Duality
The champions who race along the front lines of magic scholarship are, for convenience, gathered under the single title of magic scholar. Look any closer at what lies beneath that name, however, and one finds that these so-called magic scholars are, quite unexpectedly, split into two unmistakable camps.
Theoretical magic scholars, and experimental magic scholars.
Both labor toward the advancement of the discipline, and yet oil and water were never meant to mingle as if no boundary lay between them. That each side should eye the other as a chicken eyes a cow—and a cow a chicken—is simply the way of things.
But there was a new breed upon whom scholars of both factions heaped their scorn with a single voice.
The fake theoretical magic scholar.
"I can't stand listening to a theory-monger's nonsense."
To borrow the words of the man beside me, a theory-monger.
I noticed he was there, ironically enough, only when he rose to leave. At first I had been wholly absorbed in cutting the meat on my plate, and afterward I was eavesdropping on the debate drifting over from a nearby table, so I never even registered who had taken the seat beside me.
"Isn't that right, friend?"
Only then did my eyes meet his.
Friend?
I pointed at my own chest, as if to ask whether he meant me, and he nodded. I had no memory of befriending a young man of the Federation who wore so self-satisfied an air, and so I decided he must have the peculiar habit of addressing every man, in the third person, as friend.
In any case, he had asked, and so an answer was owed.
"I don't think it's the sort of question one ought to settle in haste."
"Hmm. A thoroughly lukewarm answer. Don't tell me you're of a kind with those fellows?"
It was not a remark one could let pass.
A fake theoretical magic scholar is, quite literally, someone who puts on the airs of an intellectual with nothing but theories picked up secondhand. Not a scrap of the hunger to inquire or to know—only envy of the honor and standing of the great scholars of the magical world. A sham student, through and through.
There would be many, very many, who took issue with my gray hair. Slandering an inborn trait does no real damage. But I could not stand by and watch someone belittle my hunger for magical inquiry. That would be no different from slandering Benjamin, who had taken me as his disciple.
I rose slowly from my seat.
"......You're asking if I'm a 'theory-monger'?"
"That's right."
"If you're asking whether I dream of becoming a theoretical magic scholar, then the answer is yes. But I have never, not for a single moment, looked down on magic scholarship."
"Is light a wave, or a particle?"
Having let my words in one ear and out the other, he abruptly began talking to himself.
"I think it's a particle."
"Why?"
The particle nature of light. In the old days it had been treated as orthodoxy, but in the magic scholarship of the present, to utter those words without evidence would most likely be taken for a joke. Those "intellectual youths" over there were hard to credit, and yet that the wave nature of light had been demonstrated was, at least, the truth.
The man before me, however, went on with perfect confidence.
"The experiments tell us as much, don't they? Light is suspicious."
"What?"
"Have you heard the news of Thomson's discovery of a new particle?"
Thomson. An unforgettable name. The letter that had driven me to resolve upon crossing the sea—he had been the central figure of that astonishing discovery.
I nodded.
"In his experiment, Thomson used light to separate out a new particle."
"......"
"And that isn't all."
The man grinned and looked my way, as if to say, go on, you have a try. It felt strange, being tested in a manner altogether different from Benjamin's, but I wasn't displeased. To leave one's interest in magic scholarship unhidden, and to stand as a student unfolding debate and scholarly exchange—the moment before me faintly resembled the scene I had long dreamed of.
And I could tell which experiment the youth meant to speak of. Rather than teaching me magic scholarship outright, Benjamin had concentrated on having me lay an academic foundation, though now and then he would toss out some fragmentary bit of common knowledge tangled up with the field. The story of a certain experiment had been one of those.
"You mean the Michelson–Morley experiment."
The moment the wave nature of light was proven, people had thought that waves such as sound are always carried through a medium, and so light must be the same. To prove the existence of a medium given the name aether, two magic scholars devised a precise apparatus and carried out an experiment.
They failed.
There was no aether.
But the failure paradoxically called forth a greater value. A wave without a medium. It only confirmed, all the more firmly, that there was something strange about light.
It seemed I had the right of it, for the man nodded with a thoroughly satisfied face.
"I rather like theory-mongers like you."
"......"
"I've come to want your honest answer. Particle, or wave. What do you think?"
He asked. A brief silence followed, and then I opened my mouth.
"Both. Would that not do?"
"......Puhahaha! Here I thought you were a moderately interesting friend, and you turn out to be an enormously interesting one."
