Mammoth Dawn
(written with Gregory Benford)
If only the protesters’ intellect matched their verbal cleverness, Alex thought, the Helyx Corporation wouldn’t have any problems at the gate.
It’s Not Nice to Fool with Mother Nature! said one of the waving signs displayed on a securitycam window projected on the surface of his desk. The usual. Alex Pierce had stopped trying to understand the Evos’ odd point of view, had ceased even being bemused by their antics. He had a company to run.
He relegated the securitycam image to the background and brought more important documents forward. Datascreens and email lists cluttered his table-sized desktop screen as much as memos and paper messages had once done.
Earlier that morning he’d woken up in Miami with a hangover. He’d downed three drinks too many at yet another fancy fund-raiser dinner—this one to preempt birth defects through parental genetic screening. Before midday he had choppered back to the main lab administration offices in rural Montana. For a worldwide corporation, business hours lasted all day long, and it was always time for the boss to get back to work.
His wife Susan had stayed home on the ranch. She disliked black-tie functions like the one in Miami, though she could be devastating in a cocktail dress, the barest breath of jewels implying wealth far better than gaudiness did. But too often the diplomats and VIPs treated Alex as the only important face in the room, and Susan the gorgeous trophy wife rather than a talented scientist in her own right. She hated the attitude, and Alex had made appropriate excuses for her.
But Susan’s real reason was that she wanted to stay with her mammoths.
As his company had grown from a fledgling startup with one biotech product—a symbiotic microorganism that could fend off strange E. coli in the human digestive system—to a corporate leviathan that spent most of its resources just figuring out how to receive and manage the enormous profits, Alex had learned to multi-process. While taking care of corporate details, answering vidmessages, and delegating responsibilities, a calm and meditative part of his mind was anticipating an evening of campfires and peace with his wife, out near the herd.…
“We got another fence-jumper,” Ralph Duncan said on the secure phone, interrupting a dozen separate trains of thought and delivering a problem of his own. “Got him cold.”
Alex’s autosecretary instantly knew this was important, captured the call, and transferred the security man’s weathered image to the upper corner of the desk. “Remember that li’l hint we got on the acoustics? Tracked him in the woods up along the eastern ridgeline. Ambitious bastard.”
Alex was glad to be interrupted from pharmaceutical statistics, Third World traveler health records—dull, even if they did point to continued success. “Another Evo type?”
“They don’t carry some kinda ideology tag, Boss, but you can bet he was trying to get a look at the mammoths. Should I tell the sheriff?”
“No, he’ll just process the guy, slap him on the wrist, and let him back out to cause more mischief.” Alex rubbed his fingers over thin lips. “Usually only the hardcore ones try to get past the fences. How’s he outfitted?”
“Pretty fancy. Overnight gear, one of those microbags for sleepin’, videocam with close-up fittings. Five kilometers inside the fence, easy. No question about boundaries and jurisdictions.” Ralph snorted.
By now, the questions came automatically to Alex. The ranch often had intruders. “No weapon?”
“Nope. Except for tryin’ to run at first, gave us no trouble.”
As he dealt with the conversation, Alex finished some routine computer work, forwarded several inquiries to Susan’s mailbox, bumped a set of interview questions to his PR squad (who knew all the right answers anyway), and keyed out, using his thumbprint to secure. At no point did Ralph ever notice that he didn’t have Alex’s full attention.
“If you ask me, this guy wanted to be caught. Claims he knows you professionally.” Ralph’s sun-grizzled face showed just a hint of amusement. “His ID says Geoffrey Kinsman.”
Now Alex paid attention. “Damn! I think I know him. Spelled with a G?”
“Yep.”
“What’s a good biologist doing with that bunch of Luddites?”
“Says he’ll talk only to you, Boss.”
Alex shut down the other operations in the office, signaling all his staff distributed around the world that he was not presently available. “Bring him to the Hospital, not here.”
Ralph had an intuitive sense of Alex’s moods, born of a decade’s close collaboration. But now the security man seemed surprised. “Show and tell, Boss? For one of those clowns?”
“The Evos are always more afraid of what they imagine than what they actually see.” He put on a pair of spex and tested the uplink as he headed out of the office, his boots clomping down the varnished wooden stairs, and out onto the plank porch. “Stall him for five, Ralph. Give me time to profile him.”
When Helyx had purchased an isolated chunk of northern Montana, Alex kept the original ranch buildings, letting them fade and weather from bleached white to an ash gray like raw silver. The primary genetics labs were in the old pine-log barn, which Susan had dubbed the Pleistocene Hospital.
“Full database search,” he subvocalized into the spex as he walked. “Summarize relevant information on Dr. Geoffrey Kinsman. Reference point: He was in my lab around fifteen years ago. Apply context filters.”
With a big drive-in bay and concealed windows, the hospital barn looked like an equipment garage. Inside, the crisp antiseptic air mixed with the moist organic odors of feathers and fur, droppings and feed—a contrast to the smelly oil drums just outside on the loading dock.
Lounging in his jeans against the split rail that bounded the old barn, Alex read a data summary that scrolled across the spex. All he needed to know about Geoffrey Kinsman: a man with just a bit too much clout and education to dismiss as simply a misled Luddite, as Alex had always considered the Evos to be.
For years, Kinsman had associated with political activism, starting with Ruckus Society training camps, where bright-eyed kids learned street protest tactics. His molecular biology research had produced over a hundred papers, recently with an angle toward genetics and species preservation. Another “clean genes” guy. Unarmed, a routine lab type, Kinsman did not seem dangerous. Maybe that didn’t include the threat of being bored to death.
Alex bit his lip in annoyance. He wished they had a network of sympathetic locals who would warn Helyx before a guy got this far in. He had endured the backwoods suspicions, had expected them because he’d grown up just over the Idaho border. For the first few years, the locals had given him a narrow-eyed appraisal. In fact, for a while an ugly rumor had spread that he was here to recruit locals as organ donors for sinister Helyx experiments.
But when his staff offered only day work and some well-paid farmhand jobs, the people were disappointed—until the area economy picked up and kept growing. Within a year Alex Pierce could walk into any bar and get his beer paid for, because Helyx Ranch pumped in a goodly share of the county’s revenue.
Alex pursed his lips, pondering. A lot of the locals might agree with the protesters’ views, even help them out a little. A bitter truth—he hadn’t won the war of ideas even here, in home country. He knew these people, shared many of their gut responses. But he had not lived in their world, really lived in it, for a good long while. Ralph was the real thing—and looked it in his rough pants and boots as he came through the door with his captive.
The man walking next to him was a dapper, compact item, fresh from an upscale outfitter: olive green Gore-Tex jacket, trim all-weather leggings, a big hiker’s watch with a global positioning readout. He looked as out of place as a chicken in church. A bit heavier than Alex remembered, but the tight mouth was the same.
Geoffrey Kinsman’s voice was as hard and flat as a stove lid. “Dr. Pierce.” East Coast accent, mid-Atlantic state. He held out a hand, and Alex ignored it. “You don’t remember me?”
“I remember. Just read the data squirt about you, Dr. Kinsman. All the good stuff.” He decided to have some fun with him. “You seem to have strayed a bit out of your way.”
“Might as well admit the obvious,” Ralph growled, playing the tough cop. “You wanted to create some disturbance—give the Feds a pretext to come in here.”
Kinsman glanced at the old security chief as if he were some kind of lab specimen. “You overestimate my powers.”
“That’s just what you did at that animal experimentation facility outside Topeka, five years ago,” Alex said. It sometimes put these people off-balance if you could demonstrate up front that you knew all about them.
But Kinsman didn’t even blink. “That was coincidence.”
Ralph snorted, and Alex grinned. Kinsman was not going to be any trouble, he judged; he didn’t even have a cover story. “We’ll be fine, Ralph. Thank you.” As the security man turned to leave, Alex scowled back at Kinsman. “So why, exactly, was it so important to break through my fences and trespass on my private property?”
The man allowed himself a small, dry chuckle, but his eyes were a brittle gray, like chips of slate, as he said, “To talk some sense into you. I consider that constructive, not destructive.”
“Sense? Those people at the south gate have an excuse: they’re ignorant. But we worked together, so I thought—”
“You didn’t think twice about me when you published that paper, the one on mammoth genes.”
“Right, you did some of the preliminary scans on the gene lines. A grad student for two years, then left.”
Kinsman took on a self-righteous air. “I disagreed with the work, once I understood what you were doing.”
“So what was your gripe? Was it because I ‘didn’t think twice’ about you?”
“Neither of you even asked if I wanted my name on that paper.”
