by K. W. Jeter
'And what's that supposed to mean?' Iris stopped and turned toward him. 'Let me guess,' she said irritably. 'What you're saying is that I wanted to come out here. And that I somehow engineered that into happening.'
Behind Carsten, the desert stretched past the machinery and the sagging fence, shallow rolling dunes and brown scrubby weeds dotting the vista all the way to the gray hills at the horizon. Little scratch marks on the cloudless sky moved in slow circles, revealing themselves as hawks — the last survivors in the wild — scouring the ground for prey with their razor-sharp scrutiny.
'In your heart of hearts.' Carsten spoke somberly; all possible irony drained from his reedy voice. 'When you were searching for something, that's the last place you would ever have looked.'
With her hands planted on her hips, Iris regarded the old man for a few seconds, then shook her head. 'I don't,' she said, 'keep either escaped replicants — or owls — anywhere near my vital organs.' She turned and started walking again, in the direction in which they had been previously heading.
Iris could hear Carsten murmur something behind her, almost inaudible. 'As far as you know,' he said. She ignored him.
With no idea of where they had been heading, she stopped and found herself gazing at the compound's fence, topped with razor wire, a few meters away. The low, metal-constructed buildings were somewhere behind them, as Carsten caught up with her. 'This is what you wanted to show me?' Iris gestured toward the fence and what lay beyond it. 'Looks like sand.'
'Not there.' Carsten touched her arm. 'You walked right by it. Without even seeing it.'
She turned and looked where the old man pointed. An angled trench had been slashed, into the earth, dug and scooped out by a couple of the earth-moving machines, painstakingly resurrected for the purpose. Mounds of darker subsoil mingled with the buff-colored sand from above, sloped against the caterpillar treads of the crane and scoop-fronted bulldozer.
'A hole in the ground,' said Iris. 'I'm less than impressed.' 'It's what's in the hole that's important. Come on.'
The trench had been excavated in such a manner as to leave an earthen ramp leading to its bottom. Carsten started down it; after a moment, Iris followed him. She had to lean back as she stepped, hand against the loosely crumbling side of the trench, to keep the gravel from sliding out from beneath her bootsoles and spilling her backward.
At the lowest point of the trench, a battered metal door was incongruously mounted, its hinges set into a surrounding frame. The sun above had moved just far enough from its zenith so that the trench's floor had been hidden in deep shadow; standing or passing anywhere near the trench, she had been unable to see what lay in it.
A sepulchral chill pricked the skin on Iris's forearms. She and Carsten were far enough below the desert's surface — the trench's lip was at least a couple of meters above her head — that the air temperature had fallen several notches. That wasn't enough, though, to account for the degree of cold she felt crawling toward the marrow of her bones, or for the pearlescent layer of condensed moisture that had collected on the door. Iris reached out and laid her palm against the metal, letting the thermal differential pull at her own overheated blood for a moment. When she drew it away, the print of her hand remained, with clear drops of water collected and trickling down both from its base and her own wrist.
'Keep your groceries in here?' Iris wiped her damp hand on her trousers. 'Good idea. Things could go off pretty fast in this kind of weather.'
'A little more important than that.' Fumbling in his jacket pockets, Carsten produced a ring of keys, old-fashioned brass ones without blinking mini-lights or any other sign of digital security coding. 'As I'm sure you'll agree, in just a bit.' He unlocked the door, then turned with both hands a bar-shaped lever. A cloud of even colder moisture, like a little puff of Arctic wind released from an invisible bottle, blew across him and Iris as he pushed open the heavily insulated door.
Iris felt someone watching her, the weight of another's gaze falling from above, across her shoulders. She looked up and saw that it was more than one person: there must have been at least a dozen of them standing at the edge of the trench, like mourners at a burial service, regarding her with somber, unsmiling expressions. Iris recognized one of them as the guard who had sat across from her in the first small, metal-roofed building to which she had been brought; she supposed that the others, like the guard, had been part of the pursuit team that had tracked her and Vogel down, at the Tyrell Corporation ruins, back in LA.
'What the hell do they want?' Staring straight up into the watching men's eyes, Iris nudged Carsten with the point of her elbow. 'I mean, what do they want now?'
