Deadstock (punktown) Page 16

  He smelled her skin now. He smelled the hair of her head, her hair down there. Her hard slender calves were unshaven, hairy as a boy's. It excited him. A few hairs grew from the corona of her nipples. It enthralled him, all of it-every detail pretty or plain- because she was not a dream, not a fantasy; real flesh and blood, a creature of the earth and forest, hands not fossilized white like the aristocracy of her race but with dirt and blood under their fingernails.

  Or was she? Was she so real, now? Hadn't she become a fantasy after all, like a porn movie android, like a seemingly three-dimensional actress in a holovid?

  Why couldn't he forget her? He had tried. And sometimes, for months even, had succeeded. But some ghosts couldn't be exorcized.

  Why had she returned again, as if reincarnated, at this time specifically? What was happening, or not happening, in his life to bring her back with such extra intensity?

  The tease of Janice's attraction to him? The beautiful slanted eyes of Yuki? Or was it even John Fukuda, longing for his murdered wife? Aching for his dead twin brother, a missing half, the absence of which couldn't help but leave him shattered and incomplete? In empathizing with Fukuda too much, had Stake only reopened his own war wounds?

  She did care for me, he chided himself. Hateful- afraid-of his doubts. He reminded himself of something else she had said. Something she had told him before being led into the air cavalry craft. Her tone dark and strong again, not her bedroom whisper.

  "T'ank you, Ga Noh. T'ank you, take care, take care of me. Some time I take care you. I take care you, too."

  Tears burned Stake's eyes like acid. Angrily, he swiped his wrist across his face. And then he pulled his window's shade.

  When John Fukuda entered his own bedroom, he heard a soft hissing sound and realized the Ouija phone was still activated inside his jacket pocket. He closed his door, slipped out the gadget, and stared down at it as if to melt it in the heat of his gaze.

  Was that a tiny voice he heard? Small as the voice of an insect that had crawled inside the thing through a hole in its mouthpiece?

  Slowly, as if afraid it might explode in his hand, explode against his skull, Fukuda lifted the device to his own ear. Held it an inch away from touching.

  "James."

  "My God," he whispered. He trembled more inside than outside. "Yuriko." "James."

  John Fukuda dropped the phone to the carpet. And then he stomped the heel of his shoe upon it.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  the outsider

  Dai-oo-ika lifted his eyeless head to watch Dolly appear out of the labyrinth of sewer tunnels, a plastic shopping bag in hand. She stepped over the streaming brook of a run-off channel and hoisted herself up onto the tiled platform that was their home, pulling the hanging blanket back into place behind her to offer some illusion of security. As she hunched down beside him and started opening her bag, the old woman paused to frown at her companion.

  "Did you get bigger while I was gone, or what? I don't know how you keep looking bigger but you won't eat a damn thing I give you." She rustled through her bag. "Can't say I haven't tried. How about this?" She extracted a banana, all black and soft except for its end. She broke this off and extended it to him. The tentacles that were all he had for a face, ringed in black and silvery bands, writhed and squirmed but did not reach out for the morsel. His hands remained on his knees. "No?" Dolly said. "Christ, are you fussy or don't you ever eat at all?" She crammed the good banana end into her mouth, then peeled the gelatinous rotting section and ate that, too.

  Watching her, Dai-oo-ika thought of his child mother again. Nourishing him with her love. Embracing him to her chest. He missed her; a yawning canyon of inarticulate yearning. Yes, that was the hunger he always felt.

  Dolly settled in beside him, sitting on her stained mattress. She produced her syringe filled with a metallic sand of microscopic nanomites, almost insects and almost machines. "Time for my medicine again, Junior," she told him. "You be a good boy and watch over me while I rest." She injected a measure of the nanomites into a vein in her wrist, then sighed and hid the syringe back inside her coat. She leaned her head against the tiled wall, closing her eyes. "Don't let those punks steal my stuff while I'm resting," she purred grumpily. "They try to… steal… my mediciii…"

  Dai-oo-ika continued to watch her, as she had requested. He watched her eyeballs move back and forth beneath their thin lids as if tossing and turning under a ratty blanket in troubled sleep. He sensed that there was no rest for her species, even at rest. But then, he had his own disturbing dreams, didn't he? Not only of the past-of his lovely, angelic child mother, kissing his belly-but of a future time that would come, or at least was intended to come. He had been having one of these dreams just before Dolly had returned from foraging. Dai-oo-ika had envisioned a burning and mostly flattened city, stretching out black and twisted to all horizons. Below him, thousands of upturned faces and arms lifted in praise. The faces were a mix of human and nonhuman, but all were charred black, blistered by fire and deformed with radiation. Silvery pus ran out of heat-sealed eyes. Yet despite the pain these people must be feeling, they were singing to him, all in one voice of adoration. And he looked down upon them from a great height. For he was huge. Huger than an elephant. Vast. He was their god.

