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

The crop came in on the two hundred and forty-ninth day and by the two hundred and fifty-sixth Leon had stopped being pleased about it, because a harvest is not food and it is certainly not seed.

Everybody else was pleased. There were beans on the terrace in a quantity that made people stop and look at them, and Doran had already worked out what it did to the winter and had said so, and two of the students had eaten some raw and been told off by three different people.

Leon spent that week looking at them and thinking about water.

A bean coming off the plant is about a fifth water. Put it in a jar like that and by the middle of the wet it is a jar of mould, and the part of it that is not mould will not come up when you put it in the ground, because the thing inside a seed that makes it a seed is alive and drowns quietly at its own speed.

This is the sentence that has ended more villages than any predator ever has and nobody writes it down because it is boring.

He knew the method. That was the whole of his advantage and for once it was enough.

You dry them, and then you find out whether you dried them.

The drying part is not clever. Spread them thin on hide in the sun, turn them twice a day, take them in at night so they do not pick the damp back up, and keep going for longer than anybody thinks is necessary. The only trap is heat — a bean dried too hard and too fast cracks its own coat and kills the thing inside, so it goes on the hide and not on hot stone, and it takes eight days instead of three.

Ket asked how they would know when it was done.

And Leon put a bean on a flat rock, and put another rock on top of it, and hit it once.

It shattered.

Not split. Not squashed. It came apart into four pieces with edges, the way a small hard thing does, and the pieces went off the rock and one of them hit Tevi.

Then he took one from the middle of the pile that had been drying two days and did the same thing, and it went flat and stayed in one piece with a rock-shaped dent in it, and sat there looking damp.

"That one is not done. That one is."

He did it four more times and then handed the rock to Ket-li, who was seven and who had been leaning on the edge of the platform since the second bean, and she did it and got it right and then did it eleven more times because she was seven.

Twenty seconds. Two rocks. And it is the difference between having a crop next year and not having one.

He taught it to every person on the drying ground in one afternoon and none of them could write and it did not matter in the slightest.

Then the jars, which were harder and were not his.

Dry seed in an open basket picks the water back up out of the air, and in the wet the air here is a wet cloth. So it has to be sealed, and sealed means fired clay with a lid and a fat-and-resin joint, and the settlement had eleven vessels of that quality and every single one of them was already holding something.

Oren came and looked at what Leon wanted and asked what the difference was between this and a grain jar.

"It has to still be shut in a hundred days."

"They are all shut."

"Na." Leon drew it. A jar with a gap the width of a hair at the lid line, and an arrow going in. "Grain in a jar with a small hole is grain with a hole in the jar. Seed in a jar with a small hole is nothing at all in a hundred days."

Oren looked at the drawing for a while and then said he would have to make new ones and that they would be slower and he would want the good clay from the second bend, and Leon said yes to all of it before Doran could work out what it cost.

There was one more thing and Leon put it in because he had been waiting three months for a use for it that was not soap.

Ash. A handful of clean fine wood ash turned through the seed before it goes in the jar — it keeps what little damp there is off the beans, and it is death to the small insects that get in, because it is abrasive and it dries them out from the outside.

Ket looked at the leach barrel and then at him and did not say anything, and Leon understood that he had just found a second use for a thing that had cost this settlement a season of arguing, and that saying so would be worse than not.

Not a word. Do not make a speech about the barrel.

He did not make a speech about the barrel.

The thing he could not solve he wrote down anyway.

There are insects that lay in the pod, in the field, before you ever bring the crop in, and their young grow up inside the seed where nothing can reach them. Ash does not touch those. Nothing they had touched those. He would open a jar in a hundred days and find holes in half of it and there would be nothing he could have done about it in advance except know that it might happen, which is not nothing but is not much.

He put it under the reasoned-mark with a query and moved on.

Then he asked how long until the wet, and did not get a number.

Fel Longline gave him signs. The second flower on the reed. The waders going. A particular quality of the light in the last hour that Fel could describe and Leon could not see. Veya gave him a count, and her count was in events and not in days, and it was better than Fel’s and it was still not a number.

He sat with that for an evening.

Nobody here can tell me how long a year is. Not because they are ignorant. Because nobody has ever needed the question in that shape, and I have never once needed it in any other.

He wrote it in the register on a page of its own and did not start on it, because he had a harvest to store and because he had a strong suspicion that the correct way into that problem was to ask Veya how she counted rather than to arrive with an answer.

***

Nayra declared first, at the fire on the two hundred and sixty-first day, and it was the first time anybody used Doran’s rule.

She stood up and said that four students were eating on this terrace and would be until the season turned, and gave the rate, and sat down. It took about eleven seconds. Nobody objected, several people looked faintly surprised that she had bothered, and Doran wrote it on the page under the law without any expression at all.

Then Leon stood up.

He declared the seed trial, and he did it properly, because there was no version of standing up at that fire and being approximate.

Three jars. Not one. The same seed, dried the same, sealed the same day. One with ash. One without. One buried in the cool ground under the north side of the granary and one on a shelf and one in the store with the rest.

Three portions of seed, held back and not planted, for one season, to find out which of the three is right.

"How much."

Leon told him: about a fifth of the seed stock, and it would be a fifth less planted next spring, and one of the three jars would probably be a loss on top of that.

"Why three?"

And Leon gave the honest answer, which he had been assembling for eleven days and which came out shorter than he had planned.

"Because I am sure, and sure is not tested."

He sat down. Doran wrote it. Veya, from the edge, did nothing at all, which from Veya was a review.

***

Oren came to find him the next morning about the jars and stood in the doorway of the works with the way he stood when the answer was going to cost money.

"Three jars."

"Ei."

"You want to know whether the jar holds for a hundred days."

"Ei."

"Then I make four," Oren said, "and on the day you open yours, we break the fourth one open and look at the lid line, and if the fourth is bad then all of them are bad and your test told you nothing about seed and everything about me."

Leon opened his mouth to say that three was enough and closed it, because it was not.

"You cannot test a jar," Oren said, "without breaking a jar."

So he made four.