Eye and Talon

by K. W. Jeter

  'Check completed,' announced the surresper. The grid of lines, starting an inch or so apart then narrowing down to map finer details, had disappeared from the living owl. 'Specific identity confirmed; recorded and physically present items are same creature. Chronological back-displacement estimated at one year, probability estimate in plus-ninety percentage range. Identifying tally marks are as follows: texture-read and mapped analysis of feather pattern, striation of organic beak base-material, impact stress marks at edge and point of beak, fibrous ocular patterning—'

  'Skip all that.'

  'Idiosyncratic heart and respiratory at-rest impulses—'

  'I said, skip it.'

  The surresper fell silent. Iris regarded the two identity-matched owls, one framed by a small section of the opulently wood-paneled Tyrell Corporation headquarters, the other by the bare walls and window frame of her own apartment. 'End re-creation display,' said Iris. The illusory owl vanished, along with its summoned-up surroundings. She was left alone with just the living creature in front of her.

  'Now what do I do,' muttered Iris aloud. She turned and walked into the kitchen module, ignoring the chat cringing under the table, and poured herself a glass of water at the sink. The tap continued to run as she drained the glass in one gulp, head thrown back; then she leaned forward, face lowered to the thin stream of water, and splashed it into her face. There were streaks of pinkish red swirling toward the drain when she took her hands away; not her own blood, but that of the men in the room above the movie theater. Face still wet, she turned from the sink and regarded her leatherite jacket which she had tossed across the kitchen's fold-down table when she had made her way back here to home.

  'That's bad enough.' Iris spoke to no one else as she picked up the jacket by its collar and regarded the damage the bullets had done to it. 'Christ,' she said in disgust as she poked the fingers of her other hand through the rips and tatters underneath one sleeve and along the corresponding side-seam. The jacket was a signature piece for her, as much as the collection of repro cowboyshirts she'd always worn underneath it. She would have felt naked out on the streets of LA without it.

  Even worse, the cheap-ass LAPD didn't reimburse for in-field losses and damages like this. The only way Iris would have gotten any money out of the department, she knew from experience, would've been if the bullets had been an inch or two lower and closer to the center, and had left her flesh in bone-splintered tatters as well. She had never been able to figure out exactly how much of a morale-booster for the troops it was supposed to be, that the department was so willing - even eager - to splash out on funeral services, but not on incidental expenses along the way. Just irritating, she'd always considered the practice.

  She threw the jacket across the table again and leaned back against the sink, arms folded across her chest. The money thing irritated her to what she knew was an irrational extent; the jacket wasn't so much of a loss - she could always get another, but not one that had been so nicely broken-in as this veteran, almost a second skin to her – except that she was also aware of how much she was in the hole on this job, already.

  The extraction operation at the movie theater had gone well enough, in that both she and the owl had gotten out intact; and losing that weird Vogel character, whatever his personal agenda had been, was a bonus as well. But the material cost, all the expensive gear she had promised to return to Meyer, had been high: to really keep him clear with the departmental armory, she would've had to have retrieved the casing for the expended glare grenade, as well as the automatic rifle she'd laid on Vogel. Now, she couldn't even call in one of the department's regular clean-up crews, who would normally have taken care of the messy details like that; the gear had come out of the LAPD armory's back door, via Meyer, and hadn't been authorized to be in her possession to begin with. The only way to have kept in the clear would've been to sneak the stuff back into the armory the way it'd come out, without anyone knowing about its little excursion. She and Meyer both were in the deep shit. Meyer might be able to pull them out, with his usual string-pulling expertise inside the department, but she would then be even further beholden to him than she had been before — and that was a situation definitely not to her liking.

  Which was why, she knew now, she had brought the owl here to her own place, rather than immediately getting it off her hands by taking it to Meyer at his office, either in the shiny, new police station or the old, abandoned one where he had given her this funky bird-hunting job. She hadn't planned on doing that, either before she had gone to the theater hiding-place with Vogel, or immediately after, when she had been on her own again. Some instinct or half-formed rationale inside her head had turned her steps toward home, rather than going ahead and finishing the job — the easiest part of it — no matter how much she had thought she'd wanted to.

