by Cat Rambo
“Careful,” Matthew said. “I’ll get jealous.”
“Of me or him?”
As she touched his skin, Jumbo raised his head, looking at her. His trunk touched the side of her face in return and she half-closed her eyes. An odd tension filled the hold, lingering in the air. As Matthew watched, the massive elephant slowly bent his legs, kneeling down as though bowing before her. Smiling, she whispered something.
“I’ll be damned,” Matthew said. “I never taught him that trick.”
Her hand lingered on the wrinkled skin, each fold thick enough to swallow her slender finger. “Perhaps he is preparing for life as a performer,” she said, her voice low and husky with a sorrow Matthew did not understand.
Later, Matthew and the woman sat together on the freighter’s rear deck, watching the trail from the ship, moonlight gleaming on the frothy waves.
“Twenty years I’ve been with that elephant,” Matthew said. He’d liberated a bottle of Barnum’s champagne. The cork came away with a pop and spray and he offered it to her. She took a sip and laughed.
“It’s like drinking fizz,” she said.
He chuckled at her. “You can’t tell me you’ve never drunk champagne before.”
“I haven’t,” she said. “Really.”
He loved the way the light played on her dark hair. “Laxmi. That’s not a European name.”
“You may call me Gaja, if you like,” she said. “And no, it’s Indian.”
He studied her. As though the words had evoked it, he saw the subtle but apparent exotic cast to her face, the almost slant of her eyes. He took another drink to give himself time to think.
“That bothers you,” she said.
“No,” he said. “No, it doesn’t.”
She shrugged. “No matter,” she said. “This can only happen here, between worlds.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Old World and the New. Right now we’re in neither.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said helplessly.
She looked out across the water, watching the moonlight drifting on the waves. “Imagine there was once a goddess,” she said. “The world is changing, and no one believed in her anymore. Which was a relief, actually. No one asking to win at dice or father sons or find gold hidden beneath their doorstep.
“But the goddess found herself looking at the humans in another light. She found that they had taken one of her favored creatures and made it an animal like any other, to be slaughtered for goods to sell.”
Her dark eyes regarded him. “For a god and a mortal to touch is perilous in any world. Do you understand now why we have so little time?”
She was pulling his leg, he figured. Flimflamming like Barnum. He drew her close and tilted her face to his. “Then we should make the most of it,” he said and kissed her.
Thousands met the ship when they arrived on Easter Sunday. April in New York didn’t seem that different from London. The sun shone in a watery blue sky, and danced on the water as the ponderous crate swung ashore. Cheers went up as Barnum ceremoniously swung open the massive door and when Matthew led Jumbo out, a shout came from the crowd. Children waved pennants, each printed with Jumbo’s likeness, or had stuffed elephants tucked under an arm. The air smelled like a circus—peanuts and popcorn vendors vied with men selling sausages or meat pies. Matthew looked for Gaja, but saw her nowhere. As though she had vanished.
“We’re taking him to my Hippodrome Building,” Barnum shouted in his ear over the crowd’s clamor. “The circus opens there tonight. See the team of ponies pulling the steam calliope? Fall in behind them.”
The buildings here seemed taller than London’s, and there was a cold edge to the wind that blew through the scarlet coat Barnum had made him wear. Like London, the air was full of coal smoke and the smell of people living too close to one another. The parade moved along the street and the delighted faces made him feel better about the tears that had accompanied Jumbo’s departure. He looked again for Gaja, but she was nowhere to be found. He didn’t know that it would be years before he’d see her again.
Barnum stood in the center ring of the Hippodrome in a dazzle of torchlight. Next year, he thought, he’d bring in that new invention of Edison’s and make the inside of the tent shine as though it were daylight. To his left a tiger’s angry scream rent the air. It was a windy night, and the canvas tent roared like a windjammer under full sail.
