The One Who Lost the Dream — 3
Today, the moment class let out, I went straight back to my lodgings. Victoria was busy. Nearly three weeks have passed since that day, and the weather has turned quite cold. I don't feel it myself, but the students coming in to the Royal Academy have taken to much thicker clothes.
A wholly different kind of cold confuses me, too. For me, summer and winter are equally cold.
Set that chill aside, and I would be glad if the Royal Academy could simply go on with ordinary lessons. The lessons themselves are ordinary enough, and the classrooms haven't changed — but something has. The dormitory.
Those born noble used to commute from villas outside the school. Only nobles without money, and people who had been of the citizen class like Victoria, used the dorms, so most of the rooms stood empty. Then, all at once, the nobly born moved in, with no regard at all for what year they were in.
So where the place had been deserted, the dormitory is now full of incidents. More precisely, everyone has marked out a territory of their own, and the fighting has followed. Just as in the main school building, they cluster by faction and plant themselves, and in the worse cases they pick a quarrel the moment someone from another faction steps in. They complain as well — that the dorms are too small, that there aren't enough people to wait on them. The usual sort of thing.
And so Victoria had to change rooms. The Royal Academy is a class society too; when those above tell you to do something, you obey. The only way to prevent that is to grow close to someone high up, yet the nobles of truly wealthy houses still commute from outside.
What has changed is the sort of people who attend them. Armor has been fitted to the carriages they ride to school and back, and more hands have been assigned to them for the sake of safety. Those who pushed their children into the dorms must have judged that, out there, they could no longer answer for that safety. At the Royal Academy, at least, if anything happens, the garrison posted right beside the grounds can deploy at once. Which is also to say that the affairs of this country have grown that dangerous. Anyone with only middling power is better off living in the dorms — so it is rather funny that the dormitory itself has become the dangerous place.
At any rate, I thought society would cast clockwork machines aside at this rate. It hasn't rejected them completely. I saw as much through Victoria's eyes, when she went to the clockwork knight school. If clockwork machines were being driven out, that school would have to shut its doors, wouldn't it? It hasn't. If anything, as though they mean to raise clockwork knights on a grand scale, the school is under construction, with new buildings going up.
From what passes between Victoria and her teacher, they are cutting out every clockwork machine tied to the three companies and trying to begin the industry over from nothing. Every product built to the three companies' standard is to be destroyed, and the specifications deliberately changed, so that compatibility is difficult from the very start. In a word, they mean to rebuild it as a state enterprise.
We have certainly come too far to sweep clockwork away overnight and pretend it was never there. Too many parts of society are already at the point of struggling without clockwork machines. Transportation, if nothing else, above all. Railways that do more than run the length of this country — that link it to other countries besides. Those, at least, are hard to replace.
Once I understood that, a great deal came into view. They aren't simply doing away with clockwork machines. They are trying to replace the companies. Far too many goods have already been turned out by those machines for the machines themselves to be treated as something that never existed. The country is working hard.
First they have set the press in motion so that hatred of clockwork machines gathers upon the three companies, and — urging everyone to use what we ourselves have made, while painting the three companies as a foreign power — they have split the machines away from the enemy inside that hatred. Of course, once a clockwork-hater has been made, their numbers keep climbing. The harvesters who fled into little villages see it more than anyone. However small the village, the newspapers still arrive. A sensational piece — machines a wicked company hid away in order to kill people, that sort of thing — paralyzes reason with ease. And once a single mood spreads through a small village, changing it is all but impossible.
The kingdom sees this clearly enough, and is moving while it tries to hold the thing down, though I couldn't say whether that will take properly across the whole country.
There is something else of interest, too. I came by it through Aurora's eyes. Not only this country, but every nation, they say, is moving at the same time to erase the three companies outright. They do have the technical power, so I had wondered whether somewhere might take them in, and some country pull ahead of the rest. The sanctions are thoroughly in earnest — serious enough, I'm told, that any nation involved would be designated a public enemy state altogether.
At first I didn't know the reason. But Aurora held the same doubt, put the question to Sorindiges, and received an answer. It is no different, apparently, from the discovery of a blade that could stab a king and his nobles to death whenever it pleased. Just as the clockwork machines that piloted the royal airship had done, clockwork had worked its way into the very heart of the country because it was convenient. And the fact that it can betray them at any moment has been discovered.
