“And you said she was similar to you, a humanoid something or other—”
“Probably.”
“And did she come here to observe Haruhi too?”
After a brief moment, Nagato answered. “I don’t know.”
Was that because their mutual understanding was imperfect? I wondered.
“Yes. It is clear that they are interested in Haruhi Suzumiya’s data alteration abilities. That is one of the reasons they dispatched a humanoid interface to this world,” said Nagato matter-of-factly. “They of the Heavenly Canopy Dominion—”
I stopped her upon hearing the unfamiliar words. “The heavenly what, now?”
“Heavenly Canopy Dominion,” said Nagato again. “That is the name the Data Overmind has provisionally assigned to them. This is a significant step forward. Until now, we had no concept of naming.”
Holding my chopsticks, I considered the meaning of the name “Yuki Nagato.”
“The name derives from their coming from the heavens, from our perspective,” she added in a flat voice.
“So where’s the Heavenly Canopy Dominion?” I asked, pointing at the ceiling. “Up there?”
“…” Nagato paused as though doing a seven-digit arithmetic problem in her head. “There.”
She pointed out the window, toward the ridge of hills beyond. I could tell that it was north, but I doubted what she was pointing at was something that could be seen with even a radio telescope. It didn’t matter what direction it had come from, anyway. Worrying about directions was for diviners.
“Nagato, do you think those jerks are going to toss us into another dimension like they did last time?”
“No indication of that is visible at this time,” said Nagato. She had raised her arm diagonally backward to point, but returned it to her page. “An interface capable of verbal contact has revealed itself. It is predicted that direct physical contact will predominate for some time.”
“That girl, huh…”
I thought about Kuyoh Suoh’s vague strangeness. I had plenty of bones to pick with the Data Overmind, but I had to admit it had good sense when designing interfaces. Nagato, Kimidori, even Asakura—I’d take any one of them over Kuyoh.
“I will defend against attacks from the individual designated Kuyoh Suoh. I will not allow harm to come to you or Haruhi Suzumiya,” said Nagato flatly.
She was the most reliable person I knew. But still—
Nagato reacted faster than my mouth could move.
“Or to Mikuru Asahina or Itsuki Koizumi.”
Or to Nagato herself, I said.
“…”
I looked very seriously into her fixed eyes.
She didn’t have any concern for herself, but I did, and so did Haruhi. I wasn’t about to let Kuyoh or anybody else from the Heavenly Canopy Dominion do anything to her. It was no fun being protected all the time. The amount I could do might have been as insignificant as a speck of space dust, but surely I could do something.
“…”
Nagato lowered her gaze to the pages of her book, and at that signal I picked up my box lunch.
There was no comparison with the day she’d first invited me up to her apartment, room 708. To think that a silence without any words to interrupt it could give rise to such a feeling of well-being.
Once afternoon classes had finished, homeroom had wrapped up, and we’d bowed to Mr. Okabe, he came down from the lectern just as my classmates were all noisily standing up.
The students who didn’t have cleaning duty had no reason to stay in the classroom, so just as I grabbed my bag and stood, gave my regards to go-home-club members Taniguchi and Kunikida, and made for the clubroom, I realized my mostly empty bag was much heavier than it should have been.
When I turned around, I saw that Haruhi had reached out and grabbed it. She had some serious grip strength.
“Wait just a minute.”
Haruhi was still sitting, and she glared somewhere in the vicinity of my ear.
“You know there’s a math quiz tomorrow, right?”
“Uh… I guess.”
Now that she mentioned it, I did have a feeling that the math teacher had mentioned something about it last week, but it seemed I was deficient in keeping such trivialities in my memory.
“So you did forget about it. That figures.” Haruhi sniffed in irritation. “You’re bringing down the SOS Brigade average with things like this. If you could just remember the basics you’d be able to get a decent score. Do that much, okay?”
What was she, my mom? Anyway, she had better let me out of my seat, or we were going to be in the way of the students on cleaning duty.
“How can you be such a slacker? Get your math textbook and get over here.”
Haruhi stood suddenly and dragged me over to the teacher’s desk. The students on cleanup duty were used to this and didn’t even bother looking at us, although their weird smiles did bug me.
Haruhi snatched my math book away and casually opened it on the desk. “Problem two on page nine is definitely gonna be on the quiz, so remember it. This formula too. This is an example question, so knowing Yoshizaki it’ll show up for sure. Where are the blackboard notes? Show me your notebook.”
I could only helplessly obey her rapid-fire orders.
“What’s this? You stop writing halfway through. You slept through the second half, didn’t you?”
So what if I did? She was sleeping during today’s classical literature class, I pointed out.
“If I decide it’s okay to sleep, then of course I’ll sleep. I don’t have to listen to understand that class. You just don’t get it, do you? Listen, you get annihilated by math and science, so that’s where you’ve got to put your effort.”
Haruhi underlined problems in my textbook with my mechanical pencil.
“I’ll tell you which ones you definitely have to do, so get those in your head. And don’t just memorize the answers. He’ll swap the figures around in the test. So to start with, this one, and this one…”
Thus for a while I stood there across the desk and took Haruhi’s special review session. Fortunately the students on cleaning duty understood and ignored us, so we did likewise. It was embarrassing. She could’ve at least done this in the clubroom, I said.
