“The turtle and that boy—that was also a coincidence. The boy always remembered getting the turtle from the man and woman at the river. He remembered the ripples in the river when the man threw the turtle into the water, and how he flowed lazily along with the current. Turtles live long lives, and every time he looks at his turtle, he remembers that scene. That gives rise to… a kind of fundamental theory. Though it was the result of many other elements as well.”
Could it be—the possibility made me dizzy even as my imagination leaped forward. Was that boy going to be the inventor of the time machine? The near-miss traffic accident, the turtle. Had I changed the future—the future of that boy, and the future of the world? All because of a few insignificant things I had done…
Suddenly a different memory came back to me. A few days before the school festival, when I was in agony trying to finish our film’s climax, Nagato had said something to me.
“In order to stabilize the future, the correct values must be input. Asahina Mikuru’s job is inputting those values.”
My memory was pretty good, but this was not the time to relish it. No, what I was concerned about now was the phrase “in order to stabilize the future.” I could no longer assume that there was but one future.
Probably. I wasn’t sure, so I couldn’t speak with confidence. What understanding I had had gotten me as far as the following, though my mind was wild with question marks.
Was the future not a stable thing?
Were there other futures besides the one from which Asahina came?
I could admit the possibility. But just barely. If the future diverged into separate branches—that could mean there was a future in which that glasses-wearing boy lived and one where he died. Except that I’d erased the possibility of the latter.
Which meant I had single-handedly obliterated an entire future.
I didn’t know if that were really true. The basis for the conjecture was so shaky that I would be an idiot to suggest that the proof was “left as an exercise for the reader,” yet I could not easily dismiss the wild notion. I was mute, struck dumb. How else could I react?
“The divergence points were concentrated in this time period. While most paths would lead to the same future, everything you did in the past few days was connected to a divergence point—a path that would lead to a different future…”
Her lovely voice got quieter.
“There will soon come an even larger divergence point. There is a very powerful future… if you should choose it, it… it would not be good for our future.”
My body felt heavy and sluggish somehow. I tried to look over at Asahina, but my head was strangely stiff.
“But it will be okay. I trust you, after all. Right?”
My consciousness began to blur. A familiar diagram emerged from within the mist. The writing from the whiteboard danced through my mind. I saw two Xs in the whirl. Koizumi’s explanation. There were two Xs.
It was impossible to completely erase the past. Once modified, history would simply be rewritten over the original time line.
And I had another memory. The loop during summer vacation. We’d repeated the same two weeks tens of thousands of times over.
But no one save Nagato could remember. It was as though those tens of thousands of repetitions had never happened. So the answer was clear.
The past could be negated. In fact, it wasn’t a question of whether a certain past had or had not existed. Even if something had happened, if nobody remembered it, it didn’t matter. Which was why—
You just had to erase the memories of the past.
If my memories of the period from December seventeenth to December twenty-first were erased—my memories of all that running around, of jumping back three years into the past and being stabbed by Asakura—and I’d simply woken on that hospital bed, what then? I would have simply believed Koizumi’s explanation, that I’d fallen down the stairs, hit my head, and lost three days of memory.
Nagato the literature club girl, Asahina from the calligraphy club, Haruhi the girl from another school who looked alarmingly good in a ponytail, and Koizumi the normal guy—if my memories of them were erased, I wouldn’t have to worry about jumping back to preserve the integrity of the time loop.
But no, that wasn’t right.
On the morning of the eighteenth, on the verge of death after being attacked by Asakura, I saw future-us, and so I knew that I would go to that time again. The only one who could repair Nagato was her three-years-previous self, and it was Nagato from this last January second who’d put that repair into action. That much was necessary.
And time was rewritten—
I felt a chill. Haruhi had no idea. Neither did Taniguchi or Kunikida. The only ones who knew were Nagato, Asahina, and me, plus—after hearing my report—Koizumi.
Which meant there was no guarantee I wasn’t in the same position as Haruhi. If history had been changed somewhere, even if I had once known of it, without any memory of it, it would be as though it had never happened.
Not just that—there was even the possibility that the version of myself who was thinking these things could be overwritten by another version from another timeline. A timeline in which my present self would cease to exist, and a different me would continue into the future.
I thought of what Nagato had said in the hospital room.
—Erasure of all your relevant memories.
—No guarantee such erasure has not taken place.
The Asahina who had come from one week in the future told me she had not met her other self. Which was why I’d gone to such lengths to make sure they never did meet. But even if they had, it might not have been such a problem.
The current Asahina’s memories of such an encounter could simply be erased. If she were then sent back in time after such erasure, it wouldn’t much matter whether or not she encountered herself.
A dark feeling rumbled in the pit of my stomach—the same feeling I’d had toward the Data Overmind as I lay in the hospital bed last month. Only this time the emotion was directed at Asahina the Elder.
She was simply using her former self, Asahina the Younger, forcing her to constantly play the confused, unreliable-but-cute classmate. Oh, sure, I knew she had no choice but to do so. I understood that she had to retrace the history that she herself remembered experiencing. “The future’s countermeasures against the past,” Koizumi had said. But wasn’t there some other way?
