Eye and Talon (33 page)

Carsten reached down and touched a control pad, near the latch of the opened coffin. A string of red digits lit up on a small black readout panel; as Iris watched, the last digit in the sequence changed from a seven to a six, in a glacial countdown process.

'As I said,' continued Carsten, 'without something like this, the Tyrell Corporation's merchandise would have been just about dead by the time it reached its ultimate destinations. Using suspended-animation technology to slow down the replicants' life processes en route resulted in a loss of a couple of months at most; still significant, which is why the Tyrell Corporation's manufacturing practice was to stuff the replicants into these boxes as soon as they came off the assembly line and before they were shipped off-planet, to absolutely minimize such losses in usefulness. The UN emigration program wouldn't have gone on paying the Tyrell Corporation, and allowing it to maintain its monopoly on the replicant technology, if it hadn't.'

'So what?' Whatever other emotions Iris might have felt were now swept aside by her exasperation. 'Why should I be concerned about how the Tyrell Corporation shipped its goods? What's it got to do with me?'

'Perhaps more than you realize,' said Carsten mildly. 'With you and all the other blade runners. None of you ever stopped to think about the time-based logistics of the so-called escaped replicants you were supposed to hunt down and "retire". Most of them were at the ends of their four-year lifespans when they showed up back here on Earth. As you saw in the Blade Runner movie you watched, the Batty replicant and its group returned to LA specifically in an attempt to shake some sort of hoped-for extension of their lives from their creator — which, of course, Eldon Tyrell was unable to grant them.'

'So?' Iris managed a near-frozen shrug. 'The replicants were out there in the far colonies, doing whatever crappy jobs they were given, for close to four years. Then some of them escaped and came back here. Big deal. Like you said, they could be in the colonies for that long, since they were basically on ice when they were shipped out there.'

'Ah — but the suspended-animation containers, like the ones here, were supposedly only used on the journey
out
to the colonies. But what about the journey
back
here to Earth? How did any of the escaped replicants manage that, without coming to the ends of their allotted lifespans and dying en route, if they had already used up most of their four years off-planet?'

'How the hell should I know?'

'Exactly,' said Carsten. 'You
don't
know. It's a mystery, if you stop to think about it. For any of the Batty group, for example, to have made their way back to Los Angeles and the Tyrell Corporation headquarters, they would have needed access to suspended-animation containers such as these, identical to the ones in which they were shipped out to the colonies. Otherwise, they would have expired by reaching the ends of their programmed lifespans, before they ever, got here.'

'Okay.' She mulled it over for a few seconds. 'Maybe they
did
have access to these things. They killed the crew and took over some ship, didn't they? That was what was said in the movie, about Batty and his group. So it was a UN emigration program freight ship, returning a load of these empty containers to the Tyrell Corporation. The Batty rep and his bunch put themselves into suspended animation inside the containers and sent the ship on an auto-pilot program to Earth. That way, they still had whatever was left of their original lifespans to try shaking down Dr Tyrell for the extension they wanted, but didn't get.'

'A nice theory, but impossible in practice. Even if they managed to pull that off on their own — these containers can't be sealed and their animation-suspending processes initiated from inside them, and the UN ships can't be brought into Earth orbit on auto-pilot — any escaped replicants would still need the assistance of other parties to be brought out of the suspended-animation state.' Carsten pointed his thumb toward the coffin-like devices. 'These things don't have alarm clocks built into them. Once you're in, you need somebody else to wake you up.'

'Fine. Then they had accomplices or something. Maybe the rep-symps did it for them.' Iris had never had any run-ins with organized groups of human replicant-sympathizers — they had apparently faded away in the couple of years she had been with the police department — but she supposed they might still be active. 'Giving a bunch of escaped replicants the chance to mess with Eldon Tyrell and the whole Tyrell Corporation — that's exactly the sort of thing that some underground rep-symp cell would get a kick out of puffing off.'

