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

Twenty-two people went up the north path on the four hundred and twenty-eighth day and were out of sight by the fourth hour, and Retharu spent the rest of the morning waiting to find out what it had cost.

Leon spent it waiting for somebody to say Ket-li’s name.

Nobody did. Not at the fire, not at the trough, not on the platform. Her mother worked the racks. She herself sat where she always sits and worked at Kel’s eleven letters and had, so far as anybody could tell, no idea at all that anything had happened.

It was Doran who put an end to it, at about the seventh hour, on the council ground, in front of about fifty people, because he does not let a thing sit in a settlement where it can go bad.

"The child did nothing wrong."

He let that arrive before he said the rest.

"I made a rule two weeks ago and I made it badly. I said nobody shows anybody the register. I did not say it to the children, because it did not occur to me to say it to the children, and if I had said it to the children I would have had to tell them why, and then six of them would have known there was a thing worth hiding, and one of them would have hidden it visibly."

Somebody laughed, once, and stopped.

"She was asked a friendly question by a stranger about work she is proud of and did in front of her mother." Doran had the hide out. "There is no rule you can write that gets a different answer out of a seven-year-old. If you want a different answer you have to want a different child, and I do not."

Kharun asked the only question that mattered.

"So what do we do instead?"

"We stop trying to keep it."

***

Leon did not follow that for about a quarter of an hour, and then followed it all at once, standing in the doorway of his own shelter looking at nineteen pages of hide.

The register is one object.

One object can be asked for. One object can be taken, or burned, or lost in a flood, or carried off by a man who has decided he would rather be somewhere else, or simply left in a shelter that goes up when a rack catches. It has already survived one fire, and it survived that one because Aru’s tally stick was in a different building.

There is no version of an object that a determined person cannot get. There is no rule that protects it. Doran had spent two weeks trying to build a wall round a thing that would fit under one arm.

"Three copies," Leon said, when he came back down.

"Four," Doran said, without looking up. "One here. One at Fel’s fire, which is a different building and a different family. One with Havek, downriver, eleven days, out of anybody’s reach who comes at us. And one that goes wherever Luma goes, because Luma is the person on this river least likely to be in the same place as the rest of us when something happens."

"That is four times the work."

"Ei."

"And four times the hide."

"Ei. I have already asked Nesh what four times the hide costs and the answer is unpleasant and I am going to pay it." Doran finally did look up. "You are about to tell me that a copy in Havek’s camp is a copy we do not control."

Leon had, in fact, been about to say exactly that.

"It is. And a woman walked out of here yesterday who could describe my hands." Doran rolled the hide. "One of those two facts is a thing I chose."

Ket came to find Doran in the evening, which nobody expected, because Ket has not asked anybody for anything since the fire.

She did not ask him to be gentle about her daughter. She had watched him be gentle about her daughter in front of fifty people and had evidently found it insufficient.

"You have all been very kind."

"Ei."

"And not one of you has said whether she was right."

Doran put the charcoal down.

Leon, sitting eight paces off and mending a strap he had already mended, watched a man who answers everything take rather a long time about it.

"She was right," Doran said. "A stranger asked her about her work and she told the truth and she told it well, and I have been in four councils where grown men could not do either half of that."

"And it cost us."

"It cost us. Both of those are true and neither one cancels the other, and I am not going to pick the comfortable one for you." He looked up. "What I will not do is teach six children that being proud of good work is dangerous. A settlement can buy its safety with that. I have seen the places that did. They are careful and they are quiet and nothing new has happened in them for three generations."

Ket took that away with her and did not thank him, which on this terrace means she accepted it.

***

Veya had been on the mat the whole time and had not said anything, which with her is never nothing.

"You are all talking about the wrong danger," she said, when the ground had mostly cleared.

Doran waited.

"She did not want your pages. If she had wanted your pages she would have taken them, and there is not a person on this terrace who could have stopped twenty-two people, and she knew that better than you do."

"Then what."

"She wanted to know whether there was one."

Veya let her hands go still on the cord, which is her equivalent of leaning forward.

"Sixty-one years, and I have been counted four times, and I have never once been asked to show the cord. Nobody asks a keeper for the cord. You cannot carry a cord away and read it — it is marks and a woman, and without the woman it is knots on a string. That is not because we are clever. It is because that is all we ever had."

"And a register you can carry away and read," Leon said.

"Ei."

"So the thing that makes it useful is the thing that makes it takeable."

"That is the whole of it, and you built it, and I am not sorry you built it." Veya turned the cord over once. "But you have made a kind of memory this river has never had, and nobody on it knows the rules for keeping one, and you are going to have to find them out the way we found out ours."

Leon asked how they found out theirs.

"Badly," Veya said. "Over four generations. There is a reason the closing sentence has a verb form in it that exists for nothing else."

***

He wrote it that night at the top of a clean page, above where the first copy would start.

A record that one person holds is a record that one person can lose.

Then he sat and looked at it for a while, because it was, word for word, the thing Veya had done on the night before the counting party without anybody telling her to, sixty-one years of it, in the dark, at the eleventh hour, into a girl of nineteen.

He crossed it out and wrote it again with her name on it.