by K. W. Jeter
A hand grabbed her under one shoulder and pulled; she knew without looking that it was Vogel, having come back down a few meters on the tangled rebar, clinging with one hand while reaching for her with the other. Instead of pushing down on the metal section against her gut, she was now able to instinctively push against it without fear of falling; her breath rushed into her lungs as the metal bar retreated a precious inch. She let Vogel drag her upward, until the rebar section was against the front of her hips, too far down for her to push against it anymore. That no longer mattered, though; she could grab onto the sections near Vogel and help drag herself free.
Just as the binding press of the metal flexed and cleared her knees, Iris felt another hand on her body, a tight grasp seizing one ankle from below. She looked down, catching one of the searchlight beams straight into her dazzled eyes, then managing to make out the faceless silhouette of the pursuer who had leapt from the rubble face onto the rebar. The man had reached through the metal sections and caught her; the rough, hollow sphere vibrated dangerously, threatening to dislodge itself from where it had momentarily halted in the ruins' vertical gap, as he locked his fist tighter onto her boot and pulled her toward himself.
She knew she had one shot left. Already free of Vogel's grasp, Iris let her arms go straight, dropping herself back down the mass of rebar. That took the pursuer by surprise; he was even more surprised when she pulled her ankle loose from his grip and, instead of trying to scrabble away from him again, brought the heel of her boot down hard into his face. Even through the overlapping noises of metal scraping against metal and both Vogel's and the rest of the pursuers' shouts, Iris could hear a satisfying crunch of splintering bone; a wet red flower blossomed where the bridge of the man's nose had been, and his eyes defocused as his mouth opened wide in shock and pain. His clutching hands jerked apart, then grabbed onto empty air as he fell away from her.
Not bothering to watch what happened to him, Iris was already scrambling back up alongside Vogel. Even as she reached that point, the tangle of rebar lurched again, twisting and rolling in the dark gap, and bringing both of them around to what was now its uppermost surface. Iris looked down through the center of the hollow shape and saw that the bloodied pursuer had managed to break his fall at the last possible moment, with one hand having grabbed hold of the metal section at the very bottom of the mass.
'It's going.' Vogel, alongside Iris, had also caught sight of what had happened below, then had quickly glanced over to where the rebar's jagged circumference scraped at the vertical sides of the gap. The angle of concrete against which the mass had been jammed tight was beginning to splinter and crumble, a loop of rebar acting like a horizontal chisel-point, driven harder by the struggles of the figure underneath. 'Jump!'
Iris felt a moment of weightlessness, as though gravity itself had been switched off, as she saw the cement outcropping explode into powdery dust and shards, and the rebar fell away beneath her scuffed knees and hands. Her unthinking animal reactions took over; her bootsoles thrust against the last remaining rebar section even as her fingertips stretched toward the rubble face opposite. With nails clawing into the face's crevices, and the toes of her boots kicking to wedge themselves in as well, Iris clung to the unlit surface, teeth gritting as she pressed herself flat against it.
'You're okay,' said Vogel quietly, from some place close to her. The vertical gap in the ruins of the Tyrell Corporation headquarters had gone completely dark again, the searchlight beams lancing from below having been extinguished by the tumbling fall of the rebar mass. 'Get up here.'
Guided by his voice, Iris climbed onto a narrow ledge of broken concrete, relatively flat and level, and crouched there, letting her pulse and breath slow once more. Keeping back from the crumbling edge, she glanced down and saw nothing. The tangled rebar had fallen with enough velocity to knock the pursuers back down toward the Tyrell private quarters; if the rebar had wedged itself in good and tight in the rubble-lined shaft, it would take them a while to find a way around it.
