Fantasy The Best of 2001

by Robert Silverberg

  But it was a start.

  We had finally begun to ride the healing path.

  So we drove away, through a land haunted with moonlight, leaving behind the bone-desert of our grief.

  GRASS

  LAWRENCE MILES

  “Only in the context of a totality of the sciences do Jefferson’s achievements make sense. This would for instance explain the apparent contradiction of how a man now famed for his contribution to the political sciences . . . [was also] purportedly the first westerner to fully reconstruct the remains of a prehistoric mammoth. It’s more the failing of an over-enthusiastic age than of the man himself that Jefferson seriously believed such antediluvian beasts could have survived until the 1800s in the wilds of the unexplored midwest . . . .”

  —D. P. Mann, The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson (1958).

  IT STARTS WITH THE President of the United States of America, although we should be clear on exactly what kind of gentleman we’re discussing here. Sitting behind the Presidential desk (rose-wood, as it happens, and very nice too) is a man whom later generations will call a polymath, a statesman-philosopher, a true product of the enlightenment. Oh yes, this particular President is a creator, with a portfolio that begins “We, the people” and works its way up to a big climax from there. He’s also a man who distrusts priests of just about every denomination, which explains much of what’s about to happen here: he’s got a lot of time for the divine, this one, but mere mortal authority figures get his back up like nothing else on God’s Earth. Now, we can’t be sure that what we’re about to see in this room is bona fide true, because the affairs of the President are traditionally left behind closed doors, and there are some rules even we’re expected to follow. But we can put the scene together out of the pieces we know. Call it listening at keyholes. Call it history by degrees. Mr. Jefferson—Mr. President—sits behind the afore-mentioned desk, in front of a vast window that looks out onto a garden of grass and cat’s-ears, a garden quite specifically designed so as to in no way resemble the three million square miles of hostile territory beyond it. The light’s flooding through the window onto the parquet-and-polish floor, while the President himself is leaning over the books with which he surrounds himself (this being a less literate time, however, “surrounds” makes the number of books involved sound greater than it really is), reaching for his little box of joy. The box is small and off-white, a gift from a visitor whose exact name and purpose Mr. Jefferson can’t quite recall: he seems to recollect that it was a woman, probably French (he has no difficulty remembering this, as he’s had a head for Frenchwomen ever since a certain remarkable incident in a brothel in Paris . . . this is another story, and not the only “another story” which will be intercepting us today). History doesn’t record what he keeps inside the box, though as we’ve imagined Mr. Jefferson as a free-thinking nineteenth century gentleman it could be anything from snuff to hashish. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume it’s chewing tobacco. Undignified as it may seem.

  “It has to be done—it must be done—it is our duty,” he says, as he starts picking at the box’s contents. He talks the way he writes, with far too many hyphens and pauses, and he’s addressing the two men standing on the other side of his desk. “If we’re to claim these lands for the good of our nation—if we’re to prevent them being overrun by jackals and opportunists—if we’re to have room in which to breathe, and not fall upon each other as they do in Europe . . . .”

  Now, it so happens that Mr. Jefferson’s domain has recently grown, thanks to a certain land deal which is not only due to increase his running total of United States, but which will also give him vast tracts of what he believes to be lush and verdant farmland, possibly including that mythical easy route to the Pacific. And the two men who now stand in Mr. Jefferson’s office, nodding in solemn agreement, will go down in history as the first men to travel into the heart of this new terrain: or the first to take notes anyway, which is the way history works. Their names are, from left to right, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. As expected.

  (This is all quite ridiculous, of course. At least one of these men already belongs to the President’s inner circle. If Jefferson wants to brief them on their mission, then he’s more likely to do it in a cozy drawing room with a bottle of Cognac, swapping stories as Lewis lounges on a chaise longue and Clark leans nonchalantly against the fireplace. But how can we resist imagining it this way? The two of them standing to attention before the Presidential desk, being instructed to journey into the dark heart of the Northwest and bring the land under control. No doubt you’re already imagining these two great explorers, these two grizzled veterans of the wilderness, walking into the President’s office dressed in furs and racoon-skin hats. We need to believe they’re going to step out of the briefing and, without even pausing for breath, stride off into the jungles of uncharted America. Such is history.)

