by John Varley
ON the way to lunch, Matt decided he could get used to this way of life.
The helicopter in Oregon had whisked him quickly to PDX, where one of Howard Christian's private jets awaited. It was an all-black vintage Boeing 727 that had once belonged to Hugh Hefner. A bunny head had been painted on the tail. At the tower, he had been swept up into a high place, as Satan had done with Jesus; only, unlike Jesus, Matt had accepted the offer. Not that he intended to fall on his knees and worship at the monetary altar of Howard Christian, but he recognized the billionaire was now his boss, and he knew bosses could turn out to want many things, some of them impossible.
Then down in the private elevator to the fifth subbasement, where there were a dozen fantastic automobiles. Howard Christian didn't believe in letting his toys gather dust—he liked to get them out and play with them. He was probably the richest man in the world who actually drove very much.
Matt paused at a pale yellow convertible with red trim that looked longer, taller, and wider than any car he had ever seen, and yet managed to seat only two people. It had big globe headlamps and four chromed pipes coming out of the hood cowl on each side.
"I see you like this one. It's a '36 Duesenberg Model J, special built with a short wheelbase, standard Deusy V-12 engine."
"This is the short version?"
"It was built for Clark Gable. He drove it to and from the studio while he was working on Gone With the Wind. Or up and down Hollywood Boulevard with Carole Lombard sitting beside him. Get in, we'll take this one."
CHRISTIAN drove them out of the basement and down Wilshire Boulevard, both of them content to enjoy the soft purr of the engine, the smell of the pale yellow leather, the luxurious suspension and road-handling ability, and the stares of other drivers. Sports car enthusiasts might sneer, but only if they were profoundly ignorant of precision engineering.
"It's not for sale."
"No, I mean, could I afford it?"
Christian glanced at him.
"What am I paying you?"
"Two million dollars a year."
"You could make a down payment."
Christian looked over at Matt again, with a smile that was a bit smug but with enough sense of
almost adolescent wonder that Matt could forgive him.
He said, "They say in Los Angeles, you are what you drive."
"So what does that make you?" Matt asked.
"Anybody I want to be."
THERE was no one in the drive-thru at the Jack in the Box. Christian pulled up to the window and nearly shut the place down as most of the patrons and employees craned their necks to get a better view.
Warburton got out of one of the two heavily armored Mercedes SUVs that had been preceding and following the Duesenberg, each carrying two heavily armed men, and hurried to Christian as he was about to pull out with the sack of food sitting next to him. He handed Christian a brown envelope and went back to his car, where he would sweat profusely in the plush air-conditioned interior until his employer was back in the relative safety of a building Warburton controlled.
Christian handed the envelope to Matt, who opened it and found one hundred new-minted thousand-dollar bills. At least, he supposed it was a hundred; it wouldn't seem right to count it just then.
"Now we've both held a hundred grand, cash, in our hands," Christian said.
ON an impulse Christian drove to the Santa Monica Pier, where he parked in the lot and was instantly hemmed in by his security crew, who were the very best money could buy, and who, to a man, wished Howard Christian had never learned how to drive. Christian unwrapped a hamburger, studied it critically, removed a dangling string of Bermuda
"Professor Wright," he said, "do you believe time travel is possible?"
"Oh, brother," Matt said. "Howard, stop calling me Professor, and please, tell me you don't
want me to build you a time machine."
Christian stopped chewing.
"I had a lot of time to think on the plane ride down," Matt said.
"And what did you think about?"
"What you might be willing to pay me two million dollars a year for, plus a large research and
development budget. I was pretty sure it wasn't fly-tying lessons, and aside from that, I don't have a lot of special skills other than a knack for mathematics."
"Some knack. I can't follow your papers. Mentioned for the Nobel Prize."
"It's just a beauty contest. And don't feel bad about not understanding the equations. It's only on my best days that I understand them myself. Your reputation precedes you, Howard. I'm not talking of the engineering breakthroughs that made you rich. I mean your... enthusiasms. Your penchant for..."
" 'Haring off after a wild hair,' that's what somebody once said about it."
"There was that rigid-frame airship you were talking about a while back," Matt said. "What ever happened to that?"
"That's still in development," Christian said, a bit defensively. The neozeppelin project, code-named Zipper, was actually in the prototype stage, and had thus far eaten well over a hundred
million of Howard Christian's dollars and returned nothing.
"Twice the length of the Hindenberg, was it?" Matt asked.
"Just about."
"Pretty expensive to fill it with helium."
"We're using hydrogen."
Matt laughed in real admiration.
"That will be a real heavy lifter. So long as you can keep it from exploding."
"Not a problem. There won't be anything aboard that can make a spark. Carbon composite construction, throughout."
wrong."
Christian didn't say anything for a few moments.
"First, answer my question. Is time travel possible?"
"Without question."
"You're talking about something on the subatomic level, aren't you?"
"Sure. There's a type of quantum entanglement whereby two particles can influence each other
even though they're separated by many light-years of distance and thousands of years of time."
