Eye and Talon (36 page)

'There's a lot of reasons it could have failed to happen.' Carsten looked unimpressed with her arguments. 'Primarily, due to Eldon Tyrell having been surrounded by far more conspirators and traitorous elements, right inside his own corporation, than he had any notion of. Whoever had been designated with the responsibility of "throwing the switch," as you put it, could have been one of those traitors. Let's face it, Eldon Tyrell hardly had the kind of charisma that inspired universal loyalty among his employees. Any one of them might have preferred to see him as a corpse rather than as an animated replicant. One has to be careful about making enemies; they tend to multiply in the dark, like insects. However, as much as something like that could have or should have happened to Eldon Tyrell, it is not in fact what occurred. His death — his true death, all chance of immortality gone — wasn't accomplished by the mere failure to throw the switch that would have put the transcription of his mind and memories into a waiting replicant receptacle. That would have been too easy — and not nearly final enough. For, of course, if the transcription that had been made of his mind and memories still existed, who could say the switch might not have been thrown later?' Carsten shook his head. 'Better to make sure Eldon Tyrell stayed dead. After all, it's what the Batty replicant wanted, as well as the conspirators who arranged for his passage to LA. And the only way to do that was to destroy the channel by which the transference of information, from the dead Tyrell to the new replicant Tyrell, was to have been made. And that's exactly what the Batty replicant did.'

Iris regarded the old man sidelong once more; the creepily fervent tone had crept into his reedy voice again. 'Yeah?' She was glad she had the gun hanging in her numb hand between herself and Carsten. 'How'd he do that?'

'You already saw how it was done,' said Carsten. 'You saw the
Blade Runner
movie. And it wasn't just a movie: as your friend Vogel told you, it was in fact the actual taped record of what happened. So the way you saw Eldon Tyrell die in the film — the way you saw the Batty replicant kill him — was the way Eldon Tyrell did indeed die; in reality, in the world as we know it. You understand that, don't you?'

'Sure.' Ice crystals sifted from Iris's close-cropped hair down the back of her neck. 'I've got the picture.'

'I'm sure you do. I'm sure you're watching it right now, on the screen of your memory:And you can in fact see — in all its red detail - the whole sequence of Batty's murder of Tyrell. Am I right?'

Iris made no reply. The mere mention of the sequence had been enough to bring it up vividly inside her head, with no necessity for her to close her eyes to appreciate its somber beauties. She had felt no distaste the first time she had seen it, on the much larger and external screen of the private theater in what had been Tyrell's personal quarters in the ruins of the Tyrell Corporation building in LA. Watching the sequence again, in her memory, produced no new queasiness.
Only a death
, Iris told herself. Exactly like others she had seen, like others she herself had been responsible for. The only difference was the hands-on nature of this one; literally so. She watched, in memory, as Batty's hands settled on either side of his creator's age-creased head.

'A very detailed shot, isn't it?' From down the row of glass-lidded coffins, Carsten's thin voice hectored at her. 'When the makers of the film edited down the shots from the concealed video cameras, they went for the tight close-up, to make sure that we could see exactly what happened. What the Batty, replicant did to Tyrell, other than simply kill him. Tell me; what do you see? What
did
happen then? What did the movie show?'

'The hands . . .' Iris spoke slowly, as the images unreeled in similar motion in her thoughts. 'And Tyrell's head . . .'

'The hands, yes; very good.' Carsten leaned forward above the coffin closest to him, watching her as intently as might any bird of prey. 'And the thumbs . . . Batty's
thumbs
. . .'

His words seemed to be coming from infinitely far away, like the faint cry of some winged creature circling in a cloudless sky above. She could barely hear him, though she knew precisely what he had said to her.
His thumbs
. Iris could see them, the exact small motion pressing into Tyrell's face, and the blood that had welled up from beneath them.

'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 . . .'

'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 . . .

'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 around 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.'