Crystal Crown*

Ao no Kiseki Volume Three
As a result of the rebellion aboard the Jules Verne, there are now eleven empty coldsleep capsules. Since all the scientists are necessary for the success of the mission, the ship is forced to stop at a nearby port to pick up replacements. Stopping to load eleven scientists in coldsleep capsules would have been bad enough; the crew (particularly Sanshirou and Kai) are infuriated to discover that the selection process hasn't been completed, and so they have to take on fifty scientist candidates plus someone to choose which eleven will go on to the final destination. This means the ship will need to stop yet again to let the remaining thirty-nine scientists off at another port.
Already in a foul temper, Sanshirou explodes when he discovers that the official who will be judging the scientists--also a medical doctor--is his own twin brother Gai. Though Sanshirou was born first, his life of space travel makes him physically about ten years younger than his brother. Gai has the same self-confidence as Sanshirou, combining it with his background of extensive education and refined speech, and treats his "older" twin as a temperamental child.

After storming out of Gai's meeting with the crew, Sanshirou encounters a frail scientist who faints at the sight of him. The botanist, Aisha, is about the same age as Kai, but his timid nature makes him seem like a young boy. Sanshirou's fierce appearance, particularly the way he habitually bares his fangs, terrifies him. Kai dislikes Aisha because the waves of fear that radiate from him are uncomfortable to the Empath.

As Sanshirou goes on duty, he's still sulking. He asks what Kai thinks of his brother and is less than pleased at the honest response that Gai seems very much like him, except calmer and more educated. Sanshirou suggests that he should switch places with his twin at the next stop and leave the ship so that Kai and Gai can be together. Kai zaps him for the insensitive remark. Kai himself feels uneasy around Gai, and his assessment was not intended as a statement of preference.
Later, several of the candidates gang up on Aisha to rape him. Kai discovers the assault and breaks it up before it goes too far, injuring two of the attackers and scaring the others. Sanshirou doesn't want to report the incident to Gai, who is the ranking official, because he's afraid it will delay them even further. Kai responds that his only alternative is to protect Aisha so that it doesn't happen again. Sanshirou gets stuck as Aisha's round-the-clock bodyguard.

For the first several days, Aisha spends his time terrified of his own protector. After he becoms accustomed to Sanshirou and sees him as a person, however, he begins to grow attached. He reveals that he is the result of an experiment: a test tube baby raised entirely in a laboratory. Though he doesn't feel he will do well on the Sigma 23 mission, his participation is already decided.
Kai goes to see Gai for a requested medical checkup. During their conversation, Gai brings up the topic of Lunan names. For Lunans, a name is a kind of accessory. Each name is given by a loved one, however temporary that love may be. The Lunan's name is the sum of all given names, which is the way they treasure and remember their relationships. Most of Kai's names were given to him by his mother. Only the most recent, the one he currently uses, was given by Admiral Drake. As Kai is leaving, Gai compares him to a crystal--beautiful and seemingly hard, yet at the same time extremely fragile.