Alex shook his head. “You were doing straightforward stuff. Not original. Sorry if we didn’t acknowledge you—” He couldn’t even remember for sure.
“Oh, there was a paragraph at the end, thanking me and a dozen others, sure.”
Alex smiled slightly. “You wanted to be on the paper. Is that what this is about?”
“No, damn it!” But Kinsman’s flushed face belied his words. “I just thought you’d listen to me because I was a lab grunt for you once. Maybe your money has insulated you from the arguments against this entire—”
Alex held up a hand, quick and decisive. “Already heard them. Before I took you on as a grad student, I had invented most of the arguments. Or my wife had. But we thought it through. Decided for ourselves.”
Kinsman blinked, looking taken aback at Alex’s bluntness. He must have had plenty of time to rehearse this confrontation while backpacking across Helyx wilderness property, Alex mused, but a lot of emotion churned in his face. There had been a lot of grad students in Alex’s lab then, most of them doing routine tasks to get experience. Somehow this one had left little impression on him. But clearly that old, simple paper had been a big deal to Kinsman. Students normally didn’t get their names on technical papers unless they did something creative, but Kinsman had apparently taken that irritating grain of sand and turned it into this pearl of a grudge. Alex had never been really good at judging people, but his years leading a stupendously successful company had sharpened what little skill he naturally had.
Nothing brings enemies out of the woodwork more effectively than success.
“Okay, let me talk some sense into you.” Alex gestured toward the old oaks that towered near the barn and the ranch buildings. The immense, gnarled trees were majestic and stately—and full of birds. “Look over there, Dr. Kinsman. Beautiful birds, graceful. You should see them fly at sunset, like a cloud.” Even without squinting, he could pick out a dozen nests in the branches, and the constant shifting, cooing, fluttering made the branches tremble.
“I didn’t come here to look at birds, Dr. Pierce.” He spat out the title.
Alex turned to him sharply. “You should. Once they blackened the skies; billions of them in North America when Columbus landed. But it was in their nature to nest in huge colonies, only in big stands of oaks or beeches, which made them easy prey. Over the centuries settlers cut down the oaks and beeches for firewood and lumber, or just to clear farmland. Hunters shot millions of those birds, usually for sport, though they shipped the carcasses to the cities by the barrelful.”
Kinsman looked impatient, then startled. “Those are—”
“Passenger pigeons lay only one egg each spring. They couldn’t possibly reproduce faster than they were slaughtered. It was genocide, pure and simple, Dr. Kinsman, perpetrated by human beings. The last passenger pigeon died in 1914 in the Cincinnati Zoo, and the species was extinct in a historical blink of an eye. Until Helyx brought them back.” Alex couldn’t keep the happy pride out of his voice.
Kinsman, though, looked disgusted to the point of being ill. “Extinction is Nature’s way, Pierce—for whatever reason. You can congratulate yourself for the hubris of your genetic breakthroughs, but can you honestly say the world is a better place because you have brought back a … pigeon?” He waved dismissively toward the oaks. As if at a signal, several of the birds took flight, ruby-throated, with lovely gray body feathers and long pointed tails. “Your means are dangerous, and your ends are utterly inconsequential. Pigeons!” The fire in Kinsman’s eyes made Alex reconsider the wisdom of having sent his security chief away so quickly. “You’re a big shot businessman—what possible market can there be for passenger pigeons. For zoos? Pets? Meat?”
“Market talk is what I feed the Board, but that doesn’t even start to explain why I’m here.” He allowed a small, self-deprecating smile. “I didn’t want to go down in history as Dr. Diarrhea.” Alex turned from the split-rail fence. “Come have a look. Maybe we can use a crowbar to open your mind.”
Inside, the lab was a mix of cool high-tech surfaces and ancient woods, the barn’s past never wholly banished. Consoles and elaborate digital diagnostics stood next to old feed cabinets, still useful for storage. High spotlights gave the scene an evenly lighted patina and crisp, conditioned air fought the old horsy smells and new disinfectants. Chrome countertops sat next to wooden fences and thick wire-mesh cages.
“Not many people get to see this, Dr. Kinsman,” Alex said.
“Not many people should.”
Why do I try? he thought. If Kinsman wasn’t a colleague …
Inside a shoulder-high pen stood two gawky-looking birds like giant chickens with stretched necks. They had mottled brown feathers, lizard-like feet, and towered nearly ten feet tall.
“This is our first mating pair of moas, a New Zealand bird that went extinct sometime in the 1600s.” Elated notes crept into Alex’s voice, but he saw no wonder in Kinsman’s eyes. “We’re currently in our third-generation retrograde development of the Tasmanian tiger, too. But the lack of a close sibling-species as well as general difficulties in dealing with the marsupial gestation process has caused some delays.”
He glanced toward the set of thick doors and reinforced windows at the back of the Pleistocene Hospital. Kinsman looked suspiciously at the closed-off rooms … but Alex didn’t think the man was ready for that sight yet. “Other resurrected animals,” he explained with an offhanded comment. “Look, I don’t have time to show you everything. It’s obvious you’re more interested in proselytizing than in science.”
A rotund bird higher than a man’s knee waddled across the floor, looking comical, its black beak blunt and ugly, its eyes innocent. Two stubby wings betrayed the flightless nature of the bird, which moved at a rapid, though ungainly, clip. A tufted curlicue of feathers poked up like a pigtail from its rear. The bird prodded around in corners, pecked at imaginary insects, as if it had forgotten where its food dish was.
This time Kinsman stared. “Dodos, too?” The dapper man leaned forward and took out his pen, pointing it at Alex as if it were a symphony conductor’s baton. “Where will you stop, Pierce? Do you intend to bring back smallpox as well? Or any number of vermin the world is better off without? Have you no respect for the natural order?”
Alex picked up the ungainly bird and carried it squawking to a bowl of grain. The dodo immediately forgot its annoyance and began to gobble the corn. “These birds lived quite nicely on the island of Mauritius until European sailors came and killed them for food. That wasn’t so bad, but the sailors also let loose dogs, rats, and hogs, which ate the dodo’s eggs. It took only a century or two for the entire species to be wiped out.” He scratched the feathers on the turkey-sized bird. “What, exactly, is natural about that?”
Kinsman directed a condescending look at Alex Pierce—who captained a gigantic corporation, who had developed a cure for the digestive misery of billions—as if he were an ill-educated child. “You can’t possibly predict the long-term consequences of your tampering. Forced breeding, gene selection, wombs implanted with embryos they were never meant to carry. Why must you push things so much?”
“Because I don’t have time to waste,” Alex said mildly. “Evolution can meander all it likes. We have calendars.”
Kinsman sniffed, clicked his pen twice in a nervous gesture. “Mankind is part of the natural order, Pierce, the dominant species on Earth, while other species failed along the way.”
“Sometimes with a little help from us. What’s wrong with rectifying that?”
Kinsman tossed his pen onto a cluttered desk and actually clasped his hands together in a melodramatic beseeching gesture. “What makes extinction caused by human interference so different from extinction due to, say, a huge asteroid impact? Will you try to bring back dinosaurs next?” He scoffed. “Or woolly mammoths? I’ve heard what you have back in your valleys.”
Alex maintained a noncommittal expression. “Rumors.”
“Satellite photos.”
Alex didn’t respond, trying to hide his surprise that Kinsman and his protesters could have gotten such high-resolution images from the Feds.
Kinsman pressed his advantage. “I want to see them, Pierce.”
* * *
Blocked from view by a thick stand of Ponderosa pines, the corral had once been used for breaking horses. But Helyx had reinforced the fences, added motion detectors and voltage zappers, and made the barricades much taller. As needed.
Inside the enclosure, Susan studied two of the first-generation hybrids, giving each one a standard monthly physical exam. Maybe Kinsman would be satisfied with this.
When she saw her husband pass through the double gate, Susan’s face lit up. They had spoken via earlink after he’d arrived back from Miami, but both of them had been too absorbed with ranch duties to see each other before now. They would have plenty of time tonight, camping out under the stars, back where no one could find them.…
Susan rang the old notes in him with a little breath, a flash of a smile. He had called those eyes “molasses brown” because when he looked into them he felt stuck and never wanted to look away. High cheekbones, luxuriant brown hair, a delicious set of curves artfully set off in a blue blouse atop trim black jeans. She greeted Alex with a broad smile, but when she saw Kinsman follow him into the corral, she immediately adopted a more businesslike expression.
“Susan, this is Geoffrey Kinsman. Remember, he was a grad student back—”
“Oh, yes. And now a member of our loyal opposition.” Her voice was neutral, neither friendly nor antagonistic.
