Eye and Talon (37 page)

'I don't get it.' The tips of her fingers felt like icicles as Iris rubbed her aching brow. 'Why put something like that inside an owl? What was the point of it?'

'The owl served Tyrell's purposes admirably; it is, in fact, the perfect medium for the transcription of the minimal set, the essential back-up of Tyrell's mind and memories. As a predator, it has a complex enough neuro-cortical system for there to be excess circuit space for that set, even if, as I said, some material had to be discarded. If the minimal set were used to animate one of the waiting Tyrell replicants, there would be undoubted gaps in Tyrell's memory, but the essence, the
gestalt
, of the man would be there. As well as his most recent memories; Tyrell was apparently in the habit of updating the contents the owl carried on a weekly basis. That's why he kept the owl so close to him, in his personal quarters, feeding and taking care of it on his own; in effect, he was merely taking care of an exteriorized part of himself, and not another creature at all. That would have required the exercise of some empathic function on his part, a function he lacked. And of course there were other, physiological reasons why the owl was used; other than the now-extinct primate species, the owl is one of the few creatures with true binocular vision. Both its eyes look straight forward, as do those of a human being; the optical-based transfer of information is impossible to perform, otherwise. Then there are reasons beyond that: beside the convenience of the owl being a relatively small and easy-to-handle animal while in captivity, given Eldon Tyrell's fussy meticulousness at doing so, there is the survival factor. With its own owl mind and instincts still operational, and the Eldon Tyrell minimum set merely carried as non-functioning neurological baggage, as it were, the owl has at least some ability to look after itself, should circumstances arise when Tyrell would no longer be able to do so. And as you've found out for yourself, that turned out to be the case. The vermin-ridden back alleys of Los Angeles were a perfect hunting ground for the escaped owl, until it was captured by the people from whom you managed to take it.'

'I didn't have it for long,' murmured Iris. A memory image arose, of the great-winged bird of prey in her tiny apartment. 'Not long at all.'

'Not your fault.' Carsten's voice was tinged with pity again. 'You were up against forces of which you could, as yet, have little understanding. You're still up against them. There have been reasons for the things that have happened to you; those reasons are still undisclosed to you, but they were real, nevertheless. Going all the way back to the beginning — and perhaps even farther than that.' He watched her for any reaction. 'Tell me — why do you think you were chosen to go hunting for the owl? Why were you given the job?'

'Because . . .' Iris was no longer sure, but came up with the only answer she was able to. 'Because they thought -I could find it. Somebody thought I could.' She shook her head. 'But I don't know who it was anymore. Maybe I never did.'

'There's more to it than that,' said Carsten. 'Do you want me to show you?'

'Do I have a choice?'

'I'll give you one. Now I will. You've come this far, but we won't go the rest of the way — unless
you
want to.' His voice had dropped almost to a whisper. 'I'll let you decide. I can show you, or you can walk out of here right now. Out into the sunshine, where it's nice and warm. And you won't have to know.'

Iris thought it over. As much as she could; her thoughts seemed frozen in place, as though they had become as chilled as the numb flesh of her limbs.

'All right.' She gave a single slow nod. 'Go ahead.'

'You have to come over here.' Carsten reached across the coffin between them and took her free hand. He stepped around the head of the container, closer to her. 'This is what you've been waiting for. From the beginning.'

He led her down the line of coffins, each with its glass lid thrown back, revealing the grimly sleeping contents within. All the way to the end of the line, close to the ice-covered wall of the chamber. The last coffin-like container was there, the one that Carsten had left unopened. The flat surface of its lid was frosted white with an accumulation of ice crystals, like a shelf of snow.

Carsten let go of her hand and reached down to the latch at the side of the coffin. Once again, Iris heard the tiny, breath-like sigh of the container's pneumatic seal being breached. Carsten grasped the edge of the lid and, with greater care than he had used with the others, lifted and tilted it back.

'Now tell me what you see.' Carsten stepped away, letting Iris come forward, reluctantly but inevitably. 'This time.'

She stood at the side of the coffin and looked down. And saw herself.

