Don't Cry. Don't Cry. — 8
While I was occupied with my after-school work of making harvesters, Berne City finally became a battlefield.
At first, people gathered in front of city hall, where the mayor works, and protested with placards in their hands. There were already dead, so they had their justification. They demonstrated by hurling stones and liquor bottles and whatever else came to hand.
It was an extremely peaceful protest.
In the countries that linger inside my faded memories, it might well have been called a violent one. But that is precisely what is strange. An ordinary protest is not so different from a riot. People are creatures who can hardly change without blood being spilled, and so it is peace, if anything, that ought to seem unnatural.
One of the protesters, though, demanded that the truth be brought to light. They were not simply asking why the accident in Berne City had happened. They were saying that the clockwork machines currently running in the city were defective, that warnings had been raised about them for ten years, and asking why nothing had been done.
When the person asking that question was killed, the survivors asked it again, out in a public place.
What flew back in place of an answer was fire.
The police massacred the protesters.
Not only the men and women who had taken part, but people who happened to be passing by. Even children were swept into it and died. The moment heads went flying and people dropped dead where they stood, those who had been fleeing in blind panic turned in their fury and began to fight.
And there were a great many harvesters in that crowd. All kinds of superhumans stood among them — some who could command water, as Victoria could, others who commanded fire instead, and others still who brought forth a monstrous strength no human body ought to be capable of.
Police armed with clockwork, against protesters who had powers. At first the police held the advantage, their strongest machines set out in front. But in this world, most people who have received a secondary education can use magic. It isn't that the police have no powerful mages of their own; the protesters simply had the numbers, and the superhumans on top of that. If anything, the greater strength belonged to the protesters.
So the enraged crowd pushed the police back by degrees, until at last they were driven onto the defensive and barricaded themselves inside city hall.
Then a new problem arose.
Not the police machines. The industrial clockwork that had been holding up the rest of the world began to kill people. As if someone had given the order, all over Berne City people were struck down by machines and died. And this time the machines were not running wild, as they had before. Simple clockwork was fine. The trouble was the machines that possessed a certain intelligence — the taxis of the Cogni Transport Company, for instance.
They had not gone berserk like last time. They were picking out people and attacking them.
Here and there, clockwork was killing. My faded memories contain works in which machines rise in rebellion, but this was not that. This was people giving the command to kill people. Several taxis would leave everyone nearby quite alone, then converge — more than one of them — on a single house, slam into it and explode, or leave the place soaked in blood. They were moving with a clear target in mind.
I will say it again. Forbid a piece of knowledge, and it spreads.
This is what they want hidden.
The power units of the clockwork machines now in use are defective. They draw on mana to produce kinetic energy, and the structure itself is flawed. A unit sucks in 100 mana, spends 80, and expels 20. The problem is that 20. It is unmistakably mana; the detectors read it as mana. And yet if you gather that 20 until it makes 100 and feed it into a machine, the machine will not run.
In the materials the harvesters have seen, it is called heterogeneous mana — mana that neither machines nor people can use.
Left alone, of course, it returns to ordinary mana on its own. But where there are as many power units as there are in Berne City, it accumulates faster than it can naturally revert. It broke through the critical point. At least, that is what the records I confirmed through the harvesters indicate.
There is something similar in the faded memories as well. The Great Smog of London. As a disaster of human making, it resembles this one. And from what I can find by digging through the harvesters' memories, nothing of the kind has ever happened before. Berne City is the first.
The most advanced city. Berne City. Precisely because it was, it held more power units than nature could bear, and the accident that was always going to burst finally did. And I could dimly guess why the clockwork was attacking people.
Clockwork has spread across the world on the back of its convenience, and it is earning an enormous fortune. The power unit that goes into nearly every machine is a mechanism almost impossible to replace. There is a similar group in the faded memories. The oil companies. They denied global warming with everything they had, because they stood to lose the money they had made.
It would be the same here. To keep their foundation from shaking — and with as much money as they have, there is nothing they cannot do.
And so Berne City burned all over again.
If the first incident was a disaster, and people rolled up their sleeves and stood together for one another's sake, the second is a matter of killing and being killed. And in the midst of it the harvesters are putting their abilities to use and killing people, so the warmth comes slipping in, full and easy.
Chaos truly does feel wonderful.
The only thing that strikes me as a little odd is that no one is saying a word about Berne City. However controlled the broadcasts may be, I have to wonder whether control can really reach this far. Either the royal family is involved, or the communications companies stand with the clockwork side. One of the two. Or both.
Watching one face of this country through other people's eyes, I went out again today with my escort, to draw the witch into the open. I walked without a plan down roads I had never taken, filling in the map as I went, and whenever I found someone crying within a suitable distance of a harvester, I made them into one. Today it was a man whose jaw and chest had been torn open in an accident at his work, a man already resigned to death.
