Mammoth

by John Varley

  Life was good... but there was an awkward age for mammoths, just as there is for children, known as adolescence. At about the age of fifteen a female mammoth was no longer a child, but not really an adult yet, either.

  At that age a female mammoth's thoughts would start to turn to male mammoths, to falling in love, and to having babies.

  But mammoth society was arranged according to what scientists call a social hierarchy, or what chicken farmers call a pecking order. That means that one mammoth was on top of the hierarchy—Big Mama—one was in second place, one in third place, and so on.

  And that means somebody was on the bottom. That summer it was a seventeen-year-old female named Temba.

  6

  MATTHEW Wright sat in his aluminum canoe and tried to think like a trout.

  He was on Clear Lake, some dozen or so miles south of Mount Hood, in Oregon. He had been told to relax. Take it easy. Take a few months off, find a hobby, something to take your mind off your work. Because, frankly, Matt, people have been remarking about some of your behavior. No, you haven't stripped naked and painted yourself blue and run through the Student Union shouting about the end of the world, but you have been acting... well, a little unusual.

  Matthew didn't precisely remember who it was that first suggested trout fishing as a suitable avocation for a scientist on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

  "Breakdown? Breakdown?" he muttered. "A long, long ways from a breakdown. I saw A Beautiful Mind, too. That was a breakdown. All I was having was panic attacks."

  One of Matthew's colleagues had commented, after seeing some of his preparations for his future hobby, that if Matt had decided to take up snowboarding, step one would have been to redesign snow, from the molecular level upward, and one day we'd all wake up to find that snow was half as cold and twice as slippery as it had been before. Matthew Wright was just that kind of guy, the kind who always starts from basics and goes logically from there.

  Step one, in trout fishing, was to understand trout. How does a trout experience the universe? What does he see? What does he think? To find out, Matt first went to Safeway and bought a trout, which he then dissected. He learned a lot, including the fact that fish had hard, clear, spherical lenses in the middle of their eyes.

  Using all the data he had collected he wrote a computer program, a virtual trout, in which he could adjust twenty-seven variables. After a long series of runs on the computer he had charts of optimum conditions. He could then cast a virtual fly into his program, and see if his cyber-trout was interested enough to bite.

  After a few weeks he bought a metal canoe, a twenty-five-foot trailer, a tackle box for his specialized flies, and a rod and reel. He set out into the wilderness along a road that used to be part of the Oregon Trail, only in reverse, feeling pleasantly like William Clark or Meriwether Lewis.

  At Clear Lake he launched his canoe and paddled out to the middle of the lovely little body of water. He opened his laptop and lowered a thermometer into the water, consulted a dandy little handheld weather station from the Oregon Scientific Company, and entered all the resulting data into his computer. The result immediately appeared on the screen: lure 14. He removed that lure—a gaudy one with two long red feathers and a bit of Christmas tree tinsel, one of his favorites—from the tackle box and tied it to the end of the clear nylon line, and prepared to make his first cast.

  He figured that, if he did catch a trout, it would have cost him no more than a few thousand dollars per pound. But that wasn't the point, was it? He was doing this to relax, and he had to admit, just rowing out to the center of the lake was relaxing. Matt was a city boy, not used to such silence, to trees so green and thick, to the sweet smell of the mountain air.

  He waved the line back and forth over his head as he'd seen casters do in one of the videos he studied, letting out more and more line. Then he cast it out before him.

  The hook caught in the shoulder of his REI canvas fisherman's vest, barely missing his ear. The length of line he'd carefully paid out fell down all around him, like spider silk.

  "Story of my life," he muttered. "Great on theory, poor on execution."

  He was still trying to untangle himself when he heard the sound of an approaching helicopter. He waited while the noisy machine turned abruptly and hovered over the middle of the lake. He could just make out someone in the back looking at him through a big pair of binoculars. Then the chopper flew off to the east, toward where Matt knew there was a clearing large enough for a helicopter to land. He stowed his rod and reel and started paddling for shore.

  The helicopter's engine had died by the time he reached shore, and as he pulled the boat up on the sand, a large, balding, powerfully built man in an expensive-looking gray suit was picking his way through the low shrubs and patches of mud that surrounded the shallow lake. Matt started toward him, indifferent to the mud on his L.L. Bean heavy-duty fishing boots.

  "You must be the guy I talked to on the phone, Mr. Warburton," Matt said. "And I'm still not interested." "Be that as it may," the man said, stopping a few yards from Matt, "I have to make my pitch. You hung up on me."

  Warburton looked momentarily confused. Then he shrugged it off.

  "I spoke to some of your colleagues at the university, and it seems you're not that interested in money. You already have your full professorship. So it's a problem, since everybody I ask about finding the top man in the country concerning the physics of time immediately tells me it's Matthew Wright. No second place."

  "Then you do have a problem," Matt said.

  "I am prepared to offer you your own private lab with a research budget of ten million dollars yearly. No more faculty committees to satisfy, no pressure to publish, no agenda, no hindrance at all to exploring in any direction you choose. After you've addressed the job we're hiring you for, of course."

