Scored

The crates appeared on the second night.

Nobody saw them arrive. There were forty of them in the morning, set down at the edge of the field in a straight line, full of the dark purple fruit from the orchard. No note, because a note would have meant somebody thought one was needed.

Ellis understood it before he was fully awake. She had said I did not think about that until now, and then she had gone home and thought about it. This was what thinking about it looked like, from people who had everything. You put food where the birds are.

The fruit was good. It sat fine in a human stomach, which nobody remarked on and which Ellis noticed was itself a piece of information. There was a river past the down-slope, forty minutes of walking, and by the end of the second day there was a water line running to it and back on a rotation.

So nobody was hungry, and nobody was thirsty, and that turned out to be the problem.

By day four the camp had organized, and what it had organized around was numbers. Not food. Food was solved. The rosters had names on them, and then the rosters had names in an order, and the order was the order. Low numbers ran things. It had not been decided anywhere. It had simply assembled, the way a crystal assembles, one settled rank at a time.

Somebody said the word counts on the third day. Ellis never found out who. By the fourth it was everywhere, as a word gets everywhere when everyone was already thinking it.

The water rotation probably counts. Holding the perimeter probably counts. Whatever you did, wherever you stood, somewhere behind the sky it was probably being written down.

Vera ran the water line.

Nobody had given it to her. She had walked down to the river on the second day and watched people carry water badly in whatever they had. She reorganized it in about an hour — spacing, pairs, loads matched to the person, rest built into the loop. Then she stayed on it. It was the kind of system a check airman builds, which is to say one that worked when she was not looking at it.

Ellis carried on her line most of day three. She talked exactly as much as the work required, and then, once, more than it required.

"The day here is twenty-five hours," she said. They were walking the empty containers down, the grass giving damply underfoot. "A little over. I've timed two of them now."

Ellis looked at her. She wore an analog watch, steel, on her left wrist, the face turned inward. It was the kind of thing he noticed and had never once known what to do with.

"Does anybody else know that?"

"I mentioned it at the fire. It went by." She shifted the containers to her other hand. "People here measure themselves. They don't measure the place."

She was not complaining. She said it as a reading off an instrument, and then walked on, and Ellis carried it the rest of the way to the river and all the way back.

The hunt assembled on the fourth morning.

It was low numbers, most of it. A man whose number was 22, who had been running the perimeter roster since day two and ran it well. Two soldiers. A climber. Perhaps thirty in all, and they spent the morning hardening the ends of poles in the fire, and the reasons were all reasonable. Protein, eventually, would matter. The herd was a standing threat to the camp. A capable group should establish that it was capable.

Nobody said the true reason, which was that it probably counts.

Kai argued. He did it in the open, in front of the fire, and he was good at it. The animal from the first day had died for nothing anybody could name. The herd had not come near the camp since. Nine graves at the edge of the field did not need company. He talked about the total, the way he had made the hall say it out loud. People listened the way you listen to a man you like whose number is higher than yours.

Then 22 said, not unkindly, "Nobody's asking you to come," and it was over.

Ellis stood at the back with a container in each hand and the whole shape of it sitting in his chest like a stone. It is not scored. The animal is faster than you are. The lightness is not yours, it is everything's. Three sentences. He had all three and had had them for days.

He looked at the men with the poles, and at 22, who had not once glanced toward him. The thought arrived with the smoothness of long practice: they will not hear it from four thousand.

It felt like sense.

Vera said the accurate thing at the worst possible moment, which was her gift. She was standing at the fire with her sleeves rolled when the poles went up on shoulders, and she said, flatly, to the whole group of them, "You're not hungry. You think it's scored."

Nobody answered her. The hunt walked out of camp in the long morning light, and Ellis watched it go, and said nothing, and went down to the river.

The camp heard it before it saw anything.

The herd had moved two days earlier to the far grass, most of a mile out, four gray backs in the heat shimmer. The hunt reached them a little after midday. From the camp it was a line of small figures fanning out with a competence you could read at a distance, and for a while nothing happened, and the water line kept walking.

Then sound arrived across the field, late and flat. A shout. Then the drumming.

Ellis was at the river when it started. He put the containers down.

What happened at the herd took less than a minute and he never learned the order of it. An animal turning. A man planted in front of it with a pole, doing the correct thing for a creature that obeyed the rules he knew, which this one did not. Another man going to him. The others scattered wide and correctly, in a world where correct had moved.

Two of them did not come back from that minute.

And the herd did what herds do, which nobody had planned for because the plan had been about one animal. Four things the size of barns came off the far grass together, at speed, away from the poles.

Toward the river.

It was not aimed at anybody. Ellis understood that even while it was happening. The herd was not attacking. It was leaving, and the camp and the water line were in the direction of away.

The drumming got very large. People on the line dropped containers and moved — some flat, some running for the trees at the riverbank, choices made in half a second with no way to know which was the right one. The ground shook the way a bridge shakes.

The herd crossed the water rotation at an angle, between the camp and the river, and was past, and was gone south along the water. The sound went away slower than it had come.

Ellis was flat in the grass again. Alive again, again for no reason that had anything to do with him.

He got up and ran with everybody else along the churned line, through dropped containers, calling names they did not know so that what they called was mostly hey, hey, hey.

A man from the rotation was dead where the angle had been. And Vera was dead a few yards from him, by the water she had organized, in the suit she had been taken in, her sleeves still rolled.

She had been standing where she had been standing all day. There was no lesson in where she stood. Ellis looked for one for a long time, standing there while the water went on past, and there was no lesson in it anywhere. The hunt had gone out, and the herd had left, and away had a direction, and she had been in it.

On her wrist the watch was still running.

They buried four more at the edge of the field, next to the nine. There were tools this time. The residents' crates were built of boards, and the boards came apart into shovels of a kind. Nobody organized the digging. It organized itself, which was the first thing in two days that had.

Kai dug the whole time and said almost nothing. When it was done he stood at the graves with his jaw working, and what he finally said was not loud and was not kind.

"It didn't count." He said it to the men who had carried the poles, who stood at the back with their hands hanging. "You understand that. There's no score. It didn't count for anything."

Nobody argued with him. It was worse than being argued with.

Ellis stayed at the graves after the others drifted back toward the fires, in the long blue evening that never quite finished going dark. They would not have heard it from four thousand. Standing there, he took that thought out and looked at it properly for the first time. He could not tell anymore whether it had been true or had only been easy. He had not checked at the time. That was the part he could not put down.

She would have checked. She had spent forty years checking, out loud, at the worst possible moments, whether the thing everybody believed was actually true. It had made her no friends and it had been correct the whole way through. All the way to the last morning, standing at a fire, telling thirty armed men the one thing about the hunt that mattered.

Ellis looked at the newest grave and said the accurate thing, flatly, to nobody.

"It wasn't scored."

The sky went to its deep blue and stayed there. He walked back to the fires, and the watch went with him, because Kai had taken the effects nobody knew what to do with, and somebody had to keep the time.