Selected Stories: Volume 1

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Cassie, the spunky, and at times incredibly earnest, young ranch hand, urged her horse into a trot ahead, anxious to get to the high overlook into the next valley. The young woman’s long chestnut hair had been quickly woven into a thick practical braid that dangled beneath her white cowboy hat. Her face still retained a splash of youthful freckles, and her clear blue eyes held a fresh sense of wonder.

  With good reason, he thought, since she has seen miracles.

  But Alex and Susan did not hurry. Feeling anticipation build, they rode side by side, smelling the creaking saddles, the sweating horses, and the sweet sun-warmed pine sap. It had been a long time since they’d been so calm, though young Cassie’s presence would dampen any amorous impulses in the sleeping bags out by the campfire. No matter; it was good just to be together.

  While Susan watched approvingly, he had made a brave show of switching off his pager, but within half an hour the cloying weight of corporate responsibility forced him to turn it back on. When Susan wasn’t looking, of course …

  Horse Valley was more lush now than it had been for millennia. Using Helyx profits, Alex had started this ranch by channeling mountain streams into the headlands above, so that his experts could use the moisture to grow the sedges that normally flourished only in tundra. Reflections of aspen shimmered in mirror puddles of water as he headed up the slope, relishing the crisp air. Purple poets always talked about the “forest primeval” and Alex couldn’t get the phrase out of his mind. That’s how this is supposed to be.

  In low-lying swampy areas beside the path, giant ferns like horned and scaly monkeys’ tails curled up, flourishing next to fluted flat-leaved hyacinth—ancient plants that had not grown naturally since the last ice age. As they rode past, he sniffed the mulchy smell, wondering if the resurrected plants were edible, if there might be a high-end niche market for, say, Jurassic Salads.…

  “Majestica is looking ready to deliver,” Cassie called over her shoulder, slowing her mare so her two bosses could catch up. “I’ve gotten close enough three times in the last week to take readings, but Bullwinkle doesn’t like it.”

  Alex smiled. “They trust you, Cassie.” Forget the scientists and the so-called professional handlers; this young woman had a better knack with the big beasts than anyone else on the ranch.

  Susan drew a deep, satisfied breath. “It’ll be our first pureblood, after fifteen years.”

  “Think of it as an anniversary present,” he said. “Without your grandiose dreams I would have spent all my research money on a cure for flatulence.” The three horses splashed across a stream, climbing steadily now.

  Susan laughed. “I still think you deserve the Nobel Prize.”

  “Relieving the world’s diarrhea problems through genetic engineering makes one fabulously rich but earns no professional respect whatsoever.”

  Behind them, the view was stunning, a full mile of untouched wilderness. It felt odd to know that he owned very nearly everything within view, even from the highest vantage. Only in Montana was there enough land to tackle the really big projects that made his wife happy.

  “After this, Alex, nobody will even bother remembering all the little things you did in your reckless youth.”

  Impatient with the two romantics, and smiling with anticipation, Cassie led them toward the top of the ridge. All around the valley, thick pine and aspen forests covered the hills. Cassie slowed her horse as they entered a rank of thoroughly stripped trees that showed long scraped gouges in the bark.

  Susan was amazed, and concerned. “They’re foraging all the way up here? They shouldn’t be wandering so far afield.” She urged her gray mare into the great field of sedges and sages so carefully arranged by innumerable days of gardening.

  Cassie cocked her hat back with a wry smile. “Do you want to be the one to tell them where they can and can’t go, ma’am?”

  Alex made a mental note to see about putting a few sonic “discouragers” up here. He couldn’t imagine what would happen if a stray happened to wander down the valley to within view of the protesters at the gate. Then he’d have to deal with the local sheriff, the Feds, a dozen regulatory agencies, and a host of tabloids.…

  As they emerged from the aspens, the girl’s sweeping arm drew Alex’s attention to the grassy lowland in the bowl of the valley. “See, they always come together at dusk. It’s the best time to watch.”