“I came to see your mammoths. I didn’t know whether I could believe the appalling—”
Susan immediately clued in with just a glance at her husband. “Actually, these are ‘mammophants.’ Just a first-generation hybrid, still far from being an actual mammoth, Mr. Kinsman.”
“Please, it’s Doctor Kinsman. I got my degree at—”
“This one is Short Stuff,” she continued without the slightest hesitation and stepped close to the oldest of the mixed-breeds, a docile gray-haired beast with rumpled skin and big eyes, a trunk shortened to a few feet, and no tail. “We used mammoth DNA from Siberia, inserted it into a female elephant’s egg, and let the mother bring the baby to term with a lot of uterine monitoring.”
Playfully, Susan reached up and slapped Short Stuff’s rump, and the tall beast ambled a few feet, then stopped to munch from a pile of sage-green hay piled near a corrugated water trough. “And she’s a sweetie.”
Alex knew the details, had lived with them for a decade. Short Stuff was not a pure mammoth because she had spent twenty-two months in an Asian elephant’s womb, sharing the chemical and hormonal bath evolved for elephants alone. But the womb had proved similar enough to a mammoth’s, or the hybrid would have spontaneously aborted.
“We’re learning the hard way that there’s a critical conversation between the genes and the womb,” Susan said. “Call it feminine knowledge. So we’re still working to get the right dialog between the mammoth genes and the wombs of each new generation.”
Indeed, Short Stuff’s womb had turned out to be a much better approximation, and using the sperm of the first male, Middle Man, their offspring was even closer.
“You can sure see the original elephant genes showing through.” Susan lifted Short Stuff’s leathery left ear, as big as a blanket. “No woolly mammoth had this large an ear. It would lose too much heat in an Ice Age climate. Most of Short Stuff’s body was designed for the tropics—she’s got a hide that stands up under strong sun. Still, you can see the beginnings of hair, an extra coat to keep her warm. A step in the right direction.”
She talked faster as Kinsman’s frowning displeasure became more obvious. Susan moved to the other big animal in the corral, the first hybrid male. He snorted, curled his trunk, but she fearlessly thrust a hand into the sparse pelt beneath the massive mouth to reveal stubby, gray-brown shafts. “See Middle Man’s tusks? Pretty short for now, but they’ll grow longer than any elephant’s.”
Susan rubbed her hands along Middle Man’s midsection, eliciting a pleased sort of grunt.
Kinsman ground his teeth—the first time Alex had ever seen anyone do that, outside of movies. “And what is the point of this nonsense animal? The pure species died out long ago, and your interbreeding process creates only a succession of polyglot monstrosities.”
Susan gave him her patented I-don’t-suffer-fools-gladly expression. “Exactly. Did you think species just jumped in one shot to a completely different form? That’s why it’s called evolution.”
Kinsman eyed the two hairy elephants in the corral. “Evolution didn’t make these forms—”
“Right. We did,” Susan shot back. “Unlike evolution, we have a goal. Short Stuff and Middle Man are investments for the next generation.”
Alex smiled; his wife was a better debater than he could ever be. And she wasn’t giving away anything technical, either, trying to swamp Kinsman with pizzazz. He did not need to know how far the plan had already progressed.
Mammoth DNA was a heritage that belonged to all humanity—paid for with private money, part of the fortune Alex had earned as “Dr. Diarrhea.” Early on, before he’d learned to keep quiet about Helyx’s activities here, he and Susan had published a joint paper—the one Kinsman had done some routine lab work on—showing that the difference between elephants and mammoths was only a few dozen critical loci. The media speculation that provoked taught them to keep their work quiet. Every journalist could see the potential, write a quick deep-think piece. But making the project happen was a career.
“You frighten me,” Kinsman said, looking from Susan to Alex. “Both of you. Our environment is a vast and complicated system that adapts to changes through delicate checks and balances. Dodos and passenger pigeons and moas—and, yes, mammoths—were removed from Earth’s equation long ago, and your meddling may well throw everything out of balance again.”
“That’s an awfully sophisticated argument for a bunch of protesters who usually can’t come up with anything more pithy than ‘It’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature.’”
Kinsman dismissed his cohorts down at the south gate. “They’re just afraid of genetic engineering on general principles. They don’t need any deeper argument than that.”
“No, I don’t suppose they do. People like that have always used their ignorance as a weapon.” And often it turned to violence.
Kinsman backed toward the gate, as if afraid to get any closer to the gentle hybrids. “Your work is immoral, even aside from the ethical issues. Introducing a big grazer into lands that cows and sheep have already depleted is sure to have a major impact on the environment.”
“Helyx’s track record speaks for itself. We’re concerned about the environment—and it isn’t just corporate bullshit either,” Alex said with a sigh. Whatever hope he had harbored that a real biologist would be open to rational ideas faded as Kinsman’s sour scowl deepened.
As a last shot, the man said, “You have to know that a lot of us in this world think what you’re doing here is, at the very least, ugly.” He flicked a disapproving glance at the furry mammophants wandering around the enclosure.
Alex could tell the discussion was over, and he knew Susan was already close to losing her cool. “I could tell you things—ugly things—that’d make your ears curl up in self-defense.”
He remembered news images dating all the way back to the late twentieth century: Eco-terrorists burning fields of modified rice that would have grown in the alkaline soil and brackish water of the poorest Third World countries. Or ripping up experimental plantings of frost-resistant strawberries, like children throwing a tantrum. Later, assassinating a researcher who was developing a protozoan symbiote that would have enabled starving populations to break down cellulose and digest some forms of grass.
And if they were caught afterward, the violent protesters always seemed smug and self-justified! Thick-headed fools …
All of those things would have helped the human population, fed millions, improved the quality of life worldwide. And yet the rowdy rabble felt they were in a better position to decide what was best for the world than all the blue-ribbon panels of experts and all the United Nations committees. Yes, indeed, they sure seemed to have the best interests of humanity uppermost in their minds.
He pointedly nudged Kinsman through the gates of the corral before Susan could lash out at him, then used the direct-connect uplink in his spex to summon Ralph and a security escort. “It’s time for you to go. You’ve had your say … I just wish you’d had your ‘listen.’”
When they emerged from the dense pines around the corral, Ralph was already there to take him away.
It wasn’t until later that Alex discovered Kinsman had left his pen behind inside the Pleistocene Hospital. Rather than hurrying to give it back to the educated Luddite—was that an oxymoron?—he tossed it into a desk drawer in disgust. He had better things to look forward to that evening.
* * *
Alex rode his strong black gelding uphill, stretching himself and enjoying the zest of at last getting away from the office, far away, with Susan and the young ranch hand Cassie Worth. Clement Valley was about as deep in the wilderness as he could go and still remain on his vast acreage.
After the irksome arguments and corporate busyness of the afternoon, this was heaven. He had spurned the convenience of using a company jeep; taking the horses felt more natural, more real. As the dense alders and ponderosa pines closed around the narrowing four-wheel-drive road, they rapidly left the log cabin lab buildings and the Pleistocene Hospital behind.
Cassie, the spunky, and at times incredibly earnest, young ranch hand, urged her horse into a trot ahead, anxious to get to the high overlook into the next valley. The young woman’s long chestnut hair had been quickly woven into a thick practical braid that dangled beneath her white cowboy hat. Her face still retained a splash of youthful freckles, and her clear blue eyes held a fresh sense of wonder.
With good reason, he thought, since she has seen miracles.
But Alex and Susan did not hurry. Feeling anticipation build, they rode side by side, smelling the creaking saddles, the sweating horses, and the sweet sun-warmed pine sap. It had been a long time since they’d been so calm, though young Cassie’s presence would dampen any amorous impulses in the sleeping bags out by the campfire. No matter; it was good just to be together.
While Susan watched approvingly, he had made a brave show of switching off his pager, but within half an hour the cloying weight of corporate responsibility forced him to turn it back on. When Susan wasn’t looking, of course …
Horse Valley was more lush now than it had been for millennia. Using Helyx profits, Alex had started this ranch by channeling mountain streams into the headlands above, so that his experts could use the moisture to grow the sedges that normally flourished only in tundra. Reflections of aspen shimmered in mirror puddles of water as he headed up the slope, relishing the crisp air. Purple poets always talked about the “forest primeval” and Alex couldn’t get the phrase out of his mind. That’s how this is supposed to be.
