Spiral (34 page)

It was past nine o'clock when Ando sank into a seat on the train. When he closed his eyes Sadako's face appeared before him as if by conditioned reflex. He'd never had his feelings about a woman change so drastically over such a short period of time. The cold air of mystery he'd sensed on their first meeting had dissipated somewhat on their second, to be replaced by a growing desire for her. When they met a third time, that desire was realized, and the faint beginnings of infatuation had stirred his heart. And then, the fall. She'd lured him up to a high place, had her way with him, and then pushed him off the edge into the abyss. It was unendurable to think that he'd copulated with a woman who should have been dead for twenty-five years. The word "necrophilia" came to mind. Where had this woman come from? Was the part about her being dead a mistake? Or had she really come back from beyond the grave?

It being a holiday, the train was comparatively empty. Only a few passengers had to stand. Across the aisle from Ando, a laborer-type was sprawled across the bench, occupying enough space for three people. His eyes were shut tight, but he wasn't asleep. Proof of this came every time somebody walking the length of the car passed by him and he opened his eyes a crack to fathom his surroundings. His eyes, however, were so heavy and dull that they almost looked dead. Ando averted his eyes from the man. But the laborer wasn't the only one. Every one of the passengers was as pale as a corpse.

Ando hugged himself to keep from trembling. If he didn't hug himself, he was afraid he'd start screaming, right there in the public space of a train carriage.

He accepted a glass of brandy from Miyashita. First he sent a trickle of it down his throat, savoring the sensation, then he drained the glass.

He was starting to feel human again, but was still shivering slightly.

"How do you feel now?" Miyashita asked.

"More or less alive."

"You must've been freezing."

Miyashita didn't know yet why Ando had come without a coat.

"It's not the cold."

Miyashita had shown Ando into the room he used as a study. Ando was sitting on the spare bed in the corner. It was where he was going to sleep tonight, but for the moment, he was just rattling its metal bars. Only after downing his second glass of brandy was he able to stop shaking.

"What happened?" Miyashita's voice was gentle.

Ando told him everything that had happened since the previous night. When he finished, he fell backwards onto the bed and let out a whine like a mosquito's.

"I give up! Explain it to me! I'm lost," he moaned.

"Good Lord," muttered Miyashita, utterly thrown for a loop. It was one of those moments when people can't help laughing, albeit bitterly, and that's what Miyashita did, weakly. When his laughter had subsided, he poured brandy into some hot coffee and started sipping it. He seemed to be deep in thought, trying to find a reply that was logical, that made at least some sense.

"The basic question is, where did Sadako come from?" The rhetorical tone suggested that Miyashita had already come up with an answer.

"Tell me. Where did she come from?"

Miyashita turned the question back on Ando. "Don't you know?"

Still supine, Ando shook his head. "No, I do not."

"You really don't know?"

"Tell me! Where did she come from?"

"Mai Takano gave birth to her."

Ando forgot to breathe for a few moments while he tried to think of an alternate explanation. But he could hardly think at all. He'd lost the power of cogitation. All he could do was repeat what he'd heard.

"Mai Takano gave birth to her?"

"The evil video was born from Sadako's mind. Mai watched it on a day when she was ovulating. The ring virus was born in her body and then fertilized her egg. 'Fertilized' isn't the right word, though. It's probably more accurate to say that the nucleus of Mai's egg was replaced with Sadako Yamamura's genes."

"I hope you're going to tell me you can explain the mechanism by which all this happened."

"Think back to when we ran the ring virus through the genetic sequencer. We discovered that it contained smallpox genes and human genes mixed together in a fixed ratio."

Ando sat up and reached for his glass. But the glass was empty.

"So the human genes were…"

"Sadako's. Split into hundreds of thousands of parts."

"Hundreds of thousands of ring virus specimens, each carrying a tiny segment of Sadako's DNA?"

"Despite its being a DNA virus, the ring virus has reverse transcription enzymes. So it ought to be able to insert those fragments into the nucleus of a cell."

