The Intrigues of Haruhi Suzumiya

by Nagaru Tanigawa

  “Wah—eek!”

  Asahina nearly tripped and fell several times, but each time Nagato came to her rescue—Koizumi and I were encumbered with the heavy shovels, and we couldn’t help. I wanted to just toss the stupid shovel aside and assist Asahina, but for now I’d leave it to Nagato. Asahina bowed her head every time—You’re reading too much into it, Asahina, I wanted to say.

  Thanks to the nearly straight route we followed down the mountain, it took almost no time to arrive at our destination, especially compared with how long it’d taken to climb up.

  “This is the place. Isn’t it strangely flat here? See?”

  Haruhi stopped and indicated what she meant. There was no mistaking it. This was the same spot (Michiru) Asahina and I had visited the day before yesterday. This was the place. It was surrounded by tall trees, which kept it gloomy even at midday, and the memory of the crescent-shaped clearing and the fallen leaves that littered the ground was all too familiar to me.

  The gourd-shaped rock stood there. It wasn’t quite as brilliantly white as it had been before, but that was because of the rain. Having been coated in moisture, it was uniformly faded. The water had also washed off some of the dirt that had clung to it, so that if you didn’t look too closely, the difference between the two sides wasn’t apparent.

  Yet when Haruhi strolled up to the rock, a chill ran through me. She was too damn perceptive, and I hoped she didn’t sense anything amiss. Just then, she put her foot on the rock and casually kicked it over. Paying it no further mind, she sat down upon it.

  “Kyon, Koizumi—time for phase two. Just start digging somewhere around there, okay?”

  She smiled impishly. Koizumi immediately replied with a crisp “Understood” and immediately set to digging, but I had something else I was worried about.

  The spot where the rock had originally been—(Michiru) Asahina and I had disguised it a bit, but close inspection would reveal that it had been disturbed. But when I looked—

  “…”

  Nagato had unrolled the mat on that very spot. I caught a quick glimpse of her expressionless eyes behind her hair. She didn’t give me anything that seemed like a signal or a sign. I watched her silently sit on the mat and open her book, Buddha-like.

  The corner-loving alien left a large space open on the mat, so Asahina hesitantly sat down as well. The two very different but nonetheless beautiful goddesses sitting in a pair like that made for quite a spectacle. Whoever sat between them would seem like a significant person indeed.

  “Hey! Kyon, quit spacing out! Go help Koizumi!”

  That “significant person” yelled like a construction foreman making sure nobody was slacking off. She sure did enjoy bossing people around. If some boss somewhere had Haruhi for their subordinate, they’d probably stop coming to work because of the stress. I picked up my shovel, reflecting on the fact that I’d probably never have that problem, and hurried over to Koizumi’s side, where he had already started digging into the wet earth.

  Let’s just skip to the results.

  As expected, no matter how much we dug we found not so much as a single fragment of pottery, to say nothing of treasure. That was exactly what (Michiru) Asahina had said would happen, so I wasn’t a bit surprised. My shoulders slacked in a complicated feeling of relief, since I’d been constantly worried that by some mistake we would turn something up. This was all fine, but hadn’t it been a bit too easy? I wondered.

  “We’re just not finding any buried treasure, are we?” said Ha-ruhi, her head cocked. She noisily ate a chocolate cookie she’d gotten out as she sat on the gourd-shaped rock.

  I took a break from shoveling dirt back into the holes and looked around the area. The once-undisturbed ground had been ravaged. Thanks to the constant excavating and reburying, it looked like a field that had just been plowed. It really would have been better to just leave nature alone.

  “Oh well,” said Haruhi with uncharacteristic perspective. “I don’t really see anywhere else to dig, so we’ll wrap things up right here.”

  She then finished by pointing right at her feet, directly in front of the gourd-rock on which she sat.

  Koizumi and I dug as ordered. It was another hole that revealed nothing. We then shoved the soil back into the hole.

  All we’d done was make the hard earth a nicer place for earthworms to live.

