Deadstock

CHAPTER SEVEN the doppler effect

As he followed John Fukuda to their table, Stake took in the people who had already sat down to their lunch. Most of them were men in expensive five-piece suits, some of whom had left overcoats and bowler hats-the current fashion for the stylish businessman-with a robot attendant which would not misplace a single item. But one article of clothing that many of the men continued to flaunt proudly caused Stake to give a derisive smirk. Tucked into a pocket of their jackets like a handkerchief, these men wore a soiled pair of teenage girls' panties. Preferably white, though sometimes with a soft flowery pattern or even cute-kawaii-designs such as the adorable jellyfish that proliferated on clothing lately. Other men, though, wore their panties tucked into the collar of their shirts, hanging down their fronts like a tie. One gentleman who was just being seated actually wore his pair across his lower face like a mask to filter his breathing. Presumably he would remove it in order to eat. The two sharply dressed adult women being seated with him appeared utterly indifferent to this accoutrement, apparently not insulted by the fact that their own larger personal garments would not be coveted in this way.

Stake touched Fukuda's elbow, causing him to pause and face him. "What do you think of this fad with the panties, Mr. Fukuda, having a teenage daughter of your own? I've heard girls even younger than Yuki sell their underwear to panty brokers, who put them in those vending machines you see around."

Fukuda's hands were tucked into his jacket pockets. He withdrew his right hand just far enough to reveal a shimmering membrane of white silk that he rubbed between his fingers. "Cotton is most popular, but I find the touch of silk more calming." His eyes twinkled, testing Stake's reaction.

Stake couldn't stop himself from stammering, "Those aren't… Yuki's?"

Fukuda lost his twinkle immediately, exchanging it for a look of dismay. "What? Of course not!" It seemed to take him a moment to compose himself, after the rattling suggestion that he might fetishize an article of his own child's clothing. "Mr. Stake, in the community of Luzon, here in town, a man might savor the taste of dog. But he will not eat his own. And he will protect his dog from ending up on someone else's plate, too. Do you catch my meaning?"

Stake caught it only too well, but he wanted to pursue the matter and ask how his client would feel if he learned that one of these businessmen were right now wearing his daughter's used dainties, sold by Yuki to one of those entrepreneurs who in turn dispensed them through vending machines in subway stations, malls, and even in the washrooms of upscale nightclubs, but he decided not to poke the man about his hypocrisy. It was no different from a man having no qualms about a woman selling her body-so long as he had not sired that body. Anyway, they were now holding up traffic behind them, and needed to seat themselves at their own table instead of standing in the midst of these others.

The executive cafeteria of Fukuda Bioforms was smaller, more intimate than the one in which Stake had lunched with Yuki Fukuda. It was more of a restaurant, really, and once they were settled a wait staff served them their drinks and salads. Though Stake was sure the general cafeteria for the hordes of office drones and lab techs was considerably less swanky.

Hemmed in by tropical potted plants and subdued lighting, Fukuda and his guest hovered over their blood orange martinis until their steaks arrived. Fukuda had insisted on ordering for Stake, after first determining that he was not a vegetarian. He watched avidly as the private investigator cut off a tender chunk of filet mignon, popped it into his mouth and chewed.

"Mm." He nodded. "Mmm. Don't tell me- from your deadstock, right?"

"Oh, Mr. Stake, you ruined my surprise. Yes, it is. Wonderful, eh?"

"It really is. Very delicious. Thank you."

"Janice Poole phoned me to say that you had talked with her about the daughter of Adrian Tableau. And talk of that butcher Tableau put me in mind to treat you to something of a far better quality than the blobs he churns out at Tableau Meats."

"The consumer gets what he pays for, I guess." Mention of Janice Poole made Stake want to casually establish how well acquainted with her Fukuda truly was, but he knew it wasn't relevant to the matter at hand, and he couldn't say he was jealous enough, yet, to obsess over it. So instead, he focused on Fukuda's relationship with this Adrian Tableau. "Then you two are definitely not fond of each other."

