The Intrigues of Haruhi Suzumiya (4 page)

Speaking of exams, it was about time for the diagnostic tests that the entering middle school students would take to get into special classes, of which my school had a couple. Koizumi’s Class 9 specialized in science and math. I don’t know whether it was the shadowy Agency backing him that got Koizumi into that class, or if it was just his own academic ability, but either way it was impressive for a transfer student to get in. I sure as hell didn’t have any interest in a class whose main dish would be extra helpings of math and science.

In any case, I turned my attention away from the hell of college entrance exams into which I’d inevitably descend, purposefully avoiding the calendar in an effort to extend my few remaining days of life as a freshman, and once I got back from that fateful December eighteenth, carefully maintained my state of relaxation.

After all, I sure can’t think of anything more dangerous than repairing space-time, and having successfully done so, surely I deserved some R&R. Nagato had returned to her usual self, Asahina’s smile was back, and while something was up with Haruhi, she’d start making noise about it soon enough.

So there really shouldn’t have been any problems at all, or at least I didn’t want to think about them. But there was one person in the clubroom who selfishly insisted on making mountains out of molehills—the only one who, like Haruhi, had been left out of
the loop, the esper whose powers were useless when it came to changing space-time—one Itsuki Koizumi, who said:

“You’ve repeatedly visited two separate mornings of December eighteenth.”

Koizumi had enjoyed hearing about the time-travel incidents I’d been through ever since the episode at the snowy mountain mansion, pestering me to relate them to him like a kid begging his grandfather for another story. As an aspiring time traveler, he seemed to envy me. Taking the train back from Tsuruya’s villa, he’d gone on and on about “Might you not find some way to take me back with you?” and “It should be fine so long as your past self doesn’t see me,” but it went without saying that I paid him no heed.

I was still deeply embarrassed about the whole Nagato thing, and although it was all over and settled, I still tended to prevaricate about it, but in the face of Koizumi’s curiosity-borne persistence, and when just the two of us were in the clubroom, I finally told him the whole story.

And as I’d expected, he happily began his commentary.

“You see, it was the morning of December eighteenth when the malfunctioning Nagato changed the world into one where Suzumiya and I, and even Asahina, were all normal people. You spent three days in that world, then used Nagato’s escape program to travel three—no,
four
years into the past. There you met the still-functioning Nagato and returned to the morning of December eighteenth.”

That was all true. And incidentally, I’ve now been back to that morning yet again, I told him.

“I know. But think carefully now. Suppose we refer to the moment Nagato changed the world on the morning of December eighteenth as time
x
. When you returned to time
x
from Tanabata four years previous, it was no longer the same
x
.”

What was he talking about? There was no way there could be more than one version of the same time, I told him.

“There can—in fact, there must. The reasoning is simple. If the
time
x
where Nagato changed the world disappeared, then neither Suzumiya’s disappearance nor her and my transformation into regular people would have happened. And were that the case, you would never have needed to travel into the past.”

He was talking about a time paradox. I had plenty of first-hand experiences with those, I said.

“But a necessary precondition for returning this world to its previous state was you traveling into the past. If you hadn’t, the world would have stayed changed. But you did go, and you did repair it. Otherwise, this timeline would not exist.”

I glanced over at the door, hoping desperately that someone would come and interrupt this conversation.

“Let me use a diagram to explain. It might make it easier to understand.”

Ever since the incident, Koizumi seemed to have gotten really into diagrams; he took an erasable pen and walked over to the whiteboard.

“Say this vertical line represents the flow of time from past to future.” He stopped the line in the middle of the board, drawing a dot and labeling it with an
x
.

“This is the first time
x
. This is where Nagato changed the world that surrounded her, and where the time as it exists in your memory was created.”

Koizumi resumed the movement of the pen, but he did not directly continue the line. Instead it curved to the right, eventually creating a circle that returned to point
x
. The diagram now looked like a morning glory sprout with one leaf plucked off.