"Okay. Hypothetically, then. Is it possible to build the kind of time machine, the kind that"—Christian spread his hands wryly—"that a man like me would want to buy?"
"You're talking about a fancy bicycle with a crystal handle and rotating thingamabobs and so
forth like in a movie."
"More or less. Something that can get a useful mass from Time B to Time A—"
"Without killing it."
"Sure."
"I'd have to say no. See, the theory allows for moving in any direction through time... but it forbids the transfer of any information that way, whether the information is a single 1 or 0 bit, or the information in, say, strands of mammoth DNA, or the rather more complex information that is the molecular makeup of a living body. And Howard, I really hate to tell you that, because I was getting to like this lifestyle, and now I have to say I can't take your money. That is, if building a time machine was what you wanted to hire me for. Was I right?"
Christian looked at the sea, and the big Ferris wheel, and when he turned back to Matt there was a measure of satisfaction there.
"You were on the right track, but not on the money," he said.
"Excellent. That's where you learn things. So how did I go wrong?"
"Not enough information."
"There's always that danger." Christian turned the key in the ignition and the V-12 engine rumbled powerfully. He put the Duesenberg in gear.
FROM "LITTLE FUZZY, A CHILD OF THE ICE AGE"
That same summer in what would one day be called Canada there was a male woolly mammoth we will call Tsehe.
Tsehe was in musth in a very bad way.
Just as human females are affected in different ways by their menstrual cycles, male elephants react to musth in different ways. For some women, getting their period is no big deal. For others, it means days spent being sick in bed and getting angry at everyone.
Tsehe was like that.
; The long, thick fur on his head was sticky and matted from smelly stuff that oozes from a gland male mammoths have on their temples. It was irritating.
His penis, which he normally kept tucked safely away in a sheath like horses or dogs do, was now erect almost all the time. Sometimes it dragged on the ground (mammoths had very long penises!), which was irritating.
He urinated constantly and that made a green alga grow on his most sensitive parts, and that irritated him. He took to rubbing himself against rocks and trees because it itched so badly, but this only made it hurt worse.
No wonder mammoths in musth were cranky!
He had a bad headache, like what we would call a migraine, so that colors looked too bright and every movement around him made him feel dizzy.
At the same time, he was very sexually aroused.
All around him for many miles were herds of woolly mammoth females coming into season. They were calling out to him. And they were doing it in an amazing way.
Since mammoth females could only become pregnant during four or five days out of the entire year, it was important that males and females get together for courtship and mating during those few days.
But because males and females lived apart and didn't really have that much to do with one another during most of the year, this could be a problem. Mammoths had very good noses (just look how long they are!), but this was not always enough to bring males and females together at the right time.
However, evolution had provided mammoths with a way. It was a sort of long-distance telephone, many years before humans invented the telephone. Mammoths could make sounds that would have been below the range of human hearing. Imagine the deepest musical note you have ever heard... and then try to imagine a note twice as low as that! (Musicians call this an octave.)
Scientists call these very low notes infrasound, and it travels much farther than normal sound.
When male mammoths heard these infrasound songs, they became very excited. In mammoth
language, the females were singing:
"I'm ready!"
And the males sang back:
"I'm on my way!"
8
LELAND said, "How do you give an enema to an elephant?"
"Diplomatically," Roger suggested.
Susan Morgan sighed and scowled at them from the other side of Queenie. "Will you boys get serious long enough to get this done? There's a lot at stake here."
"Especially for Queenie," Leland responded. Roger giggled.
Susan didn't know why she bothered. Leland and Roger were in fact both older than she was. But they were unable or unwilling to repress what she thought of as their frat-boy/med-student tendency toward the gross-out... what they would have described as irreverent humor.
The procedure they were about to undertake wasn't an enema but, as Leland had observed yesterday, it was close enough for rock and roll. What they were getting ready for was the last stage of a process Susan was pretty sure had never been tried on an elephant, in vitro fertilization. If it was successful, in about twenty-two months Queenie would give birth to a baby that was half Elephas maximus and half Mammuthus primigenius.
In laymen's terms, half Indian elephant, half woolly mammoth. SUSAN Morgan had been working for Howard Christian for almost eight years, but had never thought of it that way. She was circus people, third generation, and she worked for the circus. If that circus was owned by a network, which was owned by an Internet service provider, which was owned by some vast tax-evading offshore holding company that was owned by Howard Christian, who gave an elephant fart?
Susan was often at the head of that thundering parade, trotting along beside the leader, but she was not a performer. The spotlight never sought her out. She had no stage presence, and didn't want any. There was a Russian known as the Great Kristov who handled the glamorous part of the show, who wore the spangled tights and flashed the perfect teeth. Kristov was touted as the world's greatest animal handler, but the truth was that if it hadn't been for Susan and two big cat behaviorists doing the endless training behind the scenes, Kristov wouldn't have lasted a week in his big finale, which included four elephants, eight lions and tigers, and eight white horses.
