Eye and Talon

by K. W. Jeter

  She reached down and picked up the plastic water bottle, unscrewed the lid and drank, tilting her head to let the lukewarm liquid slide down her throat. She set the bottle down between herself and the guard. 'So where's Vogel?'

  The guard gazed non-reactively at her. 'Who?'

  Iris rolled her eyes toward the sheet-metal ceiling of the shack. 'You know,' she said with forced patience. 'Vogel. The guy you picked up with me.'

  'That his name?' The guard shook his head. 'We didn't bring anybody back here except you. That other person you were with — he got away. And we didn't bother to go chasing after him.'

  'Yeah, right.' Iris considered the guard's statement with sour disbelief. Expect me to believe that? 'So why didn't you go after him?'

  The guard shrugged. 'He's not important.' With a nod, the guard indicated Iris sitting across from him. 'You're important.'

  'Thanks. That makes me feel better, all right.' She turned again toward the bleak view outside the shack.

  A tight-cell phone sounded its characteristic trill, muffled only by the leather of the guard's shoulder holster. As Iris watched, he dug beneath the holster and extracted the tiny device from his shirt pocket. 'Bolcom here.' He listened for a moment, then nodded. 'Got it.' The phone went back where it had come from. 'Let's go.'

  Iris remained seated as the guard stood up. 'Go where?'

  'Conference room.' The guard gestured toward the shed's door, indicating some place beyond it. 'Believe me, you'll like it better. It's got air-conditioning.'

  'You got that right.' Her cowboy shirt, dirty and torn from crawling through the various passages of the Tyrell Corporation ruins, was starting to stick to the skin over her ribs. She stood up. 'Lead on, pal.'

  As they were walking across the fenced compound, toward a distant set of larger buildings shimmering in the heat, the guard dug into his jacket pocket and held out something to Iris. 'Here,' he said. 'I was told you could have this back now.'

  Iris glanced at the familiar object in the guard's hand. 'Really?' She was unimpressed. 'What good's an unloaded gun to me?'

  The guard lifted an eyebrow at her, then halted. He raised the weapon and aimed it toward one of the ancient, half-buried bulldozers several meters away, then squeezed the trigger. The sound of the shot rolled out toward the distant, slate-colored hills, followed immediately by the bullet pinging against the bulldozer's concave scoop. Fresh, bright metal showed where the bullet had hit, knocking away layers of rust.

  'It is loaded,' said the guard quietly, holding the gun out to Iris again.

  I'll be damned. Iris stared at the gun, its black checked grip pointing toward her, then took it from him. The gun's comforting weight filled her hand, like a portion of her own anatomy that had been magically restored to her. She could tell there was a full clip inside it, minus the one shot that had just been fired off.

  The guard continued walking, exposing his broad-shouldered back; a sweat stain darkened the area along his spine. 'Wait a minute,' Iris called to him.

  'Now what?' The guard stopped and looked back at her. 'They're waiting for us.'

  Iris leveled the gun at him. 'What's stopping me from blowing your head off, finding a spinner and leaving this cheap popsicle stand behind?'

  'Why would you want to do that?' The guard appeared genuinely puzzled. 'You're among friends.'

  He started walking again, without looking back. After a moment, Iris lowered the gun and followed him.

  'Here you go.' The guard pushed open a battered steel door at the front of the complex's largest building. Air seeped out, several degrees cooler than the stuff rising off the desert floor. 'Make yourself comfortable.'

  'I've been trying to.' She walked into the empty room. Hearing the door close behind her, she glanced over her shoulder and saw that the guard hadn't followed her in.

  It took a moment for her to realize that she wasn't alone in the space. And that there were other eyes watching her. She'd had her senses attuned for human presences, somebody who wanted to talk to her, who wanted answers from her, and who she might — it was always possible — get answers from.

  So she wasn't ready for the owls.

  The surprise was enough that her hand actually darted toward the gun she had tucked into her jacket pocket, grabbing the checked metal grip and pulling the cold metal partway out before she realized what they were. Golden eyes, at least a dozen pairs of them, blinked and stared at her. Iris took a step back, so she could get them all into view. She saw now that one wall of the room was studded with bare metal perches, slightly higher than her own head, on which the animals perched. There was a variety of sizes and appearances, as though some retail aviary had been transferred intact from the souk in downtown LA. A couple of the owls were some pygmy breed, half the size of the others, but with the same sharp claws and predator's avidity; a couple had round faces, different in plumage from the rest of their bodies; one was almost pure white, with a few black flecks on its chest. Most of them were of the same goldenish brown, with black feathers as horns, as the one she had been pursuing for so long. For all she knew, one of the owls before her now might have been that elusive target.

