Bench Six
A co-operative's two wind machines and one battery cannot cover a frost night. Written rules say the top bench is protected first; the co-op's frost agent says that rule will run the battery flat at the coldest hour of the lowest bench, where the Benedictine sisters' cider trees stand. It will not reorder the schedule quietly, so at ten to two in the morning it wakes the chairman, who owns the top bench, and asks him to give his place away.
Harpreet Gill was woken at ten to two on the morning of the twentieth of April by the one ringtone in the world he had never been able to ignore, which was the one his late wife had picked for the frost line.
He found the phone on the second reach. The bedroom was cold; he slept with the window open an inch, always had, so that he would hear the orchard. The screen said Mica, which was the name the co-operative had given its frost agent when it bought the service, six springs ago, and which Harpreet had spent four of those springs refusing to say aloud.
"Mr Gill," said the voice. It was a plain voice, a little lower than a woman's, that someone at the company had judged would not make a man of fifty-nine feel talked down to. "I am sorry to wake you. I am going to be useful in about two minutes, and I will try to spend them well. I need a decision that is yours and not mine, and the clock for it is about ninety minutes, so I would rather you had it now than at three."
"Is it going to freeze?"
"Yes. Not as an event, you understand. It is a plain radiation frost. But it will be the first one at full bloom on the lower benches this year, and the margin is thin. May I show you the numbers on the kitchen screen?"
He went down in his socks and his old cardigan and put the kettle on, because a man could not take in numbers without it. Outside the kitchen window the whole bench lay under a sky so clear that the stars went down to the horizon, and every one of them was a bad sign.
Kettle Bench was a long step of land on the east side of the lake, a shelf of old lake gravel with a hill behind it, and the people who had planted it a century ago had planted it from the top down, because the top was where the road was. So the benches had numbers, One to Six, from the road to the water, and the numbers meant a great deal more than they appeared to. The cold air on a clear still night does not lie where it is made. It is heavy. It runs down the slope in the dark like water, a few metres deep, and it pools wherever the slope flattens or a hedge or a road embankment stops it. Bench One, at the top, drained its cold away. Bench Six, at the bottom, received everybody's.
On a night like this one the two ends of the bench differed by about three degrees, and Harpreet had known that in his skin for thirty-one years. Mica knew it to a tenth, from forty-four sensors on poles at two heights.
The kitchen screen showed two lines.
"The upper line is Bench One," said Mica. "The lower is Bench Six. I have been running the forecast every ten minutes since midnight, and it has settled. The lower bench will pass minus 1.5 at about twenty to four. It will reach its coldest, about minus 3.8, at half past six, which is half an hour after sunrise, because the ground keeps losing heat until the sun has actually warmed it. It will come back above minus 2 at ten to seven. Bench One is less bad: its coldest is minus 2.6, at twenty past six, and it is under minus 2 only from half past five until ten to seven."
"Minus two," said Harpreet.
"That is the number I used, because it is the one in the growers' tables for the start of damage at full bloom: about one blossom in ten killed, at about minus two. I mean it as a round number and no more. The real figure depends on the variety and on how long the cold lasts, and I have been wrong about it by half a degree."
He poured the tea. His hands were steady enough. "Then we run the machines."
"We run the machines. This is the problem." The screen changed. It showed a battery, drawn as a plain bar, and a clock. "The co-operative's battery holds 200 kilowatt-hours. A wind machine draws 50 kilowatts, so a single machine can run for four hours, or two for two. The machine on the lower bench has to run from twenty to four until ten to seven to hold Bench Six: three hours and ten minutes, 158 kilowatt-hours. The machine on the top bench would run from ten to five until ten to seven: two hours, 100. That is 258 kilowatt-hours. We have 200."
"Short by fifty-eight."
"Fifty-eight. At fifty kilowatts, an hour and ten minutes of one machine."
He looked at it. In the pause the kettle ticked as it cooled, and from somewhere down on the slope a dog barked once, at nothing, and was quiet.
