Eye and Talon Read online

  'The most accomplished yet, treading a tightrope between the paranoia of Dick's original novel, the high-tech noir gloss of Ridley Scott's classic movie and Jeter's own original concepts. Not to be missed.' Starlog

  'The prose is worth the price of admission in itself and seamlessly conjures up the film's near-future bleakness of landscape and spirit.' Interzone

  Jeter does a good job of intertwining his new characters and story lines with the situations and people from the original movie, adding further depth to the bizarre future world that resulted from the blend of Dick's imagination and Hollywood realization.' Locus

  BLADE RUNNER™ 4

  EYE & TALON

  K.W. JETER

  Copyright © the Philip K. Dick Trust 2000

  All rights reserved

  The right of K. W. Jeter to be identified as the author

  of this work has been asserted by him in accordance

  with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This edition published in Great Britain in 2001 by

  Gollancz

  An imprint of the Publishing Group

  Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin's Lane,

  London WC2H 9EA

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 1 85798 867 1

  Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  To Patrick Gyger

  Out-Take

  MEDIUM SHOT, a small airless room, two chairs with a table between them. A ceiling fan turns slowly through strata of blue-gray cigarette smoke; like knifeblades through ghosts. 'A cop stands peering out through a horizontal slit of a window, as narrow as though it were at the surface level of some underground bunker.

  THE COP'S POV. What the cop sees: the narrow window doesn't look out at the ground, but rather from above, down towards the lights of some massive nocturnal city, stretching out toward the horizon, like an inverted mirror of the sky that can no longer be seen past dirtied, rain-heavy clouds. As the cop watches, the mottled undersides of the clouds turn reddish-orange, tinged by gouts of flame that blossom like the tongues of dragons from needle spires stitched through the dark. The dragon-hiss sounds of the jetting flames are answered by the quick traces of police spinners cutting the night city into quadrants and smaller, asymmetric sectors. What the cop sees is dead space, from the pulsing neon streets intertwining with each other below, to the rain-driven ashes miring the crests of the jumbled towers. What the cop sees is Los Angeles.

  A MAN'S VOICE: 'Okay if I talk?'

  The cop doesn't turn away from the narrow window. 'Talk all you want,' says the cop.

  REVERSE ANGLE, showing the window slit from the outside of the building. CLOSE on the cop's face, CLOSE on the cop's eye, CLOSE on the dark center of the eye, until the eye's mottled pupil fills the screen.

  PULL BACK, all the way to LONG, showing the window's narrow slit of light, like the cut of a knife in the sloping exterior wall of the building's massive pyramid shape.

  'I kind of get nervous when I take tests.'

  The cop turns away from the window and looks at the man heavy-set, muscular, not too bright — sitting at the table. The cop's brow creases; something is already wrong. Or rather, not right, off in some almost invisible but important way. It can be felt in the heavy, oxygen-depleted air filling the small room.

  Something's always wrong. The cop walks over and sits down at the table, opposite the big, stupid guy. The cop smiles, even though she knows the smile comes across as creepy and unpleasant on her face.

  'Don't move,' says the cop.

  The room is empty except for the two of them. The room is silent except for the muted whisper of the ceiling fan, slowly and ineffectually moving the blue-gray smoke around.

  There's something else in the room with them. It sits on the table between them, a machine slowly breathing in and out, silently, its fan bellows moving back and forth, breathing in the molecules of sweat and fear in the room.

  CLOSE on the Voigt-Kampff machine. A camera lens points toward the big, stupid guy; a tiny screen mounted on a metal stalk is turned toward the cop. Another eye fills this screen; if the big, stupid guy moves, it'll spoil the focus that the cop is painstakingly adjusting.

  'Sorry.' The name stitched on the front of the big, stupid guy's coveralls is LEON. He's not so stupid-looking that there isn't a trace of brutish cunning visible in his stubble-jawed, weak-chinned face. Somebody watching him might have easily figured that he was trying to screw up the whole procedure. But now he sits still, with his hands clasped in his lap. 'I already had my IQ test this year and I—'

  The cop cuts him off. 'Reaction time is a factor in this.' Her voice is severe, admonishing. Face attractive, even beautiful – eyes large, skin of porcelain fineness, contrasting with the red artifice of her lips; dark hair arranged in a retro fashion both severe and oddly delicate but with an expression of cold hauteur. 'So please pay attention,' she continues, 'and answer as quickly as you can.'

