Eye and Talon (20 page)

She walked into the further darkness, feeling the smooth difference of its floor, covered only with dust, compared to the rubble-strewn tunnels through which she and Vogel had traveled. Like the door, the room itself was tilted at an angle, as though it were an antique sailing ship run aground on a costal reef; without a wall immediately handy, to touch and steady herself against, Iris had to lean back a bit to keep her balance. As she watched, the room slowly took perceptible form, in wavering, massed candlelight. With the flashlight switched off, Vogel lit the ranks of tapers in several elaborate, floor-standing and wall-mounted candelabra.

'Behold,' said Vogel, his self-appointed task completed. He snuffed out the loose candle he had been using as a lighter, his one good hand pressing the wick against the front of his coveralls. 'Look familiar?'

I've been here before
, realized Iris. Not in the flesh, the way she was now, breathing the room's captured air and seeing the actual, expensively wood-paneled walls behind floor-to-ceiling swaths of heavy, ivory-colored fabrics. But as good as; the surresper device in her apartment had summoned up an illusion of this room, complete with the shifting, moody light of the candles, from the datad that Meyer had first given her. Having walked through that illusion, superimposed over her apartment's living room, she already knew her way around in the reality of it. She glanced over to the wall at one side, farthest from the ranks of burning candles, and saw, as she expected, the empty perch on which the owl had wrapped its talons, golden eyes blinking and watching everything that went on.

'So I take it,' said Iris aloud, 'that these are the private quarters of the late Dr Eldon Tyrell?' Even in the room's precariously angled condition, with dust from the surrounding rubble having been sifted across every surface, the expensive luxury was apparent. 'Guess he really did have the bucks.'

'Enough.' Vogel gave an appreciative nod, surveying the expansive suite of rooms with an explorer's proprietary manner, as if by discovering them he had taken possession from their original owner. 'Let's just say that Dr Tyrell had a taste for the finer things in life, and he didn't mind spending what it took to get them. Case in point being a real live owl, of course. Besides —' A wave of Vogel's good hand took in the room and the ones beyond it. 'All tax write-offs; he'd get the Tyrell Corporation to pay for what he wanted. Not only luxuries, of course.' With one finger, Vogel pointed toward the intricately worked ceiling. 'The corporation also paid to have the good doctor's private quarters structurally reinforced, to withstand any kind of seismic or otherwise destructive event. Even explosions that took place within the building complex itself wouldn't have been able to touch this area. You get past that pricey wood on the walls, there's enough of a steel cage wrapped around these rooms, all strung on breakaway connector joints, to have withstood anything short of old-time thermonuclear warheads. Even the windows.' Another gesture, to the wall opposite. 'They had steel barriers, nearly a half-meter thick, that came slamming down like guillotine blades when the complex was destroyed. There was a self-contained oxygen supply that kicked in, running off power sources separate from the buildings' main grid. That subsystem has gone dead by now, though; the hermetic seals have retracted. But basically, if Eldon Tyrell had still been alive when his corporation went up, he could've ridden out the explosions with nothing more than a few bruises.'

'What happened to him?' Iris peered around at the candle-illuminated spaces. 'Why was he already dead when this happened? I mean . . . unless he died of old age or a heart attack or something.'

'Hardly.' Vogel shook his head. 'Somebody like Tyrell doesn't die like ordinary people; he wasn't an ordinary person. Let's face it; there's a certain amount of violence — maybe even what people used to call "evil" — inherent in the way the Tyrell Corporation made its money. You're talking about a commercial product — replicants which is perfectly willing to kill to get its freedom, and which gets killed if it tries. One way or another, somebody — or some thing — is going to get hurt. just because it was legal for you to do the hurting when you were still a blade runner doesn't change anything.'

'Spare me the lecture,' said Iris. 'Tell me what happened to Tyrell.'

