Chapter 2:
The Princess in the Tower
1
It was late afternoon, and Kaori finally woke up. There was a circle of golden sunlight on the Persian rug. The scent of herb tea reached her nose soothingly. She could see canapes covered in caviar on the table, and a pot of Black Tea. Jiiya (the elderly family butler) must have put them there while she slept. Kaori rubbed her eyes like a baby. She stretched and winced at the pain in her joints. Three days had already passed since... Kaori thought about it in her bed. Three days ago she had been strolling in the garden's golf course.
It had snowed the day before and the lawn's greenery was hidden, but now the weather was unbelievably fine. The distant white birch tree looked beautiful under the sapphire sky. Kaori walked on the snow, ruminating on the contents of the letter her father had sent. Soon it would be her birthday. What kind of present would be good, her father asked.
What do I want..? I don't want anything any more... she thought.
Something glittered above her in the sky. Four streaks of lightning tore from space and one struck Kaori. She screamed and fell onto the snow. It was evening before Jiiya found her. She had been unconscious all that time. Now she untangled her limbs in her bed.
That was three days ago and she still felt the pain. Be that as it may, Kaori thought, what was that light? She had felt very strange ever since the light bathed her. I haven't done hard exercise and still my muscles ache.
Three days ago was when the Earth Ship exploded. Could that have any connection? The newspaper reports had said the cause of the accident was unknown. Currently it was known that a number of people had died. And that was truly terrible. Now that the Earth Ship, which had defended world peace, was gone, criminals would rejoice.
But... Kaori changed her mind. Surely someone will do something. There's nothing I can do about it. She got out of bed and sat down in front of the dresser. It would be better if she moved around. Lying down all the time she would just feel worse. As she brushed her hair, she studied her face in the mirror. It wasn't a bad face, she thought. Maybe her eyes were a little too big, she looked aristocratic. At least she looked intelligent.
She thought back once more to her father's letter. Every year as her birthday approached, she only felt worse. She did not want to be given another present and then have to pretend it made her happy. She wanted to be free of that pain. She could not say anything like that. She could not let down her mother and father. They just wanted to see their daughter's happy face. She had too many useless things. Exclusive designers sent the latest fashions every day, even though she did not order any. Last year her parents had built her a house at the Mediterranean Sea. The year before last it was a Thoroughbred horse.
She had gone to the holiday house only once, but she did ride the horse once in a while. At about this time the servants were feeding it in the back garden stable. Why are we so rich? Kaori wondered. Being rich is being bored.
She seldom saw her mother and father. They were busy flying about all through the year. They did not have any work. Even so they were free of concerns about money. It just piled up without their attention. Her mother and father were always busy giving lectures or doing philanthropic work. In a sudden fit of anger, Kaori threw her hairbrush forcefully against the wall.
Yesterday was so boring. Today was boring. And without a doubt tomorrow would be boring. For Kaori was afraid that, day after day, she was becoming the world's most bored person.
Now, of course Kaori had many so-called upper-class friends. She could hardly keep from yawning when they talked to her about their troubles. They were all nice kids. They could talk about politics, literature, the weather and suchlike. The boys did not do anything weird. She just was not interested in any of them. There did not seem to be a point. She could stand them even though they were so boring, because they kept falling in love with her. And she had no patience with other girls. They were just so commonplace.... What can they know about my real thoughts? Those kids are so boring. No one knows the real me. Not Mother, Father or even Jiiya. How I wish with all my strength I could do something RISKY! I want to escape from this shell. I never want to talk about the weather, learn etiquette or play the piano ever again!
But she did not have the courage to take that step. Maybe, if someone pushed me to leave I could go.
Kaori ate her meal from the table. She changed out of her negligee and went down to the basement, taking care not to be noticed by Jiiya. She became absorbed in planning a game. It did not really mean anything interesting would happen, but Kaori often played in order to focus her mind. The basement was wide and all sorts of famous art, both Eastern and Western, was stored down there. Things her father collected. There were just too many of them and she had no idea how many there were. When Jiiya last counted them, he told her there were twenty-thousand. Now there had to be so many more. Kaori felt like defacing a few paintings, like by painting eyebrows on a masterpiece.
Already, several paintings had suffered her attentions. She had drawn a moustache on Botticelli's Venus, and altered Renault's portrait of a naked woman to have a more slender form. She had taken the dark, gloomy Rembrandt she hated and repainted it bright, cheerful colors. She had painted eyebrows on Picasso's face, but it did not seem to have changed. Now she was after van Gogh's self-portrait. Kaori could take that self-portrait and change it so it was a little more to her liking. Make the eyebrows thicker, the eyes bigger and straighten the nose....