'It's much more complicated than that,' said Carsten. 'The operation of these suspended-animation shipping containers is a highly technical affair; they were developed solely for the use of the replicant industry, and there's no expertise from other areas that can be applied to them. In fact, the members of our committee who keep these up and running are former Tyrell Corporation employees, on whom we had to expend considerable resources in recruiting and then extracting from their positions with that company. For the repsymps to have aided the kind of conspiracy you imagine, for the purpose of aiding escaped replicants in their attempts to reach Earth, they would have to have recruited and kept in place similar, highly trained operatives. And not just here, at the escaped replicants' destination, but at the outer colonies as well, so the replicants could be both placed into the suspended-animation state as well as taken out of it. For such parties to have been rep-symps, as you theorized, would mean the rep-symp underground and its activities had spread all the way to the far colonies. Not very likely, given that the only human beings out there are either UN emigration program personnel or the emigrants themselves, all of whom had been carefully screened to eliminate anyone with rep-symp tendencies.'

'Okay. Then who the hell
did
help the escaped replicants get here to Earth, alive and kicking?'

'I don't know.' The smug attitude had evaporated from Carsten's wrinkled face. 'I wish I did. It's something our little committee is working on, trying to determine exactly that. But our resources are limited, and we have other things that take up the lion's share of our attention. The only thing of which we feel reasonably sure — and it's a matter of logic more than hard evidence — is that whoever was behind the traveling assistance provided to the escaped replicants, it must have been some entity with connections going right to the top, either in the Tyrell Corporation itself or the UN emigration program.'

'Yeah, right,' said Iris sourly. 'Like Eldon Tyrell would finance an operation that was not only going to make his company look bad — dangerous escaped replicants running around in the streets of LA — but would ultimately get him killed. How likely is that?'

'Eldon Tyrell was a complicated man.' A sliver of Carsten's humorless smile returned. 'And as I indicated before, one carrying a large karmic debt — or bad conscience, to use a more old-fashioned term. He was capable of anything.'

'Like having replicants made from himself?' Though her breath was still a white plume from her nostrils, her rising anger managed to generate something like heat inside her gut. 'Why would he do that? Replicants were supposedly manufactured in order to provide slave labor for the colonists out there. If I were one of them, and I got stuck with a rep as ugly and scrawny as some Eldon Tyrell model, I'd demand a refund.'

'That's hardly why he did it.' Carsten shook his head, gazing down the line of unopened coffins. 'His reasons were more complex than that: he wanted more than to be the templant for some production line of replicants, to be shipped off to the colonies. He might have had a considerable ego, but not one that would have considered his physical form worth duplicating.'

'Then why?' Something in the way the old man spoke had chilled Iris, far beyond a matter of her blood growing thick and heavy in her veins. His voice had gone so soft and quiet, as if he had begun to whisper of secrets that even the replicant sleeping its long, slow hours and years inside the glass-lidded coffin, dreamless behind the withered face of Eldon Tyrell, was afraid to hear aloud. 'What's the deal, then?' She peered closer at the figure standing on the other side of the coffin. 'Or is that something else you and your committee don't know?'

'We know plenty.' Her words appeared to have needled a flash of anger out of Carsten. His pale eyes looked like ice chips as he regarded her. 'It's
your
ignorance that we need to remedy.'

'So what is it that I don't know? Either tell me, or let me, go out and play in the sunshine.' Iris visibly shivered. 'I can't even feel my feet anymore.'

'It's not what you don't know. It's what you
think
you know. And that you're completely wrong about.'

'Sure —' Iris stamped one bootshod foot, in a vain attempt to get its circulation going again. 'You already ran that number past me. All that business about the Voigt-Kampff machine being a fake, and blade runners actually "retiring" real human beings instead of the replicants we thought we were putting away. Whatever.' She shook her head. 'Maybe everything you said is true; I don't know. I don't even know if it matters to me anymore. That was another world.' She spoke the realization aloud, before she knew herself what it meant. 'I used to live in it, I used to have my job there, and I loved that job. But I don't have any of that now; I don't live in that world anymore. So if you want to go ahead and tell me that everything I knew about that world was a lie . . . go ahead. Why should it matter to me now?'