It had happened before. The memory of watching the movie and seeing the woman up on the screen, the one who had looked exactly like her. The one named Rachael who the blade runner Deckard had fallen in love with. She had been able to deny it to herself then, that she had been looking at her double, the face the same as her own. Deny it until Vogel had pointed it out to her, had made her admit the truth. And fury and tears had burst forth, from some unknown place inside her, for some reason she couldn't fathom. Fury at being frightened, frightened by not knowing what it meant; tears at knowing it meant everything, even though she had yet to discover why it did . . .

'You see her, don't you?' Carsten's soft voice came from behind Iris. 'It's like a mirror, isn't it?

Iris had only time for one slow nod of agreement, before the mirror shattered.

She heard the cry from the sleeping woman, the one with her face but a different name, the one named Rachael. As if the woman were suddenly waking up from her long sleep, woken by bad dreams, bad enough to make her cry out in pain, mouth wide and back arching up from the padded, silken lining of the glass-lidded coffin. The cry broke louder, echoing from the icy walls, until it was just as suddenly silenced by the blood that welled up and filled the woman's throat and mouth.

And the echo wasn't that of her silenced cry, but the ringing of the gunshot which had brought a smaller red flower blossoming at her breast, with a dark center where the bullet had smashed through the collarbone below, stopping the infinitely slow beat of her heart.

The next shot from the gun in Iris's raised hand slammed the woman with her face back down into the coffin. The woman's arms flung wide, hands spread, as if she were trying to embrace a bullet big as the world. And then she was only a crumpled dead thing in the red-spattered box, the backs of her wrists against the metal of its edges.

'You poor fool,' said Carsten. No shock, but only sadness sounded in his voice. 'That won't do any good. It won't stop anything. It's too late for that.'

Iris let the gun, warm enough now to thaw her frozen hand, drift downward from its own weight. She felt dizzied and unsure as she turned away from the coffin and its dead contents to look at the old man. 'I don't know why . . . I did it . .

'It doesn't matter.' Carsten reached out and touched her shoulder, with almost paternal kindness. 'Not for you . . . or her. Which is the same thing, really. You know that, don't you? It's like suicide, only you're still alive afterward. You can't kill yourself that easily.'

Not for lack of trying
, thought Iris. She wondered if she had been trying to, from the beginning. The beginning before the owl. She raised the gun in her hand, its metal chilling again to the temperature of her cold flesh, and regarded it—

The sound of another gunshot came, distant and muffled by the chamber's ice-laden walls. More shots, the distinct stutter of automatic-rifle fire, filtered though from outside and above, at the surface of the surrounding desert.

Carsten turned away from her, his slight body visibly tensing into full alertness. 'That's not supposed to be happening,' he muttered.

'What?' Iris could hear more shots, still muffled but louder and closer. 'What's happening?'

'Stay here,' ordered Carsten. He plucked the gun out of the stiff fingers of her hand, then headed with it toward the door by which they had entered the chamber. The disembodied eyes, in their fluid-filled vessels, watched him pass without comment.

Carsten, gun poised in one hand, pulled open the heavy door. Bright sunlight didn't pour in; Iris realized that she and the old man had been down there for hours, long enough for evening to have set in above, in the real world. There was enough dim light from outside to silhouette another figure in the doorway, just past Carsten.

Should've let me do it
, thought Iris; a measure of her former hardcore professionality returned as she saw what happened next. Carsten's reaction time was too slow; even with the gun already raised into position, he wasn't able to get a shot off in time. A snarling flare burst from the silhouetted figure's automatic rifle, braced against his hip; the impact of the bullets was enough to lift Carsten's slight form off the floor and send him flying backward into the chamber. Before he landed, the clenching of his fist upon the gun he'd taken from Iris sent a single bullet upward; it hit one of the bare fluorescent light fixtures. With a sparking sizzle of electricity, the entire chamber was plunged into darkness.

With the first shots, Iris had scrambled behind the row of suspended-animation chambers. Crouching down, she watched as the figure in the chamber's doorway switched on a flashlight; its beam swept across the space, illuminating the eyes floating in their gelatinous liquids, then passing on. The figure stepped over Carsten's body and walked cautiously past the lab benches.

