Unfortunately, I've Grown Attached — 5
Winter in the third world is nearly over, which means the time to return to the Royal Academy is drawing near.
Surprisingly, Victoria has decided to come back to the capital. Morris and Beatrice worked hard to persuade her. She would have been better off giving up and simply going on with her life out there… But setting my own feelings aside, it seems she'll come up in time for the start of term.
That aside, an interesting sort of tool has begun to sell in the capital. Tools that run on life force. Tools with Dagon's technology worked into them.
Unlike the existing power devices, they say, these give off no sensation of mana being drawn in from the surroundings. In other words, you can run a clockwork machine and still be difficult to catch. Use one recklessly even now, and rioters come bursting in. A grudge, once made, does not fade easily. And even if a thing looks strange when you examine it logically, once a society has acknowledged it as evil, acting on that acknowledgment becomes something people are permitted to do. So tools that let them sidestep the problem and use the machines anyway have begun to sell under the table.
What's more, they far outperform the tools Morris made. Technology brought over from a more advanced world — if that's only natural, then it's only natural. The trouble arises precisely because of it. The trouble will come of having copied someone else's work. They skipped the sequence one has to accumulate in order to arrive at that technology, and so they never learned much of what ought to have been learned along the way. The safety measures tacked on only after the thing has taken blood into itself, for instance — a function that stops once the life force in a body drops below a certain point.
Honestly, I had expected Dagon's technology to bloom in Berne City. These were desolated people, so much of what they had built now collapsed, resolved amid the ruins to protect only themselves and go on living. I thought they would throw every ethical consideration aside and develop cruel techniques.
That was what I thought. Instead, Berne City adopted Yuanshi Tianzun's technology. It isn't that Dagon's failed to appear there. They looked at both kinds and chose Yuanshi Tianzun's.
Does that mean they grew by using a painful past as a foothold? The closed disposition remains just as it was, though, so I can't say how things will go from here. As far as I know, a closed group is apt to bury itself and come apart. I'm curious which it will be.
The two places that interest me are flowing along in that fashion. And taken as a whole, the Harvesters have settled properly into society. Even an ordinary person, on becoming a Harvester, improves in both body and mind. There's nothing strange about exceptional people rising, is there? Harvesters who began their work relatively early are pushing past those around them and climbing into high places.
Besides, a great many people died over the course of this winter. A great many seats emptied, and Harvesters sat down in them first. Now they only have to marry and bear children.
If either parent is a Harvester, the child is invariably born already finished with its contract with me. And the mutated Harvester state is inherited. The skin is just as white, and the hair is purple. Around the third generation it has grown a little paler — though that isn't certain. Not many Harvesters have reached a third generation, so I can't be sure. From the generation after that, the Harvester traits might suddenly come in darker again.
Counting the first world as well, there aren't many who have reached a third generation. But in this world, I think I'll be able to watch several. And a future in which that looks possible is on its way, which makes me happy.
Oh, and one thing more. The place where the clockwork knight school stood has been turned into a memorial park. A Harvester went in as a construction laborer, so I know what was done with it. Inside there is a graveyard, and a small museum has been raised to tell what happened there.
Surprisingly, only the facts are written down. A monarchy could neatly leave out whatever reflects poorly on itself, and yet they set the history down as it was: that the great corporations had done this, and so the clockwork machines were destroyed, and the economy then worsened; that when things deteriorated, rioters rose to vent their anger and attacked the clockwork knight school. They even put on display the photographs of the corpses Victoria gathered the day after the incident, and the photographs of the ringleaders' executions. They really did write it while keeping a passable sort of neutrality.
That is, if you set aside the minor fact that the people labeled ringleaders were not, in truth, anyone one could call a ringleader. They were simply unlucky enough to be caught. It's true they became rioters, but they were only swept along by the madness of the crowd. There is a distortion of that petty sort.
Not that the country has abandoned clockwork machines entirely. Unfortunately, there are no senior officials among the Harvesters. Princess Aurora and a handful of figures at the rank of general have become Harvesters, but they have nothing to do with the work of running the country. It isn't that the state knows nothing at all, though. It's the same reason I knew what lay inside the memorial park.
Harvesters are strong in both power and stamina. Even without any special knowledge, they can earn a great deal of money in places like construction sites — and in doing so, they become my eyes and ears.
On the outskirts of the capital, near the military base, buildings are going up across a broad plot that had stood empty. A Harvester is working there, and through that Harvester I heard what is being made.
A clockwork knight school.
They moved the one that had stood in the center of the capital clean out to the edge, and built it where, should the need arise, soldiers can be set in motion at once, so that nothing like this will happen again. They've learned from the past. Well — it takes something like that before parents will send a child into a dangerous place. Even by those means, they mean to carry clockwork technology forward. To throw the machines away entirely at this point and begin again would be too much, I suppose. Too much civilization has been piled on top of them.
They ran aground once, and still they seem intent on raising a clockwork civilization again. Dagon's method, too, only replaces the flawed portion of the power apparatus, and Berne City, which is using Yuanshi Tianzun's method, likewise rests on a foundation of clockwork machines. It isn't wholly new. It has been laid over the technology that was already there. Given time, it may branch. At least for now, this is how it stands.
