Chapter 226: Hymn of the Betrayed - 6
Victoria has been very quiet ever since she burst into tears that day. The life has gone out of her without a trace, and she no longer so much as opens a book on clockwork machinery. From the final examinations until now, with the grades already out, she has spent most of the hours left to her shut inside her room, like someone sunk in depression.
Polaris is profoundly uncomfortable with it. She understands that friends and teachers from the school are dead, but she had been sure that would not be enough to break Victoria. Victoria, she said, would get over it easily.
I wonder.
I thought so too. But Victoria was an ordinary person. Her heart may be a little stronger than most — and yet the whole road toward her dream was smashed to pieces, wasn't it?
It isn't that Polaris made no effort to ease her. The finals simply fell at the worst possible time, and Victoria was left alone for long stretches. She may be growing ill.
In the meantime, the capital has changed a little.
Dozens of the riot's ringleaders hang in the square, drying in the winter wind. Fortunately the winter is cold, so the corpses do not rot, though it is hardly a pleasant sight.
Yes. That's right. The kingdom handled it properly.
When citizens rise in a riot, they say the most dangerous moment is the very beginning. That is the hardest time to answer them, and if the damage spreads then until it slips beyond what can be controlled, it is over. After that, the chaos cannot be stopped.
But Victoria bought time, and because of that the kingdom was able to respond as it should. They gathered people in the square, deliberately pulled a few of them out, and held trials that meant nothing. Those people did take part in the riot. That much is true. The riot itself, though, was never planned. It simply erupted.
There is no real culprit.
The state manufactured culprits all the same, through sham trials. It created villains and laid the blame across their shoulders. The meaning of it is this: they committed treason in an attempt to overthrow the nation, and they are the wicked ones. Those who were deceived into joining will not be charged. But treason is an evil act, and you would do well to look closely at what becomes of the people who commit it.
They strung people up on poles and had them stoned to death. And anyone who insisted, even there, that they were innocent — or that they had only looted because they were hungry and needed something to eat — was hung as a spy.
After that, the people who told the truth disappeared.
Then, where those corpses could be seen plain, they handed out rationed food and fuel.
By the memories of the leader within me, it is an effective way of keeping the ignorant in line. Show them the end that waits for anyone who defies you, and let them see that if they obey, they receive the supplies by which they can live.
The stick and the carrot. A method of husbandry that everyone knows.
And the papers, one after another, pile on articles about how those butchers attacked the Clockwork Knight School and slaughtered children. In the space of a single week they became traitors who had nursed their grievances against the state and made a wreck of it, and the worst of murderers besides — people who killed children at the school for the sake of their treason.
But I know two of the dozens hanging there, because Harvesters were their neighbors. Those two were only ordinary people, worn out by the world, thrashing about however they could simply to stay alive.
Seeing them, it is plain enough that there are no traitors of the kind being named. There was merely someone on hand to take, in their place, the price of sins others had committed — someone they could point to and say that they themselves had only been used, that that one was the villain. Nothing more than a place to set the guilt down.
No. If anything, the heavier a thing sits on a person's conscience, the more eagerly they sell the other out. Otherwise the anxiety would leave them unable to breathe.
That one is the bad one. I'm not.
Even a child can manage it. And the state was clever enough to make use of a psychology like that.
So it made scapegoats at once and executed them, then announced that the investigation had yielded its results and named three corporations as the powers behind the treason. They had attacked the Clockwork Knight School, the story went, for fear that casting the old firms aside and making a new clockwork technology would ruin the market.
If I had not turned the people who attacked that place into Harvesters, I would have been taken in. The logic was that convincing.
Once the state broadcast the tale widely through the press, the smaller papers inflated the rumor in their turn. Even the Harvesters who stormed the Clockwork Knight School and killed the students believe they were deceived. Facts that never existed are being manufactured, and they are changing into something that passes for the truth.
They don't rule and run a country for nothing, it seems.
And alongside news of that sort comes word that the state understands how hard this winter is, that it is releasing the food it has stockpiled, and that people should go and receive it. Manufacture an enemy, slip in something to soothe the public mood — and in that fashion the country is working through the disaster, methodically.
That they should, in the midst of it, keep such a firm hold on the Harvesters, who are so apt to bolt in every direction... I hardly know what to call it. If I were human, I would have found it quite unsettling.
I remember the Harvesters who were dragged away for human experimentation. After the Harvesters self-destructed, nothing of that kind happened again. But I remember. Yes.
This country is no flower garden.
