Mammoth

by John Varley

  All through the bad winter they moved west, and when spring came they found themselves looking out at more water than any of them but Big Mama had ever seen, so much water that you couldn't see the other side of it.

  The water was what we would later call the Pacific Ocean. It wasn't good to drink but it was fun to swim in, and they were in a green and lush valley we would later call the Los Angeles Basin.

  The mammoths had come to California.

  10

  SUSAN Morgan opened the door in the side of the big trailer box and stepped inside to a familiar smell. It didn't surprise her that the hired attendant hadn't been as scrupulous at cleaning out the traveling stall as he should have been. She'd met the man at the elephant retirement ranch up north and judged him to be one of entirely too many elephant keepers who had no business within a mile of a pachyderm. Elephants frightened him. He relied on a hook to control the beasts, and one day one would squash him like a bug.

  Not her problem.

  This one was a twenty-five-year-old Indian named Petunia-tu. Most elephants that young would still be working, but Petunia-tu had developed a foot infection a few years back that had left her semicrippled, unable to perform, and a behavior problem when the foot was giving her pain. Little chance of that now; she was doped to the eyebrows with painkillers and tranquilizers for the trip to the big city. The tranks had probably not been necessary. She was a circus veteran, used to traveling to two or three cities a week.

  Now she was about to embark on a great adventure, and she would never know it.

  The keeper had given Susan one useful bit of information about his charge beyond the basic medical information concerning the missing part of Petunia-tu's left front foot. She had a fondness for watermelon, so Susan had had one cut into bite-sized—for an elephant—chunks in a wicker basket. She approached Petunia-tu slowly, always watching her eyes, reading her body language. Susan felt she could always spot anger in an elephant's eves, and the animal's movements spoke volumes to those who could read them. Petunia-tu was radiating calm. She might even have been enjoying her return to the road. It was sure a more interesting life than the game park.

  Susan held out a chunk of melon and Petunia-tu took it and eagerly jammed it up into her massive jaws, which began their unique grinding motion. She didn't spit out the seeds. She didn't even spit out the rind.

  When the watermelon was half gone Susan opened the gate that separated the carrier into two halves. She took the end of the rope looped around Petunia-tu's neck and tugged her gently, and the living gray mountain lumbered forward, her trunk probing into the wicker basket.

  Outside, the keeper had lowered the heavy ramp in front, put there so the cargo didn't have to back up, which was always chancy with a beast weighing ten thousand pounds and lacking a rearview mirror.

  Petunia-tu balked at the top of the ramp, not wanting to put her weight on her weak foot to come down the ramp. The keeper—Susan thought his name was Barry—stepped forward and, sure enough, there was an elephant hook in his hand. Susan scowled at him and waved him away, and coaxed Petunia-tu carefully to the ground. After that it was a piece of cake to lead her into her stall in the cool interior of the big warehouse. She perked up a little and raised her trunk as soon as she smelled the other inmates, and immediately went to the fence of steel girders that separated her quarters from Queenie's on her left. The cows sniffed each other for a while, and neither seemed upset. Susan was sure Petunia-tu was instantly aware that Queenie was pregnant, though it would be many more months before she showed.

  She stayed a while to be sure no conflicts would erupt. Elephants were social animals and could be temperamental about dominance, which they worked out as nicely as the U.S. Senate, but it was mostly the males who were trouble. Females tended to establish the pecking order peacefully. She expected Petunia-tu to fit into her growing herd easily enough.

  Outside, as she was closing the door to the warehouse, the truck was pulling away. As it left it revealed the other, more mysterious half of Howard Christian's mammoth obsession, that Matthew Wright fellow she hadn't spoken to more than half a dozen times since his first day at the project when she had given him the short course in artificial insemination. He was sitting at a wrought-iron table Christian had had installed in the parking lot behind the warehouse, next to the ten-foot security fence that hid the whole installation from prying eyes. He was under a big canvas umbrella that seemed a good idea with his pale complexion; the merciless summer sun would no doubt broil him like a lobster in about five minutes. He had spread the wrapper of a huge Subway sandwich on the table and was watching her as he ate it. He gestured toward the closed door with the hand holding the sandwich.

