Eye and Talon (6 page)

Whose fortune, though? The big question, Iris figured, was who the owl belonged to now, given that the nominal owner, the Tyrell Corporation, was defunct. Who had theownership of the owl passed to? She'd have to root around a little, find out who the survivors and heirs to the Tyrell Corporation were.

'Who, who, who.' Iris spoke the words like the owl's own hooting cry, and smiled. The bird was a hunter like herself; she could admire the sharpness of its claws.

She couldn't make out the details of the high-ceilinged room that the surresper had laid over her own; the light from that other space, dim and fragmentary, cast anemic, wavering shadows with too little strength to keep from being swallowed up by a larger, surrounding darkness. 'Enhance ambient light levels,' Iris instructed the surresper. 'Fifty pink lumens.' She always started a bright-scaled visual scan in the pink zone, the spectrum band that the human eye could perceive. Going white, into the full-bandwidth spectra, added more information, but rarely anything useful.
What the eye can see
, Iris repeated a basic police-training adage,
the eye can find
. The corollary being that what the eye couldn't see wasn't important. 'Another ten. Stop and edge-sharp boundaries, probable physical objects, max detail def.'

The high-ceilinged room that the surresper had called up now seemed flooded with daylight, as though the other building's roof had been torn off during some season when the city wasn't being pounded with monsoon rains. Banks of candles, guttering in crystal dishes or antlered in horizontal arcs by the arms of cathedral-style candelabra, had their small teardrop flames almost eclipsed by the multiplied light filling the summoned room.

At the same time, the owl – arrested in its flight, yellow eyes and clawtips gleaming – seemed to shimmer for a moment, as each feather leapt into unnaturally high definition; the effect was as if a rough crayon sketch had suddenly been re-done with a single-hair brush, honed engraving needle, and infinite patience. The outspread claws looked sharp as hypodermics.

The winged creature held her attention again. 'Fact-check basic, taxonomic on down.'

A neutered, dispassionate voice sounded from the surresper. '
Bubo virginianus
, commonly known as great homed owl. Adult size varies, generally within range of sixty-three to sixty-six centimeters; wingspread one point four meters. Largest, best-known variety of common owls; former range in wild extending throughout all parts of Northern America—'

'Urban areas?'

It took a second for the voice to switch to another text section of its built-in encyclopedic function. 'On occasion, particularly in areas adjacent to open country or with large, densely forested park zones with small prey opportunities.'

So
, thought Iris,
it could live in a city
. But it'd been a long time since LA had had anything like a park in it, at least in the sense of green, growing things and small edible creatures running around.
Other than rats
.

The voice picked up again. 'Range in coloration: nearly white in Arctic areas, to dark brown and gray, mottled and streaked markings below.'

'Yeah, I got that much.' Iris regarded the owl, suspended in midair, once again. 'Current population status?'

'Extinct in wild, certainty level one hundred percent. Last captive breeding program terminated, DNA samples discarded as non-viable. Some unsupervised trading suspected among private collectors; no official priority level established for tracking.'

That was pretty much as Iris had suspected. Government agencies, from the local level right through to the UN, had enough on their hands without worrying about
bubo virginianus
. In this world, people were an endangered species. It might not have seemed like that, when pushing your way through the packed streets of Los Angeles, but outside the remaining population magnets – LA, Mexico City, Jakarta, the Euro-Disney Workers Paradise, New Beijing – the human gene-pool dried up rapidly. The cities were like the last, luridly fluorescent night-blossoms on a dying bush, roots withering in polluted soil; if humanity didn't get transplanted successfully to the star colonies, then it would be as extinct as the owl and every other creature that didn't make the cut in a toxin-rich environment. Hard to imagine what collectors would be around to trade the last few members of the otherwise dead breed.

