by K. W. Jeter
'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.
'I don't want you around. Okay? That's an order.' Iris had another reason for wanting the artificial creature to go to sleep. Her alternate plan,- swiftly coalescing in her thoughts, was to get out of the apartment entirely, taking the owl with her somehow, and going on the run. Anywhere out on the streets would be preferable to a place where she could be tracked down so easily. If she did split — and that option seemed increasingly sensible to her — she didn't want the chat to pitch a fuss as she went out the door. Her hands would already be full with the owl bagged and tucked under her arm again, the way she had brought it to the apartment in the first place. 'Go.'
The chat shook its head. 'You need me.'
Iris let the gun dangle at her side as she gazed in exasperation at the small creature. Its persistence, cute at less pressing times, was seriously annoying her now. 'How do you figure that?'
'Come on.' The chat shifted its small weight from side to side, as though exhibiting its own impatience. 'You're stressed out. I can tell. Countering deleterious stress and its performance-degrading effects is why you got me. That's what I'm for.'
The creature had a point. It wasn't the same sort of mandatory equipment as her upgraded-from-standard-issue surresper, but at the same time she knew that a lot of cops, particularly those in the blade runner division, had artificial companions similar or identical to the chat in whatever places they called home. A highly recommended practice; a cop could get, if not a black mark, then a definite gray in his personnel folder from the departmental shrinks for not having a chat-like buddy on which to unload his griefs and tensions. Cop life was hard on normal human relationships; marriages were rare, divorces frequent, domestic homicides common enough to have merited their own slang reference: 'at-home retirement'. Chats and other substitutes for regular, civilian-type social interaction had one big advantage over the human type, in that an artificial talking companion, if it got on one's frayed nerves too badly, could be eliminated without legal entanglements. Which could be a satisfying, even therapeutic experience in its own way; there was still a dark scorch mark down by the baseboards of the apartment's living room wall, where this chat's immediate predecessor had exploded into nasty-smelling plastic shrapnel when Iris, grumpily exasperated by its small talk, had emptied her gun into its rounded belly. That had been before she had at least partially mastered her temper. She didn't go in for that kind of emotional catharsis anymore; even if legal, chats made for expensive target practice.
'Your nerves are shot,' continued the current chat. 'Shaky hands; you could get hurt!'
'Don't worry about me.' Iris tightened her grip on the gun hanging at her side. 'I'll be all right.'
'Yeah — but what about me?' The chat bobbed up and down in the kitchen doorway. 'This is a wick-wick-wicked universe we live in. Full of bad things! Gotta protect the ones you love.'
It struck Iris that the situation must be as grim as she herself had perceived it to be. She had never heard the chat speak at such length before. 'What do you propose, buddy?'
'Take one hit.' The chat hurriedly waddled over to her and stretched up on its pudgy legs toward her free hand. 'It'll calm you down. Then you can shoot real straight. Get the bad guys. I promise you.'
She considered the small creature's offer. In its own way, it was exhibiting more bravery than she was, given how terrified it was of the owl perched on the other side of the room.
Just a little,' wheedled the chat. 'I'll tone it down. I will, I will! Mild and sweet, guaranteed to make you a better, more productive lethal agent. Come on . . . you know you want to . . .'
'All right, all right. Jeez,' said Iris, giving in. 'Nag, nag, nag.' She reached down with her non-gun hand and laid her fingertips across the top of the chat's head, already shining with its chemical exudations.
The jolt came up her arm like lightning, a straight shot to the top of her skull. Where it exploded in white, glaring radiance, blinding and felling. The last sensation she had before her knees went liquid and buckled from beneath her was her fingers flaring out from each other, rigid and spastic, the gun's warmed black metal dropping away like an ine
rt, dead stone.
A micro-gap in consciousness ended when the side of her face struck the floor. Iris could feel her heart laboring inside her chest, and could focus on the door at the other side of the room, but no more than that.
Sparks danced outside her overloaded cortex as the vertical row of doorlocks melted through and gave way, one after another. A few points of light were still sizzling and dying from white to red, inches from her trembling, paralyzed hand, as the door swung open. The still functioning parts of her brain expected several intruders to walk through, but instead only one pair of dark-trousered legs was visible, striding unhurriedly toward where she lay prostrate.
