Authors: K. W. Jeter
Either the owl didn't, by its own nature, reject food it hadn't killed itself, or maybe the late Dr Tyrell had trained it that way; maybe the living and expensive white rat she had witnessed in the surresper's data record had been a special treat. Even someone as rich as the head of the Tyrell Corporation had been wouldn't have been able to come up with goodies like that on a regular basis.
Making progress
, thought Iris. For the time being, at least, the problem of keeping the owl alive was solved. There was enough vermin in the apartment building to feed the thing indefinitely. But she wasn't planning on keeping it that long in her possession; the owl was still desired by some powerful people and forces. The sooner she figured out what to do with it, and then proceeded to get rid of the thing, the safer she'd be.
'Get rid of it,' echoed a tiny voice behind her.
Iris looked down over her shoulder and saw the chat pressing close to her ankles, looking around her shins at the feeding owl; the expression on the chat's round features was one of active hatred.
'Can't just yet.' Iris picked up the chat and held it to her with one forearm, careful not to stroke its endorphin-producing head. 'Gotta think.'
'What's to think about?' The chat laid its tiny paws on her breast. 'Icky.'
'Couple of items.' She walked a familiar circuit, back and forth in the apartment's living room, steering well clear of the owl. It had always helped sort out her thoughts, speaking them aloud to the chat; it was one of the artificial creature's useful functions for her. 'One — I don't really know what Meyer's intentions are, at least as far as I'm concerned.'
'Who's Meyer?'
'Nobody for you to worry about.' A big worry for her, though. The whole job stank even more of a set-up than it had before.
Not good
. Iris shook her head as she continued walking back and forth, the chat held closer to her. She'd had some residual measure of trust in Meyer before, no matter how much he'd jerked her around, even before this job; that was his job, as head of the division, to hand out crap to all the blade runners, herself included. But not to get them killed, or at least not deliberately. A set-up like the one she could have found herself in — that amounted to a departmental execution, as efficient as putting a gun's muzzle behind her ear and pulling the trigger. Hard to go on trusting anyone, even minimally, with an analysis like that.
'But what did he want?' Iris mused over the question, taking one step after another, back and forth.
'Who?' The chat peered up into her face.
'Meyer.'
'Him again,' said the chat, annoyed.
It was the big question.
Did he want the owl
, thought Iris,
or did he want to get me killed?
Maybe both, though she wasn't sure how that would have worked out. But if her death had been Meyer's objective, then it would be suicide for her to go to the police station and hand over the owl. If the owl was in fact something that Meyer wanted, and not just a pretext to maneuver her into a situation where she'd get killed, then as soon as he had the damn thing, he'd have no reason to keep her alive; people got iced all the time inside police stations, cops included. The entrance to the building, either on street level or up on top where the spinners landed, was sometimes a one-way door, with no exit other than in a box. But those cops who got executed by the department were nearly always ones who'd screwed up big-time, either by taking so many bribes from criminal types that the internal-investigations division had no choice but to get rid of them; or by reason of having run afoul of departmental politics, getting on the wrong side of one of the brass way above Meyer's rung on the ladder. Right off-hand, she couldn't think of any reason why anybody up above would want to eliminate her.
It's like being a replicant
, thought Iris. Or to be more exact, like a replicant who doesn't know that it's not human. She'd never had to retire one like that — at least, not yet — but she'd heard of a few cases where the poor bastards thought they were human, and then, as though they'd been dropped into a Kafka novel rewritten by Mickey Spillane, found themselves being hunted down by some armed and legal nemesis figure like Iris herself.
You wake up one day
, it struck her,
and somebody wants you dead. For no reason you've been told
. She felt a twinge of pity, not only for herself, but for those replicants who got killed without even knowing why.
'Screw it,' Iris said aloud. She didn't care what the reason might be; she just wanted to stay alive. Again, like those poor bastard replicants; all of them, whether they knew what they were or not. She was starting to feel a little sympathy for them – which was a dangerous road for a blade runner to go down. First mere sympathy, then empathy, the actual sensing and experiencing of another creature's sufferings; Iris couldn't figure how she'd be able to do her job if that happened to her.
