by K. W. Jeter
'The eyes.' Iris spoke quietly, the gun in her hand forgotten for a moment and drifting downward. 'Batty crushed his eyes . . .'
'Now you know,' said Carsten. His voice had turned gentle, almost kind in its soft tones. 'Or at least a bit more than you did previously. Look at me.'
She turned her gaze away from the bloody images of memory and toward the old man in the ice-bound chamber.
'You've got your hand – at last – upon the end of the thread that will unravel the rest of the secrets.' There was no fervor in Carsten's words now, only the simple authority of fact. 'That's the trick, the switch to be pulled, as you put it. That's what is so important about them, and the way the Batty replicant killed Eldon Tyrell. Watch.'
With the cold gun hanging at her side, Iris watched as Carsten reached down toward the face of the figure sleeping in the open coffin before him. With a gentle motion, he drew his fingertips across the eyelids of the Eldon Tyrell replicant. When he raised his hand from the figure's creased brow, there were two black holes where none had been before.
Carsten walked along the row of opened coffin-like containers, reaching down and repeating the same simple action. As he passed, the faces all gazed upward with the same empty stare. When he came to the one in front of Iris, he drew his fingertips across its face as he had done with the others, then stepped back and regarded her in silence.
She looked down at the empty eye-sockets, emptier than any night sky could be. The hollowed-out sockets looked like twin wells, into which one could fall, and keep falling, without ever hitting bottom.
'The eyes . . .' Carsten's words came from somewhere close by her. 'They're the secret . . .'
Intercut
'Okay,' said the director. He leaned forward, peering even more closely at the monitor screen. 'She's onto it now.'
The camera operator scanned across the other screens before them, row after row of fragmented images from the icy subterranean chamber, the set beneath the desert's surface. God, that's ugly, he thought, wincing at the views of the suspended-animation containers and what they held. He could have lived a long time without any need for seeing one eyeless Eldon Tyrell, rather than a whole platoon of them.
But in some way, the view from the prime monitor, the one that the director was so intently studying, was even worse. The look on the female's face, as the camera operator had zoomed in on her, was that of someone on the verge of waiting from her own troubled sleep, from bad dreams, into—
He didn't know. The director hadn't shown him the script. Everything had been live, real-time improv, the camera operator working the controls with virtually no respite for hours on end. But it's almost over, he told himself. Even for a job like this, with so much left so irritatingly mysterious, a certain instinct for pacing had kicked in; he could tell when the end was coming.
Whether the female they had been tracking, the one whose face filled the monitor screen, would be as relieved was another matter.
'Stay on her,' instructed the director, swiveling his chair away from the bank of glowing images. 'We're going in for the kill now.'
From the corner of his eye, the camera operator watched as the director reached for the tight-cell phone sitting on the top shelf of the wheeled equipment cart. He had no idea what the director meant by that, but it didn't sound good to him.
The director had his wide, overfleshed back to him, so he couldn't hear what was being said into the phone, what new instructions were being given, and to whom. Not your department, the camera operator told himself. All you have to do is watch.
He looked back toward the monitor screen. The female's eyes seemed to gaze right back into his own, as though waiting for him to speak, to warn her somehow . . .
16
'The eyes,' said the old man. He didn't look down at the sleeping figure in the glass-lidded coffin. 'That's the secret.' The row of Eldon Tyrell duplicates dreamed whatever slow dreams they might, without benefit of eyes to see them. 'From the beginning, that was the secret. That was what you needed to know.'
Iris dosed her own eyes and stepped backward, away from the coffin between her and Carsten. 'I don't want to hear anymore.' She held up her free hand, palm outward, as though to fend off both him and the hollow-eyed figure in the coffin. 'I've heard enough.'
'No, you haven't.' Carsten's voice was cruelly blunt. 'You have to hear it all. Every bit of it. You don't have any choice about that.'
