In the comedy, Buddy-whose mutation, Stake had read, was called
Stake couldn't fault Vrolik for humiliating himself this way. It was a better life than he'd ever known. He'd been able to move his family out of Tin Town. But Stake knew that Vrolik's benefactors had not been motivated by concern for his welfare. And if other mutants, each more grotesque than the last, became the subjects of their own sitcoms produced by rival networks, then it would not set into motion a wave of public concern for the horrendous living conditions of Tin Town, the epidemic lack of health care for the poor, the toxins in the air. It would set into motion a wave of laughter, from viewers smugly relieved that they had two arms, two legs, two eyes.
Janice Poole returned to the bedroom, wrapped in a purple silk robe and toweling her gray-threaded dark hair. She saw what he was watching as he still lay nude on her bed, but with the skin sheet pulled up to his chest. 'Oh, this guy is so funny,' she said, sitting down on the edge of the mattress. 'I saw him interviewed on VT a few weeks ago and he really is funny in real life, too.'
'The indomitable human spirit,' Stake said drily.
Janice looked around at him. 'I missed you in the shower, lazybones. We could have had fun in there.' She leaned down over him and pressed the side of her face to his crotch, the living flesh of her bed sheet forming a thin barrier between his flesh and hers. She pretended to be listening to a baby inside the womb of its mother. 'I hear something kicking in there.'
Stake ruffled a hand through her hair in a gesture more obligatory than affectionate. He had not been too lazy to shower with her. He had needed the few minutes alone, after the hours they had spent in bed together tonight. They had been watching movies on the entertainment system opposite the foot of her bed. Some of her favorite movies, starring some of her favorite actors.
She had instructed Stake to keep his eyes on the screen. Occasionally she had even touched her remote in order to freeze a huge close-up, so that he could focus on his subject all the better. Like a sniper, keeping her target in her sights. In this way, Janice Poole had at first made love to the hot new actor, Crow Tidwell. And after she had had her fill of Crow, she had exchanged him for the leading man Harris Docker, but in a movie a few decades old, from when he'd first become popular. Stake had not objected. He had complied, passive beneath her, or even behind her. Once in a while stealing a look at her skin, instead, to keep himself aroused.
She raised her head to smile up at his face. 'My toy,' she said. She was so honest about it; how could he hate her for it? 'Back to your 'default' mode, I see.'
'Sorry.'
She narrowed her eyes perceptively, but didn't say anything. She followed his gaze back to the screen, watched Buddy Vrolik for a few moments. In a slapstick scene, his rascally sitcom nephews were trying to roll him down a bowling lane in the hopes of winning a competition. It was VT; of course they'd get the trophy. Janice said, 'How come your face isn't turning all blank right now? What keeps it from trying to copy him?'
'My subconscious seems to know when it's something beyond my reach. I don't try to turn into a Bedbug,' he said, referring to the bipedal insectoid race, from an alternate dimension like the Ha Jiin. 'I won't even try to mimic a Tikkihotto.' This of course was one of the handful of alien races that were truly humanoid, but whose 'eyes' were squirming nests of clear ocular filaments. 'I could reproduce their faces in general, but because their eyes are so different my gift shuts down and refuses to try.'
'Okay, so if your gift is controlled by your subconscious, can't your subconscious be controlled by drugs? Or a chip? Or even therapy?'
Stake met her eyes. 'Why? Are you anxious to lose your toy?'
She arched a brow at him. 'I'm only saying, why didn't you ever do that?'
'I guess I feel this is who I am, now. It came in handy during the war. Comes in handy in my job. And, I suppose it makes me feel a bond with my mother. She was a mutant, too.'
'You don't think there's something masochistic about not dealing with it?'
'What do you mean?'
She held up her hands to ward off potential anger. 'Never mind. I'm being too personal, maybe. Things always deteriorate when men and women stop fucking and start talking instead.' She sighed. 'I'm not good with long-term relationships.'
'Me neither,' he muttered. Though he resented the way she had used him tonight, at least she had wanted him in some way. He had found it difficult to meet a woman who wanted anything from him at all. If she wanted his money, that made it easy enough, in a brief and barely satisfying way.
'Has anyone ever played these games with you before?'
'Well, I once had a woman hire me to find her missing husband. It turned out he'd been murdered by a business associate. She was devastated; especially because she'd doubted him by thinking he'd run off with another woman. A few months after I found him, she contacted me again. She, ah, paid me to take on her husband's appearance. We met a few times for sex.' He shrugged. 'Then, about a month after we stopped that, I heard she committed suicide.'
'Wow.'
'I wondered, for a while, if I made her problem even worse, by doing what I did.'
'Oh no, don't say that. She was badly messed up already. You take on people's faces, Jeremy, but I think you take on their pain a lot, too.'
Again, he met her eyes. It was a more insightful and sensitive observation than he would have expected from her.
In a moment, however, she was back to being the playful Janice, smirking and asking, 'Did a man ever pay you to impersonate a lost
Stake confessed, 'I guess the last time I met with John Fukuda, when I was leaving him, I was kind of afraid of that. Afraid he might ask me to take on his dead wife's form. He'd been looking at me very strangely through lunch. Especially after he'd had a few drinks. I thought I saw tears in his eyes. Then again, he'd talked a little about his twin brother, earlier.'
'Mr. Fukuda did adore his wife, from what I hear. But I don't think he'd accept a man as a substitute. He's very much a fan of the ladies.'
'You sound like you speak from experience.' Stake had finally come out with it.
Again, the smirk. 'Jealous?'
'Curious. It didn't develop into anything major?'
'I guess we're both too restless, he and I. Restless in here,' she tapped her chest, 'instead of here.' She reached over to touch his cheek.
Stake thought of the Ha Jiin clerical caste, with their vortex faces and the smaller vortex in the center of their chests. 'I'm restless in both places.'
She slipped under the sheet with him, but thankfully kept on her robe, content to lie on her back and stare absently at the VT screen. 'How is the Fukuda case coming along?'
'I brought up Tableau Meats to him. The possibility that Adrian Tableau's daughter might have stolen Yuki's doll out of hatred, because their fathers are rivals. I'm going to follow that angle for now. In fact, I think I'm going to try to meet with Tableau in person.'
'Who knows, maybe he'll even hire you to look for Krimson. Or would that be a conflict of interest?'
'Technically, maybe not, but I think I'd have to decline at this point if he asked.'
'So, how much do you know about John's meat company? The former Alvine Products? It has quite a history behind it.'
'I know the basics of the scandal.'
'Oh, I was fascinated with the whole thing when it came out.'
Like Tableau Meats, Punktown's other large meat supplier, Alvine had been in the business of manufacturing livestock-or deadstock, as Fukuda had told Stake they were nicknamed. Battery animals, as they were more formally referred to by bio-engineers. Chickens without pesky heads or feathers, rapidly grown by the thousands in great tanks of nutrient solution. Headless cattle with rudimentary limbs. Hogs that were little more than pink blobs of meat for the harvesting. Tikkihotto hetreki, which were like giant sloths, and llama-like reptiles called glebbi, from the planet Kali. In fact, the top executives of Alvine Products had been Kalian; apparently the leaders of a bizarre