'Poetic justice. Or karma — what's the difference?' Vogel lifted his shoulders in a shrug. 'One of his replicants, that'd come off the assembly lines right here in this building, came home from the far colonies to have a little talk with its creator. The replicant's name was Roy Batty, and he told Dr Tyrell that he wanted more life. That four years just wasn't long enough, for a creature like him, who was so hungry to survive and taste life. And then when Tyrell couldn't give him any more, things got ugly. Ugly and fatal: the replicant Roy Batty crushed Dr Tyrell's head between his hands like a big egg. Right here in this room.' Vogel had delivered the details in a flat, uninflected monotone. 'That's the way it goes, right? What goes around, comes around. All that built-in, suppressed violence walked in the door, and made itself at home.'

'You seem to know an awful lot about it.' Iris regarded him with even more suspicion than before. 'Like you saw it happen, or something.'

'In a way, you could say I did.' The glow from the massed candles wavered across Vogel's face as he smiled thinly at her. 'Funny thing is, a lot of people saw it. Maybe you're the only one — the only one in all of LA — who didn't.'

'What're you talking about?' The same unease came over her as before, when she and Vogel had been standing outside the ruins they had now penetrated, and he'd pointed out her ignorance of the place and whatever had happened to bring it down. It had been her job to know things other people didn't — you couldn't track down escaped replicants unless you were on top of things — yet there seemed to be whole worlds of which she had known absolutely nothing. 'How many people could have been here in Tyrell's private quarters, to have witnessed him getting killed?'

'No one was here,' said Vogel, still smiling. 'Or just about: the only actual witness was a little nerdy genetic engineer named J. R. Sebastian, who'd worked freelance for Tyrell before. And he got dinged up pretty badly by Roy Batty as well; the initial police report actually had him down as dead also, though that part turned out to be wrong. So other than him, there was only Dr Tyrell and the escaped Batty replicant here in the room when it all went down.'

'All right, then.' Iris spoke with elaborate, barely maintained patience. 'So how could everybody in LA — except me, of course have seen this Batty rep kill Eldon Tyrell?' She gestured around at the wood-paneled walls. 'I don't exactly think that the head of a powerful outfit such as the Tyrell Corporation would allow video bugs to be planted in his private quarters. Execs like that usually have more of a taste for privacy.'

'That they do,' agreed Vogel. 'And Tyrell was more private than most. So it wasn't really here in this room that people got to see Tyrell's gruesome death. Let's say it was as good as here.'

Iris sighed wearily. Vogel's toying around wore her out more than the trek through the buildings' ruins. 'I'm not following you.'

'It was in the studio; that's where it happened. Or at least what everyone saw. Not Tyrell's real death — but as good as. Realer than real, as some might say. The
re-creation
of Tyrell's death. On tape.'

'Wait a minute.' Iris held up her palm, to stop any more words from coming. 'You're saying somebody made a video production, after the fact, of this Eldon Tyrell getting murdered?'

'You bet.' Vogel gave a single nod. 'Of that, and a whole lot else, besides. An epic, as it were, about this bunch of escaped replicants Roy Batty was part of, and the cop that got assigned the job of tracking down and retiring them. You know the one; the blade runner named Rick Deckard.'

'I've heard the name.' Iris shrugged. 'That's about it, though.'

'Now that's what I was talking about before. There are some real holes in your knowledge of what's been going on here in LA. Or beyond; this thing was broadcast throughout the world, and to the off-planet colonies. Don't you think it's a little curious that you're not aware of it?'

'What was it called?'

'
Blade Runner
,' said Vogel. 'That's all.
Blade Runner
.'

'Catchy title.' Iris searched her memory for a couple of seconds, then shook her head. 'Nope. Complete blank on anything like that.'

Vogel peered closer at her. 'And you don't find that strange? I know for a fact that it was pretty popular with a lot of LAPD rank-and-file.'

'No,' said Iris. 'Not really. I don't watch a lot of video stuff, broadcast or otherwise. I don't have time for it.'

'You should still know about this one. It was a big hit, just about everywhere; got very high ratings. And beyond; it's still got quite a cult following.'

'I told you. Never heard of it.'

'So I see.' Vogel's gaze wandered across the candlelit room for a few seconds, then snapped back to Iris. 'Maybe you should watch it some time. Might learn a lot from it.'

She could tell where this was going. 'Maybe I should.'

Vogel's smile widened. 'Now's a good time.' His teeth looked like antique, yellowed ivory in the wavering candlelight. 'Real good.'