It turns out that the attack on Aisha was only a symptom of a deeper problem. Squabbles and fights begin breaking out among the scientists with alarming frequency. People who never raised a hand to anyone before will start arguing with and attacking others over minor disagreements. The crew can't understand the atmosphere of dark tension that pervades the ship.
Sanshirou takes a break from his guard duty to visit his partner's quarters. He wants to combat Kai's self-destructive nature by goading him into expressing feelings and desires, but nothing he does has any effect. He becomes more violent in his lovemaking, hoping that he will provoke Kai into saying something on his own behalf, to no avail. Kai is simply passive, accepting whatever Sanshirou does to him.
Sanshirou winds up hating himself for his own violent actions, knowing it is only feeding into Kai's deathwish. He decides that he needs to pull back and decide how he should handle himself so he won't hurt his partner. He puts their relationship on hold until he can figure things out.
Gai calls a meeting with the crew to discuss the increased tension aboard the ship. He believes that things simply don't make logical sense according to the information they have. It's unheard-of for so many scientists to be packed onto a spaceship in the anxiety-producing situation of knowing that only a few of them will be chosen for a prestigious mission. Gai reasons that the situation must have been intentionally contrived to produce stress, probably for someone's experiment.
The crew members decide to patrol the ship, breaking up any conflicts and remaining on the lookout for signs of a ringleader. In this way, they hope to piece together the data and discover who is running the experiment. Unfortunately, the tension between Kai and Sanshirou adds to the air of frayed tempers.
Kai has never been dumped before. He has always been the one to decide when a relationship should end, and having Sanshirou walk away is a new and unpleasant experience. He also can't help thinking that it's his fault, which makes him more depressed because he doesn't know what he did wrong. Sanshirou is not the type to spend a great deal of time in thought; he prefers to react instinctively. Having to ponder his relationship at length makes him frustrated. He tries kissing Kai again once, but the same violent feelings arise, and he pulls himself away before he can act on them.

Fed up with his internal struggle, Sanshirou tries to find some kind of distraction. At first he propositions Sandra, but she turns him down. If he were truly interested in her, she would jump at the opportunity, but she knows he'll go right back to Kai as soon as he resolves his issues. Aisha, who has developed a strong crush on him, offers to take Kai's place. Sanshirou doesn't believe the innocent Aisha realizes the full extent of what would happen and tries to frighten him off. In the process, he reveals his anger that Kai cares so little for his own life and wants someone to kill him.

Gai invites Kai to visit him for tea, but the Lunan declines on the grounds that caffiene doesn't affect him. Lunans have a genetic tolerance for most mood-altering substances, from caffiene to alcohol to strong drugs. It was originally because the first lunar colonists had to take a lot of drugs to ease the pain of living under primitive environmental domes. They later transferred the habit to a tradition of rabid pleasure-seeking.
Despite the refusal, Gai uses the conversation to relate more of what he has discovered. Upon analysis of the scientists aboard, he noticed that many of them have phobias that make extended space travel particularly stressful. He also tries to proposition Kai, offering himself as a replacement for his twin. However, no matter how similar the two appear, Kai knows they are completely different people. His obsession for Sanshirou won't allow him to accept a substitute. The reason he gives for his rejection, on the other hand, is that trying to replace Sanshirou with someone so similar would be like admitting that he is obsessed.

Aisha confronts Kai and accuses him of being selfish. His argument is that if Kai wants to die, he should kill himself, he shouldn't drag Sanshirou into it. Kai doesn't love Sanshirou, he's just using the most convenient tool to achieve his goal. Kai is shaken, but he still won't admit to himself that he *hopes* to die, he rationalizes that he simply isn't afraid of death.

Kai is summoned to the Bridge to handle a crisis. One of the scientists, Jed, has locked himself in a room, with Sanshirou curled up in pain on the floor in front of him. Jed demands that the ship return to the spaceport immediately. Gai attempts to negotiate, but the man is incoherent and uncooperative. Heart racing, Kai does his best to figure out how Sanshirou could have been incapacitated. He locates several mosquitoes in the room and deduces they must have been the cause. He sucks them up with the ship's ventilator so that Sandra can break into the room safely and capture the insane scientist.

Jed had genetically engineered the ancient disease malaria to be fast-acting and extremely deadly. One of the modifications was that it makes the victim highly susceptible to suggestion. If the person is told that he is cold, his imagination will make him freeze to death even while his body is burning up with fever from the malaria. Kai terrorizes Jed into revealing that he made Sanshirou relive every pain he ever experienced until he dies. Jed considers the spaceship a hellish environment and has been vocally disruptive the entire trip. On one of his patrols, Sanshirou had interrupted Jed in the middle of spouting his views and causing a commotion; Jed saw the disease as a fitting punishment for the inconsiderate mercenary.
The ship carries no medicine to fight malaria, which hasn't been around for over a thousand years. Luckily, one of Aisha's plants is effective in treating the symptoms, and that brings Sanshirou's fever down. Yet nothing can stop the hypnotic suggestion that is killing him. Kai knows there is only one way he can save his partner--by using his empathic talent to perform mental therapy. It is the strategy he had suggested to Lord back when their computer was out of control; he has to synchronize intimately with the patient and draw the pain into himself to cure it.

