Eye and Talon (2 page)

Wimps, thought Iris, as she stepped through the woman's face, luminous white.

The geisha image was all around her, a substance tangible as the foggy mists that rose between monsoon bouts from the stagnant lagoons that had once been the San Pedro freight docks at the edge of the city, where LA's sprawl was terminated by the gray, oil-shiny waves of the Pacific Ocean. Iris had childhood memories of the docks and the dead, decaying sea — from not that long ago; the street orphanage had unlocked and taken from her ankle the coded radio-emitter band, the magic cirdet that had enabled her to check into the safety of the hivelike, hexagonal sleeping shelters every night, just a few years ago, when she had passed her twenty-first birthday. That was when she had been legally entitled to sign away enough bodily security rights to join the LAPD's basic training program. The worst part of joining up had been lying in a departmental hospital chamber for a week, with a thermal-reduction blood substitute filling her veins while all of her drained-off real blood was being scanned for trace elements and metabolites of the few toxically thrilling chemicals that the lab's filtrons were sensitive enough to detect. She remembered through all that time, with her body core hammered down to 78 degrees Fahrenheit, dreaming of icebergs, blue and glowing like summer moonlight, marching in ponderous slow-motion through the LA streets, sweeping them clear, leaving them pure and englaciated, like the diamonds she had felt growing along her spine. When the department medics in their bloodstained blue scrubs had woken her up, and she had blinked away the ice crystals from her eyelashes, she had been almost sad to see the dirty city again, washed no cleaner by the fever-laden tropical rains . . .

Giant red
kanji
marched through the enveloping cloud, spelling out the brand name of whatever wideband tricyclic the geisha was so happily placing on her tongue. The ideograms and the face faded a bit, enough that Iris could see a narrow swath of stars through a break in the bigger, darker nightclouds above. And enough that her prey might be able to spot her; with the bulky black metal of her gun filling both her hands, and poised barrel-upright along the side of her head, Iris drew back into the building's shadow. Under her bootsole, fragments of the concrete ledge crumbled and fell, dropping like cold, dead stars the twenty stories to the street's crowded, neon-shimmering wetness. The rain creeping down the building's exterior slunk through the neck tendrils of her close-cropped black hair, and down inside the collar of her Kevlar®-stranded leatherite jacket. Her knuckles were studded gemlike with drops of the same rain; wet, the gun's muzzle looked like carved and polished obsidian, a little totem of violence raised aloft by one of its worshipers.

All right
, thought Iris.
Where is it?
The adrenaline in her veins was making her impatient. She wanted to bag this one before the chase-exhilaration that revved her pulse modulated to a slower pace, marathon-running mode rather than a sprinter's full-out push. Half the pleasure in replicant-hunting came with sighting down on one, with her heartbeat so strong in her throat that she had to fight her own body to keep the gun from trembling in her grip, and the quarry turning and locking its fated gaze with hers, so they both knew exactly what was going to happen next, what moment of terminal intimacy they were about to share, only the small motion of a curved finger away, trigger and release, all the way up her braced arms and into that small, private room beneath her breastbone . . .

The other half of the pleasure came with getting paid a blade runner's bounty. She could use the money. The gun in her hands wasn't regulation LAPD-issue, but something she was still making payments on, herself.

A little motion fluttered the damp cloud pressing around her, a motion that wasn't caused by minor meteorological shifts, wind currents or a ventilator shaft's purge-release cycle. Something human, Iris knew, had done it. Or something close enough to human to run like one, far enough from human to be legal prey.

Come on
. . .

She slid her foot along the narrow ledge, the heel of her boot scraping against the ancient brick facing. Carefully, with each small movement timed to her own pulse, she made her way to the building's corner. The sweat of her palms mingled with the rain inching along the grooves of the gun's incised grip.

