DEADSTOCK

"No. No, Jeremy, please. At that point there was no other way. They were about to torture her, weren t they? At least she had a chance at being rescued, that she never would have had if Janice hadn t told you she d been kidnapped. But maybe it would have been better that way. You wouldn t have been so seriously injured. And I would have perished alongside Yuki, as I deserved."

"Don t say that. You gave her a brief life filled with love. You don t deserve to die for that. The men who deserved to die are dead."

Stake said that, but even he had to admit that- his methods aside-Tableau had only wanted to find the daughter he loved. And his security men had only wanted to do a good job for the man who had given them a life after the war for which they had been manufactured. Still, Stake had no room for remorse. After all, every enemy he had ever killed had been a child at one time. At some point, all life was i

Fukuda said, "Maybe it was wrong giving her that life. It was a selfish thing, done to alleviate my guilt. I brought a human being into existence just for a way to redeem myself. But at the time, I told myself it was for Yuriko. That was why I made her my daughter, not my lover. I didn t want to lust for her again. My lust for her was what killed her the first time. But it didn t matter, in the end, did it? I still got her killed anyway. It may not sound scientific for the owner of Fukuda Bioforms to say, but it makes me think that she was not fated to be reborn. That I was trying to cheat her destiny."

"Who can say? I don't know if I believe in destiny. But once I didn t believe in ghosts, either."

"The owner of Fukuda Bioforms." Fukuda echoed his own words with a tinge of bitterness, staring off at one of the large VT screens as it played a commercial that managed to seem loud even with the sound muted. "There is no redemption for me. I think I can come to peace with that, in a way. That s my destiny."

Stake tried not to look at Fukuda s face for too long. On top of everything else the man was feeling, he didn t need to see his brother resurrected in front of him once more. So staring through his beer glass, the seething bubbles like cells on a microscope's slide, Stake said, "You know, any time people purposely conceive children, they really do it for their own pleasure. Not to further the human race or anything noble like that. Well, excepting our biological programming to further the race, misguided as those instincts may be. But anyway, like I say, that impulse is no less selfish than what you did in creating Yuki. Right?"

Fukuda heaved a sigh and tried on a smile again, returning his gaze to Stake. "Have you ever wanted children, Jeremy?"

"Yeah. Little blue-ski

Fukuda narrowed his eyes with speculation.

"Hm."

Stake realized he d said too much. He did not want to discuss the mysterious Ha Jiin woman, or the reason for the destruction of Steward Gardens, the fate of Dai-oo-ika, or whether Fukuda would now be sure to order Pablo Fujiwara to destroy all the remaining research from Alvine Products. At that moment, he just wanted to go empty his bladder to make room for the beers to come, so he said as much to Fukuda as he rose from the table. "Be right back," he told him. "And the next round's on me."

"I ll be here," Fukuda replied.

The detective had been gone for a few moments, during which time Fukuda s eyes had wandered back to the muted VT s splashy brightness in the gloom of the bar, when a beeping sound came from inside his jacket. He flinched. For a second, he hesitated in reaching into his pocket, but a couple of other patrons glanced boozily his way. Throwing a look toward the direction in which Stake had disappeared, Fukuda nervously produced a little hand phone. It was a new, state-of-the-art model called the Planchette, with the orange outlines of Day of the Dead skeletons cavorting across its black surface.

The beeping continued, a

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

"Daddy," a voice said, tiny and remote.

There was much crackling, hissing static. She was saying more, but he could not make out the words, the message she wanted to relate.

"What is it, my love?" he said into the mouthpiece. Tears quivered in his eyes, and his own voice cracked as he pleaded, "Please speak louder. I can't hear you. I can't hear you."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeffrey Thomas's milieu of Punktown has been the setting for other of his books, such as the collections Punktown and Punktown: Shades of Grey (with brother Scott Thomas) and the novels Health Agent, Everybody Scream!, and Monstrocity, which was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award. Several of these have been translated into German, Russian, and Greek language editions. Deadstock's protagonist Jeremy Stake also appears in the story "In His Sights" in the anthology The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction. When not visiting Punktown, Thomas divides the rest of his time between Massachusetts and Viet Nam.

You can visit Jeffrey at:

www.jeffreyethomas.com

www.myspace.com/jeffreythomaswriter