'You know, you're really losing your capacity to surprise me.' Iris put her hands on her hips. 'I already watched one of your movies. There at the blimp, that other grungy hangout of yours. Just because you've dragged me into this pile doesn't mean I'm in the mood for another one.'

'Ah, but that other one was a live feed. That was so you'd know what was going on with the owl, and who had it then. What I've got here for you is real cinema, something historic. Higher production values. So it's a lot better than mere reality.'

As if Id know anything about that,
thought Iris,
anymore
. The rabbit-hole feeling embraced her again; she felt the weight of the Tyrell Corporation's rubble pressing down upon her, as though the ruins were ready to extinguish the small, charmed bubble of existence inside it. Somewhere, in the wandering through the maze that had led her here, the thread leading back to the outside world had been broken; she didn't know if she would ever find her way out again. Or if that other world out there even still existed. Or if it ever had.

'You win,' said Iris. She knew she didn't have a choice about the matter. Even if she did emerge from the ruins' depths, she would eventually crawl back into them, just to find out what it was that Vogel had wanted to show her. Not out of curiosity, but the fear of not knowing. 'Where do we go for -this flick of yours?'

'Follow me.' Vogel picked up one of the floor-standing candle racks and carried its pool of light with him to a farther section of the rooms. 'Here we go.' He pushed open a door concealed in the wood panels, revealing another dust-covered, expensively furnished chamber. 'Eldon Tyrell's private theater. He didn't use it much — more of a book guy, you know?- — but it had all the amenities. Or at least enough of them for our purposes.' Vogel gestured toward a pair of vintage leather wingchairs. 'Have a seat.'

Real leather; Iris could tell the difference between the stuff and her own jacket as she leaned back in the chair and rubbed her hands along the fatly padded arms. The way Tyrell had gone through the endangered species of the world, converting scraps of them into personal luxuries, there eventually wouldn't have been anything left alive on the planet, except rats and replicants.

Behind her, Vogel fussed about with some ancient-looking machine on a rolling stand. Leaning around the side of the wingchair, Iris watched him threading a thin strip of something black and shiny through cogs and sprockets, from one spoked double-wheel to another above it. 'What the hell's that?'

'Film,' said Vogel. 'Pre-digital technology. Like they use at that movie theater, where we had our little party.'

'Okay . . .' Iris recognized the stuff now; there had been coiling masses of it on the floor of the theater's projection booth. 'But those were old movies. Nobody produces anything on it anymore. And you said that this was something recent.'

'Very recent. But Tyrell had discriminating tastes; nothing but the best. Which for him meant no cheap-ass digitized mass of pixels, like everybody else in the world has gotten used to watching — mainly because they don't know any better. So if whatever he wanted to watch wasn't on film to begin with, he'd have his guys in the lab do a cross-media conversion on it, using the old equipment and hoard of film stock that he'd stashed. Then they'd strike a one-off print like this, just for his eyes. Though this is one movie Tyrell never got to see. Since he gets killed in it — really killed — he wasn't around to see the final edit, and all the top-drawer technical work his employees did on it. Which is too bad, from a cinephile viewpoint, because they really did a good job — right up there with the rest of them.'

'The rest?'

'In Tyrell's private archive. In the vault next to this theater there's racks of film cans stored away. This particular movie was the last to be logged in, after Tyrell's, shall we say,
sudden
demise. But like I said, they're all top quality. That's film for you, though — most people can't tell the difference; the percept systems in their brains have been degraded to the point that they think a bunch of dots is the same thing as reality. So an analogue medium such as this is just no big thing to them. Maybe you'll be able to tell, though.'

She couldn't. When Vogel turned out the lights and set the clattery machine running, a horizontal cone of light sprang from its bright lens, filling the screen in front of her. Points of light showed, a nighttime vista of some sprawling city. When gouts of flame burst into the sky and a police spinner streaked past, she realized that the city was LA itself. It looked real enough to her, but no different from any digital depiction ever had. The knowledge made her uncomfortable, as though some subtle test had been put before her, like the trick questions used with the standard-issue Voigt-Kampff machine. And she had failed the test.