Dreams Lost — 11
The holiday rushed past, and the weekday came around again.
The sky was clear, but the morning must have been cold. An unusual number of students had arrived bundled in warm clothes, and half of them sat through class with faces wilted from exhaustion. Most of the tired ones were the students who had been at the palace yesterday. It had ended terribly late. There was nothing to be done about it.
"Why are you perfectly fine, Bell?"
Lunchtime. Polaris jabbed me with a finger, looking thoroughly put out.
"It wasn't all that hard, was it?"
"I'd rather have crossed that whole city with you. That would've been easier."
She meant that working the body to exhaustion was better than enduring an uncomfortable place.
"What happened yesterday?"
Victoria looked from me to Polaris, puzzled.
"We went to work for the royal court."
"Our parents dragged us."
Victoria's face changed into that of someone who had just heard something difficult to comment on.
"So both of you went to the royal castle?"
"Yeah. See the tired kids still in our class? Every one of them got dragged there."
Polaris flicked a glance toward the students left in the classroom. Quite a few of them sat sunk in a deeply gloomy mood, fatigue stacked on fatigue until they looked years older in their seats.
"What on earth was going on?"
Victoria asked, hesitating. She was wondering whether a question like this was even all right to ask. It had been a royal affair, and she was worried it might not be something one ought to know. But the banquet had come after the meeting ended, so wouldn't it be fine? I wasn't sure, so I turned my gaze toward someone who would be. At Victoria's question, Polaris shook her head hard.
"Whenever there's a gathering, it's always the same. What have you accomplished compared to so-and-so. Get along with this person. Arrange things so you can marry that one. And that's only what you hear from your parents, to start with."
"Whoa. Uh — to start with? There's more?"
Even a banquet, then, wasn't truly time for play. That hour was work as well. Polaris pressed on.
"Kids our age are all gathered in one place, you know? Don't touch that one. You think you're so great? I'm so-and-so's son — want to do it with me? Who do you think you are, wagging your tail at my man? And on and on. Don't even get me started."
"It's the animal kingdom..."
"Worse than that, Tori."
At Victoria's mutter, Polaris shook her head and added her own verdict. It hadn't only been things like that. There had been boys and girls who bowed their heads and asked to be looked on kindly, but she didn't mention that part at all. The essence of the act was flattery, I supposed — not genuine longing or anything of the sort, but a deception, sweet talk meant to draw out some profit. Polaris wasn't foolish enough to be taken in by it.
"Bell went to a place like that too?"
Victoria looked at me as she asked.
"You didn't cause any trouble?"
"The way you're worrying sounds a little strange, doesn't it?"
When I asked, looking at her, Victoria quietly avoided my eyes.
"No. After seeing that, there's no way I'd be worried about you, Bell."
"That?"
Had I done something so very large? Making gold?
"Mali."
"Ah. So you mean that."
When she said that, Victoria had looked at me with an expression of pure revulsion. Goosebumps had actually risen on her skin. It was an object now, so I had only called it that — was it really something to be so afraid of?
"This one isn't going to up and die no matter where she goes. But standing still in the same spot for hours looked rough. She was so motionless that people were whispering she might be a doll."
Beside us, Polaris said what she had been thinking while she watched me there. A pity, really. Harvester or not, I can't know what someone is thinking unless they speak it or write it down.
"Human beings have strong arms and legs."
"Even so, standing motionless in one posture is torture, Bell."
"Bell? No — yeah. That's true. When she was at the house, if there was something to do she'd move all over the place and act like a mom, but if there was nothing to do she'd go so still you wondered if something was wrong with her."
At Polaris's words, Victoria seemed to picture it, and soon she was bringing up the old days. Now that I thought of it, when I cleaned Victoria's room with Beatrice, she had grumbled at me that never tidying up was just her taking after her father. I had acted like a mother because Victoria lived without organizing a single thing.
"There were kids jealous that she was standing beside a young man whose name was everywhere as the next captain of the royal guard — and even they lost interest, because she didn't seem like a person."
Polaris tossed it out with a bored look.
The next captain of the royal guard?
Ah. That good-natured young man. Come to think of it, quite a lot of girls had sent jealous looks my way at the start, and by the end not one of them was looking at me like that.
Victoria turned to me as if to ask whether there had really been such a person.
"My escort? He had a good personality, and he did his work well."
"Oh my. What. Are you interested?"
Polaris asked it with a fascinated face, as if she had just heard something delightful.
"By interested, you mean am I thinking of marriage?"
"Yeah."
"I'm not. The body I entered was originally a fish-person, so it ought to produce eggs, but there's no sign of that, which means I probably can't make children. Ah — not hard eggs. Eggs wrapped in a membrane. Fish-people fertilize externally to begin with, so a human wouldn't feel sexual pleasure. I don't think I could be used as a wife on their side, do you? Being unable to perform one's nightly duties is grounds for divorce, isn't it?"
Polaris's expression fell apart like a broken machine. She failed to understand what I had said and stared at Victoria, her face full of questions.