"He's the one who seems to have a problem with me, though there's room in the market for us both. This is a hungry town, and we both ship our product as near as the city of Miniosis and as far as the planet Earth. But our client base is a little different. As you say, his products appeal to those with less discriminating tastes."

"And less money."

"Yes. Not that our products are overpriced, just of a higher grade. Well, I suppose that after the Alvine Products scandal and the closing of their plant, Adrian grew used to having the market all to himself for a few years."

"Do you think he hates you enough to have someone steal your daughter's valuable kawaii-doll? If not his daughter Krimson, then another girl?"

"It's a possibility. I was aware that his daughter had gone missing, but I never put that and the disappearance of Dai-oo-ika together until Janice brought it up to me in her call. Still, it's a pretty indirect way for Tableau to attack me, unless his daughter did it on her own purely out of spite."

"Yuki told me that a friend of Krimson's claims to have heard her on a Ouija phone."

"Bah." Fukuda waved his fork dismissively, one cheek bulging with his own bite of steak. "I'm not convinced about those things. And even if they do enable people to speak with the trace energies of the departed in some alternate existence, it isn't healthy. It isn't meant for us to throw stones into the well of souls, so to speak, in some irreverent form of play."

"Maybe we can learn from the dead."

"I'll find out about it firsthand one day. I can wait until then."

"I think the kids are less afraid of this stuff than we are," Stake observed. "More open-minded about the technology."

"Or more naive. Or it could be that being older, we're more uncomfortably aware of our own mortality."

Stake wanted to ask Fukuda about his wife, then, especially now that he knew from Janice Poole that she had been murdered. But that had no bearing on the matter at hand, either. How could it? As Yuki had warned him, her father had loved his wife dearly. Why upset him if there were nothing to gain from it?

"Well," Fukuda went on, "this is food for thought, anyway. Pardon the pun." He poked at his steak with his knife, looking pensive. "I should hope it wasn't Tableau behind it. I wouldn't want to imagine why he'd want that doll."

"I'll look into it. Though honestly, I think it's more likely that the daughter would do it on her own, instead of her father putting her up to it. But I don't want to make limiting assumptions."

"Mm," muttered Fukuda, digesting thoughts that tasted decidedly less appetizing than the meat he savored. He looked up at last and studied Stake's face. And smiled an odd, sad smile. "I don't mean to make you self-conscious about it, so perhaps I shouldn't mention it, but in the past few minutes you've started to take on a resemblance to me again."

Typically, Stake dropped his gaze. "Sorry."

Fukuda laughed. "Why apologize? I don't consider it a personal violation. As I've said, it intrigues me a great deal." His smile faltered, took on that melancholy aspect again. "But seeing you this way does fill me with a strange emotion. You see, I had a twin brother-James. He died some years ago."

Stake was plainly surprised. First Yuki's revelation about her mother, and now this. Was their family under some curse? But then, Punktown was a dangerous place. Even so, shouldn't the Fukudas' wealth have insulated them a bit better from that?

"I didn't realize," he said. "I'm very sorry to hear it." He didn't know what he should say, how much curiosity was prudent. He couldn't help it, though; it was his job, and thus his mind-set, to be curious. He asked, "Was he, uh, a fraternal twin or identical?"

"Identical. Like you're becoming."

"I'm not that good at this."

"Good enough. It's uncanny. So, this ability of yours must come in handy in your line of work."

"It's been useful. I can program faces into my wrist comp, like masks I carry with me." He tapped its screen. "It gets me in places. It gets people to talk to me when they might not otherwise. I control it the best I can. If my look starts to slip, I just stare at my comp again. And if I need to be me again, I have my own face in here, too."

"It's all so amazing."

"Sometimes I think what's more amazing is that people's cells are constantly being replenished, replaced, and yet they maintain their appearance. It's like they clone themselves over and over and over again. Right down to every last mole and scar."

"Hm. Yes." Fukuda prodded at his meat some more. "We are fascinating organisms, aren't we? The flesh is the ultimate clay; how could we as a species not want to mold it? We have tattooed it, pierced it, exercised to tone and build it, tanned it and tamed it. Modified it and improved upon it with bio-engineering." He wagged his head, then sipped his martini. Observed his guest as if contemplating himself in a mirror. "Is that all you've been, then, a hired detective? Was that your dream from an early age? A romantic, idealized sort of profession? Or did you just fall into it?"