She turned her face upward, and felt something cold and wet upon it. For a second, Iris wondered if she had at some point torn her skin, perhaps a sharp edge of one of the rebar sections across her brow, and hadn't felt it during the chaos and disorientation in the ill-lit ruins. Still kneeling on the ledge, she reached up with one hand and touched her forehead, then drew her fingertips away and rubbed them together. The wetness wasn't sticky enough for it to have been blood, and it didn't taste salty when she put one fingertip to her tongue. But if it's just water, thought Iris, then maybe . . . 'It's rain,' she said aloud. Now she recognized the taste, only slightly acrid and chemical from its descent through the city's constant atmospheric pollution. Another sensation of damp and cold, seeping in from both the ledge and the surrounding rubble, and the slight noise of drops falling onto the hard surfaces, indicated that the rainwater was trickling all around her and Vogel. 'Look—' Iris fumbled to where his voice had come from, found his arm and pulled him toward her. She stood up, dragging him along with her, and craned her neck to peer beyond the outcropping of jagged cement above them. Through a narrow triangular hole, she could make out a wedge of the flame-lit underbellies of the stormclouds moving across LA's night sky. 'We made it,' said Iris, letting go of Vogel and wiping the rain from her face. 'We're at the top.'
'Of course.' Vogel sounded amused. 'That's what happens when you climb long enough. Even with this other stuff happening.' Enough dim light trickled into the space for him to be able to indicate a ladder-like slope of debris chunks threaded with the metal reinforcing rods. 'This part's easy.'
True enough, thought Iris, when she pulled herself out from the mouth of the shaft and stood upright again. The wind drove the rain and various pieces of sodden trash – newspapers with Chinese ideograms for headlines, tattered advertising banners even more obscurely coded – almost horizontal, with enough force that Iris had to brace herself to keep from being knocked over. As Vogel climbed out of the narrow opening behind her, she shielded her eyes and looked about the surrounding cityscape.
Like a mountain, thought Iris. Ringed by other, taller and spikier mountains. She and Vogel had emerged at what seemed to be the highest point of the Tyrell Corporation ruins, a slope-sided mound of concrete rubble and twisted steel girders poking up from them like the fingerbones of an ill-buried giant's corpse. Down in the shaft winding vertically through the debris, by which they had fled from Eldon Tyrell's private quarters, their lungs and tracheae had become so coated with inhaled ash and the other by-products of explosive combustion that they had no longer been able to smell or taste them. A few deep inhalations of the night's rain-wet air, however polluted, brought a black wad onto Iris's tongue, that she had to spit out to keep from choking on it. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand as her eyes adjusted to being able to see once more, by the towering buildings' bright pinpoints of light and the intermittent gouts of flame that burst above them.
'Great,' said Iris. Vogel stood next to her on the uneven, shifting pinnacle, pointlessly brushing off the sleeves and front of his now-tattered jumpsuit. 'We took the long way out.' She had lost all sense of direction, at least as far as compass points were concerned; the direction by which she had first approached the ruins of the Tyrell Corporation headquarters, out on the edges of the surrounding streets, was extinguished from her physical memory. 'How do we get off this mess? Looks like a long walk, no matter which way we go.'
'I don't think,' said Vogel quietly, 'that we're going to get to make that decision.'
She saw that he was pointing to the sky; she turned and looked in the direction of his raised hand and extended index finger. A set of lights, that she had mistaken for stars dimly breaking through as the rain-depleted clouds thinned and scattered, grew suddenly brighter and agile, swooping down from above. Even before Iris discerned the trails cut across the night's darkness, the flaring lines closer set and visibly hotter than regulation police spinners, she knew they weren't LAPD. As they sw
ooped lower and closer, the engine noises caught up with them, snarling lower in pitch than any cop vehicle, as though predators were already exulting in the catch their claws reached toward.
'These are Urbenton's?' Iris quickly glanced over at Vogel. 'How big a crew does he have working for him, for Christ's sake?'
'I don't know,' murmured Vogel. The expression on his face, lit by the glow of the spinner trails, was one of baffled dismay. 'I must've been wrong . . . down below . . .' One lowered hand gestured toward the exit hole behind him, and the Tyrell private quarters at its bottom. 'The ones down there weren't the only bunch after us; somebody had these waiting up here, too. But these can't be from Urbenton. He doesn't have anything like this . .
