Mammoth

by John Varley

  "Maybe we should change our names to Adam and Eve," she said.

  He looked at her, and for once in his life he didn't even think about it, he just leaned over and kissed her. She responded for a moment, then pushed him gently away.

  "I want you to hold me," she said. "Let's get together under both these tarps, we'll be warmer."

  "Good idea," he said, breathing hard. They struggled to get it all arranged, and then lay down side by side and he took her in his arms. She hugged him tightly.

  "I'm afraid," she whispered.

  "So am I."

  "I want you to make love to me," she said. "But I guess it would be too dangerous. There's things out there, hunting. We need to stay alert."

  "You're right," he said. She let go of him and started squirming around, and he asked, "What are you doing?"

  "Getting out of my pants. Wishing, for the first time in a long time, that I'd worn a skirt, so if we have to run for it I wouldn't have to run half-naked."

  "Maybe I should get out of my pants, too. So you won't be the only one running away half-naked."

  "That's very considerate of you," she said. She raised her knees under the tarp and got her jeans off, then faced him and slipped her hand into the waist of his pants, and squeezed his erection. "Yes, I do think you should take off your pants."

  She helped him, then took his hand and pressed it to her belly. He moved it over her hip, down her thigh, and then into curly hair and wetness. She kissed him, and he moved over her. "I wanted to tell you... I've been trying for weeks to tell you that I love you."

  "I wouldn't."

  "I know," she said. But Matt noticed she didn't say she returned the love. She asked, "When?"

  "When did I fall in love with you?"

  "Yes."

  "You want me to pinpoint a moment?"

  "Sure. Can't you?"

  "I'm tempted to say it happened over time, as I got to know you. But I think it really happened

  the first time I saw you."

  She looked at him, and grinned. "Really? Love at first sight?"

  "I'll have to admit it wasn't the first time it's happened to me. I used to fall in love at first sight

  several times a week. This was just the first time I've been able to do anything about it."

  She laughed. "When did it first happen?"

  "My first day of college. But she was an older woman. She was, oh, I'd guess around twenty.

  And I was twelve."

  "You're something else, Matt. My first supergenius."

  It was only later that he even thought about that, of other men she might have made love to, or been in love with. She might still be in love with another man, she had never talked about it. So maybe it was despair, surrendering to the idea that they would never go back to the world they knew. Maybe it was fear of the darkness out there and the things hiding in it. Maybe it was the need for human warmth and knowing he was the only one who could provide it. He didn't care. Just then he lived entirely in the moment, in his body and not in his head. Just then she became his entire world.

  THEY never did get to sleep that night. The creatures in the dark made themselves known with rustlings, twitterings, and the occasional terrifying roar. Once they saw eyes reflecting the firelight. They threw a torch in that direction and the eyes vanished. They talked about taking watches, but decided against it. They made love again, this time more carefully, if such a thing can be done, Matt kneeling with his back against the tree they sheltered under, Susan on her hands and knees, aware of each other and aware of their surroundings, too.

  When dawn came they started walking again. Within a few hours they came to a low hill overlooking a small stream. The Los Angeles River? There was no way of knowing, but they did know it was quite a few miles from the warehouse. And they weren't the first ones there. From the hilltop they could see, half a mile away, a herd of mammoths drinking and splashing.

  Matt wanted nothing more than to get away, but he didn't interfere with Susan's pleasure in seeing the beasts. If they were stuck here, and he was beginning to fear they were, being with an expert on elephant behavior was a lot more luck than he felt he deserved. And being in love with her into the bargain. They would have to learn to deal with mammoths, and much more.

  "I hadn't thought about that," Susan said. "Naturally, wherever there's water, there will be other animals. We're going to have to learn to approach it cautiously, just like all the other animals. Predators hang around waterholes."

  "Like right over there," Matt whispered, and pointed off to their left, where a saber-toothed cat was slowly approaching the river.

  "Jesus!" Susan quickly turned and brought her rifle to bear on the cat. It was not quite as large as an African lion, but far larger than Matt would have liked. Its fangs were six inches long and it moved with the easy grace of a born killer.

  "Here," Susan said, and thrust the gun toward Matt.

  "I don't know anything about shooting!"

  "Neither do I, I've fired it twice. It's got a gigantic kick. You're heavier than I am so maybe it won't knock you over. If it comes at us, aim in the general direction and maybe the noise will scare it away. If it doesn't, keep shooting. If you hit it anywhere you'll probably tear it to pieces."

  Matt followed the beast as best he could with the sight, wondering if he should tell Susan this was the first time he'd ever held a firearm.

  When the cat was no more than fifty yards away it stopped, looked at them for a long moment... then dismissed them and resumed his walk down toward the water. Soon it was out of sight in some bushes.

  "Let's get out of here," Matt said.

  "Which way?"

  "Back toward the warehouse."

  THEY talked about it on the way back. Their choices were stark. Neither of them wanted to move away from the warehouse; it was their only protection unless they could find a cave. Neither wanted to spend another night away from the safety of steel walls. But this river was too far away to haul water from.

