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

The third count went out on the thirteen hundred and eleventh day, five carriers, five copies, one morning, exactly as the first one had.

It is a worse number than the first and a slightly better number than the second, and Doran read it twice before anybody left, and about eleven people asked him whether that was really what they were sending.

A hundred and seventy-six people.

Two hundred and nine baskets, of which a hundred and thirty-one are the first year of the weir.

The weir, described in four lines, including the hole at the foot of it and the numbers that showed it stopped and the two hundred and forty stones they put in anyway.

Nineteen offices, thirty-one names, and the rule that a second is chosen for the work and where they were born may not be given as a reason.

Nine dead in two years, named. Fel Longline last.

And at the bottom the sentence that had been an easy thing to write when the store was four hundred and fifty-two.

This is what we have. We will send it again next year at the same time whether it is more or less. If it is less, it will still be the true number.

***

Veya made them stop and hear it.

She had herself carried down for it, which she does perhaps twice a year now, and she made Doran read the last line and then made him stop.

"That is the year."

Nobody followed.

"Two years ago you sent out four hundred and fifty-two baskets and every one of you was pleased with yourselves and thought you had done a brave thing." Her hands were still on the cord. "You had not. You had told six camps that you were rich, which they already suspected, and it cost you nothing at all."

She let that land.

"This is the year it costs. This is the first count that says we are not what we were. If you send this one, the thing is real. If you find a reason not to, then the first two were a performance and everybody on this river will know it inside a season, because they can count as well as you can."

They sent it.

Leon watched the five go out at first light for the third time and found that it was worse than the first time and not better, and wrote that down, because he had expected it to get easier and it does not.

***

The carriers came back over eleven days and four of them brought nothing back but the ordinary.

The fifth one, who had gone up the reach past the camp two reaches up and on to the third, came back with a thing that was not addressed to anybody and which he reported at the fire because he had been told to report everything.

Toran's spring is failing.

Not gone. Less. Less this year than last year, and less last year than the year before, and four years of that in a row.

They are drawing from a second seep now that they did not use to use, and it is further out, and the water is worse, and there are two hundred and forty people up there on ground that has been theirs for longer than anybody's cord.

Nobody at that fire had a strong reaction, because Toran is three reaches up and everybody has enough to think about.

Except that Kharun did not say anything for the rest of the evening, and Kharun always says something.

***

Leon found out from Veya four days later and he did not go looking for it.

He had gone up to sit with her about a completely different thing, which was whether the offices page ought to name the cord as an office at all, and she answered that in about four words and then said the other thing without being asked, in the flat way she says things she has decided somebody needs to know.

"Kharun was born at Toran."

Leon put the page down.

"His father is alive. He is about seventy. His name is Tor and he was a good man when I knew him and I have not seen him in thirty years."

"Kharun has never —"

"Na. He has not." Veya turned the cord. "He came down that reach at twenty-six with about forty people and he has not been back and he has never told anybody here why, and I know because I was the one who took the account of the arrival and there are four sentences in it that he asked me not to give out loud."

"Do you know what is in them?"

"I hold them. That is not the same as telling you." She said it without any edge. "Ask him."

***

Leon did not ask him.

That is the part he has written down and gone back to and cannot make come out any other way, and there is no version of it where he behaved well.

He had four opportunities over eleven days. Kharun was on the terrace, in the works, at the fire, on the path. He is not a difficult man to talk to and has never once refused Leon a question in three and a half years.

And Leon did not ask, and the reason he did not ask is that he did not want to be told to mind his own business by the person on that river whose opinion of him he cares about most.

He wrote that sentence down and then sat looking at it, because it is not a good sentence about a man of thirty who has spent two years telling a settlement that the danger is the thing nobody says out loud.

***

It was Doran who put it on the ground, eleven days later, because Doran does not have that problem.

"Toran."

"What about it," Kharun said.

"Two hundred and forty people and a spring that has been failing for four years, three reaches up, and we have a man here who has spent two years telling us to say the cost out loud." Doran did not look up from the hide. "So I am asking. Do we do anything?"

Kharun took a moment.

Then he gave four reasons, and every one of them was true, and Leon sat there and watched about a hundred people be entirely satisfied by an answer that was not the answer.

They have no request. Nobody has asked Retharu for anything and turning up uninvited at a camp of two hundred and forty is not help, it is a survey.

They have their own water and their own ground and their own people who know it better than anybody here.

Retharu has two hundred and nine baskets and a hundred and seventy-six mouths and had one thin winter already.

And the last one, which is the one that stopped the ground.

"And we do not know what is wrong with it. A spring that is going down is a spring that is going down for a reason, and the reason is in the ground, and nobody here can see into the ground." He turned his cup over. "Leon cannot. I have asked him."

Which was true. Leon had said so.

He had said it carefully, four days earlier, in about six sentences, to Kharun, alone, and had ended it by saying that there were three or four things it could be and that he would need to stand there and look.

He noticed, sitting on that ground, that the second half had not been repeated.

He did not say so.