'Because now,' said Carsten, 'you're lying to yourself. If it didn't matter to you, you wouldn't have followed the traces to the ruins of the Tyrell Corporation headquarters. You could easily have died there. So you must have wanted something from that rather arduous process you put yourself through.'

'No kidding. I wanted my old job back. I thought maybe I could get it, if I found the owl I had been assigned to locate in the first place.'

'And you stuck around there, watching old movies with your friend Vogel, long after it was apparent that the owl in question was hardly to be found in a place like that. Or even any further clues as to its whereabouts. But you stuck around because Vogel had other things to tell you and to show you; things you apparently wanted to know.' Carsten raised one of his snow-white eyebrows. 'So it seems you weren't searching for the owl at all — perhaps not even from the beginning of your quest. Whether you knew it or not, or were prepared to even admit it to yourself, you were searching for the truth. And now you have to face the possibility that you're about to find it.'

'Because you're going to tell it to me, I suppose.'

The old man nodded. 'That's what you're here for.'

'All right,' said Iris. 'Tell you what.' She reached inside her jacket, her hand forcing its way past the leatherite stiffened by the chamber's cold. The gun was colder than her fingers; the nearness of the metal to what was left of her heart had done nothing to keep it warm. She drew the gun out, raised it and sighted directly along its black barrel toward a point between Carsten's pale eyes. 'You say you've still got some big secrets left to lay on me. That you know what it is I've supposedly been looking for. The real truth, and all that other bullshit.' Iris curled one forefinger around the gun's trigger. 'I'm going to give you a chance to prove it.'

'Really?' The sight of the gun, aimed and rock-steady, didn't appear to alarm Carsten. 'And what's that?'

Iris shifted the gun a few millimeters and squeezed the trigger. The flash from the muzzle lit up the chamber as though a streak of lightning from one of the thunderstorms preceding LA's monsoon season had transferred inside the ice-covered walls. At one side of Carsten's head, the wispy white hair fluttered as the bullet passed just above the top ridge of his ear.

The echo of the shot had slammed against the limits of the chamber hard enough to temporarily deafen her. As her hearing cleared once more, Iris could hear the minute, bell-like tinkling sounds of ice crystals, dislodged by the shockwave, drifting like bright stars and diamonds from the ceiling and settling across the grim face of Eldon Tyrell and the glass lids of the other coffins, as though the chamber held a depiction of a winter's mass funeral from a child's illustrated storybook. The thickly viscous liquid in the various glass beakers and jars had shivered with the impact, their contents disturbed enough to slowly turn inside, as though the bodyless eyes had been aroused by events and had brought their silent gaze around to watch.

'Maybe that wasn't such a good idea.' Carsten reached up and touched the side of his head, then checked his fingertips to see if there was any blood on them. 'To have given that weapon back to you. Your emotional state is obviously a little shaky.'

'Too late now.' Iris raised her voice against the shrill whistle of escaping refrigerant; the shot had penetrated one of the larger pipes

at the far end of the chamber, releasing a gray jet of condenser gas. 'But don't worry; it's not a hormonal thing. I've got a proposition to make you.'

'I'm listening.'

'Here's the deal.' Iris kept the gun dead-level between herself and the old man. 'Whatever revelations you've got lined up, they better absolutely blow me away. So to speak. Or I blow you away.'

'But I was going to tell you everything, anyway.'

Now you'll really be motivated to make it good.'

Carsten considered for a moment, then nodded. 'It's worth a shot,' he said. 'So to speak.

'Exactly.' Iris raised the gun a little higher. Her arm felt both weightlessly numb, and solid as a carved extension of ice. 'So go for it.'

'The truth? The real truth, as you spoke of? Here it is, then.' Carsten took a step backward, spreading his arms wide to indicate not only the row of glass-lidded coffins, but the ice-bound chamber itself. 'Everything you see here, everything you thought you knew about replicants — it's all wrong. You don't even know the real
purpose
of replicants. Why they were created. What they're made for. You just don't know.'