Not One Thing Goes Smoothly — 11
The weekdays have come around again.
There is only a single day that could be called a weekend, so the turn comes terribly fast. If anything, it is strange that a weekend exists at all. Far more worlds simply have no such day of rest.
Anyway, I am in the middle of class.
It is history, though so much of it has been edited that I have to wonder whether it still deserves the name. They explain a war without ever saying why it began, or announce that a country was invaded at some point and then let several decades vanish outright. Of course, so many nations were destroyed afterward that little remained to record—but as history, it leaves a great deal wanting.
There are interesting things in it, though. In a history text I believe we covered last semester, an account survives of the hero who actually caught the Demon King. Surprisingly, he neither became a king nor was stabbed to death like a hunting dog that had outlived its use. He kept a restaurant and lived out his natural span. The textbook says that, having crossed the continent and tasted what it had to offer, he created delicious food of his own—and that, I have to admit, genuinely made me laugh.
Anyway.
The history period ends—the distant past, oddly enough, having more in it worth reading—and lunch begins.
"What on earth did you do yesterday?"
Victoria sets a newspaper down in front of me. I look, and the incident in which I made Harvesters in the slums is spread across the front page: a photograph of me taken from far off, and of people kneeling together as they wait their turn. It is written in the vein of a saintess appeared in the modern age.
This is not the approach the Dormiens royal house wants, and yet they printed it all the same. They have been working rather hard to strip away the religious angle—will this paper be shut down too? Even so, it is a famous one, known to most of my Harvesters. Well known here, and in Berne City as well. Or they will run a correction. A great many people like it, after all.
"I gave myself to the people who wanted me."
"What is that supposed to mean?"
Victoria looks puzzled. I am the one who cannot see why she fails to follow something said this plainly.
"Don't you remember? When we made the contract."
"I remember it perfectly. No—what I want to know is why you suddenly went to a place like that."
I could answer at once, but I ask it this way on purpose, to lay on a little more of the look of someone who does not know how the world works.
"A place like that?"
"The slums are dangerous."
Yes. As a rule, it is a dangerous place. I know that. It is plainly somewhere people die, somewhere anyone in their right mind ought to stay away from—the same as avoiding poorly policed districts when you travel, for the sake of keeping your own body safe.
But listen, Victoria.
"That place is where people scream. People who want to keep living, and still cannot go any farther. Like you, Victoria, on that day. The you who was there."
She, too, was turning into a sahagin, waiting for death. The girl who had wanted so badly to become a Clockwork Knight did, in that last extremity, everything she still could until she died. Of course she failed at the very end and collapsed—and even so, she brought the nest down. Afterward she was full of despair and resignation, waiting to die.
"Ah— uh. Right. Yeah."
Victoria scratches hard at her head. It is not a very girlish gesture, but that is how deep the day sits in her as a wound. From the outside she might have put a special-forces unit to shame, yet a person's heart is not so simple. If this keeps up she will scrape the skin off, so I catch her arm and draw it down. Victoria is still not of an age to be called an adult.
"You went there to save people?"
She looks at my hand, then lifts her head and asks me.
The salvation of people—so that is how it looks? In truth it is the opposite. Taking warmth, I am told, means stripping away every possibility that soul possesses. That is what it means to take warmth. An easy comparison would be human experimentation carried out on those who have fallen out of society, under the pretext of curing them.
"No. That part they have to manage themselves. I only went and offered a few honeyed words—that it was still all right to dream."
I divide the Harvesters in half: half Daegon, half Yuanshi Tianzun. I cut out their memories and put them in. I tell the people who have something they want to do that they should go and do it—but do you know? Most people live without a dream. They do not know what it is they want. So what happens if something flows into that emptiness? Wouldn't it become a dream?
It is all deception. One must always be careful about what one says on the surface, so as not to be caught out. And even if one is caught, it ought to look as though this person did it because they were kind. For the record, I read this kind person as someone who profits me.
I gather a great many people into my embrace. The first world bore more than a hundred million. A mere few tens of thousands becoming Harvesters will probably not bring this one down. Even if they bear children, what is passed on is the contract, not me. Because it is judged that a contract already exists, I can put it in without permission—but I do not enter automatically. In other words, I may also choose not to put it in. I mean to manage the Harvesters' descendants that way.
"Honeyed words? You—"
"It's the truth."
Yes. It is the truth.
I let go of Victoria's hand. Most of the Harvesters are rejoicing as if they have been granted a new life. But they will understand soon enough. Nothing has changed. Unless someone was missing limbs, or carried severe scars, most of them have not changed in any great way. Their bodies are healthier and their minds sharper, but in a society advanced enough that this degree of improvement is the baseline, overturning the place one already occupies in an instant is difficult. The wall between classes only grows higher as time passes.
