by John Varley
Susan stood there for a moment, watching him vanish into the night. Suddenly the reaction set in, all the horror of the worst night of her life, and she sat down on the twisted remains of the fence that had separated the sidewalk from the tar pits and the audio-animatronic mammoths that had been forlornly waving their trunks at the passing traffic on Wilshire for decades. Emergency workers were running up and down the street in front of her, police were setting up more secure barriers to keep out the curious while the scene of the catastrophe was investigated. Not far to her left people were cautiously approaching the huge bulk of Big Mama, still on her side, and apparently still breathing.
But one of them wasn't. Cowering at the side of the female on the bank of the tar pit, between the cow and her calf, was a second baby mammoth, this one entirely covered in thick, reddish black hair. It saw Susan and took a step toward her, then retreated back into the shadows of its new surrogate mother and attempted to nurse.
18
THE lights dimmed slowly under the big top until the audience in the bleachers, just back from the intermission with their hands full of expensive popcorn and chips and fresh paper cups of beer, was left in darkness broken only by the faint radiance seeping through the glass ring of skyboxes above and behind them, where the corporate sponsors and the very rich dined on prime rib and lobster and caviar and sipped champagne. There was a burst of excited noise that gradually fell away. The sound of the electronic music, when it came, hammered out of suspended planar speakers like a living thing, beginning on an almost supersonic note and plunging rapidly to spaces way, way, way below the bass clef, became a rumble that grabbed at the guts and shook one's entire body.
Then came the voice of the ringmaster.
"Ladies and gentlemen... and children of all ages..."
A thousand computer-controlled pencil spotlights blazed in a hundred colors and swept crazily around the arena as the music swooped stereophonically from one end of the big top to the other. Fog belched from hidden ducts, and soon the spotlight beams were slicing through it like crazed laser warfare.
"...Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus..."
The spotlights suddenly merged on a gigantic, flat black curtain at the far end of the arena. The curtain opened slowly to each side to reveal... a second scalloped curtain of red velvet.
"...a Howard Christian Company..."
The velvet curtain began to rise at a tantalizing creep, the sound of a thousand snare drums beginning what sounded like the world's longest drum roll. Slowly, slowly a massive proscenium arch was revealed: two stylized giant ground sloths carved from ice, thirty feet tall, backed by a stainless steel arch that reached even higher.
Jungle sounds began to enter the mix, a polyglot, nonsensical, multicontinental cacophony of wild animals that might have been cribbed from an old Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan picture: monkeys chattering, macaws cawing, lions and tigers and bears roaring, lizards hissing, kookaburras doing their kookaburra thing.
"...takes you back to the last Ice Age, when vast sheets of ice covered the very ground we now stand on..."
Now the collective gasp of the audience could actually be heard over the hugely pumped sound track as the vast, billowing big top disappeared to be replaced by towering clouds in a sky so impossibly blue it hurt the eyes, the clouds forming and dissolving and whipping by in time-lapse madness, and maybe the guy sitting next to you breathed in an awed voice How did they do that? if he wasn't in on the trick, which was that, though the big top looked like a gigantic tent from the outside—it was in fact a gigantic tent, outside—the acres of canvas covered an inner layer that was actually the world's largest spread of millimeter-thick hi-def television screens which had cost millions, set over an arena that had been dug into the ground deeply enough that the "skyboxes" were in fact slightly below ground level, and the gently billowing shrouds of honey-colored canvas you had been seeing for the last half hour while the lights were up during the intermission was actually only the picture of the inside of a big top.
"...and proudly presents..."
And now a wind began to howl, a cold wind thrust from a solid ring of ducts mounted atop the skyboxes, a wind generated from air that had been supercooling for three hours in frosty refrigeration chambers, impelled now into the arena by fans that used to power supersonic wind tunnels. Hats were blown off, hair mussed, and a trillion goosebumps crawled over acres of exposed skin. Children shrieked in delight and women snuggled under the arms of their menfolk and complained of the chill while the men laughed and tried to pretend they weren't cold, too.
