Hymn of the Betrayed - 5
The next day.
For all the enormity of what had happened yesterday, the Royal Academy ran on without a hitch. Rain had kept falling right up until I stepped outside that morning, and that must have played its part — unlike the day before, there wasn't a protester in sight. Perhaps that was why no one inside the Royal Academy spoke of what had happened in the capital. They were far too busy going over what had passed at the banquet thrown, almost by chance, while Sorindiges lingered on.
That mattered more. What had happened in the capital was, in practice, no different from someone else's affair. A connection to the person who would one day be king was far more important.
So not a single word was said about the riot that had broken out outside yesterday. What made the rounds instead was gossip of the usual kind — who had made a good impression on Sorindiges in the banquet hall, who had tried too hard to stand out, and who looked likely to rise.
And besides, the rain Victoria had called down put a stop to the riot that ought to have gone on. Cold rain in winter steals the strength to move.
It was a little funny, the way the warmth of those who froze to death in that rain trickled faintly in at dawn. Not that Victoria had killed them, exactly. They had already been dying. They were unlucky.
Five children, seven old people, and one man who drank the liquor he had looted, got drunk, fell asleep on the bare ground, and froze. Thirteen in all?
When the weather turns foul, a child dying in a back alley, or an old person — that isn't so strange, is it?
Even so, if a Harvester is caught at the root of the cause, the warmth still comes to me. It seems to have been judged that Victoria killed them. Rather curious, that.
And there is one thing this has made clear to me. I realized it last night, watching a Harvester shiver in the rain on the way back to their nest: riots of this kind probably aren't happening only in this country.
Most countries have banned the clockwork machines they already had, in one form or another. When the productivity those machines built breaks down, everything that productivity was holding up collapses with it. Just as we see in this country now, the situation turns grim.
That anger might turn, as it did here, on an easy target like a clockwork knight school. Or it might turn on that country's king. What is certain is that this is not happening only here.
People look to someone else for the reason their lives have grown hard. That is why religion exists.
I have fallen into misfortune — why won't you save me? Why am I the only one suffering? Save only me. Drive everyone else into misery if you like. Only me. That is the shape of it.
I know it well. I have lived it.
That is why I hate gods. Not the frauds who delude themselves into thinking they are gods — someone who shoved me down into that deep sea. Even if they don't exist, I would hate them.
Not atheism. Antitheism. I can't prove whether a god exists, but I deny them. Whether they exist or not. Otherwise I would be far too pathetic, wouldn't I?
This isn't something I know through knowledge. It isn't something I know through information. I know it through experience.
You resent someone in order to live, and before long you live in order to resent.
Kihik.
There is a next step, too. It only falls once you can no longer die, so it doesn't apply to ordinary people.
Anyway. Therefore.
Nothing is over yet. If anything, this is only the beginning.
Perhaps somewhere in it the companies will find a way to survive. Isn't grimy business like that the stuff of human affairs?
At first I worried, because the people here were kind to an uncanny degree. Fortunately, people of the kind I know are living here too. They slant a little toward the good, but that falls inside the range education can change.
Every human is born a beast, and becomes a person only by being educated. You don't think so? You'd be shocked if you knew how cruel a child can be to an animal that can't speak.
Every culture human beings call goodness is the sum of the civilization they have piled up. Someone even put it this way: the moment humanity began to build civilization was not when we started using fire, but when we started keeping the injured alive. Which is to say, when we took the weapon called society into our hands.
They packaged the conduct required to form that society as goodness — the act of going against instinct and devoting oneself to the group. They called that good, and they began to teach it. That is education.
I looked at Victoria, who had received that education.
I had expected some darkness to be lodged in her face. She was fine. She wasn't pretending to be fine, either. The more Harvester memories I took in, the better I could read human feeling, and if she had been pretending, I would have known at once.
Still, even when the feeling itself is certain, I can be wrong the moment interpretation — that subjective thing — mixes in. I had learned that last time. I needed to be careful.
If, midway through a conversation, someone felt disgust at a cockroach flying past behind my back, all I would actually know is a disgust like the sight of a bug. I might decide I had said something wrong and stepped on a landmine. But the presence or absence of feeling, at least, I know for certain, so I wasn't misreading what Victoria felt.
If she was all right, I would treat her as I always did.
"Clean your room properly."
"After everything that happened yesterday, that's what you ask?"
Lunchtime. I went over and gave her a prod, and she looked thoroughly incredulous.
"Then what am I supposed to ask?"
"So yesterday was nothing? Is that it?"
Things were fairly settled just then. If the conversation slipped, in that state, into prying about me, I had a feeling I would make a mistake somewhere. Better to offer a subject Victoria would actually care about.
