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

Leon tried to write down the testimony on the first morning of the way back and got about a fifth of it.

He worked at it for four hours with the boat under him and the register on his knees, and what came out was a list. The way. The drained stretch. The lines in the ground. The thing that took a morning to walk past. The name, which he did not attempt.

What he could not get was the order.

Rehu-vek had not told it in the order Leon had written it down in. He had gone forward and back and sideways for twenty hours, and the shape of the whole thing — which part he had said before which, and what he had circled back to twice, and which detail he had produced only after being asked something else entirely — was gone out of Leon’s head within a day, and the shape was the part that told you what the man actually believed.

He looked up at Luma, who was sitting in the bow doing nothing at all.

She had not written a mark. She had not asked anyone to repeat anything. She had sat in a shelter for two days and then got into a boat, and she was now watching the bank go past with the expression of somebody who is not thinking about anything in particular.

Leon asked her how she was holding it.

Luma thought about the question for a while.

"I am not holding it," she said. "It is in there."

She went back to watching the bank.

"If I go through it now I will put it in the wrong order by trying. You leave it until somebody asks for it properly."

Then she said the part he wrote down twice.

"If I look at it before Veya asks, I will start deciding what it means." She was still watching the bank. "Then I give her what it means. Not what he said."

***

They came onto the Retharu landing on the fifty-sixth morning and Luma gave it to Veya that afternoon.

It took a little over an hour.

Leon had expected twenty. He had spent the whole river thinking about how you compress two days of an old man’s talking, and had assumed the answer was summary, and had been quietly grieving in advance for everything a summary would throw away.

That was not what happened.

Luma did not summarise. She gave back the whole of it in a form Leon eventually understood was not a shortening but a sorting — everything Rehu-vek had said, once each, grouped as he had grouped it, with the circling back left in as circling back and marked as such by a change in her voice. When he had repeated himself, she said so. When he had contradicted himself, she gave both versions and did not resolve them.

Where she did not understand a phrase, she reproduced the sounds and said that she did not understand it.

Veya sat opposite her with the cord across her lap and her hands moving the whole time.

Twice she stopped Luma and asked for a section again, and both times Luma gave it back in the same words, and Leon, who had been listening for exactly that, could not detect a single difference.

At the end Veya asked her the only question that mattered.

"Which parts was he sure of?"

Luma answered without hesitating, because she had spent four hours learning that before she let him talk about the north at all.

He was sure of the way. He was sure of the lines in the ground and of how long it took to walk past the standing thing. He was not sure how many days he had spent at the far end, and he had said three different numbers over two days without noticing. And he was completely certain about the name, because the certainty was not his — a woman had put it into him four times and he had been carrying it ever since like a stone in a pocket.

Veya tied nothing. She simply worked, and kept working after Luma had finished, and did not look up for a long time.

Then she said, "The cord has never held anything from eleven days north."

She was still working.

"It does now."

***

Nayra came and found Leon at dusk and asked him to bring the medicine module.

He had known this was coming since the boat and had been not thinking about it with some determination.

Pel had been on his back for seven days. The bones were set and splinted and Nayra had done that within an hour of him arriving on the hide, and she had been irrigating the wound at the front twice a day with boiled water that had been standing long enough to cool, and she had been marking the edge of the redness with charcoal every morning so that she could see whether it had moved.

It had moved. Three days running, a little each day.

She showed him the marks and then said the thing out loud, in front of Kharun and Doran, because she was the person who wrote things down and this was going to be written down.

The bone had come through the skin. Everything that lives on this river had been in that wound within a minute of it happening, and no amount of clean water afterwards took all of it out again. The leg was hot. He had a fever that came in the afternoons.

"If it goes on, it is the leg or the man," she said. "I have about four days to choose."

She put the charcoal down.

"I took a leg off once. Twelve summers back. He died anyway."

Leon put the module on the mat and opened it.

***

There were nine.

Nine. I sat in a room in Bavaria and thought nine was generous.

He had packed the medicine module in a laboratory under a hill in Bavaria across three evenings, with an emergency physician from Munich sitting opposite him telling him repeatedly that he was thinking about it wrong. Leon had wanted variety. The physician had wanted depth, and had won the argument by asking Leon what he intended to do on the day somebody’s leg opened.

So Leon had bought depth. Ten point eight kilograms, and inside it, nine complete courses of a broad oral antibiotic that works on the things that get into dirty wounds, packed flat, sealed, dated, with the dose printed on every strip.

Nine.

He had chosen the number himself. It had been chosen for one man, alone, expecting to live somewhere between a hundred and sixty-seven and two hundred and three years, and Leon remembered sitting in that laboratory thinking that nine was generous.

There were a hundred and seventy-four people on this terrace.

Nayra knew the number already. She had counted the strips in the third week and had never once mentioned it and had never asked for any of them, and Leon looked at her across the open module and understood that she had been carrying that arithmetic for five weeks by herself.

She took one course.

She read the dose off the strip with Luma checking her, and wrote it in her own record under the fourth mark, and said out loud what she was doing and why and what she expected, and then said the last part in the flat voice.

"This improves his chance," she said. "It does not make him well. If the wound is already too far, it changes nothing except that there will be eight."

Doran asked the question and got it out before anybody could stop him and did not apologise for it afterwards.

"How many times can we do this?"

Nobody answered him, because the answer was on the mat in front of all of them, and because the real question underneath it was not how many times but who decides, and nobody in that shelter had any idea how you would even begin.

Leon closed the module and locked it and handed the key back to Kharun.

Then he went and sat by himself at the eastern break for a while, and thought about a man in Munich who had made him buy depth instead of variety, and who had been completely right, and who would have been horrified to learn that his advice had produced a supply of exactly nine.