varied in color, from monochrome to shimmering, eye-aching full-spectrum 
assaults. "But if you're selling, I'm buying. Got it?" 
Before the merchant could reply-he'd backed up a step from Deckard on the 
other side of the counter, sensing at least the possibility of 
violence-another customer came up. A wraithlike figure, all starvation eyes 
and scab-picked shivering flesh, arose trembling at Deckard's elbow. "Do you 


A mouth studded with a few cracked and yellow teeth, beneath unattended 
running nostrils, quivered open. "Do you have any more of the ... the New 
Orthodox West Coast Fundamentalists?" The emaciated figure struggled to bring 
his scattered thoughts to words. "Specifically ... the Reformed Huffington 
Rite? The Santa Barbara branch?" 
"Get out of here. You mooch." The stallkeeper glared at the creature. "This is 
a cash-only business. Nothing on credit. Not that I'd ever have given you 
any." 
"I got money! Look!" A grubby fist unfolded, revealing wadded paper with 
pictures of famous dead people. "Not even scrip-real money!" The supplicant 
voice rose in pitch, a sympathetic vibration shivering the ragged man's body. 
"I can pay!" 
Grumbling subaudibly, the stallkeeper turned, pawed through the thin packets 
stapled behind him, pulled one off, and slapped it on the counter. Distaste 
curled the corners of his mouth as he sorted out the grease-impregnated bills 
and octagonal coins. "You're a dollar short," announced the stallkeeper, as 
though that pleased him more than a simple 
sale would have. He snatched the packet away as the ragged man's shaking 
fingers reached for it. 
"For Christ's sake-" Deckard reached into his own pocket and dug out a bill 
from his dwindling stash. He flicked it into the stallkeeper's hollow chest. 
"Give the guy what he wants, and let him get out of here." Worth it, just to 
get things moving. 
A second later, the wraith had fled back into the churning crowd, the packet 
clutched to the visible bones beneath his throat. "All right," said the 
stallkeeper, turning his dark-ringed eyes back toward Deckard. All pretense of 



religious feeling had been stripped away, leaving the pure mercantile entity 
beneath. "What do you want? Buy it now and get what you can out of it, before 
you wind up like that asshole." 
"It's not what I want." Deckard pulled out the rest of his money, enough to 
evoke a swift glance of interest from the other man. "It's what I need." 
"Let me guess." In another life, another world, the person inside the stall 
could have been a tailor; the tape measure was at the center of his empty 
pupils. "Pentecostal? Got a wide selection here." He gestured at the packets 
surrounding him. "You'll have to supply your own snakes, or at least have 'em 
inside your brain, if you want to get into that Southern Degenerate thing." A 
shake of the stallkeeper's head. "Naw- you don't look the type to have even 
that much fun. Nothing Jewish line, either; you'd know how to deal with guilt, 
if that was the case. No d say Heavy Calvinist. You look like you're into 
predestination. Badly so." The man gave an ugly, knowing smile. "Like Weber 
said: 'Forced to follow his path alone to meet a destiny which had been 
decreed for him from eternity.'" 
Deckard knew the rest of the quote. "'No one could help him.'" He nodded. 
"From The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism." 
"Good for you. I should give an educated man a discount, but . . . we've 
really got the spirit of capitalism here." The man fingered a couple of 
packets at the side of the stall. "How about Dutch Reformed? That should be a 
severe-enough God for you. Give you a good price-I'm trying to move this stock 
before it goes stale." 
"No, thanks." Deckard shook his head. "I don't need anything like that." Got 
enough of that kind of shit already, he thought to himself, without acquiring 
any more. "No packets. I just need the supplies. Couple quarts colloidal 
suspension fluid, calibrated beaker, inert glass rod. That's all." 
The stallkeeper gave him a hard look, eyes narrowed. "You got your deity 
already? The one you're going to use?" He didn't wait for an answer. "If 
you're going with some back-alley, home brew pile of dust, you're asking for 
trouble, man." 
"Think so, huh?" Deckard let a partial smile show as he gazed around at the 
stall's wares. "This stuff you're peddling doesn't exactly look like it's FDA 
approved." 
"Hey. There's standards in this business." The stallkeeper drew back, 
offended. "I'm here, and my competition's not, because I sell quality. I've 
got customers right up at the top, man, the very top. I go in the front door 
of the cable offices, I've got merchandise sticking out of my jacket pockets, 
and the guards don't even blink." 
"I bet," said Deckard. It explained a lot. "Did you have a good time getting 
your competition cleared out of the marketplace?" 
"Loved it, pal. Made my day." The stalikeeper's deep-set eyes glittered. "And 
just to show what a nice guy I am, I only jacked up my prices ten percent. But 
for you, because you're such an asshole, it's twenty." He reached beneath the 
stall's counter and fetched out a plastic gallon jug; the contents sloshed in 
a slow gelatinous wave as he set it down. The beaker and glass rod were 
slapped down beside the container. "There you go, sport. Knock yourself out. 
You want to see God on some low-rent basis, it's your head's funeral, not 
mine." 
A minute later, his roll lighter-Deckard had never bought this kind of stuff 
before, so he didn't know whether he was getting absolutely screwed or not-he 
turned away from the stall, purchases hugged to his chest. Before he 
could bull his way into the crowd, the merchant called after 
him. 
"Hey-" The man held up a creased, much-used paper bag. "Don't be an idiot and 
just go walking with it where everybody can see. The next millennium hasn't 
arrived yet, pal." 
The briefcase harangued Deckard as soon as he walked in the door of the hovel. 
"Did you get it?" Batty's voice drilled insistent at his ear. "Did you get 
everything I told you to get?" 



Deckard set the bag on the table next to the briefcase. "I'm not so screwed up 
I can't handle a three-item shopping list." He pulled out the plastic jug and 
the other objects. "This is what you asked for, this is what I got." 
"Anybody see you?" 
He laughed. "Hundreds. Thousands. Not exactly a depopulated zone around here." 
"Come on." The briefcase sounded annoyed. "You know what I mean. Cops, the 
police, the authorities. People who shouldn't have seen you. Not if you want 
to take care of business without being interrupted." 
"We're all right-for the time being." Deckard didn't know if that was true or 
not. And didn't care. In some ways, it would be a relief if the hovel's front 
door were suddenly broken down by jackbooted storm troopers from the deepest 
basements of either the cable monopoly or the U.N's diplomatic headquarters. 
Then he wouldn't have to go ahead with what he'd already told the briefcase he 
would. "Don't sweat it. You're not the one who has to worry about what 
happens." 
"Only because the worst already has." Batty's voice prodded at him. "Let's get 
going." 
He'd already gotten his instructions, the measuring and pouring and mixing 
involved in the process, from the briefcase. The colloidal suspension poured 
out like transparent molasses, heavy and glistening. He thinned it out with a 
half cup of water from the kitchen tap, stirring the results with the glass 
rod. A reddish tinge, rust from the emigrant colony's decaying pipes, mingled 
with the faint ionic discharge of the colloid's activation. 
All through the back alleys and in the surrounding hovels, as well as in the 
crowded cities back on Earth, the same preparations were being made, all the 
differing communicants readying their sacraments, assembling the doorways 
through which they would pass to meet the God they had chosen. Back in L.A., 
Deckard had never been attracted to the whole dehydrated deity underground, or 
repelled by it, either; he'd developed enough cop glaze to favorably regard 
anything that kept the citizens off the streets, tucked away in their little 
rooms or dorm cribs, bodily inert while their central nervous systems were off 
in the ozone, walking with the King. Less trouble generated that way-usually; 
some of them came back with the light of fanaticism in their eyes, ready for a 
private jihad on anything that crossed their paths. Those types never got very 
far; religious obsessives- at least the murderous kind-did everything in 
public and found a snipered martyrdom preferable to reloading their own 
weapons. That was the kind of thing that made L.A. police work easy, even 
enjoyable at times. 
Deckard tapped the glass rod on the rim of the calibrated beaker. Already, as 
the less-viscous fluid settled, the flakes of rust were precipitating out, 
drifting to the bottom of the container like some obscure precious metal. 
From somewhere on the edge of his consciousness, Batty's voice intruded. 
"Nothing happens," the briefcase said dryly, "if you just sit there looking at 
it. The rest is in the little packet." 
"Right." Deckard picked up the thin rectangular shape, the same as yet 
different from the ones at the marketplace stall. The one word, the name 
SEBASTIAN, in large block letters-Not much of a clue there, he thought again. 
Or even instructions. "What, do I just dump the whole thing in?" 
"Christ, no." The briefcase emitted an exasperated sigh. "Not unless you're 
mixing for a party or something-and then you'd need a beaker a lot larger than 
that; maybe a bathtub or something. No-you throw the whole packet in what


 you got there, you'll be at a toxic level. It'd strip the = catecholamines 
out of your brain so fast-burn out all the neural receptor sites along the way 
as well-you'd wind up a vegetable. At least in this world; no way of telling 
where you'd be on the other side." 
"You sound like you believe in this kind of thing. Like it's true." 
"I don't believe," replied Batty. "I know. At least enough not to screw 
around. The rep-symps back down on Earth, the same ones who scraped me off 
that freeway where you left me and put me in this box . . . those people know 
what they're doing. They may be visionaries, but they still know what's going 



on. They wouldn't have put that packet inside me, and told me to lay it on 
you, if there weren't some serious force majeure to it." 
As with most things this version of Batty said, that one made sense as well. A 
lot of effort had been expended, with corpses attached, to get the briefcase 
and its contents here, in Deckard's hands. Even if his old partner, Dave 
Holden, hadn't gone through some big crisis of conscience, hadn't had the 
change of heart that would've put him working with the rep-symps-there wasn't 
any way that someone like that would have signed up on a pure chump mission. 
No matter what side he'd been on. 
"You know Deckard reached over to the packet on the table and picked it up 
between thumb and forefinger. "I'm taking an awful lot here on trust." 
"What choice do you have? It's like that old Chinese proverb: Safety is on the 
shore, but the pearl is in the ocean." A silent shrug. "You want answers, you 
have to go somewhere to find them. You're just lucky-you're holding that 
somewhere in your hand." 
Deckard didn't feel lucky. He wasn't sure he'd recognize the sensation, if it 
ever happened to him. You want answers? That was what the briefcase had 
promised him; that had been the whole reason for his little shopping 
expedition out to the colony's illicit marketplace. So he could come back here 
to the hovel he called home-as much as he'd ever called any place home, even 
back in L.A-and mix up a small batch of the dehydrated deity in the packet. 
The one with Sebastian's name on it. 
He asked what he had asked Batty before. "Why would Sebastian-if it's really 
him inside here-why would he know the answers?" Deckard remembered the little 
wizened genetic engineer as a decrepit childlike creature with no more control 
over his destiny than he had over his own rapidly aging body. The last time he 
had seen Sebastian in the flesh, major parts of it had already been lost, 
limbs amputated in the attempt to keep the core functions going. Too bad, 
mused Deckard, that he couldn't take the knife and cut the stupid bits out of 
his heart as well. The poor little truncated bastard had been in love with 
Pris, or the remains of her, and hadn't even been aware that she wasn't a 
replicant, but a human the same as him, only crazier. Sebastian had set up 
housekeeping, out in the sideways zone at the edge of L.A., with the animated 
corpse he'd adored-and then he'd had even that much happiness taken away from 
him. A loser like that-a loser by fate, written right down into his own 
genetic code- didn't sound like a very promising candidate for deity status. 
"What the hell," asked Deckard aloud, "could somebody like that have figured 
out?" 
"I don't know." Batty's reply was a flat, simple statement. "I've never been 
in there ... where you're going. Those pocket universes, that whole dehydrated 
deity trip-I never did any of that, and now I can't. Not possible in my 
present condition. The activated colloidal suspensions only interface with 
organic human nervous systems. Leaves me out." The briefcase laughed. "Hey, 
I'd love to go in there myself, rather than counting on you. But as it is, 
you've got the only ticket." 
"All right," said Deckard. "Whatever." Thinking about fate, whatever 
Sebastian's had been, left him resigned to his own. He might as well get this 
stage-even if it was the final one-over with. "Let's do it." 
The Sebastian packet was still in Deckard's hand. He rapped the edge a couple 
of times against the table, to make sure the contents were all at the bottom, 
then tore the upper edge open. 
Batty must have heard the sound of ripping paper. "About a teaspoonful should 
suffice." 
Spoons he'd had already; Deckard rinsed one off in the kitchen sink and 
brought it back to the table. He measured out what the briefcase had 
instructed him to, then folded down the top of the packet. 
The powder in the spoon smelled like yeast, though he knew it wasn't. When it 
hit the watered-down fluid in the beaker, the minute grains sparked off more 
luminous ions; the faint blue light tinged his hand as he picked up the glass 
rod and stirred. 



"Bottoms up," said the briefcase. 
The blue ionic discharge had died out, leaving clear liquid again; Deckard 
supposed that meant the colloidal activation was complete. A deity of some 
kind-hard to imagine it actually being that pathetic double amputee-existed in 
the beaker. Or so it was to be believed. Deckard picked up the container and 
took a sip. 
Bitter on his tongue; he managed to swallow. In his throat, he felt nothing, 
as though the liquid had already seeped into his tissues, heading for the 
first connections with his spine and brain. 
He drained the rest at one go, placing the empty beaker on the table. Then he 
leaned back in the chair and waited. 
It didn't take long. 
She opened the door, a metal door like others through which she had gone in 
her life . 
And stepped into the past. 
I've been here, thought Sarah Tyrell. The smell of ocean water, the salt of 
invisible tears, drifted through the canned atmosphere. A snake of water, a 
leak curling underneath one of the rubber-flanged seals, threaded down the 
corridor extending in front of her. The metal door closed behind her with a 
sigh, its security mechanisms sealing her with the interstellar ship's world. 
A world she didn't recognize from memory but from dreams. Long, slow, empty 
dreams, from which she had always awakened trembling, gazing up at the 
nightbound ceilings, blue light of moon and stars like ice upon the skin of a 
frightened child. 
There were no stars here. No skies but the rust-streaked silver metal above, 
that could almost be touched by her fingertips if she reached as high as she 
could. If there was any memory of that, it would be as a child's remembering. 
It 
must've looked like a real sky to me-as far away as any of the Earth on which 
her parents had been born, cloudless and unmarked by time and the enveloping 
ocean's decay. Even when her father had carried her in his arms, taking his 
infant daughter from one part of the Salander 3 to another- surely he had done 
that, he must have carried her; Sarah didn't remember, but she believed, or 
tried to-even then, what would that child of the past have known about any 
world, any sky, other than this one? 
The real sky, that grey realm of storms and ice-honed winds, was far above her 
and the waves rolling over the Salander 3's hull. Her faithful and demanding 
retinue, Wycliffe and Zwingli, were probably back on the shore of Scapa Flow 
by now, the deserted town and looming cathedral at their backs as they shared 
a thermos of coffee and waited for her to reemerge. Or if night came on-a 
relativistic darkening in a zone as northern as the Orkneys-without her 
returning back from underneath the waters, the two men would likely retreat to 
the warmth and safety of the interplanetary yacht in which they'd brought her 
to this place. 
And what if I don't come back up? The thought had occurred to her, even as the 
two men had rowed her across the Flow in a tiny, primitive low-tech wooden 
boat, probably something they had found abandoned on the shore. Out to the 
triangular opening of the shaft by which she would descend to the Salander 3 
and the past-she had watched them inexpertly manning the oars, splashing more 
than actual rowing, yet still somehow managing to make progress against the 
wind feathering the tops of the low waves. The last she had seen of 
them-perhaps the last she would see-they had been bobbing in the little boat, 
looking down at her as the shaft's hatch had irised shut, sealing her in 
darkness until sensors had registered a human presence and flipped on a faint 
dotted line extending down toward the Flow's depths and the scuttled ships 
layered over the rocks. She supposed that if she didn't come back, bearing all 
the secrets of the past in her seaweed-festooned arms-if the past swallowed 
her whole, the way it had always threatened to, and didn't let her go-then the 
two die-hard loyalists would 
likely move on to Plan B for resurrecting the Tyrell Corporation. She could 



imagine them winging their way off-planet, a whole Mutt-and-Jeff routine in 
the cockpit area of the yacht: 
Well, Mr. Wycliffe, going into the past didn't seem to accomplish much. No, 
Mr. Zwingli, it sure as hell didn't . 
Meanwhile, she'd be dead or worse, scuttled at the bottom of the Flow along 
with the Imperial German Navy from the end of the First World War. The little 
cage inside the shaft had gone on falling, through fathoms and decades, until 
it had hit the bottom with a soft thump, and the metal doors had opened to the 
interior of the Salander 3. 
Sarah walked farther into the ship, toward the corridor's branching junction. 
At the limit of her hearing, the sound of motors switching on, somewhere deep 
in the craft's innards; air stirred and brushed against her face as the 
programmed ventilation systems came to life. The workings of her birthplace, 
the mechanical womb that had enclosed the softer one of her mother, switched 
on as she passed by the triggering sensors, each measuring and recording the 
blood warmth of her presence. 
"Do we know you?" A voice spoke softly from above her. 
She glanced up at a round speaker grille set between luminescent panels. She 
smiled, wondering where the optics were that focussed on the slight movement 
of her facial muscles. "I don't think so." 
"It's very puzzling," continued the ship's autonomic computer. "I feel as 
though I should pick you up in my arms-if I had arms-and rock you to sleep." 
"I'm sure that would be very pleasant." She wasn't being sarcastic; the desire 
rose in her to rest her head against the shining corridor wall and close her 
eyes, drifting to sleep. 
"There's a genotype file on you in my data banks." The computer was still 
trying to puzzle it out. "That is, there's a file that you match." The 
ventilation flow in the corridor reversed for a second, as though the 
machinery behind the walls had taken another sniff at her. "But you don't 
match it somehow. You're too big." 
The fussy, worrying voice reminded her of another one; it took a moment for 
Sarah to remember. The calendar, she 
thought; the one that had hung on the wall of the hovel, out on Mars, that 
she'd lived in with Deckard. Or existed, at least. It'd had the same 
solicitous manner programmed into its numbered pages. The ship's computer had 
the advantage of being effectively invisible; she didn't have to look at tacky 
postcard photos of rural Oregon. 
"I'm all grown up," said Sarah. She gazed around the empty corridor. "Since 
you saw me last. That's why. That's why I'm different and the same." 
"Oh no, child-that can't be." The voice softly chided her. "For you to be 
different ... different from what you were 
or are The computer displayed the same limited grasp of difficult concepts 
that she remembered the calendar struggling with. "That would mean that time 
had passed. Has passed. And that's just wrong, sweetheart. No time has passed. 
All my clocks and chronos, they all say the same thing, the same as they 
always have. Since we came back, I mean. No time, no time-nothing has passed. 
We don't do that here." 
She felt sorry for the computer, and by extension, the whole ship. It was 
doing the best it could. If its maternal instincts were only electrons moving 
along wires and through silicon, they still exceeded what could be found in 
most humans. 
"I wasn't here." Sarah tried to explain. It delayed having to go farther down 
the dimly lit corridor and finding . . . she didn't know what. "I went outside 
you. I was taken out. Don't you remember?" She had seen the photos in the 
company archives, and the ones that her uncle had kept in the bottom drawer of 
the intricately wrought table beside his canopied bed, so she could describe 
what had happened back then. "The men came, and the nurse, and they took me 
away. When you-when we-came back here to Earth. I was just a child then. 
That's how you remember me. That's the ifie you have." 
"Oh, sweetheart-I don't think I would've forgotten that. You were such a 



pretty little thing." The ship's computer lapsed into its own fond reel of 
memories. "Both of you were . . 
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' ag 
ing 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. 



Unless the cat did it, she thought wryly. That furry creature in her mother's 
arms in the old newspaper photo. The notion produced a partial, humorless 
smile on her face. When pets go bad . . 
The protection of irony wore thin and vanished; she couldn't keep up that 
defense. Fear-driven nausea tightened her gut, dizzying her. She had to lean 
her shoulder against the corridor's wall to keep from falling. 
Something wet seeped through the sleeve of her coat, 
touching her arm inside. She barely felt it. Something as soft as the touch of 
another person's fingertip, even the same temperature, warm as the substance 
within her own veins. Sarah pushed herself back from the wall, her palm miring 
in the fluid thick upon it. 
She looked at her hand. And saw blood. 
Ink-black in the corridor's partial light; knowing what it was filled in the 
redness. Her thumb smeared it across her fingertips; spreading them apart 
revealed the larger, irregular blot filling her palm. For a moment, she 
wondered if it might be her own blood, if she had cut herself accidentally on 
the broken plastic she had picked up, the sharp-edged fragment from the 
smashed overhead lights. She could have wounded herself and not even known it; 
she would've preferred that to any other possibility. 
Not wanting to, she turned slowly to one side. Dreading, Sarah forced herself 
to look at the corridor's wall, to try to see what was there. 
Words, a message. Big red letters, black . . . in the darkness, she could no 
longer tell the difference. Enough light trickled down the corridor, slid 
beneath her flinching eyelids and back to the farthest spaces inside her 
skull-enough to make out the ragged shapes of the letters, the scrawl reaching 
up higher than her own hand could reach, to the angle of metal above. 
This is craziness. Her own words, unspoken voice, to herself. She knew that; 
everyone did. You found words written in blood, in big smeary letters on the 
wall, when there were crazy people around. Bad crazy people, the kind that 
hurt other people. And worse. Sometimes it was the crazy people's own 
blood-another memory trip flashed through her head in a millisecond, a buried 
one that kept coming back into the light where she didn't want it, a memory 
that ended with her watching herself, standing just outside in true schizoid 
fashion, as she had written her name in red exactly like this on the mirror 
over a green-veined marble bathroom sink with golden faucets, her wrists 
dripping into pinkly darkening water. That memory ended in blackout, as that 
other Sarah she'd watched had fallen, hand smearing across the bloodied 
mirror, as her uncle's doctors and security guards had been breaking down the 
door. Crazy. But she still knew that most times, the blood had been inside 
those other people, the ones who got hurt, cut instead of cutting, the ones 
who weren't alive anymore. Crazy . 
She stood back from the wall, as far away from it as possible, in the middle 
of the lightless corridor. Far enough away that she could read what it said, 
the edge of the distant glow picking out the wet letters, the one word, the 
name, as a slow line trickled from the bottom curve of the S to the floor. 
SARAH 


Her own name. As big and crazy as possible; not in a bathroom mirror this 
time-in this time-but filling a whole wall, each letter standing higher than 
herself. Written a long time ago, by the measurement of the world outside, up 
above, where the grey waves rolled beneath the mounting storm clouds. Written 
just now, in the now that never ended, could never end, inside the Salander 3. 
The voice of the ship's computer whispered inside her head, a tape loop of 
what it had told her, warned her about, as she had walked away from the light. 
Maybe you should go home, little girl. You don't belong here . 
She should have taken the computer's advice. It had only been trying to 
protect her, just as it always had. I should've listened; too late now, Sarah 
knew. She had come this far; there could be no leaving until she had gone all 
the way to the end. 
With a shudder arcing down her spine, she turned away from the red-scrawled 



name on the wall. As she looked down the corridor again, a light appeared, a 
tiny, flickering thing. Not at the height of her gaze, but lower; she had to 
shield her eyes for a moment from what might have been a flashlight beam 
turned straight at her. 
The beam shifted away, toward the floor; Sarah lowered her hand. Light 
shimmered on liquid. The thought came to her that the ship was slowly flooding 
with water; the sealing mechanisms had broken loose, jarred by nothing but her 
footsteps, or the hatch to the shaft behind her hadn't closed 
properly, letting the Flow's waters seep in. A dark expanse stretched in front 
of her, covering the floor; the breath of the ship's ventilation system 
stirred a shimmering ripple across the surface. 
But it wasn't seawater; she had known that as well, and couldn't deny it to 
herself, when the red trickle from the word on the wall reached the bottom of 
the wall. The red line, running down from the big smeared S of her name, 
merged with the dark pool and was the same color, the same substance, black in 
darkness, red in her knowing. 
The glow from the flashlight, or the lantern or whatever it was, reflected 
from the small lake of blood, faintly illuminating the figure on the other 
side. She could see the person now. 
"Hello," spoke the child, in a child's unafraid, curious voice. "Did you just 
get here?" 
Sarah said nothing, then slowly shook her head. "No," she managed to say. 
"Perhaps. I don't know." 
"I don't know, either." 
The light wavered across the surface of the blood, sending the child's shadow 
fluttering behind her. Sarah's eyes made their final adjustment to the dark, 
revealing a little more of the image across from her. A little girl, perhaps 
ten years old, no more than that; dark hair falling to her thin shoulders, 
dark, serious eyes. A beautiful child who would grow more beautiful. No, Sarah 
reminded herself. Would have grown. Someplace where time moved. 
"But The girl looked up shyly, through her long black lashes. "You can 
stay here if you want to. I don't mind." 
Sarah felt her heart tightening under her breast; a pulse would have shattered 
it to pieces. Not real, thought Sarah. She closed her eyes, taking the child 
from her vision for a moment. She's a ghost. That was the toxic effect of this 
place. The past didn't die and go away, as it should. You see things. That 
didn't exist, except in memory and the past. 
"I'll stay," said Sarah. "For a little while, at least." 
The little girl couldn't keep from smiling. "What's your 
name?" 
"It's Sarah. That's all." 
A puzzled look shaded the girl's eyes. "Like that?" She glanced over her 
shoulder to the bloodied wall, then 
back to the girl. "That's right." She nodded. "What's yours?" The same shy 
smile appeared. "It's Rachael," said the image of the little girl. "My name's 
Rachael." 
A Spanish-language double bill was playing at the Million Dollar Theater. The 
same movies had been playing there forever, or seemingly so; the management 
never changed the plastic letters on the marquee. They just let the red 
plastic letters fall off one by one, hitting the rain-soaked sidewalk and 
lying there like cryptic messages underneath the sizzling broken neon. The hot 
blue colors ran crazy on the wet street, reflected in every puddle and gutter, 
upside down and backwards-who could tell?-and legible as the fire-tinged storm 
clouds rolling across the L.A. night sky. 
Christ, thought Rick Deckard. This is a fake. A real good fake, better than 
the sets and stages and all the other phony rigging at the Outer Hollywood 
studios. As real-looking as it'd ever gotten there-with accurate rain piped 
over and drizzling down on walkable streets colored with the same intricate 
lights and electricity-still, all you'd had to do was look past the camera 
lenses and the show was over, illusion shattered. This false Los Angeles was a 



better job-dehy 
drated deities lived up to their advance billing, as far as he was concerned; 
no wonder people got into them-but it was still just as much a fake as any 
other. Perhaps even as much as the real one back on Earth. 
He looked up at the garish marquee as he walked down the center of the empty 
street. The effects of downing the beaker loaded with the colloidal 
suspension, activated by a spoonful of the Sebastian packet's contents, were 
still setting in on him. For a few minutes-though it was hard to gauge the 
passage of time in a place that didn't exist-he had been able to see both the 
hovel's interior, with the tap still dripping into the kitchen-area sink and 
the briefcase with Batty's voice lying on the table, and the lineaments of 
this pocket universe, like two photo transparencies laid on top of each other. 
He'd even been able to see himself, his legs sprawled out, his hand resting on 
the table beside the empty beaker he'd just slapped down, as another 
perception of his body, standing not sitting, wearing the long 
pseudo-trenchcoat he'd always affected in L.A., had disorientingly faded into 
his consciousness. The Deckard body sitting in the hovel on Mars had faded 
out, the first thing in that other universe to go. The one in the pocket 
universe had tilted his head back, getting the grey-tinged rain in his face 
and seeing past the roiling clouds to sectors of hard-edged needle-tip stars, 
with gouts of flame bursting beneath them. Deckard figured the stars were as 
fixed in place as the heavy, dark clouds, indicators of this L.A. 's eternal 
night. 
Dicking around with time like that was the main indicator of the pocket 
universe's fake status. A night that never ended-though the real L.A. had 
often felt like that to him- and little anachronisms. Right down to the 
Million Dollar's marquee above his head; that was a fragment from the past, 
something vanished from the real world. This whole tenblock sector of the 
city's decaying downtown had been levelled by urban-renewal terrorists to 
drive out the last squatter tribes some time after Deckard and Sarah had gone 
off-planet; news footage of the mini-nuked buildings had shown up on the 
Martian cable's nightly clown-wrap. Even on the tiny video screen in the 
hovel, he'd been able to recog 
nize the old movie palace's curling ornaments, lifeless and unlit in the 
rubble. 
The news clip hadn't shown the old Bradbury Building, across from the 
transplanted theater, or what had been left of it-Deckard had assumed that 
even if there'd been no explosive charges planted there, the concussion from 
the surrounding blasts would've knocked the structure over; the place had been 
falling into plaster dust and splintering support beams when he'd been inside 
it. All the old intricate wrought-iron balustrades and open stairwells, the 
clanking antique of an elevator and its cage, the grand fabric of early 
twentieth-century business enterprise fallen on hard times- the building had 
looked like some kind of vertical mausoleum when he'd tracked the last of his 
quarry in there, the replicant Batty and the psychotic would-be replicant 
Pris. He'd gotten the shit kicked out of himself there as well, by Pris and 
the nonhuman Batty in turn. But as somebody else had said an even longer time 
ago, the race wasn't always to the swift; they had died and he was still 
alive, both in this world and the other one, the real one. 
Though he didn't feel too swift at the moment; a wave of nausea rolled up in 
his throat, the hallucinated city street blurring and thinning to 
insubstantiality for a few seconds. The colloidal suspension, the deity 
stirred from a dry powder to a potentiated liquid, was still asserting its 
hold on his central nervous system. His perceptions, what his flesh and mortal 
eyes were gazing upon inside the hovel, were being overridden by . . . what 
Sebastian saw. After all, thought Deckard. It's his world. Whatever he was 
now. 
Deckard turned away from the movie theater and toward the building directly 
across the street. It looked the same as when he'd seen it last, in the real 
world, in the real L.A. Complete with the fat-bellied swirling columns that 



had been grafted onto the original structure in an ill-advised attempt to 
evoke some kind of pseudo-Arabic multiculturalism, and that had only resulted 
in the same kind of bastard kitsch the city had always been known for. The 
other added ornamentation was the wadded-up trash in the entranceway, the same 
rain-soaked pile of unidentifiable rubbish that the wet windsstacked up 
against every Angeleno doorway. He picked his way through the mess, greasy 
food wrappers tangling against his ankles, then drifting away to the empty, 
glistening street. 
That was the other fake thing. Even more so than the sets up in the Outer 
Hollywood station; at least there, extras had crowded the action, simulating 
the restless urban population. Here, in Sebastian's pocket universe, the 
streets were devoid of any human, or close-to-human, activity. As depopulated 
as this zone had been in the real L.A., there had still been some life 
stirring about, even if only dwarf scavengers climbing over his police 
spinner, trying to unbolt the roof-mounted air filters. If this place was 
Sebastian's show, he'd made it a private one. Believers only, thought Deckard. 
Or at least just communicants. The little guy had obviously never had much use 
for other people, or at least not for anything other than the autonomic toy 
friends he'd manufactured for himself. And Pris; but that'd been true love. 
Deckard shoved the building's front door with the fiat of his hand; it swung 
into darkness. The colored light from the movie theater marquee seeped past 
him, picking out small details-brass handrails still recognizable under layers 
of dirt and tarnish, rain puddling and spilling from one open floor to the 
next-in the cavernous space. He stepped inside, letting the door fall shut 
behind him, sealing out the street sector of the hallucinated world. 
He stood in the middle of the space looking upward. What he saw produced a 
partial smile, one constructed of both irony and grudging admiration. Too 
perfect, thought Deckard. Through the building's broken roof, past the levels 
of iron-grilled walkways, beams of shifting light penetrated the darkness like 
the radiance of magnified stars falling from the fixed spheres in which this 
little world was enclosed. The lights came from the blimp, the old U.N. 
advertising vessel with its billboard viewscreen and spiky antennae, looking 
as though it were some kind of sea creature that had inflated itself enough to 
rise up in the air. 
Squinting against the slants of light, Deckard could just barely see the 
blimp's shape cruising in absurd majesty above the building and the 
surrounding streets, the Euro-hybrid geisha face on the viewscreen smiling 
with a mute guardian angel's uncommunicable wisdom. Sebastian had brought that 
back as well, another fixture for his pocket universe; in the real world, the 
real L.A., the blimp was gone, taken out by a mortar round from rep-symp 
fringe terrorists. Deckard himself had seen the blimp go down in flames, a 
latter-day Hindenburg, something even the most blas or stoned L.A. citizens 
had had their attention caught by. A nonevent for Sebastian, though; he'd 
already been living out in the sideways zone's wasteland, with his 
patched-together Pris, so he'd missed all that. This urban concoction was the 


L.A. that Sebastian had known before he'd left. 
Rain from the building's leaking roof sluiced down the brass handrail that 
Deckard grasped. As he looked up the flight of stairs, their treads rotted to 
creaking sponges, his other hand moved inside his coat. From force of habit, 
old ingrained cop ways, as well as from the memory of when he'd been here in 
long-ago reality. His fingers were searching for his gun, that great black 
metal weight, a hammer as big and effective as a cannon; they found nothing 
but lint and a rip in his shirt, through which his sweat-moist flesh could be 
felt. He drew his hand back out, empty. He would've felt better with even a 
hallucinated weapon in his grasp, but he wasn't surprised that such things had 
been edited out of Sebastian's universe. 
The last traces of the other world, the hovel where his real body was sitting 
without consciousness, blindly watched over by the talking briefcase, had 
faded away. This world had locked in tight; he could feel the wet steps 
yielding beneath, the rail's cold metal chill against his palm. The smell of 

rust and crumbling plaster, the stink of decades-old pigeon shit, mired in his 
breathing. A mist-smeared shaft of light from the blimp above the building 
crossed over his face, then cut a diagonal through the empty lobby he'd left 
behind. 
"Sebastian!" He called out, voice loud in the building's silence, as he 
mounted to the floor where the genetic engineer 
had kept his suite of rooms. Deckard looked down the open walkway to the tall 
double doors, one of them pushed slightly ajar. No answering voice came. From 
somewhere past the doors, a wavering light fell, as though from a lit 
candelabra. "Anybody there?" 
He knew there had to be. As empty as the building felt, with its vacant spaces 
and nailed-down shadows, there was still another human presence inside it. Or 
something slightly different from human, something imbedded in the walls and 
pockmarked floor tiles. You 'i'e walking around in his head, Deckard told 
himself. Or as good as. Remember that. 
At the double doors, halfway down the walkway, the silence was broken by a 
drip of rain into the puddle that had formed in front of the sill. The water 
rippled like a softly broken mirror as Deckard stepped into its center and 
pushed one of the doors all the way open. Flickering candlelight brushed 
against his face as he gazed across the high-ceilinged room within. 
Toys; he remembered them from that time when he had tracked Pris and the 
replicant Batty to this spot. There had been a pocket universe for Sebastian 
even then, a little world that he had created for himself, and this place was 
it. His refuge, a child's refuge, from the hurtful, bustling world of 
grown-ups, everybody bigger than him, everybody who wasn't dying from a 
galloping progeria, the accelerated decrepitude that had turned him into a 
wrinkled, fading nonadult. L.A. wasn't a city for children; no wonder 
Sebastian had been dying in it. If he hadn't built this hiding place for 
himself, his small corpse would have been trampled in the streets. 
Past the candles guttering in their branched silver settings, Deckard saw 
torn, gauzy curtains drifting in an unfelt breeze, their ragged ends trailing 
across the nearest mannequins and stuffed animals. Whatever contents of 
Sebastian's head hadn't spilled out to reenvision the L.A. street and the 
decaying building were exposed here, like some soft, babyish army. Glass eyes 
stared at nothing or were reflected in gilt mirrors with ornate frames, the 
inert photo-receptors switched off or robbed of batteries. When Pris, on the 
run with the escaped replicants she had thought she was one of, had disguised 
herself as one of Sebastian's mechanical creations, a leotarded bridal doll 
with a veil draped over her strawlike hair, she had finally achieved the 
nonhuman apotheosis her cracked brain had been seeking all along. To be a 
thing, a killing thing or a loved one; it didn't matter. 
One of the mannequins stirred, fat clown of ambiguous gender; it croaked out a 
woman's laugh as the rubbery wattled neck shook, white-painted face tilting 
back. Stubby fingers pawed the air like pale anemones brought up from ocean 
shallows. 
Deckard halted in the center of the room, forcing his breath to a measured 
pace, pushing back an emergent claustrophobia. The place would've seemed 
uncomfortably close, crammed with too much junk-disassembled tube radios and 
thrift shop antiques and patzer chess pieces, all the hobby collectibles of a 
perpetually dying, too-clever child-even if there hadn't been unpleasant 
memories filling up the unoccupied areas. He'd come close to getting killed 
here, twice in rapid succession, first by crazy Pris, then by the even loonier 
replicant Batty; the human original he'd met up with later, the one whose 
cerebral contents were stored in the talking briefcase, had been a piece of 
cake by comparison. 
His fingers ached, not just for the want of a soothing gun-not that the real 
weapon had been much use here, the real here-but from old wounds; the 
replicant Batty had broken fingers as easily as snapping twigs. The fingers 
had healed badly, aching when provoked by shifts in weather or the pressure of 
memory. 



