I no longer found the sight of my smiling sister trespassing in my room particularly surprising, but seeing her playmate gave me a shock like being smacked in the forehead by a giant dragonfly out on a countryside road.
The girl had Shamisen on her lap and was stroking him indulgently. She looked up and narrowed her eyes at me in a friendly smile.
“What a nice cat. I read it in an essay somewhere, but cat personalities are hit-or-miss completely irrespective of breed or lineage. Apparently it has more to do with the owner’s qualities. So far as I can tell, you really nailed it with Shamisen here. You’re not just lucky for owning a male calico. How do I put this: It’s like he’s got a certain cleverness about him, but also retained a certain wildness, such that it makes you wonder if he doesn’t understand humans better than even a human child would.”
“I get the feeling he doesn’t even think of himself as a cat. Sometimes he definitely acts superior to humans.”
“Kyon, you’ve got it backward. Cats think of humans as being like them—in other words, cats. They think of humans as just being slightly larger cats. That’s why they don’t show us any deference, since from their perspective, we’re less agile and we can’t even catch our own food. We’re just clumsy animals who are only good at sitting. That’s where they’re different from dogs. Dogs have had to fit themselves into human society for ages. And because humans and dogs are both creatures that have to live in groups, it’s easy for them to get along. Dogs probably think of themselves as being the same species as humans. That’s how they can be so loyal to their owner or leader.”
“Sasaki,” I said in a hoarse voice, forgetting to even put my bag down. I then finally faced my sister. “Where’s Mom?”
“She went to get groceries for dinner!” said my sister, totally oblivious.
“I see. Well, no matter. Anyway, get out.”
“Whaa?” She puffed her cheeks out. “I’ve been having fun with Sasaki! Kyon, you meanie!”
She did her best to tilt her head and look cute, but I was having none of it. “No way. I have important stuff to talk about with Sasaki. Also, were you the one who let her in? I thought you knew better than to let strangers into the house when you’re alone.”
“She’s not a stranger! Sasaki used to come over with you all the time. I mean, at least to the front door. I used to see you together on your bikes all the time. Right?”
My sister turned her pleading face to Sasaki for backup, and Sasaki nodded with a chagrined smile. “I’m happy you remember. Kids sure do grow up quickly, though. I barely recognized her. I guess it’s a little rude to say ‘kid.’ You’re a lovely girl.”
Really? From where I was standing, her appearance and personality had hardly changed since then, I said.
“That’s how siblings always are. You’ve always been together, so she’s just a part of your everyday scenery. You’re watching her maturation in real time, so you can’t see its precise result; it’s like an analog clock to you. On the other hand, I have a digital snapshot of her, so the change for me is really significant.”
I supposed that made sense, but Sasaki hadn’t come to my house to talk about my sister growing up, I pointed out.
“True enough. I’m not controlled by my emotions to the extent that I take such random actions.”
I picked the purring Shamisen up off of Sasaki’s lap, and passed him to my sister, whom I then pushed out of the room.
“Meow!”
I ignored Shamisen’s cry of protest. “Just go play downstairs. We have something just the two of us need to discuss. It wouldn’t even be interesting to you, and we’re not playing. Go put some of the catnip spray on the scratching post in the living room. And he’d be thrilled if you clean the litter box and brush his fur.”
“Whaa? But I want to talk with Sasaki too! I wanna know what you’re gonna say!” Holding Shamisen, my sister made a full-body protest, but I forced her out. For a while I could hear the grade schooler and the cat grumbling on the other side of the door, whining and meowing respectively, but eventually I heard them go downstairs, and finally calm returned to me from its place high above the clouds.
It’s also possible that Sasaki’s chuckling had something to do with returning me to my normal state.
“She’s very, very cute. You don’t have to talk with her much to know she’s your sister. You’re her closest relative, and she thinks of you as being almost magical. Just when she was thinking she wanted a cat, you happened to bring that calico home. She really respects you quite a bit.”
