Connie Willis - Bellwether

I was being unfair to Billy Ray. He was in love with what was trendy, he might even stand in line in a blizzard for an hour and a half, but he wouldn’t marry someone because marriage was in. And what if it was a trend? Fads aren’t all bad. Look at recycling and the civil rights movement. And the waltz. And, anyway, what was wrong with going along with a trend once in a while?

“Time for dessert,” Billy Ray said, looking at me from under the brim of his hat.

He motioned the waitress over, and she rattled off the usual suspects: crème brûlée, tiramisu, bread pudding.

“No chocolate cheesecake?” I said.

She rolled her eyes.

“What do you want?” Billy Ray said.

“Give me a minute,” I said, breathing hard. “You go ahead.”

Billy Ray smiled at the waitress. “I’ll have the bread pudding,” he said.

“Bread pudding?” I said.

The waitress said helpfully, “It’s our most popular dessert.”

“I thought you didn’t like bread pudding,” I said.

He looked up blankly. “When did I say that?”

“At that prairie cuisine place you took me to. The Kansas Rose. You had the tiramisu.”

“Nobody eats tiramisu anymore,” he said. “I love bread pudding.”

Virtual pets [fall 1994–spring 1996]

Japanese computer game fad featuring a programmed pet. The puppy or kitten grows when fed and played with, learns tricks (the dogs, presumably, not the cats), and runs away if neglected. Caused by the Japanese love of animals and an overpopulation problem that makes having pets impractical.

Ben met me in the parking lot the next morning. “Where’s the bellwether?” he said.

“Isn’t it in with the other sheep?” I scrambled out of the car. I knew I shouldn’t have trusted Flip. “Billy Ray said he put it in the paddock.”

“Well, if it’s there, it looks just like all the other sheep.”

He was right. It did. We did a quick count, and there was one more than usual, but which one was the bellwether was anybody’s guess. “What did it look like when your friend put it in the paddock?”

“I wasn’t down here,” I said, looking at the sheep, trying to detect one that looked different. “I knew I should have come down to check on it, but we were going out to dinner and—”

“Yeah,” he said, cutting me off. “We’d better find Shirl.”

Shirl was nowhere to be found. I looked in the copy room and in Supply, where Desiderata was examining her split ends, which were lying on the counter in front of her.

“What happened to you, Desiderata?” I said, looking at her hacked-off hair.

“I couldn’t get the duct tape off,” she said forlornly, holding up one of the still-wrapped hair strands. “It was worse than the rubber cement that time.”

I winced. “Have you seen Shirl?”

“She’s probably off smoking somewhere,” she said disapprovingly. “Do you know how bad second-secondhand smoke is for you?”

“Almost as bad as duct tape,” I said, and went down to Alicia’s lab in case Shirl was feeding in stats for her.

She wasn’t, but Alicia, wearing a po-mo pink silk blouse and palazzo pants, was. “ None of the Niebnitz Grant winners was a smoker,” she said when I asked her if she’d seen Shirl.

I thought about explaining that, given the percentage of nonsmokers in the general population and the tiny number of Niebnitz Grant recipients, the likelihood of their being nonsmokers (or anything else) was statistically insignificant, but the bellwether was still unidentified.

“Do you know where Shirl might be?” I said.

“I sent her up to Management with a report,” she said.

But she wasn’t there either. I went back down to the lab. Bennett hadn’t found her either. “We’re on our own,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “It’s a bellwether, so it’s a leader. So we put out some hay and see what happens.”

We did.

Nothing happened. The sheep near Ben scattered when he forked the hay in and then went on grazing. One of them wandered over to the water trough and got its head stuck between it and the wall and stood there bleating.

“Maybe he brought the wrong sheep,” Ben said.

“Do you have the videotapes from last night?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said and brightened. “Your friend’s bringing the bellwether will be on it.”

It was. Billy Ray let down the back of the truck, and the bellwether trotted meekly down the ramp and into the midst of the flock, and it was a simple matter of following its progress frame by frame right up to the present moment.

Or it would have been, if Flip hadn’t gotten in the way. She completely blocked the view of the flock for at least ten minutes, and when she finally moved off to the side, the flock was in a completely different configuration.

“She wanted to know if Billy Ray thought she had a sense of humor,” I said.

“Of course,” Ben said. “What now?”

“Back it up,” I said. “And freeze-frame it just before the bellwether gets off the truck. Maybe it’s got some distinguishing characteristics.”

He rewound, and we stared at the frame. The bellwether looked exactly the same as the other ewes. If she had any distinguishing characteristics, they were visible only to sheep.

“It looks a little cross-eyed,” Ben said finally, pointing at the screen. “See?”

We spent the next half hour working our way through the flock, taking ewes by the chin and looking into their eyes. They were all a little cross-eyed and so vacant-looking they should have had an i stamped on their long, dirty-white foreheads for impenetrable.

“There’s got to be a better way to do this,” I said after a deceptively scrawny ewe had mashed me against the fence and nearly broken both my legs. “Let’s try the videotapes again.”

“Last night’s?”

“No, this morning’s. And keep a tape running. I’ll be right back.”

I ran up to the stats lab, keeping an eye out for Shirl on the way, but there was no sign of her. I grabbed the disk my vector programs were on and then started rummaging through my fad collection.

It had occurred to me on the way upstairs that if we did manage to identify the bellwether, we needed something to mark it with. I pulled out the length of po-mo pink ribbon I’d bought in Boulder and ran back down to the lab.

The sheep were gathered around the hay, chewing steadily on it with their large square teeth. “Did you see who led them to it?” I asked Ben.

He shook his head. “They all just seemed to gravitate toward it at once. Look.” He switched on the videotape and showed me.

He was right. On the monitor, the sheep wandered aimlessly through the paddock, stopping to graze with every other step, paying no attention to each other or the hay, until, apparently by accident, they were all standing with their forefeet in the hay, taking casual mouthfuls.

“Okay,” I said, sitting down at the computer. “Hook the tape in, and I’ll see if I can isolate the bellwether. You’re still taping?”

He nodded. “Continuous and backup.”

“Good,” I said. I rewound to ten frames before Ben had forked out the hay, froze the frame, and made a diagram of it, assigning a different colored point to each of the sheep, and did the same thing for the next twenty frames to establish a vector. Then I started experimenting to see how many frames I could skip without losing track of which sheep was which.

Forty. They grazed for a little over two minutes and then took an average of three steps before they stopped and ate some more. I started through at forty, lost track of three sheep within two tries, cut back to thirty, and worked my way forward.