If this were a world like the second, where force alone was enough, perhaps it would be different. But in a world where killing people is taken for granted, climbing higher only means the instrument of killing changes from a blade to a person. Doesn't it?
Anywhere is fine. What matters is the memory itself—that someone, once, reached out a hand and lifted you. A person who has despaired all along accepts reality without warmth, and gives in. But if they have seen hope, a person can try. They can do anything in order to become better, no matter how cowardly or filthy the act. That is why empty hope is so good. Morally speaking, there is no problem at all. I only told them a nice little story about dreaming. Isn't that so?
I have nothing to apologize for.
Even so, it is hard to explain why I called them honeyed words. Because I must speak only the truth, I might slip somewhere. So I shift the subject, just a little.
"You're moving to make your own dream come true too, aren't you, Victoria? You seem busy these days. How have you been getting on?"
I ask what she did in the time she was not with me. Of course I can see through Victoria's eyes, so I already know everything she does—but it would be strange to know something I am not supposed to know. That is why I make a point of hearing it this way in advance.
"Me? Yesterday I met a teacher from the Clockwork Knight school and had a talk. I went with a teacher from here, and we decided I'd learn whatever there is to learn!"
There she glances up at the sky for a moment.
"It's practically the same as going to two schools, but that's something I can handle if I work at it. The teachers helped me so much, so I'm going to work hard too."
There really are a great many good people. A teacher of the Royal Academy, and a teacher of the Clockwork Knight school. There must be some difference between them, and yet when Victoria said she would do it, neither objected—they were pleased, and agreed to make allowances here and there. The Clockwork Knight school's teacher is probably being kind because Victoria was already a diligent student, but the Royal Academy's teacher is a genuine surprise. When you think about it, she would be learning from someone else, not from them. Or perhaps Victoria simply enrolled at a fortunate time, when a teacher like that happened to be there.
If something like fate exists, it would not be for Victoria's sake. If it were not for me, she would have died there. If anything, an environment ideal for me may be taking shape in Berne City: a society that grinds people up like fuel and feeds them in. It is too radical, so it will collapse at some point—but it will last at least until the moment it is thrown away for poor efficiency. Thinking of that, it might have been better for me if Victoria had died there.
Mm... no. Then I could not have made contact with the Dormiens royal house and turned that princess into a Harvester. So I will call it not particularly bad.
And what if. What if even I exist inside the great trunk of something called fate. Then I will break that fate itself, no matter what it costs—the thing that cast me to the very bottom and left me shivering in the cold.
I will not forgive it.
"Bell. Your face is scary. What is it—don't tell me you hate being apart from me or something?"
"I was thinking about something else for a moment."
I start to speak of fate, then swallow it. This is not something to say to a person.
"If things keep on like this, I'm worried you won't make a single friend, Victoria. Do you even have time to meet anyone between all the studying?"
Victoria wears the look of someone poked in a sore spot.
"Ah, no. Studying's what matters, right? Friends can come later. Yeah. You cheered my dream on too, so... it'll be fine. Probably."
She is making excuses. She seems to know it is a problem herself. Wouldn't it be better to go to Polaris, take a factory, and work there? Her main work, I suspect, would not be that of a Clockwork Knight so much as killing someone.
Oh? Isn't that better for me?
"Victoria. How about going to see Polaris?"
So I ask, lightly. Victoria shakes her head from side to side, sullen.
"I already turned that down. And before I do anything like that, I'm going to try what I can do first. When exams hit I'll probably end up crying and begging someone to save me, though..."
"If you're that resolved, do as you like."
At that, Victoria extends a finger and pokes my cheek.
"Annoying. And what about you, Bell? What do you want to do from here? You've been in this place quite a while. Isn't there something you want?"
Hmm. About half of that is sincere.
"I need warmth. I always do. So I keep working so that I can obtain it. What was in this newspaper was that, too."
Victoria tilts her head.
"Warmth?"
"Someday, when a person does what they want to do and dies, I will leave the soul where it is and take only the last warmth that remains."
I choose a sentence that is easy to misunderstand, and I say only what is true. I twist the words so that something entirely different is mistaken for the same thing.
"Wherever you go from now on, Victoria—wherever you are—I will be with you until you die."
"No—I'm going to get married someday and all that, so I can't stay with you forever!"
Ah, right. She can take my words that way. At times like this, I put it a little more plainly.
"Even if this body dies first and disappears, I will be with you."
She looks at me, startled. The worry seeping into that expression is cute.
"I don't want you dying before me, Bell."
"The body is a vessel. I myself cannot die, so there is no need to worry about that."
Victoria looks at me with an expression in which feelings too difficult to name are all mixed together.
"Is that what they mean by a god?"
"Then shall I try being called an Outer God, the way other people do?"
I say it as a joke and rise from the table. Linger too long, and the next class will begin. And so lunch comes to an end.