Connie Willis - Bellweather.pdf - Connie Willis - margozap

Bellwether

Connie Willis

To John

From Abigail

"Yours—yours—yours—"

acknowledgment

Special thanks to the girls at Margie's Java Joint, who make the best caffè latte and conversation in the world, and

without whom I wouldn't have made it through the last months of this novel!

beginning

Brothers, sisters, husbands, wives—

Followed the Piper for their lives.

From street to street he piped advancing,

And step by step they followed dancing.

robert browning

hula hoop [march 1958-june 1959]

The prototype for all merchandising fads and one whose phenomenal success has never been repeated. Originally a

wooden exercise hoop used in Australian gym classes, the Hula Hoop was redesigned in gaudy plastic by Wham-O and sold

for $1.98 to adults and kids alike. Nuns, Red Skelton, geishas, Jane Russell, and the Queen of Jordan rotated them on their

hips, and lesser beings dislocated hips, sprained necks, and slipped disks. Russia and China banned them as "capitalist," a

team of Belgian explorers took twenty of them along to the South Pole (to give the penguins?), and over fifty million were

sold worldwide. Died out as quickly as it had spread.

It's almost impossible to pinpoint the beginning of a fad. By the time it starts to look like one, its origins are far in the

past, and trying to trace them back is exponentially harder than, say, looking for the source of the Nile.

In the first place, there's probably more than one source, and in the second, you're dealing with human behavior. All

Speke and Burton had to deal with were crocodiles, rapids, and the tsetse fly. In the third, we know something about how

rivers work, like, they flow downhill. Fads seem to spring full-blown out of nowhere and for no good reason. Witness

bungee-jumping. And Lava lamps.

Scientific discoveries are the same way. People like to think of science as rational and reasonable, following step by

step from hypothesis to experiment to conclusion. Dr. Chin, last year's winner of the Niebnitz Grant, wrote, "The process of

scientific discovery is the logical extension of observation by experimentation."

Nothing could be further from the truth. The process is exactly like any other human endeavor—messy, haphazard,

misdirected, and heavily influenced by chance. Look at Alexander Fleming who discovered penicillin when a spore drifted in

the window of his lab and contaminated one of his cultures.

Or Roentgen. He was working with a cathode-ray tube surrounded by sheets of black cardboard when he caught a

glimpse of light from the other side of his lab. A sheet of paper coated with barium platinocyanide was fluorescing, even

though it was shut off from the tube. Curious, he stuck his hand between the tube and the screen. And saw the shadow of the

bones of his hand.

Look at Galvani, who was studying the nervous systems of frogs when he discovered electrical currents. Or Messier.

He wasn't looking for galaxies when he discovered them. He was looking for comets. He only mapped them because he was

trying to get rid of a nuisance.

None of which makes Dr. Chin any the less deserving of the Niebnitz Grant's million-dollar endowment. It isn't

necessary to understand how something works to do it. Take driving. And starting fads. And falling in love.

What was I talking about? Oh, yes, how scientific discoveries come about. Usually the chain of events leading up to

them, like that leading up to a fad, follows a course too convoluted and chaotic to follow. But I know exactly where one

started and who started it.

It was in October. Monday the second. Nine o'clock in the morning. I was in the stats lab at HiTek, struggling with a

box of clippings on hair-bobbing. I'm Sandra Foster, by the way, and I work in R&D at HiTek. I had spent all weekend

going through yellowed newspapers and 1920s copies of The Saturday Evening Post and The Delineator, trudging

upstream to the beginnings of the fad of hair-bobbing, looking for what had caused every woman in America to suddenly

chop off her "crowning glory," despite social pressure, threatening sermons, and four thousand years of long hair.

I had clipped endless news items; highlighted references, magazine articles, and advertisements; dated them; and

organized them into categories. Flip had stolen my stapler, I had run out of paper clips, and Desiderata hadn't been able to

find any more, so I had had to settle for stacking them, in order, in the box, which I was now trying to maneuver into my lab.

The box was heavy and had been made by the same people who manufacture paper sacks for the supermarket, so

when I'd dumped it just outside the lab so I could unlock the door, it had developed a major rip down one side. I was

half-wrestling, half-dragging it over next to one of the lab tables so I could lift the stacks of clippings out when the whole side

started to give way.

An avalanche of magazine pages and newspaper stories began to spill out through the side before I could get it pushed

back in place, and I grabbed for them and the box as Flip opened the door and slouched in, looking disgusted. She was

wearing black lipstick, a black halter, and a black leather micro-skirt and was carrying a box about the size of mine.

"I'm not supposed to have to deliver packages," she said. "You're supposed to pick them up in the mail room."

"I didn't know I had a package," I said, trying to hold the box together with one hand and reach a roll of duct tape in

the middle of the lab table with the other. "Just set it down anywhere."

She rolled her eyes. "You're supposed to get a notice saying you have a package."

Yes, well, and you were probably supposed to deliver it, I thought, which explains why I never got it. "Could you reach

me that duct tape?" I said.