The laughing clown's barking noise suddenly shrilled up another octave, the 
rubber hands jerking even more spasmodically above the fright-wigged head. 
Deckard stepped away from the device, watching as a shudder of ill-meshed 
gearing ran through its frame. The clown suddenly froze, the garish face 
paralyzed in a rictus of manic hilarity; the room's silence congealed once 
more as a wisp of black, burntrubber smoke trailed out of the parted mouth. 
Another face appeared, popping up from behind the stricken clown. "Oh ... hi." 
The black cloth covering the device's workings was draped over Sebastian's 
shoulders; his moist-eyed gaze, still set in the wrinkled flesh of his aging 
disease, blinked at Deckard. "I didn't hear you come in. I was busy working on 
this old thing, trying to get it running again." He laid a wrinkled, 
protective hand on the clown's shoulder. "It's a real keeper; used to be in an 
old amusement park and stuff." 
"No, it didn't." Deckard shook his head. "It's not even real. Nothing here 
is." 
"Well ... yes and no." Grease marked Sebastian's hands; he rubbed them against 
his trousers. "Real in the what's-it, uh, Platonic sense." With an extended 
forefinger, he poked at one of the clown's eyes, getting its line of vision to 
match the other. "This is the idea of the physical manifestation, of what came 
from the amusement park. Ideas are real things, too." Sebastian's voice went 
on the defensive. "Just as much as all that stuff . . . you know . . . out 
there." He nodded toward the room's high, arched window, but it was clear that 
he meant someplace farther away than the visible street. "Where you just came 
from." 
"That's why it's called the real world," said Deckard. "And this isn't." He 
gestured toward the other man. "In the real world, you didn't have legs. Not 
anymore." 
"Yeah." Sebastian nodded slowly. "I had to get rid of them out there." His 
expression brightened. "But here- 'cause this is my world-I figured I should 
have 'em again. And I was right! They come in real handy." 
"Should've given yourself a second pair of arms. Be even more convenient." 
"Oh, they told me I could do that if I wanted-" 
"Who's 'they'?" Deckard peered closer at the short-statured image. 
A matter-of-fact response came from Sebastian. "The repsymps. When they did 
this for me. You know, what they call 'dehydrated'? Only it's not dehydrated 
at all; that's just a slang term. Same way with being a deity; I don't feel 
like one." He smiled shyly. "I just feel like myself. The fact that they were 
able to do me over, to take what was left of me and turn it into a polymerized 
sensorial override encapsulate- that's the technical term for the process-it 
doesn't change anything. Real or not." 
Deckard gazed around the overstuffed room, then back to his host. "There's one 
big difference here," he said quietly. "You don't have to die here. The way 
you were on the outside." 
"Well, I could if I wanted to. Anything's possible." Sebastian placed a hand 
against the front of his coveralls. "I could make this whole body go away. I 
mean, it could just crumple up and blow out the window like dust. But He 
looked across the silent dolls and toys. "There's enough of me left in all 
this-it's all me, actually-so I guess I'd still be here. In spirit, kinda." 
Sebastian frowned, as though trying to puzzle the situation out. "Like that 
old bit-did you ever hear about it when you were a kid?-about splitting an 
apple and finding God in the seed. So maybe I am some kind of deity, like all 
those genuine name-brand ones that you get in those little packets. Huh." 
Deckard felt sorry for him, the same as he had long ago, in the real world. 
"Yeah, maybe you are." 
"You shoulda seen it, though, when I first got here and I was joking around 
and stuff." The moist eyes glittered with excitement. "I made myself ten feet 
tall! Always wanted to be." A forefinger pointed up. "Hit my head on the 
ceiling, though, so it wasn't really practical. Guess I coulda made the room 
bigger, though-but then it wouldn't have been the same as before. And that was 
the way I wanted it. Just the same. And with my little friends, too." He 



shouted past Deckard. "Hey, Colonel! And Squeaker-come on out here. We've got 
company." 
A glance over his shoulder, and Deckard saw two even smaller figures, an 
ornately uniformed teddy bear and a long-nosed toy soldier, waddle-marching 
from one of the other rooms. The bear's button eyes fixed on Deckard with 
evident suspicion; the soldier's spine went rigid, as though the automaton was 
considering its courses of action. 
"Now, come on, fellas. Be nice." Sebastian waggled his finger, 
stained with black grease, at them. "Mr. Decker isn't going to do 
anything to hurt us. He can't, anyway, even if he wanted to. Least, I don't 
think he can." The watery eyes peered at him. "Can you?" 
Deckard shook his head. "No. Not anymore." 
The toy companions weren't convinced; the bear emitted a soft growl. "Foo," 
said the soldier. "He's not a nice man." 
"I'm sure, Colonel, he's as nice as he can be. Mr. Decker hasn't had as easy a 
life as we have. As I have." Tilting his head to one side, Sebastian regarded 
his guest thoughtfully. "He doesn't have real good friends like I do. He's all 
alone. Aren't you?" 
"Not alone enough." Time might not be ticking along in this room-like 
everything else, that might have been left outside in the real world-but 
Deckard knew that there was at least one other person waiting for him 
somewhere. Unfinished business, his mutual fate with Sarah lyrell still to be 
worked out. "But I can deal with it." 
A shrug from Sebastian. "Suit yourself. That's your pocket universe. The one 
inside your head." 
"What about you?" The other's low-rent holiness had irritated Deckard, 
bringing out a mean streak he didn't feel like concealing. "Your little 
buddies really enough company for you?" 
"Sure-" Sebastian looked suddenly nervous, picking up on the edge of hostility 
in the dust-moted air. "They always were. They had to be." 
"What about Pris?" Deckard felt his own thin smile appear. "Where's she?" 
The childlike innocence flashed out of Sebastian's face, as though the switch 
on one of his mechanical toys had been thrown. Replaced by something both 
hotter and darker, that could be seen like black-enameled metal at the center 
of the man's eyes. "That's not any of your business, Mr. Decker." His hard, 
annihilating stare could have bored holes through real-world skin and flesh. 
"You don't have any right to ask about that." 
"Just a simple question." Deckard's turn to give a shrug. "You don't have to 
answer. It's your world, remember." 
That world trembled in sympathetic connection to its creator. Plaster dust 
sifted from a network of cracks that suddenly shot like negative lightning 
across the water-stained ceiling. The crystal attachments to the candelabra 
and unlit chandeliers rattled, as though the fault lines beneath the real L.A. 
had been duplicated here. 
"Stop!" Another voice shrilled from the opposite side of the room. "Stop 
that!" The toy soldier shook his tiny fists in the air, as high as the point 
on his spiked helmet. "Let him alone!" Beside the soldier, the uniformed teddy 
bear stamped its feet, anger sufficient to have caused this earth's tremors. 
"Wicked, wicked, wicked!" 
"No, fellas ... don't Face wet with tears, Sebastian held one palm outward 
as he sank into a carved wooden chair. "It's all right . 
The teddy bear attacked first, the tassels of its epaulets shaking as it 
locked stubby arms around Deckard's leg, the round face nuzzling a muffled 
growl against the long coat's lower edge. Deckard peeled the animated creature 
from himself, hoisting it up just long enough to pitch it against the 
approaching toy soldier. Both of Sebastian's automatons sprawled into a 
corner; the soldier burst into whimpers of frustration. 
"Don't hurt them Leaning forward, Sebastian grabbed hold of Deckard's sleeve. 
"It's not their fault. They're just doing what I programmed them to do. 
They're just trying to protect me . 



Deckard looked down at the weeping man. "From what?" An old, deeply buried cop 
circuit linked inside Deckard's brain, producing the almost shamefully cruel 
satisfaction that came with doing the job well. This might have been 
Sebastian's world, his little private pocket universe, but Sebastian didn't 
control it any longer. I do, thought Deckard. Things had to be broken before 
the things they concealed could be seen, out in the open. Now he could find 
out what he needed to know. "Protecting you from what?" 
Sebastian took a deep, shuddering breath, drawing himself upright. "Oh ... 
everything, I guess. I don't know." He made a visible effort to calm himself 
down, the fragile body 
parts drawn together by an invisible string. "Nothing, really." His trembling 
fingers wiped the last tears from his eyes. He looked up at Deckard. "I mean 
that. From nothing. She's not here." 
"Pris? Why not?" 
"I just don't know Sebastian morosely shook his head. "I tried to make her 
be here-you know, the way I made Colonel Fuzzy and Squeaker Hussar just be the 
way they were before." He pointed to the bear and the toy soldier, who had 
sullenly withdrawn into a corner of the room. "I should've been able to do 
that. This is my world, isn't it? The rep-symps put me here, they made me a 
dehydrated deity, they gave me all this . . . I should be able to have what I 
want, shouldn't I?" 
"I suppose so." Deckard nodded. "Whatever you want." 
"But I just couldn't make it be that way. I tried and tried, but it just 
wouldn't happen. That's really why I didn't change anything, why I kept it all 
the way it was before. Look-" Sebastian jumped up from the chair, ran to one 
of the tall windows and yanked its gauzy curtain to one side. "I got that 
right, didn't I?" His finger stabbed toward the dark, rain-drizzled urban 
landscape below. "That's the street, isn't it? Just the way it was." 
Another slow nod from Deckard. 
"And all this. The building and everything." The small man turned around in 
the center of the room, hands upraised to indicate all its contents and the 
spaces beyond. "I know I got all this right. I lived here so long, not here 
but out there, out in the real world-this was my world. I just had to make it 
all over again. And I did." 
Deckard watched him and listened. He felt even sorrier for the poor little 
bastard. He'~s finding out. The same things that Deckard had found out, had 
learned and written on the charred scroll of his heart. There were some things 
you couldn't bring back. You could grieve for them, and that was all. 
"But Pris Sebastian looked puzzled, as if he was about to start crying 
again. "When I got done, she still 
wasn't here. She was supposed to be-I made it that way- but she wasn't." 
Deckard knew why Sebastian, the deity of this pocket universe, had failed. He 
wondered if he should tell him. 
"I tried and tried-" 
"Look," said Deckard. "It's not going to happen. Why don't you just give up on 
that? You've got your memories. Those'll have to do." 
A big sigh from Sebastian rendered him even smaller and more fragile. "I know. 
I know you're right." His shoulders slumped in desolation. He looked hollowed 
out, insubstantial, as though the contents of his skin had been converted to 
loose atoms and exhaled; another night breeze coming through the windows might 
have blown him away entirely. "There's a reason for it. Why she's not here." 
"You don't have to talk about this if you don't want to. That's not why I came 
here." 
"Of course not. You've got important business to take care of. Still 
Sebastian turned back to the silent and motionless clown mannequin. He lifted 
the black cloth covering its mechanical innards; from one of his coverall 
pockets, he took a yellow-handled screwdriver and poked at the meshing gears. 
"Like I said, I know why. Or to put it another way, kinda, it's because of 
what I don't know. About Pris." He extracted some small part from the workings 
and studied it between his thumb and forefinger. "I mean, I know all about 



something like this. And all the other stuff I got." Still holding the metal 
piece, Sebastian gestured toward the room's contents. "And the building, and 
the street outside, and the whole city even . . . I know what those are. So 
I've got 'em the right way inside my head, and so I could make 'em be here, 
the way they were before, out there. You know, in the real world. But with 
Pris He leaned close to the clown's workings, screwing the little part 
back into place. "I thought I knew what she was. But maybe I was wrong." 
Deckard said nothing. For a moment, the room and all the empty spaces around 
it were silent, except for the touch of 
rain upon the window glass and the corridors' pools of dark 
water. 
"Do you think, Mr. Decker, that that's possible?" Sebastian's gaze, sharper 
beneath the constant moistness, like a 
knife under blurry water, fastened onto him. "You think I 
could've got it all wrong?" 
i'm glad you're here," said the little girl. She reached up and took Sarah's 
hand, and gave her a shy, pretty smile. "I was getting kind of lonely. All by 
myself . 
Poor little thing, thought Sarah. She~s not even real. The notion of ghosts 
and shadows, and all other unreal things, suffering from loneliness, the same 
way she always had, now weighted her down with an inescapable sadness. If this 
little girl-or the little girl that she saw, a temporary incarnation of memory 
and the past that was all jumbled up inside the Salander 3-if she could feel 
lonely, then loneliness was some sort of universal constant, like gravity or 
the speed of light. Everything in the world, this one or any other, was made, 
at least in part, of it. 
The little girl's dark hair, dark as Sarah's own, was pulled back into a long 
braid tied with a red ribbon at the end. The girl-the image, the ghost, the 
hallucination-didn't draw away as Sarah felt the ribbon's thin substance 
between her fingertips. The ribbon felt real enough, and even touched by 
the passage of time; it looked old, faded and frayed, the gossamer threads 
coming loose at the edges. 
"Did you do that?" Sarah spoke gently to the little girl, as though any harsh 
word might have dispersed her from even this illusory existence, like a hand 
brushed through a curl of smoke. "Or did somebody here fix your hair for you?" 
"I can do it." The girl spoke with affronted dignity. "If I want to. But 
usually I let the nanny do it." 
"The nanny? What nanny?" 
"You know." The girl, still holding Sarah's hand, used a nod of her head to 
indicate the corridor walls and hidden machinery of the ship. "The things that 
take care of you. That's their job. But they don't have to do so much for me 
anymore-I'm not a baby now. But it makes them happy if they can do things, so 
sometimes I let them." 
Sarah knew what the girl was talking about. The Salander 3 's computer was 
still silent, as though they had left its voice behind them as they had walked 
farther through the ship's interior. But she could sense the pseudo-life 
imbedded in the structure of the vessel, the flow of electrons, the activation 
of solenoids, the meshing of gears; all the tiny functions that had been 
programmed into the lifeless metal and silicon. That had, she knew, kept her 
alive as well; that had been her nursemaid all the way back to Earth, so many 
years ago. When the Salander 3 had turned back from its voyage to the Proxima 
system, and had returned with two human corpses and one living child as its 
only passengers-the computer and its most delicate manipulators hadn't tied 
any red ribbons, but it had done everything necessary to preserve the real 
life that had been left in its charge. 
Their steps, hers and the little girl's, had led them farther into the 
Salander 3; Sarah had wanted to get away from the pool of blood near which she 
had found her illusory companion. The girl had seemed to pick up on Sarah's 
queasiness; she had led the way, her hand in Sarah's hand, past the entrances 
of other corridor branches, down which had been visible other scrawled 



markings on the walls in the same wet red that looked black in the overhead 
fluorescents' partial spectrum. Only when they reached a section of the ship 
that had escaped whatever violence had rolled through the other enclosed 
spaces-it seemed to be some kind of storage area; crates and boxes with 
stenciled lettering lined the sides-had Sarah been able to draw her breath and 
speak again. 
She halted, turning the little girl to face her. "Tell me," said Sarah. "And 
you have to tell me the truth, the real truth." She knelt down, so that her 
gaze was on the same level as the girl's. "Is your name really Rachael?" 
"Of course." The girl gazed back at her, somber and unblinking. "What else 
would it be?" 
Sarah didn't answer. The girl's image stepped from a mere optical perception 
to something else, which moved through other dark corridors, the ones inside 
her own memories. She knew what the girl reminded her of: one of the 
photographs that had been inside her uncle's desk, the ornately carved and 
gilded bureau plat in his vast and lofty-ceilinged office suite in L.A., that 
she had inherited along with every other object belonging to the 'I~rrell 
Corporation. The photograph had been of herself, taken when she had been about 
the same age, ten years old or so, as the girl who stood before her now. She 
couldn't remember when the photo had been taken, though she supposed it had 
been in Zurich, in the expensive, conventlike boarding school where her uncle 
had lodged his orphan niece as soon as she'd been old enough for it; the girl 
in the picture had been wearing the stiff-collared uniform that had itched so 
badly through her thin white stockings. 
There had been something else in that old photograph. Her hair had been pulled 
back, the same as this little girl's, but without a ribbon of any color, or 
else it just hadn't been caught by the camera. And bangs, thought Sarah; she'd 
had bangs when she'd been ten years old, combed down to a half inch above her 
eyebrows. Whereas this little girl had hers parted at one temple, then brushed 
slanting across her forehead. That was different; but the face . . . the face 
was the same. Sarah could see that, calling up the photograph in her memory 
and comparing it with the child in front of her. The same dark eyes, the same 
incipient beauty, the fragile paleness. 
And something else, deeper and more hidden, yet obvious to see. That 
sadness, even when the little girl smiled, even when that vanished Sarah in 
the old photograph had smiled, shy and hesitant. Exactly the same. 
That proves it, thought Sarah. It didn't make her any happier to know that the 
little girl she knelt before and in whose dark eyes she saw her own grown-up 
face mirrored was a ghost, a hallucination, a temporal anomaly. Something that 
the toxic effects of the Salander 3's depleted interstellar drives had 
conjured up out of the jumbled past held inside the curved metal. Or out of my 
head-that must be what the little girl's name meant. Rachael. Where else would 
she have gotten it? Straight out of Sarah's own memories and desires; Sarah 
had even called herself Rachael, had tried to be Rachael, back when she had 
thought she could replace, the original for the copy, the replicant that 
Deckard had loved. Fm going crazy down here, thought Sarah. Or crazier. 
Wycliffe and Zwingli had told her it was a poisonous environment; they hadn't 
been lying. She had the proof of that in front of her eyes, or in the trenches 
of her misfiring central nervous system, wherever a hallucination like this 
could be said to exist at all. 
Sarah stood up. "Your name's not Rachael," she said coldly. 
The little girl frowned. "Yes, it is. I know my own name." 
"Your name is She took a deep breath, fighting against a wave of fatigue 
that had suddenly risen inside her. "Nothing. Nothing at all." 
"That's silly. How can somebody be called nothing?" 
"It's easy. If she doesn't exist." 
"Speak for yourself," the child said with an adult's dignity. "I know I exist. 
What's your problem?" 
"Let's not go into that now." She rubbed the corner of her brow. "Your name's 
Sarah. Just the same as mine." 



The girl laughed scornfully. "That's just stupid. How can we both have the 
same name?" 
"Because you and I are the same person." She wondered why she was trying to 
explain this to an illusion. "In a way, that is. You're part of me. You're 
just something that came out of my head. You're not real, except to the degree 
you're something that my subconscious put together out of my memories." 
"You're the one who's not real." The child's mood had quickly changed to 
sullen. "I never saw you before. I've been here a long, long time, all by 
myself. Then you show up and you start saying awful things." She glared darkly 
at Sarah. "Where did you come from anyhow?" 
"From far, far away." One of Sarah's hands made a vague gesture toward the 
ship's walls and everything that lay beyond. "From someplace where there's 
light and time and 
all sorts of useful things." 
"No The girl studied Sarah, then reached out and grabbed her hand, more 
roughly than she had taken it before. She peered intently at Sarah's palm, the 
veins and sinews of her wrist. The girl shook her head, the braid brushing 
against her shoulders. "You came from here." She sounded puzzled. "I can tell. 
You're made of the same stuff. As me." The sharp gaze moved up to Sarah's 
face. "But you weren't here before. I don't get it." 
She~s right, mused Sarah. I am from here. This had been where she had been 
born, though then it had been out among the stars instead of at the bottom of 
Scapa Flow. Not that it makes any difference-Sarah looked around at the 
stacked crates and the silvery walls behind them. The ventilation's breeze 
carried scrubbed and filtered molecules to her lungs, the same canned air she 
had been born breathing. Like coming home, she thought. 
"Maybe that's what I should do." Sarah spoke aloud, almost forgetting the 
other perceived presence standing next to her. "I should just forget about all 
that other stuff-" 
"What other stuff?" The child had noticed the drift of attention, and tugged 
on Sarah's hand. 
"Everything else. Up there." She gestured with a toss of her head. "Out in 
that other world, the one you don't know anything about." How could she? Sarah 
reminded herself. She doesn't even exist. "Perhaps it'd be a good idea to just 
forget about that world." 
"You made it sound kind of nice." Puzzled again, the girl stared at her. 
"Light and stuff. It's dark a lot here." 
"It's dark a lot up there, too." Sarah couldn't keep a trace of bitterness 
from filtering into her voice. "Believe me; I'd know." A long hallway lined 
with doors ran down the length of her memories to that vanishing point beyond 
which it was useless to go. She kept all the doors carefully locked, though 
she knew exactly what was behind each one of them. And sometimes the locks 
didn't work, and the doors opened, whether she wanted them to or not. "And ... 
you've got enough here. To see your way." She wondered whether the Salander 3 
's batteries would ever run down, or whether the ship was sufficiently mired 
in time that the lights would stay on forever, whether the ventilation system 
would go on sighing through the corridors. Maybe not; there were probably some 
laws of physics that would be contravened thereby. She didn't care; she 
wouldn't even mind living in the dark down here, breathing whatever stale air 
remained, over and over again. Perhaps this was what she had been looking for, 
why she had let Wycliffe and Zwingli convince her to come down here. A return 
to the womb . . . or to the grave. She didn't care which. "You've got plenty," 
she whispered, eyes closed. "More than enough of what you need . 
"Well ... I don't want to stay here." The voice of the little girl made a sour 
announcement. "It sucks." 
"Why do you say that?" Sarah opened her eyes. "Wouldn't you like to stay here 
forever? As long as I did, too?" She tried to give the child a friendly smile. 
"We could have little tea parties, just the two of us. And we could sleep in 
the same bed, if you wanted. All warm." The ocean could cradle them to their 
dreams, supposed Sarah. If there were any need for dreams in a place like 



this. "Wouldn't that be nice?" 
"No." The little girl scowled, face darkening as though the shadows had crept 
out from behind the boxes on either side. "It's creepy and scary down here. 
I've been scared the whole time I can remember. Which is always." 
"Why? What's to be scared of?" 
"There's others down here." The Rachael child's voice dropped to a whisper. 
"Others who aren't nice." 
"I thought you were the only one-until I came here." The way the little girl 
spoke had raised chill, prickling flesh on Sarah's arms. "That's why you were 
so lonely." 
"You sure don't know very much." The brooding, apprehensive look hadn't 
vanished from the girl's face. "Don't you know? That you can be alone even 
when there's other things around you?" 
The emphasized word made Sarah wonder. She had said things, not people-what 
did that mean? 
"Look. I don't need to be lectured by some piece of my own subconscious. 
Especially about the nature of being alone-" 
"Shh! Be quiet!" The Rachael child grabbed Sarah's arm with both hands, 
squeezing tight. "There they are! Don't you hear them?" 
"Who? What?" The child's evident terror jolted Sarah's spine rigid. She looked 
over her shoulder, in the direction from which she and the Rachael child had 
come. "I don't-" 
Then she did. The sounds of footsteps, not the little girl's, as she heard 
when she had first entered the ship. But louder and heavier, echoing from the 
distance and down the Salander 3's metal corridors; what she would have 
thought to be a man's, except for the slowly ominous pace, as though lumbering 
under some heavy and unnatural burden. 
The child had pressed herself against Sarah, arms wrapped around her waist and 
hugging tight. Sarah grasped the thin shoulders and drew her even closer, as 
much for her own comfort as the child's. "Who is it?" She managed to pull her 
gaze away from the dark recesses of the corridor and down to the little girl. 
"Who's coming here?" 
"We better go. Come on-" The Rachael child had peeled herself away and was now 
tugging at Sarah's hand. 
"Wait-" The footsteps had grown louder. If that was what they were: the noises 
had turned to impacts upon the ship's metal decking sufficient to tremble the 
walls, the stacked boxes and crates shifting with each blow. Even the lights 
ifickered, as though the hidden wiring were being jostled loose from its 
connections; her shadow and the child's jittered nervously, as ancient dust 
sifted down from the joints between the overhead panels. "I have to see." 
"No! You don't want to!" The illusion's tugging hand became more insistent, 
pulling Sarah back a few steps. "Come on.', 
It's nothing, she told herself. It can't be anything at all. Her own voice, 
strident inside her head, insisted upon that. Whatever was in the darkness at 
the other end of the corridor was nothing, a ghost or hallucination, a 
cobbled-together fragment of the dead past, as insubstantial as the image of 
the little girl yanking at her hand. What was there to be afraid of? This is 
what I came down here to find out, she told herself, her voice shouting above 
both the thunderous footsteps and the trembling of the blood in her veins. All 
the pleasant notions of childlike tea parties, of curling asleep and dreamless 
beneath the ocean waves, had vanished, scoured clear by the rush of adrenaline 
through her body. 
"Let's go!" screamed the child. 
Sarah angrily jerked her hand free from the image's grasp. "Go on, then!" Her 
shout tightened the cords in her throat. "Get out of here-I don't care. You 
want to leave, go ahead-you're not even real!" 
Tears coursed down from the girl's dark eyes. "I won't go without you The 
voice, the audible hallucination, could barely be heard against the other, 
greater one pounding through the Salander 3's corridors. It sounded now as if 
some unseen force was driving a sledgehammer into the walls, the metal 



deforming and shimmering from the distant and approaching violence. "I found 
you!" howled the Rachael child. "You were lost and I found you! I'm not going 
to let you go-" 
Face reddened with weeping, the child tried to grab Sarah's hand again. Sarah 
snatched it back, raising the hand almost to shoulder height, as though she 
were about to slap the image and drive it away from her. "Go away! I don't 
need you! Don't you understand? You don't exist-" 
The child had cowered away from the undelivered blow, her own arm brought up 
to her face to protect herself. She lost her balance as another impact, louder 
and more violent than all the ones before, shuddered through the space, 
rippling the floor beneath them. The child's image landed on its side, 
skidding a few feet before its neck and one shoulder twisted against the 
nearest stack of boxes. The back of the Rachael child's head snapped against 
the container, hard enough to daze her, her eyelids fluttering at the point of 
losing consciousness. 
Sarah came close to falling, staying upright only by catching and bracing 
herself against the wall. The vibration of another impact travelled through 
her flesh and into the center of her bones. For a moment, the thought came to 
her that the Salander 3 might be shaken apart, seams tearing loose from one 
another, letting the Flow's icy waters come pouring in. Even if she could make 
her way back to where she'd entered the ship, it might do no good; a picture 
flashed through her mind of the shaft from the water's surface having been 
snapped loose from the sunken hull, drifting out of her reach. Wycliffe and 
Zwingli, bobbing around in their little boat, would look at each other through 
their square-rimmed glasses and know that something had gone wrong . 
Silence, broken only by her own panting and the softer breath of the Rachael 
child, filled the corridor. Sarah's stilled heartbeat was useless as a 
chronometer of perceived time; seconds or minutes, measured by the outside 
world, could have crawled by as she watched for whatever approached in the 
darkness before her. 
Something touched her, though not her skin; she sensed the presence rather 
than felt it. Sarah looked down and saw that the flooring on which she stood 
had changed, become glistening and wet. She saw her face in a red mirror, a 
thin film of blood that had seeped out of the dark, a soft, inexorable tide 
that mired around her shoes. Nausea welled inside her as she stepped back from 
the pool, leaving two red footprints that the larger redness swallowed, one 
after another. 
When another footstep sounded, just marring the corridor's breathing silence, 
Sarah looked up. A hand, clenched into a white-knuckled fist, left its shadow 
on the glistening floor. A man's fist, scarred and cut, as though breaking 
glass had chewed raw the skin over the bones. The small wounds oozed red, 
trickling one drop after another, or the same one 
over and over, that fell and broke the pooled blood into a rippled shimmer. 
Sarah's reflection shattered and recoalesced, as though there were no escape 
for it, either. 
The fist struck the wall across from Sarah, hard enough to dent the metal 
around it, straining the welds on all four sides of the panel. But she heard 
nothing; the impact took place in silence, the air seemingly unable to carry 
any more shock waves to her ears. Or else-the random thought tumbled inside 
her skull-my hallucinations have a limit. They know how much I can take. 
That limit, if there was one, shattered when the man's image stepped forward 
from the darkness into the light. His face was still shadowed, as boots that 
were already bloodied up to the knees stepped into the thin puddle that 
reached to the point where Sarah had retreated. 
She looked up into the man's face. Saw him, and recognized him from the 
overlapping layers of her own memory, at its farthest recesses, and from 
images that weren't memory but things on paper, scraps of the long-buried 
past. Sarah looked into the image's eyes and saw her mirror reflection there, 
two bright points locked in darkness into which the flickering glow of the 
ship's overhead panels could never extend; the reflections held fast, not 



scattering into fragments the way her face in the pool of blood had gone. 
Thking another slow step backward, Sarah watched as the man stepped forward, 
as though his motion was locked to hers, inseparable. Her gaze was held as 
well; from both his face, that she saw even clearer now that he had come full 
underneath the overhead panel's radiance, and her own doubled image. He took 
his fist away from the wall, its imprint left beneath a smear of red. 
Something as bright and wet glistened on his face. She saw now the stripes of 
blood and torn flesh, three vertical, parallel rows on each side, just below 
his eyes; the wounds might have been from someone else's nails, someone 
struggling futilely against the figure's advance and the closing of his hands 
upon a throat and the breath within. 
For a moment, the man's brow creased, a flicker of puzzlement passing across 
his sight. His upraised fist opened, the fingers pulling from the blood at the 
center of his palm. "Who are you?" His voice was a harsh, grating sound, a 
part of him that had become unused to speech. "You can't be . 
you're already dead. I already took care of you . 
You'i'e the one that's dead-Sarah wanted to shout out the words, but her own 
voice wouldn't move. She backed away from the figure-the man seemed to tower 
above her, his black hair scraping against the light panels so that he had to 
lower his head to the level of his shoulders to come any nearer. 
Her heel caught on something behind her; she was barely able to keep from 
falling. Her hand caught on one of the stacked boxes as she looked over her 
shoulder. The Rachael child lay on the corridor's flooring, back partway 
raised against one of the bottom crates. Her eyes drifted open, looking first 
up at Sarah, then widening in terror as she caught sight of the figure looming 
at the other end of the narrow space. 
Sarah's own will broke; the figure had come close enough that his red hand had 
started to reach for her, broad fingertips inches from the tangle of hair that 
had come loose and fallen across her neck. The face that looked back at her 
from the dark mirrors of his eyes had paled with the same fear that had 
wrapped around the child cringing behind her. If the image wasn't real, it was 
real enough. Enough to kill, the voice inside Sarah whispered. 
She turned to run, to escape from the space's narrowing confines, to get 
anywhere that blood, hallucinated or real, was not seeping tidelike toward her 
feet. Another hand caught hers; the child had reached up and caught hold, 
clinging to Sarah's wrist. 
The child wasn't real, either; she knew that. But she didn't shake the 
illusory grasp from herself. She swiftly knelt down and gathered the child 
under the arms, pulling her upright. With her own arm pressing the small form 
tightly against her side, Sarah hurried for the doorway at the opposite end of 
the corridor, away from the man standing in the middle of the expanding pool 
of blood. 
A glance over her shoulder; Sarah glimpsed the red hand 
closing on nothing, on the empty space where she had been standing. She had 
recognized the face, though she had seen it before only when she had been an 
infant; she had brought it back from that past almost beyond memory, and from 
the old photographs in the Tyrell Corporation's archives- The face was that of 
her father. The features darkened 
with rage, as red and trembling as the image's clenched fist. Pushing the 
child in front of herself, Sarah ran into the 
darkness, toward any dark but the one in which she had seen her own face 
reflected. 
Anything's possible." Deckard shrugged, feeling uncomfortable. The other 
man-or whatever Sebastian was now- had figured it out, at least partway, but 
there was no need to confirm his suspicions. If Sebastian's beloved Pris had 
been replicant or human, what did it matter? "I've been fooled by things. And 
people. I thought they were one way, and they turned out to be something else. 
It happens." 
"I suppose so." Sebastian made a few more tinkering adjustments to the clown's 
gears. "You're probably right," he said, nodding slowly. "You've got more 



experience along those lines than I do. 'Cause of your being a cop, a blade 
runner, and everything. That's your job, isn't it? To go around and find 
things that are pretending to be one way-like human-and they're really just 
replicants. And then you-what was the word?-you eliminate 'em or something." 
"Retire." Deckard glanced over his shoulder at the teddy bear and toy soldier, 
who were still huddling sullenly in the corner. "I don't do that anymore." 
"But still ... it must've done things to your head. Changed it. Permanently. 
So that's how you see things. Nothing is what it seems to be. Everything's 
lying." Sebastian's voice turned bitter. "Everyone 
"Maybe so. But that's my problem. Doesn't have to be yours." 
"Sure." Bitterness shifted to self-laceration. "I could just go on being a 
fool. An idiot. That's what everybody thinks of me anyway. Even the rep-symps, 
when they put me in this place. They just figured I could do a job for them. 
Same as when I was working for Dr. Tyrell. You just do what you're told, and 
maybe they'll let you alone for a little while. With your silly little toys 
and slit." 
"Take it easy," said Deckard. He'd seen processes like this before. The small 
man, or the image or perceptual incarnation or whatever he'd become, was 
undergoing a complete collapse. Which didn't fit into his own plans. "It's not 
that bad-" 
"Yeah, that's easy for you to say. You don't care." Sebastian gave him a 
venomous look. "You're trained not to, aren't you? Like all cops. That's just 
the world you live in. Not that this one's any different." He pulled out the 
screwdriver and tucked it back into his coveralls. His eyes had become rimmed 
with red, as though blood were leaking into the perpetual tears. Letting the 
black cloth drape over the clown mannequin's workings again, Sebastian ifipped 
some hidden switch. The device came to pseudo-life again, the head tilting 
back and the pudgy arms rising. 
The clown's high-pitched mechanical laugh grated on Deckard's nerves. "Shut 
that thing off." 
"Why? Is it bothering you, Mr. Decker?" A vindictive gleam showed in 
Sebastian's glare. "But you've got ways of taking care of things that you 
don't like. Why don't you just blow it away, like you used to? Oops, sorry; I 
forgot. You don't have your gun with you-I didn't give you one when you showed 
up here. Well, it's too late now." Sebastian's voice had risen in pitch, 
competing with the noise from the mannequin shaking back and forth with its 
own laughter. "Maybe you can toss it out the window-that should do it, I 
imagine. Or you can tear it apart with your bare hands. You'd like that, 
wouldn't you?" 
From the corner of his eye, Deckard saw other motion in the room. The clown's 
laughter, growing louder and more abrasive, seemed to have set off the rest of 
Sebastian's collection of toys. Things haltingly stirred to life, a ballerina 
with empty eye sockets elevating itself en pointe, a sawn-off oem-media 
dell'arte Punchinello grinning with malice and shaking a bell-cuffed fist at 
unseen enemies. The ornate howdah on the back of a miniature elephant collided 
with the chessboard's corner, scattering the white and black pieces across the 
floor. In an ornate Victorian birdcage, a mechanical nightingale trilled, its 
wire-and-silk feathers moulting onto layers of age-yellowed antimacassars and 
cracked circuit boards. 
The touch of claustrophobia that Deckard had fought off before now reasserted 
itself, stronger and tighter; he could feel the cold sweat of panic encasing 
his skin. Too many things, both dead and animated, pressing around him; with 
his forearm, he shoved away a tottering, slack-limbed Oz scarecrow that had 
thrust its idiot smile into his face. The rag-garbed creature fell onto its 
back, waving its arms around and shedding plastic straw. Deckard edged away 
from it and the other toys, his cop instincts driving him toward anyplace 
where he could see what was coming toward him. 
"All right-" He held up his hands, palms outward, as though trying to ward off 
the chaos welling up in the room. "Okay, just settle down." His words were 
directed at Sebastian. The little bastard~s doing all this. They were 



Sebastian's toys, his creations. "Just shut 'em off." 
"Why? Don't you want to have any fun?" A malevolent delight suffused 
Sebastian's face. He no longer appeared childlike, a decrepit infant; his 
withered skin was that of an old man, a sexless, ageless being. "You're my 
guest. You should enjoy yourself." 
For a second, Deckard had a flash of another wrinkled visage, another cruel, 
time-scorched entity. One that had gazed upon him from behind square-rimmed 
glasses, an owlish re 
gard that had weighed and judged more keenly than any Voigt-Kampff machine. 
That had been in another high-ceilinged room, even emptier of any human 
presence . 
The image of Eldon Tyrell's face vanished as Deckard forcibly pushed it out of 
his head. "That's it." The miniature elephant bumped against his shin, and he 
angrily kicked it away. "You can stop all this crap now. I've had enough." 
"Oh, I don't think so. Not yet. We're just starting." 
"Just! Starting!" Behind Deckard, the toy soldier had scrambled to its feet 
and marched out of the corner, followed by the uniformed teddy bear. The 
soldier's elongated nose quivered with a feverish excitement. "Fun!" 
A sudden gust of wind blew out the nearest row of tall windows, scattering 
crystals of glass through the room; Deckard raised his arm, protecting his 
eyes from the razor-edged shards, blue-tinted in the luminous night that 
flooded past the tattered curtains. The candelabras and other wavering lights 
were extinguished, collapsing all the room's shadows into darkness. 
The floor buckled, gaps splitting between the scarred wooden planks, carpets 
sliding into rumpled corrugations beneath the sideboards and high-backed 
chairs. Paintings framed in tarnished gilt fell from the walls, canvases 
ripped through as they were impaled upon the stiff-fingered hands of 
mannequins undergoing spasticlike seizures. A pegboard the length of an entire 
wall section, covered with soldering irons and needle-nose pliers, folded and 
tore loose from its mounting bolts. It toppled across a banquet table like a 
two-dimensional bat feasting on the silver bowls filled with dusty wax fruit. 
Deckard stumbled back against the smallest table, feeling the chessboard skid 
beneath his hand, a knight piece digging into the palm; the room tilted as 
another seismic convulsion rocked the building. For a moment, as he was thrown 
toward the wall, he had a glimpse through a window ringed with broken-glass 
knives of the street below and the gaping chasm that had jagged down its 
center. The theater marquee burst into sparks, the neon curlicues snapping 
loose, raking blue tendrils across the sidewalk.


