Tuesday, the twenty-seventh of June 2051, half past six in the morning, Ken Schaefer's machine shed.
Ken has the co-op printout pinned flat on the workbench under a socket set so it won't curl. South half, eight cores composited. Water pH 5.9. Buffer 6.6. Recommendation: two and a half tons an acre of ag lime, ECCE 90 or better.
Two and a half again. Same as last time, which is the reason there was a last time.
Under the numbers, in the co-op's gray font, the agronomy agent has added a line of its own:
Suggested application window: post-harvest, est. Oct 9–20 2051. Spreader availability held for SCHAEFER K (TAZ-17). Reply HOLD to confirm.
"It held a spreader," Janelle says.
"It does that. It held one for my dad's place in '49, and he's been dead since '47."
"Are you going to reply HOLD?"
"I'm going to reply when the beans are off." He puts a grease-black finger on October. "But that's about right. Second, third week."
So now there's a date. It's the co-op agent's date, not Ken's, but Ken nodded at it, and in this shed a nod is a signature. She counts on her fingers where he can see. Five before-storms in hand. Twelve was the number she talked Wendell into paying for. Seven to go, fifteen weeks to get them. A wet Illinois summer gives you a half-inch storm every ten days or so. A dry one gives you one every three weeks. She doesn't get to pick which summer this is.
"And if you're short?"
"Then the first line of the file says eleven, or nine. Anybody who wants to subtract from it knows what they're subtracting from."
Ken thinks about that. "You'd put it in writing that you didn't get enough."
"That's most of what I put in writing."
He folds the printout and hands it over. "Copy it. Give it back. Don't let the Terraline thing have it."
"It's your soil. It isn't public unless you file it."
"Good."
Outside, the beans in the south half are knee-high and dark green and have no idea there's a date on them. She photographs the printout on the truck hood and writes the window on card thirteen. Not the pH. The pH is his.
228. 6/27/51 K.S. SOIL TEST BACK (S HALF). LIME REC SAME AS PRIOR (OWNER'S #S, NOT FILED). CO-OP AGENT 'SUGGESTED WINDOW' OCT 9–20, K.S. NOT CONFIRMED, 'ABOUT RIGHT.' NEED 7 MORE, ~15 WKS. IF SHORT: COUNT IN FIRST LINE.
Tuesday, the Fourth of July 2051, twenty to eleven at night, Ken's ditch.
The fireworks over Pekin got rained out at the second volley, which is how she knows before the radar agent does. The kid is in the truck with a sparkler that won't relight and opinions about it.
"You want to see the pipe?"
"Is it on fire?"
"It's the opposite."
He wants to see the pipe. She gives him the spare headlamp and one job, hold it on the staff, and he holds it with both hands like a ruler he might get wrong. The rain is warm. It smells like spent powder from somebody's yard and like wet road.
Staff 0.17 when they get there. 0.24. At 11:05 it reads 0.30 and rising. The bucket fills in 18.0 seconds, 18.3, 17.9. The same liter-point-one a second she had on the sixteenth of May, same head, same flow, which was the whole point of picking 0.30. EC 680. pH 7.18. The water is brown again, less brown than May. She caps the bottles under the surface so no air rides along, and lets him write R on the caps with the grease pencil. His Rs face backward. She doesn't fix them. A backward R is still an R, and Dale has a sense of humor.
The peak is small, 0.33 at 11:40. By ten to one it's back at 0.30, falling. Bucket 18.1, 18.0, 18.2. EC 615. pH 7.22. She writes F on those caps herself, because the kid is asleep across the bench seat with the headlamp still on, lighting the roof liner.
On the drive home the wipers keep time and she does arithmetic out loud, quietly, so as not to wake him. Rising 680, falling 615. Sixty-five apart this storm instead of ninety. The gap moves around. She writes that down as a fact about the gap and not as a number to correct anything with, because somewhere in Denver a methods agent at Terraline already turned one of her plots into a fleet-wide factor of 0.90, and she isn't going to hand it a second one.
Dale opens the lab on the fifth, since the Fourth is a holiday even for alkalinity. Rising 3.1, falling 3.3. He holds up the backward R.
