Warning: in this chapter mr. Field gives his unreserved opinion of Japanese behavioural patterns.
Political Correctness had not been invented yet back in 1986, and he wouldn't be anyhow.
2.
"'…to our wonderful world full of light.' she said, and so we did return." finished Hyoga.
There was a long silence. He wondered if he should continue, and tell them of his rebellious actions.
Then Nick started to clap.
"Bravo! You have surpassed yourself, Queer: this is your best performance yet. Where did you dig up such a convincing actor? Next time, try pulling the other one though: it's got bells on."
"Oh Ye of Little Faith!" cried Queer, "Hyoga, smite the Unbeliever! Go on, freeze his balls off."
"Quirinalis! Language! Don't be obscene." admonished mrs. Field sternly.
"Some other appendage then. Nothing vital anyway. His brain? "
"Alright, that's enough, son. A joke's a joke, but your obsessive attempts at comedy end up not being funny at all." said mr. Field, as he lit his pipe again.
"It's not a joke. It's deadly serious, dead being the operative word here! You heard the guy: he and his buddies are directly or indirectly responsible for all those thousands who died in the recent floods all over the world.
What would the people in Bangladesh say if they knew, one wonders? Not that there are many left, with all of their country swept away…mind you, it did wonders for the problem of over-population…"
"Queer! That's enough, your father said!" cried mrs. Field. "Think of your poor aunt Josie and uncle Om who were evacuated just in time, and lost their house! I am…Oh!"
Hyoga, at loss what to do but desperate to be believed, held out his hands, half a meter apart, and created an ice-storm in-between.
Vimi gave a small cry. Mrs. Field threw her arms protectively around her daughter; Mr. Field dropped his pipe.
"Holy fuck!" cried Nick, and shrank in his chair.
"Who is being obscene now?" asked Queer smugly.
In her cage, Sybilla screeched and somersaulted; Janiculus jumped up, ran to sniff at mr. Fields pipe, and barked.
Queer snatched it up just before it started to burn a hole in the carpet, and handed it to his father.
"Can I say it, please? Can I?"
"'May I'?' corrected mr.Field, automatically.
"May I say: 'I told you so'? There! I've said it already!"
"OK stop glowing." growled Nick, "What's it all about?"
"It's a trick." said Vimi, speaking up for the first time, in a hoarse, constricted voice: " It has to be. There are no such things as Gods, Saints, Cosmic Powers nor Sixth, Seventh or Eight senses. "
She sounded like she was trying to convince herself.
"Oh, but there are, and that's the problem." said Queer, "Believe the evidence of your own eyes! The lad has powers of some kind. If that part of his story is true, why shouldn't the rest of it be?"
"Because it shouldn't!!!!" said Nick vehemently, " Greek gods walking about! Boys who can split the earth with their fists! An underwater realm…Hades! It's scientifically not possible."
"Oh, yes, Esq will have kittens when he hears about this." said Queer, with a generous amount of glee in his voice. He turned towards Hyoga and explained: " Esquilinus is our elder brother. He's a Theoretical Physicist doing all kinds of Einsteiny stuff, trying to sum up Life, the Universe and Everything in one single mathematical formula. He'll go spare!"
"I'm still surprised at how we all took it in our stride. " mrs. Field would marvel, later, " Everything Hyoga told us was so…so mind-boggling! In retrospect, the whole idea of people becoming Gods and having warrior-saints to fight over the dominance of earth sounds like something out of a Fantasy novel, and a bad one at that."
"Well, it's no good saying pigs can't fly when you see them flapping in your front yard, my dear. Or in your living room, for that matter. Hyoga proved us that he had the powers he said he had, so we had to accept the rest of his story too. And once you have accepted that as truth, going spare may be an option, but hardly a constructive one. Keeping a cool head was the thing to do, and I'm glad we did it."
"I'm close to that myself." confessed mrs. Field, shaking her head and at the same time looking almost apologetically at Hyoga, " Even the parts in your story that are more or less credible are frankly disturbing!"
"I'll say!" cried Nick, " This Mitsubishi fellow now…"
"Mitsumasa." corrected Hyoga.
"Whatever. Kido. What a guy! Hell, I've heard of Simenon supposedly having had a thousand mistresses, and Dumas père scoring twohundred and fifty children, but that was a lifetime achievement, I mean, one hundred kids from ninety-nine different mothers in one year time…chapeau!"
"Coming from a connoisseur, that is praise indeed!" said Queer with a wicked, lopsided grin, " You'll have to work hard to equal him."
"It will be my pleasure." said Nick, smugly, "I'll even spare the time for giving you a few lessons in the fine art of …"
"Yes, yes, we all know that you are a chaud lapin. Incidentally, how is your little Becky? With her mother, this weekend?"
"Quirinalis." said mrs. Field quietly.
Queer looked suitably chastised.
"Sorry , Nick, I know I crossed the line there. Your Becky is a great kid and it would be a shame if she didn't exist." Then he added, with a wink: And thanks for the offer, I might take you up on it!"
"Not before we've had a long talk, son." said mr. Field.
Hyoga looked from the one to the other and wondered if this was how ordinary people spoke.