“The circle is the history that you remember since December eighteenth. You used the escape program to travel back to the Tanabata four years earlier, then jumped back to the morning of December eighteenth. If Nagato had just been repaired at that moment, everything would have been fine, but that’s not how it went.”

Yeah, because Ryoko Asakura was there. But Asakura wasn’t the only one there. There was also another version of me from
the future, along with Asahina and Nagato, and we managed to put things right. From my perspective now, it had happened a month ago.

“Indeed. You saved yourself. And that”—Koizumi’s pen started at
x
again, this time drawing a circle that looped to the left—“is this point, from which this world is now continuing. In Suzumiya’s memory as in mine, you fell down the stairs on December eighteenth and were unconscious until the twenty-first. And a month later, you would travel back from this timeline to go save yourself.”

Once he’d finished drawing the circle to the left of the line, Koizumi didn’t stop. He then continued on past the
x
, extending the line up until it reached the top edge of the board, then setting the pen down. Koizumi then took a half step back from the board and regarded me carefully.

I quickly grasped the nature of the diagram. It looked like an eight turned sideways—the symbol for infinity—with a line exactly bisecting the point between the two loops. Point
x
was where all the lines met.

Even I, who’d long proclaimed my cowardice in the face of math and science, gradually began to understand what Koizumi was trying to explain.

The loop on the right was the time in my memory. After a lot of hassle, I’d returned to point
x
and met glasses-Nagato just as she was changing the world, then gotten stabbed by Asakura.

On the other hand, the loop on the left was time of which I had no memory. I’d been stabbed, lost consciousness, been taken to the hospital where I was in a bed for three days until waking up—all within that loop.

And both of those loops had their start at
x
.

“Which means that there are two points
x
,” explained Koizumi. “There’s point
x
, where the world was changed, and… let’s call it
x'
, where the change was undone,” he said, looking contemplatively at his diagram. “Without
x
, there can be no
x'
. So
x
was not erased. You can probably think of them as being superimposed.
Yes… one written atop the other. Just as old data is covered up by new data written atop it,
x
, along with the changed world that followed from it, was overwritten by
x'
, but it hasn’t disappeared completely. It’s still there.”

“I do not remotely understand,” I said with nonchalance even as I recalled Asahina the Elder’s words.

An even larger and more complex space-time-quake
, she’d said.

“It’s something like looking at a multilevel circuit board from above. There are points where the circuits appear to cross each other in two dimensions, but when you factor in the third dimension, you see they’re on different levels. Things that appear to occupy the same space in two dimensions differ in depth.”

I rubbed my temples. Koizumi was explaining all this, but I wondered what a time traveler would say. Or an alien.

“There is another possibility. May I explain?”

Given the circumstances, I’d listen to whatever the hell he wanted to say.

“The memory that you lack but which we have—the three days between December eighteenth, when you fell down the stairs, and December twenty-first, when you awoke—that may never have existed.”

Did it matter one way or another? I’d been asleep either way, I said.

“Indeed, it’s precisely as you say. Do you remember what I said earlier? We can’t prove for certain that the entire universe wasn’t created five minutes ago. You being rushed via ambulance and being comatose for three days may never have actually happened. It’s possible that the time between your repair of December eighteenth and your awakening on December twenty-first didn’t exist. Which would mean that Suzumiya’s and my memory of those three days is completely fabricated, and we were made to hold them after the reconstruction on the night of the twenty-first.”

I’d agreed to listen, but this was just ridiculous—but no, I
couldn’t claim that. It wasn’t impossible. It was possible to rewrite an entire year—when considering that, these three days were small by comparison.

“Also, this is changing the subject, but we can now state the identity of the ‘mystery girl’ that Suzumiya saw.”

Who was it? Who pushed me down the stairs?

“Nagato.”

Now he was just talking nonsense. Hadn’t Nagato been at the bottom of the stairs with everybody else at the time? They’d said I was at the tail end of the group, hadn’t they?