"New tech?"
"Unpaid."
"Union's gonna hear about this."
Sixth stroke on the back of card thirteen. Under it she writes S21 GAP 90, S23 GAP 65 (S22 6/13 COUNTED, FALLING ONLY, NO PAIR) and leaves room, because two gaps aren't a pattern and she's not the one who'll make them a constant.
229. 7/4/51 S23 0.6 IN. 2ND RISING GRAB. R EC 680 / F EC 615, 1.1 L/S BOTH. GAP 65 (S21: 90). ALK R 3.1 F 3.3. TALLY 6/12. KID HELD LIGHT.
Tuesday, the eleventh of July 2051, ten past eight in the morning, the creek forty on the Kuhl place.
Marcy's tile outlet is a twelve-inch corrugated mouth in the creek bank, half hidden by reed canary grass, running a pencil of July baseflow. No storm in a week. This point doesn't need one. It's the monthly control Wendell agreed to, the paired field nobody limes, and all it needs is to happen the same week every month so the months line up.
Cup, 250 milliliters, fifty-one seconds. EC 640, pH 7.20. Marcy stands on the bank above her holding her phone out at arm's length, like it might drip on her.
"It found me again."
The ASH-C outreach agent. Same satellite-reflectance pitch it sent in spring, plus one new paragraph:
Public District records (TAZ-17, C-Q relationship, 2051) indicate measurable dilution effects at nearby reference sites. Your field's untreated status may be limiting carbon credit eligibility. ASH-C offers a no-cost 5-acre trial application.
"It's quoting you," Marcy says. "Like you're on their side."
Janelle reads it twice. They didn't cite the file. They cited the idea of the file. The dilution is rain. The C-Q relationship is one pipe's falling half. Neither has anything to do with Marcy's carbon. The agent has taken three true things, sewn them into one false one, and stitched her district's name on the label.
"They can quote it. They can't make it say that."
"Can I make them stop?"
"You can file a refusal in your field history. You did one in April. File another. The agents read refusals, because a refusal has the date in the first field and that's the field they parse."
"And it'll stop?"
"It'll stop sending you this one."
Marcy laughs once. "So it'll send me a different one."
"Probably in October."
Dale's number on Thursday: 3.1. Three months now, 3.0, 3.0, 3.1, steady as a fencepost. If Ken's water moves in November and Marcy's doesn't, Wendell gets the paired field he paid for. If Marcy takes the free five acres, he doesn't, and nobody at ASH-C will ever know what they cost him.
230. 7/11/51 KUHL CREEK 40 MONTHLY #3. EC 640, ALK 3.1. SERIES 3.0/3.0/3.1. ASH-C AGENT CITES 'DISTRICT C-Q' TO PITCH FREE TRIAL. NOT OUR CLAIM. M.K. FILING 2ND REFUSAL.
Tuesday, the eighteenth of July 2051, quarter past two, the district office, then Ken's ditch.
Twenty-one days since the Fourth. The radar agent sends her a summary every morning, No significant precipitation expected in the TAZ-17 catchment, and lately it has started adding a small sun icon, which feels personal.
The tally on the back of the card sits at six. Twelve weeks to the co-op's window. Six storms in twelve weeks would be an ordinary summer. This is not that summer. The beans in Ken's south half have stopped growing taller and started rolling their leaves at noon, and his tile, which needs water above it to run, has nearly stopped too.
Ray leans over the cubicle wall. "Do baseflow. Pipe's still weeping. Bottle it every Tuesday and you've got twelve by September."
She thought of it a week ago. She's been not doing it ever since.
"Baseflow isn't a storm. It's the water that's been sitting in the ground longest. Lime shows up there last, or first, depending how it moves, and I don't know which. If I count it, the before is half storms and half not, and whoever subtracts from it won't know which half they're holding."
"So don't count it."
"So I bottle it and don't count it."
Ray has been at the district eleven years. "That's twice the work for half the credit."
"It's the same credit. It's in its own column."
