Bellwether

by Connie Willis

  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.

  When I had ten points for every sheep, I fed in an analysis program to calculate proximities and mean direction, and continued plotting vectors.

  On the screen the movement was still random, determined by length of grass or wind direction or whatever it was in their tiny little thought processes that makes sheep move one way or the other.

  There was one vector headed toward the hay, and I isolated it and traced it through the next hundred frames, but it was only a matted ewe determined to wedge itself into a corner. I went back to tracing all the vectors.

  Still nothing on the screen, but in the numbers above it, a pattern started to emerge. Cerulean blue. I followed it forward, unconvinced. The sheep looked like she was grazing in a rough circle, but the proximities showed her moving erratically but steadily toward the hay.

  I isolated her vector and watched her on the videotape. She looked completely ordinary and totally unaware of the hay. She walked a couple of steps, grazed, walked another step, turning slightly, grazed again, ending up always a little closer to the hay, and from halfway through the frames, the regression showed the rest of the flock following her.

  I wanted to be sure. “Ben,” I said. “Cover up the water trough and put a pan of water in the back gate. Wait, let me hook this up to the tape so I can trace it as it happens. Okay,” I said after a minute. “Walk along the side so you don’t block the camera.”

  I watched on the monitor as he maneuvered a sheet of plywood onto the trough, carried a pan out, and filled it with the hose, watching the sheep sharply to see if any of them noticed.

  They didn’t.

  They stayed right by the hay. There was a brief flutter of activity as Ben carried the hose back and lifted the latch on the gate, and then the sheep went back to business as usual.

  I tracked cerulean blue in real time, watching the numbers. “I’ve got her,” I said to Bennett.

  He came and looked over my shoulder. “Are you sure? She doesn’t look too bright.”

  “If she was, the others wouldn’t follow her,” I said.

  “I looked for you upstairs,” Flip said, “but you weren’t there.”

  “We’re busy, Flip,” I said without taking my eyes off the screen.

  “I’ll get the slip halter and a collar,” Ben said. “You direct me.”

  “It’ll just take a minute,” Flip said. “I want you to look at something.”

  “It’ll have to wait,” I said, my eyes still fixed on the screen. After a minute, Ben appeared in the picture, holding the collar and halter.

  “Which one?” he shouted.

  “Go left,” I shouted back. “Three, no four sheep. Okay. Now toward the west wall.”

  “This is about Darrell, isn’t it?” Flip said. “He was in a newspaper. Anybody who read it had a right to answer it.”

  “Left one more,” I shouted. “No, not that one. The one in front of it. Okay, now, don’t scare it. Put your hand on its hindquarters.”

  “Besides,” Flip said, “it said ‘sophisticated and elegant’ Scientists aren’t elegant, except Dr. Turnbull.”

  “Careful,” I shouted. “Don’t spook it” I started out to help him.

  Flip blocked my way. “All I want is for you to look at something. It’ll only take a minute.”

  “Hurry,” Ben called. “I can’t hold her.”

  “I don’t have a minute,” I said and brushed past Flip, praying that Ben hadn’t lost the bellwether. He still had her, but just barely. He was hanging on to her tail with both hands, and was still holding the halter and the collar. There was no way he could let go to give them to me. I pulled the ribbon out of my pocket, wrapped it around the bellwether’s straining neck, and tied it in a knot. “Okay,” I said, spreading my feet apart, “you can let go.”

  The rebound nearly knocked me down, and the bellwether immediately began pulling away from me and the not-nearly-strong-enough ribbon, but Ben was already slipping the halter on.

  He handed it to me to hold and got the collar on, just as the ribbon gave way with a loud rip. He grabbed on to the halter, and we both held on like two kids flying a wayward kite. “The … collar’s … on,” he said, panting.

  But you couldn’t see it. It was completely swallowed up in the bellwether’s thick wool. “Hold her a minute,” I said, and looped what was left of the ribbon under the collar. “Hold still,” I said, tying it in a big, floppy bow. “Po-mo pink is the color for fall.” I adjusted the ends. “There, you’re the height of fashion.”

  Apparently she agreed. She stopped struggling and stood still. Ben knelt beside me and took the halter off. “We make a great team,” he said, grinning at me.

  “We do,” I said.

  “Well,” Flip said from the gate. She clicked the latch up and down. “Do you have a minute now?”

  Ben rolled his eyes.

  “Yes,” I said, laughing. I stood up. “I have a minute. What is it you
wanted me to look at?”