He leaned forward and whispered, low enough that only I could hear.
"That university student over there is wearing the uniform of Fraussen Federal Magic University, but I'll wager it isn't even his. The university doesn't admit the sort who are busy showing off with knowledge they've only picked up in passing."
"......"
"How old are you?"
"Nineteen."
"Same age, then."
Having heard everything he wanted, he flung open the restaurant door with a grand sweep of his arm.
"I'm Werner. A man who dreams of becoming the experimental magic scholar who will one day lead the most dangerous experiments of all. Gray-haired friend—we'll meet again at the magic university!"
With that final declaration, he vanished as suddenly as he had come.
What on earth was that? I felt as though a storm had swept straight through. A strange sense of familiarity clung to the name Werner, and I was tilting my head over it as I cleared the dishes when I realized something.
From the moment he had sprung from his seat, his voice had been rather loud, and the discussion that followed between us had gone back and forth at the same volume. So it was only natural that the pride of the leader of those "intellectual youths" should have been crumpled—he had not only been branded with the slur of theory-monger, but forced to sit there, eyes wide open, and watch a discussion of a whole higher order unfold on the very same subject right beside him. All the more so because he had been sharing the table with the female student who seemed to have caught his fancy. That said it all.
"You there. Gray hair...."
A trembling voice. I glanced over to see whose it was. Even the hand gripping his utensils was quivering, and an uncontrollable fury burned in his eyes.
Clack. He set the utensils down and shouted.
"Follow me out to the square. A duel!"
Three years ago, when even the memory of it had gone faint. A time when I had not yet grown used to the air of the storeroom.
In those days I was devoting myself to learning Frauvian. I hauled out encyclopedias and tried brute-force memorization, but what worked best of all was plays. The very purpose of language is to carry thought, and I remember acquiring words fastest when I met them inside the context of a story.
The plays I encountered came to six in all. Four were tragedies, and two were comedies. Drama itself had never much flourished in the Empire; it was a literary form that had grown up in the Federation, and so a broad and varied landscape of the Federation had soaked into those plays. And amid all of that, one element appeared in every one of the six, tragedy and comedy alike.
The duel. Let opinions diverge by the slightest degree, and it was a duel. Let the pettiest misunderstanding arise, and out came the guns at once. I could not for the life of me understand why the people of the Federation were so fond of so excessively radical a stage for settling conflict.
Of course, it was plainly the imprint of playwrights eager to whip the course of a play into a frenzy, and so I had assumed, as anyone would, that the people of the Federation did not actually go about picking duels as a matter of course.
Which is to say, I had never dreamed—not even in sleep—that someone would challenge me to one. And a duel in the manner of magic scholars, no less, of a kind I had never so much as heard of.
As it happened, the restaurant stood directly beside the boulevard that ran straight out to the square.
"To the square."
"......"
Whether for ill or for good, a few minutes' walk from the restaurant brought the greatest square in Fraussen before my eyes.
Rapian Square. A splendid statue and fountain. A lively row of shops. People laughing and talking in high spirits. To turn my back on all of that and have to face a man brimming with rage as an enemy was a thing one might well call a tragedy.
He came to a stop. At once his six lackeys planted themselves at his back and began to glare at me. The only small comfort was the female student who served as their secretary, standing off to the side with her mouth shut as if to plead that she had no part in this. Everyone else was hostile to me.
Come to think of it, I still didn't even know the man's name.
"Évariste Dumada."
"......Eugene."
The next moment he took up a magic book and struck a posture that seemed to mean something. I stood there blankly, merely watching his eccentricity, and Évariste, displeased, picked a quarrel.
"Don't tell me you don't even know the etiquette of a magic duel?"
"It would be stranger if I did...."
"I am an Undergraduate Student of Fraussen Federal Magic University! Not knowing a magic duel of long history and tradition is what's wrong with you. Tch. You have a magic book, don't you? Hold it in your left hand."
With that he resumed the bizarre posture and glared at me. How to put it—a stance that might have looked impressive back when magic was still nothing more than a branch of ritual superstition. Does he sincerely think this is impressive?
Werner's claim that the man was falsifying his credentials was gaining credibility, and I was beginning to suspect that whatever book he had read was not a work of magic scholarship at all, but a compilation of some outsider scholar's delusions—when a voice laden with a sigh reached me, not from ahead and not from behind, but from the side.
"That's enough. It's unsightly."
It was the female student's voice.