Eye and Talon Read online

  'And if they had, do you really believe the LAPD would have released that kind of information? That any of the cops it had given authority to kill, based upon the numbers read out from the Voigt-Kampff machines, had actually screwed up and blown away actual human beings? That's great public relations, all right. Even in Los Angeles, it's hard to get away with that many potential murders. Even if the local authorities had wanted to take the hit on something like that, the UN wouldn't let them. The emigration program, and its dependence on replicant technology, is premised to an essential degree on there being a way of telling real humans apart from the fake ones; the system collapses otherwise. Who's going to be stupid enough to sign up and emigrate off-world if there's no reliable way of detecting and controlling the slaves who do the work? Whether or not the Voigt-Kampff machines and the empathy testing protocols actually can tell if a suspect is a replicant, everybody involved, from the blade runner out on the streets right up to the top levels of the UN emigration program, has to pretend that it works.'

  'You want to know something? I don't really care.' The ghostlike feeling, produced by the room's deep chill on top of her fatigue, rolled over her again like an invisible tide, in which she wavered with minimal gravity. 'If you want to make a case that all blade runners, including me, are murderers, blowing away real human beings because our V-K machines don't have anything inside them besides a couple of flashlight batteries — hey, knock yourself out. Whatever works for you.'

  'Oh, there's plenty inside the Voigt-Kampff machines, all right.' With one of his pink fingertips, Carsten idly tapped against the side of a flask; its contents slowly rotated in response. 'Just because they don't do what you thought they did, doesn't mean they're functionless. In fact, the V-K devices have some pretty impressive innards. If you'd ever taken one apart, you'd know what I mean.'

  The next time I have a couple free hours and a set of screwdrivers handy, I'll do that.'

  'It'd take a little more than that, I'm afraid. Specifically, several advanced degrees in micro-circuitry implementation, and a reverse-engineering team with a few decades of combined experience in the field. Not to mention the ability to get around the melt-down charges that are trigger-wired into the Voigt-Kampff machines. Those are real tricky to deal with; they're designed to keep anybody from figuring out just what it is that the devices are really for. Break the seal on the circuit-board casing and you're basically looking at a puddle of charred silicon and polycarbonate scrap. It took our committee's techs a long time to find a way of bleeding off the thermal charges before they wiped out the circuits underneath.'

  'Good for them,' said Iris sourly. 'I hope they kept their fingers intact as well.'

  'We lost a few, actually. Techs, not fingers; some V-K models have wired-in charges up in the lethal range.'

  'So was it worth it? What did you find?'

  'We found . . .' Carsten's voice trailed off for a moment, as if the thoughts in his brain took a few moments to sort and assemble. 'We found that the Voigt-Kampff machines are definitely not fakes; that is, they're not empty boxes, with a few colored lights and meaningless dials to make people think they're doing something real. They do something, all right. Specifically, the Voigt-Kampff machines look for something. And interestingly enough, the same thing we're looking for.'

  'Sure they do.' Iris didn't bother to filter the skepticism from her voice. 'And what is it? Something to do with eyes? Or owls?'

  'Both.' The expression on Carsten's face had achieved an oddly somber mischievousness, as if he enjoyed teasing someone about deadly serious matters. 'As you've undoubtedly noticed and filed away in that inquiring police-mode brain of yours, we have an interest here in exactly those categories.'

  'No kidding.' The cold had penetrated deeply enough into Iris's flesh that it was no longer painful. An anesthetic numbness had taken possession of her. 'They do seem kind of important to you. Given the effort you folks have gone to, just to round up so many.'

  'Important to others as well, and for much the same reasons.' With a gesture for her to follow him, Carsten turned and walked farther into the chamber, away from the door by which they had entered. 'Let me show you something really interesting.'

  She stumbled as she let him lead her, all sensation gone below her knees; ice crystals seemed to crunch beneath some other person's bootsoles, a truly invisible ghost inhabiting the exact same space that she did.

