Chapter 43: One of Them Had Known for Two Months
Doran came back on the forty-first day with four answers and did not enjoy giving any of them.
Doran gave them in the order he had collected them, which was the order of the river, and he gave them standing at the council ground with his hands behind his back like a man delivering a report he had argued against and was now going to deliver accurately.
Havek said yes before the message was finished.
Havek had heard about half of it, Doran said, and had then held up a hand and said the rest of it back, which meant he had already had the same thought and had not known what to do with it. Low Reed was two days downstream of Retharu and one day upstream of open water and had eleven fewer people than it had two summers ago. Havek said yes, and then asked what Retharu wanted from him.
"Nothing," Doran had told him.
Havek had not believed that for a moment and had said yes anyway.
The second camp said yes with conditions.
They wanted to know what Retharu would do if the counting party came to them first. They wanted it in a form they could hold on to, and since neither camp had writing that meant a cord, and Doran had spent a day and a half sitting with an old man working out what a cord between two settlements would even look like, because nobody had ever tied one.
They had not solved it. They had agreed to keep talking about it, which Doran said was worth more than the yes.
The third camp said no.
They were polite about it. They fed him, they heard the whole message, they thanked him for it.
Then their speaker said, "We have nine days of food."
She did not soften what came next either.
"You are asking us to take on the trouble of a place two days upstream with a hundred and seventy-four people in it and a burned wall. We have our own."
Doran said the number they had given him. Eleven days.
Doran said it twice, because it was the same as Retharu’s, and because he had spent six days walking with a version of himself who had predicted exactly this and had wanted, on the way home, to be wrong.
Then he said, "The fourth camp is the part you want."
The fourth camp had been visited two months ago.
Three people. Two young, one older. They had come in daylight, brought nothing to trade, stayed most of an afternoon, asked after the camp’s health, said that the season had been poor in the north as well, and left.
Doran had recognised the description before the man finished it. He had made the man say it a second time and had not told him why.
"Nobody there thought it worth telling anybody," Doran said.
It had not been frightening. Nothing had happened. Three strangers had walked in, been courteous for four hours and walked out again, and the camp had gone back to being short of food, and the whole thing had been the kind of event you tell your family about once and then do not think of again.
They had been counted in the middle of the dry season. Retharu had been counted at the end of it.
Somebody was working down the river in order.
Kharun said one word and left the council ground.
Kharun was back inside a minute with a question Leon had not thought to ask.
"How far north does it go?"
Nobody in that ground could possibly know, and it was now the second most important thing they did not know.
Then he rolled his sleeve up and held his forearm out to Nayra without being asked, and she turned it over twice and pressed along the bone with her thumb and said something short, and he pulled the sleeve back down.
Leon caught that one entirely. It had been sixteen days since she had last looked at it and thirty-nine since the shield had come back into that arm hard enough to put it in a sling.
Cleared.
Kharun did not look pleased about it. He looked like a man who had just had one of his remaining excuses removed.
***
Leon said his first causal sentence in Rethari that evening and it was terrible.
Leon had been building it for two days. Luma had given him the joining word on the thirty-fifth day and he had been carrying it around since then like a man with one nail.
What he wanted to say was that the counting party had gone down the river in order because a river is the only road, and that therefore the camps above Retharu had been counted first, and that somebody upstream had known for longer than two months.
What he actually said, to Kharun, in front of Doran and Luma and Veya, was:
"River is road. Because road, they walk down. Camps up-river before us. They know before."
It took him eleven seconds and he heard three separate mistakes come out of his own mouth while he was making them.
Kharun did not laugh, and neither did anybody else, and Leon understood afterwards that this was not politeness. It was that the sentence had been understood.
Luma repeated it once, correctly, so that it would be in the room in a form Veya could put in the cord.
Then she looked at him with an expression he could not read.
"You used the joining word," she said. "Properly."
Forty-one days on this continent, and he had just constructed a because.
Leon would have been more pleased about it if the thing he had used it for had been less unpleasant.
***
Leon took the cube reading that night, in the dark, with the shutter over the doorway and no lamp.
Doing it now had not been the plan; the plan had been another month. The reason he did it was the date — the end of the next dry season, which Doran had turned from a threat into a deadline, and which meant that information had a value now that it had not had a week ago, and that a thing you cannot afford to know is worth more than a thing you can.
The service key went in. The recessed surface rotated without any mechanical click, the way it always did.
RESERVE ENERGY: 0.0000037%.
Leon asked for the anchor.
The cost showed before the answer did, which he suspected was deliberate and had never been able to prove.
PRIOR OPERATOR ANCHOR: ACTIVE.
Then the one-second map, exactly as it had come on the twenty-first day: a geometry he could not read, and one point, pulsing, far east.
Leon held the image in his head and let it go and sat in the dark comparing it against the copy he had drawn in the register twenty-two days ago, line by line, angle by angle.
It had not moved.
Not by any amount he could detect. Same bearing, same relative position, same pulse period that was not the length of a local day.
Leon sat with that for a long time.
Since the twenty-first day he had been carrying a picture of a man. An old man, alive, somewhere east, walking around, doing whatever a person does after fifty or sixty years in a place like this. The picture had a face in it, because Marek had shown him a photograph in a turbine hall and Leon had never been able to unsee it.
A man moves. A man moves every day, and over twenty-two days a man moves a long way, and a bearing to a man would have drifted.
This had not drifted at all.
Whatever was east was not walking anywhere. It was fixed, and it had been fixed for twenty-two days, and it had a period.
RESERVE ENERGY: 0.0000036%.
Leon wrote both numbers in the register, and the bearing, and the date, and then he sat with the pencil not moving for a while and finally wrote one line under the reasoned-mark.
Not a man. A place.
Then, after a moment, and because it was true and because Nayra’s system did not permit him to leave it out, he wrote a second line underneath it.
A place can have a man in it.