Dreams Lost - 2
That afternoon, Victoria returned to the dormitory and found a letter waiting. It was from Beatrice.
She broke into a bright smile, caught the letter up, and unfolded it. The page was brimming with worry—was Victoria living properly, was she getting along all right.
Victoria cried as she read, and so she never noticed. But I was reading through her eyes, and to me the letter had a serious flaw. There was hardly anything in it about Beatrice and Morris. Only a brief line, telling her not to worry about what had happened in Berne City. Shouldn't they at least have written where they were, and what they were doing?
Beyond that, nothing at all.
For Victoria, though, it seemed to be enough. A smile filled her face. I'm seeing this from inside her, so it isn't exact, but the pull of the muscles in her face and the shift in her voice told me clearly enough. She was happy.
Mm. That's a relief.
She had fought so hard, only to come back without the thing she actually wanted. She had rushed off in a needless panic and brought the hardship on herself. Even so, she had learned they were safe, and I decided that was good enough.
For the record, it is evening now. Victoria is in the dormitory. I am at my own lodging, and from here I look out over the world through the eyes of the Harvesters, as I always do.
A few things have changed in the capital. The rankings of the best-selling papers have shifted, and the newspapers people read have shifted with them. Newsstands stand all over the city, so when the papers change, you notice at once. And the clockwork machines that used to haul freight or carry passengers have all but vanished.
Right after the state broadcast aired the truth the three companies had tried to hide, a great many machines were destroyed. Most of the power units at the heart of the trouble disappeared, and more and more households turned to wood for their heat.
The look of the capital has changed. Come mealtime, smoke rises all across the city, and so now, in the late afternoon, it curls up from house after house, unlike only a little while ago. From the Brightshin Slums it goes up in a pale haze.
Even people in the slums could once afford a clockwork device for heating water, so no smoke used to rise there either. But they have shunned those devices and gone back to burning wood. The slums are full of old buildings, so if anything they still can. Only a dozen years ago, heating with wood was simply what everyone did, and the older a house, the more likely it still has a place where wood can be burned. Which is another way of saying that the new buildings have no such space at all. There is nowhere inside them meant for fire. Water was boiled and heated by clockwork machine.
They don't use the clockwork anymore. The machines have lost so much credit that people will scrounge up a makeshift hearth rather than trust one again. Well, the distrust runs deep, doesn't it. When something is declared dangerous, that whole kind of thing vanishes for a while from anywhere it might be seen. This world is no different.
Even so, tools that run on mana don't absolutely have to be thrown out. If this were a problem with no solution, a civilization of magic could never have grown in the first place. When I look through my memories, they say the trouble is somewhat lighter if you have several kinds of mana converter—turning mana into heat, or into water, changing it from one thing into another. Then even mana missing some part of itself mixes back together and returns to what it was.
But this place went too far. They did everything by turning mana into rotational force. They made light with it, made heat, set things moving, and drew up water. Compare it to light, and it is like using only the green, so what they gave off as residue was light with the green plucked clean out of it. Before long the air is full of light that has no green. Then, even if mana is present, the parts that need green cannot answer, and magic fails; and however full of mana the machines may be, without green they will not move. The machines, concluding that the world around them was normal because mana was there, drank in still more, and the ones that overdrew and overheated exploded.
For the record, the old things called magical tools—not the modern things called clockwork machines—are perfectly fine to use. But the more prosperous a district, the fewer people still use them. So the larger a city, the more likely it is to suffer an accident like the one that struck Berne City.
No. I've wandered. Once word spread that clockwork devices as a whole were flawed, countless of them were thrown away. Those built into a house from the start, fused into it when the house was raised, can't be helped; but anything that can be discarded is discarded, and anything that can't is simply left unused.
The age is sliding backward.
It isn't only the capital. The cities nearby are the same, and so is Berne City. Among those brought from Berne City, the ones released early have gone back, so I can see how things stand there as well. In Berne City, and at Nantes Harbor along the way, people are trying to return to ordinary life.
You would like to say that, as a result, construction is booming. Surprisingly, it isn't. The firms that ought to be prospering got themselves tangled up with the companies, and that was that. Of course, even without those great construction houses, plenty of people know how to raise a building. The trouble is that they aren't in the cities large enough for a firm to set up shop. They are scattered through the provinces.
It isn't that someone who belongs to a construction firm is unable to build apart from it. But if it comes out that they do belong to one, the crowd kills them. In Berne City, all the more. The people who read the materials the capital released until the blood nearly bursts in their eyes are the citizens of Berne City, and anyone connected to the three companies is in genuine danger.
The interesting part is that those three companies had planted themselves in Berne City, so most of the people there belonged to them, directly or indirectly.
So do you know what they do?
