Eye and Talon (29 page)

Or had never existed. She turned slowly in the chamber's frigid air, looking around at the glass beakers and vessels sitting on top of industrial storage units and laboratory benches, with the spherical human eyes, complete with trailing optical nerve tissue, floating in some thick, almost gelatinous liquid. The eyes gazed back at her, unblinking and emotionless, as though possessed of some timeless perspective on human folly, beyond resignation or fear.

'I know this place,' said Iris aloud. Her words, and every breath she exhaled, hung in front of her in a little cloud. She could taste ice crystals forming on the tip of her tongue. 'I've never been here, but I know it.'

'That's right.' Carsten, standing beside her, didn't seem to notice the cold. It passed through his thin frame with no apparent effect. 'I'm aware that your friend Vogel showed you certain things. An old movie. About people like yourself: cops, blade runners. And about the other things, that are also like you, in their own way. Only they don't get to live. Not in the old movie, and not in this world. They have to die.'

'Too bad . . . for them.' The cold made Iris clench her teeth, involuntarily. A shiver ran up her spine and across her shoulders, invoked less by the temperature than the unsettling aspect of the eyes floating in their glass containers. 'They should try for better parts the next time.'

'But you do recognize this?' Carsten gestured with upraised hand at the space surrounding him and Iris. 'From the movie?'

'Sure.' Iris nodded. The scene replayed itself in her memory, from what she had watched in Eldon Tyrell's private theater. It had been something with a couple of the escaped replicants that the blade runner named Rick Deckard had been tracking down, with intent to 'retire' them. Only Deckard hadn't been in the scene; it had been just the leader of the fugitive replicants, the one named Roy Batty and the big stupid one with the weak chin whose name Iris couldn't remember at the moment. Those two, and some kind of Asian-looking technician, with wispy Mandarin-like facial hair and pidgin English, an array of magnifying lenses turned up on his brow, and swaddled in artificial furs with heating tubes plugged in and trailing behind him. Which the Batty replicant had yanked out with a steam-like hiss, as he and the dumb one had terrorized the smaller figure. 'It was a real charming bit.'

I made your eyes
. That was what the tech had said, in an odd transport of pride in his own work, as he had pointed with his gloved hand toward Batty's evilly smiling face. He had seemed happy to have had these walking evidences of his state-of-the-art craftsmanship, his contribution to the Tyrell Corporation's manufacturing of products that looked just like human beings, talked and feared death just like humans, but somehow weren't human.
Your eyes
. . .

'Not, though, with a happy ending. At least not for old Chew.'

She supposed that had been the name of the eye technician, both in the movie and in real life, whatever that meant. If it meant anything at all, anymore. She couldn't remember at the moment if anybody had spoken the wispy-bearded man's name aloud, in the process of the replicant Batty and his partner extracting the information they had wanted from him. Information about Dr Eldon Tyrell, and how to get to him. Which hadn't resulted in a happy ending for Tyrell, either.

There were some differences to the scene she had watched in the
Blade Runner
movie. More disembodied eyes, to be exact. Chew had been happily fussing around with only a few of them, peering down a microscope and making little tweaky adjustments, probably on some deep-tissue, sub-cellular level, when Batty and the big dumb one had come strolling in—

At the back of her brain, Iris wondered – now – how the two escaped replicants had gotten in so easily, as if there had been no door locks or alarm systems hooked up at some Tyrell Corporation subcontractor's production area. In the movie, Chew had looked momentarily surprised to see the two figures standing there, like they shouldn't have been able to waltz right in and catch him at work.
Maybe this old guy is right
, thought Iris.
Maybe somebody did grease their way in
. Maybe not the UN, but somebody with some kind of inside access to the eye tech's workshop. Tyrell? Why would Eldon Tyrell have wanted to arrange this particular death? Iris could feel herself slipping, thoughts spiraling into another infinite regress of paranoia and true conspiracy.

The only thing she could be sure of at the moment was that in the movie she had watched deep inside the Tyrell Corporation ruins there hadn't been so many eyes, in so many jars and beakers and graduated flasks. Even the wall full of owls in the other compound building hadn't been able to creepily stare her down as thoroughly as what was happening here.