In low-lying swampy areas beside the path, giant ferns like horned and scaly monkeys’ tails curled up, flourishing next to fluted flat-leaved hyacinth—ancient plants that had not grown naturally since the last ice age. As they rode past, he sniffed the mulchy smell, wondering if the resurrected plants were edible, if there might be a high-end niche market for, say, Jurassic Salads.…
“Majestica is looking ready to deliver,” Cassie called over her shoulder, slowing her mare so her two bosses could catch up. “I’ve gotten close enough three times in the last week to take readings, but Bullwinkle doesn’t like it.”
Alex smiled. “They trust you, Cassie.” Forget the scientists and the so-called professional handlers; this young woman had a better knack with the big beasts than anyone else on the ranch.
Susan drew a deep, satisfied breath. “It’ll be our first pureblood, after fifteen years.”
“Think of it as an anniversary present,” he said. “Without your grandiose dreams I would have spent all my research money on a cure for flatulence.” The three horses splashed across a stream, climbing steadily now.
Susan laughed. “I still think you deserve the Nobel Prize.”
“Relieving the world’s diarrhea problems through genetic engineering makes one fabulously rich but earns no professional respect whatsoever.”
Behind them, the view was stunning, a full mile of untouched wilderness. It felt odd to know that he owned very nearly everything within view, even from the highest vantage. Only in Montana was there enough land to tackle the really big projects that made his wife happy.
“After this, Alex, nobody will even bother remembering all the little things you did in your reckless youth.”
Impatient with the two romantics, and smiling with anticipation, Cassie led them toward the top of the ridge. All around the valley, thick pine and aspen forests covered the hills. Cassie slowed her horse as they entered a rank of thoroughly stripped trees that showed long scraped gouges in the bark.
Susan was amazed, and concerned. “They’re foraging all the way up here? They shouldn’t be wandering so far afield.” She urged her gray mare into the great field of sedges and sages so carefully arranged by innumerable days of gardening.
Cassie cocked her hat back with a wry smile. “Do you want to be the one to tell them where they can and can’t go, ma’am?”
Alex made a mental note to see about putting a few sonic “discouragers” up here. He couldn’t imagine what would happen if a stray happened to wander down the valley to within view of the protesters at the gate. Then he’d have to deal with the local sheriff, the Feds, a dozen regulatory agencies, and a host of tabloids.…
As they emerged from the aspens, the girl’s sweeping arm drew Alex’s attention to the grassy lowland in the bowl of the valley. “See, they always come together at dusk. It’s the best time to watch.”
Their horses standing close together, the three of them looked down onto Clement Valley in the last light of afternoon. Susan could barely tear her dark eyes from the sight below, but she gave her husband a loving glance that said, We did this, you and I.
Alex stood transfixed by the slowly moving shapes before him. His company had been right to keep the media resolutely away from the valley, and here was the proof. You had to see the woolly mammoths for yourself.
Whenever he had a fresh glance at the herd, the beasts seemed like sailing ships. There was a stately glide to their passage as the great russet vessels crossed the flatness, each beast moving as though before steady winds. Only slowly did the mammoths tack and turn, ponderous yet inevitable.
As if Cassie had trained them to recognize her, the nearest behemoth raised its head and let out a long, soaring salute. The next took up the sound, and the next, and soon nearly three dozen massive beasts joined in the trumpeting call.
Alex felt an eerie shiver travel down the length of his spine. The strange, echoing song reached even deeper into his primal core, building in layer after layer, delving into bass notes seldom heard outside the cathedrals of Europe. Even when the haunting chorus faded into the soft sigh of a breeze among the shadowed pines, the three human interlopers remained still, afraid to move as if they had been the ones transported through time, not the mammoths.
“Humans haven’t heard that call in ten thousand years,” Susan said as she leaned over to kiss him. He was too overwhelmed to say anything at all.
* * *
With Cassie in the lead, sitting high on her roan mare, Alex and Susan rode down toward the mammoths in the last light of afternoon. The herd was accustomed to horses, and especially to the smell of the young ranch hand who tended them. Raised entirely without predators, the mammoths were unwary. Though his mare seemed a bit skittish, Alex did not feel threatened as he approached the magnificent woolly behemoths.
The sedge grasses were tall and resilient, grazed short and trampled flat especially around the muck of watering holes. Playing the Helyx CEO, Alex noted that at the grassy margins the cottonwood branches and even bitterbrush were being browsed down to nubs. He would have to speak to the tenders about keeping the food supply going so the animals didn’t wander into the stands of trees bounding the meadows. Soon, the herd would outgrow this valley.
He made a mental note to look into buying even more land, maybe expanding the huge Helyx Ranch into adjacent valleys. The politics of doing that would be far worse than the economics; the perpetual gang of Evo demonstrators at the south gate would grow, joined by garden-variety environmentalists. Folks around here didn’t look much to the future—or to the distant past, either, it seemed—and they didn’t like change.…
With the approach of the horses, the mammoths snorted and stirred. Bullwinkle, the big leader of the herd, hung his shaggy head and lowered long tusks as he gazed at the others. The mixed-bag of hairy elephants had a range of body types, each generation only a few years separated from the previous, and each one significantly woollier than either of the two hybrid mammophants Alex had allowed Geoffrey Kinsman to see.
Cassie halted her mare beside a tree completely stripped of leaves and half of its bark. “Best to tie up our horses here.” She dismounted with the springy grace of a gymnast. “I prefer to walk among them.”
“Aren’t you afraid of getting stepped on?” Susan asked.
The ranch hand flipped her braid back between her shoulder blades and adjusted her hat. “No, ma’am. But I’m afraid for the horses.”
The few stands of valley grass darkened to jade as the sun settled on the distant blue mountains. A nighthawk flitted with thin cries above the willows of a narrow creek that meandered through the meadow. Alex’s eyes followed the hawk up toward the peaks that towered against a hard, cobalt sky already dotted with the fires of far suns. The light would fade fast, dark scarcely an hour away.
A perfect night to camp.
Cassie started ahead, glancing over her shoulder and resisting the impulse to leave the other two behind. Alex remembered when he had been that impatient, and that young—not so long ago. Though this entire project had sprung from his wife’s dream decades ago, Cassie Worth was the unrelenting factotum who supercharged the Helyx staff and never seemed to sleep. She ran down innumerable practical details about exotic animal husbandry, and she figured out the answers for herself when no alleged “expert” had a clue.
Alex reflected as he watched the young woman move swiftly through the herd. To think that she had just applied to Helyx out of the blue. No advanced degrees, just solid experience at UC Davis, a farm upbringing, and an ache to bring back to the world something long gone. Alex had noted more common sense in Cassie than in half of his own VPs and Division Heads. And she had a real rapport with the animals.
“Come on, you guys, I want to show them off, but I’ll need to get us back up on the slope where I can set up camp for the night … or did you change your minds again?” She turned her clear blue eyes to Alex—did he see a girlish crush there? He was abashedly reminded that he had canceled their plans three previous times for the usual “business reasons.”
“Nothing’s more important tonight.” Alex reached over to stroke Susan’s shoulder. “My wife and I are going to sleep out under the stars.”
“Where I can hear my mammoths snore,” Susan added.
They moved among the gigantic but gentle animals; it seemed to Alex as if he had wandered into a truck stop filled with living, hairy semis. The heavy air was laden with smells like hot oiled leather, old upholstery, musk and fur—stronger than the closeness of bison or penned cattle. But it was a wild musk, from thick and wiry hair grown to protect the beasts from the cold of an Ice Age.
Alex felt giddy.
It was a pure joy to watch Cassie in her element, like a child at a petting zoo. She led them from one large bulk to the next. Alex had never before seen so many of the beasts together in the valley. In a single glance he could see that each successive generation had fewer of the humped backs of African elephants. Instead, the younger hybrids’ backs sloped down, the rich cinnamon-colored pelts thickened, and the males’ tusks grew.
Closer and closer.
Cassie reached beneath the coat of the nearest hybrid and pulled up the coarse guard hair to reveal silky red under-wool. “It’s so good now we should be able to leave them out all through next winter.”
“Even in Montana’s worst?” Alex asked, trying not to sound as if he was just protecting his investment.
“They’ll love it,” Susan said, smiling at the young woman.
“And they’re getting interested in mating with each other now!” Cassie said, then lowered her voice as if embarrassed. “I follow them on the vidcams, and they really go at it. Just frisky play, so far. After all, they haven’t reached adolescence yet. But the males are starting to herd the females—another sure sign.”
Susan said softly, “We can’t actually let them mate, though.”
Cassie cried, “Why not? Just think—no more egg transfers, no sperm-sucking games to play.” Her face wrinkled in disgust, and Alex didn’t want to imagine the details of the mammophant sperm-harvesting operations.