I'd have to give up being a cop
, she thought,
and go for being a saint
.
'The way I see it,' Iris told the chat, 'is that I've got a couple of options.' Neither of them impressed her as very good. 'I could call up Meyer—'
'Hrmph.'
'And try to cut a deal with him. If he wants this owl – or if somebody above him does – then they're not getting it until I'm in the clear. Meaning that I walk away after delivery, and nobody tries to retire me.'
The chat hadn't understood what she had said, but nodded its round, bald head anyway. 'Sounds good.'
'Only if you're an idiot,' said Iris. 'Which I'm not, except to the extent I got myself roped into this mess in the first place. I already don't trust the guy; why should I trust him about keeping a promise to let me live after I hand over the owl to him?'
'Dunno.'
'Exactly. Besides, it might not be up to him. If he's merely the errand boy, following somebody else's orders, he could make all the promises in the world, have every intention of carrying them out, and I'd
still
get iced. He might, too, but that wouldn't do me any good.'
'Gosh.' The chat wrinkled its simple features in perplexity. 'Doesn't sound nice.'
'You got that right, pal.' Iris stopped pacing, nodding slowly to herself as she mulled over the various bleak possibilities in front of her. 'Which leaves the other option ...'
'Is?'
Iris glanced over at the owl. 'I try to figure out what's so important about our guest here.' She pointed a thumb toward the creature. 'And exactly why some people seem to want it so badly.'
'Ee-yuck.' The chat scowled. '
I
don't. Get rid of it!'
'Wish I could.' A sigh moved up from her heart. 'You don't know how
much
I wish I could.' This whole business, symbolized by the owl, had gotten way more complicated than she would have been able to imagine at the beginning. Her former life, in which all she had to do was track down and kill escaped replicants, now seemed like some vanished paradise, graced with an innocent and leisurely charm. 'But I'm stuck with it. For the time being.'
'How long's that?'
Something in the chat's question raised the skin prickling along her forearms. 'What do you mean?'
'You know.' The chat pushed itself back from her chest, so it could look up at her, full-face. 'Until something happens.' It tilted its round head to one side, small button eyes appearing slyer. 'More guests?'
Every once in a while, the chat's simpler brain circuits hit it right on the mark, catching something she had overlooked.
Of course
, thought Iris. The base beneath her gut seemed to vanish.
Something is going to happen. And soon
. The guests would be coming, and their visit, while short, wasn't likely to be pleasant. Iris cursed her own stupidity, the amount of time she'd wasted fidgeting and fussing, right here where anybody looking for her would be sure to find her. And there would be people looking; too many possible connections were hooked up between her and what had gone down in the room above the movie theater for her to have gotten away scot-free. Meyer had known that something was going to happen as soon as he'd delivered the gear from the armory to her; when she didn't get back to him within a reasonable amount of time, he'd start his own investigation. He might not know where the action had been, but to find out if she was still even alive the first place he'd come looking would be right here at her apartment. The multiple coded locks on the door wouldn't slow him down; by departmental regulation, every cop had to log his or her code registry in the police station's personnel database, to facilitate surprise inspections for contraband and/or ongoing drug-usage violations. With his rank, Meyer would be able to pull those codes and come waltzing in here whenever he felt like it. And would he be happy to find the desired owl sitting here, instead of having already been delivered to him at the station? Probably not – and he was smart enough to flash onto the simplest explanation for that non-delivery, which was that Iris no longer trusted him. In as nasty a situation as this one was shaping up to be, personal problems like that were likely to be solved by simple termination. Not from the job, but from one's life.