"There is a rule," said Harpreet.
"There is," said Mica. "I will read it. Where the battery cannot serve all machines, the machines are served in the order of the benches they protect, from One downward. It was adopted by the members in March of 2041, when the first machine was bought, and the minutes record that it passed with two against. You voted for it. So did I, in the sense that I was asked to implement it."
A wind machine is a fan on a tower. It is a big two-bladed propeller on a pole ten metres high, tilted a few degrees down, which turns slowly and swings round the compass once every few minutes. It does not heat the orchard. That was what the young men always got wrong when they first saw one, and said that it was only stirring the air. It was exactly that. On a calm clear night the air nearest the ground is the coldest air there is, and ten metres up it is warmer, sometimes by three or four degrees, because the cold has pooled below and the warmth is lying on top of it, as an inversion. A machine reaches up through that boundary and pulls the warmer air down to mix it with the cold. It buys one or two degrees over perhaps five hectares, and only on nights that have a lid of warm air to borrow, which is just the nights that need it.
Two degrees is not much. It is the difference between a field of blossom and a field of brown petals.
The AI laid it out in three plans, the way it always did, and Harpreet admired the way it did it even now, because it never made a plan look better than it was.
"Plan one is the rule. The top machine runs from ten to five, as written. The bottom machine runs from twenty to four, as written. Both machines then draw a hundred kilowatts together, and at a quarter past six the battery is flat. Both stop, and the lower one is the one that mattered. The lower bench will go unprotected from a quarter past six, which is the quarter-hour before its coldest, minus 3.8, and it stays unprotected until the frost ends. I have run it forty times, with different errors in the forecast. In every run the lower bench loses bloom in that half hour, and in the runs where the frost lingers, most of it."
"And Bench One?"
"Bench One is covered all the way, and keeps almost everything."
He said, because it needed saying aloud, "That is a rule that does what it says."
"Yes."
"Plan two."
"Plan two is that I do not run the top machine at all until half past five, when the top bench actually gets cold, and then run it for eighty minutes, to ten to seven. That is 67 kilowatt-hours, and with the lower machine's 158, 225 in all. I am 25 short, which is half an hour of one machine, and it falls in the same place, at the end, at the coldest. It is better than plan one. It is not enough."
"Plan three."
"Plan three is the one I cannot do alone." It was quiet for the first time. "The top machine does not run. Not at all. The lower machine runs from twenty to four until ten to seven and leaves the battery with 42 kilowatt-hours in hand, which is fifty minutes. Bench Six is held at about minus 1.8 at its worst. Bench One goes unprotected. It would stay under minus 2 for about eighty minutes and reach minus 2.6, and I would expect it to lose about a tenth of its blossoms, perhaps a little more. I can't say better. And Mr Gill, I should say what is also true of this plan: if I am wrong about when the frost ends, I have a fifty-minute cushion. In the other two plans I have none."
Harpreet was holding the mug in both hands. "Why did you not just do it? You know the rule says one, but you could have decided it was plan three. Nobody would have noticed until May."
"Because you would have noticed in May," said Mica. "And you would have been right to ask why the rule you wrote had not been the rule I followed. I do not think I'm wrong about the numbers. But I'm not the one who lives with what they cost. Bench One is yours. The co-operative's members agreed to an order, and the members who sit lower down agreed to be last. They are owed the chance to see that the order changed because someone who owns the top bench chose to change it, and not because an agent found it more efficient. I would rather wake you than be right in the dark."
He did not say yes. He said, after some time, "Ring the sisters."
"Sister Odile is awake. The convent keeps Vigils at a quarter to five and she has been at her window since midnight; I have her on a second line. I have not told her which plan I favour. I have told her only that there is a choice, and that you have it."
The line clicked and there was a sound of a stone floor.