  Their horses standing close together, the three of them looked down onto Clement Valley in the last light of afternoon. Susan could barely tear her dark eyes from the sight below, but she gave her husband a loving glance that said, We did this, you and I.

  Alex stood transfixed by the slowly moving shapes before him. His company had been right to keep the media resolutely away from the valley, and here was the proof. You had to see the woolly mammoths for yourself.

  Whenever he had a fresh glance at the herd, the beasts seemed like sailing ships. There was a stately glide to their passage as the great russet vessels crossed the flatness, each beast moving as though before steady winds. Only slowly did the mammoths tack and turn, ponderous yet inevitable.

  As if Cassie had trained them to recognize her, the nearest behemoth raised its head and let out a long, soaring salute. The next took up the sound, and the next, and soon nearly three dozen massive beasts joined in the trumpeting call.

  Alex felt an eerie shiver travel down the length of his spine. The strange, echoing song reached even deeper into his primal core, building in layer after layer, delving into bass notes seldom heard outside the cathedrals of Europe. Even when the haunting chorus faded into the soft sigh of a breeze among the shadowed pines, the three human interlopers remained still, afraid to move as if they had been the ones transported through time, not the mammoths.

  “Humans haven’t heard that call in ten thousand years,” Susan said as she leaned over to kiss him. He was too overwhelmed to say anything at all.

  With Cassie in the lead, sitting high on her roan mare, Alex and Susan rode down toward the mammoths in the last light of afternoon. The herd was accustomed to horses, and especially to the smell of the young ranch hand who tended them. Raised entirely without predators, the mammoths were unwary. Though his mare seemed a bit skittish, Alex did not feel threatened as he approached the magnificent woolly behemoths.

  The sedge grasses were tall and resilient, grazed short and trampled flat especially around the muck of watering holes. Playing the Helyx CEO, Alex noted that at the grassy margins the cottonwood branches and even bitterbrush were being browsed down to nubs. He would have to speak to the tenders about keeping the food supply going so the animals didn’t wander into the stands of trees bounding the meadows. Soon, the herd would outgrow this valley.

  He made a mental note to look into buying even more land, maybe expanding the huge Helyx Ranch into adjacent valleys. The politics of doing that would be far worse than the economics; the perpetual gang of Evo demonstrators at the south gate would grow, joined by garden-variety environmentalists. Folks around here didn’t look much to the future—or to the distant past, either, it seemed—and they didn’t like change.…

  With the approach of the horses, the mammoths snorted and stirred. Bullwinkle, the big leader of the herd, hung his shaggy head and lowered long tusks as he gazed at the others. The mixed-bag of hairy elephants had a range of body types, each generation only a few years separated from the previous, and each one significantly woollier than either of the two hybrid mammophants Alex had allowed Geoffrey Kinsman to see.

  Cassie halted her mare beside a tree completely stripped of leaves and half of its bark. “Best to tie up our horses here.” She dismounted with the springy grace of a gymnast. “I prefer to walk among them.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of getting stepped on?” Susan asked.

  The ranch hand flipped her braid back between her shoulder blades and adjusted her hat. “No, ma’am. But I’m afraid for the horses.”

  The few stands of valley grass darkened to jade as the sun
settled on the distant blue mountains. A nighthawk flitted with thin cries above the willows of a narrow creek that meandered through the meadow. Alex’s eyes followed the hawk up toward the peaks that towered against a hard, cobalt sky already dotted with the fires of far suns. The light would fade fast, dark scarcely an hour away.

  A perfect night to camp.

  Cassie started ahead, glancing over her shoulder and resisting the impulse to leave the other two behind. Alex remembered when he had been that impatient, and that young—not so long ago. Though this entire project had sprung from his wife’s dream decades ago, Cassie Worth was the unrelenting factotum who supercharged the Helyx staff and never seemed to sleep. She ran down innumerable practical details about exotic animal husbandry, and she figured out the answers for herself when no alleged “expert” had a clue.

