Loups-Garous (25 page)

She peered at Rey Mao. The unregistered girl looked somewhat like a police officer standing in front of the entrance like that. Maybe she was guarding the room, but she was just standing there quietly. Hazuki just remembered that Rey Mao hadn't uttered a single word through the whole transport.

Rey Mao suddenly jumped.

The doors flew open.

Ayumi was standing just beyond them.

Rey Mao widened her eyes in surprise for a moment, then looked concerned.

Ayumi walked into the room without so much as looking at Rey Mao and put the box in her hands down on the table.

In the box was junk food and bottles of water.

“Just what we needed,” Mio said with a laugh.

“Rations? They're disgusting! More importantly, you think she can take medicine now?”

Ayumi brought out a pill case from the box.

“All I have are these calming supplements.”

“That's no good!” Mio interrupted.

“Getting drugs nowadays is really hard. If I try sneaking this stuff out I'll be instantly under suspicion.”

“I'll say I took it.”

“If they check you more than twice the medical center will access your file.”

“I'll make something up,” Ayumi said and moved to the adjacent room. “The sooner she's out of here the better.” Ayumi waved her hand at Yuko.

“Even if she gets better she can't leave here,” Mio said.

“We're not keeping her till she recovers. We're keeping her till the case is solved.”

“Out of the question.”

“I'm sorry.” A frail voice. Yuko lifted her face.

“I'm sorry I'm…”

Causing so much trouble
, she seemed to say.

“Just take your medicine. Then go back to sleep,” Ayumi said. She moved to lift Yuko up. Hazuki tried to read Yuko's face, but Mio was blocking her view.

“Hey, Kono. You can say what you want, but you know that aspirin won't do anything, right? People were so worried about side effects it's been stripped of all its potency.”

“I know,” Ayumi said without intonation.

“If you know, then don't bother giving us placebos!” Mio whipped her head and scrunched her nose, grabbed a package of junk food from the table, and went to the bedside.

“The medicine will take effect better if you eat even just this little bit first. Here. This should get you back on track.”

What would being back on track mean?
Hazuki had no idea.

Mio said, “I'll have a bite myself,” and pulled a chair up to the table, facing Rey Mao, who was still at the door. She told her
you should sit down too
. Rey Mao didn't respond and simply glared at her.

“Why are you fronting? You know you're hungry. I don't care if you think you're savage or an animal or whatever, but everybody needs to eat or they'd die. Isn't that right, Makino?”

Mio pushed some food at Hazuki.

“Even the grossest synthfood tastes good when you're hungry. Just sit down, Catwoman. Or are you still worried about what Ayumi here said?”

Rey Mao turned her body about-face so that her back was to Mio.

“Whatever.”

Mio put the dummy meat in her mouth, brought some over to the wire fencing, and plopped down.

“You're
not
cute, you know. These doves are cuter than you. Ugh. This is meat? It tastes like meat. Ayumi, what do doves eat, anyway? Do they eat meat?”

From the room next door they heard a voice say
I don't know
.

“You don't know? C'mon, they eat meat, right?” Mio started tearing strips off the meat and asked Hazuki.

“I don't think so…”

Before Hazuki finished answering, Rey Mao said, “Doves don't eat meat.”

“They don't? I guess meat-eating birds would be brutal. Like they'd resort to eating each other. They really don't though, huh?”

Rey Mao said
they don't eat meat
at almost the same time Ayumi yelled at them to shut up.

“What's wrong with you two?” Mio kept nibbling on her food and sulked. Ayumi stared her down cold.

“Don't interfere.”

“You feed them, right?”

“No.”

“But aren't they hungry?”

“I don't know.” Ayumi was seated right in front of Hazuki.

“These birds just moved in on their own. I don't know what they eat or what they do. If I leave them alone they take over the whole room. That's why I put up the fence. So that they wouldn't take over any more space.”

“Then why don't you shoo them out? Or put screens on your windows.”

“This many doves doesn't bother me. You, here—that bothers me.”

Mio scrunched her nose again.
Tch
.

“I'm worse than a bird, huh?”

“At least birds can take a hint. If I mark my territory the birds won't cross the line. Dividing land and selling it is a human endeavor. Birds don't care where you put them. And I don't need this space to live or anything. I have no reason to kick them out.”

“You cohabit, then.”

“The only thing is, if I let them come over here then I can't eat here.”

“You're more pragmatic than I thought,” Mio said, bored, drinking water from the pack. “I don't know about the birds, but this is still your territory right, Ayumi? They invaded
your
place. Accommodating them is the same as keeping them as pets. Why don't you just eat them?”

“Doves…”

“You can
eat
them?” Hazuki blurted out.

“Can't you? They used to. Right?”

Mio looked at Rey Mao. Before Rey Mao could answer, Ayumi said
yes you can
very matter-of-factly to Hazuki.

“Have you eaten one before…Ayumi?”

Why. Why did Hazuki feel fragile all of a sudden? Asking her such stupid things.

Ayumi faced the fence and bared the nape of her neck.

“I've never eaten one, no.”

“Of course you wouldn't.”

“I don't know how to prepare them.”

“You prepare them?”

Hazuki's eyes shifted to the strange object that moved around by the wire fence. Its form was organic but its movement was machinelike. It was made of a shiny material, but it was hard to imagine what it felt like to the touch.

It definitely couldn't make itself understood. That was why it was so frightening.

This small animal had nothing in common with them.

“
Dove preparation
, huh?” Mio let out. “Sounds like a lot of work. I don't think I could eat something like that.”

“Not just doves. I couldn't eat anything that was once alive.”

“But people used to. And it looked like this.” Mio took a bite out of her synthetic meat. Hazuki's hand hovered over her own container of meat.