When, exactly, is the witch going to come?
I walked on, thinking it would be nice if she possessed a wide range of knowledge, the way Yasle does.
But I couldn't get back to the lodging.
The road was wrong.
Late afternoon. The sun was beginning to set. Tomorrow might be a holiday, but there was not a single person anywhere around me, and on the empty road the streetlamps, only just starting to come on, were flickering.
A road with no one on it — and at some point the path I had been walking changed completely. Meriwether, who had been at my side only a moment before, was gone.
The witch?
But there was no one around.
The buildings I could see were not buildings I remembered. Boards were nailed over the doors and windows, so getting inside looked difficult, and the interiors visible through the dark were in ruins — cobwebs and dust, furniture smashed to pieces. They seemed to have been abandoned for a very long time.
I lifted my eyes to the sky. Dull black clouds were writhing there. It was not a proper sky. If I rewound my memory even a little, there had been nowhere near so many clouds.
If I couldn't tell what this was, I had better try finishing the map. Thinking so, I walked on.
Then I saw a person's shadow up ahead. But it was not a person. It had never been a living thing to begin with. There was no light inside it.
Even so, it came walking toward me. A clock was jammed at random through half of its head, along with brass fittings, and between them blood vessels squirmed. The clothes were an ordinary gentleman's, though Kanna's memory said the fashion had been dead for more than eighty years. An eyeball sliced in half shifted and looked down at me. I looked up at it.
Glass covered the cut face, and behind the glass, clock hands were moving. Along a long tube, a yellowish lump of fat writhed its way up an iron rod rising above the head — two of them, punched through the gentleman's hat. It wasn't alive in the first place, so there was nothing strange about any of it.
It opened its mouth. The last word dragged itself out, long and thin, snarled together with an unpleasant crackle.
Then it stretched out a hand and pointed somewhere.
Having produced a sentence as warped as if it had been run through a translator, he turned at once and sprang forward.
The legs were wrong. As if they were compressed springs rather than legs of flesh, they snapped straight and launched him far away.
Sproing. Sproing.
With that exaggerated, ridiculous noise, it vanished from before my eyes in an instant. And as if to tell me I should follow, fragments — screws, springs — lay scattered along the way he had gone.
A curious place. I set off after him, just as he had bid me.
Rumble!
Or rather, I tried to.
The ground gave way. The bricks that came apart were perfectly sound. Bricks went past, then brass-colored drainpipes, then soil baked bone-dry. It was dry as if a hole had always been there. Soil is usually damp once you've dug into it, after all.
And I fell. Down, and down, and down. Astonishingly, the walls turned into bookshelves. Countless books stood in their rows, or else the shelves were crammed with volumes eaten through by worms. Now and then a book was soaked, or burning.
Thud.
And I landed on the sandy floor with a lightness that startled me.
When I had leapt up onto the water at the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult, my lower body had been smashed to pieces. Here, I was perfectly fine. It felt as though I were inside a dream.
Strange. Since becoming a monster, I have never once fallen asleep. The flesh I use nods off readily enough, but my mind is always awake. Dream or waking — or if neither of those, then perhaps I was inside an illusion. I don't even know whether I can tell them apart.
I raised my head. Far above was the hole I had fallen through, ringed with rock. I lowered my gaze, and there was a cave full of darkness. I lowered it further, and there was the dried-out corpse of a single rat.
Sproing!
Just then, from overhead, I heard the sound from a little while ago.
I took my eyes off the rat's corpse and looked up, and something with a clock driven diagonally into its head came down onto the floor. In his hand was a child who had not been there before. A broken bottle was jammed into the head, and it was even on fire. The hands were in tatters; the legs hung limp. And amid all of that, there were features I knew.
White skin. Purple hair.
It was the child I had brought back not long ago. The child who had died today.
Dying is nothing out of the ordinary. Unfortunately, the child who had only just become able to walk went dashing about in delight, ran into a dresser, and — unfortunately again — the jar of jam sitting on top of it came straight down onto the child's head. The real misfortune was that a house which had only ever held a child who could not walk had never had the chance to learn how dangerous a child who gets around can be.
And now, in the clock-head's hand, was a child whose skull held jam where a brain should have been. The child saw me and waved. But before I could speak, the clock-head snapped those legs out like springs once more and dashed off ahead, making that ridiculous sound.
Hmm.
I can't see through the child's eyes, which means that one is not a harvester. The reproduction doesn't go that far.
Either way, the only way I could see to get out of this world was to follow, so I set off in the direction the clock-head had gone.