John Varley - Mammoth

In his mind's eye he saw the lights dim in the big top, heard the drum roll, heard the dramatic voice of the ringmaster, his voice echoing over the public address:

"And now, ladies and gentlemen and children of all ages... Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus... a Howard Christian Company... the Greatest Show On Earth for over a century... proudly presents... after an absence from planet Earth of over ten... thousand... years!... The Columbian Mammoth!" It was an announcement he had been dreaming of for over a decade, and now not only did he not have living mammoths from the past, all his most promising hybrids had vanished to wherever his building, his host-mother elephants, and two of his employees had gone. Howard didn't know where that was, but it was starting to look like it was the Pleistocene Era.

God damn them, trigger-happy cops.

He took a last look at the scene of slaughter, the remains of what could have been the biggest circus attraction the world had ever seen, now just heaps of steaming meat with a baffled old man sitting on his ass on the asphalt beside his walker right in the middle of it, and reached for his phone to dial Warburton. Howard sensed there was going to be a lot of coverage of this incident, inquiries, commissions, press snooping around, private "advocates" of one stripe or another, most of them looking for somebody to sue for damages, and he needed to alert his senior fixer to get cracking on containment, at whatever cost. Then he spotted Matthew Wright standing there on the street behind the line of police.

Matt Wright, Doctor Matthew Wright, with his 1600 SATs, his IQ off the end of the charts, Matt Wright who was able to do without apparent effort things that Howard Christian had worked his ass off all his life to achieve. Matt goddamn Wright who had the temerity, the gall to accuse Howard of...

He zoomed in on Matt's face. It was a much more battered face than it had been the last time Howard saw it. Blood and dirt were smeared across it in about equal measure. His clothes were tattered, his hair was filthy. Howard nudged the controls of the telescopic sight and now, in addition to dirt and a smear of blood, crosshairs appeared on Dr. Wright's forehead. Howard felt his trigger finger twitch.

For a moment, Matt was looking right into Howard's eyes, as if daring him to shoot. He could almost feel the gigawatts of power gathered in the basement, coiled like a snake, ready to lash out at the speed of light with the application of only a few ounces of pressure from Howard's finger.

He took a deep breath, and removed his hand from the trigger. At almost the same moment, Matt turned and, pulling on Susan's hand, hurried away down Curson Avenue, directly away from Howard, almost as if he sensed the danger.

"Warburton!" Howard shouted into his microphone. "Warburton, get up here, you son of a bitch! I need you!"

"SUSAN," Matt said, "I'm going to have to go away for a while."

They had returned to the corner of Curson and Wilshire, walking at first, then running, Matt having to drag Susan. When they reached the sidewalk in front of the tar pit Matt stopped and looked around. It was amazing, the amount of damage done. All the trees in the median strip had been knocked down. Cars had been trampled. Shattered glass glittered in the remaining streetlights. There was the smell of spilled gasoline and gun smoke.

It took a while for Matt's statement to penetrate through the fog of horror in Susan's mind. Finally she looked at him and frowned.

"Go away? Where?"

"I don't know. There are some things I have to work out. It may take... a while. I'm not sure how long."

"But how will I—"

"I can't say any more now, there isn't time. I'll try to contact you as soon as possible. Until then... it's very important. I hope you'll just trust me for now."

"I trust you, Matt, but—"

"I'm sorry, Susan, I'm truly sorry. But there's no time. I love you." There was no time, no time at all, and he pulled her close to him and kissed her fiercely, then turned and ran, not daring to look back.

Susan stood there for a moment, watching him vanish into the night. Suddenly the reaction set in, all the horror of the worst night of her life, and she sat down on the twisted remains of the fence that had separated the sidewalk from the tar pits and the audio-animatronic mammoths that had been forlornly waving their trunks at the passing traffic on Wilshire for decades. Emergency workers were running up and down the street in front of her, police were setting up more secure barriers to keep out the curious while the scene of the catastrophe was investigated. Not far to her left people were cautiously approaching the huge bulk of Big Mama, still on her side, and apparently still breathing.

But one of them wasn't. Cowering at the side of the female on the bank of the tar pit, between the cow and her calf, was a second baby mammoth, this one entirely covered in thick, reddish black hair. It saw Susan and took a step toward her, then retreated back into the shadows of its new surrogate mother and attempted to nurse.

THE lights dimmed slowly under the big top until the audience in the bleachers, just back from the intermission with their hands full of expensive popcorn and chips and fresh paper cups of beer, was left in darkness broken only by the faint radiance seeping through the glass ring of skyboxes above and behind them, where the corporate sponsors and the very rich dined on prime rib and lobster and caviar and sipped champagne. There was a burst of excited noise that gradually fell away. The sound of the electronic music, when it came, hammered out of suspended planar speakers like a living thing, beginning on an almost supersonic note and plunging rapidly to spaces way, way, way below the bass clef, became a rumble that grabbed at the guts and shook one's entire body.

Then came the voice of the ringmaster.

"Ladies and gentlemen... and children of all ages..."

A thousand computer-controlled pencil spotlights blazed in a hundred colors and swept crazily around the arena as the music swooped stereophonically from one end of the big top to the other. Fog belched from hidden ducts, and soon the spotlight beams were slicing through it like crazed laser warfare.

"...Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus..."

The spotlights suddenly merged on a gigantic, flat black curtain at the far end of the arena. The curtain opened slowly to each side to reveal... a second scalloped curtain of red velvet.

"...a Howard Christian Company..."

The velvet curtain began to rise at a tantalizing creep, the sound of a thousand snare drums beginning what sounded like the world's longest drum roll. Slowly, slowly a massive proscenium arch was revealed: two stylized giant ground sloths carved from ice, thirty feet tall, backed by a stainless steel arch that reached even higher.

Jungle sounds began to enter the mix, a polyglot, nonsensical, multicontinental cacophony of wild animals that might have been cribbed from an old Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan picture: monkeys chattering, macaws cawing, lions and tigers and bears roaring, lizards hissing, kookaburras doing their kookaburra thing.

"...takes you back to the last Ice Age, when vast sheets of ice covered the very ground we now stand on..."

Now the collective gasp of the audience could actually be heard over the hugely pumped sound track as the vast, billowing big top disappeared to be replaced by towering clouds in a sky so impossibly blue it hurt the eyes, the clouds forming and dissolving and whipping by in time-lapse madness, and maybe the guy sitting next to you breathed in an awed voice How did they do that? if he wasn't in on the trick, which was that, though the big top looked like a gigantic tent from the outside—it was in fact a gigantic tent, outside—the acres of canvas covered an inner layer that was actually the world's largest spread of millimeter-thick hi-def television screens which had cost millions, set over an arena that had been dug into the ground deeply enough that the "skyboxes" were in fact slightly below ground level, and the gently billowing shrouds of honey-colored canvas you had been seeing for the last half hour while the lights were up during the intermission was actually only the picture of the inside of a big top.