My neck’s curse on my head was finally broken. It felt like it had taken an hour just to look sideways. But when I went to speak the words that came to mind, I realized no one was sitting there.
Asahina had disappeared. I was the only one sitting on the bench in the faint glow of the streetlight. In her place, there had been placed a small box.
A small, square, ribbon-wrapped box.
There was a message card attached to it. I held it up to the light. It carried a single greeting: “Happy Valentine’s Day.”
The chocolates inside were completely normal. There was nothing futuristic about their flavors or shapes. Either the chocolatiers of Asahina’s world had not changed their recipes much, or they’d matched chocolate to its destination era.
“But still, Asahina…”
I didn’t want to think that I would concede so easily. Yes, today she’d deviated and provided me with information, but it still wasn’t enough. I’d even accept her reasons for not telling me about her kidnapping. But she’d deliberately refrained from saying anything about Haruhi’s Valentine’s Day plans or the truth of the treasure hunt and gourd stone. That was totally meaningless, even now. Haruhi could have buried those chocolates anywhere. There was no reason it had to be next to that particular rock. And there was no reason for me to move said rock.
Or was this part of your plan too, Asahina the Elder? Were the things I was thinking and doing right now among your predetermined events?
“When everything is over…”
It seemed like that was not today.
I’d eventually come here again. And maybe I’d bring the rest of the SOS Brigade along. I’d love to see her try to explain all this to Haruhi and Koizumi. All I was good for was playing the observer.
I placed a phone call from the park.
“Hello? Ah, Tsuruya? It’s me. Yeah, about Michiru. She’s gone home. I really appreciate everything you did for her, and I’ll definitely get your clothes back to you—huh? Oh, really? Oh, also, listen—when you see the Asahina you know tomorrow, she might randomly start apologizing to you, but just let it slide. And there should be a North High uniform she left in your apartment, so could you bring that to school tomorrow? Yeah, to me. Before the end of class.”
So far, so good. I listened to Tsuruya’s cheerful “Okay!” and took a deep breath.
“There’s one more thing, and this is the important one. It’s about your family’s mountain—the one from the treasure map. Yeah, that one. Haruhi used it in this crazy roundabout scheme of hers to… yes. Yes, I got them. Four—I mean, three. It was a lot of fun.”
I continued talking over the sound of Tsuruya’s laughter. “It’s about that treasure map. Did you know there’s a trail that leads from the fields at the base straight up the south side? Oh, good, that will make this faster. If you follow it, you’ll come to a flat, open area. Oh, you know that too? There’s a rock there—if you go about three meters east and dig, you might find something interesting.”
Tsuruya’s response sounded doubtful.
“I don’t have any proof myself, so it’s not a one-hundred percent guarantee. But I get the feeling there might be something.”
If I hadn’t moved the rock, Haruhi would have taken it for a marker the moment she laid eyes on it, and we would’ve wound up digging right next to it. And we might well have found something. Something we should never have found.
Three meters west. That was how far I’d traveled after picking up the rock. Just that far.
I gave Tsuruya some vague responses, then hung up.
There’s your piece of defiance from me, Asahina. I’m not trying to outwit you or your future, but sometimes a guy just wants to give something a try.
After all, I wasn’t nearly as audacious as Haruhi.
EPILOGUE
The next morning, I barely arrived at the classroom in time for the first bell. Ignoring the irritated-looking Taniguchi as well as Kunikida, who was already teasing him, I took my seat and spoke to the person behind me.
“Hey, how’s it going?”
“Great, obviously.” Haruhi flashed a Cheshire cat grin full of intrigue at me. Goodness, but she hadn’t even glared at me first—could she, too, flip moods over the course of a single night?
As the bell rang, she leaned forward over her desk and whispered into my ear from behind me.
“And Kyon, let’s get something straight. Don’t go talking about what happened yesterday. Especially to, say, Taniguchi. You gotta keep it a secret, got that? It would be embarr—well, not embarrassing, but still. Don’t go spreading rumors. It’ll ruin the value of the gift.”
What the hell was she mumbling about? I wasn’t giving the gift back, I told her. Especially since it was edible.
“I didn’t tell you to give it back. If that were the case, I wouldn’t have given it to you in the first place. Also, changing the subject. We’re gonna be busy after school today, so prepare yourself.”
I knew all too well. I’d be busy myself, as it happened. I had to send Asahina eight days back in time, then be there to greet the returning version of herself. And then—finally—this long, long week would be over.
During the lunch period, Tsuruya came by my classroom. Fortunately, Haruhi rarely brought her own lunch from home, and she had gone to the cafeteria to eat. As soon as I heard Tsuruya’s “Hey, Kyon!” I set aside my half-eaten lunch and headed out to the hallway, where she waited.
“Not here,” she said, dragging me by the necktie to the stairway, then leading me all the way up past the top floor to the roof level, stopping just before the door. Haruhi had dragged me up to the dim little landing here once before, and then, as now, it was scattered with art supplies.
“So I’ll just get right to the point,” said Tsuruya, smiling cautiously as she produced a stack of photos from her breast pocket. “Kyon, how did you know there was something buried in that spot? I was blown away, seriously.”
