Deadstock

CHAPTER FIFTEEN unburdening

"Corporal!" said Captain Rick Henderson, smiling out from Jeremy Stake's computer monitor. "This is a nice surprise."

"Nice to see you, sir," Stake told him, smiling back. "Thanks for the Christmas card. How are your wife and children?"

"Good, good, thanks. Hey you, don't call me 'sir,' okay? When we served together, you were the 'sir.'"

"Well, things have changed a lot since then. But if that's the way you want it, then don't call me 'corporal.' Fair?"

"Fair enough. How is the private eye thing going? Must be more fun than sitting embalmed behind this desk like me."

"Well, I have a bit of a private eye kind of favor to ask you, but it's not part of a job. Something personal." Stake repositioned himself in his seat edgily.

"Name it."

"The Earth Killer."

Henderson stared back at his former commanding officer for several beats. "The Earth Lover," he corrected him.

"Yeah. I've tried to find her over the years. On and off. Mostly from the Ha Jiin end of things, but their information systems leave a lot to be desired. I lost her trail some years ago."

"I don't have much to do with the Ha Jiin or the Jin Haa these days, Jeremy. But if you want me to, I'll certainly put out my feelers and see what I can find."

Stake hoped Henderson couldn't see the swallowing motion of his throat. "I'm just curious about how she made out after her trial and all. If she's okay now. You know?"

Henderson nodded. "Yeah. I know, Jeremy."

"I appreciate it. You ever need a free snoop job, I'm your man."

"I will keep that in mind. I've got a pain in the ass colonel over me who I'd love to see exposed as an S and M slave, or something."

Stake smiled again. "I've got another call to make, Rick. I'll talk to you again soon. Again, I appreciate this a lot."

"Seriously, I'll do all I can. You take care, Jeremy. Great to hear from you."

Stake signed off. Then, he made the second call he had alluded to. It was to the home of John Fukuda.

On Stake's monitor the owner of Fukuda Bioforms appeared weary, still wearing his business suit but with the collar unfastened. "Mr.

Stake," he said. "Hello. Do you have some news for me?"

"Some questions for you, Mr. Fukuda. Some things that may or may not have bearing on the theft. But I find them troubling."

"It's been a troubling night for me," Fukuda sighed. "I shouted at my daughter. I was very cruel to her. She's sleeping now, so I'll have to wait until the morning to apologize." Stake could tell then that he'd begun drinking.

"Well I'm sorry to call right now. I was hoping we could meet someplace, if you thought it wasn't too late."

Fukuda nodded distractedly. "Do you think you could come here to my home? I'll send the directions to your vehicle if you want to give me your program code."

"Thanks. Yeah, if you could do that it'd be great."

"Nice place," Stake said, looking around him as he followed his host across the veldt of living-room carpet. Fukuda had met him in the hallway outside his apartment after security had allowed the investigator through the foyer to the elevators.

"Would you fancy a blood orange martini again, Mr. Stake?" Fukuda asked.

"A coffee would be preferable, sir."

Fukuda turned and looked at Stake more closely. His eyes seemed to will themselves to sobriety. "Why don't we talk in the kitchen, then," he said.

Stake watched his client's back as he ordered them both a coffee from his state-of-the-art food dispensing system. "Sir, maybe I'm blurring the line between professional curiosity and personal curiosity, but I'd like to ask you a few questions about some things I've stumbled across in my investigation. Sort of by accident. Like I said, they may not have to do with this case at all, but I have to cover all angles. Every possibility. And…"

Fukuda faced him, handing the hired detective one of the coffees. "What is it you have to ask that requires such a lengthy set up?" He smiled as he said it.

Stake held his gaze and jumped right into it. "Your wife was murdered, I understand."

It was Fukuda who had to break their gaze. "Yes. That's true."

"And your twin brother. He's dead, too. The thing is, sir, I have to know if you have enemies. Either Tableau or someone else, who hates you a little more than I'd imagined." Stake pictured the hominid on display in Adrian Tableau's personal miniature zoo. "I've learned that Tableau can be a pretty vindictive guy."

"Adrian Tableau didn't murder my wife," Fukuda muttered, looking down into the steam rising off the black pool of his coffee. "Or my brother James, either."

"But you're saying James was murdered as well?"