At the corner, with its blunt knife's-edge against her spine, she could look down and discern through mist the broken, rusting skeleton of the blimp that had used to cruise past the buildings' upper reaches, with its spiky, sea-creature-like antennae and swiveling pinlights, its pixel-swarm display of tantalizing off-world vistas, and synthesized voice boomily extolling the virtues of emigration to the stars. Rep-symp terrorists had brought the service-ad blimp down some time after Iris had gotten out of the LAPD's advanced training immersion compound, and she had been starting to make her mark in the blade runner unit, with an effective kill ratio knocked down from a straight one-thousand only by winging some pedestrian who had panicked in the wrong direction when she had started emptying her clip down the length of Figueroa Boulevard. Off-duty and narcotized asleep, Iris hadn't seen the blimp go down; from what some of the uniformed bull cops had told her, it'd looked like an ignited whale, as though Captain Ahab had traded his harpoon for a flame-thrower. The dead seas held no more whales; their bones rotted in the marine trenches, covered with oil. Only in bad dreams and televised news could you see one fall from the sky with such slow, sad grace.

There
.

She'd spotted it, the target she'd been pursuing all the way from the hovel burrows beneath the old Angel's Flight tracks, in the densely humid and compacted core of the city. The troglodyte denizens, pale as cave fish and blinking at even what little sunlight was available during LA's monsoon season, had managed to excavate a dome-like space in the earth beneath the stacked-up office towers, lit it with bootleg current tapped off one of the main trunk lines, and had been selling tickets for an entertainment uniquely attractive to the bodyguarded residents of the fortified Beverly Hills and Brentwood enclaves. Most of the show was the usual tawdrily choreographed sex thing, retro Vegasy glamor from the empty spot in the desert on the city's edge where Vegas used to be, tit spangles mixed with sinister black-leather military kitsch straight out of genetic memories of Fosse-ized Weimar Berlin. But the star of the underground show, the singular sensation, had been something truly, sickly intriguing

A replicant impersonator.

That's entertainment
, Iris had thought when she'd heard about it, down at the station's plain-clothes briefings. Show biz and flash, a genuine human being imitating an imitation of a human being. The ultimate drag queen, not transformed from one sex to the other, but deeper than that, from real flesh and blood, man born of woman, to synthesized, born of the old Tyrell Corporation's production lines.

Supposedly Art Enesque's act — that was the rep impersonator's stage name — ran the gamut from a funny interrogation bit, with wink-nudge answers over a prop Voigt-Kampff machine and leering asides to the audience clustered around the tables and their watered drinks, to a hardcore demo, with half the chorine troop as assistants, of how much physically stronger replicants were than humans — in every department. And the finale, where the impersonator took a mock bullet in the head from a cliché blade runner, all dead eyes and grubby trench coat, was supposed to be a stone riot.

'Let the vice squad shut it down,' had been Iris's answer when she'd been told by the squad's captain to scope the show. 'If it's over the line, they can take care of it.'

'Nothing's over the line,' the captain had replied. 'Not in LA. Just check it out.'

So she had, sitting hunched over an unsipped drink that her departmental expense account had paid for, inhaling the sour, mingled sweat odors of the laughing civilians around her. A tour bus full of Cambodian businessmen, face-masked and giddy from their Customs Division full-body searches, had swarmed in behind her; Iris could hear them all through the show's clanking, sax- and gamelan-heavy stroke music, their laughter and gasps like softly muted bells. She had mastered the art of ignoring them by the time the headliner came on.

None of Enesque's jokes had struck her as particularly funny.
Wasting my time here
, she'd decided, the glass's sweat chilling her fingertips. Then the interrogation bit had started, and she had realized why she'd been sent there. The prop Voigt-Kampff machine had huge gauges mounted on it, big enough for the audience to see from their tables in the subterranean club; part of Enesque's shtick had been his twitching in synch with the needles on the dials, as the straight man playing the cop had run through the questions. Halfway through the familiar catechism, Iris had felt the fine, dark hair along her neck tighten and rise.
It's real
, she had thought.
It's a real V-K machine
. The rest of the audience might have thought it was just a dummy prop, a wheezing accordion bellows and some phony dials and lights, but she had known different. Which had meant . . .

She had knocked over the glass sitting untouched in front of her, as she had reached inside her leatherite jacket. Even before she had pulled out her gun, Art Enesque's sharp gaze had snapped around from his partner in the act, and had locked onto hers. The classic split-second moment of realization had passed between them, like a bullet or a thrown kiss, in which cop and prey, blade runner and replicant, recognized each other for what they really were.