They draw up lists of who joined the protests and who did not. Without the permission of those who joined, you have no right to come back to Berne City. Walk in as you please, and they kill you.
Through a Harvester's eyes, I watched people of the three companies come home thinking the trouble was over, and burn alive in the city square.
The hatred is spreading exactly as it should.
The city that had run furthest ahead has become the city most full of hatred and discrimination.
Splendid.
Harvesters were the ones who led it, so I received warmth as well.
My. Only two weeks ago I was worrying whether this was truly an acceptable world, and people turned out to be properly people. They think, quite correctly, with their hearts, and feel with their heads. They tailor the world to whatever emotion happens to be flowing, and do their feeling in the places where they ought to judge.
So petty hate crimes are taking shape, and an extremely closed society along with them, but warmth is being supplied to me, and I am happy. Nothing so very large has gone wrong yet, either. People are dying, you say—isn't that a large thing?
Because the king stands above the law, the kingdom's laws are not especially rigid. In an ordinary kingdom, executing a criminal is a circus, something a great many people can watch and enjoy. So even if they burn someone to death, so long as the citizens around them agree, those who enforce the law, as a rule, do no more than scold them—don't leave your rubbish by the roadside—and let it pass.
I would call it closer to a post-traumatic disorder than to anomie, that deviance which appears when a society lurches and its norms cannot catch up. A morality that holds killing to be wrong does still exist, and it isn't as if social order has come apart. They have simply lost so much that they are near the point of being unable to bear any more.
It is like a soldier who has lived through a war, going about an ordinary day, suddenly taking his surroundings for the middle of a battle and acting as he acted when he was a soldier. It isn't one person going through it. Berne City is.
Broken, and twisted.
There, the Harvesters tear their own wounds wider by their own strength. And each time they do, a little warmth trickles into me.
Hehe.
I think it would be quite all right if you suffered a little more. They are wounds that will have to heal someday, but I would like them to drag on as long as they can.
The capital, by contrast, is certainly in a tidier state. The witch's assault left the whole of it in ruins, yet unlike Berne City it is recovering. Those who lived through something truly horrific are vanishingly few, and most of the survivors spent the worst of it asleep after being pricked by thorns, so not many were badly hurt. With this announcement from the royal house, though, anything tied to clockwork machines has been thrown away.
My memories are strange, though. Why does a related search turn up words like economic panic?
I look through those memories, and there is no reason for such a thing to happen here. There is no great mass production, and no great mass of debt. No reason anyone should end up sitting out in the street.
Memories must chain together oddly. When you brainstorm, words with no real connection surface on their own, don't they? It is probably something like that.
These past few days I have lain in bed, savoring the warmth Berne City sends me.
Ah. It feels good.
Little of it went as I had thought, as usual. Still, warmth is coming in, so let us say it all turned out well.
I am humble, after all!
Ah—before it gets any later, I ought to put this body to sleep and turn my attention to the Harvesters' point of view.
In the meantime, a Harvester in another world was seized by something called a demon, dragged off to another world called hell, and died. The warmth came over to me, but I saw even the light carried off by the race called demons.
Unfortunately, I can't see past that.
The Harvesters caught few and far between, down at the very bottom—when one of them disappears, the whole view of that world disappears with them. It makes me sad.
Still, there is the example of Eunjae. If my luck holds, I might be called across. I'll think about it at my ease.
For now, I'll develop the technology here until it reaches the level of crossing into other worlds. I'll live like a vending machine that regenerates on its own and does no harm. A foundation is already laid, to some degree, so I have room to spare. Even in a city-building game, when resources run short, the way of it is to leave the thing running and wait until they pile up.
I don't know how long this body can endure. But once the Harvesters' descendants multiply, I can rise into reality by offering those descendants as Sacrifices, just as I did in the first world.
I have set a good number of Harvesters down in places far apart from one another. From here on, barring something truly extreme, the Harvesters will flourish. They are handsome, they are clever, and their bodies are strong.
In fact, some have had children after becoming Harvesters. A baby was born to a female Harvester who works in a shop where carnal desire is seen to.
The circumstances of one's birth don't matter. Only the dream matters. The strength for it is already there. The world around them is dreadful and reality is harsh, but a Harvester, even falling somewhat short, is still better off than an ordinary human.
From here, live a good life. Be happy enough, and then die. Have a great many children, if you can.
A Harvester's child carries the contract onward, but if I am not placed inside them, their light is white, like that of a person who never contracted with me. Which is to say, it is light. It weighs very little. So the world will not collapse, as the first world did.
Yes. This time I will contract with care, and with people standing as high as I can reach.
This third world, at least, I will shape exactly as I please. I will build an automatic warmth-harvesting factory, and nothing is going to stop me.