Susan put an arm around Cassie. “We’re careful with their genes. Select for mammoth aspects, weed out the elephant ones. Unchecked mating would scramble all that.”
Cassie looked stricken. Plainly this had been her big announcement.
“But you’re right,” Susan hastily added. “Just like in nature. Desire is the only sure diagnostic.” She gave her husband a quick, sultry glance. His breath caught. “These animals know, right down in their hearts—which by the way are bigger than a human head, bigger even than Alex’s!—that they are worth making more of.”
He hugged her. “And so we’ll make more.” Some people buy diamonds for their wives … I clone mammoths.
Cassie made quick jabs at nearby shapes, showing off as she quickly recited the names of the other hybrids. “Those two are Rachel and Napoleon—the shorter ones are always the worst—and Angel Pie.”
Alex was amazed she could identify the individual herd members so easily. The Helyx geneticists had used five to ten elephants for each step of the process, because it took twelve years for any one of the hybrids to mature to fertility. And some interbreeding attempts spontaneously aborted, nature’s editing.
Cassie led them unerringly to a huffing female, her big eyes casting a calm gaze down at the small humans. Long breaths steamed in the cooling air as dew condensed on the rocks and trampled grass. “Here, Majestica is at term and already showing signs of labor. Everything’s normal, as far as I can tell. She’s been in labor for about a week already.”
“I can’t imagine being in labor for a week,” Susan said.
And the big female’s gestation period had already taken nearly two years. “Mammoths and elephants aren’t in much of a hurry about these things,” Alex said.
Actually, the gestation period had varied with each hybrid generation, as the offspring approached pure mammoth stock. According to her continuing researches into the original genome, using numerous fourth-order projections with hypercomputers inside the pine-walled stable building, Susan was convinced that the mammoth gestation time in the Pleistocene would have been longer than a modern elephant’s twenty-two months. One of the earlier female hybrids, Alexandria, had carried her baby for twenty-three months.
“We’re converging toward the mammoth pattern in the ancient wild, I bet,” Susan said.
Alex smiled wryly. Given her anxious attention to all aspects of the projects, his wife probably would have preferred to keep the pregnant Majestica in a separate corral back at the Pleistocene Hospital, with a whole bank of real-time blood-test gear, round-the-clock technicians, and a full array of instrumentation and diagnostics surrounding her pregnant bulk.
However, these creatures needed to bear their young naturally, in the wild, and Cassie Worth had seen more live births among ranch stock than any of Helyx’s experts. She was ready.
But no one alive had ever seen the birth of a real woolly mammoth.
* * *
The smoke of green branches and dry wood wafted up from the campfire, crackling with a pungent, sweet bitterness. Alex breathed deeply, smelling the heady primal scent. Hidden in the gathering darkness, insects and night birds set up a simmering background music that seemed to come from a different time altogether.
Below them in the valley, under the light of the waxing moon and a billion stars in transparent Montana air, the herd of elephant-mammoth hybrids settled down for the night. Many of the big dark shapes still moved about restlessly. While some slept like mounds of dirt near the watering hole, others paced around, munching on sedge grass. Eerily, some of the mammoths on the fringe looked as if they were keeping watch.
Cassie busied herself, happy to be out camping, much more comfortable here within sight of her mammoths than up around the administration buildings. She never tried to understand the protesters, preferring to ignore them by staying far from the gate. “People always find something to complain about, especially when somebody else is successful,” she had said once.
The young woman had outdone herself with the fire, the bedrolls, the childishly simple dinner of hot dogs roasted on twigs over the flames, a speckled blue-enamel coffee pot hung over the coals. All they needed was marshmallows (and Alex wouldn’t have been surprised if Cassie had them stashed in her saddlebags). A perfect evening, in every detail.
Helyx could have provided the most sophisticated camp equipment, thermal chargers for foodpacks, heated sleeping bags and damp-resistant tents. Alex could have assigned workers to set up comfort-weave tents, groom the clearing, erect tables, string lanterns, even prepare a gourmet meal.
But this was better, much better.
“When do we start singing ‘Kum-bay-ya’?” Alex said with a grin to his wife.
“I have a strummerpack,” she answered, calling his bluff.
Alex’s implanted pager tingled, and he recognized the source. He reached up, touching a contact point. “What’s the trouble, Ralph?”
Susan frowned at him, mouthed the words, I thought you turned that off?
“Can’t figure, Boss.” His usually casual voice now sounded pinched with concern. “We’re getting pinged by microwaves. Somebody’s interrogating a passive receiver. Must be located somewhere around the ranch buildings.”
“Not one of ours?”
“No chance. Just a simple incoming pulse from some airplane, flying pretty high. Don’t think anybody could get much from that, maybe just a location marker. The pulse could be hitting some tiny receiver that shoots it back with a li’l information attached, I’d guess. Not powerful enough for us to track down where it is, though.”
“Probably some new gear brought in by the demonstrators at the gate,” Alex suggested. He didn’t need a new technical puzzle to ruin his jealously planned evening.
“Could be, Boss. Those Evo types have plenty to spend on new toys.”
“Keep on it.” He disengaged the pagerlink, saw both Cassie and Susan staring at him with concern. He made a placating gesture but didn’t volunteer any details. The ranch hand would assume it was yet another corporate emergency such as had canceled their first three outings; Susan, though, could read his expression much better. Her molasses-brown eyes trapped him again, looking like bottomless wells in the smoky campfire shadows.
He leaned against Susan as they both stared into the throbbing orange and yellow embers. Their clothes smelled of sweat mixed with the musk of mammoths. Alex preferred this sharp but resonant aroma to the infrequent, expensive perfumes his wife felt obligated to wear at ecological fundraisers—like the recent one she’d skipped in Miami.
Under the stars, Alex helped with the bedding down chores, glad for the chance to get his hands dirty rather than just pound on a computer keyboard all day. It felt good, and safe, to be out here, “just like a real person.”
The crackling wood made him think of the prehistoric hunters, Cro-Magnon warriors who had tracked herds like this using spears and pits and cliffs to kill the giant animals for food, fur, and ivory.
Like the restored bison on the Great Plains, Susan’s dream-experiment might turn out to be so wildly successful that large numbers of these once-extinct creatures could roam the open Montana range. They might wander north into Saskatchewan and Alberta, heading up toward the subarctic regions for which their huge bodies were designed.
He had been so focused on working one generation after another, converging toward a full-blood woolly mammoth, that he had not let his mind wander far into future possibilities.
“Maybe one day we’ll have a large herd of mammoths that breed true and reproduce in the wild.” He ran fingers over Susan’s hair, recalling Kinsman’s concern (one of his few legitimate ones) about the impact a sizable group of such huge grazers would have on the landscape and environment. What if they had to thin the herd? “Can you imagine if we had enough of them that we could even sponsor a good old-fashioned mammoth hunt?”
Cassie, very protective of the animals, glared across the fire at him. “What! Use guns on my mammoths?” She had been working here only two years, but the mammoths were hers. “Not unless you play fair.” The girl’s firm lips curled into a devilish grin on her freckled face. “Dress your big-game hunters in furs, then send them out with stone axes and sapling spears. Pleistocene rules. I don’t think you’d get many takers.”
“Not me,” Susan said. “Not for all the testosterone in the world.”
Alex returned a noncommittal smile. He did not argue, but he knew both women were wrong. Over the years, he had encountered any number of too rich, too bored, dot-com millionaires or genetics patent holders—people who had delusions of immortality and an overblown sense of necessary machismo.
Even with Pleistocene rules, Alex knew he could find plenty of takers.…
* * *
As he bedded down next to Susan, the moon continued to rise, spilling silver light. Even here, as isolated as one could be in the continental US, he felt as if he were under a spotlight. He couldn’t sleep, and he knew Susan was awake and thinking beside him.
Below, the mammoths sounded restless. Snuffles and loud snorts rippled through the big animals. Most of them seemed awake. On the other side of the fire, young Cassie sat alone, her knees drawn up to her chin as she stared down into the valley, reflecting the animals’ uneasiness.
Alex couldn’t imagine what possible threats or predators could worry the gigantic prehistoric beasts this deep within ranch property. “Are they like this every night?”
Impishly, Cassie raised her eyebrows. “I do have quarters of my own back in the complex, Dr. Pierce. Sleeping outdoors is a treat for me, too.”
A bright meteor streaked overhead, low and horizontal, like a rocket on the Fourth of July. It came over the line of trees on the ridge, flying hot, traveling with a speed and deadly accuracy that surpassed any shooting star.
