Eye and Talon (19 page)

'Maybe not.' Vogel gave a slow, judicious nod. 'But you're pretty much in the dark, though. You don't even know
why
you came here. Do you?'

'It was a lead. A clue.' Her own voice sounded sullen to her. 'Sure, I didn't know what I'd find, but I had to come here and look. That's my job.'

'No, it isn't. You keep forgetting things. You don't
have
a job anymore. You're not a blade runner now; Meyer fired you. You're on your own.' The edge of Vogel's sharp gaze seemed to peel back a layer of her skin. 'So whatever you do, you're doing it for your own reasons. You just don't know what they are yet.'

'And you do?'

'Maybe,' said Vogel. 'After all, there's all sorts of things I know that you don't. Important things. And not only about owls and stuff.' The hand that he could still use reached out and laid a fingertip on her rain-damp brow. 'Things about
you
.'

'Prove it.' Iris slapped his hand away from her face. 'Otherwise, I've got stuff to do.'

'You don't have anything more important than
this
.' Vogel's hand gestured, with exaggeratedly slow grace, toward the ruins. 'This means
everything
to you.'

'Are you kidding?' She sneered at both him and the mountains of rubble. 'I don't even know what this place is.'

'Exactly,' said Vogel. He turned his head slightly, peering closer at her. 'Don't you think that's strange? I mean — your not knowing about this place. It's a big surprise to you, isn't it? You've never seen it before.'

'No.' Iris shook her head. 'I haven't.'

'Yet look at the size of it.' Vogel turned and gestured expansively, with his one good hand. 'It's huge. Before its fall, it must have been the largest building complex in all of Los Angeles.'

'Maybe.'

'Trust me on this one. It was. And here's what's left of it, right in the heart of LA, and you don't know anything about it.'

'It's a big city. I can't be expected to know every square foot of it.'

'For a city girl, you've got some interesting gaps in your geography,' Vogel said. 'But never mind. Come on. I'll show you around.' He started walking toward the jagged floes of steel-reinforced concrete, like an Arctic explorer heading toward the jumbled forward edge of glacial ice. When Iris didn't follow, he stopped and glanced over his shoulder at her. 'What's the matter? You got a lot out of the last time. Why are you scared now?'

She didn't know.
But he's right
, she thought.
I'm terrified
. It was a new feeling for her, one so intriguing that she felt she could almost step outside her own skin and study it, like a close examination of her image in a mirror. She took her focus from her trembling soul and laid it upon the mounted ruins beyond the taunting Vogel. The rain had increased its slanting fury, the monsoon's leading edge having given way to the heart of the storm; both she and Vogel were drenched to the skin. Her eyes had adjusted to the fractional blue streetlight seeping out from between the intact buildings behind her; it glistened upon the crumbling edges of the broken mass, rivulets collecting and trickling from one irregular form to the next, spiraling down ridged loops of rebar and burst phone and electrical cables. The shadows deepened in the ruins' crevices, more lightless than the night sky tinged orange by the sudden gouts of flame, high above.

Gazing upon the storm-lashed ruins, Iris realized at least one reason why it so frightened her. It was the first empty place she had ever seen in LA; empty as in unoccupied by any human presence, real or artificial. Everywhere else in the city someone could be sensed, even if not visible: some low-level empathic reaction picked up on the slight noises of respiration, breath and heartbeat, so quiet as to be under the threshold of normal hearing, or on the soft electrical tides of catecholamines inside the skull. But there was always someone, watching or listening in turn.
Except here
, thought Iris. Even in as crowded a locale as LA, with its teeming streets and mingled human exhalations, with every possible hole inhabited, somehow these ruins had been left abandoned. Whatever the reason, it probably wasn't a good one.

'So what's it going to be?'

Vogel's words snapped her out of the dark reverie into which she had fallen. She looked up, taking a moment to reassemble the image of his face into something recognizable.

'You're going to have to make up your mind.' His voice turned sharper. 'I don't have all night. You know, you're not the only one with things to do. If I don't take care of my business with you involved, then I gotta get busy and find somebody else.'

