Bellwether

  Praise for Connie Willis’s

  HUGO AND NEBULA AWARD-WINNING

  DOOMSDAY BOOK

  “A TOUR DE FORCE.”—The New York Times Book Review

  “SPLENDID WORK—BRUTAL, GRIPPING, AND GENUINELY HARROWING. THE PRODUCT OF DILIGENT RESEARCH, FINE WRITING, AND WELL-HONED INSTINCTS, THAT SHOULD APPEAL FAR BEYOND THE USUAL SCIENCE-FICTION CONSTITUENCY.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “THE WORLD OF 1348 BURNS IN THE MIND’S EYE…. IT BECOMES POSSIBLE TO FEEL … THAT CONNIE WILLIS DID, OVER THE FIVE YEARS DOOMSDAY BOOK TOOK HER TO WRITE, OPEN A WINDOW TO ANOTHER WORLD, AND THAT SHE SAW SOMETHING THERE.”—The Washington Post Book World

  LINCOLN’S DREAMS

  “A LOVE STORY ON MORE THAN ONE LEVEL, AND MS. WILLIS DOES JUSTICE TO THEM ALL. IT WAS ONLY TOWARD THE END OF THE BOOK THAT I REALIZED HOW MUCH TENSION HAD BEEN GENERATED, HOW ENGROSSED I WAS IN THE CHARACTERS, HOW MUCH I CARED ABOUT THEIR FATES.”—The New York Times Book Review

  “A TANTALIZING MIX OF HISTORY AND SCIENTIFIC SPECULATION … WILLIS TELLS THIS TALE WITH CLARITY AND ASSURANCE…. IMPECCABLE.”—San Francisco Chronicle

  “FULFILLS ALL THE EXPECTATIONS OF THOSE WHO HAVE ADMIRED HER AWARD-WINNING SHORT FICTION.”—Los Angeles Times

  “LINCOLN’S DREAMS IS A NOVEL OF CLASSICAL PROPORTIONS AND VIRTUES … HUMANE AND MOVING.”—The Washington Post Rook World

  “LINCOLN’S DREAMS IS NOT SO MUCH WRITTEN AS SCULPTED … [A] TALE OF LOVE AND WAR AS MOVING AS A DISTANT ROLL OF DRUMS. … NO ONE HAS REPRODUCED THE PAST THAT HAUNTS THE PRESENT ANY BETTER THAN CONNIE WILLIS.”—The Christian Science Monitor

  REMAKE

  “ANOTHER BRILLIANT WORK BY AN AUTHOR DESERVING OF ALL THE PRAISE AND AWARDS HEAPED ON HER.”—Des Moines Sunday Register

  “WILLIS’S WRITING IS FRESH, SUBTLE, AND DEEPLY MOVING.”—New York Times Book Review

  ALSO BY CONNIE WILLIS

  Fire Watch

  Lincoln’s Dreams

  Doomsday Book

  Impossible Things

  Uncharted Territory

  Remake

  To Say Nothing of the Dog

  Passage

  Miracle and Other Christmas Stories

  To John

  From Abigail

  “Yours—yours—yours—”

  acknowledgment

  Special thanks to the girls at Margie’s Java Joint, who make the best caffe latte and conversation in the world, and without whom I wouldn’t have made it through the last months of this novel!

  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 at 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.”