Mammoth

by John Varley

  Howard gestured to another of his men, this one holding a big Maglite—the great man doesn't even carry his own flashlight, he hires help for that—and in a moment Susan's eyes were dazzled, then the beam swept over the baby mammoth, on past it... and she heard a shout even over the racket of the helicopter. Howard stood there with his jaw dropped and his eyes wide, then he shoved the flashlight away and was frantically signaling to his people, all of whom turned their backs, as Howard did, as four Los Angeles uniformed police walked by in the street. He stood there among them, hands clasped behind himself and looking casually at the sky, in what he apparently thought was an innocent attitude. My god, was he actually whistling, too? Susan wondered how he ever got away with anything as a kid if that was the best he could do. When the cops had gone by, he casually turned and gave her a broad wink over his shoulder. Her opinion of his ability to handle this mess plummeted. She needn't have worried. Howard had learned long ago the secret of getting things done, and it was simple: Hire the people who know how to get things done. He was at that moment surrounded by a dozen such types, headed by the very able Mr. Warburton, the ablest of them all. If Warburton didn't know how to get it done, he knew somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody who did. So he turned to Warburton and said:

  Warburton turned to one of his minions and gave his instructions, and more phone calls were made. Ten minutes later a moving van pulled up to the closest police tape on Wilshire, and a dozen very large men got out. They were given their instructions, and proceeded cautiously down the gentle slope to where Susan was standing. They surrounded the little mammoth, ropes were attached, and the squealing infant was unceremoniously wrestled up the slope, over the collapsed fence, and into the back of the van, while a crowd of cops, emergency workers, reporters, and curiosity seekers looked on. Live images of the capture were fed to a worldwide audience by the dozens of news cameras present both on the ground and in the air.

  Susan was already working her telephone as the door slammed on the back of the van—and kicking herself for not thinking of it a few minutes ago. She could have called Howard, standing fifty feet away! But things had been a little hectic there, and she hoped she could be forgiven for overlooking it.

  She knew all the elephant keepers from the Griffith Park Zoo, and within an hour most of them were on their way to the Miracle Mile.

  When Big Mama woke and staggered to her feet, it was to find herself completely immobilized with ropes and nets. She was bullied and prodded until, not without difficulty, she was induced up the ramp of a giant stake-sided flatbed truck to begin her slow progress through streets lined with most of the population of Beverly Hills, Hollywood, and all intervening Los Angeles neighborhoods until she reached the elephant house at the zoo, at three in the morning.

  At the same time crews were trying to figure out how to rescue Big Daddy, but it was hopeless. By the time Big Mama arrived at her temporary new home, the bull had ceased to move, and shortly afterward a veterinarian declared him dead, suffocated by the increasing pressure as he sank into the black ooze. The operation was immediately switched from a rescue to one of recovery. Howard did not intend to let twelve tons of mammoth meat and bones—and viable spermatozoa—be swallowed up to emerge in another twelve thousand years as blackened bones. By the time the sun came up a massive crane had been moved into place, stabilized and counterbalanced. A giant claw, normally used for horsing entire giant eucalyptus logs onto truck beds, plunged into the asphalt and clamped around Big Daddy's corpse. Ribs could be heard cracking as the claw plucked the body free like a cork from a bottle of very bad vintage wine.

  These three ultradramatic operations drew attention away from a fourth one going on at the same time on Curson Avenue. As helicopter cameras followed the progress of the trucks carrying Big Mama and the calf, other trucks had arrived on the side street, other cranes and forklifts were gathering every scrap of still-steaming mammoth meat and hustling it into refrigerated vans, which sped off to an undisclosed location. There wasn't a news director in the world who would cut away from the frantic attempts to save Big Daddy to shots of bullet-riddled pachyderm corpses with exploded heads, but by the time the big bull was dead the remains of the other adult cows were nowhere to be found, and even the gallons and gallons of blood had been hosed away. It was as if it had all been a dream, the slaughter on Curson Avenue, and if there hadn't been the video to prove it had happened many people would have preferred to leave it that way.