  The other might have been the Martyr's father. There was a family resemblance in the withered ruins of this old man who, once or twice a week, took his son's place, sitting in a lawn chair of nylon webbing and holding the same sign. He had a case of dowager's hump so bad he couldn't lift his head above the level of his shoulders, and his jowls sagged far below the level of his jaws. She called him Droopy.

  The sign they carried read, STOP GODLESS CLONING, NO FRANKENSTEIN ANIMALS. CALL OR WRITE YOUR CONGRESSMAN.

  She would have found it a lot easier to ignore them if there hadn't been a tiny bit of doubt in her own mind as to the morality of what she was doing. She was no technological alarmist and hardly religious at all, but sometimes at night she lay awake and wondered if she had the right to pull such a trick... such a stunt, on innocent beasts.

  She wondered what Matt Wright thought about it. Even more to the point, she wondered just what it was he was doing in his sealed-off half of the building. Breeding and keeping elephants, that took some space. What could Wright be up to that took just as much space? Did it have to do with mammoths, too?

  She'd never figured out how to ask him.

  Now he was gesturing at his sandwich.

  "Could I interest you in an Italian bomber with all the trimmings?" he asked.

  "No, thanks." She took off her hat and wiped her brow. "But I'd like a sip of that soda if you don't mind."

  "I can do better than that." He opened a small blue six-pack cooler and took out an eight-ounce stubby glass bottle of Coke, twisted off the top. A little foamed over the side, and tiny bits of ice clung to it. Not much else in the world looked quite that good on a scorching day, except maybe a beer, which she wouldn't drink until almost sundown. She took it gratefully and drained a third, then sat at the table with him.

  "They're okay cold."

  "So how many female elephants do you have in there now?" he asked.

  "Cows. Female elephants are cows. And Petunia-tu is the fifth."

  "And all of them are... I mean, except Petunia-tu..."

  "Pregnant?" She shook her head. "Just Queenie and the second one, Mabel."

  "And I guess you haven't figured out any way to rush things."

  Susan laughed. "The old-fashioned way is still the only way I know. Twenty-two months. That would probably surprise old Droopy and the Martyr." He knew immediately who she was talking about, and grinned. "They probably think we're going to grow a mammoth in a test tube. Most of it is well-established veterinary practice."

  "And he will be... a woolly mammoth?"

  She shook her head. "He'll be half mammoth."

  "Sure, I knew that. But will he have hair?"

  "That's a question Howard asks me about three times a week. Hair, hair, hair, that's all he's

  interested in, that's what this is really all about. Mammoths had a distinctive body profile, lots different than any of the three living elephant species, and they had longer tusks, and—"

  "I thought there were only two."

  "No, for quite a while now we've divided the African genus into savanna and jungle species. It was determined genetically; they don't have a lot of differences you can see. Anyway, I'll tell you what I tell Howard. We don't know. My guess would be he'll be fuzzy, at least. He probably won't have the really lo
ng fur coat the frozen sperm donor had. On the other hand... that donor did have a long fur coat, and that was a bit of a surprise, when we finally realized just what it was we had."

  Matt frowned, and shrugged. "A mammoth, right?"

  "Yeah, but what kind of mammoth?" She couldn't stop herself from grinning. "I tell you, Matt, if Howard wasn't so obsessed with cloning, he could already be a celebrity. All he has to do is let Dr. Rostov publish his findings. This frozen mammoth isn't like any that's ever been found before."

  "Tell me about it." She hesitated, then stood and finished her Coke.

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

  Temba had grown and grown all the last year. In California she ate even more, and grew even more. When the time of the year we would later call June arrived, she was so big that walking was awkward. She could feel stirrings inside her as the baby kicked and twisted, wanting to get out into the wide world.

