by K. W. Jeter
'Because now,' said Carsten, 'you're lying to yourself. If it didn't matter to you, you wouldn't have followed the traces to the ruins of the Tyrell Corporation headquarters. You could easily have died there. So you must have wanted something from that rather arduous process you put yourself through.'
'No kidding. I wanted my old job back. I thought maybe I could get it, if I found the owl I had been assigned to locate in the first place.'
'And you stuck around there, watching old movies with your friend Vogel, long after it was apparent that the owl in question was hardly to be found in a place like that. Or even any further clues as to its whereabouts. But you stuck around because Vogel had other things to tell you and to show you; things you apparently wanted to know.' Carsten raised one of his snow-white eyebrows. 'So it seems you weren't searching for the owl at all — perhaps not even from the beginning of your quest. Whether you knew it or not, or were prepared to even admit it to yourself, you were searching for the truth. And now you have to face the possibility that you're about to find it.'
'Because you're going to tell it to me, I suppose.'
The old man nodded. 'That's what you're here for.'
'All right,' said Iris. 'Tell you what.' She reached inside her jacket, her hand forcing its way past the leatherite stiffened by the chamber's cold. The gun was colder than her fingers; the nearness of the metal to what was left of her heart had done nothing to keep it warm. She drew the gun out, raised it and sighted directly along its black barrel toward a point between Carsten's pale eyes. 'You say you've still got some big secrets left to lay on me. That you know what it is I've supposedly been looking for. The real truth, and all that other bullshit.' Iris curled one forefinger around the gun's trigger. 'I'm going to give you a chance to prove it.'
'Really?' The sight of the gun, aimed and rock-steady, didn't appear to alarm Carsten. 'And what's that?'
Iris shifted the gun a few millimeters and squeezed the trigger. The flash from the muzzle lit up the chamber as though a streak of lightning from one of the thunderstorms preceding LA's monsoon season had transferred inside the ice-covered walls. At one side of Carsten's head, the wispy white hair fluttered as the bullet passed just above the top ridge of his ear.
The echo of the shot had slammed against the limits of the chamber hard enough to temporarily deafen her. As her hearing cleared once more, Iris could hear the minute, bell-like tinkling sounds of ice crystals, dislodged by the shockwave, drifting like bright stars and diamonds from the ceiling and settling across the grim face of Eldon Tyrell and the glass lids of the other coffins, as though the chamber held a depiction of a winter's mass funeral from a child's illustrated storybook. The thickly viscous liquid in the various glass beakers and jars had shivered with the impact, their contents disturbed enough to slowly turn inside, as though the bodyless eyes had been aroused by events and had brought their silent gaze around to watch.
'Maybe that wasn't such a good idea.' Carsten reached up and touched the side of his head, then checked his fingertips to see if there was any blood on them. 'To have given that weapon back to you. Your emotional state is obviously a little shaky.'
'Too late now.' Iris raised her voice against the shrill whistle of escaping refrigerant; the shot had penetrated one of the larger pipes
at the far end of the chamber, releasing a gray jet of condenser gas. 'But don't worry; it's not a hormonal thing. I've got a proposition to make you.'
'I'm listening.'
'Here's the deal.' Iris kept the gun dead-level between herself and the old man. 'Whatever revelations you've got lined up, they better absolutely blow me away. So to speak. Or I blow you away.'
'But I was going to tell you everything, anyway.'
Now you'll really be motivated to make it good.'
Carsten considered for a moment, then nodded. 'It's worth a shot,' he said. 'So to speak.
'Exactly.' Iris raised the gun a little higher. Her arm felt both weightlessly numb, and solid as a carved extension of ice. 'So go for it.'
'The truth? The real truth, as you spoke of? Here it is, then.' Carsten took a step backward, spreading his arms wide to indicate not only the row of glass-lidded coffins, but the ice-bound chamber itself. 'Everything you see here, everything you thought you knew about replicants — it's all wrong. You don't even know the real purpose of replicants. Why they were created. What they're made for. You just don't know.'
