Chapter 560

Still smiling, I stepped down beside the podium, doing my best to maintain my composure to the very end.

I had no way of knowing whether the negotiations would succeed. That was beyond my remit. I had been brought in to sway the audience, so my job ended with the speech. I had delivered my speech successfully. The rest was for the government to negotiate with the school.

Before the speech, I had kept two principles in mind.

First, don’t lecture them.

Second, don’t talk for too long.

The reasons were clear. For one thing, the situation wasn’t exactly favorable. The school had already informed the Imperial Family that it would refuse their support, and instead of having the people in charge talk things over, the Imperial Family had abruptly arranged a speech. The school was bound to take that badly. After all, it was the faculty and student volunteers, not the Imperial Family, who were caring for the Rampagers. Trying to persuade them through a speaker summoned by the Imperial Family, without first listening to the people actually doing the work, wasn’t the right approach. So even I had lost much of the resolve to push for the forceful persuasion the Imperial Family wanted.

Besides, above all else, I had to be a student right now. A student lecturing teachers went against the usual image people had of students. If I was supposed to be playing an innocent student, I couldn’t also succeed at negotiating with them from that podium. The longer I spoke, the more likely I was to end up lecturing them. I needed to keep it as short as possible, while still saying something they could understand immediately and continue to think about afterward.

That was why I had quoted Pensées.

“Your ability to think on your feet never ceases to amaze me.”

Abraham spoke with a smile that lifted only the corners of his mouth. He had opened the door to the waiting room and was leaning against the doorframe.

I had believed a quotation from Pensées would be appropriate because the book offered a Christian perspective. Pascal had written it to defend Christianity, and it was where his famous wager came from: if God exists, you stand to gain everything, and if God doesn’t, you have nothing to lose.

It isn’t known whether Pascal was Catholic or Protestant. He was born into a Catholic family and grew up in an era of intense religious conflict, during which he was said to have been influenced by Jansenism. In letters to his friends, Pascal defended the Jansenists and criticized the Jesuits and the Catholic Church. That didn’t make him a Protestant, of course, but for that very reason, some Protestants viewed him favorably.

So there was a good chance these Lutheran—meaning Protestant—believers would consider my quotation from Pensées appropriate and understand what I meant.

Abraham was probably pleased for that very reason, too… I glanced at him and realized that the cigarillo I’d gone to the trouble of lighting had vanished without a trace. He was supposed to be out there by now, talking with the school administrators and teachers, yet here he was, lounging around as if he had all the time in the world. I left him to it and headed down the hallway, accompanied by a school staff member who showed me to the teachers’ restroom.

Splash—

After locking the door and stepping inside, I carefully splashed some cold water onto my cheeks. Rubbing my warm eyelids with cold hands helped clear my head a little. I raised my head and looked in the mirror. Without makeup, it was easy to see the color returning to my face. I’d rarely worn heavy makeup in front of cameras to begin with, but given my profession, I’d always had at least something done to my skin. Now I was reminded just how much it had concealed my natural complexion.

“Can you control the color of your face at will?”

“You are certainly persistent.”

An arm appeared from the side of the mirror that didn’t reflect my image and settled on my shoulder. I took Abraham’s hand and lowered it, then wet my hands again and wiped the water down my neck. To give a different speech, I had to approach it with a different mindset. The ‘me’ up there couldn’t just be the seasoned speaker I’d been before. I had to be a student who seemed innocent, and with that mindset came different physical reactions, too. That was how acting worked. I supposed there was nothing to be done about people like him, who kept needling me from the sidelines when I wasn’t even giving it a second thought myself.

“How dull. I came to congratulate you on a job well done.”

I didn’t answer. Abraham continued, apparently having found something else to tease me about.

“It is quite a novelty to see you so embarrassed just because some Old Human students have fallen for you when you are a New Human. I wouldn’t have thought you would react that way.”

I was just as amazed every time I saw how effortlessly you could recognize and internalize strategies that belonged to an era that hadn’t arrived yet. You’d been like that from the very first time we met…

“If you don’t think it is because I am flustered, then you should at least recognize that it is part of the act.”

“Then you should know why I am saying this, too.”

