Deep Beneath the Sea - 4
I was to spend the night in the royal palace. I could no longer return to my lodgings, but the guest room they have given me is lavish beyond all reason. The trouble comes when I set it beside my own rooms and award even partial credit for how convenient a place is for putting people to use: the lodgings still come out ahead. That, frankly, is rather frightening.
Really, now. Just how overjoyed were they, to have made a Harvester of Aurora?
From the scraps of talk I overhear, she was cursed at her birth, and though they tried every avenue open to them, they failed. They strained to undo it by any means they could find; every last method failed, and she was dying. Even when the witch appeared, the magic they had prepared to kill her came to nothing. Well — Maleficent was one of the most powerful witches in this world, so merely doing one's utmost was never going to be preparation enough. She was a witch who had wiped several nations off the map single-handedly.
And in the midst of all that, I saved Aurora. So it seems they mean to indulge her in whatever she wants. I don't understand it.
Be that as it may.
"We have a guest."
"Oh — you caught me?"
Anyone else might not have noticed. But she is one of the few Harvesters in the palace.
"Hello."
"Mm. Hello. So you've helped us again."
Aurora Dormiens. Every sort of title is fixed before that name, and she uses those as names as well, but cut it down to the person alone and this is what remains.
By the time I was summoned before the king, she had already come up from the cellar where she had been hiding with the prince. At present King Hyphion and Prince Solindiges are being ground down in real time, clearing away the aftermath of what happened in the capital, and Aurora, free at last, has taken the chance to come find me.
She has heard this and that from one person and another, and so she has a fair grasp of the situation as a whole. She isn't wholly ignorant. That is what I mean.
Would it be better, here, to accept a simple goodwill on the grounds that I helped? Or should I deny it, and play at being a good child?
I'll affirm it.
Someone too good is suspicious, if anything. And besides, since the intent in question truly brushes against wickedness, anything short of the genuine article is useless no matter how I try to wield it.
"Yes. Maleficent can no longer do evil of her own will."
Even if she is put to use in doing evil, it would not be by her will, would it?
"I see. I came to see you, since you're the one who saved me. You know my name, don't you?"
"Yes. I do."
Aurora wears a light, simple dress with scarcely any pattern to it, but according to Canna's memories the cloth is made of extraordinarily precious stuff. To anyone who knows, it is an outfit that declares her a princess at a glance, and Aurora knows that. She fell into her slumber half a year ago, and until then she had been properly learning everything a princess is meant to learn.
She is also very good at reading what people think. She was a girl who, for all practical purposes, had been scheduled to die this year, and so a great many pitied her — not only her family, but the people who worked in the palace as well. Keen in her sensibilities, she grew up feeling those gazes the whole way through, and so she went looking for the reason behind them. She found it. Even so, she acted as though she didn't know, and when the fated day arrived she lay down to sleep having braced herself for death.
She says she was afraid of dying. But she was not fool enough to miss that everything gathered around her had, all that while, been moving on the premise of her death.
"Will Bell do?"
"Call me whatever you like."
There is a faint resentment stirred into her expression. Will she turn it on me, or let it pass? I know Harvesters well — all the more so one who was made a Harvester only recently.
"Bell."
Aurora comes to stand before me, and bows her head.
"Thank you for helping us."
She offers her thanks just like that.
Of course she does. She is someone who, even knowing that others pity her, never took that pity as license to do as she pleased. She is weak, and she is unfortunate, and rather than use either as a reason to treat people cruelly, she treated them all the better across the time she had left to live. She is not an ordinary person.
A bare few are wicked, a bare few are good, and most travel back and forth between the two. That is what people are. She was a little better than ordinary, because she is clever — clever enough to have weighed, over the span of a life, what sort of thoughts it is best to fill oneself with, and then to have chosen, quite deliberately, to live by loving others. That was her pillar.
I thought the pillar would give way. I thought the moment would come when she might do anything at all, and that she would then do exactly as she liked. She hasn't.
"Very well, Aurora. If you truly feel grateful, then grant me what I wish."
And so I twist it.
"What you wish? What is it?"
