Eye and Talon

by K. W. Jeter

  15

  Cold, thought Iris, and timeless. For a moment, and a seeming eternity, she felt the way she had at the movie theater in LA, when she and Vogel had ingested the thermatos. World without end. But no amen. Both clock time and her own pulse had come to a halt, frozen in place, while waiting for a signal from somewhere in what was left of that other world, the one outside her skin.

  She felt the signal, another's pulse, and it took all her self-control to keep herself from dropping the cold wrist she held, and snatching her hand back to herself, as though the icy flesh had suddenly flared with heat. For a few moments longer, Iris kept her fingertips poised against the blue vein threading snake-like among the tendons that disappeared under the sleeve of the jacket in which the late Dr Eldon Tyrell had been dressed. Or not so late, she corrected herself. Once ' again, the slow, fragile pulse made itself known.

  'That's a good one,' said Iris. 'Real good one.' Still holding the body's wrist, she glared across the coffin, its glass lid thrown back; her slitted gaze narrowed even further as she regarded Carsten. 'You must live for little jokes like this one. What kind of reaction were you hoping to get from me? Screams or a dead faint?' She shook her head in disgust. 'Sorry I can't oblige. I'm too stiff right now to collapse.'

  'Your reaction was pretty much what I expected.' Carsten's attitude of mild amusement hadn't ebbed. 'You're a professional, after all. In many ways. In the line of work to which you're accustomed, the difference between the living and the dead is merely a matter of what stage of the process you're in.'

  She ignored the comment. 'So what is this supposed to be? A practical joke, or something?' She gestured with the dead man's hand. 'What did you do, wire him up with a subcutaneous pump? There's a lot that can be done with hydraulics. Or at least until the batteries run down.'

  'You know it's not a joke.' Carsten took the late doctor's hand from her, as though Tyrell were a dance partner being turned over to the next in line. 'If it were a joke, I don't think you would have gotten quite so angry; really, it's written there in your face. You look as though you'd like to kill me.'

  'That's accurate.'

  'But you're not going to,' said Carsten. 'That's what I mean by professionalism. There are still questions to be answered, and you figure I can tell you what you want to know.' His childlike shoulders lifted in a shrug. 'So ask away.'

  'All right; I'll do that.' Her voice got louder and harder, bouncing off the ice that coated the chamber's walls. 'What's the deal here? Eldon Tyrell is dead. I saw him get killed in that stupid movie Vogel showed me. Which is why the Tyrell Corporation is ganz kaput, or at least the reason why it's not put back together the way it used to be. And put back together is what Tyrell himself would have to be, if you want me to believe that somehow you've got him here, and he's got his ticker going, only turned down low. What I saw the Batty replicant do to him in that movie was like an egg getting crushed. Skull-wise, the prognosis was not good for the poor bastard.'

  'No, it wasn't.' Unperturbed, Carsten leaned down and fussily restored the hand and forearm to where it had been lying folded on top of the other, across the body's chest. If you thought the number you saw the Batty replicant perform on Eldon Tyrell was a fatal one, you'd be absolutely right.'

  'So what's the deal?' Inside her head, she tried to pick apart the old man's words, trying to find a clue in their tangled connections. 'Are you trying to tell me the movie I watched, that Blade Runner thing, was a fake? And what I saw happen to Tyrell — that didn't happen to him?'

  'Oh, it happened to him, certainly enough. Eldon Tyrell had accumulated enough, shall we say, bad karma in his lifetime that such a fate was inevitable for him. In many ways, it could be postulated that he had done his own part to bring about exactly the death he had wished for himself. In the machinery of the universe, a guilty conscience is one of the teeth on the gears that mesh with such flesh-rending precision. When the Batty replicant's hands closed around Eldon Tyrell's skull, just as you saw in the movie, the result was rather like Humpty Dumpty, in the old children's rhyme.'

  'I take it you mean that was an egg which was not going to get put back together any time soon.'

  Not with all the duct tape in the world.' Carsten exuded a grim satisfaction. 'The Batty replicant should be admired for its thoroughness; that was a good kill, if a messy one.'

