by John Varley
What Big Mama wanted to do was kill a few of these pesky bipeds. As she rounded the tar pit she could actually feel biped bones crushing under her mighty feet. It was a good feeling.
The explosion of sound startled her and stopped her in her tracks. Another member of the herd, the one with the notch in her left ear, mother of the third child to be born last birthing season, actually collided with her, something that would have been unthinkably rude normally, and would have earned her a big cuff on the head. Big Mama hardly noticed it. She had no idea a slug of lead big and fast enough to have torn through her massive skull had passed a few feet over her head. She only knew she hated that sound. She didn't want to go toward it.
But what was she to do? Behind her the land still burned, and she could smell the approaching hunters even over the stench of smoke. After another few moments she lowered her tusks, aimed at the two bipeds, and charged.
Before she had taken three steps, everything changed.
SUSAN was between Matt and the bus, with her back to it, her whole concentration on the herd of mammoths bearing down on them. As the brakes of the bus began to shriek, Matt got up and dived at her, his arms extended, and lifted her right off her feet, thrusting her out of the path of the bus. Then there was no time to do more than put out his hands as his feet got tangled under him. He was falling backward when the bus struck him, the bike rack on the front missing him by an inch. The back of his head hit the pavement and his vision was filled with bright points of light for a moment... then he looked up to see the bottom of the front bumper of the bus just above his face and, inches from his head, a massive gray foot smelling of urine and tar and elephant shit. Just above that, he had an astonishing worm's-eye view of a full-grown Columbian mammoth as she thrust forward with all the strength in her body. Glittering cubes of safety glass showered down all over him as he closed his eyes, hard, and hoped for the best. SIGHT is the fastest sense, and the first thing that assaulted Big Mama was a scene in which she recognized nothing. A human could not have been more baffled if she had been instantly transported to the bottom of the sea.
Scent information was the last to arrive in her brain with her first massive inhalation, but it was the most important to her, and the most awful of all, because there were literally thousands of smells in the night air that were perfectly alien to her. In her normal surroundings just one strange scent made for an exciting day, and she might linger over it for many minutes, fixing it in her comprehensive library of smells, far more vast than a human mind could comprehend.
There was a crumpled McDonald's cup lying in the gutter, which had held a strawberry shake; she smelled that, had a pretty good idea where it was, no idea what it was, though she knew it was edible as it was related to her mental folders labeled milk and berries. On the other side of the street a woman was walking a German shepherd on a leash and Big Mama smelled that, too. It was something like the dire wolves she had always ignored in her world, puny little animals, but also wildly different, and mixed with a hundred other smells she could separate but not identify: shampoo, his mistress's perfume, dog food containing the cooked flesh of several different animals plus carrots, grains, charcoal, and the metallic smell of the tin the food had come in.
There were dozens of restaurants a short whiff away, each emanating a thousand smells, very few of them pleasant. There were a thousand people on the street each with an odor as distinctive as a face, each wearing clothing made of alien substances, laundered in harsh detergents, and shoes made from canvas and rubber and leather.
There were smells of creosote from phone poles, paint and plaster and brick from the buildings, a monstrous panoply of chemicals used in processing paper and plastic and cloth and electronic devices and metals and ceramics, a phantasmagoric stench that could be summed up in a word no puny Pleistocene biped had yet used in Big Mama's world: civilization.
Over it all, a vast enveloping presence, was the apocalyptic smell she classified as burning tar, the petrochemical miasma humans constantly swam through, as oblivious to it as a fish to water. The burned tar products belched from the tailpipes of the bright, low, shiny animals that darted past her on all sides, sweated off the oil-coated sides of their roaring guts, oozed off the hard asphalt surface she stood on. It was a smell antithetical to everything her heart knew as wholesome, and she hated it. Hated it.
