Eye and Talon (32 page)

'Watch out.' The director nodded toward the monitor before them. 'She's going to snap out of her funk any second now.'

'Don't worry; I'm on top of it.' Firing back at the director was something that the camera operator could afford to do.
He'd have a hard time finding somebody who could replace me
. Which wasn't a matter of digging up another operator with moral standards so diminished as to have no objection to working on a job like this one — the notion of moral standards in the video business being more a conceptual item than a real one — so much as the high-level skills to pull it off. Half the hidden cameras out in that walk-in refrigerator, buried somewhere beneath the sun-baking desert surface, had had their lens defrosting units go out seconds before the old man and the female blade runner had stepped into the set. The camera operator had looked up at the ranks of monitors before him and the director and had seen every other rectangle of light blurring out beneath a gray fog. There was no way the shoot could be scrubbed until after a tech crew had gone in and fixed the problem; the big difficulty with working
faux-vérité
style with a lead character who wasn't in on the joke, such as this female blade runner, was that re-shoots were out of the question. Once the set-up was rolling, there was no turning back. The director might get a kick out of a high-wire act like that, but it mainly put knots in the bellies of the people having to do the actual work.
Like me
, groused the camera operator to himself. He'd wound up, at a moment's notice, having to figure out a way of pulsing the switch-on power surges for the afflicted cameras, generating enough heat from the overloaded micro-circuitry to dispel the mist from their lenses, giving him a thirty-second scan time before they clouded up again. When the tapes got uploaded to the post-production booth, the editors would be cursing him, but at least they'd have something to work with.

'Make sure,' ordered the director, 'that we've got both a wide and a tight close-up when she speaks. I might want to do something fancier here, get her location re-established and personal situation isolated.'

'You got it.' The camera operator had anticipated the request; there were no adjustments he had to make yet. Making the female blade runner look small, dwindled at the center of the chilly environment, was such a classic way to go that he would've been surprised if the director hadn't asked for it. 'They're live now, on seventeen and thirty-two.'

'Get ready.' The director leaned toward the monitors, scanning across the different angles of the woman's face and the darker corners of the ice-encrusted chamber in which she stood. 'Now . . .'

The director spoke as if he were personally willing time to start up again, some place where it had become embedded in an invisible glacier. The two figures, fragmented and reassembled on the monitor screens, might as well have been caught in that frigid stasis, their hearts slowed down to synch with the mired tempo of the corpse in the glass-lidded coffin. Which was, of course, the trouble that came from doing business with the dead, getting caught up in the affairs of those who had spent their time among the living and had no change coming to them. The camera operator sensed that in his bones, as if the chill from the distant subterranean chamber had seeped through the wires and out of the monitor screens, then across the short pseudo-synaptic gap between the illuminated glass and his hand. His arm suddenly felt bloodless and numb, a bent stake hammered into his heart.

That's what I get
, he thought morosely. The same advice he had silently given to the female blade runner, he should have taken himself She was as good as dead, in more ways than one; the whole business of her having the same face as the replicant named Rachael, who the poor doomed bastard Deckard had fallen in love with, had implications just as fatal for her.
And now
, mused the camera operator,
I'm nose-deep in her business
. Watching her, getting her into focus, watching his hands move across and work the controls, as if they were an infinitely variable substitute for the more sensitive points of her anatomy, his actions falling somewhere between seduction and rape. He wondered of whom; she didn't even know he existed, let alone was watching her by remotely controlled and hidden cameras. His own concerns were moving from mercenary to obsessive. Which was a bad sign, considering for whom he was working. The director's agenda, to the extent it had been revealed, didn't seem to allow for a lot of happy endings.

He could warn her; it was a possibility that had occurred to him already, back when the nature of the job had first started making itself clear to him. It would take only a few punches of the buttons in front of him to start up the fog-clearing overload pulses he'd jury-rigged into the hidden cameras and let them go unchecked, long enough so they'd blow up with a satisfying spatter of lens glass and smoking circuits. The female blade runner was a smart enough cookie to realize on her own, given that kind of tip-off, to figure out that something was unkosher about the set-up with Carsten and his so-called committee; maybe she'd be smart enough to turn tail and run, right out the frozen chamber's door, away from the glass-lidded coffins and their creepy contents. Maybe she'd be smart enough to keep running, out into the desert, toward the slate-gray mountains to the east, even farther away from LA's drizzling rains and neon-lit darknesses and whatever they concealed.
Forget the owl
, he told her; he tried to make the words penetrate the monitors' glass and travel across the wires to her.
Just go
. . .

