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

They sowed on the three hundred and ninety-sixth day and it went wrong in the first hour in a way that was entirely Leon’s fault and took a seven-year-old to find.

The rule was simple and he had said it four times. The jar seed goes in at the old spacing, because the jar seed is ninety-four in a hundred. The store seed goes in thicker — three where you would put two — because the store seed is sixty-one and thirty-nine of every hundred are dead.

Two seeds, two rates, one field, and about thirty people planting.

By the middle of the first morning Ket-li came down the row and stood in front of him with her hands full of beans and asked how anybody was supposed to tell which was which.

They were the same beans.

Same crop, same field, same year, dried on the same hides by the same people. The jar seed had spent a hundred days sealed and the store seed had spent it in a basket, and there was no visible difference between them at all, which was the entire reason the germination test had been necessary in the first place.

Leon had put them in two piles at the head of the field and had told people which pile was which, and by the middle of the morning the piles had been carried, split, tipped into aprons, refilled, and mixed by four separate people acting reasonably.

He stood in the row and worked out how much of the field he had just ruined.

It is not ruined. It is worse than ruined. It is unknowable. In eleven days a third of some rows will be empty and I will not be able to say whether that row got the good seed at the wrong spacing or the bad seed at the right one, and the field will teach us nothing.

Then Ket-li, still holding the beans, said the other half of it.

"You could have made them different."

They stopped the planting.

Kharun stopped it, on Leon’s word, which Leon noted at the time and thought about later, because a season ago he would have had to argue for it.

It cost them a morning and about forty people standing in a field doing nothing, and Doran priced it out loud at half a day and said it was cheap, and everybody understood that the alternative was a field nobody could read.

What they did about it took Ket about ten minutes and a bowl.

Charcoal and water, thin, and every bean out of the store pile went through it and came out grey, and it did not hurt the seed and it washed off in the ground and you could tell the two apart across a row at walking pace.

Ket did not point out that this was the same trick as the ochre. She did not have to. Leon got there on his own about four seconds after the bowl came out, and had the good sense to say so out loud in front of the people who had just lost a morning.

"Nayra’s," he said. "Six days after I arrived."

"Ei," Ket said, and went on stirring.

***

They planted through the afternoon and the whole of the next day and it went the way planting goes, which is badly for the back and well for the mood.

The children counted rows.

That was Kel’s doing and it had not been asked for. Six of them had come down from the shelter with a strip of bark each, and they walked the rows behind the planters and counted, and by the end of the second day they had a number for every row in the field and which seed had gone in it and at what spacing.

It was, Doran said, the first field on this river that anybody would be able to argue about afterwards.

Tov’s sister, who was five, could not count past thirty and solved it by putting a mark for every thirty and then starting again, which nobody had taught her and which is exactly what a tally is, and Kel let her get all the way to the end of the row before he told her she had invented something.

Leon walked the field at dusk on the second day with the register under his arm and did not open it.

Forty rows. Eight of them jar seed at the old spacing, thirty-two of them grey seed at three-for-two, all of it counted, all of it written down by people who could not write a season ago, on a strip of bark held by a child who cannot count past thirty.

Eleven days to emergence. And for the first time since I got here I know what the answer is going to look like before it arrives.

That is not a small thing. That is the whole of what I actually brought, and it took four hundred days to hand over, and the handing over is the part that worked.

He sat down on the edge of the field for a while.

And in thirty days a hundred people come down that path to work out what we are worth, and if they are any good at it they will not count the baskets.

They will count the children with the bark.

Nayra found him there when the light had nearly gone, on her way back from the far end, and sat down beside him without being invited, which she did about twice a season.

"You stopped it."

"Ei."

"You have never stopped anything." She was looking at the field and not at him. "You start things. You start eleven things and four of them work and you write down why the other seven did not. You have never once, in the whole time I have known you, put your hand up in the middle of a morning and said stop, this is going wrong now."

Leon thought about that and found that it was true and that he did not particularly like it.

"It cost half a day."

"It cost half a day." Nayra got up, slowly, because she had been bent over a row since first light. "You have cost this settlement a great deal more than half a day by not stopping things. You will notice that nobody has mentioned that either."

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