Chapter 58: What Oliver Put in the Box
Halu Reed-Cut came off Nayra’s unable list on the hundred and nineteenth day and walked the length of the terrace without anything in his hand.
It took him a while. The leg had been eleven weeks in a splint and had come out of it thin and wrong, and he had spent three weeks doing what Nayra told him and swearing about it, and the walk was not good.
Nayra let him get to the end before she said the rest.
The bone had set true, which was the good news and was mostly luck. The leg would be a little short and would always be worse in cold and in wet, and there would be days in every wet season for the rest of his life when it would not do what he asked it to.
She said that in front of him and to him and did not soften it, and Halu said ei, and went and stood at the eastern break for a while, which was a thing several people on this terrace did now.
Leon watched him do it and understood that Halu was looking at nine metres of new palisade that had been built while he lay on his back, and that this was the first time he had been able to walk out and look at it.
***
By the hundred and twentieth day the wet had been running for six weeks and the terrace was bored in a way Leon had not anticipated.
Not idle. There was work — there is always work, and in the wet it is all of the small indoor kind, and it never stops and never finishes and nobody can point at any of it afterwards.
But nothing had happened for eleven days. The river was high and brown. The spur watch had been suspended after the ninety-sixth day because Kharun would not leave pairs out there once he knew somebody could walk past them. There would be no meeting, no expedition, no building, no visitors and no news until the water dropped.
Aru had started a competition about who could throw a stone furthest into the river and had got nineteen people involved by the second afternoon, which Leon regarded as the single most impressive act of leadership he had witnessed in four months.
That evening Leon went and got the archive module and took out the second-to-last thing in it that was not information.
***
There were two packets and he opened one.
They had crossed two hundred million years in a sealed rigid case and were in perfect condition, which was the least surprising thing about them, because that is what they are engineered to be. Wheat noodles, folded, in a block. One foil sachet of seasoning. A picture on the front of a bowl that had never existed anywhere.
Oliver Grant had put them into the module in a laboratory under a hill in Bavaria while Leon was doing something else, and had refused to take them out, and Leon had removed seventy-four grams of copper wire to keep the second one and had told himself at the time that the exchange was rational.
He boiled two litres and put the block in and stood over it.
The smell came up out of the pot at about ninety seconds and it was so completely wrong for that terrace that four people came over to see what had happened.
***
Fourteen people ate some of it and the reactions were not what he expected at all.
Aru went back three times and would have finished the pot alone if anybody had let him.
Nayra had one mouthful, held it, swallowed, and then wanted to know what was in it and would not be put off, and Leon had to admit through Luma that he could not read the ingredients from memory and that a significant fraction of them were things he could not name in any language present.
Sila did not like it and said so in one word.
Kel, who was eleven and had carried nineteen cups on the day the child was ill, ate his portion very slowly with an expression of intense concentration and then asked whether everything in Leon’s world tasted like that, and Leon said no, and Kel said that was good, and would not explain.
Veya took a small amount because it would have been discourteous not to, chewed once, and said something that Luma delivered with a completely straight face.
"It tastes," she said, "like a thing made by somebody who has never been hungry."
Leon sat down on the mat with a bowl in his hands and did not have an answer to that, and the worst part was that he was not sure she had meant it unkindly.
Then Doran, who had not eaten any of it, asked what had been in the small silver packet.
Leon told him.
Doran wanted the amount, and Leon estimated it, and Doran did the arithmetic in his head in about four seconds and gave the number out loud, which was that the seasoning in one packet of instant noodles was somewhere near a third of what the settlement’s salt works produced in a day.
He was not accusing anybody of anything. He said it the way he said all numbers.
But eleven people at that fire had walked to the mineral seep on the twenty-fifth day and had come back with half a load and one man torn open, and Leon had just boiled a comparable quantity into a pot as a novelty, and the silence afterwards lasted about three seconds too long.
***
Luma found him at the water chain later and asked the question properly.
Not what it was. What it was for.
She had watched him get the module out, and open a sealed case that had not been opened in a hundred and twenty days, and take out a thing that was not medicine and not a tool and not a seed, and cook it for fourteen people who mostly had not enjoyed it.
Leon had a hundred and forty words and the past tense and none of it was going to be enough, so he used all of it badly.
"A man put this in my box," he said. "I did not want it. He would not take it out."
He looked at the jar in his hands rather than at her.
"He knew I was going. He could not stop me. This was the thing he could do."
Luma thought about that for a while.
Then she asked, "Is he dead?"
Leon said he did not know, and heard himself say it, and had to stand there for a moment with the jar in his hands, because in a hundred and twenty days he had somehow never once put that sentence together in any language.
Oliver Grant was either alive and forty-one and wondering, or he was two hundred million years of nothing at all, and there was no version of the arithmetic that produced an answer, and Leon had been carrying both possibilities around in an unopened compartment since the twenty-seventh of October.
Luma did not say anything comforting. She was not, in Leon’s experience, capable of it.
What she did was ask him the man’s name.
"Oliver Grant."
"Oliver Grant." She said it twice, correctly, with the stress in the right place, which was what she did with words she intended to keep.
***
He put the second packet back in the module and locked it.
The cube was in there too and he did not take it out. He had not read it since the forty-first day and had been not-reading it deliberately for eleven weeks, because a reading cost a number he could not replace and the answer had not changed in twenty-two days the last time he had asked, and asking a question you already know the answer to is the most expensive kind of anxiety there is.
Fixed. East. Not a man.
It would still be fixed in the spring.
Leon closed the case, and went out into the rain, and stood on the terrace for a while looking at a settlement of a hundred and seventy-four people that had two hundred and forty-one baskets of dried fish, a wall it maintained, five camps it met with, a rule about drinking water it had written down, and eight courses of antibiotic that nobody had worked out how to allocate.
Ten months had become nine.