Eye and Talon (27 page)

The other part of the curse: these weird-ass lectures. Iris hoped she wasn't going to have to sit through another sermon, like the kind Vogel and the others had gotten into the habit of laying on her. 'All right,' said Iris. 'Same question, then: what's so valuable about Tyrell's owl?'

Carsten gave a slow shake of his head. 'That's not an easy question to answer.'

'I was afraid of that. Somehow I just
knew
I was going to get jerked around about this. Again.'

'Not at all.' Carsten's tone was both mild and amused. 'Your cop-type cynicism is getting the better of you. Though of course, given recent events in your life, I can well understand why that would be. Still, you should make an effort not to become embittered; it's not an attitude that suits you very well, considering the remarkable things that are in store for you.'

'What?' Iris gazed at him in perplexed amazement. 'You gotta be kidding. What the hell is
that
supposed to mean?' She could hear a couple of the owls on their perches, flapping their wings in alarm as her voice rose. 'If there's
more
in store for me, I don't want to know what it is. I've already gotten canned from my job — which I
loved
, and I don't need you telling me what was so wrong about it — plus, before that, I wound up getting my brain fritzed from a hot-wired chat which I was also fond of —
and
woke up in the police department hospital — which I was
never
happy about. And all that was
before
I got dragged through the Tyrell Corporation ruins.' She knew she was stoking her rage higher, and didn't care. 'Let's not even go into what your bunch did to get me here. If all you wanted to do was have a chat like the others I've had recently, all of which didn't tell me a damn thing, and show off your bird collection, next time —' Iris jabbed her finger at the old man. '
Next time
, just
mail
me your invitation.'

'Really.' None of her angry words had disturbed Carsten's placid demeanor. 'And if I had, would you have accepted it? I think not.

Please . . .' He extended a small, softly pink hand toward her. 'Why don't we start over? As if you had just walked through the door, having come here of your own volition.'

'That'd be the day.'

'Perhaps so.' Carsten gave another small shrug. 'I admit such would have required a prescient amount of wisdom on your part. We can't
really
expect that from other people, can we? So let's
pretend
that you had been smart enough to have done so.' Under his grandfatherly mannerisms, a layer of steel was discernible. His small eyes didn't so much twinkle as glint with the edge of an instrument sharp enough to slice through another's tough demeanor. 'Look — there's coffee here.' He gestured toward a table at the side of the room. 'Real coffee, not any of that ersatzoid stuff. Those industrial by-products they sell from those street stalls will eat a hole in your lower intestine.'

'You're right about that,' said Iris. She knew a bunch of retired cops who'd gotten into the bad habit, when they'd still been on the force, of parking their spinners alongside one of those cheap xeno-glot operations and draining a quart-sized polystyrene cup full of hyper-caffeinated junk simply to get through a couple of end-to-end shifts. They'd all wound up with colostomy bags in addition to their major-league Wambaugh Curve moodswings.

'Very expensive, of course — and just for you. We wouldn't do it for anyone, believe me. We have to work within our budget constraints. Unlike your former employers, we have to depend upon our own private sources of operational funds. Come on.' Carsten led her toward the table, where he poured out a cup from a thermal carafe. He handed it to her, then pointed to the other articles on the table. 'And surely you must be hungry, after all that expenditure of energy and in the cold and damp, you poor thing! — at the Tyrell Corporation ruins. Please, help yourself. That's what it's for.'

Iris realized that she did feel both hungry and tired. The slight ebb of her anger had been produced by the old man's hospitality, however phony; enough to have exposed that pure adrenaline and temper had been keeping her going. She took the plate Carsten handed her, then watched as he deposited a jelly doughnut on it.

'That's such a cliché.' She shook her head.

'My apologies.' Carsten seemed genuinely apologetic. 'No simple cop inferences intended. But as I said, our resources are limited. And this —' He turned, gesturing at the building's interior. 'This is only a temporary set-up. Provisional. We'll be here only as long as we need to be. In order to get the job done. So we haven't established a proper kitchen. There aren't very many of us and we can get by, for the time being, without one.'

Iris took a bite. 'Who's this "we"?' She swallowed. 'Who are you people?'