  'You like them?'

  Iris turned and saw that someone else, as human as herself, had entered the room. Round-faced, elderly enough that the thinning fringe of hair brushed past his ears was completely white, infirm enough that he moved with the aid of the type of aluminum cane whose floor-end sprouted a set of widely spaced rubber tips. Carefully balancing himself, he pushed the door closed, shutting out the harsh glare bouncing off the expanse of sand, then turned his smile toward her again.

  'They're okay, I guess.' An odd, ill-formed memory tugged at her thoughts; it took a few seconds to remember exactly what it was. Nothing that had happened to her when she had been asking questions at the souk, or anything that had really happened to her at all; instead, it was something from the movie Vogel had shown her inside the ruins of the old Tyrell Corporation headquarters. The bit where the cop Deckard first met the replicant Rachael; the first thing she'd said to him was to ask whether he liked the company owl, sitting on its perch in Eldon Tyrell's executive suite. And what had Deckard said to her? Iris couldn't remember the exact words; some stupid question about whether the owl was real or not. As if that mattered. Iris glanced back at the array of owls; a few of them were settling their wings around themselves again, as though the sound of human voices had startled them from sleep. 'I wouldn't know one kind from another, though.' She gave a small shrug. 'It's not exactly a topic I'm keen on.'

  'So I understand.' The elderly man gimped his way farther into the room, extending the multi-footed cane and then dragging himself along after it. 'We know all about you — Iris, isn't it?' He smiled at her with teeth turned translucent with age, as he passed slowly before her. 'You may call me Carsten, if you like.'

  'Why?' She stood with hands on hips, watching him. 'Is it your name?'

  'Ho ho. Very cop-like of you, I'm sure.' He radiated a twinkly, grandfatherish persona. 'Young ladies shouldn't go into your line of work. It turns them cynical.'

  'Wrong. I was cynical before I became a cop.'

  'You're the exception, then.' Carsten didn't look at her, but stood directly in front of the owls, both of his gnarled and brown-spotted hands folded on the cane's rubber grip; he gazed upward, as if admiring the birds. But then, that's something else we do, in fact, know about you. That some things, that are for other people either optional — that is, a matter of choice for them — or the results of their formative experiences, are not so for one such as yourself.' He glanced over his shoulder at her. 'As you've indicated, on more than one occasion, you started out this way.'

  'Christ, I don't even know what you're talking about.' Iris was beginning to think this was the essential element of the obscure, infuriating curse that had been laid on her. Since the replicant Enesque's death, everyone she encountered seemed to talk in riddles, weirdly profound on the surface, but balloon-empty once the wo
rds had been peeled away. Like they're trying, she thought irritably, to screw with my head. For what purpose, she hadn't yet been able to determine. 'Look, why don't you just tell me what you want from me?'

  'Want from you?' The notion seemed to amuse the elderly figure. His smile, with its worn-looking teeth, grew wider. 'Why should anyone want something from you? That would indicate that you have something. Do you?'

  'Only this.' She took the gun from her jacket pocket and held it up. 'Maybe I haven't used it enough. If you know what I mean.'

  'I can guess.' Unruffled, Carsten returned to admiring the owls arrayed on their perches. 'This is undoubtedly another characteristic of your unfortunate profession. If you cannot figure out what you need to know, in the sense of determining the answers to your many questions, you believe you can force them to be produced. You can put your weapon to someone's head and then that person will tell you both what is true and what is necessary — which, of course, are not always the same thing, are they?'

  'I'd settle for either one at this point.'

  'The moderation of one's desires,' said Carsten, 'is the point at which wisdom commences. Come here, sweetheart.' He was no longer speaking to Iris, but to one of the owls perched in front of him. A russet-brown specimen extended its wings and flapped — audibly down to Carsten's extended arm. Iris saw now that none of the owls was chained or otherwise fastened to the metal extension on which it sat. 'There's a good girl.' Holding one arm level, he stroked the owl's head with his other hand. The sleeve of his old-fashioned tweed jacket had no apparent padding or leather protection; the owl somehow managed to keep its sharp claws from penetrating the rough fabric and the skin inside, as though even its inadvertent potential for harm had been tamed away. life's not so bad here, is it?' Carsten glanced at Iris, standing behind him. 'They can be very difficult creatures to maintain in captivity. They're sensitive to all sorts of conditions: humidity, degrees of light exposure, that sort of thing. But it can be done.'