Funny, I never detected a bit of respect from her. Up until two or three years ago she was a helpless crybaby. How many times did I fantasize about shoving a gag in her mouth? But I knew from experience that there were people whose families didn’t include a little sister, and so the word calls to mind a certain image, so I suppose I could see how it would look that way from the outside. But none of that mattered.
Or so I thought, but Sasaki pressed her attack.
“By the way, this is totally unrelated, but why do you think cats prefer drinking used bathwater instead of fresh water?”
What was she talking about?
Sasaki chuckled. “Like I said, it’s totally unrelated.”
“And?” My bag was still hanging over my shoulder; I finally set it down on the bed, then sat myself down cross-legged in front of Sasaki, regarding my old classmate’s pleasantly smiling face. “So what is it you came to talk to me about? I very much hope it’s not ‘unrelated.’ ”
“All sorts of things.” Sasaki’s gaze was as pleasant as a cherry blossom tree in full bloom. “I was thinking you must be getting pretty close to your limit. Our last meeting had too many interruptions, in more than one sense of the word. For my part, I’ve been hoping to get to talk to you alone. I was so sure you would have some kind of plan that I stayed up all night waiting for your call. I actually thought it was a bit of a joke that there was no ringing at all.”
Surely it wasn’t that big of a deal. I was totally at a loss myself. How was I supposed to deal with that alien, for example? It wasn’t as if I could just look up the dispatcher for the galactic cops in the yellow pages.
Sasaki gave me a mischievous look as though she knew where all of my traps were hidden. “How cruel! Ah well, no matter. I’m used to you. I’ve no compunctions about engaging the spirit of forgiveness. So, moving on to the topic at hand.”
I was still a little vague on what the topic at hand was supposed to be, but I went ahead and nodded anyway. If she was going to tell me, the least I could do was hear Sasaki out. She’d gone to the trouble of making a house call, after all. Whatever she was going to say would be worth hearing.
“First, I’ll tell what I’ve learned about Kuyoh Suoh after much trial and error.”
That was definitely one of the things I wanted more information about. I’d turn my ear to her until it was at about the level of a dachshund, if I had to.
Sasaki picked off some fur Shamisen had left behind on her legs, and gazing at it, continued. “Ever since I was a kid, I’ve imagined what extraterrestrial life would look like, if it existed. In manga and novels, we’re often able to observe them optically, and being able to communicate with them is something of a prerequisite. For example, establishing if they understand things like prime numbers. Items like universal translation devices were also not uncommon.”
The number of space novels that began with such premises were too numerous to count. Thanks to Nagato’s influence, even I’d started reading tricky foreign SF novels. You can learn a lot from fiction, I said.
“Well, leaving that aside,” said Sasaki, twirling Shamisen’s fur about in her fingers, “Nagato’s Data Overmind and Kuyoh’s Heavenly Canopy Dominion are fundamentally different from the easily understood aliens humans have created in their stories.”
I wanted the old SF authors who wrote about humanoid aliens on Mars or Mercury to hear that sentence. It might have motivated them to write more interestin
g stories at the time.
“Good point. And that’s not just limited to SF either. If John Dickson Carr had lived in this era, he could’ve used modern technology to create even more amazing locked-room mysteries, which I would have been totally addicted to. I wonder if we could bring Carr back into the current era. Would you ask Asahina about that for me? I’m being serious.”
Unfortunately, even I had found traveling into the past to be traumatizing enough, and I’d never been to the future. Thanks to all that classified information stuff, I guessed taking someone ahead into the future was probably against the rules.
“That’s just a digression, though.”
The bit of calico fluff fell from Sasaki’s slender fingers.
Her clear gaze took in my face. It was the sign that the small talk was over.