A New Human behaving like an Old Human… Since he’d put it that way, of course I knew what he meant.

I gazed at him in silence. The difference in the levels of color in his irises was clear in the light. He stared right back at me. Neither of us spoke until I was the first to turn away, and only then did the conversation resume.

“It wouldn’t be wise to lump all the students’ feelings together like that.”

If he wasn’t going to say anything directly, I saw no reason to do so myself. I didn’t give him the answer he wanted.

Still, there were surely people among them who continued to hold a grudge against me, as well as those who had simply thought, Oh, someone’s here, without giving it another thought. The latter probably made up a larger portion than I expected. An increase in Affinity didn’t necessarily mean romantic interest, either. Hadn’t I seen Affinity reflect simple goodwill toward someone when facing crowds of all ages and genders?

Abraham waited until I was ready, then headed outside. Now it was time for the negotiations. Since we had arrived together, it would be improper for us to leave separately, so I followed him.

No matter how hard the teachers tried to keep them under control, students kept peeking through the windows and watching from the hallways. Dozens of eyes followed us. Abraham went up to the second floor of the main building with a school representative. Then, in front of a massive wooden door, he shoved his hands into his pockets and turned to look at me. When I gave him a questioning look, this was the answer I got.

“You could take a little break.”

Click—BANG!

Abraham disappeared through the doorway with a smile.

“Wow.”

The school representative and the students lingering in the hallway turned to look at me awkwardly. I could feel dozens of eyes on me. So the government was going to handle the negotiations on its own, was it? Honestly, Abraham went to extraordinary lengths even for the simplest things. He’d gone out of his way to make me follow him, only to leave me standing outside the door. It took a special kind of effort to behave like that. I stood there looking unimpressed, then started to lean against the wall for a rest before realizing it wouldn’t be very dignified. I slowly turned my head instead.

Should I ask them to lend me an empty classroom? I could just sit there and zone out.

No, that wouldn’t do. That was the sort of thing only someone with a truly free spirit would do. According to proper etiquette, in a situation like this, I was supposed to…

“Your Highness, if you don’t mind, would you allow us to show you around the school?”

The school representative asked, extending an arm toward the grounds visible through the window at the end of the hallway.

“Of course. Thank you.”

What I was supposed to do was inspect the grounds.

It would have been better for the school if I simply stayed out of the way, but that wasn’t the proper etiquette. I wasn’t a school inspector, and I had no intention of evaluating anything, but my presence would inevitably make them feel pressured. So, rather than deliberately touring the buildings, I took my time walking around the grounds. Near a path leading into the woods behind the school, the representative pointed to a building made of clay bricks.

“This is our infirmary.”

“So this is where the Rampagers undergo rehabilitation.”

“That’s right.”

As we stopped in front of the rehabilitation facility, a student with an air of intelligence strode over with three or four other students in tow and bent her knee in a curtsey.

“It is an honor, Your Highness. My name is Sophia Nussbaum.”

I remained silent, waiting for her to explain why she had approached me. The student soon raised her head and continued.

“I am the student council president of Victoria Lyceum.”

I held out my hand. The student glanced at it with an expression that seemed to say, Well, look at that, before meeting my eyes.

It was rare for a member of a ruling house to offer a handshake. The student council president had bowed to me first because I was, for all intents and purposes, royalty. She was still staring intently at me. It was an analytical gaze. She wasn’t looking at me with the sort of reverence or gratitude that would have made me uncomfortable. Rather, she was revising her assessment of me. She seemed to have judged me as more progressive than conservative. Her courtesy had come from social convention, not from deeply ingrained conservative values. The student council president was evaluating how progressive I was and finding it unexpected. Meanwhile, I was doing the same with her, and finding her progressiveness just as surprising.

If there were many students like her, the Empire might no longer exist by the 21st century in this world. What was expected to take hundreds of years might be shortened to a little over a century, or even a few decades. Democracy might take root, eventually replacing the hollow constitutional monarchy they had now with a genuinely democratic republic or constitutional monarchy.

