CR · P05
The Windfall
Part Four of five. The valley finds out what an hour of water is worth.
A hotel signs a lease, a valuer from Fribourg puts a figure on the rota, and thirty people who have watered their meadows for sixty years without thinking about it begin, quietly and all at once, to count.
She spends the winter on the work nobody in the valley knows she does: a man in Trás-os-Montes with nine terraces and a deed of 1911, two sisters in Arcadia who are not speaking, a woman in Aragon with a nineteenth-century ordinance, and a man near Zahlé with a title in a script of which she cannot read a single letter — solved through the parcel numbers in a French overlay of 1930, because numbers survive scripts. It is the best winter she has ever had and she tells nobody, because there is nobody to tell.
Eight of the nine holdings agree. The ninth is a family in Crans who reply through a firm in Sion, in nine numbered paragraphs, with not one discourteous word in any of them, and who want to know what the thing is worth before they agree to be limited in it.
Which means somebody has to value it. And the lawyer warns her, on his own doorstep, that the moment anybody puts a franc figure on an hour of the rota, every man in that room who has watered his meadow for sixty years without thinking about it will know, to the franc, what he is standing on — and will never unknow it.
The hotel’s lease is signed in April: fifteen years, capped, metered, suspended in any declared drought, twenty-eight thousand francs a year into an account that held six hundred and thirty-one the previous May.
From it the valuer works to a figure for a single hour of the rota — and the lawyer, it turns out, was right about what would happen when anybody saw it.
What an hour of water is worth, and what it does to thirty neighbours to know it, is the fourth part of the book.
The book
Five parts — first water, the set, the thinning, the windfall, the keeping — and one year on a shoulder above the Rhône where the channel decides what is worth anything. The villages are where I say they are and the water law is the water law. The ground the story stands on does not exist and never did. It is Jacquard fiction: history woven into the future of AI.