Free Eye and Talon by K. W. Jeter Page B

through the apartment's small shuttered and barred windows. The chat was freaked by the sudden gloom, and clung to her ankle, shivering. The neon's power source, usually a parasitic tap on a main feeder circuit, had probably gotten over-extended and had snapped at some critical corner junction. That left only the pencil-thin glass tubes covering the walls and nearly every other hard surface, to be broken up and swept away, ghost-like vacated letters and pictographs.
    I'll just clear off the bed , thought Iris. If she woke up surrounded by shards and needles of broken glass, it wouldn't be the first time.
    'Residual data left,' announced the surresper. 'From encyclopedic function.'
    At the bedroom door, still hobbled by the frightened chat, Iris glanced back at the machine. 'All right,' she said. 'Give it to me.'
    '“Large, varies in color, nearly white when found in Arctic conditions, mottled dark gray and brown otherwise . . .”'
    'I already heard that bit.' Iris shook her head. 'So it's a bird,' she said disgustedly. 'That's all it is.'
    There was more: '“Once thought to possess supernatural powers, due to ability to see in the dark; solemn, prepossessing aspect gave rise to being considered as symbols of wisdom or occult knowledge.” End of data.'
    'Even better,' said Iris sourly.
    But the surresper had switched itself off, and wasn't listening.

4
    The soukmeisters were clever bastards.
    Gotta hand it to 'em , thought Iris. She stood in the neon-stitched darkness and let herself be buffeted by the jostling crowd around her. The people who ran the marketplace in artificial animals, the shadowy figures who collected the rents on the densely packed stalls and storefronts, had gone to the trouble and expense of making the place smell as if real animals were being bought and sold in it; the zone was interspersed with scent-emitter units protruding from the sewer grates that gave off a cycling olfactory parade of sweaty barnyard odors, moldering grain feed mixed with the riper, nastier tang of unswept fecal droppings. Iris could see that the dealers' customers obviously went for it; the sensory impression filling their nostrils added to the illusion of purchasing a real, biologically living animal, rather than some battery-powered replicant sheathed in fake fur or feathers.
    Careful not to step in any of the more realistic props that had been deposited in the street, Iris pushed her way through the crowd toward the open-fronted, double-wide stall with the sizzling neon above that read WINGS OF GOLDEN SMILE. An animated sparrow, twenty times life-size and outlined in glowing blue, flapped its wings through a stuttering, three-step drill, over and over.
    'What can I do ya for?' The half-dozen staff behind the stall's counter looked like brothers of a single family, a genetic mélange like any other in LA; this specific one could have been a third-generation cross of Hmong and Vladivoski squareheads. 'How 'bout a canary? It'll sing you to sleep. If that doesn't work for ya' — the lead counter guy winked at her — 'then you and I can make other arrangements.'
    'Put it back in your pants, pal.' Iris leaned forward, looking past him and into the depths of the stall. The other staff turned from their workbenches and abacus, regarding her with impassive silence and ink-black pupils as she scanned the wares on the dangling perches and inside the wire cages. Most of their stock consisted of smaller birds, but there was a pair of ravens — bigger than she had expected them to be, hulking like sullen murderers on a rusting steel perch and even a redtail hawk, staring at her with one glittering yellow eye. So maybe the tout at the edge of the souk , who Iris had queried and then tipped with a pre-devaluation titanium quarter, had been right about this being the place for predatory birds. 'I'm looking' — Iris leaned away from the counter guy's kimchi -scented breath — 'for an owl.'
    'Owl, huh? You mean a regular horned owl or