Groping toward the future by rough conjecture, I stopped in at the shops right beside me. For the record, the money arrived on the second day after I moved — a letter, and with it, under the name of living expenses, a considerable sum. The letter was from King Hypion. The ornamental phrasing went on at great length, but interpreted, it came to this: he was sorry to have moved me into so small a house, and if anything proved difficult, I was to say so at once at this address. So I wrote back my thanks.
Anyway. Wondering what would become of my situation as it stood, how this country would change, and whether this world would become a place where warmth harvested itself for me, I shopped among the stores.
The body I keep in the fourth world is, at present, in considerable danger. The third day. Every supply has been cut off completely. No nutrients come through the tubes sunk into my back and abdomen, they bring no Harvesters under the pretext of an experiment, and there hasn't been so much as a sign of the chimera who used to manage me. My body is drying to the bone, and I was turning over whether I ought to become a corpse like this and regenerate from outside, when — for the first time in a long while, I heard the laboratory door open somewhere far off.
Several sets of footsteps followed. Among them, a heavy tread stopped directly before me.
"Did you rest well?"
It's Geber's voice. So I recited the text of the contract.
"As expected. No personality to speak of. Is the Violet God merely a law? An intelligence so poor it can't comprehend pain or pleasure? Or is intelligence simply unnecessary?"
Geber mutters to himself. I'm sorry to say the intelligence is entirely intact. So is the personality. The moment something begins to make demands, one ought to notice that an intelligence is present. To fail to grasp even this. Or has he already settled on a conclusion, so that even if some other possibility exists, it never occurs to him to press into it? Either way, his competence is lacking.
Setting Geber aside, I hear machines being worked around me. The click and clack of something turning, the tapping of keys, and now and then a pump kicking in. At length, something came into me along the hose. The instant it entered, my cells all but purred — yes, this is the one — which told me it was nutrients.
An experiment, then? Honestly, Geber's knowledge in itself isn't worth obtaining at the price of shouldering all those risks. I already possess the thing that surpasses it: Dagon's knowledge. What I have instead is a keen interest in this world. Which is why I've been praying over the draw, asking it to give me a Harvester who goes outside — but today the footsteps are strange.
A small sound. The weight is light. Have they brought a kidnapped child? But I hear no breath gone thick with fear, so it doesn't seem to be a child taken from somewhere else. There is one chimera Harvester in this place, only it's bent so diligently over its own work that it isn't looking toward where Geber stands, and I can't tell what sort of child it is. A little stifling.
"Dad, do I look at this?"
A young, frail voice, just then. But — Dad?
"Yes. Gina. Examine that for me with your telepathy."
Oho. Telepathy? An ability that can read another person's mind? It was then that the chimera Harvester finished its work and turned its eyes on Geber, as if waiting for the next command. And beside Geber stands a girl with horns on her head and skin of a fierce, bright red. She isn't the child the three chimeras charged with education had with them last time. Which is to say that a great many individuals have been produced from the test subjects. Judging by the horns and the skin, was she mixed with a demon? She has quite a classical look.
The girl he had called Gina walked up before me, reached out both hands, and closed her eyes.
"Mmm… Dad! Lower this a little! I think I have to touch it myself!"
When Gina said it in a bright voice, Geber had a chimera adjust my position. The chains fastened to my severed arms came loose, and my upper body descended toward the floor. Gina came close and set both hands upon my head.
Telepathy. Will she be able to read my thoughts?
"…Cold."
I feel nothing at all, and yet Gina murmured it, very small.
"What did you say?"
Geber asks again. But Gina doesn't answer. Instead her arms tremble more and more. Through the chimera Harvester's eyes, it isn't only the arms. She is shaking in her whole body.
"Cold. Cold. Cold. Cold. Cold. Cold. Cold. Cold. Cold. Cold. Cold."
And she mutters the same word, like a broken toy.
"Dad, save me. Cold. Too cold. Save me. No. I don't want this. Cold. Coooooooold!"
The girl, who had bolted upright all at once, runs this way and that, crying out that she is cold as if she were screaming.
"Catch her, now!"
Geber's flustered shout comes from a distance, and the chimera lunges for Gina. I see it seize her tight at once, but she shakes through her whole body, and now she isn't speaking — she's screaming.
And then—
Her body caught fire.
It took without warning, but the chimera's response was perfect. It drew water from somewhere and dumped it over her. But the fire did not go out. No — to put it precisely, the fire had risen from inside the body. The way a wooden pillar, once you bore a hole in it and set the inside alight, can look perfectly sound on the outside while it burns within, a crimson flame was already wavering beneath the skin. Nothing done from that point was of any use.
All at once the screaming vanished, and silence took its place. And warmth came into me. Through that hushed stillness came the sound of burning, and soon that, too, was gone. Only a pure white ash remained where Gina had been.
"Spontaneous… combustion?"
Geber mutters it in a voice gone slack.
I see. She fled the cold, and ran into death.
Cowardly.