Connie Willis - Bellwether

Which, if the stack of papers Flip was holding in her duct-taped arms as she passed among the crowd was any indication, were longer than the old funding application forms, and they were thirty-two pages.

“While the interdepartmental assistant’s distributing the forms, I want to hear your input. What else can we do to make HiTek a better place?”

Eliminate staff meetings, I thought, but didn’t say it. I may not be as well versed as Gina is in Meeting Survival, but I do know enough not to raise my hand. All it does is get you put on a committee.

Apparently everybody else knew it, too.

“Staff Input is the cornerstone of HiTek,” he said.

Still nothing.

“Anybody?” Management said, looking GRIM. He brightened. “Ah, at last, someone who’s not afraid to stand out in a crowd.”

Everybody turned to look.

It was Flip. “The interdepartmental assistant has way too many duties,” she said, flipping her hank of hair.

“You see,” Management said, pointing at her. “That’s the kind of problem-solving attitude that GRIM is all about. What solution do you suggest?”

“A different job title,” Flip said. “And an assistant.”

I looked across the room at Dr. O’Reilly. He had his head in his hands.

“Okay. Other ideas?”

Forty hands shot up. I looked at the waving hands and thought about the Pied Piper and his rats. And about hair-bobbing. Most hair fads are a clear case of follow-the-Piper. Bo Derek, Dorothy Hamill, Jackie Kennedy, had all started hairstyle fads, and they were by no means the first. Madame de Pompadour had been responsible for those enormous powdered wigs with sailing ships and famous artillery battles in them, and Veronica Lake for millions of American women being unable to see out of one eye.

So it was logical that hair-bobbing had been started by somebody, only who? Isadora Duncan had bobbed her hair in the early 1900s, and several suffragettes had bobbed theirs (and put on men’s clothes) long before that, but neither had attracted any followers to speak of.

The suffragettes were obviously ahead of their time (and rather fearsomely formidable). Isadora, who leaped around the stage in skimpy chiffon tunics and bare feet, was too weird.

The obvious person was the ballroom dancer Irene Castle. She and her husband, Vernon (more miserable little boys), had set several dancing trends: the one-step, the hesitation waltz, the tango, the turkey trot, and, of course, the Castle Walk.

Irene was pretty, and almost everything she wore had become a fad, from white satin shoes to little Dutch caps. In 1913, at the height of their popularity, she’d had her hair cut short while she was in the hospital after an appendectomy, and she’d kept it short after she got better and had worn it with a wide band that clearly foreshadowed the flappers.

She was a known fashion-setter, and she’d definitely had followers. But if she was the source, why had it taken so long to catch on? When Bo Derek’s corn-rowed hair hit movie screens in 1979, it was only a week before corn-rowed women started showing up everywhere. If Irene was the source, why hadn’t hair-bobbing become a fad in 1913? Why had it waited for nine years and a world war to become a fad?

Maybe the movies were the key. No, Mary Pickford hadn’t cut off her long curls until 1928. Had Irene and Vernon Castle done a silent film in, say, 1921?

Management was still calling on waving hands.

“I think we should have an espresso cart in the building,” Dr. Apple-gate said.

“I think we should have a workout room,” Elaine said.

“And some more stairs.”

This could go on all day, and I wanted to check and see what movies had come out in 1922. I stood up, as unobtrusively as possible, snatched a form from Flip, who had skipped our table, and ducked out the back, leafing through the form to see how long it was.

Wonder of wonders, it was actually shorter than the original. Only twenty-two pages. And the type was only slightly smaller than—I crashed into someone and looked up.

It was Dr. O’Reilly, who must have been doing the same thing. “Sorry,” he said. “I was thinking about this funding reapplication thing.” He raised both hands, still holding the funding form in the right one, and faced his palms out. “Tell your partner three things you don’t like about Management.”

“Can it be more than three?” I said. “I suppose this means you won’t get your macaques right away, Dr. O’Reilly.”

“Call me Bennett,” he said. “Flip’s the only one with a title. I was supposed to get them this week. Now I’ll have to wait till the twentieth. How about you? Does this affect your Hula Hoop project?”

“Hair-bobbing,” I said. “The only effect is that I won’t have any time to work on it because I’ll be filling out this stupid form. I wish Management would find something to think about besides making up new forms.”

“Shh,” someone said fiercely from the door.

We moved farther down the hall, out of range.

“Paperwork is the cornerstone of Management,” Bennett whispered. “They think reducing everything to forms is the key to scientific discovery. Unfortunately science doesn’t work that way. Look at Newton. Look at Archimedes.”

“Management would never have approved the funding for an orchard,” I agreed, “or a bathtub.”

“Or a river,” Bennett said. “Which is why we lost our chaos theory funding and I had to come to work for GRIM.”

“What were you working on?” I asked.

“The Loue. It’s a river in France. It has its source in a grotto, which means it’s a small, contained system with a comparatively limited number of variables. The systems scientists have tried to study before were huge—weather, the human body, rivers. They had thousands, even millions of variables, which made them impossible to predict, so we found…”

Up close his tie was even more nondescript than from a distance. It appeared to have some sort of pattern, though what exactly I couldn’t make out. Not paisley (which had been popular in 1988), or polka dots (1970). It wasn’t a nonpattern either.

“…and measured the air temperature, water temperature, dimensions of the grotto, makeup of the water, plant life along the banks—” he said and stopped. “You’re probably busy and don’t have time to listen to all this.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I’ve got to go back to my office, but I’ll walk you as far as the stairs.”

“Okay, well, so my idea was that by precisely measuring every factor in a chaotic system, I could isolate the causes of chaos.”

“Flip,” I said. “The cause of chaos.”

He laughed. “The other causes of chaos. I know talking about the causes of chaos sounds like a contradiction in terms, since chaotic systems are supposed to be systems where ordinary cause and effect break down. They’re nonlinear, which means there are so many factors, operating in such an interconnected way, that they’re impossible to predict.”

Like fads, I thought.

“But there are laws governing them. We’ve mathematically defined some of them: entropy, interior instabilities, and iteration, which is—”

“The butterfly effect,” I said.

“Right. A tiny variable feeds back into the system and then the feedback feeds back, until it influences the system all out of proportion to its size.”

I nodded. “A butterfly flapping its wings in L.A. can cause a typhoon in Hong Kong. Or an all-staff meeting at HiTek.”

He looked delighted. “You know something about chaos?”

“Only from personal experience,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, “it does seem to be the order of the day around here. Well, so, anyway, my project was to calculate the effects of iteration and entropy and see if they accounted for chaos or if there was another factor involved.”