by K. W. Jeter
'Yeah, great.' Iris shook her head in self-disgust. 'Now I know what some other failed blade runner named Rick Deckard looks like. That's really going to help me.'
'As I said, you're being too hard on yourself. You now have an idea of what it is that you don't know, and how important that is. Whereas before, you went on without even being concerned about your own ignorance, and that's how you wound up in so much trouble.'
'Spare me the lecture.' Iris closed her eyes. The tonnage of ruins weighing on her shoulders hadn't moved. 'I feel, bad enough already.'
'Self-knowledge is always painful,' said Vogel. 'You have to die to achieve it; die to your former self, that is. So that you can live again.'
She opened one eye just enough to try and see if he had been joking. 'What the hell are you talking about?'
'You're not there yet — but you will be. Whether you want to or not. That's what this is all about.' Vogel nodded toward the dark, empty screen on which the movie's images had slid past. 'Didn't you notice?'
'Notice what?'
'Something else a little mysterious.' Vogel tilted his head, alertly studying her responses. 'Something you should've noticed in particular. Not the business with Deckard and the other cop getting set up. Something about the woman; the one that Deckard fell in love with.'
'You mean the replicant?' Iris's brow creased in puzzlement. 'The one named Rachael?' She slowly shook her head. 'No . . . I didn't see anything. What about her?'
'You didn't notice?' Vogel lowered his head, like a predatory bird focusing on some small creature. 'Her face? That was what she looked like, in reality, when all of that stuff really happened.'
'So what about her face?'
Vogel leaned back. 'She looks exactly like you,' he said simply.
The rock encasing Iris's heart chilled, as though it had suddenly been exposed to the vacuum beyond LA's night skies. 'You're lying.' She could feel her pulse ticking faster. 'Now you're lying, too.'
'What's to lie about? It was there on the screen, where you could see it. Where you should've seen it.' With his free hand, Vogel reached into one of his coverall's pockets. 'I was afraid you might react like this. You've still got a long way to go. So take a look at these.'
Iris took a half-dozen glossy photo prints from his hand. Her own hand was trembling as she turned the photos around to look at them. 'What are they?'
'Stills. From the movie you just watched. Take a good look. And tell me what you see.'
She had to hold them tight with both hands, to keep them from shaking. The fear was lodged tight in her throat, as she looked down at the unmoving images. Iris could even remember the scene in the film, from which the still at the top of the pack had been extracted. It had been right at the beginning, when the Rick Deckard character had first encountered the enigmatic Rachael, and he had been requested by Dr Tyrell to run the Voigt-Kampff replicant-detection test on her. Which she had failed, of course. But in the meantime, she had sat there across the table from Deckard, with the softly breathing V-K machine between them, in the studio reconstruction of the Tyrell office suite in which Iris had found herself; smoking a cigarette and answering Deckard's rote drill of questions, in a curt and abrasive manner, her loathing for the cop in front of her readily apparent.
For a moment, Iris didn't see the still photos in her hand; instead, a memory flash of the movie opened inside her mind, the first scene between Rick Deckard and the replicant Rachael playing in infinite slow motion on the even more private screen behind her brow. She could see the female replicant named Rachael, with her icy attitude and hard retro makeup and hair, like some ancient film noir temptress, a trace of blue cigarette smoke curling into the air above her, her clothes more expensive and tailored than any of the rough street-gear that Iris wore . . .
And then she realized that Vogel was right.
The still photos scattered across the floor as Iris leapt from the wingchair, her fists trembling convulsively at her sides. 'You're wrong!' She didn't know where the fear and anger inside herself had come from. 'You lying sonuvabitch!' The fury surged up along her spine and consumed every other thought. 'She doesn't look like me at all!' Leaving only the denial of what she already knew was true. 'She doesn't!'
Then her vision cleared from the face she had seen in the movie to that of Vogel, regarding her with sad, calm patience. Waiting for her to admit it.
She looks exactly like you.
Iris collapsed into the wingchair, pressing her face against its soft leather, wet with her tears. Now she knew — or had just begun to know — why she had come here.
