K. Jeter: Edge Of Human

"That's one of the reasons I quit. I didn't think keeping Tyrells alive should've been part of the job description." Facing her was like standing at the cabin's open door during a hard winter storm. "You're Eldon Tyrell's niece, huh?"

"As I said."

"The corporation should've sent you out with a better lie." He shook his head, almost feeling sorry for her, whatever she was. "Don't you think I pulled the department's file on the Tyrell family? I did that a long time ago, even before I left L.A. Eldon Tyrell had no nieces, nephews, kids of his own; nothing. Nada. He was the last of the line. Thank God."

Her smile appeared again. "The police files have a hole in them. I was born off-world; there wouldn't be any record of me in the files, unless my uncle had wanted it to be there. And he had a thing for family privacy."

"Good for him. But the files include colony births. You could've been popped anywhere from Mars to the Outreaches, and you'd be in there."

She half sat upon the edge of the coffin, the high-collared and expensive-looking coat falling open. "I wasn't born in any of the colonies." One hand brushed a fragment of blackened leaf from the synthetic fur. "But in transit. And not a U.N. ship. Private."

"Impossible. There hasn't been a private spaceflight since…"

"That's right." She knew — he could see it — that she had him then. "Since the Salander 3. The last one before the U.N. clampdown on corporate interstellar travel. The last one, and it was a Tyrell operation. That's where I was born. On Tyrell Corporation property — inside it, actually — and way beyond U.N. jurisdiction."

"The Salander 3…" He nodded slowly, mulling the formation over, trying to dredge up from little-used memory whatever he knew about it. The dates seemed right, just far enough back so that somebody could've been born aboard the craft and have grown into an adult by now. That wasn't the problem.

Private-sector travel beyond the Earth's atmosphere had been forbidden by the U.N. authorities for a reason. And the Salander 3 had been it. A failed expedition to the Prox system, failed despite the billions that the Tyrell Corporation had poured into the effort… and that was about the limit of public knowledge, eroded even further by collective memory failure. But the police files on the matter weren't my better. Once, when he'd first started retiring escaped replicants for a living, he'd poked through the department's on-line files, looking for anything that'd help give him a handle on his walking, thinking prey. A search keyed on Tyrell gave him days' worth of the department's internal memos and reports, the corporation's own press releases, product schematics, research papers from their bio-engineering labs.. the works. Punching in Salander 3 had mired him in one screen after another of ACCESS DENIED and AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY flags, password requests way beyond his rank. He'd already been savvy enough about how the department worked to know that prying off a lid weighed down with that many alarms and padlocks would get him nothing but hex marks in his own personnel file.

Going off-line and into the basement morgue of hard-copy printouts had been even spookier. He could remember standing beside a battered metal cabinet, beneath low sizzling fluorescents, water dripping from a broken pipe to the already inch-deep concrete; standing there with a thin sheaf of dog-eared manila folders, all with some variation of Salander 3 at the top edge, all of them empty except for yellowed routing slips signed by long-retired secretarial staff, ghosts with initials…

The memory flash rolled through his head, dark and jagged as photo-reverse lightning. Standing in the deepest department basement, dust sifting onto his shoulders from the vibration of the rep train hurtling through its own unlit tunnels, past the endless rows of tottering cabinets and the walls cryptically stained with black rot.. The files had been pulled from on high, from the top government levels, like God reaching down into the affairs of men. And never returned; maybe they'd all been asked the day after the one marked on the routing slips. That's what it'd be like to die, he'd thought then and now, or at least the old comforting notion of the process. You ascended, leaving your empty manila folder behind on the ground, but you didn't return, not ever.

"Where'd you go? Where are you?"

He kept his eyes closed, walking around in those echoing rooms inside his head. A little more poking around online had brought him a few scraps: a low-rez news photo of the Salander 3's mission leaders, Anson Tyrell and his wife Ruth, setting out with big smiles for Proxima.. and six years later, the day after the Salander 3 had come limping hack to the docking terminals out at San Pedro, the notice of the cremation service for them. You didn't need cop savvy to get suspicious about that one. There wasn't a cover-up deep enough to keep corpses frozen between here and Prox from giving off the decayed smell of murder.

And now he was standing here, decades and what might is well have been a world away, with their grown-up orphan child in front of him.

"Listen, Deckard — I don't have time for you to go fading out on me. There's never time for that."

Her voice, the same as Rachael's but with a tighter and harder edge, stung him back into present time. He saw her still standing beside the black coffin. "So you're the daughter of Anson Tyrell — is that it?"

"Very good. You're up on your Tyrell genealogies. And since Eldon Tyrell was his only brother, and no other family besides me — that means I am Tyrell now." Sarah's gaze set level into his. "I inherited the world's largest privately held corporation. The whole thing. Not bad."

"But before that — while your uncle was still alive — he used you for.. what's it called?" The specific word was stuck back in his memory and wouldn't come out. "The template?"

"Templant. The term of art in the Tyrell labs is templant. As in replicant. And you're right — that's what my uncle used me for. The source model for your Rachael." On her face, eyes narrowed, the partial smile was a knife wound even thinner. "And his."

More spooky things, the creepy business of the dead — he could hear them in her voice. "Were there others?"

"Besides her?" She looked down past her hand on the coffin's glass lid, at the face of the sleeping, dying woman inside, then back up to him. She shook her head. "Just the one. Rachael wasn't what you'd call a production-line number. More of a custom job, if you know what I mean. For my uncle Eldon."

He knew. He'd suspected as much, way back then in the city, when he'd gone to the Tyre11 corporate headquarters and talked to the man. There'd been that sick jitter in the pillared office suite's atmosphere, a tension shimmer that cops, like dogs, could catch at the limit of their hearing. And Eldon Tyrell's smile, possessive and sated, the corners of his mouth pulled upward as if by invisible fishhooks. Every silent thing about him had given away the game.

"I wouldn't have thought that'd be something a person like you would go along with. Being a templant."

"Really, Deckard." She sounded almost pitying. "Not as if I had an option in the matter, is it? When my uncle was alive, you would've been right: I was Tyre11 property. Meaning his. Besides, what would the alternative have been? Not being a templant — and then there wouldn't have been any Rachael. There would've been just me. And him."

He'd known all these things, or some of them at least, though Rachael hadn't told him. He'd known instead from her silence, from the way she would sometimes stiffen in his arms, turning her face away from his. Away from any man's face.

"Maybe.. maybe having a replicant of you made… maybe that was his way of showing that he did love you. After all."