Beauty and the Beast - 13
"You're saying everything happening right now is tied to those three companies? All of it—wrecking the city, and making the army kill the citizens?"
I had thought that the moment she joined us, Polaris would insist we turn straight back. Instead she asked who the enemy was. So I nodded. Victoria nodded too. Victoria knew because she had heard it from Marquis Gaston himself. I had heard it as well, but there was no need for me to say so. By now it was common knowledge to everyone here.
Hehe.
Only one group left to shake. The Purple Twilight Society. If I can manage it, I will make the ones with religion still clinging to them stop and think again.
Why?
I'm in a bad mood. What other reason would there be?
Victoria and Polaris would, of course, rather not meet them. It can't be helped. I know they will follow, and I will do as I please anyway. And if Victoria is ever to return to Berne City, better she face them now—before the resentment aimed at her cools and hardens into solid hatred.
"Once I'm back in the capital, the list of things to do has grown. So you're saying the ones who wrecked that city are the three companies. And the reason was to cover up what happened in Berne City. Right?"
Polaris looked at us as she asked.
"What in the world happened in Berne City that day?"
I looked at Victoria, because she was turning something over in her mind. I could have told the story, but it was dangerous for me to know that much. Even a little. From the moment I had spoken the companies' names, there was a risk of being found out—that I can see from a Harvester's point of view. Being caught wouldn't drop me straight into ruin, but it could become dangerous later, so I ought to hide it as far as I could. And I didn't have to be the one to speak.
"I'll explain what I know."
Victoria told Polaris everything that had happened in Berne City, and everything she had reasoned out on the way here. The three companies were moving like a single body, and they were concealing a fatal flaw running through clockwork mechanisms as a whole. If that came to light, they might have to pay more compensation than they could bear. Damages, the cost of a recall, and the collapse of their public standing, all reckoned in money—the sum would be truly astronomical. So, she said, they meant to treat it as something that had never happened, and replace the whole of it within two years. Then she asked for my opinion.
"What do you think, Belle?"
"I don't really understand the affairs of people."
Victoria looked at me with suspicion in her eyes. I was unashamed. I truly don't know, not exactly. What I do know is that her guess has not reached the truth.
Two years. A long time, certainly, but far too much time if all they needed was to recall everything already sold, or replace it by some other means. The company spies inside the army now fighting the clockwork machines so desperately are discard cards—paid to carry out the orders they were given, then thrown away.
How do I know?
Because every Harvester who secretly tampered with a clockwork machine is dead, killed by the very machines they tampered with. Killing them to shut their mouths. Truly cunning. The one who handed out the work had told them that their names and faces were already up on our server, so if they simply did as ordered, survival was assured—and if there were no survivors, a bonus would be paid. Everyone who ended up a sacrifice believed they themselves would be fine.
And there was a reason for that. The people the companies approached all shared one trait: they had squandered their money gambling. Every one of them was a person who had taken on a severe impairment. A gambling addict is a sick person whose brain has been seriously damaged, and that makes them convenient to use. To get the money to gamble again, they can kill someone without a second thought. Desperate enough to do anything without thinking, they bite the moment you offer them pay, and once they have been used they are workers you feel no regret throwing away.
Some of them are wary, of course. In that case you set them a few shoddy little jobs, and plant the impression that these people pay when you work. Then, when you truly need them, you tell them this one is trivial too, and off they go, panting, at the thought of being paid again. That is exactly what these ones did.
Not every spy became a Harvester, but every spy who did had frequented the same gambling den, and they had become spies before the Berne City incident broke. In other words, someone had known in advance that Berne City would end up that way. When things erupted there, they had not scrambled to do something in a hurry. They had been waiting a very long time. Truly meticulous.
Which is why it is strange. All this, merely to buy two years in which to fix a defect? I think there is another reason. Not knowing what it is—that is my limit. But I have no particular need to learn that dangerous plan. What matters to me is how much blood gets spilled in the course of it. I was thinking exactly that when a hint arrived, all at once.