'Why?' She looked at him now. The fear that had sent her heart pounding, trying to force her cold-thickened blood through her veins, had been evoked by the Tyrell figures' empty eye-sockets; she had no idea where, from what part inside herself, that flinching terror had come. 'Why me?'
'You'll find that out as well, soon enough.'
'Really? You'll tell me?' The hope in her voice shamed her. Iris felt something colder than before on her face, stinging sharper than the ice crystals that had drifted down from the chamber's ceiling. She touched her face with trembling fingertips and found frightened tears, already at the point of freezing. With the back of her hand, she wiped them away. 'Don't screw around with me anymore,' she pleaded. 'I can't take it.'
'Just listen, then.' Carsten lowered his voice, knowing she would still be able to hear every word. 'Here's the deal. This is how it works. The eyes are how the transfer of information is made; it's an optical process. The windows of the soul, right? When those windows are thrown wide, things can enter as well as exit. That's how the chain is forged, link by link, as it were. And it's different from the download process used in the manufacture of ordinary replicants, the ones with fictional biographies and memories instead of real ones; those false memories are loaded in during the actual cellular construction of their brains, on top of the base material transcribed from the minds and memories of the human templants upon which they're based. But what's loaded through the eyes is the new material, that the original human or the most recent replicant duplicate has experienced, and that has become part of the human's mind and memories, in whatever interval of time since the base gestalt-forming material was laid down. Plus — and this was the breakthrough Eldon Tyrell achieved, since the original replicant technology was stolen and handed over to him — a counter-entropic signal, based upon wave-cancellation theory, ensuring that with each new subsequent transfer of information, data errors from previous transfers are identified and eliminated. Essentially, instead of a cascading pile-up of data errors, eventually resulting in paralysis or idiocy, the transcribed information is constantly renewed to a pristine state. And the result of that is true immortality; an unbroken chain. If everything had gone according to his plans, Eldon Tyrell would have lived forever.'
'If you say so,' murmured Iris. The words had come streaming past her, with only a few catching in her thoughts, like scraps of paper written upon in an incomprehensible language, swirling in the gutter of an LA street. 'If he'd wanted to . . .'
'There's no doubt about that. Eldon Tyrell wanted everything; that was the problem. And to never let go of it. That was why even his associates, such as the officials of the UN emigration program, turned on him at last. They had to; that much greed and hunger couldn't be trusted, even by those who were nearly as greedy and hungry. It's one thing to want, as the Batty replicant did, more than a meager four years of life. It's another to want eternity.'
'He didn't get it, though . . .'
'No,' said Carsten. 'He didn't. No one does. At least, not yet.'
'I don't get it, either,' said Iris. She brushed the last of the ice crystals from her face and looked direct at the old man. 'If the eyes are the important things — and that must've been why Tyrell had somebody else working on them, outside the Tyrell Corporation, right? — then why the mysteries beyond that? What was all that for?'
'Mysteries?' Carsten appeared amused; he raised one white eyebrow. 'I'm not saying there aren't any — in fact, there are plenty — but which ones in particular are you referring to?'
'Come on. I said before, don't screw arou
nd with me. The owl,' she said bluntly. 'What was the whole business with the owl? Why send me, why send anybody, off on some hunt for it? What has a stupid bird to do with Eldon Tyrell's eyes?'
'Everything,' replied Carsten. 'Do you really imagine that someone like Eldon Tyrell would keep an animal of any sort, a mere living thing, around for no reason? He was hardly the sentimental type. And if there were any sort of genuine test of empathic capability, if a Voigt-Kampff machine could be made to work and discern whether someone was human or not, the chances of his passing the test would have been slight indeed. So if the owl was there in his personal quarters in the Tyrell Corporation building, there was some purpose for it. And the owl's purpose was that it was Eldon Tyrell's back-up survival system.'
'Say again?'
