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

The fix was to make the soap worse, and Leon worked that out on the hundred and fifty-second day while looking at a jar he did not want to look at.

There was fat in it that had never reacted. That was the whole fault. Weak liquor and a generous hand with the fat, and what he had made was a paste that was part soap and part grease and put back about as much as it lifted.

So: less fat.

Run the liquor in excess, boil it longer, and accept that every scrap of fat gets taken apart because there is nothing else for the liquor to work on. What comes out the other end is thinner, harsher, and there is less of it for the same barrel of ash.

It also has nothing left in it to redeposit.

He did not tell anybody what he was doing for four days, which he recognised at the time as a small cowardice and did anyway.

Ket helped and asked one question, on the second morning, which was whether he was sure this time.

"Na."

She seemed to find that satisfactory.

The yield went down by rather more than he had expected. The same barrel of ash and the same four hours at the leach gave about two thirds of what it had given before, because the liquor was doing more work per unit of fat and there was less fat to bulk the result out. Two thirds of a jar for the same day of somebody’s labour, and the somebody was Ket, and Ket had a drying ground to run.

He wrote that down too, in the column where costs went, and did not enjoy it.

***

Nayra ran the ochre again on the hundred and fifty-sixth day, six hands, the same bowl.

The first three came off with red still in the creases and Leon felt the platform go quiet around him in a way he had learned to recognise from the wrong side.

Then Nayra stopped the fourth person halfway and told them to keep going.

They kept going. She counted out loud. At around forty the water under their hands changed colour. At sixty she let them stop, and the palm went onto the white bowl and came off it clean, and so did the crease, and so did the ring at the base of the finger.

They did the last two at a count of sixty and both were clean.

Then they went back and did the first three again, properly, and those came clean too.

"It works."

"Ei."

"At sixty."

"Ei."

She looked at the bowl for a while. Then she said the thing that emptied the afternoon out of him.

"Nobody washes for a count of sixty."

***

He spent an evening trying to argue with it and could not, because it was not an opinion.

Sixty is a long time. Sixty is standing at a bowl doing nothing while the light goes and there are eleven baskets still to turn and somebody is calling you. He timed himself at the end of a working day, honestly, without deciding in advance to be honest, and stopped at nineteen.

Nineteen. And I know. I am the one person on this river who knows exactly why it has to be sixty, and I stopped at nineteen because a man shouted something about the racks.

The chemistry was finished. He turned the page in the register and wrote the new ratio and the new boil and the count, and it was correct and complete and it was going to change nothing at all, and he understood that this was not a chemistry problem any more and had probably not been one for a week.

What he tried first was the thing that had worked in the wet.

He went to Luma and asked her to build it the way Veya built the account. Six sentences, thirty seconds, the reason inside the words: the red stays in the creases, the count is sixty, sixty is what it takes, here is the bowl. Luma did it in an afternoon and did it well, and it went round the terrace twice, and by the second evening a good number of people could say it back.

They said it back with their hands in the water for a count of about fifteen.

They know. Every one of them knows. Knowing is not where the problem lives and I have spent two days putting a very good explanation into a place that did not need one.

Nara found him the next morning with a piece of bark.

She had been counting.

Nobody had asked her to. She had started on her second day because she wanted to be useful in a way that would be noticed, which Leon had recognised in her the first hour and had privately been slightly unkind about, and she had kept it up for eleven days.

Every person she saw wash. A mark for the ones who went past twenty. A different mark for the ones who did not.

The bark was covered on both sides.

Nayra put a hand out when they brought it up. "Read it to me."

Nara read it. The four students were nearly all long marks, because the four students were being watched every hour of every day and knew it. Ket was long. Nesh was long, and Nesh had spent nine days with his forearms wrapped and did not need telling twice about anything to do with a wound.

Everybody else on the terrace was short. Not some. Not most.

A hundred and forty-one people is what Nara could see from where she worked, and over eleven days the long marks belonged to nine of them. Tevi had counted the racks end for two of those days and got the same shape, which nobody had asked him to do either, and which was the first thing he had volunteered since he arrived.

"Your soap is good," Vethra said, from the other side of the platform, where she had been doing something to a splint and had not appeared to be listening. "You have made a thing that works if a person does it in a way that a person does not do it."

Nayra took the bark off Nara and looked at both sides.

Then she turned Nara’s hands over and looked at those, and the backs of them were red and cracked at the knuckles, and so were Selora’s, because harsher liquor is harsher liquor and eleven days of doing it right had cost them skin.

"And it takes the hands off the ones who obey," Nayra said. "So it punishes exactly the four people I need."

***

Kharun came up at the end of it because somebody had told him there was an argument on the healing platform, which there was not, which was worse.

He listened to the whole thing standing up. Leon gave him the ratio and Nara gave him the bark and Nayra gave him the two pairs of hands, and Kharun looked at the hands longest.

"You want a hundred and seventy-four people to want a thing," he said.

"Ei."

"You will not get that." He said it without any unkindness. "I have been asking this settlement to want a wall for eleven weeks and I have a wall because I put the timber where the path goes, and people carried it because it was in the way."

Leon opened his mouth and shut it again, because something had just moved.

"Where does everybody go?"

"The water chain."

"Na. Everybody who has hands on food." Kharun turned and pointed down the terrace with his chin, at the place the whole settlement passed through twice a day and nobody had ever thought of as a place. "There. Between the racks and the fire. They all come through and they come through carrying."

He looked back at the bowl with the red on it.

"Do not make them want it. Make it a gate."