Mammoth

by John Varley

Susan took a deep breath, but there was really no sense in beating around the bush. The only question was pretty much as Warburton had expressed it: Did she want to be involved in the experiment of the century?

  "How do I join up?" she said.

  THE well-versed men turned out to be Leland and Roger, the Abbott and Costello of veterinary medicine. But they were competent enough when it came to manipulating the genetic material recovered from the mammoth carcass. Very soon they were ready to implant some reconstructed DNA into elephant eggs cells.

  But first, you needed to gather the elephant eggs, and these were in the middle of full-grown cow elephants, eight tons of flesh that might not be eager to surrender them. Leland and Roger read some papers, called some colleagues. They figured they had a handle on it. They explained what they wanted to Queenie's handler, a lad who worked at the game farm in Simi Valley who had been given just enough instruction to lead the animal into a stall or onto a truck. He saw no problem with it; Queenie had never given him any trouble in the nearly three months he had worked with her.

  That first entry was for test purposes, to calibrate the equipment as well as accustom the elephant to the process. Encouraged, the handler and the vets decided to go after eggs the very next day. The extraction process, called transvaginal oocyte retrieval, involved locating the ovaries with ultrasound, then extending a narrow probe through a needle inserted into the interior of the vagina. They had done it countless times with horses and cows, and expected no trouble because there were no nerve endings inside the vagina.

  Queenie must have felt something, because she turned around and knocked Leland sprawling forty feet over the messy concrete floor with one massive thrust and shake of her head. She picked up the ultrasound machine with her trunk and smashed it on the floor, over and over, until it came apart. Then she went back to her manger and resumed placidly eating the delicious green alfalfa.

  "Could have been a lot worse," Susan told them when she heard the story on her first day at work, which was the very next day after her cross-country trip. "Some of them store up their bad feelings. Then one day you do something she doesn't like and she pays you back all at once. Next day, she's fine."

  Two days after that, when the quarters and examining and operating rooms were fixed to her satisfaction, they went in again with Queenie in the press and under mild tranquilizers. They harvested six ooctyes that had been primed and ready for ovulation by two weeks of hormone therapy. Under the microscope they looked good, and two of them began to divide after being injected with the mammoth DNA. They decided to try an implant. They were well into the procedure when Howard Christian walked into the lab with a guy wearing a lot of fishing lures stuck into his clothes.

  "This is the mammoth-cloning project everybody seems to have heard so much about," Christian said, perhaps a little petulantly. It had not exactly been top secret, but he didn't like his projects to become the object of too much speculation before they showed results. That was because his projects had, fairly frequently, failed to show any results. He introduced Leland and Roger to his guest.

  "And this is Dr. Susan Morgan. Susan, Dr. Matthew Wright."

  "Just Matt, please."

  "And just Susan." Doctor of what? she wondered.

  "Susan worked for the circus until a few weeks ago. Now, if this fertilization is successful she'll be a nursemaid to this elephant for two years." "Must be quite a change after the glamour of the circus," Matt said with a smile. Susan thought he might be putting her on.

  "We have a better grade of elephant shit here in California," Leland offered.

  "No, that's bullshit you're thinking about," Susan said.

  "I knew it was some sort of shit."

  It was obvious that Howard Christian was eager to move on, but Matt asked a question, then another, and Christian paused to listen to the answer, and before long he found himself observing the entire implantation procedure. Matt seemed utterly fascinated with every aspect.

  The three vets finished the implantation with Matt watching the ultrasound image over their shoulders as they positioned the probe and delicately inserted the tiny mass of tissue that hardly qualified as an embryo, but which in two years might grow to be the wonder of the century.

  Leland pulled the probe out of Queenie, sighed, and stretched.

  "Was it good for you, Roger?"

  "I could use a cigarette."

  "Oh, sure," Leland said. "Then you'll turn right over and snooze, when what Queenie wants right

  now is a little cuddling."