'It's simple enough.' Carsten gestured toward the figure sleeping in the glass-lidded coffin. 'Tyrell was realistic enough to know that he had enemies. He knew something might happen to him that would prevent the transfer — the throwing of the switch, as you put it between him and the next intended link in the chain. Given the situation, he would have been a fool not to have created some kind of a back-up, a way of somehow increasing his chances, giving himself at least a shot at survival in case the worst came to happen. And that's why the Tyrell Corporation's owl, so amusingly named Scrappy, was — or perhaps is, given that the creature might still exist, alive, somewhere in the city. We don't know who took the owl from you, or what that person might have done with it. Or even why anyone else might have wanted it; it's useless without one of the replicants you see here, after a new set of artificial eyes are surgically grafted in. Because all that Scrappy the owl contains, encrypted into its limited cortical matter, is a minimal set of Eldon Tyrell's basic mind and memories, a highly compressed version, with some considerable amounts of data eliminated, of the gestalt-forming mental contents that would have been transferred optically from him to the next waiting replicant in the sequential chain, if the Batty replicant hadn't gotten to Tyrell first.'
'I don't get it.' The tips of her fingers felt like icicles as Iris rubbed her aching brow. 'Why put something like that inside an owl? What was the point of it?'
'The owl served Tyrell's purposes admirably; it is, in fact, the perfect medium for the transcription of the minimal set, the essential back-up of Tyrell's mind and memories. As a predator, it has a complex enough neuro-cortical system for there to be excess circuit space for that set, even if, as I said, some material had to be discarded. If the minimal set were used to animate one of the waiting Tyrell replicants, there would be undoubted gaps in Tyrell's memory, but the essence, the gestalt, of the man would be there. As well as his most recent memories; Tyrell was apparently in the habit of updating the contents the owl carried on a weekly basis. That's why he kept the owl so close to him, in his personal quarters, feeding and taking care of it on his own; in effect, he was merely taking care of an exteriorized part of himself, and not another creature at all. That would have required the exercise of some empathic function on his part, a function he lacked. And of course there were other, physiological reasons why the owl was used; other than the now-extinct primate species, the owl is one of the few creatures with true binocular vision. Both its eyes look straight forward, as do those of a human being; the optical-based transfer of information is impossible to perform, otherwise. Then there are reasons beyond that: beside the convenience of the owl being a relatively small and easy-to-handle animal while in captivity, given Eldon Tyrell's fussy meticulousness at doing so, there is the survival factor. With its own owl mind and instincts still operational, and the Eldon Tyrell minimum set merely carried as non-functioning neurological baggage, as it were, the owl has at least some ability to look after itself, should circumstances arise when Tyrell would no longer be able to do so. And as you've found out for yourself, that turned out to be the case. The vermin-ridden back alleys of Los Angeles were a perfect hunting ground for the escaped owl, until it was captured by the people from whom you managed to take it.'
'I didn't have it for long,' murmured Iris. A memory image arose, of the great-winged bird of prey in her tiny apartment. 'Not long at all.'
'Not your fault.' Carsten's voice was tinged with pity again. 'You were up against forces of which you could, as yet, have little understanding. You're still up against them. There have been reasons for the things that have happened to you; those reasons are still undisclosed to you, but they were real, nevertheless. Going all the way back to the beginning — and perhaps even farther than that.' He watched her for any reaction. 'Tell me — why do you think you were chosen to go hunting for the owl? Why were you given the job?'
'Because . . .' Iris was no longer sure, but came up with the only answer she was able to. 'Because they thought -I could find it. Somebody thought I could.' She shook her head. 'But I don't know who it was anymore. Maybe I never did.'
'There's more to it than that,' said Carsten. 'Do you want me to show you?'
'Do I have a choice?'
'I'll give you one. Now I will. You've come this far, but we won't go the rest of the way — unless you want to.' His voice had dropped almost to a whisper. 'I'll let you decide. I can show you, or you can walk out of here right now. Out into the sunshine, where it's nice and warm. And you won't have to know.'
Iris thought it over. As much as she could; her thoughts seemed frozen in place, as though they had become as chilled as the numb flesh of her limbs.
'All right.' She gave a single slow nod. 'Go ahead.'