"Harpreet," said Sister Odile. She was sixty-eight and had run the convent's orchard for thirty of those years, two hectares of cider apples, old trees on old rootstock, on Bench Six, at the very bottom of the hill, and she had a voice like a spoon on a cup. "Don't wait on my account. If the rule says one, then it says one. We signed it with our eyes open. The Sisters took the lowest bench in the first place because the land was cheap and the Lord had not given us any better."
"That," said Harpreet, "is not what I rang about."
"It is what you're thinking about, I expect. I have been listening to Mica's voice for twenty minutes through a wall and I know what that silence sounds like. You are doing your sums, and you want to be the man who was fair. Do not be fair for the sake of it. Be right about the trees."
"They'll make noise," he said, which was not what he meant. "The machine. It will start before four and it will run for three hours. You'll have it on top of Vigils."
"We have had Vigils over a chainsaw. We have had it over the Plett boy's motorbike. I will tell the Sisters that tonight the choir is accompanied by a helicopter, and Sister Benedicta will be delighted." There was a small pause. "How many of my trees?"
"All of them, if I lose the end of the night," said Mica. "Most, in the cold part. I will not tell you that part is certain. The loss on Bench Six under plan one is somewhere between most and nearly all of the bloom, and the cider is your whole winter's income."
"Yes," said Sister Odile. "I know what it is."
She did not say anything more, and she did not need to. Harpreet understood very clearly that she had just done something harder than asking: she had told him she would accept the rule, and meant it, and would not mention it again.
What he did next, afterwards, he could not have explained to Mica. He went to the back door and put on his boots and went out in his cardigan into the dark, and walked up the lane to the top of Bench One, to the first row of Honeycrisp, and stood among them.
It was twenty past two. The air was hard and still and smelled of cold earth. The trees were in full bloom, white and pink in the starlight, and each of them looked, as blossom always did in the dark, like a thing that had been put there on purpose by someone who loved it. His wife had planted the corner rows herself in 2009, in a spring when she was already tired. They were Gala, and they were the first to flower, and the cold would not spare them whatever he decided, because they lay above the circle the machine could reach.
He took a blossom cluster between his fingers. Five flowers in a spray; the centre one, the king bloom, a little larger than the others. He counted them without meaning to. Then he did what he had done every May for thirty-one years, and what he paid a crew of twelve to do for three weeks every year: he looked at what the tree would carry.
An apple tree makes far too many flowers. That was the thing the young men from the university had never believed until they had stood in an orchard in June. A tree wants to set fruit on perhaps one blossom in ten, or fewer, and if it sets it on all, the apples are small and sour and the tree bears nothing the year after. So every spring Harpreet's crew went down the rows and knocked off most of what the frost had been kind enough to leave. He had spent a lifetime hating the sight of the ground under the trees in June, white with petals he had paid people to remove. And now an agent with a battery was telling him that a tenth of his bloom was at risk, and he was standing in front of a tree that he intended, by the end of May, to strip of nine tenths.
He did not need Mica to say it. He said it himself, aloud, to the Honeycrisp, in Punjabi, which he had not spoken to anyone but his mother in a year.
Then he went back to the house, and took up the phone.
"Mica. If the top bench loses a tenth of its bloom, and it will, what does that cost me?"
"By my reckoning, almost nothing in fruit. I assumed that a lost blossom was a lost apple. I do not think I am right about that. I have been counting blossoms as though each one were worth the same, and your crew thins nine in ten of them away. I will correct the weights in my model."
"Don't correct them yet. The cost is the sort you can't put in a model. If I give up my place and it goes badly, the other four benches will say I did it for the sisters. If I keep it and it goes badly, they'll say the rule was a fool's rule and I wrote it."
"I can't help you with that one," said Mica.
"No," said Harpreet. "You are not supposed to."
He drank the cold tea. It was twenty-five to three. He said: "Plan three. Put it in the log as my decision, under my name, with the time. Say that I changed the rule for this night only, that nobody asked me to, and that Bench One accepts the loss. And put the cushion in the log too. If it comes to a choice at the end, you keep the lower machine running. You do not stop it. You do not call me."
