Don't Cry. Don't Cry. — 1
"Bell, is something wrong?"
The last class of the week had ended, and we were just about to leave, when Victoria asked me out of nowhere.
"What do you mean, something wrong?"
I knew she had looked over my face more than once, though her eyes never seemed to settle on any one place. I had taken it for a passing whim—until she said something I hadn't expected.
"You look like you're in a bad mood."
Mm. Do I?
I touched my face. My expression shouldn't give that much away.
"Do I?"
"You realize you're the one saying you're in a bad mood, don't you?"
I nodded. That I feel bad isn't a fact I have to hide. Why was she staring as if my answering had startled her?
"I thought it would take you a while to say anything, but you nodded right away. So what is it?"
I can't explain all of it. Still, the rule is that when I'm asked a question, I tell nothing but the truth. Without that, I wouldn't know where the telling ought to start or where it ought to stop. Lie, and somewhere along the way there is no turning back. Someone else would see through me long before I could see through that myself. It isn't that I can't trust myself. I simply never forget that there are people cleverer than I am.
"I'm cold."
"Huh? Is it that cold today? Or are you sick? You don't seem to have a fever..."
Victoria laid a hand on my head to check. Her hand was warm. While I was still startled by how much heat she carried, she asked me several things with a serious face, and since none of them applied, I shook my head from side to side. I don't even know whether this body is capable of bearing a child in the first place.
"I'm fine. It's only that the time when I could forget the cold has fallen far away behind me."
Yes. Every one of my expectations had come apart. Kanna gave up on killing her family and climbing over them, and in Berne City people stopped acting out of selfishness. Then the rain came, and as if waking from a dream, the people of Brightshin no longer scribbled down knowledge like madmen. Nothing that would have satisfied me had happened.
But that was all right. I had already done a great deal. Aurora and Kanna—a princess and a highborn lady. I had made people of high station into Harvesters. Even if I could expect nothing of them themselves, who could say what might come of their children, their descendants?
The people moving through Berne City might have grown kind, and still the world could be otherwise. Of all things, they had made a religion. For now it was only a primitive faith, offering prayers of thanks to me. I was not a god yet, and they did not think of themselves as believing in one. They simply looked up to me, the way one might press one's hands together before a great person.
But how would that look to someone who had nothing to do with religion? In a country that had chosen reason and rationality as its ruling ideology, religion was something old and squalid. Perfectly suited to being cast out.
And the Brightshin Slums. For the moment, knowledge had stopped spreading like a plague. Had it gone on that way, I would have been more at ease. A little more at ease. Only that much. It isn't merely that knowledge grows—more people come to see it. And once someone with strength and power lays eyes on it, the chance they will carry it off only rises.
But it was all right even if they didn't. I had confirmed that the knowledge was settling in properly, and the Harvesters would draw the techniques seated in their heads out into the world. However long it took, if this world was optimistic about science and technology, it would not be able to escape this art. I had only been robbed of the fast food I might have eaten right away. I was short on warmth that came easy and quick.
That did not mean I would harvest warmth from the Harvesters this very moment. I was not so wanting in principle. I was not foolish enough to break my own rules and come apart. Patience is my specialty. Now I had only to take my time, and watch the world go forward.
The Harvesters had already worked their way inside people. Some twenty-five thousand of them. Among them were Harvesters of exceptional bodies and high intelligence. In the struggle to survive, who held the advantage?
Clean skin is a beauty in itself. Among the Harvesters were many women whose trade was selling sex. Even after they changed, they went back to that work—went back in bodies far more beautiful, and far more healthy. This was an age without contraceptives. Their looks had improved as well. Whose rate of success in breeding would be higher?
All I had to do was wait. Wait for the descendants of the Harvesters to cover the world. Even if every living thing became their descendant, the world would not collapse. I would only need to choose, among them, someone standing in a place of leadership, and push myself in. Then warmth would come to me on its own. A Harvester's descendant does not contain me until I recognize that descendant and push myself inside.
Spreading far and wide by means of the contract text is easy and fast, but I learned in the first world that the world breaks if I do it that way. So I would take the safe road, even if it cost me time. The danger was if reason and rationality moved in some twisted form, and something like a purge of the Harvester race broke out.