  "Or we could head to the ocean," Susan said. "All rivers join the sea."

  "Good idea."

  A bit after noon they did find a watering hole... and that's when they realized they were lost.

  They had been following what they thought was the trail of their elephants, in reverse, but they had apparently crossed a mammoth trail and not noticed they had taken the wrong turning. They looked around, trying to orient themselves, but other than the distant Hollywood Hills there were no landmarks to guide them.

  "We should have blazed a trail," Susan said.

  "Next time we will. It shouldn't be a problem. We can't lose the ocean, and the warehouse isn't far from that. How many places could it hide?" Thousands of places, Matt told himself, and he knew Susan realized that, too. But there was no point in thinking about that yet. They needed to find it before dark.

  "I think we're north of where we should be," she said.

  "I think you're right."

  Now that they were looking for them, though, they noticed dozens of mammoth trails. They followed some until they started to look wrong, then backtracked and tried again, all afternoon. Finally it was getting too dark to see, and they had to admit it was time to start gathering wood and prepare themselves for another night in the open.

  "We're not very good at this, are we," Susan said as she watched Matt blow on the twigs and leaves to get the fire going.

  "We'll get better. We have to."

  They huddled together again, too tired and frightened to make love again, and eventually they fell asleep in each other's arms.

  4

  "MATT, something's coming!"

  He sat up quickly. There was a red glow far away through the trees. He heard the sound of breaking branches and what might have been a trumpeting elephant. Had Susan's herd returned? "What is it?"

  They were both standing now, looking in the direction he knew was west because he had seen the sun set over there. A wind had come up, blowing from that direction, and i
t brought with it the smell of smoke.

  "A brush fire," Susan said.

  "Los Angeles," Matt groaned. "Always either burning down or shaking apart."

  Then the wind brought a sound different from the mammoth's trumpeting. The sound was answered, again and again.

  "Tell me that wasn't a human voice," Matt said.

  "I think it was. It sure sounded like a war cry."

  "Or a hunting cry." He paused. "I think it's coming this way."

  They both stared into the west. Part of the land was indeed burning, but there were also isolated points of firelight on the top of the next ridge, moving quickly down. They looked like torches.

  "Somebody's herding the mammoths," Susan said in an awed whisper.

  It was hard to see. It must be something like being in the heat of battle, Matt thought. He had read that confusion was the norm, that one seldom had a clear idea of what was happening, there was not a godlike perspective like you had in the movies. Night made it worse, and so did unfamiliar terrain.

  Everything seemed to be happening at a distance of about a mile. What little they could see of it was on the top of a small rise, and it seemed to be moving down into the draw, getting swallowed up in the vegetation. Beyond that... was that a moving shape in the darkness? Was that another? It was hard to see them, though from the trumpeting they knew they must be out there.

  "I think we ought to get out of here," Susan said.

  "Me, too. Just take the guns, we may not have much time."

  He didn't like leaving their gear, but the sounds of the mammoth hunt were getting closer pretty fast. He picked up the tranquilizer gun from the ground, wishing he had more confidence that he could hit anything with it if he needed to, or that it would bring down a mammoth faster than ten or fifteen minutes. But it was better than chucking rocks, he supposed. With the gun in one hand and the time machine in the other, he fled into the night.

  Like a nightmare, he didn't know where he was, he didn't know where he was going. He wasn't sure what was behind him. About all that was missing was the sense of running in place, of being stuck to the ground, working hard and not getting anywhere. And before they had traveled a mile, he had that, too.

  "I know where we are," he shouted to Susan.

  She was already some distance ahead of him, but she reluctantly hurried back.

  "What's that on your shoe?"

  "Tar. We're where the intersection of Wilshire and La Brea will be. We're in the tar pits." At that moment a bull mammoth crashed through the trees and faced them across a mirror-smooth pond.

  He was enormous. He had to be fifteen feet high at the head, with a big hump behind that. He was covered with short fur, and his tusks extended so far from his face that he could not have pointed his head straight down without poking them into the ground. They flared out, then curved back and almost crossed each other in front of him. He was no more than fifty feet away from them, and there was nothing between them but the pond, which did not look deep.

  His surprisingly small ears flared out and he lifted his trunk and bellowed. He turned in a half circle, every massive muscle in his body flexing, knocking over a tree and tearing up the ground. He trumpeted again, and charged at them. Within four steps he was up to his knees, unable to move, and rapidly sinking deeper into the tar that lay just beneath the surface of the pool.

  Matt and Susan stood, frozen in place, and watched as the creature's struggles mired him ever deeper in the tar. He bellowed, he raged, he thrashed about, and nothing did any good. Soon his legs were completely below the surface.

  "They're driving the mammoths into the tar pits," Matt said, in awe. The hunters could end this bull's struggles with arrows, or spears, or whatever weapons they had, or wait until it died, and carefully climb onto its back and cut away the parts they could use. An animal like this could feed a tribe for a year, if they dried the meat.

  He was going to tell Susan this when he happened to glance down at the time machine. The red light was on.

  "Susan..."

  "Matt! Look!"