  Several meters beyond the laboratory workbenches, with their beakers and flasks occupied by the silently floating eyes, Carsten stopped by a row of rectangular objects resting on low trestles. The sight didn't dispel any of Iris's bleak mood, as the objects were the dimensions of coffins; the rear section of the icy chamber appeared as though it had been prepared for a public mourning ritual, with the victims of some mass tragedy arranged for viewing.

  A thick layer of snow-like frost had accumulated on top of the coffin-like objects, obscuring any other indicators of their nature. Carsten stood beside one, looking across it toward Iris. 'What do you suppose we've got here?'

  'God knows.'

  'I'll help you out.' Carsten leaned down and with the flat of his bare, pink hand, brushed the white crystals away from one section of the top. The glittering crystals drifted down to the toes of his shoes. 'There.'

  His clearing of the ice was enough to show that the object's horizontal surface was made of glass or some other transparent, durable substance. And that it was indeed a coffin; Iris could make out a human form lying inside, face upturned, hands crossed on its chest, with the utter tranquility of the dead.

  'Great,' said Iris. She supposed the other coffins held similar contents. 'I'll have to hand it to you. You've got all sorts of keen collections here.'

  'For someone who has been in the business you have — getting paid to kill things that look like human beings, and who could very well have been human beings, for all you might have known — you sound a little disapproving.'

  'I just retired them; "killed", if you prefer. Then I got paid and that was the end of it.' She glanced down at the coffin between herself and the old man; the face of the body inside was too blurred, by the smeared ice crystals still adhering to the glass, for her to make out its features. 'Maybe this was even one of them; I wouldn't remember something like that.' She looked back up at Carsten. 'That's because after they're dead, they don't really matter to me anymore. Maybe I'm lacking in the same necrophile leanings that you and your committee seem to have, from the looks of things around here. I never even kept a scrapbook of my completed jobs, with pieces of paper and photos and stuff; I know some blade runners did, though. And they wound up far out on the Wambaugh Curve, where there was no way for them to come back. So I sure as hell wouldn't have kept the bodies around, either, even if I'd had room for them in my apartment. Not my notion of interior decorating, I guess.'

  'Please — you can forgo the sarcasm.' Carsten held up one of his hands, its palm turned out to ward off her stream of words. 'It hardly becomes you. But since you insist on demonstrating how callous one can become from working as a blade runner, I'm sure you won't mind if I show you a few more things.' He reached down, toward a metal latch at the side of the coffin's glass lid. 'You've seen worse, I expect.'

  'Feel free. Like I said before, there aren't a lot of things left that can surprise me.'

  'Don't be too sure about that.' The latch clicked apart, metal from metal; with a hiss of air, like a vacuum-pack of standard ersatz coffee being popped, the coffin's lid unsealed from the silicon gasket around its edge. Vapor clouded the glass, turning it completely opaque as Carsten tilted it back on its concealed hinges. 'This universe is made for surprises.' He reached over, still grasping the edge of the lid, then let it drop on the other side, where Iris stood. 'Now what do you see?'

  She peered down, then shook her head. 'Oh, this is good, all right.' In some ways, the sight of the coffin's contents, and being able to see clearly the face of the human figure within, had genuinely surprised. But not so much
that she wasn't able to conceal her reaction from Carsten. 'Eldon Tyrell, taking a long deserved rest. That's cute.'

  It had taken her only a few seconds to recognize the corpse, though she had never seen the living man. Only in the movie, Iris reminded herself. The one Vogel had shown to her, appropriately enough, in the late doctor's private theater, deep in the ruins of the Tyrell Corporation headquarters. It was a relatively easy match, between that remembered image and the face of the glass-lidded coffin's inhabitant, even with its eyes shut and the rectangular-framed glasses missing. Tyrell had looked so close to death, like an animated corpse, in the Blade Runner movie, that the evaporation of whatever remaining vital spirit he'd once possessed had hardly changed him at all.

  'Indeed,' said Carsten. 'I'm glad Dr Tyrell's face is familiar to you.'