  'So then, like I said before, this has to be some kind of a fake.' Arms wrapped around herself once again, Iris nodded toward the unmoving figure in the glass-lidded coffm. 'And frankly, I don't get the point of it. If that's not Dr Eldon Tyrell in there, what is it?'

  'Oh, it's Tyrell, all right.' Carsten nodded slowly. 'But not the one you saw in the Blade Runner movie; not the one that got killed by the Batty replicant. Let's just say it's a different Eldon Tyrell.'

  'I think,' said Iris after a moment, 'I know where this is going. And I don't like it. Not one bit.'

  'Really?' .The attitude of mild amusement returned to Carsten. 'Why should it bother you to consider that this' — he pointed to the body in the coffin — 'might in fact be a replicant? An Eldon Tyrell replicant, to be exact.'

  'It complicates things.' Iris spoke with barely contained fury. 'And things are complicated enough already. I don't need this.'

  'Why should it be such a problem for you?' Carsten's words gently but relentlessly needled at her. 'I thought you blade runners were supposed to be the experts at telling the real from the fake, human beings from replicants.'

  'Don't start with me about that.' Iris turned the flat of her hand toward him. 'It doesn't matter whether cops like me can tell humans from replicants or not. But if Tyrell was having his labs make a replicant, using himself as the templant, the master that the copy would be based on — then it takes everything up another notch, headache-wise.' Her own head actually was beginning to throb, as though, by some sympathetic magic, it felt the trauma the late Eldon Tyrell's had undergone. 'Why would he have even wanted to do something like that?'

  'A good question,' Carsten said. 'You're getting better and better at this game. But you're slightly off, regarding the details. It's not "replicant", in the singular. We're talking about more than one.'

  'Okay, that does it.' Iris turned and took a step back the way she and the old man had come, past the shelves of silently staring eyes and toward the door. 'I don't care about any answers. I'm not hanging around for this.'

  'Yes, you are.' Surprisingly strong, Carsten grabbed her by one arm, stopping and pulling her around to face him. 'If you didn't want to know things like this, you shouldn't have started asking questions. Going right back to the beginning, when you were trying to find a certain lost owl, and you didn't have any idea where it was going to lead to.' He let go of her and stepped back beside the glass-lidded coffin. 'If this is where the trail winds up, you're going to have to face it, no matter what it means. That's what a real cop would do, at any rate.'

  The old man's words stung her. Inside her jacket, the gun the guard had returned to her had chilled into a small sculpture of black ice. Though one that could both silence the old man, and still the slow pulse ticking through the veins of the coffin's occupant, once and for all. You're taking an awful big risk, she thought as she glared at him.

  'You see,' continued Carsten, elaborately helpful, 'in some ways, it should have been obvious to you.' He gestured at the other coffins, lined up on their short trestle supports. 'I thought that, given the business you were in, you would know more than you apparently do about the exact mechanics of the replicant industry. What I suppose looks to you like funeral caskets, standard cemetery furniture, are in fact shipping containers — though, of course, not of any ordinary kind or function. They're what had been used when the UN emigration program had been in full swing, for transporting the products of the Tyrell Corporation, the completed replicants, to the colonies in the outer star systems.' His smile turned wry and ugly. 'That's the problem with canned meat, you might say. Any time you're shipping perishables, you're faced with a
spoilage problem. And since the Tyrell Corporation's replicants have only a four-year life expectancy, your customers aren't going to be too happy if you use up a good percentage of that shelf-life getting the products out to the colonies. Even with the UN transport ships' enhanced light-speed capabilities, by the time the Tyrell Corporation would have warehoused the replicants here on earth, shipped them out to a central distribution point, then from there to the separate colonies and finally into the hands of their new owners, there would have been at the most a few months left of the replicants' lifespans. Hardly an economic proposition, even for an entity with the resources of the UN emigration program. Thus the need for shipping devices such as this.'