  Alex reflected as he watched the young woman move swiftly through the herd. To think that she had just applied to Helyx out of the blue. No advanced degrees, just solid experience at UC Davis, a farm upbringing, and an ache to bring back to the world something long gone. Alex had noted more common sense in Cassie than in half of his own VPs and Division Heads. And she had a real rapport with the animals.

  “Come on, you guys, I want to show them off, but I’ll need to get us back up on the slope where I can set up camp for the night … or did you change your minds again?” She turned her clear blue eyes to Alex—did he see a girlish crush there? He was abashedly reminded that he had canceled their plans three previous times for the usual “business reasons.”

  “Nothing’s more important tonight.” Alex reached over to stroke Susan’s shoulder. “My wife and I are going to sleep out under the stars.”

  “Where I can hear my mammoths snore,” Susan added.

  They moved among the gigantic but gentle animals; it seemed to Alex as if he had wandered into a truck stop filled with living, hairy semis. The heavy air was laden with smells like hot oiled leather, old upholstery, musk and fur—stronger than the closeness of bison or penned cattle. But it was a wild musk, from thick and wiry hair grown to protect the beasts from the cold of an Ice Age.

  Alex felt giddy.

  It was a pure joy to watch Cassie in her element, like a child at a petting zoo. She led them from one large bulk to the next. Alex had never before seen so many of the beasts together in the valley. In a single glance he could see that each successive generation had fewer of the humped backs of African elephants. Instead, the younger hybrids’ backs sloped down, the rich cinnamon-colored pelts thickened, and the males’ tusks grew.

  Closer and closer.

  Cassie reached beneath the coat of the nearest hybrid and pulled up the coarse guard hair to reveal silky red under-wool. “It’s so good now we should be able to leave them out all through next winter.”

  “Even in Montana’s worst?” Alex asked, trying not to sound as if he was just protecting his investment.

  “They’ll love it,” Susan said, smiling at the young woman.

  “And they’re getting interested in mating with each other now!” Cassie said, then lowered her voice as if embarrassed. “I follow them on the vidcams, and they really go at it. Just frisky play, so far. After all, they haven’t reached adolescence yet. But the males are starting to herd the females—another sure sign.”

  Susan said softly, “We can’t actually let them mate, though.”

  Cassie cried, “Why not? Just think—no more egg transfers, no sperm-sucking games to play.” Her face wrinkled in disgust, and Alex didn’t want to imagine the details of the mammophant sperm-harvesting operations.

  Susan put an arm around Cassie. “We’re careful with their genes. Select for mammoth aspects, weed out the elephant ones. Unchecked mating would scramble all that.”

  Cassie looked stricken. Plainly this had been her big announcement.

  “But you’re right,” Susan hastily added. “Just like in nature. Desire is the only sure diagnostic.” She gave her husband a quick, sultry glance. His breath caught. “These animals know, right down in their hearts—which by the way are bigger than a human head, bigger even than Alex’s!—that they are worth making more of.”

  He hugged her. “And so we’ll make more.” Some people buy diamonds for their wives … I clone mammoths.

  Cassie made quick jabs at nearby shapes, showing off as she quickly recited the names of the other hybrids. “Those two are Rachel and Napoleon—the shorter ones are always the worst—and Angel Pie.”

  Alex was amazed she could identify the individual herd members so easily. The Helyx geneticists had used five to ten elephants for each step of the process, because it took twelve years for any one of the hybrids to mature to fertility. And some interbreeding attempts spontaneously aborted, nature’s editing.

  Cassie led them unerringly to a huffing female, her big eyes casting a calm gaze down at the small humans. Long breaths steamed in the cooling air as dew condensed on the rocks and trampled grass. “Here, Majestica is at term and already showing signs of labor. Everything’s normal, as far as I can tell. She’s been in labor for about a week already.”

  “I can’t imagine being in labor for a week,” Susan said.

  And the big female’s gestation period had already taken nearly two years. “Mammoths and elephants aren’t in much of a hurry about these things,” Alex said.

