by John Varley
"Hey, you, how about moving that piece of crap?"
"Friggin' air conditioner broke down again," Fred called out. He stopped the mechanical monster, made it turn and lower its head until it was staring right through her windshield, and then it opened its mouth and roared. There was a little bear in it, and some elephant trumpeting, and maybe even a hint of Star Wars Wookiee, something whipped up in the sound labs. It was sure loud enough.
After the Indricothere had slouched across the road and the crossing alarm shut down, Susan drove past the phony redwoods and skirted the Ice Dome, to the employees' gate. The guard waved her through. A short drive through real forest and she passed by the Animal Vigil one hundred yards from the arch of the main park entrance, the closest they could get without being on private property. They had been there round the clock from opening day. This late there were only half a dozen of the hardest of the hard core, but on weekends there were often a hundred or more. They were not allowed to pitch tents—twice temporary encampments had been torn down by park security. They were forbidden to build fires and on a rainy Oregon day they could be a lugubrious sight, but their morale apparently remained high and even tonight they were slowly marching up and down on the dirt path they had beaten down, chanting slogans and carrying signs:
CIRCUS = CRUELTY
MEAT IS MURDER
ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS
FREE WOOLLY!
Not even the mighty Howard Christian could prevent them from doing that, though he had tried, and they had vowed to stay there until the place closed down. Since Fuzzyland had been pronounced the most successful entertainment extravaganza since Disney World, Susan figured they had a long wait in store. Or maybe not....
The sight of her truck with its Fuzzyland logo on the side set them off, shaking fists and shouting slogans. She sped down the road and through the blossoming commercial strip of Zigzag, then another mile down to a side road and two miles into the hills. Around a bend, up a steep grade, and there it was. Her hideaway.
She pulled up the short gravel driveway and parked next to her huge fifth-wheel trailer. It was what was called a "garage" model. She could drive up a ramp at the back in her dune buggy. Andrea had suggested she should have something to do, some activity or hobby, on her Mondays off. She had chosen off-roading. Other than that, she didn't have much of a life. She got out and wearily mounted the twenty steps to the deck.
Her weariness went away instantly, though, when she saw the man sitting with his back against the glass wall next to her front door, right there under the porch light.
His clothes were well used, just short of ragged, jeans and high-top sneakers, a blue down vest, and a flannel lumberjack shirt. There was a small backpack sitting beside him, with canteen and bedroll. His hair was long, black streaked with gray, and fell forward around his face. He seemed to be asleep.
He might be one of those animal rights protesters, he had the look. Should she call the sheriff? And wait half an hour or more for them to get here?
The hell with it.
"Hey, get up and get out of here," she said.
Matt Wright looked up and smiled uncertainly.
"Can we talk for a moment first?" he asked.
She just stood there for a moment, then slowly walked the three steps between them and slapped his face as hard as she could.
21
HOWARD Christian reached into his pocket and took out a peanut, cupped it in his palm, and held it through the heavy horizontal steel I-beams toward the most famous animal that had ever lived, the most beloved creature that ever walked on four legs—or maybe even on two, for that matter.
Little Fuzzy. His Little Fuzzy.
In the darkness of the far side of the enclosure a darker shadow stirred, as Howard had known it would. This was supposed to be Fuzzy's sleep time, though neither elephants nor mammoths needed a lot of sleep, sometimes having to feed as much as twenty hours per day to support their enormous bulk on the low-energy foods they consumed—and as much as sixty percent of that went right through their sixty-foot guts undigested to emerge as a cornucopia for dung beetles.
Fuzzy slept lightly and his hearing or sense of smell was uncanny.
He always knew when Howard had entered the building, and he always smelled the peanuts.
Now he shambled over to the mammoth-proof fence and the soft, moist tip of his trunk probed Howard's hand with infinite delicacy. There was a snuffling sound and the peanut was sucked up, the nostrils pinched, and the trunk snaked up above the pendulous lower lip and Fuzzy blew the tiny morsel into his mouth and crunched it. Immediately his trunk was held out for more.
Life is good, Howard thought. Life is very good.
THERE had been some dodgy days there at first, five years ago, when Fuzzy and Big Mama and the herd had appeared like magic on Wilshire Boulevard.
The first twenty-four, forty-eight hours had been critical, as he had known they would be right from the moment he shut down the big laser. His claims to ownership of the mammoths were tenuous at best, but that was what lawyers were for. By noon of the second day, with the media maelstrom swirling undiminished, Howard's legal team had filed no fewer than seventeen lawsuits in five separate jurisdictions outlining why the prehistoric creatures belonged to Howard Christian and no one else, under no fewer than three legal theories, each of them contradictory to the other two. His public relations team was hard at work selling the proposition that not only was Howard entitled to the spoils, it would be a travesty of justice, a blight on the free enterprise system, an insidious undermining of the basic principles that made this country the greatest democracy in the world if ownership of these poor defenseless creatures was awarded to anyone other than the man who was responsible for their arrival in the twenty-first century, i.e., the aforesaid Howard Christian.