"...after an absence from planet Earth of over ten... thousand... years!...."
Overhead, night fell rapidly, blazing stars embedded in a sky so dark it shimmered like polished obsidian, a sky presided over by a full yellow moon that had to be five times—no, ten times—wait a minute—twenty times as large as the moon ever appeared from the Earth, even in the Ice Age, the moon was no closer then, was it, daddy? of course it wasn't, it's what they call artistic license, sweetheart, or maybe they call it making it up as they go along, but it's a heck of a show, isn't it, sweetie, so why don't you be quiet for a minute and watch it?
And then, silence. Silence and darkness, all the music and animal sounds and air blowers suddenly quiet and all the lights off, only the murmurings of the crowd filling the dark and almost at once that tapered off, too, as everyone knew something big was about to happen... and then, what was that smell?
Well, it was essence of mammoth, that's what it was, and it was issuing from tiny openings in each and every chair in the joint, angled up at the faces... and essence was the right word, but it was a slightly edited essence, wasn't it, there was the musky smell of mammoth hide, the dusty smell of mammoth feet, even the slightly rotten odor of masticated hay and pulverized fruits and vegetables that made up the brown stuff that accumulated around mammoth teeth... but there was the merest whiff of what was actually the dominant olfactory impression one got if one walked even within a city block of any mammoth habitat and that was, not to put too fine a point to it, mammoth shit. But nobody ever said the circus was about realism, the circus was about superreality, taking real animals and people and putting them on a wonderful stage and hyping them up and watching them do fantastic things. And the overpowering odor of mammoth dung swamping one's nostrils was definitely not on the menu of anybody's concept of entertainment, so the carefully crafted smell had just a whiff, just enough to titillate the noses of the city-bred audience, no worse than strolling through a carefully tended horse barn at the county fair.
"...The Columbian Mammoth... Big Mama!"
Well, that wasn't precisely what they had been waiting for, but it was good enough, it would do for now because everyone knew that what they had all really come to see would be there in his own good time, this was merely setting the stage, and after all, this was the Greatest Show On Earth, an organization that would never disappoint, these were circus people who knew that building the anticipation was almost as important to the show as the main attraction itself.
And what a buildup!
The night sky was suddenly shattered by a meteor shower the likes of which the planet hadn't seen since the last major asteroid strike, first a hundred, then a thousand streaks of blue-white and pale yellow and blazing green, some exploding silently at the end of their trajectories, then larger chunks, some hitting the ground on the far side of the mountains that could now be seen not only by moonlight, but by meteor light. Explosions could be heard (and nobody cared that the speed of sound dictated that most of those impacts wouldn't be heard until whole minutes had passed, this was show business, not science) and it looked like the Earth was on fire over there, and then one hit on this side of the mountains and the entire gigantic building shook, hard enough to spill a few drinks in the skyboxes and to cause gasps of genuine alarm from those who hadn't read the warning in the program books designed to prevent an earthquake panic ("Explosions, bright flashing lights, and harmless
seismic effects are included in tonight's show!"). And not one voice was raised in protest that a giant asteroid impact had killed off the dinosaurs, sixty million years ago, not the mammoths in the recent past.
And now, here it came... well, no, not yet, but once more no one complained, because what did come was the elephants.
The great steel doors beneath the arched icy ground sloths sprang open and they lumbered out, twenty of them, in full circus regalia of red leather harness studded with brass, multicolored drapes big enough to carpet a fair-sized room hanging from their sides, and headdresses of pink feathers. Ten went left and ten went right around the oval arena floor and they spread out evenly, then turned to face the center. Then all twenty elephants reared up on their hind legs and raised their trunks and started trumpeting, a truly amazing sound, considering that their already ear-splitting volume was caught by throat mikes, amplified, and sent to the speakers overhead.