Make a wish …
Susan was already on her feet, leaping out of the blankets on the damp ground. “It’s heading toward the lab complex!”
The trail of fire faded into orange against midnight blue, and the incandescent arrow struck the valley behind them with a bright flash. The main Helyx compound. A muffled whump.
As Alex lurched to his feet, the implanted pager tingled again. “Boss, we’ve been hit down here. Somebody sent in a mini-cruise, I’d say. Hit the pines close to the Hospital … still trying to assess the damage.”
“A mini-what?” Alex subvocalized, and his words went back to Ralph.
“Backpack-sized cruise missile, Boss. Short-range, with a nose full of high explosive. A man can carry one a fair way, then launch it from a rack.”
Susan was already racing for her horse while Alex paused to get an update. “I’m going there!” she shouted and swung herself up bareback. “Short Stuff and Middle Man are still in the corral.”
“Wait! You can’t do anything—”
“Just work things out with Ralph,” she called over her shoulder, then raced her horse down the four-wheel-drive road and disappeared into the shadowed trees. He had never seen her ride like that before.
Reacting on instinct, Cassie was at their supply packs. She withdrew the two shotguns she had carried with them, ostensibly for protection against coyotes or bears.
Alex didn’t need to think hard about who might have done such a thing. “Kinsman was a decoy,” he said to Ralph. “Him and his supposedly reasonable discussion, he was just a plant to get inside. But how could they target the hospital in the dark and from so far away?”
“I’m willing to bet they targeted this place with those microwave echoes I keep hearing. If Kinsman planted some sort of passive echo locator—”
“His pen! Damn, I didn’t even think! He left it on purpose. They could have targeted from that. I’m packing up Cassie, and we’ll be right down there.”
Before Alex could switch off, the security chief said, “Wait—that’s gunfire. Jesus, those bastards are coming in from the south gate!” Ralph’s voice strayed for a moment as he barked orders to a security crew, who scrambled in response. “The Hospital’s in flames, Boss. We’re sending people in to try and rescue the animals.”
“Keep yourself safe,” Alex barked. “Susan’s already on her way.” He thought of the two adult mammophants in the corral, the wonderful dodos and moas, all the exotic and frightening animals he kept in the solid-wall pens in the back of the Hospital. And all of his people. He prayed his wife would be safer down there with Ralph and his crew than up here. “We’re coming in—”
Another thin patter of popgun shots rang out. Alex thought he was getting Ralph’s background noise until Cassie cried, “Just below us!”
“Ralph, we’ve got intruders up here, too.”
“Clement Valley! Jesus, do you want me to send a—”
“You just do your job there. And watch Susan’s back, dammit.”
He shut down his link and studied the shadowy trees. Another few shots, yes, nearby. One of the mammoths bellowed in surprise, or perhaps pain, sounding like a squeaky cannon.
“Hey!” Cassie tossed Alex one of the shotguns, and he caught it instinctively. The weapon felt hard and cold and strange in his hand. She looked at him with an anguished face. “Maybe that missile hitting the Hospital was just to get our forces away—so they could come up here and kill my mammoths.” She swung herself up onto her already frightened mare and bent low, snatching the tether rope. “I’m going down to the herd.”
The gunshots came faster as she rode hard down into the valley.
“Wait!” Alex called after her—pointlessly—then got his butt in gear.
He mounted his own gelding and followed her into the darkness. Here he was, the head of a gigantic international corporation—and his wife and a young girl had both jumped into action while he stood around and talked to himself.
The horses were already uneasy with the smell of the mammoths, and the pattering gunfire spooked his mount even more. He caught up to the young ranch hand as she tried to see down into the darkness. “You leave the mammoths alone!”
“Quiet!” he urged, fearing the shadowy attackers might target Cassie instead of the animals.
Sharp, flat shots from their left.
Alex saw dim shapes running, stalking closer, as if intimidated by coming so close to the prehistoric beasts. Simple rifles would have little effect on a woolly mammoth, he thought—just before another round of muffled percussive bangs.
A few seconds, then distant explosions came from the open valley floor.
“Grenade launchers.”
“You bastards!” Cassie screamed.
“Hush! They don’t know we’re up here.” He and the young ranch hand were still on a slope above the trees, a hundred meters from the open grassland. They urged their horses closer. It was quiet for a moment, a deathly stillness.
The mammoths churned about, grunting, drawing closer like covered wagons circling against a Comanche attack. Amazingly, acting on instinct, the bigger bulls formed outer ranks, clearly to protect the rest of the herd. The alpha male, Bullwinkle, with its huge tusks and russet fur, snorted and moved forward like a locomotive, looking for an enemy.
No sign of the shadowy figures, but the fringe forests offered plenty of cover.
Alex knew that Cassie’s first thought was for Majestica, the pregnant female about to give birth to the first pure mammoth. They rode toward her, and Alex prayed the beasts could tell the difference between friendly humans and deadly ones.
Abruptly, scarlet fireballs burst a hundred meters away … and another right on top of them. One of the wild grenades struck Majestica between the shoulders, and the impact knocked even the giant female battleship flat to the ground, her upper body cratered with ragged, flash burn wounds.
Cassie screamed. She threw herself off her horse and raced to the fallen pregnant female.
Alex waved his shotgun around, then took a few high potshots, hoping the retaliatory gunfire would at least stall the attackers, send them scrambling for cover. But it was a pitiful gesture at this range. None of the terrorists came out of the tree line.
Gunshots rang out and ineffectual bullets peppered the mammoth-elephant hybrids, sending them trumpeting into a frenzy. Some charged, stopped, trumpeted. But the big male Bullwinkle thundered into the night, toward the attackers hiding in the trees.
Alex dismounted and came up beside a determined but weeping Cassie. His heart wrenched, knowing they had all been betrayed. The young woman impatiently swiped tears from her eyes and got to work. “Damn, Dr. Pierce—I don’t have the equipment for this!”
Back in the forest, startled shouts turned to shrieks. Alex could well imagine the giant bull trampling the bastards into paste on the ground. Bullwinkle hooted, a powerful bellow that brought more shrill screams. A grenade burst near the beast, then the big mammoth was into the trees, smashing branches, splintering trunks, following the panicked outcries.
More screams. He did not think further about what Bullwinkle was doing. He could see only the pregnant mammoth’s blood shining dark and wet in the moonlight. “Don’t worry. I’ll help,” he said to Cassie. Corporate CEO bullshit, but it seemed to be what she needed to hear. He knelt beside her, trying to anticipate what the young woman was trying to do. She worked with utter concentration, adrenaline, and desperation, staving off panic.
As he tore off his shirt and wadded it up into a large pad—nowhere near enough, he saw, as he pressed it into the gaping wound—he heard a faint sound and looked around. Other mammoth hybrids bellowed, but the gunfire had halted for the moment. Bullwinkle’s work?
The whispery sound of feet in the sedge grasses came nearer. Cassie didn’t notice it. Bare-chested, Alex backed away from the dying animal, leaving his shirt to soak up a gusher of blood. He smelled gunpowder and meat. “They’re coming back,” he said. Grabbing his shotgun from the trampled ground, he moved as quietly as he could around Majestica’s massive bulk.
“Keep them the hell away from my mammoths,” Cassie said, her voice thin. She didn’t even look up from Majestica.
Alex jacked a shell into the shotgun, hoping the flat clack-click sound would be enough of a deterrent. Never. Halfway around the heaving beast, he crouched down, looking across the moonlit expanse.
He cursed himself as much as the fanatics. He had underestimated their dedication, dismissing them entirely. He had scoffed at their mindset, never giving them credit for a zeal that would push them beyond theoretical protests. How could they be so vehement? There was a long, precarious bridge between waving signs and launching missiles, but Kinsman and his Evos had crossed it.
He’d considered the Luddites to be quaint, backward, even silly. Now they had proved deadly. Causes had always attracted violent crusaders whose actions seemed inexplicably extreme to most people—pro-lifers shooting abortion doctors, environmentalists “protecting the Arizona desert” by setting fire to luxury homes. Could any ends justify such means?
The Evo crusaders came out of the trees, hunched over as they emerged from the protective shadows. They were competent enough, moving quickly, not talking. But Alex saw the reflection of their eyes as they covered the last twenty meters. Three that he could see, two headed directly this way, weapons ready … thinking they had already won.
He raised the shotgun and a lot of thoughts ran through his mind. It was easy enough to think you could shoot at an enemy, someone with a grease-blackened face and cradling a grenade launcher, pistol strapped at his waist. But when it was a kid of maybe twenty …
The kid raised an arm to his comrades, who immediately squatted and aimed—at Majestica. And Cassie! They knew their target. They knew exactly what they intended to shoot.
