Deadstock

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