  She refilled the glass from the tap and carried it out to the apartment's living room, where she sourly regarded the owl on its improvised perch.

  'You cost me, sucker.' Iris took a sip, then stepped over and refilled the dish she had put within reach of the owl. There had been enough left of the chain attached to the metal band on its foot that she had been able to secure the creature in place. The chat was already terrified of the intruder merely being in the apartment; if it'd been free to swoop around, with predatory intent toward anything smaller than itself and reasonably alive-seeming, the chat would probably have blown its circuits out of sheer panic. 'I don't know how yet,' said Iris, 'but I know you did.'

  The owl maintained its dignified silence, gazing back at her with its round, golden eyes.

  Iris looked down at the pinyin newspapers she had spread beneath the owl's perch. The papers were soaked wet around the base of the dish, blurring the vertical columns of Chinese ideograms; when she hadn't been watching, while she had been in the kitchen, the owl must have slaked its thirst. She wondered exactly how owls did that; could they lap water up, the way real cats supposedly did? It raised another question, which had already been nagging at the back of her mind, about keeping the animal alive. 'I suppose you gotta eat,' said Iris. The owl blinked its golden eyes, but otherwise made no comment.

  She didn't have a fresh — and real — white rat to give to the creature. Little out of my budget, thought Iris. She was in the hole as it was, with this job. Did owls eat only live kill, or was that snakes? A vague memory played through her mind, something she'd read, that real frogs and toads had eyes or circuits in their brains that could only recognize moving, buzzing-around insects; a frog could be surrounded by mountains of tasty, nutritious dead flies and bugs, and starve to death because it couldn't tell they were there.

  This thing should've come with a manual, groused Iris to herself Either that, or she should have asked some questions of a more practical nature when she had been down at the animal traders' souk. Or kept one of the men in the room above the movie theater alive long enough to have found out what they had been feeding the thing.

  'Let me see what I can find you.' The owl blinked back at her.

  Iris left the apartment's front door open, as she was only going to the end of the hallway. By the trash chute opening, the building's management had set out an array of traps for the scurrying brown mice that were a constant feature of life in LA — another survivor species, like the pigeons that fouled the ledges and roofs of the older buildings.

  Underneath a bare lightbulb swaying at the end of a frayed cord, Iris poked the toe of her boot through the traps, sorting out three that appeared to have been sprung recently. The blood spattered from the tiny corpses was still wet and shiny. Wrinkling her nose in distaste, she knelt down and pried open the traps, gingerly extracting the dead mice, their eyes like tiny black beads. She realized that she hadn't brought anything from the apartment to carry them with; when she stood up, she had a palmful of soft, dampish-feeling fur objects, their bare tails "trailing over the side of her hand.

  'Try these,' said Iris. She deposited the tiny corpses on the newspaper in front of
the owl. As she turned away to re-lock the front door, she heard the powerful whap of the owl's wings against the air, and the scrape of its claws across the paper. She looked back and saw the owl disassembling one of the dead mice, the hook of its beak tearing through the flesh beneath the soft grayish-brown fur.

  Either the owl didn't, by its own nature, reject food it hadn't killed itself, or maybe the late Dr Tyrell had trained it that way; maybe the living and expensive white rat she had witnessed in the surresper's data record had been a special treat. Even someone as rich as the head of the Tyrell Corporation had been wouldn't have been able to come up with goodies like that on a regular basis.

  Making progress, thought Iris. For the time being, at least, the problem of keeping the owl alive was solved. There was enough vermin in the apartment building to feed the thing indefinitely. But she wasn't planning on keeping it that long in her possession; the owl was still desired by some powerful people and forces. The sooner she figured out what to do with it, and then proceeded to get rid of the thing, the safer she'd be.

