Chapter 212
King Hypion gathered everyone in the room into a single place.
If I listened closely to the way he spoke, the people here all seemed to stand at a level close to his own. So I rummaged through Polaris's memories, and Kanna's, to check. I saw the dress of other nations. Among them were diplomats, royalty — even kings. In other words, the place was packed with the leadership of foreign countries.
An international conference? Was he about to introduce me?
I was still turning that over when Hypion called for a soldier, saying the man had been prepared in advance. A middle-aged man of considerable years came in, his uniform clustered with dangling medals. Two things about him stood out. First, the right sleeve fluttered — which meant there was no arm inside it. And a long, torn scar ran across his face, one eye already sealed shut by an old wound.
He stood before the king and bowed. Hypion left him standing there and came over to me.
"Bell. Heal him."
"Yes. I understand."
So I stepped up in front of the man. He watched me with a face full of questions, and from the look of him he didn't know much about me at all. Even if Hypion had never explained me, did he not watch television? I must have been on it any number of times, and yet he showed no sign of recognizing me. Well. There are people like that. More harvesters is better for me regardless, so I recited the contract.
The man looked at Hypion as if to ask whether this was really all right, and Hypion nodded with a grave face. But the gravity in it was not the gravity of someone who trusted me. It was colder and more clinical than that — an eye measuring exactly how useful I was.
Mm. Very good. When you buy a thing, you ought to inspect its performance with care.
"Yes, I understand. I simply agree, like this?"
He agreed. I pushed myself into his light.
Hm? Something caught. But it was truly only a thin bubble, and the moment I put a little force behind it, it popped and was gone. The light stained a proper purple. Then his whole body swelled and hardened stiff, and, splitting the way porcelain cracks, it broke open to show skin pure white underneath. His hair turned purple as well, though no one in the room was looking at that.
I thought they might be looking at the arm that had grown back. They were staring at the eye. A new harvester's pupils meet a great many gazes. He, by contrast, was not touching his eye at all. With a clumsy, unfamiliar hand he kneaded the arm that had come back.
He had lost it fighting a dragon that knew how to lay curses. Afterward he had tried everything to regain the arm, but the curse remained, and it could not be properly healed. For reference, the eye had been hurt so long ago that he had given up on it. More precisely, it is a sensitive place to begin with, and healing magic does not restore such things well, so he had never expected much. There was also a memory of refusing treatment after being told he might die of shock in the middle of regenerating. The gap between a part one could have restored and did not, and a part one could not restore no matter the effort, seemed to be a wide one.
But a curse. There had been something like that when I entered Choseol's body, too. That one was a mark the Great Dragon had claimed ahead of anyone else, and even something of that degree I can crush. The dragon's curse had been simple as well. No — compare them by any measure, and what the Great Dragon had laid down was the stronger. Mm.
The man named Hound stood there utterly dumbfounded, touching his eye and his arm. Hypion pointed to him and launched into the pitch.
"The arm of Baron Philios, the Dragon Slayer, lay under a dragon's curse. But this person's power can erase even a curse of that kind with ease, and regenerate what was lost."
The audience murmured. But Hypion turned the talk aside from there.
"However, a miracle has its limits."
He explained the changes that come when one properly becomes a harvester, and the limits of those changes. The hair is dyed purple. The skin turns white — or, if the wounds were severe, blue. And once regeneration has been used, a second time is impossible. Stressing that the miracle of regeneration comes only once to a person, he said that so long as they were alive, they could be regenerated even while asleep. He called it a miracle, and then explained in a long, circling way that it was not a miracle at all. Along the way he remarked that what a human being can do has limits, that miracles do not descend so often, and he defined me, properly, as an esper. He added that any wound, any illness, could be healed once.
The eyes of those who had come from abroad had already changed, and long since. Gazes in which hope and hunger were tangled together. Truly. Splendid. There would not be a person here who failed to understand what my ability meant.
And yet he had not said the most important part. I know the royal house has already grasped it. If I make someone a harvester, the disease called aging can also be healed, once. Of course, becoming a harvester doubles one's lifespan, so the practical span feels about the same. If one must force a ranking, those who became harvesters after they had already grown old lived longer more often. But the share of that time spent in health is similar, so honestly I think them the same.
In the first world I was able to gather a great many who had already lived. Back then I only had to recite the contract, and I poured myself in and filled them. I don't intend to do that from here on. Even if I do, I will do it with extreme care. The moment a single contradiction appears, trust is destroyed by that one instance. For a kind like me, who must take warmth through contracts, that is fatal.
Selling a trust that does not exist in order to make a contract — I understand why they say a demon keeps its bargains. Without some nameless guarantee that the contract will be honored no matter what, who would ever contract with you? All the more a demon that drags even the soul down to hell. If it will not grant the wish, then to what end? If I were a demon, I would keep, without fail, the fact itself that one can obtain what one wants from a demon. Otherwise no one would make the contract at all.