“Yes, that’s what we remember. Nagato didn’t directly shove you from behind. However, she was the one who created the history wherein you’d been knocked unconscious. Suzumiya must have subconsciously realized that fact. Of course, she doesn’t know Nagato was the culprit—in reality, the culprit wasn’t there. And yet somehow Suzumiya sensed the fact that
someone
was behind all this.”

Koizumi smiled brightly.

“That feeling of suspicion became the image of a girl pushing you. A phantom girl who never really existed.”

You could hardly use intuition to explain away all that. If Nagato could change the world, she could certainly alter a few memories. Yet Haruhi had realized that something was amiss—that someone was doing something. Or had done something.

“It’s just a theory. A hypothesis I created to answer your questions.” The pleasant bastard sat down in a folding chair and spread his arms wide. “Practically speaking, I don’t know the first thing about time construction and movement. But Asahina came from the future to accomplish something here. So this is my question: if you were in the position to travel into the past in order to avert a disaster, would you do it?”

I thought of Asahina the Elder on the night of Tanabata. Surrounded by a Haruhi and Koizumi who had gone to a different school, an Asahina who’d stayed in the calligraphy club, and a
glasses-wearing Nagato, I’d pushed Enter on the computer and traveled back in time again. The version of myself, sitting on a bench at that park. The version of myself, helping a middle school–aged Haruhi draw pictures in the school courtyard.

If I had gone running up to my other self, what would’ve happened? If I’d told him everything that would happen—if I’d told him not to let Haruhi make a movie, not to cause Nagato constant trouble, if I’d spilled my guts to him.

All I could do was shrug my shoulders. “I have no idea.”

When an opportunity like that comes up, your body moves on its own before you can think. I didn’t really trust my brain, but my body knew what it should do. That had gotten me this far, and I figured I’d keep it up. Good luck, self.

“Still, though—I really don’t think there’ll be any more time travel. The whole reason for doing it is gone now.”

“That’s a shame. I had been hoping that you’d take me along next time.”

I didn’t care if his eyes looked as desperate as Shamisen’s when he’s hungry in the middle of the night. He could go ask Asahina. And not current Asahina, but Asahina the Elder. Not that I had any idea where or when she was. The only thing I could tell him was to make sure to bring motion sickness medication.

Koizumi shook his head resignedly and returned to the game of shogi he was playing against himself; my attention drifted back to the manga magazine I’d been reading, and silence returned to the room.

“Sorry to keep you waiting!”

Wham
. The door slammed open, kicked, and the main ingredient in all this chaos entered. Haruhi the omnipotent smiled with pointless energy, a convenience store shopping bag in her hand, her skirt and hair fluttering attractively.

“The snack shop nearby didn’t have this stuff, so I had to go all the way back down the hill. Whew, it’s cold!”

Following soon after the brigade chief, who was now warming
her hands by the electric heater in the corner of the room, came Nagato and Asahina.

“…”

Nagato silently closed the door.

“Um, what do we do with this?” asked Asahina, her head cocked at a puzzled angle.

“Isn’t it obvious? Don’t you know what today is, Mikuru? I mean—did you buy this stuff without realizing it?”

“It’s February third, but what…?”

“It’s Setsubun! Setsubun!”

Haruhi produced a small packet from within the convenience store shopping bag.

“Honestly, you’re just hopeless. Didn’t you celebrate it when you were a kid? Today’s Setsubun, and Setsubun equals bean-throwing and ehomaki-eating!”

It’s true that ehomaki, or the practice of eating a whole piece of futomaki in an auspicious direction while contemplating one’s hopes for the upcoming year, was, of course, an obscure local tradition, but our brigade chief was a fanatic about observing every obscure seasonal tradition she could. If you’d said we weren’t the “Save the world by overloading it with fun Haruhi Suzumiya Brigade,” but instead the “Save the world by celebrating every obscure seasonal event Brigade,” you wouldn’t have been wrong.