 "Isn't this fun?" Sebastian's face had reddened into fury; he'd braced 
himself spread-legged in the middle of the room, riding out the successive 
impacts of the quake. "Come on- you got to admit it is!" 
With the teddy bear wrapped around his leg, Deckard pushed himself away from 
the wall. He dove toward Sebastian as the bear's toothless mouth managed to 
chew a dry hole through the fabric of his trousers. The impact knocked 
Sebastian off his feet, sending him and Deckard skidding through the rubble of 
chess pieces and hand tools. Still-warm candle wax smeared across Deckard's 
cheek as he trapped Sebastian's arms against his chest. The smaller man 
grimaced and spat, writhing futilely. 
Outside, the U.N. blimp had floated lower, the light beams from among the 
spiked antennae slashing through the broken windows, pulling sections of the 
room into bright illumination, then back to hard-edged shade. Deckard got his 
knee onto the other man's chest, pinning him to the floor. 
Another light seeped through the room's walls. Enough plaster had fallen to 
reveal the skeletal understructure of the building; beyond the broken laths 
and support beams, the image of a smaller area, the confines of a hovel on 
Mars, began filtering into Deckard's perception. For a few disorienting 
seconds, he could see himself-his other self, the real one-sitting at the 
rickety table in the hovel's kitchen area, head nodding with eyes closed as 
though in sleep or drug stupor, the briefcase silent now, waiting for him to 
come back from wherever he had gone . 



More than vision: the quake rolling through the fabric of Sebastian's private 
universe seemed to shake the dim outlines of the hovel on Mars. The empty 
beaker rolled from the table and shattered on the floor; shards of glass 
nicked across the back of Deckard's hand. Blood welled between his fingers and 
onto the shoulder of the figure struggling beneath him. 
The distraction had been enough for Sebastian to work one arm free; the butt 
of his palm shoved up against Deckard's chin with a hysteric's strength. Head 
pushed back, Deckard could just glimpse the infused life draining out of 
the toys and mannequins. The clown froze, paralyzed, laughter choked in its 
rubber-swaddled throat; the ballerina doll collapsed, the sequins across its 
meager breasts dulling to flakes of lead. Into the floor's dark lightning 
cracks, the chess pieces rolled and disappeared, like crumbs swept from one of 
the overturned tables. 
"Don't fade out on me, you little sonuvabitch-" Deckard knocked Sebastian's 
hand away from his face; with the same fist, he clouted the smaller man on the 
side of the head. "I'm not done . . . with you yet." His own breath came 
panting with exertion; around him, he could feel the planes and corners of the 
room growing even less substantial, the illusion of their existence 
dissipating along with Sebastian's will to maintain them. "Came here ... to 
find out something . . 
Deckard gritted his teeth, aiming another blow with the flat of his hand. "Not 
leaving ... until I do . 
"I don't care," sobbed the other man. Sebastian's eyes squeezed shut, his 
wrinkled face looking even more like an aging infant's. "Go ahead and kill 
me-I don't care." 
"If I could, I would. Don't tempt me into trying, though." The uniformed teddy 
bear had let go of Deckard's leg, toppling onto its back, button eyes staring 
lifelessly up at what remained of the ceiling. A few yards away, the bear's 
comrade-in-arms had fallen face-downward, long nose skewed to one side, the 
point of its helmet broken off. "Just shut up and listen." His brain raced in 
desperation, trying to figure out what to tell the weeping figure. "Look. Just 
because Pris isn't here . . . that doesn't mean she isn't anywhere at all. 
Maybe you just haven't looked for her in the right places." 
"Huh?" Sebastian rubbed his wet face with his free hand. As Deckard let go of 
him, he scooted back and sat up. "What do you mean?" 
"Come on. Figure it out." Deckard knew he was talking crap, but managed to 
conceal it. "This is where she was killed, right? I mean, right here in this 
building. I should know; I'm the one who did it, who blew her away. Out in the 
real world. You think if you put this place back together here, she's going to 
want to hang around it? Get real."


 "Huh." With his sleeve, Sebastian wiped his reddened nose. "Never thought of 
that." 
"Only natural." Deckard wasn't sure if that word applied in a private universe 
like this. Raising his knees, he rested his forearms on them. From the corner 
of his eye, he could see that the room's accelerating dissolve had been 
halted, perhaps even reversed; the walls, while still cracked and flaking 
plaster, appeared less nebulous. He could no longer see the other room, the 
one where his real body was sitting at a table with a briefcase on it. "Maybe 
you haven't put the place back together yet where Pris would be." He gestured 
toward one of the broken windows and the night sky beyond. "How far does this 
go?" 
"How far ... you mean the city? L.A.?" 
Deckard nodded. "Everything. All the stuff you put together for yourself here. 
Did you just do the street outside this building, or does it go beyond that?" 
"Gosh. I don't really know." Sebastian gazed up to the cracked ceiling, 
sorting through his thoughts. "I never really go outside anymore. Not since 
the rep-symps put me here. It's netlike I go out walking around or anything. I 
just made the stuff come back that I could see from the windows-you know, what 
I saw when I was back in the real world and I looked out and there was the 
street and everything." He got up and walked over to the nearest window. With 



one hand, Sebastian pushed away the rags of the curtain. "Well it's hard to 
tell from here. I mean, just how far things go. All the other buildings on 
this street are so much taller. There's just kind of one angle over there 
where you can see some more of the city." He pointed out to the night. 
"Doesn't look too ... you know, real or anything. Kinda fakey." Sebastian 
shrugged in embarrassment. "Guess I sorta skimped on that part. I wasn't 
really paying attention." 
"You ought to get out more," said Deckard dryly. "Do you good." 
The room looked as if a storm had passed through it, scattering the contents. 
Deckard stood up, then reached down to 
set upright one of the little tables and the candelabra that had been on it. 
In the rubble on the floor was a scuffed Second World War-vintage Zippo 
lighter; he flicked on its thin flame and lit the half-burnt candles. The 
wavering light drove the shadows back to the corners. 
"Maybe ... maybe you're right." Still standing at the window, Sebastian leaned 
toward the darkness, gaze searching across the close urban vista. "About Pris. 
You're right, she wouldn't be here!" His voice grew more excited; he turned 
back toward Deckard. "If she came back-and she must've; I wanted her to-she 
would've run away from someplace like this. Where she got hurt so bad and all. 
She might've gotten away before I even got a chance to see her again." 
Deckard kept his silence. There was nothing more to be said to the little man, 
to sell the point to him. He'd lied to Sebastian, raised his hopes, just to 
keep him from totally dissolving his private universe. There's no Pris out 
there, thought Deckard. There's not even an out there. 
Beyond the building's walls, the U.N. blimp drifted slowly overhead. The 
enormous viewscreen on the blimp's side was reflected in the rows of intact 
window glass across the empty street. Deckard saw a fragmented image of the 
screen's geisha face, the smile replaced by a somber, knowing pity. 
"I've got to go looking for her!" Sebastian appeared ready to immediately rush 
out of the building and onto the street below. "Maybe she's waiting for me-" 
His manner became even more frantic and agitated. "She might be all alone 
somewhere, and wondering why I haven't come to be with her-" 
"Hold on." Deckard grabbed hold of the other man's shoulder as he started for 
the door. "Wait a minute. We've still got things to talk about." 
The room and the surrounding building, the fabric of the pocket universe, had 
resolidified. Or the illusion of it had- Deckard had to remind himself that 
the place wasn't real. He wondered how much time he had left here; at some 
point the effects of the activated colloidal suspension would wear off, 
flushed out of his percept system by the constant, slow percolation of his own 
biochemistry. For all he knew, the spoonful of the Sebastian packet that he'd 
ingested had already worked its way through his kidneys and was, along with 
its various breakdown components, ready to be pissed out. At some other time, 
the notion that one deity or another could reside in his bladder might have 
wryly amused him; right now, he was in a hurry. 
"Let's go! Let's go!" The toy soldier, its nose still bent at an angle, tugged 
at Sebastian's coveralls. "Right now!" At the other side of the room, the 
reanimated teddy bear had started rooting through the objects that had been 
knocked loose and scattered during the quake, as though it were assembling 
provisions for the journey. "Come on!" 
"No, no, Squeaker-Mr. Decker's right." Sebastian patted the soldier on the top 
of its helmet. "He came all this way to talk with me; he's our guest, so we 
should treat him right." He glanced up with an embarrassed smile. "I'm real 
sorry for what happened just now. I got kinda carried away." 
"That's all right. I understand." The twinge of guilt sharpened underneath 
Deckard's breastbone, though he was careful not to let any sign show on his 
face. Maybe-a small trace of hope moved inside his thoughts-maybe he will find 
Pris out there. Or something like her. "I know what it's like." 
"Well, yeah ... I suppose so." Sebastian tilted his head, his wet gaze 
narrowing as he studied the figure in front of him. "You know, though ... 
maybe it wasn't Pris I got all wrong. Maybe it's you." 



"What's that supposed to mean?" 
"You shouldn't have been able to just come in here and push me around like 
that." Sebastian spoke without rancor- he had obviously gotten used to being 
pushed around, one way or another. "This is my world, remember; my little 
private universe. I'm supposed to be the deity here. If I'd wanted to bring 
the whole thing crashing down, I shoulda been able to do that. And you 
wouldn't have been able to stop me. At least, that's the way it's supposed to 
work. No . . . something funny's going on." He raised an eyebrow. "When we 
were wrassling around and all, I was trying to make you 
disappear-well, I was losing, wasn't I?-and you just wouldn't. You're still 
here. That's really strange, don't you think?" 
Deckard shrugged. "I'm not an expert on these places. This is the first time 
I've even been in one." 
"Yeah, well, I live here now. This is the only place I exist. So I should know 
what the deal is on 'em." He slowly shook his head. "I don't get it. What are 
you, Deckard?" 
"I don't know." What the hell~s that supposed to mean? The question didn't 
even make sense. "Is it important?" 
"Maybe not." Sebastian brushed his hands off on the front of his coveralls. 
"Whatever." All around him, the cracks in the walls' plaster were slowly 
disappearing, the edges stitching themselves back together. He leaned down and 
pulled the ballerina doll clear of the crevice in the floor before it could 
close up on her leg. "So ... what is it you came here for? What'd you want to 
find out?" 
"You tell me. I was sent here. To see you." 
Sebastian nodded. "Yeah, like I said ... I knew you were coming. The rep-symps 
told me you'd show up eventually. That was all part of the plan. With the 
Batty box and all." 
"The briefcase," said Deckard. "If that's what you mean." 
"That's the one. You know that's Batty in there, don't you? Of course you 
do-it's not like he's ever exactly quiet about it. Not the one I first met-the 
replicant who came here-but the other one. The original, the human templant." 
"He was the one who told me to come here. He gave me the packet with your name 
on it; it was inside him, inside the briefcase." Deckard glanced toward one of 
the windows as though some change in the night's darkness might have indicated 
the passage of time. "And to get the stuff to mix it up. He had all the 
instructions. They must have briefed him pretty well." 
"In a lot of ways," agreed Sebastian. "Those rep-symp guys they're pretty 
sharp. Psychologically, I mean. They 
knew you'd take some convincing." 
"I still do." 
"They thought you'd trust me." Sebastian's guileless, ingratiating smile 
appeared again. "Do you?" 
Deckard shrugged. "I don't know that, either. Depends on what you tell me." 
"All I can do is tell you the truth. Or at least as much of it as I know 
about." 
"That'd be a novelty." Deckard didn't bother to smile. "The truth, I mean." 
"Well Sebastian fiddled nervously with one of the screwdrivers he took 
from his coveralls pocket. "You can start with this. Batty wasn't lying-the 
Batty box, I mean; the briefcase-when he was telling you what the deal is. 
Whatever he told you about . . . what was the fella's name? Something Holder?" 
"Holden. Dave Holden." 
"Yeah, that's the guy. He's probably dead now, huh?" 
Deckard gave a short nod. "Pretty much." 
"It was kind of a risky job they stuck him with. Taking the Batty box out to 
you. He must've known what the chances were." A troubled expression shaded 
Sebastian's face. "I don't think the rep-symps would've lied to him about 
that." 
"If that's who he was working for." 
"Oh, no The teary eyes went round. "You don't need to have any doubts 



about that. That's one of the true things I'm supposed to tell you about. 
Convince you and everything. That's what you came here for, isn't it? For me 
to tell you that, so you'd know it's true-you believe me, don't you?" 
"I'm not sure." He wasn't going to admit any more than that. "You could be 
telling the truth. I just don't know." 
"But you've got to believe me!" Sebastian's voice went up in both pitch and 
anxious trembling. "Your old partner, that Mr. Holden-he'd gone over to the 
side of the rep-symps, and the insurgents out in the colonies, and all those 
people. He'd decided that was the right thing to do. Just like you did, when 
you quit the police department. When you stopped being a blade runner." 
Deckard barked a quick laugh. "When I quit the department, I didn't exactly go 
out and sign up with a bunch of psychotics and traitors who're all out looking 
to get themselves iced by the U.N. security squads." 
"Maybe you would've, if you had the chance then." 
A shrug. "I'm past caring about that. So what about Batty?" 
"What about him?" Sebastian looked puzzled. 
"He's with the rep-symps as well, I take it." 
"Well, yeah, obviously. I mean, we all are. Your old partner David Holden 
certainly was-and that's the truth." Both of Sebastian's hands rose in an 
appeal. "Why would I lie to you about something like that? Jeez, Mr. Decker, 
I'm way out of the loop now. I don't even exist anymore, at least not in the 
world you do. So it's not like I've got something at stake in getting you to 
believe this. I'm, like, a disinterested party. Sort of, anyway. I mean, I 
care what happens and all. So you could say I'm on the rep-symp side, too." 
"You know Deckard laughed again, softer and more ruefully. "The funny 
thing is, I'd really like to believe you." 
"You should! I'm telling you the truth!" Sebastian's hands quivered. "Look, 
you did me a favor just now. When you told me about why Pris wasn't here, and 
about where she might be. That . . . that gives me hope, Mr. Decker. That I 
didn't have before. I was going to give up, just let this whole place 
disappear. And me with it-I can do that if I want to. I don't have to exist. 
Here or anywhere else. But I've decided to stick around-because of what you 
told me." He stepped forward and grasped Deckard's arm. "So I owe you one. I 
do, really. I wouldn't lie to you, especially not about the stuff you came 
here to find out. David Holden brought the Batty box out to you because he 
believed in the rep-symps' cause; he died for it. Now it's up to you-it's your 
decision-about whether you should find a way to get the briefcase, and the 
information that's inside it, to the replicant insurgents out in the 
colonies." 
Deckard regarded the other man. "What do you know about the data in the 
briefcase?" 
"Not much. Just that it's important that the insurgents get it. If they're 
going to have a chance of winning and being free and all. Or even being 
allowed to live." 
"The U.N. would wipe them out? Exterminate them?" 
Sebastian nodded vigorously. "You bet. In a second, if they 
could. And they might be able to-things really aren't going that well for the 
insurgents. At least, that's what I picked up from the rep-symps. So there's a 
lot at stake in getting you to carry that briefcase out to the replicants. In 
some ways . 
He let go of Deckard's arm at the same time his voice dropped. "There's a lot 
more at stake than just the fate of the replicants out in the colonies and 
their rebellion. That's just . . . just the least little bit of it!" A fervent 
gleam appeared in Sebastian's eyes. "It's not just the replicants; it's humans 
it's everybody . 
The sudden intensity of the other's voice pushed Deckard back. "What're you 
talking about?" 
"They told me you weren't supposed to know Sebastian squeezed his pale 
hands together. "I wasn't supposed to tell you . 
"About what?" 



"I promised them I wouldn't tell ... but The little man was growing more 
visibly agitated by the second. "Like I said, I owe you one. I owe you 
everything Sebastian's voice suddenly began to grow fainter and fainter. 
"It's like this. The stuff the rep-symps didn't want me to tell you-it's all 
about the difference between humans and replicants. If there is any-remember 
what Dr. Tyrell used to say?" The voice had diminished to the level of a 
whisper. "The Tyrell Corporation motto? 'More human than human.' He didn't 
know how true that was . 
"Hey-what're you doing?" Deckard had leaned closer to the other man, trying to 
hear the words being spoken. "Sebastian-" He realized that he could see 
through the other's image; the details of the scattered toys and dolls, even 
the cracked plaster of the far wall, had begun to show. Layers of 
transparency: each object, Sebastian object, seemed to be turning to clouded 
glass, or mist contained in the outlines of what had been solid. "You're 
fading out on me-" 
"Huh?" Sebastian's gaze refocussed as he pulled himself from his monologue. 
His partial image looked as though he was shouting, but the sound that emerged 
was barely audible. "Mr. Decker-where are you going? You can't go now-" 
Deckard reached for the other's arm, as though he could drag Sebastian back 
into perceived reality. His fist closed on nothing. Sebastian's image wavered 
and grew fainter. 
"It's not me, Mr. Decker-it's you!" Sebastian's faraway voice became more 
frantic. "The stuff you took, that activated colloidal suspension stuff-it's 
wearing off. It's going out of your system; you're not here anymore-" 
"Goddamn-" A wave of vertigo rolled over him. The indistinct walls and ceiling 
had exchanged places. 
From somewhere above him, Sebastian's voice called out. "Wait! There's still 
things I gotta tell you!" The ghostly form grabbed an object from the table 
and hurriedly thrust it toward Deckard's hands. "Here-take this-" 
A small metal box; it felt light and hollow, but real, against Deckard's palms 
as the rest of Sebastian's pocket universe lost its substance. He suddenly 
found himself toppling backward, balance lost as the floor beneath him thinned 
out of existence. 
Distance and direction vanished with all the other aspects of that world. He 
fell into the rapidly enfolding dark. 
Miss Tyrell! Over here!" A voice came out of the darkness, the words barely 
distinguishable against the howl of the wind and the lashing of the rain. 
"We're coming-" 
The water, salt of the Flow mixed with ice crystals driven from the dark roil 
of clouds above, stung beneath Sarah's eyelids. She shielded her face with one 
hand, holding on to the edge of the shaft's doorway with the other. The 
triangular structure bucked on the surface of the water, storm waves lifting 
and dropping the platform beneath her feet. The shaft itself, leading down to 
the Salander 3, strained with the violent motion as though it might snap free, 
like a rope stretched to its breaking point. All the way up from the 
sea-buried ship, as the tiny elevator had carried her toward light and air, 
she had wondered if that would happen. If it does, she had told herself, I'll 
drown like a bug in a soda straw. 
That some kind of atmospheric turbulence was pounding Scapa Flow had been no 
surprise to her. The clouds had been 
gathering, growing more ominous and heavy-laden, when she had first stepped 
onto the Orkney mainland, in sight of the old stone cathedral stuffed with its 
bogus monitoring equipment. And if the storm's fury had been unleashed while 
she was locked away in a little bubble of stilled time, that made sense as 
well. Given what Sarah had witnessed, the things she had seen, the past made 
visible and tangible-given all that, it would have been little wonder to her 
if this world's sun and moon had crashed together, with wormwood and the stars 
tumbling into the ocean like hot coals. 
"Just hold on!" The call came from the boat careening on the Flow's dark, 
churning surface. She could just barely make out the silhouette of Wycliffe 



standing braced at the prow, while Zwingli behind him manned the oars. "We'll 
be there in a second!" A wave mounting as high as Wycliffe's chest slammed 
into the boat, nearly toppling him overboard. Zwingli's frantic rowing clawed 
helplessly at the raucous water. 
Just my luck, thought Sarah; the phrase had become the obvious refrain to the 
events around her. I would've been safer back down below. She knew that wasn't 
strictly true; as it was, she had barely escaped from the Salander 3 with her 
sanity intact. There was no way she wanted to see those things again; once had 
been more than enough. 
The foam-crested waves struck the platform, a hammer seemingly more solid than 
liquid. Her fingers gripped tighter to the doorway as the impact tore at her, 
then passed, the shaft's tension snapping it down into the trough that came 
after. 
"Here! Catch this!" Wycliffe had mounted into the boat's prow again, a heavy 
rope coiled around his arm, one end of the rope fastened near Zwingli. He 
managed to synchronize his throw with the Flow's swell; a knot and ioop sailed 
through the rain. 
Sarah took one hand away from the shaft's entrance; her hand missed the rope, 
but she pinned it against her side with her arm. It slithered like a coarse, 
wet snake, but she hung on to it, gripping and maintaining her balance as the 
platform rolled and tilted beneath her. She looped the rope over 
the projection of the doorway's broad hinge, just above her shoulder, then 
used her weight to draw the line taut to the boat. 
"That's it-" A crevice had opened up in the storm clouds overhead, enough to 
let a thin sliver of moonlight onto Wycliffe's face. Rain coursed across his 
brow and eye sockets, then into his open mouth as his chest labored with the 
unfamiliar exertion. His fanatic loyalty to the Tyrell Corporation and its 
human emblem was all that kept him standing in the small boat, his hands 
tugging at the rope. Behind him, Zwingli had pulled the oars alongside 
himself, turning where he knelt and grasping his partner around the waist, 
securing him against the next wave to hit. 
The boat swung around and hit the edge of the platform broadside. Wycliffe 
leaned down and forward, catching the raised metal lip with his fingers, 
straining to hold the boat tight against the force of the water drawing it 
back. "Miss Tyrell-" His drenched face looked up at her. "You must-" The words 
came out as gasps. "Jump-" 
She let go of the rope, getting to her knees and then half falling, half 
scrambling into the boat. A smaller wave tilted it; her back struck the other 
side, sending a quick stab of pain up her spine. 
"Are you all right?" Zwingli had grabbed her forearm and pulled her next to 
him. 
Sarah nodded. "I'm fine." She pushed her sodden hair away from her face. 
"Let's go-" 
"Wait a minute-" Kneeling at the prow, Wycliffe still grasped the rope in one 
hand; the knot at the far end had snagged against the hinge of the shaft's 
doorway. "There's somebody else there. Look!" 
A glance over her shoulder, and through the sheets of rain Sarah was able to 
make out the small figure standing just inside the entrance to the shaft, 
clinging to the edge. The little girl's face was filled with both awe and 
terror at her glimpse of the outside world's unlimited size and violence. 
"Who's that?" Wycliffe looked back at Sarah. "Who came up with you?" 
"Wait a minute." She turned her gaze from the child to the 
man at the boat's prow. "What are you talking about? Are you trying to tell me 
. . . that you see her, too?" 
"Right there." A puzzled expression crossed Wycliffe's face before he pointed 
to the doorway. "Of course I see her; she's right there." 
"So do I," piped up Zwingli. He leaned forward, from where he crouched beside 
Sarah. "I can see her. Who is she?" 
Sarah laughed, head thrown back, throat exposed to the rain. Even after all 
that had happened down in the Salander 3, the things she had seen both before 



and after her father's murderous apparition had shown itself to her, it still 
struck that this was a weird place to be having a conversation like this. 
Stuck out on a boat, she thought, in the middle of a storm that's going to 
drown us all. And these two idiots want to debate the existence of an unreal 
thing, a total hallucination. The laugh died when another realization struck 
her; she gazed slit-eyed at the man beside her, then at the other one. She 
wondered what they were trying to pull, what scheme was being forwarded by 
their claim of seeing the little girl. She' my hallucination-they had no 
claim on the child. 
"All right; that's it." Sarah made a cutoff gesture with one hand. "I've 
really had enough of this." The boat pitched in the water, rising to the crest 
of another wave and dropping again, banging against the edge of the platform. 
She had to raise her voice even louder to make her words audible against the 
rush of the wind. "I don't know if this is part of some little plan of yours, 
or what. But I'm not in the mood for it. You want to claim that you see a 
little girl there, fine; go ahead. But you're not convincing me that you see 
her. Because I know she's not real-" 
"But, Miss Tyrell Wycliffe gestured toward the shaft's doorway. "She's 
right there!" 
She looked where he pointed and saw the Rachael child, just as she had known 
she would. The child's image-and the sound of her breathing, even the scent of 
her dark hair, everything that worked to make the hallucination seem real-had 
come up with Sarah from the Salander 3, all the way along the storm-buffeted 
shaft to the surface of Scapa 
Flow. The child had said nothing, but had gazed up at Sarah with her big and 
sad dark eyes, seemingly aware that some change was coming in her existence. 
Or nonexistence, as Sarah had had to remind herself. Whatever part of her 
subconscious was responsible, in league with the influx of material from the 
ship's bottled-up past, it was certainly doing a thorough job. The illusory 
child hadn't remained as Sarah had perceived her down below, but had taken on 
the aspect of being caught out in a gale from the North Atlantic: her clothes, 
soaked through, clung to her small body as her wet hair tangled across her 
brow, the braid even heavier and darker against her neck. The water that had 
trickled down her legs and from her ankles had collected in a pool around her 
feet, shimmered by the gusts of wind. 
"Look. Just drop it, all right?" Sarah spoke fiercely, drawing her arms tight 
around her body. "I'm cold and wet and tired. And believe me, I've seen enough 
of things that don't exist. Including this little girl-which you can't see, 
unless you're as crazy as I am. All right? So let's get back to shore. 
Immediately." 
"We're not going to leave her here." An obstinate expression formed on 
Wycliffe's face. "We can't." 
"I'm ordering you to. How's that?" Sarah shook her head in exasperation. "We 
can play whatever games you want to later on." 
Wycliffe made no reply. The waves had slackened a bit, enough for him to 
loosen one hand's grip on the platform's edge and extend it toward the image 
of the little girl. "Come on," he said to the nonexistent child. "I've got you 
. 
A few seconds later, the apparition who called herself Rachael was in the 
boat, next to Sarah. A few feet away, Wycliffe stationed himself in the prow, 
watching as the wind and rain whipped into his face, as though he was 
concerned that Sarah might do some impossible harm to the child. The boat 
moved away from the triangular platform as Zwingli applied himself to the 
oars. 
"Some loyalists," she said darkly. "I thought you were supposed to do what I 
told you to. Both of you." 
"I'm sure that Wycliffe shrugged uncomfortably. 
"That you'll agree that this was the right thing to do. When you've had a 
chance to reconsider." 
"I doubt it." Beside her, the Rachael child pressed closer, trying to get 



warm; she tucked Sarah's hand into both of hers, snuggling into the woman's 
ribs. "Well. I hope you're satisfied." Sarah looked down at the image. The 
child ignored the acid comment, rubbing the side of her face against Sarah's 
sleeve. "You're not even really here, and you pulled this one off." 
Once ashore, Wycliffe and Zwingli skipped the cathedral, even though it was 
closer. With the rain lashing at their backs, they led Sarah and the Rachael 
child back to the shadow corporation's interplanetary yacht. The breaks in the 
storm clouds let the stars' cold light through, enough to pick out the rocky 
edges of the trail. Ahead of them, the running lights and docking signals of 
the yacht glinted and blinked in sequence along the ovoid shape's 
circumference. 
Thank God, thought Sarah as the gangway irised open. All she wanted now was 
another shower and a change of clothes. She had glanced down at herself as she 
and the others had trudged away from the little boat pulled up on the Flow's 
pebbly shore. The palms of her hands were still stained with blood from when 
she had tripped and fallen, running from all that she had seen and feared 
inside the Salander 3; the rain hadn't managed to wash it away. Nor had it 
taken the blood from the patch along one leg or the side where she had landed 
hard against her rib cage; there had been so much blood inside the ship that 
it had seemed to imbed itself in every fabric of her being, like the canned 
and recirculated air drawn into her lungs. 
A half hour later, Sarah found herself wondering how many of the black 
undertaker suits Wycliffe and Zwingli had aboard the shadow corporation craft. 
While she had been in the master suite's facilities, looking down through 
billows of gratefully received steam at the trickles of red sluicing off her 
body, thinning pink as they ran down the drain near her bare feet, the two men 
had managed to transform themselves back into the muted-and dry-personae in 
which she had first seen them. With the thick bathrobe pulled around herself, 
the Tyrell Corporation logo monogrammed over her breast, she sat down in 
the ship's central lounge, taking the largest and plushest of the chairs 
available. The two men had remained standing-she wondered how long they had 
been waiting for her to reappear-but one other figure was already there, 
sitting with her legs tucked up under her in one of the lesser wing chairs. 
With large grave eyes, the image of the little girl watched and waited. 
"You're still here?" Sarah had extracted a cigarette from the enameled case on 
the nearest small table. She lit the cigarette, inhaled, then let the grey 
smoke be carried away by the yacht's ventilation, so much quieter and 
unobtrusive than the ancient system she'd encountered at the bottom of Scapa 
Flow. "I thought-well, perhaps I hoped-that you'd have gone away by now." The 
hot shower, taking away the chill that the storm winds had driven into her 
bones, had seemed so therapeutic that a diminishing of hallucinations had not 
seemed entirely unlikely. "You know ... this could become quite tiresome. 
You're not really needed anymore." 
"I'm not going away." The little girl's face darkened with her stubborn 
defiance. "And you can't make me." 
"We'll see about that." Sarah regarded the glowing tip of the cigarette. 
"There are ways. These things can always be accomplished. One way or another." 
She'd have to look into it-when there was time. Or if. A fatalistic calm had 
settled over her, part fatigue, part resigned acknowledgment of the meshing of 
the universe's gears. "Even if, say, psychotherapy didn't work. Drugs might. 
Or surgery, perhaps." She nodded slowly, as though contemplating the 
possibility. Though it was technically easier to get material in and out of 
the brains of replicants-the whole system of control through implantation of 
false memories was a Tyrell Corporation development-it could be done, to a 
limited degree, with humans as well. Sarah imagined that a sufficiently 
skilled neurosurgeon could root around inside her skull with his microscalpels 
and tiny electrified probes and root out whatever lump of grey matter 
contained the little girl's image. 
Or there might be even simpler ways. The ultimate sur 
gery: "I could just kill myself." Sarah enunciated the words clearly, with no 



hesitation attached to them. She had considered the option enough times to 
render it free of pain. "Then you would disappear, wouldn't you? If I blew a 
hole in the side of my head, you could just flutter out and be gone." 
"Miss Tyrell ... for heaven's sake." Wycliffe had turned pale. "Don't say 
things like that." 
"Why? Will it blow up the franchise or something?" When all else had failed, 
there was still some sadistic pleasure to be gotten out of needling the 
die-hard loyalists. "I nearly forgot. Without me, your chances of resurrecting 
the Tyrell Corporation are just about zero. A suicide would ball up your 
plans, wouldn't it? All this work for nothing." 
"It's more than that," insisted Wycliffe. "There's a certain matter of . . . 
personal loyalty." 
"He's right." Zwingli added his voice to the statement. "Since there really is 
no difference between you and the corporation. That makes it sort of a 
liege-vassal relationship." 
"It didn't sound like that out there on the Flow." Sarah nodded toward one of 
the viewports, through which the storm-lashed waters could be seen. "You 
weren't exactly taking orders from me when I told you to leave behind this . 
She gestured in the direction of Rachael. "Child ... apparition, or whatever . 
. . that you claim to see." 
"I'm not," announced Rachael sullenly, "an apparition. I know what that word 
means." 
"Miss Tyrell. If it would do any good-" Wycliffe sounded desperate. "We'd be 
happy to pretend we don't see any child sitting here with us. You could order 
us to do that." 
"What child?" asked Zwingli helpfully. He watched Sarah for an approving 
reaction. 
"But it really wouldn't change anything." Hands spread apart, Wycliffe hunched 
up his shoulders. "We'd still see her. And since she did come with you out of 
the Salander 3, it's vitally important that we get whatever information we can 
from her. Whether she's an apparition or not." 
"You people must be crazy." The Rachael child turned a withering look on all 
of them. Sitting back in the wing chair, she folded her arms across her chest. 
"An apparition is something 
that doesn't exist. The nanny told me all about it. Because there were 
plenty of apparitions down there. I was told to be very careful about them. 
Because even if they don't exist, they can still hurt you." 
"Truer words," said Sarah dryly, "were never spoken." She flicked grey ash 
onto the lounge's carpet. "Though in this case, I'm not much worried." 
"Perhaps we could settle this later." Wycliffe looked both fretful and 
conciliatory. "When you're not quite so worn out from your efforts, Miss 
Tyrell-" 
"You mean, when I'm not feeling cranky. About you two claiming you can see my 
hallucinations." She was still wondering-or worse, coming to conclusions-about 
what they were trying to accomplish with that bit. 
"Whatever. But there really is some time pressure here, Miss Tyrell. We'd like 
to debrief you about what you encountered down in the Salander 3 while the 
memories are still fresh-" 
She laughed, holding the half-drawn cigarette off to one side. "They're not 
exactly the kind that fade. Believe me." 
"Every detail," persisted Wycliffe, "might be important. If the Tyrell 
Corporation is to be brought back to what it was before. We need to know." 
"Sometimes ... I think I must be working for you. Instead of the other way 
around." 
Wycliffe stiffened to his full funereal height. "We are all in the service of 
the Tyrell Corporation." 
"Really." She smiled as she regarded him. Pompous twit- though she supposed it 
was ever thus with religious fanatics. No sense of humor at all. A good thing 
for him that he hadn't been the one to enter the scuttled Salander 3. He 
wouldn't have made it back out alive, or with even as much sanity as she'd 



retained intact. Because that moment had come, while she had been down there, 
with all the mass of the ocean on top of her and the even more crushing and 
airless weight of the past sealed around, that it had seemed at last like a 
joke, a hard and cruel one, but a joke nevertheless. That she had gone all 
that way, a complete round-trip to the place and frozen time of her infancy, 
just so the one who 
would have killed her so long ago could have another chance at her . . 
It must've seemed so very accommodating of me, thought Sarah. She breathed out 
smoke, tilting her head back and watching the insubstantial, disappearing 
shape it made. All the murderous ghosts of the past; if they dreamed, it would 
have to be of death. They couldn't die themselves, not while the past endured 
unbroken, sealed tight within its bottle, away from the real world and real 
time. But as the little girl had said: Even if they don't exist, they can 
still hurt you. 
"Miss Tyrell?" Wycliffe's voice poked at the edge of her awareness. 
She brought herself the rest of the way back from the Salander 3's world, the 
replica of it inside her head. "Very well." Sarah ground out the cigarette 
stub in the green-veined malachite bowl beside her. "What do you want to 
know?" A smile below half-lidded eyes, directed in turn at Zwingli and 
Wycliffe. "What do you want me to tell you?" 
"You don't have to tell us anything other than the truth." Wycliffe appeared 
as if he had won some obscure debating point. "What you saw. What happened to 
you. Everything that happened down there." 
Kill them all, thought Sarah. Her eyelids went all the way closed. And let God 
sort them out. 
She heard the child's voice, piping up: "There were bad things. The ones 
that're always there. That's what she saw." 
"Yes," said Sarah, nodding. She opened her eyes and gazed at the two men 
watching her. "That's what I saw. The things that are always there." Her thin 
smile became laughter that she couldn't help from tearing her throat. "Excuse 
me. But it's really very funny." 
"Are you all right?" Zwingli spoke, sounding genuinely concerned. "Can I get 
you something?" 
"No, no; it's all right." Sarah gestured with one hand. "It just struck me 
that I solved the mystery . . 
"Mystery?" From inside his jacket, Wycliffe had taken out a small notepad. He 
glanced up from the few words he had scribbled. "What mystery is that?" 
"Is there more than one?" She brushed a tear away from 
the corner of her eye. "The cat, of course. I found out what happened to the 
cat." 
"Cat?" The stylus remained poised on the notes. 
"The one that my parents took with them. The official pet of the Salander 3 
expedition. You must've seen it, in the old news photos, in the company files. 
A big, fluffy marmalade cat." 
"Ginj er," said the image of the little girl, sitting forward in the wing 
chair. "That's what it's name was. That was what my mother called it. The 
nanny told me so." 
"Miss Tyrell ... when I said that everything could be important, I might have 
misspoken." Wycliffe tapped the stylus on the notepad. "The cat-and yes, I do 
remember seeing it in the old photos-that actually might not be critical to 
our mission. If the cat is alive and well down there, that's wonderful, but 
really-" 
"Hardly alive." Sarah glared at the man. "And it probably wasn't too well when 
it died. Though that probably didn't take too long, from the looks of what I 
found." Her voice turned flat and grim. "It wasn't that big a cat when it was 
alive. When Anson and Ruth Tyrell took it aboard, and they all went sailing 
off toward the Proxima system. But it's amazing how large an area an ordinary 
domestic house cat can cover . . . when somebody puts their mind to it." She 
looked down at her hands, which she had spent so much time scrubbing clean in 
the shower, long after the red marks had swirled down the drain. "And somebody 



did." 
"Miss Tyrell . 
"Be quiet," she snapped. "You wanted to know everything. You don't get to pick 
and choose now." Sarah let her voice drop to a whisper. "We were running ... 
the little girl and 