And Alex had no time left for doubt. Executives, he often said to others, were people who could make decisions on time. Well, here was one. He shot the kid with a spray of pellets. He hit him in the legs, but square on.
Alex did not let himself hear the screaming as he jacked the next shell in, sighted on a man who had half-risen to his feet and was swinging a long-barreled weapon toward Alex. “Cassie, get down!” he yelled, then sighted and squeezed off the round. The feel of the gun was as natural as when he’d potted away at clay pigeons on weekends, long ago.
Now the third Evo, a woman—but she was already running away. He let the terrorist take three more strides to be sure she was out of lethal range. The blast of pellets against her shoulders and backpack did not knock her down, but she cried out, and ran even faster in a headlong stagger back toward the trees.
The first kid was yelling, rolling around with his bloody-hamburger legs drawn up to his chest. The second man lay still; Alex didn’t even know where he’d hit the terrorist. The woman made it to the trees, where Bullwinkle was still crashing around. Alex kept down—the Evos had plenty of distance weapons and would be looking toward the source of his shots.
“Dr. Pierce! I need your help here!” Cassie sounded closer to panic than he had ever heard her.
Slinging the shotgun low, ready to spin around and open fire again into the night, Alex scrambled back around the dying Majestica.
* * *
Susan rode hard, and her horse was hot, its mouth foaming as she careened down the bumpy jeep road. She could see the darkness of trees and night blended with probing beams of hard white surveillance lights ahead.
She and Alex had always talked about beefing up security in an apron covering the entire approach from the south gate. When the protesters had settled in, they’d brought their own lights, as well as coolers of food and drink, so they could squat down and begin chants and drum beating in a general disruptive “people power” party. They kept it up until the early hours, youthful idealism uniting with the universal instinct to party. Annoying, certainly, and frustrating—but nothing to be taken seriously.
That had been their biggest mistake.
Occasionally, those little protests had only been a distraction, a cover for one or two Evos to slip past the fencing and guard stations in the dark. Once inside, though, they had no good idea which targets to go for, what vandalism to accomplish. Inept commandos, they generally blundered into staff housing or maintenance sheds, which had been deliberately disguised to look like laboratories and stables.
But now, the log-fronted Pleistocene Hospital was on fire. They had struck directly to the heart of the retrograde evolution project.
“Damn you,” she said. “Damn you all.” She kicked her horse, riding harder.
The tall pines surrounding the corral had become torches in the night, crackling resinous flames. From inside the high reinforced fences she heard a roar, an indescribable screaming cry that sounded like nothing human. Short Stuff and Middle Man, the first two mammophant hybrids, were still in there, far from the safety of the rest of their herd … brought back to the ranch buildings for regular health monitoring.
Susan dismounted from her gray mare before the horse had even come to a stop. She hit the ground running and, frightened by the noise and the smoke, the exhausted mare trotted away in confusion. The fire from the Ponderosa pines had already descended to the corral fence. Susan slammed through the gate, calling out to the two oldest mammophants.
Middle Man had backed to the far corner, away from the burning trees, away from the light. The big male trumpeted a sound like anguish, obviously frightened and confused. He bled from several wounds in his thick hide, but the injuries seemed relatively minor. Susan didn’t even stop to consider whether Middle Man might charge her.
In the center of the trampled enclosure lay Short Stuff, collapsed to the ground like a defeated calf in a rodeo spectacle. High-powered gunshots had blasted both of her forelegs, ripping gouges in muscle and bone until the female hybrid had crashed. Short Stuff chuffed and hooted as she struggled on the grass, her legs bloody and useless appendages.
In shock, revulsion, and helplessness, Susan swayed backward, grabbed for the corral fence to support herself, but missed. Watery-kneed, she sank down, and froze, utterly unable to do anything. Short Stuff trumpeted again in unspeakable pain.
Ralph Duncan strode into the corral, swinging his head from side to side, taking in details. His eyes had always looked world-wise, as if they’d already seen everything, but now his face had a disgusted horror. “God damn! God damn!”
He strode forward like an avenger, holding the powerful rifle at his side. Susan made a strangled sound, and he whirled, ready to shoot, but when he recognized her, his expression instantly changed. “Miz Pierce!”
Short Stuff let out another hollow, trumpeting call. Ralph’s expression hardened, and he turned away from Susan, ignoring her. Without hesitation, he marched up to the writhing, wounded mammophant, pushed the barrel of his rifle up against the base of Short Stuff’s massive skull, and pulled the trigger. The hybrid groaned and slumped. Ralph shot her again, then turned back to Susan. His face was ruddy and murderous. “God damn it!”
Shaking, Susan pushed back to her feet, then grabbed the corral fence and vomited. More shouts and gunshots came from the main lab complex. Through the fence and the trees she could see flames shooting from the admin building. She coughed and spat. “How many are there? What—”
He took her arm and led her out the gate. “Middle Man’s fine for now. I’ve got security troops split between defending the ranch and trying to fight the fires.” He touched his earpiece, listened, then shouted, “Dammit, don’t wait for the sheriff! Just move on it!”
Susan heard the distant patter of gunfire, military-style commands, and the frenzied shouts of shadowy attackers. They could have broken through the fences anywhere. Were these the same protesters that had innocuously waved their signs and posed for the TV cameras? Could it all have been a feint, a ploy to let Helyx security believe the Evos were ineffectual whiners and bored activists in search of a cause … when all the while they were planning this brutal strike as soon as they could get a man inside?
She saw birds fluttering in the trees, the passenger pigeons disturbed from their nests in the big oaks. “I’m going to the Hospital!” She heard sounds that could only be giant moas squawking in panic. “Ralph, get those fires put out!”
As she ran toward the Hospital, Ralph yelled louder into his voice pickup. On one side of the main admin building, a few men had set up a hose and were spraying the yellow flames on the log walls, but fiery fingers already crept along the roof.
Susan didn’t give a damn about the computers and office furniture inside. She ran toward the Hospital itself where all the retrograde hybrids were kept, her life’s work, the maturing ambassadors of species long extinct. Why would anybody want to harm them?
Probably the same people who break into cancer-research centers and “liberate” all the experimental animals, she thought. I guess they don’t see the contradiction.
Out in the Hospital yard, she saw tall, ostrichlike moas set free from their cages, wandering around in terrified confusion. Brown feathers ruffled, serpentine necks swiveling about, horny beaks open with hissing squawks, they kicked up dirt with lizardlike feet and pecked at any person who came close. Ungainly dodos scrambled about like overgrown drunken chickens, honking in fright. Susan heard other animals scream and yowl from within the Hospital itself. Smoke oozed through several broken windows, growing thicker, blacker.
Just then a man with a prim face and dapper-looking clothes stepped across the porch holding a revolver in his hand. Geoffrey Kinsman. Like a grim executioner, he pointed at the dodos and methodically shot them all, moving from one to the next to the next.
Though armed with nothing but her anger, Susan raced toward him. Other protesters ran past Kinsman into the lab building, not willing to simply let the fire do its work.
Kinsman turned toward the closest frightened moa, putting three bullets through its long neck. The giant bird toppled like a fallen tree. Not even pausing to reflect on his handiwork, the man stalked toward the smashed-open door of the Hospital and vanished inside.
Susan screamed in outrage, but Kinsman didn’t even notice her.
After stepping over the shattered carcasses of the magnificent lost birds, she barged into the main laboratory. Evos were overturning desks, smashing computers, dumping animal feed on the floor in a wild frenzy, like capering cannibals celebrating the arrival of a boatload of missionaries. These crusaders had no organization, no plan, just chaos.
Dressed in her jeans and camping clothes, Susan entered the lab, smelling the fire and spilled chemicals, the blood and nose-tingling gun smoke.
In the harsh, stinging smoke she saw Geoffrey Kinsman, proud slayer of helpless dodos and moas, trotting from cage to cage, shooting every creature inside. Fast, methodical, intent.
Susan’s eyes burned with disgust. Ducking through the smoky light, she went to the cages on the other side, past lab furniture, desks, equipment racks. She threw open cage doors and coops, chasing the dodos, moas, and other hybrids out, giving them a chance. Squawking and hissing, the marvelous creatures ran, fleeing the fire, fleeing the gunshots.
There, dammit! The chaos grew. Shouting and gunshots echoed from outside. She heard a shrill whistle, a bullhorn. A helicopter circling.
Grinning, a blond-haired, clean-shaven man ran past her holding a long shovel, battering file cabinets, smashing beakers, computer screens, even ceramic coffee cups. He took a swipe at a waddling dodo, missed, and Susan grabbed the shovel handle, wrenching it out of his grip.