  Arms lifted, so many arms lifted as if to embrace him. It would take that many to embrace him. But when he had been small, it had taken only one pair. Having remembered those arms, he could not forget them again. How he longed to be enfolded in them just one more time.

  Dai-oo-ika stirred, shifted his growing bulk. The blue tarp he had been wearing as a poncho made a crinkling sound as he removed it, but Dolly was too lost in her dreams to be bothered by the noise. He moved closer to her. And spread his thick arms, to embrace her. His friend. He loved her. She was all he had for a mother now.

  Dolly gave a dreamy, muffled moan as her face was pressed against his white belly. He squeezed her tighter, until she not only indented his flesh, but began to slide into it. Where only moments earlier the flesh of his belly had been firm as the flank of a whale, now it was a yielding cloud of cells, a raw pudding of protoplasm that let Dolly's body break its surface, submerge beneath it.

  Dai-oo-ika embraced Dolly until there was nothing left to embrace. And when he opened his arms again, she was gone.

  He knelt there in their little corner of Punktown, surrounded by her cartons of junk, his arms spread empty. On one level, he felt nourished again at last. But on another level, the embrace had left him feeling only emptier still. His friend had fed him. And his friend had gone.

  A confusion overwhelmed him. A sense of helplessness. He did not understand his world. He did not understand what he was, or what he should expect of himself. Had what he'd just done been against his nature, or a fulfilling of it?

  Piercing through all this turmoil was one bright, burning ray. It shot out of him as if to burn this whole city to a crisp. Though he could not utter a sound, it was a howl to burst the eardrums-or mind-of every life form in the universe. It was something he had never felt before.

  Guilt.

  Along with the nanomites in Dolly's system he had absorbed her syringe as well, and the entire swarm now coursed through Dai-oo-ika, racing madly, exploring and mapping this terra incognita and adapting their programming to tickle and soothe a new kind of brain. But their thousands of minuscule claws only itched at it, scratched at it, irritated it instead. A maddening infestation of fleas in the hide of his mind. Gripped in a humming spasm, Dai-oo-ika spread open his wings, their struts like clawed fingers to rake an unknown enemy. Like the wings of a butterfly fresh from its cocoon, drying in the air. But at that moment, Dai-oo-ika wished he had never emerged from his chrysalis of forgetfulness.

  Then, abruptly, he cocked his Medusa-faced head, as if a faraway sound had caught his attention. It was as though his silent howl of rage and loss had burned a tunnel through the ether, allowing this distant sound to come to him. It was like a ghostly but famil
iar voice. It possessed a quality of kinship.

  He turned toward it, because he had nowhere else to go. He would follow the voice like a beacon. But rather than lead him up out of the sewers, it led him deeper into their maze instead.

  "Want anything from the caf?" Mirelle asked her coworker Suuti.

  Mirelle was attractive, he supposed, for a woman of Earth ancestry, but he just couldn't get past those terribly small mouths of theirs. Still, the Choom found her company pleasant. They were cooped up together in this small monitoring office of Fallon Waste Management Systems for their entire shift, and so a harmonious atmosphere was paramount.

  "Uhh, how about a mustard?" he said. Hot mustard was a traditional Choom drink that he had coaxed Mirelle into trying, and now she even bought the occasional cup herself. He began reaching for some change.

  "No, no." She held up a hand. "It's my treat." Mirelle left the office, and Suuti leaned back in his chair, stretched and groaned. His bored gaze returned to the bank of status displays and security screens ranged above his terminal.

  With Mirelle out of the room for twenty minutes or so (he figured she'd work a bathroom break in there), Suuti sat forward and changed one screen to play one of the porn vids he had secreted into the system. He was starting to select a Ron Bistro classic when a loud burst of static on another screen drew his attention.

  A pixilated blizzard filled the monitor. Suuti frowned and lowered his gaze to the tool bar at the bottom of the image. One of the sewage conduits not so far from here: Section D-16. Suuti lifted his eyes again to see a vague dark form shifting behind the veil of static. Then, most of the crackling blizzard cleared, and Suuti saw the form more distinctly.

  It had been moving slowly across the screen from left to right, but now the hulking figure stopped in mid-frame. A head like the body of a mollusk turned. It faced Suuti, and he knew that despite its absence of eyes, the head was seeing him, too.

  Mirelle reentered the monitoring station with a cup of thick, steaming mustard in one hand and a tea for herself in the other. And she almost dropped both cups as she stood transfixed just one step inside the room, staring at Suuti. He was curled like a fetus in the far corner, hugging his knees, rocking and mumbling. "Suuti, are you all right?"

  His head lifted from behind his knees, his Choom grin huge. Suuti's eyes were swollen shut, pink and shiny, as if he had been badly beaten. Fat, silvery tears like mercury were beginning to leak out from their sealed lids.

  "Outsider," he giggled, like a boy caught doing something naughty while Mirelle had been away. "Outsider."

  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."