The female blade runner didn't seem to hear his silent warning. And his hands stayed professional and restrained, away from doing anything with the controls that might have given the game away.

'All right,' said the camera operator. He spoke to himself as much as to the director sitting beside him. He had spotted the shift in the woman's face, the eyes that had widened slightly when she had perceived the pulse inside the supposed corpse's wrist, now narrowing in the next stage of her reaction. She had recovered herself, ready to speak and move again.
Worse luck for her
, thought the camera operator as he tweaked the gain on the spot mike hidden closest to her. 'Let's roll . . .'

Cold
, thought Iris,
and timeless
. For a moment, and a seeming eternity, she felt the way she had at the movie theater in LA, when she and Vogel had ingested the thermatos.
World without end. But no amen
. Both clock time and her own pulse had come to a halt, frozen in place, while waiting for a signal from somewhere in what was left of that other world, the one outside her skin.

She felt the signal, another's pulse, and it took all her self-control to keep herself from dropping the cold wrist she held, and snatching her hand back to herself, as though the icy flesh had suddenly flared with heat. For a few moments longer, Iris kept her fingertips poised against the blue vein threading snake-like among the tendons that disappeared under the sleeve of the jacket in which the late Dr Eldon Tyrell had been dressed.
Or not so late
, she corrected herself. Once ' again, the slow, fragile pulse made itself known.

'That's a good one,' said Iris. 'Real good one.' Still holding the body's wrist, she glared across the coffin, its glass lid thrown back; her slitted gaze narrowed even further as she regarded Carsten. 'You must live for little jokes like this one. What kind of reaction were you hoping to get from me? Screams or a dead faint?' She shook her head in disgust. 'Sorry I can't oblige. I'm too stiff right now to collapse.'

'Your reaction was pretty much what I expected.' Carsten's attitude of mild amusement hadn't ebbed. 'You're a professional, after all. In many ways. In the line of work to which you're accustomed, the difference between the living and the dead is merely a matter of what stage of the process you're in.'

She ignored the comment. 'So what is this supposed to be? A practical joke, or something?' She gestured with the dead man's hand. 'What did you do, wire him up with a subcutaneous pump? There's a lot that can be done with hydraulics. Or at least until the batteries run down.'

'You know it's not a joke.' Carsten took the late doctor's hand from her, as though Tyrell were a dance partner being turned over to the next in line. 'If it were a joke, I don't think you would have gotten quite so angry; really, it's written there in your face. You look as though you'd like to kill me.'

'That's accurate.'

'But you're not going to,' said Carsten. 'That's what I mean by professionalism. There are still questions to be answered, and you figure I can tell you what you want to know.' His childlike shoulders lifted in a shrug. 'So ask away.'

'All right; I'll do that.' Her voice got louder and harder, bouncing off the ice that coated the chamber's walls. 'What's the deal here? Eldon Tyrell is dead. I saw him get killed in that stupid movie Vogel showed me. Which is why the Tyrell Corporation is
ganz kaput
, or at least the reason why it's not put back together the way it used to be. And put back together is what Tyrell himself would have to be, if you want me to believe that somehow you've got him here, and he's got his ticker going, only turned down low. What I saw the Batty replicant do to him in that movie was like an egg getting crushed. Skull-wise, the prognosis was not good for the poor bastard.'

'No, it wasn't.' Unperturbed, Carsten leaned down and fussily restored the hand and forearm to where it had been lying folded on top of the other, across the body's chest. If you thought the number you saw the Batty replicant perform on Eldon Tyrell was a fatal one, you'd be absolutely right.'

'So what's the deal?' Inside her head, she tried to pick apart the old man's words, trying to find a clue in their tangled connections. 'Are you trying to tell me the movie I watched, that
Blade Runner
thing, was a fake? And what I saw happen to Tyrell — that
didn't
happen to him?'

'Oh, it happened to him, certainly enough. Eldon Tyrell had accumulated enough, shall we say, bad karma in his lifetime that such a fate was inevitable for him. In many ways, it could be postulated that he had done his own part to bring about exactly the death he had wished for himself. In the machinery of the universe, a guilty conscience is one of the teeth on the gears that mesh with such flesh-rending precision. When the Batty replicant's hands closed around Eldon Tyrell's skull, just as you saw in the movie, the result was rather like Humpty Dumpty, in the old children's rhyme.'