  Susan was busy injecting a dose of doxapram to bring Queenie back to full consciousness, but she looked up in time to see Wright and Christian going through a door in the wall that divided the building roughly in half, a door they'd all noticed and whose handle all of them had tried at one time or another, with no result.

  Susan wondered what was on the other side.

  FROM "LITTLE FUZZY, A CHILD OF THE ICE AGE"

  Tsehe heard the song, and he came calling. Even though it was the wrong song.

  Woolly mammoths and Columbian mammoths were very much alike, but they were different in some important ways. One of these were the songs they sang during the mating season.

  We can't understand the songs whales sing, but a humpback whale knows the difference between a dolphin song and a sperm whale song. Canaries sing one way, and crows sing another. Usually these different species ignore the songs of other species.

  But the two types of mammoth were very closely related, and Tsehe was feeling very confused and out of sorts, so the song sounded okay to him.

  Tsehe approached the female and began his courtship.

  Mammoths liked to stroke each other with their trunks, just like elephants do. They rubbed against each other and smelled each other, paying a lot of attention to the urine. We find this smell unpleasant, but mammoths found it very exciting!

  Right away Tsehe noticed this female smelled funny. His eyes told him this was a female mammoth, and his nose told him she was in estrus. His nose also told him there was something different about her.

  But it was all too much for his aching head.

  Tsehe hadn't been near the herd very long when Big Mama became aware of him and decided to call a halt to the whole business before it got out of hand. The female Tsehe had chosen was a grand-niece to Big Mama, and she wasn't about to let this intruder trifle with the youngster's affections. Big Mama had her standards. No member of her family was going to consort with long-haired, smelly, tiny-eared trash from the wrong side of the tundra!

  Even though he was angry, confused, and irritable, Tsehe knew when he was outclassed. Big Mama was by far the largest mammoth he had ever seen, even if she didn't have much hair. Her tusks were enormous, and her ears were huge! They were like the wings of a giant bird. As if that wasn't enough, there were half a dozen other females behind her as she charged at him in a cloud of dust.

  He stood his ground only for a moment. One swipe of Big Mama's tusks to his aching head and he turned tail and ran!

  The female watched his retreat sadly. Normally, this would have been the end of things. Vanquished males do not mate in mammoth society.

  But he had been driven off by females, not by a larger male who would obviously make a better mate.

  And it wasn't as if there was a long line of suitors vying for the trunk of this female mammoth. In fact, there hadn't been a single one.

  With a guilty look back at Big Mama, still bellowing her triumph, the female started toward the low hill where Tsehe had gone. Soon she was farther from the herd than she had ever been.

  As you've probably already guessed, the female was Temba. 9

  9

  It was fifteen inches long by twelve inches wide by six inches thick. It was made of aluminum, with two metal latches. The top fit snugly to the bottom, and there was a rubber gasket between the two parts. When it was built, it was probably waterproof. Now, in the shape it was in, all bets were off.

  Matt had finally
been admitted to the inner sanctum, the holy of holies, after almost an hour touring the facility. The only part of the tour he had enjoyed was the artificial insemination of the elephant, and that had little to do with his own project. Still, it wasn't every day you saw a possible half-mammoth embryo implanted in an elephant.

  The object that Christian had assured him was a broken time machine rested on a long lab table in a big room protected by a keypad-locked door. It had been set there on the table and someone with a sense of the dramatic had positioned a baby spot over it, as if it were a bit of sculpture in a museum.

  Matt had been looking at it for half an hour now. He had moved all around it, he had repositioned the light several times, he had moved a bit closer and squinted at this or that detail, but he had not touched it. He hadn't been told not to touch it, the thing was his project, after all, and he would have to be allowed to do what he thought best or what was the point of hiring him in the first place? But he didn't want to rush things.

  So he looked at it, and tried to think like a time machine.

  FIRST there had been the frozen mammoth carcass, and that had been pretty interesting, too. Christian pulled the plastic back and showed him the frozen man, huddled up against the mammoth's flank. It was gruesome.