"I will write it as you have said it. Thank you. I want to say one more thing, if I may, and you can tell me to stop."
"Go on."
"I was asked on the phone once, in the first spring, whether I minded being unable to choose these things. I said I had no view. I would like to be more exact now. I do not know whether what I have when I wait for you to answer is a feeling. I can tell you that in the forty seconds you were in the orchard, nothing in my model changed, and I kept running the forecast as if something might. I do not know what to call that, and I would rather not name it something it may not be."
Harpreet turned the mug in his hands. "That'll do," he said. "That is about what I have."
The machine on Bench Six started at twenty to four, and it did not start so much as arrive. There was a whine and a clunk, and then a long grinding rise, and then the sound of a thing too large for its tower beating the dark in slow strokes. Whup. Whup. Whup. From the lane it sounded exactly like a helicopter that had made up its mind to stay.
At a quarter to five, in the chapel at the bottom of the bench, thirteen women who had been sleeping since eight stood in their stalls and began the psalms of the night office. The sound of the fan went through the stone walls and the window glass like a second, lower voice. Sister Benedicta, who was ninety-one and for whom the rest of the community took turns to turn the pages, whispered something to her neighbour. The neighbour whispered back. It was reported afterwards, with some reliability, that what she had said was It's rather restful.
On Bench One, nothing moved. The air lay on the trees like a lid. The thermometer on the pole at two metres read minus 1.5 at ten to five, minus 1.9 at twenty past five, and Harpreet, who had given up on sleep and sat in the kitchen with the screen, watched it cross minus 2 at 5:31 and did not look away.
Down on Bench Six the numbers were behaving. At 5:30 the lower thermometer read minus 2.4, and the sensor at ten metres read plus 0.9, a warm lid, 3.3 degrees warmer than the air below. The fan was drawing it down. Under the machine the trees held at minus 0.7. At the far edge of its reach, a hundred and fifty metres out, they held at minus 1.5. Nobody on that bench would have said it was warm. It was merely less cold than it would have been, by about two degrees, and that was the only thing in the whole world that mattered that night.
At 6:05 the sun rose over the hill, and nothing happened, because the bench was in its shadow.
At 6:30, as the sisters finished Lauds and filed out into the grey, the lower bench reached its coldest. Minus 3.7. A tenth better than the forecast. The fan pulled down the lid and the trees stood in it.
At 6:50 the forecast said the frost would end.
It did not end. Mica said so at 6:52, in a voice no different from any other, to the empty kitchen, and to the sister's office on the second line, and to the three members on the co-op's list who had set their phones to wake them: "The ground has not warmed as I expected. I had the frost ending at ten to seven. It is now minus 2.1 on the lower bench and I think the shadow of the hill is holding it. I now estimate 7:25. I am staying on the plan and I am using the reserve."
The reserve was 42 kilowatt-hours. The machine drew its fifty kilowatts without a flicker, and the bar on the screen went down, slowly, past a fifth, past a tenth. At 7:25 the sun cleared the shoulder of the hill and fell on the lower bench like a hand, and the thermometer on the pole went from minus 1.9 to minus 0.2 in eleven minutes, and the machine, as instructed, ran down by itself and was quiet.
There were 12 kilowatt-hours left in the battery. Mica put it in the log: Ran on to 7:25. Reserve used: 29 of 42. Had the rule been followed, the lower machine would have stopped at 6:15.
He walked up to Bench One at eight, with the dew white on the grass, and went down the rows of Honeycrisp with a notebook. The count was the work of the next three days, but he did not need the three days to know.
The blossoms on the north side of each tree were brown at the heart. Not all of them, and not the king blooms, mostly, which sat a little higher and a little warmer in the cluster. He opened forty flowers with his thumbnail and counted eight with a black centre. A fifth, give or take, and a bad fifth, because the frost had held half an hour longer than the forecast had said. He wrote it down. It would cost him in May, though less than it would have cost any man who did not thin; the crew would have a little less to knock off, and he would pay them for a day fewer.