  Pay attention. She falls silent, as though troubled by the words. They hardly sound like her own, or even spoken in her own voice. She has to wonder whose words they really are.

  CLOSE on Leon. He sulkily nods his head.

  'A man,' says the cop. She leans back in her chair, watching the trembling fluctuations of the eye magnified on the Voigt-Kampff machine's tiny screen. 'Goes into the desert. He's walking along in the sand when he looks down and sees—'

  'What one?'

  CLOSE on the cop. She looks annoyed. 'What?'

  'What desert?'

  'It doesn't matter . . . ' She stops, searching for the right words. As though she has to remember them, bring them up from somewhere else. Somewhere outside of herself 'It doesn't make any difference,' the cop says at last. 'It's completely hypothetical.'

  'How come he'd be there, then?'

  She knows he's trying to screw it up, to throw her off balance, to blow the test, render the results useless. So that tells me right there, thinks the cop. That he's a replicant. The cold look in her eyes indicates the thoughts behind them. And as any cop would know, there's nothing dumber than a dumb person trying to be smart. She might as well just haul out the big gun from inside her jacket and blow him away, right now. Why wait? But the cop knows that there are steps to be gone through, departmental procedures, and that asking the questions is part of all that. Necessary, even though at this moment, she couldn't figure out why.

  'Maybe he's fed up.' The rest of the words come a little easier to her, though she still doesn't know from where. 'Maybe he wants to be by himself ' That is what the cop wants right now; her pulse pounds at her temples and the small room seems to be getting even smaller, constricting around her like a fist. 'Who . . . ' She concentrates fiercely, bearing down on the words and the magnified image of the eye in the little screen. 'Who knows?'

  'It's okay,' says Leon softly. The big dumb guy's words are wrong, out Of character, as though he had managed to perceive the cop's attack of nerves. 'Take it easy.'

  The cop glares at him. She doesn't need his help. She'll get through this.

  'Anyway' – she snaps the word out, viciously – 'this man looks down and sees a tortoise.' The words come faster, pushed out by the anger that makes her pulse beat even faster and harder at the limits of her skull. 'Looks down and sees a tortoise crawling towards him—'

  'A tortoise?' Leon's back in sync, and in character. 'What's that?'

  'You know what a turtle is?'

  'Sure.'

  'Same thing,' says the cop. The small room is closing around her again, pressing the breath from her lungs. She skips ahead, not caring about the missed dialogue. She just wants to get out of here. Before anything else goes wrong. 'The man reaches down an
d ffips the tortoise over on its back.'

  CLOSE on the machine in the middle of the table. The needles quiver on the dials, just as the cop knew they would.

  CLOSE on Leon's big, sulky face. 'Do you make up these questions,' he asks, 'or does somebody write 'em down for you?'

  The cop doesn't seem to hear him. Her lips move slightly, as though reciting different words, another question, from some other time and place.

  Is this testing whether I'm a replicant . . . or a lesbian, Mr Deckard?

  Leon whispers to her: 'Come on . . . '

  The cop rouses herself, emerging from her own vague, insubstantial memories. Leon's words seem to irritate her, even though she had known somehow that he would ask that of her.

  'They're just questions, Leon.' She leans back in her chair, making the effort to regain control, to seem cool and in charge. A thin, unpleasant smile shows on her face as she reaches out to the only other object on the table, closer to her, an ashtray with a hand-rolled cigarette trailing a gray thread up to the other smoke at the low ceiling. Real tobacco, black-market goods, the kind of thing that only a cop would be so open about indulging in: The cop inhales, blows out the smoke, all the while coldly regarding the bulky figure across from her. 'That's all. Don't sweat it.'