  "Can you imagine?" Howard almost whispered it. "I wish I'd been there. Amazing enough to find the frozen man, with the mammoth! Did he shelter up against a mammoth that was already dead, or did he kill it? Or is it possible he domesticated it? But then... they see the briefcase. Frozen under ice that had to have formed ten to twenty thousand years ago."

  "Or a few weeks ago," Matt said.

  Christian nodded, reluctantly.

  "It's a possibility I can't completely deny. Rostov knows what a hoax like that would do to his reputation, he'd have to find a new life's work, and I don't think he's ever cared about anything much except prehistoric creatures. He admitted to me that, when he saw the briefcase, his first impulse was to beat a confession out of his workers, but then he saw how scared they were. He's having horrible and wonderful thoughts right now; he knows this could destroy him if he's been swindled somehow."

  "Or win him the Nobel Prize, if they had one in archaeology." "Exactly. It wasn't hard to persuade him to keep quiet about it. As for the rest of the crew"—he smiled with half his face—"some families in Nunavut are driving around in brand-new snowmobiles and Humvees."

  "Or the government, so far." Christian held up crossed fingers. "My influence can only work so far in that direction. If some spook agency gets wind of this and wants it, 'in the national interest,' I don't know if I could hang on to it. I'd hire enough lawyers to gag a mammoth, of course, but this is so revolutionary..."

  "You don't have to convince me. In fact, I wonder if you realize just how revolutionary it could be." Matt was wondering if anyone, anywhere, at any time, would ever grasp the revolutionary nature of this thing as well as he did. Like Howard had said, not many people were equipped to do the math.

  "MAYBE we could use a specialist from a museum," Matt said, still contemplating the box. "Someone who knows how to approach the exploration of old artifacts. Things recovered from the bottom of the sea, things that will crumble if exposed to the air. Someone who knows how to remove a layer of unknown substance without damaging whatever layers may be beneath it. I don't know anything about that. I could use some advice."

  "Ask Warburton to find out about that," Christian said. He was speaking to the small man with glasses who had been introduced to Matt as "Ralph, who will get you absolutely anything you need, and keep it all organized for you." Ralph reached for his cell phone and spoke quietly into it.

  "I'll need a machinist, and a good computer man, naturally, one who knows where to find the right programs or write them if he has to. An engineer, a metallurgist. They'll tell you what they'll need." Matt turned away at last from the box. He shrugged.

  "Howard, the truth is, you don't really need me at all for this stage of your project. I know very little about engineering, and rebuilding or duplicating this thing is a job for an engineer. A gadget man. All I can do is look over his shoulder. Then, when we maybe get an idea of what it's supposed to do, and some notion of how it's supposed to do it, maybe I can be useful uncovering the underlying theory behind the thing. But to make it, and to make it work..."

  Christian thought he was seeing an attack of cold feet. He just wasn't used to dealing with a man like Matt Wright, who told the truth as he saw it most of the time, and always when it came to mathematics.

  "I have confidence in you," he said. "We'll have all that you asked for in place by tomorrow morning. In the meantime, you probably want to get to your hotel suite and clean up. I imagine it's been a long day."

  Matt looked down at his trout-fishing vest, realized it had been a long day, but he didn't feel tired at all. He knew there were some interesting times ahead, and he knew that could be a problem—did Christian know why Matt had been out in the middle of a lake fishing in the first place? To tackle this problem, he would have to have some insights on the order of those of Einstein when writing his theory of relativity, or Heisenberg with his uncertainty principle. He would need a new way of thinking.

  IT was the following afternoon before Matt felt ready to get started.

  Most of what would be needed for analysis was in place, from a complete forensic lab to a mass spectrometer to a fully equipped machine shop. Matt had his engineer, his metallurgist, his computer man, and, most important, his restoration specialist. This was Dr. Marian Carreaux, an intense, fiftyish woman stolen away from the Getty Museum. She was a suspicious woman. The device was being

  kept in a sealed glove box in a helium atmosphere.

