Eye and Talon (8 page)

'Interesting,' mused Iris aloud. 'Very . .

'What is?' The chat, now stationed by her ankles, looked up at her. 'The only thing more curious than a hole, where something should be, is a partial hole. You know?' She smiled down at the chat. 'If somebody's got the power to remove it, they should have the power to remove it all the way, without leaving little pieces behind. And if they want to remove it in the first place, why wouldn't they want to remove it all?'

'Dunno.' The chat shook its head. 'Cuddle?'

'Later. I'm still working.' The tingling, subdermal numbness in her fingertips had already ebbed away, along with whatever woozy endorphins had been produced by handling the chat. That was fine by Iris: figuring out a new assignment's intricacies, sniffing the trail of the tiny and fragmentary data and where they led to, gave a better high.

This Deckard thing . . .

She had the sense, down in the base of her gut, that it was important. Though what a partially deleted blade runner could have to do with tracking down an escaped pet owl, she didn't have a clue on yet.

'Resume playback.'

The owl showed up again, in the surresper's current discrete sequence. Only for a moment, sitting on a different metal perch, but with the same alert and round, golden eyes, scanning the territory in front of it. Which this time included the image of a woman coming into the illusory room. She looked even colder and harder than the blade runner Deckard, though she was obviously younger and, by objective standards, prettier. The woman looked as if she had been dipped in money as well, gilded by its transforming power into another piece of the Tyrell Corporation's expensive furnishings. Her dark hair was done up in some kind of retro fashion, like the brittly unpleasant rich girl in an ancient black and white movie; the image's makeup had the over-precise, controlled sexuality that Iris associated with virgins and mental patients. Iris shook her head and looked away, giving in to her own deep, instinctive dislike of the young woman, without bothering to figure out what about her had triggered such a quick aversive reaction.
Maybe she reminded me of somebody . . .

In the illusory room, in the surresper's brief snippet of reconstructed past, the two images exchanged a few words — and then it was over. 'Sequence terminus,' announced the machine.

'That's it?'

'Affirmative.' The circuitry inside the surresper didn't care, one way or the other. 'Loaded data contains two chron sequences, optical and auditory representation. Viewing of first sequence aborted before terminus, upon command; second sequence played through.'

Not much to go on
, grumped Iris to herself. There had been only a quick glimpse of the owl, looking exactly as it had in the other sequence, and a few words exchanged between the images of the woman and the cop named Deckard. She had barely paid attention to what the two had said; she'd been paying attention to the owl, over at the side of the reconstructed space. The bit had been so brief and uninformative that Iris had to wonder why Meyer had included it in the first place.

'Play it again,' suggested the chat, sensitive to her mood. This time, she listened to what the two images said.

Do you like our owl?
That was the first thing the woman said to Deckard, as she'd walked into the room and caught him looking at it. The woman's use of the word 'our' confirmed what Iris had already surmised: the owl belonged to the Tyrell Corporation itself.

It's artificial?
Deckard had asked an obvious, and logical, question in return. Owls of any kind weren't seen every day.

Of course
—

'Freeze sequence,' Iris instructed the surresper. Now that she'd heard it correctly, it didn't make any sense. 'Back five seconds, resume sequence action.'

The woman's image said it again, in her cold, unemotional tone:
Of course
.

Meaning that the owl was artificial, as Deckard had asked. Or that the woman had believed, at that time, that it was.

Iris listened to the rest of the image's 'dialogue.

Must be expensive
. Deckard again.

Very
, said the woman's image.

Iris halted the surresper's playback once more. The words, these in addition to the others, made even less sense than they had before. She stepped closer to the woman's frozen image, studying it, trying to figure out if that one word had been either a deliberate lie or a simple mistake. An artificial owl of this quality would have been expensive, all right, but not enough to brag about. Larger and more complicated avian simulacra, emus and ostriches and the like, even down to nanotech-stuffed hummingbirds, could be obtained easily enough, at the
souk
in the center of LA. A noodle stand could afford a mascot like that; Iris herself patronized one down the street that had a brace of artificial fresh-water arawanas swimming in a tank behind the cash register; those fish had never been anywhere near the Amazon where their biological prototypes had been sourced. Whereas a genuine living owl, sitting on a perch at company headquarters, would have really been something for a Tyrell Corporation representative to brag so haughtily about; that kind of expenditure, on top of the, already lavishly appointed surroundings, would have indicated a whole other level of wealth and power.