It'd been a good disguise, she had to admit. Maybe the best possible: for an escaped replicant on the run, hiding out in the center of the city, what better front to assume than as a human pretending to be a replicant? Too clever, though; his own answers had given him away. Or if he had used a real fake Voigt-Kampff, instead of one he must've stolen from an outlying police station or that had been fenced to him by some former blade runner, burnt-out and on the skids, hard up for money. But to use a real one, and pump up his tiny physiological responses so that the needles jumped from side to side, but with that crucial little lag time, measured in milliseconds, that only a trained V-K operator could spot, and which was a critical factor in IDing replicants.

That was a mistake. Or sheer bravado, or simple death wish. Which Enesque had compounded by grabbing the gun of his partner in the act, the one playing the cop asking the questions. The gun turned out to be real as well; the club's patrons had realized that as soon as he had started firing. They all hit the floor, tables and chairs overturning, as Iris had been left as the only one standing, arms extended and hands locked on the grip of her own gun, coldly firing off enough rounds to send Enesque running for a backstage exit.

By the time Iris had emerged from the same upwardly sloping tunnel through which her target had fled, she had slammed another full clip into her gun. The usual milling crowds that filled the streets of LA, like a slow, shuffling sea of nocturnal sunglasses and chanting, saffron-robed millennial cults, had been shoved apart by Enesque's furious onrush, then had closed behind him. Iris had had to scramble on top of a police
koban
, quickly scanning the throng of heads and faces for any sign of her target. A disturbance in the crowd's flow, something crouched down to remain unseen, but obviously pushing its way past the slower bodies around it, had signaled the replicant's escape route to her. With gun held aloft, she had leapt from the
koban
, flattening a pair of unfortunate pedestrians to the sidewalk, then kneeing them aside as their pallid hands had clutched at her.

That had been the real start of the chase, the kind she knew and liked, a scrambling predatory run across any impeding vehicles stalled in the streets, losing sight of the target and then spotting it again. The adrenaline rush in her blood blotted out all sensory input except for the focused, radar-like scan of her vision, locked onto the back of her target like some ancient military heat-seeking missile.

She would run it through her mind again later, when she was savoring these memories on top of all the ones that had gone before it. Standing on the narrow, crumbling ledge at the corner of the building tower, she focused on the precious moment before her. She and the escaped replicant were in end-game mode; above and below her, the building's maze of retrofitted power conduits and ventilation shafts thrummed hollowly with their own blind, nervous energy, as though in sympathetic motion with the blood pulsing tighter and faster from her heart.

Maybe on whatever off-world colony from which he'd escaped, Enesque had been some kind of high-steel construction drone, expendable and trained for altitude maneuvers. Maybe it was where he felt safest, that far above the ground; so when the chase had eaten up the last of his rational thought processes, reduced him to a thing of gasping anger and fear, that was where he had naturally scrambled to. Iris had spotted him clambering up the side of this building, using the exterior pipes as hand and footholds, heading for the giant geisha-and-pill ad projected onto the low, artificially generated clouds.
At least he can't take a shot at me now
. She'd also spotted that the replicant had had to stash his gun inside his jacket, to leave both hands free for climbing. Iris had tucked her own gun away, into the silicone-greased shoulder holster beneath the leatherite, and had started after him.

Part of the magnified geisha's face blanked out, as Iris took another slow step along the ledge, rounding the building's corner and coming in front of one of the projector units. Each breath was sharp with the distinctive metallic tang of the microscopic water droplets, ion-charged so the pulsing magnetic field could sculpt the mist cloud into a smooth enough surface for the animated image. The pulses made the gun lying so close to Iris's heart seem almost alive, as though it also had started beating with the chase's excitement.

Another wind gust split the cloud, so she could see across the empty space above the street to the old, dead billboard from which the geisha had used to smile and beckon. The projector behind her cast Iris's shadow, twenty times larger than life, onto one corner of the flat, gray rectangle; its shadows wavered with the rain sluicing down the deactivated pixels.