John Varley - Mammoth

Warburton turned to one of his minions and gave his instructions, and more phone calls were made. Ten minutes later a moving van pulled up to the closest police tape on Wilshire, and a dozen very large men got out. They were given their instructions, and proceeded cautiously down the gentle slope to where Susan was standing. They surrounded the little mammoth, ropes were attached, and the squealing infant was unceremoniously wrestled up the slope, over the collapsed fence, and into the back of the van, while a crowd of cops, emergency workers, reporters, and curiosity seekers looked on. Live images of the capture were fed to a worldwide audience by the dozens of news cameras present both on the ground and in the air.

Susan was already working her telephone as the door slammed on the back of the van—and kicking herself for not thinking of it a few minutes ago. She could have called Howard, standing fifty feet away! But things had been a little hectic there, and she hoped she could be forgiven for overlooking it.

She knew all the elephant keepers from the Griffith Park Zoo, and within an hour most of them were on their way to the Miracle Mile.

When Big Mama woke and staggered to her feet, it was to find herself completely immobilized with ropes and nets. She was bullied and prodded until, not without difficulty, she was induced up the ramp of a giant stake-sided flatbed truck to begin her slow progress through streets lined with most of the population of Beverly Hills, Hollywood, and all intervening Los Angeles neighborhoods until she reached the elephant house at the zoo, at three in the morning.

At the same time crews were trying to figure out how to rescue Big Daddy, but it was hopeless. By the time Big Mama arrived at her temporary new home, the bull had ceased to move, and shortly afterward a veterinarian declared him dead, suffocated by the increasing pressure as he sank into the black ooze. The operation was immediately switched from a rescue to one of recovery. Howard did not intend to let twelve tons of mammoth meat and bones—and viable spermatozoa—be swallowed up to emerge in another twelve thousand years as blackened bones. By the time the sun came up a massive crane had been moved into place, stabilized and counterbalanced. A giant claw, normally used for horsing entire giant eucalyptus logs onto truck beds, plunged into the asphalt and clamped around Big Daddy's corpse. Ribs could be heard cracking as the claw plucked the body free like a cork from a bottle of very bad vintage wine.

These three ultradramatic operations drew attention away from a fourth one going on at the same time on Curson Avenue. As helicopter cameras followed the progress of the trucks carrying Big Mama and the calf, other trucks had arrived on the side street, other cranes and forklifts were gathering every scrap of still-steaming mammoth meat and hustling it into refrigerated vans, which sped off to an undisclosed location. There wasn't a news director in the world who would cut away from the frantic attempts to save Big Daddy to shots of bullet-riddled pachyderm corpses with exploded heads, but by the time the big bull was dead the remains of the other adult cows were nowhere to be found, and even the gallons and gallons of blood had been hosed away. It was as if it had all been a dream, the slaughter on Curson Avenue, and if there hadn't been the video to prove it had happened many people would have preferred to leave it that way.

By two that afternoon, not much more than fifteen and a half hours after the arrival of the mammoths, traffic was flowing smoothly again, and Howard Christian, bone weary by now, retired to his aerie in the Resurrection Tower to begin writing the checks to pay for it all.

But he was smiling.

IT was not much later than that before Susan had a chance to catch her breath and realize, with a flush of shame, that she hadn't thought of Matt more than once or twice the entire day. There had just been too much to do, too many places to be at once, trying to see the baby mammoth safely to his temporary new home at the zoo, monitoring and advising during the operations around Big Mama and Big Daddy by cell phone cameras, with barely any time to weep when Big Daddy breathed his last, mighty breath.

But at last she and the zoo veterinarians completed their checkup of the little mammoth, who stood calm and compliant for all the poking and probing, either in shock or unable to fathom what had happened to him and thus ready to accept any friendly attention, and she sat down with a sandwich and a cup of coffee and wondered why Matt had taken off as abruptly as he did. He had said he might be gone... how long? "A while." One of those maddeningly inexact English words describing time. A bit. A moment. A tick. A spell, a flash, a jiffy, a shake, a space, a stretch, a breath.

In this case, a while would be five years.

CENOZOIC Park had been erected over the next few years in what had once been farmland not far east of Portland, Oregon, along the newly widened Route 26 that went by Mount Hood and across the Cascades toward Bend.

There was not a lot of middle ground when it came to the theme park. Oregonians either loved it or hated it, and were just about equally divided on the matter. The only thing everyone agreed on was that nobody but the planners and builders called it Cenozoic Park from the moment ground was broken. Everybody called it Fuzzyland. Portland had been fighting urban sprawl for decades, and having better luck with it than many another metropolitan area. When the plans for Fuzzyland were announced, a year to the day after the slaughter in Los Angeles, environmental activists were stunned to discover it was already a done deal. Several millions of Howard Christian's money, discreetly applied, had obtained variances to land-use regulations. The hearings that followed were a formality. In only weeks bulldozers were at work on the much loathed Mount Hood Freeway, something planners had thought dead and buried for forty years. It was almost finished by opening day, the remaining construction just enough to make the traffic delays getting there merely dreadful rather than nightmarish.

"A shot in the arm for tourism, and the ski industry!" proclaimed all the various chambers of commerce in the affected areas.

"A blight on the Cascades!" the environmentalists sneered.

Though the words "tasteful" and "circus" are not traditionally used in the same sentence, Howard instructed his architects to do the best they could, and they did manage to avoid the worst excesses of Las Vegas and Orlando. You could barely see the place from the highway, camouflaged as it was by hundreds of Douglas firs. (The trees were actually metal frameworks supporting colored Styrofoam bark and easy-to-clean plastic needles, but who cared?)

When you drove through the forest toward the vast underground parking lots you barely got a glimpse of the park just before plunging into the depths. It was mostly low-slung, sprawling, hugging the ground, dominated by the largest plastic and steel geodesic dome ever built, gleaming in the spring sunshine—or, more likely, glistening in the Oregon rain. It wasn't until you took the long escalators to the monorail that circled the park and took you to one of the four themed areas, three resort hotels, two RV parks, and one campground that you got a sense of the scale of the place.

You quickly realized that the dome was a lot bigger than you had imagined. A structure like that, with very little to give it a sense of scale, it could sort of sneak up on you, it took a while to realize you were farther away than you thought. It was big.

Placed between the parking lots and the park itself were the hotels, each with its monorail stop.

First was the smallest, the Alpine, on the side of the nearest hill, a Frank Lloyd Wright knockoff of dressed stone and polished wood and glass, cantilevered over a rushing river a la Falling Water, hangout of those who had come mainly to sample the year-round winter sports under the dome or the winter recreation nearby. Ski bums, hotdogging snowboarders, slumming Euro trash tired of the slopes of Aspen and Gstaad, aging snow bunny wannabes from the RV parks there to take their first and only bobsled or luge ride on the short, hair-raising, but guaranteed safe indoor course.