  Mr. Jefferson is telling the explorers that nobody can say for sure what they’ll find in the Northwestern territories. The French who sold him the land have hardly been forthcoming, and the Indians aren’t likely to be much help either. The President expects every form of terrain imaginable, from the tropical to the simply peculiar. He’s read the greatest naturalists of the age. He has plans to meet with Alexander von Humboldt himself. He’s even heard the theories of the Englishman Frere, who claims to have found human remains which blatantly defy the book of Genesis, something Mr. Jefferson greatly appreciates. Oh, yes indeed. As an enlightened gentleman, the President knows the terra incognita Lewis and Clark will find is no Biblical wasteland. It’s to be an altogether more rational landscape, filled with all the wonders that biology and geology can produce. A new world, untouched by Church dogma, governed only by the laws of Nature and Nature’s God.

  This is the point when Mr. Jefferson tells. Lewis and Clark about the mammoths: Oddly—seeing as most of this patchwork conversation will be lost to posterity—the part about the mammoths is the one thing the history books do record.

  It starts with the President, but in purely chronological terms the briefing in the office isn’t the first thing to actually happen. Just look at this landscape, for example. Nothing behind-closed-doors here. The sky’s a color which later generations will be unable to imagine as anything other than a kind of paint, a deep blue, a dark blue, that makes the green, green grass look as though it’s glaring in the sunlight. The air’s fresh, pre-industrial fresh, the kind of fresh you only get once it’s been filtered through the lungs of several million herd animals and a couple of dozen Indian tribes (this is as fresh as nature gets, no doubt about it). The grass clings to the slopes, sticks close to the curves of the land, so the green’s only broken up by the dirt-paths where animals have left their scents behind them like breadcrumb-trails. And mountains? Oh, there are mountains. Just waiting on the horizon, looking as if they’ll always be just waiting on the horizon, wherever you stand on the surface of the Earth. Perfect idyll. Perfect Montana. Timeless, we’d say. But from the President’s point of view, we’d have to call it the past. Months before the briefing of Mr. Lewis and Mr. Clark, the white race has already set foot in the Land of the Shining Mountains.

  Here she comes now.

  Her name’s Lucia Cailloux, and at this moment she’s running barefoot through the grass, up the side of a slope which seems to have been put there just to warn travelers that the Rockies will be starting soon, and that they’d better get used to moving uphill. An observer would point out that Lucia—whose manner of dress is unusually masculine, but then, that’s probably what you’d expect from someone who’s spent so much time talking to damned heathen Indians—is technically wearing boots. But that’s not how it feels to Lucia. No, she can feel the warm, warm earth between her naked toes, because in her head she’s suddenly become an eight-year-old. As a twenty-year-old woman in the service of her government, this is hardly what she’s being paid for, but right now her superiors are more than eight thousand miles away and Lucia can’t help
but feel she’s going to get away with it.

  You see, right now she believes she’s going somewhere. When she was young, she once ran all the way up the Rue Viande, something of an achievement when you’ve got child-sized legs and no shoes, because the Rue Viande is a perfect slope and the sheer amount of dirt on it (in those days, anyway, before Napoleon started cleaning it all up) made the road feel like mud in the summer. On that day—running all the way to the tannery, right at the highest point of the street, where the skins were strung up like flags at the top of the world—the junior Lucia could feel the whole world cracking like glass behind her, with the wind ripping through her dirt-blonde hair and the sheer speed (all of, oh, two miles an hour) tearing at her little dress. And as she headed for the tip of that slope, she knew—she knew—she’d look down and see something big and wonderful on the other side, as her reward for running all the way. She knew she’d see the whole world, in all its truth and majesty. The face, if you will, of Nature’s God.

  She was right, as well. Young Lucia always was a perceptive little witch.