  But it was obvious, now that I looked at her. She had dyed her hair—hank, hair wraps, even the fuzz of her shaved skull—a brilliant, bilious Cerenkhov blue.

  “Well?” Flip said. “Do you think he’ll like it?”

  “I don’t know, Flip,” I said. “Dentists tend to be kind of conservative.”

  “I know,” she said, rolling her eyes. “That’s why I dyed it blue. Blue’s a conservative color.” She tossed her blue hank. “You’re no help,” she said, and stomped out.

  I turned back to Ben and the bellwether, who was still standing perfectly still. “What next?”

  Ben squatted next to the bellwether and took her chin in his hand. “We’re going to teach you low-threshold skills,” he said, “and you’re going to teach your friends. Got it?”

  The bellwether chewed thoughtfully.

  “What would you suggest, Dr. Foster? Scrabble, Ping-Pong?” He turned back to the bellwether. “How’d you like to start a chain letter?”

  “I think we’d better stick to pushing a button to open a feed trough,” I said. “As you say, she doesn’t look too bright.”

  He turned her head to one side and then the other, frowning. “She looks like Flip.” He grinned at me. “All right, Trivial Pursuit it is. But first, I’ve got to go get some peanut butter. Sheep Management and Care says sheep love peanut butter,” and left.

  I tied a double knot in the bellwether’s bow and then leaned on the gate and watched them. Their movements looked as random and directionless as ever. They grazed and took a step and grazed again, and so did she, indistinguishable from the rest of them except for her pallid pink bow, unnoticed and unnoticing. And leading.

  She tore a piece of grass, chewed on it, took two steps, and stared blankly into space for a long minute, thinking about what? Having her nose pierced? The hot new exercise fad for fall?

  “Here you are,” Shirl said, carrying a stack of papers and looking irate. “You’re not engaged to that Billy Ray person, are you? Because if you are, that changes my entire—” She stopped. “Well, are you?”

  “No,” I said. “Who told you I was?”

  “Flip,” she said disgustedly. She set down the papers and lit a cigarette. “She told Sarah you were getting married and moving to Nevada.”

  “Wyoming,” I said, “but I’m not.”

  “Good,” Shirl said, taking an emphatic drag on the cigarette. “You’re a very talented scientist with a very bright future. With your ability, good things are going to happen to you very shortly, and you have no business throwing it all away.”

  “I’m not,” I said, and made an effort to change the subject. “Did you want to see me about something?”

  “Yes,” she said, gesturing toward the paddock. “When the bellwether gets here, be sure you mark it before you put it in with the other sheep so you can tell which one it is. And there’s an all-staff meeting tomorrow.” She picked up the memos and handed one to me. “Two o’clock.”

  “Not another meeting,” I said.

  She stubbed out her cigarette and left, and I went back to leaning on the fence, watching the sheep. They were grazing peacefully, the bellwether in the middle of them, indistinguishable except for her pink bow.

  I should move the feeding trough out to the paddock and check the circuits, so it’d be ready when Ben got back, I thought, but I went back in to the computer, traced vectors for a while, and then sat and looked at the screen, watching them move, watching the bellwether move among them, and thinking about Robert Browning and bobbed hair.

  mood rings (1975)—–Jewelry fad consisting of a ring set with a large “stone” that was actually a temperature-sensitive liquid crystal. Mood rings supposedly reflected the wearer’s mood and revealed his or her thoughts. Blue meant tranquillity; red meant crabbiness; black meant depression and doom. Since the ring actually responded to temperature, and after a while not even that, no one achieved the ideal “bliss” purple without a high fever, and everyone eventually sank into gloom and despair as their rings went permanently black. Superseded by Pet Rocks, which didn’t respond to anything.

  The bellwether could definitely make the flock do what she wanted. Getting the bellwether to do what we wanted her to do was another matter. She watched as we smeared peanut butter on the button she was supposed to push and then led the entire flock into a smothering jam-up in the back corner.

  We tried again. Ben coaxed her with a rotten apple, which Sheep Raising for Fun and Profit had sworn they liked, and she trotted after him over to the trough. “Good girl,” he said, and bent over to give her the apple, and she butted him smartly in the stomach and knocked the wind out of him.

  We tried decayed lettuce next and then fresh broccoli, neither of which produced any results—“At least it didn’t butt you,” I said—and then gave up for the night.

  When I got to work the next morning with a bag full of cabbage and kiwi fruit (Tales of an Australian Shepherd), Ben was smearing molasses on the button.