"They're pulling something this strange on the army just to hide a defect? The profit they stand to gain is far too small next to the risk they'd have to clear."
Polaris offered another way of looking at it.
"Couldn't they, though? They're global conglomerates."
Victoria asked, and I thought so too. International conglomerates often shake a nation itself. They buy the law with money and set themselves above it. But Polaris shook her head and denied it.
"Do you know that the bigger a city gets, the more dangerous its defense force becomes?"
At that, Victoria looked puzzled and asked back.
"If a city's big, isn't it safer, because there are more people? You mean it gets dangerous because there are too many of them?"
Polaris shook her head. She looked at Victoria as if it were strange not to know, and then her expression shifted, as though something had just come to her.
"Say you're going to a restaurant. Would you go somewhere it takes forever just to fetch a single side dish, or somewhere right beside you?"
Ah. That was easy to understand. She meant that where people gather, something comes to eat its fill.
"But the number of people guarding them grows just as much, doesn't it?"
"The stronger the monster, the better the feeding ground it keeps inside its territory."
Only then did Victoria seem to grasp what Polaris meant, and she nodded. They have to face monsters like that, so the bigger the city, the stronger its defense force. Put in terms a person can easily follow, a chocolate cake has more calories than a cucumber. And calories are flavor, aren't they?
"So even if the companies succeed, there can't be no survivors. And look. It's nearly over."
As she said it, Polaris pointed the opposite way from the direction we had been walking. The soldiers had formed teams of three to one, or four to one, and were disabling the clockwork machines one by one. They must have found a way to deal with them. The big machines were being broken with ease now, and the people inside hauled out. It was the small machines that were hard, because the joints thrashed at random and the person within had been reduced to little more than a lump of meat. They died with a whole body moving against their will until every joint there was had snapped—full of that pain, the guilt of having killed their comrades, and the despair of being able to do nothing.
When a Harvester kills the person inside, warmth comes in, and memory comes with it. Even if it arrives in fragments, every one of them is so alike that the pieces can be gathered. So most of those riding the smaller war machines died, while the ones in the larger machines lived. The army was now smashing in advance not only the machines people were riding, but anything of the sort that ran on clockwork. They seemed to have realized that clockwork itself was dangerous. If the enemy was a company bound up with clockwork machines, it was safer to break them beforehand.
In the end a great many people died, but they succeeded in holding the army together as a group. They were still fighting, though it would not be long before the fight ended. Provided an enemy burning with the will to massacre that army did not come charging in afterward, they would be safe. As you know, that enemy is hurrying this way even now. So I walked toward it.
At the pace we were keeping, we would meet them inside the forest. I quickened my steps a little, so the meeting could happen at the boundary between forest and grassland.
"Belle? Why are you suddenly running?"
"She won't answer even if you ask. Just follow her, Pola."
The two of them talked behind me.
That's right.
On the outside, at least, I am diligent. I diligently do things that look virtuous. I act so that I will be seen that way on purpose, and I choose my words so that people will think of me that way. I am not particularly clever. That is why, from the very start, I behave in a way that shows no opening.
I don't especially want to live a good life. I don't want to live an evil one either. If it can be managed, I would like people to live well—not killing one another too cruelly, simply paying no mind to whether or not someone is dying far off in the distance, and living happily on the byproducts of what they have exploited. If people increase that way, my warmth increases too.
Like the corporations you see in the third world, a company grown bloated inevitably tramples life, even if every individual inside it is good. If it does not, the world does not turn. So I don't go out of my way to steer them into fighting one another. Point people at what is right, and they fight on their own. However much they doubt me—even if I make some mistake I myself fail to notice—it is all right. Unless I abandon that world, or something more important comes along, I have acted in ways that look kind, and I will go on doing so.
You think that's foolish?
It actually works. Victoria and Polaris both know I am up to something, and still they trust me and follow, don't they?
Hehe.
And just barely, I met them—before the Purple Twilight Society could enter the forest.