  Carsten reached down and touched a control pad, near the latch of the opened coffin. A string of red digits lit up on a small black readout panel; as Iris watched, the last digit in the sequence changed from a seven to a six, in a glacial countdown process.

  'As I said,' continued Carsten, 'without something like this, the Tyrell Corporation's merchandise would have been just about dead by the time it reached its ultimate destinations. Using suspended-animation technology to slow down the replicants' life processes en route resulted in a loss of a couple of months at most; still significant, which is why the Tyrell Corporation's manufacturing practice was to stuff the replicants into these boxes as soon as they came off the assembly line and before they were shipped off-planet, to absolutely minimize such losses in usefulness. The UN emigration program wouldn't have gone on paying the Tyrell Corporation, and allowing it to maintain its monopoly on the replicant technology, if it hadn't.'

  'So what?' Whatever other emotions Iris might have felt were now swept aside by her exasperation. 'Why should I be concerned about how the Tyrell Corporation shipped its goods? What's it got to do with me?'

  'Perhaps more than you realize,' said Carsten mildly. 'With you and all the other blade runners. None of you ever stopped to think about the time-based logistics of the so-called escaped replicants you were supposed to hunt down and "retire". Most of them were at the ends of their four-year lifespans when they showed up back here on Earth. As you saw in the Blade Runner movie you watched, the Batty replicant and its group returned to LA specifically in an attempt to shake some sort of hoped-for extension of their lives from their creator — which, of course, Eldon Tyrell was unable to grant them.'

  'So?' Iris managed a near-frozen shrug. 'The replicants were out there in the far colonies, doing whatever crappy jobs they were given, for close to four years. Then some of them escaped and came back here. Big deal. Like you said, they could be in the colonies for that long, since they were basically on ice when they were shipped out there.'

  'Ah — but the suspended-animation containers, like the ones here, were supposedly only used on the journey out to the colonies. But what about the journey back here to Earth? How did any of the escaped replicants manage that, without coming to the ends of their allotted lifespans and dying en route, if they had already used up most of their four years off-planet?'

  'How the hell should I know?'

  'Exactly,' said Carsten. 'You don't know. It's a mystery, if you stop to think about it. For any of the Batty group, for example, to have made their way back to Los Angeles and the Tyrell Corporation headquarters, they would have needed access to suspended-animation containers such as these, identical to the ones in which they were shipped out to the colonies. Otherwise, they would have expired by reaching the ends of their programmed lifespans, before they ever, got here.'

  'Okay.' She mulled it over for a few seconds. 'Maybe they did have access to these things. They killed the crew and took over some ship, didn't they? That was what was said in the movie, about Batty and his group. So it was a UN emigration program freight ship, returning a load of these empty containers to the Tyrell Corporation. The Batty rep and his bunch put themselves into suspended animation inside the containers and sent the ship on an auto-pilot program to Earth. That way, they still had whatever was left of their original lifespans to try shaking down Dr Tyrell for the extension they wanted, but didn't get.'

  'A nice theory, but impossible in practice. Even if they managed to pull that off on their own — these containers can't be sealed and their animation-suspending processes initiated from inside them, and the UN ships can't be brought into Earth orbit on auto-pilot — any escaped replicants would still need the assistance of other parties to be brought out of the suspended-animation state.' Carsten pointed his thumb toward the coffin-like devices. 'These things don't have alarm clocks built into them. Once you're in, you need somebody else to wake you up.'

  'Fine. Then they had accomplices or something. Maybe the rep-symps did it for them.' Iris had never had any run-ins with organized groups of human replicant-sympathizers — they had apparently faded away in the couple of years she had been with the police department — but she supposed they might still be active. 'Giving a bunch of escaped replicants the chance to mess with Eldon Tyrell and the whole Tyrell Corporation — that's exactly the sort of thing that some underground rep-symp cell would get a kick out of puffing off.'