  Actually, the gestation period had varied with each hybrid generation, as the offspring approached pure mammoth stock. According to her continuing researches into the original genome, using numerous fourth-order projections with hypercomputers inside the pine-walled stable building, Susan was convinced that the mammoth gestation time in the Pleistocene would have been longer than a modern elephant’s twenty-two months. One of the earlier female hybrids, Alexandria, had carried her baby for twenty-three months.

  “We’re converging toward the mammoth pattern in the ancient wild, I bet,” Susan said.

  Alex smiled wryly. Given her anxious attention to all aspects of the projects, his wife probably would have preferred to keep the pregnant Majestica in a separate corral back at the Pleistocene Hospital, with a whole bank of real-time blood-test gear, round-the-clock technicians, and a full array of instrumentation and diagnostics surrounding her pregnant bulk.

  However, these creatures needed to bear their young naturally, in the wild, and Cassie Worth had seen more live births among ranch stock than any of Helyx’s experts. She was ready.

  But no one alive had ever seen the birth of a real woolly mammoth.

  The smoke of green branches and dry wood wafted up from the campfire, crackling with a pungent, sweet bitterness. Alex breathed deeply, smelling the heady primal scent. Hidden in the gathering darkness, insects and night birds set up a simmering background music that seemed to come from a different time altogether.

  Below them in the valley, under the light of the waxing moon and a billion stars in transparent Montana air, the herd of elephant-mammoth hybrids settled down for the night. Many of the big dark shapes still moved about restlessly. While some slept like mounds of dirt near the watering hole, others paced around, munching on sedge grass. Eerily, some of the mammoths on the fringe looked as if they were keeping watch.

  Cassie busied herself, happy to be out camping, much more comfortable here within sight of her mammoths than up around the administration buildings. She never tried to understand the protesters, preferring to ignore them by staying far from the gate. “People always find something to complain about, especially when somebody else is successful,” she had said once.

  The young woman had outdone herself with the fire, the bedrolls, the childishly simple dinner of hot dogs roasted on twigs over the flames, a speckled blue-enamel coffee pot hung over the coals. All they needed was marshmallows (and Alex wouldn’t have been surprised if Cassie had them stashed in her saddlebags). A perfect evening, in every detail.

  Helyx could have provided the most sophisticated camp equipment, thermal chargers for foodpacks, heated sleeping bags and d
amp-resistant tents. Alex could have assigned workers to set up comfort-weave tents, groom the clearing, erect tables, string lanterns, even prepare a gourmet meal.

  But this was better, much better.

  “When do we start singing ‘Kum-bay-ya’?” Alex said with a grin to his wife.

  “I have a strummerpack,” she answered, calling his bluff.

  Alex’s implanted pager tingled, and he recognized the source. He reached up, touching a contact point. “What’s the trouble, Ralph?”

  Susan frowned at him, mouthed the words, I thought you turned that off?

  “Can’t figure, Boss.” His usually casual voice now sounded pinched with concern. “We’re getting pinged by microwaves. Somebody’s interrogating a passive receiver. Must be located somewhere around the ranch buildings.”

  “Not one of ours?”

  “No chance. Just a simple incoming pulse from some airplane, flying pretty high. Don’t think anybody could get much from that, maybe just a location marker. The pulse could be hitting some tiny receiver that shoots it back with a li’l information attached, I’d guess. Not powerful enough for us to track down where it is, though.”

  “Probably some new gear brought in by the demonstrators at the gate,” Alex suggested. He didn’t need a new technical puzzle to ruin his jealously planned evening.

  “Could be, Boss. Those Evo types have plenty to spend on new toys.”

  “Keep on it.” He disengaged the pagerlink, saw both Cassie and Susan staring at him with concern. He made a placating gesture but didn’t volunteer any details. The ranch hand would assume it was yet another corporate emergency such as had canceled their first three outings; Susan, though, could read his expression much better. Her molasses-brown eyes trapped him again, looking like bottomless wells in the smoky campfire shadows.