There were those who said the day of animal acts was, or at least should be, over. They said it was barbarism to teach our animal cousins unnatural behavior, or to have them in captivity at all. Susan understood their point of view and had witnessed abuses, but as long as she was in charge her twenty-six elephants would lack nothing, and would get only the best treatment while working, and guaranteed care in retirement. She preferred to think of her relationship with her animals as a partnership, as it was with the best mahouts in Thailand and India and Sri Lanka, where she had spent three years teaching and learning after getting her D.V.M. She was the first in her family to go to college, a great source of pride to her grandfather.
She had heard of Howard Christian and his mammoth-cloning project and wasn't sure she approved, though the thought of getting to know an actual mammoth was almost too seductive to contemplate.
When Howard Christian sent out the emergency call for the world's best elephant handler, he was informed that there were many who were about equally good, but he already employed one of the best at the winter headquarters of the circus, in Sarasota, Florida.
A few hours later a man named Warburton picked his way carefully through piles of elephant dung and made Susan an offer she couldn't refuse.
NOW Susan checked the tension on the elephant press as the two mad doctors prepared their diabolical instruments of torture down at Queenie's other end. The procedure actually would have been more of a discomfort than torture, but it was academic. Queenie wouldn't feel a thing. Susan had administered a dose of azaperone an hour earlier as a calming agent, to assist the sometimes touchy process of getting her into the sling without alarming her. Then she was led into the elephant press, which was basically like a cattle chute with sides that could compress around an elephant and hold her immobile even if she got frisky.
After that, all Susan had to do was administer the big dose of carfentanil and assist the operation by monitoring Queenie's vital signs, standing ready to pump doses of diprenorphine and/or naltrexone into her if she got in any respiratory trouble.
The comedy team of Leland and Roger had been lucky. They were very experienced at the process of in vitro fertilization with cattle and horses. With an elephant, all you'd need was a bigger probe, right?
Wrong. They had made an attempt to inseminate Queenie without the press and the lift and the drugs, and were lucky to be alive. And so the call had gone out for an elephant handler and a vet, and Howard had found both in the person of Susan Morgan.
SUSAN had been flown to Los Angeles in a black private jet. At LAX she was limoed to a helicopter which deposited her at the base of the Resurrection Tower, then whisked to Howard Christian's office. It finally began to seem real to her, shaking hands with the man whose face she had seen on many magazine covers.
"You want to clone a mammoth, right?" she said. Christian sailed a copy of the secrecy agreement over his desk and sat back in his chair. Susan signed.
Howard Christian had driven her to Santa Monica in a car he said was a 1933 Pierce-Arrow Silver Arrow V-12. She had no reason to doubt him. The front looked a lot like a Rolls-Royce to her and the rear was a '30s version of a car of the future. The inside was luxurious enough, with a lot of maple wood trim. Cars didn't do much for her, though she tried to feign interest.
Their destination was a large but ordinary steel-sided warehouse in a district near the airport that had dozens of warehouses just like it. He drove through a big open door and parked beside a dozen trucks making deliveries. Then they dodged guys with hand trucks and dollies and forklifts unloading and stacking an amazing variety of stuff, most of it new in the box. Everybody was in a huge hurry. Howard Christian was used to paying big bonuses for work done very quickly.
Christian dug in one of his vest pockets and came
up with a laminated I.D. badge with Susan's picture on it. She was pretty sure it was her driver's license photo, probably obtained from the Florida DMV. These people worked fast.
In one corner was a big concrete cube, and in it was a door of the type used on refrigerated meat lockers. It wasn't cold on the other side, but there was a second door at the end of a long room with a dozen heavy parkas on hooks and insulated boots and gloves in cubbies. They donned the cold-weather gear and Christian punched a code into a pad beside the inner door.
And there it was. Sitting back on its massive haunches, leaning a little to the right against a support that was no longer there, a looming mass of long, tangled, reddish gold hair. The first specimen of Mammuthus primigenius Susan had ever been close to, but judging from the many photos she had seen, possibly the most complete carcass ever recovered.
The animal was still largely in situ, reminding her of a museum diorama. The base was wrapped in black plastic, and it looked like they had brought a large chunk of frozen tundra with the animal.
It didn't smell very good. No matter. Susan was used to working in elephant houses, which weren't very sweet, either.
She took in the humps on top of the head and on the shoulders. She moved around the front of the animal and inspected the tusks, which were fifteen feet long and turned like a corkscrew. She had never heard an explanation of why mammoths had needed tusks that big; surely they would be a hindrance in many things.
She took off her glove and ran her hand over the ancient ivory, and smiled.
"The only work we've done on him so far is back here, of course," Christian said, and guided her around the mammoth's left side. Then she was peering into the incisions that had been made to get at the beast's testicles. Mammoths carried them internally.
"We removed one," Christian said. "Left the other in place in case we screw up the first one, then we'd rethink before we took the other. Two men are in charge of recovering and preparing the spermatozoa. They are well versed in animal in vitro fertilization... but they don't know elephants. That's where you come in."