'Thinking?' The chat tapped at her shin with one of its tiny paws. She nodded. "Tis a mystery.' Her words were followed by a shrug. 'But that's the kind of thing I get paid to figure out.'

There was one more scrap of information to be gotten out of the second discrete sequence on the surresper. At the very end of the bit, the image of the woman spoke her name. Iris played it back, to make sure she got it right.

I'm Rachael.

That was what the woman had told the cop named Deckard. Iris mentally filed the info away, and forgot about it for the time being. She had more important things to worry about right now, such as where this missing owl had gotten to. This woman in the data she'd fed to the surresper, Rachael whoever, had probably been caught up in the collapse of the Tyrell Corporation, along with everybody else who had been connected to the replicant-manufacturing company. Not a big deal — at least that part wasn't.

'Go back to the first discrete sequence.' The room with the cop named Deckard and the snotty young woman disappeared, replaced

by the other illusory one that held the owl and the late Dr Eldon Tyrell. With his silver bowl on the antique writing desk, and the white rat he had tossed onto the center of the room's intricately loomed Oriental rug . . .

This time, Iris watched the sequence all the way through. The owl did what its own biological nature had programmed it to do. The claws that catch, Iris found herself thinking, remembering some scrap of a nonsense poem. It wasn't nonsense to the white rat, whose programming was to die.

The image of the owl flapped to its perch, where it bloodily disassembled its meal. Still coldly smiling, the image of Dr Tyrell watched, then picked up the empty silver bowl and carried it away, back into the darkness from which it had emerged.

'Sequence complete,' announced the surresper.

Whatever
, thought Iris. 'Terminate session.'

The illusory room, with its candlelit, cavernous spaces and glossy, expensive wood paneling disappeared, restoring Iris's own, smaller apartment.

The neon had died.

It happened sometimes. Iris found herself in darkness, relieved only by the horizontal slots of blueish streetlight coming in through the apartment's small shuttered and barred windows. The chat was freaked by the sudden gloom, and clung to her ankle, shivering. The neon's power source, usually a parasitic tap on a main feeder circuit, had probably gotten over-extended and had snapped at some critical corner junction. That left only the pencil-thin glass tubes covering the walls and nearly every other hard surface, to be broken up and swept away, ghost-like vacated letters and pictographs.

I'll just clear off the bed
, thought Iris. If she woke up surrounded by shards and needles of broken glass, it wouldn't be the first time.

'Residual data left,' announced the surresper. 'From encyclopedic function.'

At the bedroom door, still hobbled by the frightened chat, Iris glanced back at the machine. 'All right,' she said. 'Give it to me.'

'“Large, varies in color, nearly white when found in Arctic conditions, mottled dark gray and brown otherwise . . .”'

'I already heard that bit.' Iris shook her head. 'So it's a bird,' she said disgustedly. 'That's all it is.'

There was more: '“Once thought to possess supernatural powers, due to ability to see in the dark; solemn, prepossessing aspect gave rise to being considered as symbols of wisdom or occult knowledge.” End of data.'

'Even better,' said Iris sourly.

But the surresper had switched itself off, and wasn't listening.

The
soukmeisters
were clever bastards.

Gotta hand it to 'em
, thought Iris. She stood in the neon-stitched darkness and let herself be buffeted by the jostling crowd around her. The people who ran the marketplace in artificial animals, the shadowy figures who collected the rents on the densely packed stalls and storefronts, had gone to the trouble and expense of making the place smell as if real animals were being bought and sold in it; the zone was interspersed with scent-emitter units protruding from the sewer grates that gave off a cycling olfactory parade of sweaty barnyard odors, moldering grain feed mixed with the riper, nastier tang of unswept fecal droppings. Iris could see that the dealers' customers obviously went for it; the sensory impression filling their nostrils added to the illusion of purchasing a real, biologically living animal, rather than some battery-powered replicant sheathed in fake fur or feathers.