'So tell me, then.' Iris was beyond impatience. 'What's the purpose of replicants?'
'Batty knew,' said Carsten. 'When that group of escaped replicants went to Los Angeles, to confront Tyrell — they knew. Somehow they had found out the secret about themselves, about all replicants. So you tell me something. You saw the Blade Runner movie; what did the Batty replicant and his band go to LA for? What did they want from Tyrell?'
'Life. Or more life.' The gun didn't move. 'What else would they want? When you're at the end of a four-year lifespan, getting a postponement on your death is pretty much going to be your number one priority.'
'And why would they go to Eldon Tyrell to ask for that kind of extension? It would seem a pointless quest to ask that from the very same creator who had dictated the moment of your death to begin with.' Carsten folded his arms across his chest. 'If Eldon Tyrell had decided upon what was to be the pitifully short length of their existences, why would the Batty replicant or any of the others have thought they could change his mind about that?'
'Maybe they didn't. Maybe they just hoped they could get something out of him. A reprieve. They would be equally dead if they hadn't gone to LA and confronted their maker. The odds didn't matter. They didn't have anywhere else to turn.'
'Which raises the question about why they would have thought it was even possible for them to be given longer lives; to have their own deaths pushed a little farther away. When you watched the movie when you saw what actually happened between the Batty replicant and his creator, Eldon Tyrell — didn't it strike you as odd how quickly Batty folded?'
'What do you mean?'
'Batty was a determined individual; he was designed to be. The original Roy Batty, the human being who was the templant upon which the replicant Batty was based, had been a real piece of work. I know that for a fact; I knew the man. If the replicant Batty had possessed even half the human Batty's ruthlessness, he wouldn't have simply accepted Eldon Tyrell's quick explanations, one techno-buzzword after another, about why it was impossible to extend the escaped replicants' four-year lifespans. But since the Batty replicant was in fact a true duplication of its original's nature, the fact that he seemingly accepted getting brushed off by Tyrell indicates that possibly something else was going on. That whatever else the other escaped replicants in the group might have been led by the Batty replicant to believe, he at least had some other agenda.'
'If he did then he wasn't any smarter than the rest of them. If somebody is coming to the end of his four-year lifespan, what could be more important than trying to get some kind of extension?'
'That depends,' said Carsten simply. 'Upon the nature of the replicant — that is, the nature of the human templant that the replicant was duplicated from. And as I said, the original human Batty was not an easy-going kind of person. In fact, he could be downright vicious; that's why he was considered so valuable at what he did, and why the Tyrell Corporation used him as the templant for a production run of military-aggressor model replicants. Basically, the original human Roy Batty felt, deep within what passed for his soul, that whatever problems he was confronted with, the best solution consisted of killing somebody else.'
'Charming.'
'You should talk.' Carsten's pale eyes gave her a wry glance, above the barrel of the gun leveled in his direction. 'You've never made your living any other way than that. The only difference between you and the original Roy Batty, the human one, is that you and he have had different problems. You thought all you had to do in this world was retire a few escaped replicants, and the original Batty never had
any problem with killing humans as well. Perhaps he even preferred it; at least you haven't gotten around to that stage yet. Though in some other important ways, you and the original Batty were even more alike than you might think.'
'Really?' Her hand and the raised gun had frozen into one solid construct. 'And how's that?'
'Neither one of you knew what was really going on. What you were really doing as you went about your deadly jobs. You didn't have the slightest idea — didn't even care, probably — about what the real purpose of the replicant technology was. The Roy Batty replicant knew; somehow he had discovered the truth, out there somewhere in the far colonies, among the stars. Maybe he was told the truth by whatever parties they were who helped him and the other escaped replicants reach Earth. Maybe those other individuals — humans or other entities; who knows? — and organizations had their own agenda about why they wanted murderous replicants such as Batty to return to the Los Angeles where they had first been created. But the suspicions remain, and the facts behind them, that the Batty replicant wasn't in any way interested in groveling to his creator, pleading for a few more days of life. Whatever he did along those lines might have been nothing more than an act, a subterfuge that pulled along with him the other escaped replicants whose help he needed — plus fooling Eldon Tyrell himself. Tyrell's personal quarters at the Tyrell Corporation building were laced with security and alarm systems; with the number of enemies he had made in his lifetime, he would have been an idiot not to have had them. Right?'