I. Because we were scared. Because we had seen the bad things; they had come 
right out and spoken to us, they had told us what they wanted to do. That's 
why we were scared. And it was dark-there are some very dark places down 
there-and I tripped and fell. I had Rachael by the hand; she was running to 
keep up with me, and then she almost fell, too." 
"But I didn't," said the girl. 
"That's right. You didn't." Sarah nodded. "Because you knew." For a moment, 
she wondered how a piece of her own subconscious could know something that she 
herself wouldn't have been able to know. But she let the thought pass away. 
"You knew your way around; you knew what else was down there. I didn't; that's 
why I fell. On the cat. Or what was left of it." 
She paused, looking from one man's face to the other's, gauging their 
reactions. Why they should be so queasy about the death of a cat that had 
happened over two decades ago-she supposed their reaction was due to the 
closeness of detail. The deaths of so many people in the apocalypse of the 
Tyrell Corporation's L.A. headquarters-hundreds? Thousands? She had never 
bothered to find out the exact number-they didn't matter. 
"The person who did it," continued Sarah, "must have been very thorough. From 
the evidence. It's one thing to just make a mess-anyone can do that-but to 
have a certain artistic sense . . . that's almost as admirable as it is evil." 
Under her breastbone was a cold, hard stone where her heart should be; Sarah 
knew that she wouldn't be able to speak like this, otherwise. I wouldn't even 
be able to live. Not anymore. "I don't suppose the cat would have suffered too 
long-it wouldn't have been able to. It would have to have died at some point 
early on in the process. So it wasn't done for the cat's sake . . . or at 
least no more so than was necessary." 
"For whom, then?" Wycliffe's voice was nearly as soft as hers. "And who did 
it?" 
"Who did it? My father, of course. Anson Tyrell." A shake of her head, as 
though chiding the one who had spoken. "And don't pretend that comes as so 
much of a shock to you. I have a feeling that you both knew-perhaps the whole 
shadow corporation knows-just what happened aboard the Salander 3. About my 
father's insanity and his homicidal rampage. You all knew; perhaps you were 
the ones who erased any mention of it from the company files. So that I 
wouldn't know." 
Wycliffe and Zwingli exchanged glances with each other, but said nothing. 
That was enough for Sarah to know that she had surmised correctly. "Don't 
worry about it," she said, amused by the flicker of panic she had seen in the 
men's eyes. "I'm sure you and the others did it for the absolute highest of 
reasons." 
"It was ... to protect you." Zwingli blurted out the words. "Really." 
"Of course it was. If I didn't know what had happened when I was just an 
infant in my mother's arms-all those things of which I was supposedly too 
young to have formed memories-then I wouldn't have bad dreams, would I? How 
thoughtful of you. And naturally, I wouldn't be quite so resistant to your 
plans for resurrecting the Tyrell Corporation as I might have been if I 
already knew what was in the Salander 3. You might not have been able to talk 
me into going down there." 
"That's not quite fair," said Wycliffe. "As you've said before, without you 
there is no Tyrell Corporation. The opposite can be said as well: you don't 
exist, or you can't for much longer, unless the corporation comes back from 
the shadows. Any subterfuge was as much for your benefit as ours. And as it 
happens, there are only the slightest, fragmentary records of what might have 
happened during the Salander 3's final expedition. A few transcripts of 
statements made by the company employees who went aboard the ship after it had 

returned to Earth-and most of those had been severely edited or destroyed 
before anyone from the shadow corporation would have had a chance to access 
them." 
"You have to give my uncle credit for his thoroughness, all right." Sarah felt 
her face hardening. "God forbid anything should besmirch the Tyrell 
Corporation's public image." 
"Eldon Tyrell might have had motivations beyond that." Wycliffe shrugged and 
spread his large-jointed hands apart. "If things are as you found them inside 
the Salander 3-and we have no reason to doubt you on that score-then it might 
not have been for the company's sake that Dr. Tyrell acted as he did in 
suppressing this information. It might have been for the family name." 
"Oh? And there's a difference?" Sarah raised one eyebrow. "Between the family 
and the corporation?" 
"Not much, admittedly. Let us say, then, for your father's sake. And the way 
he was remembered. Anson Tyrell wasn't a psychotic murderer when he left on 
the Salander 3 's expedition; whatever happened to him aboard the ship, it 
happened out there." One of Wycliffe's bony fingers pointed upward, to the 
night sky beyond the yacht's contained spaces. "Something happened that made 
him do what he did." 
"You said 'murderer.' That was the word you used." Sarah's narrowed gaze 
fastened onto the man. "People don't say 'murderer' when they're talking about 
a cat getting eviscerated and hung around a room like a Christmas garland." 
One of her hands balled into a fist, knuckles as white as those she had seen 
through the blood smeared on her father's hand. "Perhaps 'psychotic'-that's 
easy enough. But not the other." 
Wycliffe's mouth opened, but snapped shut again before any words came out. 
"I caught you out on that one," said Sarah with grim satisfaction. "I haven't 
told you yet about the other things I saw down there-" 
"The really bad things," chimed in the little girl sitting in the wing chair. 
"Not just some stupid old cat." 
"Ah. Yes ... exactly so." Wycliffe attempted a feeble smile. "I must have been 
... anticipating what you were about to tell us." 
"I don't think so." She lifted the lid of the ornate box on the small table 
beside the chair, and watched her hand run a fingertip across the cigarettes' 
silky paper, before turning her gaze back to the two men. "I think you knew 
very well that my father didn't stop with the cat. When he had his psychotic 
breakdown, somewhere between here and the Proxima system-he didn't go just a 
little bit crazy. He went all the way." 
"There were ... some indications . . . about that." 
Sarah slapped the box lid down. "Gentlemen-I found more than indications. I 
found my mother's body. Or what was left of it. Perhaps, for my father, the 
cat had just been a little warm-up, a practice session to get ready for the 
main 
A 
event. Which was my mother." One fingertip ticked against the box lid. "And 
myself." 
"That would seem to be ... consistent." Wycliffe's hands folded around each 
other. "With the fragmentary reports of those who went aboard the Salander 3 
when it returned to Earth." He gave a single nod. "It's fortunate, of course, 
that Anson Tyrell didn't manage to fulfill his deranged agenda." 
"Oh, I agree." She made no attempt to disguise her sarcasm. "I doubt that even 
when I was an infant I would have enjoyed those particular attentions of my 
father. You see, I've been inside his head; that's what the Salander 3 is now. 
With all that toxic past locked up and unchanging inside it-it's like that 
Jungian definition of the psychotic condition as that state when no new thing 
ever enters into a person's thoughts. Just the same thing over and over again, 
like an endless tape loop. And that thing in my father's case was murder. And 
blood, lots of it; more than what's inside a cat, or what was inside my 
mother." Sarah's voice grated rawer and tighter. "An ocean of it. That must've 
been what the inside of his head looked like before he died. Just big hollow 



spaces like the ones inside the Salander 3, washed with blood." 
"Was ... was your mother Zwingli's words came out in a stammer. "Had he 
done the same thing to her? Like he did to the cat?" 
"No." A shake of the head. "That didn't happen. From what I could tell . . . 
he slashed her throat. And then . 
Her own words came slower and slower, close to halting. "He stopped there." 
"That's not the whole story." The Rachael child spoke up, her voice hard with 
scorn. "She's not telling it right!" Gripping the arms of the wing chair, the 
little girl looked around at Wycliffe and Zwingli in turn. "And she even saw 
what happened. She saw it!" 
Wycliffe turned from the child back toward Sarah. "Miss Tyrell . . . what did 
you see? What happened?" 
The tape loop inside her head, that segment of the longburied past that had 
wormed its way into her own memories, became visible once more as she closed 
her eyes. It would 
never go away. Once seen, it was as unending as it had been in the hulk of the 
Salander 3. 
"What happened." She spoke without raising her eyelids to admit the lounge's 
softly filtered light; even that was too much for her now. "I saw her-my 
mother; Ruth Tyrell, whatever you want to call her. It doesn't matter. She was 
running, too; she was running with the baby in her arms. Because she knew what 
he wanted to do." 
"That's the real story." From somewhere outside Sarah, the little girl's voice 
spoke again, approvingly this time. "That's what really happened. I know, 
because the nanny told me. Because when I saw those things happening over and 
over again, they scared me. I wanted to know, so I wouldn't be scared anymore. 
So the nanny told me who they were." 
Sarah waited until the child was finished speaking, without even wondering if 
the two men could hear those words or not. "The infant ... that was me." She 
spoke slowly, trying to get everything exactly right, as if that could help 
somehow. "And then ... and then he caught her. He caught up with my mother. 
His wife. Ruth and Anson Her voice trailed away. 
"Go on, Miss Tyrell. We have to know everything." 
"There's not much more, is there?" She sighed and shook her head, opening her 
eyes to look up at the radiant ceiling. "My father knew his way around the 
Salander 3 better than my mother did, so there was really no place for her to 
hide. Plus she had the baby-she had me-with her. Plus . . . you can't ever get 
away from the really bad things. Whether they exist or not. Eventually, they 
catch up with you. The way my father caught up with her." 
Nothing but silence surrounded her. They were all waiting for her to go on. 
Those poor ghosts, thought Sarah. For a few seconds, she wasn't sure who she 
meant. The people here, in the richly appointed lounge of the shadow 
corporation's interplanetary yacht-they didn't seem any more real to her than 
the figures she had seen down at the bottom of Scapa Flow, acting out their 
endless time-stilled rituals of fear and madness and 
death. They might not even know they~re dead. She supposed that statement 
might apply to the ones here as well. In a way, the only one that did appear 
real to her was the hallucinated Rachael child. At least that one had come out 
of her head, up from her unlit subconscious, the same way Sarah herself had 
come up from the sunken ship. So she's at least as real as I am. That wasn't 
saying much. Maybe just a little bit real, perhaps. 
As if on cue, the child spoke again. "He cut her throat." A simple 
announcement. "That's what he did. He had a knife and he cut her throat. Just 
like that." The girl made a quick swooping gesture, one hand holding an 
invisible blade. "And she died." 
Sarah didn't wait for the two men to ask what happened next. "And then," she 
said, "so did he. My father died." The tape loop inside her head had run to 
its end and started over, one moment of the past welded inexorably to its 
antecedent. "He had his dead wife at his feet and a wailing infant lying in 
the pool of blood on the floor." She had watched all that, with the 



hallucinated Rachael child close beside her, the two of them pulled back into 
the shadows of one of the ship's unlit corridors, as the ghosts locked in time 
had gone through their rituals in the light, as though they were the ones who 
existed outside of memory. There was something else that she didn't speak of, 
not because she didn't want Wycliffe and Zwingli to know; it was just too 
painful to try to find the words. That her mother had died shielding her, 
protecting the infant in her arms. Even when the crazed figure with the knife 
had taken her mother down to her knees, his other hand twisting her hair tight 
into his fist, drawing her throat taut and vulnerable; even then, Ruth Tyrell 
hadn't screamed, but had gasped out a plea, not for her own life but for the 
smaller one she'd held desperately against her breast. 
Desperate because Ruth had known-as her daughter, Sarah, had known, when she 
had seen the madness in her long-dead father's eyes-that the child, the infant 
in her mother's arms, had been the true target of his wrath. He'd murdered his 
wife, drawn the knife across her white throat, only to get at his own child . 
. 
"But he didn't." Sarah spoke her thoughts aloud. She didn't care whether 
anyone else heard them. "For a moment 
he wasn't crazy. And that was all it took. He must have heard what she said to 
him, what Ruth had said." Sarah, watching from the dark corridor, hadn't been 
able to make out the words her mother had spoken. Words in a ghost's mouth; 
perhaps they hadn't even been words at all but just some inarticulate cry. Or 
articulate enough. For that brief section of the past, the past that had 
happened so long ago and so far from Earth, one sixth of the way to the 
Proxima system; for just that long, a matter of a few seconds, Anson Tyrell 
had been sane again; whatever gripped him had relaxed its hold, letting a 
horrified rationality possess him once more. 
He had his dead wife at his feet, the blood still running from her opened 
throat and pooling around the two of them, forming a redly shining mirror in 
which he looked down and saw his own unrecognizable face. And saw the knife in 
his upraised hand, which he might not even have known was there, he'd been 
that crazy. And saw his face in that smaller red mirror, the one smeared on 
the blade's bright metal; and recognized. 
That was how it had appeared to Sarah, watching the ghosts. Who were so locked 
into the past that she would have seemed like a ghost to them if she had 
stepped out of the dark corridor. If they had been able to see her at all. 
Sarah's time, that she was locked into and that she carried around with her as 
though it were some invisible diving bell, had separated out from the time 
held in the Salander 3, like the markings of trace elements divided by their 
specific gravity. Those elements, her time and the ghosts' time, had been 
swirled together for a little while, when she had first descended and entered 
the transport. So that the elements had bumped up against each other, become 
visible to each other, the dead looking at the living, or at least the 
not-so-dead. Her dead father had been able to see her, had probably thought 
she was one more part of the craziness sparking away inside his head. Would he 
have been able to do more than just look at her and say crazy, murderous 
things? She didn't know; 
that had been when she had turned and ran, snatching up the Rachael child by 
the hand and pulling her along after herself, not caring that the child was 
even less real than her dead father. 
"And then your father killed himself." 
She didn't know which of the men had spoken. "That's right." She supposed that 
was something else of which they had been aware all along, another little 
fragment left in the company records, transcribed from one of the employees 
who had gone aboard the returned Salander 3. What else they found: the two 
corpses with slashed throats, the knife still in Anson Tyrell's hand. "When he 
was sane again, and he could see what he had done. He used the same knife on 
himself." That kind of grief, she knew, being another sort of insanity. Or 
else it was being really, truly sane at last. It all had the same results. "He 
didn't worry about the infant lying in the pooi of blood, wailing away and 



kicking its little feet. He knew that the Salander 3's computer and all its 
built-in autonomic machinery would take care of me. Better than he would be 
able to; that's what it was designed for. Especially since he had no way of 
knowing how long he would stay sane. The craziness had come over him like a 
storm, and it had passed, but it might come again. Better to let the ship 
bathe and feed and comfort his child." 
"And bring it back to Earth," said Wycliffe. "Bring you back. The Salander 3 
's return program wouldn't have kicked in while your father was still alive. 
The computer only went into autopilot when it could no longer detect any adult 
human presences aboard." 
There was some small comfort to be had from that. Sarah felt cold and empty, 
the hard bravado she had been displaying now worn thin, as though the warmth 
of the yacht's lounge had failed to reach the bones chilled by the ocean's 
storm. Still, she thought as she gazed at the elaborate marquetry of the 
cigarette box's lid and did not see it. Still . . 
he was trying to protect me the only way he could. From all the bad, crazy 
things. From himself. 
"But ... we don't know why he did it. What could have caused Anson Tyrell to 
go mad." 
V 


Sarah looked up and saw the two men in conference, heads leaning toward each 
other, voices lowered but not to whispers, as though they had simply put her 
presence out of their minds for a moment. Between them, seated in the wing 
chair, her hallucination of the Rachael child looked up at them, following 
their conversation like a tennis spectator. 
"That's true," replied Zwingli. He nodded thoughtfully. "We have more details 
... but not really any more information. Not that we can use." 
"That's a problem." Behind the square-rimmed glasses, Wycliffe's eyes seemed 
to focus on his own deep considerations. "To have come all this way . 
"Yes As though in a slightly distorted mirror, 
Zwingli's gaze looked the same, complete to the spectacles 
exactly like those of the late Eldon Tyrell. "It seems a 
shame . 
Wycliffe remained silent, lips pursed in thought. 
"Do you really suppose we could? I mean, ask her to do that . 
"Ask me to do what?" Sarah heard her own voice cut across the yacht's lounge. 
"What are you two talking about?" 
"We wouldn't ask it of you, Miss Tyrell Wycliffe raised and spread his 
hands. "If it weren't so absolutely critical to our mission . . 
"That's right." Zwingli nodded vigorously. "We're really only thinking about 
the ultimate fate of the Tyrell Corporation." 
"I bet." A bitter taste formed on Sarah's tongue. "You want me to go back down 
there. Back down to the Salander 3. I didn't bring back enough information 
with me on that last trip. Not enough to suit you, at any rate." 
"As I said." Wycliffe made an attempt at looking apologetic. "Only because 
it's so crucial. That's the only reason. You understand that, don't you?" 
"Oh, I understand all right." Sarah stood up from the chair. She pulled the 
robe tighter around herself, grabbing the dangling ends of the belt and 
cinching it hard at her waist. "And as you also said-" She could feel the 
stiffer embroidery of the company logo against her skin, just above 


AL 
her heartbeat. "Without the Tyrell Corporation, I'm nothing. So I really don't 
have much choice in the matter." 
"That's rather a ... harsh way of looking at it-" 
"Stuff it. You're supposed to be working for me. And I don't need your 



lectures." Sarah held out her hand, palm upward. "You promised me something. 
Back on Mars. And I haven't gotten it yet." 
Wycliffe looked puzzled. "Promised you what?" 
"A gun. Another one, to replace the one I had." 
The two men exchanged nervous glances. 
"Don't worry about it, for Christ's sake." Sarah shook her head in disgust. 
"It'll be all right-" 
"Miss Tyrell ... that might not be such a good idea. Not right now. 
She glared at Wycliffe. "You mean, not after I've been talking about killing 
myself." 
"Well . 
"Look, you want me to go back down there? Then give me the gun. Because I'm 
not going to go down there without it." 
A faint smile showed on Zwingli's face. "A gun wouldn't help you. Not there. 
Not with those kinds of things." 
"I don't care about that." Sarah kept her hand extended in the same position. 
"Give me the gun. Or you can kiss off getting anything more from the Salander 
3." 
Wycliffe's owlish gaze regarded her for a few moments longer. Then he turned 
and walked over to the cabinets at the far end of the lounge, extracting a 
ring of keys from his pocket as he went. He came back with a large black 
object in one hand. "Here you are," he said stiffly. "As you requested." 
She examined the gun, turning it from side to side. It was bigger and heavier 
than the one she'd had back on Mars. That should do. "How do I know that it's 
loaded?" Sarah held it at arm's length, sighting along her wrist and down the 
weapon's massive barrel. "Or that it works at all? Maybe it's a dummy, just 
some prop you got ready for me." 
A sigh from Wycliffe. "It's loaded. We keep them that way." 
"I need to test it. Before I go back down there." 
He glanced toward one of the lounge's dark-filled 
viewports. "Perhaps when the storm is over. In the morning; then you could go 
outside with it-" 
"No." Sarah shook her head. "I don't have to go outside." Arm still extended, 
she swiveled the gun around. "Not at all." 
The bullet caught Wycliffe in his chest, sending him aloft, arms spread wide, 
as though he were falling back onto some invisible bed just behind him. He 
landed in a crumpled mass at Zwingli's feet. The other man looked down at his 
partner's corpse, then back up at Sarah, eyes wider behind the square glasses 
than they had ever been before. 
This is too easy. The echo from the first shot was still rolling around the 
space as she pulled the trigger once more. They must have wanted it this way. 
She didn't care whether they had or not. 
"Gosh." The Rachael child had gotten out of the wing chair and had gone over 
to look at the two bodies, one lying on top of the other. The Eldon Tyrell 
memorial glasses gazed blankly at the lounge's ceiling. "What's going to 
happen now?" Unfazed, the child looked over at Sarah. 
She set the gun down on the small table, then extracted a cigarette from the 
ornate box. "I've got other business to take care of." Sarah slipped the 
lighter into the robe's pocket. "Far from here." Tilting her head back, she 
exhaled smoke. "Unfinished business." 
"Can I come with you?" 
A shrug. It didn't matter to her. The little girl didn't really exist, and, 
for all practical purposes, the two die-hard loyalists had stopped existing as 
well. She was alone. 
"Sure." She turned and started back to the master suite, to finish dressing 
before going up and setting the yacht's course. Back to Mars. And Deckard. She 
wondered idly how he'd react when he saw her again. I'll know soon enough. 
"Don't fade away on my account." Sarah glanced over her shoulder at the image 
of the little girl. "Stick around as long as you like . . 
He woke up and wondered where the hell he was. 



For a moment, Deckard thought he was back in L.A. Or that he'd never left it 
and that everything that had happened anywhere else had been a dream, the kind 
you snap out of like falling off a cliff or the edge of one of the tallest 
buildings. Covered in night sweat, heart pounding inside your chest, fingers 
scrabbling at anything that would provide a second's hold. 
An alley; he could tell that much, as full consciousness seeped back into his 
head. Narrow, cramped, and dark, at the bottom of thickly grimed and 
graffiti-scrawled walls with no windows. A damp cushion of rubble beneath him, 
moldering urban decay that had been swept or pushed or just blown by the wind 
into these forgotten dead-end niches; the sweet, rank smell of garbage and 
other human castoffs filled Deckard's nostrils. His own stink as well, as 
though he had been lying there for some undetermined amount of time; he ran a 
hand across his chin and found the stiff, short bristles of a two-day beard. 
There had been an alley like this back in L.A., lots of them, most of which 
he'd been in during his blade runner days. Often with an escaped replicant at 
the terminus, at that point where there was no place left to run to. Where all 
they had left was to press their spines against the buildings' steaming bricks 
and retrofitted exhaust shafts and wait for the shadowed figure to approach 
and lift the big black gun in his hand, aim, and fire, that roar of light the 
last thing their manufactured eyes would ever see. Deckard knew he didn't have 
a gun on him-he couldn't sense that weight tugging anywhere in his begrimed 
clothes-so he felt sure he hadn't fallen back into that soul-killing time. 
The Outer Hollywood studios? He pushed himself up into a sitting position, 
scanning the area for more clues. Maybe he'd found himself in that perfectly 
reconstructed L.A., the faux cityscape orbiting above Earth's brown 
atmosphere. A few seconds was enough to convince him otherwise. No extras, 
thought Deckard, looking out to the alley's mouth. So it couldn't be Outer 
Hollywood-the money had always been spent there on a crowd of pedestrians, 
expertly gotten up like the real L.A.'s packed and cultish street life. The 
area he could see now, out beyond this alley, was empty, at least for the time 
being. 
"Hey. Hey, buddy ... let me help you with that . 
Deckard heard the voice at his ear, a ragged, whispering sound. And felt the 
other's presence, whoever it was, close enough to touch. My cop skills must be 
all shot to hell, he couldn't help thinking ruefully. He'd let somebody get 
right next to him without any instinctive defenses' being triggered. 
A hand fumbled at the place where Deckard's own hands were crossed over the 
front of his jacket, holding on to some light object like a souvenir from his 
forgotten dreaming. It felt like thin metal, a box of some kind, light enough 
to be empty; his thumbs felt the ridge where the lid snapped tight. The other 
person's hands tugged at the little box, trying to slip it out from under 
Deckard's grasp. That pushed him to full awake; his eyes snapped all the way 
open, catching sight of a grizzled, cadaverous face close to his. One hand 
left the box and backhanded the stranger, knuckles spattering blood out of the 
gap-toothed mouth. 
"Jeez ... you didn't have to do that The other man scuttled a few feet 
away and then crouched, wiping the red from his face, yellowed eyes sulkily 
watching Deckard. "You want to be left alone, just say so . 
The alley had to be on Mars, in the back reaches of the emigrant colony; the 
ineffectual roller had the twitching, jittery look of someone just starting to 
fall under the effects of acute stimulus deprivation. The skin under the rags 
and dirt seeped raw from the man's broken fingernails' plucking at his own 
flesh. Deckard drew himself up farther, leaning his back against the wall 
behind him. He looked down at the box in his hands-chipped white enamel on 
thin metal, with a faded red cross in the lid's center-and tried to remember 
what it signified. Inside his head, the blurred components of a dream moved 
toward each other, linking up one by one. 
Now I got it-a picture had formed, a little wrinkled face with weepy eyes. It 
grew clearer; Deckard saw the rest, not a dream but memory. Not entirely real, 
but real enough; something that had actually happened. A room with earthquake 



cracks running through the plaster, even across the high ceiling, the white 
dust sifting over toys and dolls, big ones, a frozen ballerina and a fat, 
silently laughing clown. The face of an aging child wasn't one of those, but a 
human's face; or what had been a human, Deckard corrected himself. Now a deity 
in his own little pocket universe. Which is where he'd just been, and from 
which he'd fallen out of . . . how long ago? 
Deckard reached over and grabbed the quivering man's thin wrist, pulling him 
closer. "How long have I been here?" 
"Huh?" The yellow eyes stared at him. Stringy muscles jumped beneath the man's 
hollow cheeks. "What're you talkin' about?" 
His temper flared higher as he yanked the man right into his own face. "How 
long have I been lying here in this alley?" 
"Huh-how should I know? C'mon, fella-uh!" The pawlike hands shoved futilely at 
Deckard's chest. "I don't-" 
"When did you first see me here? How long ago?" 
"Maybe ... maybe yesterday. Yeah-" The man gave a nod vigorous enough to 
rattle his whole body. "Yeah, there was a pile of stuff here when I went by, 
and that was yesterday, and then I came back to check it out . . . and it was 
you. Okay? So that's how long you been here. Since yesterday. Let go of me, 
willya?" 
Deckard released him with a hard thrust of his arm. "Take a hike." The man 
scurried out toward the street, twitching slightly less from the input to his 
nervous system. 
A day at least, lying in this alley-Deckard shook his head, trying to clear 
out the last of the fog. Even without having been unconscious, his time sense 
was screwed up, an aftereffect of being in Sebastian's private universe. That 
was one of the well-known problems with getting involved with any of that 
dehydrated deity stuff: a true Rip van Winkle syndrome, only in reverse. He 
had probably spent less than an hour of perceived time in there, and years 
could've gone by out here in the real world; no way of telling how much time 
had elapsed before he'd fallen into the alley's muck and trash. 
The rest of his memories coalesced, sharper than the indistinct images and 
forms left by dreams. He could recall everything that had happened, from the 
moment he'd found himself walking along Sebastian's re-created L.A. street, 
with the Million Dollar Theater's neon glimmering off the rain-soaked 
pavement, all through the seismic fragility of the toy-stocked hideaway at the 
top of the Bradbury Building. I lied to the poor bastard, thought Deckard. He 
was in no condition to start feeling guilty about it. All he'd been trying to 
do was buy a little more of that false world's time, enough for Sebastian to 
tell him the big secrets. So he'd conned the genetic engineer turned 
small-scale god, handed him that line about Pris's being somewhere else at the 
fringes of that patched-together L.A., waiting for Sebastian to come find her. 
What a shuck-maybe it was just as well that he'd dropped out of the pocket 
universe and back into this larger one before Sebastian had found out he'd 
been given the shaft again. The guy might have really gone to pieces, worse 
than just the building shaking into plaster atoms. 
Something else had been there, that Deckard remembered: 
the little box, battered white metal with a red cross on the lid. Sebastian 
had forced it into Deckard's hands, pressing it on him, excitedly going on 
about how important it was . 
Deckard looked down at the object in his hands, the exact same one as he'd 
seen and held in the dehydrated deity's pocket universe. Makes no sense, he 
thought. The box looked like the container for some sort of regulation first 
aid kit; it even had clips on the back for mounting on a wall or in a 
cabinet-ordinary enough, but it didn't belong here. It'd been part of that 
other, smaller universe, the one that the transmogrified Sebastian had pulled 
together from the contents of his head. Everything Deckard had perceived 
there, from the snakelike glow of the theater marquee's neon shimmering on the 
empty wet sidewalk to the maniacal laughter of the clown mannequin, had its 
existence in that world, not this one. Even the feel of the box's lid, both 



enamel smooth and rougher where the rusted metal was exposed; by rights, it 
should have stayed back there in Sebastian's illusory hideout. Deckard knew he 
should have woken up with hands empty, no matter what some tiny withered god 
had tried to put in them. 
The temptation to throw the metal box away-just another encumbrance, when 
Deckard had enough on his mind already-rose in him. He could just pitch it 
onto the rest of the trash and junk that formed the alley's bottom strata, and 
not miss it. The box, first aid kit or whatever it was, or had been, felt 
virtually weightless-he gave it an experimental shake and heard some even 
smaller objects rattling around inside. Prying the lid open, Deckard found a 
couple of small brown vials, antiseptic liquids that had dried up despite 
their seals; a plastic bottle of aspirin with nothing but white dust inside; a 
few once-sterile bandages, now suspiciously stained with age. A paper label 
had been inexpertly glued to the inside of the lid; if it had had instructions 
or words of medical advice, they had long since faded away. 
I should've let the guy have it, thought Deckard. Instead of getting into a 
hassle with the twitchy stim-deprived case who'd been trying to lift the 
little metal box from him. Then it would have been his problem, about what to 
do with it. 
Deckard cocked his wrist, preparing to flip the ancient first aid kit into the 
farther reaches of the alley, then hesitated. For some reason, Sebastian had 
wanted him to have it, had hurried to shove it into his hands when the pocket 
universe had started to fade away. And the box had come with him when Deckard 
had fallen back into this world. If nothing else, it made for a strange, sad 
remembrance of the age-wrinkled figure and his retinue of somber toys. 
He tucked the box into his jacket pocket and stood up. The empty vials rattled 
against the metal, an erratic, hollow rhythm as Deckard headed for the 
colony's streets that had people in them. Cop instincts shifting to criminal: 
if anybody was looking for him, it would be easier to hide in a crowd than out 
in the open. 
The door of the hovel was unlocked; the knob turned in his hand without 
resistance. It had taken him another half hour, pushing and shoving his way, 
head down, through the thickest part of the milling pack, to get to the 
Niemand residence; the last dozen or so yards, where there had been no one 
about except for a few total burnouts rooting blindly through the accumulated 
debris, had been the most nervous-making for him. He knew that if any kind of 
trap had been laid, it would be right here on his own front step. The old 
instincts, hard to root out as the sinews along his bones, had again moved his 
fingers under his jacket, searching for the gun he'd carried in his other 
life; his hand came out as empty as it had on the neon-lit street of 
Sebastian's private universe. 
Darkness inside; he pushed the door open, enough to reach in and flip the 
switch on the wall. In the hovel's cramped spaces, everything looked as it had 
before he'd left, minus himself sitting at the table, slumped unconscious. The 
briefcase was still there, handle turned toward the door; he could see his 
initials on the small metal plate beneath. And the various paraphernalia, the 
graduated beaker and glass 
rod, the packet torn open with a few granules of the white powder spilled out, 
the spoon from the kitchen area . . . a tableau that might have been of more 
interest to a drug enforcement agency, if any had stuck their heads inside the 
hovel. 
He shut the door behind himself. As soon as he had, he knew there was someone 
else there with him; he could sense the minute disturbance in the trapped air, 
different from the leakage through the ceilings' and walls' multiple patches 
and caulking. Deckard halted, listening, hearing nothing; then stepped quickly 
around the table, taking the couple of paces to the bedroom door and shoving 
it open. 
"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 mo 
ment 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. 
From his own memory, Deckard pulled up another question to ask the child. 
Something that he'd been told, reminded of, in the Van Nuys Pet Hospital, that 
sanctuary for escaped replicants where Isidore busied himself converting them 
into creatures that could pass for fully human. There had been another photo 
there, an old news clipping on the wall of Isidore's office that he had looked 
at and wondered about. Because the woman in that ancient photo had looked so 
much like Rachael. 
"Tell me something." He leaned forward, bringing his gaze level and just 
inches away from the little girl's eyes. "Was your mother's name Ruth?" 
The girl's face lit up. "Yes! It was!" She did a quick, excited bounce in the 
chair. "That's what the nanny told me her name was. It was Ruth." 
He angled his head to one side. "What nanny?" 
"Well ... not like a proper nanny. Like in the storybooks and the videos." The 
child named Rachael gave an embarrassed shrug. "That wasn't real; not like me 
and you. It was just the computer, and the machines and stuff, that took care 
of me. 'Cause there weren't any real people . . . at least until she came 
along." The child gestured toward the door-and Sarah, in the hovel's other 
room. "There were just ghosts and things that looked like people-they were all 
dead, though. So the nanny had to tell me all about stuff." She looked closer 
at him. "Do you understand?" 
"Sure." Deckard nodded. He had an idea of what she was talking about. "This 
place, with the nanny and the ghosts- did it have a name? Was it called the 
Salander 3?" 
"That's it!" The little girl looked excited and pleased, as though finding 
herself on another human being's wavelength. She suddenly looked puzzled, 
forehead creasing. "How do you know that? You weren't there." 
"Oh ... I know all sorts of things." More flashes from the time he'd spent 
with Isidore, and even before that, rummaging through what was left of the 
LAPD's ancient files on the Tyrell Corporation. There had been all sorts of 
fragmentary data, bits and pieces transferred one way or another into the 
personal memory bank he carried around inside his head. The problem isn't in 
knowing things, mused Deckard. It~s understanding them. 
Like how did this little girl come to be here? She didn't look to be more than 
ten years old, if that-the mix of a somber adult quality, a wary regard of the 
things happening around her, and those kid reactions, when he'd guessed her 
mother's name, made it hard to precisely fix her age. Deckard suspected that 
if he asked her that simple question, the reply would be that she didn't know. 
How could she? Something had gone wrong with the flow of time itself for the 
girl to exist at all. If she really was the daughter of Ruth Tyrell- he tried 
to remember the father's name, having to concentrate on the memory of the old 
newspaper clipping, before coming up with the name Anson, the brother of Eldon 
Tyrell-if that was true, and right now he felt sure it was, then it meant that 
the girl had somehow been born after her parents had died on the Salander 3's 
aborted mission to the Proxima system. 
And what did all the rest of it mean? Deckard tried to sort through the pieces 
as he studied the girl's face. He could see the other Rachael, the one she 
would grow up to be, already present there, as though an embryo, or more 
accurately, a flower that had only begun to show the color of its petals. No 
sexual feeling was triggered in him by the girl, though everything about 
her-the color of her eyes, the lift of chin and shape of cheekbone, even the 
barely perceptible fragrance of 
her dark hair-reminded him of the adult Rachael who had slept in his arms. A 
sadness-tinged wonder, rather, at the girl's appearance; she could have been 
the child that Rachael and he would have had together, if replicants could 
bear children. One more thing of which Eldon Tyrell had deprived them. But 
that was what the girl looked like; a convoluted genetic inheritance, yet 