Intercut
'Damn.' The director leaned forward, shaking his head as he gazed at the monitor screen. 'He wasn't supposed to tell her that.'
The camera operator glanced over at the figure beside him. 'Why not? Wouldn't she have figured it out on her own?'
12
Pull yourself together.
She heard the voice inside her head. Her own voice, stern and unyielding, and without pity. For her pain, or anyone else's.
'All right,' said Iris. She pushed herself away from the soft leather upholstery of the wingchair, in which she had pressed her face in a vain effort to shut out both Vogel's words and the images that kept playing over and over on the screen behind her eyes. With the palms of her hands, she wiped away the tears that had dampened both her skin and the chair's. 'Tell me what you want.'
'What I want?' Vogel regarded her smugly. 'Maybe it's time to ask that question of yourself '
'I just want out of here.' Iris stood up from the chair, wiping her hands across the front of her trousers. 'This whole thing is crazy. I don't know even know why I'm in this place.' The moment of revelation she'd experienced, sparked .by the screen image of the female replicant Rachael's face, the mirror image of her own, had already faded. Her shoulders hunched with deep physical revulsion as she looked around the dark space, the glow of the candles barely able to push back the tonnage of ruins she felt weighing above her head. 'You're the one who dragged me in here for some godawful, idiotic reason. I don't care what your agenda is, anymore.' Anger tensed in her voice; the humiliation of having broken down in front of Vogel, weeping like a child as he'd regarded her in silence, took her resentment up another notch. 'I don't care about some stupid, fucking owl, I don't care who wants it, or why; I don't care what anybody's going to do to me if I can't find it—'
'You should care. There's some heavy people involved.'
'I'm beyond caring,' said Iris bluntly. 'I don't know if that's what you wanted to accomplish, if that was on your list of personal goals, but you've accomplished that much, at least. I'm going to walk out of here—'
'You wouldn't be able to find your way,' Vogel said.
'I'll dig myself out, then. Straight up and out of this mess.' Her trembling hands clenched into near-fists, as if her nails were poised to start prying at the rubble stacked above her. She headed for the private theater's door, making a quick, dismissive gesture at the empty screen on the far wall. 'One way or another. I don't have time for this.'
'It's all you have time for.' Vogel followed her out into the other room, brighter-lit with its massed ranks of candles. 'Don't fool yourself, now that you've gotten this close.' He reached out with his good hand, grabbing her shoulder to stop and pull her around to face him. 'Why do you think you're reacting the way you are? After all you've been through, what's the big deal about seeing someone who's got the same face as you?' Lowering his head, he peered closer into her eyes. 'That's what you've got to ask yourself.'
'And that's what I told you I don't give a shit about.' Iris angrily shoved his hand away from her. 'I'm outta here. I'm not interested in any more of your home movies. Show 'em to somebody who cares.'
'All right,' said Vogel mildly. He stepped back from her and smiled, radiating a superior attitude that infuriated Iris even more. 'Maybe I'll show them to that other woman. The one named Rachael.' With a tilt of his head, he indicated the private theater and it
s blank, empty screen. 'The one your face really belongs to.'
'Yeah, right.' Disgust welled up in Iris, heavy enough to be felt on her tongue. 'You're going to run that old joke by me? It's the creakiest one in the book.' She stood with both hands on her hips, shaking her head as she regarded him. 'That whole business – what if the blade runners are really replicants themselves? – that's about as dumb as it gets.'
'Really?' Vogel looked as amused as before. 'What's so "dumb" about it?'
'Everything,' snapped Iris. 'For one, I've already heard that joke; it was maybe funny the first hundred times I heard it. For Christ's sake, that's one blade runners tell to each other; it's like basic cop-shop locker-room wise-cracking. "Hey, what if we're the ones who're replicants? Wouldn't that be a crack-up?" Granted, every once in a while somebody in the division has some kind of mental collapse and starts believing it's true. But by then they're usually so far around on the Wambaugh self-loathing Curve, they're about ready to eat their gun-muzzles, anyway. So it's no big loss. And it doesn't make the joke any funnier, or any less creaky.'