“That’s ridiculous. The clubroom is for doing club activities, not for studying. You’ve gotta protect the distinction between these things. Only a killjoy does boring stuff during time that’s supposed to be for fun.”
Haruhi looked bored as she pointed out the problems she guessed would be on the quiz, explained a subtle solution, and didn’t release me from the teacher’s desk until I’d gotten all the problems right.
“I guess that about does it.” Haruhi rolled my mechanical pencil for about five minutes before my brain was about to protest at being forced to work past its shift. This was after the cleaning was over and my other classmates had disappeared entirely.
“If you’re still below the class average after this, there’s no hope for you. You’ll need surgery. Try to memorize this stuff before the midterms.”
I could make no such guarantees. I couldn’t be bothered with stuff so far ahead in the future. I shoved my poor, scribbled-in textbook into my bag while looking down at Haruhi’s eyes, which glared up at me challengingly. I thought about saying something, but no words came, so I simply nodded up and down in an attempt to fool her.
“Anyway, this should get you through tomorrow’s quiz. If you can’t solve at least half of them, as brigade chief I’ll have to take remedial measures. And if it comes to that, I’ll be forced to make up practice drills for you, so don’t make me waste my time on that.”
Haruhi strode back over to her own desk and picked up her bag.
“Don’t just stare off into space like that. Let’s go. Mikuru and the others will be sick of waiting.”
I doubted there was anyone else whose ability to patiently wait rivaled those three, but that had been my intention from the start.
&n
bsp; Haruhi’s quick stride made her hair brush against the tops of her shoulders as I followed after her. If I were being perfectly honest, it wasn’t as though I’d banished tomorrow’s quiz to the depths of forgetfulness. I’d just been planning to ask Kunikida for some pointers in the break before math class.
But then that had happened today, and the person switched to Haruhi, so yeah, I guess that can be classified as something I don’t really care about one way or another.
Catching up with Haruhi as she made for the end of the hallway took ten big strides.
Haruhi walked like the wind, with her usual pointlessly authoritative stride, almost like Shamisen when he heard a can of cat food being opened, and in order to synchronize with her speedy steps, I had to order my leg muscles to operate at full speed.
Thanks to that, we arrived at the clubroom very quickly, and Haruhi pushed the door open without knocking, coming to a stop only once she’d stepped into the room.
“Oh, Suzumiya, Kyon!”
Asahina ran pitter-patter up to us, wearing not her maid outfit, for some reason, but her normal school uniform.
The girl from the future had a troubled look on her face, and she spoke in a fleeting and uncertain voice.
“I’ve been waiting for you—actually I was just about to go get you. Um, I mean, actually it wasn’t me who was waiting, er…”
Haruhi wasn’t moving, so I craned my neck to look past the shoulder of her uniform.
“Ugh!” I couldn’t help blurting out.
Nagato was reading a book in a corner, and Koizumi was sitting at the table smiling his usual smile—all of this was normal and fine, but something totally unexpected was happening.
“Everyone’s been waiting. I didn’t have enough teacups to serve tea, so about half an hour ago I started serving them one by one… I… I just didn’t know what to do…”
I understood her troubled expression perfectly well.
I didn’t even have to check the color of their school slippers. The sense that they would be the same color we’d worn last year suffused the room. I suppose it would be unduly conventional to call the ambience “fresh.”
New first-year boys and girls were packed into the literature club room.
There had to be around ten of them.
They all looked at Haruhi and me with weird smiles on their faces.
There in the tense atmosphere, Haruhi finally spoke.
“… Are you guys by any chance prospective new members?”
Preceding Asahina’s and Koizumi’s replies, the chorus of ten boys and girls replied with a harmonious “Yes!”
Hearing their youthful voices full of unfounded hopes, I replied with a single inharmonious line.
“Oh, boy…”
β—5
Monday. Morning.
Thanks to everything that had happened the previous day, I was filled with complicated feelings, but I couldn’t let that complexity show on my face. Given that this was Haruhi, whose powers of perception were as sharp as an all-purpose kitchen knife, she could probably twist my ill feelings around, rotate them 360 degrees, and arrive at the right answer.
So I had to keep the mask on good and tight.
For better or for worse, Haruhi had arrived at school before me and had draped herself over her desk lethargically, looking exhausted.
It wasn’t like she would’ve been tired out by the daily hike up the hill, so I wondered if she was short on sleep because she’d stayed up watching a late-night movie or something.
It was convenient, though. I was only too happy to enjoy a bit of peace courtesy of an exhausted brigade chief, so I took my seat as quietly as possible and set my bag carefully down beside my desk.
I heard the rustle of fabric and hair that accompanied Haruhi raising her head slightly as I stared at the blackboard, which was as yet untainted by chalk.
Until the bell rang and Mr. Okabe entered the classroom in top form, I just kept doing that.
As far as sleep deprivation went, the truth was I was short on sleep too. Thanks to being forcibly transported by weirdos to another dimension for the first time in quite a while, head-clearing sleep had been hard to come by.