"Employees aren't supposed to ask interdepartmental assistants to run personal errands or make coffee," Flip said.

"Handing me a roll of tape is not a personal errand," I said.

Flip sighed. "I'm supposed to be delivering the interdepartmental mail." She tossed her hair. She had shaved her head

the week before but had left a long hank along the front and down one side expressly for flipping when she feels put-upon.

Flip is my punishment for having tried to get her predecessor, Desiderata, fired. Desiderata was mindless, clueless, and

completely without initiative. She misdelivered the mail, wrote down messages wrong, and spent all her free time examining

her split ends. After two months and a wrong phone call that cost me a government grant, I went to Management and

demanded she be fired and somebody, anybody else be hired, on the grounds that nobody could possibly be worse than

Desiderata. I was wrong.

Management moved Desiderata to Supply (nobody ever gets fired at HiTek except scientists and even we don't get

pink slips. Our projects just get canceled for lack of funding) and hired Flip, who has a nose ring, a tattoo of a snowy owl,

and the habit of sighing and rolling her eyes when you ask her to do anything at all. I am afraid to get her fired. There is no

telling who they might hire next.

Flip sighed loudly. "This package is really heavy."

"Then set it down," I said, stretching to reach the tape. It was just out of reach. I inched the hand holding the side of the

box shut higher and leaned farther across the lab table. My fingertips just touched the tape.

"It's breakable," Flip said, coming over to me, and dropped the box. I grabbed to catch it with both hands. It thunked

down on the table, the side gave way on my box, and the clippings poured out of the box and across the floor.

"Next time you're going to have to pick it up yourself," Flip said, walking on the clippings toward the door.

I shook the box, listening for broken sounds. There weren't any, and when I looked at the top, it didn't say FRAGILE

anywhere. It said PERISHABLE. It also said DR. ALICIA TURNBULL.

"This isn't mine," I said, but Flip was already out the door. I waded through a sea of clippings and called to her. "This

isn't my package. It's for Dr. Turnbull in Bio."

She sighed.

"You need to take this to Dr. Turnbull."

She rolled her eyes. "I have to deliver the rest of the interdepartmental mail first," she said, tossing her hank of hair.

She slouched on down the hall, dropping two pieces of said departmental mail as she went.

"Make sure you come back and get it as soon as you're done with the mail," I shouted after her down the hall. "It's

perishable," I shouted, and then, remembering that illiteracy is a hot trend these days and perishable is a four-syllable word,

"That means it'll spoil."

Her shaved head didn't even turn, but one of the doors halfway down the hall opened, and Gina leaned out. "What did

she do now?" she asked.

"Duct tape now qualifies as a personal errand," I said.

Gina came down the hall. "Did you get one of these?" she said, handing me a blue flyer. It was a meeting

announcement. Wednesday. Cafeteria. All HiTek staff, including R&D. "Flip was supposed to deliver one to every office,"

she said.

"What's the meeting about?"

"Management went to another seminar," she said. "Which means a sensitivity exercise, a new acronym, and more

paperwork for us. I think I'll call in sick. Brittany's birthday's in two weeks, and I need to get the party decorations. What's in

these days in birthday parties? Circus? Wild West?"

"Power Rangers," I said. "Do you think they might reorganize the departments?" The last seminar Management had

gone to, they'd created Flip's job as part of CRAM (Communications Reform Activation Management). Maybe this time

they'd eliminate interdepartmental assistants, and I could go back to making my own copies, delivering my own messages,

and fetching my own mail. All of which I was doing now.

"I hate the Power Rangers," Gina said. "Explain to me how they ever got to be so popular."

She went back to her lab, and I went back to work on my bobbed hair. It was easy to see how it had become

popular. No long hair to put up with combs and pins and pompadour puffs, no having to wash it and wait a week for it to

dry. The nurses who'd served in World War I had had to cut their hair off because of lice, and had liked the freedom and the

lightness short hair gave them. And there were obvious advantages when it came to the other fads of the day: bicycling and

lawn tennis.

So why hadn't it become a fad in 1918? Why had it waited another four years and then suddenly, for no apparent

reason, hit so big that barber shops were swamped and hairpin companies went bankrupt overnight? In 1921, hair-bobbing

was still unusual enough to make front-page news and get women fired. By 1925, it was so common every graduation picture

and advertisement and magazine illustration showed short hair, and the only hats being sold were bell-shaped cloches, which

were too snug to fit over long hair. What had happened in the interim? What was the trigger?

I spent the rest of the day re-sorting the clippings. You'd think magazine pages from the 1920s would have turned

yellowish and rough, but they hadn't. They'd slid like eels out onto the tile floor, fanning out across and under each other,

mixing with the newspaper clippings and obliterating their categories. Some of the paper clips had even come off.