"It's still ongoing, isn't it?"
The moment she heard me, Victoria's face hardened.
"Ongoing...? Yesterday? That?"
"Do you think anyone there learned that what they did was wrong?"
No one.
They had only pulled back. Just then they would be putting their rain-soaked homes in order, or moving to get food however they could, or going around trying to sell what they had stolen. The riot itself was over. But there was no reason they wouldn't start another. If anything, the reasons to riot again would only grow as supplies ran out, day by day.
And the second time is easy. They had learned that killing someone else can get you something, hadn't they?
Some had truly cried out because they couldn't sit still and die in the situation they were in. Others had found a way to profit from it. The desperate, the ones who would use people, the ones who would be used, the ignorant, the ones who wanted to be angry, the ones who wanted to curse someone else, and all the rest. Every one of them was still there.
Only a fool does the same thing and hopes for a different result.
"This is bad."
"Is there anyone else you know in the capital?"
At my question, Victoria stopped. She thought for a moment, then shook her head.
"There... shouldn't be."
She had gone around collecting the bodies herself and checked the faces, so it wasn't that she didn't know. Everyone she had known from her days at the clockwork knight school was dead.
In the fragmented memories that came in with that faint warmth, there had been a boy who nursed an unrequited love for Victoria, among others. Already dead. Or else, midway through dying, their misfortune had caught them at last.
I didn't particularly care about the misfortune of those whose warmth I had already taken. What I regretted was that I could have gained so much more, and had gotten far too little. If I had only been a little faster, I could have taken in heaps of warmth. It really was only a few people.
Put another way, every friend Victoria had from the clockwork knight school was dead. And since they were all dead, there was nothing left that could wound her any further.
"Then you're fine."
"Aren't you being too cold? You don't care what happens to the people you went to the trouble of saving?"
Hmm. How should I answer?
If I answered too heartlessly, Victoria — who, surprisingly, hadn't been all that disappointed yesterday — might actually be disappointed this time. I would fasten something plausible onto it.
"If they've been restored once, haven't they already had their chance? Anything beyond that is outside what I can do anyway. I give them a chance, but when did I ever tell them to live better? Did I tell them to live a good life this time? Live as you please. As you please. Do whatever you want."
I said it to Victoria with my chin propped on my hand, still in the chair where I sat.
"If I gave my affection to every living thing, just how many lives would I have to send off?"
It's a common enough notion. That an immortal comes to suffer every parting, that sort of thing. I had blurted it out thinking that something everyone knows might quiet her, and the effect was surprisingly good.
Victoria's face filled with shock. Then it shifted into pity for me. Wasn't this working a little too well?
"I've never... thought of it that way. So that's why you..."
Ah.
Right. This world doesn't have works of that kind. Or even if it does, they aren't the sort you can simply pick up and read. By my measure the culture here sits far below, and to Victoria it was a concept she had truly never once considered.
Mm.
If she would misunderstand me that way, it suited me well enough. Everything I had said until now — only the facts, spoken coldly — had suddenly become the pain of parting, once you grow attached to someone.
Then I ought to shake her once more, here, so she would think entirely with her feelings.
There is no creature so frail as a person who thinks with the heart.
"Victoria. You lost a great many people yesterday. Are you all right now?"
The same subject. Meeting, and parting. For me it was a matter of the future; for Victoria, it was real. Of course, the future she imagined and the future I felt were nothing alike!
"I'm fi—"
What?
Wasn't she supposed to say she was fine? Yesterday she had gone back to her room, peeled her clothes off any old way, washed herself clean with her power, gotten into bed, and slept. Then she had woken at dawn, stared at nothing for a long while, and come here. Hadn't it already closed over?
A choked sound broke from her. Something surged up inside Victoria all at once, and the tears burst free. She cried so hard it was almost absurd, the tears pouring down her face.
A murmur rose around us. People turned to stare at Victoria as she wept.
She covered her mouth and held her breath, but that couldn't stop the wail from spilling out. Polaris had gone to meet her own people, and what was I to do with this. Victoria bent at the waist, clutching the sobs down however she could.
That was when Freesia came over with a puzzled look and whispered, low, at my ear.
"What's going on?"
"She lost all her friends in the riot that broke out outside yesterday."
"Ah... Bring her. This isn't a place for a girl to cry."
She was right. This was a classroom with boys and girls mixed together. It was... a bit much, yes. And she knew a riot had broken out outside yesterday. She knew, and she simply didn't make a topic of it, because there was no need to care. Someone else's affair.
I took Victoria to the room Freesia led us to. And there she cried in earnest — bitterly, wretchedly — until lunch was nearly over.
People are frail.
Just as I am.
Victoria had not been special after all.