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

They built the obvious thing in two days and were pleased with it for about four minutes.

A post either side of the path where it narrowed between the drying racks and the cook fire. A plank across. A wide clay basin on the plank, water in it, and the jar of soap beside it on a flat stone. Kharun had put the posts in himself, which he had not needed to do, and Ket-li had been allowed to pour the first water because she had asked in a way that was hard to refuse.

Nayra came down at the end of the second afternoon and looked at it for some time.

"How many people go through here?"

"All of them. Twice."

"And how many bowls are there?"

He got it about half a second before she finished the sentence, which was half a second too late for it to be his.

One dipper. I have spent nine days building the exact thing that put four children in her ward on the sixth day, and I built it wider.

He did not say anything for a moment.

"Na," he said. "Bad."

"Very bad." Nayra was not enjoying it, which made it worse. "A hundred and seventy-four pairs of hands in one water. The last hands in that bowl at dusk are wearing everything the first hands brought at dawn."

Oren pulled the plank off before anybody had finished agreeing with her.

***

The redesign took four days and most of it was Oren’s.

Not a basin. A trough — a split log, hollowed, laid on a fall of about one part in forty, fed at the upper end off the drainage channel they had cut through the terrace in the wet and had not found another use for since. Water in at the top, out at the bottom, through the ground and away below the path, and nothing standing anywhere along it.

Leon drew it and Oren corrected the fall twice and the length once, and the second correction was the one that mattered: Leon had put the outfall where it ran across the path, and Oren pointed out that a wet path in front of a gate is a place where people fall down carrying baskets.

Six stations. That was the throughput and Leon did the arithmetic in front of them because the arithmetic was the argument.

A hundred and seventy-four people. Sixty at the trough each. That is a hundred and seventy-four counts of sixty, and if there is one place to stand it is nearly three hours of people queueing between the racks and the fire twice a day, and it will last four days before somebody goes round the outside and then everybody goes round the outside.

Six places to stand makes it half an hour.

"And six times the soap," Ket said.

"Ei."

Nobody said anything about the fat, and Leon noticed that nobody said anything about the fat, and wrote it down.

***

On the second morning of the build Nayra came down and gave them a smaller number, and she did it badly, because she did not want to.

She had been sitting with the arithmetic for most of a morning. Sixty was hers. Sixty came off the ochre bowl and the ochre was ground into rendered fat and smeared into the creases, which is what a hand looks like after gutting fish for six hours, and she had set the standard for the worst hand she could imagine because she had been designing it for four students who would spend a season with their hands inside people.

Most people coming through that gate had not been gutting anything.

"Twenty. For a hand that has held a basket and a paddle and a child."

"And sixty?"

"Fish. Gut. Blood. A wound, before and after." She said the list the way she said the water rules, which is to say once and in an order she had already fixed. "Anybody who has done any of those does sixty and they do not decide for themselves whether they have."

"Who decides?"

"The person standing there."

Leon started to ask the next question and Kharun answered it before it arrived, which he did about once a month and always got right.

The spur watch went out in pairs and came back in pairs, and a pair coming off the spur has done nothing for six hours except stand somewhere and notice things, and is generally not tired and generally not wanted anywhere else for an hour.

"They can stand at the trough," Kharun said. "It is the same work. It is watching a place."

***

It ran for nine days before anybody could say anything about it.

The first two were bad. People went round. A man Leon did not know well went round twice and was not stopped either time, and on the third morning Kel — who had come off the spur at dawn and had the trough that hour — stood in the path and did not move, and said nothing at all, and the man washed. Leon watched the whole thing from thirty metres away and understood that he could not have done it and that it had taken about eleven seconds.

By the fifth day the queue had sorted itself into a shape nobody designed. People came through in the order they came off the racks, and talked while they were doing it, and the talking was what made the sixty survivable, because sixty counts of standing at a trough with somebody is not the same as sixty counts of standing at a trough.

Nara kept counting. Nobody had asked her to do that either.

On the ninth evening she read it out on the healing platform: a hundred and fifty-one people seen, and the long marks belonged to a hundred and thirty-eight of them.

Nine out of a hundred and forty-one, eleven days ago.

Vethra made a sound that was not quite a laugh.

Nayra took the bark and looked at both sides of it for a long time and then said the most careful thing Leon had heard anybody say on this river.

"I have not made one person well." She handed the bark back. "I have made a hundred and thirty-eight people wash their hands. In a year I will tell you whether those are the same thing."

Then she went and put grease on Nara’s knuckles, which were still cracked, because twenty is easier on a hand than sixty but neither of them is kind.

Leon walked back down past the trough at dusk. The water was running and the soap was on its cord so it could not go into the channel, and at the fifth station somebody had cut a row of marks into the log and had been adding to them for at least four days.

He asked three people who was doing it. Two did not know and the third said she had assumed it was him.

He was still standing there with his hand flat on the marks when he did the other arithmetic, which he had been carrying around unfinished for a fortnight in the way a man carries a thing he already knows the answer to.

A jar of the new soap took about two kilograms of rendered fat and most of a day of somebody’s work. Six stations went through a jar every four days.

He had never once put those two numbers on the same page, and doing it now took under a minute, and he did not like the shape of it at all.

Doran was standing at the top of the trough with a length of cord in his hands, and had been for a while.

"How much fat."