  And one day she felt a pain like she had never felt before, and she knew it was her time.

  The rest of the herd knew it, too. They gathered around her. They pressed against her sides. They stroked her with their trunks and made reassuring sounds. All day and into the night they stayed near, and then the baby's hind legs appeared.

  A few minutes later the little mammoth was born.

  He was a boy!

  But he was not so little! If there had been scales to weigh him, he would have tipped them at about three hundred pounds!

  Temba was very busy for a while then. Mammoths were born wrapped up in something called an amniotic sac, like dogs and cats and horses. Temba used her trunk to pull this away from her baby, there in the dark night.

  Then she lifted the baby to his feet. He tottered for a moment, then fell onto his side. Temba lifted him again, and again he fell. But the third time she set him on his feet he stayed there, swaying and blinking.

  The herd gathered around him and his mother and touched him with their trunks. Some of them flapped their ears nervously and shuffled their big, flat feet.

  Something was wrong with the baby.

  It smelled funny.

  It felt funny. The trunks of the herd explored the tiny little ears and gathered clumps of hair that was still wet and smelled of blood from the womb.

  And then Big Mama came over. The others made way for her, respectfully.

  For a time Big Mama explored the baby. We can't know exactly what she was thinking that day, so long ago, but if we guess it might be something like this: (He is a male baby. He is a very hairy male baby. And what about those ears? What is the deal with those ears?)

  Big Mama kept exploring, and kept up her big, slow thoughts. Finally, she wrapped her trunk around the new baby and stroked him.

  Well! Did the other mammoths feel relieved that the baby was accepted?

  Probably not. Mammoths and other animals don't think like people do. A lot of what they do is governed by instinct. And though mammoths and elephants are much smarter than most other animals, they do not think ahead like we do, and they do not worry about the same things we do. They deal with things as they come up, and since Big Mama did not decide to drive the new baby from the herd, no one ever had to deal with it, and so they didn't worry about it. Temba never knew her baby's fate was being decided by Big Mama. Probably Big Mama didn't even know it. She just sniffed the baby, decided it was odd but okay, and then forgot all about it.

  The baby himself had no idea what was going on, either. He simply knew he was hungry. His instincts drove him to where he could smell his mother's milk, and he pressed his face into the space behind her front leg and began to nurse.

  Temba was content.

  And the baby's name?

  Well, mammoths did not give each other names like we do, though they could easily recognize one another.

  But we can call the baby Fuzzy.

  11

  HOWARD Christian held up the shrink-wrapped box and regarded the toy robot inside. It was a rare Bandai X-56 MechaMan, one of the earliest plastic toy robots to become really expensive, mainly because of the extremely limited production run. Howard wasn't a big fan of plastic. Like most serious robot collectors he went for the older tin models most of the time. But he liked the X-56, and he didn't have one.

  This was the best-known example, and naturally it was sitting on the table of the unquestioned mogul of collectible toys, a man who called himself Radicon.

  The table was near the door to a small side room off the main floor of the Anaheim Convention Center that housed the several dozen most exclusive dealers attending the annual National Toy Collectors Convention—the Nat-Toy—a gathering Howard had not missed in fifteen years. To get into this room you had to know someone, or someone had to know your net worth and credit rating. Toys had changed hands in this room for well over one million dollars.

  He turned the box over in his hand. One of several problems with plastic toys was that they had started showing up at the same time manufacturers began packaging most of their wares in boxes with clear plastic windows so you could actually see the toy inside. Typically, the box would then be either wrapped in cellophane or shrink-wrapped in a more flexible plastic.

  This X-56 was NRFB, and bagged in Radicon's own protective wrapper as well, so no fingerprints could mar the original material. Because, though "never removed from box" was not the only criterion for collectability, it was incredibly important. Early in Howard's collecting career he had paid thirty thousand dollars for a 1950s tin toy, took it home, unwrapped it, and threw away the box. He was stunned to learn, a few weeks later, that the value of the item was now about four thousand dollars. Which meant he could now never show it. Not that he minded losing the twenty-six thousand so much... but if he showed it without the box, people would realize he no longer had the box—it was the only possible explanation. And he didn't want to look like a sap.