breeding true, from the smiling beauty of Ruth caught in the old news clipping 
photo . 
and how much farther back? Perhaps the woman that Anson Tyrell had married, 
had tried to take with him to the stars, had been part of a long line of 
heartbreakers, not so much beautiful-though Rachael had been that, and Sarah 
Tyrell was, even now-as some other quality, almost invisible but still real, 
that laid a fingertip on men's hearts, stilling the pulse like a soft, 
effective bullet. 
She'll also be that way, thought Deckard as he looked at the child sitting in 
front of him, waiting for him to speak again. Not for me. For him, there would 
only be Rachael, the one he'd loved and had taken from him. For someone else . 
"What's going to happen now?" With the slightest tilt of her head, the Rachael 
child indicated the bedroom's doorway. A shadow passed through the light from 
the other part of the hovel. "She doesn't seem to like me very much." A note 
of worry sounded in the girl's voice. "And I don't have anywhere else to go. I 
don't know my way around here, like I did back home." 
"Well it'll be all right." Deckard squeezed the girl's hand. "Nothing bad will 
happen to you. I promise." 
"What a performance." The air temperature in the hovel seemed to drop several 
degrees as a bitterness-laden voice spoke from the doorway. Deckard looked up 
and saw Sarah standing there, leaning against the plastic door frame, arms 
folded across her breasts. "I really have to hand it to you." She slowly shook 
her head, her glare daggering straight into his eyes. "Who would have thought 
you were such a consummate performer? I should've learned by now not to put 
anything past you." 
"Oh, oh." The calendar, sensing trouble to come, whis 
pered from behind its image of snow and trees. "I don't think-" 
"Be quiet." Deckard hadn't taken his own gaze away from Sarah. "What're you 
talking about?" 
"Your little show here." With a sharp flick of one hand, she gestured toward 
him and the girl. "I could almost believe that you really do see her. The same 
as I can." 
He didn't feel like arguing the point with her any further. "You went 
off-planet-didn't you? You must have." That had to be the case, though Deckard 
had no idea yet of how it could have been accomplished. But the Salander 3, 
the interstellar transport upon which Ruth and Anson Tyrell had headed for the 
Prox system, wasn't here on Mars. If it existed anywhere, it would have to be 
back on Earth, sandbagged somewhere to keep the notoriously toxic effects of 
the old-style propulsion units from leaking out. "Where did you go? Who took 
you?" 
"You sound like a cop," said Sarah disgustedly. "Always ready for the 
interrogation, aren't you? Maybe you'd like to take me down to the station and 
slap me around a while. That'd probably seem like old times, wouldn't it? 
Oops, sorry-" She held one hand up. "I forgot. With blade runners, it's shoot 
first and don't even bother asking questions later. Right?" 
"Knock it off." The needle of her words had gotten under his skin, as 
intended. "Look. I went away, I came back, and you're not here. I go away 
again-" That was what he figured his time in Sebastian's pocket universe 
amounted to. "I come back, you're here. Great; whatever. But things have 
changed. There's a kid sitting right here-" He pointed to the Rachael child. 
"I see her, you see her ... she's real. I don't want to hear any crap about 
hallucinations. I just want to know how you got to Earth, how you got into the 
Salander 3, wherever the hell it is now, and why you brought this girl back 
with you." His voice had hardened with his growing anger. "How about that for 
right?" 
"Don't try to bully me, Deckard." With one hand, Sarah pushed herself away 
from the door frame. She stood looking at him with her hands planted on her 
hips. "I don't even 
want to talk to you, let alone listen to you. You're just making it easier for 
me to go through with what I've already decided to do. Not that I was going to 



find it hard to do it." 
A great weariness settled on Deckard's shoulders, his own fatigue meeting all 
the sense of lost hope and futility that Sarah Tyrell's mere presence evoked 
in him. A bad marriage, he thought, just as if the aliases of Mr. and Mrs. 
Niemand had been the names of real people. There had been a time, when he had 
first taken Sarah from Earth, when he had believed he could accomplish 
something by welding his fate to hers. Even if it had been no more than moving 
her so far away from any sources of power that she could wreak no more harm to 
humans or replicants. But you can't fight crazy people-he told himself that 
once more, something he had known from the beginning. They~re always crazier 
than you are sane. When he looked into Sarah's eyes, past the memory image of 
the Rachael he'd loved, he saw the black hole of madness that could consume 
all reason and desire and life itself, a place that could give nothing back to 
the living, imploding as it were with the dense gravity of its own obsessions. 
He should have known-he had known-that it was hopeless to fight against 
something like that. 
"All right," he said, pulling his bent spine upright. "Whatever it is you've 
set your mind on, go ahead. I've got other business to take care of." There 
was still the briefcase sitting on the hovel's table, the one that spoke with 
the voice of Roy Batty and that had Isidore's list of disguised replicants 
encoded somewhere inside. Whatever else had happened in Sebastian's pocket 
universe, he'd at least been convinced of that much. Both Batty and the 
rep-symps who'd put the dehydrated deity packet inside the briefcase had been 
right: he would believe Sebastian when he would believe no one else. Not 
because of the little genetic engineer's transmogrification, his new enhanced 
status as a small-scale god, but simply because Sebastian was incapable of 
lying. A nature as simple as his didn't change, from this world to any other. 
Deckard looked up at the woman in the doorway. "I've got things to do." 
Sarah laughed. "Like what?" 
"You don't need to know." Somehow, he had to find a way to carry the briefcase 
to the replicant insurgents, out in the stars. Belief in the briefcase's 
contents and the acceptance of his mission were locked together for him now; 
he had no choice. 
The mission would have been hard enough to pull off even if the U.N. were 
still sending new emigrants to its far cob-flies . . . but possible. The 
shutdown of the emigration program, the absolute bottleneck here on Mars, was 
compounded for him. They'i'e looking for me, thought Deckard glumly. The 
people who'd already killed Dave Holden, the first courier attached to the 
briefcase, they might be right outside the hovel, right now, watching and 
waiting, the only mystery being why they didn't just move in and ice him 
immediately. Maybe they were showboats, the breed of cops who liked to kill in 
public, where everybody could see; that was the kind of display that could get 
someone promoted to the blade runner unit. He supposed that some grunt 
climbing to the ranks of the elite over his ventilated corpse would be an 
ironic justice. But one I want to avoid, Deckard reminded himself. 
"What about me?" The Rachael child spoke up, as though she had been able to 
read his milling thoughts. "You said 
you promised . 
"That's right, sweetheart. I promised." And now this complication. Whatever he 
had to pull off to ferry the briefcase and Isidore's data to the insurgents, 
it would have to be done with the little girl in tow. And I don't even know 
where she came from or how she got here. Still-"I'm not leaving you behind." 
"True," said Sarah from the room's doorway. "That's because you're not going 
anywhere, Deckard. That's what I came back here to tell you." 
He looked back around at her, but another voice broke in before he could 
speak. 
"Mr. Niemand-be careful," said the wall calendar. "She's got a gun. A new 
one." 
The calendar was telling the truth. The evidence was in Sarah's hand, pulled 
from her coat pocket. The black metal 



hung suspended a short distance from Deckard's face; the muzzle's hole looked 
as deep and dark and fatal as the centers of the woman's eyes. 
He allowed one eyebrow to rise. "That's what it's come to?" Deckard was really 
only surprised that it had taken this long. 
"Oh it's always been this way." Sarah's gun hand displayed no wavering. "I 
just didn't know it until recently." 
"Well, it's always good to know what you want." Right now, he wanted to keep 
her talking while he figured out what to do. She knew how to use the gun; he 
was aware that she could pull the trigger without flinching. No chance of 
making a sudden grab for the weapon; Sarah stood a carefully judged distance 
from him, just far enough away that a quick lunge was out of the question, 
especially from his sitting position. And just close enough that she could 
unload the gun's clip right into his chest, grouping the entrance holes into a 
pattern tight as her fist. "So A trickle of sweat ran down one side of his 
neck. "What finally decided you?" 
Sarah tilted her head back, keeping her narrowed gaze and the gun aimed at 
him. "This little act of yours, this thing you've cooked up with the shadow 
corporation, the die-hard Tyrell Corporation loyalists-" 
"I don't know what you're talking about. What shadow corporation?" 
"That's good, Deckard. That's real good." One corner of her mouth lifted in a 
humorless smile. "You're a real professional. An actor-you're going to keep 
your part rolling right up to the very end." 
"I'm not acting." He gave a shrug. "I just don't know what the hell you're 
going on about." 
"Deckard ... there was probably a time when I would've believed you about 
that." A slow shake of the head; her expression changed to one of sad regret. 
"I would've liked to have believed you. It might have made things easier in 
some ways. But it's too late for that." A twitch of the gun's muzzle indicated 
the little girl across from him. "This business-this performance-of sitting 
here and talking and acting as if 
you can see somebody else here with us. A child who says her name is Rachael." 
She took a deep breath and expelled it through clenched teeth, an audible 
hiss. "Those other two- Wycliffe and Zwingli; I bet you know their names-that 
was how they were going on as well. Before I took care of them. Trying to make 
me think they could see my hallucinations; trying to make me think what I saw 
was real. You sonsabitches must've thought you were really being clever." 
"Never heard of anybody named that. At least not outside the history books." 
Deckard spread his hands apart. "Besides-even if these people, whoever they 
are, and I were in on some big conspiracy against you, what would we 
accomplish by pretending we could see things that don't exist? I don't get 
it." 
"Why should I try to figure it out? Perhaps you're just sick individuals." 
Sarah's face darkened with anger. "Sicker when you put your heads together. 
Perhaps you're all just crazy." The same thin, ugly nonsmile appeared. 
"Perhaps even as crazy as I am." 
He saw an opening. "You think so? I'm not joking around now." Deckard kept his 
voice low and serious. "But did you ever really consider that possibility? You 
know, that I might be as crazy as you are. And not just that. But crazy in the 
same way." 
Without saying anything, Sarah regarded him over the top of the gun. The 
muzzle dropped a quarter inch, no more. 
"Think about it." Deckard pressed on, trying to expand the tiny fracture he'd 
created. "Wouldn't I have to be? You know how contagious insanity is; it 
spreads from person to person. From you to me. After the things we've been 
through together, how could it be any other way?" 
"Shut up." The gun jerked back into position as Sarah visibly tensed. "I don't 
want to listen to you. It's just another one of your con jobs, the stuff cops 
will say to get themselves out of a tight place. I just didn't think you'd be 
quite so good at it anymore." 
He decided to backtrack, to come at her from another angle. Work fast, he told 



himself. Even without a clock in the room, he knew that time was running out, 
the moment approaching when she would realize she had been stalled, the moment 
when she'd pull the gun's trigger. 
"Tell me something," said Deckard. "After you kill me . 
what're you going to do with her?" He nodded toward the little girl across 
from himself. "Anything?" 
Sarah gave a noncommittal shrug. "Hadn't thought about it. Perhaps I'll try 
shooting her as well." 
The Rachael child shrank back in the chair, her eyes wide and apprehensive. 
"Doesn't seem like that would accomplish much. If she's not even real." 
"True," admitted Sarah. "But it might get her out of my head. It doesn't 
matter, anyway, if it works or not. Since I'm already planning on killing 
myself. That should do the trick." 
The hovel's bedroom had become a little world of madness, with Sarah as the 
gatekeeper, the black staff of her office weighing in one hand. For a moment, 
Deckard considered whether he might have spoken more truly than he'd intended. 
Maybe I am as crazy as her. A sure sign of that condition, when you could talk 
calmly about death, about desiring and willing it, in a strange parody of 
rationality. 
"What if I'm not conning you, though?" Deckard kept himself still, 
unthreatening. "I'm not in any conspiracy against you; I don't know these two 
men you've been talking about. And I can prove it." 
"Really?" A sneer passed across Sarah's face. "How?" 
"You say I don't see her." He pointed a thumb toward the Rachael child. "That 
I can't; she's a hallucination. Your hallucination. So ask her to tell you 
something." 
Sarah eyed him with suspicion for a moment, then glanced over at the girl. 
"When we were inside the Salander 3 . . . when I found you there . . . what 
was on the floor between us?" 
"That's easy," said the girl. "There was a big pooi of blood. It was so big 
you could see yourself in it, like a mirror. That's what you said." 
"'A big pool of blood,'" repeated Deckard. He looked up and caught Sarah's 
gaze, fastening tight upon it. "'It was so 
big you could see yourself in it, like a mirror.'" He spoke the words dryly, 
in a matter-of-fact tone. "'That's what you said.' That's what the girl here 
just said." 
"Impossible Sarah's expression changed to one of puzzlement. "You 
shouldn't have been able to hear her say that. She doesn't exist. Except in my 
head . 
"But I did hear her. So she's in my head, too. Isn't she?" 
The gun dropped lower as Sarah tried to figure out the puzzle. "She's not real 
... she isn't really here . . . but you heard her . 
He was aware of the child watching them both. Maybe she' the only sane one 
here, thought Deckard. 
A genuine smile, one of realization, appeared on Sarah's face. "Then you're 
right," she said. "You are crazy. Just like me." 
"Just like you." 
With her free hand, Sarah rubbed one corner of her brow. "That's so strange. 
You know ... it comes as rather a relief. It's like when I went into the 
Salander 3. And I found her." She nodded toward the girl. "I didn't feel quite 
so alone. It didn't matter whether she was real or not." 
"You're not alone." Make her believe it-Deckard softened his voice, the way 
one would speak to a lover. "You and I-we really are in this together. Whether 
we wanted it to be that way or not." 
"Is that true, Deckard?" She gazed at him in wonder. "Is it?" 
He pulled something up from memory, his memory and hers. "Do you know what you 
had me say, a long time ago? Do you remember that? It was what you knew I'd 
said to her, that other Rachael . 
A slow nod as that tiny fragment of the past became clear to her once more. "I 
wanted you to say those things to me. The way you'd said them to her." 



The past that had been his and Rachael's, that had become his and Sarah's. He 
spoke the words again. "Do you trust me?" 
Gun in hand, Sarah closed her eyes, hearing him this time, and in that other 
time, and in that time stolen from the woman he'd loved. "I trust you," she 
said softly. 
Deckard knew he had her now. The gun still hung in the air between them, her 
finger on the black trigger's curve, but not for much longer. "Say ... I want 
you." More words from the past. "Say it." 
"I want you . 
He stood up and reached toward her, not to take the gun out of her trembling 
hand but to take her in his arms, press her close to himself. The way he had 
taken Rachael and brought her lips to his, felt her heartbeat trip and 
accelerate, in sync with his own. In this time, the gun was caught between 
them, her hand trapped against his chest, the black metal like a second shared 
heart, one with no pulse, no time, nothing but the death they had both raced 
toward. Deckard kissed her, and for that moment she wasn't Sarah, she was 
Rachael. Memory, the past, madness-all folded around him and he didn't care. 
He would have given anything, everything, for that moment to last. 
The woman in his arms-Sarah, Rachael; he wasn't sure which-yielded to him. 
Perhaps she didn't know which one she was, the living or the dead. Madness, 
thought Deckard as he drew her to the bed, his arm around her shoulders, 
sitting her down beside him at the mattress's edge. He brushed her dark, 
tousled hair away from her brow; her face burned feverish as she leaned it 
into the cup of his palm. 
For a few seconds they were alone in the room; the other, the child, 
forgotten. 
"You're right," whispered Sarah. "You're as crazy as I am. You poor bastard . 
. 
He nodded. "There's not much we can do about it." 
"Nothing ... except She looked down at her hand, still gripping the gun 
resting in her lap. "Except what I'd already decided to do." Her unmasked, 
desperate gaze searched for some sign in his eyes. "That's right, isn't it? 
That's what you want, don't you?" 
Deckard could almost feel sorry for her. "Sure." When he 
looked back at her now, he saw only Sarah Tyrell. The woman he'd loved was 
dead. A long time ago. "That's what I want." 
"I knew it." An odd, broken happiness sounded in her voice. "I should've known 
it." 
"Tell you what." He squeezed her shoulder, bringing her closer into his side. 
"I'll do it. It's easy for me; you know that it is. I'll kill you, and then 
I'll kill myself." He brought his head down to look straight into her eyes. 
"That'll work." 
A coy smile appeared; she looked up through her eyelashes at him. "I trust 
you, Deckard ... but not that much. Besides . . . if I went first, then I 
wouldn't get to see you dead. And I wanted that, too." 
"You can have whatever you want." Deckard brought his face closer to hers 
again. "You deserve it." As he kissed her, he brought his free hand between 
them, onto hers holding the gun. Her fingers had relaxed, loosening their grip 
on the cold metal. As he had hoped, known, they would. 
In one swift arc, he grabbed the gun and pulled it away, sealing it in his own 
fist. The arc was completed when he leaned back from her, the gun's black 
weight swinging up and smashing across the angle of her chin. The impact 
rocked Sarah's head back, lifting her partway and throwing her back onto the 
bed, one empty hand reaching futilely toward him. 
"Come on-" Deckard stood up and grabbed the Rachael child's hand, yanking her 
to her feet. He shoved the gun inside his jacket; it produced a hollow clank 
of metal against metal, the blunt muzzle rapping on the ancient first aid kit 
that he had brought back with him from Sebastian's pocket universe. Ignoring 
the sound, he pulled the girl toward the door. "We're getting out of here." 
"Mr. Niemand!" A voice shrilled from the wall. "Now's your chance!" The 



calendar's pages fluttered. "Don't just leave her-kill her! Shoot her! She's a 
wicked person-she blew away the clock!" 
He was already reaching inside his jacket, his hand closing around the gun, as 
he looked back toward the figure on the bed. It's right, his thoughts ran, 
don't be a fool, do it-
All he saw was the woman's tangle of dark hair, an angle of her face shadowed 
both by darkness and the overlay of his own memory. 
"Goddamn." He shoved the gun deeper into his jacket. The chances were more 
than good, they were certain, that he'd regret this. "Let's go." 
In the front part of the hovel, Deckard let go of the Rachael child's hand 
long enough to pop open the lid of the briefcase on the table. "What's going 
on?" asked Batty's voice. "I could hear you people talking-" 
"Later." Deckard swept the Sebastian paraphernalia, the packet and other bits 
and pieces, into the briefcase, then snapped it closed. "Just shut up for 
now." 
Briefcase in one hand, leading the Rachael child with the other, he emerged 
from the hovel. No hail of gunfire met him. That~s a good sign, thought 
Deckard wryly. He set off at a fast pace, carrying his burdens with him. 
That sonuvabitch." She splashed cold water onto the bruise that had begun 
forming along one side of her jaw. Small, but darkly colorful; it looked like 
a smoky-red L.A. sunset as viewed from the top levels of the 
no-longer-existent Tyrell Corporation headquarters. "I knew I shouldn't have 
trusted him." 
Sarah fixed her angry glare at her own reflection in the hovel's bathroom 
mirror. Angrier at herself than Deckard; she had known what kind of a schmuck 
he was, and she had still let herself be conned by him. I want you . . . The 
memory of those words in her mouth pooled salt on her tongue, tasting like the 
blood from the cut lip Deckard's blow had given her. The perfect image of a 
woman wronged; she looked at herself with contempt. I trust you . . . Typical, 
she knew. They'll say anything, get you to say anything, and then they're 
gone. Right after the fist is applied. 
She emerged from the hovel's tiny bathroom, toweling her face, punishing 
herself with the wincing pain from the bruise. At least the chair near the bed 
was empty, the hallucination of the Rachael child vanished for the time being. 
Deckard, for whatever twisted reasons were in his head, had kept up the act of 
pretending that the little girl was real right up to the moment he was beyond 
the hovel's front door and out of earshot; she didn't even want to speculate 
why. Probably just to drive me crazier. As if that were possible. 
"Mrs. Niemand ... you know, it's not too late." The calendar on the wall had 
spotted her; the hectoring voice had taken on an irritatingly superior tone. 
"There are still viable options." 
"What?" She scowled at the calendar and its too-perfect scene of trees and 
distant mountains. "What're you talking about?" 
"You can still kill yourself. These things can always be arranged. Just 
because Deckard is gone, that doesn't mean you have to change your own 
personal plans." 
"Oh, I like that." Sarah shook her head in amazement. "Suicide as a viable 
option-that's good." 
"Well, or therapy perhaps," the calendar said helpfully. "Some other kind of 
therapy, I mean. You were talking about that, remember? In regard to these 
hallucinations you feel you're suffering from. Now, in my opinion-and you can 
certainly take it for what it's worth-I feel that surgery would be your last 
option. That's a little extreme-" 
"Just shut up." She reached over and ripped the calendar off the wall. "You 
traitorous bastard. Telling Deckard to go ahead and shoot me." She flung the 
calendar into the corner of the bedroom, where it landed with a fluttering 
squawk. "You're lucky I don't have a gun right now." 
That was the problem. Out in the hovel's kitchen area, as she rummaged through 
the cupboard over the sink looking for the meager stash of coffee substitute, 
Sarah weighed her options. If I had the gun, she thought grimly, I probably 



would. Kill herself; she hadn't changed her mind about that. There was just no 
way that appealed to her as much as the finality of a bullet through the head. 
After being so tritely 
humiliated by Deckard, she didn't want to employ any less violent method, 
anything-like a drug overdose or a Plathian head-in-the-oven genuflection-that 
smacked of feminine frailty. After all this time, she had to admit that she 
was of the blood of Eldon Tyrell in more ways than one. If she could crack her 
own head open like an egg, she would have. 
She brushed away a trace of white dust on the sink counter and spooned the 
ersatz coffee into a chipped-edge cup. Her jaw still ached, reminding her-as 
if she could forget-of Deckard. He probably enjoyed that. Even more than the 
hit, the mind trip, the getting her to believe that he was ready to die with 
her. Taming on the tap, she held her hand in the thin stream of rust-tinged 
water, waiting for it to heat up. Well, she thought, her Tyrell blood bringing 
her own decisions back into focus, if he doesn't want to go voluntarily, 
that'~s all right. She held the cup under the tap and watched it slowly fill. 
There are other ways. 
Pulling a chair out from the table, she sat down with the fake coffee in front 
of her. It tasted like brackish plastic. I should've brought some real stuff 
back here from the yacht. There had been every indication that it'd been 
stuffed with the expensive pleasures of life, as one would expect from a part 
of the late Eldon Tyrell's private fleet. However bleak her situation might be 
otherwise, she wasn't without resources; she supposed she could find a way of 
unloading the yacht's contents-and the yacht itself-on the emigrant colony's 
black market. Perhaps she could track down some high-up exec in the Martian 
cable monopoly who'd give her a package deal for the whole thing, rather than 
having to dispose of it piece by piece; either way, it'd come to a good deal 
of operating capital, more than enough with which to buy Deckard's murder. 
She took another sip of the repellent black liquid, holding the cup between 
both hands. She didn't need to; the muscular tremors of her rage had died 
down, replaced by cold, nerveless calculation. And regret: she wished now that 
she hadn't gotten rid of Wycliffe and Zwingli. She could have used them. If 
nothing else, they had been hem only means of getting in touch with the rest 
of the shadow corporation; she imagined that theme were others dedicated to 
the Tyrell resurrection. And among those, former members of the security 
department, hard men and deadly. Those were the ones she really needed now. 
She didn't feel like waiting for them to show up at her doorstep, the way the 
first two die-hard loyalists had appeared. Another slow, meditative sip, her 
tongue almost numb to the taste; she'd have to think of some way of contacting 
the shadow corporation . 
A sharp, quick sound came from behind her. Someone had knocked on the hovel's 
front door. 
That's too good, thought Sarah. She carefully set the cup down on the table. 
Either the universe, in its mysterious and infinite workings, had learned to 
read her mind, or her hallucinations had become even more convenient. All she 
had to do was ask for something and it would be provided. With only one catch 
to it . 
She turned around in the chair, facing the door. "If you don't exist," she 
called out, "then go away. I don't need you." 
A muffled response came through the thin fiberboard. "Hello?" The knob 
rattled, as though the person on the other side had tried it and found it 
locked. "Is there anybody home?" 
If it were a hallucination, considered Sarah, I would've given it a key. She 
got up and went to the door, pulling it open. 
The man on the hovel's doorstep was shorter than her, running to fat, as if 
compressed from a taller size. "You must be Sarah-" He smiled, blinking at her 
from behind ordinaryseeming lenses. If he was part of the shadow corporation, 
he hadn't adopted the same square black rims as the late Wycliffe and Zwingli 
had. "Sarah Tyrell? Am I right?" 
It struck her that hallucinations shouldn't need introductions. Maybe he's 



real. "You could be." She put her hand against the door frame. "Depends on who 
you are." 
"Miss Tyrell, my name is Urbenton. That's all I go by." His smile broadened, 
creating more elaborate details in his 
rounded cheeks. From his breast pocket, he extracted a business card and 
offered it to her. "That's how people know me." 
She looked at the card, holding it by one corner. The man's name appeared 
beneath larger letters spelling out SPEED DEATH PRODUCTIONS, with a company 
logo of a stylized, sharp-edged skull with wings. "Charming." She tried to 
hand it back to him, but he refused it with an upraised palm. 
"Keep it." The man radiated an oily unctuousness, as though his excess body 
fat were percolating into the air around him. "Just in case we can't come to 
an agreement right now, Miss Tyrell-" 
"How do you know my name?" Sarah tilted her head, eyeing him with increasing 
suspicion. "My real name." 
"I've got a lot of contacts," said Urbenton with a wink. "Contacts are 
important in my line of business. I'm a video director. Producer, too. I do it 
all 
A memory fragment drifted through Sarah's head. The names, of both the man and 
his company, sounded vaguely familiar to her. Deckard had said something about 
them, a long time ago. Before he had left the planet the first time. Something 
about going to do a job for them. That's how he knows my name, she thought. 
Because of Deckard. She tucked the business card in her neckline. "What's that 
got to do with me?" 
Urbenton glanced around the narrow, shadowed streets of the emigrant colony, 
then back to Sarah. "May I come in? So we can talk?" 
"We're talking now." She folded her arms across her breasts. "As I said-what's 
that got to do with me?" 
His smile appeared more forced. "Let's just say ... that maybe we can do 
business together. You and me." 
"Oh?" She raised a skeptical eyebrow. "Such as?" 
"I have good reason to believe, Miss Tyrell, that you'd like to have a certain 
Rick Deckard taken care of. Murdered, as it were." The smile disappeared, 
replaced by a hard glitter in the man's eyes. "How would you like it if I made 
that possible for you?" 
Sarah regarded the man for a few seconds, then stepped back, clearing the 
doorway. "Perhaps," she said, "you'd better come inside." 
"This'll do. For now." He steered the child toward an opening beneath words 
outlined in flickering lightbulbs, half of which had gone permanently dead. 
"Let's go in here." 
Behind the bar, an unshaven figure swabbing out glasses with a dirty towel; he 
spotted Deckard and the Rachael child as soon as they stepped into the dimly 
lit interior. "Hey-" The bartender pointed a black-nailed finger toward the 
little girl. "No minors." 
Deckard left the girl a few steps away from him. With the briefcase dangling 
from one hand, he leaned an elbow on the bar. "Let me tell you something." He 
kept his voice low, face close to the bartender's. "I was just talking with 
somebody who claimed that there's no little girl at all. She's a 
hallucination." 
An ugly smirk curdled the other man's lip. "Yeah, right. Now get her out of 
here." 
Opening his jacket partway, Deckard displayed the black metal of the gun he'd 
taken from Sarah. "About that hallucination. Some very influential people 
think the same way." 
The bartender's eyes shifted from the gun back up to Deckard's face. "There's 
a real nice booth in the back. Suitable for a party of one." He tried to 
smile. "Like yourself." 
"Thanks." Deckard peeled a bill from the rapidly dimishing roll in his pocket 
and laid it on the bar. "I really value my privacy." 
The establishment was dark enough, and so sparsely inhabited that he was able 



to steer the Rachael child to the back with little fear of being spotted. Once 
away from the bar and its pallid fluorescents behind the ranks of bottles, the 
only illumination came from the video screens hanging at strategic intervals 
from the ceiling. A flickering wash of blue tinted the isolated faces gazing 
up, their hands cradling the carefully nursed drinks that kept the patrons 
from being eighty-sixed out of the place. None of them looked around at 
Deckard and the girl slipping into the farthest booth; eyes remained on their 
stimulus fix from the cable monopoly. He stashed the briefcase beneath the 
table. 
"Won't he call us in? That guy?" The Rachael child had easily figured out that 
Deckard was trying to keep them from being spotted by the emigrant colony's 
police. The evasive route that he had taken them on this far left little 
doubt. "You don't trust him, do you?" 
"Of course not." Deckard didn't look at her, tucked into the darkest part of 
the booth and shielded by his own body. Eyes adjusting, he scanned the bar's 
interior for any suspicious indicators. He was grateful that Batty, the part 
of him imbedded in the briefcase, had heeded his warning about staying quiet 
in public. "But we don't need to worry just yet. The bartender'll keep a lid 
on it for a little while, just on the hope that I'll feed him some more 
money." 
"Is a little while all we need?" 
The child's voice was capable of unnerving him; she sounded on occasion like 
an adult asking questions with a child's sharpness. Deckard supposed that came 
from her unusual upbringing, whatever it had been, on the Salander 3. "I just 
need time to think," he said, glancing over at her. "If I get that, maybe we 
have a chance." 
"Oh." The Rachael child mulled over his words, forehead creasing. "What're you 
going to do?" 
"I said, time to think. Not talk." 
He was rewarded with silence. Spreading his hands flat on the table, he leaned 
his head back against the booth's padded leatherette and closed his eyes. 
"Not interested in the show, huh?" 
Deckard's eyes snapped open at hearing, not the child's voice, but a man's. 
Even before he focussed on the figure that had slid in on the table's other 
side, his hand had darted inside his jacket and fastened onto the gun. 
He wasn't quick enough. The other man was quicker, reaching across and seizing 
Deckard's wrist, pinning his hand beneath the jacket. "You don't have to do 
that." The other man smiled. "Think of all the commotion it'd make in here. 
Nice quiet place like this." He squeezed the wrist 
tighter, numbing the fingertips on the gun's cold metal. "Perfect for a little 
conversation." 
The Rachael child had shrunk back in the booth, watching the two men to either 
side of her. 
"Yeah. It's lovely." The speed of the other man's movement indicated some kind 
of professional status; if not cop, then something equally deadly. Deckard 
nodded slowly. "Very intimate." 
"I knew you'd agree." The thin smile had remained on the other man's face. 
"Now m going to let go of you, and then we can just sit here politely 
looking at each other without things getting all ugly between us. I'm going to 
do that, Deckard, because I know you really do want to talk to me. The bit 
with the gun lb just chalk that up as a nervous reaction on your part." 
The other's hand still hadn't let go of Deckard's wrist. "I don't go in much 
for conversation." 
"You will." The man loosened his grip slightly. "Because you either talk to me 
or you can forget about going much farther than this bar. Your ass is in the 
proverbial sling, Deckard. I can get it out." 
Deckard was silent for a few moments, then nodded. "All right. Let's talk." 
"You're a smart man, Deckard." He let go and sat back in the booth, folding 
his arms on the table. "Or smart enough." 
"Who is this?" The Rachael child sounded annoyed as she scowled at the 



broad-shouldered figure. 
Deckard didn't answer her, but looked closer at the other man, letting the 
angles of the face assemble and connect with one in his memory. 
"I know you," said Deckard. "You were there at the Outer Hollywood station. I 
remember now-" The whole scene flashed through Deckard's mind, including the 
corpse of David Holden, laid out in a reproduction of the interview room at 
what had been the Tyrell Corporation headquarters in L.A. "You were the one 
who killed that Kowalski replicant right in front of me." 
"That's right." The man looked pleased with himself, as though flattered by 
Deckard's recall. "There really wasn't 
time for proper introductions. The name's Marley." He extended his hand across 
the table again, as though to shake Deckard's. "Or at least that'll do for 
now." 
Deckard looked at the hand in distaste. "You must be joking." 
"Not about this." The man shrugged and pulled his hand back. "You're a 
tenderhearted soul, aren't you? It's not as if you hadn't ever killed any 
replicants." 
"I never went around bragging about it." 
"Ah ... I see. The money was enough for you." Marley appeared even more 
amused. "Well, Deckard, you don't have to like me. You just have to . . . 
shall we say? . . . do business with me." 
The constant, self-assured smile irritated Deckard. "What kind of business?" 
Marley didn't answer; he looked up to the nearest video screen. "You're right, 
you know; this isn't too interesting." Some kind of sporting event that 
involved oxygen masks and a medical triage staff at each end of the playing 
field was on. "That's all right, though." He turned the smile back toward 
Deckard. "There's something better coming on in a few minutes." 
"I'm not interested in the cable schedule," grated Deckard. "Just tell me what 
you want from me." 
"You've got it all wrong, pal. It's what you want from me. I spent a great 
deal of time and effort tracking you down, just so I could offer you my help." 
Deckard didn't return the man's smile. "I don't need it." 
"Oh, I think you might," said Marley. "You've got a big job ahead of you." 
"What do you know about that?" 
The other man shrugged. "Bits and pieces. Or maybe the whole thing. You're 
trying to put together some travel plans, aren't you? For you and the little 
girl here. And someone else. Or should I say some thing? I guess it depends on 
how you regard that briefcase you've been toting around. Is it human enough 
for you to think of it as a person?" 
"Hey!" Batty's voice sounded from beneath the table. "Fuck you, pal!" 
Deckard gave the briefcase a kick. "Shut up. Let me handle this." 
"You tell him," said Marley. "That old bastard's out of the loop now. He's 
luggage. Too bad you can't just wrap him up, stick the postage on, and mail 
him out to the far colonies." 
"Who says that's where we're going?" Deckard wondered just how much the man 
sitting across from him was clued in on. "I could be taking him and the little 
girl anywhere. Maybe back to Earth, for all you know." 
"But you're not." Marley's smile broadened. "And I do know. I know all about 
the job you've undertaken. I know that's what you're racking your brains over, 
trying to figure out how you're going to get off-planet with that thing, how 
you're going to deliver it to the replicant insurgents . . . the whole bit." 
Deckard coldly regarded the other man. "You know an awful lot." 
"More than you do. I know what's really in that briefcase." The smile faded, 
the man's face turning hard and serious. "And I know who the little girl 
really is." 
"Somebody who knows things like that ... or somebody who even claims to 
Deckard looked straight back into the other man's eyes. "Chances are good it 
means that person's a cop. So who are you working for? U.N. security? LAPD?" 
"I'm not with anybody like that." Marley glanced up at the video screen. "You 
should think of me as your friend. Like I said, I'm here to help you." 