'What's that?' Carsten was fussily restoring the key to his pocket; he turned his gaze in the direction of Iris's, and saw the younger men standing above. Loose, sandy gravel trickled down the sides of the trench, dislodged by their boots. 'Oh . . . it's only natural.' He looked again toward Iris. 'You'll have to excuse some curiosity, and apprehension, on their part. They know how important your presence is here.'
'Yeah, right.' Iris wrapped her arms around herself, against the cold air that had rolled out of whatever space lay beyond the metal door. She had become so used to moving in virtual invisibility on her murderous errands through the distant city's streets, with none of the inhabitants paying her or her raised weapon any mind, that to be silently watched in this way was a novel and disconcerting experience. 'Let's get on with the show.'
'By all means.' Carsten pushed the door, with both hands this time, leaning into its thick weight. The frost cloud, bigger than before, momentarily eclipsed his face and upper torso, rolling past him like the breath off some antiseptic-smelling sea. 'Come on.'
It was dark inside, and even colder than Iris had expected, especially when Carsten pulled the heavy, insulated door shut, its edges meeting the surrounding metal as though a hermetic tomb had been installed here beneath the desert. The dark was sucked away and extinguished when Carsten flipped the light switch beside the doorway.
'Jesus Christ.' Iris hugged herself even tighter, fingers pressing through the torn sleeves of her embroidered shirt. She could feel the intense cold marching toward the center of her body, viscera contracting. 'What the hell is this? Some kind of a—'
She fell silent as the sensation of being watched, of eyes upon her, once again manifested itself. The room was empty, though, of all living things except herself and the old man; this time, she was sure of that. There was no wall of perching owls with their golden eyes regarding her, judging her as prey or threat. The gray concrete walls were lined instead with wide-diameter pipes and vents, layered with ice; minute crystal stalactites, frozen and glassy, extended from the ceiling. Blue fluorescent light, from tubes and flickering square panels, filled the chamber, dimly enough that it took her a moment to realize that the eyes whose presence she sensed, at the periphery of her own vision, were disembodied. The eyes existed, but the human or human-like – bodies that might have once held them were gone.
Or had never existed. She turned slowly in the chamber's frigid air, looking around at the glass beakers and vessels sitting on top of industrial storage units and laboratory benches, with the spherical human eyes, complete with trailing optical nerve tissue, floating in some thick, almost gelatinous liquid. The eyes gazed back at her, unblinking and emotionless, as though possessed of some timeless perspective on human folly, beyond resignation or fear.
'I know this place,' said Iris aloud. Her words, and every breath she exhaled, hung in front of her in a little cloud. She could taste ice crystals forming on the tip of her tongue. 'I've never been here, but I know it.'
'That's right.' Carsten, standing beside her, didn't seem to notice the cold. It passed through his thin frame with no apparent effect. 'I'm aware that your friend Vogel showed you certain things. An old movie. About people like yourself: cops, blade runners. And about the other things, that are also like you, in their own way. Only they don't get to live. Not in the old movie, a
nd not in this world. They have to die.'
'Too bad . . . for them.' The cold made Iris clench her teeth, involuntarily. A shiver ran up her spine and across her shoulders, invoked less by the temperature than the unsettling aspect of the eyes floating in their glass containers. 'They should try for better parts the next time.'
'But you do recognize this?' Carsten gestured with upraised hand at the space surrounding him and Iris. 'From the movie?'
'Sure.' Iris nodded. The scene replayed itself in her memory, from what she had watched in Eldon Tyrell's private theater. It had been something with a couple of the escaped replicants that the blade runner named Rick Deckard had been tracking down, with intent to 'retire' them. Only Deckard hadn't been in the scene; it had been just the leader of the fugitive replicants, the one named Roy Batty and the big stupid one with the weak chin whose name Iris couldn't remember at the moment. Those two, and some kind of Asian-looking technician, with wispy Mandarin-like facial hair and pidgin English, an array of magnifying lenses turned up on his brow, and swaddled in artificial furs with heating tubes plugged in and trailing behind him. Which the Batty replicant had yanked out with a steam-like hiss, as he and the dumb one had terrorized the smaller figure. 'It was a real charming bit.'
