Eye and Talon

by K. W. Jeter

  'Very expensive, of course — and just for you. We wouldn't do it for anyone, believe me. We have to work within our budget constraints. Unlike your former employers, we have to depend upon our own private sources of operational funds. Come on.' Carsten led her toward the table, where he poured out a cup from a thermal carafe. He handed it to her, then pointed to the other articles on the table. 'And surely you must be hungry, after all that expenditure of energy and in the cold and damp, you poor thing! — at the Tyrell Corporation ruins. Please, help yourself. That's what it's for.'

  Iris realized that she did feel both hungry and tired. The slight ebb of her anger had been produced by the old man's hospitality, however phony; enough to have exposed that pure adrenaline and temper had been keeping her going. She took the plate Carsten handed her, then watched as he deposited a jelly doughnut on it.

  'That's such a cliché.' She shook her head.

  'My apologies.' Carsten seemed genuinely apologetic. 'No simple cop inferences intended. But as I said, our resources are limited. And this —' He turned, gesturing at the building's interior. 'This is only a temporary set-up. Provisional. We'll be here only as long as we need to be. In order to get the job done. So we haven't established a proper kitchen. There aren't very many of us and we can get by, for the time being, without one.'

  Iris took a bite. 'Who's this "we"?' She swallowed. 'Who are you people?'

  'Another good question.' Carsten nodded approvingly. 'You're getting better at this. Some day . . .' His voice faded, almost to a whisper. 'Some day you'll know . . . exactly the right question to ask. And then . . .' He brought the gaze of his small, pale eyes around to her again, from whatever interior focal point it had fallen to. 'Then you'll have to decide whether to ask it or not.'

  She froze in place, between heartbeats and the tiny, almost silent motions of the old-fashioned numbered clock on the room's wall. A red, viscous trickle from the half-eaten doughnut inched slowly down the inside of her wrist.

  'Don't be frightened,' said Carsten gently. 'You might be lucky. That moment might never come.'

  Frightened. She could remember when the same fear had touched her before. Then it had brought tears, a bout of weeping, of which she was no longer ashamed. Because she knew now that she had been right to be frightened. She did look exactly like me, thought Iris. The memory of that image, of the woman's face, the replicant named Rachael, filled the screen behind her eyes. There had been a question then as well, that she could have asked — but hadn't. Because she had been too afraid to.

  Her hand came to her mouth, automatically, and she took another bite of the doughnut. She didn't want Carsten — whoever he was — to know how his words, and her memory, had scared her. Her mouth had gone so dry she could barely swallow.

  'Drink your coffee.' Carsten had noticed her effort, close to choking. 'That'll help.'

  She obeyed. She could feel her pulse start up again.

  'Could you unfold this for me?' Carsten had pulled out a metal chair, like the ones that Iris and the guard had sat on in the other building. 'The joints are a bit rusty — like mine, I suppose.' The simulated twinkle appeared in his eyes again, as though they were some sort of cheaply artificial gemstone. 'And the other one as well. We might as well make ourselves comfortable. We have a lot to talk about.'

  Iris set the chairs on either side of the table. She and Carsten sat down — creakily, in his case — with the thermal carafe between them.

  'You asked a question.' Carsten refilled her cup, then poured one for himself. 'And as I indicated, one of the better ones available to you. So I feel duty-bound to answer it for you. I don't want you to think I'm wasting your time.'

  'You wouldn't be the first,' said Iris.

  'Ah. But with us — you and me, that is — it's different. I know how much time you have. And there isn't any to spare.'

  She drained the cup in one go, head tossed back, then set it down empty on the table. 'Go on.'

  'You wanted to know who we are.' Carsten wrapped both his hands around his own cup, as though trying to warm his thin, elderly blood. 'Our organization, such as it is, has no identifying name or other identifier. It's not even an organization; more of an amalgam, or an ad hoc committee.'

  'For a committee, you seem to have an awful lot of members. That was a pretty good sized pack you had chasing me and Vogel through the Tyrell Corporation ruins.'