“Ladies and gentleman!” he shouted as the other rings stilled. “I direct your attention to the center ring! It is Barnum and Bailey’s greatest pleasure to present to you one of the wonders of the world! I give you the towering monarch of his race, whose like the world will never see again! I give you…Jumbo!”
The elephant was bedecked in spangled harness, stepping slowly, enjoying the roar of applause as Matthew led him around the ring. The other circus elephants were lined up around the ring and at a signal, they backed onto their hind legs, sitting with their front legs up, and let out a unified trumpet of acclamation. In their center, the smallest elephant, Tom Thumb, knelt to stand on its head. Jumbo glowed in the light like a fairy tale figure, so brilliant and bedazzling that he took the crowd’s breath away.
“That elephant cost me $30,000 all together, and every penny well spent,” Barnum gloated in his trailer as he thumbed through the receipts. “Pulled in $3,000 a day in the first three weeks. They’ve even named a town in Hardin County after him.”
“He’s a champ, all right,” the accountant said, totting up figures.
“Drinks a bottle of beer every night with his keeper. I’m thinking about having a special mug made in his shape. It’d sell, all right, but the Temperance folks would pitch a fit. I’m having a special train car made for him, with his picture painted on the sides so whenever the train pulls into the station, the people will know to come.”
The best thing about the circus was getting a chance to sit around with the other elephant keepers. Some of them had been in the business longer than Matthew. He liked the easy camaraderie, the friendship of men who knew how to figure out whether or not a tiger would take to flaming hoops, the ways to keep fleas from spreading, or the best method for lancing a boil on a baboon’s ass.
Every Thursday was poker night, and they sat around the table playing with dog-eared cards and drinking beer and swapping stories.
“Used to have a little elephant, dainty as could be, named Siri,” Joe D’Angelo said. The cigar in his mouth puffed, sending up blue smoke around his dark face, mounted with a beaklike nose. “You know what she’d do? Give her an apple or an orange and she’d put it on the ground, tap it dainty as you please with her foot, then pick what was left and rub it all through her hay, like she was flavoring it. What a sweetie she was—real little lady. Hit me with two cards.”
“I had an elephant used to cry like a baby if he made a mistake,” George Arstingstall said.
“Go on, I never seen an elephant cry.”
“He did,” George insisted, throwing his cards on the table. “I’ll pass. Yell at him and there he’d go, crying away. Tears as big as a china cup.”
“They’re strange critters,” Joe said. “Gotta admit them Indians, the real ones, are onto something when they worship them. They got a god called Garnish, got six arms and an elephant trunk. Got a straight.”
“Beats my hand,” Matthew admitted.
“All sorts of elephant mysteries,” Joe continued. “I had a friend who said he’d met the Queen of the Elephants in human form. Walking around like you or me. Said you always knew her because she dressed all in gray. Your deal.”
Thoughts of Gaja flickered across Matthew’s mind as he shuffled the cards.
“What’s she doing walking around then?” he said.
Joe shrugged. “Hey, I seen elephants do all sorts of things. Who says they think like you or me?”
Jumbo didn’t mind the circus, although he still didn’t like the smell of the tigers. Matthew knew it, and he always took care to m
ake sure the big cats were safely stowed away, twenty cars up the line, before they boarded Jumbo’s car. It was custom-built for him, painted crimson and gold, with double doors in the middle to let him enter.
He didn’t feel hungry anymore. Whenever he was hungry, food was there.
“Gotta keep up your strength, you’re the star of the show,” Matthew said. He brought him fruit and hay, and handfuls of peanuts.
It was a good life. The children came and petted him, and Matthew would help him lift the bravest ones to his back, clinging there like fleas. At night Matthew slept in his stall with him, and would talk into the night, the small voice washing over him as he swayed into sleep.
“You can’t go to Toronto,” Gaja said.
“You show up after three years and your first words are, ‘Don’t go to Toronto?’” Matthew said. “Where have you been?”
She looked the same as ever. He’d swear it was the same dress.