Unfortunately, that ultimately entailed the revelation of the means whereby they had arrived in the twenty-first century, something Howard would very much have liked to have kept close to his vest, but that was the cost of doing business. You never got everything you wanted, so you concentrated on the main attraction and gave a little here and there.
It was a lot sexier story than cloning, and that would have been sexy enough. That was the angle his PR teams took: Howard the time travel pioneer, Howard the techno-wizard, Howard the man who was going to revolutionize the world once again. And that was fine, too. Wasn't a man entitled to the fruits of his labors?
There was also the matter of actual physical possession. Possession is nine-tenths of the law, or something like that. That was how his father had put it, anyway, and Howard could remember the exact circumstances when he'd first heard it, as Dad stuffed a boombox into a gaffed shopping bag and sauntered casually out of a Wal-Mart, "avoiding the unconstitutional state sales tax," as he had put it.
Six months later he had legal possession as well, over the protests of the Sierra Club, the Fund for Animals, the State of California and County of Los Angeles, and many others. On the day the appeals court issued its ruling Howard gave the go-ahead to his planning team, which had already been working on tentative proposals for the circus that was to display Fuzzy and Big Mama: Full steam ahead, boys!
Yes, life was indeed sweet, or as sweet as it ever gets. There's always a little lemon peel in the lemonade, and there are three things you can do about that: minimize it, add more sugar, and/or learn to like a little bitterness. Howard did all three things, at various times.
There was the question of the slaughter of the fleeing mammoths.
There was no way simply to make that ugly event just go away; billions of people had seen it on live television. Not that anyone wanted to arrest anybody over it, the animals were clearly out of control, and if somebody had killed them that was more or less all right... but how? Exactly what had happened out there that bloody night?
Best answer, five years later: Nobody knew. Leading theory: It was some side effect of the time traveling itself. Some invisible force seemed to have seized th
em when they got a certain distance from the point of "temporal translation," as one of Howard's experts put it. It worked like this:
Forces are accumulating as a person travels through the temporal continuum. Those forces are strongly localized to what the expert called a "six-dimensional synclastic infundibular space-time nexus" (i.e., the site of the temporal breakthrough), and increased as the cube of the distance from this nexus to the location of the time traveler, decreasing only as the square of the interval between temporal translation and "present" time X, measured in seconds. If not enough time is allowed between temporal translation and movement away from the space-time nexus, this expert testified to five separate investigation boards and a committee of Congress (with a degree of chutzpah that had serious mathematicians chuckling in admiration even five years later), the accumulated forces discharged, with the awful results everyone had seen repeated endlessly on videotape.
Or some such bullshit.
Howard, who was no math slouch, could not follow all the man's equations, but that was what he was being paid for. Obfuscation, smoke and mirrors, intended to make the ordinary viewer, simple congressperson, or even educated layman drop his jaw and say... duuuuuh, okay, if you say so.
Knowing the public would never be completely comfortable with an explanation like that, Howard's PR firm suggested how the whole bucket of lemons could be sweetened a bit, and so a second expert was hired. This one was a well-known populizer of science with the stature and stage presence of the late, great Isaac Asimov but without Asimov's scruples. That worthy came up with the following analogy:
Ouch!
Well, yeah... but why didn't the same thing happen when Big Mama and Fuzzy and the corpse of Big Daddy were removed? Easy. What happens if you don't reach for that doorknob? What if you wait a minute or two before trying to open the door? Why, the static charge bleeds off into the air.
Viola!
This was all said with such conviction, reasonableness, and aplomb that even Howard almost found himself ready to believe it. And the public and the investigatory boards, knowing that there was a solid basis of mathematical gobbledygook underlying this rampant flummery, accepted it, too.
The biggest reason everyone, scientist and layman alike, pretty much had to accept Howard's version of events was that there was absolutely no proof that it was wrong. Other than to reveal that time travel had been accomplished, that a time machine existed, Howard had revealed a sum total of... nothing.
He knew there were those who viewed his exploding mammoth hypothesis as the sheer claptrap that it was. There were alternative explanations, of course, some of them wacky enough to make amusing reading, most just stupid. The Internet was rife with websites claiming to have the straight dope on that fateful night, from UFOs to communists to vast conspiracies of animal-hating capitalists to the Wrath of God Himself. There were even a few that got it right, but who was listening? They all faded into that vast babble of nuts that everyone was so used to by now, the online riffraff, the crazies with an ax to grind who drowned each other out in their relentless paranoia.
Then there were the handful of people capable of following the highest of higher mathematics, who knew that a few decimal points had been dropped, a few numbers divided by zero, a few Riemannian terms sneaked into the Lobachevskian continuum presented with such gusto. But how were they going to explain that to those who couldn't even spell continuum, much less understand what it meant?
Better yet, even many of those who could spot the bad shuffle simply assumed it was deliberate disinformation given out not to cover up anything Howard had done, but to conceal what he knew. So what if somebody had his thumb on the scales of the equations submitted publicly? The incontrovertible fact was that time travel had happened, that human beings had gone back in time and returned to the present day with living—and dead—proof that they had been there.
