Replicant Night by K. W. Jeter Page B

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