'Well, I'm not waiting to find out.' Freed of the soul-dampening claustrophobia of the ornately furnished rooms buried somewhere beneath her, as well as the even tighter press of the exit route she had just scraped through, Iris's normal temper flared. If she'd had the time, she would have decked Vogel with a fist to his jaw for needlessly dragging her through that entire vertical tunnel, and nearly getting her killed in the process. We could've stayed right there, thought Iris as she started to run, and saved ourselves the trouble.
The slope of the ruins increased her speed. She caught herself with both hands against any outcropping of broken cement and steel that blocked her path, turned and kept her footing on the loose, sliding rubble, and kept running. The spinners, whomever they belonged to, were right above; Iris could hear the louder snarl of their engines as they swooped and banked only a couple of meters above her head.
Searchlight beams lanced around her, racing with the spinners' motion, in front and behind, then locking tight upon her, turning the rubble to a cold blue-white, blinding in its reflected glare. Her broken shadow vaulted across the glacier-like concrete floes.
Then her running stopped, as she skidded to a stop at a cliff's edge before her; she had to fall back and grab onto the rubble behind to keep herself from going over. The toe of her boot dislodged a piece of concrete small as a pebble; she heard nothing for several seconds, then far below the tiny sound of it clattering against the stratum of ruins at street level.
It was worth a shot, Iris told herself — though she had already known that she wasn't going to get away. Just not in the cards.
In the distance, blurred by the last of the rain, the lights of the city stacked up to the sky, all of them beyond her reach. Then they were blotted out by the brighter and closer glare of the searchlights as the anonymous spinners hovered down in front of her and trained their gaze upon the hard-shadowed figure pinned against the rocks, shielding her eyes from the glare.
13
'So when do I get to meet this Urbenton guy?'
'Who?'
At first, Iris thought that was supposed to be some kind of a joke. The other person sitting on a folding chair in the galvanized metal shed was one of the crew that had captured her on top of the Tyrell Corporation ruins; she recognized him, even though it had been dark then, with nothing more than the cold stars breaking through the clouds and the beams of the searchlights glaring into her eyes. His had been one of the voices calling out to the others, that this stage of the operations had been completed and objective secured.
'Don't make owl noises at me,' snapped Iris. It figured that they were all in on it, every one of them, right from the beginning. The only person who doesn't know the whole story, she thought irritably, is me. Just her luck — which, when she thought about it, had never really been the same since she had retired the Enesque replicant, as though that job had put some kind of convoluted, Nacht und Nebel curse on her. 'You don't have to rub it in.' She glared at the man guarding her. 'I want to know when we're going to segue onto the next tune, and I get to talk to the guy in charge.'
The guard peered at her, as though at some unexpected biological specimen that had crawled out of the surrounding desolate area and into the shack. 'And that would be . . . ?'
'Jesus Christ,' said Iris. 'No, don't go with that; I don't want to confuse you. I mean Urbenton. The director, or whatever the hell he's supposed to be.' She could tell, from the puzzled look in the man's eyes, that she wasn't coming across. 'Read my lips. Ur . . . ben . . . ton.'
'I don't know who the hell you're talking about.' The guard leaned back in his chair, tilting its front legs clear of the floor's splintery wooden planks, his arms folded across his chest. 'I've never heard of anybody named Bourbonton.'
Iris didn't bother to correct him. Pointless, she thought. She'd handled enough interrogations during her cop career, with suspects and perps both dumber and smarter than this guy, to know when things had reached a dead end. Either the guy really didn't know, in which case she was wasting her time by even asking, or he had been trained well enough to put up a convincing front, one that would take a long time to crack. Plus the ability to beat the crap out of him, which was more or less standard LAPD procedure in situations like this. She doubted if that much time was available to her, and she was sure that the other part wasn't, given that the guy was strapped with a big ugly piece in a shoulder holster, and she was weaponless. Her chair and his were far enough apart that if she tried anything cute he would have plenty of-time to unfold his arms, pull the gun out and put its muzzle in her face before her butt was even off the curved metal seat beneath her.