"More fell into it. I don't know that I ever had a dream occupation, just a dream to escape Tin Town. I was born there."

"Ohh, I see."

"I joined the military at eighteen, to get out."

"Really? And did you see action?"

"A full four-year stint in the Blue War."

"You lived through that hell, eh? Thank God for that. And did they take you in spite of your mutation, or because of it?"

"They were enthusiastic about it. They started training me straight off for deep penetration missions, behind enemy lines."

"You did that in the Blue War? Then, can your skin take on a blue color, too?"

"It tries. It gets. bluish. I ended up using a dye for that. But the dye didn't wash off too quickly, and it almost got me shot by my own people a couple of times even after my face had reverted to normal."

"You've had an interesting life."

"Think so?"

"Yes, very much so. Maybe not lucrative, but lucrative and interesting do not necessarily walk hand-in-hand."

"You sound like you have regrets."

Now it was Fukuda's turn to avert his eyes. "We all have regrets, Mr. Stake."

After lunch, the rich food and drink sitting in his guts like its weight in gold, Stake returned to his flat. This was on the top floor of a squat tenement building at the very end of Forma Street, one of the town's longest and most colorful avenues. Unfortunately, one of the presiding colors was red. But perhaps in some masochistic way, the street suited Stake's mood, though he could have afforded to live in a somewhat less raucous neighborhood. He joked to people that the gunfire at night reminded him of his soldier days.

He wasted no time in changing from his generic black business suit into something much more comfortable: a pair of jeans and an old T-shirt. This was in camouflaged shades of blue, from pastel to indigo. Barefoot, coffee in hand, he stood at his windows and watched the daily Mardi Gras for a few minutes before turning away to sit at the banged-up secondhand desk that was all he really had by way of an office, though the computer equipment arranged atop it was fairly state-of-the-art.

He was juggling a few other cases concurrently with John Fukuda's, though it was more conventional stuff. He checked his messages and did a little research into this or that ongoing investigation. One of these involved a runaway daughter, Yuki's age, but her scowling photo on one of Stake's array of screens suggested she was far less innocent. At this point Stake was pretty sure that the girl had run off with a thirty-four year-old boyfriend, down south toward the Outback Colony. This girl put him in mind again of Krimson Tableau, whom Yuki had said might also have run off with an older boyfriend. When Stake did a net search on her name, however, he found little that was useful. A missing persons report had been filed by her father, Adrian Tableau, over a week ago, apparently one day after she had failed to return home from school. But there was no mention of any boyfriend that the police had been asked to seek out and question. Maybe just schoolyard gossip? After all, if Yuki's story about Krimson speaking over a Ouija phone could be believed, the girl was not a runaway, but more likely a murder victim. Murder victim.

Stake's next net search had him looking into the death of Yuki's mother. John Fukuda's wife. Just out of nagging curiosity.

Again, he found little. Yuriko Fukuda had been murdered four years ago. (Janice had been right; she hadn't died when Yuki was a baby, as the girl had claimed.) Shot to death in her home by an unknown assailant, possibly in a bungled robbery of their high-class apartment. Attached to the news report was a holoportrait which Stake rotated on one of the other screens. A stunning woman. He could see where Yuki had got her looks.

Stake rolled back a bit in his chair, still staring at the revolving disembodied head of the beautiful woman, and yawned. He thought he might steal a nap, then get up and head down to LOV 69 for a dinner of burgers and brews. He wondered if the Legion of Veterans Post bought its cheap hamburger in bulk from Tableau Meats.

Beautiful head. Spinning and spinning. Beautiful face. Turning away from him, then turning his way again.

She had been so beautiful. As beautiful as the monastery, with its outer and inner walls tiled in mosaics that told the story of her faith in place of a holy text. (It's a comic book, joked one of his fellow soldiers as he followed the story. Then the soldier had gunned away the brightly glazed little tiles that composed the face of their prophet in one of the "comic book" panels.)