If only that man were to appear in front of me, Kaori thought, I would ask him to take me. She liked strong men. If she made love with a man, she wanted to be held by arms so strong they could literally bend her in two. Several times a week she imagined having a powerful man in her bed. Imagined it was his hands rather than hers taking off her clothes and pleasuring her body. The more bored she was, the more she played with herself.
"Young Miss, I'm sorry to disturb you, but guests have arrived." Jiiya had come, before she was finished altering the portrait, to alert her about these guests.
Kaori took a deep breath. Probably some of those nice kids, her "friends" had come. Time to go out and talk about the blasted weather again.
2
"Birdnic Wave?" Kaori asked her two visitors.
The man and woman were strangers to her. The woman called herself Aya Odagiri, and had a strong presence. The man called himself Ryu Tendo, and had an extremely solid physique coupled with an impression of fearless determination. They claimed to be survivors of the Earth Ship's destruction. "Yes, that was the light that bathed you three days ago," Odagiri informed Kaori.
The three faced each other in Kaori's huge garden. When Kaori sat down on a bench, Ryu and Odagiri stood in front of her. When I was bathed in that light... it couldn't possibly be serious. She could not curb the anxiety in her breast. Well, it looked like today and yesterday would be quite different after all.
"You..." Ryu started to say, then tried again. "You've become a Jetman without knowing what that means." That was what the red bracelet on his right wrist meant.
He had not wept. Before his eyes Rie had been torn from him to vanish into the depths of space. And then Odagiri had shot him. By the time he regained consciousness, he was already in the Jetman secret emergency base. He spent a long time staring at his right hand. He could still feel Rie's grip on it. He could still hear in his ears the sound of her voice calling his name. All the same, he had not wept. As a soldier, this emotional control had been pounded into his veins. And though he could control his emotions, Rie's form remained printed on his eyelids. Rie, falling into the darkness. This terrible memory only increased his hatred for the mysterious enemy who had suddenly appeared and destroyed the Earth Ship.
Even now Ryu could remember the ghastly face appearing on the monitors. Half young and half old, he just could not forget that ugly face. We MUST fight, no matter what. The Earth Ship would take a long time to rebuild. Only the Jetman could fight, now. The nature of the Birdnic Wave was to bond with an organic system. When the Earth Ship exploded, the wave split into four lightning bolts and scored direct hits on four civilians. I will fight with them. If what Odagiri said was true, the Jetman could not fight at full strength unless there were five of them.
Fortunately, the Wave's energy had an extraordinary signature. The base possessed radar capable of locating that signature. And so now, Odagiri and Ryu stood before Kaori.
Odagiri told Kaori everything. About the Jetman Project. The arrival of the mysterious enemy. The fact that the Birdnic Wave was developed from a new element found on another planet. The effect of this energy was to activate cell properties at an extraordinary level. This energy could create a special steel by bonding with a metallic element, or a polymer by bonding with a living organism.
"In short," Odagiri continued, "though you cannot see it, your body is covered by a polymer." And at the bracelet's signal that polymer would recombine and change. Data indicated it would form a two, three-fold reinforced battle suit. In short, she would transform into a Jetman.
"Jetman! What a capital idea!" Kaori said. She had not really listened to the explanation. She was all a-bubble with the only thing that had sunk in: the difficult to imagine idea that she would fight to save the world. "I've been waiting for this day forever! Today I fly away from this every-day tedium...." What is more, she took a good look at Ryu. This is the face I wanted to draw, just a little ago, just as it is. I'd paint this face over van Gogh's in a minute.
3
The mysterious body that had destroyed the Earth Ship was now hidden on the opposite side of the moon. The enormous, transparent womb glittered in the light of the stars. The dead womb which could birth nothing. Like blood vessels with no blood passing through, numberless cracked pipes snaked throughout the body until they united. And at the place where the pipes joined, a space in the body's interior, stood Radiguet.
He possessed a strange face. The right side was designed to appear as an icy youth, the left side as an ugly, ancient man. Both eyes were closed, though, and Radiguet hung upright in midair. There were three shadowy shapes with him. Like him, their eyes were closed and they hung peacefully in the air.
Though he looked asleep, Radieguet was awake. What will Juuza try to say? Even when he seemed calm and quiet on the outside, in a deep place he was always very much awake. He had to be in that state, or he would be unable to hear Juuza's voice. It was the same for the other three. She only existed within the four of them, for she was dead.