  'Loyal employees,' said Carsten. 'As with most of the people you might find here. You see, the committee, such as it is, is made up of the other organizations — companies, a few research labs — that had been involved in the design and production of so-called "replicants", before the Tyrell Corporation established its monopoly in that field.'

  Iris picked up her empty cup. 'There were other companies making replicants?'

  'Several.' Carsten poured out a refill for her. 'Sudermann, Grozzi . . . in fact, the company for which I was the chief technical officer, Derain et Cie, held several key patents, without which no viable replicants could be manufactured at all.'

  'Wait a minute. I thought Eldon Tyrell invented the replicant technology.'

  'All by himself? That's a good joke.' The faint smile on Carsten's face showed no trace of amusement. 'Eldon Tyrell — and the Tyrell Corporation — certainly wanted other people to believe that. They put a lot of their public relations flacks on the task of implanting that notion, and they largely succeeded. But then, they had help: the Tyrell Corporation didn't achieve its monopoly in the replicant trade on its own. They were essentially given the monopoly, or rather, it was stolen for them.'

  'Who did that?'

  'Ah. As the ancient Romans would have said, Cui bono? Who benefits? An excellent adage, for helping determine the truth, and the culprits.' Carsten sounded both bitter and sarcastic. 'Obviously, the Tyrell Corporation benefited — but they weren't the ones who did it. They merely received the stolen goods into their hands; or, rather, into Eldon Tyrell's hands. You'll have to excuse my personal animosity toward the man; let's just say that I didn't shed any tears when I heard he had been killed by one of his own creations, the replicant known as Roy Batty.'

  'I suppose,' said Iris, 'he got what he deserved.'

  'You could say that. And you'd be correct. The mill-wheels of the gods grind slow, but they grind exceedingly fine.' A note of grim satisfaction sounded in Carsten's voice. 'Someday, certain UN bureaucrats, the ones in charge of the emigration program, will get what they deserve as well. They were the ones that handed the replicant monopoly over to the Tyrell Corporation. Eldon Tyrell was simply their lackey, following their orders, doing what they wanted done. Tyrell might have thought differently, but then, he was an egomaniac. And a deluded one.'

  Iris sipped at the coffee. She looked over the cup's rim at Carsten. 'You're saying the UN was behind the Tyrell Corporation?'

  'All the way.' The old man's temper had simmered down, but was still visibly present. 'It could even be said that the Tyrell Corporation was nothing more than a puppet organization, a wholly controlled subsidiary of the UN emigration program. In return for his complete cooperation, Eldon Tyrell was handed all the profits from the replicant industry, which was of course considerably enhanced by the ramped-up production orders placed by the UN for those slave-labor replicants given to the human emigrants. Something of a devil's bargain, I'm afraid, for poor Eldon; he became the master of the replicant industry, with all of his competitors eliminated — rather violently, too, by the UN's elite special forces military units; I remember when the blue-helmeted squadrons arrived on my company's doorstep. It wasn't pretty.' The small, pale eyes in the old man's face seemed to cloud with memory. 'And there weren't many of us that survived — of the Derain executives at the home office in Poitiers, I was the only one that got out alive. I had to go underground and rebuild the corporation from our branch office personnel, or at least the ones I was able to get to before the blue helmets did. That took a long time, and there was a limit to how much we could accomplish, even in
league with the other replicant designers and manufacturers who had managed to survive the extermination process. Our little "committee" had its work cut out for it, just in trying to remain among the living. And all the while, Eldon Tyrell and the Tyrell Corporation were installed as the masters of the replicant industry — but as I said, at a price. Tyrell had the UN emigration program's leash around his neck from the beginning. And for an ego-driven type such as himself, that had to be galling.'

  'I bet,' said Iris.

  A thin smile showed on Carsten's face. 'Perhaps Eldon Tyrell made the mistake of trying to remove that leash; he might have convinced himself that he and his corporation had become more powerful than the UN, or that he was somehow able to protect himself from its retribution for his disloyalty. And as we know, he was wrong about that.'

