Ikuo, too, considered this, and the three of them were silent for a while until Gii, youngster that he was, couldn't stand the silence anymore and raised a new topic.
"Patron asked me why my mother and I hadn't kept the Church of the Flaming Green Tree going," Gii said. " 'Don't they even call you the new Gii? ' he asked. I was kind of annoyed. I felt almost like picking a quarrel with him, coming back with something like, What if I am? If I asked you to return Brother Gii's chapel to me, would you do it? But I kept my cool and talked about what's always been on my mind. You're asking me why I distanced myself from both the Church of the Flaming Green Tree and the Base Movement and why I had to create the Young Fireflies? Well, the reason is that I have some prob- lems with the leaders of both those movements. I may not be using the term correctly, but I think both leaders were defeatists. That's what I told Patron."
Gii stopped speaking, his pale face quite excited. Ikuo, too, was silent, pondering all this.
"What do you mean by defeatists?" Kizu asked.
Gii's pale cheeks suddenly revived. He'd been afraid they'd point out he'd used the word incorrectly.
"What I mean is from the very beginning neither Former Gii of the Base Movement nor Brother Gii of the Church of the Flaming Green Tree thought their movements would be successful."
Gii pursed his lips tight and turned pale again, so Ikuo explained things to Kizu.
"You know how the Former Gii threatened the people who lived down- stream, saying he was going to blow up the dam and flood them? If he'd re- ally wanted to, he could have done it, but he didn't. When he was murdered and his body dumped in the Hollow, his own tale was finished. Hadn't he known this? He created his movement resigned from the start that it would end up this way, which is why he's a defeatist.
"Brother Gii attracted a lot of followers and got production up and run- ning at the farm, and things would have gone well if only he'd stuck it out.
But suddenly he announced that the church was over, and a handful of fol- lowers would go out as missionaries, and that's when he was killed. I suspect he had a premonition at the beginning of his missionary trip that his story was over too. Gii thinks this is defeatist, and that putting that kind of person in charge is a big mistake."
As Ikuo spoke, Gii looked at him again with trusting eyes, blushing. But a moment later Ikuo turned on him.
"I haven't asked this before, but do you think that Patron, who did the Somersault, is a defeatist too? Are you saying that Patron, without doing a proper self-critique, has come here to this region to restart his church, but he's still a defeatist? And that before anything concrete gets done he's going to be murdered or something? In other words, you guys aren't taking him seriously; you think that if you just bide your time the Fireflies will come out on top?"
Far from flinching, Gii held Ikuo's gaze calmly. To Kizu, Gii's fea- tures-the outline of his ears and nostrils, as well as his clear eyes-looked fresh and soft, like some newly budding plant. Gii chose his words carefully as he replied.
"I haven't given the term defeatist a lot of thought, so there may be con- tradictions in what I said. But I find it interesting that Patron would start his own church and religious movement and then, at a certain point, do a Somer- sault and announce that everything he's preached till then was nonsense. The defeatists I'm talking about never had the guts to do that.
"No, I'm not some optimist sitting just around waiting for Patron's church to self-destruct. We Young Fireflies are planning to make this re- gion independent, and now a formidable opponent has entered the picture- your church. I don't think either Patron or Ikuo are defeatists. The Hollow's legally occupied, as are these large buildings; that's a given. What we have to do is build up our forces so we can compete with you. Anyway, that's the sec- ond thing I wanted to tell you."
Later that day, Kizu recalled their conversation and felt quite keenly that Gii was, as Ikuo had told him, an outstanding young man, the main rea- son being the skillful way he'd wrapped up their conversation.
"Patron told me you have cancer, Professor," Gii had said suddenly, throwing Kizu a challenging look. "The church hasn't begun any new ac- tivities, he said, but he'd like to concentrate his spiritual strength in trying to control your disease."
Looking over Kizu from top to bottom, Ikuo asked, "So has Patron's spiritual concentration had any effect?"
"The exhaustion I felt when I lived in Tokyo doesn't seem to be as bad as it was before," Kizu replied. "And I'm not as depressed."
"Yeah, but having a person's spirit soar when the founder of his reli- gion concentrates his spiritual power for his sake does seem a bit predictable, doesn't it?" Ikuo said, as Gii let out a happy laugh.
23: THE TECHNICIANS
1
"I heard from Gii," Dr. Koga said, "that Patron's trying to use his spiri- tual powers to control your cancer. Who knows but what it might be slowing down the spread of the disease."
He said this as he handed over two weeks' worth of the various medi- cines Kizu was taking.
Putting the question of how he was feeling on hold, Kizu looked at the painting he'd done that was hanging in a frame on the wall of the clinic, the one showing Ikuo from behind, naked down to below his waist. Ikuo's broad back was so muscular it looked like he was carrying a soft shell on his back.
His overall build, with its bulging muscles, looked entirely natural, not like the localized protuberances one expects from weight trainers. Dr. Koga, put- ting all the medications in a paper bag, followed Kizu's gaze.
"Ikuo seems to fit right in with the kids here," he said. "The parents who use my clinic used to consider the Young Fireflies as some reserve youth corps of the yakuza, but with Ikuo in the picture they changed their tune."
"The art class project was turned down, though, thanks to my affilia- tion with the church," Kizu said. "Well, with Ikuo and the Fireflies doing so well, Dancer and Ogi wanted me to ask you something, an internal matter of the church actually."
"About the Technicians?"
"That's right. Ikuo seems to have a good relationship with them too, but there doesn't seem to be much communication between them and Patron."
Dr. Koga fixed his dark deep-set eyes on Kizu and then gave a practi- cal suggestion, hoping to lighten the mood.
"The clinic's closed today, and it's raining a little, so what do you say we take a drive and talk? Patron's spiritual concentration aside, a drive shouldn't be bad for you. In the afternoon I'll drive over down below the dam and honk my horn."
Every two weeks, on days when the clinic was closed in the morning, Kizu went to get a thorough examination from Dr. Koga and refill his pre- scriptions. He'd heard that Dr. Koga had been taking drives here and there in the area, using copies of maps from the town hall, since with all the new logging roads that had been built the standard maps were of little use.
Dr. Koga showed up after lunch, early, and Kizu climbed into his car.
The rain had ended but, instead of a uniformly overcast sky, clumps of dark- gray clouds scuttled across overhead. They drove up the slope toward the forest, which was chockful of lustrous leaves after the morning's rain. The slope was steep, but as long as one paid attention to the shoulder it wasn't dangerous. When they passed the T-shaped intersection below the farm that Ikuo and the Technicians had taken over, they saw a small truck that was going to pick up some materials that had come down and was waiting for them to pass when the rain had let up; some of the Technicians were aboard.