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

The council that decided what to do about the north took three evenings and produced four things, and Leon spoke at length in the first one and was wrong about nearly all of it.

He had prepared. He had spent the last four days of the run building the argument in his head while opening fish, and he had got Luma to check the words, and what he laid out on the first evening was a programme.

Send a party north. Not to the end of the road — to the fourth day, where Tala had turned back, and no further. Map it. Count what came down it. Learn who used it and how often. Build a picture over the ten months, in stages, so that when the counting party arrived the settlement would know what it was dealing with instead of guessing.

It was a good plan. He was fairly confident it was the best plan available and he still thinks so.

Kharun let him finish and then asked one question.

"If they see us doing it," Kharun said, "what do they learn?"

Leon had an answer ready and got about four words into it before he heard the answer himself.

"They learn that Retharu is the camp that goes and looks."

Five camps had been counted on this river. Four of them had done nothing at all afterwards, because four of them had not known there was anything to do. If one camp began putting people on that road, then whoever was at the end of it would learn, within a season, exactly which of the five had understood what the visit meant.

And a camp that understands is a different kind of problem from a camp that does not, and gets handled differently.

Leon sat down.

***

On the second evening they did the thing he had not thought of at all.

Veya proposed sending nothing north and everything downstream.

Not a message this time. A meeting. All five camps, at Low Reed because it was the middle, before the wet season closed the river, with a speaker from each and Luma present.

The reason she gave was not defence. It was the water rules.

Six hundred people had agreed five things on this terrace in four hours because there had been an animal on the ground and no time to argue. That agreement had held for two days and had then walked away in five directions, and there was currently nothing at all keeping it alive except the fact that everybody had been there.

"A thing agreed once is a thing that happened," she said. "A thing agreed twice is a thing that is done."

And that if the five camps were ever going to be anything to each other when the counting party came back, they would have to have met about something ordinary first — about drinking water and latrine ground — because you cannot build the habit of agreeing in the season you need it.

Doran, who had objected to the first message and had been recorded objecting, said that this one would cost nine days of five camps’ time and that he had no objection.

***

The third evening was Tala’s and she got what she asked for by not asking for very much.

No expedition north. She accepted that in the first minute and did not argue it.

What she wanted instead was the spur.

Four watching positions on high ground at three and a half kilometres, cleaned each time, used three times in a season, most recently four days before Pel found them. Whoever used them would use them again, because a position that good does not get abandoned, and the next use would be somewhere in the next few months.

She wanted two people on that spur, in pairs, on a rotation, all through the wet season. Not to intercept anybody. Not to be seen. To find out how often.

Kharun asked what she would do if somebody came.

"Nothing," Tala said. "I would do nothing."

Kharun waited.

"I lie in the wet for six days. I count. I come home. The whole of it is in not doing anything else."Leon watched Kharun take about four seconds to accept a proposal that involved his best scout lying in cold mud for the next four months in order to produce a number, and understood that this was the thing he had got wrong on the first evening.

He had wanted to go and look at the road.

The road was eleven days away and belonged to somebody else. The spur was three and a half kilometres away, on ground the settlement could reach, and it was where the other side had chosen to stand.

You do not go and find out about people. You find out about the place they keep coming back to.

***

The four things came out of it on the third night and Doran wrote them and Veya put every one into the cord.

The meeting at Low Reed, before the wet.

The spur watch, in pairs, through the wet season, by rotation, reporting a count and nothing else.

Nothing goes north. Not a scout, not a trader, not a message, not one person, until the meeting has happened and all five camps have said the same thing about it.

And the last one, which came from Kharun and which nobody had expected.

The lamp stays dark.

Not because of the spur, though that was the reason it had gone dark in the first place. Because the settlement had now spent seventy-three days working out that it was interesting, and the single most interesting thing on this terrace was a white light that nothing else on this continent could make, and it was going to stay in a box until somebody could give a reason for taking it out that was better than convenience.

Nayra agreed to it for the second time and looked, Leon thought, about eleven years old for a moment.

***

He went down to the stake at first light on the seventy-sixth morning out of habit.

The river was up nine marks from the low and still rising slowly, and the reading took eleven seconds, and he wrote it in the back of the register on the fifty-third line of a column he had started for no reason at all on his third day here.

Then he sat on the bank for a while with the book on his knees.

Ten months.

Long enough to build something. Long enough for somebody eleven days north to hear that one camp on the western river has started meeting the others.

He had spent his first fifty days measuring a river because measuring things was what he did instead of panicking, and had built a granary and a water chain and had lost most of a solar panel and had contributed almost nothing to the two largest events of the season except pace and throughput.

And the settlement was going to be all right, and had worked that out for itself, and had made four decisions in three evenings, and he had been wrong in the first one and quiet in the other two.

Ten months is not a long time.

It is long enough to build something. It is also long enough for somebody eleven days north, who cuts brush back on both sides of a road and makes old men repeat a name until they get it right, to hear that one camp on the western river has started meeting the others.

Leon looked at the water for a while longer.

Then he closed the book, and went up the bank, and got on with it.