It is a matter of technology brought in from outside. Honor has been damaged. They let a murderer into the safest ground they possessed — reason enough to drive any territorial creature into a frenzy. The higher the station, the more dreadfully one prizes one's own life. And beyond even that there is honor, which matters more: the worth of a name, the dignity of a house, things that go by names like those. That is what was stabbed.
You might as well call it a seizure already. However much power the three companies held, they never occupied an international position. I think I have been reasoning from memories that have faded too far. I assumed that if a company of global scale merely withdrew from a single kingdom, the one to take the loss would be the kingdom. But in an age when kingdoms are what the world runs on, that line of thought doesn't fit the facts.
They have blasted away the very ground on which that global company might have set its foot. Should any country take it in, mistaking it for an opportunity, they will destroy that country itself. This country, too, is arresting everyone tied to the three companies, investigating them, and standing them up for trial. That countries with violent kings will execute those involved is as clear as flame. Thought of that way, the warmth being thrown out onto the ground is far too precious to waste.
If I can manage it, I would like to make the royalty of other countries into harvesters as well. But that can be taken slowly.
In any case, on the whole a great many good things are happening for me. In a season of change this sharp, it is easy for someone underneath to seep upward — easier still for anyone possessed of a particular power, or a particular skill.
The harvesters in Berne City, and the technicians among them most of all: many, once the country had finished investigating them, went not to punishment but into the national research institute. Which is to say that a fair number of so-called engineers on a leash have come into being. It is obvious enough that their lives will hold no light from here on, and yet the harvesters themselves don't seem to find their lot a bad one. Some even think that this way they can take revenge on the three companies that wrecked their home. All of them, though, have moved their dwellings to cities near the capital, because Berne City is far too dangerous.
No — not only Berne City, not anymore. In nearly every city, outsiders are investigated down to the bone, and once it comes out that someone is of the three companies, a mob beating has become the natural order of things. The country does say not to, and it does crack down. The trouble is that the ones doing the cracking down look the other way, and sometimes go so far as to leak the information themselves. So society is in profound confusion, and witch hunts rise easily enough.
And amid all of that, there are people whose faces alone let them pass. None other than the harvesters. They carry a strong image of having led those who were harmed in Berne City, and on top of that the state broadcasts are dressing them up as righteous folk who resisted the wicked companies. People of Berne City who were detained there come before the press and give interviews about what happened then and there. I suspect that, on Aurora's account, the impression the harvesters make is being tended without pause — and because of it, the harvesters have become, of all things, talent one can trust. At which the harvesters who had been living in Brightshin were called away in every direction.
As the saying goes, crisis is opportunity. People whose very faces are a warrant of trust are talent wanted anywhere at all, and they are especially prized in work that carries things from place to place, or that keeps a person on the move. To arrive in some place, or some region, and be met with goodwill rather than suspicion — that is an enormous gain, isn't it?
The harvesters are finding proper work and climbing out of the station of the poor. Which is to say that they are spreading, widely. And then they will have a great many children, too.
Hehe.
Flourish, far and wide.
The more they do, the more easily I can grow warm.
Surveying my surroundings through the harvesters in that way, I found the time had slipped past quickly. I came in at midday, and already it is evening. Through a harvester's eyes, I take in the sunset.
The capital has changed a great deal as well. Come evening, snow-white smoke rises into the sky from place to place. Lower the gaze, and there are buildings still bearing the gashes where a colossal thorn-tree raked past and tore the surface away — traces of Maleficent's rampage. Three weeks is far too short to clear every trace. It isn't the minor buildings, merely scratched along the outside, that are the trouble. Worse are the ones the thorn-trees crushed, the ones whose walls were badly damaged, and the ones standing on the very verge of collapse.
Lower the gaze again, and evening has made it very dark. It used to be brighter. But the mana-lamps along the streets were broken by the thorn-trees and left as they were, so only a mana-lamp here and a torch there, hung at wide intervals, light what is around them. Perhaps for that reason, fewer people walk the roads. Far fewer carriages pass as well. And the carriages themselves have changed: vehicles that ran on mana have largely vanished, and carts drawn by beasts come and go in their place. Honestly, it looks like nothing other than a civilization in retreat.
But there are plenty of technicians, and the kingdom is working hard to set it right, so it ought to be settled before long.
It will, won't it?