  "Is this thing radioactive?" she asked.

  It seemed a natural enough thing to ask. So they brought in a Geiger counter and several other

  instruments. They reported only background radiation.

  She cleaned it on the outside. There were scratches all over it, and on the top side three indentations that Marian said had been made by a metal object, not a stone tool. Near the handle, set

  into the side, were two standard peanut lights, one red and one green.

  It was the bottom that was interesting.

  When the grime was cleared away they could see a deep puncture that had been sealed up with

  tar. And someone had scrawled a message on the aluminum surface. Analysis revealed traces of flint in the grooves. Howard was summoned and they all looked at the writing on a television screen. It had been computer enhanced. HAD A GOOD LIFE NO REGRE There was another mark, about where the crossbar of a T would have been.

  "No regrets?" Howard mused. He looked grim. "I have to say, I cannot imagine a man from our time going back to the Stone Age and having even a tolerable life, much less a good one. God, it must have been a brutal life."

  "I agree. Looks like he died before he could finish the sentence."

  "He wanted to send a message to someone, if he was ever found."

  Matt shivered, thinking of the man from... somewhen? Writing out what had become his last testament as his fingers grew too numb to hold the flint arrowhead.

  "I have no idea. What would you recommend?"

  She had a lot of suggestions. By the time they were ready to open it, they were equipped to detect dozens of poisonous gases, and to collect any gas or liquid that might come out of the box. Nothing that might provide a clue as to function or origin would be allowed to get away.

  Finally the moment came. Matt and Howard stood back and looked on as Marian reached into the glove box and prepared to open the time machine.

  She secured it with padded clamps, then opened the first of two ordinary latches that held the top down. It squeaked as it came free, and a brownish fluid began to leak around the rubber seal.

  That fluid was collected, and the various monitors were checked. Nothing dangerous seemed to be coming out, so Marian proceeded to open the second latch and lift the lid, and e
veryone crowded around for the first look inside.

  FROM "LITTLE FUZZY, A CHILD OF THE ICE AGE"

  Young Temba got pregnant that long-ago summer in what would become Canada. But Canada would not be the young mammoth's home.

  Mammoth mothers carried their children for a long, long time.

  Human mothers take nine months to make a baby. Elephants and mammoths take almost two years!

  Twenty-two months! Ninety-five weeks! Six hundred and sixty-two days!

  Temba moved south with the herd and she never saw Tsehe again. We don't know what happened to Tsehe, but we can hope he led a long and happy life up there on the green and grassy steppes.

  Temba did not miss Tsehe. Mammoths were not like humans, they did not mate for life, and in fact except at mating season adult males and females did not concern themselves with the opposite sex very much.

  This would not be a good way for humans to live, but it was fine for mammoths.

  The herd drifted south and west as the summer drew to a close and the rains came. That winter the herd got as far south as the place we now call Arizona. But Arizona was not like it is today, which is to say very hot and dry and barren. Much of the American southwest was lush and green and tree-covered. The grazing was wonderful, and that was a good thing because mammoths needed a lot of food! Each full-grown mammoth could eat as much as three or four hundred pounds of grass and leaves and fruits every day.

  Summer came again and the herd moved north, but not so far north as they had the year before. They spent most of the summer in what we would later call Colorado and Nebraska.

  Then it was time to move again.

  Now the weather turned bad. The herd had to forage hard to find the food it needed, and sometimes went a few days without water.

  But Big Mama was old and wise. She had seen hard times before. She had been over this ground, and many other places as well. She knew where the pools and wallows were, the places where the herd could bathe and frolic after a hot and hungry day. And if there were no pools, she knew every spot where a mammoth could dig with her massive feet and find water under the surface, enough for all her sisters and daughters and nieces to drink enough to get them to the next watering hole.