I did the re-sorting on the floor. One of the lab tables was full of clippings about pogs that Flip was supposed to have

taken to be copied and hadn't, and the other one had all my jitterbug data on it. And neither one was big enough for the

number of piles I needed, some of which overlapped: entire article devoted to hair-bobbing, reference within article devoted

to flappers, pointed reference, casual reference, disapproving reference, humorous reference, shocked and horrified

reference, illustration in advertisement, adoption by middle-aged women, adoption by children, adoption by the elderly, news

items by date, news items by state, urban reference, rural reference, disparaging reference, reference indicating complete

acceptance, first signs of waning of fad, fad declared over.

By 4:55 the floor of my whole lab was covered with piles and Flip still wasn't back. Stepping carefully among the piles,

I went over and looked at the box again. Biology was clear on the other side of the complex, but there was nothing for it. The

box said PERISHABLE, and even though irresponsibility is the hottest trend of the nineties, it hasn't worked its way through

the whole society yet. I picked up the box and took it down to Dr. Turnbull.

It weighed a ton. By the time I'd maneuvered it down two flights and along four corridors, the reasons why

irresponsibility had caught on had become very clear to me. At least I was getting to see a part of the building I ordinarily was

never in. I wasn't even exactly sure where Bio was except that it was down on the ground floor. But I must be heading in the

right direction. There was moisture in the air and a faint sound of zoo. I followed the sound down yet another staircase and

into a long corridor. Dr. Turnbull's office was, of course, at the very end of it.

The door was shut. I shifted the box in my arms, knocked and waited. No answer. I shifted the box again, propping it

against the wall with my hip, and tried the knob. The door was locked.

The last thing I wanted to do was lug this box all the way back up to my office and then try to find a refrigerator. I

looked down the hall at the line of doors. They were all closed, and, presumably, locked, but there was a line of light under

the middle one on the left.

I repositioned the box, which was getting heavier by the minute, lugged it down to the light, and knocked on the door.

No answer, but when I tried the knob, the door opened onto a jungle of video cameras, computer equipment, opened boxes,

and trailing wires.

"Hello," I said. "Anybody here?"

There was a muffled grunt, which I hoped wasn't from an inmate of the zoo. I glanced at the nameplate on the door.

"Dr. O'Reilly?" I said.

"Yeah?" a man's voice from under what looked like a furnace said.

I walked around to the side of it and could see two brown corduroy legs sticking out from under it, surrounded by a

litter of tools. "I've got a box here for Dr. Turnbull," I said to the legs. "She's not in her office. Could you take it for her?"

"Just set it down," the voice said impatiently.

I looked around for somewhere to set it that wasn't covered with video equipment and coils of chicken wire.

"Not on the equipment," the legs said sharply. "On the floor. Carefully."

I pushed aside a rope and two modems and set the box down. I squatted down next to the legs and said, "It's marked

'perishable.' You need to put it in the refrigerator."

"All right," he snapped. A freckled arm in a wrinkled white sleeve appeared, patting the floor around the base of the

box.

There was a roll of duct tape lying just out of his reach. "Duct tape?" I said, putting it in his hand.

His hand closed around it and then just stayed there.

"You didn't want the duct tape?" I looked around to see what else he might have wanted. "Pliers? Phillips

screwdriver?"

The legs and arm disappeared under the furnace and a head emerged from behind it. "Sorry," he said. His face was

freckled, too, and he was wearing Coke-bottle-thick glasses. "I thought you were that mail person."

"Flip," I said. "No. She delivered the box to my office by mistake."

"Figures." He pulled himself out from under the furnace and stood up. "I really am sorry," he said, dusting himself off. "I

don't usually act that rude to people who are trying to deliver things. It's just that Flip..."

"I know," I said, nodding sympathetically.

He pushed his hand through his sandy hair. "The last time she delivered a box to me she set it on top of one of the

monitors, and it fell off and broke a video camera."

"That sounds like Flip," I said, but I wasn't really listening. I was looking at him.

When you spend as much time as I do analyzing fads and fashions, you get so you can spot them at first sight:

ecohippie, jogger, Wall Street M.B.A., urban terrorist. Dr. O'Reilly wasn't any of them. He was about my age and about my

height. He was wearing a lab coat and corduroy pants that had been washed so often the wale was completely worn off on

the knees. They'd shrunk, too, halfway up his ankles, and there was a pale line where they'd been let down.

The effect, especially with the Coke-bottle glasses, should have been science geek, but it wasn't. For one thing, there

were the freckles. For another, he was wearing a pair of once-white canvas sneakers with holes in the toes and frayed

seams. Science geeks wear black shoes and white socks. He wasn't even wearing a pocket protector, though he should have

been. There were two splotches of ballpoint ink and a puddle of Magic Marker on the breast pocket of the lab coat, and one

of the patch pockets was out at the bottom. And there was something else, something I couldn't put my finger on, that made

it impossible for me to categorize him.

I squinted at him, trying to figure out exactly what it was, so long he looked at me curiously. "I took the box to Dr.

Turnbull's office," I said hastily, "but she's gone home."

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