Longtusk

by Stephen Baxter

  He hoped the mastodonts would survive, and find freedom.

  At last the three of them scrambled onto the rocky hillside. It felt scarcely less unsteady than the ice, so powerfully did the gushing water shake it.

  He looked over the flooding land to the south. New rivers surged along the dry old valleys, like blood surging through a mammoth's veins. Already the ridges of soil and gravel, slowly and painfully colonized by the plants, were being overwhelmed and swept away.

  But now the ice dam collapsed further. Immense blocks, blocks the size of icebergs, calved off the eroded walls and fell grandly to the battered land — and the flooding reached a new intensity.

  A wall of gray water surged from the huge breach, a river trying to empty a sea. This new mighty flow simply overwhelmed the puny canyons and valleys hit by the first flooding, drowning them as if they had never been. A great bank of mist and fog rolled outward from the breached dam, looming up to the sky as swirling clouds.

  Beyond the advancing wave front, bizarrely, the sun still shone, and the land was a placid blanket of folded earth peppered with trees. Longtusk saw a herd of bison, a black lake of muscle and fur. They looked up from their feeding at the wall of water that advanced on them, towering higher than the tallest trees.

  The herd was gone in an instant, thousands of lives snuffed out as their world turned from placid green to crushing black.

  And still the water came, that front of gray advancing without pity over the green, spreading out over the land in a great fan from the breached dam, as if trying to emulate the sea from which it had emerged.

  ...Now, though, the flow began to diminish, and the water surging over the land began to drain away. Longtusk saw that the breached dam had, if briefly, reformed; slabs of ice and boulders, presumably torn from the basin of the trapped lake, had jammed themselves into the breach, stemming the flow, which bubbled and roared its frustration at this blockage.

  As the flood waters subsided, draining into shallow pools and river valleys, the drowned land emerged, glistening.

  It was unrecognizable.

  Where before there had been green, now there was only the red-brown and black of the bedrock. Under the dam, where the water had fallen to the ground, a great pit had been dug out, gouged as if by some immense mammoth tusk, already flooded with water and littered with ice blocks. It was not that the surface of the land had been washed away, a few trees uprooted — all of it, all the animals and trees and grass and the soil that had sustained them had been scoured clean off, down to the bony bedrock, and then the bedrock itself broken and blasted away. Even the hills had been reshaped, he saw, their flanks eroded and cut away. It was as if a face had been flensed, scraped clean of hair and skin and flesh down to the skull.

  Mighty rivers flowed through the new channels, and in folds of the land lakes glimmered — huge expanses, lakes that would have taken days to walk around. It was a new landscape, a new world that hadn't existed heartbeats before. But he knew there was no life in those rivers and lakes, no plants or fish, not even insects hovering over their surfaces. This was a world of water and rock.

  And now there was a new explosion of shattered rock and crushed ice. The temporary dam had failed. The water leaped through and engulfed the land anew, immediately overcoming the lakes and rivers that had formed and gleamed so briefly, a world made and unmade as he watched.

  Surely this mighty flood would not rest until it had gouged its way across this narrow neck of land to reach the brother ocean to the south, sundering the continents, cutting off the new lands from the old.

  And with the Fireheads trapped in the old world, the mammoths would be safe in the new.

  But such small calculations scarcely seemed important. Longtusk felt the shuddering of the planet in his bones, a deep, wild disturbance. The Earth was reshaping itself around him, the sea asserting its mighty fluid dominance over the land. Before such mighty forces his life was a flicker, no more significant than droplet of spume thrown up as the water surged through the broken dam.

  ...And yet he lived, he realized, wondering. They still stood here — the three of them, Willow, Crocus and himself, the Firehead and the Dreamer still clutching his soaked fur.

  For a heartbeat he wondered if they might, after all, live through this.

  But now Crocus cried out, pointing.

  The hillside they stood on was crumbling. Its surface was cracking, falling away into the gray-brown torrent that gushed below. And the exposed gray-black rock was crumbling too, exploding outward, great shards of it being hurled horizontally by the power of the water. Its lower slopes must have been undercut by the flood.

  The land itself was disappearing out from under him, faster than any of them could run.

  So it is time, he thought.