And so I become a launching cradle for harvesters. When Hypion tells me to bow, I bow. When he tells me to be still, I am still. I do my very best to earn that credit — that if you wish, the wish will, at least, be granted. So that to anyone looking, I seem an astonishing instrument of healing owned by King Hypion. And so that it is plain to see that the king is using that instrument to sell the cure.
Judging by the course he has taken so far, this promotion is probably for Aurora as well. Blue skin is alien. But if that is the aftereffect of a numinous treatment, the way people look at it will change. Of course that will not be the only reason. If a thing can be used, it will be used. Hypion looks as though he has a head for that.
And so he kept me at his side, greeting those who approached and introducing me to them. He never put it in so many words, but there was no one who failed to understand that he was inviting them to come if anything troubled them. Once the greetings with the people gathered here were finished, Hypion and the foreigners assembled in the room moved on to the real subject.
Yes. Promoting me had been nothing more than an advertisement run before the film begins. I don't know why I am in this place, but the representatives of each nation gathered here have assembled to discuss how to dismantle three companies. Truly dismantle them. It even came up that they would gather the senior executives and the researchers involved, plant at an international conference the pretext that these were enemies of the world, and execute them as a public spectacle.
Strangely, it was not this country — the one that had been seriously wronged — but the other countries that burned hotter. A kill order capable of murdering a person at any moment had been hidden inside the clockwork dolls that came and went from their own bedchambers, and every one of them, without exception, was furious. They felt it was the same as an assassin hiding in the bedroom. Put the other way, it meant clockwork machines had spread so widely through every nation that they passed in and out of the very places that ought to have been safest.
A little further along — if this had been a world where the power of the people had grown greater, like the place I come from — those three companies could not, in fact, have been touched by anyone. In my faded memories there is a genre called cyberpunk. There, corporations are stronger than nations. A world in which an entire city becomes the property of the company outright. That might have been possible here, too. Now that clockwork machines are being cast out, prices have risen a little, haven't they? Citizens, by nature, scream when prices rise, and they pour the resentment for it onto their leaders. But this place is mostly monarchy. A king's power is stronger than the logic of the market.
They had probably assumed that even if one country made trouble, the others would take those companies in. The bonds between nations proved more solid than that. Beyond mere terrorists, they had become an outright common enemy.
And the conference did not end there. Surprisingly, a forum opened to debate how the clockwork industry ought to be improved. Too much had been built upon it to pretend the thing had never existed. If it collapsed, they said, it would be dangerous; the harm was already touching the market; it was a matter that had to be handled at once.
Mm. Is it that serious a problem?
But among the people in this room, there was not one who was discussing the fact that such a problem existed. Whether the fact was there or not seemed to have been fully grasped already. The only people here were people considering how to deal with it. Well. The posture of having a problem and meaning to solve it is a good one. But why must it be done at an international conference? Could they not simply take this opening and advance their own country alone?
The moment I thought it, a sentence lit up — and not from one or two, but from most of those who had belonged, in their own fashion, to the ruling class.
Hmm?
They say that moving in a single direction through cooperation, and sharing the development that comes of it, advances faster than going forward alone and shut away. Places that are connected can send capital back and forth along those connections, and they can check one another and keep a balance. And a nation that does not come inside is set down as a notional enemy and trampled underfoot. That, apparently, is the diplomatic accord being made here.
Then a question occurs to me. Wouldn't a great nation simply absorb the company and pull the furthest ahead in technology? But that, they say, makes that nation the root of every incident that has not even happened. A pretext appears — the pretext that that country slipped into the king's bedchamber assassins who could kill the king at any moment.
Mm. Watching, I can see the shape of it. The kings in this room are not making an accord out of goodwill. If they are crushing the companies to death because they are furious that a knife meant to stab them was hidden in the most fatal place, then I can understand it. It is emotion. This, I can understand. In particular, the more deeply a person had been steeped in the convenience of clockwork machines, the more thoroughly they proposed grinding the companies down. They shouted to kill even those with the slightest connection. Read on the basis of emotion, it makes sense.
In short, it is this. It is like the fury of parents who bought goods for their baby, and then heard, from somewhere else, that a baby had died because of those goods.
The meeting went on. Several hours passed. At last it ended.
But is it really a meeting if what they do here is not deciding, but announcing what each of them brought prepared, then marking it up and revising it? Anyway. They closed by each signing some document and pressing a seal, which was curious enough. And the people here moved on to the next item of the schedule. A banquet — the place Aurora is working so hard to prepare, and waiting in even now. Seeing that Sorindiges is beside her as well, this seems to be the work of the royal family.
Thinking that, unexpectedly, they do have things to do, I followed Hypion to the banquet hall, exactly as he told me to.