The Intrigues of Haruhi Suzumiya (20 page)

Enjoying lunch in the mountains with all five of us was actually very nice. Nagato wasn’t hesitating to dig right in, I noticed with relief, and she seemed very much herself. Haruhi seemed brimming with energy, and Koizumi was the usual Koizumi. Asahina was fine too, although when it came to her I knew there was another version holed up at Tsuruya’s place, which made it hard for me to feel really at ease.

“Hey, Kyon, if we do find treasure, what’re you gonna do with your share?” asked Haruhi, her mouth full of cutlet sandwich. I had fantasies like that all the time, so it was an easy question to answer.

“I’m gonna cash it in and buy a new game system with all the games I’ve wanted to play, then go to the used bookstore and buy back all the manga my mom made me sell off, then save the rest.”

“You make it sound like it’s your allowance. You gotta dream bigger than that!” Haruhi gulped down the sandwich in a flash and regarded me with a pitying smile.

So what would
she
do? I demanded.

“I don’t really care about money, so even if we find the kind of treasure we’d be able to sell off, I don’t think I’d do it. I mean, we went to all that trouble to get it, right? I’d lock it up for a while, then bury it again somewhere. Don’t you think leaving a treasure map for your own descendants would be worth more than plain old money?”

Sure, a childish treasure hunt was fun and all, but I wasn’t so overflowing with allowance I’d use it that way. If we found something useful, I’d happily keep it for myself, but if I didn’t need it,
I’d rather just throw it away than take the trouble to bury it, I said.

“Oh, you’re no fun,” said Haruhi, her lips pursed in exasperation. But then she smiled. “I guess if you’re just going to blow it on pointless stuff like that, I hope we find something you
can’t
exchange for money. Right, Mikuru?”

“Eh?” Interrupted midbite, Asahina looked back and forth hesitantly as she simultaneously tried to set down her half-eaten lunch and cover her chewing mouth politely with her hand. “Er… y-yes, I guess—wait, no… um, I mean, maybe that would make everybody happier, or…” She trailed off as her eyes met Haruhi’s and mine in turn. She waved her hands frantically. “I mean, I just hope we find some! Treasure, I mean.”

“Oh, we’ll find some treasure. I know these things.”

Haruhi made her usual baseless assertions as she stuffed her face with a sandwich.

Nagato sat on the mat’s corner, demolishing her lunch as though wanting to best Haruhi; beside her was Koizumi, down on one knee like a pop idol posing for a teenybopper magazine. He noticed my gaze and tipped his cup slightly, smiling wordlessly as Asahina watched the lunch she’d prepared get taken care of by Haruhi and Nagato.

For just a moment, I wasn’t thinking about the letters from the future or the other Asahina hiding out at Tsuruya’s house. I was just enjoying having a fun picnic lunch with everybody. Despite the unseasonal hike and the pointless treasure hunt, looking at the high-spirited Haruhi, the thankfully normal Nagato, along with Asahina and Koizumi being their usual selves, for a little while I felt like everything was going to be okay.

No… everything
had
to be okay.

Which made me remember the future that lay before me—there were things I had to do tomorrow and the next day in order to
keep
everything okay.

The pleasant lunch ended, after which Haruhi and I bickered for a bit just to settle our stomachs, though there was no point in relating the details. Finally she clapped and stood. I braced myself; the time had finally come.

“Well, then, time to start the afternoon treasure hunt!” Haruhi picked up the lunch boxes and thermoses and gave Asahina a sidelong glance. “I headed down the mountainside over there. There are so many trees on this mountain that there aren’t many places to dig. Which means the treasure must be buried somewhere without trees. You can’t dig holes on top of trees, after all.”

I picked up my shovel.

“But I found an open space that looks pretty likely,” said Ha-ruhi. “Let’s head that way. Plus, we can head straight down from there, so it’ll be quicker to go home. We shouldn’t have bothered to take the bus, really.”

I looked and saw that Koizumi had already shouldered his shovel and was heading down the mountain. Nagato rolled up the mat we’d sat on, and Asahina carefully held on to the picnic basket, nodding meekly at Haruhi’s pronouncement.

Haruhi bounded down the tree-filled, rock-strewn slope like an antelope. Though we weren’t particularly in a hurry, Nagato followed smoothly after.

“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 analyst 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!”