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

Vethra came and got Leon on the four hundred and second day, in the middle of an afternoon so uneventful that he had been re-tying a cord on a drying frame purely to have something to do with his hands.

"Now."

"Now what?"

"Now is nobody’s turn."

She had been waiting a hundred and forty-seven days for an afternoon like it and had said so on the day she refused to write the rule, and Leon had assumed at the time that it was a way of not doing a thing.

It was not. She had been watching for it.

Nobody on a mat. Nothing on the fire. The wall crew out at the timber ground. The sowing done and eleven days from telling them anything. Kel teaching six children who could be heard from the platform and did not need anybody. Two people asleep who should not have been.

"If we do it today," Vethra said, "nobody in this settlement will be able to say afterwards that we made it to fit somebody. That is the whole of why I would not do it in the wet."

There were seven of them on the platform and it took most of two days, and Leon was there for all of it and said almost nothing, which he had decided beforehand and found much easier than the last four times.

Nayra. Vethra. Veya. Kharun. Doran. Luma, to hold it. And Leon, because it was his box and because Vethra said that a man who is not in the room becomes an argument that cannot be answered.

They started with what they had.

Seven courses. Never eight again. A course cannot be halved and a part course is worse than none. Seven days each, two a day, and once it starts it finishes or the whole thing was worse than nothing.

And four camps who now know the box exists.

The first thing they did was the thing Leon had not expected and which he understood, watching it, was the correct place to start.

They did not begin with who gets one.

They began with who decides, and Nayra put it there deliberately, because she had been carrying the other question for eleven months and had learned something from carrying it.

"If I am the one who decides," she said, "then every person on five camps who wants one has to persuade me, and I will be persuaded, because I am in the room with the person who is dying and they are not."

Vethra agreed with that inside four words and then made it worse.

"And if it is the council, it is thirty people who have never seen a wound turn, deciding in an evening, about somebody they can hear."

Kharun said the obvious one and it was rejected fastest.

"Two of you together."

"Then it is me and her," Vethra said, "and one day it will be her and somebody else, and the day after that it is one healer and whoever is standing nearest, and nobody will notice the day it changed."

***

What they built took the rest of the first day and all of the second and it is four lines long.

One. The courses are not the healer’s. They are the settlement’s, and the healer holds the key with Veya, and neither can open it alone.

Two. A course is used only when the healer says, in front of one witness who is not a healer, that the person will die without it and may not die with it. Not might help. Not worth trying. That sentence, or nothing.

Three. Every use is written the same evening in the column Nayra ruled: who decided, when, why, who was not here — and who else was ill that day and did not get one. Named.

Four. Nobody outside Retharu is refused for being outside Retharu.

The fourth one took four hours and Doran fought it hard, and he was not wrong, and everybody in that room knew he was not wrong.

Five camps. Roughly six hundred people. Seven courses.

"You are writing a rule that says a stranger from Low Reed with a turned wound has the same claim as a child on this terrace," he said. "And there will be a day when it is exactly that, and the child is somebody’s, and you will have written down in advance that the child does not come first."

"Ei," Nayra said.

"Say the rest of it."

"There is no rest of it. That is what the rule says and it is what I want it to say."

Doran turned to Vethra, who was the one he actually wanted.

And Vethra, who had spent thirty years in a camp of ninety with one bone-setter and no rule at all, gave him the only answer that has ever worked.

"Because the day we write ours first, four camps stop sending us their sick and start sending us nothing at all, and the box makes us hated instead of useful. And because I am from Low Reed, and if you put ours first in that rule I will not be able to stay, and you will have to explain to Nayra why she has one healer again."

Doran sat with that for a long time.

Then he wrote it down himself, in his own hand, which was the only apology anybody ever got out of him and was worth more than one.

***

They did not sign it, because nobody here signs anything.

Veya put a knot in the cord — the fourth in sixty years, and the first that was not a dissent — and she said what it was for before she tied it, so that in sixty years nobody would have to guess.

"Made on a day when nobody was ill."

Leon walked down afterwards with the whole of it in his head and one thing sitting under it that he did not say out loud, because it was not his to say and because the room had been better than he was.

Seven. Not eight, not nine, and never any more, ever, on this planet, for as long as anybody here is alive.

They have just built a fair way to spend a thing that is running out and cannot be replaced, and they did it well, and it took two days, and every rule in it is better than anything I would have written.

And in about eleven years the box will be empty and every line of that rule will still be true and will apply to nothing at all.

He wrote that in the register that night, under the reasoned-mark, and then sat looking at it for a while and added one more line underneath.

So the rule is not the answer. The rule is what you do while somebody works out how to make more.

Nobody here can. Which means it is mine, and I have not started.

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