'You have to come over here.' Carsten reached across the coffin between them and took her free hand. He stepped around the head of the container, closer to her. 'This is what you've been waiting for. From the beginning.'
He led her down the line of coffins, each with its glass lid thrown back, revealing the grimly sleeping contents within. All the way to the end of the line, close to the ice-covered wall of the chamber. The last coffin-like container was there, the one that Carsten had left unopened. The flat surface of its lid was frosted white with an accumulation of ice crystals, like a shelf of snow.
Carsten let go of her hand and reached down to the latch at the side of the coffin. Once again, Iris heard the tiny, breath-like sigh of the container's pneumatic seal being breached. Carsten grasped the edge of the lid and, with greater care than he had used with the others, lifted and tilted it back.
'Now tell me what you see.' Carsten stepped away, letting Iris come forward, reluctantly but inevitably. 'This time.'
She stood at the side of the coffin and looked down. And saw herself.
It had happened before. The memory of watching the movie and seeing the woman up on the screen, the one who had looked exactly like her. The one named Rachael who the blade runner Deckard had fallen in love with. She had been able to deny it to herself then, that she had been looking at her double, the face the same as her own. Deny it until Vogel had pointed it out to her, had made her admit the truth. And fury and tears had burst forth, from some unknown place inside her, for some reason she couldn't fathom. Fury at being frightened, frightened by not knowing what it meant; tears at knowing it meant everything, even though she had yet to discover why it did . . .
'You see her, don't you?' Carsten's soft voice came from behind Iris. 'It's like a mirror, isn't it?
Iris had only time for one slow nod of agreement, before the mirror shattered.
She heard the cry from the sleeping woman, the one with her face but a different name, the one named Rachael. As if the woman were suddenly waking up from her long sleep, woken by bad dreams, bad enough to make her cry out in pain, mouth wide and back arching up from the padded, silken lining of the glass-lidded coffin. The cry broke louder, echoing from the icy walls, until it was just as suddenly silenced by the blood that welled up and filled the woman's throat and mouth.
And the echo wasn't that of her silenced cry, but the ringing of the gunshot which had brought a smaller red flower blossoming at her breast, with a dark center where the bull
et had smashed through the collarbone below, stopping the infinitely slow beat of her heart.
The next shot from the gun in Iris's raised hand slammed the woman with her face back down into the coffin. The woman's arms flung wide, hands spread, as if she were trying to embrace a bullet big as the world. And then she was only a crumpled dead thing in the red-spattered box, the backs of her wrists against the metal of its edges.
'You poor fool,' said Carsten. No shock, but only sadness sounded in his voice. 'That won't do any good. It won't stop anything. It's too late for that.'
Iris let the gun, warm enough now to thaw her frozen hand, drift downward from its own weight. She felt dizzied and unsure as she turned away from the coffin and its dead contents to look at the old man. 'I don't know why . . . I did it . .
'It doesn't matter.' Carsten reached out and touched her shoulder, with almost paternal kindness. 'Not for you . . . or her. Which is the same thing, really. You know that, don't you? It's like suicide, only you're still alive afterward. You can't kill yourself that easily.'
Not for lack of trying, thought Iris. She wondered if she had been trying to, from the beginning. The beginning before the owl. She raised the gun in her hand, its metal chilling again to the temperature of her cold flesh, and regarded it—
The sound of another gunshot came, distant and muffled by the chamber's ice-laden walls. More shots, the distinct stutter of automatic-rifle fire, filtered though from outside and above, at the surface of the surrounding desert.
Carsten turned away from her, his slight body visibly tensing into full alertness. 'That's not supposed to be happening,' he muttered.
'What?' Iris could hear more shots, still muffled but louder and closer. 'What's happening?'
'Stay here,' ordered Carsten. He plucked the gun out of the stiff fingers of her hand, then headed with it toward the door by which they had entered the chamber. The disembodied eyes, in their fluid-filled vessels, watched him pass without comment.