'I take it you mean that was an egg which was not going to get put back together any time soon.'

Not with all the duct tape in the world.' Carsten exuded a grim satisfaction. 'The Batty replicant should be admired for its thoroughness; that was a good kill, if a messy one.'

'So then, like I said before, this has to be some kind of a fake.' Arms wrapped around herself once again, Iris nodded toward the unmoving figure in the glass-lidded coffm. 'And frankly, I don't get the point of it. If that's not Dr Eldon Tyrell in there, what is it?'

'Oh, it's Tyrell, all right.' Carsten nodded slowly. 'But not the one you saw in the
Blade Runner
movie; not the one that got killed by the Batty replicant. Let's just say it's a
different
Eldon Tyrell.'

'I think,' said Iris after a moment, 'I know where this is going. And I don't like it. Not one bit.'

'Really?' .The attitude of mild amusement returned to Carsten. 'Why should it bother you to consider that this' — he pointed to the body in the coffin — 'might in fact be a replicant? An Eldon Tyrell replicant, to be exact.'

'It complicates things.' Iris spoke with barely contained fury. 'And things are complicated enough already. I don't need this.'

'Why should it be such a problem for you?' Carsten's words gently but relentlessly needled at her. 'I thought you blade runners were supposed to be the experts at telling the real from the fake, human beings from replicants.'

'Don't start with me about that.' Iris turned the flat of her hand toward him. 'It doesn't matter whether cops like me can tell humans from replicants or not. But if Tyrell was having his labs make a replicant, using himself as the templant, the master that the copy would be based on — then it takes everything up another notch, headache-wise.' Her own head actually was beginning to throb, as though, by some sympathetic magic, it felt the trauma the late Eldon Tyrell's had undergone. 'Why would he have even wanted to do something like that?'

'A good question,' Carsten said. 'You're getting better and better at this game. But you're slightly off, regarding the details. It's not "replicant", in the singular. We're talking about more than one.'

'Okay, that does it.' Iris turned and took a step back the way she and the old man had come, past the shelves of silently staring eyes and toward the door. 'I don't care about any answers. I'm not hanging around for this.'

'Yes, you are.' Surprisingly strong, Carsten grabbed her by one arm, stopping and pulling her around to face him. 'If you didn't want to know things like this, you shouldn't have started asking questions. Going right back to the beginning, when you were trying to find a certain lost owl, and you didn't have any idea where it was going to lead to.' He let go of her and stepped back beside the glass-lidded coffin. 'If this is where the trail winds up, you're going to have to face it, no matter what it means. That's what a
real
cop would do, at any rate.'

The old man's words stung her. Inside her jacket, the gun the guard had returned to her had chilled into a small sculpture of black ice. Though one that could both silence the old man, and still the slow pulse ticking through the veins of the coffin's occupant, once and for all.
You're taking an awful big risk
, she thought as she glared at him.

'You see,' continued Carsten, elaborately helpful, 'in some ways, it should have been obvious to you.' He gestured at the other coffins, lined up on their short trestle supports. 'I thought that, given the business you were in, you would know more than you apparently do about the exact mechanics of the replicant industry. What I suppose looks to you like funeral caskets, standard cemetery furniture, are in fact shipping containers — though, of course, not of any ordinary kind or function. They're what had been used when the UN emigration program had been in full swing, for transporting the products of the Tyrell Corporation, the completed replicants, to the colonies in the outer star systems.' His smile turned wry and ugly. 'That's the problem with canned meat, you might say. Any time you're shipping perishables, you're faced with a spoilage problem. And since the Tyrell Corporation's replicants have only a four-year life expectancy, your customers aren't going to be too happy if you use up a good percentage of that shelf-life getting the products out to the colonies. Even with the UN transport ships' enhanced light-speed capabilities, by the time the Tyrell Corporation would have warehoused the replicants here on earth, shipped them out to a central distribution point, then from there to the separate colonies and finally into the hands of their new owners, there would have been at the most a few months left of the replicants' lifespans. Hardly an economic proposition, even for an entity with the resources of the UN emigration program. Thus the need for shipping devices such as this.'