Whether this country would become a republic like 21st century Germany and France or a constitutional monarchy like 21st century Britain and the Netherlands was a secondary question. I knew of the merely nominal republics of the 21st century, and I knew that a republic did not guarantee democracy in itself. Likewise, in a constitutional monarchy, the constitution was supposed to constrain the monarch. Yet Germany had adopted a constitutional monarchy while operating quite differently from the constitutional monarchy of 21st century Britain. Having seen a failed republic on the Korean Peninsula in the 21st century and a transitional constitutional monarchy in 19th century Germany, I couldn’t say that one system was necessarily preferable to the other.

Becoming a republic or a constitutional monarchy could not be considered the ultimate goal of democratization. If we wanted to improve society, we shouldn’t fixate on the secondary question of whether this country should become a republic or a constitutional monarchy. Instead, we should focus on how deeply the democratic spirit took root in people’s minds. Both questions mattered, but if we failed to recognize that the latter—the question of civic virtue—was more fundamental than the former, we might finally win democracy only to assume that it would endure by default simply because we lived under that system. That was how democracy could collapse all over again.

The adoption of a particular political system should follow an initial period of democratization and then develop alongside it, each reinforcing the other. Otherwise, if we treated any one system as the absolute ideal of a utopia and made it our first priority, the result would be an ideological struggle that failed to put improving people’s lives first.

Seeing here the spark of the change Elias had hoped for—a spark that seemed faint now but could grow into something powerful—I felt the corners of my mouth lift.

Her friends were beginning to look uncomfortable at the sight of their student council president openly scrutinizing me without bothering to observe the usual courtesies before royalty. But that was a limitation of their times. Whenever I met students like her, whose thinking hadn’t stagnated along with the era they lived in, I felt a little more hopeful.

Having finished sizing me up, the student council president took my hand without hesitation, her manner polite and composed. I murmured to her, “I am glad.”

The president’s lips curled into a smile, her eyes bright with intelligence. The other students still made me uncomfortable by staring wide-eyed at the sight of royalty offering a handshake. The president paid them no mind. Instead, she gave a glance to the school official who was clearly their teacher, then gestured toward the school building.

“Since you have come all this way, we would like to welcome you as our guest. Would you have the time?”

“Of course.”

“Then allow me to show you inside.”

There was no reason to refuse. This meant I wouldn’t have to keep wandering around the school under everyone’s watchful eyes. I followed them inside.

The conversation in the student council room went almost exactly as I’d expected. They served some tea and light refreshments, then tactfully conveyed what the students wanted from the government without being too direct. Their main request was for an increase in government funding so they could invite a philosophy teacher to the school.

Although that fell under the parliament’s jurisdiction, I acknowledged the need and gave them an encouraging answer, saying I’d see what I could do. After wrapping up the conversation at an appropriate point, we moved on to lighthearted small talk.

As I wondered when Abraham would finish the negotiations, the student council president changed the subject.

“That was a good speech.”

She seemed to be referring to my earlier address, though it had been more of a presentation than a speech. I gave her a polite smile and replied, “Is that so? I was worried my words might be misunderstood, so I am glad they came across that way.”

“You said we shouldn’t hesitate to save lives just because we are caught up in religious conflicts. It is an obvious thing to say, and yet it isn’t. Since it came from a young student like Your Highness rather than an older politician, the teachers’ reactions were better than I had expected.”

I raised an eyebrow at that and looked at the student council president and the others.

“It seems you were already favorably disposed toward the government’s proposal.”

“I have no religion,” the student council president answered bluntly.

Since she had no religious affiliation, she wasn’t inclined to share the hostility between the Lutheran school and the Catholic Church.

“I don’t believe the Central Party is on the right track. It is true that they are wary of the Catholic Church’s extreme rhetoric and want what is best for Germany, but I believe that if Bavaria can successfully keep the Papal See in check, the Church won’t be able to manipulate Germany either. That is because, from what Bavaria has shown us so far, it is wholly committed to Germany’s interests.”

“Bavaria, you say.”

Now that she’d spoken her mind, perhaps the school might be willing to trust Bavaria and accept the offer of support. The student council president spoke again, her expression barely changed from before.