  'Wait a minute.' Iris warily regarded the old man sitting across the table from her. 'You're saying the UN was responsible for Eldon Tyrell's murder? That would mean that the Roy Batty replicant, the one who actually crushed Tyrell's skull, was operating under UN orders.'

  'Not at all. It's almost certain that the Roy Batty replicant was acting on its own personal agenda when it killed Eldon Tyrell. But at the same time, there are some — shall we say? — suspicious circumstances about how Batty and the, other replicants in his group of fugitives were able to both reach Earth and also penetrate the Tyrell Corporation's security systems. At every step of the way, things were made oddly possible for the Batty group. Cui bono? Hm? If the UN emigration authorities wanted to eliminate an associate who had become too troublesome to maintain a relation with, they didn't have to send any blue-helmeted hit squad after him; that would have been a little bit too noticeable, even in a place such as LA. How much easier and more secretive, yet no less certain and fatal, to simply make sure that a killer such as the Roy Batty replicant was able to gain access to Tyrell.'

  'You don't have any proof of that, though.'

  'True.' Another shrug from the frail-looking shoulders. 'You could even say that it might be no more than wishful thinking on my part; my personal animus toward the late Dr Tyrell is no doubt apparent. But I'm hardly alone in having wanted him dead; he had made himself a lot of enemies, both human and otherwise. And Tyrell certainly had the kind of devious mind— devious for the sake of being devious — that wouldn't have been satisfied with his privileged position as industrial lackey to the UN emigration program; they might have had to eliminate him to short-circuit any number of schemes he could've cooked up. But as to absolute proof?' Carsten smiled. 'Let's just say that, as I'm certainly older than one such as yourself, I might be at least a little wiser as well when it comes to the machinery of the universe.'

  'Maybe.' It was Iris's turn to shrug; she wasn't going to argue the point with him. And if Carsten had actually killed his old rival Tyrell himself, or had arranged for it to happen, and was now trying to foist the blame off onto the UN, it wasn't any of her concern; that hadn't been anything assigned to her, even while she had been with the department. 'So you've got your committee of all the companies that were screwed by the Tyrell Corporation.' She gestured toward the old man with the rim of her cup. 'Now what're you trying to accomplish? Get back into business? Seems like now would be a good time for it, given that the Tyrell Corporation seems to be pretty much defunct.'

  'It's not that simple,' said Carsten glumly. 'Nothing ever is. Even if the UN emigration authorities were aware of our existence — and we've gone to a lot of effort to make sure that they're not — they'd hardly be likely to turn the replicant industry back over to us. To do so would amount to revealing how they had attempted to wipe us out in the first place; that's something the UN itself, the administrative levels above the emigration program, might not even be aware of. There's every indication that the emigration program might in fact be a rogue element in the UN, operating on its own initiative, outside anyone else's oversight and control. They can only continue that way, and avoid being brought back under administrative discipline, if they keep secret the sort of illicit activities in which they've been engaged.' Carsten leaned across the table, his voice stripped down to utter seriousness. 'The emigration authorities are in too deep to let the truth come out about how they enabled the Tyrell Corporation to take over the replicant industry. They would rather destroy that industry, and even the emigration program itself, before revealing that.'

  Iris didn't doubt the old man's analysis. It was an investigative truism. The cover-up, she told herself, is always worse than the original crime. Especially in that it created an endless cycle that got progressively more violent and ruthless as it spiraled downward, with one cover-up succeeding another to hide an original crime that became progressively smaller and less significant, by comparison.

  'Okay,' said Iris, 'same question, then. What's the agenda? What do you guys want?'

  'In practical terms? Very well.' Carsten laid his small, delicately manicured hands flat upon the table. 'We want the owl.'

  I knew that was coming. 'The owl, huh? By which, I take it, you mean Eldon Tyrell's owl. Good ol' Scrappy.'

  Carsten nodded. 'Of course.'

  'What's the matter with the ones you've got?' Iris nodded toward the golden-eyed birds perched on the opposite wall. 'Or are you trying to complete a full set?'

