Mammoth (25 page)

The center of Fuzzyland was Fuzzy’s Big Top, dwarfing all the others and yet tastefully done, eschewing the gaudy reds and yellows and whites and purples of traditional big tops for wide vertical stripes of khaki and olive with gold trim, like a designer wine label. Big as it was, though, when regarded as a part of the larger edifice of Cenozoic Park and its sculpted environs, it seemed a small tail wagging a very large dog.

But it was true, and everyone agreed on it: Fuzzy the baby mammoth was the reason all this was here, and without him it might very well all dry up and blow away. Everybody had a great time at all the surrounding attractions with all their bells and whistles, they enjoyed the first act of the circus performances,
which featured the very cream of lion tamers, clowns, jugglers, and daring aerialists, they got a big kick out of the opening of the second act with its giant overhead hi-def screens and its elephants and Big Mama…but what most people came here to see was the world’s darling, Little Fuzzy. “Most people” meaning those who could afford it. Fuzzy’s show was put on twice a day, except Mondays—separate ticket required, and that ticket was three times what you paid to get in, and
that
wasn’t cheap—so not everyone who visited the park on a given day would get in to the show.

The operators went to a two-tiered system within a week of the opening day: reservations and a much higher price for the skyboxes and front rows, and a lottery of park attendees, who won the privilege of paying for the open seats. An hour before showtime scalping was strictly dog-eat-dog, with crying children and parents sometimes coming to blows.

Twelve shows a week, and practically everyone in the world wanted to get in, even the hard-core environmentalists who opposed the park, the circus, and everything it stood for. Everyone, that is, except for Susan Morgan, who had to be at every one of them.

Twelve shows a week.

She had been doing it for one year, and it was starting to look like a life sentence.

SUSAN
left the elephant/mammoth compound at eleven
P.M.
, one hour after the end of the final show of the night. She climbed up into the cab of her super-heavy-duty Dodge pickup, emblazoned on the door with a magnetic smiling baby mammoth logo of Fuzzyland. The beast burst into life with a rumble of its huge 6.2-liter diesel engine.

Now she traveled the route visitors took from the entrance and parking lots, but in reverse, and by pathways visitors never saw. Off to her left she could sometimes glimpse the maglev rail perched on its big concrete pylons, but usually it was concealed behind rows of trees or high fences. Cenozoic Park was, for the most part, a world of illusion—that’s what the trees and fences were designed to hide, because the magic went out of the trick if you knew exactly how it was done.
Back here, there was no illusion, just utilitarian blacktop and concrete and nondescript cheap sheet-metal buildings that housed the workshops and electrical boards that kept the machines running, pumps that kept plants and animals and visitors watered, and storage warehouses that fed the insatiable appetites of the thousands who entered every day, from cotton candy mix to tons of frozen hamburger patties to bottles of champagne to Cenozoic Park bumper stickers and T-shirts to Little Fuzzy refrigerator magnets and rubber keychains.

As she came to the Cenozoic Safari a red light began flashing and a striped barrier came down, exactly like at a railroad crossing, and a ten-foot gate rolled back, but what came lumbering across the road was not a train but an Indricothere, looking a little like an elephant from its tree-trunk legs and slab sides, a little like a rhino from the thickness of its neck, a little like a giraffe from the length of that neck…but looking most of all like a terrible mistake, because the concealed hatch on its back was thrown open and the operator’s head and shoulders were sticking out. Susan recognized him, one of her few friends outside the elephant house. His name was Fred Richardson, and his face was red and swimming with sweat. She stuck her head out the window and called out to him.

“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:

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.

The realtor called it a cabin, and it was in fact made of logs—not the kind Abe Lincoln split and notched together, but the kind made in a factory that really weren’t much more than a facade for the well-insulated walls behind them. A log cabin with a three-car garage, a huge cantilevered deck with a spectacular view of Mount Hood, a vaulted A-frame living room, four bedrooms, four baths, sauna, Jacuzzi, and wine cellar.

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.

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.

Still, Susan Morgan insisted her charge get his rest at night, claiming the two shows a day tired him out, something Howard had seen no signs of, which was why Howard had to sneak into his own building in his own theme park late at night, when Susan was not there, to get a little quality time with his prize pet.

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.

With that in mind, Howard had made sure that neither Fuzzy nor Big Mama spent more than one night in the elephant compound of the Griffith Park Zoo. At dawn on the second day six lawyers and two large trucks appeared at the zoo gates, waving a court order from a judge who was in a tough reelection fight, and one hour after that both trucks were rolling west and north on US 101, the Ventura Freeway, toward their new home in a compound just outside Paso Robles on the central coast, safely out of Los Angeles County. Howard had possession of both animals, and all the carcasses, and that was nine-tenths of the way to ownership.

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 them 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.