The lower half of her body was fuzed into the wall. The upper half was dried up, mummified. Her eye sockets were dark and empty. Her pure white hair, her two, small, frozen breasts. Before long, her mouth began to shift slightly, to shudder open and closed. ...... the five powers... obliterate......
The five powers. Radiguet's eyes flashed open.
4
Under the clear winter sky lay the green of trees, the red of fruits. The wind set leaves fluttering so their white undersides could be seen. The rich brown of the soil. The soil and trees bound together by a procession of ants. The occasional whirling, joyful flights of birds whose names he did not know. He had forgotten the roar of the city and just breathed in the serenity. It was past noon, and here he had stopped to enjoy the mild breezes of this season. Just then a wind came from the city buildings and set the leaves chattering like teeth, exposing the whiteness to his eyes. It was as though the trees started to laugh at the same time.
The stout bushes bore rich, red tomatoes, that basked in the sunlight and their glossy surfaces shone. They were a red as deep as blood. If anyone just once ate these tomatoes, they would be astounded by their sweetness. Here was the last true agricultural land in the midst of the city. Here it was like being in another world with the warmth of the soil surrounded by the cold concrete jungle.
The whole 1,200 Tsubo (4740 square yards) of land was given over to the tomato fields, except for the pigsty in one corner. The man was working in the pigsty. He used a scoop to move pig feces into the field. It did not bother him one bit when his body was smeared with feces.
Ryu, Odagiri and Kaori were trying to get through the stubborness of the man before them. When they talked to him, he would not say a word. He would not even look at them, only kept working silently, wearing his milk-bottle glasses, his plump body jiggling slightly.
The stench that drifted over from the pigsty made Kaori feel as if she might faint. Lyta (for that was his name) spread watered down pig-feces in the tomato field. Sometimes he used a hand towel to wipe perspiration from his neck. When Odagiri and Ryu tried to get close to him, Lyta looked at them darkly. He wanted to ignore them, but he could not help thinking about it. This must be a joke. What is a Jetman? This is so much trouble. Yes, I was bathed in some mysterious light that day I was working in the fields. But why should I have to go fight some enemy? I will never leave here. This Birdnic Wave thing was not my fault. All I want is to live here, taking care of my pigs and tomatoes.
Ever since he was old enough to understand the world around him, Lyta disliked himself. His eyes were bad, his face was bad. He was short and fat and out of shape. His motor reflexes were zero. Most of all, he was an extremely shy person. In the old days in school, he was bullied all the time. They would stick worms in his lunch. They stole his wallet. They punched him on any pretext. The schoolgirls and the lady teachers in the classroom were cold to him. He never fought back against the bullies. He just waited, cringing, for the aches and the storms of bullies to pass him by.
While he was in high school, he attended a Self-Improvement Class seminar. He realized he could make himself stronger by learning Judo. The seminar was for children who were always bullied, but Lyta was still bullied by the other children attending it. Trying to do Judo, he broke his arm and leg, so he quit. When at last he graduated high school, he was relieved from the bottom of his heart. After graduation, he decided to help his parents with their farm. The bullying was over. No more muffled crying in his futon during the night.
And so he only slept a short time, and threw himself into his work. The pigs and tomatoes were his only friends. He was not even a little lonely. The first thing he did every day was say "good morning" to the pigs. In the evening before he went to bed, he always called "good night" to the tomatoes. A wounded person, Lyta gave all the warmth and affection he carried inside to help the pigs and tomatoes. And now at the end of four years of trial and error, no one could best him at making tomatoes grow and he had gained considerable self-confidence.
Actually, the tomatoes he grew were as sweet as apples. It was not as if he was giving them any special fertilizer. The knack to it was to not give them too much nourishment. Tomatoes were originally from the Andes, he knew, so he created an environment for them like their original home. So he had taken poor soil from the mountains to cover the soil in his fields. He never used rich fertilizer. Sometimes he scattered only severely watered-down manure.
Then the tomatoes began to grow by themselves. The tomatoes' roots dug into the soil and anchored there. When the tomatoes were budding then, under the moon on beautiful evenings, Lyta would go out into the fields and sing his plants a lullaby (the one his mother sang to him in the old days). Lyta had never, not once, sang in public. Only the moon and the tomatoes knew he had a beautiful voice.
"Leave me alone," he responded to Ryu and Odagiri's continued efforts. "You want me to fight to protect the world. I can't do that. I hate violence," he answered them stubbornly. More than that, he was afraid of being taken from his fields. Only here was it his world.
Odagiri took a deep breath. The Birdnic Wave had hit such completely different people. But she had to be resigned to it. No matter what she preferred, this man was a Jetman.