A single virus specimen would be incapable of carrying the entirety of a person's genetic information. It simply wasn't big enough. But things would be otherwise if a person's DNA could be split into hundreds of thousands of segments, and each segment parceled out to a different piece of virus. In the photos taken by the electron microscope, they'd seen what looked like countless numbers of ring viruses, mobs of them. It turned out that each one of them had been carrying a part of Sadako Yamamura's genetic code, and together they'd ganged up on Mai's egg.

Ando started to stand up, but thought better of it and sat down again. He always got fidgety when he tried to counterargue.

"But Sadako died twenty-five years ago. Her genetic information shouldn't be able to manifest itself anymore."

"Let's think about that. Now, why do you think Sadako projected those images on a tape?"

What had she been obsessed with at the bottom of that well, on the brink of death? The idea of packing all her hatred for the masses into images that would bring terror to anyone who saw them? Practically speaking, what would she get out of that? There had to be some deeper purpose. But Ando couldn't comprehend what Miyashita was trying to say.

Miyashita tried to guide him toward the answer. "She was only nineteen."

"So?"

"So she didn't want to die."

"She was too young to die."

"Isn't it conceivable that she transformed her genetic information into a code and left it behind in the form of energy?"

Ando's only answer was a sigh.

She translated her genetic information into images and then projected those images?
True, Ryuji had succeeded in communicating with them by encoding the word "mutation" into his own DNA base sequence. But the human genome was huge, much too big to be translated into a single videotape.

Ando finally countered with, "Impossible. The human genome is too large."

Miyashita spread his arms to point at the corners of the room. "Take this room, for example.

Let's say we were to express the totality of this room in words."

The study was about eight mats large. A desk stood next to the bed. There was a computer on the desk, and next to that a pile of dictionaries. Most problematic were the bookshelves that took up one wall. They were crammed with what had to be a few thousand books ranging from works of literature to specialist works on medicine. It could easily take a day just to list all the titles and authors.

"That's a lot of information."

"But what if…" Miyashita mimed holding a camera. Click. "… you took a picture. You've got it all in an instant. With just one photo you can store most of the information that makes up the sight of this room. And think, continuous images would increase the capacity that much more. It wouldn't be impossible to encode Sadako's complete genetic information that way."

Ando saw what his friend was trying to say, but he still wasn't ready to go along. "Let me think about it for a while," he said, shaking his head. He needed to go back and retrace for himself a path through what Miyashita was saying.

"Go ahead and think. I'm going to go take a leak." Miyashita disappeared down the hall, leaving the study door open.

Of course, what Miyashita had spelled out was merely a hypothesis. But regardless of whether or not the mechanism Miyashita had suggested was actually how it had happened, the fact remained that Mai Takano had given birth to Sadako Yamamura a week after insemination. That seemed to be beyond question at this point. A week from insemination to birth was an awfully short time. Something must have served to hasten the process of cellular division. A cell's nucleus contains chemical compounds called nucleic acids, and cellular division only occurs when the levels of these nucleic acids exceed a certain level. Accordingly, the only way to drastically accelerate the frequency of cellular division is to provide excess quantities of nucleic acids. Perhaps the ring virus had managed this somehow, making it possible to force an incredible rate of growth in the fetus.

The first time he'd visited Mai's apartment he'd felt the presence of something hidden, even though there was nobody there. His feeling had been right. The newborn Sadako had been hiding somewhere in that room. No doubt she'd been very small still. She could have easily found a place to secrete herself, in the wardrobe, maybe, or in the cabinet under the sink. Ando hadn't gone so far as to search those places. And because she was still so young, when she'd seen Ando in such a compromised position in the bathroom, she'd laughed. The thing that had touched his Achilles tendon had most likely been little Sadako's hand.

Sadako took over that room in the absence of its rightful inhabitant and grew there, away from the eyes of other people. A week was enough time for her to reach adulthood. And when Ando visited the apartment a second time, she emerged from within it as a full-grown woman.