'I suppose so.' Iris gave a stiff nod. 'Rich people in general tend to be on the paranoid side. Especially when they live in the middle of a hole like LA. Everybody wants a piece of them, and they've all got knives.'
'Exactly. Yet Tyrell didn't trigger any of those security alarms when he was confronted with an intruder like the Batty replicant, even though he knew from the design parameters for one of his company's own products that Batty wasn't likely to have been there on a social call. Things could get really ugly, really fast, when either a human or a replicant Batty was around. So to keep Tyrell from calling for security, whole divisions of which were available right there in the building, the Batty replicant would have needed a cover story, some explanation for why he had come there that would distract Tyrell from the actual purpose of Batty's visit. That's what the business of wanting more life, an extension to his paltry allotted span of four years, was about. The Batty replicant knew all along there was no way he or the other escaped replicants could get that from their creator; he'd always known that. Useless to ask. But useful, as I said, for a cover story. Something to divert Eldon Tyrell from the real reason the Batty replicant was there. And it worked.' A thin smile showed on Carsten's face. 'As you saw, in the Blade Runner movie. It worked long enough for the Batty replicant to take care of the business he had come there for.'
'You're saying,' said Iris slowly, 'that the Batty replicant went to the Tyrell Corporation headquarters . . . just to kill Eldon Tyrell?'
'Does that surprise you?'
'Not much.' Iris still kept the gun leveled at the old man's forehead. 'I suppose it was a matter of who got first crack at him. Eventually, somebody had to.' Both her arm and the gun felt weightless; she held them in place without effort. But what would the Batty replicant have gotten out of it?'
'The same thing anybody would have gotten, if they had been cheated of all but four short years of existence, lied to and sold as slave labor to the humans in the far colonies. The same thing you would have wanted if it had been you that had made your way to your creator's private quarters. What else but revenge?'
She had to admit the old man was right; that was exactly what she would have wanted. If I'm going — she addressed an invisible Eldon Tyrell inside her head, as though she had inserted herself into the movie she had watched in the ruins — then you're going with me. She was so angry about merely losing the part of her life her job as a blade runner had been, that the frozen gun in her hand seemed to thaw a little bit from the heat of her brooding. But at least she'd had the life; Batty and the other replicants had been cheated out of even that much.
'But he got his revenge,' said Iris aloud. 'He did kill Tyrell.' The images from the movie, of the Batty replicant crushing Tyrell's skull between his hands like a withered egg, were still bright red in her memory. 'He got what he wanted.'
'And he came a long way for it.' On the other side of the gun, Carsten nodded in agreement. 'Risking what little bit of his life was still left to him. When you only have four years in total — and you're aware of that — then any single day is infinitely precious. Whereas real human beings, who don't know when they're scheduled to die, think therefore that they're immortal; we can waste all the days we care to. An unlimited supply — but replicants know better. In that way, the old Tyrell Corporation motto is true: "More Human than Human." They are better than us.'
Iris was unimpressed. 'But not so much better,' she pointed out, 'that someone like me wasn't able to settle their hash for them.'
'True.' Carsten's thin smile appeared on the other side of the gun. 'But that might mean something slightly different from what you think it does. But never mind that, for the moment. One secret at a time. We were talking about what it is that the replicants knew, which was so important that their leader Batty would risk the few remaining days of his oh-so-short life to make sure their creator Tyrell wouldn't have any more of his. After all, when the Batty replicant and his followers climbed into the suspended-animation shipping containers' — Carsten gestured toward the row of glass-lidded boxes between himself and Iris — 'they had no way of being sure they would climb out of them when they reached their destination — if they did. They could just as well have been lying down in their real coffins, the ones nobody ever exits, or at least not alive.'
