With the granary rising, Enki turned to the next bottleneck: the grain itself. The rhythmic, back-breaking work of the saddle quern—a stone rubbed over another—consumed the hours of the village's women. The abundance they had grown was trapped by the drudgery of its processing.
He took Lulal to the riverbank, to the head of the canal where the water was most forceful.
"The river works all day and all night," Enki said. "It does not grow tired. We asked it to water our fields. Now, we will ask it to grind our grain."
For two days, Enki sketched in the wet clay. He drew a vertical wheel with paddles. A horizontal axle. A system of simple, interlocking wooden gears. Finally, a second, vertical axle turning a heavy, notched grinding stone.
Lulal stared, his mind wrestling with the cascade of cause and effect. "The water pushes the wheel... the wheel turns the gear... the gear turns the stone... by the gods, Enki. It turns the millstone."
"It is a lever for time," Enki said. "The river provides the force. We are simply redirecting it to give our people back their days."
The construction was their greatest challenge. Shaping the great wooden gears with their bronze adzes was a prayer of precision. The day they diverted the canal's flow into the millrace, the entire village gathered. The water struck the paddles. The wheel groaned, turned once, twice, and then caught the rhythm of the current. With a solid clunk-clunk-clunk, the gears engaged, and high in the wooden frame, the upper millstone began to rotate.
A cheer erupted. It was the sound of time being created. The sound of freedom.
But Enki was already looking ahead. He noticed the first signs of mice, drawn to the new, concentrated wealth of grain.
"That is the next problem," he said to Lulal. "For every storehouse we build, we create a feast for others."
The solution came not from his 30th-century mind, but from observing the world. He saw the sleek, independent hunters that lurked at the edge of human settlements, drawn by the same rodents.
A few days later, Enki returned from the reeds with a mother cat and her two half-wild kittens, placating the spitting mother with a offering of fish. He released them into the nearly-complete granary.
"The best guard," he told a bewildered Lulal, "is not one you have to command or feed. It is one who shares your enemy. They will hunt the mice. In return, we give them shelter and a purpose. A partnership."