Now here came another animal, an animal actually larger than Big Mama, a unique and affronting experience in itself and one she normally would have run from, being at her center a peaceful and cautious beast. But her capacity for caution was gone and there was nothing left but a red and blinding rage. She turned, faced the creature, and lunged at it. Her tusks went right through its eyes, which were hard and brittle and no match for ten feet of ivory. Inside the beast she could see other creatures, more of the damned bipeds, screaming and fleeing toward the back of the thing's bright alien belly. This made no sense, but she was far beyond any concept of sense. She roared again, and tried to flip the creature onto its back. It was too heavy, so she put one huge foot into the broken eye socket and stomped down on it.
"Matt, you've got to get up!"
He scrambled to his feet. He was vaguely aware of people spilling out the back door of the bus, tumbling over each other. Susan pulled him away and they staggered together to the sidewalk and Matt watched as Big Mama did battle. Still backing up, he hit something metal, turned, and realized he was backed up on the iron fence surrounding the tar pit. In addition to the animatronic mammoth that had been mired in the tar for many years, there was now a live one, still struggling and trying to free himself.
How could that be? He had to accept that it had happened, just as the building and its contents had been swept into the past by whatever forces the machine had unleashed... but did the tar the mammoth was mired in come along with him—was he stuck in Pleistocene tar, or twenty-first-century tar? How can I think about a thing like that with half a dozen mammoths raging through modern-day Los Angeles?
If Susan was being bothered by such questions she gave no sign of it. She raised the elephant gun to her shoulder and fired it at Big Mama. It made a pathetic little chunk, with no recoil at all, and Matt realized it was the tranquilizer gun. She must have picked it up when he dropped it. She racked another dart into it and fired again, and then a third time, before lowering the barrel toward the ground.
"I'm afraid any more might kill her," she told Matt.
"Susan... you may have to kill her."
"No," Susan said. "If that has to be done, you do it."
As he took the gun from her, he noticed for the first time that tears were running from her eyes. He realized with a shock that this must be the realization of an elephant trainer's worst nightmare: one of her charges running berserk, too angry to reason with and too big to be stopped by anything short of deadly force. He imagined she had envisioned this situation in nightmares, on sleepless nights.
He raised the gun and aimed it at the mammoth, then wondered where the brain was in that massive head. Should he try for the heart? And where was that?
"A little to the left, Matt," she sighed. "But don't shoot unless you have to."
"I wouldn't dream of it." But if the mammoth turned this way and took... what, two steps?... he knew he would have to. Make it three steps. And one more for Susan.
Now all officers carried 9mm Glocks with twenty-cartridge magazines. Most patrol cars had military assault rifles and concussion grenades in the trunk. Stationed around the city were special weapons vehicles that could be anywhere with ten minutes' notice. And if all else failed, if howitzers and helicopter gunships were called for, there were arrangements with National Guard units that could be brought to bear anywhere in no more than half an hour.
A herd of half-crazed mammoths was a problem, but not an insoluble one.
As in any such situation, the first minutes were chaos. The word "mammoth" was never uttered over a police radio until long after the crisis was past; these were not
paleontologists who were called upon to be the first line of defense against the creatures, they were police officers, and to a man and woman they referred to the animals as elephants, according to the well-known principle that if you hear hoofbeats your first thought should be horses, not zebras. If it's gray, twelve feet tall, weighs ten tons, has tusks and a trunk, anyone could be forgiven for calling it an elephant. In the end, it didn't really matter. Mammoths were just as vulnerable as elephants to the firepower the LAPD could bring to bear in an escape situation, and that firepower was being assembled.
To their credit, the responding officers did not immediately set about wiping out the animals. Their first priority was the protection of human life, but a strong second to most of them was to capture the elephants alive, if possible. Protection of property was clearly in third place, so the first officers at the scene stood by as Big Mama demolished the city bus, once it was clear there was no one inside and all nearby pedestrians and motorists had fled the scene.
Roadblocks were quickly established a block away in all directions from the site of the temporal breakthrough, and lines of cops stood behind them pointing shotguns and handguns at what might have been six, might have been eight milling and confused pachyderms. It was hard to tell in the dark, which had been made worse when several streetlight poles were knocked over by confused mammoths.