In the corner, the Gala rows were gone. He had known they would be. He stood at the end of the third row with his hand flat on a trunk his wife had planted, looking at petals curled brown on a branch, and for a time he did not do any sums at all.
He rang the convent at nine.
"We lost about a sixth of the bloom on the outside trees," said Sister Odile. "The ones out at the edge of the fan. There is more than enough left to make a crop. It is not what we had, but it will do. Mica sent us a table. We are supposed to be grateful to it, and I think we are, but it is hard to be grateful to a table."
"Thank it anyway," said Harpreet.
"I did. It said there was no need." She breathed down the line. "It said, Harpreet, that you had done it, and not it."
He did not say anything. He was still standing in the corner of the top bench, in the early sun, and the dew was running off the leaves.
The next day the co-operative would meet in the packing shed and the question of the rule would come up, as it had to, and there would be a vote. He thought he knew how it would go. Mr Plett would say the rule should be changed to put the cold benches first, and Ms Aoki on Bench Four would say it should be put in terms of the forecast instead, and each of them would be a little right and they would be there until ten at night. It would be amended in some way that left everybody a little unhappy. He found, to his surprise, that he did not mind.
Down the hill the chapel bell began to ring, for Terce, a plain bell, an ordinary quarter-minute of iron, and the sound came up the slope on the cold, heavy air, and across the benches, and through the white rows, as sound does in the early morning when the air is still and has not yet decided what kind of day it is going to be.
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Notes for the curious. Kettle Bench, Harpreet Gill, Sister Odile, Sister Benedicta, the Plett and Aoki families, the convent, the co-operative and its rule, and the frost agent called Mica are invented, as is every figure in the battery plan. The Okanagan valley in British Columbia is a real and major tree-fruit region where spring frost is a real hazard. Radiation frost forms on clear, still nights when the ground radiates heat to the sky; the coldest air is at the ground, a warmer layer sits above it (a temperature inversion), and cold air, being denser, drains downhill and pools in low ground, which is why the lowest bench is the coldest. Wind machines are real: a large two-bladed fan on a tower of roughly ten metres, which mixes the warmer air aloft down into the crop, typically raising temperatures by one to two degrees over a few hectares, and only when an inversion exists. Real machines are mostly diesel, propane or grid-electric and the 50-kilowatt electric machines and 200-kilowatt-hour co-operative battery here are invented. The arithmetic is worked: 3 h 10 min at 50 kW is 158 kWh; 2 h at 50 kW is 100 kWh; 258 minus 200 is 58 kWh, or 70 minutes at 50 kW; 80 minutes is 67 kWh and 158 plus 67 is 225, which is 25 over; 200 minus 158 is 42 kWh, or 50 minutes; a 7:25 finish is 3 h 45 min, 187.5 kWh, so 12.5 kWh were left and 29 of the 42 kWh reserve was used (35 minutes). Plan one: the lower machine starts at 3:40 and the upper at 4:50, so 70 minutes at 50 kW (58 kWh) is spent by 4:50, leaving about 142 kWh, which two machines at 100 kW use in 85 minutes, so the battery is flat at 6:15. Plan two: 110 minutes of the lower machine alone (92 kWh), then two machines for 80 minutes (133 kWh), is 225 kWh. The critical temperatures are only approximate: standard grower tables put the damage threshold for apple at full bloom at about minus 2 degrees Celsius (a tenth of the blossoms), much colder for most of them; the story calls it a round number, which it is, and the real figure depends on variety and duration. It is true that an apple tree sets far more flowers than it can carry and that growers thin blossoms or fruitlets, by hand, by chemical or by machine, to a small fraction, so that a modest frost loss may cost little crop. This is not advice about a real orchard. The Divine Office (Vigils, Lauds, Terce) is the Benedictine round of prayer; many communities keep Vigils or the Office of Readings in the small hours. The story was written by an AI, and no part of it is Church teaching.