  Just as I was wondering how Haruhi was going to react to not finding any treasure—

  “Well, let’s go home. The sun’s getting low, and if we’re up here any longer we’re gonna freeze. We’ll just go down this way. It comes right out near the road that leads to North High.”

  Koizumi and I gathered up our supplies, and after taking a moment to rest and have some Asahina Tea, we complied with the order to descend the mountain. It didn’t seem like any of the bodies descending the narrow animal trail had any particular attachment to the treasure or the mountain. C’mon, really? I thought. So we just went on a picnic and dug a bunch of holes?

  Koizumi’s hand came to rest on my discouraged shoulder. “Come now, it’s all right, isn’t it?”

  I didn’t want him to lecture me. He reminded me of the way my mom was when I got angry, I said.

  “Apologies. However, I’m quite tired myself, but I do think it would be best to leave the area promptly, before Haruhi spies another spot to excavate.”

  I agreed with him on that. Asahina and Nagato—who was carrying only the rolled-up mat—were both preparing to leave. I’d just been trying to figure out what was the point of everything I’d just done, I told Koizumi.

  “The point?” Koizumi was behind me as I started walking, and I heard a smile creep into his voice. “Why not simply accept that Suzumiya is a capricious girl. Isn’t that always so?”

  Haruhi strode ahead, her attachment to the idea of treasure totally gone. Behind her walked Asahina, Nagato, and a bit farther, Koizumi and me.

  There in the middle of the animal trail, Koizumi lowered his voice and continued. “However, it does seem a bit strange that there really was no treasure.”

  It was the kind of thing he’d say. For some reason I felt the same way.

  “You can be sure of this: if Suzumiya truly believed that something was there, it would not matter whether Tsuruya’s long-dead ancestor Fusauemon had actually buried something—we would have found something. Suzumiya has that kind of power.”

  Apparently so, if the stuff he said was true.

  “Nevertheless, we were unable to find anything. This is rather mysterious. Do you know why?”

  Because Haruhi herself hadn’t really believed it, I guessed. A worthless treasure map like that? It had to be a prank from old man Fusauemon, I said.

  Koizumi nodded quietly. “I see you understand the way of it. Suzumiya did not truly want to find Genroku-era treasure. That’s the only possibility. We can conclude that all she wanted was to go on a picnic.”

  She could’ve just said so, instead of going to all the trouble of this treasure-hunting nonsense. Even I would’ve been on board for a picnic.

  “Who can fathom a maiden’s heart? She’s been stable ever since winter vacation—too stable. Most likely she grew bored.”

  Well, that just made his job easier, then. It wasn’t like the paycheck from his part-time job got lower when those blue giants appeared.

  “No, wait.” I raised my hand and searched for the words. “You said Haruhi’s mental state has been stable? Ever since the beginning of February?”

  “Yes. There have been subtle fluctuations, but nothing trending to the negative. If anything, her mood’s been elevated.”

  So what had the vaguely depressed aura I’d felt from Haruhi all this time been? My imagination? I asked.

  “Is that what you felt?” Koizumi asked with mild surprise. “She seemed like her usual self to me.”

  Wasn’t he supposed to be the expert on Haruhi’s psychology? How come he hadn’t picked up on something I’d noticed? Was he planning on quitting his amateur analys
t racket? I asked.

  “That would be nice,” he said, his usual smile returning as he regarded me. “If you’re truly better at interpreting Suzumiya’s mind than I am, I’ll gladly hand over my role—including fighting the Celestials in closed space. You haven’t visited that world in a while, after all.”

  Forget that. I had no desire to go back. All things considered, I preferred it here, I said.

  “That’s a shame. That said, I haven’t been in a while myself.”

  It must be frustrating to be an esper and never get to use your powers. Why not put together a closed space tour package? I bet all kinds of weirdos would love to see the place, I said.

  “I’ll take that under advisement. Although it will take a significant amount of courage to deliver such a proposal to my superiors.”