"And like I said, I don't want-" 
"Hey, just hold on a bit." Marley held up his hand, palm outward. "We can talk 
some more in a little while. But this-" He pointed at the video screen a 
couple of yards away. "This is going to be a good program. I really want you 
to take a look at it. I think it's something you'll get a bang out of." 
Beside him, the Rachael child had sat forward, trying to get a better viewing 
angle. Deckard looked over at the screen. The sports event, whatever it'd 
been, had apparently ended; the cable monopoly's logo, all swirling colors and 
state-of-the-art abstract graphics, danced and shivered its 
pixels. He knew it wasn't going to be a news show; there weren't any. The 
cable's feeds were all entertainment, or what passed for it in this captive 
market. 
"You know," said Deckard, "I'm not really interested in whatever soap opera 
you might be addicted to. Maybe you should watch this on your own time. I've 
got more important business to take care of right now." 
"Not any more important than this. Trust me." Marley gave a nod toward the 
screen. "This is just about the most important thing in the universe for you. 
Just sit back and watch, all right?" 
The cable logo faded out and was replaced by another one, a stark 
black-and-white graphic of a stylized skull with wings. Deckard recognized it 
even before the words SPEED DEATH PRODUCTIONS pulsed into view; the skull 
image and the video company name had been on the advance check he'd received 
from that sweating, pudgy director he'd walked out on back at the Outer 
Hollywood station. It took a moment longer to remember the guy's name. Urben 
ton-the recall prompted a slow nod from Deckard. That was it. 
In the bar's muffled quiet, the sound of a cheaply synthesized sound track, 
all throbbing bass and disembodied string choirs, oozed out of the video 
monitors' tiny speakers. Deckard found himself watching intently, leaning 
forward across the table, despite his earlier scorn. On the screen, a black 
night vista was suddenly broken by a leaping gout of fire. 
"That looks good." Marley nodded admiringly. "Real spooky and dramatic." 
The title appeared on the screen, blanking out everything but the darkness 
behind it. Two words: Blade Runner. 
"What the hell A surmise weighted with dread started to form inside 
Deckard. 
A crawl of other words, smaller than the video's title, moved upward across 
the screen. Broken phrases lodged in Deckard's head-based on a true story . . 
. from actual LAPD case records-with their meanings slowly adding up to the 
realization of what he was seeing. The final piece locked in when he saw his 
own name listed in the opening credits as technical adviser. 
Marley pointed to the words. "That was nice of that Urbenton fellow, don't you 
think? Considering that you voided your contract with him-he didn't have to 
leave your name on there." 
"This ... this is the video he was making." With a sick feeling, Deckard gazed 
at the screen. "That he hired me to go out there and help him with." 
"Come on-he hired you for more than that," chided Marley. "Urbenton bought 
your life story-or at least that part of it that went down in L.A., when you 
were tracking that last bunch of escaped replicants. Well, here it is." He 
made a sweeping gesture toward the nearest monitor and all the other identical 
screens mounted in the bar. "This is the premiere showing. Right now, on the 
entire Martian cable network." Another smile. "See? I knew you'd dig it." 
"Shit-" Deckard stared at the video monitor in dismay. The fury of his own 
thoughts drowned out anything coming from the audio track. "Everybody's going 
to see this. Everybody on this entire planet." 
"That's right, pal." Marley's hands made an expansive gesture, as though in 
congratulation. "There's only one channel, and you're the star. It's your 
fifteen minutes, Deckard; enjoy it." 
Deckard didn't have time to respond to the other man's sarcasm. This was 
something he hadn't counted on. Now Fm really screwed, he thought. In a few 
minutes, once the video got past its opening sequence, with all the artsy Los 



Angeles location shots that Urbenton had faked from the Outer Hollywood street 
sets-once the story got rolling, Deckard's own story-then it would be his own 
face up on the video screens. Not just here in this bar, but everywhere. Nice, 
big close-ups, all zoomed-in and personal; he had watched Urbenton directing 
the cameras during the video shoot, bringing them in tight on the actor in the 
distinctive long coat carrying the police-issue gun through the city's dark 
and rain-soaked streets. There had been some full-on shots that would very 
likely fill the monitor screens. And it'll be my face, he thought. Not the 
face of the actor playing me. But my face. That had been the other thing that 
he'd sold the rights to, 
that Urbenton and his Speed Death Productions had bought. Spelled out in 
precise contractual language: . . . the undersigned contracting party, in 
consideration of the financial remuneration specified above, grants as well 
the right to use a full and accurate facial depiction of self~ along with any 
associated physical mannerisms consistent with an identification of the 
portrayed individual as the former Los Angeles Police Department special agent 
known as Rick Deckard . 
That was what he'd agreed to, the contract he'd signed, back when he'd still 
been under the impression that the money from Urbenton would be enough to get 
him and Sarah Tyrell off Mars and heading out to the U.N. 's colonies in the 
stars. Deckard hadn't anticipated being on the run, with Christ only knew what 
kind of police agencies breathing down his neck. It was a wonder he hadn't 
been nabbed already; the suspicion had started to grow in him that the cops 
were giving him a long rope, seeing if there was anybody else he'd entangle 
before they picked him up. Eventually, they'd tire of that game, get tired of 
waiting for him to contact his nonexistent accomplices, and then Deckard would 
find the rope around his neck, where it'd always been. 
It was going to be a lot easier to tighten that noose now, or as soon as this 
video had finished airing over every cable-linked monitor in the emigrant 
colony. When Deckard had been there, at the Outer Hollywood station, orbiting 
above Earth, Urbenton had even shown him how the special-effects people were 
going to digitize his face, from the bones up through the web of muscles, to 
the skin and every whisker stubble and freckle on it, every little detail that 
made up the world-weary, tired-of-killing but still deadly gestalt that 
Deckard saw when he looked in a mirror. Standard practice in the modern video 
business: in postproduction, once the principal photography was done, the 
techs would lay the digital face over that of the actor who had gone through 
the paces on the set, who'd hit the marks and had the prop guns fired at him, 
taken the hits from the other actors, done all the hard stuff . . . and what 
the audience would see, when the video was broadcast, would be a reconstituted 
Rick Deckard walking those garish, milling, neon-streaked L.A. streets again, 
just as the real one had, gun in hand, eyes scanning for his prey. 
That'~s what they're going to see, thought Deckard, right now. The only chance 
he'd had was based on anonymity, on being able to move through the emigrant 
colony's crowds without being spotted, on hiding out in the open, his face 
hidden in the torrent of other faces. And now that was going to be taken away 
from him. They're going to see me. My face. 
On the monitor screens, the video's opening credits had ended; the camera 
angle had dropped from the fire-laced night skies above L.A., crossed by the 
screaming flares of the police spinners, to street level; the reflection of a 
neon dragon, red tongue darting through a crudely animated sequence, shimmered 
on the wet asphalt. A figure in a long coat, shoulders hunched with fatigue, 
was seen from the back. As the real Deckard watched from the booth, the 
video's all-seeing eye moved in on his taped double. 
Then a quick cut, the shot going to a front angle, tight on the Deckard 
figure's shirt beneath the open coat's lapels, buttoned to the top with a 
costume department duplicate of the rough-woven tie he'd always affected back 
then. The shot moved up to the image's face, a close-up in good lighting, a 
noodle bar's bright fluorescents driving away any concealing shadows; the real 
Deckard winced, anticipating what he was about to see



He didn't. In the booth, in a cheap dive somewhere in the Martian emigrant 
colony, Deckard stared in amazement- and with an uncomprehending sense of 
relief-at what he saw on the monitor, echoed simultaneously on the screens 
throughout the bar. 
"That's not you," said a small voice behind him. The Rachael child looked past 
Deckard and Marley, on either side of her, toward the nearest screen. "I 
thought this was going to be about you and everything, about stuff that 
happened to you before. But that doesn't look anything like you." 
"No Deckard continued to watch the video image. The Deckard there, the 
figure reenacting the story of those nights in L.A., had moved away from the 
camera and into a 
medium shot; the face was still visible, though. "It's not my face." 
"Now that is interesting." No surprise registered in Marley's voice. "You 
weren't expecting that, were you, Deckard? I was getting kind of a kick out of 
watching you. Really thought your cover was about to be blown, huh?" 
Deckard said nothing, but just nodded slowly, still watching the image on the 
screen, the Deckard that didn't look like him. 
"Something must have happened," continued Marley. "For that Urbenton fellow to 
change his plans like that. I know that wasn't the original deal. They were 
going to ceegee your face on top of that actor's; all he had to do was go 
through the motions and it would wind up looking like you were doing all that 
stuff all over again. Hunting down those replicants like the bad ol' blade 
runner you used to be." 
"I know." Deckard felt a measure of tension easing out of his spine. The 
dismaying prospect that every other face in the bar would turn toward him, 
connecting him with the image on the video monitors, had vanished. If the 
police agencies were going to put out the net for him, they would have to do 
it without the advantage of having every person with eyes doing their spotting 
for them. "That's a break." 
"You figure it's just luck? The director Urbenton just happened to change his 
mind?" 
He looked over at the other man. "No-" Deckard shook his head. "I don't have 
that kind of luck. If I ever did. Nothing happens without a reason." 
"For anybody not in the kind of position you are, that would be considered 
paranoia. For you, Deckard, it's the beginning of wisdom." 
Whatever relief he had felt over the broadcast of the video, and the absence 
of his face from it, was replaced by the suspicions he had for this character. 
"I don't have to be real wise, buddy, to wonder what it is you want from me." 
"What do I want?" Marley looked back at him with wideeyed, feigned innocence. 
"Like I said, I want to help you. And the way I do that is by stopping you." 
"Stopping me from what?" 
"Come on, Deckard. I'm way ahead of you." The naive mask had dropped from 
Marley's face. "I know what you're up to. You've accepted a little job, 
haven't you? The fact that you're carrying around that talking briefcase only 
goes to prove it. If you had any sense-if all you were interested in was 
saving your own skin-you would've ditched it by now." Marley tilted his head 
toward the other occupant of the booth. "Same with the little girl. Nice kid, 
but she's only going to slow you down." 
"That's my problem," said Deckard. 
"Oh, exactly." Marley's thin smile returned. "It's your problem because it's 
your job. The job you've taken on for the rep-symps of getting that briefcase 
and its data contents out to the insurgent replicants." 
Deckard stiffened. "If you know all that ... and you want to stop me . . . 
then you must be some kind of cop. You'd have to be working for the 
authorities." 
"Not at all." The smile grew wider. "I'm with the repsymps." 
For a few seconds, Deckard thought that one over, then slowly nodded. "Sure 
you are. You blow away that Kowalski replicant right in front of me, and then 
you come and tell me that you're working on behalf of the replicants. You 
really think I'm going to believe that one?" 



"Shooting the Kowalski replicant Marley shrugged. "Regrettable, but it had 
to be done. And not even all that much to be sorry about-he was pretty much at 
the end of the four-year life span that the Tyrell Corporation had built into 
that model. So he didn't really lose that much. And besides, there are other 
Kowalski replicants." 
"That's a pretty cold attitude." Deckard studied the other man. "At least I 
had the grace to develop a guilty conscience over what I'd done." 
"Good for you." Deckard's words had left Marley unfazed. "That must be why you 
got picked for this job you're doing. Guilty consciences screw up people's 
heads, make 'em easy to manipulate. Like you. Otherwise, if you were thinking 
straight, you would've been able to figure out a few things about the 
situation you're in." 
"Yeah? Like what?" 
"Work on it, Deckard." The other man leaned closer across the table. "You 
think because I've said I want to stop you-to make sure you don't get that 
briefcase and its data out to the insurgents-you think that must mean I'm with 
the authorities. Have you ever thought that it's exactly the authorities- the 
police, the U.N., whatever-who want you to get that briefcase out to where 
you've been told it's supposed to be delivered?" 
"Hey!" The voice of Roy Batty piped up from beneath the table. "Don't listen 
to this guy! He's trouble!" 
Deckard glanced over to the monitor screen, where the Deckard of the video, 
still wearing the actor's face, was talking to somebody in a set that was 
supposed to be the LAPD's high-ceilinged main headquarters. He didn't hear the 
characters' words, concentrating instead on what the figure across from him 
had just said. 
"Look at it this way," continued Marley. "The cable monopoly here does 
whatever the authorities tell it to do-that's why it gets to remain a 
monopoly. If U.N. security tells the monopoly to run this video or that one, 
or that one"-he pointed to the screen-"then it gets broadcast all over the 
colony. Same way with Urbenton and his little Speed Death Productions company; 
if he wasn't in tight with the police before, it wouldn't take much pressure, 
if any, before he'd do whatever they tell him to. Especially since he doesn't 
owe you any favors. If they told him to cut the computer graphic effects, the 
dubbing in of your face over the actor who was playing you-he'd do it in a 
second. Urbenton wouldn't care if it helped you or hurt you; just the kind of 
guy he is." 
Deckard had to admit that Marley was right, at least as far as that part of 
the analysis went. "I think I'm starting to see what you mean . . 
"I bet you are. You're not totally stupid, Deckard. If the police and the U.N. 
security forces and everybody else who should be after you, if all those 
people wanted to find you and stop you from carrying that briefcase out to the 
insurgents, they wouldn't have let that actor's face stay in the video that's 
being broadcast. They would've told Urbenton to go 
ahead with his original production plans and dub your face in there. So that 
everybody in the emigrant colony would know what you look like; so they could 
put out a bulletin, offer a little reward, and there would've been no place 
you could hide. We wouldn't be sitting in this cozy little hole having this 
conversation; the police would've hauled your ass away by now." 
It made sense; or put another way, the video broadcast didn't. This was their 
chance, thought Deckard, to make sure everybody knows what I look like. And it 
hadn't happened. The corollary of the principle that, for him, everything 
happened for a reason-not paranoia but wisdom, a survivor's assessment of how 
the universe worked-was that when things didn't happen, that was also because 
somebody wanted it that way. 
"Then that would mean Deckard slowly picked through his own words. "It 
would mean the authorities don't want to stop me. They don't want to catch me 
. . 
"They want you to get away." On the other side of the table, Marley regarded 
him with evident satisfaction, pleased with the impact his arguments had made. 



"So the question you have to ask yourself now is . . . why?" 
"Why do they want me to get away Deckard rubbed his mouth with a knuckle. 
"They must have a reason . 
"It's not you, pal." Marley seemed to be taking pity on him. "If it's any 
comfort to you-nobody's ever considered you to be that important. So you 
needn't bother building up your ego now. It's what you're carrying. The job 
you've undertaken. Got it?" He smiled. "It's the briefcase. They want you to 
deliver it. Not the rep-symps, but the authorities. The police, the U.N. . . . 
all of them. The bad guys." 
"I told you!" Batty's voice shouted louder from beneath the table. The 
briefcase vibrated against Deckard's shin. "I told you this guy was trouble. 
He's messing with your mind. Don't listen to him!" 
The Rachael child leaned to one side in order to talk to the briefcase. "It's 
okay," she said in a soothing tone. "Nothing bad's going to happen to you-" 
"Christ," spoke Batty disgustedly. "I don't need this. You 
people are all screwing up big-time. Man, I wish I still had legs. I'd walk 
out of here right now and take my chances on my own. I'd let you all just sit 
here until you rotted away." 
"Shut up." Deckard resisted the impulse to give the briefcase another kick. 
"Problem is, the guy's making sense." 
"That's not a problem." A smile and a shake of Marley's head. "It's your 
salvation, Deckard." 
"Goddamn it, don't listen-" 
Batty's voice had gone up enough in volume to require action. Angrily, Deckard 
reached down and grabbed the handle, pulling the briefcase up and slamming it 
down hard on the table. He looked around to see if anyone in the place had 
noticed; as far as he could discern, the bartender and the patrons scattered 
among the tables were still watching the dimly lit adventures of the 
re-created Deckard in the video. 
"Listen up," said Deckard, laying his hand on top of the briefcase's lid. 
"You're getting on my nerves. You keep yelling and carrying on, somebody's 
bound to think that's a little unusual. And I don't really feel like 
attracting attention right now. Understand?" 
"You're the one who doesn't understand." Batty's voice had turned sulky. "You 
got a job to do, and this asshole is getting in the way." 
"I don't care what I agreed to do." He pulled his hand back. "Just shut up and 
let me work this out, or so help me, I'll leave you at the nearest pawnshop 
and I'll take the two bucks I'll get for you and spend it on aspirin. I'm not 
joking." 
The briefcase said nothing. It radiated a silent, sullen fury. 
"Good call." Marley nodded approvingly. "You're the one in charge. Remember 
that-" 
"Fine." The anger boiling up in Deckard hadn't abated. "I'm in charge? Then I 
want answers. I want to know what's going on. Right now, without any more cute 
shit from you." 
"All right." Marley laid both his large-boned hands on the table. "I'll give 
you the short-and-sweet version, if you think 
your little mind oan handle it. The briefcase here"-he tapped on it with one 
flngernall-"Wa not what you thinb it Is. It's not what you've been told." 
"Yeah? So what Is it, then?" 
Marley smIled coldly at him. "You're carrying a bomb." 
Deckard sighed wearily. "The hell I am." He had been hoping for something more 
plausible than that. "The authorities supposedly want me to carry this 
briefcase out to the replicant insurgents-because it's some kind of bomb? Get 
real." 
"I am real." Marley's smile didn't change. "This is as real as it gets." 
"Come on." Deckard pointed to the briefcase. "How much damage could be 
accomplished with something this size? And it came to me virtually empty; even 
if it were packed with high explosives-Christ, even if it'd been shoved full 
of fissionable materials-how much of a bang do you think that would amount to? 



Not enough to destroy a rebellion that's spread across all the U.N. colonies 
out in the stars. You're talking some big distances there, and a lot of 
replicants. If this so-called bomb killed thousands of them-even hundreds of 
thousands-that wouldn't change anything." He shook his head in disgust. "How 
about you figuring something out? Tell me-why would the authorities go to this 
much trouble 
just to enable me to carry one piddly bomb out there? Doesn't make sense." 
"Oh ... it might." Marley shrugged. "Depends on what kind of bomb it is, 
doesn't it? Problem with you cop types, all you can ever think of are things 
that go boom. Little boom, you kill one person; big boom, and you kill lots. 
But that's as far as your imagination goes. There are some things that don't 
go boom at all, and they kill all the people you need to." 
"For Christ's sake." Batty's voice came from the briefcase. "The guy's a liar, 
and he's not even a good one." 
Deckard ignored the disembodied words. "So you'd like me to believe that 
there's some kind of biological agent in this thing. A virus, a bacterium . . 
. some kind of disease vector. And my taking it out to the insurgents would 
somehow introduce that disease into their population and wipe them out. Is 
that it?" He felt even more disgusted, considering the shallowness of the 
concocted story. "It doesn't wash. That makes even less sense. One, replicant 
genetics are based upon their human originals, like the way the replicant Roy 
Batty was based upon the human Batty who got stuck in this box. So the 
replicant population is as genetically diverse as the human population, so the 
chance of coming up with a disease that would cut a wide enough swath through 
the insurgents is just about zero. And second, even if you could come up with 
a disease like that, some kind of superbug, it would almost certainly be just 
as deadly for the humans out there in the colonies. The U.N. authorities 
aren't going to wipe out all their emigrants in order to take care of the 
insurgents- what would be the point?" 
"You know, Deckard, you're kind of a wordy bastard. For a cop, that is." 
"I get inspired," he replied sourly, "when I think somebody's trying to 
bulishit me. You want a third? I'll give it to you for free. Replicants have 
four-year life spans. You don't have to do anything to kill them off, let 
alone introduce some bio-engineered disease. If all the U.N. wanted to do was 
to eliminate them en masse, it would just have to outwait them, let 'em come 
to the ends of their own built-in ropes." 
"Very good." Marley smiled and nodded in admiration. "Not bad arguments for 
somebody who's under the kind of pressure you are. You make some big 
assumptions, though. You're underestimating both how scared and how ruthless 
the U.N. can be. The insurgents have them in a panic; they'd happily kill off 
the entire human emigrant population if that's what it took to knock the 
replicants down. They can always get more emigrants; how much rottener does 
life have to get on Earth before everybody's lined up to go? There's already a 
nice little bottleneck full of 'em right here on Mars, just waiting for their 
tickets out. And as for the business about the replicants and their four-year 
life spans Marley shook his head. "Maybe that's not quite the issue that 
you think it is. But the main thing is that you're just wrong. You're wrong 
about what you think I'm trying to tell you. I never said the briefcase had 
some kind of disease agent inside it. You're just jumping to your own 
conclusions way too fast, Deckard. Maybe you should learn to just sit back and 
listen for a change." 
"All right." Deckard leaned his shoulder blades into the booth's padding. "I'm 
listening." 
"When I said you were carrying a bomb, I didn't mean the kind that goes boom, 
or something full of nasty little bacteria and viruses." The smile had 
evaporated from Marley's face. "I'm talking a memetic bomb. Pure information 
that changes what people do-in this case, what replicants do. When you were 
told that there was important data imbedded in the briefcase, that wasn't a 
lie. That's all there is inside it. And that's enough. Enough to take care of 
the insurgent replicants." 



"Memetic bomb'? What's that supposed to mean?" Deckard gazed at the other man 
in disbelief. "You're talking about a meme? Just some kind of idea, and that's 
all? I suppose it's some really bad one-something like 'Why don't we all just 
commit suicide? It's fun and it's easy.' And that bad idea is just somehow 
going to infect the replicant insurgents, they'll kill themselves, and the 


U.N. 's troubles will be over. You must be joking. You have to be." 
"No Marley actually looked sad. "I wish I were." 
The shift in the other man's attitude made Deckard un 
easy. "What is it, then? What good is a meme as a weapon if the replicants 
could just come up with a countermeme for it? Because that's all it would 
take. Any idea, bad or good, isn't something that people have to obey without 
even thinking about it. It's not like a bullet-or a real bomb. You don't get 
to argue about those." 
"Guns have triggers," said Marley. "So do bombs; the things that make them go 
off. That's what you don't argue with. When the triggers get pulled, things 
happen. Real bad things. When the meme is the trigger-a trigger for something 
that already exists inside the target-then that completes the bomb as soon as 
you bring the two together. And that's what you'd be doing by taking that 
briefcase out to the insurgents. The bomb that would go off isn't some bad 
idea, some little self-destructive notion, that they'd be able to argue with. 
It's something that's built into them, just like those false memories that the 
Tyrell Corporation implanted into them. It's already in their heads, Deckard, 
where they can't get at it. They don't even know it's there. But they would as 
soon as you showed up with that briefcase and the data inside it. What the 
insurgents out there believe would be a list of the disguised replicants on 
Earth, their fifth column that they could contact and bring in on their 
side-they'd have a big surprise coming. It wouldn't be any list. It'd be their 
death warrants that you'd delivered to them. And they'd take care of the 
killing by themselves." The smile, when it appeared this time, was a mordant 
twist in one corner of his mouth. "That's a pretty good bomb, wouldn't you 
say?" 
More than one change; the other man's voice had gone deadly cold as well. "How 
does it work?" Deckard was almost ready to believe. "What is it inside the 
replicants' heads?" 
"Remember what I said about the four-year life span's not being an issue 
anymore? That's got a lot to do with it." Marley leaned across the table. "The 
replicants have changed. Because of being out there. Out in the stars, so far 
away from Earth. That's what the Tyrell Corporation was afraid would happen, 
and what the U.N. authorities have found out to be true. That's what started 
up the rebellion, made the replicants think they had something worth fighting 
for. Their 
own lives. And not just some crummy little scrap with a built-in cutoff date. 
In the outer colonies, that's what started happening: the replicants began 
spontaneously living longer than the four years they were intended to live. 
They changed. They're still changing." 
"If that's true," said Deckard slowly, "then it means . 
everything. Everything would be different. And not just for the replicants." 
"You got it, pal. That last batch of replicants that escaped and came to 
Earth-the ones you hunted down-they weren't part of the insurgents. The Batty 
replicant and the others- they didn't know what was going on. The rebellion 
hadn't gotten hold of them yet. And they missed it." Marley shrugged. "Kind of 
ironic, don't you think? Cruelly so. The Batty replicant and the other ones 
with him-they all wanted more life. To live longer than four measly years. And 
they could've had that if they'd just stayed where they were. Out in the 
stars. Instead of coming to Earth. That's where their death was waiting for 
them all along. And it didn't even have anything to do with you." 
"What do you mean?" Deckard looked harder at the other man, trying to figure 
out the words. 
"The spontaneous life extension-it's only happening out there." Marley pointed 
up to the bar's ceiling. "In the outer colonies, where the insurgents are. It 

doesn't happen anywhere near Earth. Actually, there are some indications that 
replicants who've changed, who've acquired a life span longer than four years, 
will revert if they get within range of their home planet, the place where the 
Tyrell Corporation put them together. Earth is toxic to them; the planet 
itself is the trigger for that life span bomb that Tyrell wired into each one 
of them." 
"You said they were still changing. The ones out there . . 
"That's right," said Marley. "Because there's more to life, isn't there? More 
than just extending your own. There's the cycle, the way one generation gives 
birth to another. That's a big part." 
He could already see where Marlev was going. "But that's something replicants 
can't do. Give birth. Have children. Replicants are sterile; they can't 
reproduce. They were designed to be that way. That's how the Tyrell 
Corporation built them. The only way you could get another replicant would be 
to have Tyrell build it for you." Deckard regarded his own hands for a moment, 
then looked back up to the other man. "That's the way it's always been . 
"But that's not the way it is now. Now, things have changed. The replicants 
have started to reproduce. On their own, without the Tyrell Corporation; there 
are replicant mothers and fathers, and replicant children." Marley tilted his 
head toward the Rachael child sitting next to him. "And guess what? They look 
just like human children, the way replicants look like adult humans. And they 
grow up and become like their parents, just the same as human children do." 
"Then what's the difference?" It was the Rachael child who spoke, peering at 
Marley. "What's the difference between them? Between humans and those other 
people?" 
"Ah." Marley nodded. "That's a good question. A real good question." 
"Then answer it," said Deckard. "I'd like to know." 
"All right. Here's an answer for you." Marley regarded the girl for a moment, 
then looked back up at Deckard. "The replicants aren't the only ones changing 
out there. So are the humans. Or what used to be the humans. This is what the 


U.N. doesn't want people back on Earth to hear about; it would put a real 
crimp in the emigration program if it got out that going to the stars has some 
real hairy effects on the human species." 
"Like what?" 
"Sterility, for one. The colonists are in danger of dying out just from lack 
of reproduction. There hasn't been a human infant born in the outer colonies 
for a nearly a decade." With his thumb and forefinger, Marley made a zero. 
"Nada. No kids; the end of the line, unless the U.N. starts sending out more 
colonists. Who will in turn go sterile, from all indications; nobody's found a 
cure for what's happening. But that's not the only change. The mass 
reproductive failure is just 
the most obvious sign that something is going wrong, at least for the humans 
out there. There's other changes, which are a little more subtle but just as 
bad." 
"And you're going to tell me about them." Deckard felt a wave of foreboding 
pass through him. "I'm beginning to be sorry that I asked." 
"Too late for that," replied Marley. "It's why I'm here. To clue you in. 
Here's the deal on what else is happening with the emigrants in the outer 
colonies. Psychological changes; a decrease in that faculty usually known as 
empathy. You remember that one, don't you, from your blade runner days- the 
ability to feel what another living creature is feeling: its pain, its 
suffering, its joy. Well, the colonists are showing lower and lower marks on 
the standardized tests that measure that sort of thing. To the point where, if 
they were administered empathy tests with a Voigt-Kampff machine, they'd 
flunk. Some of them have already been given the V-K tests, and they didn't 
make it; the machine registered them as being below the cutoff point for the 
empathic response that characterizes human beings." 
"Then they're not human." Deckard saw the cold logic of what he was being 
told. "They're not human any longer." 
"Well, there you go." Hands grasping the edge of the table, Marley sat back in 

the booth. "Life's a bitch, isn't it? Things just happen, and then you have to 
deal with them." He shook his head as though in wry amusement. "Of course, the 


U.N. authorities have their own way of dealing with the situation." One hand 
patted the briefcase's lid. "Thus, you and this bomb you were told to carry 
out to the replicant insurgents." 
"But if what you're saying is true Deckard no longer doubted it. "Then 
they're not replicants anymore. They're the human ones out there." 
"Matter of semantics, isn't it? It's all in how you define the word." Marley's 
hand gestured lazily toward Deckard. "Now you, given your background-being a 
blade runner and all that-you just naturally tend to think that anything that 
passes a Voigt-Kampff test is human, and anything that doesn't isn't. And 
maybe you're right. But what it means is that the U.N. emigration program has 
been successful, but not in the way they intended. There is a human presence 
in the outer colonies, way out there in the stars, but it's not us; it's not 
the things that used to be human beings. It's those other ones, that were the 
replicants. They're the humans now." 
"Why ... why is it happening?" 
"There's different explanations." Marley shrugged. "Little hard to get a 
definitive answer right now; the U.N. authorities want to keep a lid on what's 
going on, and the replicants are busy fighting for their lives and their 
freedom. All that sort of thing. But there's basically two schools of thought 
on the issue. One is more or less scientific, having to do with a hypothesized 
morphogenetic field centered on Earth itself, a field that determines, in 
addition to the genetic code carried in our DNA, the essential characteristics 
of the human species. The outer colonies are beyond the range of that 
morphogenetic field. Once that happens, there's slippage for both humans and 
replicants. Their outward physical appearance might not change, but other 
things will happen, like the shift in fertility and the empathic faculty." 
Another shrug. "As good a theory as any." 
Cold, abandoned vistas opened inside Deckard's thoughts. "I knew," he murmured 
to himself, "we should never have left home." He found himself inside a seedy 
bar in the Martian emigrant colony, wrapped in darkness, an image with his 
name but not his face on the scattered video monitors, an image in a long coat 
like the one he used to wear, moving through neon-laced streets and endlessly 
deep shadows, none of which were real but all a simulation, far from home, far 
from L.A. And this isn't even as far as those other ones went, he mused. They 
went so far, and got so lost, that they even lost themselves. 
He wondered what they were like now, those things with human faces that used 
to be human. A bleak memory came to him of riding back into the colony on the 
shuttle filled with the native mine workers, the grown-up children that had 
been born here on Mars. And of feeling alone among them, 
more alone than he had ever felt, even in L.A., where aloneness had pretty 
much defined the human condition in the thickest of crowds. The stage beyond 
alone, that of disconnected; he had looked around the shuttle and seen faces 
like his, human faces, but had felt no kinship with them. In turn, their 
unfathomable gazes had swept past him with no spark of recognition. They'd 
changed just by coming this far. Not so much evolved, which implied some 
better state, but at least adapted. They'd shed their skins, all the excess 
baggage that came with being human; they didn't need that stuff anymore. 
"Maybe nobody does . 
"What was that?" Marley leaned toward him, trying to catch his whisper. 
"Nothing. Just thinking." He let the uncheering vision drain away, like water 
poured on the red desert sands. "You said there was some other explanation. 
What's that one?" 
"Simple enough. There are some more mystical types who believe that being 
human isn't an inherent, genetically based condition at all. Humans don't 
decide who's human and who's not; that's taken care of by something outside 
them. Way outside." Marley looked uncomfortable, as though he were speaking of 
things not meant to be revealed. "There's supposedly an aspect of God that's 
called the Eye of Compassion . . . and it can only see suffering; it's blind 

to everything else. And those things that it sees, the suffering ones, those 
are what are fully human. Anything else is . . . something less. So there may 
have been a time when the things that we consider to be human may actually 
have been that way . . . but not anymore. The Eye doesn't see us; you and I, 
Deckard, we're part of that which causes suffering. The ones who used to be 
the replicants-the ones we made-they suffer at our hands. They suffer, and the 
Eye of Compassion sees them and judges them to be human. They become human. 
It's the gaze of the Eye-its ability to empathize with other creatures-that 
determines who's human. It's nothing we do. There's nothing we can do about 
it." He gave a nervous shrug. "Anyway ... that's what some people think." 
"More human than human-" 
"What was that?" Marley peered at him. "What did you say?" 
Deckard had closed his eyes while listening to the other man. He opened them, 
then slowly shook his head. "Nothing. Nothing important. I was just thinking 
of that slogan that the Tyrell Corporation had. 'More human than human.'" A 
grim half smile appeared on Deckard's face. "Eldon Tyrell didn't know how true 
that would be." 
For a few moments of silence, Marley studied him. "You know, though. You know 
it's true, don't you?" 
He made no reply. He looked at the image of himself on the nearest monitor; 
that Deckard had a gun raised in one hand and was picking his way carefully 
over a field of shattered glass. "I don't care," he said at last. He looked 
back around to the other man. "Human is as human does, I suppose. It doesn't 
make all that much difference to me. There was a replicant that I fell in love 
with, and it didn't matter to me if she was human or not. Like you said-I'm 
not the one who decides about that sort of thing." 
"That might be, Deckard. But there are still other things that you do have to 
decide about. That nobody but you can decide." Marley tapped a finger against 
the briefcase. "Like what you're going to do with this thing. Whether you're 
going to go ahead and try to carry it out to the replicant insurgents. Or 
whether you're going to bag that whole notion, because you know what kind of a 
weapon it is." 
"But I don't know." He looked hard at the man across from him. "I've heard a 
lot of talk from you about what's happened to the humans and the replicants 
out in the stars. And maybe I even believe some of it. But even if it's true 
that the replicants have started becoming human-that they live as long as 
humans, and they have children like humans-that doesn't tell me anything about 
what's inside this box. And about why it should be so deadly to the 
replicants." 
"That's right." Batty's voice broke into the conversation, coming from the 
briefcase. "Remember that, Deckard. This guy hasn't proven anything. All you 
know for sure is that he wants to stop you. Just like the U.N. security forces 
and all 
the other cops in the universe would like to stop you. He's just got a fancier 
line." 
"Yeah," agreed Deckard, "he does talk a good line. Which makes him a funny 
kind of cop. I'm used to the kind that solves problems with a bullet." He 
studied the other man, looking for the clue he needed. "That was the kind of 
cop I was. And let's face it, Marley-you're not exactly squeamish about that 
sort of thing yourself. You didn't have any trouble over killing that Kowalski 
replicant when you thought you had to. So why are you being so careful with 
me?" 
"I'm not being careful at all." Marley smiled at him. "I don't care about you 
at all. I'm just thorough, that's all. I've got a job to take care of, same as 
you. So I've got my orders, and they specifically said to leave you alive. 
Since I'm working for the rep-symps-the real rep-symps, not the phony-ass U.N. 
collaborators who set you up-I figure they must know what they want. 
Otherwise, I would've taken care of this whole problem my own way. The same 
way I took care of that Kowalski replicant back at Outer Hollywood." The smile 
became wider and meaner. "You know, you cop types are right: a bullet really 



is the best way. Simple and effective. If I weren't operating under 
restrictions, you would never even have seen what hit you, and that briefcase 
would be dismantled to atoms. And I'd be long gone from here." 
"Hey! Screw you, pal!" Batty's miffed voice sounded again. "I'd kick your 
ass-if I could get to it." 
Both men ignored the angry words. "So what is the deal?" Deckard pointed to 
the briefcase. "All that stuff you were talking about a memetic bomb. Some 
kind of data, pure information. That the U.N. security forces want to get 
piped to the insurgents. What kind of data would cause that much damage, to 
make all this worthwhile?" 
"You got to remember," said Marley. "The Tyrell Corporation had all sorts of 
clever ideas. Eldon Tyrell had a knack for looking ahead and imagining the 
worst possibilities. Like the replicants' getting out from under his and the 