And according to several Harvesters serving in the army, the military is better at killing people than at killing monsters.
What does that mean, you ask?
It means they can wage war.
In fact, there was war between nations during the reign of the present king. Some of the Harvesters living in the Brightshin Slums left the army over wounds taken then, and were in the middle of being killed by poverty.
Every country is like this, at bottom. In wartime they are proud soldiers, but let them survive with their wounds and they are nothing but troublesome garbage — parasites the state must go to the annoying expense of feeding. You say that isn't so? Only the barest few are otherwise, and citizens see only that few. They hold up the fraction and proclaim that this is how we honor our soldiers, so that when the need arises they may be spent as troops.
Truly, even in those faded memories, how many of the people called veterans ever lived well? Most of them, bodies ruined by the wounds they took back then, scavenged scrap paper until their breath stopped in some cold little room, and when spring came months later it was the smell of rot that announced they were dead.
The plaque that offers thanks for saving the country — you need only call in someone who is living well and hang it on them. It costs less to drag over one survivor who prospers and press a certificate or a medal into their hands, with a word of thanks, than to look after every soldier.
Capital is zero-sum.
There is far too little of it to weigh by right and wrong and portion out one person at a time. So honor spends a capital of illusion. Let real capital enter the matter, and it becomes a loss, doesn't it?
Money is ruthless. The people who use it are vicious; if they were not, they could not make money. That is the way of the world. Money itself is not evil, but greed inevitably contains viciousness.
What is worse than that, though, is faith.
Why, you ask?
Because it becomes, just as I do, a refuge for weak humans to flee to. There is a saying that religion is the opium of the people, but that is nonsense. Opium at least gives pleasure. Religion gives only the hope that pleasure will come.
Empty hope.
Harbor all the hope you like; its substance is nothing but a pit of despair. Set beside a drug that at least offers pleasure, a religion that sets you thrashing on empty hope until you die — which is the crueler?
Of course, in the first world there were religions that granted things like divine power. But those, too, were places defiled by human wisdom. Even if gods exist, it is the same.
My thoughts have wandered. The point is this.
There is an army meant for dealing with people. This country will not be the only one, and nothing guarantees that other nations, trying to escape a disaster this large, will not go to war.
I can sit in the comfortable chair the king prepared and let the time pass. Where people live, it is not so. As time goes on they grow unhappier. They die, or they burst.
Looking at things now, you think this counts as some halfway soft landing?
No.
There is no such thing as a soft landing.
I know that.
The day after the calamity at the Clockwork Knight School, the royal family set about holding memorial rites within its walls to bring the school back to life, and declaring they would invent a technology of their own that would not lose to the wicked corporations. But a human heart does not move so simply. Bend it once, and the crooked place remains.
And there is more. Every day the royal family sends people out to distribute food, and yet now it is not only provisions — every price is rising. Haulers bound outward can no longer move at all unless they first assemble into an enormous caravan and travel with mercenary companies whose business is people.
Look. The situation is getting worse, isn't it?
If this were the Middle Ages, it might be another story. Forget nation and nation — they stand independent by the village, don't they? So whatever happens, the effects for the most part end inside the village. But here there are railroads. Coming and going between countries is not so difficult. Princess Lunasi, Aurora's older sister, is in fact studying at a school in another country.
When my memory brightens, a sentence rises to meet me: if diplomatic relations are poor, one does not do such a thing. Were it a vassal state there would be no choice, though I also hold a memory that says, in that case, it is the prince who is dragged away. She is a princess, and so the chances are high the king sent her — or something to that effect.
Even so, how far does a relationship like that extend?
This is an age when the links between nations run deep. Should one country begin to shake, several others can prop it up. They will be stripped of all manner of interests, of course, but collapse can be avoided.
And if it passes that limit?
Depression arrives in a chain. You cannot shut the door and escape merely because it is some other country. Once the connections exceed a certain point, the moment you close the door the situation only grows worse.
The signs are already here. Refugees entering this country are increasing as well, and because of those immigrants a mood that was already sour turns uglier still.
Truly, I look forward to seeing how this world will shake, and into what shape it will change. The second world was far too short, but the first was considerably entertaining. The wider the view through the Harvesters' eyes became, the more warmth came pouring in.
Whether a nation rises or falls, it is all the same to me. I need only watch the world flow past, and let the time go by. If warmth offers itself along the way, I will move. For now, though, this is the season for watching, until the seeds sown in the field germinate.
In short, I need only enjoy the present.