  Leon glances nervously about the room, then back to the cop. He knows that things are going wrong, have gone wrong, will always go wrong. But they won't end, either; he has to ride it out, just as she does.

  'Okay,' says Leon slowly. 'About the turtle—'

  'Forget the turtle.'

  CLOSE on Leon. His brow creases. 'But the turtle's important—'

  'No, it's not.' The cop picks up the cigarette again and takes a long drag on it, almost burning her knuckles as the hot end comes close to her hand. 'Forget the fucking turtle. It doesn't matter now. I'll ask you another one.'

  Leon heaves a deep sigh, both agitated and resigned. 'Go ahead.'

  CLOSE on the cop. Her gaze turns away from the figure on the other side of the table, away from the little screen with its magnified image of his eye, and toward some place deep inside herself. Where her thoughts have turned wordless and strangely calm, no longer apprehensive and unsure. But absolutely certain now, of what was going to happen next.

  EXTREME CLOSE. She gazes at the burning cigarette stub between her fingers, then slowly and carefully sets it back down in the ashtray. The thread of blue-gray smoke cuts a vertical line through the air. The cop turns her gaze back toward Leon, focusing on him once again.

  'Let me ask you,' she says, 'about . . . your mother.'

  'My mother?' Leon acts puzzled, though the cop knows he understood the question.

  'Sure.' The cop nods, her smile encouraging and even friendly. Or as much so as is possible under the circumstances. She feels better now; it'll be over soon. 'Just tell me in your own words ... everything good you remember about your mother.'

  'My mother . . . ' Leon's expression darkens, like the lowering clouds filling the night sky outside the little room and the pyramid-shaped building. 'I'll tell you about my mother.'

  The cop knew what was going to happen. She wasn't surprised when the shots tore through the surface of the table, fire erupting from the gun in Leon's hands, hidden below. It made no sense that he would have the gun, that he should have been able to sneak it into the interrogation. Where were the security procedures? But at the same time, it made perfect sense. It had to happen that way . . .

  A diagonal line, from the gun to her. The bullets struck the cop, slamming her back into the chair, slamming the chair backward against the flimsy pre-fab wall, the bullets' force smashing the chair through a corona of splinters and dust. The chair toppled over, spilling the cop onto the floor and onto her back. She looked up, with eyes already starting to de-focus and film over.

  All wrong, she thought. And exactly the way it had to be.

  Time stopped, dilated, spread around the cop like the cooling puddle of blood beneath. The room seemed vast to her now; it contained whole universes. She was just conscious enough to be aware of two other figures coming into the room, and Leon looking up at them and asking, Was that all right?

  You were fine, answered one of them. Don't worry about it. But the cop could hear the disappointment in his voice.

  Even more so, when the figure came and stood over her and she could hear him speak to the other, in the last infinite second of her dying.

  This one didn't work, either. In the unfocused dark, the cop could make out the slow shake of his head. We'll have to try another one . . .

  PULL BACK to LONG SHOT.

  ELEVATED ANGLE, the dead cop on the floor.

  And FADE TO BLACK.

  1

  She loved her job.

  Iris knew she was good at it. Even at a time like this, when she also knew that she could die any second, and that her death would be her own fault — even now, the conviction burned within her, a white-hot spark at the center of her gut, that there was nobody better at this. Most of the other blade runners — or at least those who had been at the game as long as she had — were already dead or burnt out.

  Wimps, thought Iris, as she stepped through the woman's face, luminous white.