Iris knew all that, and didn't care. She had the same comforting belief system as the generations before her:
I'll be gone before the shit comes down
. Gone in the sense of no longer being alive. No matter how good she was at the blade runner trade – and deep in her heart, she knew she was the best that her boss Meyer had at the moment – she knew it was a short-lived profession. She wasn't worried about the Wambaugh Curve, the burn-out cycle that tripped up most runners — only wimps and whiners let themselves get tweaked about killing replicants. But eventually, as in any contact sport, even a long-term champ would feel her step slowing by a fraction of a second, the gun in her hand weighing a fraction of an ounce more, coming up and aiming a hair's-breadth too late and a sliver of a degree wide of the fatal mark on the chest of its target — all of which would give that faster, harder and younger target the micro-second gap in time for turning, aiming and firing before she could get her own shot off

That was the unfair thing about replicants, and why hunting them was, eventually, like betting against the house. They were always,
de facto
, at their prime; their four-year lifespan, as much as some of them griped about it, meant they were always at the top of their own efficiency curve, at their fastest and smartest and deadliest peak.
At least
, thought Iris,
they don't have to worry about losing a step as they get older
. And many of the replicants, especially the ones designed for military combat, had a lot on the ball to begin with; they were to humans as the owl was to the small furry creatures that it seized in its scything talons and tore apart with the cruel machinery of its hooked beak. It was no wonder that the authorities tolerated having blade runners, the next step up in the prey-and-predator chain, running around the streets and firing off cannon-sized weaponry in the midst of the taxpayers and citizens; the alternative was even bleaker. Fat chance of getting the human race to pack up and move out to the stars, with the negative advertisement of escaped replicants, who were supposed to be mankind's slaves and servants in the far colonies, proving how much tougher and more dangerous than their masters they were. In that regard, there was a real PR value in blade runners blowing away the escapees in as public a manner as possible: it showed that everything was still under control, that the gone-bad replicants would be eliminated before they could crush too many people's heads like eggshells.
As long
, mused Iris bitterly,
as they let us do our jobs
. Which, as her boss Meyer had indicated to her, was a matter up in the air for the moment.

That was just more shit destined to come down someday, like the oil-dark rains burdening the black clouds above the city. With any luck, Iris figured, she'd have made her wad by then, rolling up the bounties and socking them away in her retirement accounts, and she'd be able to chill out in her comfy apartment, reminiscing about how good a bullet-warmed gun had felt in her hand, back when she'd been in the game, and watching on the broadcast news as the city's streets filled with blood.

'So much for the bird.' Iris spoke aloud. From the corner of her eye, she spotted her pet chat creeping out a few inches from its hiding place and regarding the frame-stalled image with acute suspicion and loathing. Iris turned her attention back to the surroundings that the surresper had summoned up, a ghost-walled room now more brightly lit than her own.

Expensive, as she had figured it would be: wood paneling from some close-grained tree species that was probably reduced to a few acres in New Guinea by now. If in fact the last of the breed hadn't been leveled to provide the board footage for the illusory chamber in which Iris stood. Common knowledge that a lot of high-level corporate execs, with money to burn, indulged in the luxury of species extinction, giving their material comforts a true
Après moi, le déluge
thrill. It wasn't a complete wipe-out unless any surviving genetic material was taken from deep cryo storage and destroyed, to make sure nobody came along later and recreated one's unique and private possessions. That was probably what had happened to
bubo virginianus's
DNA samples as well: nothing enhanced the collector's market like scarcity, and nothing enhanced scarcity like death. For animal collectors, extinction — or as close to it as one could get while still leaving a specimen or two alive — was a desirable quality.

And for the rich, the dead past was a treasure trove as well. The illusory space that the surresper had conjured up was tastefully — not her taste, but someone's — and expensively appointed with true museum-level antiques, bits and pieces from the dead centuries before this dying one. Even with only an optical feed to her senses, Iris could just about smell the hand-rubbed matte patina on the ornately inlaid writing desk standing against one wall on curved legs with gilt-clawed feet. Above it, a circular, convex mirror, surrounded by stylized golden sunrays, showed her own face's image; the surresper's simulator programming had spliced that bit of the real world's data into the illusory one.

There was another image in the mirror, of someone approaching from a dark hallway on the opposite side of the high-ceilinged room. The hallway's shadows, even with the light enhancement she had ordered from the surresper, all but concealed the figure of a short and slight man frozen in midstep as he headed toward her. The only detail that the light was able to pick out was its own reflected gleam upon a deep silver bowl he carried in one hand.