It wasn't the first time that something said by Vogel had made her wonder exactly what his agenda was. The same disturbing perception struck her, of questions and answers planned in advance, like the catechism of some obscure, vaguely threatening religion — plus all the other ritual steps that had to be gone through, as though the ruins before which they stood were just one more point on the stations of the cross that had been laid upon the night streets of LA.

'All right,' said Iris. 'You're right; I don't really have anything else going right now.' She stepped forward, closing her eyes for a moment as though not wanting to see the cliff-edge in front of her. 'Lead on.'

The last of the streetlights' blue illumination fell away behind them, as Vogel brought her to a point some fifty meters or so around the edge of the ruins. Here, a pair of immense stone and metal slabs had jammed against each other, forming a triangular cavern with the ground. With his unencumbered hand, Vogel lifted a net-like skein of wires up from the unlit space's mouth, then ducked his head and entered. 'Come on.' He held the wires up for Iris. 'I can't show you what you need to see if you just hang out there.'

With her mind made up, fatal or otherwise, Iris didn't need any more prompting. She had already followed him into one destroyed and decayed locale, though the downed UN advertising blimp had been but the tiniest fraction of these ruins' immensity; perhaps this place would contain the answers to the questions raised by the other.

'I don't care for your taste in habitats.' With her head and shoulders bowed below the cavern's angled ceiling, Iris followed the darting beam of the small flashlight Vogel had taken from his coveralls' pocket. The ground beneath her feet was an inch deep in puddled water, seeping down from above. 'Why not get yourself a regular apartment?'

'What fun would that be?' Vogel glanced back at her, his smile malicious. 'Besides, the blimp was affectation; this is serious. This is where you
have
to be.'

Bet me
, thought Iris grimly. The crude tunnel's ceiling had lowered even further, forcing both her and Vogel into a bent-kneed crouch as they proceeded into the dark confines. The air smelled musty and soggy-damp, and she had been wrong, technically, about the complex of ruins being unoccupied: the city's ubiquitous vermin, with eyes that glittered as yellow pinpoints in the beam of Vogel's flashlight, scurried ahead, their tiny, sharp claws pattering against the smaller chunks of rubble.

More disturbing noises, lower in pitch, came from the ruins themselves: soft groaning and grinding, as though the jagged slabs of concrete and twisted steel were about to go through some delayed seismic rearrangement, and come down collapsing upon her and Vogel's heads.

'Hey —' Iris's voice broke into echoes and died away. 'Is this place safe?'

'It's all relative.' Vogel glanced back at her. 'Considering how close you've come to getting killed out there.'

Their crouching progress caused Iris to lose track of distance traveled; she couldn't be sure whether they had gone a hundred meters into the tumbled ruins, switching from one narrow passage to another, or an accumulation of miles. The small reserves of strength she had managed to force together when she had slipped out of the hospital were now close to a final ebb; her heart was laboring in her chest as she steadied herself, with one hand clutching for holds on the rough surface of the tunnel wall.

Blind from exhaustion, Iris bumped into Vogel; he had stopped in the narrow passageway without her noticing.

'Careful . . .' With one hand locked onto her arm, he kept her from falling. 'We're right at the edge.'

Iris found that she could stand upright. At some point they had emerged from the tunnel into a larger space, though still roofed with the giant slabs of concrete and steel; she could sense their tonnage above, blotting out the night sky. She shook off Vogel's hand. 'Edge of what?'

'You'll dig this.' Vogel tucked the butt-end of the flashlight into his sling, so he could adjust the beam from narrow to wide. 'It's worth seeing.'

She watched as he played the light out to one side. The surfaces it struck were so far away that it seemed for a moment that she and Vogel were in some kind of subterranean cathedral, its vaultings and pillars constructed in pure brutalist fashion. The only thing missing was any semblance of floor or bare-earth ground a few feet from where they stood. A yawning chasm had opened up, almost bottomless in appearance as the flared beam of light angled down into it.

'What the hell is this?' Iris could see other shapes, complicated metal and transparent forms, all still interlinked, even though the destruction of the building complex above had obviously wrought major damage upon them. 'Some kind of factory?'