You couldn't say she dwarfed the assembled Indian elephants... well, P. T. Barnum probably would have said it, he claimed his famous Jumbo stood thirteen feet high at the crown of his head, but he never let anyone measure him while he was alive... but she stood in relation to her attendant pachyderms as a Clydesdale would to an ordinary horse. She was in fact thirteen feet tall at her tallest point, which was her massive, humped shoulders, and none of the Indian elephant honor guard topped out at much over ten feet... and come to think of it, maybe that does qualify as dwarfing them.
But her tusks. Her tusks!
They were the crowning glory of the Columbian Mammoth, growing almost straight out from her face, then curving inward until they almost touched, ten feet from her mouth. They had been yellowish in color when she was captured on the streets of Los Angeles, but assiduous dental care had made them gleam white as a toothpaste advertisement.
Big Mama was a show business veteran by now, used to the bedlam, the flashing lights and the noise and the smells that at one time were so alien to her. It also didn't hurt that a tranquilizer pill the size of an apple had been mixed with her feed an hour before showtime because, though the circus didn't like to talk about it much, Big Mama still had a streak of wildness in her, had been known to lash out without warning, had in fact seriously injured her chief trainer a few years ago because, after all, you can't keep an animal in a tranquilized torpor twenty-four hours a day even if, with an animal like Big Mama, you might like to.
But the big cow had never been known to act up when the spotlight was on her, it was almost as if she enjoyed performing, and she was a trooper tonight, following docilely behind her handler, an anonymous woman with a slight limp dressed all in black so as to be as unobtrusive as possible, like those Japanese Bunraku puppeteers who manipulated their life-sized mannequins right out in plain sight but were hardly noticed. She lumbered once around the ring to thunderous applause, the crowd on its feet, bringing down the house. On the screens above, dawn broke, and computer-generated mammoths fully as convincing as real ones circled with her, and if you thought that forty or fifty hundred-foot images of mammoths above would somehow detract from the majesty, the massive dignity, the sheer star power of Big Mama, you would have been wrong; this audience had been weaned on huge screens in outdoor stadiums cheering for the Raiders or the Dodgers, they were used to towering images in replay or magnifying the actions that were tough to see from the nosebleed seats, they loved it, they understood it was just a setting, a backdrop, that it made Big Mama more of a towering figure.
She made two circuits of the arena with the ring of elephants alternately saluting her or being urged into other tricks by their black-clad handlers—headstands, dances, daisy chains, stand perches—and it helped cover up the fact that Big Mama essentially had only one "behavior" to demonstrate, which was standing on her hind legs with her head aimed up so that the tips of her tusks were thirty feet above the ground, waving her trunk around and bellowing, and few people knew how hard it had been to get a crusty old bitch like her to do even that. Training elephants, like training any large and dangerous animal, relied on the animal accepting the unlikely idea that the human trainer, though demonstrably smaller and weaker, was in fact bigger and stronger than the trained animal, that the human ought, by natural right, to be the dominant figure in the social contract, and Big Mama had been the leader of her herd for too long to accept that idea with any regularity or consistency unless lulled by large doses of tranquilizers.
So where was the Great Woolly? For the first time, the audience began to get a little restless.
This did not go unnoticed by the producers of the show. Hidden in every tenth seat were electronic devices that functioned pretty much like a lie detector, measuring heart and respiration rate, palm sweat, and the pressure of butts on seats. Lasers were constantly scanning the audience, measuring pupil dilation and analyzing posture. These factors were inserted into a complex entertainment algorithm to produce a satisfaction index, and every night this presentation produced the lowest value. But Howard Christian liked this part of the show, so it stayed in.
Finally the arena was cleared, the lights and the tent screens faded to black, and one spotlight and every eye in the place swung once more to the grand entrance arch. You could practically feel the ringmaster take a deep breath and then announce, in his most grandiloquent manner—which could have taught the Lord God Almighty Himself thundering "Let there be light!" a thing or two about pomposity—
"And now, without further ado, the star of the show, the most famous, the most beloved animal in the world, the Great Woolly Mammoth... Little Fuzzy!"