“Dove cuisine is not normal in this country.”

“So they eat it mostly…abroad?”

“I guess they must have to kill it and take it apart,” Mio said. She waved at the birds on the other side of the fence.

“I read somewhere that doves used to be a symbol of peace.”

“This one's pretty combative if you ask me,” Ayumi said in response to Hazuki.

“He looks like war,” Mio said with a laugh.

“They would totally eat each other.”

“No they wouldn't,” Rey Mao said coldly. “They only eat cereals. Only humans eat everything.”

“But humans eat nothing. You know, I remember reading something once. That even animals that only eat grass will resort to eating meat if left hungry long enough. Pigeons look so fierce, I bet if they were left unfed long enough they'd start eating each other.”

“Animals don't commit cannibalism.”

“I don't know about that,” Mio said almost regretfully. Then she looked through the fence again. “I wonder if living things taste good.”

“You want to try, Tsuzuki?” Ayumi said.

“Aren't you curious?” Mio said.

Mio turned her head to Hazuki. “Don't you love animals?”

“I mean, I like them, but—”

“If you like them don't you want to eat them?”

“Eating them means…”

Killing them
.

“Right.”

Ayumi grabbed a food pack and said, “You can't eat them unless you kill them.”

“Ayumi…”

“Makino would never kill an animal.” Ayumi handed the pack to Rey Mao, who remained standing. Rey Mao accepted it without a word.
Why is that?
Mio asked.

“Because it's cruel? Because it's gross?”

“Because she's human,” Ayumi said.

“That's a pretty obvious answer even for you, Kono. Didn't we already decide humans are also animals this afternoon? I think humans aren't animals anymore. Animals actually eat other animals, but humans have become totally emancipated from having to kill to eat.”

“Emancipated?”

“Yes. We're no longer qualified to be called animals.”

Speaking of which…

Mio had been saying humans had abandoned the animal kingdom. That timidity had, over a long period of time, forced humans out of the food chain.

“Humans are still animals.”

“I don't know about that.”

“I told you before. Animals live only to live. So if they're full they don't eat. They don't do anything in excess. Here…”

Ayumi opened a package of junk food.

“This does not run or hide and has plenty of protein, so why would a human go out of their way to prepare a dove? That's all. The absorption of excess nutrients only hinders the sustenance of life.”

Mio said, “I still don't know about that,” and started chewing on her second piece of dummy meat.

“I mean, going back to cannibalism, if you were starving and about to die, wouldn't you kill one of these doves, Ayumi?”

“I suppose I would,” Ayumi said. “It'd be easier than eating you, that's certain.”

“I'm edible too now?”

“If the situation were so bad that I would consider eating doves, it goes without saying I'd have to consider you as well. For that matter Hazuki would have to consider eating doves too.”

“And killing them?”

“Yes,
killing them
. You have to kill it to eat it.”

“I…I could never eat a dove or kill one for that matter,” Hazuki said.

Why not.

Was it because as Mio had said, “it's cruel,” or because “it's gross”?

She thought it was something else altogether.

Mio was definitely right, but it was more than that.

It was because it would be sad.

Yeah, that seemed the closest description of why she felt she couldn't do that. It would be sad.

“Animals,” Hazuki said without power. She didn't command the gravitas that Ayumi and Mio did. “Animals don't think about how sad it is for other animals they kill, do they?”

“No, they don't,” Ayumi responded without a pause. “Animals don't think of anything, actually.”

“They don't?”

“I wonder what it feels like not to think of anything at all,” Mio said as she looked over at Hazuki's face.

“But you know, I read somewhere that animals do have a consciousness. It said it's not like animals don't have emotions. I mean, I don't know about lesser life-forms,” Ayumi said.

“Having a consciousness or emotions is different from thinking.”

“Different?”

“In order to think, you need to be able to establish time. If you have no sense of time, you can use logic but you can't think. Animals don't know how to gauge time. Mammals only live for the moment.”

“Oh yeah? But mammals have memories. They learn.”

“They learn, they memorize, sure. But whether it's something that happens in a moment or over ten years, one event is still only ever one event for an animal. There's no depth. It won't matter if you can connect events—if they don't have any depth they won't be empathetic to a situation. So they are forever only in the now. That's what my sister told me,” Ayumi said.

Mio stared at the ceiling, food still in her mouth, and eventually said, “I see.”

“So you're saying they have the memory necessary for pattern recognition but they have no concept of the passage of time and therefore cannot connect pattern to pattern from separate experiential events? Now I get it. That's amazing,” Mio said.

Did she really understand?

Because Hazuki didn't.

Why couldn't she just be “forever only in the now”?

Why couldn't that idea be learned?

Hazuki did not understand this at all.

Sad things were sad.

That's why humans stopped killing animals
, Hazuki thought.

Hazuki didn't know anything about transcending the ecosystem or protecting the earth's natural environment the way Mio did, and she hadn't really thought about it in close personal terms, but everyone knew it was bad to kill animals and eat them. That was why humans had stopped eating animals.

Because it was sad.

“You think it's sad because you
don't think
of that thing as a dove,” Ayumi said.

“That's not true. That's…”

A dove.
It was nowhere as cute as it was on a monitor screen, but it was the right design.

“This is a dove.”

“All right. Then what's a dove to you? Is it part of your tribe, does it menace your existence, is it something you want to eat, or do you not care about it at all? An animal will put you in one of those four categories.”

“It's none of those things.”

Would it be something she didn't care about if she was so positive about her answer?

“It's something I don't care about,” Mio continued. “Since it looks like I can't eat it and it's so gross. I totally don't care.”

“What do you mean by ‘gross'?”

Ayumi faced the fencing.