'What did you do?' Iris wasn't able yet – if ever – to unwrap her arms from herself. She used a nod of her head to indicate the vessels with their floating contents, like white, cycloptic tadpoles. 'Drag everything out of the dead guy's file cabinets?'

'We did more than that,' said Carsten. He still seemed unaffected by the chamber's cold, as if he had spent enough time here to get acclimated. 'This is more than old Chew's stock; our committee scoured all the other neuro-optical labs that had been subcontracted out to the Tyrell Corporation. There was a whole high-security district in Taiwan, with no other industrial production than that going on; the whole place was a virtual fiefdom, with Eldon Tyrell its absentee lord and master. None of the European operations, mainly around Neues Frankfurt and the Mont Blanc Tunnel sub-warrens, was as big as that, but there were more of them. It took quite a while, after the destruction of the Tyrell Corporation headquarters, to track those facilities down and clear them out.'

'What were you looking for?'

'Nothing,' said Carsten. 'Our committee's operatives were just making sure there wasn't anything going on elsewhere, with any of the other subcontractors, that was at the same level as what Chew had been doing in LA. Even before we moved in on what was left of Chew's neuro-optical facility, we'd had a pretty good idea that that had been where Tyrell's important design and prototyping work had been going on. For one thing, it was right under Eldon Tyrell's nose, practically speaking, so he'd have been able to keep an eye on it without having to leave the city or resort to potentially crackable communications links. The other indication was, of course, that Chew had been the best in his particular field; he had been chief technical officer and operations manager at the Taiwan facilities, building them up from scratch, before Tyrell brought him over here. That's why his English was so poor, the way you heard it in that movie you saw; he was hardly a native Angeleno. Even the ethnic sub-culture types can usually pull it out better than that, at least when they want to.'

'His language skills couldn't have been too bad,' said Iris, 'if he was as important to Tyrell's operations as you claim he was.'

'That's because the two of them, Chew and Tyrell, spoke a universal language, beyond English or pidgin, of design specs and prototype refinement. It's not as if they needed to socialize with each other; Tyrell was hardly the sociable type, was he?'

'Not from what I've heard.' Rubbing her arms in a vain attempt to create warmth, Iris glanced around the ice-bound space again. 'If you ask me, you and your bunch are a little on the obsessive side as well. Otherwise, you wouldn't have gone to so much trouble to re-create Chew's lab out here in the middle of nowhere.'

'Oh, we didn't
re-create
it; this is Chew's neuro-optical lab facility.' A note of pride sounded in Carsten's voice. 'Everything, right to the exterior walls. Even this.' Carsten leaned down and brushed ice crystals from a large, rectangular object propped against one of the workbenches. He flipped a switch at the back; with a faint, electrical buzzing, blue neon letters and back-lit plastic came on. The sign, when fully illuminated, read LA EYEWORKS. 'Just like in the movie — right?' Carsten smiled at Iris as he straightened up. 'It wasn't really the name of Chew's facility — as a matter of fact, it didn't even have a name, only an invoice code in the R and D section of the Tyrell Corporation's operating budget. Chew inherited it from some other business that had been there before, and kept it as his little joke.'

'Yeah, right; hilarious.' Iris couldn't keep from shivering; she felt as if the blood in her veins was starting to turn glacial from the chamber's cold. 'How'd you get all this stuff here?'

'That took some doing.' Carsten picked up one of the flasks, examined the floating blue-pupilled eye inside, then set it back down. 'Our little committee's operatives had to work pretty fast to pull it off. We had been keeping an eye on Chew for some time; we knew who he was working for, and how important that work was for the Tyrell Corporation. Soon as we knew that both Chew and Eldon Tyrell were dead — that Batty and the other escaped replicants had done their job — we knew we had at least a small window of opportunity before the Tyrell Corporation got reorganized enough to keep track of its subcontractors. Fortunately, buildings are constantly being demolished or being constructed in the city, so there wasn't any notice paid, even by the police, when our team took LA Eyeworks apart, boxed it up into half-a-dozen transport containers, and smuggled it out here. Twelve hours max, and it was ours.'