So there had been something there. I asked what it was.
“Something amazing!” Tsuruya fanned out the photos. “The first thing that surprised me when I started digging was this pot just popping up to say hello, and it was… three hundred years old!”
She showed me a photo of an earthen pot, covered in cracks, photographed against a plain white background.
“Are you sure it’s that old?”
“I’m super sure. I even had it carbon-dated. But what was inside was even more of a surprise!”
The second photograph showed an old piece of parchment. It seemed like a name was written on it, but I couldn’t make it out. One thing was for sure—at the edge of the paper was a drawing of a very familiar mountain with an X on it. I don’t need to tell you what spot the X indicated.
“This was definitely written by Fusauemon Tsuruya, my ancestor. It was the fifteenth year of the Genroku era—1702! A quick translation of it reads, ‘I found a strange object, but it made me feel uneasy, so I buried it on the mountain.’ ”
Haruhi’s treasure map. She had said that something similar was written on it. And that one was a fake, but this was for real.
“But what was Old Man Fusauemon thinking? How’re we supposed to find the treasure if he buried the map in the same spot?” said Tsuruya, smiling as she indicated a third photograph.
“What’s this?”
The photograph gave no sense of the scale, but it looked like a metal rod about ten centimeters long. It was so shiny you’d never think it had been buried for centuries, and close inspection revealed that its surface was covered in spiderweb-fine lines, like a circuit board. Although the pattern looked disorderly at first, I realized that it actually had a beautiful symmetry. Was it really made during the Edo period?
“This and the letter were all that was inside the pot. But here’s the real question. Nobody will believe that something like this came out of my ancestor’s time capsule!”
“Why not?”
Tsuruya grinned, waving the photos. “Because this thing is made of a titanium-cesium alloy!”
Okay, that was a surprise. I’d have to find Kunikida later so I could tell him and freak myself out all over again.
“Metallurgy from three hundred years ago could never create something like this, y’know? The person I had do the testing had no idea—they said that if this had really come from three hundred years ago, it was either the product of some ancient advanced civilization, or a time traveler from the future had traveled back to 1702 and left it there, or it was a fragment of some alien spaceship.”
… I really didn’t want it to be from some ancient civilization.
“But doesn’t it look like a component for something else?” said Tsuruya, staring at the third photograph, then aiming her smile at me. “What do you think it is, Kyon? Which do you like better, aliens or time travelers?”
The innocent girl’s question left me totally speechless.
“You better decide soon, boy!”
The mysterious artifact that had come out of the clay pot, which in turn bore the Tsuruya crest, would be stored securely at the Tsuruya estate. Tsuruya herself promised, so that was one thing I didn’t have to worry about. She would definitely do what she said she’d do. The most important thing was to make sure Haruhi didn’t find out about it, but I must confess to a certain misgiving. I didn’t want things to turn out this way—to be honest, I didn’t even want to think about it, but…
… I couldn’t escape the feeling that we’d need that artifact eventually.
I wondered if I’d given Tsuruya the location of the treasure too so
on. I could also have kept it to myself, neither digging it up nor telling anyone else about it.
But was that really possible? Could I have resisted digging it up once I’d realized there was probably something interesting there? I was a curious guy—when I saw a word I didn’t know, I always had to immediately go look it up on the Internet.
Plus there was the other possibility, that for some reason Ha-ruhi would want to go back and dig some more. It was better for the mysterious part to be taken in by Tsuruya’s family. If a member of an ancient race, or an alien, or a time traveler showed up and demand it be returned, I doubted very much that Haruhi would simply agree. Plus, I didn’t want anyone like that showing up in front of her in the first place. There was no guarantee they’d hide their true forms the way Nagato and Asahina did. Rather than traveling back in time to change the present before it happened, it was better to do what I could in the present to avoid bad outcomes in the future. We did live in the present, after all.
Tsuruya and I parted ways, and I returned to my classroom, where I came upon Haruhi happily eating my lunch.
“Hey, what the—? That’s mine.”
“I know. Even I wouldn’t eat the lunch of someone I don’t know, y’know.”
Well, if they’re someone you do know, you should also know you can’t just eat their lunch, I said. Give it back. Spit it out.
“Anyway,” said Haruhi, putting the chopsticks back in my lunch box and pushing it toward me, then looking up at me with a strange expression. “What’re you making that weird face for? Stop grinning.”
Grinning? Was there a reason I should grin? But when I put my hand to my face, I found that Haruhi was right—the muscles in my face had somehow relaxed into a smile.
“You look weird,” said Haruhi rudely, then turned away. Her hair rustled with the movement, her small ears peeking through.
In that instant, I realized it.
I realized why I was unconsciously grinning. What reason would I have to smile? What had happened to me this past week? Besides wandering all over the place with Asahina, I encountered a new time traveler and a new mysterious organization, which had kidnapped Asahina among other dastardly deeds. Not only did they seem likely to appear again, but likewise the rival alien faction would probably show its face again as well, and now a mysterious artifact had been found on Tsuruya’s mountain—it was surely no time to be grinning like an idiot.
The Intrigues of Haruhi Suzumiya Page 25