  Most collectors would not view the presence of original wrapping as a drawback to a toy. They would happily put it on their shelf, or more likely in their climate-controlled sealed exhibition case with the laser alarm system, and smugly check the catalogs every few months to see how it was appreciating.

  But when a toy is encased in shrink-wrap you can't get it out without ruining the seal, and if you can't get it out of the box, you can't... well, you can't play with it.

  Not actually play, Howard thought. Not like children play. There would be no bashing and tossing and stomping, no battles staged, no leaving it out in the rain in the sandbox. It's just that, when he got something like a toy robot, he wanted to put a battery in it, turn it on, and watch it do its thing. Otherwise, why collect? Investment, so important to the majority of his fellow fanatics, was low on Howard's list of priorities.

  He did have a curator on his staff who was very clever with these things. When the man was done repackaging an item, very few experts could tell it had ever been tampered with.

  But a few could, and many of them were in this room.

  It was a pretty problem.

  Howard noticed Warburton had approached him as he examined the X-56. He glanced at him, then put down the robot and picked up a Pez dispenser in a clear baggie. It was the 1960's "Psychedelic Eye," one of the more valuable ones. Naturally it was in mint condition, and Radicon wanted $1,500 for it.

  "Why do you figure he'd do that?"

  "Beats me. He knows the penalties."

  The "gadget" was what they were calling the presumed time machine, for security purposes.

  They got it from the Manhattan Project.

  Howard pulled out a Justice League comic and examined it critically through the clear plastic sleeve. He got out his digital assistant and punched in the volume and issue numbers. A picture of the comic appeared on the screen, with the notation that it was an issue he had in medium to fine condition. The one in his hand was marked very fine to mint, and cost $150.

  "I don't see this as mint," Howard told the dealer. "There's a chip right here on the fold. See?

  A
nd isn't that a repaired crease in the corner?" To Warburton he said, "Do we have it on tape?"

  "That hardly qualifies as a chip."

  "Of course, we tape everything. There's a camera right over the door."

  "A chip's a chip. I'll give you a hundred for it. File the tape away. If we ever need to take him to

  court, it could be valuable."

  "I already ordered it."

  "One hundred twenty-five."

  Howard took a roll from the light trench coat he always wore to sales like this and peeled off a

  hundred and a twenty, laid them on the table. The man scowled, but scooped them up.

  "And you pay the tax," Howard said, strolling back to Radicon's table. He put the comic into one of the coat's big pockets. The Pez dispenser had vanished. He took another long look at the

  X-56 in the sealed box, then shook his head and walked away.

  Warburton hurried over.

  "Must have slipped his mind," he said. "He's very busy."

  "Sure," said Radicon, solemnly, crossing his arms. They'd played this game before, and would

  probably play it again. "How much was that dingus, now...?" "Twenty-five hundred," Radicon said, with a look that dared Warburton to haggle. He needn't have bothered; Warburton would have gone twice that without a peep. But he couldn't help thinking, Fifteen hundred for a lousy little plastic pillbox with a hand holding an eyeball on top. If he worked for men like Howard Christian all the rest of his life—and he knew he probably would—he would never understand them.

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

  At first little Fuzzy stayed close to his mother, like all mammoth babies.

  He was the smallest member of the herd... but that didn't mean he was small! He got his long reddish-black hair from his father's side of the family, but his size he got from his mother.

  Like most little mammal children, Fuzzy loved to play. Two calves had been born the summer before, a male and a female, and they had been slightly smaller than Fuzzy when they were born, but now weighed almost a thousand pounds! Fuzzy played with these two calves, and when another calf was born a few weeks after his birthday, he played with her, too.