'Useful things,' said an unfamiliar voice. Iris couldn't see the man's face. 'If you know what's inside them.' One hand and arm became visible, reaching down and picking up the chat from the floor. The creature was no longer active; its button eyes were dull and gray, as though the charge it had delivered had also burnt out the delicate circuits inside. 'But you didn't. Not this one, at any rate.'
A ringer, thought Iris. The amused tone in the man's voice irritated her, but not enough to overcome the residual paralysis in her limbs. Somebody . . . must have snuck it in . . .
The man stepped over her. For a moment, Iris expected to feel something else, the smooth circular business-end of a gun's muzzle being placed behind her ear. Which would've been the last thing she would have felt.
That didn't happen. Instead, she heard a noise from the other side of the room, like small metal being snapped apart, then the owl's hooting cry and the muffled flap of its broad wings.
'Thanks,' came the man's voice once again. 'I appreciate your hard work. You've saved me a great deal of difficulty. Retrieving this valuable merchandise would not have been quite as easy for me as it apparently was for you.'
With a convulsive spasm of will, Iris managed to thrash herself onto her back. She had only a brief glimpse of the owl, snugged inside the soft bag in which she had brought it to the apartment, and nothing of the man's face, before she found herself gazing up at the water-stained ceiling.
'Who are ... you working for?' The words creaked and stumbled from Iris's dried mouth. 'Who ... sent you?'
'Do you really need to know?' A smile was audible in the man's soft voice. 'Think about it. I've given you a little present. The most valuable one possible: time. Think about what you need. Because right now . . . you don't really know.'
Whatever time existed, there wasn't enough for her to try and ask another question. With her fingertips still quivering against the floor beside her, Iris heard the apartment's front door swing open. And then the footsteps of the man, carrying his prize with him, fading away in the corridor beyond.
9
'You should've brought it to me.' Hands clasped between his knees, Meyer leaned forward in the chair beside the hospital bed. 'Straight off. I could've helped you.'
It was still hard for Iris to talk. Her tongue felt like some formerly living part, which had been extracted and embalmed, then sewn back into her mouth. 'Now . . .' Overly sensitized, she could feel the muscles at the back of her neck contract and release against the starchy white pillow as she forced out one word after another. 'Now you tell . .. me . .
'For Christ's sake.' Meyer sounded both angry and disgusted. He picked up the paper cup from the table, fished out a thawed-smooth ice chip between his thumb and forefinger and placed it between Iris's lips. 'As if you didn't know already — or you should've known, if you hadn't been trying to be so fucking clever.'
'You're right ...' his gratefully let the cold liquid trickle into her throat, still raw-feeling from the air-passage tube that the doctors had shoved down it, like an unpleasant sexual encounter. 'That's . . . my problem . . .'
'Your problem,' said Meyer, 'is not trusting people. Or at least the ones you should trust. Like me. No, instead you've got your brain jacked up into overdrive all the time, turning every little thing over and over like a monkey with a nut, looking for the way to crack it and find out what's inside.' He shook his head. 'You can't just deal with things on the surface; everything's gotta be a big mystery to be solved.'
'Come on ... ease up on me.' Iris felt worse now than she had when the emergency paramedics spinner had dumped her off on top of the LAPD hospital tower. Then she had been doped up, an IV morphine drip fat as a baby anaconda needled into her wrist by one of the angels in their blood-spattered, lime-green surgical scrubs; the anesthetic had been in addition to most of her cerebral cortex having been shut down by the jolt she had received from the booby-trapped chat. 'I already . . . feel like crap . . .'
'It's what you deserve,' grumbled Meyer.
'You're so . . . sympathetic . . .'
'Not my job to be. Like it wasn't your job to take that owl home and babysit the damn thing. What your job was, was to get it and bring it to me. And that's all.'
'Sorry.' Iris barely opened one eye, and watched as Meyer pushed himself up from the chair and began pacing back and forth in the small, equipment-crowded room. 'I screwed up . .
'No shit.' Meyer was as angry-looking as she had ever seen him. 'This one's gonna cost us both, big time. My ass is on the line in about twelve different locales - mainly upstairs at the police station. Major heat - and for what?' He had already crossed the room a half-dozen times; now he stopped and swung his dark gaze back at her. 'And what did you accomplish, with your flipped-out paranoiac ratiocination? Nada.'
'Less than.' She wondered how long he was going to go on chewing her out. 'I agree.'
