I Won the Lottery and Went Back in Time!?!

Leon left Retharu on the five hundred and forty-fifth day and did not sleep the night before, which he had not expected and was embarrassed about.

Five hundred and forty-four days on one limestone terrace. He had been eleven kilometres from it once, to the seep, and back inside a day.

Kharun walked him to the gate and did not make a speech.

"Come back."

"Ei."

"That is not a courtesy. You promised me on the fourth day that you would not go anywhere at night on your own, and I have held you to it for a year and a half, and I am now sending you eleven days downriver with four people." He was looking at the north path and not at Leon. "So I am saying the thing out loud instead, and Doran is writing it, and you are going to be irritated by that for about a week and then you will understand it."

Tala took point. Luma came, with her own copy, because a copy that goes wherever Luma goes goes wherever Luma goes. Two carriers, both of them people Halu's list said could do eleven days twice in a season.

They made about eighteen kilometres a day, which Leon found humiliating for the first three days and then stopped thinking about, because there was too much else to look at.

***

The river below the third bend is not the river he knows.

It widens and then narrows into a reach with rock on both sides and no landing for most of a day, and there is a fish weir there — a real one, four generations old, the one Veya's third precedent is about — and Tala walked him out onto it and let him stand on it for as long as he wanted.

Stone, laid in courses, keyed into the bank on both sides. A gap at the deep end with a woven trap in it. Silt built up behind it, and grass growing on the silt, and a footpath along the top that somebody's grandmother wore into it.

There is nothing clever in it. There is not one thing on that weir Leon could improve.

What there is, is about four thousand man-days of work by people who are all dead, and the great-grandchildren of those people were standing eighty paces away doing something else entirely, on ground that exists because of it.

He sat down on the end of it for longer than the day allowed and nobody hurried him.

"Fel has stood there," Tala said, when he finally got up.

"When?"

"Every time he has ever come down this river. My father saw him do it." She shouldered her load. "He does not tell anybody. He goes and sits on the end and then he comes back and says nothing about it for a year."

***

The sixth day was the one that mattered and it was not supposed to be anything.

A small camp on the eastern side, twenty-two people, no name that Luma could give him in a form he could hold. They stopped for water and were given water, and the head of it was a woman of about forty who wanted to know whether the Varu was the Varu and then lost interest almost immediately.

Leon walked past a rack of flat stones in the sun with wet cloth on them and about two hundred seeds laid out under the cloth, and he stopped dead.

They were doing the germination test.

They were doing it about a third right.

They had the cloth, the warm stone, and the shade, which is the part he would have expected to be lost first. They were counting.

They were counting on the third day.

"Say that again," he said to Luma, very carefully, because he had already worked out what it meant and wanted to be wrong.

Luma asked twice and got the same answer twice.

Three days. They put the seed out, they count on the third morning, and whichever pile has more sprouted is the pile they plant.

Which is not a test. It is worse than no test, because it is a test that answers confidently and answers wrong.

Ten days is not decoration. Ten days is the whole instrument. A seed that comes up on the third morning is a fast seed and a seed that comes up on the ninth is a live seed, and a hundred beans counted at three days will tell you that the vigorous small handful is better than the sound large one, every single time.

Leon stood in front of that rack and did the arithmetic: one season run, believed, and a camp about to select the wrong seed on purpose, using his method, having never heard his name in connection with it.

Nobody had lied. Nobody had been careless. It had gone from Vethra to a student to a camp to a boat to here, four hands, and every hand had passed on the part that was easy to remember.

The number was the part that was easy to forget.

***

He had about an hour and he thought about it the whole hour, and what he did not do was the thing he wanted to do, which was explain.

Explaining would have taken forty minutes through Luma, made a woman of forty look foolish in front of her own camp, and finished with everyone agreeing politely and counting at three days again the moment the boat was out of sight.

What he did instead was ask her to show him.

He got her to walk him through the whole of it, out loud, in her own words, with him saying nothing but ei, and when she got to the third morning he asked one question.

"What happens to the rest of them?"

She stopped.

He asked it again, differently. The ones that have not come up on the third morning. What are they.

And she said the true thing, because she is not stupid and had simply never been given the day to think about it, and the true thing was: some of them come up later.

"How many?"

She did not know. Nobody had ever counted.

Leon left a page.

Eleven lines, plain, no reasoning, the number of days at the top and underlined twice. Luma read it out loud to the whole camp because a page nobody can read is decoration, and the woman had one of her sons copy the shapes onto bark while Luma read, badly, and Leon did not correct him once.

Then he did the thing Kharun had put in the ruling and which he had privately thought was a formality.

He wrote out how to find out whether it worked. Two piles. Count at three days, then leave them and count again at ten. Do it once. If the two counts say the same thing, keep your way and tell somebody I was wrong.

They will do it or they will not. He will very probably never find out.

***

He was quiet on the boat afterwards and Tala eventually asked, in the flat way she asks things, whether he was angry.

"Na. I am doing arithmetic."

"About what?"

"Six days from home." He watched the bank go past. "That page has been out in the world since the autumn, in mouths, and it is faster than we are, and it got here first and got here wrong."

"And the copies?"

"The copies are eleven days behind a rumour and always will be."

Tala considered that the way she considers ground.

"Then send more of them," she said, "and send them to more places, and stop being surprised when the water gets there before the boat."

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