How they had done it was proprietary, far too closely held even to risk applying for a patent. Howard was assumed to be protecting his interests until he had everything sewed up, until he had figured out how to squeeze every dollar out of this revolutionary new technology, until every conceivable piece of it and application for it was wholly owned by Mr. Howard Christian. In short, he was doing exactly what they would have done if they had discovered time travel. And nobody could do a damn thing about it.
He didn't have a clue how to make a time machine.
It was enough to make a billionaire weep.
"Howard, darling, it's getting late."
Just like that, all thought of time machines and defeats and that bastard Matthew Wright and that ungrateful bitch Susan Morgan fled from Howard's mind. He turned, smiling, and drank in the face of Andrea de la Terre.
Andrea de la Terre, head of Terra Firma, the conservation group she had founded and nurtured into a force to rival the Cousteau Society or Friends of Nature. Terra Firma was heartily disliked by the semi-radical groups, who sometimes viewed her as wishy-washy—Andrea was not a vegetarian, for instance—but they had to deal with her because she got things done and she knew everybody. Everybody that counted, that is, which is to say all the "green" stars in Hollywood and the music business. A dozen phone calls from her could bring out more star power to a rally, and more money into organizational coffers, than a year of hard work by any lobbying group other than the NRA.
Andrea de la Terre, until recently the very definition of Hollywood Liberal, who had turned down a multimillion-dollar cosmetics endorsement over the issue of animal testing, and prevailed in a brand-libel suit brought against her when she publicly burned boxes of eyeliner, lipstick, and rouge. Andrea de la Terre, the former Melba Horowitz of Queens, New York City. Top female box office draw for the last three years, maker of politically and environmentally responsible epics that also made pots of money, much of it for Howard Christian's studio.
Howard had never actually met her until two years ago. He did not mix with movie stars, even when they worked for him. They had ended up facing each other across a long conference table where he had sat down with groups opposed to Cenozoic Park in an attempt to iron out their differences. That was Andrea's stated intent, anyway. Howard viewed it as a wasted afternoon. He had intended to sit politely and smile politely and nod politely, and then go back to doing exactly what he had been doing before. The nerve of the woman, she and her bigshot famous Hollywood idiot friends, people with perfect teeth and skin and chiseled features, the very guys who had hammered him in the playground from the time he was five, the very girls who had sneered openly at his shitty clothes, his big ears, his zits, his stammer. Screw them all.
Until Andrea de la Terre opened her mouth and spoke, and then he was lost. ANDREA had brought grapes.
Let's don't get into that, Howard thought.
She stood there, every man's fantasy, every woman's unattainable ideal, and Howard marveled again at a thought he would never express to her: she was not really beautiful. She was attractive, no question about it, and no single part of her face was anywhere near grotesque... it's just that the parts were not assembled in a way that would normally qualify a girl as gorgeous. Howard was reminded of Judy Garland, or of Barbra Streisand, though Andrea looked nothing like either of them. If she was sitting in a bus station or on a stool at Schrafft's you'd walk right by her.
But in the same way that, when Streisand began to sing, you forgot all about the nose and she became the most wonderful thing in the universe, when Andrea looked at you, when she spoke, when she moved... you were lost. From the moment she started talking, Howard would have given her anything she wanted. (Lucky for him, she never realized that, but he did concede half a dozen points he had not intended to budge on.)
Howard was in love.
He had never expected to be, not at his age, not at this point in his life. He had had the usual crushes on the prettiest girls in school, those times when he had been in school and not self-educating in an anonymous trailer park or a juvenile hall in one state or another. They were pur
ely sexual attractions, since he had seldom exchanged so much as two words with any of those prom queens and cheerleaders. That had lasted right on through college. Then he was working, inventing, devoting himself to his computers, and there was no time for romance, even in the event he believed any of the engineering majors he met in the pathetic thing he called a social life would respond to him.
Then one day he looked around and realized he was rich. It really seemed to happen overnight. And when others realized it, the girls began to show up. He went so far as to marry one, and the divorce a year later had cost him (and he got a lot of satisfaction every month when he wrote her a check that seemed pitifully small to him now, and must have seemed miniscule to her avaricious heart when she saw what he was worth now), and he learned the lesson all rich, homely men learn if they intend to stay rich: Your bank balance is the most attractive thing about you.
Then he was a billionaire, and one of the most eligible bachelors on the planet, and everything he had learned applied doubled, tripled, squared, and cubed. When you have billions, the pool of possible women who might actually love you for yourself narrows enormously. Basically, they had to be either rich or famous, or both, and he simply didn't move with any ease in that social milieu.
He had made a few halfhearted moves to spruce himself up, hired an image consultant who gave him a new haircut and chose his wardrobe for him, but he soon drifted back to his old familiar cowlick and comfortable clothes. He even tried plastic surgery, electing to fix, of all the disastrous features the sawbones swore he could tidy up, his unfortunate nose which, he had always thought, could adorn Mount Rushmore with very little alteration in scale if George Washington ever lost his. But he felt the new schnozz didn't look all that much better than the old one, on the one hand, and yet, on the other, he was sure it was enough different that everyone who knew him saw nothing else but the nose, and were snickering behind his back.