  Willow plucked at his ears. He bent his head, and the Dreamer slid proudly onto his back. Another story was ending here, thought Longtusk: this squat, aged Dreamer was probably the last of his kind, the last in all the world, and with his death his ancestors' long, patient Dreams would end forever.

  Crocus was weeping. She was frightened, like the cub he had once found in the snow, lost and freezing and bewildered. She looked up at Longtusk, seeking comfort.

  He wrapped his trunk around her. She curled up in the shelter of his powerful muscles, pulling his long thick fur around her. She closed her eyes, as if sleeping.

  ...The land disappeared with a soft implosion, startlingly quickly, and there was nothing under his feet.

  He was falling, the Dreamer's legs locked around his neck, Crocus cradled in his trunk. The air gushed around him, laden with noise and moisture.

  He could hear the rush of water beneath him, smell its triumphant brine stink as the sea burst across this narrow neck of land, sundering continent from continent.

  Is this how it feels to die? Is this how it feels to be born?

  Defiantly he lifted his mighty tusks. Milkbreath! Thunder! Spruce!

  And then—

  7

  The Cousins

  IT WAS LATER — MUCH LATER — before Threetusk truly understood what had happened. And, as he grew older yet, the strange events of those days plagued his mind more and more.

  He found her cropping grass with the painful, slow care of the old.

  "You look terrible," said Saxifrage, as she always did.

  "And, Matriarch or not, you're just as uppity as when you were a calf and I could lift you in the air with my trunk."

  She snorted with contempt. "Like to see you try it now." But she reached up and nuzzled her trunk tip into his mouth.

  Her flavor was thin, stale, old — yet deliciously familiar to Threetusk. They had sired four calves together. Threetusk had known other mates, of course — and so, he knew, had Saxifrage — but none of his couplings had given him such warm joy as those with her. And (he knew, though she would never say so) she felt the same way about him.

  But Saxifrage was a Matriarch now, and her Family stood close by her: daughters and granddaughters and nieces, calves playing at the feet of their mothers, happy, well-fed and innocent.

  Even in this huge and empty new land, birth and life and death had followed their usual round for the mammoths, and Threetusk found the world increasingly crowded by unfamiliar faces. Sometimes he was startled to discover just how old he was: when he tried to kneel in the water of a spring, for instance, and his knees lanced with arthritic pain; or when he grumbled about the smoothness of his teeth — and then recalled they were the last he would ever grow.

  He settled in beside her, and pulled at the grass. "I've been thinking," he said. "We're the only ones who recall it all. The crossing. The only ones who were there. To these youngsters, all of it — Longtusk, the refuge, the corridor — is as remote as a story in the Cycle."

  "It already is in the Cycle."

  "Yes," he said. "And if I knew Longtusk he'd bury his head in a mud seep rather than hear some of the legends that are growing up around him."

 
"But he was a hero... You know, you never told me the last thing Longtusk said to you. That day when he announced we had to leave the nunatak, and he took aside you and my mother, Horsetail."

  "I've been thinking," he said again.

  She rumbled, irritated at his evasion. "Bad habit for your age."

  "About ice and land bridges and corridors... You see, it isn't so easy to reach this new land of ours. First you have to cross the land bridge, and you have to get through the ice corridor. You have to time it just right; most of the time one or other of them will be closed, by sea or ice—"

  "So what?"

  "So it's difficult, but not impossible, for others to make the crossing. Although for now we're protected by the ocean, there might come a time in the future when the land bridge opens again, and they come pouring across..."

  Saxifrage shivered, evidently as disturbed as he was by the notion that the Fireheads might come scouring down this innocent country, burning and hunting and building and changing.

  "It won't happen in our time," Saxifrage said. "And—"

  But they were interrupted by a thin trumpeting on the fringe of the gathering. It sounded like a calf — a badly frightened calf.

  "Circle!"

  Saxifrage's Family immediately formed a defensive ring around their Matriarch.

  Impatiently Saxifrage pushed her way out of the ring, determined to see what was going on. Threetusk followed in her wake.

  A calf stood in the protection of her mother's legs, agitated, still squealing with fright. It was immediately obvious why she was distressed.