'Why'd you bury it?'

'Several good reasons.' Carsten gestured toward the walls. 'Out here in the desert, the thermal factor looms rather large. We've got a brace of generators going full-bore as it is, to keep this thing down to the appropriate temperature. Let's be practical -- why should we make it even more difficult for ourselves, by letting it sit out in the sun? Not to mention what would happen if there were a problem of some kind, like the power supply going on the fritz.' He pointed to the flask he had set down a moment before; the eye's silent, patient gaze had swivelled around toward Iris. 'The stuff we're holding here is basically raw human tissue, or replicant tissue, which is pretty much the same thing, in terms of your basic spoilage effect. We don't have the temperature down all the way to Chew's operating conditions, but it's cold enough for our purposes. And we'd like to keep it that way. Down here, underground, things would stay basically cool at least until our tech crew got the generators running again.'

'That's one reason.' Iris reached over and turned the flask around so that the floating eye was no longer staring at her. 'What's the other?'

'We've got,' said Carsten matter-of-factly, 'what some other people would like to get hold of. Or to put it another way, we've got what other people would like to make sure we
didn't
have. We've got Chew's gear and stock out and hidden, but we don't want anybody else tracing it here. Our committee's operatives scanned everything as well as they could, when they were tearing it apart and boxing it up, but time was limited. There might have been bug elements, location devices, wired into the walls, right down at practically the molecular level. The Tyrell Corporation might have done that, to make sure that none of the work Chew was doing for them wound up in the wrong hands.'

'Well, you don't have to worry about the Tyrell Corporation any longer.' Iris balled her right hand into a fist; the flask had been so cold that it had stung her fingertips. 'From the looks of it, they're long gone.'

'Don't be too sure about that. The Tyrell Corporation wasn't synonymous with Eldon Tyrell. There were even elements inside the corporation that were actively opposed to the late doctor; the whole company was a rat's nest of intrigues and conspiracies. It's something of a tribute to him that he was able to keep on top of all that, right up until the end.'

'Maybe he didn't,' said Iris. 'If what you're saying is true, it might not have been any operation by the UN emigration program that did him in. It could've been some group right inside the corporation itself.'

'True.' Carsten raised an appreciative eyebrow as he regarded her. 'We've considered that as well. Which is another reason for our committee to be on its guard. The Tyrell Corporation had contingency plans for any catastrophic event, such as that which leveled its headquarters in LA. It's almost certain that a shadow corporation still exists, carrying out some kind of agenda aimed at restoring its power. If that shadow corporation is headed by the type of individuals who would have no qualms about eliminating their own CEO, then that indicates just how ruthless they are.'

'Yeah, well, that makes them about on the same level as everyone else. I don't see you and your bunch as being exactly non-violent.' Iris rubbed her upper arms even more fiercely and vainly. 'Look — how much longer is this going to take? I'm
freezing
here. I mean, I've seen your collection of owls, and now I've seen your collection of eyeballs in jars. What else is there?'

'Seeing those things is one matter,' said Carsten. 'Understanding them, and what they mean, is another. My committee's operatives didn't round up all the neuro-optical technology that the Tyrell Corporation had paid for, back when it had, been a functioning, above-ground entity, just so we could have some entertaining souvenirs. There's a purpose to everything, even if it doesn't seem quite apparent to you yet.'

'Fine. Lay it on me before I get frostbite.'

'Impatience in the pursuit of wisdom might be foolish, but hardly something of which I can disapprove.' Carsten strolled away from her, his calm, unruffled breath hardly creating even the smallest cloud before him. He stood looking for a moment at a wall-mounted metal shelf, lined with more of the floating eyes and softly trailing optical cords. 'These little bits of flesh and nerve tissue — what do you think is so important about them?' He picked up one of the jars and tilted it slightly, studying the contents. The disembodied eye regarded him back with perfect equanimity. 'I mean, what do you think their importance was to Tyrell? Both the man and the corporation, that is. Why did the Tyrell Corporation go to such lengths to subcontract out this part of the replicant technology, instead of doing it in-house with all the rest of the bits and pieces that went into their products?'