At four she drives out anyway. The V-notch is dry. Under the plate there's a slow dark stain on the concrete where the tile still weeps, maybe a cup every two minutes. It's hot enough that the wet edge dries while she watches. EC 690. She bottles it, caps it under, and writes BF on the cap. Not R. Not F.
Back at her desk, the public C-Q file gets a new column between LIMB and EC: FLOW_TYPE. Every storm row says STORM. The new row says BASEFLOW, and its USE says SEPARATE. In the site history, date in the first field: 2051-07-18 BASEFLOW SERIES STARTED. NOT A STORM. NOT IN PRE-APP TALLY.
She writes that last sentence for the agents. Terraline's will read the file at 4:11 tomorrow morning, the way it reads it every morning. She doesn't want it counting twelve.
231. 7/18/51 DRY 21 DAYS. TALLY STALLED 6/12. BASEFLOW KEPT (BF ON CAP), NEVER COUNTED AS BEFORE. FLOW_TYPE COL ADDED. TAZ-17 BF #1 EC 690.
Tuesday, the twenty-fifth of July 2051, five past six in the morning, Ken's ditch.
An inch and two tenths overnight, on ground baked hard enough that half of it ran off before it soaked in. She slept with the sound on and it didn't help. The rain started at three-thirty. She woke at ten past five to the radar agent: Precipitation event concluded. Falling limb, then. She writes F on the caps in the truck before she gets out.
The bank is mowed. Ken's hired man came through Saturday with the boom mower, and the boom has taken a bite out of the staff gauge post. The staff is still up. It leans about a thumb's width toward the plate.
The lean itself is nothing, a degree, a rounding error. What matters is whether the boom shoved the post down when it hit it. A post that's been hit can sit high or low, and you can't tell which by looking. If the head is wrong the flow is wrong, and if the flow is wrong this is S16 again, a storm she'll have to plot hollow and can't count.
So she doesn't sample first. She surveys. The benchmark is a nail in the culvert headwall, painted orange in 2049, its elevation known to the hundredth of a foot. She sets the level on the wet bank, shoots the nail, shoots the zero mark on the staff. Zero sits two hundredths low: the boom drove the post into the bank. She shoots it again. Two hundredths low. Every reading on that staff is two hundredths too high until somebody resets it.
Then the bucket. Twenty liters in 13.1 seconds, 12.9, 13.0, about one and a half liters a second. The knocked staff reads 0.37. Corrected, minus two hundredths, 0.35. Her rating curve, fit to her own buckets and not to the handbook, says 1.5 at 0.35 and about 1.65 at 0.37. The bucket agrees with the corrected reading, not the raw one. That's what she wanted: two separate ways of knowing the flow, meeting at the true zero. Her knees are soaked through and the mosquitoes have found her neck.
EC 590. pH 7.22. Dale by ten: ALK 3.0.
Ken's truck stops on the road at seven-thirty. He gets out and looks at the post.
"Lyle get it?"
"Two hundredths."
"That bad?"
"It's fine because I checked. It's bad if I don't write it down."
"Want me to tell him stay off it?"
"I want a stake on each side so he can see it from the cab."
That afternoon there are two lath stakes flagged orange on either side of the post, and a new row in the site history: 2051-07-25 STAFF ZERO 0.02 FT LOW VS BM (MOWER, POST DRIVEN). READINGS -0.02. SURVEYED TO BM. CORRECTED. BUCKET CONFIRMS (CURVE = BUCKET FIT). HEAD_FLAG reads CORRECTED. USE reads YES.
Seventh stroke on the back of card thirteen. Five to go. Eleven weeks. A spreader held in October by an agent that once held one for a dead man, and Ken still hasn't replied HOLD. She tapes the kid's backward-R cap to the edge of her monitor, where she'll see it every time the sun icon comes up.
232. 7/25/51 S24 1.2 IN. FALLING. STAFF HIT (MOWER), ZERO 0.02 LOW VS BM, SHOT 2X. READINGS -0.02: RAW 0.37, CORR 0.35. BUCKET = CORR. EC 590, ALK 3.0. USE YES. TALLY 7/12. STAKES UP (K.S.).