'Resume action, half-speed.' Iris stepped back from the room's center, so the man's reconstructed image wouldn't overlap with her own physical presence. 'Maintain enhanced light levels.'

Even before she had finished giving the surresper its instructions, the owl's wings swept into motion. Iris ducked reflexively as two slow-motion beats, like the furling and unfurling of a magician's feathered cape, brought the creature over her head and onto a metal perch, away from the small flames of the candelabra. The owl's claws seized onto the perch's crossbar; its feathers smoothed into place as it drew the broad wings close to itself. Golden eyes, perfectly round as coins, turned their fierce, unblinking gaze toward the approaching image.

The man's image, carrying the silver bowl, stepped slowly into the illusory room, where Iris could see him.

Her first thought was that he looked like death. Her second was that death would look better.

'Freeze image.'

The image halted, unmoving as the owl in mid-flight had been. Iris stepped up close to the image, examining the man's face almost nose to nose.

Between the man and the owl were certain similarities. The man's eyes were magnified by black-rimmed, rectangular-lensed glasses, giving him an owlish look, avidly staring, as though some small prey had been spotted in the patterned Oriental rug that the surresper had laid out underfoot. Skin of wrinkled parchment was stretched tight across the facial bones; the city's rains might never have come in this man's lifetime, leaving him to wither in the deracinating sun beyond the clouds. One corner of the man's mouth had already lifted into a smile as he had entered the room; the kind of smile, it struck Iris, that a person got when they were about to indulge in some small, private pleasure.
Pleasant for him
, thought Iris.
Maybe not so much, for anything else
.

She stepped back from the man's image and instructed the surresper again. 'ID male subject.'

The surresper was silent for a few seconds longer than usual. 'Process failure,' the machine announced. 'No identity file on record for subject in view. Redact command?'

'Really?' Iris glanced away from the image, and over her shoulder toward the surresper. 'All banks trawled?'

'Trawled, indices and by-file mode. Still negative.'

The chat had overcome some of its fear of the owl, and had crept out close to Iris's ankle. 'Wuzzat mean?'

'Means this guy's one rich sonuvabitch.'
Or maybe was
, Iris corrected herself. There was always the chance that he was dead already. Either way, it took a lot of money, and the power that went with it, to keep one's personal information out of the LAPD databanks. Tyrell Corporation power? Iris slowly nodded. The odds were in favor of it.

'Facial scan,' said Iris. 'Block and grid, left profile, left three-quarters, full face, right three-quarters, right profile. Index all possible recognition points for brute-force trawl—'

'Excuse me.' The surresper interrupted Iris's orders. 'But brute-force ID trawling was made illegal by United Nations Justice Court administrative decree code MMH, executive number 13-4583, reaffirmed on appeal number 565-8891. Adopted as procedure standard by Los Angeles Police Department, command level alphaalpha-zero-point-twelve.'

'Wow.' Strings of numbers always impressed the chat. 'What's that mean?'

'Figure it out,' Iris answered irritably. She spoke louder, so the surresper would be sure to hear. 'Override on personal authority. Execute command as given.'

'Must advise: all override instructions are reported to departmental supervisor.'

As if I didn't know that
. Iris felt a thin smile show on her face. The surresper would fink on her, she knew already; it was wired straight to the LAPD switchboard. Which meant that a piece of paper with her name on it somewhere would land on her boss Meyer's desk. He could either round-file it, or keep it handy for some blackmail possibilities against her. She didn't care which; nobody worked in the blade runner division for very long without racking up a fat file folder of black marks.

'Proceed,' instructed Iris.

A job like that would take some time, not in the scanning of the image's face, but in cranking through the match-up with the details of any person, human or replicant, outside the regulation ID bank. With the chat tagging behind her, Iris headed for the apartment's kitchen module to scrounge a cup of something warm. The illusory room's wood paneling had been laid over the door; she walked through the optical data of the burnished woodgrain, not even blinking as the sensory feed passed across her face. The chat had to pluck up its courage and dive through, eyes closed. Tucked into a ball, it rolled against the kitchen module's wall, then scrambled onto the solitary chair at the fold-down table.