Try waiting, Iris told herself. For her, it was a novelty, but she couldn't see that any other options were available at the moment.
'Thirsty?' The guard, unruffled by their exchange, pushed a plastic water bottle toward her with the toe of his boot.
'I'll let you know.'
Which wouldn't be long. The metal shack was already starting to heat up, from the desert-like sun hammering down on it. When she had been loaded into one of the spinners that had come hovering down on her, the first blood-red light of dawn had been starting to leak around the bases of the surrounding buildings. As the spinner had risen and flown eastward, away from the black-mottled ocean, the radiance had changed to a brighter and dirtier orange, textured and smudged by the constant ground-hugging pollution that silted the lungs of every Angeleno. Iris had spat out enough of it, to know what the taste was like, waking in the middle of the night with the sensation that some invisible bedmate was sitting on her chest, hands tightening on her throat; that was the kind of repeating dream that came with the urban territory. So it didn't surprise her to see the black-brown inhalants lapping up against the low mountains, that surrounded the dense city basin like the tide of derelict oil tankers.
She turned and gazed out the single small window on one side of the shack, its lower left pane broken out, leaving one jagged triangle sticking up like a tooth. The rest of the window was too clouded with dust to see much, but through the hole she could make out a long vista of sand and scruffy, dried-brown brush clinging precariously to the dunes' hollow slopes. Dead machinery populated the area, right up to the distant limits of a sagging fence topped with rusting coils of razor wire. Most of the equipment looked like ancient earth-moving gear: bulldozers with their shovel-like snouts scraped into the dry rock beneath the sand, caterpillar treads snapped and draped off the giant metal gears, saurian cranes whose necks had been torn free of their sinews, their fanged scoops crashed down upon the little plastic-windowed booths where the human operators had once sat, a long time ago; steamrollers whose massive cylindrical wheels had become pitted with wind-driven gravel. Iris figured that the machines must have been used for road-building, not city roads but highways and freeways, back when there had still been open spaces anywhere near Los Angeles, before the metastasizing city had swallowed them up, oozing itself over them like some slowly and endlessly self-replicating unicellular organism.
Curious, passing time in the shack's heat and stilled air, she leaned to one side so she could look farther along the rows of defunct equipment. Her guess had been right, confirmed by hodgepodge stacks of what had been the signs mounted over the freeways -- she had seen photos of t
hem in some historical video documentary, part of her perfunctory civics dasswork at the LAPD's training academy. Dark green backgrounds, with reflective white lettering, bright in the desert glare; it hurt her eyes to even look at them. Squinting, with the corners of her eyes watering, Iris could decipher the destinations spelled out on the old signs: places like Pomona and Glendale, Riverside and farther west to San Bernardino, farther north to Ventura and Oxnard. Nothing but names now, without meaning or reference; those places had been buried long ago, beneath the space-hungry city.
Which left no place to go to; not really. That was the true distinguishing feature of Los Angeles: every place in it was just like every other place. Something like the long-expected and even wished-for heat death of the universe had been achieved; with no place to go to that was any different from where someone had started from, why go at all? Instead, there was the constant milling about of LA's street crowds, like the random Brownian motion of molecules in suspension, without purpose or order, or even sensation. Iris supposed that was a big part of the reason for the characteristic blank-faced apathy of LA's citizens, and why she and other blade runners had always been able to run around in the streets with cannon-sized weaponry held aloft, and blow away things that looked like real people, and that died just as gruesomely, without any of the bystanders getting the least bit disturbed by what they were witnessing. Someday, mused Iris as she gazed out at the desert beyond the rusting machinery, someday they'll invent a mass Voigt-Kampff test, one that somebody can run on a whole city at once. And LA'll flunk it.