“The Kingdom of Bavaria, under His Excellency Nikolaus Ernst, is the last line of defense keeping Germany German. When the Kingdom of Prussia nearly handed the German Empire over to another great power, Bavaria’s achievements helped prevent that from happening. There is no way Bavaria would hand over the influence it has fought so hard to gain to another country now. Besides, even though Bavaria is a Catholic state, liberalism is gaining ground there, so I doubt it would be as eager as the Central Party to strengthen the Roman Papacy. Above all, a political party and a state have different perspectives.”

As I’d thought earlier, the Central Party was a Catholic party in Prussia, generally associated with conservatism. The student council president was thinking far more rationally than the school itself.

“You have an excellent grasp of the situation.”

“It is common knowledge.”

“With perceptive students like you around, the future looks bright. That is a relief.”

For the first time, the student council president tilted her head. She exchanged glances with the other students, then smiled faintly.

“Well, that sounds like something a teacher would say… Lord Askanien, you speak as though you are a good ten years older than me.”

Guessing where this was going, I smiled and twisted my lips into a slightly awkward expression. She found it strange that someone her own age would say something like that, and I had to admit, she had a point. To stop myself from slipping into this habitual way of speaking, I’d have to abandon the perspective of Askanien the politician. It wasn’t a serious problem, so I was about to deflect the remark with a joke when the student council president continued without giving me a chance to respond.

“Your Highness, you are two years younger than I am, you see. I am the one who thinks the future looks bright when I see younger students growing up to be like you.”

“Pfft…”

The other students tried to laugh, then quickly covered their mouths.

So she was twenty, not nineteen. She wasn’t much older than me, but she was still an adult, and yet here I was, being treated like a kid by a high school student… My time…

It wasn’t as if I wasn’t already spending my days surrounded by high schoolers, but for the first time, I wanted to get away from them. What could I expect from an era in which Mecklenburg, who should have been around the same age as me under normal circumstances, was much older? I forced an awkward smile, feeling both embarrassed and disillusioned.

“I appreciate that. And I am sorry about all the trouble.”

“Not at all, Your Highness. That wasn’t the kind of answer I was looking for.”

The student council president replied with a straight face, apparently thinking I was taking things too seriously. Even so, she seemed to be holding back a smile. I wasn’t sure what she found so amusing, but the more we talked, the more the tension from our first meeting seemed to ease. Realizing that she had come to see me as someone who was distant from her in status, but still around her own age, I narrowed my eyes at her with a hint of playfulness of my own. The other students’ laughter had lightened the mood a little, so I shook my head and said, “I am glad to know there is someone my age like you, too. I would have felt the same even if our opinions differed.”

“That is why I have been speaking so openly with you. ‘There is enough obscurity to humiliate the elect and enough obscurity to blind the reprobate.’ Those are good words. Most of the Lutheran teachers were focused on guarding against the growing influence of Catholicism. You got straight to the heart of the matter so simply. It was exactly what I would expect from someone who gained both his life and his fame through a speech. And…”

She paused to gather her thoughts before continuing.

“Personally, I have always believed that wasting opportunities to save more lives because of religious conflicts does nothing to change the world. And you said the same thing. I was born into an ordinary family, while you were born into a ruling house. I have never enjoyed anything close to the luxury you have had. On the other hand, I have been able to live an ordinary life and attend school like anyone else, while you have been under the scrutiny of the entire nation since childhood. Until last year, you had never had the chance to live like a normal person. To be honest, this debate over the death penalty doesn’t strike me as anything new. And to be equally honest, most people who have lived in circumstances like mine wouldn’t hesitate much to have you executed by firing squad. One reason is that you have so much money we could never hope to possess. We are on parallel paths, and perhaps we will never truly understand each other. Even so, I am glad that despite our differences, we can share the same goal and have a conversation like this.”

She understood what I was asking about. Quite a few of the people who supported executing me did so simply because I belonged to a ruling house. A single conclusion could rest on multiple reasons. Of course, I expected her to say no, but since the subject had come up, I wanted to hear what she actually thought and how she would put it into words.

The student council president furrowed her brows at my question, then tilted her head before answering casually.

