Chapter 129: He Did Not Come to Warn Us

Everybody at Retharu spent four days assuming Iven Marr had come to warn them.

He had not, and he said so on the fifth morning, without any embarrassment at all, when Doran finally asked him straight out what he wanted.

"I want a person who can write."

***

He is sixty and has read those sticks since he was eleven. Three people at First Garden can read part of the system and nobody can read all of it, and the reason is not neglect.

It is that reading those sticks requires knowing what happened at the far end of each one, and the far end is a year counted from a thing that occurred a hundred and ten years ago, and the only way to know which year a stick is is to have been told, in order, by somebody who was told.

"I was told by my mother's brother, who was told by his mother," Iven Marr said. "He died at fifty-four. I got about two-thirds of it before he did and I have spent forty years putting the rest back from four old people who disagreed."

Veya, from the mat, without any expression at all: "Four."

"Ei."

"How long did it take?"

"About thirty summers."

They looked at each other a moment and said nothing else, and Leon watched two people who had never met establish, in nine words, that they had survived the same disaster.

***

What Iven Marr wants is not writing in the abstract.

He wants a page, with the whole of what those sticks say on it, in a form a person who never met him can open in eleven years and read.

Not the notches described. The contents, as a table: plot, year, yield, with a heading, and under it the thing that makes it a record instead of a curiosity, which is a plain account of how each number was got and by whom.

"I do not want the sticks copied," he said. "The sticks are safe. The sticks have survived four generations and a fire. It is the reading of them that is going to die."

Doran did not answer for a while.

Then he asked the question he had been chewing since the second morning, in the form he uses when he already suspects the answer.

"Why us?"

"Because a man with a bad hand read me four pages, and one of them said that where the master itself is wrong you write the correction into it, with the day and the name of whoever found it, and leave the old wording legible underneath."

Iven Marr put his hands on his knees.

"I have been looking for forty years for somebody who would do that. Everybody else I have asked would have made it tidy."

***

Kharun said yes and then made it cost something, which is what he does.

Not payment. Retharu takes nothing for pages and that rule has been read out four times this year already.

What he asked for was harder, and Iven Marr agreed inside four seconds, which told everybody he had come expecting worse.

The table goes in the master. Not a copy sent east: in Retharu's register, under its own heading, with First Garden's name and Sayo Marr's name and the date the sticks were opened.

Which means anybody may read it. Which means Havek may read it, and Low Reed, and Rhek Var, and Onnek, and Rothen.

"You are giving away the only thing your people have that nobody else has," Doran said, because Doran makes people hear it.

"I am giving away a hundred and ten years of a mistake." Iven Marr did not blink. "You are all being very careful about my feelings and I would rather you were not. Those sticks are the record of my family clearing good ground twice and ruining it twice, and every camp on every river is going to do the same thing sooner or later, and most of them are going to do it without a stick."

***

The copying took nineteen days and it was Kiri.

Kel could not do it. He can write but he cannot sit up for nine hours, and the work is nine hours of a man reading a notch out loud and a girl writing a number and both of them checking.

Ket-li did the checking. She is nine, and over nineteen days she read the second column back four hundred and twelve times and found eleven errors — nine Kiri's, two Iven Marr's — and reported all of them the same way.

On the fourteenth day Iven Marr stopped in the middle of a stick and could not go on for a bit.

Nobody asked him about it. Kiri put the charcoal down and waited, which is a thing Kel taught her, and after a while he said what it was, to her, and not to any of the adults.

"That is the year my mother was born. I have had that stick in my hand for forty-nine years and I have never once been able to put the two things next to each other."

***

The finished table is four pages.

A hundred and thirty-four rows. Plot, year, yield, and a fourth column that Doran insisted on and that Iven Marr had never thought of, which is: how do we know this?

For about ninety of the rows the answer is Sayo Marr cut it in the year it happened.

For eleven of them it is cut later, from memory, by her daughter, and she said so at the time.

For four of them it is disputed between two of the four old people, and both numbers are here.

And for one row it is this stick is broken and the year is a guess, which Iven Marr had known for forty years and never once said out loud, and which he said to a girl of fifteen from a camp two reaches up, at the second hour, and then went and stood outside.

***

Leon read the whole thing when it was done and then read the fourth column on its own, twice.

A record that says how it knows is a different kind of object from one that does not.

He has had the same four pages I have had for four years. The same shape, the same curve, the same disaster on the same schedule. And neither of us could do anything with it, because his was in a form only he could read and mine was in a head only I could open.

Nineteen days. One girl of fifteen and a child of nine.

He looked at it for a while.

And the thing it says is that we have about seven years.

***

He took that number to Kharun on the last evening and did not dress it up.

Four years in, on better ground, with a smaller planted area and a crop that is not doing the one thing it was supposed to do.

Not a collapse. A decline starting between the fourth year and the seventh, slowly enough that nobody would call it anything until the eleventh.

"So we have seven years to find something that puts it back."

"Ei."

"And you cannot make it."

"Na."

Kharun turned his cup over, which he does.

"Then say the other thing. You always have another thing."

"There is one." Leon did not enjoy saying it. "There is a whole planet of ground out there that has never been looked at by anybody who knew what to look for, and I have been on one terrace for four years, and I have never once pulled up a native plant and looked at its roots."