Aurora asks. I have no intention of asking anything so strange.
"The life you have left. Do what you want to do."
She is a Harvester now, and she no longer has to be cherished with her death put up as collateral, nor show the world only a virtuous face. A future has opened in which she can do anything, and so I urge her toward whatever she wants. It would be better still if she bore many children. This is an investment.
Once adolescence arrives and her appetites swell out of all proportion, she may follow her desires wherever they lead, for all I care. If she is royalty, then living as royalty lives — killing and being killed in the struggle for power — would be no bad thing either. By my reckoning Aurora will remain a good person to the very end, and that choice is not a bad one either, because I have already tasted the fruit of it, back when someone that good spread far and wide.
The first world. The descendants of Tisha.
They were truly delicious. And if their number grows great enough, I can rise all the way up here without ever fashioning a body of my own.
"That's a rather strange thing to say."
"Strange?"
"Why is telling me to do what I want something that you want?"
Hmm. Give most people a plausible story and they interpret it for themselves, but this one asks. I rather like that she doesn't mistake what she doesn't know for understanding. I don't like it being turned on me, though.
Shall I make an excuse? No. The more I excuse myself here, the stranger it becomes. I'll throw her off with something convoluted.
"Because that's what people are."
It is the sort of answer you give when someone asks what temperature you like and you tell them just right — though I delivered it with a thoroughly listless air. A somewhat foolish reply shouldn't leave her much to seize on.
"What do you mean, that's what people are? If doing what you want is what a person is, then that's what Bell wants? Isn't that the same as wanting nothing at all?"
She keeps prodding, little by little. How frightening.
"Why would that amount to wanting nothing? People summon me because they have a wish. I answered, and I gave them myself. I want the people who carry me to do what they want to do."
I grant wishes without discrimination. Hand out power indiscriminately, making no distinction between the good and the wicked, and most people will walk a bad road — that is what I believe. Those who commit crimes don't do it because they dislike doing good. They do it because they believe they can profit from wrongdoing and never be punished for it. For them there are only two things: the easier task, and the harder one.
Barring certain exceptions, most people are like that. Which is why, if you mean to strengthen public order, what matters is not how cruelly you punish the guilty but how reliably you catch them. People do not readily move when the odds of being caught for their misdeeds run high. How severely you punish them comes after that.
That is public order, kept for the sake of holding a society together. It is not kept to defend justice. In any number of societies, when a high official — or that official's child — commits a crime and goes unpunished, it isn't because money changed hands. It is because letting them go has no bearing on the maintenance of order. Public order, after all, is only a tool for keeping one's own livestock from killing one another and spoiling their worth as goods.
And great power, in most worlds, lets you stand above the law. It lets you cross the line that divides livestock from persons. Someone only just risen from livestock into personhood lacks the know-how for governing livestock, and so they do as they please. That is when the warmth flows into me. The failures of the immature, strong in nothing but power, never fail to bring it.
I believe in that. Not in good and evil, but in the simple fact that people are not perfect — and so, without fail, they fail.
"So Bell is a god who grants wishes."
"A monster."
"A demon, then."
The binary of good and evil. Not a bad method. Digital is simple, and clean.
"But you lived, didn't you?"
"I did. I thought I was going to die, but my body has healed completely, and the witch who tormented our people is gone. If all it cost me was a single soul, that's cheap."
She says it while watching me with a sharp look, and a wrong answer here would be dangerous. Aurora is good-natured, but that does not make her soft. She has the mind to tell ordinary good from ordinary evil, and the strength of heart to have held to goodness even knowing the future was hopeless. So I deny the one thing properly.
"I don't need anything like a soul. I am a monster, but — well. There is only one thing I need."
"Something you need?"
I nod, looking at Aurora.
This, at least, I say with my true heart in it. Not that the warmth is the warmth you know.
"I see."
Aurora starts to say something, then swallows it. She apologizes for intruding so late at night, and leaves this place, and by a hidden passage she returns to her own room.
Aurora.
She would be dangerous as an enemy. I have time to spare, so it seems best to restrain myself a little — until she grows old and dies.