'Another good question.' Carsten nodded approvingly. 'You're getting better at this. Some day . . .' His voice faded, almost to a whisper. 'Some day you'll know . . . exactly the right question to ask. And then . . .' He brought the gaze of his small, pale eyes around to her again, from whatever interior focal point it had fallen to. 'Then you'll have to decide whether to ask it or not.'

She froze in place, between heartbeats and the tiny, almost silent motions of the old-fashioned numbered clock on the room's wall. A red, viscous trickle from the half-eaten doughnut inched slowly down the inside of her wrist.

'Don't be frightened,' said Carsten gently. 'You might be lucky. That moment might never come.'

Frightened
. She could remember when the same fear had touched her before. Then it had brought tears, a bout of weeping, of which she was no longer ashamed. Because she knew now that she had been right to be frightened.
She did look exactly like me
, thought Iris. The memory of that image, of the woman's face, the replicant named Rachael, filled the screen behind her eyes. There had been a question then as well, that she could have asked — but hadn't. Because she had been too afraid to.

Her hand came to her mouth, automatically, and she took another bite of the doughnut. She didn't want Carsten — whoever he was — to know how his words, and her memory, had scared her. Her mouth had gone so dry she could barely swallow.

'Drink your coffee.' Carsten had noticed her effort, close to choking. 'That'll help.'

She obeyed. She could feel her pulse start up again.

'Could you unfold this for me?' Carsten had pulled out a metal chair, like the ones that Iris and the guard had sat on in the other building. 'The joints are a bit rusty — like mine, I suppose.' The simulated twinkle appeared in his eyes again, as though they were some sort of cheaply artificial gemstone. 'And the other one as well. We might as well make ourselves comfortable. We have a lot to talk about.'

Iris set the chairs on either side of the table. She and Carsten sat down — creakily, in his case — with the thermal carafe between them.

'You asked a question.' Carsten refilled her cup, then poured one for himself. 'And as I indicated, one of the better ones available to you. So I feel duty-bound to answer it for you. I don't want you to think I'm wasting your time.'

'You wouldn't be the first,' said Iris.

'Ah. But with us — you and me, that is — it's different. I know how much time you have. And there isn't any to spare.'

She drained the cup in one go, head tossed back, then set it down empty on the table. 'Go on.'

'You wanted to know who we are.' Carsten wrapped both his hands around his own cup, as though trying to warm his thin, elderly blood. 'Our organization, such as it is, has no identifying name or other identifier. It's not even an organization; more of an amalgam, or an
ad hoc
committee.'

'For a committee, you seem to have an awful lot of members. That was a pretty good sized pack you had chasing me and Vogel through the Tyrell Corporation ruins.'

'Loyal employees,' said Carsten. 'As with most of the people you might find here. You see, the committee, such as it is, is made up of the other organizations — companies, a few research labs — that had been involved in the design and production of so-called "replicants", before the Tyrell Corporation established its monopoly in that field.'

Iris picked up her empty cup. 'There were other companies making replicants?'

'Several.' Carsten poured out a refill for her. 'Sudermann, Grozzi . . . in fact, the company for which I was the chief technical officer, Derain
et Cie
, held several key patents, without which no viable replicants could be manufactured at all.'

'Wait a minute. I thought Eldon Tyrell invented the replicant technology.'

'All by himself? That's a good joke.' The faint smile on Carsten's face showed no trace of amusement. 'Eldon Tyrell — and the Tyrell Corporation — certainly wanted other people to believe that. They put a lot of their public relations flacks on the task of implanting that notion, and they largely succeeded. But then, they had help: the Tyrell Corporation didn't achieve its monopoly in the replicant trade on its own. They were essentially given the monopoly, or rather, it was stolen for them.'

'Who did that?'

'Ah. As the ancient Romans would have said,
Cui bono
? Who benefits? An excellent adage, for helping determine the truth, and the culprits.' Carsten sounded both bitter and sarcastic. 'Obviously, the Tyrell Corporation benefited — but they weren't the ones who did it. They merely received the stolen goods into their hands; or, rather, into Eldon Tyrell's hands. You'll have to excuse my personal animosity toward the man; let's just say that I didn't shed any tears when I heard he had been killed by one of his own creations, the replicant known as Roy Batty.'

