Chapter 514

One, two, three.

The silence brought everything to a halt, and I thought it had to be my imagination. If it wasn’t, I wondered how long it would last. The light sank away. Only then did Emanuel’s face finally tighten into a frown.

“What?”

“I mean that I can travel to the future. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. And I truly am sorry that I can’t tell you everything.”

Even to my own ears, the words spilling from my mouth made no sense at all. I spoke mechanically. There was nothing numb or careless about the way I felt as I said them. That was what I had expected. This manner of speaking was the result of trying to reveal the truth before I could hesitate and confess it myself.

“Ha…”

Emanuel looked down at me as if I had gone mad. I looked back at him without a flicker of agitation. The stifling heat, combined with the disconnect between my body and mind, made me feel sick.

Emanuel studied me for a long while before arriving at his own shocking conclusion.

“You’re… not joking.”

It was something no one could believe. The fact that he even considered the possibility that I wasn’t joking was astonishing enough—even if he had probably figured it out using his Special Ability. So I knew his words weren’t born of carelessness. Confused and caught between belief and disbelief, he was groping for the truth, his tongue moving before he could think. In other words, he asked me again even though he knew that, if what I had said was true, asking me to confirm it could be taken as rude. Like this.

“You’re really not?”

“Why would I joke with you, Your Highness?”

The cold sofa quickly absorbed my body heat. The powerful chemical agent introduced without gradually acclimating the body to it caused unexpected shifts in body temperature and twisting of the organs.

Perhaps Emanuel knew that I was feverish in more ways than one. He poured liquor into a glass filled with ice and handed it to me. It would have been better to fall asleep than waste the strength it would take to accept it and drink. Instead, I answered by burying my head against the sofa, then raised my left hand and struck something hard.

Ah, Emanuel made the sound reflexively and reached into the air in surprise. The cold that had been creeping toward my neck scattered away. Emanuel was naturally not the sort to simply sit still after being refused, and he had been just about to press the cold glass against my neck.

Perhaps he was startled because he thought the glass might be knocked over and spill, but I wasn’t so lacking in control that I couldn’t handle even that. I snatched the glass away first, the opening neatly sealed with mana, set it down on the table, and let out a sigh. Every time I moved, I wanted to fall asleep right there in whatever position I happened to be in. Even now.

Emanuel drank the liquor I had refused, refilled the glass, then placed the hand that had been holding it on my shoulder. A chill passed through the fabric. His mana spread over my skin. The sleep that had been closing in on me scattered again.

Emanuel asked with a faint smile, “Earlier, when you called me ‘you’ instead of using my title—you weren’t joking?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Then you’ve come here from the future?”

“Something like that… It’s my Special Ability, after all. Probably.”

“‘Probably’? What do you mean by that? What happened to Everett from Princeton?”

He held out the glass again. Water dripped down its surface. He didn’t seem to care whether I was uncomfortable with it while half-asleep, so, wanting to get this over with as quickly as possible, I suddenly sat up, snatched the glass from him, downed the drink in one go, and set it down on the table with a sharp clack. I expected it to make me even more groggy, but instead, my mind gradually began to clear. Perhaps the alcohol was dissolving the magic of the sleeping drug. I took off my damp gloves and threw them aside, then pressed my fingers to my temples.

“I’ll be honest with you. I don’t know what’s going on either. I have absolutely no idea what kind of mechanism is behind all this. Everett from Princeton? I don’t even know whether that’s me or not, let alone what happened to him. All I can do is work things out as I go, and there’s no guarantee that my conclusions are correct.”

“That’s remarkably down-to-earth.”

“I’m not God. Of course I don’t know everything.”

“I’m not so sure.”

That dry answer was immediately met with one just as sharp.

“Since the grace of magic was bestowed upon mankind, the only thing humanity has never been able to overcome is time.”

He wanted to say that the power to bend time at will belonged to God alone. It would be blasphemous to say it outright, though, so he didn’t. I listened without reacting.

“Because we cannot turn back time, we can do nothing but watch as the black fluid spilling from the mouths of corpses dries up, and the Empire’s treasures crumble into dust. Pompeii and the old lazaretto¹ remain exactly as they were on the day they died. Countless people struggle just to make the veins pulsing along the surface of the lungs beat one more time, until the day every fluid coursing through our bodies rots away and turns to dust. The countless prayers that have reached Heaven, that are reaching it now, and that will continue to reach it in the future—all of those problems would be solved if only we could turn back time.”

So what? No matter what else might make sense, turning back time was a power no one possessed. I didn’t resent him for whatever he thought of me. I simply wanted to hear what he had to say. I rattled the empty glass. While I held a piece of crushed ice in my mouth, Emanuel poured amber whiskey into it again. I merely nodded and drank.

Emanuel’s voice came again, heavy with thought.

“To be honest, I still can’t believe it. When, where, and what kind of future did you see before coming here?”

“I’m not going to tell you.”

I answered, feeling a headache of a different sort coming on. Still hunched over with my elbows on my knees, I only turned my head toward Emanuel and spoke firmly.

