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

Leon had a route drawn before the light came on the hundred and thirty-third day, and it was wrong, and he did not know that yet.

Eleven days north to the maintained road, because that was Rehu-vek’s number at seventy-seven. Call it eight for a man of twenty-six with better legs and worse sense. Then east, and a stake in the margin at forty days out and forty back.

Eighty days is most of a dry season and the counting party comes in nine months, and he had been trying to make those two numbers sit on the same page since the fire went down. He had also not slept, and he knew what that did to arithmetic, and had decided around the fourth hour that tonight it did not apply to him.

He went down to the landing to find somebody to argue with.

Veya was already there.

She was on the flat stone she used when she did not want to be in her own shelter, the cord across her knees and her hands not moving on it, which was the part Leon had learned to read.

"Seven."

He did not have seven what in a form that would carry, so he waited.

She told him slowly, in the register she used for teaching. Seven people had come to her since the fire went down. Not to Kharun, who asked the question, and not to Doran, who was on the mat when it was asked. To her. And each told her the story before asking, the way people do, so she would know they already knew it.

"The first one said there was a name on the metal."

She turned the cord over in her hands.

"The fourth said the man is waiting in the east."

She turned it back.

"The seventh said he is coming."

Leon stood on the landing with the river four marks lower than when he last wrote it down.

A hundred and seventy-four people had gone to sleep in a settlement where east was a direction and woken in one where east was a place with a man in it, and the man had acquired an intention between the third telling and the seventh, and nobody had done it on purpose.

Nobody lied. Seven people told the truth as they had it, and it got worse every time it changed hands.

"Na," he said, which was not adequate, and then, badly, in the past tense he had spent eleven wet nights learning: "I did not say he is coming. I said the name."

"I know what you said." Veya still had her eyes on the water. "I was there. Six of them were not."

Then she said the thing he wrote down that evening and underlined twice.

"A story you cannot stop, you can only outrun."

***

Outside the works the four pieces of metal lay on a mat, because Kharun had put two people on them overnight and Oren objected to two people in his doorway.

In daylight they were less impressive and a great deal more informative. The blade fragments were nothing: broken, reground, broken again, no way back up the chain. The file was the file, and he had spent most of the night not looking at it on purpose.

The flat strip was the problem.

Leon sat down with it and Oren let him, which was Oren’s way of asking.

It was the length of a hand and two millimetres thick, with a curve across the width that was not a bend and was not damage. It had come off something round.

Along one edge the metal had rolled into a burr and the line was stepped and ragged where it had torn rather than parted, which is what sheet does under a cold chisel when you have no shears. It rolled instead of cracking, which made it soft, and nobody makes a tool out of anything that behaves like that. You make a tool out of the file. You make a body out of this.

Three holes, evenly spaced, fifteen millimetres in from the other edge.

He put a fingertip under one. The far lip was bellied outward, the way a plate goes when something is dragged through it under load instead of cut out of it.

Rivets. Pulled.

He sat back on his heels.

His hundred and forty words did not cover this came off a riveted assembly, so he got out the register and drew. A curve. The strip inside it, three rivets through. Then an arrow, and the strip alone.

Oren looked at it for about four seconds.

"Somebody took a made thing apart."

"Ei."

"Not to use this." Oren picked the strip up, which nobody else had, and turned it in the light the way he turned timber he was pricing. "This is what was left over. They wanted the rest of it."

He set it down squarely.

"I did that on the day the racks burned. I pulled down the best thing I ever built to make a gap." He wiped his hands. "Nobody does that for a small reason."

Leon went and found Nayra, because she was the only person on the terrace who would tell him he was not allowed to think.

He gave her all three, with Luma carrying what his verbs could not. Somebody else’s cargo, cut up. Something Elias made here out of stock he brought. Or it is not from his world at all and he is a tired man finding his own face in a scratch.

Nayra heard it out, then asked how long he had been awake. He told her.

"Which of the four is this?" She did not have to say which four. She had built them on the sixth day out of a pebble, a leaf, a thumbprint and a shell, and everybody on this river argued in them now.

"Reasoned."

"By a man who has not slept."

"Ei."

"Then it is not reasoned. It is guessed." She went back to the bowl in her lap. "Sleep. Nothing about the metal will change while you are lying down."

Then she said the other thing, which had been waiting a while.

"Hands. The students come when the river is down and I cannot teach four people to finish a day of gutting fish with clean hands, because I do not have the thing that does it. Ash and water is not enough. I have used ash and water for thirty years."

Leon opened his mouth to say ash and fat and shut it, because he had just been told he was not allowed to reason, and went to sleep.

***

He woke four hours later to Luma reciting.

She was on the terrace edge with twenty people round her, doing it the way she did a genealogy — one pass, no notes, at the speed of somebody reading off a page nobody else could see. Veya had built the account that afternoon and it ran thirty seconds.

A trader called Boro Nightcall walked east for a hundred and twenty days and came back with four pieces of metal. On one of them there are five marks. The Varu says he saw the marks. The Varu says the marks are a name from his world. The Varu does not know whether the man lives. The Varu does not know how far. Nobody is going.

Six sentences. Two of them does not know, and every one carrying the ending Rethari puts on a thing a person has said rather than a thing anybody has seen.

Leon listened to his own life told in the third person by a woman who had learned it in an hour, with the uncertainty built into the grammar where it could not fall out, and could not find one word to correct.

Boro had gone at first light and left one thing for the cord. Not a warning and not a price. The name of the camp four hands east where the file had hung on a belt.

Ossaven.

Veya had never heard it. Luma had never heard it, which was worse, and had made him say it twice.

Kharun came and stood beside him and watched Luma finish and start again for a second group, because that was how it was done.

"Last night I asked a thing."

"Ei."

"I am answering it." Kharun did not look at him. "Not this year."

Leon had eighty days drawn in his register and a stake in the margin under them. He said nothing, and found it cost him nothing, which he had not expected.

"Nine months. They come and they count us. After that we will find out what a man can walk to."

He went down for water at dusk, because he had slept through the afternoon and owed somebody a turn.

There was a girl on it, seven years old, Ket’s, with a jar too big for her that she was managing anyway. She looked up at him with no particular awe, which was how children here looked at him, and gave him the account.

All six sentences, in order, at speed, with the endings right. Including both of the does not know. Including the fourth one, which Leon still got wrong about a third of the time.

Then she took her jar and went up the path.

Her name was Ket-li and she was seven, and she had the whole of it, and she had not been at the fire.