“Walking up and down the earth,” she said. “Does it matter?”
“I thought we had… I mean I thought we were.”
“It was nice,” Gaja said. “It was very nice. But I can’t get attached.”
“Attached, is that what you call it? Simple human decency would have meant saying goodbye, at least!”
“I’m telling you not to go to Toronto.”
“But why?”
“I can’t tell you.”
Matthew laughed. “And I should go to that prick Barnum and say we can’t go because some woman’s got her knickers in a twist?”
She looked down. “Can’t you just trust me?”
“Are you the Queen of the Elephants, that I should trust you?”
“Not the Queen,” she said. “Just a goddess who saw the plight of the animals she loved.”
“Not even the right kind of elephant, is he? African rather than Indian. You’re insane!”
“Please,” she begged. “They’re all my children. Please. I thought if you loved me you’d listen and we could prevent it. You can’t let it happen.”
He turned away. “Go away, Miss Laxmi. I have no reason to listen to you.”
Barnum was there the next day with a long thin skeleton of a man. “Wanted to introduce the two of you,” he said. Matthew started to hold out his hand but Barnum said, “No, no! Him and Jumbo, I mean. This is Henry Ward. He’s a taxidermist from Rochester. Stuffed all sorts of things for me. He wants to be the one to stuff Jumbo.”
Ward was gazing up at the elephant, enraptured.
“Anything ever happens, we telegraph him immediately so he can save the skin and skeleton,” Barnum said.
“That’s macabre,” Matthew said, appalled. A chill ran down his spine.
“It’s good business practice, that’s what it is,” Barnum declared.
Matthew led Jumbo and the smallest elephant in the circus, Tom Thumb, along the tracks to the waiting cars, through the darkness lit by flickering torches. Overhead the incurious stars glimmered like a dancer’s spangles across the sky. The trio were the last to board. The small elephant squealed and danced along, still happy from his performance. Jumbo rested his trunk for a moment on his companion, perhaps to calm him, or perhaps only to show affection. They paced along the tracks, steep embankments on either side, the blare and glare of the Big Top behind them and the sounds of the departing crowd, the last visitors leaving with the smell of cotton candy on their hands and glamour pervading their minds to haunt their dreams that night.
When he heard the chill whistle of the express train behind him, his first thought was, “But there’s none scheduled.” The ground shook underneath his feet and he heard the roaring of the coal engine, the screech of the brake, applied too late, too fast. Then all was chaos. The train crashed into Tom Thumb, scooping him onto its cowcatcher—elephant catcher was Matthew’s next thought—pushing him screaming along the track before he rolled down the embankment.
“Run!” Matthew shouted but Jumbo shied away from the slope, trying to flee and unable to see the gap in the fence in his panic.
Train and elephant met. Jumbo was driven to his knees, a massive blow to the earth that Matthew felt to his bones. The train shuddered, its length crumpling, falling away from the tracks.
All thoughts vanished from Matthew’s mind. He knelt beside the groaning, dying elephant, sobbing. The trunk crept around his waist and the two held onto each other until Jumbo’s grip slackened. Matthew clung to his friend in desperation, but the light in the massive eyes died away.
“It’s taken three years,” Henry Ward announced to the Powers’ Hotel banquet room, filled with journalists. “But at last Jumbo’s remains are preserved. All of you have received a piece of the trunk, suitably inscribed for the occasion, but I have another surprise for you. You’ll note the jelly before you. It is a most unusual dish. In the course of preparing the body, I accumulated a pound and a half of powdered ivory. The cook here used it to create the dish, allowing each of you to assimilate a little of the mighty creature.”
He held up his champagne glass. “To Jumbo. Mightiest of his race, Loxodonta Africana.”
“Did you hear that?” one newspaperman said to another.
“What, the toast?”
The man frowned, shaking his head. He was a slight, dapper man, his waistcoat figured with a print of green elephants. “Maybe not hear, but feel. Like a vibration shaking the floor, some sound too deep for the human ear. Maybe a train is passing outside.”