  By two that afternoon, not much more than fifteen and a half hours after the arrival of the mammoths, traffic was flowing smoothly again, and Howard Christian, bone weary by now, retired to his aerie in the Resurrection Tower to begin writing the checks to pay for it all.

  But he was smiling.

  IT was not much later than that before Susan had a chance to catch her breath and realize, with a flush of shame, that she hadn't thought of Matt more than once or twice the entire day. There had just been too much to do, too many places to be at once, trying to see the baby mammoth safely to his temporary new home at the zoo, monitoring and advising during the operations around Big Mama and Big Daddy by cell phone cameras, with barely any time to weep when Big Daddy breathed his last, mighty breath.

  But at last she and the zoo veterinarians completed their checkup of the little mammoth, who stood calm and compliant for all the poking and probing, either in shock or unable to fathom what had happened to him and thus ready to accept any friendly attention, and she sat down with a sandwich and a cup of coffee and wondered why Matt had taken off as abruptly as he did. He had said he might be gone... how long? "A while." One of those maddeningly inexact English words describing time. A bit. A moment. A tick. A spell, a flash, a jiffy, a shake, a space, a stretch, a breath.

  In this case, a while would be five years.

  20

  CENOZOIC Park had been erected over the next few years in what had once been farmland not far east of Portland, Oregon, along the newly widened Route 26 that went by Mount Hood and across the Cascades toward Bend.

  There was not a lot of middle ground when it came to the theme park. Oregonians either loved it or hated it, and were just about equally divided on the matter. The only thing everyone agreed on was that nobody but the planners and builders called it Cenozoic Park from the moment ground was broken. Everybody called it Fuzzyland. Portland had been fighting urban sprawl for decades, and having better luck with it than many another metropolitan area. When the plans for Fuzzyland were announced, a year to the day after the slaughter in Los Angeles, environmental activists were stunned to discover it was already a done deal. Several millions of Howard Christian's money, discreetly applied, had obtained variances to land-use regulations. The hearings that followed were a formality. In only weeks bulldozers were at work on the much loathed Mount Hood Freeway, something planners had thought dead and buried for forty years. It was almost finished by opening day, the remaining construction just enough to make the traffic delays getting there merely dreadful rather than nightmarish.

  "A shot in the arm for tourism, and the ski industry!" proclaimed all the various chambers of commerce in the affected areas.

  "A blight on the Cascades!" the environmentalists sneered.

  Though the words "tasteful" and "circus" are not traditionally used in the same sentence, Howard instructed his architects to do the best they could, and they did manage to avoid the worst excesses of Las Vegas and Orlando. You could barely see the place from the highway, camouflaged as it was by hundreds of Douglas firs. (The trees were actually metal frameworks supporting colored Styrofoam bark and easy-to-clean plastic needles, but who cared?)

  When you drove through the forest toward the vast underground parking lots you barely got a glimpse of the park just before plunging into the depths. It was mostly low-slung, sprawling, hugging the ground, dominated by the largest plastic and steel geodesic dome ever built, gleaming in the spring sunshine—or, more likely, glistening in the Oregon rain. It wasn't until you took t
he long escalators to the monorail that circled the park and took you to one of the four themed areas, three resort hotels, two RV parks, and one campground that you got a sense of the scale of the place.

  You quickly realized that the dome was a lot bigger than you had imagined. A structure like that, with very little to give it a sense of scale, it could sort of sneak up on you, it took a while to realize you were farther away than you thought. It was big.

  Placed between the parking lots and the park itself were the hotels, each with its monorail stop.

  First was the smallest, the Alpine, on the side of the nearest hill, a Frank Lloyd Wright knockoff of dressed stone and polished wood and glass, cantilevered over a rushing river a la Falling Water, hangout of those who had come mainly to sample the year-round winter sports under the dome or the winter recreation nearby. Ski bums, hotdogging snowboarders, slumming Euro trash tired of the slopes of Aspen and Gstaad, aging snow bunny wannabes from the RV parks there to take their first and only bobsled or luge ride on the short, hair-raising, but guaranteed safe indoor course.