The monastery had been secreted away in the heart of a jungle where every frond and blade and leaf and vine was a vivid shade of blue. Blue lizards basked in the broken rays of twin blue-white suns. Lovely insects fanned their blue wings as they rested on blue flowers. Deceptively like butterflies, they were. But they drank blood, not pollen.

It was ironic that the monks themselves could not see the mosaics, but they spent hours each day reverently running their hands over the raised and contoured shapes as if reading a bible printed in Braille. It was the first time some of his fellow soldiers had seen the Ha Jiin's clerical caste, and they were horrified. Their horror made them angry and rough as they herded the monastery's ten monks together, prodding them where they wanted them to go with the muzzles of their guns.

They wore beautiful flowing robes of azure silk, embroidered with raised religious symbols also seen worked into the mosaics. On their heads, black three-cornered hats. And because the holy caste started smoking their incense as children, each of the ten monks had a whorl-like hole in place of a face. Like a huge knothole in leathery blue tree bark. The incense had cancerous properties that ate their features away over the years, obliterating their identities so that they were all identical servants of their faith. The cancer eventually reduced their fingers to nubs so that the hands they rubbed along the tiles were more like blunt flippers, fleshy mittens. They sacrificed their fingers by pinching the hot glowing incense out of the bowls of the pipes they smoked. Then, they pressed the ash to a point in the center of their chests until over time a smaller vortex wound opened there, like a window straight to their hearts. They humbled themselves this way day after day. Until they were fully transmogrified. Until they needed the incense no more.

"This is how hardcore these people are," marveled one of the soldiers, wagging his head in awe. In fear. "This is why they're so fucking tough to fight!"

Devoted to their faith. Devoted to win their war against the emerging Jin Haa nation. And the Earth Colonies' military forces that supported it.

It was because of this fierce devotion that Corporal Jeremy Stake was a little surprised that the two Ha Jiin fighters who had taken refuge in the monastery surrendered when the Earth soldiers surrounded it. Stake was in command by the time they captured the monastery, because their unit's lieutenant and sergeant had both been killed by sniper fire.

The captured fighters were a woman in her early twenties and a boy of maybe nineteen with a badly infected leg wound that had slowed them down and forced them to hide out in the monastery. Stake ordered their medic to see to the boy. Their guns were collected. From the woman they took a sniper rifle; a sophisticated Earth weapon she had no doubt taken off a corpse at some point.

"Let me shoot that bitch!" Private Cortez raged, aiming his own gun at the now unarmed woman, her fingers linked on top of her head. "She's the one who killed the lieutenant and Sergeant Lindy-has to be!"

"We don't execute prisoners unless they attempt escape," Stake intoned, quoting regulations.

"She looks like she's gonna make a run for it to me" remarked another unit member, leveling his bulky, multi-barreled assault engine.

"She was picking off our officers," Cortez said. "You would've been next, man!"

"I mean it," Stake told them. "Just get some restraints on them."

"Sir," said Private Henderson, calling him over to examine the sniper gun they had confiscated. He pointed to some Ha Jiin characters etched or burned into the weapon's stock. "Can you read this?"

"What's it say?"

Henderson met his eyes gravely. "'The Earth Killer.'"

Overhearing this exchange, Cortez bounced on his feet and jerked his gun at the woman, raging anew. "It's her! She's the Earth Killer! That's what they call her! She's snuffed I don't know how many of us, Stake! We need to riddle this fucking bitch now!"

"I told you to back off, didn't I?" Stake snapped. "Don't argue with me or it goes in my report."

"The corporal's gunning for general," wisecracked another man, but he ignored it.

The Earth Killer. Her own people had dubbed her that. A legend, almost, even to them. And it had worked its way to the ears of the Colonial troopers. A cold-blooded little beauty, carrying a gun almost as big as herself, with a patient trigger finger and an instinctive eye for drilling solid projectiles and various types of ray beams into enemy soldiers at great distances, even through the intervening chaos of jungle vegetation.