In the corner of the room at an obscure table, Gaja Laxmi sat. She took a spoonful of the pale green jelly, sprinkled with flecks of white, and ate it deliberately, her tears falling to the white tablecloth like slow warm rain.
I was doing some freelance writing that involved researching P.T. Barnum’s acquisition of Jumbo the elephant, and found the actual story too fascinating not to get used in a piece of speculative fiction. All details of the story, with the exception of Gaja Laxmi, are drawn from history, including the jelly made with the powdered ivory from Jumbo's remains.
This story originally appeared in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. I had not thought it overly experimental, especially for a genre story, but a slush reader blogged in a derogatory fashion about it – which was an odd experience, particularly since the magazine subsequently took it. Personally, I think we need more stories from non-human POVs.
IGMS found the original title too long and truncated it. I've taken the liberty of restoring it.
In Order to Conserve
1.
In order to conserve color, the governments first banned newspaper inserts, the ones where dresses and dishwashers and plastic toys and figurines of gnomes with wary smiles tumbled across glossy surfaces. Readers faced columns of type interspersed with dour black and white line drawings, no slick sheets cascading on their laps as they unfolded the newsprint to gaze at the reports of latest developments in The Color Crisis. Others turned to the Internet, monochromatic monitors scrolled by blogs denouncing the Administration, the liberals, the conservatives, the capitalists, alien spiders, and a previously obscure cult known as the Advanced Altar of the Rainbow Serpent.
The change had been almost imperceptible at first. Only artists, fashion designers and gardeners noticed the dimming of shades, the shadows of reds, blues, purples that blossomed from less verdant stems. They brought the shift to the attention of white-coated scientists, who measured the changes in angstroms, then announced that laboratory results proved it true. Somewhere, somehow, color, once thought an inexhaustible natural resource, was running out, and doing so quickly.
The National Guard quelled the initial panic, while their counterparts did the same in other countries. Marching along in their drab uniforms, they shook hands with the populace and rescued black and white cats from birch trees. Waving for the cameras, they smiled that all was well before having them shut down and bundled away by nervous newsfolk, breaking up crowds that had gathered to discuss the situation. Color TVs were piled in broken heaps on on
street corners, awaiting pick-up by the shadow-hued trucks that lumbered and clanked their way through early morning beneath a colorless sky.
As the months passed, more stringent measures were introduced and more and more things were rationed out with booklets of black on black stamps. People tried to use the rarer colors, magenta, fuchsia, pale lavender, but even so, the fashion industry unwillingly made black and white houndstooths, seersuckers, plaids, and ginghams the next statement of style. Grade school students were introduced to the fine art of cross hatching. Studios set to work, uncolorizing old movies.
Color became totally contraband. The majority of police car paint jobs were unchanged. Taxi cabs, on the other hand, turned gray striped with silver, a gleaming paint that reflected a thousand shades of concrete.
You would have thought that people would have mobbed art museums, to stare at the last canvases ever touched by color, but attendance fell off. People didn’t want to be reminded of what they were missing, and security guards, their eyes welling deep with tears, moved among the lonely paintings before going to collect their last paychecks.
2.
An acute scientist, whose hobby was the cello, was the first to notice the decline in sound. The blackberry finches and house sparrows that flocked to her feeder each morning to feast on thistle seed were morose, silently pecking at each other. Sighing, she picked up the telephone, then changed her mind and bicycled away to send a telegram to the White House.
Teachers were forced to come up with new classes to replace band, orchestra, and music appreciation. Playground shouts were monitored. The uniformed guards held up placards to the students: “Conservation begins with you!” and taught sign language during the lunch hours.
Flashing white lights took the place of bells and buzzers. Audiences, after watching their black and white movies, took flashlights out of the purses and pockets and flicked them on and off to demonstrate approval.