“Executing someone who isn’t me in this way… Technically, it has nothing to do with me or people of my social class, so it might not seem relevant to us. But the biggest problem is that it all stems from the same root. Whether it is believing that New Humans can simply be replaced by creating another one, or that someone from a ruling house is fair game to kill while we have the chance, both ideas come down to the same way of thinking: that if someone has certain traits, it is perfectly fine to kill them. From the perspective of the middle class, who want to do away with the privileged, that might even seem like justice in its own way. But I can’t agree with it because if this way of thinking became widespread, I would have to die, too. Someone might decide that I have certain antisocial traits, that my way of life deviates from the norm, and that society would be better off if I were dead.”

“That is something I once heard from a friend. It is remarkable. What experiences led you to think that way?”

“Some Old Human elders say that people like us can’t possibly be students. As a New Human, Your Highness probably can’t even imagine the reasoning behind that. They say girls’ schools are destroying tradition, ruining society, and angering God. In their eyes, people like us, who are simply receiving a normal higher education and preparing for university entrance exams, are antisocial elements that need to be removed from society. In the end, even though what you have experienced and the humiliation we face are worlds apart, and completely different in every other respect, the stubborn conviction that our school must be destroyed and the conviction that you must be killed come from the same root. So how could I, as the student council president of this school, think that it would be fine to kill you just because you belong to a ruling house? Knowing how ugly that root is, I can’t possibly think there is anything right about what grows from it. I am neither poor nor wealthy, so I am hardly in a position to worry about you. And it is not as though I have actually been worrying about your circumstances. But I did worry about your life—about how your very right to live has been seized by everyone and your life tossed around at their whim.”

She leaned toward me and reproached me.

“That is why I never expected you to ask me whether I felt the same way. Surely Your Highness, who gave a speech like yesterday’s, understands that it is not all that different from supporting the elders who insist that our school should be shut down and we should all be sent home. After all, their argument grows from the same root. You must also understand how the same reasoning can be extended to other cases.”

“I simply wanted to hear your thoughts firsthand. I doubt there are many people who think the way you do.”

“There may be more than you think. A friend of mine from the debate club in particular challenged my reasoning, but even that friend doesn’t think the debate over your execution was a good thing.”

“So you had a debate about it. How did your friend argue against you?”

“They said my argument was excessively reductionist. The issue of whether girls’ schools should be allowed to exist is a social issue, whereas your situation is, sociologically speaking, on the opposite end of the spectrum. It is the fate of an individual from the privileged class.”

“That sounds reasonable.”

“Your Highness, we are talking about your own life here. How can you say that so casually?”

The student council president interlaced her fingers and laughed in disbelief. I couldn’t help being deeply interested in an argument. I glanced at the other students, who had grown somewhat tense, and asked carefully, “So what did you say in response? It would have been interesting to sit in on that debate myself. What a shame I missed it.”

“I had no choice but to tell them they had misunderstood the premise from the start. My friend and I were talking about entirely different things. I wasn’t trying to take two problems that lay far apart and tie together the tips of their branches, either. I was simply saying that the trees growing in the north and south of this vast garden were rooted in the same continental soil. Do you see what I mean?”

“You approached it from a holistic perspective, while your friend took a reductionist one. If you look at the world through those theoretical lenses, I can see how your approach might come across as reductionism taken too far.”

“Exactly. They responded that way because they misunderstood my premise. My argument was rooted in the soil we all grow from, not in the branches of the trees. So to claim that I was being excessively reductionist by tying the branches of two trees together is a rather absurd misreading. From beginning to end, my point was that we must keep the ground we are rooted in from becoming barren. In other words… just as His Excellency Nikolaus Ernst said today, I was talking about the civic spirit we ought to cultivate. The root of the problem, not its outward manifestations.”

The student council president exchanged glances with the other students and nodded. By the time Nikolaus Ernst came up, the others were smiling calmly, too. Taking the opportunity to continue on the subject, the president gestured lightly and asked.

“Lord Askanien, if you don’t mind my asking, do you respect His Excellency Ernst?”

This was a bit like a political litmus test. The question carried an unspoken meaning—This will tell me what kind of person you are. I was taken aback to find myself in this situation when the subject was none other than me, but they were serious. Sensing the subtle tension in the room, I nodded.

“Of course.”