  'If you know what you're doing, I suppose.' Iris watched as the old man took from his jacket pocket a small plastic bag filled with scraps of meat; he transferred the bag to his other hand, then extracted the wet red bits from it and fed them one by one to the owl on his arm. The other owls regarded the process with keen interest, some of them partway flapping their wings, others shuffling back and forth on their metal perches. 'I never took care of an animal; I mean, like a pet or something. I had a chat for a while — until somebody messed with it — but that's not the same thing. They're designed to be low-maintenance.'

  'Not at all the same thing,' agreed Carsten, feeding another scrap to- the owl. 'Plus a living creature reacts to stimuli in its own way; they can be unpredictable, even the simplest of them. These' — he nodded toward the golden-eyed birds — 'are still essentially wild; they can never be truly domesticated.' His fragile visage seemed both sad and well-informed. 'At best, you could say that I've reached a certain understanding with them. They refrain from drawing my blood they do so now, at least; it took a while, and quite a few scars, before we reached that point — and in return they get the little tidbits they desire.'

  'Then they're lucky.'

  'No, just smart,' said Carsten. 'Or smart enough. Smarter than human beings, at any rate. Smarter than you.'

  'Maybe so.' Iris watched the owl take another scrap from the tips of the old man's fingers. 'You don't have to rub it in, though.'

  'It's not meant to hurt, but to motivate. There are things you want to know, why not ask the questions?'

  'Asking questions,' said Iris, 'is what's gotten me into this much trouble.'

  'Only because you didn't ask enough of them. Or not the right ones. People so rarely do.' Carsten slid the plastic bag into his jacket pocket; with an empty-handed, tossing gesture of his arm, he sent the owl flapping back to its perch. 'But that's the chance you're getting now. So go ahead. Ask. Whatever is on your mind.'

  'All right.' Iris looked from him, to the owls, then back again. 'Any of these Scrappy?'

  'Pardon?'

  'I'm not asking about their dispositions. Their names. What I want to know is if any of these owls is named Scrappy.'

  'Ah.' Carsten nodded. 'As in Scrappy, the owl that at one time belonged to the Tyrell Corporation. And to Eldon Tyrell, in particular.'

  'That's the one.'

  'A worthwhile inquiry,' said Carsten, 'given the amount of trouble to which you've gone to find that particular owl. Unfortunately — and not just for you — none of the owls you see here before you is in fact the one Dr Tyrell so amusingly named "Scrappy". And let me answer your next question before you ask it: the owl you've been seeking has indeed never been here at our facility. As much as we would wish it otherwise.'

  Iris mulled over the old man's words. As far as she could determine, he was telling the truth. Even though at least a couple of the owls, including the one he'd just fed, looked like the one she'd been sent to find, she wasn't enough of a bird expert to make a specific ID call — and the elusive Scrappy hadn't been in her possession long enough for her to have memorized any particular key feature. Except for it having been wild, with a chain attached to its banded foot to keep it from escaping; the ones here were conspicuously free of any such tether. As Carsten had claimed, they might not be exactly domesticated, but they had no inclination not to hang around and get their bloody treats handfed to them.

  'Okay . . .' There had at least been one item of interest in what this Carsten person had told her. 'So I take it that you people out here are the ones who wanted to find Tyrell's owl? I mean, the ones who really wanted to and not just some front organization.'

  'Of course we wanted to find it.' Carsten fastidiously deaned his reddened fingertips with the handkerchief he'd taken from his jacket's inside pocket. 'But then, that is not an exclusive characteristic of our little group. There are others besides ourselves who would like to have possession of that same animal.'

  Maybe, Iris thought to herself; at this point, she wasn't prepared to believe even that much. For all I know, there's only one organization — or maybe only one person — who wants the thing. And all the others were fronts for that mysterious entity. She spoke her next words aloud: 'Like who?'

  'Oh . . . many.' Carsten's frail shoulders lifted in a shrug. 'You'd be surprised, I'm sure, if I were to give you an exhaustive list of everyone who is interested in the same thing — the owl — that you and I are. Or who have been in the past. It's an item of considerable value. Worth going to great lengths to acquire, I assure you.'

  'Why? What's so valuable about it?'

  'There now.' The old man nodded in obvious appreciation. 'That's the important question, isn't it? The question you should have ascertained the answer to before you started out on this so-troublesome quest. Why is always more important than who or where; inasmuch as to know the why of something is to know, in potentia, all the other questions and answers as well.'

  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 i
s. 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.