Eye and Talon (28 page)

'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.'

'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.'

'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.