  The Family was standing at the edge of an open, grassy flood plain. A forest bounded the southern side of the plain. And something had emerged from the fringe of trees on the far side of the clearing.

  It might have been a mammoth — it was about the size of a healthy adult Bull, Threetusk supposed — but it was almost hairless. Its skin was dark brown and heavily wrinkled, and it sprouted patches of wiry black hair. Its head was strangely small, and its trunk was short and inflexible.

  And it had four short, straight tusks, one pair in the upper jaw, one in the lower.

  It was staring at the herd of mammoths, clearly as surprised and alarmed as they were.

  "It's a calf of Probos," said Saxifrage, wondering. "A cousin of the mammoths — like Longtusk's mastodonts. There have been rumors of creatures like us here: distant sightings, contact rumbles dimly heard. But..."

  A young Bull mammoth had gone to challenge the strange animal.

  Threetusk struggled to hear their encounter. "His language is strange. I can barely understand him. Gomphothere. His kind are called gomphotheres. We are cousins. But we have been apart a long, long time—"

  Saxifrage grabbed his trunk. "Threetusk, don't you see? This is proof. Your ideas about the bridge and the corridor opening and closing must be right. The way must have opened in the past and let through that gomphothere thing — or his ancestors anyhow. And if the way opened in the past, it will surely open again in the future. Oh, Threetusk, you were right. It won't happen in our lifetimes. But the Fireheads are coming." She shuddered. "And then what will become of us?"

  "...We shouldn't call them Fireheads," he said slowly.

  "What?"

  "That's what Longtusk said to Horsetail and me. On that last day." He closed his eyes and thought of Longtusk. It was as if the years peeled away like winter fur.

  We know their true name. They are already in the Cycle. Driven by emptiness inside, they will never stop until they have covered the Earth, and no animal is left alive but them — heap upon heap of them, with their painted faces and their tools and their weapons. They are the demons we use to scare our calves; they are the nemesis of the mammoths. They are the Lost...

  Saxifrage said, "Some day in the future the ice will return, and the steppe will spread across the planet once more. It will be a world made for mammoths. But will there be any mammoths left alive to see it?"

  The young mammoth's tusks clashed with the gomphothere's, a sharp, precise ivory sound. The gomphothere trumpeted and disappeared into the forest.

  Epilogue

  ON THIS WORLD, a single large ocean spans much of the northern hemisphere. There are many smaller lakes and seas confined within circular craters, connected by rivers and canals. Much of the land is covered by dark green forest and by broad, sweeping grasslands and steppe.

  But ice is gathering at the poles. The oceans and lakes are crawling back into great underground aquifers. Soon the air will start to snow out.

  The grip of the ice persisted for billions of years before being loosened, it seemed forever. And yet it comes again.

  This is the Sky Steppe.

  This is Mars.

  The time is three thousand years after the birth of Christ. And in all this world there is no human to hear the calls of the mammoths.

  Afterword

  THE PICTURE DRAWN HERE of the processes which led to the extinction of the mammoths and other Ice Age fauna is largely based on the careful studies of Gary Haynes and others; see Haynes' Mammoths, Mastodons and Elephants (Cambridge University Press, 1991) and Peter Ward's The Call of Distant Mammoths (Copernicus, 1997). Details of human cultural involvement with mammoths may be found in Mammoths by Adrian Lister and Paul Bahn (Macmillan, 1994). A fine reference on human Ice Age culture is Bahn's Journey Through the Ice Age (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994). A good reference on the strange world of the Ice Age, with its land bridges and ice corridors, is After The Ice Age by E.C. Pielou (University of Chicago Press, 1991).

  The idea of humans taming mammoths or mastodonts in such ancient times is speculative but not impossible. We have records that elephants have been tamed since 2000 B.C. in the Indus Valley and China, and used in war since 1100 B.C.

  A valuable source on Neanderthals and their culture is James Shreeve's The Neanderthal Enigma (Penguin, 1995). It's sadly unlikely that any Neanderthals survived as late as the period in which this book is set. But hominid fossils are hard to find, and much of Beringia is now submerged by the ocean...

  Any errors, omissions or misinterpretations are of course my responsibility.

  Stephen Baxter

  Great Missenden

  May 1999