Careful not to step in any of the more realistic props that had been deposited in the street, Iris pushed her way through the crowd toward the open-fronted, double-wide stall with the sizzling neon above that read WINGS OF GOLDEN SMILE. An animated sparrow, twenty times life-size and outlined in glowing blue, flapped its wings through a stuttering, three-step drill, over and over.

'What can I do ya for?' The half-dozen staff behind the stall's counter looked like brothers of a single family, a genetic mélange like any other in LA; this specific one could have been a third-generation cross of Hmong and Vladivoski squareheads. 'How 'bout a canary? It'll sing you to sleep. If that doesn't work for ya' — the lead counter guy winked at her — 'then you and I can make other arrangements.'

'Put it back in your pants, pal.' Iris leaned forward, looking past him and into the depths of the stall. The other staff turned from their workbenches and abacus, regarding her with impassive silence and ink-black pupils as she scanned the wares on the dangling perches and inside the wire cages. Most of their stock consisted of smaller birds, but there was a pair of ravens — bigger than she had expected them to be, hulking like sullen murderers on a rusting steel perch and even a redtail hawk, staring at her with one glittering yellow eye. So maybe the tout at the edge of the
souk
, who Iris had queried and then tipped with a pre-devaluation titanium quarter, had been right about this being the place for predatory birds. 'I'm looking' — Iris leaned away from the counter guy's
kimchi
-scented breath — 'for an owl.'

'Owl, huh? You mean a regular horned owl or something more exotic, like a winter-plumage snow owl? Doesn't matter.' He turned and shouted over his shoulder to one of the other staff 'Francesco — c'mere a minute.'

The other man approached, wiping his hands on an oil-stained rag. 'Nice shirt,' he said, indicating Iris's chest. Like the rest of the staff, he was wearing a modified Stetson knock-off and shiny neoprene bondage lederhosen that exposed his yellowish and scabby knees. 'I collect Autreys myself. Lariat motif, mainly.'

'Lady wants an owl,' said the first counter guy. 'What's the line on that?'

Francesco nodded slowly. 'Yeah ... we can do an owl.' His face was longer and sadder than the other staff's. 'It'd have to be a special order, though. We don't keep that kind of body frame in stock.' He pointed his thumb back toward the stall's interior. 'We do mainly the smaller
columbidae
and
psittacidae
— you know, pigeons and parrots. That's what people can afford around here. And maybe a couple of the bigger
accipitridae
— hawks — three or four times a year. For the collector's market. But we can swap around a lot of the basic structural elements on those. An owl, though ...' He shrugged. 'Different configuration; kinda stacked up vertical, you know what I mean?'

'Right,' said Iris. 'But that's not what I'm talking about. I mean a real owl.'

Both men stared at her in silence for a few seconds.

'Lady . . .' The lead counter guy spoke up, shaking his head in disgust. 'If you walked into a Seven-Eleven and asked for a diamond necklace, you might
get
a diamond necklace — but it wouldn't be a real one.' He turned and waved his hand at the stall's stock. 'See these? See how they go chirp chirp, flap their wings and stuff? They're fakes. That's what we
do
.' He turned back to Iris. 'Did you
think
they were real?' He glanced over at his longer-faced colleague. 'Lady thinks we deal in real birds.'

'I understand,' said Iris slowly, emphasizing each syllable, 'that you have, in fact, done so. On occasion. Dealt in real birds. True?'

'Who told you that? One of those putzes out on the street? Tell me which one, point him out, and I'll kick his ass.' The counter guy crossed his arms and scowled. 'Real animals are restricted. Even birds. You can get into a lot of trouble dealing in 'em without a license.' One of his thin eyebrows raised. '
You
got a license?'

'I don't need one.' Her eyes had adjusted further to the gloom inside the stall; she could make out a few more birds tucked away into the corners and on top of a pile of packing crates. 'So nobody's come around lately, offering you a deal on a hot owl?'

'Yeah, right. Who'd have one? Tell me that.'