When two of the animals started to make a charge for freedom the officers in their path first tried firing into the air, and unleashed such a fusillade that the mammoths turned quickly and rejoined the milling herd.
Things remained in a standoff for almost five minutes. HOWARD Christian was not physically suited to being the only thing he had ever really wanted to be: a superhero. He knew it was childish and so he had never told anyone of his ambition, not even when he actually was a child. What he really wanted to do was swing through the concrete canyons of New York on fibers of mutated spider silk, or grow steel claws like his favorite X-Man mutant, Wolverine.
But what was the Green Lantern without his ring, or Batman without his gadgets? Just guys in spandex suits, that's what. When he finally convinced himself of that he set about playing to his strengths instead of bemoaning his weaknesses. He began building his own Fortress of Solitude, his Bat Cave in the sky.
Now the Dark Lord of Los Angeles, also known as Howard Christian, sat in the control seat of the Eagle of Vigilance and surveyed his realm.
He came here a lot, mostly at night, and most of all when he was upset. It was a good feeling, almost reclining in the soft leather of the chair custom-built to his body, his feet on the pan and tilt controls, no less than three keyboards arrayed in easy reach, the large red joystick with its array of buttons built into the right armrest. Before him were eight large hi-def video screens butted together so that they could display eight separate scenes or one sweeping panorama.
He liked the term Dark Lord, but that didn't mean he was bad. He felt he was up here in the tallest building in the world to do good, not evil. The dark part came from the fact that he was a creature of the night, unknown to the populace that lay spread out below him. But the night meant nothing to the Dark Lord. He had a thousand eyes: L.A.'s armada of traffic helicopters, security cams on almost every light pole in the city, and satellites that could read a newspaper from space.
If that was all he had, he would be nothing but the world's most high-tech voyeur. No, he had his own secret weapon concealed in the basement, known to only a few of his most trusted employees. Its purpose was to shoot down suicide bombers approaching the Resurrection Tower in hijacked airplanes. Travelers arriving and departing LAX didn't know it, but in addition to the FAA and Homeland Security, their planes were being tracked by Howard's secret death ray.
It was, so far as he knew, the world's most powerful microwave laser. If the military had something bigger, they weren't talking about it. It could burn a hole through armor plate, and cut an airplane in half in a microsecond. Of course, it was there only as a last resort. It had never been used. But it gave him comfort to sit here in his chair, following car chases with the crosshairs centered on some fleeing sack of shit, knowing he could vaporize the bastard with one squeeze of the trigger.
Matthew Wright. Matt and Susan and a whole goddamn warehouse full of elephants and the frozen corpse of a mammoth. Where did they go? Howard turned his thoughts away from that, for the hundredth time that day. That's what he'd come up here to the Eagle of Vigilance for, to get his mind off this insoluble problem.
"Stop it," he said, then was startled that he had spoken aloud.
He roamed the night with his thousand eyes, his finger on the trigger, his ears tuned to the police radio.
17
BIG Mama took considerable satisfaction from stomping the big square animal. It was all sharp edges and hard as rock, and it stank like nothing she had ever encountered, but none of that bothered her. After she had knocked its eyes out she devoted herself to destroying the creature's head. Done with that she hurried to its side and began pushing, meaning to turn it on its side and attack what might be the softer underbelly. The thing might be dead already, but she wanted to make sure.
But something felt wrong.
She didn't feel so good. Her head was swimming. Her massive legs felt wobbly; she swayed for a moment, then shoved again at the big square monster. In her rage, she had not even felt the tiny bites of the tranquilizer darts as they pricked her leathery skin, but the sedatives they had contained were rapidly doing their work.
She heaved again, and the creature almost went over but then it was too much, Big Mama backed off, and the thing rocked back onto its round, smelly feet.