Queer winked at him.
"We're were talking over your head there, were we not? That's just unmarried father Nick showing off his education and sexual prowess…stick with us a while longer and you'll get used to it."
"Can we get back to the matter at hand?" asked mr. Field ," Nick, you were about to make a point concerning this Kido…"
"Can't remember now."
"What I would like to know," said Vimi, " Is what happened to the mothers."
"So would I!" cried mrs. Field, " No mother would abandon her child like that. This Kido must have put tremendous pressure on those poor women to make them hand over their sons to an orphanage. Surely someone must have protested."
"Anywhere else someone surely would have." answered her husband, turning towards Hyoga, "That is the one part of your story I find totally believable: that your Goddess elected Japan as her base. In no other country would she find a combination of modern technology and total obedience. "
"I'll say! " cried Nick, "There was a delegation at a dentist's congress I attended last year…never saw so much kow-towing!"
"That would be 'kei-reiing'." corrected mr. Field, " The ordinary 30-degree bow."
"Cap…" began Queer.
"Alternatively you may execute the sai-keirei, the 45° bow. "
"Cap."
"And for the extreme cases, you can go on your knees and bang your head on the floor, performing the full 'dogeza'…"
"Cap!"
"But most Japanese settle for the 'shimatsusho', a standard letter of apology, that will excuse everything.
According to our friend Hoolagan, long-time ambassador in Japan, even a rape-case will be dropped by the police if the rapist writes a shimatsusho to his victim, like it never happened."*
"Thank you, Cap, for that short introduction to Japanese morals - or lack thereof- and etiquette." said Queer,
" Come to the point, bitte."
"That is the point. " said mr. Field, puffing on his newly lit pipe, "Bowing to authority is the Japanese way of life. Any authority. Back in '45, they were bowing and shouting 'banzai!' to the American occupation troops as they marched through their streets, simply because they had proven themselves to be the strongest.** Little has changed in forty years, except that Hirohito is no longer publicly acknowledged to be a God. All in all, the ideal place for a reincarnated Goddess to establish her rule of law. She will not be questioned should she decide to go public; and didn't you say she has this entire Japanese information network at her disposal?"
"That is my…Mitsumasa Kido's …the Graad Foundation…but it existed before he found Athena" answered Hyoga, hesitatingly. It rather gratified him to hear his own thoughts about the Japanese spoken so openly here, but there was still a small part of him feeling loyalty towards the man who was, after all, his father.
"But still he found her, right, Hyoga?" asked Queer, " Coo, what a coincidence: the one man who had the means and the sons to support her."
" Actually…it has always been assumed that it was Zeus who guided my…Mitsumasa's steps, perhaps even inhabited his body for a while, a s Poseidon did with Julian Solo…"said Hyoga with some difficulty.
Both mrs. Field and her daughter looked shocked, Nick growled, and Queer made a strangled noise.
"That is totally immoral."
"The Greek gods never were ones for morality." said mr. Field calmly, " And Zeus least of all. I wouldn't put it past him to take over that Kido in order to conceive all those children for his own ends. "
"Hubert…" cautioned mrs. Field, " You are talking about the boy's father."
"I don't care." said Hyoga, with sudden vehemence, " I've always hated Kido, and Zeus even more. Even if either of them is my father, I don't care! May they both rot in hell!"
Mrs. Field stood up, and went over to the young Russian, taking his hands.
"Darling, you mustn't say that. If your father's mind was taken over, he is as much a victim as any of you, and if there still was part of him aware of what was happening, he must have suffered greatly."
"But if he wasn't? What if he freely allowed Zeus in? Think of all the power it gave him, being the Guardian of Athena…if he hadn't died, he would be the most powerful man on earth now. Saori-Athena adored her 'grandfather', and would have complied with his every wish. "
"Dying probably wasn't something he had banked on, then" said Queer. "But sacrificing one's own children is perfectly acceptable god-like behaviour. Didn't Zeus eat his new-borns? No, wait, correction, that was Chronos.
Zeus just ate Athena, or her mother, I don't quite remember…anyway, she was birthed from his head. Ghoulish.
But then so is this whole business. Gods Galore! Child soldiers with phenomenal powers raised to kick the crap out of each other every time the Gods reincarnate from their 200-year nap…"
"Wow, we're really heading into the Twilight Zone here." said Nick, shaking his shaggy head, "I mean, you're saying…what? That you are a son of Zeus? Does that make you a demi-god or something, Hyoga?"
"If I wasn't one already by birth, I have since become one by reaching the Eight' Sense to enter the realm of Hades."
"That's it, we're in the zone!" cried Nick, throwing his arms in the air. Then he grinned and chanted: "Deebah-deebah, deebah-deebah, deebah…"
Hyoga, who had never watched television in his life and therefore would not recognise a sixties cult-series if he saw one, much less it's opening tune, wondered if this was normal behaviour for the man, or that he had just gone mad.
"You guys make me sick!" cried Vimi, with such sudden vehemence that it made Hyoga jump and stare: the young woman looked so frail, breakable like one of those egg-shell porcelain teacups Athena ("No, that was Saori.") drank out of, that it seemed almost impossible for her to have such fierceness inside. Yet somehow underneath her outward weakness he could guess the great inner strength and anger, welling up from behind that vast empty nothingness that was depression surrounding the core of her being.