Also, I kept lying awake wondering if the phone was going to ring.
Maybe that was why.
I started to drift off in the middle of second period classical literature. The spring sunlight streaming into the classroom only exacerbated the irresistible sleepiness. I could hear Haruhi’s sleeping breath behind me, and surely the sleep-study researchers wouldn’t mind having one more patient…
… No, it was no good. The sandman that was assaulting me was a particularly high-level one.
Sadly, I fell into the hands of a short nap, and actually even started to have a dream.
A dream of something that had actually happened to me.
Memories of a certain day… in my third year of middle school.
…
…
…
At times in the ten-odd years of peace and limitless tedium, occasionally I would find myself thinking truly disturbing things and be shocked at this discovery.
For example, wondering if a military somewhere might have a missile misfire, which would then come falling down, or wondering if a satellite might fail to burn up in the atmosphere and instead land somewhere in Japan, or wondering if a meteor might crash into the Earth causing unprecedented chaos—not because I wished for a catastrophe that would throw my life into disarray, but just because I happened to ponder these things.
When I’d tell my friend Sasaki about these things, she would say, “Kyon, that’s the modern entertainment syndrome. You’re reading too many manga and novels,” she explained with her usual courteous smile.
It was a term I’d never heard before. Obviously, I asked about it—what was she talking about?
“It’s not surprising you’ve never heard it before. I just now made it up,” she began. “Reality is not constructed the way your favorite movies, TV shows, novels, or comics are. And it’s unsatisfying. The protagonists in the world of entertainment suddenly find themselves caught up in fantastic phenomena, sense trouble, and get stuck in situations that are hardly convenient. In many cases, the protagonists will develop wisdom, courage, a hidden talent, or pure strength of will to overcome their circumstances. But those are things that can only happen in fiction. And because they’re fictional, they make for good entertainment. If the same things that happen in movies, TV shows, novels, and comics happened in everyday life, they would no longer be entertainment but mere documentaries.”
I half understood and half did not, so I honestly said so. Sasaki chuckled throatily.
“In other words, reality is built upon hard-and-fast laws. No matter how long you wait, aliens are not going to attack, nor are ancient gods going to rise out of the oceans.”
But how could she know that? Was she saying that there were things in this world that absolutely could not happen? At the very least, the possibility of a giant meteor hitting the Earth wasn’t zero.
“Probability, you say? Look, Kyon—if we’re going to talk about probability, then nothing is totally impossible. For example.” Sasaki pointed to the wall. “If you charged directly at that wall, the probability that you would pass right through it and on into the next room is not technically zero. Ah, but you’re about to tell me there’s no way you can pass through a wall. But that’s not quite true. At the quantum level, despite the presence of an insulator that should never let an electron pass through it, it happens that electrons sometimes do pass through such objects and appear in a different place. It’s called the tunneling effect. If you consider that, given that the elements that make up your body are made up at the lowest level of particles like electrons, it’s not impossible, in principle, that you could pass through the wall without making a hole in it. However, the probability is so low that if you tried to do it once every second, you’d still never do it in fifteen billion years. So isn’t it reasonable to
say it’s impossible?”
What the hell were we talking about now? As I listened to Sasaki talk, my own thoughts became less and less clear, and the conversation would end with my feeling sort of tricked.
A serene smile spread over Sasaki’s face, and she looked directly at me.
“About that, Kyon. If you were thrown into such an unrealistic story-world, it’s extremely doubtful that you’d be able to conveniently act like a protagonist. The reason they can wield wisdom, courage, talent, and secret abilities to triumph over adversity is because they’ve been created that way. But where is your creator?”
I remember not making a sound.
This all happened two years ago on a day in June, during a conversation between Sasaki and me in our third-year classroom in middle school. Sasaki had first become my classmate that spring, but we got along pretty well and thus wound up talking about all kinds of random stuff. Sasaki was the only person I knew who was reading the Ellery Queen series in its entirety. Incidentally, I was not reading it. I only knew about it from Sasaki’s amusing recaps of what she’d read.
Sasaki happened to go to the same after-school cram classes I was forced to attend, so if I explained that our friendship was roughly at the level where you eat lunch together at school, you’d probably get the idea. I was the type of guy who basically liked reading manga magazines alone while I ate, but I was happy to eat with her. But we had no contact outside of school. So if I were asked whether I considered her a close friend, I’d probably have said no.
Sasaki leaned over from the next seat and put her elbow on my desk. Her glittering black eyes stood out from her other features. If she would have eased up on the roundabout logic and conversation, I think she probably would’ve been pretty popular with boys.
I decided to try saying exactly what I thought, for once, so I told her so.
“You sure say interesting things!” Sasaki made a face like she’d stifled an explosion of laughter. “I don’t understand why someone would question whether or not she’s attractive. I always want to be rational and logical, no matter the time or place. To accept reality as it is, emotional or sentimental thinking is nothing more than an obstruction. I can’t help but think of sentiment as a crude shelter that inhibits humanity’s progress toward autonomy. Particularly feelings of love, which are practically a kind of mental illness.”
The Dissociation of Haruhi Suzumiya Page 14