She blinked, and looked around, feeling more exhausted than she had in her long life. She could no longer remember where she was. What were all these new smells? What were these lights up on shiny trees with no limbs on them? What were all these noises? Big Mama was confused. She went down on her knees. Maybe if she could just sleep for a little...
In a moment, Big Mama fell onto her side.
THE herd was already way beyond upset. They were separated from the matriarch, huddled and milling together next to a tall, smooth cliff. The cliff was made of something smooth and clear as water, but which seemed to have no smell at all. Several times they had tried to get to Big Mama's side, and each time some of the two-legs with dark blue heads had pointed sticks at them. These sticks weren't sharp, but they were horribly noisy, noisier than anything any of them had ever heard except thunder. There was fire inside the sticks, and smoke, and the smoke smelled awful.
Now Big Mama fell over on her side. The beta female, what humans might have called the master sergeant of the herd, raised her trunk, smelled Big Mama's distress, and bellowed. SUSAN had tried to fire her remaining tranquilizer darts at the herd of mammoths down the street, while the big matriarch was still occupied in her epic battle with the Los Angeles city bus, but she couldn't see if she hit anything with the three darts she fired. She tried to get closer but was turned back by police, who didn't have time to listen to her explanation that she might be able to sedate the beasts. All her arguments were turned aside, and she saw this wasn't the time to stand on principle. The cops were barely organized, frightened, and anything could trigger a disaster.
THE first call came from a frantic patrolman crouching behind his car door. He reported a rampaging elephant, then three elephants, and then an entire herd of elephants. Howard's fingers flew over his keyboards as other officers responded, giving their locations and estimated time of arrival at the corner of Wilshire and La Brea.
One of the screens before him promptly displayed the three commercial satellites currently in range of the Los Angeles area. Through long practice, Howard quickly translated the positions and derived their look-down angles in his head, then selected GEOS-324 as the one with the best view down Wilshire. As a normal user he would have to make an appointment or get in line to gain controlling access to one of the satellite's array of five high-res imaging sy
stems, but Howard owned a company that owned a company that owned GEOS-324, so he punched in an override code, and somebody got bumped. A blurred image of five city blocks appeared on another screen, from an angle thirty degrees west off the vertical from the corner of Wilshire and La Brea. He touched another control and the camera zoomed in until only two blocks filled the screen. Available light in the city was usually enough for a pretty good picture, but Howard wasn't satisfied with what he was seeing, so he brought up a program for real-time enhancement, and the picture clarified and brightened considerably.
In the back of his mind was an equation he could not justify, but which nagged him nonetheless on a level that made his hands sweaty: One herd of elephants vanishing in Santa Monica = One herd of elephants appearing on the Miracle Mile. There was a dizzy logic to it that some primitive level of his mind could not dismiss. Those must be his lost elephants. He had seen films of what a rampaging elephant could do, and the idea of a herd of them running wild through a city was almost too frightening to contemplate.
The picture on his screen wasn't very clear. It looked as if some streetlights were out in the target area. He brought up an infrared image on a second screen. He enhanced it. He was presented with a view down Wilshire, looking east. Already quite familiar with interpreting the night-vision infrared orbital cameras, he quickly picked out a line of vehicles that weren't moving, out in the middle of the street, the brightest part of them being the unseen engines under the hoods. Near the curb by the park that surrounded the tar pits and the museum was a larger heat source that he quickly identified as a city bus, and right in front of it was a massive, moving object. He clicked up the magnification twice. It sure looked like an elephant, and it was doing battle with the bus. Beyond it, he could see police cars, doors open, with officers crouching behind them. There was something odd about the elephant. Howard switched back to the visible light lens, and clicked it up two more notches. The resulting picture was grainy and indistinct, even with the real-time enhancement, but he immediately noticed the fantastically long tusks, the hump behind the animal's head, and the incredible size, four or five feet taller than his Indian elephants. Howard was the first person in Los Angeles to realize that the city was facing an invasion of mammoths.