Silently, Iris crept farther behind the row of coffins, away from the armed figure's approach, until she was hidden by the first container Carsten had opened. The flashlight beam swept across the row, then settled on the coffin at the far end, the one holding her own double.

With his automatic rifle slung over his shoulder, the figure held the flashlight directly above the far coffin, then leaned forward to examine the dead female replicant it held. Enough of the beam caught his own face, and Iris was able to recognize him.
Meyer
, she thought.
My old boss
. Somehow, she found herself unsurprised.

It took only a few seconds' examination for Meyer to assure himself that the female replicant in the coffin was dead. Switching off the flashlight, he turned and strode toward the exit, the doorway illuminated by what was left of the fading twilight outside and above the trench in which the chamber was buried.

Iris slowly crept forward, so she could keep an eye on Meyer for as long as she could. She ducked behind the corner of one of the workbenches when she saw another figure outside the doorway.

The second figure said something she couldn't catch, though she thought she could recognize the voice. But Meyer's words, as he was still inside the chamber, were plain enough.

'Yeah, I found her.' With a tilt of his head, Meyer pointed toward the unlit interior. 'I worked with her long enough when she was alive; I should be able to tell.'

The other figure started to make some protest, but Meyer cut him off

'I don't
care
what happened to her. Just that it did.' As Iris watched, Meyer pulled the automatic rifle up into firing position, braced against his hip. 'You earned your pay.'

Another quick burst of rifle fire sounded, then Meyer stepped across the corpse sprawled outside the doorway.

Iris waited until Meyer had climbed out of the trench, then she crept forward and found her gun beside Carsten's outstretched, motionless hand. She picked the gun up in both her numb hands, holding it close against herself as she listened to the distant sound of spinners lifting from the desert's surface. The vehicles' jet exhausts snarled, then faded in the night sky above.

Enough stars had come out that, in their cold blue radiance, Iris was able to look down at the face of the corpse outside the chamber doorway, and recognize the sharply etched features of Vogel. Her capacity for surprise was exhausted; she stepped over the body and out into the trench. Looking up, past the hole's crumbling rim, she could discern the luminous scars of the spinners' trails, heading to the west. Toward Los Angeles.

They did a good job
, thought Iris as she walked across the bare sand of the compound.
Very thorough
. She appreciated their work on a coldly craftsmanlike basis: the area around the low buildings and rusted earth-moving equipment was littered with the bodies of the committee's operatives, most with their own automatic weapons inches away from their outflung hands. The peacefulness of dead things, their agendas terminated, lay over the star-illuminated patch of desert like a benediction.

She found her guard, the one who had given her both water and her gun, face down outside the main building. Stepping around him, Iris pushed the door of the building open. No lights — the raiders, whoever they had been, had apparently taken out the chugging generator on which the compound had been running. She had already taken a flashlight off one of the corpses outside; she switched it on and sent its beam across the building's interior.

Thorough, all right
. This time, disgust tinged her estimation as she saw the dead owls scattered across the building's floor, their feathers raddled with blood, looking like unfortunate stuffed toys that had been dragged through the machinery of some slaughterhouse, She turned away and walked back outside.

A shadow, a moment darker than the blue night, passed across her.

Iris looked up and saw tiny sections of starlight blinked out; as something flew above. Something much smaller than a spinner that moved in silence and swooping curves, thrust by the beat of its widespread wings. She swept the beam of the flashlight up into the night sky, and caught, for a fraction of a second, the reflected glow of two golden eyes. That was all it took for her to recognize the owl, the same one she had hunted and captured before.

The owl flew out into the open expanse of the desert, toward the jagged shapes of the far hills. Her own eyes had become so adjusted to the partial spectrum laid down by the stars that she could follow the creature's rapid shadow across the flat landscape. In the distance, beyond a broken, flattened section of the fence ringing the compound, she saw the owl dart down toward the ground. The figure of a man, barely discernible, stood waiting for it, one forearm raised. The owl's wings flared outward to brake its plummet, its talons reaching for and catching upon the perch of the man's arm. Once settled there, the owl wrapped its wings close against itself.