'Maybe their souls would've climbed out,' said Iris sourly. 'Assuming they had any.'
'Assuming that anybody does. We're talking about Los Angeles here. If such things existed, they'd be for sale somewhere. But the secret, the truth, the escaped replicants knew — that somebody either told them or they had found out on their own — made such things as souls unnecessary. Or at least unnecessary as far as actual life is concerned.' Carsten's reedy voice grew subtly louder and more emphatic; his pale eyes brightened with a feverish spark. 'Because in a way the Blade Runner movie you watched with Vogel was right: Eldon Tyrell did have the ability to stave off death, to grant more life — even immortality. But not to his own creations; not to replicants such as Roy Batty and his followers. But to himself. That was the secret, and the truth. And that's what the replicant technology was about, before it was stolen by the UN emigration program and handed over to the Tyrell Corporation. It had nothing to do with providing cheap slave labor for the emigrants in the far colonies; that was merely what the UN, with Eldon Tyrell's connivance, had twisted it into. Its real, true purpose was life itself. Eternal life.'
'You're joking.' The fervor in the old man's voice had sent a creeping sensation across Iris's chilled skin. And I don't think it's very funny, she told herself. If it were only some kind of joke, it would be better than the nut-case religious tone that had seized upon Carsten's words. She didn't relish the thought of dealing with a religious fanatic, which was what he sounded like now; the fragile, white-haired figure had been transformed into some latter-day Savonarola, right before her eyes. Which means, thought Iris, I'll have a hard time with the rest of this bunch out here. The rest of his 'committee' and its operatives were probably as crazy as he was. If she popped him, there was no telling how the ones up above, on the sunlit desert surface, would react. Not well, was her best guess.
'Immortality,' said Carsten quietly, 'isn't something to joke about. Except when you don't think it's possible. Then everything is a joke, isn't it? — because everyone dies, eventually. Humans and replicants alike; it's just a matter of how soon. The Batty replicant wouldn't have had to do anything to have his revenge on Eldon Tyrell, except wait. Even if that waiting had t
aken place after Batty was dead, his brief four years over — he'd have died with the comfort of knowing that someday, soon or late, his creator would join him in the grave. As all men do.'
'But somehow — that's what you're saying — the Batty replicant knew that wasn't going to happen. Not with Tyrell.' She studied the wrinkled face on the other side of the gun. 'Somehow he wasn't going to die. Ever.'
'That's correct.' Carsten gave a single nod. 'Because even though Eldon Tyrell and the UN emigration program had stolen and perverted the replicant technology, turned it into an assembly line for manufacturing slaves, its original purpose still existed. The replicant technology could be used for exactly that for which it had first been devised. But in this case, not for the sake of all humanity, but for one human being: Tyrell himself.'
'If,' said Iris, 'it actually could work that way. Which you haven't proved to me.' She extended the gun a little farther, emphasizing her doubt. 'You haven't shown me anything, except a corpse in a glass coffin. A corpse which has some kind of way-slowed-down heartbeat. And that looks like somebody I saw get murdered.' She shook her head. 'I don't think much of the evidence so far.'
'That's because you haven't seen all of it.' Carsten stepped away from the open coffin, with the Tyrell-like figure inside it. 'Let me show you something you might find more impressive.' He stopped beside the next coffin in the row, all of them mounted on the same knee-high trestles. With one hand, Carsten reached down and unlatched the glass lid and eased it back, the way he had done with the first of them. He took a step away. 'Take a look.'
She had tracked him with the gun as he had gone through his showman routine. Now she stepped forward and glanced down into the newly opened coffin-like container. The twin of the other figure, the occupant of the first coffin Carsten had flung open, lay in this one. The exact same sleeping face, the grimly withered visage of Eldon Tyrell, was gently touched by a few ice crystals that had been dislodged from the rim of the glass lid.