'What if it's not a joke?'
'Get real,' said Iris. 'It is a joke. It's nothing but the standard "set an old cat to catch an old rat" theory. What better way to catch replicants than with some other replicant, right? Like there'd be some special wavelength that they're all on together. The only problem is that there's a definitive physiological test for replicants, the bone-marrow examination. Replicants have a distinctive regularity to their bone structure that's only visible under exhaustive inventorying using an electron-scanning microscope. Which are still just a little too heavy for agents in the field to carry around with them, when they're trying to track down and retire some escaped reps – plus the amount of batteries you'd run through, keeping something like that powered up. Not to mention that it takes about two days to get the results cranked out. That's a long time to ask some suspected replicant to stand around and wait to see if you're going to put a bullet through his head or not. Impatient bastards that they are.'
'Considering that you're about to ice them,' said Vogel, 'maybe they've got a right to have something more accurate than the VoigtKampff run on them.'
'The Voigt-Kampff's accurate enough. Nobody complains about it afterwards, do they? But that's beside the point. You want to know whether blade runners are one hundred percent human or not? Fine – that's why when you join the police department, you do get one of those bone-marrow exams run on you. I still got the scar where the LAPD medics punched in for the sample.' Iris pushed the ragged sleeve of her jacket up past her elbow, turning her arm to display a dime-sized faded mark on her biceps. 'Hurt like a sonuvabitch, too, I can tell you. But when the results come back from the lab two days later, and you pass, and you're in, then you don't have to wonder about crap like that anymore.'
'No, you don't.' Vogel's thin smile was more unpleasant than it had ever been before. 'You just have to wonder if the LAPD would give you the real results of the bone-marrow test, or whether it would simply tell you whatever it wanted you to hear.'
'Shit.' Iris's right fist clenched tighter, as if she were about to launch it right into Vogel's insinuating smile. Which meant, she knew, that she didn't have an answer in words that she could fire back at him. 'Look,' she said finally, 'forget about proving whether any blade runners are human or not. You know why? Because it doesn't matter. They get the job done; that's what's important. I got the job done, when I was a blade runner. So what would it matter if I were a replicant?'
'You tell me,' said Vogel. 'You're the one who burst into tears when you finally realized that some other woman – supposedly a replicant – has the exact same face as you. One of you has a problem.'
'Yeah, well, it's not me.' Iris looked away, scanning the candlelit room and trying to reconstruct the route by which she had gotten there. 'I've been under a lot of stress lately – all right? And you took me by surprise with that one.' There seemed to be a confusing number of doors available, any one of which might open onto the tunnel through the piled-up mass of ruins. 'So I had a little breakdown. I don't know why, but it's over now. If you want to go around thinking that Rachael person, or whatever her name was, is the real human being and I'm the replicant – fine. Whatever. But I'm not exactly worried about my ex-boss Meyer sending the troops from the blade runner division out after me.' The thought, a belated retort to Vogel's insinuations, had just struck her. 'If I'm supposed to be a replicant, why didn't Meyer have one of the other blade runners retire me as soon as I was bounced out of the police department? Hell, Meyer could've done it himself, right there on the spot; he carries a piece around with him. And the way things are going for him right now, he could've used the money. So tell me, smart guy, if I'm a replicant, why am I still—?'
'Shut up.'
'What?' Iris was more pleased than offended by any evidence of getting under the smug Vogel's skin. 'What did you—?'
'I said, be quiet.' Vogel held up his good hand and made a gesture for silence. 'Listen.'
'I don't hear anything,' said Iris after a moment.
Vogel's gaze lifted toward the dark spaces at the room's lofty ceiling, beyond the reach of the candlelight. 'That's because you don't know what to listen for.' His voice had sunk to a tense whisper. 'You don't know this place; you've never been here before.'
'Yeah, and I don't want to be here again—' Iris broke off as she heard a distant noise, a faint scraping and thud of metal against concrete, somewhere above their heads. 'That's not good,' she said, her own whisper matching Vogel's. 'What's going on?' Her pulse ticked faster. 'Is this place coming down?'
Vogel remained silent as he listened intently to whatever was happening above.