  'I'm not. I could've gone through my whole life, happily, without ever seeing him, either live, on a video screen, or dead like this. Let's just say he doesn't exactly set my pulse racing, okay? In this mode or any other.' Iris glanced back down at the face in the coffin; it appeared as if Tyrell were asleep, his thin-lipped mouth set as though he were savoring some dream of corporate empire. 'Though somebody in your outfit did a good job, putting him back together. From what I saw in the Blade Runner movie, and how Tyrell got iced by the Roy Batty replicant, I would've expected the remains to be in much worse shape than this.'

  'Oh, he's in good shape, all right.' Carsten seemed even more ironically amused than before, the delicate, pink- crepe of his face wrinkling with a wider smile. 'You might be surprised at exactly how good. Here, let me show you.' With no apparent squeamishness, Carsten reached down and fastened his hand upon the wrist of one of the hands folded on the body's chest. He lifted it and held it toward Iris. 'Go on.'

  After a moment's hesitation, Iris let the old man place Tyrell's wrist in her own hand. Carsten's fingers pushed hers into place, on the underside of the cold flesh. The slight weight of the dead's hand and forearm rested against her fingertips, as though she were to try to read by Braille the delicate lines of the tendons there.

  'Charming,' said Iris. 'But I already knew what corpses felt like. It's not much different when they've been put on ice like this one. Still feels dead.'

  Carsten didn't say anything, but went on gently smiling at her. And waiting.

  That was when she felt it. Faint, almost imperceptible; slow, with seconds between each trembling occurrence.

  A pulse. The heartbeat of the dead. Or not quite dead enough.

  'You see?' With her eyes closed Iris heard Carsten's voice, only subtly mocking. 'I told you that there would be a few surprises left for you.'

  Intercut

  'That was great.' The camera operator nodded in appreciation. 'Did you catch the expression on her face?' His own image was a ghostlike reflection on the glass of the monitor screen. 'Moments like that make it all worthwhile.'

  'Not bad,' said the director, beside him at the control panel. 'It'll do.'

  Don't knock yourself out. From the corner of his eye, the camera operator gave the other man an irritated glance. Nothing was ever good enough for the sonuvabitch; it made for a bad working atmosphere, in a situation where things were already not exactly bright and cheerful. Show a little appreciation, why don't you? He knew, though, that it would only make things worse if he'd said something like that out loud.

  And it hadn't been exactly easy to get the shot down on tape; the camera operator's hands had been darting over the board, punching up one angle after another, his brain moving even faster in its circuits, trying to anticipate where the POV would have to go next. He hadn't been able to depend upon somebody on location, the way he had before with so many of the remote set-ups, to get the female and the surrounding action in line for him. This old man, out wherever they were in the desert, was unreliable; he couldn't be counted on to get things right. He was into the scene all the way, completely in character, with no consideration for technical matters.

  'Watch out.' The director nodded toward the monitor before them. 'She's going to snap out of her funk any second now.'

  'Don't worry; I'm on top of it.' Firing back at the director was something that the camera operator could afford to do. He'd have a hard time finding somebody who could replace me. Which wasn't a matter of digging up another operator with moral standards so diminished as to have no objection to working on a job like this one — the notion of moral standards in the video business being more a conceptual item than a real one — so much as the high-level skills to pull it off. Half the hidden cameras out in that walk-in refrigerator, buried somewhere beneath the sun-baking desert surface, had had their lens defrosting units go out seconds before the old man and the female blade runner had stepped into the set. The camera operator had looked up at the ranks of monitors before him and the director and had seen every other rectangle of light blurring out beneath a gray fog. There was no way the shoot could be scrubbed until after a tech crew had gone in and fixed the problem; the big difficulty with working faux-vérité style with a lead character who wasn't in on the joke, such as this female blade runner, was that re-shoots were out of the question. Once the set-up was rolling, there was no turning back. The director might get a kick out of a high-wire act like that, but it mainly put knots in the bellies of the people having to do the actual work. Like me, groused the camera operator to himself. He'd wound up, at a moment's notice, having to figure out a way of pulsing the switch-on power surges for the afflicted cameras, generating enough heat from the overloaded micro-circuitry to dispel the mist from their lenses, giving him a thirty-second scan time before they clouded up again. When the tapes got uploaded to the post-production booth, the editors would be cursing him, but at least they'd have something to work with.