“What I think is that Nagato and Kuyoh are unable to understand human reasoning and values. They’ve forced themselves down from a higher dimension of existence to be among humans, so even if they understand what we’re saying, they don’t understand why we’re saying it. Or maybe they don’t understand why we would need to say such things. If out of the five W’s and one H, you only understand ‘who’ and ‘where,’ and find the other four completely incomprehensible, do you think you’d be able to have a conversation with a being like that?”
I did not. I could barely understand what Nagato said, so when it came to Kuyoh it was hard to know even what role she played in this particular whodunit.
But Sasaki continued. “This issue of incomplete communication is not actually a very complicated problem. For example, can you understand the values of a water flea or a paramecium? Do you imagine having a conversation with the whooping cough bacteria, or a mycoplasma?”
I allowed as how that would be difficult, at my intelligence level.
“Even if single-celled organisms or bacteria had human-level intelligence, I’m sure they’d feel the same way. They’d wonder what those bipedal mammals were thinking when they did what they did. What do humans want out of life, they’d wonder. They’d probably be totally shocked after they asked what humans wanted to do with this planet, this universe.”
I wasn’t even sure myself what my purpose in life was, or what I wanted to do. And in that regard, I was pretty sure I was in the huge majority of humans.
“For example, Kyon—what’s the most precious thing in the world to you?”
How was I supposed to answer a question like that on the spot? I asked.
“I couldn’t do it either. In this society of complex, rapid information, no one ever quantifies their value systems.” There was no change in Sasaki’s tone or expression. “For example, for one person it might be money, for others it might be knowledge. For still others it would be relationships. Each person’s values are so different that it’s impossible to use only your own to try to judge everything in the world—as you and I are well aware. Which is why we can’t answer that question quickly.”
I supposed that was true.
“But I don’t think people in the past would’ve had to think so much about that question.”
I supposed that was true.
Right now, people could access almost any information they wanted to. But just a hundred years ago, or even a few dozen years ago, the information you could access was much more limited. If you went back to the Sengoku era or the Heian era, would they hesitate over what to choose in life more than people did today? Their choices were surely more limited.
Even if you say that freedom of choice has greatly increased, if you consider it to be instead an increase in the worry over what to choose, an increasing number of options would actually be a bad thing. When you have to choose without any information, people choose according to the majority. But that’s putting the cart before the horse. Far from diversification, that led to concentration and homogenization.
“Seems like the aliens have privileged the evolution of homogeneity,” said Sasaki calmly. “But they’re showing signs of having realized there’s another side, and my guess is that meeting Suzumiya and you was the trigger for that.”
Sure, Haruhi, definitely. I could see her getting a bunch of Martians to elect her president. But me? I didn’t have that kind of vitality.
“No, no, the truth is you’re quite impressive. You managed to pull off a tense negotiation with an extraterrestrial you could barely communicate with. That’s not something just anybody could imitate. No one would even think of it. It’s thanks to your experience, I’d say. I envy you, Kyon. From what I’ve heard, Nagato is a charming being. I really do want to talk with her about her favorite books someday. Kuyoh hardly ever talks in front of me.”
She was joking around, but I could tell that Sasaki was at least half-serious.
“So what should I do?” I asked.
“Well, let’s think about that. Fortunately, Fujiwara and Kyoko, and even Kuyoh, can all understand our language. This is our biggest weapon. Kyon, think about it; we just need to pin them with our words. I won’t claim it’ll be easy, but I’m sure you can do it. So can I. After all, thinking and explaining your thoughts to others are abilities every human is born with.”
I would love to know just what I could do with a high school–junior level of education and reasoning. Wasn’t this a problem better suited to a Nobel prize–winning physicist? I didn’t even know if Ganymede was bigger than Triton or not. The only person I knew who was assuredly less academically inclined than me was Taniguchi.
“If that’s the extent of your problems, then those aren’t problems at all. Because, you see, these matters revolve around Haruhi Suzumiya. Her consciousness is the basis of everything. All the factions have her actions and cognition as their fundamental underpinnings. And that’s the weakness we can use.”
