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

They opened the jars on the three hundred and sixty-second day with about forty people watching, which Leon had not asked for and could not have stopped.

Oren broke his own one first.

He had made four and had said from the start that the fourth existed to be destroyed, and he did it the way he did everything, which was without ceremony and slightly too fast for anybody to prepare themselves. He put it on a flat stone, put a chisel to the shoulder and hit it once, and it came apart along the line he had chosen and not anywhere else.

Then he picked up the lid ring and turned it over and looked at the joint.

"Dry," he said.

He passed it round so that people could put a thumb on the inside of the seal, and the inside of the seal was dry to the touch after a hundred days across the end of a wet season, and a small number of people on that terrace understood exactly what that meant and the rest of them understood that Oren was pleased, which is a thing that happens about twice a year.

So the jars were good. That question was closed, and it had cost one jar, and Oren had been right that there was no other way to close it.

The three trial jars were the same seed, dried the same, sealed the same day, and they differed in two things and only two.

Jar one: ash through the seed, buried in the cool ground under the north side of the granary.

Jar two: no ash, buried in the same place, an arm’s length away.

Jar three: ash, but standing on a shelf inside the store.

Leon had put them out that way on purpose so that jars one and two told him about the ash and jars one and three told him about the ground, and he had explained that to five people at the time and he was fairly sure two of them had followed it.

All three opened without any drama at all.

The seed in all three looked like seed. Nobody who was not looking for something would have found anything wrong with any of it, and about eleven people said so and started to lose interest.

Then Leon poured jar three out on a hide and went through it with a thumb, and after about four minutes he found the first hole.

A neat round hole, smaller than a pinhead, in the flat side of one bean. Then another. Then, once he knew what he was looking at, a great many.

He sat back and let himself be right about the wrong thing.

I wrote this down a hundred days ago and put a query on it. They lay in the pod, in the field, before the crop ever came in, and the young grow up inside the seed and come out when they are finished. The ash never touched them because they were already inside when I put the ash on.

Jars one and two had them too. Fewer, but there.

Which meant the ash was not the story and the ground was not the story either, and the whole trial was about to tell him something he had not designed it to say.

***

He did the thing nobody on this river had ever seen and it took ten days.

A hundred beans from each jar. Counted out, one at a time, in front of Nayra, because she had asked to watch and because he wanted a witness who would not let him fudge a count.

Each hundred went between two layers of wet cloth on a warm flat stone in the shade, kept damp, turned once a day.

And then you wait ten days and count how many of them have opened.

Nayra understood what he was doing before he had finished laying out the second hundred, and Leon watched her understand it, and it was one of the four or five best moments he had had on this planet.

"You are asking the seed."

"Ei."

"Before you put it in the ground."

"Ei."

She sat back on her heels and looked at the four squares of wet cloth for a while.

"How long has your world been able to do that?"

Leon thought about it and gave her the honest answer, which was that he did not know, and that it was so ordinary where he came from that nobody had ever bothered to tell him when it started.

"It is not ordinary," Nayra said. "You have four kinds of knowing on that page and none of them can tell you what a thing will do next year. This can."

He did four hundreds, not three, and the fourth is the one that mattered.

The fourth hundred came out of the store — out of the four fifths of the seed stock that had not gone into a jar, that had sat in baskets on a shelf through the last of the wet, and that the settlement was going to put in the ground in about thirty days.

He nearly did not do it. He was three hundred beans in, it was late, and the fourth hundred felt like tidiness rather than a question.

He did it because Nayra was standing there.

***

They counted on the three hundred and seventy-second day.

Jar one, ash and buried: ninety-four.

Jar two, no ash, buried: ninety-one.

Jar three, ash, on the shelf: seventy-eight.

And the store: sixty-one.

Leon counted the fourth square twice and then made Nayra count it, and she got sixty-one as well, and then Vethra counted it and got sixty-one, and by then there were about twenty people on the platform and nobody was talking.

Thirty-nine beans in every hundred that this settlement was going to plant in thirty days were dead, and there was no way to see it by looking, and they would have found out eleven days after sowing when a third of the rows came up empty and everybody blamed the ground.

Doran arrived at the count because Doran arrives at counts, and did the arithmetic out loud in about ninety seconds.

Same ground, same water, same work. Plant the store seed and you get roughly two thirds of the field you thought you were getting. Plant the jar seed and you get all of it.

They had enough jar seed for about a fifth of the planting.

"And the rest?"

"You sow it thicker," Leon said. He had the words for that one, at least. "Three where you would put two. It costs seed and it costs nothing else."

Doran wrote that down.

Then he asked the question that Leon had been building an answer to for ten days and had not managed to make any better.

"Why is only a fifth in jars?"

There was no version of that with an edge taken off it, so Leon gave it to them straight, through Luma, because he wanted the exact shape of it to arrive and not a soft one.

Because on the two hundred and sixty-first day he did not know that a sealed jar mattered.

He was sure. He was so sure that he stood at that fire and told them he was sure, and then said the thing he was pleased with himself about — sure is not tested — and put a fifth of the stock in jars to prove a point about method.

And the method was right and the amount was wrong. He had protected the sample and left the crop in a basket.

If he had sealed all of it he would have had ninety-four in a hundred across the whole planting and no trial at all, and would never have known why, and would have done the same thing again the following year and been lucky twice.

If he had sealed none of it he would have had sixty-one and would have blamed the ground.

He got the answer and he got it by accident, and it cost thirty-nine beans in every hundred of four fifths of a year’s seed.

Nobody said anything for a while.

Then Vethra, from the back, in the voice she used on the healing platform when a student had got the right answer for a reason that would kill somebody next time:

"Then next year you seal all of it and you keep a hundred back in a basket on purpose."

Leon opened his mouth.

"That is what she does." Vethra nodded at Nayra without looking at her. "She does not test the medicine. She tests the thing she is going to stop doing."

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