I made your eyes. That was what the tech had said, in an odd transport of pride in his own work, as he had pointed with his gloved hand toward Batty's evilly smiling face. He had seemed happy to have had these walking evidences of his state-of-the-art craftsmanship, his contribution to the Tyrell Corporation's manufacturing of products that looked just like human beings, talked and feared death just like humans, but somehow weren't human. Your eyes . . .
'Not, though, with a happy ending. At least not for old Chew.'
She supposed that had been the name of the eye technician, both in the movie and in real life, whatever that meant. If it meant anything at all, anymore. She couldn't remember at the moment if anybody had spoken the wispy-bearded man's name aloud, in the process of the replicant Batty and his partner extracting the information they had wanted from him. Information about Dr Eldon Tyrell, and how to get to him. Which hadn't resulted in a happy ending for Tyrell, either.
There were some differences to the scene she had watched in the Blade Runner movie. More disembodied eyes, to be exact. Chew had been happily fussing around with only a few of them, peering down a microscope and making little tweaky adjustments, probably on some deep-tissue, sub-cellular level, when Batty and the big dumb one had come strolling in—
At the back of her brain, Iris wondered – now – how the two escaped replicants had gotten in so easily, as if there had been no door locks or alarm systems hooked up at some Tyrell Corporation subcontractor's production area. In the movie, Chew had looked momentarily surprised to see the two figures standing there, like they shouldn't have been able to waltz right in and catch him at work. Maybe this old guy is right, thought Iris. Maybe somebody did grease their way in. Maybe not the UN, but somebody with some kind of inside access to the eye tech's workshop. Tyrell? Why would Eldon Tyrell have wanted to arrange this particular death? Iris could feel herself slipping, thoughts spiraling into another infinite regress of paranoia and true conspiracy.
The only thing she could be sure of at the moment was that in the movie she had watched deep inside the Tyrell Corporation ruins there hadn't been so many eyes, in so many jars and beakers and graduated flasks. Even the wall full of owls in the other compound building hadn't been able to creepily stare her down as thoroughly as what was happening here.
'What did you do?' Iris wasn't able yet – if ever – to unwrap her arms from herself. She used a nod of her head to indicate the vessels with their floating contents, like white, cycloptic tadpoles. 'Drag everything out of the dead guy's file cabinets?'
'We did more than that,' said Carsten. He still seemed unaffected by the chamber's cold, as if he had spent enough time here to get acclimated. 'This is more than old Chew's stock; our committee scoured all the other neuro-optical labs that had been subcontracted out to the Tyrell Corporation. There was a whole high-security district in Taiwan, with no other industrial production than that going on; the whole place was a virtual fiefdom, with Eldon Tyrell its absentee lord and master. None of the European operations, mainly around Neues Frankfurt and the Mont Blanc Tunnel sub-warrens, was as big as that, but there were more of them. It took quite a while, after the destruction of the Tyrell Corporation headquarters, to track those facilities down and clear them out.'
'What were you looking for?'
'Nothing,' said Carsten. 'Our committee's operatives were just making sure there wasn't anything going on elsewhere, with any of the other subcontractors, that was at the same level as what Chew had been doing in LA. Even before we moved in on what was left of Chew's neuro-optical facility, we'd had a pretty good idea that that had been where Tyrell's important design and prototyping work had been going on. For one thing, it was right under Eldon Tyrell's nose, practically speaking, so he'd have been able to keep an eye on it without having to leave the city or resort to potentially crackable communications links. The other indication was, of course, that Chew had been the best in his particular field; he had been chief technical officer and operations manager at the Taiwan facilities, building them up from scratch, before Tyrell brought him over here. That's why his English was so poor, the way you heard it in that movie you saw; he was hardly a native Angeleno. Even the ethnic sub-culture types can usually pull it out better than that, at least when they want to.'
'His language skills couldn't have been too bad,' said Iris, 'if he was as important to Tyrell's operations as you claim he was.'