  Now the older Lucia, barefoot and booted, knows the same thing. She can quite literally smell it on the wind. At the top of the slope, she stops, so this is the point when we finally see her face in closeup. Dirt-blonde hair ragged around her shoulders, pasty little freckles blistering in the sunlight, the pupils in her big, big eyes getting smaller as she brushes the last few drops of sweat and sunshine away from her forehead. It doesn’t really matter whether we’re looking at Lucia now or watching the eight-year-old flashback version, because as it turns out her hair’s naturally dirt-blonde in color. Twelve years after the Rue Viande, even a clean Lucia looks that way.

  Lucia can hear her co-traveler, the Indian, thumping his way up the slope behind her. He calls out to her: “Quelque chose?”

  And Lucia calls back: “Tout.” (But that’s pretty much the last time we’ll be hearing her words in their natural spoken tongue.)

  So the world spins around us, vertigo-wise, until we can look down on the great grass-covered crater beyond the slope. The dimple in the world, where Nature’s God herself has reached down and left a whacking great fingerprint on the landscape. A gentle pit, with slopes of green sunning themselves in the midday heat, letting troughs of rainwater simmer and merge on their skin.

  And there at the bottom of it all, the mammoths.

  Now Lucia finds herself running again, and for a moment she isn’t sure whether it’s now her running or then her, until she remembers that on the Rue Viande she never went down the other side of the slope. At the bottom of the basin, the mammoths are grazing. It’d be almost abstract, like seeing drawings of fluffy brown clouds on a painted backdrop, if it weren’t for the smell.

  (Of course, when the eight-year-old Lucia stood on the other slope, the view was quite different. What she saw was a cartload of corpses, blocking the street while the horseman stopped to flirt with one of the local girls, as if having a cartload of corpses was some kind of aphrodisiac. But then, that was the Revolution for you. C’est la vie, as they say everywhere except Paris.)

  That smell’s starting to bother Lucia now, because she’s remembering the smell of dung on the Rue Viande. She’s so busy separating the horse-smell from the mammoth-smell that she doesn’t even realize how far inertia’s taking her. Gravity drags her to the bottom of the crater, then keeps her going, so before she can think about it she’s stumbling over the ridges where the beasts have chewed and trampled away the grass. Pity the poor woman. The second most momentous moment of her life so far, and all she perceives is a series of confusing, ragged-edged images. The red-brown blurs that she knows are impossible animals. The smears of green that mark the walls of the crater, plastered with spoor and crushed plants: and is that a baby there, a baby mammoth, a little smudge of hair trying to stick close to its bigger smudge of a mother . . .?

  This is when things get slightly out of hand. It’s when Lucia turns, nearly falling arse over tit in the process, and finds herself staring at the absurdly huge shape which is even now bearing down on her. The bullmammoth weighs just over seven tons, not that Lucia will ever know it, and when rising up on its hind legs (as it is now) it must be all of fifteen feet high. When it raises its trunk, and opens its mouth, and flexes its massive lungs, you know it’s quite capable of destroying anything that threatens its own stomping ground.

  Nonetheless, the first thing Lucia does when faced with this monstrosity is “protect” herself by putting her arms up in front of her face. And they call this the Age of Reason.

  There was an Indian. You might have forgotten about him.

  He’s now standing on the crest of the slope, watching the great beast rear up over the woman who’s nominally his employer, though as a product of a non-market culture the Indian considers this “employer” business to be a pile of deershit. The Indian’s name (for our purposes, anyway) is Broken Nose, which is not, of course, a “real” Indian name. It was given to him by a group of Frenchmen with especially fat faces, and it was earned after a confrontation at a French trading post, during which—predictably—the Indian broke a French official’s nose. The friends of the unfortunate fat-faced man, being typically European, found this amusing. Being very typically European, “Broken Nose” was their idea of irony. It’s apparently supposed to sound like an authentic Indian title, although Broken Nose himself considers it just a good excuse to punch future fat-faced men without them being surprised. Besides, his original Shoshoni name was even more embarrassing.

