Nothing Goes Smoothly - 5
The moment I parted from Canna Tamerlane Theodore, I headed straight for the dining hall. For the record, it isn't in the U-shaped main building, but in a separate structure standing off on its own. The Royal Academy has a great many buildings besides the main hall and the dormitories; I expect I'll have cause to visit the others someday.
Inside, it works like a buffet. You choose what you like and take only as much as you want, which suits me — otherwise a great deal of food would be left over. For the record, Victoria had already eaten lunch and slipped out, so today I was eating alone.
I took a reasonably empty seat and started in, and I could feel eyes on me. Not one or two of them. A great many. I suppose that's what comes of being the person the press has been advertising so enthusiastically.
I saw it myself, through the Harvesters. The broadcasts and the newspapers — all of it. For the record, the broadcasts include radio as well as television. On them I was presented as a special superhuman capable of healing people. It was also reported that someone healed once can never be healed again, and that those whose lives had hung in the balance end up with their skin dyed blue.
They went so far as to call the blue-dyed skin a defect. When I watched the broadcasts through the Harvesters, and around the time I healed Aurora, I did wonder whether it was all right to speak of it that way. Now I know the reason. They did it deliberately, to scour away any religious tint.
The group known as the Purple Twilight Society has swelled explosively, with the outskirts of Berne City as its starting point. Most of the Harvesters made in Berne City that day belong to it, and so do the people who clawed their lives back there.
At present it is closer to a charity. But if a thing like that throws on the cloak of religion and curdles into a cult, it becomes a terrible headache — all the more so when a phenomenon one might call a miracle exists in a form the eye can see. Because that stain could rub off on his own daughter, I can understand the attempt to balance the scales by cutting me down.
If I have one complaint, it is that the Purple Twilight Society is being run properly. Yes. It is functioning properly, as a charity. With the Harvesters at its center it is performing acts of charity in the most literal sense, and far too many people are living new lives.
Weren't human beings supposed to be greedier than this? Or are they still drunk on the act of doing good? When reality comes surging in and the intoxication breaks, do they mean to start committing whatever evils they please? I would much rather that came quickly.
They have gained powerful strength, fit for striking others. They have gained excellent minds, fit for deceiving others. And a few of them have even taken special superpowers into their hands. Egos ought to bloat. Anyone in the way ought to be disposed of with violence. They ought to grow arrogant. Is it only that not even a few months have passed? I look forward to the sight of them turning selfish, once the heat cools and cold reality arrives. There is plenty of time.
I left my dishes and went out. Yesterday I had tried to clear them, only to learn that here you simply leave the empty plates and go, and someone sees to them. Being a gaslamp fantasy, I had expected a rather more extravagant place, but it is more austere than I thought. If anything, the Belle Époque, in the faded memories of history I carry, was the more lavish of the two. Then again, that was not a world where magic-wielding monsters the size of great buildings went wandering about.
Turning that over, I left the dining hall and returned to the classroom.
Afternoon. Class ended with word that there would be a magic practical tomorrow.
I would have liked to ask them to teach a technique anyone could use, but here, everyone can use magic. A flame no larger than the one that lights a cigarette — anyone can manage that with a little practice. It is so entirely a matter of course that it sits closer to a function of the body, like muscular strength. Through society's eyes, a mage occupies a peculiar station, something like a scholar and an athlete joined together. In other words, the subject is akin to physical training. Physical training, of course, exists as a class of its own.
Why do I know this? Because among the people I made into Harvesters, there was one who had graduated from the Royal Academy.
The heart of Berne City was a place where the elite gathered thickly, and among them were those born noble. The Royal Academy, for that matter, is not a place only nobles attend. Notable figures come in their own right, and so do the children of notable figures. Victoria and I are of that sort, so there are a fair number of people here who are not nobles at all. These are the memories of someone who had already graduated, but in those days there were children of famous musicians, and children of the heads of great corporations.
It is a method of drawing exceptionally capable people up into the higher ranks — and a method of keeping them there. Clever. A great many places collapse precisely because they cannot reward people in proportion to their achievements, don't they? A reward, by another name, is a future. A small reward means there is no future, and then isn't leaving the obvious course? There are also plenty who, in place of a reward, build a prison of the mind and stuff you into it, because that is far easier and costs far less.
Anyway.
On the way back after class, I thought of Victoria — who, while I was meeting Theodore, had approached no one and eaten alone — and offered her a word.
"Go and make a few friends."
"Bell, you're talking like a mom!"
Still on the walk back to the dormitory, I pointed at the school building.
"That place is for making connections. If you've come, you ought to make some."
Flocking with one's own kind is fine. Joining some vast faction and claiming a seat in it is fine as well. That must be what this school is for. Groups formed when one is young are surprisingly solid.