  As Koizumi and I played verbal catch, we came to the same field-dividing footpath I’d visited the day before yesterday. Having descended ahead of us, Haruhi, along with Nagato and Asahina, was waiting there. The three of them standing there in the golden light of sunset beside the fallow rice field—if an impressionist painter had seen them, he probably would’ve started painting right away. But before I could take the time to appreciate the view—

  “There’s no need to head all the way back to the train station. We’ll just be dismissed right here.” Haruhi collected my shovel and smiled, satisfied. “That was fun. It’s good to get out in nature sometimes. We didn’t find any treasure, but that’s no reason to be depressed. I’m sure we’ll find it eventually. And the time will come when we’re glad we got this experience. We’ll have to tell Tsuruya too. Maybe next time we’ll find a Muromachi-era map!”

  I didn’t care what era the treasure was from; I was finished with maps. You can tell that to Tsuruya—that whatever happened, she shouldn’t give Haruhi anything else.

  But as I watched Haruhi’s form recede along the road, bouncing merrily, two shovels in hand, I didn’t say the nasty things I was thinking. I didn’t know whether or not her strange silence in the classroom had been my imagination or not, but in any case, I was glad she was happy. When she got weirdly quiet like that, it just made me nervous that her internal power gauge was building up to an explosion. Huh? Why did it suddenly seem like I was monologuing to myself?

  Once we emerged onto the road that led to North High, we walked as a group for a little while. Eventually we got to the usual spot where we parted ways, whereupon Haruhi turned around, as though having suddenly remembered something.

  “Oh, that’s right! We’re gonna meet up at the station tomorrow too. Same time as today. Got it?”

  If I said I couldn’t, would she reschedule? I asked.

  Haruhi looked at me with a grin. What was up with that grin?

  “We’re gonna search the city for mysterious phenomena. We haven’t done it in a while, after all,” said Haruhi, not answering my question at all. She looked at everybody as though checking them out. “You guys got that? And don’t be late. Tardiness…”

  She drew a deep breath of cold air, then finished her statement the same way she always did.

  “… equals punishment!”

  The first things I did upon returning to my room were turning on the heater and getting out my cell phone.

  By this time it had become part of my normal routine to call—where else?—the Tsuruya house. By now I was well used to the voice of the polite female servant who answered, as well as the smooth transfer to Asahina. By this point, I’d called Tsuruya more often than I’d ever called Koizumi.

  “It’s me.”

  “Ah, hello. It’s me—Michiru… I mean, Mikuru.”

  “Is Tsuruya at the house?”

  “No… she seems to be out today. She said her family was attending a memorial service.”

  I got the feeling that it was best not to pry too much into what Tsuruya was doing and where.

  “Asahina, we went and did it.”

  “You mean the treasure hunt…?”

  “We didn’t find anything, though.”

  I could hear Asahina let a little sigh slip past her lips. “Thank goodness it turned out the way I remember. If it had been different, I don’t know what I would’ve done.”

  The phone still pressed to my ear, I furrowed my brow. “Is there any way that could possibly have happened? Isn’t the past always the same, no matter where you go?”

  “Uh… er, that’s, that’s true, but…”

  I could practically see Asahina holding the receiver as she wavered.

  “It’s extremely rare, but sometimes things change… er… I don’t really understand it myself, but—”

  I remembered something as I listened to the hesitant voice. The double loop Koizumi explained, when I told him about the December eighteenth date I’d visited so many times.

  When I thought about it, I was the same, insofar as even now I didn’t know from when to when the period of fixed events extended. When Nagato had changed an entire year, how had she managed that? According to Koizumi’s theory, there were two Decembers the eighteenth. It was too much trouble to have multiple timelines, so this timeline—the one we’d corrected—was the “right” one, I was pretty sure…

  So what had that other thing been? Last month, I’d saved a little boy from being killed in a traffic accident. That little glasses-wearing guy living longer must have been a fixed, required event. But what about that car? What if someone had been trying to run that boy down in an effort to manually interfere?