The student council president gave a crooked smile, then nodded.

“I thought so. I feel the same way. If I had to name the German politician I have been most impressed with in recent years, and the one I had most want to look up to as a student, it would be him.”

“Why?”

“He is the one who pulled Germany back from the brink of war, isn’t he? I also like that, although he is a foreigner, he is now one of Bavaria’s own. And I admire his progressive views.”

“Is that so?”

Perhaps my answer had been too vague, because the student council president nodded and pointed elsewhere.

“I imagine many people feel the same way. They are even putting up a statue in his honor at the church just around that alley.”

“Pardon? Surely not.”

“They really are.”

“Why would they do that while he is still alive?”

The student council president stared at me as if to ask whether I ever read the newspapers, so I cleared my throat.

“Well, that is a good thing.”

“You don’t seem to think so.”

I improvised a response and put on a pleasant expression.

“Of course I do.”

The president rolled her eyes as she spoke.

“Fine. If you say so, then I suppose it must be. I am not sure I should be saying this on a day when His Imperial Highness the Crown Prince is visiting, but anyway, I will be attending university in Munich, so I am hoping I might get the chance to meet His Excellency Ernst.”

You don’t need to go all the way to Munich. You’re already looking right at him.

My back stiffened. Still, the conversation was gradually drifting toward casual small talk. I tried not to swallow so conspicuously and answered as calmly as I could.

“Munich? That is quite a long way.”

“My older female cousin is often there. We are practically like sisters, so I am planning to live with her family when I go to university.”

“That sounds nice.”

I replied as casually as I could.

Not long afterward, I heard that Abraham had ordered someone to bring me to the lobby. Delighted at the thought that I could finally leave, I headed outside. But the first thing I encountered was an Affinity window.

“…….”

Once I left the student council room, where I’d been treated as both a student and a politician, I found myself facing a different sort of student. There were so many different kinds of students in this one school alone. The Affinity windows popping up all around me the moment I stepped outside left me baffled. I wondered what it would take to get the system to come to its senses. Then I turned my attention to the next problem—how was I supposed to get all these students standing around to go back to what they’d been doing? There was no way…

Even so, none of them were coming any closer. They were simply standing all around me, staring blankly. They stayed where they were while the student council president and I moved along. As I headed toward the school lobby, I endured their uncomfortable stares.

Even when I reached the lobby, Abraham was nowhere to be seen. He’d be here soon, though.

After waiting a little, I looked at the student council president one last time. She’d been looking straight ahead, but when she glanced up at me, I snapped my fingers and cast a soundproofing spell.

“Huh.”

The student council president herself wasn’t startled, but I heard surprised voices from the other students. I turned toward the source of the noise, offered them a polite smile, then spoke to the president.

“I haven’t had a chance to walk around the square yet, so I don’t know what people are really saying about all this. Still, it is refreshing to meet someone like you.”

When Elias and Eugène Lamour had said similar things, I’d understood exactly where they were coming from because they’d gone through the same experiences. I’d been deeply moved by their existence and grateful to them. But it never ceased to amaze me when I met someone who hadn’t shared my experiences yet still didn’t make me feel as though I were talking to a wall.

It wasn’t simply a matter of whether she agreed with me. Some people thought deeply about the world around them and tried to identify the roots of its problems from within their own circumstances. And it was remarkable that, through those efforts, people with vastly different lives could arrive at words that others could understand, almost by chance. The sense of wonder I’d felt when I met Leonard stirred faintly within me.

If I’d attended this school, I might have become good friends with this student. Of course, New Humans couldn’t enroll here, so that would never have been possible… As I mulled it over, I rubbed my chin. Then a thought suddenly occurred to me, and I spoke.

“Actually, I wanted to thank you.”

“What do you mean, ‘wanted to’? Are you saying you don’t anymore?”

“No. I do. I just don’t want to leave it at that.”

I looked at her and continued.

“Would it be all right if I wrote to you?”

Why am I phrasing it as a hypothetical when she isn’t even my enemy?

If I wanted to be friends, I could just get to know her. As I entertained a thought that would have been unthinkable to me a year ago, I felt my heart begin to race. The student council president merely blinked, then shrugged.