And Meyer wasn't the only one she had to worry about dropping in on her unexpectedly. The armed and ugly men from whom she had lifted the owl had undoubtedly been working for somebody else; they'd had the Rottweilerish appearance of mercenaries, highly skilled and equipped ones, but still operating on somebody else's orders. Somebody who could very likely afford other hired thugs, who in turn would be able to do their job more efficiently than the last batch, as Iris would no longer have the element of surprise on her side. For all she knew, they were already on their way; the owl might have some kind of micro-seed tracer element planted in or on it that she would have no way of detecting without using the through-pulse scanners at the police station's security labs. Her apartment could already be in the center of a glowing red circle on a track-in-progress screen, with other ominous red dots moving in on it . . .
'Shit.' Iris pulled the chat off her and dropped it, squealing in protest, to the floor. She hurried to the kitchen module and pulled her damaged leatherite jacket off the shoulder holster she had previously draped across the fold-down table. From the holster she extracted her gun; its weight in her hands provided more comfort at the moment than all the chat's exudations could have.
Iris walked back out into the apartment's living room, with both hands wrapped around the gun's checked grip, its muzzle pointed down but ready to be swung up at the first target to present itself. From its perch at the side of the room, the owl regarded her with round-eyed impassivity, as she flattened her spine against the wall beside the window. She took one hand from the gun and spread the slatted blinds apart, enough to peer out through the barred window and down to the street below. Tendrils of active neon laced their reflections through the blue-black mirrors of the pavement, slick with rain; a formation of nocturnal bicyclists, masked and shrouded, splashed through and disappeared in the distance, intent on their mysterious group-errand or religious observation. Then the street was empty, except for the shades of her fears, unseen but sensed as they gathered closer.
You're being an idiot
, Iris told herself.
Like they're going to come walking down the street and ring your bell in the building lobby
. More likely, given the resources that the thugs' employers seemed to have at their disposal, an unlicensed police-level spinner would land silently on the roof, the men with the guns would just as silently break through the access door's locks, and they would sift down through the stairwells and corridors like the unavoidable heat of an LA dry-season Santa Ana wind. One you didn't know was coming, until it hit you in the face and sucked the breath out of your lungs.
A little voice spoke, from down beside her ankles. 'You're scaring me,' said the chat in its tiniest-seeming, most fragile manner. It had rarely seen her gun inside the apartment, and never in her hand; Iris knew that the sight of the cold metal tended to upset the creature's delicately tuned sensibilities.
'I'm sorry, sweetie.' With her free hand, Iris scooped up the chat; she kissed it on its rounded brow, then set it back down on the floor. 'But this is a work thing, okay? Not just for spookiness. So I gotta do it. Understand?'
'No.' The chat shook its head. 'Don't.'
'You don't have to. Tell you what. Why don't you take your basket, and pull it into the closet? Nap time. Nice and quiet and dark. You'll be happier that way.'
No matter what happens
, Iris told herself grimly. 'Go on.' She pointed to the foam-padded basket in the corner of the room. 'Hop, hop.'
The chat continued to gaze up at her. 'But what about you?'
'Don't worry about me,' said Iris.
I'll take care of that
. 'You go bed down.' She let her voice take on a stern edge. 'Right now. Move it.'
Reluctantly, the chat did as ordered. When Iris was alone in the apartment's front room again — alone except for the owl, blinking its round, golden eyes, the source of all her recent troubles — she stilled her breath and heartbeat as far as possible, listening into the resultant silence for the slightest sound of intruders anywhere in the building. She heard nothing but the almost subliminal inhaling and exhaling of the structure itself, the mingled indicators of the living things, dreaming or awake, in the rest of its small rooms.
Iris was so intent on listening, as though she had been transformed into one of the small creatures pursued through night forests by owls and other predators, that she jumped from sheer nerves when an already-familiar voice spoke again. 'Cuddle,' demanded the chat.
'For Christ's sake.' She had swung around with the gun clasped in both her hands, aiming it straight toward the chat in the doorway to the apartment's bedroom. Her arms and shoulders de-tensed as she lowered the gun. 'I
told
you to go to the closet and take a nap. You're going to be in my way if you hang around here.'
'Will not,' the chat said stubbornly.