"Are you familiar with the poet Robert W. Service, Mr. Stake?"

"As a matter of fact I am. He wrote war poems. He was a medic in Earth's First World War."

"Very good. And he has a poem called 'The Twins,' who are also named James and John.

Service's poems are very simple, plain, but I feel they have great impact. In this poem, one brother goes off to fight in the war, and while he's away the other brother steals his job. And then he steals his woman. The final verse reads:

Time passed. John tried his grief to drown; To-day James owns one-half the town; His army contracts riches yield; And John? Well, search the Potter's Field."

Stake watched Fukuda's face, waiting for more. Some elaboration. It didn't seem to be forthcoming. "Sir?"

"It was my brother James, Mr. Stake, who murdered my wife Yuriko."

"What? Why would he do that?"

"My brother and I were very close, which should come as no surprise. But there was always a competitiveness in our relationship, as well. I guess I was the more practical one, more disciplined. James was wilder, took more chances. Though one might say he had more imagination. When I started up Fukuda Bioforms, I offered him a position, but he didn't want to be subordinate to me. And I admit, I didn't want him as an equal partner. Not that I didn't want to share the glory, but I didn't trust his judgment. So James tried his hand at other enterprises. A string of unsuccessful enterprises. He worked for other companies in between these adventures, but he still wouldn't come to work for me. As the years went on, and he suffered failure after failure, I know he became more and more jealous of me. But his crowning failure was yet to come."

"And that was?" Stake asked, observing his client with almost scientific attention. As if he were a psychologist now instead of a private investigator.

"Steward Gardens," Fukuda went on. "An apartment complex just off Beaumonde Square. An expensive bit of property, as you can imagine, and James was proud as hell that he acquired the loan for it. He came to me and hired my services- at a greatly discounted price, of course; he consented, at least, to that-to produce the encephalon server that would be the brains of the complex. For this, I had to collaborate with an outfit that specializes in encephalon installation and programming, because my field of expertise lies more in the organic than the inorganic. That's why I outsource some of the work on the nanomites we produce, for instance. In any case, encephalons are not something we normally create at Fukuda Bioforms, for that reason, but James knew I had done it before. And the idea amused him that the tissues from which I would produce this semi-organic mind should come from his own brain."

"Huh," Stake grunted.

"Yes. A flamboyant touch. A Jamesian touch. As he liked to joke, he was 'really going to put himself into this place.' So, this I achieved. With the little outfit he hired, we produced and installed the computer brain. But that was actually James's secondary concern, in regard to my contribution to his dream project. What really intrigued James, what he hoped would give the place a uniqueness, a lure to fill all those apartments with ambitious young Beaumonde Street sharks, was his notion to provide a bio-engineered servant for each and every one of them. Seventy-two of them, in total. A simple sort of organic automaton, able to bring you a coffee. Change the sheets. Water a plant. Zap the trash. Not something to talk to, or trust to babysit your child. Or take to bed, in case you were wondering. Nothing with a mind that advanced. In fact, rather than develop a humanlike brain for these life forms, I teamed with his encephalon crew to develop a computerized chip to serve as an inorganic brain. Actually, it wasn't even that. More of a remote receiver than a brain, because these servants would all share a single, communal mind: the encephalon we installed in the basement."

"I see." For a moment or two, Stake had envisioned the camouflaged clones he had fought alongside in the Blue War. And Mr. Jones, the war vet who worked for Adrian Tableau. But now he knew the golems Fukuda had designed for his brother had been nowhere near as human.

"And there was another attraction with these creatures. In theory, at least. Each was programmed to act as a security guard. A personal bodyguard for their owner, should they be attacked by a rapist or mugger outside their apartment. Because that was where each creature would be stored when they were not needed, in a little nook beside your apartment's outer door. I designed them to resemble statues, so that they would blend into the architecture of the building itself. An artistic flourish. But James's brainstorm again, naturally."

"But all this was a miscalculation? People weren't interested in having their own mindless slave to fetch their slippers?"

"James's miscalculation was in hiring that inept little team who worked with me on the encephalon, and on the servants' receiver chips. You get what you pay for, and they were cheap because they were young, cocky and inexperienced. There was glitch after glitch. James ended up suing them. Meanwhile, he was paying very sizable taxes on this property, owing money to its builders, and so on. I managed to stay out of the lawsuit for the most part, but James resented me for that. For not suing those idiots, myself. He accused me of 'sneaking out' of the whole mess. Turning my back on him. And now, four years later, with multiple lawsuits unresolved and liens by the town, the place is in legal limbo. A fly trapped in a web of red tape, even though the spider itself is dead."