  “Well, there’s definitely been information diffusion,” he said. “Three other sheep have already butted me this morning.”

  We led the bellwether over to the trough using the chin-rump-halter method and a squirt gun, which Sheep Management and Care had suggested. “It’s supposed to keep them from butting.”

  It didn’t.

  I helped him up. “Tales of an Australian Shepherd said only the rams butt, not the ewes.” I dusted him off. “It’s enough to make you lose faith in literature.”

  “No,” he said, holding his stomach. “The poet had it right. ‘The sheep is a perilous beast.’”

  On the fifth try we got her to lick the molasses. Pellets obligingly chattered into the trough. The bellwether gazed interestedly at it for a long minute, during which Ben looked at me and crossed his fingers, and then she bucked, catching me smartly on both ankles and making me let go of the halter. She dived headlong into the flock, scattering it wildly. One of the ewes ran straight into Ben’s leg.

  “Look on the bright side,” I said, nursing my ankles. “There’s an all-staff meeting at two o’clock.”

  Ben limped over and retrieved the halter, which had come off. “They’re supposed to like peanuts.”

  The bellwether didn’t like peanuts, or celery or hat-stomping. She did, however, like bolting and backing and trying to shake her collar off. At a quarter to one Ben looked at his watch and said, “Almost time for the meeting,” and I didn’t even contradict him.

  I limped to the stats lab, washed off what lanolin and dirt I could and went up to the meeting, hoping Management would think I was making a sterling effort to dress down.

  Sarah met me at the door of the cafeteria. “Isn’t it exciting?” she said, sticking her left hand in my face. “Ted asked me to marry him!”

  Commitment-Aversion Ted? I thought. The one who had severe intimacy issues and a naughty inner child?

  “We went ice-climbing, and he hammered his piton in and said, ‘Here, I know you’ve been wanting this,’ and handed a ring to me. I didn’t even make him. It was so romantic!

  “Gina, look!” she said, charging toward her next victim. “Isn’t it exciting?”

  I went on into the cafeteria. Management was standing at the front of the room next to Flip. He was wearing jeans with a crease in them. She was wearing Cerenkhov blue toreador pants and a slouch hat that was pulled down over her ears. They were both wearing T-shirts with the letters SHAM across the front.

  “Oh, no,” I murmured, wondering what this would mean to our project, “not another acronym.”

  “Systemized Hierarchical Advancement Management,” Ben said, sliding into the chair next to me. “It’s the management style nine percent of the companies whose scientists won the Niebnitz Grant were using.”

  “Which translates to how many?”

  “One. And they’d only been using it three days.”

  “Does this mean we’ll have to reapply for funding for our project?”<
br />
  He shook his head. “I asked Shirl. They don’t have the new funding forms printed yet.”

  “We’ve got a lot on the agenda today,” Management boomed, “so let’s get started. First, there’ve been some problems with Supply, and to rectify that we’ve instituted a new streamlined procurement form. The workplace message facilitation director”—he nodded at Flip, who was holding a massive stack of binders—“will pass those out.”

  “The workplace message facilitation director?” I muttered.

  “Just be glad they didn’t make her a vice president.”

  “Secondly,” Management said, “I’ve got some excellent news to share with you regarding the Niebnitz Grant. Dr. Alicia Turnbull has been working with us on a game plan that we’re going to implement today. But first I want all of you to choose a partner—”

  Ben grabbed my hand.

  “—and stand facing each other.”

  We stood and I put my hands up, palms facing out. “If we have to say three things we like about sheep, I’m quitting.”

  “All right, HiTekkers,” Management said, “now I want you to give your partners a big hug.”

  “The next big trend at HiTek will be sexual harassment,” I said lightly, and Ben took me in his arms.

  “Come on, now,” Management said. “Not everybody’s participating. Big hug.”

  Ben’s arms in the faded plaid sleeves pulled me close, enfolded me. My hands, caught up in that palms-out silliness, went around his neck. My heart began to pound.

  “A hug says, ‘Thank you for working with me,’” Management said. “A hug says, ‘I appreciate your personness.’”

  My cheek was against Ben’s ear. He smelled faintly of sheep. I could feel bis heart pounding, the warmth of his breath on my neck. My breath caught, like a hiccuping engine, and stalled.

  “All right now, HiTekkers,” Management said. “I want you to look at your partner—still hugging, don’t let go—and tell him or her how much he or she means to you.”