No. It wasn't necessarily dangerous. Not so long as they had powers beyond the ordinary. Even then, the chance of the Harvesters losing was small. There were already Harvesters in this world who had gained the power to brainwash.
Then, as if it were nothing at all, Victoria drove the blade called truth deep into me. A chill struck my chest, truly and all at once.
This is why.
This is why I keep my rules as if my life depended on it. Where, and how, does a person arrive at the truth?
Probably this: I make mistakes, and Victoria has been gathering the pieces. There is no guarantee that only Victoria can do it. She isn't special, and I am no genius. Which means there will be many who reach the truth. So shouldn't I, fool that I am, at least keep my rules with everything I have?
I have to try.
Outer God. An Outer God. I am no god. Who was it that said so first?
Ah.
"A certain witch called me that. But I'm not a god, so it was rather funny."
At my words, Victoria looked up into empty air. Was she picturing the witch? It must have looked ridiculous. To pin a name like that on a mere monster who wasn't even a god. The mistake of a lifetime, wasn't it?
"You must have been terribly frightening, Bell. That's why she gave you a name so easy to understand."
"Why are you taking that side?"
"Because you're extremely easy to understand?"
Perhaps speaking nothing but the truth is the finest rule I have ever made for myself. If I hadn't, I—I might already be strung up somewhere.
"I did think I was easy to read. Is it to that extent? No—if I'm easy, then there shouldn't be anything frightening about it, should there?"
At my question, Victoria folded her arms. She tipped her head this way and that for a moment, putting her thoughts in order. To my mind, a person whose thoughts show clear as day can only look like easy prey, so for her to call that frightening was unexpected.
"You're treating 'easy to understand' as a single thing, aren't you? But there's the side you show on purpose, so you'll look easy to read, and the side you show without even knowing it. Those two are different."
I knew the first. I was doing it on purpose. The second I absolutely had to keep. My weakness had come out this easily.
"Is it the side I hide that's frightening?"
"No. That part... mm. Not yet. I don't want to say."
And then Victoria suddenly leaned her face in close to mine.
"Then, want me to make you listen?"
I wanted to hear it. But.
"No. Victoria. I don't force anyone."
Small accidents may happen in the course of putting memories in, but I have no intention of truly twisting a consciousness. I can stand my ground only if I can face myself without shame.
But.
I had forced someone before.
Yes.
In the second world. When I set out for Kunlun.
I closed my eyes. Back then I had coveted Yuanshi Tianzun's memories far too much—a technique that could move other worlds. So I had run to Kunlun and taken it. Now I had set it loose in this world, so that one might stand in this world and cross into another. So that an unhappy future might come to everyone. So that, for me, a happy age might arrive, an age in which I could obtain warmth.
I had made the right choice. And so I opened my eyes again.
"So how will you see me now, Victoria?"
"Now? From here on, too, Bell is Bell to me."
Victoria smiled brightly and drew back. Then she set a hand on my head.
"Ahaha! To feel better over something like this. You are incredibly twisted, Bell."
Those with somewhere to be had already gone. What remained in the classroom were people like us, lingering over idle talk. Victoria started toward the door, and I followed her.
"By the way, what happened to that witch?"
I thought of the little witch who never knew when to laugh. She had not been a Harvester.
"Who knows. I wonder what became of her."
After she fell all the way to the place where I was, she vanished as if she had never existed. I never did anything to her, so I truly don't know what happened.
"You don't know?"
"She vanished like foam, but I don't know whether she really died. She refused the contract to the very end, so I gained no warmth from her last moment."
In truth I had been touching her, so I could have taken it if I had chosen to. But the place where I exist must have been cold as a refrigerator from the beginning. She disappeared without leaving a trace.
"Was she a bad witch?"
"She tormented anyone weaker than herself and took their goods, and when someone stronger came, she mocked them and ran. A witch, through and through."
"Wow. What trash."
Victoria shook her head. More than the witch, there had been another friend who was always with her...
I shook my head, scattered the thought, and decided to change the subject. Stories of another world were stories this world had no need of yet.
"Victoria. The person who keeps the house where I live says a bodyguard will be coming before long, so we can be close from now on, can't we?"
"Isn't getting close something you have to do, Bell?"
"I have a generous heart, Victoria."
"When you say it like that, you make me sound small-minded!"
Chatting like that, we left school.