19
LITTLE Fuzzy the Great Woolly Mammoth was no longer exactly little, not really fuzzy, and technically not a woolly mammoth, but it was hard to deny his greatness. He was the biggest animal star in history, bigger than Jumbo, bigger than Seabiscuit, Lassie, Flipper, Secretariat, and King Kong. He was bigger than Mickey Mouse.
Within a few more minutes the police and emergency response commanders were answering their own phones and getting their orders from the very top levels. Many of them resented it, at least at first, until they saw how quickly and efficiently the scene was being managed, and then it occurred to many of them that this could turn out to be the biggest shitstorm to hit L.A. since Rodney King, and did they really want their names written down anywhere near it? Of course they didn't. The killing of the herd had gone out on live television, and it was not going to go down well with animal lovers around the world. Best to let Christian shoulder the blame.
Miraculously, there were no reports of anyone having been killed or even seriously injured in the catastrophe, though the property destruction had been enormous. Crime scene procedures were drastically shortened, as no one could think of any actual crime that had been committed unless someone had deliberately unleashed the animals on an unsuspecting city. So Big Mama and her slaughtered herd were hastily photographed, even as Warburton's trucks were backing up to haul them away. The fate of the male mammoth, eventually to be known as Big Daddy, was handed off to Howard and Warburton with almost audible sighs of relief.
It wasn't until the arrival of a large horse trailer at the edge of the tar pit itself that anyone other than Howard's people even knew there was a third mammoth still alive.
SUSAN witnessed the arrival of Howard's ridiculous car with more relief than she would have believed possible.
Every second for the last half hour she had feared that she and the baby mammoth would be discovered. The bull mammoth was mired no more than a hundred feet from where she stood, his mighty head moving less and less frequently, his trunk lashing wildly, getting stuffed with the thick goo which he would then snort out, each time more fitfully than the last. Many times flashlights swept over him and she heard people shouting about bringing up some big lights, but that was apparently delayed. The streetlights in the area were mostly knocked down, and the outdoor diorama was in deep shadow. Twice flashlights illuminated the phony bull in the pool and the phony cow and calf standing on the shore,
but Susan was standing behind a thick palm tree and whoever had the flashlight either didn't see the real baby mammoth or accepted it as part of the display, even when he moved his little trunk over the plastic flank of his temporary surrogate mother, and the beam moved on.
But he had proved amazingly tractable. Mostly he seemed content to hover in the shadow of the big statue. If he started to move away Susan moved toward him, and he quickly retreated to what he must have thought of as safety. It seemed reasonable, from his point of view. If this auntie here isn't afraid of the two-legs, why should I be?
She had no idea what to do. One thing she was sure of, though, and that was that this baby was not going to be slaughtered like the others, most of which were probably his aunts and one of which was almost certainly his mother. If she had to stand between the baby and the bullets, so be it. She was not going to let this one get away.
And so, for the first time since she had met him, she was happy to see Howard arrive. Whatever else he might be, Howard was power, and power got things done in this world.
It took her a while to get Howard's attention as he strode up and down the sidewalk above her, shouting into his cell phone or at Warburton. The shadows that had protected her now frustrated her in her attempts to flag him down, there was still too much hubbub for her to easily make herself heard, and she was afraid if she made too much noise she might spook the calf. Once Howard almost seemed to hear her hissed words. He looked around and so did one of his bodyguards, but they didn't see her. He strode off up the street and she almost cried.
He was back soon, but this time a helicopter overhead drowned out any sounds she could make. She scrabbled around on the dark ground, looking for a good rock, but all she could come up with were a few clods of dirt. She started throwing them, and the third exploded at his feet. He stared at it dumbly for a moment, then he looked up in the air as if wondering if he was being pelted by meteors, and at last one of his entourage pointed down the slope to where Susan stood with one hand held out and one finger held to her lips, hoping she was getting across Be quiet, and don't come down here yet!