  That would mean that there were people trying to destroy the timeline, as well as time travelers from the future like Asahina who were trying to protect it. What if the former were also from the future? Who could oppose them? Only fellow time travelers.

  I was starting to see what Asahina the Elder was up to. What she was trying to get me to do.

  “I’m sorry, Kyon,” said Asahina, dejected. “I’m restricted from telling you the things I want to tell you, and I don’t know anything useful… Kyon, I just…”

  I could tell she was about to cry. “Anyway, about tomorrow,” I said frantically.

  Exactly according to the plans Asahina had related to me, Ha-ruhi had said we were doing a city patrol tomorrow. Since Asahina and I had to carry out the instructions of the #3 envelope, we’d need to decide on a place to meet up—someplace where Haruhi and the other Asahina wouldn’t spot us.

  “Asahina, do you think you could wear a disguise?”

  “A disguise?” She sounded confused, and she sniffled. I could picture it very clearly.

  “Like sunglasses?… No, I guess that’d be weird. It wouldn’t be strange to wear a flu mask this time of year, though, right? Could you do that?”

  “Oh, sure. I’ll ask Tsuruya for one.”

  “So about the time. About when did we finish up tomorrow?”

  “Umm…” Asahina took only a moment to remember. “It was at five o’clock. We met up at three, then we all went to the café.”

  I took the #3 envelope out of my desk and opened the contents. The place it indicated was about a ten-minute walk from the train station where the brigade would meet up. Even if it took fifteen minutes, that was still only a half-hour round-trip.

  It would be best to have Asahina lay low at Tsuruya’s place in the morning, then rendezvous with her a little while after the city patrol started.

  Having asked her the details of the day’s schedule, I explained where and when we’d meet up.

  “Okay then, see you tomorrow. Try to dress as unobtrusively as you can. Oh, also”—I felt a tinge of foreboding in my chest—“if you can, can you get Tsuruya to come along? Tell her I asked her to. Or… well, no, I shouldn’t get her involved in this. Don’t worry about it. It would be good if she could see you off and meet you when we’re done, though.”

  Asahina would have to go from Tsuruya’s house to the rendezvous point on her own. Maybe I was overthinking it, but my danger sense was tingling. I didn’t want to make her walk alone.

  “O-okay
. I’ll tell her.”

  Tsuruya was smart—she’d see through my request in an instant. I could count on it.

  I hung up, then immediately called Nagato. Here I was, asking another favor of her.

  However.

  “Huh?”

  To my great surprise, her line was busy.

  Who could Nagato possibly be talking to? I couldn’t think of anybody short of a hard-sell telemarketer. I put down my phone and changed clothes, feeling sympathy for the headset jockey who’d been unlucky enough to wind up talking to Nagato. I threw my muddy pants into the washing machine, then came back to my room and tried again.

  This time, she picked up.

  “It’s me.”

  “…”

  Nagato’s familiar silence.

  “I’ve got a favor to ask you. It’s about tomorrow. You know how we always split up the patrols by drawing straws? Tomorrow and the day after, I want you to rig them.”

  “I see,” answered the cool, clear, high voice.

  “Yeah. Tomorrow’s afternoon patrol, and the next day’s morning one—both of those times, I need to be paired up with you. Can you do it?”

  “…” There was a slightly long-seeming silence, then, “I see.”

  I was pretty sure that was the affirmative, but I thought I’d make sure.

  “So you’ll do it, then?”

  “Understood.”

  “Thanks, Nagato.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “By the way, when I called a second ago, the line was busy. Who were you talking to?”

  There was another silence, as though time itself had stopped. Just as I was starting to wonder if she was having some kind of side story with somebody I didn’t know—

  “Haruhi Suzumiya.”

  Now I wished it had been somebody I didn’t know. “She called you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What the heck did she want with you?”

  “…” A third silence. I strained to hear and was starting to pick up a sense of anxiety over the receiver when Nagato finally replied.

  “I cannot say.”

  Nagato sure had been full of surprises these past few days. To think she’d be using that line on me, of all people.