'For Christ's sake, Iris, you had the goddamn bird in your hands.' Teeth gritted, Meyer let his own hands curl into fists, as though he were laying hold of the object under discussion. 'In the bag. All you would've had to do was drop it in my lap, just like that, and you and I would both be golden in the department, no matter what we'd done to pull it off. We could've cleaned out the armory and sold it to Uzbeki gunrunners, and nobody would've cared. Didn't I make that clear to you at the beginning? How important this stupid owl is? Or was I only talking to myself?'
'I heard you.' Iris managed a small nod. The first time.'
'You didn't hear me enough, then.' Meyer slowly shook his head, the anger visibly draining out of him, as though his choleric skin was no more than a punctured balloon. 'Not nearly enough.' He sat down heavily on the corner of the high hospital bed, barely clearing the monitoring wires and the tubes from the dangling plastic bags. 'I gotta tell you, Iris - I don't see the way out of this one.' His shoulders slumped forward, bearing the weight of his sorrows. 'There's not a lot of favors I've got left that I can call in. You and I were both pretty much overdrawn on those accounts, before we even got into this mess.'
'Wait a minute.' Iris managed to struggle a little higher on the pillows stacked behind her. 'What . . . are you talking about?' Her movements sent microscopic bubbles up through the dear Ringer's solution seeping into her body. 'I thought . . . I was number one. In the whole division.'
'Yeah, right; the fair-haired girl. Killing machines like you are always popular with the top brass.' Meyer's disgust was audible in every spat-out word. 'For a while, at least. But any time somebody goes on too long, being a little too good at what she does, then the supervisor types start getting nervous. You're supposed to burn out, hit the low end of the Wambaugh Curve, drop out of the division or kill yourself, or find some way to get killed on the job. If nothing else, it saves the department heaps of money it'd otherwise have to pay out in retirement benefits - I mean the kind of retirement where you're still living and breathing. That kind is expensive, compared to a good, clean suicide; it'd take a lot of money to keep all of yesterday's blade runners in some old folks' home, stocked with enough cheap booze and adult-incontinency undergarments so they didn't come back out on the streets, waving their guns around and embarrassing everybody.'
'Sure . . .' The image evoked a feeble, wry smile from Iris. 'Give me a break, Meyer. I don't think . . . the department's really worried about what I'm going to
be like . . . when I'm eighty. If I make it that far.'
'You won't at this rate.' Meyer's anger had ebbed to the point that the expression on his face was almost pitying. 'Stupidity has a low survival value. Especially in this business.'
The thin fabric of the hospital gown shifted across her body as her shoulders lifted in a shrug. 'I've done all right.'
'Up until now,' said Meyer. 'But that's over.'
His words produced a chilling crawl of flesh beneath the bandages that kept the tubes in place. 'What do you mean?'
'Over - as in over for you. You're done. Finito.'
'All right . . .' Iris nodded. 'Whatever. I didn't care for this whole owl business, anyway. I'd rather be out on the streets, taking care of real blade runner business.'
'You don't get it, do you?' The pity in Meyer's eyes was even more obvious now. 'When I say "over", I mean all the way over. You're not just done, you're out. As in goodbye. Get the picture?'
Iris couldn't believe what she'd heard. 'You mean, out of the division?'
'The division, the department, the cop business – the whole nine yards.' Meyer reached over and gently patted her knee, beneath the hospital-bed blanket. 'You're busted, sweetheart. Right on your sweet ass. You'll be going back out on the streets, all right – the nurses told me you'd be on your feet again in a couple of days – but you won't be going out there as any kind of a cop. It's civilian time for you again. Little people—' The tenderness faded from Meyer's voice, and his hand squeezed viciously tight on her leg. 'Know what I mean?'
'Yeah,' said Iris. 'I sure do.' The anger surging up from her gut produced enough strength for a backhanded swing of one fist, connecting hard enough against Meyer's jaw to knock him against the bed's metal end rail. One of the rehydration tubes tore loose from the needle inserted in Iris's wrist, spraying clear fluid across the top blanket; a trickle of blood seeped from under the loosened bandage and through her knuckles. 'You sonuvabitch. You sold me out – or you set me up; I don't know which one's worse.' Fury turned the edges of her vision red, as though the blood had gotten into her eyes. 'This whole thing was a screw, right from the beginning.'