  Next was the Timberline II, "the World's Largest Log Cabin," patterned on the WPA structure on nearby Mount Hood, famous from exterior shots in Stanley Kubrick's movie The Shining, only TII was ten times as large and seemed from the outside to be made entirely of Lincoln Logs. (More Styrofoam, but who cared?) This was the cheapest of the three, with its retro '30s decor and its bellhops dressed as forest rangers (but not cheap; for cheap you had to go to the little town of Zigzag, to the Motel 6s and 8s and Comfort Inns that had sprouted like weeds when Cenozoic Park was abuilding, and take a shuttle bus to the park entrance).

  The trip wound through lakes and hills, not Styrofoam this time, but not natural, either, having been scooped out and piled up by Howard Christian's devouring earthmoving machines and landscaped by armies of gardeners, here and there getting glimpses of an ever-growing Ice Dome, until finally the entirety of the park was visible.

  First the monorail plunged into the dome itself and all the newcomers would gasp as snow began to swirl around them, melting instantly when it hit the glass and metal of the train cars on a summer day, clinging in the winter. It was always snowing in the dome, somewhere, but only when and where the designers wanted it to snow. Promoters liked to boast that the snow removal budget every week at the Ice Dome was greater than that of the city of Portland for the entire winter. (Well, sure, but Portland tended to simply spread a little sand around on the rare occasions when it snowed.) In the center was Mount Mazama—which had destroyed itself thousands of years ago in the explosion that created Crater Lake, but who cared?—five times the height of Disney's Matterhorn and just as hollow, with a bobsled ride that ran on real ice. There were the animal exhibits: the polar bears, the musk oxen, the penguins, the arctic foxes, arctic owls, Seal Island, the white wolves, the caribou herd. There was Frosty's Snowman Lane and Toboggan Hill and Snow Fort Country for the little ones. There were three ice rinks, and a roller coaster. All the themed areas had roller coasters.

  Beyond that was Redwood Empire, Fuzzyland's obligatory nod to the Sierra Club, where you could wander in the perpetual mists among the towering giants—not Styrofoam this time, but plaster so realistic that crews were kept busy patching woodpecker holes—and learn about Mother Earth and endangered species and how to recycle your newspaper, where most people paused long enough to walk around a massive tree trunk, maybe take an educational ride, pretty much like at Epcot, and then hurry on to less earnest amusements.

  Which were to be found in Cenozoic Park itself, now called Cenozoic Safari, originally intended to be the heart of the development but now just one of four areas and only the third most popular. Here were more exciting nature rides, on open-topped robotic excursion buses painted in jungle camouflage, down paths with names like the Eocene Trek, the Oligocene Adventure, the Paleocene Expedition, and the Pleistocene Experience. Here you encountered the amazing mammals of the Tertiary and Quaternary periods, so long upstaged by the big reptiles of the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous.

  And you want big? You think dinosaurs were big? Down the swampy ways of the Cenozoic lurked Basilosaurus—a mammal in spite of the reptilian name—an early whale that grew to eighty feet or more, ate great white sharks like minnows, and could lunge onto shore to dine on primitive hippopotami... or it did that in the park, anyway, in one of the animated diorama showstoppers that splashed gallons of water on the delighted safari bus passengers.

  Ambulocetus, Durodon, Andrewsarchus, Hyaenodon, Amphicyonia, knuckle-walking Chalicotheres, turtle-shelled giant Glyptodonts, Ancylotherium, Deinotherium, Propaleotherium, Moeritherium... by now the kids had had about all the -theriums they could take, it was time to get to the Pleistocene Promenade, time to get to a place where the animals had names you could pronounce and remember, names like Mammoth, Mastodon, Irish Elk, Cave Bear, Cave Lion, Woolly Rhinoceros, Saber-Toothed Cat, and Giant Ground Sloth (Megatherium, if you wanted to get technical, which nobody but the guides did by that point). Here they were, the fabled creatures of the various ice ages and interregnums, many of which had been hunted, maybe to extinction, by our ancestors, and like all the large cybers in Cenozoic Park, these didn't just stand there and wave their trunks and nod their heads and maybe paw the ground, they walked!