  'Get rid of it,' echoed a tiny voice behind her.

  Iris looked down over her shoulder and saw the chat pressing close to her ankles, looking around her shins at the feeding owl; the expression on the chat's round features was one of active hatred.

  'Can't just yet.' Iris picked up the chat and held it to her with one forearm, careful not to stroke its endorphin-producing head. 'Gotta think.'

  'What's to think about?' The chat laid its tiny paws on her breast. 'Icky.'

  'Couple of items.' She walked a familiar circuit, back and forth in the apartment's living room, steering well clear of the owl. It had always helped sort out her thoughts, speaking them aloud to the chat; it was one of the artificial creature's useful functions for her. 'One — I don't really know what Meyer's intentions are, at least as far as I'm concerned.'

  'Who's Meyer?'

  'Nobody for you to worry about.' A big worry for her, though. The whole job stank even more of a set-up than it had before.

  Not good. Iris shook her head as she continued walking back and forth, the chat held closer to her. She'd had some residual measure of trust in Meyer before, no matter how much he'd jerked her around, even before this job; that was his job, as head of the division, to hand out crap to all the blade runners, herself included. But not to get them killed, or at least not deliberately. A set-up like the one she could have found herself in — that amounted to a departmental execution, as efficient as putting a gun's muzzle behind her ear and pulling the trigger. Hard to go on trusting anyone, even minimally, with an analysis like that.

  'But what did he want?' Iris mused over the question, taking one step after another, back and forth.

  'Who?' The chat peered up into her face.

  'Meyer.'

  'Him again,' said the chat, annoyed.

  It was the big question. Did he want the owl, thought Iris, or did he want to get me killed? Maybe both, though she wasn't sure how that would have worked out. But if her death had been Meyer's objective, then it would be suicide for her to go to the police station and hand over the owl. If the owl was in fact something that Meyer wanted, and not just a pretext to maneuver her into a situation where she'd get killed, then as soon as he had the damn thing, he'd have no reason to keep her alive; people got iced all the time inside police stations, cops included. The entrance to the building, either on street level or up on top where the spinners landed, was sometimes a one-way door, with no exit other than in a box. But those cops who got executed by the department were nearly always ones who'd screwed up big-time, either by taking so many bribes from criminal types that the internal-investigations division had no choice but to get rid of them; or by reason of having run afoul of departmental politics, getting on the wrong side of one of the brass way above Meyer's rung on the ladder. Right off-hand, she couldn't think of any reason why anybody up above would want to eliminate her.

  It's like being a replicant, thought Iris. Or to be more exact, like a replicant who doesn't know that it's not human. She'd never had to retire one like that — at least, not yet — but she'd heard of a few cases where the poor bastards thought they were human, and then, as though they'd been dropped into a Kafka novel rewritten by Mickey Spillane, found themselves being hunted down by some armed and legal nemesis figure like Iris herself. You wake up one day, it struck her, and somebody wants you dead. For no reason you've been told. She felt a twinge of pity, not only for herself, but for those replicants who got killed without even knowing why.

  'Screw it,' Iris said aloud. She didn't care what the reason might be; she just wanted to stay alive. Again, like those poor bastard replicants; all of them, whether they knew what they were or not. She was starting to feel a little sympathy for them – which was a dangerous road for a blade runner to go down. First mere sympathy, then empathy, the actual sensing and experiencing of another creature's sufferings; Iris couldn't figure how she'd be able to do her job if that happened to her. I'd have to give up being a cop, she thought, and go for being a saint.

  'The way I see it,' Iris told the chat, 'is that I've got a couple of options.' Neither of them impressed her as very good. 'I could call up Meyer—'

  'Hrmph.'

  'And try to cut a deal with him. If he wants this owl – or if somebody above him does – then they're not getting it until I'm in the clear. Meaning that I walk away after delivery, and nobody tries to retire me.'