'I suppose,' said Iris, 'he got what he deserved.'

'You could say that. And you'd be correct. The mill-wheels of the gods grind slow, but they grind exceedingly fine.' A note of grim satisfaction sounded in Carsten's voice. 'Someday, certain UN bureaucrats, the ones in charge of the emigration program, will get what they deserve as well. They were the ones that handed the replicant monopoly over to the Tyrell Corporation. Eldon Tyrell was simply their lackey, following their orders, doing what they wanted done. Tyrell might have thought differently, but then, he was an egomaniac. And a deluded one.'

Iris sipped at the coffee. She looked over the cup's rim at Carsten. 'You're saying the UN was behind the Tyrell Corporation?'

'All the way.' The old man's temper had simmered down, but was still visibly present. 'It could even be said that the Tyrell Corporation was nothing more than a puppet organization, a wholly controlled subsidiary of the UN emigration program. In return for his complete cooperation, Eldon Tyrell was handed all the profits from the replicant industry, which was of course considerably enhanced by the ramped-up production orders placed by the UN for those slave-labor replicants given to the human emigrants. Something of a devil's bargain, I'm afraid, for poor Eldon; he became the master of the replicant industry, with all of his competitors eliminated — rather violently, too, by the UN's elite special forces military units; I remember when the blue-helmeted squadrons arrived on my company's doorstep. It wasn't pretty.' The small, pale eyes in the old man's face seemed to cloud with memory. 'And there weren't many of us that survived — of the Derain executives at the home office in Poitiers, I was the only one that got out alive. I had to go underground and rebuild the corporation from our branch office personnel, or at least the ones I was able to get to before the blue helmets did. That took a long time, and there was a limit to how much we could accomplish, even in league with the other replicant designers and manufacturers who had managed to survive the extermination process. Our little "committee" had its work cut out for it, just in trying to remain among the living. And all the while, Eldon Tyrell and the Tyrell Corporation were installed as the masters of the replicant industry — but as I said, at a price. Tyrell had the UN emigration program's leash around his neck from the beginning. And for an ego-driven type such as himself, that had to be galling.'

'I bet,' said Iris.

A thin smile showed on Carsten's face. 'Perhaps Eldon Tyrell made the mistake of trying to remove that leash; he might have convinced himself that he and his corporation had become more powerful than the UN, or that he was somehow able to protect himself from its retribution for his disloyalty. And as we know, he was wrong about that.'

'Wait a minute.' Iris warily regarded the old man sitting across the table from her. 'You're saying the UN was responsible for Eldon Tyrell's murder? That would mean that the Roy Batty replicant, the one who actually crushed Tyrell's skull, was operating under UN orders.'

'Not at all. It's almost certain that the Roy Batty replicant was acting on its own personal agenda when it killed Eldon Tyrell. But at the same time, there are some — shall we say? — suspicious circumstances about how Batty and the, other replicants in his group of fugitives were able to both reach Earth and also penetrate the Tyrell Corporation's security systems. At every step of the way, things were made oddly
possible
for the Batty group.
Cui bono
? Hm? If the UN emigration authorities wanted to eliminate an associate who had become too troublesome to maintain a relation with, they didn't have to send any blue-helmeted hit squad after him; that would have been a little bit too noticeable, even in a place such as LA. How much easier and more secretive, yet no less certain and fatal, to simply make sure that a killer such as the Roy Batty replicant was able to gain access to Tyrell.'

'You don't have any proof of that, though.'

'True.' Another shrug from the frail-looking shoulders. 'You could even say that it might be no more than wishful thinking on my part; my personal animus toward the late Dr Tyrell is no doubt apparent. But I'm hardly alone in having wanted him dead; he had made himself a lot of enemies, both human and otherwise. And Tyrell certainly had the kind of devious mind— devious for the sake of being devious — that wouldn't have been satisfied with his privileged position as industrial lackey to the UN emigration program; they might have had to eliminate him to short-circuit any number of schemes he could've cooked up. But as to absolute proof?' Carsten smiled. 'Let's just say that, as I'm certainly older than one such as yourself, I might be at least a little wiser as well when it comes to the machinery of the universe.'