"And so how did James die?"

John held up a finger, asking for patience. "James had one more reason to resent me. Envy me. My wife, Yuriko. A beautiful, beautiful woman. Sweet. Graceful." Fukuda drew in a long breath. "One afternoon, James came to my apartment while I was away. He tried to seduce my Yuriko. She resisted. And in a fit of anger, James killed her."

"My God." Stake wagged his head. "I'm so sorry."

"I came home while he was still there. In fact, I heard the shot and rushed in. I grappled with James. I got the gun out of his hands. And then I shot him. I'm the one who killed him. My own twin brother." The man had been avoiding Stake's eyes, but now he looked up at them at last. "I don't think anyone would blame you for that."

"Well, the law thinks otherwise about such things. So I used my influence, my money, to cover up the situation. Yuriko was killed in a home invasion by an unknown party. James was killed in a hovercar wreck, his body badly burned, a week later." Fukuda smiled tremulously, held out his wrists in front of him. "Care to arrest me now, detective?"

"I'm not a forcer. And like I say, I can understand what you did. Finding your wife that way."

"My wife." Fukuda averted his gaze once more. "I tell you, I worshipped her. We had only been married two years. We had dreamed of having children."

"Dreamed? But, what about Yuki?"

"Do the math, Mr. Stake." He snorted a little laugh. "I never had a daughter. There was, and is, only Yuriko."

"What are you saying? That Yuki's. a clone?"

"Given my resources, how could I resist it? But despite how much I mourned her, despite my agony at not having her beside me, I couldn't bring myself to try to duplicate Yuriko exactly. How could the unique woman I loved ever truly be replaced? If one is to believe in the soul, then I felt Yuriko's soul had ceased to be. At least in this plane. The being I created from her-it was Yuriko, but it was also its own self. So in a kind of compromise, I reasoned that if something were to remain of Yuriko, it should be an offspring of sorts. The child she did not live long enough to give birth to. Though, of course, Yuki is more of a twin than a daughter. And more than a twin, too." Fukuda faced Stake with sudden sharpness, as if he'd been accused. "She is my tribute to Yuriko. But you aren't to think that I have ever acted in any indecent way toward her. I have never even been tempted. I've raised her as my daughter. That is the only way I see her, now."

"But she doesn't know any of this."

"No. I accelerated the clone to the age of twelve, four years ago. I thought it was a good age. A child old enough to be self-sufficient, and yet a charming companion for me. Old enough to resemble her mother. But still innocent. Anyway, I had a history built for her out of photographs and vids that are actually of Yuriko, expensively falsified records, and even by infusing her with memory-encoded long-chain molecules in a brain drip-a method for providing a clone with instant learning. Instant memories, real or imagined."

"I know," Stake said. It was how the cloned soldiers he had fought beside had been trained, enabling some-like Sergeant Adams of the 5th Advance Rangers-to outrank him though only several years old, physically.

Fukuda went on, "No, Mr. Stake, my dear child knows none of this. And she doesn't know that the woman she's been hearing on her Ouija phone, trying so urgently to speak with her, is actually herself."

"It isn't fair, you know. Not to tell her." An angry spark was lighted in Fukuda's eyes, but a rising tide of tears extinguished it. "I will tell her, one day. When she's old enough to fully understand. And forgive me."

"I'm sorry. That wasn't my place to say."

"Don't apologize, Mr. Stake. I'm the one who should be apologizing to you, for keeping this from you. But at the same time, for unburdening myself to you. Forgive me. Please. Forgive me."

Stake was shocked, then, when John Fukuda took several unsteady steps toward him and grasped one of his hands in both of his. He squeezed it, staring into Stake's face, only a short distance away.

And then Stake understood. By now, he figured he must look nearly as much like Fukuda as his brother James had. He knew that just then, it was not he who Fukuda was begging forgiveness from-but from the twin brother he had murdered four years earlier.

"I forgive you," Stake croaked softly.

Still clutching his hand, John Fukuda burst into sobs.