"I know that, but……."
"You had hardly any friends at the Clockwork Knight school, either."
The gaze that had been fixed ahead whipped around and lodged in me.
"Hey. How do you know that?"
Victoria's voice had dropped. She truly didn't seem to know.
"Beatrice was worried. She said you take after Maurice and aren't sociable — wherever were you going to find a decent husband to bring home?"
Victoria covered her face with both hands.
"No."
She made to go on, and couldn't.
"No. Setting aside that Mom even knows that — why do you know it?"
"It came up while we were chatting over the cooking. Victoria is the only topic Beatrice and I have in common, isn't she?"
"I'm going to lose my mind."
Victoria lowered her hands, wearing the look of someone stabbed without mercy in a sore place and about to die of it.
"You cooked at our house, too?"
"The day before Maurice arrived, I made the meals. It was a chance to learn this world's ingredients."
I know how to cook, but I hadn't known the ingredients well. I am no cook, so making a dish from something I have tasted only once or twice is impossible. But if I know the ingredient and I know the method, then I know how the food is made, and I can simply follow that. That is why the rice I first gave Soo was a failure. Yes. Among the memories I gained in the first world there was a cook, so I set to work fully confident I could make something delicious, and ruined all of it. And so I learned, in my own flesh, that having a memory does not mean I can do the thing well. Fortunately, Soo was kind enough to eat it anyway.
"What were you even doing, living at our house?"
"Raising Victoria?"
"I was the one being raised?"
Her face had gone blank, as if the shocking truth had driven the sense clean out of her. But where sociability was concerned, I didn't think there was much need to worry. Victoria herself believes she is timid, and therefore unsociable. A person who isn't the least afraid to speak to someone when it is necessary is not what one calls timid. If she had been timid to begin with, she would never have escaped that prison — she would have been ground down and remade inside it. She simply lacks interest in the things that don't interest her.
A key clicked. We had reached the room, and Victoria drew it from her pocket, opened the door, and went in.
"That was the most shocking thing I've heard yet. So?"
"About what?"
"Earlier it looked like some important person hauled you off. Nothing happened to you, right?"
She looked at me, worried.
"I think Victoria is forgetting what I am."
"Pick one. Are you a monster, or a classmate who plays mom?"
Victoria's face soured.
"I have never played at being a mother. If that is how it feels, perhaps you ought to examine your own conduct."
"That. That's the mom part. What is this, you changing the subject?"
I hadn't particularly meant to change the subject, so I shook my head.
"Canna Tamerlane Theodore. She didn't summon me in order to make an enemy of me. She said that if anything should happen, she would lend me her name."
"That doesn't mean she's scheming something, does it?"
A perfectly natural suspicion. In truth, it was obvious she had some intention. I shrugged.
"If she wishes for a contract, I will simply make one."
"Uh — when you went to the royal family, you didn't get slapped with some kind of restriction, or anything?"
Victoria asked it with her voice lowered. I wondered whether it was really something that had to be asked so cautiously, but the royal household itself is a place one ought to handle with care. This was probably the proper way.
"No. There was nothing of the sort."
It seemed they had sought me only to save Aurora. From beginning to end, they had moved for her sake. The problem was that I didn't know why they had gone on keeping me after that. They offered their thanks, and a few days later, saying they would shoot some footage, they shot it — and after that there was no interference at all. Even when I came to the Royal Academy, I was simply transported at once, like luggage.
At first I thought they had shut me away in the castle to store me for later use. But for that, they were leaving me far too free. The royals visit Aurora often, so they could hardly be so busy as to be unable to see me. It would sort itself out somehow.
"You don't even know when you'll be out?"
"I don't."
"Still, it's the royal family, so nothing strange ought to happen……."
I did not say that the place was considerably murky. A sovereign's cruelty is a virtue. Make that into a Harvester, and just how much warmth would come flowing in. If they meant to neglect me, then let them neglect me. That was fine. When I was needed, in the moment I was needed, I only had to be there. I couldn't tell whether this neglect was genuine, or surveillance wearing neglect as a disguise, so for the time being I intended to live while minding my step.
A vending machine short on a will of its own.
A good tool, once it has been used, is a difficult thing to go back to living without.
"Don't worry. If anything, Victoria is the one who worries me. Wake up early."
"I was thinking about it while I ran over today. I don't even have to bother washing — I can just wash with this. Meaning I could sleep a little longer, right?"
At my words she had turned her face away; then, all at once, she looked back at me and set droplets of water afloat over her palm. A superpower is a fine thing, used well. But still.
"Wake up early."
"Hnn……."
She was doing something even Soo wouldn't, so I set a hand on her head and stroked it. A little embarrassment would do her good.