“I can’t tell you. Do you understand? Whether you ask me to tell you about Your Highness’s future or anyone else’s, I won’t say a word unless I come to the conclusion that telling you is the only way to keep you safe. You can threaten to kill me, and I still won’t tell you.”

Only afterward did I realize how intensely I had been looking at him. He seemed momentarily taken aback by my expression, then studied me for a long while. Those familiar eyes picked apart every detail. With each statement like this, Emanuel was becoming more and more certain that I wasn’t lying.

“If you studied in America, how could you possibly know the future of the Bavarian royal family?”

I looked at him just as I had before. Unable to find an answer in my expression, Emanuel asked again.

“Am I going to die or something? That’s the only way news about me could reach you. If not, then are you not American?”

“Don’t ask.”

I ran a hand through my hair, then realized I was still keeping this damn hairstyle and untied it. It had been a mess for a while anyway, so it hardly mattered. Once my face was hidden by my hair, Emanuel gathered it and swept it to the other side before looking down at me. I was still hunched over, staring at the floor, but I could tell that was what he had done.

I continued quietly.

“The only thing I can tell you is about Pleroma. …And which stocks are likely to rise around this time, and where railways are going to be built.”

“Oh?”

Despite this hardly being the time for jokes, Emanuel sat beside me in the same position and leaned his face closer.

“Then let’s hear it. Excluding anything that’s already been reported, where is the next railway station to be built?”

‘Exclude anything that’s already been reported’? Railway construction is exactly the sort of thing that gets talked about everywhere, often starting ten years before a line even opens. In other words, he was asking about a confidential route that the Bavarian government had only just reviewed and approved.

I put a hand to my head and went through every newspaper article I had looked at in 1898 as Nikolaus Ernst while studying Bavarian history. One fortunate thing was that the memories from the world I had lived in hadn’t become too thoroughly mixed together. As I had realized from the case of Duke Orsini’s The Name of the Rose, which still made me deeply wary whenever I thought back on it, there were fields where the very existence of something could differ depending on whether a particular individual lived or died. At the same time, there were countless fields where that wasn’t the case at all.

Other fields were more flexible. Things born from the balance of supply and demand in the market, or things that grew from the same soil like branches from a common stem—similar ideologies, institutions, minor inventions, and the like, all shaped by the involvement of certain ‘groups’—often followed paths partly similar to what I knew. But their points of origin could be moved forward or backward by years, and that was only natural.

I couldn’t exactly be grateful for the fact that I had never studied the history of German railways anywhere before becoming Nikolaus Ernst. Still, at least it left me in a state of quiet peace.

So I answered without hesitation.

“You’ll be establishing the Bayreuth–Warmensteinach line. The Bavarian Ministry of Commerce already gave it positive consideration in ’66, but the project dragged on and eventually ended without any results.”

Silence fell.

“We never told anyone about it.”

Of course they hadn’t. It was 1886 now, and the Bavarian government would approve it and have it opened about five years later… I rubbed the corner of my eye and waited for his next question. Or for him to accept the explanation.

“You guessed it from the Ministry of Commerce’s records…?”

“I don’t have access to those records, and I’m sure Your Highness knows that. There are countless railway lines that were proposed and then quietly abandoned, and I’m talking about one from ’66. It’s 1886 now. You also know perfectly well how many requests for railway construction are submitted to the government.”

“Did you figure it out because it’s an area where iron ore and timber are easy to obtain?”

“If that were enough to go by, there would be plenty of places where railways could be opened.”

Emanuel fell silent. He took a cigarette case made of leather and platinum from inside his jacket and pulled out a cigarette different from the one he had been smoking earlier.

“There is a saying that the one who knows his master’s will shall receive more lashes. That is because of the responsibility that comes with knowing his master’s will. The righteous will likewise continue to do what is right, because of the responsibility that comes with righteousness. And the one who receives the most will be the one from whom the most is demanded.”

I nodded. Emanuel continued.

“It’s the sort of thing you have to think about, because it doesn’t make sense at first glance. The words omitted from this sentence would be ‘from God,’ I suppose. The one who receives the most from God will be the one from whom God demands the most. Those who are to be saved will be made to endure great suffering before they can be saved. What an unfortunate thing to say. So I understand why Sir Everett doesn’t want us to know the future. It isn’t for your sake. It’s for ours.”

He moved his lips as though he were about to say that knowledge meant bearing God’s will, then closed his mouth. Then, sitting right beside me while still maintaining a distance of about a hundred million light-years, he said, “Then, in that sense, what about you, Sir?”

I looked into his eyes without saying a word. Emanuel’s face disappeared behind the cigarette smoke, then emerged again.

“Don’t you know too much? Doesn’t that mean you have to act righteously because of it?”

He put particular emphasis on ‘have to.’ I felt someone reflected in his face. I thought of the friend I had left behind. So I gave no answer and ended the conversation. Emanuel looked at me as though he didn’t understand, then smiled genuinely for what was probably the first time since we had come here. But the smile quickly disappeared. For a long while, all that could be heard was his sighing.

