Connie Willis - Bellwether

If there is any, I thought, watching the sheep.

One of them walked a step, grazed, walked two more steps, and then apparently forgot what it was doing and gazed vacantly into space.

Flip slouched by, wearing a waitress uniform with red piping on the collar and “Don’s Diner” embroidered in red on the pocket, and carrying a paper.

“Did you get a job?” Ben asked hopefully.

Roll. Sigh. Toss. “No-o-o-o.”

“Then why are you wearing a uniform?” I asked.

“It’s not a uniform. It’s a dress designed to look like a uniform. Because of how I have to do all the work around here. It’s a state ment. You have to sign this,” she said, handing me the paper and leaning over the gate. “Are these the sheep?”

The paper was a petition to ban smoking in the parking lot.

Ben said, “One person smoking one cigarette a day in a three-acre parking lot does not produce secondhand smoke in sufficient concentration to worry about.”

Flip tossed her hair, her hair wraps swinging wildly. “ Not secondhand smoke,” she said disgustedly. “Air pol lu tion.”

She slouched away, and we went back to observing. At least the lack of activity gave us plenty of time to set up our observation programs and review the literature.

There wasn’t much. A biologist at William and Mary had observed a flock of five hundred and concluded that they had “a strong herd instinct,” and a researcher in Indiana had identified five separate forms of sheep communication (the baas were listed phonetically), but no one had done active learning experiments. They had just done what we were doing: watch them chew, totter, mill, and throw up.

We had a lot of time to talk about hair-bobbing and chaos theory. “The amazing thing is that chaotic systems don’t always stay chaotic,” Ben said, leaning on the gate. “Sometimes they spontaneously reorganize themselves into an orderly structure.”

“They suddenly become less chaotic?” I said, wishing that would happen at HiTek.

“No, that’s the thing. They become more and more chaotic, until they reach some sort of chaotic critical mass. When that happens, they spontaneously reorganize themselves at a higher equilibrium level. It’s called self-organized criticality.”

We seemed well on the way to it. Management issued memos, the sheep got their heads stuck in the fence, the gate, and under the feed dispenser, and Flip came periodically to hang on the gate between the paddock and the lab, flip the latch monotonously up and down, and look lovesick.

By the third day it was obvious the sheep weren’t going to start any fads. Or learn how to push a button to get feed. Ben had set up the apparatus the morning after we got the sheep and demonstrated it several times, getting down on all fours and pressing his nose against the wide flat button. Feed pellets clattered down each time, and Ben stuck his head into the trough and made chewing noises. The sheep watched impassively.

“We’re going to have to force one of them to do it,” I said. We’d watched the videotapes from the day they arrived and seen how they’d gotten off the truck. The sheep had jostled and backed until one was finally pushed off onto the ramp. The others had immediately tumbled after it in a rush. “If we can teach one of them, we know the others will follow it.”

Ben went resignedly to get the halter. “Which one?”

“Not that one,” I said, pointing at the sheep that had thrown up. I looked at them, sizing them up for alertness and intelligence. There didn’t appear to be much. “That one, I guess.”

Ben nodded, and we started toward it with the halter. It chewed thoughtfully a moment and then bolted into the far corner. The entire flock followed, leaping over each other in their eagerness to reach the wall.

“ ‘And out of the houses the rats came tumbling,’ ” I murmured.

“Well, at least they’re all in one corner,” Ben said. “I should be able to get the halter on one of them.”

Nope, although he was able to grab a handful of wool and hold on nearly halfway across the paddock.

“I think you’re scaring them,” Flip said from the gate. She had been hanging on it half the morning, morosely flipping the latch up and down and telling us about Darrell the dentist.

“They’re scaring me,” Ben said, brushing off his corduroy pants, “so we’re even.”

“Maybe we should try coaxing them,” I said. I squatted down. “Come here,” I said in the childish voice people use with dogs. “Come on. I won’t hurt you.”

The sheep gazed at me from the corner, chewing impassively.

“What do shepherds do when they lead their flocks?” Ben asked.

I tried to remember from pictures. “I don’t know. They just walk ahead of them, and the sheep follow them.”

We tried that. We also tried sneaking up on both sides of a sheep and coming at the flock from the opposite side, on the off-chance they would run the other way and one of them would accidentally collide with the button.

“Maybe they don’t like those feed pellet things,” Flip said.

“She’s right, you know,” I said, and Ben stared at me in disbelief. “We need to know more about their eating habits and their abilities. I’ll call Billy Ray and see what they do like.”

I got Billy Ray’s voice mail. “Press one if you want the ranchhouse, press two if you want the barn, press three if you want the sheep camp.” Billy Ray wasn’t at any of the three. He was on his way to Casper.

I went back to the lab, told Bennett and Flip I was going to the library, and drove in.

Flip’s clone was at the desk, wearing a duct tape headband and an i brand.

“Do you have any books on sheep?” I asked her.

“How do you spell that?”

“With two e s.” She still looked blank. “ S. H.”

“The Sheik of Araby,” she read from the screen, “ Middle-Eastern Sheiks and —”

“Sheep,” I said. “With a p.”

“Oh.” She typed it in, backspacing several times. “ The Mystery of the Missing Sheep,” she read. “ Six Silly Sheep Go Shopping, The Black Sheep Syndrome…”

“Books about sheep,” I said. “How to raise them and train them.”

She rolled her eyes. “You didn’t say that.”

I finally managed to get a call number out of her and checked out Sheep Raising for Fun and Profit; Tales of an Australian Shepherd; Dorothy Sayers’s Nine Tailors, which I seemed to remember had some sheep in it; Sheep Management and Care; and, remembering Billy Ray’s sheep mange, Common Sheep Diseases, and took them up to be checked out.

“I show an overdue book for you,” she said. “ Complete Words by Robert Browning.”

“Works,” I said. “ Complete Works. We went through this last time. I checked it in.”

“I don’t show a return,” she said. “I show a fine of sixteen fifty. It shows you checked it out last March. Books can’t be checked out when outstanding fines exceed five dollars.”

“I checked the book in,” I said, and slapped down twenty dollars.

“Plus you have to pay the replacement cost of the book,” she said. “That’s fifty-five ninety-five.”

I know when I am licked. I wrote her a check and took the books back to Ben, and we started through them.

They were not encouraging. “In hot weather sheep will bunch together and smother to death,” Sheep Raising for Fun, Etc. said, and “Sheep occasionally roll over on their backs and aren’t able to right themselves.”

“Listen to this,” Ben said. “ ‘When frightened, sheep may run into trees or other obstacles.’ ”