"Ah, right. We're so used to how she looks now, but Bell — at first she was an enormous fish-person."
Victoria seemed to be calling up the memory of our first meeting, and she paid no mind to the look on Polaris's face.
"Besides, if you go by the sex of the body I entered, it's male. A male called Daegon was originally meant to enter this body. So I might not even be able to make eggs."
"What am I even listening to?"
Polaris lifted a hand, weakly.
"The reproductive concept of my body."
"It's too explicit, so let's not put it like that, Bell."
Victoria cautioned me. Was it? Didn't they have some tolerance for talk of a sexual nature? One look at Polaris's pale face told me they did not.
Polaris clutched her head in both hands. Muttering, she sorted through everything I had said.
"So Bell isn't originally Bell. You're inside someone else?"
"Close. It's more accurate to say I'm inside an artificially made meat doll. This time, there was no victim."
Polaris looked at me strangely. Victoria, wearing an expression more wretched than hers, looked at me and asked.
"So there were times when there was a victim."
"Sacrifices that become vessels easily are often young girls."
Even setting aside the matter of summoning me in particular, if one dug through Yaseulle's memories, young girls were the ones most often made Sacrifices — sometimes simply killed and offered, sometimes used to summon something. Faded as those memories were, shrine maidens and shamans appeared in them too, so it seemed less the law of a single world than a universal one.
No. Daegon's memories were shining, and Yuanshi Tianzun's as well. It was actually so. Daegon being the one with the details was unpleasant.
In any case, depending on the species, the males were sometimes the ones offered. Thinking of seahorses made it easy to understand. If being unilaterally exploited by one's own kin — kin who were not oneself — was built into the system of life, then conceptually it became easy to hold something else inside. The easiest thing to enter was a colony, but then the commanding individual that governed it noticed easily, and at the slightest abnormality you were discarded at once, so properly ascending into a god was difficult. Weigh the return against the time and effort, and a memory sparkled to the effect that using an intelligent creature, like a human, was easiest in the end. Half-formed intelligence, and therefore easy to deceive — something along those lines.
"Twice it was a girl, and now it's this meat doll."
"You're not a person... I see."
Polaris spoke, stumbling over the words. Calling it a person was impossible, when the creature would regenerate even if its head flew off and only a single arm remained. No — Tisha might have managed it. She had never been hurt that badly, so I couldn't be sure. In any case, not a person.
"I am a very dark, cold sea."
"Then... me using water is because of that, too?"
At my words, Victoria floated water up into the empty air.
"No. It has nothing to do with me. Among the people I gave myself to, there are some who use fire, and some who move the air, aren't there?"
"Ah... yeah. Right."
Victoria had already seen Harvesters like that. Perhaps because of it, she understood at once.
"I'm not taking aim at anyone and granting an ability. From the start, I don't even know why a person is healed when I give myself. I did it, it worked, and so I'm simply using it. It's the same as your ability, Victoria."
"An ability, she says."
Polaris stared hard at Victoria — more precisely, at the tiny droplet of water floating beside her.
"I can't use something like this?"
She asked it while pointing at the droplet. An extremely good question. I had been curious all this time, and it had been a hard thing to ask outright. I pressed my delight down and put the question to Victoria as blandly as I could.
"Victoria, what was it like when you gained your superpower?"
"Me?"
Victoria pointed at herself, then folded her arms and sank into thought. She was probably calling up the time we first met.
"I did it, and it worked."
"What kind of answer is that."
Polaris grumbled, but Victoria paid her no mind. She closed her eyes as if turning over an old memory and went on, slowly.
"I mean it literally. I did it, and it worked. No — more precisely, it was so natural I couldn't understand why I hadn't been able to do it until then. Just like moving an arm. I could do it as a matter of course, so I simply did."
As expected.
Gain a superpower, and from the moment you gained it, you knew how to use it. I had personally guessed that some set of instructions entered the mind, but they had felt it as naturally as if they had been using it all along. A third arm had grown, and they used it well at once. Perception itself had been written over anew. This.
That was why Tisha, who had gained the passive superpower of regeneration, tested her ability only after she left that place. Her actions then had been so unhesitating that I guessed she already knew, even before she tested the power — and now it had actually come to light. If there were a Harvester with superhuman patience, or one who found this power uncanny and resolved never to use it, they might have possessed a superpower and still never used it. Well. Use it even once, and I would know. I ought to file that away in a corner of my mind.
"So if you don't get that feeling, you can't use it."
Polaris hung her head, disappointed.
"Do you need power?"
"I'm not asking for the kind of power I saw back in Berne City. Just that kid. Look how conveniently she's using that superpower."
At that, Victoria sent the droplet dancing this way and that, showing off for Polaris. Polaris wore a look of pure distaste and turned to me.
"I wanted a convenient power like that, too."
"The chance has already flown."
"I don't want that! Give me one toooo—"
Polaris threw a tantrum, and Victoria grinned and teased her. And so the brief span between the end of lunch and the start of class passed by.