The smell of cigarettes was giving me a headache, so I washed down the foreign gas entering my throat and airways with alcohol—though it probably wasn’t being diluted at all. It only felt that way.

“What am I supposed to do if I keep answering every question you throw at me?”

After thinking for a long while, Emanuel said, “No matter how much I ask, if this is what your ability is, you shouldn’t have answered me.”

I couldn’t help but laugh at that, turning my head to the side. I could see Emanuel looking down at me from above. I asked him, “Then what? You want me to distance myself from you like this?”

Emanuel quietly looked down at me. I forgot that, at some point, I would have to blink. Keeping my eyes fixed on his, I slowly said, “How am I supposed to convince you that I’m acting in Bavaria’s interests? If you want, I can give you permission to bring a powerful divine power mage from the Vatican, break down my mind, and force me to tell you the truth. You already had the power to do that, and the only reason you didn’t was because it wouldn’t have been right. Giving my permission for something that isn’t right doesn’t make it honorable or right. Once this is over, we can’t go back to before we committed violence under this agreement.”

Emanuel rested an arm on the back of the sofa, his expression saying that he couldn’t exactly disagree, though his tone was quite different.

“It was an incredibly dangerous thing to do. What were you going to do if I reported you? What if I went around carelessly blabbing about it, or became so blinded by Bavaria’s national interests that I had you admitted to a hospital and demanded that they conduct all sorts of technical experiments on you? What then?”

“You wouldn’t do that. Please, say something that actually makes sense.”

I said it with a sigh, rubbing the corners of my eyes. Emanuel leaned closer to me, eyes wide.

“I’m telling you not to go around saying things like this elsewhere, Sir Everett.”

There wasn’t the slightest hesitation or doubt in his voice as he urged me.

“Absolutely nowhere.”

Right. To no one. I knew that well enough already. I wouldn’t tell anyone else, either. I stared into those pale blue eyes for a long while before turning my head and speaking.

“I expected you to react like this. I didn’t say it because I was desperate to get myself out of the situation and thought, ‘Whatever happens, happens.’ I’d been thinking about it all along. This was one of the two possible outcomes I had anticipated. Just because there were two possible outcomes doesn’t mean they had a fifty-fifty chance of happening. I considered this one quite likely, which was why, while the three of us were talking with Archduke Maria, I had already decided that I couldn’t continue treating you all this way. If we had a common goal and were cooperating from our respective positions, there would be neither a need nor a reason to tell anyone everything. But that isn’t our situation. I’m asking for your help unilaterally, when you have no goal of your own in this matter. From the very beginning, that didn’t sit right with me… More fundamentally, I thought that was simply wrong.”

I looked at Emanuel again.

“I did it because I wanted us to remain friends, too. That’s why I told you. I’d already decided that I should be as honest with you as possible. So you don’t need to worry about me telling anyone else.”

Emanuel slowly smiled. Looking away, he suddenly said, “I’m still not convinced.”

“Which part?”

“Even the idea of the two of you going into the past through an out-of-body experience sounds strange enough, but I can’t understand how a person could travel to the future on top of that. That isn’t an ability a human being should be able to possess. They say the Lord allowed mankind many things, which is why we were given the ability to use magic. But as I said, He did not grant us time. So you must…”

“I don’t believe there is a God.”

Emanuel raised an eyebrow at my answer. Slowly understanding what I meant, he blinked, then opened his mouth.

“Ah. I see. I suppose I don’t, either, if I’m being precise.”

Silence fell.

I had just declared myself an atheist in front of someone who had grown up in a Catholic family and naturally become a Catholic himself. Whether he truly believed in the existence of God or not, he had no intention of backing away from the question. I was unfazed, while he wrestled with it. Then, strangely enough, his expression became serene, almost detached—a look of Gelassenheit².

“Then that settles it. If there is no God, then there are no limits on you. The idea that there are abilities humans should not and cannot possess has no place in your atheistic worldview. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

Emanuel turned his head away. He spoke casually.

“Right. Then you’re human after all.”

He said it to himself. At least, that was how it felt at first. Then, almost immediately, I had a feeling that I needed to remember those words, no matter who they were meant for. Everything had happened so recently that it was impossible not to. It was a vague feeling in itself.

“I said I wasn’t convinced, but that was only the technical side of things.”

Emanuel stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and continued.

“Unfortunately, I already knew that you didn’t intend to harm us, but I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. Now, however, I can. As you know, knowing something and accepting it are two different things.”

His playful air returned. Looking relaxed again, he hooked both arms over the back of the sofa and slouched a little, acting nonchalant for a moment. Then he got up, propped his chin on one hand, and tilted his face up toward mine.

“Should I apologize first, or thank you first?”

Translator Note

1. Pompeii was an ancient Roman city destroyed and buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. A lazaretto was a quarantine station used to isolate people suspected of carrying contagious diseases. The ‘old lazaretto’ mentioned here refers to the remains of such a site, preserved as a reminder of the people and events of the past. ↩︎
2. Gelassenheit means a state of calmness, inner peace, and letting go. ↩︎