"Making jokes and talking about it like it was some interesting problem for you to analyse and solve! Manipulating people like puppets is immoral and cruel and something should be done about it!"
"I couldn't agree with you more." said mr. Field, "Which is why we first have to calmly analyse the problem first. For one thing, we need more information. These training camps now…"
He took a puff at his pipe, found it had gone out, went over to the fireplace and proceeded to empty it by knocking it upside down against the mantelpiece. Ashes slowly drifted down into the fireplace and on the carpet.
"Use the ashtray, dear." said mrs. Field in the long-suffering voice of someone who has told a dozen times, and handed him one. Looking a little sheepishly, her husband took the offered tray and emptied his pipe, then went on to clean and refill it as he continued: " Somewhere along the line someone must begin to ask questions. You can stop people from bodily going in, but there are such things as spy-satellites. This Sanctuary in Greece for instance and what's happening there must show up on somebody's screen. How do they manage to evade detection?"
"Simple enough. All they have to do is take control of the satellites in question and replace the real image with an innocuous faked one. And if anybody notices there's something wrong, hell, they are telepaths, no? Wipe the records, wipe the mind, easy as pie. Creepy." said Queer.
"Creepy!" cried Vimi, "It's criminal and plain evil, torturing people like that."
"Mind-wiping, Vimi, not quite the same thing."
"Torture." repeated the young woman with conviction, " Not being master of your own self: imagine the agony of it…."she shuddered suddenly, "I don't have to imagine. I know. "
Mrs. Field hugged her daughter hard.
"We shall put a stop to it." she said, firmly.
Hyoga's mouth fell open.
"You don't know what you are talking about! You can't fight the Gods: they can kill you in the blink of an eye! "
"Some have already tried." growled Nick, "Sounds like a being caught between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea kind of situation. Either we resist and are destroyed, or we accept the rule of these Gods, and whenever they get into another one of their little family-quarrels on who is to rule, we are destroyed anyway. Lovely. Well, I don't know about you, but if we have to go down, I'd rather go down fighting."
"My hero." Said Queer, "And what will you threaten them with, your dentist's drill?"
"We have to do something!" said Vimi.
"Or die trying." said Queer cheerfully.
"Mad." whispered Hyoga, shaking his head and staring at each of them with his one eye wide with terror, " You are all quite mad. One doesn't oppose the Gods: I should know, I've tried. My brothers and I barely came out of those wars alive…" he swallowed, "Some didn't. They are all bound to Athena now, hearts, minds and souls. I tried to resist, and now I am a renegade, marked for death. And so will all of you be, when They find out you have sheltered me! I've put you all in danger!"
He jumped to his feet so suddenly that the half-empty beaker he had been holding in his lap fell on the ground, leaving a trail of tomato soup as it rolled along. With a joyful bark Janiculus the dog leaped at it and started to lick both the floor and the insides of the cup.
Red with embarrassment, the Ice Saint bent down to picks up the object. Dogslobber was dripping down its sides, and Janiculus, eyes full of reproach, went to sit on her haunches in front of him, expectantly banging her tail on the ground. Hyoga didn't know whether to laugh or to run. What he really wanted was to cry.
"You were such a portrait of misery then." Queer would say, " Just looking at you would have decided us, even if you had told us nothing. And, since you did, we were committed."
"I still am not sure whether you were incredibly brave or just insane."
"Then it is the kind of insanity that prevails against all odds. Anyway, you were not the only the only one to have second thoughts about Athena. I came in late in the Godgame, having followed the false Pope first, and then I only did it because of Seiya…I never imagined he would be the price I had to pay for my loyalty. It made me question Athena's rule and her justification for it…and I did not like the answers I was getting when I snooped around a bit, behind the fair facade she put on. But I had no one to turn to, so I ran…you were lucky, Hyoga, to have found such staunch supporters in the Fields."
"It's typical, isn't it? We all had similar feelings, but not a single one of us dared to share them. I felt sure that, because of my previous record, They were keeping an eye on me, just in case I might go 'bad' again, so I never spoke of my suspicions to anyone. I thought I couldn't trust anyone: except you, little brother, but I was afraid to drag you into it."
"Ikki, there is such a thing as being overprotective. If only you had said…we would have talked, and I would have told you about how Hyoga felt before he ran, and then we would not have stood alone."
"But then again, I would not have met the Family."
Mister Field reached over and took the beaker from Hyoga's hands.
"You had better tell us the whole story, lad. Don't leave anything out, so that we fully know what we're up against!"
"I can't, please…you have no idea…absolutely no idea!"
"Seeing you so frightened, I begin to have a pretty clear idea by now."
Hyoga took a deep breath. He was frightened. Not for himself, for he had never feared for himself, never having cared enough about his own life; but now there were these people, whose lives he had put at risk.
"Very well. " he said, trying to control the tremor in his voice, " I will tell. And then you will let me go, and forget. "
To be continued
* and ** authentic