'That's because the two of them, Chew and Tyrell, spoke a universal language, beyond English or pidgin, of design specs and prototype refinement. It's not as if they needed to socialize with each other; Tyrell was hardly the sociable type, was he?'
'Not from what I've heard.' Rubbing her arms in a vain attempt to create warmth, Iris glanced around the ice-bound space again. 'If you ask me, you and your bunch are a little on the obsessive side as well. Otherwise, you wouldn't have gone to so much trouble to re-create Chew's lab out here in the middle of nowhere.'
'Oh, we didn't re-create it; this is Chew's neuro-optical lab facility.' A note of pride sounded in Carsten's voice. 'Everything, right to the exterior walls. Even this.' Carsten leaned down and brushed ice crystals from a large, rectangular object propped against one of the workbenches. He flipped a switch at the back; with a faint, electrical buzzing, blue neon letters and back-lit plastic came on. The sign, when fully illuminated, read LA EYEWORKS. 'Just like in the movie — right?' Carsten smiled at Iris as he straightened up. 'It wasn't really the name of Chew's facility — as a matter of fact, it didn't even have a name, only an invoice code in the R and D section of the Tyrell Corporation's operating budget. Chew inherited it from some other business that had been there before, and kept it as his little joke.'
'Yeah, right; hilarious.' Iris couldn't keep from shivering; she felt as if the blood in her veins was starting to turn glacial from the chamber's cold. 'How'd you get all this stuff here?'
'That took some doing.' Carsten picked up one of the flasks, examined the floating blue-pupilled eye inside, then set it back down. 'Our little committee's operatives had to work pretty fast to pull it off. We had been keeping an eye on Chew for some time; we knew who he was working for, and how important that work was for the Tyrell Corporation. Soon as we knew that both Chew and Eldon Tyrell were dead — that Batty and the other escaped replicants had done their job — we knew we had at least a small window of opportunity before the Tyrell Corporation got reorganized enough to keep track of its subcontractors. Fortunately, buildings are constantly being demolished or being constructed in the city, so there wasn't any notice paid, even by the police, when our team took LA Eyeworks apart, boxed it up into half-a-dozen transport containers, and smuggled it out here. Twelve hours max, and it was ours.'
'Why'd you bury it?'
'Several good reasons.' Carsten gestured toward the walls. 'Out here in the desert, the thermal factor looms rather large. We've got a brace of generators going full-bore as it is, to keep this thing down to the appropriate temperature. Let's be practical -- why should we make it even more difficult for ourselves, by letting it sit out in the sun? Not to mention what would happen if there were a problem of some kind, like the power supply going on the fritz.' He pointed to the flask he had set down a moment before; the eye's silent, patient gaze had swivelled around toward Iris. 'The stuff we're holding here is basically raw human tissue, or replicant tissue, which is pretty much the same thing, in terms of your basic spoilage effect. We don't have the temperature down all the way to Chew's operating conditions, but it's cold enough for our purposes. And we'd like to keep it that way. Down here, underground, things would stay basically cool at least until our tech crew got the generators running again.'
'That's one reason.' Iris reached over and turned the flask around so that the floating eye was no longer staring at her. 'What's the other?'
'We've got,' said Carsten matter-of-factly, 'what some other people would like to get hold of. Or to put it another way, we've got what other people would like to make sure we didn't have. We've got Chew's gear and stock out and hidden, but we don't want anybody else tracing it here. Our committee's operatives scanned everything as well as they could, when they were tearing it apart and boxing it up, but time was limited. There might have been bug elements, location devices, wired into the walls, right down at practically the molecular level. The Tyrell Corporation might have done that, to make sure that none of the work Chew was doing for them wound up in the wrong hands.'
'Well, you don't have to worry about the Tyrell Corporation any longer.' Iris balled her right hand into a fist; the flask had been so cold that it had stung her fingertips. 'From the looks of it, they're long gone.'
'Don't be too sure about that. The Tyrell Corporation wasn't synonymous with Eldon Tyrell. There were even elements inside the corporation that were actively opposed to the late doctor; the whole company was a rat's nest of intrigues and conspiracies. It's something of a tribute to him that he was able to keep on top of all that, right up until the end.'