U.N. 's control. So they built in things like the four-year life span. But 
that wasn't the only fail-safe mechanism that Tyrell designed into the 
replicants. There's another one that's specifically re 
lated to the whole reproductive issue. The only reason it works is that it's a 
variation on a deeply buried mammalian instinct, some dark coding that's in 
the primitive layers of the human nervous system. Which is, after all, the 
basis for the replicant nervous system, so it's in there as well. All that 
Eldon Tyrell did was to invert part of it, design his own little twist into 
the replicants." Marley took a deep breath before going on. "The original 
instinctive behavior is the one by which adult male animals are driven to kill 
the offspring of other adult males of the same species, thus increasing the 
ratio of their own offspring in the breeding group; it's sometimes called the 
'stepfather syndrome.' Just one of those ugly parts of genetically directed 
behavior where the gene's own survival and propagation are the only things 
important to it. Morality doesn't enter into the equation. What Eldon Tyrell 
did with the replicants he designed was to program in a pair of aberrations to 
that basic, primitive instinct. The first was to make it much stronger, to the 
point of being a homicidal obsession; the child-murdering behavior takes over 
the entire organism, overriding even its own instincts for self-preservation. 
The other aberration on the basic instinct directs the behavior toward the 
organism ~s own offspring. You following me? The organism-the 
replicant-murders his own children. It's like a breakdown in an extended 
immune system, one that extends beyond the replicant's own skin. The primitive 
drive is inverted, so that the individual attacks and destroys the very thing 
it's supposed to protect." 
"I don't get it," said Deckard. "If that's the behavior that's programmed into 
the replicants, then there's no contest. There's no way that they can win any 
kind of struggle against the U.N.'s colonists. Because they'll destroy 
themselves; they'll reproduce, but they'll murder their own children. It's all 
over for them. They're a biological dead end." 
"Not quite. The 'stepfather syndrome' behavior is built into them, but it's 
buried. It's not activated unless it's triggered. That's where you come in, 
Deckard. You and the little job you agreed to undertake for the cops and the 
U.N. security forces that had managed to inifitrate the rep-symp underground. 
You're carrying the trigger right here in this briefcase. The 
data that's been imbedded in it isn't any list of disguised replicants on 
Earth; that was just the cover story to get you to agree to the job. What the 
people who put this together did was encode the memetic bomb, the trigger to 
activate the buried behavior pattern, and stick it in here, in this box. Then 
they wrapped it up, like putting a bow on a birthday present, by imbedding Roy 
Batty's cerebral contents in there-more to goad you into taking on the 
delivery job than to actually help you get there. Because in reality, you 
don't need any help; there's no real effort being made by the authorities to 
stop you. The U.N. and the police, all of them- they want you to get there. 
You delivering that briefcase to the replicant insurgents is what their big 
plan is all about. You'd be showing up on the replicants' doorstep with the 
trigger to the bomb that's already wired into them. The buried behavior 

pattern would be activated, and there'd be nothing they could do to stop it. 
And that'd be the end of the replicants. When they die, there'd be no 
replicant children to replace them." 
"This is crap," growled Batty's voice. "Don't listen to this jerk. He's just 
playing with your mind, Deckard. He's the one who's working for the 
authorities." 
"I'm afraid our friend here protests too much." Marley rapped his knuckles on 
the briefcase's lid. "He's hardly a disinterested party in this whole affair, 
is he? Since his whole existence is bound up with what the two of you have 
been told about his contents. And why you should go ahead and deliver them." 
"There's someone else," said Deckard. "Batty's not the only one. There was 
someone else who convinced me I should do it." 
"Ah, yes. Our transcendent authority in these matters." Marley nodded. "The 
good Sebastian, who's gone from this mortal realm to a higher if slightly 
smaller one. It only goes to show that even a deity, albeit a dehydrated one, 
can be wrong." 
"You knew I went to see him? In his little pocket universe?" 
"Of course." Marley gave a casual shrug. "The people I'm working for-the real 
rep-symps-know all kinds of things. The other rep-symps may have been 
infiltrated and taken over by the police, but it doesn't end there. My bunch 
has its contacts and moles on the other side. They know what kind of data was 
imbedded in the briefcase, and what else they put in it. And what they 
instructed Batty to tell you so you'd go off and get convinced by Sebastian 
about your holy mission. Your delivery job. The problem is, Sebastian can tell 
you only what he himself believes to be true; he's not omniscient, at least as 
far as this world goes." 
If he couldn't believe Sebastian-and Deckard had to admit that could be the 
case, that the little genetic engineer, even in his new transfigured 
incarnation, could've been lied to and misled-the question became, once more, 
a matter of trusting anyone at all. This Marley character had at least the 
advantage of a certain cold logic on his side to carry his arguments. They've 
made it easy for me, thought Deckard. He glanced over at the video monitor. 
All it would have taken, a simple thing, was to have let the director Urbenton 
go ahead and dub Deckard's face onto the actor playing him. A standard 
production technique. And then I would've been a marked man. Anybody in the 
emigrant colony could have recognized him and turned him in, if the 
authorities had, in fact, been hunting him down. But instead . 
"You're asking me to believe a lot," said Deckard. "Not that everybody I run 
into hasn't been doing the same. But this 'stepfather syndrome' business-this 
memetic bomb that I'm supposed to be carrying-that seems pretty extreme. Why 
should I believe you on this one? Got any proof?" 
"Mere evidence isn't enough for you." The smile appeared on Marley's face 
again. "Or logic, what you can figure out about what's happening around you-" 
"It's not that." Deckard didn't bother with a smile. "I just don't trust 
murderers." 
One of Marley's eyebrows rose. "So not even yourself?" 
"Especially not myself." 
"All right," said Marley, exuding an affable calm. "You 
want proof? Or at least as much as can be gotten in this fallible universe. 
Fine-you've been carrying it around with you." 
"The briefcase?" Deckard laid his hand on it. "I thought that was the whole 
problem, not the answer." 
"Well, maybe you've packed a few extra things inside. Things that might sort 
out the situation a little bit." Marley pulled the briefcase out from beneath 
Deckard's palm and turned it around toward himself. 
"Get your hands off me-" 
Marley ignored the protest that came in Batty's voice. His thumbs pushed back 
the latch buttons on either side of the handle; a second later, he had thrown 
the lid back, exposing the lined interior. 
"Not a lot in here." He glanced up at Deckard. "You could've made better use 



of it, you know. Thrown in a change of clothes or something. No matter-there's 
enough. At least for right now." 
Leaning back against the booth's padding, Deckard watched as the other man 
examined the briefcase. A rectangular packet, one end torn off and then folded 
down to preserve the contents, was held up before him. 
"You held on to this?" Marley looked at the name SEBASTIAN on the packet. 
"Thought it might come in handy, I guess. Just in case you wanted to talk to 
him again. Though what more he could tell you, I have no idea. Still, maybe 
you could just keep it as a little souvenir of your travels." He laid the 
packet down on the booth's table. The briefcase's lid blocked Deckard's view 
of the other man's hands rummaging inside. "Or perhaps you just wanted to keep 
the original package all together, with all the bits and pieces-since the 
collaborator rep-symps, the ones the cops have taken over, put this in here, 
you might as well keep it the way it came to you. But this is something new." 
Marley held up another object. "I know what was in here originally, and this 
wasn't part of it. You just put this in here since you got back from 
Sebastian's pocket universe." 
Deckard looked across the table and saw a square of white-
enameled metal in Marley's hand. The other man turned it slightly, revealing 
the broad red cross on the small box's lid. The old first aid kit-ancient, 
perhaps, considering how battered and scuffed it appeared. He had almost 
forgotten about it; when he had left the hovel, tugging the Rachael child 
along with him by one hand, the briefcase in the other, he had stopped when he 
had felt the little metal box slipping out of his jacket. He had popped open 
the briefcase and thrown the box in there for safekeeping, not even trying to 
figure out why he was hanging on to it at all instead of pitching it away as a 
worthless piece of junk. 
"You do remember, don't you? Where you got this?" Marley held the white metal 
box up in front of his smile. "It wasn't that long ago." 
"What do you know about that?" The question of just how extensive the other 
man's sources of information were troubled Deckard again. "You weren't there 
when it happened." 
"No," admitted Marley. "But I knew Sebastian had this. It's a pretty important 
little item, even if it doesn't look it. So it's worth keeping track of. If 
Sebastian had it, and now you do, chances are good that you got it from him. 
Logical, huh? And I'm right, aren't I?" 
A nod from Deckard. "So what's so important about it?" 
"Well, why don't we take a look?" Marley gave a playful wink. "Shouldn't be 
too hard for a couple of geniuses like us to figure out. Let's see With 
his thumb, he pried open the lid; rust in the hinge joint creaked as the flat 
metal was prodded back by one fingertip. "Not too promising, if you're looking 
for the secrets of the universe." He glanced up at Deckard. "Old bandages and 
dried-up disinfectant." The fingertip now pushed around the box's 
antique-looking contents. "How about these aspirin?" When he pried the lid off 
one of the tiny bottles, the decayed vinegar smell wafted through the booth. 
"Hm, I think the expiration date might've gone by already-" 
"Cut the crap." Deckard scowled in irritation. "Get on with it." 
Marley ignored him, continuing with the routine. "Not much else in here. 
Hardly seems worth the trouble, does it? You'd have to wonder why anybody 
would make a fuss over something like this." 
"I know what that is." At the back of the booth, the Rachael child had pushed 
herself forward, hands flat on the table so she could see bet~ter. "There were 
things like that where I came from. Like that box and all that stuff in it." 
"Of course there were." Marley turned his smile toward the girl. "You're 
absolutely right, sweetheart." He~ glanced over at Deckard. "She knows what 
the score is-or at least part of it. Because this is a standard-issue item, 
something that was stocked in all transports going outside Earth orbit. No big 
deal, just your basic little kit for small emergencies, incidents you didn't 
need to bother going to the infirmary for. There were probably dozens just 
like this aboard the Salander 3. But this particular one it's very special. 



Not because of the bandages and the dead aspirin. But something else." 
"It's all old." The Rachael child's brow creased as she studied the box in 
Marley's hands. "The ones we had, they were new. I mean, they weren't all beat 
up like that one." 
"Sure-" Marley nodded. "That's because those other first aid kits were still 
there with you, where there wasn't any time. This one fell out-well, it was 
taken out. Somebody carried it out of the Sal ander 3. Because they had found 
out how important it was. So it's been out here, in real time. And that's 
where things get old and beat-up. Like this." He turned back toward Deckard. 
"You don't know yet what I'm talking about. But you will." 
"I don't know if I want to." 
"You don't have a choice, Deckard. Not anymore. Not that you ever did." Marley 
set the first aid kit down on the table. "If it's not the contents-all this 
old crap-then maybe it's the box itself. Think that could be?" He didn't wait 
for an answer. "See the inside of the lid here? What's it look like to you?" 
"Paper." Mottled and browned by the same passing of time that had marked the 
small box's exterior; Deckard didn't see anything remarkable in the thin 
lining. "That's all. Probably 
it was some instructions, or a list of supplies." The paper was blank, 
whatever words that had been on it long since faded. "Standard issue, like you 
said." 
"Wrong on that one, pal." Marley watched as one of his fingernails picked at 
the edge of the paper. "What was standard on these kits was to have the 
contents list printed right on the metal. See? Like that." One corner had been 
peeled away enough to reveal the black lettering beneath. "So somebody must've 
stuck this in here. For a reason." He grasped the wrinkled paper between thumb 
and forefinger and tore it away. "Which you shall see." 
Something else was behind the paper, a rectangle just as thin but stiffer. 
Marley pulled it from the hiding place and looked at it for a few seconds 
before handing it across the table. 
A photograph. Deckard held it by the edge, looking into the frozen section of 
the past that had been caught there. 
He was still looking at it and listening to Marley explain what it meant, what 
it showed-listening and understanding at last-when the first bullet hit. 
For a moment, Deckard thought it was something from the video monitor, 
something that was happening to that other Deckard, the actor playing him in 
the reenacted past. The noise of the shot was so loud that it pulled his gaze 
away from the ancient, long-hidden photograph and toward the monitor. That 
Deckard, with his long coat but without his face, was backed up against a 
motorized urban trash-retrieval unit; the gun was a gleam of black metal 
spinning away, knocked out of his hand by the taller figure looming above him 
. 
A quick scream of fright from the Rachael child, and he realized that the shot 
had been in this world and not in the one held by the monitor. The bullet had 
torn into the fiberboard ceiling above the booth, gouging out a ragged trench 
from which a loop of electrical conduit dangled like a silvery intestine. 
The second bullet took out the video monitor a few feet away, sending bright 
specks of glass across the floor and the table, as though that other Deckard 
and his small world had 
been further reduced to their component atoms, a furious energy propelling 
them from one reality to a larger one. 
Deckard's hand, guided by its own instincts, was already pulling the gun from 
his jacket as his gaze snapped toward the doorway. Black-uniformed figures 
stood between the bar's darkness and the light outside, their weapons raised 
and aimed straight toward him. 
She saw everything that happened. 
They had told Sarah to stay back, out of danger; they would take care of the 
situation. Right now, she didn't have to do anything except watch. 
"These guys are professionals," said Urbenton, standing beside her on the 
street outside the bar. The area hadn't been cordoned off-no need; the 



operation wouldn't take more than a few minutes-so a small crowd from the 
emigrant colony's surrounding alleys and warrens had formed, attracted by the 
audible stimulus of the gunshots and raised voices. "I wanted to use some of 
my video crew-I figured they're good enough at faking this kind of thing, they 
should be able to pull something off in reality, with real guns and stuff. But 
I got overruled on that account. So we got the heavy hitters on our side." 
A glance over her shoulder, and she saw a few more of the uniformed men 
keeping the gawkers back with well-directed blows of their rifle butts. She 
looked back toward the doorway of the seedy bar, where all the rest of the 
U.N-provided storm troopers had blitzed a few seconds ago. "I'm going in 
there," she said, walking without haste toward the scene. 
"Hey!" The short, round video director grabbed at her arm, trying to pull her 
back. "You can't do that-" 
She shook Urbenton off and kept walking. 
The predictions had been right; the extraction procedure was happening so fast 
that Sarah managed to see only the last bit of action. She had no qualms about 
being around the U.N's elite squad members; they reminded her, in their 
wordless, cold-eyed efficiency, of some of the men who had worked for her when 
she took over the Tyrell Corporation. 
They set about their jobs, and did them, and then melted back into the 
shadows, minus whichever of their number had crossed over and become corpses. 
Standing in the bar's doorway, looking down the short flight of steps that led 
in, Sarah could see overturned tables and chairs, the few unnecessary figures 
of the other patrons shoved up and huddling against the walls, the 
ceiling-mounted video screens either smashed or still displaying the end 
sequence of Deckard's reenacted travails in Los Angeles. And at the far end of 
the space, the targets, the whole reason for her bargain with Urbenton and his 
backers. 
A last flurry, which she was able to witness over the dark-uniformed 
shoulders. Deckard, sitting at one side of a booth, had pulled a gun out of 
his jacket, the same weapon he had taken from her back at the hovel. Before he 
could level it and fire, the other man-she had been told he would be there, 
and for whom he was working-reached over and wrested the gun away from 
Deckard. The other man had a more urgent agenda, one that he had a chance of 
accomplishing; he emptied the gun's clip into the briefcase lying on the 
table. At that close range, the elongated bursts from the gun's muzzle touched 
the briefcase's imitation leather like quick tongues of fire; the heavy slugs 
ripped the briefcase into tattered shreds, suspended for a moment in the air 
beyond the table's edges. A cry, not of pain but furious rage, sounded from 
the fragments before they fell in twisting, charred scraps across the 
glass-littered floor. 
That was all that the man sitting across from Deckard accomplished. The U.N. 
troopers had their orders; the man was driven backward by the assault rifles' 
bullets, his chest shattered to the spine. Deckard had scrambled from the 
booth, reaching to grab the barrel of the nearest gun. The trooper expertly 
turned the rifle around, catching Deckard across the angle of the jaw, the 
hard blow sending him sprawling and unconscious. Another storm trooper reached 
into the booth and grasped the wrist of the little girl cowering there, then 
yanked her out into the open. 
The operation was over, silence filling the debris-strewn bar. "Let's go," 
said Urbenton, taking Sarah by the elbow and 
drawing her back from the doorway. "Nothing else is going to happen here." The 
troopers behind them swung their rifles, clearing a path to the ground vehicle 
that would take them out to the emigrant colony's landing field. 
"You should have killed him," Sarah said when she and the video director were 
back aboard the shadow corporation's yacht. She had kept her silence until 
then. "When you had the chance." 
"But that wasn't the deal we made." Urbenton glanced up at her, then returned 
to fussing with the intercom buttons on the lounge's desk. "You accepted my 
help-all the assistance we needed to pull this off-but you knew there were 



conditions attached. You should just be grateful that the authorities owed me 
a favor for going along with them on that video they just broadcast here." 
She sat back in the wing chair, her favorite one. "You sound like you're not 
even interested in having Deckard killed." 
"I'm not, particularly. I just think it'll make a great tape when it happens. 
A really neat .show, even better than this last one I did." His broad 
fingertip jabbed at another button. "And I just want to rev up the image, 
that's all. The right set, the right feel it'll be wonderful." Another voice 
spoke up, unprompted by any of Urbenton's poking at the intercom controls. 
When it finished and clicked off, he turned toward Sarah. "That's it," he 
announced. "They've got the little girl aboard. We're ready to go." 
Finally, she thought. She could feel it deep inside herself, the end time 
coming at last. She didn't care if Urbenton and all the rest of them went on 
acting and talking as if they could also perceive her hallucinations; it 
didn't matter. 
She didn't even care which L.A. they were heading toward. Just as long as she 
knew that-soon enough-Deckard would be there as well. 
He took the gun with him even though he knew that Marley had fired off every 
round that had been loaded inside it. The weapon might still come in handy, 
despite feeling so much lighter. 
"You're back here?" The man on the other side of the counter sneered at 
Deckard. "I thought you didn't care for our services. Figured we'd pretty much 
lost you as a customer." 
Deckard didn't feel like getting into another argument with the man; the last 
one, when he'd brought the skiff back to the rental yard upon his return from 
the Outer Hollywood station, had been pointless enough. He dug into his pocket 
and brought out all the cash he had, a hot sweaty clump of scrip, and dumped 
it on the counter. "Just give me the same one I had before," he said. "If it's 
fueled up and ready to go." 
Leaning his weight against the counter's front, Deckard didn't bother watching 
as the other man sorted through the bills. He felt tired and bruised, the 
physical aftermath of the 
attack on the bar where he'd been sitting and listening to the late Marley. 
The front of his jacket was still spotted with Marley's blood, memorial 
evidence of the assault rifle bullets that had poured into the booth. I got 
off light, thought Deckard as he looked down at himself. His jaw ached from 
the rifle butt blow he'd taken from the U.N. storm trooper; when he'd come to 
on the floor of the bar, it'd taken a few minutes for a spell of blurred 
double vision to clear, at least enough for him to stumble out onto the 
emigrant colony's streets. 
"You're short," announced the man behind the rental yard's counter. He stirred 
the bills about with his greasy forefinger. "There's not enough here for the 
deposit." 
Deckard brought himself up from his bleak thoughts and levelled his gaze at 
the man. "Then I'll take it on credit." 
The man's laugh barked out. "We don't do that." 
Wearily, Deckard sighed and reached inside his jacket. "Yes, you do." He 
placed the cold muzzle end of the gun against the man's forehead. 
A few minutes later, as the skiff was passing through the orbits of Phobos and 
Deimos-the rental yard man had told him to ju~t keep the little craft, to not 
even bother returning-Deckard pressed his aching body back into the cockpit 
seat and assessed his situation. There~s a limit to what you can do with an 
empty gun, he told himself. Especially since, where he was going, they would 
likely know that it was empty, that he was essentially unarmed. In some ways, 
it didn't even matter; he wasn't sure why he was going at all. 
Just to get killed-that was the likeliest answer to come to him. Could there 
be a better reason? Before he had lost consciousness, lying on the floor of 
the bar, Deckard had caught a glimpse of the figure standing in the doorway, 
past the U.N. storm troopers taking care of business. Even without that 
sighting, he would have known that Sarah Tyrell was the prime motivator of all 



that happened. A dramatic touch, typical of her; she might have arranged for 
the lighting to be as perfect as that, spilling past her into the bar's 
darkness, silhouetting her like some shadowed angel, merciless and 
unavoidable. 
One other glimpse, sighted as he had rolled onto his back, the last of his 
awareness pouring out through the hole that the rifle butt blow had knocked in 
his world-he had even reached up, a futile hand swamped by the black wave 
engulfing him. Reached up to stop the men pulling the Rachael child out of the 
booth, taking her away . 
That was all he had seen. The memory of it rushed through his aching skull as 
soon as he had been able to lift his head from the bar's floor. Deckard had 
brushed bits of glass from his face as he'd worked himself into a sitting 
position and looked around the empty space. He'd been alone, patrons and 
bartender having wisely fled. The presence of the dead had been with him, both 
in Marley's corpse, slumped across the blood-mired table, and the briefcase, 
torn to mute fragments. Deckard had prodded the largest remaining piece, a 
corner with one lid-hinge still attached, and had gotten no response. Whatever 
part of Roy Batty, the human original, had been imbedded in the briefcase was 
gone now, dispersed to atoms as cold and fine as the white powder scattered 
irretrievably from the empty Sebastian packet. The walls of the bar had seemed 
to recede as Deckard had dropped the dead rubbish from his hands, as though 
the dimly lit space had grown as hollow as the one inside his chest. 
Before he had gotten to his feet, balancing himself with one hand against the 
booth's table, he had found one other thing in the wreckage. Obviously left 
for him, placed right at his fingertips-Deckard had reached down and picked up 
the white rectangle of a business card, flipping it over to see the words 
SPEED DEATH PRODUCTIONS and Urbenton's name below that. 
Fm doing just what they want me to, thought Deckard as he gazed out the 
skiff's cockpit at the stars wheeling by. The gears meshing around him were 
pushed by both the living and the dead, with no great distinction made between 
those categories. Even the dead Marley had conspired, in his way, to limit all 
possibilities for action to one inevitable line. Quick thinking on Marley's 
part: when the U.N. storm troopers had burst into the bar, he had used the gun 
to eliminate 
the briefcase itself, and thus any chance of Deckard's accomplishing the job 
he'd accepted. There'd be no carrying of Batty and whatever other information 
had been encoded into the box-Isidore's list of disguised replicants or 
memetic bomb; no telling now-to the insurgents in the outer colonies. Before 
he'd died, Marley might have had the comfort of knowing that his own job, the 
one of stopping Deckard's delivery of the briefcase, had been pulled off. 
Which left the teeth of the other gears. Sarah Tyrell and Urbenton, and the 
forces aligned with them, had correctly read Deckard's mind, had predicted 
what he would do when he regained consciousness and found both the Rachael 
child missing and the simple card indicating where she had gone. Urbenton's 
card; the only address on it was a contact point in care of the studios at the 
Outer Hollywood station. That was Urbenton's world, the one in which he 
comfortably operated. That was the destination to which Deckard had programmed 
the skiff, as inevitably as the tape unrolling on some distant video monitor. 
They knew he would come there, gun loaded or not, whether his chances of 
survival were at zero or any point above. Not just for the little girl, the 
child named Rachael, but for Sarah as well. Wherever she went, he would have 
to go there, inevitably. Her destiny had become so intertwined with his that 
there was no escaping. I should've killed her when I had the chance-Deckard 
gazed out of the cockpit without even seeing the stars. Too late for regrets 
now; he had waited too long, his hand stayed by memory of another woman's 
face, the one he had loved, identical in every aspect to Sarah. The great plan 
that he'd had, that he'd conceived all the way back on Earth so long ago, had 
been the excuse for not putting the muzzle of a gun against her temple and 
pulling the trigger. Deckard knew that now. I should've killed her, but I 
couldn't have. 



Things had changed, though; he wondered if they had changed enough. Maybe he 
could do it now, despite her mirror resemblance to the dead Rachael. If Ihave 
to, he decided at last. If that was what Sarah was counting on, his inability 
to kill anything that looked so much like the woman who had slept in a 
glass-lidded coffin and who now slept and woke only in the sealed chambers of 
his remembering, then she might have a surprise coming to her. 
They all might. In his hand, when he'd come to, had been the last thing that 
Marley had given him, the ancient photo that had been hidden inside the lid of 
the Salander 3 first aid kit. That photograph was now safely tucked inside his 
jacket. And in another compartment of his memory were Marley's words, 
explaining what the photograph showed, what the image meant . . . everything. 
As much as the others knew, the strings that Sarah and Urbenton and the ones 
behind them could pull, there were still some things that they didn't know. 
And that he did. 
Deckard laid his fingertips against the lapel of his jacket, feeling 
underneath the thin, still substance of the photo, warmed by his skin and 
pulse. He figured the time was coming, and soon enough; at the front of the 
cockpit, the miniature lunar sphere of the Outer Hollywood station was rapidly 
approaching. A ripple passed across the stars as the skiff's drive units 
modulated down into uncompressed space. 
The hissing of snakes was merely the station's docking gates sealing behind 
the skiff, followed by the cockpit unlatching. Deckard emerged from the craft 
into near-total darkness; a few LEDs glimmered on the control panel mounted on 
a nearby bulkhead, and the skiff's own running lights sent his blue-edged 
shadow merging with the empty space. 
His footsteps rang against the metal flooring as he headed toward a faintly 
recalled passageway. No point in trying to conceal his presence or his 
movement toward the station's center; they knew he was here. Or not, depending 
upon whether anyone else was; the last time he'd been at Outer Hollywood, the 
girdered substructure had vibrated with the activity going on in the various 
soundstages and studios; the recirculated air had carried the subliminal 
molecules of the techs' and extras' sweat and exhaled breath. This time, as 
soon as Deckard had stepped down from the skiff, he'd perceived 
the station as empty and dead, as though abandoned by all the human and 
close-to-human forms that had been here before. 
He resisted the urge to call out, to attempt provoking a response. No need; 
reaching the limits of the station's landing dock, he laid his hand on the rim 
of the barely perceived doorway, and pseudo-life creaked into action. A beam 
of light flared on and swung toward him, striking him full in the face. Even 
as Deckard winced and shielded his eyes, another section of machinery stirred 
at his presence. He saw the glistening eye of a camera lens, suspended a few 
meters above, as it tracked and focussed upon him. The device's aperture 
irised farther open, then narrowed, as though the overlapping blades were 
biting down upon his curved reflection. 
A few more lights came on ahead of him, not enough to dispel the darkness, but 
sufficient to divide it into crescent shadows and blind corners. In the metal 
struts above, cameras flexed and shifted like roosting birds, control cables 
and video mix-down feeds looped like the tendrils of a black neoprene jungle. 
All the blank, glassy optics turned toward him, some drawing back for 
wide-angle shots, others zooming in close upon his face. In the closest ones, 
Deckard could see himself, his own eyes turned into yet smaller mirrors in 
which the station's tracking network could be discerned. 
Nothing human behind the lenses; he could sense that they were on automatic, 
programmed to find and lock upon him, recording every step he took. With idiot 
concentration, they performed their appointed task, their wide, obsessive eyes 
staring at Deckard in perfect, rapt silence. 
As he stepped onto the outskirts of the faux L.A. sets, picking his way over 
the tangles of cables and massive, banyanlike tripod legs, a rumbling sound 
came from the unlit reaches above his head. He looked up and saw neither stars 
nor clouds; the video cameras swiveled beneath an interlinked net of white PVC 



piping. The first drops of water struck Deckard's brow; within seconds, a 
monsoon torrent swept over him and along the empty, simulated street, as the 
rainstorm from the metal disDerser heads was whiDued hori 
zontal by the silvery rotating blades stationed around the set's edges. 
"That's good!" He couldn't keep himself from shouting, from tilting his head 
back so that the artificial rain-warm as his own blood, as though it had 
rolled all the way across deserts to the east-trickled under his collar and 
down his chest. "That's really good! I like that!" Deckard's voice boomed 
against unseen walls, beyond the false-fronted buildings next to him. The rain 
plastered his hair against his brow, pooled in the palms of his hands, dripped 
from the hem of his jacket. The wet skin of pavement shivered around him as 
the neon tubing at the corners and above the vacant shops' doorways sparked 
and flickered into blue and red life. One more switch had been thrown, a 
circuit completed, somewhere in this world's artificial heavens. "Bring it 
on!" 
As though in reply, the wind edged up to storm level, the puddled water at his 
feet driven into a sea of miniature waves before it was sucked away by the 
plumbing system hidden in the gutters. Deckard came close to being knocked off 
his balance, staying upright only by grabbing a lamppost wrapped with sodden 
kanji posters; the paper's heavy ink smeared across his hands and the point of 
his shoulder. Above his head, a dragon's red tongue flickered, the serpentine 
grace of its illuminated coils an icy electric blue. 
She~s here, thought Deckard. He scanned across the drenched cityscape to the 
enclosing reality of cameras and shuttered lights beyond. Everyone 
else-Urbenton and his crew-might have left Outer Hollywood, but Sarah Tyrell 
was still here. Deckard felt sure of her presence, as though some part of her 
had seeped into the fabric of the irreal Los Angeles. The lenses that watched 
him might as well have been her eyes, the steaming rain the fury of her kiss. 
He had wanted to confront her-he had been fated to-and now found himself 
embraced by her in a zone of no escaping. 
The rain slackened a bit; it could almost have been an invitation to him. 
Deckard pushed himself away from the lamppost and walked, with the false storm 
in his face, deeper into the city's artificial heart. 
"Wake up! Time to die . 
He heard the voice before he saw the figures before him. Two men, or what 
could have been men; Deckard saw one of them only from the back, as the 
long-coated figure was lifted nearly off its feet by the other's fist bunched 
at the throat. Deckard recognized one of the Kowalski replicants, but couldn't 
tell which it was, or what segment of repeated time he had stumbled into. Then 
that must be me, thought Deckard; his gaze shifted to the one the replicant's 
fierce smile burned toward. A burst of visual static rolled across the images. 
Deckard reached out his hand; his palm and fingertips touched the smooth, cold 
glass of a high-rez viewscreen, billboard size, taller than himself. The 
Kowalski and Deckard inside the screen's illusion of depth were as big as in 
life, as in the reality on the other side. One world enfolded the other, each 
equally false; Deckard looked away from the image before him and saw the walls 
of the same alley, the high metal flank of the autonomic trash-collection 
vehicle against which he had been trapped by the first Kowalski, the one back 
in the real L.A. on Earth, all the details that had been re-created on the 
Outer Hollywood set. He looked back again at the giant viewscreen and saw, 
only slightly blurred by the magnified pixel lines, the same alley's confines, 
like a photocopy one generation further on. 
The camera angle shifted, cutting to one directly over the Kowalski 
replicant's shoulder. Deckard saw his own face struggling for breath against 
the massive knot of the white-knuckled fist under his chin. They dubbed it in, 
he realized. The video unreeling on the screen was what Urbenton had 
originally intended, the computer-generated simulation of Deckard's face over 
that of the actor playing him. 
~flme to die . 
Kowalski's line, the echo from real time and Deckard's memory, had already 



been spoken. On the other side of the viewscreen, he watched as the 
replicant's blunt fingers rose toward his double's eye sockets. He braced 
himself for the sound of the gunshot, the bullet that would shatter Kowalski's 
forehead from behind, dropping the dead replicant to the ground . . 
There was no shot. No gun roared from the mouth of that other alley, the one 
inside the viewscreen's doubly false world. The scene played on to the end 
that left its Deckard a bloody-faced corpse sprawled at Kowalski's feet. From 
outside that world, Deckard had watched his own death with a mixture of fear 
and awe. For a moment, he wondered which side of the viewscreen was real, 
whether the dead thing with his face was the one who'd lived and died in L.A., 
and the one watching was its substanceless ghost. He looked down at his own 
hands, almost expecting to see the alley's rubbish-strewn ground through them, 
as though they were made of mist and rain. 
He heard the gunshot then, not at the mouth of the view-screen's alley but the 
narrow space in which he stood. It shouted from behind him, the muzzle blast 
tinging his shadow with fire. At the same moment, the viewscreen shattered 
with the bullet's impact. The other alley, with its Deckard corpse and 
blood-handed Kowalski, broke into darkness and shards of whirling glass. He 
flinched, turning his shoulder against the razor-edged storm, shielding his 
face with his upraised hands as the fragments bit at his wrists. 
In a few seconds, the shards had finished tumbling to the ground with the 
quick, high-pitched notes of breaking ice. Deckard lowered his hands; in front 
of him was the metal frame of the viewscreen, bent and twisted by the bullet's 
explosion. Scattered around it were the cables and debris of the workings, now 
reduced to dull, unrecognizable scraps of silicon and unlit phosphors. The 
world that had been contained in the screen was gone, replaced by the one in 
which Deckard stood, the simulation of an alley in Los Angeles. No corpse, his 
own or Kowalski's, lay on the rain-soaked concrete this time. 
He turned, knowing what he would see behind him. Standing there, as Rachael 
had stood so long ago, her coat's high collar brushing against her bound 
hair-Sarah Tyrell lowered the gun she held in both hands. The neon of the 
empty cityscape silhouetted her form, enough light leaking past to show the 
coldness of her gaze, the slight lift to one corner of her mouth. 
"That's not right," said Deckard. "If you want to get it just the way it was. 
Rachael didn't smile after she shot Kowalski. It wasn't so easy for her." 
Sarah let the gun dangle at her side. "We don't need an exact re-creation." 
She regarded him through half-lidded eyes. "Why don't we just say that ... 
we're rewriting history. Changing things to the way they should have been." 
With the gun, she gestured down the alley's length, as if the other figures 
were still visible there. "After all-consider how much simpler things would've 
been, for so many people, if Rachael hadn't come out and found you, and saved 
you. Then Her gaze shifted back to him. "Whatever else happened . . . you 
would've been dead before I'd ever had a chance to meet you." An undertone of 
regret sounded in her voice. "Simpler ... but I wouldn't have wanted it that 
way . 
From the front of his shirt, Deckard brushed away a few more bits of glass. 
"Where's the girl?" That was his most important business. "Where did you take 
her?" 
"The girl?" Sarah looked puzzled for a moment, then nodded. "Now I remember 
... they left her with me. Urbenton and the others; they thought you wouldn't 
come otherwise. But that's not true, is it?" She smiled knowingly. "You 
would've come here . . . just for me." 
"That's true." The backs of Deckard's hands were spotted with blood where the 
shards of the viewscreen had struck him. "I wouldn't have missed it. For 
anything." He watched a red drop fall from the tip of his little finger, then 
looked back up at Sarah. "But I just want to know that she's safe. Where is 
she?" 
"Oh ... she's safe enough." Sarah looked unconcerned. "As safe as anything can 
be in this world." She raised the gun, bringing it up at the end of her 
straightened arm. "You should be more worried about yourself." The black 