  "I already have most of that," Matt said. "And the project would be...?"

  "As I said on the phone, I can't tell you that until you've signed a secrecy agreement. This would be in effect whether or not you took the job. We are prepared to pay you one hundred thousand dollars simply to go with me this afternoon and examine certain artifacts that have come into the possession of the company I work for. Then you take the job or you don't take it; the hundred grand is yours either way."

  Matt was going to take the job. He had known he would take it from the moment he hooked his jacket, before Warburton's helicopter even landed. But there was no sense jumping the gun, nor in giving up his negotiating advantage.

  "We're not talking about the Company, are we? As in the Central Intelligence—"

  "No, I can tell you that much. It's a private company."

  "And what did you say the salary would be?" He laughed at the expression on Warburton's face. "Who told you I don't need money, anyway? Everybody needs money. That's why they call it money."

  "I believe it was Professor Wellburn."

  "Of course. Old Wellybelly has hated me since I got the Hawking Chair. I'd like a salary of... two million dollars a year."

  Warburton, who had been authorized to offer another ten million, tried to look as if the demand was a bitter pill to swallow. After a suitable time frowning, he nodded.

  "Done. I have a man aboard who will pack up your gear and drive your—" "Don't bother with the gear," Matt said. "If I kept it I'd only be tempted to try fishing again."

  FROM "LITTLE FUZZY, A CHILD OF THE ICE AGE"

  Temba had first come into season two years before that long dry summer, many thousands of years ago.

  Though mammoths and elephants are very much like us in many ways, they are different in other ways.

  Mammoth and elephant females become sexually mature about the same time that human females do. But human females are fertile once a month, and elephants and mammoths are only fertile once a year. With elephants that is usually in December or January. We are not completely sure when mammoths came into "season," or as scientists call it, estrus, but we think it was in the summer.<
br />
  The two summers before that, Temba had watched as the male Columbian mammoths joined the herd and started looking for mates.

  Another way humans are different from elephants and mammoths is that during mating season male elephants and mammoths go through something called musth. No other animals that we know of do this. During musth a male elephant gets very cranky, like human females sometimes do when they are having their menstrual period. He will tear up trees and go charging about angrily and attack anything that comes near him. You do not want to get in the way of a bull elephant during musth!

  Poor Temba.

  She smelled the bull elephants and she wanted to mate with them. But she was at the bottom of the pecking order, and so every time a bull in musth approached her she was shoved rudely aside by one of her older cousins or aunts. She could only watch through two summers as the mature bulls passed her by.

  But this summer it would be different.

  7

  HOWARD Christian stood in the Eagle's Eye at the 140th-floor level of the Los Angeles Resurrection Tower and looked out over the city and saw that it was good.

  Christian had conceived the tower as a memorial to the atrocities of September 11, 2001. He had architects design a tower 150 stories high. It was four-sided and square, like the destroyed World Trade Center, but there the resemblance ended. Christian had always felt the original buildings were too boxy. The architects had solved this by making the walls swoop out of the ground in what mathematicians called an asymptotic curve, one that approached a limiting vertical line but would never reach it.

  Those who predicted opposition from politicians and city planners had underestimated the determination of Howard Christian, and the Power of money. With a combination of backroom horse trading, numerous quids pro quo, bullying, public relation blitzes, and a lot of old-fashioned bribery, minds were changed, including the important minds that held the power of a yea or nay over the project.

  What finally sold it was the stainless steel eagle that perched on the tower's top. Taller than the Statue of Liberty, the eagle's baleful gaze turned continuously, covering all quadrants of the compass hourly, a fearsome bird of prey ever vigilant to find and punish America's enemies. At night, two multimillion-candlepower searchlights beamed from the golden eyes. The tower had weathered the most recent 6.2 quake with only a few cracked windows.

  Unfortunately, the tower had never been more than 70 percent full. Even this many years after 9/11, there were many people who would not enter a skyscraper at all. The images of catastrophe were too vivid.

  So the Resurrection Tower was a money-loser for Howard Christian. It ate up almost a quarter of a billion dollars of his cash each year. Howard didn't mind. At that rate, to misquote Charles Foster Kane, he'd be broke in... 140 years.

  Howard Christian was different from most multibillionaires in many respects, and a big one was this: he bought things. Most members of that very small club that never had meetings and mostly couldn't stand one another were content to husband their vast holdings of stock, and if they bought something, it was probably another corporation. What they did, mostly, was to move money around. Money in motion generates more money, as surely as one of Newton's laws.

  Christian didn't much care for money movement, for banking, for the stock market. He had bought companies in his time, naturally he had his bankers, and he owned a great deal of stock, but none of that was his main interest.

  He liked real estate, he liked building things on his property, just like the Monopoly games he had played as a child. He liked research and development, spent upwards of three billion dollars a year on projects most accountants would estimate as unlikely to return much profit. More often than not, they were wrong. His own fortune came from blue-sky research, and he never forgot it. He had, in fact, made two huge fortunes, though the second triumph wouldn't have been possible without the infusion of vast amounts of money from the first fortune.