Sasaki gave a smile that seemed as if she’d grown up ten years in an instant.
“On the other hand, I think adults would only get in our way. They’d want to analyze, break down, figure out a plan of attack… it would all be a waste of time. All of it. Listen, Kyon—this story belongs to you and me. And I think the plot should be about you and me doing something about it.”
I couldn’t help feeling sorry I’d gotten her mixed up in all of this, I said.
“There’s no need to apologize. I’ve never had so much fun. Honestly, I feel like I haven’t thanked you enough, so my plan is to listen to whatever requests you might make,” Sasaki said in a tone that I couldn’t tell whether it was joking or not. “Also, I think we have a good chance of winning. We’re one planet of a backwater star, but we’re the stage for this grand galactic-scale conflict, and so long as the aliens with their magic-like powers are here, they have no choice but to move on an Earth-scale level. I’m sure the Data Overmind and the Heavenly Canopy Dominion have either restrictions or unwritten agreements like that between them. Otherwise, there’d be no reason for them to battle covertly the way they are. The same is true of the time travelers. I don’t really understand them, but they seem to be operating under certain restrictions. And I’m thinking that’s our opening to returning the situation to normal.”
But if Sasaki was right and taking action was the right thing to do, how could we know that for sure? I asked.
Sasaki chuckled her distinctive chuckle, like a young girl who was quite sure that Santa would be coming down the chimney to leave her the present she wanted.
“We’ll be able to do something soon. I’m sure of it. You can’t possibly want the current situation. I doubt Suzumiya does either. And naturally neither do I. With everyone in agreement like this, I can’t imagine the situation will develop in the wrong direction.”
Seeing Sasaki in her school uniform and looking somehow very pleased gave me a strange feeling of déjà vu, and I realized it reminded me of Haruhi’s smile the day she’d formed the SOS Brigade. If Haruhi at the time was like a sunflower, Sasaki now was like a morning glory.
“So—”
So, what had she actually come here to tell me?
“I just wanted to have a face-to-face talk. That’s all. Just the two of us, nobody else. Telephone conversations and text messages are no good. The walls have ears, you know?”
In that moment I imagined my sister with her ear pressed up against the door, and something occurred to me. Was Sasaki really worried about eavesdropping? I was sure that wiretapping a phone was a trivial task for even a moderately sized organization. Certainly Koizumi. Mori and Arakawa… or Kyoko Tachibana’s and Fujiwara’s respective organizations. If she’d wanted to subtly convey that to me, that would explain this surprise visit.
“Another thing. Fujiwara wants to settle things quickly, is my feeling. Tachibana is easygoing and who knows what Kuyoh is up to, but our time traveler has been very clear about his willingness to pursue his goals. I get the feeling that if it doesn’t matter whether a thing is done sooner or later, he’d rather do it sooner. So I think it’s very likely he’ll take action as soon as tomorrow.”
If I could travel back in time to the Yamataikoku era, I’d want to go and find out how much of Chen Shou’s writing was accurate. Fujiwara, too, could afford to take his time and do some sightseeing, but he just had to speed things along. Or was he saying there was nothing of even archaeological value in this era?
“But you’d prefer that yourself, wouldn’t you?”
What I wanted was to resolve this vague situation and bring Nagato’s fever down, I said.
“This is a total guess on my part,” prefaced Sasaki, “but the problem that we’re facing may be just showing our reason for existence. It’s possible that everyone is working so hard just because they’re trying to make their raison d’etre into a reality. This isn’t a matter of being an alien, time traveler, or esper. Each of them must exist, and try to get another being to acknowledge their existence—and they’re all taking action with that single goal in mind. I mean, Kyon, have you acknowledged that Kuyoh, Tachibana, and Fujiwara all exist here and now? I mean just to the extent that you wouldn’t forget them, even if they all just disappeared. They were here, in this place, in this time. Perhaps their wish is but a single plaintive sentiment—‘Don’t forget us.’ ”
The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya Page 17