Bellwether

by Connie Willis

  “What are we doing wrong?” Ben said.

  “That depends,” she said. “What are you trying to do?”

  “Well, eventually I want to teach a sheep to push a button to get feed,” he said. “For now I’d settle for getting a sheep on the same side of the paddock as the feed trough.”

  He had been holding on to the sheep and squeezing the whole time he’d been talking, but the sheep was apparently operating on some sort of delayed mechanism. It took two docile steps forward and began to buck.

  “Don’t let go of the chin,” I said, which was easier said than done. We both grabbed for the neck. I dropped the book and got a handful of wool. Ben got kicked in the arm. The sheep gave a mighty lunge and took off for the middle of the flock.

  “They do that,” Shirl said, blowing smoke. “Whenever they’ve been separated from the flock, they dive straight back into the middle of it. Group instinct reasserting itself. Thinking for itself is too frightening.”

  We both went over to the fence. “You know about sheep?” Ben said.

  She nodded, puffing on her cigarette. “I know they’re the orneriest, stubbornest, dumbest critters on the planet,”

  “We already figured that out,” Ben said.

  “How do you know about sheep?” I asked.

  “I was raised on a sheep ranch in Montana.”

  Ben gave a sigh of relief, and I said, “Can you tell us what to do? We can’t get these sheep to do anything.”

  She took a long drag on her cigarette. “You need a bellwether,” she said.

  “A bellwether?” Ben said. “What’s that? A special kind of halter?”

  She shook her head. “A leader.”

  “Like a sheepdog?” I said.

  “No. A dog can harry and guide and keep the sheep in line, but it can’t make them follow. A bellwether’s a sheep.”

  “A special breed?” Ben asked.

  “Nope. Same breed. Same sheep, only it’s got something that makes the rest of the flock follow it. Usually it’s an old ewe, and some people think it’s something to do with hormones; other people think it’s something in their looks. A teacher of mine said they’re born with some kind of leadership ability.”

  “Attention structure,” Ben said. “Dominant male monkeys have it.”

  “What do you think?” I said.

  “Me?” she said, looking at the smoke from her cigarette twisting upward. “I think a bellwether’s the same as any other sheep, only more so. A little hungrier, a little faster, a little greedier. It wants to get to the feed first, to shelter, to a mate, so it’s always out there in front.” She stopped to take a drag on her cigarette. “Not a lot. If it was a long way in front, the flock’d have to strike out on their own to follow, and that’d mean thinking for themselves. Just a little bit, so they don’t even know they’re being led. And the bellwether doesn’t know it’s leading.”

  She dropped her cigarette in the grass and stubbed it out. “If you teach a bellwether to push a button, the rest of the flock’ll do it, too.”

  “Where can we get one?” Ben said eagerly.

  “Where’d you get your sheep?” Shirl said. “The flock probably had one, and you just didn’t get it in this batch. These weren’t the whole flock, were they?”

  “No,” I said. “Billy Ray has two hundred head.”

  She nodded. “A flock that big almost always has a bellwether.”

  I looked at Ben. “I’ll call Billy Ray,” I said. “Good idea,” he said, but he seemed to have lost his enthusiasm.

  “What’s the matter?” I said. “Don’t you think a bellwether’s a good idea? Are you afraid it’ll interfere with your experiment?”

  “What experiment? No, no, it’s a good idea. Attention structure and its effect on learning rate is one of the variables I wanted to study. Go ahead and call him.”

  “Okay,” I said, and went into the lab. As I opened the door, the hall door slammed shut. I walked through the habitat and looked down the hall.

  Flip, wearing overalls and Cerenkhov-blue-and-white saddle oxfords, was just disappearing into the stairwell. She must have been bringing us the mail. I was surprised she hadn’t come out into the paddock and asked us if we thought she was captivating.

  I went back in the lab. She’d left the mail on Ben’s desk. Two packages for Dr. Ravenwood over in Physics, and a letter from Gina to Bell Laboratories.

  flower child weddings (1968—75)—–Rebellion fad made popular by people who didn’t want to totally rebel against tradition and not get married at all. Performed in a meadow or on a mountaintop, the ceremony featured, “Feelings,” played on a sitar and vows written by the participants with assistance from Kahlil Gibran. The bride generally wore flowers in her hair and no shoes. The groom wore a peace symbol and sideburns. Supplanted in the seventies by living together and lack of commitment.