  Infusion. He liked that. The source of his first fortune was discoveries and patents he held in the field of nanotechnology, specifically in the design and assembly of the kind of molecular transistors currently to be found in the CPUs of almost every computer on the planet, and in outer space, too. He had done the research for these devices in a tiny laboratory, funded with only a few hundred thousand in grant money.

  But now that all that was done, now that he had revolutionized technology twice, and on a scale no one had equaled since Edison, Howard Christian devoted most of his time to his twin passions: show business and collecting.

  He had the means to be a second Hearst, pillaging the world's museums for great art, but he had tried it and found it unsatisfying. He enjoyed some of the old masters of the Renaissance, but most of their work was not for sale or came onto the market so infrequently you could grow old waiting to have a crack at a particular Rembrandt or Titian. He was puzzled by the impressionists, and baffled by everything since then. What was he supposed to do? Hang an ugly mess by Pollock in his office and then stand and stare at it, wondering why anybody spent six dollars on crap like that, much less a million, and feeling like a fool? Pretend he really liked some stupid scrawl by Picasso? He owned quite an extensive collection of original Norman Rockwells, a single Monet that he found pleasant to look at, hanging behind his desk, and that was the extent of his fine art collection.

  No, Howard Christian's mania was for things a lot more recent. He collected twentieth-century ephemera, and automobiles and aircraft of any vintage.

  His idea of a wonderful day was to drive his silver-gray 1937 Packard V-12 convertible coupe to a toy collectors' convention and spend ten or twenty thousand dollars on a few rare tin robots from Japan. Or even better, to toodle along Melrose Avenue in his Hispano-Suiza H6B, made for Andre Dubonnet by the Nieuport Astra Aviation Company from copper-riveted tulipwood—the only car of its kind in the world—and turn in under the fabulous white gate of the Warner Brothers Studio, which he owned, gate and all.

  He also owned a major television network, several cable channels, a chain of theme parks, and Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus.

  He stood now in the eagle's right eye and looked out in satisfaction at the entertainment capital of the world, much of which he owned. As the mighty bird turned, he could pick out all the major sites. Over there was Culver City, where MGM once reigned as the big dog of the silver screen. Now its old backlot was full of condominiums. There was CBS Television City. And there, to the west, was the abomination of Century City, and the corpse of 20th Century Fox Studios, now just a depressing collection of uninspired skyscrapers.

  He loved standing there. It made him feel like Batman.

  A bell sounded discreetly. "Warburton here, Mr. Christian. I have Professor Wright."

  MATTHEW Wright was first out of the elevator. "Oh, wow," he said, and strode straight for the eagle's eye, not seeming to see Howard Christian standing there. He looked out over the city, and down the steep side of the tower.

  Christian was somewhat taken aback. No more than a dozen people had ever been in the eagle's head, other than the maintenance crew. He brought people up to impress them, of course, and it was a measure of the reputation Matt Wright had in the small world of cutting-edge physics that Christian had known immediately that no other place would do for their first meeting. But he had expected to control it, as he always did, and in a way he couldn't quite put his finger on, he felt he had lost control already, before he could get two sentences out.

  "Oh, boy," Matt said, shaking his head as he stepped back from the window. "I'm doing it again. I'm afraid I don't have a lot of social graces, Mr. Christian. I'm Matt Wright." He held out his hand.

  Christian took it, slowly, and allowed his hand to be pumped. Christian saw a man who might be in his late twenties, but whose eyes were considerably older. The dossier Warburton had given him pegged his age at thirty-four. He wore hiking boots and heavy canvas pants, a lumberjack shirt, and, absurdly, a khaki vest with dozens of pockets, festoo
ned with the bright tinsel and feathers of trout lures. Christian himself disdained business clothing almost entirely, preferring cheap jeans and western shirts and outrageously expensive hand-tooled cowboy boots made from all manner of exotic leathers. The last time he could recall wearing formal clothing was three years ago, picking up the Academy Award for Best Picture.

  "I understand you've accepted my offer, Professor Wright."

  "Your man said something about a hundred thousand dollars."

  "Of course. Will you take a check?"

  "How long would it take to get it in cash?"

  Christian looked at Warburton.

  "Five minutes," Warburton said, and reached for a telephone.

  "Never mind," Matt said. "I just never held that much money all at once."

  "Neither have I, come to think of it," Christian said.

  "What, you don't have a money bin someplace where you shove tons of coins around with bulldozers?"

  Christian's smile became genuine for the first time. "You know Uncle Scrooge McDuck! I'll have to show you my comics collection sometime."

  Warburton was looking at his wristwatch, and he cleared his throat.

  "Ah... yes," Christian said. "I'm sorry to have ripped you so abruptly from your fishing trip. But I hope to make it up to you with a late lunch at the Polo Lounge. We have a reservation."

  "Okay. But didn't I read that you've said you'd rather eat at Burger King?"

  "I grew up eating Burger King," Christian said, with a tight smile. "Never developed a taste for the finer things, I guess."

  "Well, I'm not a gourmet, either. You clearly have something you're dying to tell me. Why don't we save time, eat on the way to wherever it is we're going?"