  The geisha image was all around her, a substance tangible as the foggy mists that rose between monsoon bouts from the stagnant lagoons that had once been the San Pedro freight docks at the edge of the city, where LA's sprawl was terminated by the gray, oil-shiny waves of the Pacific Ocean. Iris had childhood memories of the docks and the dead, decaying sea — from not that long ago; the street orphanage had unlocked and taken from her ankle the coded radio-emitter band, the magic cirdet that had enabled her to check into the safety of the hivelike, hexagonal sleeping shelters every night, just a few years ago, when she had passed her twenty-first birthday. That was when she had been legally entitled to sign away enough bodily security rights to join the LAPD's basic training program. The worst part of joining up had been lying in a departmental hospital chamber for a week, with a thermal-reduction blood substitute filling her veins while all of her drained-off real blood was being scanned for trace elements and metabolites of the few toxically thrilling chemicals that the lab's filtrons were sensitive enough to detect. She remembered through all that time, with her body core hammered down to 78 degrees Fahrenheit, dreaming of icebergs, blue and glowing like summer moonlight, marching in ponderous slow-motion through the LA streets, sweeping them clear, leaving them pure and englaciated, like the diamonds she had felt growing along her spine. When the department medics in their bloodstained blue scrubs had woken her up, and she had blinked away the ice crystals from her eyelashes, she had been almost sad to see the dirty city again, washed no cleaner by the fever-laden tropical rains . . .

  Giant red kanji marched through the enveloping cloud, spelling out the brand name of whatever wideband tricyclic the geisha was so happily placing on her tongue. The ideograms and the face faded a bit, enough that Iris could see a narrow swath of stars through a break in the bigger, darker nightclouds above. And enough that her prey might be able to spot her; with the bulky black metal of her gun filling both her hands, and poised barrel-upright along the side of her head, Iris drew back into the building's shadow. Under her bootsole, fragments of the concrete ledge crumbled and fell, dropping like cold, dead stars the twenty stories to the street's crowded, neon-shimmering wetness. The rain creeping down the building's exterior slunk through the neck tendrils of her close-cropped black hair, and down inside the collar of her Kevlar®-stranded leatherite jacket. Her knuckles were studded gemlike with drops of the same rain; wet, the gun's muzzle looked like carved and polished obsidian, a little totem of violence raised aloft by one of its worshipers.

  All right, thought Iris. Where is it? The adrenaline in her veins was making her impatient. She wanted to bag this one before the chase-exhilaration that revved her pulse modulated to a slower pace, marathon-running mode rather than a sprinter's full-out push. Half the pleasure in replicant-hu
nting came with sighting down on one, with her heartbeat so strong in her throat that she had to fight her own body to keep the gun from trembling in her grip, and the quarry turning and locking its fated gaze with hers, so they both knew exactly what was going to happen next, what moment of terminal intimacy they were about to share, only the small motion of a curved finger away, trigger and release, all the way up her braced arms and into that small, private room beneath her breastbone . . .

  The other half of the pleasure came with getting paid a blade runner's bounty. She could use the money. The gun in her hands wasn't regulation LAPD-issue, but something she was still making payments on, herself.

  A little motion fluttered the damp cloud pressing around her, a motion that wasn't caused by minor meteorological shifts, wind currents or a ventilator shaft's purge-release cycle. Something human, Iris knew, had done it. Or something close enough to human to run like one, far enough from human to be legal prey.

  Come on . . .

  She slid her foot along the narrow ledge, the heel of her boot scraping against the ancient brick facing. Carefully, with each small movement timed to her own pulse, she made her way to the building's corner. The sweat of her palms mingled with the rain inching along the grooves of the gun's incised grip.

  At the corner, with its blunt knife's-edge against her spine, she could look down and discern through mist the broken, rusting skeleton of the blimp that had used to cruise past the buildings' upper reaches, with its spiky, sea-creature-like antennae and swiveling pinlights, its pixel-swarm display of tantalizing off-world vistas, and synthesized voice boomily extolling the virtues of emigration to the stars. Rep-symp terrorists had brought the service-ad blimp down some time after Iris had gotten out of the LAPD's advanced training immersion compound, and she had been starting to make her mark in the blade runner unit, with an effective kill ratio knocked down from a straight one-thousand only by winging some pedestrian who had panicked in the wrong direction when she had started emptying her clip down the length of Figueroa Boulevard. Off-duty and narcotized asleep, Iris hadn't seen the blimp go down; from what some of the uniformed bull cops had told her, it'd looked like an ignited whale, as though Captain Ahab had traded his harpoon for a flame-thrower. The dead seas held no more whales; their bones rotted in the marine trenches, covered with oil. Only in bad dreams and televised news could you see one fall from the sky with such slow, sad grace.