John Varley - Mammoth

And who knew? Maybe Howard's obsession was right. Maybe she could get back to where her credit cards worked. Andrea was an environmentalist, but no outdoorswoman. The woods were full of chiggers and mosquitoes and spiders and things.

So Howard made his calculations, found they could just get there on the three thousand gallons of fuel remaining, and they made their way down the coast on just one of the big twin diesels at the most economical rpm setting as determined by the boat's computer.

They had good luck. When a big storm hit they were able to shelter in San Francisco Bay. How very, very odd to sail through it with no bridge overhead. There was nothing on Alcatraz Island, nothing on Yerba Buena, no '49ers boomtown. Nothing.

Several times they saw, and were seen by, native peoples. Some were on shore, some in canoes, but none tried to catch the big Bertram. So it wasn't the age of dinosaurs... but Howard had known that, the coastline pretty much agreed with the ship's maps—though of course all the fancy GPS stuff was useless with no satellites overhead—and the continent had been very different when T. rex stalked the Earth.

Howard had hoped to find his missing warehouse on the way, but found no sign of it. It proved nothing, though he scanned the area from the top of every rise. He hadn't realized how easy it would be to hide a single structure in wilderness like this. It could be in the next shallow ravine, or he could be miles away from it.

Or, maybe it hadn't arrived yet.

They found the tar pits. Again, nothing. They spent the night, sleepless from all the unfamiliar and frightening animal sounds, and hiked back to the ship the next day.

On the shore, a hundred people awaited them.

IT was snowing harder now. Howard kept brushing it away from his face, again wondering why he was bothering.

He remembered something he hadn't thought of for a long time: His first sight of the "caveman" nestled up against the frozen mammoth. He remembered his disgust. Soon, probably before the day was over, something would make a meal of his face. Hell, of most of his head. Not a bear, a bear would certainly drag him away and eat a lot more. Probably not a wolf. Most likely some of the little snow foxes he had seen on his way north. They would gnaw at him a while, then the snow would cover him. He found the prospect held no emotion for him, one way or the other. Though if they came while he was still alive he'd fight them off. Howard Christian was not a quitter.

He looked at his watch... and smiled again. At Matt's watch. Even after all these years he still did it from time to time. His people felt the watch held very powerful medicine, because the chief looked at it so often, and they had been sorry to see him leave with it, but of course too polite to say so.

And it did have heap powerful juju, or voodoo, or power of some sort, though not of a type any of them would ever understand. Nor, he admitted to himself, did he have more than the faintest, quasispiritual sense of the watch's power. Hell, it didn't even tell time anymore, hadn't since the radio signal from the Naval Observatory had suddenly winked off on Day One, Year One. Years ago.

Years ago.

How many? He could probably work it out, if it mattered. He had a good memory. There was Year One. There was the Year of Building. There was the year of Many Fish. There was the Year of the First-Born Child. There was the Year of the First Mammoth Kill. There was... He had forgotten the sequence. At some point it had ceased to matter. It was probably around the Year Howard Realized Matt Was Not Coming. At some point he had moved from being a middle-aged man to being an old man, and then a very old man. Probably somewhere between seventy-five and eighty.

A few brave souls had actually been aboard the Twist of Fate, but they hadn't ventured inside, and they had done very little damage. One had put a steel fishhook through his hand, but didn't seem angry about it. He seemed to treasure the bright, shiny new thing hanging there.

Howard kept his finger on the trigger, and he and Andrea both smiled a lot, and nodded, and showed open palms, and got into their Zodiac and—startling everyone when they started the engine—motored back out to the Twist.

Establishing themselves as White Gods didn't take long. They had a practically unlimited supply of miracles to offer. Soon everyone was friendly and eager to see new things. When Howard and Andrea went back to the tar pits and set up a tent, part of the tribe went with them to protect them, and the rest moved their village three miles north to guard the Twist and to fish, which was their main livelihood.

Howard waited.

To pass the time, he read. His computer memories held much of the future worlds' libraries, most of it absolutely useless but some incredibly valuable to them, from the Boy Scout Handbook to paleontology and anthropology texts. Year One passed, meticulously marked off by the internal clock in Howard's computer.

They never called the next one Year Two. When it came to an end, it was the Year of Building. Things just... happened.

Howard wasn't capable of just sitting and waiting, and neither was Andrea. They got involved in the affairs of the tribe. He was never going to be able to give them automobiles or rifles, hell, he would never even be able to smelt iron. But he could teach them things. Andrea picked up the language like a sponge, and he learned it almost in spite of himself.

And he began to change things. At first, it was for his own comfort. The food in the Twist ran out, and he was sick to death of fish. Howard longed for beef. The People trapped and hunted small game and picked wild fruit and vegetables. They lived in huts made of sticks and the bones of mammoths that had died a natural death. Southern California was a lot cooler now than it would be in Howard's time; the wind blew right through the flimsy things, and his tent had big rips in it and was miserable in the rain.

He taught them to build better shelter.

Andrea had a baby, and they named him Adam. Howard found out how elephants had been hunted and killed before gunpowder, and taught them to do that.

HOWARD couldn't even remember what the year was when he finally abandoned his vigil at the tar pits. There was too much else going on in his life by then. He was a part of the community, the leader, the shaman, the medicine man.

Andrea had a third baby and this one lived, and a fourth, and she lived, too. Dear Howie, beloved Daphne.

The People became the most powerful tribe on the coast for as far as a man could walk in many days. They were the ones who slew the mammoths, who had the white gods, and the sticks that killed at a distance. (Well, they used to. The ammo was gone now.) Howard knew the names of every person living within miles of him, all part of his tribe, his people, his family.

Then came the year that he realized... he was happy. He was happier than he had ever been in his life.

That's it! I remember now....

WHEN their first grandchild was born, Howard began to feel a restlessness.

He had thought much about time travel. He had improved the lives of the People, gave them new technology. They still lived in the Stone Age, but it was a cleaner, healthier, more prosperous Stone Age. They used to fight with other tribes, but Howard had put an end to that, first with the guns, later with improved weaponry. He gave them the bow and arrow. But there was a big conundrum. Was he changing the future? Or was what had happened fated to happen?

It occurred to him that he, Howard Christian, may have been the reason mammoths became extinct in North America. The thought did not please him... and he eventually dismissed it. Someone else would have doped it out soon enough. Some genius in Europe or Asia had learned to do it without his help.