Chapter 127: Come Back When You Can Count

Kharun said nothing for six days and then did two things in one morning, and Leon has never seen a man empty himself out that thoroughly in front of other people.

The first took about forty seconds.

He came down to the council ground at the fourth hour, before anybody had asked him for anything, and told Doran to write that he was taking himself off the question of Toran.

Not stepping back. Not staying quiet. Recused, in the register, with the day on it, and the reason under it, and his name.

"Say the reason," Doran said, because Doran does not let anything be done gracefully.

"I cannot see the bottom of my own want in this. I have said so once in private and I am saying it in front of the ground." Kharun did not sit down. "Everything I say about Toran from today is a man talking about his father. Weigh it accordingly or do not weigh it at all."

***

The second thing took him a great deal longer to get out.

He asked Veya to release the four sentences.

She made him say it twice, in front of witnesses, which is her rule and which she applied to the head of the settlement exactly as she would have applied it to anybody.

"You gave them to me at twenty-six and told me to hold them until you were dead."

"Ei."

"And you are not dead."

"Na." He looked at the ground for a moment. "A man who takes himself off a question has to tell people why, and I have been giving them a reason with a hole in it for six days, and Doran has been letting me, which is worse."

Veya untied it.

It took her about a minute and she gave all four in the form, with the endings on, slowly, so that Luma could take them at the same time.

***

Tor of Toran gave the cost, and the cost was true, and it was checked.

His son gave no number, because his son had none, and was answered.

His son said that a camp which counts before it opens its hand has already closed it — and that was heard, and it did not carry.

And Tor said to him, not at the fire: come back when you can count.

***

Nobody on that ground had expected the shape of it.

Leon certainly had not. He had spent six days assuming the four sentences protected Tor — that they were the ugly ones, the ones a son does not say about his father, and that Kharun had buried them out of some old and complicated loyalty.

They are not about Tor at all.

Every one of them is about a young man who was right, and who lost, and who lost because he had nothing to put down.

"That is why," Nayra said, and she said it into a silence, and she said it the way she says things she has just understood and does not much like understanding. "That is why all of it. The register. The count. The tests. The published number."

Kharun did not answer her.

"Say it," Doran said.

"I have nothing to add to what she said."

"You have thirty years to add to it. Say it."

***

He said it standing up, which he does not do, and it took him about a minute and a half.

"I was twenty-six and I was right and I could not prove one word of it.

"He had a number for how many days sixty people would cost us and I had a feeling about what we were, and the ground looked at both of those and chose the number, and they were correct to. I would choose the number. I have chosen the number in this settlement about nine times and every one of those nine was right.

"And eleven people died, and they were right, and both of those are true at once and I have never once got them apart.

"So I came down this river and I found forty people and a terrace nobody wanted and I have spent thirty years building a place where a man in my position has something to put on the ground. That is the whole of it. That is what all of it is for. Everything Doran holds and everything Veya holds and every page in that shelter exists because I stood in front of my father with my hands open and nothing in them."

He sat down.

"And I still do not know whether, if I had had a number, the number would have said feed them."

***

Nobody said anything for a long time and then Kel said the thing from a mat, quietly, and it went round that settlement inside two days.

"It would not have."

Kharun looked up.

"Two hundred and forty people, a thin year, sixty more mouths. You have described that arithmetic three times and I have run it three times while you were talking." Kel had a page and had been writing on it the whole while. "There is no version where Toran feeds them through the wet. Your father's number was right and your number would have been the same number."

"Then what —"

"Then the number was not the argument." Kel put the charcoal down. "The argument was whether Toran should have walked them down to the next camp instead of watching them go, and split what it had over two winters instead of one, and asked the four camps below for eleven baskets each. Nobody counted that, because nobody thought to count anything except the thing that was in front of them."

He shrugged, which he can do now.

"You did not need a number to beat him. You needed a different question. And nobody on this river had ever asked one, and you have spent thirty years teaching a hundred and seventy-six people to."

***

Leon walked up alone that night and sat in the works for a long time with a clean page and did not write anything on it for about an hour.

Then he wrote four lines, and they are not in the register, and they are in the back of his own book where he keeps the things that are only his.

I have been in this settlement three and a half years thinking I brought them the instrument.

I did not. Kharun has been building it since before I was born on another planet, out of one bad evening, on purpose, without knowing what to call it.

All I did was arrive with a name for it and a few pages of technique, at a place that had already decided it wanted one.

Which is why it took. Everywhere else on Earth, people like me turned up somewhere that had not decided, and were listened to, and it went badly.

He sat with that.

Then, underneath, because it had been sitting in him for six days and had nowhere else to go:

And a man of seventy-one, three reaches up, is drinking from a worse seep, and nobody there is counting it, and he is the only person alive who ever told my friend to come back when he could.