  'It's much more complicated than that,' said Carsten. 'The operation of these suspended-animation shipping containers is a highly technical affair; they were developed solely for the use of the replicant industry, and there's no expertise from other areas that can be applied to them. In fact, the members of our committee who keep these up and running are former Tyrell Corporation employees, on whom we had to expend considerable resources in recruiting and then extracting from their positions with that company. For the repsymps to have aided the kind of conspiracy you imagine, for the purpose of aiding escaped replicants in their attempts to reach Earth, they would have to have recruited and kept in place similar, highly trained operatives. And not just here, at the escaped replicants' destination, but at the outer colonies as well, so the replicants could be both placed into the suspended-animation state as well as taken out of it. For such parties to have been rep-symps, as you theorized, would mean the rep-symp underground and its activities had spread all the way to the far colonies. Not very likely, given that the only human beings out there are either UN emigration program personnel or the emigrants themselves, all of whom had been carefully screened to eliminate anyone with rep-symp tendencies.'

  'Okay. Then who the hell did help the escaped replicants get here to Earth, alive and kicking?'

  'I don't know.' The smug attitude had evaporated from Carsten's wrinkled face. 'I wish I did. It's something our little committee is working on, trying to determine exactly that. But our resources are limited, and we have other things that take up the lion's share of our attention. The only thing of which we feel reasonably sure — and it's a matter of logic more than hard evidence — is that whoever was behind the traveling assistance provided to the escaped replicants, it must have been some entity with connections going right to the top, either in the Tyrell Corporation itself or the UN emigration program.'

  'Yeah, right,' said Iris sourly. 'Like Eldon Tyrell would finance an operation that was not only going to make his company look bad — dangerous escaped replicants running around in the streets of LA — but would ultimately get him killed. How likely is that?'

  'Eldon Tyrell was a complicated man.' A sliver of Carsten's humorless smile returned. 'And as I indicated before, one carrying a large karmic debt — or bad conscience, to use a more old-fashioned term. He was capable of anything.'

  'Like having replicants made from himself?' Though her breath was still a white plume from her nostrils, her rising anger managed to generate something like heat inside her gut. 'Why would he do that? Replicants were supposedly manufactured in order to provide slave labor for the colonists out there. If I were one of them, and I got stuck with a rep as ugly and scrawny as some Eldon Tyrell model, I'd demand a refund.'

  'That's hardly why he did it.' Carsten shook his head, gazing down the line of unopened coffins. 'His reasons were more complex than that: he wanted more than to be the te
mplant for some production line of replicants, to be shipped off to the colonies. He might have had a considerable ego, but not one that would have considered his physical form worth duplicating.'

  'Then why?' Something in the way the old man spoke had chilled Iris, far beyond a matter of her blood growing thick and heavy in her veins. His voice had gone so soft and quiet, as if he had begun to whisper of secrets that even the replicant sleeping its long, slow hours and years inside the glass-lidded coffin, dreamless behind the withered face of Eldon Tyrell, was afraid to hear aloud. 'What's the deal, then?' She peered closer at the figure standing on the other side of the coffin. 'Or is that something else you and your committee don't know?'

  'We know plenty.' Her words appeared to have needled a flash of anger out of Carsten. His pale eyes looked like ice chips as he regarded her. 'It's your ignorance that we need to remedy.'

  'So what is it that I don't know? Either tell me, or let me, go out and play in the sunshine.' Iris visibly shivered. 'I can't even feel my feet anymore.'

  'It's not what you don't know. It's what you think you know. And that you're completely wrong about.'

  'Sure —' Iris stamped one bootshod foot, in a vain attempt to get its circulation going again. 'You already ran that number past me. All that business about the Voigt-Kampff machine being a fake, and blade runners actually "retiring" real human beings instead of the replicants we thought we were putting away. Whatever.' She shook her head. 'Maybe everything you said is true; I don't know. I don't even know if it matters to me anymore. That was another world.' She spoke the realization aloud, before she knew herself what it meant. 'I used to live in it, I used to have my job there, and I loved that job. But I don't have any of that now; I don't live in that world anymore. So if you want to go ahead and tell me that everything I knew about that world was a lie . . . go ahead. Why should it matter to me now?'