Ando went over the sequence in his head over and over until he managed to wrap his mind around the hypothesis of Sadako's birth and growth. The theory accorded with what he himself had experienced.

But what about the following days? Having reached adulthood in a week, her lifespan would have been just a few more weeks unless she somehow didn't keep on aging at the same rate. Sadako had come back to life at the beginning of last November, ten weeks ago. And yet her skin retained the youthfulness of a girl of nineteen. Perhaps maturation for her meant simply reaching the age she'd been at when she died?

Miyashita came back, shaking his wet hands, and immediately spoke. "One other thing we shouldn't forget is the vital role of the smallpox virus in all this."

"Yeah, well, Sadako and the smallpox virus seem to be in league alright."

Just before her death, Sadako had contracted the virus from Jotaro Nagao. It seemed that she'd somehow blended with it there at the bottom of the well, over a long period of time, until the mixture had achieved full ripeness. Two beings hounded to untimely extinction had exacerbated each other's potency in their mutual desire to come back to life someday.

"Now, is it true that Junichiro Asakawa is going to publish
Ring?"

"Yup. Shotoku already has it listed in a brochure of upcoming releases."

"Okay. Sadako and the smallpox virus. Those two threads were twisted into one in the form of that killer videotape. Now they're coming apart, evolving back into two separate strands. One is Sadako herself, and the other is
Ring."

Ando didn't object. A virus was something that inhabited the gray area between life and non-life anyway, something that amounted to little more than information, whose very nature it was to effect dramatic changes in itself in response to its environment. That it should switch from the form of a video to the form of a book didn't come as much of a shock.

"So that's why Kazuyuki Asakawa survived so long."

Finally, that riddle was solved. In other words, there had been two exits. One was Sadako, and the other was the
Ring
report. And that was why both Mai and Kazuyuki had been spared death by arterial blockage. As long as they had the ability to give birth, so to speak, their lives weren't to be claimed so easily. It made sense. Just as the ring virus that had invaded Mai's body had headed for her womb, in Kazuyuki's body the virus had headed for the brain. It wasn't really Kazuyuki Asakawa who wrote
Ring;
he had been forced to write it. Sadako's DNA entered his brain and made him do it. And that was how he was able to describe things with such video camera-like accuracy. Only his depiction of Sadako, the main subject, was lacking in verisimilitude, according to the logic that dictated that the person looking through the viewfinder won't appear on film.

Ando and Miyashita fell silent, trying to anticipate what was to come.

Just what did Sadako and
Ring
have in mind for humanity? Ando and Miyashita didn't need to wait for the results of their blood tests. They were sure now that they had to find some way to stop
Ring
from being published. Junichiro simply didn't understand how much misery the human race would suffer as a result of the book he was putting his name to. He had to be their first point of counterattack. They'd have to persuade him to reverse his decision to publish the book. But would he listen to them? They weren't sure they could get him to believe their outlandish tale in the first place. Miyashita slapped his knee and stood up. "Let's go, then."

"Where are we going?" "It's obvious, isn't it? Your place." "I told you already. Sadako's there." "That's why we're going. We're going to confront her."

"Now, just hold on a minute," Ando recoiled. He'd come here to get away from Sadako. It was going to take a lot to get him to go back.

"We don't have time to fart around like this. Don't you understand how deep we're into this?"

Ando did understand. It was obvious that something had to happen to him because he'd read
Ring.
But he didn't care anymore. He wasn't afraid of death, not particularly. He'd been quite afraid of death while his son was alive and his wife had loved him, but not now.

Miyashita hooked a hand under Ando's arm and tried to wrestle him to his feet. "Get a move on. This might be our last chance."

"Chance?"

"Listen, Sadako came to you and entered your apartment of her own free will."

"Well, yes."

"She must have had a reason."

"What reason?"

"How the hell should I know? Maybe she wants you to do something for her."