  But the most popular area, hands down, was the last stop on the mono-maglev train before it completed its loop back at the parking lot, was Fuzzyland. If you would rather snowboard on real slopes, if you got your fill of environmental indoctrination in junior high school, and if thirty-foot rubber chalicotheres left you cold—and that was the case with virtually all of the teenagers and most of the young adults—Fuzzyland was the place for you.

  The theme was Circus. Turn-of-the-century circus (the twentieth century, 1901 if you want to get picky), with lots of wood and brass, calliopes playing ragtime and rock and rap, penny-pitches where you actually pitched silver dollars, vast Victorian canvases depicting two-headed women and snake boys lining the midway—which actually featured fire eaters, sword swallowers, contortionists, and other carny acts rather than human freaks—big tents containing virtual reality video games, dance halls, funhouses, and shops selling a million kinds of souvenir and every type of fattening fried food known to humanity.

  And rides. Ordinary carnival rides and multimillion-dollar vertiginous coasters that had been the centerpieces of theme parks since Walt Disney opened Space Mountain. (So how did that fit with winter wonderland, ecology, and paleontology, the naysayers asked? Badly, of course, but Fuzzy himself, the reason for this entire carnival, was intended to be part of Howard Christian's circus from the get-go, and thus Ringling Bros. B&B maintained its only permanent installation outside of its winter quarters in Florida right here, so circus it would be, and circus it was.)

  But it was true, and everyone agreed on it: Fuzzy the baby mammoth was the reason all this was here, and without him it might very well all dry up and blow away. Everybody had a great time at all the surrounding attractions with all their bells and whistles, they enjoyed the first act of the circus performances, which featured the very cream of lion tamers, clowns, jugglers, and daring aerialists, they got a big kick out of the opening of the second act with its giant overhead hi-def screens and its elephants and Big Mama... but what most people came here to see was the world's darling, Little Fuzzy. "Most people" meaning those who could afford it. Fuzzy's show was put on twice a day, except Mondays—separate ticket required, and that ticket was three times what you paid to get in, and that wasn't cheap—so not everyone who visited the park on a given day would get in to the show.

  The operators went to a two-tiered system within a week of the opening day: reservations and a much higher price for the skyboxes and front rows, and a lottery of park attendees, who won the privilege of paying for the open seats. An hour before showtime scalping was strictly dog-eat-dog, with crying children and parents sometimes coming to blows.

  Twelve shows a week, and practically everyo
ne in the world wanted to get in, even the hard-core environmentalists who opposed the park, the circus, and everything it stood for. Everyone, that is, except for Susan Morgan, who had to be at every one of them.

  Twelve shows a week.

  She had been doing it for one year, and it was starting to look like a life sentence.

  SUSAN left the elephant/mammoth compound at eleven P.M., one hour after the end of the final show of the night. She climbed up into the cab of her super-heavy-duty Dodge pickup, emblazoned on the door with a magnetic smiling baby mammoth logo of Fuzzyland. The beast burst into life with a rumble of its huge 6.2-liter diesel engine.

  Now she traveled the route visitors took from the entrance and parking lots, but in reverse, and by pathways visitors never saw. Off to her left she could sometimes glimpse the maglev rail perched on its big concrete pylons, but usually it was concealed behind rows of trees or high fences. Cenozoic Park was, for the most part, a world of illusion—that's what the trees and fences were designed to hide, because the magic went out of the trick if you knew exactly how it was done. Back here, there was no illusion, just utilitarian blacktop and concrete and nondescript cheap sheet-metal buildings that housed the workshops and electrical boards that kept the machines running, pumps that kept plants and animals and visitors watered, and storage warehouses that fed the insatiable appetites of the thousands who entered every day, from cotton candy mix to tons of frozen hamburger patties to bottles of champagne to Cenozoic Park bumper stickers and T-shirts to Little Fuzzy refrigerator magnets and rubber keychains.