  'Make sure,' ordered the director, 'that we've got both a wide and a tight close-up when she speaks. I might want to do something fancier here, get her location re-established and personal situation isolated.'

  'You got it.' The camera operator had anticipated the request; there were no adjustments he had to make yet. Making the female blade runner look small, dwindled at the center of the chilly environment, was such a classic way to go that he would've been surprised if the director hadn't asked for it. 'They're live now, on seventeen and thirty-two.'

  'Get ready.' The director leaned toward the monitors, scanning across the different angles of the woman's face and the darker corners of the ice-encrusted chamber in which she stood. 'Now . . .'

  The director spoke as if he were personally willing time to start up again, some place where it had become embedded in an invisible glacier. The two figures, fragmented and reassembled on the monitor screens, might as well have been caught in that frigid stasis, their hearts slowed down to synch with the mired tempo of the corpse in the glass-lidded coffin. Which was, of course, the trouble that came from doing business with the dead, getting caught up in the affairs of those who had spent their time among the living and had no change coming to them. The camera operator sensed that in his bones, as if the chill from the distant subterranean chamber had seeped through the wires and out of the monitor screens, then across the short pseudo-synaptic gap between the illuminated glass and his hand. His arm suddenly felt bloodless and numb, a bent stake hammered into his heart.

  That's what I get, he thought morosely. The same advice he had silently given to the female blade runner, he should have taken himself She was as good as dead, in more ways than one; the whole business of her having the same face as the replicant named Rachael, who the poor doomed bastard Deckard had fallen in love with, had implications just as fatal for her. And now, mused the camera operator, I'm nose-deep in her business. Watching her, getting her into focus, watching his hands move across and work the controls, as if they were an infinitely variable substitute for the more sensitive points of her anatomy, his actions falling somewhere between seduction and rape. He wondered of whom; she didn't even know he existed, let alone was watching her by remotely controlled and hidden
cameras. His own concerns were moving from mercenary to obsessive. Which was a bad sign, considering for whom he was working. The director's agenda, to the extent it had been revealed, didn't seem to allow for a lot of happy endings.

  He could warn her; it was a possibility that had occurred to him already, back when the nature of the job had first started making itself clear to him. It would take only a few punches of the buttons in front of him to start up the fog-clearing overload pulses he'd jury-rigged into the hidden cameras and let them go unchecked, long enough so they'd blow up with a satisfying spatter of lens glass and smoking circuits. The female blade runner was a smart enough cookie to realize on her own, given that kind of tip-off, to figure out that something was unkosher about the set-up with Carsten and his so-called committee; maybe she'd be smart enough to turn tail and run, right out the frozen chamber's door, away from the glass-lidded coffins and their creepy contents. Maybe she'd be smart enough to keep running, out into the desert, toward the slate-gray mountains to the east, even farther away from LA's drizzling rains and neon-lit darknesses and whatever they concealed. Forget the owl, he told her; he tried to make the words penetrate the monitors' glass and travel across the wires to her. Just go . . .

  The female blade runner didn't seem to hear his silent warning. And his hands stayed professional and restrained, away from doing anything with the controls that might have given the game away.

  'All right,' said the camera operator. He spoke to himself as much as to the director sitting beside him. He had spotted the shift in the woman's face, the eyes that had widened slightly when she had perceived the pulse inside the supposed corpse's wrist, now narrowing in the next stage of her reaction. She had recovered herself, ready to speak and move again. Worse luck for her, thought the camera operator as he tweaked the gain on the spot mike hidden closest to her. 'Let's roll . . .'