  He looked up, and a herd of mammoths appeared on the other side of the pond. They milled around in agitation, turning back and forth between the fire and the water where the big bull was trapped. One took a tentative step into the water, sank down to her massive ankle, and pulled back out.

  Matt thought her because, though they were gigantic, none were as big as the doomed bull. Say, ten feet high, tops. One big cow made her decision, and was heading around the water. The others hesitated, not seeming to want to leave the bull, terrified of the fire, pulled to follow what seemed to be the herd leader. But they soon fell into line behind her. In a few moments they would be right on top of Matt and Susan.

  "Susan, there's..." He looked again at the time machine. The green light was on.

  "What? What? We've got to get moving, Matt!"

  "It's on," he said, simply.

  Susan frowned at him, licked her lips, and raised the elephant gun to her shoulder.

  "Do what you can," she said.

  Matt squatted down and opened the box.

  The seven by seven by seven array of clear marbles was glowing with a pearly internal light. It was hypnotic, and strangely soothing. He could almost forget where he was, what was going on....

  He touched the cube with his finger. It was warm, and hummed with energy. He felt his eyes going out of focus, felt the rippling patterns of light playing with his mind. It wasn't an unpleasant feeling... but he knew time was running out. Or moving by, or he was moving down time's arrow in a way he couldn't completely understand. What is time? Can it be experienced any other way? There were mathematical systems that said it was possible. He brought those equations to mind, some of them reaching as far back as Albert Einstein, others new and untried.

  He thought he was beginning to see a pattern.

  "Matt, they're heading this way."

  "Quiet. I've got to think."

  "Quiet? Damn it, Matt..." But she shut up, and aimed the gun toward the approaching mammoths. He looked up in time to see her elevate the barrel and fire over their heads. The report was deafening, and the mammoths stopped in their tracks. But, possibly more important, it broke Matt's concentration.

  I'm going crazy, he thought. I'm twelve thousand years from home, kneeling on the edge of a deadly tar pit, a dozen seven-ton behemoths bearing down on us while the land burns and unseen savage hunters lurk somewhere out there ready to kill us and cook us if the mammoths somehow miss... and I'm worried about a little box of marbles.

  But he knew he was right. It was the little box of marbles that had got them here, somehow, and somehow it would get them out. So he concentrated.

  Soon he was back into whatever zone he had started to enter. He didn't know how to describe it, but it was a place he had learned to access when he was about six. At first it was arithmetic. He could stare at a page full of numbers and see relationships among them. Adding them up or finding percentages was just the start; the longer he stared, the more he saw. He felt the numbers were speaking to him.

  Now this hypercube was speaking to him, not in words, but in patterns that almost made sense. His mind whirled, a few steps behind, then a step behind, then half a step.

  Without thinking too hard about it, he picked up the cube and twisted it, just like a Rubik puzzle. The top layer rotated easily, and locked into place. The pattern of chasing lights changed, but nothing else did.

  This is crazy. But he ignored the small voice, and twisted again.

  The cube became filled with light, and Matt felt his eyes crossing as it collapsed in on itself in a way impossible to describe, and suddenly it was six by six by six.

  The cube went through another iteration that twisted Matt's stomach. It happened in a series of quick steps, each one of them seeming logical and inevitable, yet when it was done the cube was five marbles on a side, and there simply wasn't any place the... six cubed minus five cubed equals ninety-one... the ninety-one marbles on
the outer surface to have gone. But they were gone, either compressed into the middle of the cube or turned through another dimension to a place his mind couldn't follow.

  When Susan fired the gun again, Matt barely heard it. He was committing the events he had just seen to memory, though already he felt them fading, in the manner of a vivid dream losing its grip on reality with the return of consciousness.

  "Matt, we've got to run."

  "Three more seconds." He wasn't sure where the figure came from, but he knew it was accurate. He hoped it would be enough time.

  Twist. Four by four by four. Sixty-four marbles left.

  Twist. Twenty-seven left. It had to be getting tight in there.

  Twist. Only eight now.

  Twist.

  He looked up to see a Los Angeles city bus bearing down on him.

  16 THE herd of mammoths appeared on the Miracle Mile at 10:18 P.M. on a Thursday night, almost two days after a building belonging to Howard Christian vanished in Santa Monica.

  Big Mama was pissed.

  First it was the pipsqueak bipeds with their annoying little spears, too small to do much damage to a mammoth but hurtful if one dared get in close enough to jab, carrying the hateful bright hot light, setting the world on fire. Then a long rush through the night, blinded and stumbling and terrified. Then Big Daddy sinking up to his belly in the sticky pit. It was at that point Big Mama began to get angry.

  Big Mama wanted to try to help Big Daddy out of the black goo, and would have, even at the risk of getting caught herself... but the world was on fire. So for a few minutes she had dithered, swayed back and forth by conflicting duties and impulses and instincts, until something inside her finally broke and she left Big Daddy to his fate. It was a moment that seldom came to domesticated elephants, but trainers dreaded it like nothing else, because when an elephant's normally placid temper broke, she was capable of doing almost anything.