Sanshirou's life has been filled with painful experiences, and reliving all of them simultaneously is more than he can endure. He has held on as long as he could, but now he just wants to sink into oblivion. When Kai reaches out for him, he swats away the helping hand, prefering to "rest." The pain clouds his memory, blocking his recollection of Kai's identity. He only remembers that the hand belongs to a person who wants to die, and he knows that can't help him at all.

Kai persists, rousing Sanshirou from his withdrawn state. The irritation makes Sanshirou's fuzzy consciousness angry, until his own argument that the annoying person should leave him to die in peace brings him up short. He doesn't want to die. He will do anything to survive. As Kai eases some of his pain, he manages to struggle metaphorically to his feet and march toward awareness. He grabs hold of Kai's hand and drags him along, refusing to leave him in that place of despair. He wakes up with Kai in his arms, then slips into a truly restful slumber.

Afterward, Kai is in a state of high arousal from the procedure. He needs someone to give him release. Though his mind and body are screaming for Sanshirou, he knows that would be impossible. For one thing, his partner is still weak from the disease, and for another, Sanshirou has made it clear he dislikes their relationship. Kai decides he will settle for asking Gai to help him.
To his surprise, Sanshirou pulls himself out of bed and comes for him. Though barely able to stand, he declares he wants Kai so badly he can't take it. Hardly believing his dream has come true, Kai melts into his arms and allows himself to be led back to Sanshirou's quarters, where they wear each other out. Before falling asleep, Sanshirou explains that he decided he wasn't solving anything by pushing Kai away.

The near-death experience gave Sanshirou a glimmer of insight into Kai's deathwish, how a situation could be so painful that oblivion seems the best answer. Kai's pain is the conflict between the pristine person he wants to be and the sexually ravenous body he was born into. Sanshirou still thinks Kai should stop worrying about it and let himself enjoy what his body craves, but he also knows that the struggle forces Kai to live fully every moment, rather than letting life just slide by. That is a perspective he can deal with in his relationship.

Kai has his own issues with love. He always used "I love you" as just another way to seduce people into doing what he wanted. When he tries to say it to Sanshirou, as a way of expressing gratitude, Sanshirou won't let him. He says, "I'll forgive any lie from you, except that." He doesn't want the word "love" used unless he's positive that both parties believe in it and what it signifies.

Gai finally puts all the pieces of the puzzle together. He had once pointed out a superior's mistake, and that resulted in him getting that superior's job. The superior found out that there was a group of government scientists who wanted to do an experiment on stress, but they couldn't for ethical reasons. The superior suggested that the environment of the Jules Verne be used for an experiment, intending to take any credit for success but shove any blame for failure onto Gai. Roughly a third of the scientists had had their phobias hypnotically exaggerated.

The time comes for the scientists and Gai to be put into coldsleep. Knowing that he probably won't see Sanshirou again, Aisha asks for a kiss goodbye. Similarly, Gai gives a fragile crystal sphere to Kai as a present. Whereas Gai likened the crystal to Kai's personality, Sanshirou sees it and compares it instead to Kai's visor--it only represents the outside, not the preciously guarded inside. Though they each still fear what their relationship will reveal about their inner selves, they will no longer run away from what they find there.

End Volume Three

* Translator's note: Contrary to the Romanization on the cover, the title is supposed to be Crystal *Clown*. Kai feels that his balancing act between his Lunan and anti-Lunan personas makes him like a clown at a circus, his desperate attempt to maintain his equilibrium on display for everyone to laugh at.

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