'You got it, sweetheart.' Vogel used the flashlight beam to pick out a few of the larger pieces of broken manufacturing equipment. 'This is the real heart of the late Tyrell Corporation – or some kind of major organ, at least. This is where the action went on, production-wise. All the assembly lines for the Tyrell Corporation's various replicant models were right here. We're talking about major bioengineering processes, building ready-to-ship units from cell cultures, all the way out to skin and hair; even the toenails. Everything except for a few bits and pieces that the Tyrell Corporation contracted out to specialist prototype developers, such as the eyes. Take a look.'

Iris stepped closer to the chasm's edge and looked down to where the flashlight beam slid across the jumbled-together factory equipment. A few of the transparent pieces of machinery revealed their contents: human-like forms, some merely skeletal, others with recognizable internal organs attached to the white frameworks. Adult figures, no children or infants; all were dead, but a few had obviously come closer to birth and life than others. To Iris, the contents of the chasm resembled a mass grave, torn open and exposed by whatever explosives had leveled the buildings above.

'Of course,' continued Vogel, 'this is just where they assembled the flesh and bones, the physical part of the product. There's a lot more to manufacturing replicants than that. Matter of fact, before Tyrell achieved a monopoly in the industry, there were other companies producing replicants. Not here in LA; most of the others were over in Europe. What enabled the Tyrell Corporation to snap up the franchise for the UN's off-world emigration program – which was the big money – were the little extras, the non-physical stuff it put into its products. The programing; the stuff in the replicants'
heads
.'

Something about the dark vista in front of Iris, illuminated one piece at a time by the shifting flashlight beam, angered her. She could feel a surge of blood at the center of her skull, as the small bright oval assembled a deeply concave terrain of broken production equipment and pale human forms, dried and flensed by the heat of the explosions into twisted leather and protruding splinters of ivory, all of which would perish no further. An image came into her thoughts, of the Tyrell Corporation's production line as it had been once, brightly lit, sterile and efficient as a hospital operating room on a grander scale. Iris could see it all, as clearly as though the other image, the one produced by Vogel's flashlight poking about in the darkness, were something evoked on a phosphor-dot screen, pixels without substance or meaning.
This is the illusion
, thought Iris, closing her eyes to the world in front of her, watching instead the one that had sprung up behind the wall of her brow. That one seemed both more real and more alive, with the human-like forms stirring their limbs, awake and fully formed, right down to the memories inside them; an industrial birth, but nevertheless a true one. The gift of Dr Eldon Tyrell, no matter how limited or dark its intent. A four-year lifespan was still life.

Vogel's words broke into her thoughts. 'Most of that cerebral-content design stuff took place upstairs.' He sounded like a dispassionate tour-guide. 'The actual force-loading process was one of the last steps before the de-vatting—'

'Okay, okay.' Iris stepped back from the chasm's edge. 'I've seen enough. If this is what you wanted to show me, great, you've done it. But I'm ready to leave now.'

'No, you're not.' The beam of Vogel's flashlight swung back into the tunnel where they stood. 'The show's only started.' He started down another branch. 'Come on.'

The new path led upward, sometimes steeply enough that Iris had to scramble up tilted slabs and rubble piles to keep Vogel in sight. Despite the exertions necessary, her breath came easier to her, the air in the higher spaces less confined and rank; through a few overhead chinks, Iris managed to catch fragmented glimpses of the night sky.

'Here we go.' Vogel stopped at a level section. 'This is what you came here for.'

The flashlight revealed a surreal juxtaposition, an ordinary door set at a skewed angle into a scarred and crumbling wall of concrete and exposed girder-ends. For a moment, Iris felt like the heroine of some dimly remembered children's story who had followed a waistcoated rabbit down a hole in the earth, only to find just such deranged and prosaic furnishings.

'What's on the other side?' Iris could see that the door was made of richly polished wood, its dimensions both higher and wider than doors she had encountered in that other world, outside the ruins.

'See for yourself.' Vogel grasped the ornate brass knob, twisted it and pushed, then stepped back so Iris could go ahead of him. 'Make yourself at home.'