  'Very amusing. There's absolutely nothing wrong with them at all; they are, indeed, very valuable creatures. In many ways, and not just on the open market, where such things are prized for their rarity.' Carsten turned his gaze from her and regarded the owls. Some of them had closed their eyes, as though in apparent sleep; the others looked back at him without blinking. 'They have a specific and unique value to the committee of which I am a part. But the owl named Scrappy — Tyre11's owl, for which you have been so assiduously hunting — has an even greater, though similar, value.'

  'Which is?'

  'Well done.' Carsten nodded in approval. 'You're definitely getting the hang of it. Of asking the right questions, that is. You're doing very well. When you know specifically why the owl in question is so valuable to us, you'll have gone a great way toward answering a lot of the puzzles facing you.'

  'That's why I asked.' Iris helped herself to more coffee from the carafe; there was only enough left to half-fill the cup. Not that I expect a straight answer or anything.'

  'That's where you're wrong,' said Carsten. 'Everything has been arranged — at great effort, I might say — just so you'd be given that "straight answer". As much as it is important to you that you should find out these things, it is equally important to us -that it be made possible for you to find them out.'

  Iris had had enough coffee; she could feel the familiar, and comforting, jittering caffeine buzz down through her arms and into her hands as she pushed the cup away from herself. 'Prove it,' she said.

  'As you wish.' Carsten stood up from the table. 'Follow me.'

  14

  'You sure you don't want to get some rest first?' The old man looked solicitously at Iris. 'We could set up a cot for you in one of the smaller, private buildings; the windows are already covered.'

  'I'm okay.' Iris kept walking, head down to shield her eyes from the noonish glare of the sun. 'Don't worry about me.'

  When they had stepped out of the building, with its coffee on the table and collection of perching owls, the daylight had hit her between the eyes like a hot fist. She could feel the sweat seeping out into the torn fabric of her cowboy-motif shirt as she walked alongside Carsten. His presence, and the gritty landscape beneath her bootsoles, was obscured by the shifting, molten after-images that had been burnt past her pupils.

  'Seriously,' said Carsten. He could just be detected, peering into her face as he led the way to their destination. 'You've been on your feet for a long time. You might not even be aware of exactly how long. And there are matters of great import ahead of you. You'll need to be ready for them.'

  He was right, she knew; her internal clock had lost its hands, a long — she assumed — time ago. The glowing
digits inside her head that kept track of the course of hours had gone dark. She had entered the fatigue zone, familiar to her from days-long chases of escaped replicants, fueled by adrenaline more than any illegal stimulant. Tanking up on Carsten's coffee, genuine as it was, hadn't helped at all. The world seemed real enough to her — or too real, as though the dials marked Gravity and Mass had been turned up to eleven — but she had doubts about herself. Iris felt herself to have faded into some dim, nerve-eroded insubstantiality, as though she were her own ghost, coming back to haunt some locale vaguely remembered from her real life. Like watching that damn movie, she thought glumly. The images on the screen had been the real people; that irrational conviction moved uneasily through her mind.

  'I'm ready,' said Iris. She raised a hand, palm outward, to keep Carsten's blurry image at bay. 'Ready as I'll ever be.' That was the actual reason that she didn't want to go to sleep, no matter how tired and messed-up she had gotten. In her present condition, there was little Carsten or anyone else could tell her or show her that would give her a shock; the sensation of not really existing put a comfortable distance between her and this world she had found herself in. Here, the desert sun was hammering down on her and the rusting, decay-bent earth-moving equipment; but in her head, the cooling monsoon rains of LA continued to sluice away the dust and heat. 'Fire away.'

  The after-images in her eyes had faded a bit; she could discern the old man's expression as he peered into her face. 'I respect your decision,' he said after a moment. 'After all — you've come a long way for this.'

  Not willingly.' She wiped the glare-stung tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. 'Don't forget that.'

  'You know' — the old man sounded as concerned as before — 'you could be wrong about that.'