  Billy Ray brought the bellwether down himself. “I put it down in the paddock,” he said when he came into the stats lab. “The gal down there said to just put it in with the rest of the flock.”

  He must mean Alicia. She’d spent all afternoon huddled with Ben, discussing the Niebnitz profile, which was why I’d come up to the stats lab to feed in twenties data. I wondered why Ben wasn’t there.

  “Pretty?” I said. “Corporate type? Wears a lot of pink?”

  “The bellwether?” he said.

  “No, the person you talked to. Dark hair? Clipboard?”

  “Nope,” he said. “Tattoo on her forehead.”

  “Brand,” I said absently. “Maybe we’d better go check on the bellwether.”

  “She’ll be fine,” he said. “I brought her down myself so I could take you to that dinner we missed out on last week.”

  “Oh, good,” I said. This would give me a chance to get some ideas of low-threshold skills we could teach the sheep. “I’ll get my coat.”

  “Great,” he said, beaming. “There’s this great new place I want to take you to.”

  “Prairie?” I said.

  “No, it’s a Siberian restaurant. Siberian is supposed to be the hot new cuisine.”

  I hoped he meant hot in the sense of warm. It was freezing outside in the parking lot, and there was a bitter wind. I was glad Shirl didn’t have to stand out there to have a cigarette.

  Billy Ray led me to his truck and helped me in. As he started to pull out of the parking lot, I put my hand on his arm. “Wait,” I said, remembering what Flip had done to my clippings. “Maybe we should check to make sure the bellwether’s all right before we leave. What did she say exactly? The girl who was down there in the lab. She wasn’t out in the paddock, was she?”

  “Nope,” he said. “I was looking for somebody to give the bellwether to, and she came in with some letters and said they were in Dr. Turnbull’s lab and to just leave the bellwether in the paddock, so I did. She’s fine. Got right off the truck and started grazing.”

  Which must mean she was really a bellwether. Things were looking up.

  “She wasn’t still there when you left, was she?” I said. “The girl, not the bellwether.”

  “Nope. She asked me whether I thought she had a good sense of humor, and when I said I didn’t know, I hadn’t heard her say anything funny, she kind of sighed and rolled her eyes and left.”

  “Good,” I said. It was five-thirty already. Flip wouldn’t have stayed a minute past five, and she usually left early, so the chances she would have come back to the lab to work mischief were practically nonexistent. And Ben was still there; he’d come back from Alicia’s lab to check on things before he went home. If he wasn’t too enamored of Alicia and the Niebnitz Grant to remember he had a flock of sheep.

  “This place is great,” Billy Ray said. “We’ll have to stand in line an hour to get in.”

  “Sounds great,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  It was actually an hour and twenty minutes, and during the last half hour the wind picked up and it started to snow. Billy Ray gave me his sheepskin-lined jacket to
put over my shoulders. He was wearing a band-collared shirt and cavalry pants. He’d let his hair grow out, and he had on yellow leather riding gloves. The Brad Pitt look. When I kept shivering, he let me wear the gloves, too.

  “You’ll love this place,” he said. “Siberian food is supposed to be great. I’m really glad we were able to get together. There’s something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about.”

  “I wanted to talk to you, too,” I said through stiff lips. “What kinds of tricks can you teach sheep?”

  “Tricks?” he said blankly. “Like what?”

  “You know, like learning to associate a color with a treat or running a maze. Preferably something with a low ability threshold and a number of skill levels.”

  “Teach sheep?” he repeated. There was a long pause while the wind howled around us. “They’re pretty good at getting out of fences they’re supposed to stay inside of.”

  That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’ll get on the Internet and see if anybody on there’s ever taught a sheep a trick.” He took off his hat, in spite of the snow, and turned it between his hands. “I told you I had something I wanted to talk to you about. I’ve had a lot of time to think lately, driving to Durango and everything, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the ranching life. It’s a lonely life, out there on the range all the time, never seeing anybody, never going anywhere.”