But Stake wanted to know her real name, and he stepped closer to her. He asked her, in his crude fumbling attempt at the native language. She said nothing, staring at him unblinkingly. He edged closer, to intimidate her. But not too close, because he was intimidated himself, though she was five feet tall at best, slim as an adolescent boy, and had had her wrists banded together in front of her. Those cat-like eyes. He stared into them. He repeated his question.

"Thi Gonh," she answered this time, in a voice surprisingly dark and strong for her small frame. And then she gasped. And Private Cortez broke into laughter.

"You're starting to mimic her, Stake," he said. "And she looks like she just saw a ghost!"

Stake realized he had been looking at her too intensely, and severed his eye contact. But he hadn't been able to help himself. The young woman was indeed a beauty, as the rumors had indicated. The shape of her face was delicate, with fine cheekbones, the mouth feminine but hard with a kind of composed arrogance. Her nose looked like it might have been broken at some point, but this-like the black mole below one corner of her mouth-rendered her beauty more individual, gave it a flawed humanity to blend with the ethereal loveliness. There was a fold of skin over the inner corners of her eyes in what is called the epicanthus, giving them the slanted look of the Asian peoples for whom Stake felt the Ha Jiin were this dimension's analogue.

The woman's flesh was the robin's egg blue that made these people so eerily lovely, like ghosts. Her waist-length hair, parted in the center and gathered loosely behind her head, stray strands hanging in her face, was midnight black-and yet, it had a metallic red sheen where the light slid across it. Similarly, the pupils of her eyes were black as volcanic glass, but when they caught the light a certain way glowed a bright, unsettling red. Demons, some of the Earth soldiers called the Ha Jiin. It made it easier to kill them.

Stake had the woman patted down for secreted communication devices or weapons, a blade or such. When he saw the soldier give her chest a double squeeze, thinking that the corporal didn't see him grin in the woman's glaring face, Stake growled, "Show some professionalism, you stupid fuck! Put her in one of the rooms we can lock. Stand guard outside it."

"Leave her cuffs on?"

"Yeah, for now."

This private and, at Stake's urging, the more professional Henderson escorted the woman away. Stake thought better of it and had a third man follow them, gun ready. Even without weapons, the Ha Jiin could fight like panthers.

Stake went on to check the medic's progress with the wounded boy, who had been taken to one of the tiny bed chambers-containing little more than a thin mattress on the floor-that each of the monks had been using before the Earth soldiers had corralled them all into one large room where they could be guarded. The boy had spoken English when the two Ha Jiin had been captured, and Stake had hoped to question him, but the medic had put him out in order to safely work on him.

Instead, he made contact with his superiors and gave a report of his unit's status. The loss of the two commanding officers and two infantrymen, the seizure of the monastery, the capture of the Ha Jiin fighters. He mentioned the words etched on the female's Earth-made weapon. And he was commended for his work.

Stake was told to hold the monastery until another ground unit rendezvoused with them in a few days, and then together they would go onward to the next X on the map, the next block on the chessboard. Since none of the Colonial Forces soldiers were so badly wounded as to require that a medevac fly in and transport them out, a flier wouldn't be sent in just yet to collect the prisoners; probably not until the joined units were ready to move onward together to their next destination. Due to the sensitivity of their operations, Stake as yet had no idea where that destination might lie, or what his people were to do when they got there.

He was ordered not to harm the clerics, as it could make for bad press. They would not be taken away when the flier eventually came in. Though small probing bands of the Colonial Forces wormed their way through this part of the jungle, officially they were not even supposed to be here due to the area's great religious significance. (Here, the valuable subterranean gases that certain parties wanted to harvest leaked from occasional fissures, coiling into the air like spirits to be worshiped.) Stake felt that his superiors wanted to digest the situation better before sending in any conspicuous aircraft. It might even be that the joined units would be required to bring the prisoners along with them on foot. When the orders came, whatever they were, he would obey them.

Ultimately, as night began to fall, Stake checked back on the captured woman. The guards were rotated, and Henderson reported that he had managed to exchange a few words with the reticent prisoner in her own tongue, aided by the up-to-date translation chip he wore in his head, programmed with the Ha Jiin language and so many others. Smiling, he told the corporal, "You really spooked her. She called you a Ga Noh. That sort of means a chimera or a shapeshifter. A mystical kind of being; part human, part god. Maybe good, maybe evil."