'Look, I don't care for the idea of being buried alive in here. Or even dead.' Given the mass of rubble and the sheer tonnage involved, if the ruins were to settle further and snuff Eldon Tyrell's private quarters out of existence, the two of them would be crushed lifeless in a matter of seconds. 'Let's get going.'
'Don't move. They'll hear you. Then they'll be able to tell exactly where we're at.'
'"They"?' Iris looked up at the ceiling; the noises had stopped for a moment, then started again, fainter but also detectably closer. 'Who is it?' Of the possibilities that raced through her thoughts, none was pleasant. Maybe, she thought, Meyer did decide to retire me. Not only out of the police department, but for good. 'How did they know we're here?'
'They always know,' said Vogel. 'They know before you do. Or at least he does.'
'"He"?' Iris frowned in puzzlement. 'What "he" are you talking about?'
Vogel didn't appear to have heard her. 'This isn't supposed to be happening,' he muttered. The expression on his sharp-angled face darkened as he tilted his head back, slitted eyes focusing on some point beyond the room's ceiling. 'It's not in the script.'
'There's a script?' Iris peered closer at him. 'What's that supposed to mean?'
'Right now' – Vogel's distracted attention returned to her – 'you don't need to know. And there isn't time for me to tell you about it. We've got to get out of here.'
'Glad you agree,' said Iris. 'That's where I've been heading for a while now.' She nodded toward the room's tall, brass-fitted doors. 'Which one did we come in by?'
'Forget that,' Vogel said. 'We can't go out the same way we came in. You should know that by now. Nobody can ever go back; there's only forward, even if you don't know where you're going.'
Great, thought Iris disgustedly. Always with the deep commentary. 'Yeah, but if that's the quickest way out of here . .
'I said, forget it.' Vogel's brow creased with furious concentration. 'I've worked with the guy long enough to know how his mind operates. Especially, how he figures other people are going to react.' A long-simmering resentment tinged Vogel's words. 'He always underestimates everybody else. He's got this godlike über-perspective on human affairs.'
'Who?' To Iris, the other's description sounded as though it were something personal. 'Is thi
s the person who lifted the owl from me, back in my apartment? So now I take it that he's got a whole crew with him?' The burrowing and scraping sounds from the rubble above had become noticeably louder, indicating a number of unwanted visitors. Maybe, thought Iris, they're the ones, or what's left of them, from the movie theater. Which was not good; they wouldn't be likely to be in a pleasant mood when they found her here. 'Who is this guy?'
'Wrong guess,' said Vogel. 'Different kind of trouble entirely. But definitely trouble; when he starts deviating from the script, it's because he thinks he has to. That means he's going to be worried about having lost control of the project.' Vogel bit the corner of his lower lip. 'What it also means is that he must have caught me going off-script. Shit.' He glanced around the corners of the room, near the beamed ceiling. 'I didn't figure he'd have this place wired as well; this whole sequence was supposed to be off-camera.' Vogel's expression turned even more bitter and brooding. 'Which was what was in the script. So if he was able to catch me deviating, that means he didn't trust me from the beginning.'
'Why the hell should anyone trust you?' Iris flung her hands up in exasperation. 'You said you went off some script you were supposed to be following. And he caught—wait a minute.' She pulled herself up short, having found herself in Vogel's spiraling mental loop. 'I don't even know who we're talking about.'
'Figure it out,' snapped Vogel. He grabbed Iris's forearm with his good hand, and pulled her with him toward the darker reaches of Tyrell's private quarters. 'It's the director!'
'Director?' Iris let herself be led past the reach of the candlelight, as much to discover what Vogel meant as to find a way out of the buildings' ruins. 'You mean . . . the director of the movie?' She pointed with her thumb back toward the theater. 'That Blade Runner thing I just watched?'
'That's the one.' Vogel let go of her arm so he could fish inside the pocket of his jumpsuit for his flashlight. With its beam flaring ahead, he kept walking at a fast enough clip that Iris had to hurry to keep up with him. 'Come on. They're going to be on us pretty soon, if we don't get a move on.'