muzzle pointed directly at him. "You're the one who's not quite safe." 
He didn't bother taking the unloaded gun from inside his jacket; he knew she 
couldn't be bluffed by it. Instead, Deckard looked up at the video cameras 
mounted in the rigging 
overhead. "What about all those?" Some of the lenses were focussed on him, 
others on Sarah, with a few drawn back to take in the whole scene. "You must 
have cut some kind of deal with Urbenton. To provide him with the kind of 
footage he likes." He pointed to the gun levelled at himself. "Is this going 
to do it?" 
"You're good, Deckard." She nodded in appreciation. The fur of her coat's 
collar was spiked with raindrops, like miniature jewels. "That's the cop in 
you-always analyzing the situation." The gun lowered in her hand. "You're 
right, though. They wanted more-Urbenton and the rest of them. They set this 
all up She gestured toward the lights and the tracking video cameras. 
"Just for the two of us. There's just some things that special effects and 
computer-generated images can't really do." A shrug. "No substitute for live 
action, is there?" 
Deckard shook his head. "No-there isn't." 
"Or death, either. It's so unsatisfying when that's faked. It's like . . . 
what was it the replicant said to you? I read it in the script. 'Like an itch 
you can never scratch.'" Sarah smiled at him. "That's why I'm so glad you 
could make it here, Deckard. We've been through so much together-it would be a 
shame not to do it right when we're just about at the end." 
"Oh ... I agree." He wondered how he was going to get the gun away from her. 
If she had been crazy before, she was worse now. But not stupid-Sarah had 
carefully kept enough distance between them so that he didn't have a chance of 
suddenly lunging toward her, grabbing her arm and twisting it behind her until 
she dropped the weapon. She'd drill him before he got halfway to her, and he'd 
land at her feet with the back of his skull at the closed end of the alley. 
"Maybe we should go somewhere and talk about it." 
"We'll talk, all right. But not just now." Sarah turned away from him, then 
coyly glanced over her shoulder. "I think you'll know where to find me." 
He watched her walking away, out into the empty street, the pools of rain 
reflecting her image like polished obsidian. 
A bank of video cameras watched as well, the glistening lenses turning on 
their pivot mounts to follow her, until she had disappeared from view. 
His guess was right. Even before Deckard got to the entryway of the set's 
replica of the Bradbury Building, he saw the footprints shining wetly in the 
protected space between the ornate columns; small, a woman's, with no attempt 
having been made to erase them. It had to be Sarah; no one else was aboard the 
station, Outer Hollywood having been vacated by the watchers of his progress. 
He supposed that Urbenton was safely tucked inside some transport in the same 
orbit, viewing at long distance the results of his production arrangements. As 
Deckard had sloshed from one rainy zone of the L.A. set to the next, the 
certainty of being isolated in this small world had increased, as though the 
city itself had been emptied of every face except his own. 
Behind him, the artificial rains lashed the street, the marquee of the Million 
Dollar Theater shedding its plastic letters one by one, the winds spelling out 
some obscure noun in the pooling waters. Deckard pushed the creaking door into 
a cathedrallike dark, then stepped after it. The cameras focussed on his back 
went dead, like birds in winter, as the ones inside the building were roused 
by his presence. 
Shafts of clouded light swerved through the elaborate set's interior as he 
gripped the stair rail and looked upward. No U.N. blimp moved outside-there 
wouldn't have been clearance for even a simulation beneath the rigging's pipes 
and struts-but a carefully synchronized array of lights achieved the same 
effect. It's not even as real, thought Deckard, as Sebastian's world. In that 
little pocket universe, at least, there had been something like a sky and 
distance between one point and any other; there would have been miles for the 
genetic engineer turned deity to have travelled before he found his heart's 



desire. But here, in this false L.A., everything had been compressed and 
squeezed down to its essentials, the way the insane obliterated all but the 
pieces of their obsessions. As Deckard mounted the steps, cold wrought iron 
sliding under his palm, he wondered if it was his head 
or Sarah's that he had entered, the thin trails of light revealing the 
wreckage of her hopes or his own. 
At the end of the encircling corridor, with rain trickling down through the 
rafters and decaying plaster above him, with the unlit empty space traversed 
by the elevator's elongated vertical cage to one side, Deckard pushed open the 
door. The same door that he had opened in the past, in memory, in a real L.A., 
and in dreams and a pocket universe-it swung away from his hand, revealing the 
high-ceilinged room beyond. He almost expected the same things to happen as 
the first time, the two sawn-off friends of Sebastian's-the animated teddy 
bear and the spike-helmeted toy soldier-to march out and greet him. 
Instead, Deckard saw the Rachael child sitting at the massive claw-footed 
table, her legs dangling at the front of the chair, its carved dark-oak back 
extending above her head. She didn't notice him when he first stepped inside 
the room; the braid of her dark hair draped over her shoulder as she bent her 
head over the sepia-toned illustrations in a Victorian gardener's manual. 
Between the pages a single rose had been pressed; she lifted the brown, 
ancient flower to her nose, trying to catch whatever scent still remained. 
That was when she spotted Deckard silently watching her. 
"You're here." The Rachael child spoke calmly, flipping her ribbon-tied braid 
behind her back. She carefully laid the papery rose inside the book and closed 
the stiff leather covers. "I knew you would be. Eventually." 
"Are you all right?" Cautiously, Deckard scanned the room as he stepped 
forward. It looked as it had when he'd been in Sebastian's private world, 
dusty and stuffed with wind-up dolls and mannequins. The laughing clown figure 
towered over one end of the table, its manic smile frozen on the stark white 
face. "Did anything happen to you?" 
"I'm fine," announced the child. "Well m bored. This is a stupid place. 
Everything's broken, or it doesn't work." She poked the bride doll standing 
next to her chair; the organza veil fluttered as the doll fell over, its arms 
and delicately poised hands sticking up in the air. "But those people, 
the ones who brought me here . . . they didn't hurt me or anything. They were 
nice enough, I suppose." 
"All right Deckard barely listened to what the girl said. The crash of the 
bride doll had echoed through the room, stirring the white powdery plaster 
that had settled on the toys and overstuffed furniture. As the dust settled, 
he tried to hear anything else moving nearby. Lenses glinted as the video 
cameras, more carefully hidden in this set than outside, swiveled silently on 
their mounts, tracking the slow turn of his head. "Is there anybody else here 
with you?" He glanced at the child from the corner of his eye. "Anyone at 
all?" 
"That woman." The Rachael child laid her hands flat on the book. "You know, 
the one that looks like me. The one you call Sarah." An annoyed expression 
crossed the girl's face. "The one who didn't think I was real. She's here." 
"Where?" 
"Up there." She gave a single nod to indicate the room's ceiling and what lay 
above. "That's what she told me. She'd just gotten back here a little while 
ago; she'd been out in the rain and stuff, like you. See?" The girl pointed to 
one of the other chairs, where Sarah's high-collared coat had been tossed 
across the scrolled arms; the floor beneath was spotted with the raindrops 
shed by the fur. "She said she was going up there to wait for you." 
"I bet." Deckard realized he was being a fool. He knew what he should do; he 
should just gather up the Rachael child and lead her out of the building and 
off the faux L.A. set entirely. The skiff was waiting at the station's loading 
dock, and it could carry both him and the little girl away from here. What was 
the point in going up and confronting Sarah, with her loaded gun and equally 
lethal madness? She was primed to blow him away, only delaying the moment for 



the perfect camera opportunity. Up on the building's roof- the set that had 
been put together by Urbenton's techs, the detailed reproduction of the one in 
L.A.-the two of them would again be under the multilensed eye of the video 
cameras and lights in the overhead rigging; much better, cinematically, than 
the relatively constricted setup here in the rooms beneath. That must've been 
part of the agreement, thought Deckard. 1b get me out where the best camera 
angles are. Completing the arc, a nice sense of structure on the director's 
part: to die where he hadn't died before, where he'd been saved from dying by 
the replicant with Roy Batty's face. "I'll just bet she wants me to go up 
there." 
"That's what she said." The Rachael child gave a shrug. And a sharp-eyed gaze 
at Deckard. "You don't have to do it if you don't want to." 
The little girl was eerily smart-for reasons that Deckard knew something of; 
back in the Martian emigrant colony, Marley had told him about the child's 
lonely, eccentric growing-up aboard the scuttled Salander 3, and more than 
that- but she was wrong now. He did have to do it, to go and meet Sarah on the 
rain-swept roof beneath the watching cameras. 
"We could never get away," he said to the girl sitting at the table. "There'd 
be no place we could go ... that I could take you to. Not Earth, not Mars, not 
anywhere. No place that she wouldn't find us again. So I'd just have to do it 
eventually. And get it over with. Here or there; now or some other 
time. But it has to happen." 


"I don't know about any of that." The Rachael child looked guilelessly 
at him. "That's not any of my business. But you have to do what you think is 
best." 
"All right." Deckard nodded slowly. "That's just what I'll do." He took the 
gun out of his jacket and laid it on the table. "This isn't any good-it's not 
loaded. So forget about it; I just don't want to carry it around with me 
anymore. If anything happens . . . if I don't come back down, or if Sarah 
comes down without me, or if those other people come here . 
He shrugged. "There's not really anything you can do. And 
you shouldn't have to." 
"Should I go hide? If that's what happens?" 
Deckard smiled at the girl. "Where do you think you'd go?" 
"I don't know." The Rachael child gave another shrug. "Somewhere. There's a 
whole city out there." She pointed to 
one of the arched windows. "With people and stuff. I could find someplace 
where nobody would know where to look for me." 
He glanced over his shoulder at the window, with the artificial rain beating 
against the glass, the gauzy curtain stirred by the drafts that had penetrated 
the meticulously constructed decay of the interior set. She believes it~s 
real, thought Deckard. The ones who had brought her here- Urbenton and the 
others-had let the child go on with the notion that they had left her in the 
middle of a real city, the real Los Angeles. He didn't know if that had been 
cruel or kind on their parts, or whether it made any difference. The way the 
girl had been brought up, by the autonomic machinery of the Salander 3, the 
city outside these windows, such as it was, probably seemed as real as any 
other could have. 
"No," said Deckard. "That's not a good idea. Don't try to hide. I don't think 
they'll hurt you. If I don't come back . 
then just let them take you to where they want to. Maybe they'll take you back 
home. You know, where you came from. You could stay there a long time, and 
you'd be all right." 
"But I don't want to." A tear had welled up and trembled at the Rachael 
child's dark lashes. "I don't want to go there. I'd rather stay with you." The 
high-backed chair toppled over with a crash as the girl pushed herself away 
from the table; she ran to him and hugged him around the waist, the side of 
her face against his jacket. "I'm going with you." 
"No, you're not. You can't." The same protective, almost paternal feeling as 
before passed silently through Deckard's thoughts. The girl looked so much 



like Rachael, the woman he'd loved; she could have been their daughter, a 
child that could never have happened. Not here, he mused. Maybe out there, in 
the stars. Perhaps Rachael would have been one of those that changed, became 
human; they could have had a life together . . 
Too late for that, he knew. Now there were only the bits and pieces of his own 
life to pick up and sort out, make something of. Something other than killing. 
That was why he'd quit being a blade runner a long time ago-but that hadn't 
been enough. That was why he'd agreed to take on the other 
job presented to him, the business of delivering the briefcase with Batty's 
voice and Isidore's list inside it; too late for that as well. Whether it had 
been salvation or death for the insurgent replicants-it didn't matter now. 
The only things left to him were the little girl . . . and what Marley had 
told him about her. About who she really was. And the slim proof-not even 
that; evidence that had to be taken on faith as to what it meant-that Marley, 
two minutes away from death, had given him. Deckard touched the front of his 
jacket, a finger's width away from where he had been carrying the empty gun, 
and felt the thin stiff rectangle of the ancient photograph, the one that had 
been hidden in the Salander 3's first aid kit. That was all he had with which 
to confront Sarah; one way or another, it would be enough. 
"Look-" With difficulty, he managed to push the child away from him. "You stay 
down here, and everything will be all right. I promise." He wondered for a 
moment why she had formed such a sudden, dramatic attachment to him. There~s 
no one else, thought Deckard. The child was all alone in this universe, or in 
any other. Plus-it was impossible to tell-she might have sensed the fragments 
of his past, the memories of someone else named Rachael that the girl's dark 
eyes and grave manner conjured up so painfully in him. Even if she didn't 
understand yet how those things had come to be. Maybe she just felt sorry for 
him. "All right?" Deckard put his hands on her shoulders and leaned down to 
look straight into her eyes; the glimpse of them ran through his own heart 
like a dagger of silver and ice. "The bad things have already happened," he 
told the girl. "Nothing else can go wrong," he lied. "So don't worry about 
me." 
He left her sitting at the table again, surrounded by the mutely uncomforting 
dolls. The Rachael child folded her arms across the thick, leather-bound book 
and laid her head down, concealing her face from him. Deckard stepped ~ut to 
the open corridor beyond and quietly pulled the door shut behind himself. 
The last time-the first time Deckard had been in this building, in fts 
original form back in L.A-he'd had to climb laboriously to its roof, his 
scrabbling progress through the crumbling, waterlogged plaster and sagging 
beams impeded by a hastily bandaged hand, the fingers that the Batty replicant 
had broken aching and useless. Fear had driven him then; he'd been trying to 
escape death. This time, he was walking toward it. I'll take the stairs, he 
thought wryly. 
A shaft of utility stairs at the back of the building-it was undoubtedly the 
same route that Sarah had already taken. In the damp air, as Deckard craned 
his neck to look upward, he caught a trace of perfume, one of the opiated 
floral scents that his mind and senses had learned to associate first with 
Rachael, then with Sarah. The invisible molecules were tinged with something 
more acrid but just as distinctive and evocative: cigarette smoke, something 
dark and expensive, suited to the taste of a Tyrell heir. He looked down and 
spot-
A 
ted, on the landing's rough concrete, silken white paper and brown shreds of 
tobacco ground out cold by her shoe. 
The metal steps echoed in the narrow space, loud enough to evoke a shiver in 
the video camera lenses that peeked out at him from their clefts in the 
unfinished walls. Up ahead, above him, Deckard saw a rust-mottled door left 
open, creaking on its hinges as the fan-driven storm winds swung it back and 
forth. He stopped, rain spattering in his face as he tried to catch sight of 
anyone waiting in the darkness. Nothing; he grasped the cold pipe rail and 



continued climbing. 
"Sarah?" He pushed the door all the way back-the metal clanged against the 
side of the hatchway structure-and stepped out onto the roof. Warm rivulets 
trickled down his throat as he called out again. "Where are you?" 
No answer came. Deckard walked farther from the door, leaving the stairs and 
his escape behind him. Looking up, he saw no stars but the broader points of 
the lights in the studio's truss-work rigging; only a few meters away, as 
though-in a child's notion of the world-he had climbed all the way to the dark 
heavens, the universe's weld-stitched limit. The lights' spectra had been 
shifted down to an icy blue, colder than the streets' veins of neon; shadows 
fluttered across him like the wings of unseen, untouched 'birds as staggered 
ranks of archaic wind turbines, blades long and scimitar-curved, rotated in 
the damp breeze coming from the edges of the set. 
He worked his way through the windmills, avoiding the scything arms, coming at 
last to the roof's raised parapet. His hands, grasping the crumbled brick and 
thick tatters of asphalt sheeting, looked as bloodless as a corpse's flesh. 
They hardly seemed to belong to him at all; the uncanny sensation passed 
through him as though he were looking at someone else, someone who had slid 
inside his body and face. The hands, and the body that leaned its 
insubstantial weight into them, might have been those of the actor who bad 
played him in the video he had seen; the disoriented feeling increased, 
setting him even farther away. For a dizzying moment, Deckard wondered if he 
were still watching the video, 
the artificial world into which his own life had been transformed. 
Squeezing his eyes shut, his hands gripping even tighter on the fragile stone, 
he tried to make himself feel real again. Or as real as possible. I've become 
my own ghost, thought Deckard. A dead thing that watches and mourns the past; 
he'd felt that way before, when he'd sat beside a glass-lidded coffin, leaning 
forward with his chin on his doubled fists, looking at the sleeping, dying 
woman he'd loved. Keeping his vigil through one sleepless night after another, 
time seeping away beneath the real stars, the rain swallowed by earth and the 
dead leaves beneath the trees. It might as well have been his own face he'd 
seen beneath the glass, in a video monitor rather than a coffin. He had died, 
or as good as, even before Rachael had; he'd just had the privilege of 
witnessing his own death, over and over, in one cold world after another. 
The bleak meditation didn't end, but became familiar enough, an old wound, 
that he could function once more. Deckard opened his eyes and looked over his 
shoulder at the elaborate rooftop set. They did a good job, he had to admit. 
Urbenton and his crew of technicians, the people who had constructed the 
set-in the thin, fragmented light, he could see how close they had come to the 
original, how much the fake was indistinguishable from the genuine. The 
turbines spun in place, like idiot dervishes on edge, over a buckling field 
speckled with pigeon shit-had they scraped up the droppings from an actual 


L.A. building roof and shipped them here, or was there a flock of birds kept 
on hand in some remote aviary zone of the station? It all smelled real enough, 
a blending of monsoon steam and guanoid archaeology, that at least some of 
Deckard's senses were fooled. 
He looked back over the parapet at the imitation city that surrounded the 
building. All the little tricks of the video trade had been used, from 
foreshortened perspectives to banks of fiber optics for a vista of pinpoint 
lights stretching to an imaginary horizon; other whole sections were blank or 
covered with chroma-key backdrops, for digitized mattes to be ceegeed in 
during postproduction. The miniature city seemed caught between different 
levels of reality, at some muddled point halfway on the line from dream to 
something that could be touched. In some way, that made the dark nocturnal 
city he saw now as real as the L.A. he remembered on Earth. Realer than real, 
thought Deckard. A night made of the same stuff as the replicants, dreams and 
fears and a desperate longing to exist. He had lived in that inchoate city, 
had been part of it, but-he knew now-hadn't belonged in it. It's their world. 
He nodded slowly, rain trickling across the backs of his hands. Their night as 

well, in which he was just a shadow, a thing that wouldn't even be remembered 
when the sun came up. 
"Hello, Deckard." The voice-the one that he'd known he would hear-came from 
behind him. "I was waiting for you." 
From over his shoulder, he looked and saw Sarah standing a few yards from him, 
in the center of the roof's area, the wind turbines spinning and stretching 
away into darkness. He turned and leaned back against the parapet, hands 
gripping its edge on either side. "I had some business to take care of first. 
With the little girl. I had a talk with her." 
"How sweet." Sarah stepped forward into the partial light filtering down from 
above. The skin of her face and throat looked cold, bloodless. "I suppose that 
was a good thing for you to do. Whether she's real or not. Actually . . . I 
don't care anymore." The gun in her hand glinted as though a piece of the dark 
had frozen. "It's not important, is it?" 
"Maybe not." His heart had ticked faster for a moment at seeing a weapon in 
someone else's hand, knowing that he didn't have one. "It all depends. On what 
you want." 
"Ah." She nodded and smiled. "That's true. I used to want things. Different 
things." With cruel playfulness, Sarah raised the gun to eye level, arm 
straight, and looked down the barrel at him. "And now ... just one thing. 
Guess what it is." 
"I've got a pretty good idea." Inside him, his pulse had slowed back down as a 
resigned calm moved through his blood. Whatever was going to happen, he had 
prepared himself for it. "I wouldn't have come here if I didn't know." 
The face of the woman he loved studied him over the gun's 
black metal. "You're not really human, are you, Deckard?" Rachael's face, 
Sarah wearing it like a mask, though it had been hers to begin with. "If you 
ever were, you've managed to get over it. Like I have. So it's not just a cop 
thing, having ice water going in and out of your heart. It's just something 
that happens to people like us." 
He nodded in agreement. "The Eye of Compassion . 
"What was that?" 
"Nothing," answered Deckard. "Something ... somebody told me about. We're not 
the ones who decide who's human and who's not." He looked over to the faked 
skyline surrounding the building, then back to her. "There's nothing we can do 
about it." 
"Yes, there is. There always is." No trace of irony or sarcasm sounded in the 
woman's voice. "You shouldn't give up hope like that." Her hand squeezed the 
gun, tight and trembling. "You can always kill. That works. Especially if you 
do it to the things you love. Then . . . then you have a chance." 
"A chance of what? Of being human?" 
"No Sarah gave a shake of her head. "Of not caring anymore. So when you 
die-when you take care of yourself finally-it's not so hard." 
The voice of madness, speaking the same words inside his head-Deckard listened 
to her and knew that it would be easy to agree. Or to go even further, deeper 
into one's own madness; the temptation always existed in him to accept only 
what he saw, what part of him wanted to see and believe. That it really was 
Rachael standing in front of him, alive again, unchanged. That the other woman 
with the same face, the one named Sarah, was as irreal as she had thought the 
child waiting downstairs inside the building was. A memory, a bad dream, a 
hallucination. If that were the case, he wouldn't have any problem with her 
pointing a gun at him and pulling the trigger. That was a small price to pay 
for seeing Rachael again, if only for the moment between the firing of the 
bullet and its entry into his deluded heart. 
He had closed his eyes, though he could still see her-remembering was enough 
for that. Easier as well, to mentally 
edit out the infinitesimal differences-the coldness at the dark centers of her 
eyes, a hard curl at one corner of her mouth-that made her Sarah instead of 
Rachael. It didn't help much; when Deckard opened his eyes again, the sight of 
the woman sent a sharp-pointed blow through him, more painful than if she had 



actually squeezed the trigger of the gun. 
"Is that what you're going to do?" He'd watched as the momentary tremor left 
her upraised hand. "Kill yourself, too?" 
"Why not Sarah's eyes almost seemed to be looking for sympathy from him. 
"Why should you be the only one to get lucky?" 
Deckard continued to watch as she strode forward, all the way to the 
building's edge. She turned and leaned back against the parapet a carefully 
judged distance away from him, just far enough that there was no chance of his 
being able to grab the gun before she fired. 
"You know Sarah mused aloud. "The illusion kind of breaks down here." She 
glanced over her shoulder, toward the street below. "It's not really very high 
up at all, is it?" Her gaze turned to him. "Not like the real one, back in Los 
Angeles. I've seen that one; I've been there." Head cocked to one side, she 
smiled coyly at him. "When I was first finding out all about you, Deckard; I 
went and looked at the places you'd been, where things happened to you." She 
nodded toward the drop on the parapet's other side. "You must've been pretty 
scared, back then; if you'd fallen from the real one, they would've had to 
have picked you up from the pavement with a sponge. Whereas here Sarah 
gave an unimpressed shrug. "Hardly enough to kill someone. You might actually 
even survive." 
"Maybe." Deckard looked over the edge behind him. She was right; the illusion 
of the city's reality was dispelled from this angle. The machinery and 
interlaced cables of the set were detectable, like the secret workings of the 
world revealed by a paranoid vision come true. "Is that the deal you made with 
Urbenton? He always wants the ~best footage he can get. So a shot of me 
falling . . . I imagine that would be 
just about perfect. He could re-edit the video he did about me, put in a new 
ending, one where I die. Maybe that would suit both him and the people he's 
working for." 
"Oh, it would. You're exactly right on that one." Sarah nodded, as though 
admiring his take on the situation. "That's pretty much the U.N's little 
agenda. The first version of the video-the one you saw-that was only shown in 
the Martian emigrant colony." She pointed toward him with the gun. "They'd 
love to do another version for broadcast on Earth that would really prove just 
how dangerous escaped replicants are. In case there might be anyone starting 
to feel sorry for them. Urbenton could always fake your getting killed, do it 
with special effects, all the different tricks they have for that sort of 
thing-but there's nothing quite as convincing as reality, is there? No matter 
how much you have to fake it. Plus, this way, there's no living blade runner 
named Rick Deckard turning up later to embarrass everyone. The little details 
. . . like your not being killed by the fall but from a bullet Sarah gave 
another shrug. "Urbenton can fix that up in postproduction. Or not. That's his 
business, not mine." She studied the gun in her own hand for a moment, then 
looked at Deckard again. "I'll have kept my part of the bargain." 
"You're a person of your word. In your own way." 
"I try to be." Sarah spoke with no more irony than before. "I've only lied 
when I had to. When there was something I had to have. And what did it get 
me?" She shook her head. "Nothing. I learned my lesson." Her voice turned 
bitter. "I should've just stayed what I was. Not tried to be something else. 
Like your precious Rachael. It's just no good-the dead get all the breaks in 
this world." 
The artificial rain had lessened a bit. Deckard looked up to where the clouds 
and stars should have been, letting the drops wash down his face and throat. 
"But do you know?" The words were soft, almost a whisper. "Do you know who you 
are?" 
"Come on." Her response was sour, irritated. "I'm not in the mood for the 
usual mind games, Deckard. I'm tired of playing even my own. So it's not 
likely I'm going to fall for 
yours. If that's what you're going to try, then I'll just stop wasting time 
and kill you now. There's a limit to how sentimental I get." 



He said nothing. Instead, he reached inside his jacket and took out the thin, 
flat rectangle of the photograph, the one that had been given to him by the 
dead man back on Mars. Deckard held it by one corner and gazed at the 
long-past scene it revealed. Then he held the photo out to Sarah. 
"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 fro~n 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 Sal ander 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." 
'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 es 
cape, 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." 
Sarah's gaze had fastened upon her hand, the one holding the gun, as though 
she were seeing it for the first time. "Who She spoke falteringly. "Who 
told you ... all this . . 
"Does it matter?" 



"Whoever it was Her teeth clenched with anger. "They were lying." 
"Sarah Her name, his voice low, the syllables as kindly said as possible. 
"You know it's true. You might not have known all the details, but the truth . 
. . you knew that 
all along. At least from the time you went back to the Salander 3. And you 
found her. The little girl; your sister. The first Rachael. She was real, and 
you knew it. You knew you weren't crazy; you knew you weren't suffering from 
some hallucination. Yet you kept on saying that you were, saying that she 
wasn't real, she didn't exist. Even though you knew she did." He drew a deep 
breath, the damp air filling his lungs. "You wouldn't have done that if you 
hadn't realized what it meant that that child should be there at all. And you 
knew somehow-you felt it-that she was your sister. That she was the same as 
you." 
The words had had an impact on Sarah. She closed her eyes, swaying slightly 
where she stood, the gun's weight trembling in her hand. After a moment, she 
nodded slowly. "Yes Her voice was a whisper, barely audible. "I knew . 
"You knew," said Deckard. "But you did not believe. Because you didn't want 
to." 
She said nothing. There was nothing more for her to say. 
"Now what do you want?" He watched, pitying her now. 
"I don't know." Sarah looked at the gun in her hand. "I suppose I could just 
go ahead and kill you." She sounded close to crying, a broken thing. "Since 
you don't love me. You never did." 
"I never did. I never could." 
She looked at him, eyes pleading. "Is that what I should do?" 
"Maybe." Deckard shrugged. He felt tired, at the end of his own words. "But if 
you do that ... remember He looked up at the video cameras watching them. 
"That's what they wanted you to do." 
"You're right." Sarah nodded, her gaze focussed on some deep interior vista. 
"That's what I've always done. I've never even known what I wanted." She 
looked up at him. "But now I do." 
He knew what she meant. He knew what would happen next. "Are you sure?" 
Sarah nodded. "It was always going to come to this. You win, Deckard." 
"No He shook his head. "You do. Because now you get what you want." 
"I suppose you're right." Exhaustion sounded in her voice, as though from the 
long journey it had taken to reach this place. She managed a smile, a fragile 
turn of her mouth. "Could you She lowered her hand, letting the gun drop 
to her side. "Could you kiss me? The way you kissed her?" 
No words. Deckard took her in his arms, feeling the warmth of her body through 
his own rain-soaked clothes. She turned her face, eyes closed, up to his. 
Time stopped. Memory took its place. But even that had to end. 
She was kind to him. She took care of herself. 
The gun fell to the rooftop, a black shape surrounded by a thin, rippling 
mirror. Even as the echo of the shot rolled against the studio walls, the 
night city's false horizon. She fell then, and was still beautiful. He looked 
down at the crumpled form, something that might have once been human. The 
blood from her shattered temple flowed and mingled with the pooled rain. 
Deckard looked up at the cameras. "How about that?" His furious shout battered 
the empty lenses. "Was that good enough? Did you get what you wanted?" 
As though in answer, the observing spark died inside all the video cameras. 
The artificial rain had already stopped; now the lights came up, dispelling 
the false night. The taping was over. Deckard stood in the center of the 
building set's roof, a dead woman at his feet, one that had the face of 
someone he'd loved, now wrapped in the same sleep, the one from which there 
was no waking. The one he envied. 
He still had a job to do. He left the gun where it lay, a few inches from 
Sarah Tyrell's hand, and walked back toward the stairs. 
The Rachael child had fallen asleep at the table, her head upon the old 
leather-bound book. Deckard touched her shoulder; she sat up, blinking and 
frowning. She rubbed her eyes with her knuckles. "I'm kind of hungry," she 



announced. 
"That's all right." Deckard took the child's hand and helped her from the 
high-backed chair. "We're going home." 
The girl looked up at him as he led her toward the door, past the silent toys. 
"Where's that?" 
"I don't know," said Deckard. "I guess we'll find out." 
After 
"Niemand-your papers are a mess." The U.N. bureaucrat looked at the documents 
spread across his desk and shook his head. "Do you really think you can get 
off this planet with your affairs in this condition?" 
"I don't know," said Deckard. He leaned back in the uncomfortable chair that 
had been provided to him. "I don't much care, either." 
The bureaucrat glanced up at him with small eyes filled by officious hatred. 
"You have an attitude problem as well." All the authority of the U.N's 
emigration program sounded in the man's voice. "Don't you?" 
Deckard made no reply. The office, a tiny cubicle in the central 
administration building of the Martian emigrant colony, smelled like photocopy 
toner and the adrenaline of small-fry bullies. Deckard had no particular wish 
to be here at all; they had sent for him. The announcement of the resumption 
of travel to the far colonies had gone out a couple 
of weeks ago, but he hadn't bothered to make an application. Let them come 
find me, he'd decided. 
And they had. The uniformed security men had shown up at the hovel, asking for 
him by pseudonym. He'd told the Rachael child to wait for him, that he'd be 
back before too long; then he'd pulled the door shut and had gone off with the 
grim-faced men on either side of him. 
"Your original entry visa-" The bureaucrat flipped through a passport. "Shows 
that you came here with your wife." The mean little eyes raised from the 
leatherette-bound booklet. "Where's Mrs. Niemand?" 
Deckard didn't even bother to shrug. "Why don't we just say . . . that she and 
I had domestic troubles." 
The bureaucrat laid down the passport. "There's also nothing in the Niemand 
family documents about having a little girl with you. When you came to Mars, 
you were childless." 
This time, he shrugged. "The domestic troubles didn't start right away." 
"Obviously. From what our sources tell us, this child . 
The small eyes glanced at another sheet of paper. "Reportedly named Rachael . 
. . is ten years old." 
"That sounds about right." 
"Mr. Niemand." The bureaucrat touched his fingertips together in a cage. "You 
haven't been on Mars for ten years." 
"Then it's a mystery, isn't it"-Deckard looked straight back into the man's 
eyes-"how these things come about." 
"No, it's not." Through his steepled hands, the bureaucrat regarded the figure 
on the other side of him. "Why don't we just cut the crap? We know who you 
really are." 
Another shrug. "Good for you." 
"We've gotten our orders ... Mr. Niemand." The bureaucrat's lip curled as he 
spoke the alias. "From the top levels. We're to put you and the little girl on 
the next transport heading to the outer colonies. You wanted to emigrate?" He 
gathered the passport and other documents into a pile. "Then you're ready to 
go. Cleared, approved, expedited- you're out of here." 
Deckard picked up the booklet on top of the rest, opened it, 
and looked at the rubber-stamped markings on the pages. "What if I don't want 
to go now? What if I've changed my mind?" 
The eyes narrowed down to pinpricks. "It's not up to you." 
He regarded his own hologram photo at the front of the passport, then laid it 
down. "You say you know who I am." Deckard kept his voice level, emotionless. 
"But what about you? Who are you?" 
The bureaucrat's gaze shifted uneasily. "That doesn't matter. Mr. Niemand." 



"It matters to me." Deckard leaned forward. "I don't know who the hell you 
are. You could be anybody." His voice grated harder. "You could be the U.N. 
You could be the cops; maybe you're really working for the LAPD. You could be 
the rep-symps; I don't know how far they've infiltrated the authorities. Maybe


 He studied the other man's round, insignificant face. "Maybe you're the 
Tyrell Corporation . 
that shadow of it. I just don't know." 
"Let's face it." The bureaucrat showed an unpleasant smile. "Your track record 
on this sort of thing isn't the greatest. You can't even tell if I'm human or 
not." 
"You're right. I can't even tell about myself anymore." Deckard slowly shook 
his head. "And I don't know why you want me to go out there. To the stars." 
"You're not important," said the bureaucrat. Or whatever he was. "You don't 
matter at all. It's the girl. You know that much, don't you?" 
Deckard kept his silence. The other man was right again. That was about all he 
knew for certain. He'd known it since he'd come back with the child from the 
Outer Hollywood station. She'd been born out there. Far away, he mused. And 
strange. The first replicant child, the beginning of that other species' 
inheritance. Of all that had once been considered the exclusive province of 
human beings. 
There had been other things he'd agreed to carry to that place he'd never 
seen. And he'd lost them. For good or ill, he didn't know. But he still had 
the child with him. A child bearing his dead love's name, and her face with 
those dark, quietly watching eyes. Rachael . . 
That much he had also known. That whatever else happened-whatever he had to 
do, however it was made possible; whatever would come about when they reached 
that destination-he would take her there. That was the job he had, the job 
that he'd accepted. 
"All right," said Deckard. He gathered up the other documents and held them 
with the passport in his hands. "I'll go." He pushed the chair back and stood 
up. "How much time do I have?" 
The bureaucrat looked up at him. "The transport leaves in twelve hours." The 
small eyes were almost kind. "You're doing the right thing, Mr. Niemand." 
"I don't know that." Deckard tucked the documents inside his jacket. He turned 
and grasped the knob of the office's thin door, then glanced over his shoulder 
at the other man. "And neither do you." 
"It's not up to us, Mr. Niemand." 
"Probably not." He pulled open the door. "Maybe out there I'll find out who 
does decide. And then I'll know." 
The bureaucrat nodded. "Perhaps." 
Deckard shut the door behind himself and headed down the narrow corridor. 
There was no hurry; the few things he had to pack for himself and the little 
girl wouldn't take long. 
Whatever else they might need, he supposed, would be waiting for them at their 
journey's end. 