"Did you tell her that I'm only some Tin Town freak?"

"No sir. It could be useful if she's in awe of you." "Just like you are, right, Henderson?" "Exactly like that, sir."

Stake looked at the closed door of the room she was kept in, a thick panel of blue-glazed wood. "I'm going to go in and have a look at her."

The woman was sitting cross-legged on the mattress, her wrists bound in her lap. She and the boy had reverently kicked off their sandals when first brought into the monastery. Stake's eyes took in her bare feet, the spacing and stunting of the big toe (did the thong of the sandals do that, over time?) making them look somewhat prehensile, and there were even little spurts of coarse black hair on their knuckles. Monkey feet, the Colonials joked about the Ha Jiin, to dehumanize them further. The woman's feet were small, like those of a child. Self-consciously, he lifted his eyes from them to meet her gaze. Her own eyes presently flashed that disturbing red color, as if lit from within.

Stake knelt down in front of her, at the edge of the mattress. "I'm Corporal Jeremy Stake," he told her, touching his chest. In halting snatches of the Ha Jiin language, he tried to tell her that he was the commanding officer, though surely she knew that already from the insignias on his blue-camouflaged uniform and from observing him take charge of the others. He had no doubt now that it was she who had picked off the lieutenant and sergeant, and that she was only too familiar with reading insignias of rank in her rifle's magnifying screen.

She said nothing. But she held his gaze. She was waiting for him to start changing again, he realized. Watching to see her own face reproduced on his, like a reflection appearing through subsiding ripples after a pebble has broken through a pond's smooth surface.

Several little flies hovered through the room, and one alighted on her chin, crawled toward her mole as if might be some rare berry. The woman turned her face toward her shoulder and crushed the bug against herself. When she returned her eyes to Stake's, he saw the tiny insect smeared across her lower lip in black flecks.

Without thinking, seemingly without willing it- but aware that the heavy door was closed behind him-Stake reached out with his thumb and wiped the flecks from her lower lip.

She opened her mouth, and closed it around his thumb.

For a moment he expected her to crush her jaws together. Then shake her head from side to side like a dog with a cat in its teeth. Instead, she sucked on his thumb. Keeping her eyes fixed on his. They were black again, at the same time mysterious and full of meaning.

And that was when Corporal Jeremy Stake knew that he and the Earth Killer were going to be lovers.

With her still sucking on his thumb, and swirling her tongue around it, he heard a strange sound from beyond the thick door. Unearthly, uncanny. Between the sound and the woman's actions, the hair rose on the back of his neck. He realized it was the sound the monks made through the spiral hole where their faces had once been. All ten monks were making the sound together. It was a time for chanting. They could see no timepieces, but it must have been an hour they felt arrive inside them.

The noise grew louder. Louder. It hurt his ears. Became deafening.

Stake no longer saw the woman. He saw only his pain. He clamped both hands over his ears, and opened his mouth wide in a cry of agony. His mouth widened. Widened. The sound of the monks was now coming from his own mouth, which widened more and more. His mouth was going to open until it swallowed his nose, then his eyes. Until all that was left was a gaping hole screaming in the center of his face.

Oh my God, he thought. I'm changing into one of them.

His eyes sprang open, his palms still pressed to his ears. That horrible sound still pouring out of his wide, wide mouth. Jeremy Stake scrambled out of the chair in front of his computer station, awake once again, and staggered into his bathroom. Terrified of what he would see in the mirror there.

But when he dared to activate the mirror-screen (which reversed his reflection for him, so that he might appear to himself as he appeared to others), Stake saw that his mouth was not locked open wide, and spreading wider, after all. It was more of a drooping grimace, really. And he panted through it, gripping the edge of the sink. Gazing at his reflection, he muttered a chant of his own.

"Jeremy Stake. Jeremy Stake. Jeremy Stake." As if he were his own prisoner of war, giving his name, rank and serial number.