  Except to Lodge Grass and Lander and Durango, I thought.

  “And lately I’ve been wondering if it’s all worth it and what am I doing it for. And I’ve been thinking about you.”

  “Barbara Rose,” the Siberian waiter said.

  “That’s us,” I said. I gave Billy Ray his coat and gloves back, and he put his hat on, and we followed the waiter to our table. It had a samovar in the middle of it, and I warmed my hands over it.

  “I think I told you the other day I was feeling at loose ends and kind of dissatisfied,” he said after we had our menus.

  “Itch,” I said.

  “That’s a good word for it. I’ve been itchy, all right, and while I was driving back from Lodgepole I finally figured out what I was itching for.” He took my hand.

  “What?” I said.

  “You.”

  I yanked my hand back involuntarily, and he said, “Now, I know this is kind of a surprise to you. It was a surprise to me. I was driving through the Rockies, feeling out of sorts and like nothing mattered, and I thought, I’ll call Sandy, and after I got done talking to you, I got to thinking, Maybe we should get married.”

  “Married?” I squeaked.

  “Now I want to say right up front that whatever your answer is, you can have the sheep for as long as you want. No strings attached. And I know you’ve got a career that you don’t want to give up. I’ve got that figured out. We wouldn’t have to get married till after you’ve got this hair-bobbing thing done, and then we could set you up on the ranch with faxes and a modem and e-mail. You’d never even know you weren’t right there at HiTek.”

  Except Flip wouldn’t be there, I thought irrelevantly, or Alicia. And I wouldn’t have to go to meetings and do sensitivity exercises. But married!

  “Now, you don’t have to give me your answer right away,” Billy Ray went on. “Take all the time you want. I’ve had a couple of thousand miles to think about it. You can let me know after we have dessert. Till then, I’ll leave you alone.”

  He picked up a red menu with a large Russian bear on it and began reading through it, and I sat and stared at him, trying to take this in. Married. He wanted me to marry him.

  And, well, why not? He was a nice guy who was willing to drive hundreds of miles to see me, and I was, as I had told Alicia, thirty-one, and where was I going to meet anybody else? In the personals, with their athletic, caring NSs who weren’t even willing to walk across the street to date somebody?

  Billy Ray had been willing to drive all the way down from someplace on the off chance of taking me to dinner. And he’d loaned me a flock of sheep and a bellwether. And his gloves. Where was I going to meet anybody that nice? Nobody at HiTek was going to propose to me, that was for sure.

  “What do you want?” Billy Ray asked me. “I think I’m going to have the potato dumplings.”

  I had borscht flavored with basil (which I hadn’t remembered as being big in Siberian cuisine) and potato dumplings and tried to think. What did I want?

  To find out where hair-bobbing came from, I thought, and knew that was about as likely as winning the Niebnitz Grant. In spite of Feynman’s theory that working in a totally different field sparked scientific discovery, I was no closer to finding the source of fads than before. Maybe what I needed was to get away from HiTek altogether, out in the fresh air, on an isolated Wyoming ranch.

  “Far from the madding crowd,” I murmured.

  “What?” Billy Ray said.

  “Nothing,” I said, and he went back to his dinner.

  I watched him eat his dumplings. He really did look a little like Brad Pitt. He was awfully trendy, but maybe that would be an advantage for my project, and we wouldn’t have to get married right away. He’d said I could wait until after I finished the project. And, unlike Flip’s dentist, he wouldn’t mind my being geographically incompatible while I worked on it.

  Flip and her dentist, I thought, wondering uneasily if this was just another fad. That article had said marriage was in, and all the little girls were crazy for Romantic Bride Barbie. Lindsay’s mother was thinking of getting married again in spite of that jerk Matt, Sarah was trying to talk Ted into proposing, and Bennett was letting Alicia pick out his ties. What if they were all part of a commitment fad?

  I was being unfair to Billy Ray. He was in love with what was trendy, he might even stand in Une 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 non-smokers (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.