John Varley - Mammoth

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!"

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?