  It has to be said, Broken Nose doesn’t have a great interest in the aesthetic. Below him are creatures the American settlers would find unbelievable, which would probably trigger a religious spawn in the Catholics or the Jesuits whom Mr. Jefferson distrusts so much. However, Broken Nose simply finds the beasts stupid-looking, wearing thick wool all over their bodies despite the sunshine. Broken Nose is slightly concerned for his “employer,” but he’s well aware that she can look after herself.

  On the first night of the expedition, when Broken Nose and Mademoiselle Cailloux made camp on the trail from Louisiana—where the Frenchwoman had arrived under the name of “Lucy Pebbles,” and bartered for sup-plies in what sounded to the Indian like a perfect local accent—the two of them talked at length. Or as much as was possible, anyway, given that Broken Nose had been taught French by men who only needed to prime him for certain tasks. Without any due modesty, Broken Nose showed Mme. Cailloux the scar which had been ritually inflicted across his inner thigh (not by his own tribe, but that’s another “another story”). And with less regard for her integrity than Broken Nose would have expected from a European woman, Mme. Cailloux bared her torso from her neck to her waist, revealing a scab left by a bullet which she claimed should have killed her, by all the known laws of Nature and science. This began a discussion about the great wars in Europe, about the little tribal elder called Napoleon and the weapons he could muster: guns like those Mme. Cailloux herself carried, but grown so large that they needed huge boats of their own. Broken Nose asked why the Europeans always insisted on fighting with each other, and that gave the Mademoiselle pause for thought.

  “Your people fight, don’t they?” she said.

  Broken Nose told her that this was indeed the case.

  “Then why do you do it?” the woman asked.

  The obvious answer was “because you tell us to,” naturally, but Broken Nose suspected this was missing the point. The reasons seemed to him to be to do with territory, with possessions, with differences in gods . . . .

  “No,” said Mme. Cailloux. “We fight to stop the other tribes becoming whole.”

  Broken Nose didn’t understand that. He still doesn’t, although Mme. Cailloux has assured him that he will, before their mission here is complete. That is, if she doesn’t get herself killed by the bull-mammoth.

  In all probability, it’s impossible to describe how it feels to have a mammoth rearing up over you. Maybe it’s like the feeling you get when
you lie on your back and watch the stars, and for a moment—just for a moment—you suddenly realize the true size of what you’re staring at, as your brain suddenly forgets to force your usual scale of perception onto things. Maybe. It might be interesting to ask Lucia, even though she has even less conception of the distances of stars than the rest of us (but she’s probably wise enough to know that Uranus, the furthest-flung of the seven planets, is seventeen hundred million miles farther away than she’ll ever travel).

  For the record, the mammoth isn’t going to trample her to death. But looking up at the beast now, seeing its great brown-black outline framed against the perfect blue, Lucia feels she’s watching the very countenance of Nature’s God. As with the cart of corpses on the Rue Viande, it’s the little details that really bother her. The strands of crushed grass on the bottom of its big round feet. The curve of its maw, the upturned V-shape that she knows could swallow a man, if not whole, then certainly in no more than two mouthfuls. The chips in its tusks, tiny imperfections in arcs of ivory so long that no matter which way she turns her head, she knows she won’t be able to see both tips at once. And then there’s its breath. Its terrible and ancient mammoth-breath, washing over her as the animal bellows into her face (one of those things Lucia’s never considered until now, and which she’s sure the academics who study the bones of these beasts have never considered either).

  Yes, these are the things Lucia has trouble coping with. So many little creases and flaws, more than she could catalogue in half a lifetime, let alone in the raw seconds she believes she has left. The beast’s stubby-but-oh-so-big front legs pedal the air in front of its body, and then it suddenly finds itself falling.

  It doesn’t push itself forward as it falls. It doesn’t, as it were, attack. It drops to the ground in front of Lucia, not on top of her, and the impact would surely crack the Earth open if the ground here weren’t so used to the abuse. This is the way a bull-mammoth warns off the opposition. Lucia’s realizing that even as she peels her heart from the roof of her mouth and tries to stop herself falling over (noticing, as an incidental detail, that the smell of sweat which is starting to blot out the dung-scent is hers and not the fault of the herd).