  The chat hadn't understood what she had said, but nodded its round, bald head anyway. 'Sounds good.'

  'Only if you're an idiot,' said Iris. 'Which I'm not, except to the extent I got myself roped into this mess in the first place. I already don't trust the guy; why should I trust him about keeping a promise to let me live after I hand over the owl to him?'

  'Dunno.'

  'Exactly. Besides, it might not be up to him. If he's merely the errand boy, following somebody else's orders, he could make all the promises in the world, have every intention of carrying them out, and I'd still get iced. He might, too, but that wouldn't do me any good.'

  'Gosh.' The chat wrinkled its simple features in perplexity. 'Doesn't sound nice.'

  'You got that right, pal.' Iris stopped pacing, nodding slowly to herself as she mulled over the various bleak possibilities in front of her. 'Which leaves the other option ...'

  'Is?'

  Iris glanced over at the owl. 'I try to figure out what's so important about our guest here.' She pointed a thumb toward the creature. 'And exactly why some people seem to want it so badly.'

  'Ee-yuck.' The chat scowled. 'I don't. Get rid of it!'

  'Wish I could.' A sigh moved up from her heart. 'You don't know how much I wish I could.' This whole business, symbolized by the owl, had gotten way more complicated than she would have been able to imagine at the beginning. Her former life, in which all she had to do was track down and kill escaped replicants, now seemed like some vanished paradise, graced with an innocent and leisurely charm. 'But I'm stuck with it. For the time being.'

  'How long's that?'

  Something in the chat's question raised the skin prickling along her forearms. 'What do you mean?'

  'You know.' The chat pushed itself back from her chest, so it could look up at her, full-face. 'Until something happens.' It tilted its round head to one side, small button eyes appearing slyer. 'More guests?'

  Every once in a while, the chat's simpler brain circuits hit it right on the mark, catching something she had overlooked. Of course, thought Iris. The base beneath her gut seemed to vanish. Something is going to happen. And soon. The guests would be coming, and their visit, while short, wasn't likely to be pleasant. Iris cursed her own stupidity, the amount of time she'd wasted fidgeting and fussing, right here where anybody looking for her would be sure to find her. And there would be people looking; too many possible connections were hooked up between her and what had gone down in the room above the movie theater for her to have gotten away scot-free. Meyer had known that so
mething was going to happen as soon as he'd delivered the gear from the armory to her; when she didn't get back to him within a reasonable amount of time, he'd start his own investigation. He might not know where the action had been, but to find out if she was still even alive the first place he'd come looking would be right here at her apartment. The multiple coded locks on the door wouldn't slow him down; by departmental regulation, every cop had to log his or her code registry in the police station's personnel database, to facilitate surprise inspections for contraband and/or ongoing drug-usage violations. With his rank, Meyer would be able to pull those codes and come waltzing in here whenever he felt like it. And would he be happy to find the desired owl sitting here, instead of having already been delivered to him at the station? Probably not – and he was smart enough to flash onto the simplest explanation for that non-delivery, which was that Iris no longer trusted him. In as nasty a situation as this one was shaping up to be, personal problems like that were likely to be solved by simple termination. Not from the job, but from one's life.

  And Meyer wasn't the only one she had to worry about dropping in on her unexpectedly. The armed and ugly men from whom she had lifted the owl had undoubtedly been working for somebody else; they'd had the Rottweilerish appearance of mercenaries, highly skilled and equipped ones, but still operating on somebody else's orders. Somebody who could very likely afford other hired thugs, who in turn would be able to do their job more efficiently than the last batch, as Iris would no longer have the element of surprise on her side. For all she knew, they were already on their way; the owl might have some kind of micro-seed tracer element planted in or on it that she would have no way of detecting without using the through-pulse scanners at the police station's security labs. Her apartment could already be in the center of a glowing red circle on a track-in-progress screen, with other ominous red dots moving in on it . . .