The man shrugged, then toppled a heavy laser-ROM storage rack, scattering the prismatic platters like Christmas ornaments. He snatched up a crowbar some other protester had dropped.
From nearby came the sound of a window smashing. More strangers ran in through the Hospital door, carrying weapons.
When his pistol was empty, Kinsman took a repeater assault rifle from one of the Evos, checked that it was loaded. Then he looked up and saw Susan. Recognized her.
“Damn you!” she said, raising the shovel as if it was a match for his rifle.
Behind her, the reckless blond Evo grabbed the closed doors of the larger pens at the back of the laboratory. The barricaded, reinforced rooms.
Kinsman hesitated with his rifle, smug with self-justification. “This has to be done.”
With a deft twist the blond Evo pried open the lock. He must have expected nothing more than another awkward-looking bird. He held his crowbar loosely in one hand, as if ready to bash a few more animals.
And a saber-tooth cat lunged out at him, already maddened by the fire and the noise.
The big panther’s front fangs gleamed, as long as scimitars. It reared up to embrace the man and with a throaty growl it bore him down, muscles moving like liquid beneath its mottled, long-furred coat. The Evo screamed as the panther/sabre-tooth hybrid tore open his chest, raising long curved fangs and plunging once, twice, three times.
Susan managed to shout “No!”—just as a panicked Kinsman opened fire.
* * *
On the sedge grass, trampled and bloodstained, Cassie leaned over the gasping, quivering hulk of the fallen Majestica. The female almost-mammoth panted and shuddered, her body core ripped open by the grenades.
“She’s dying.” Cassie looked up at Alex, her eyes wide and pleading, as if somehow this important corporate executive could do something.
“Yeah,” he said uselessly.
She seemed to be in a daze, saw the shotgun slung low in his hand. “You shot at the Evos?”
“Forget them.”
Majestica’s body heaved and clenched and trembled in spasmodic labor—dying, but also following a biological imperative. Alex heard a snorting and pounding sound and held up his shotgun, ready to defend them against a continued Evo attack—but he saw only the huge head and long curved tusks of the angry Bullwinkle. The large mammoth stomped on the ground, thrashed his shortened trunk.
In the stark, silvery moonlight Alex saw a few flecks of black blood peppering the shaggy fur, minor wounds from gunshots. He had expected to see the bull’s long ivory spears coated with gore, his front feet splattered with the blood of crushed humans. But Alex heard the Evos still screaming and crashing away into the night as they fled up the valley.
The bull mammoth had let them live. Bullwinkle could easily have trampled every one into the ground. Instead, he had just driven them off and turned back to come here. At the moment, Alex himself didn’t feel so civilized.
Lumbering close to Majestica, the shaggy bull sniffed, quested with his hairy trunk. Bullwinkle watched with round, wise eyes as Cassie felt the pregnant female’s heaving belly, her hands exploring the quivering muscle and tough hide.
She drew her long hunting knife.
The other hybrids milled about nearby, circling and snorting, some trumpeting their pain, all clearly agitated. One of the youngest hybrids waded out to the middle of the muddy watering hole and raised its trunk high as it honked into the night.
The Evos had gone away, their destruction accomplished, leaving pain in their wake. Making their savage point. Alex knew he should call Ralph and his security men, bring them out here in Helyx choppers to run the terrorists into the ground, apprehend them and haul them off for Federal prosecution.
But as he knelt beside a blood-streaked Cassie, he didn’t feel that was important enough right now.
The pregnant female had closed her intelligent eyes in wrinkles of dark skin, blinking only occasionally. Majestica’s breath was slow and deep, a bass-noted wheezing, accompanied by a bubbly wet sound of blood and air oozing from large holes in her massive torso.
Majestica’s pelt gleamed, glossy and moist. A heavy musk mixed with the metallic sourness of blood rose from the laboring mountain. The female’s pelvis was tilted, her womb clenching as she used the last of her energies to squeeze.
A charge of tension permeated the air, a slow silent sense of gathering energies … of time contracting down to a completion.
Cassie pressed her hand against the distended belly. The abdominal muscles shuddered, but Majestica was clearly dying in the moonlight. Even Alex could see that. She wouldn’t last long enough to give birth, and the purebred infant woolly mammoth would die inside the womb.
He knew that young Cassie had needed to sacrifice mother animals before, delivering their young by Cesarean. It was a part of ranch life when there were a lot of animals to herd and tend. In her hesitation now, he read that Cassie didn’t know if her muscles and her resolve and her knife edge would be up to the task she now faced.
Ralph’s hoarse voice chirped in Alex’s ear, with words so devastating that Alex could spare no attention for what the young ranch hand was about to do. “Boss, you’d better get back here.” The old security chief paused, as if gathering courage. “It’s Susan. Get back here now.”
Cassie barely looked up as Alex ran to his horse.
Sobbing, she raised her long knife high, hesitated, then plunged it deep.
* * *
When Alex rode up to the main Helyx complex, two of the ranch buildings were engulfed in flame. Fire crackled and roared, clean woodsmoke mixed with the foul stench of burning electrical wires, chemicals, and plastics.
He called for Ralph, then he saw the security men dragging bodies out onto the lawn in front of the Pleistocene Hospital. His stomach lurched.
Alex had underestimated the Evos completely, the intensity of their gut-level resistance to what he was doing. And Kinsman himself, a former colleague, was someone who should have known better. Alex had rolled his eyes at the silly signs, foolishly dismissed the objections of people he considered Luddites. “It’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature.”
Re-creating the mammoths had aroused such a passion, such a sense of wonder in his wife—but he had never considered that it might engender equal and opposite emotions in her detractors.
He called for Ralph again, but his voice broke as he stumbled across the yard. The rangy old man jogged up to him, feverish, his leathery face fallen in despair. He threw himself on Alex, both arms around his shoulders. Alex went weak with dread.
“Where is she?” he croaked, but he could tell from the stiffness in the security chief’s muscles that he was already too late. “Where is she!”
Ralph staggered back. Without a word he walked with Alex toward the burning Pleistocene Hospital. In the acrid yellow glow, a few surviving animals ran about in panic. Passenger pigeons squawked from the oak trees. Others fluttered across the night sky, escaped from burning nests. Bloody mounds of feathers on the grass marked the slaughtered dodos and moas. Extinct again.
He took a few steps, choked on acrid smoke, turned.
Susan lay outside on the ground where Ralph had carried her. She had a crumpled, broken look, he thought abstractedly. That was when the fog began to wrap itself around him, dulling the clamor, shrouding the world in a ghostlike slowness. He shook his head, but the fog remained. His field of view telescoped away and he staggered. He reached out to steady himself on a beam and his hand felt nothing. Sour air rasped into his lungs. The iron taste of blood told him he had bitten his tongue. And the soft fingers of fog thickened.
The feathers of ancient birds fluttered around her like a halo, catching the glow of hot white security spotlights. Her flannel shirt had soaked up the crimson blood. She lay, waxen, lifeless. He did not count the gunshot wounds.
In the background he barely heard Ralph’s security men shouting. Ranch workers, in shock and keeping themselves moving with forced activity, braved the inferno of the lab to rescue a few remaining experimental animals from their cages. To salvage some of the records. To preserve cellular specimens. Sometime in the distant future, he would probably thank them.
None of that mattered now.
He tried to take two steps toward Susan, but his muscles disobeyed. His knees buckled, weak and watery. Alex collapsed, sitting on the rough ground. Close enough to see her, but she would never again be close enough to touch.
* * *
An empty man rode back out to Clement Valley. The cool night air brushed at his face, but he did not feel it. The east brimmed with a pale glow, but he did not see it. The soft fog fingers were still there in his head. He shook it.
He found Cassie, her shirt and braided hair and jeans soaked with dark wetness. When he saw the blood, he had a sudden fear that she too had been shot. But she got up on unsteady legs, looking utterly exhausted in the beam of his flashlight.
Then Alex saw the small creature, like a newborn elephant but covered with matted wet fur. It stood already. About the size of a riding lawn mower. The baby mammoth moved on wobbly legs slick with its mother’s fluids—aware and healthy. Somber eyes accepted him in a mute communion.
Alex drew a deep breath. A mammoth, the first purebred ambassador from that extinct species, arriving on this night of smoke and blood.
He felt a trickle of amazement through his shell of despair. Though its mother had been murdered by attackers, this fourth-generation offspring had been successfully delivered alive.
In spite of all this. Thanks to Cassie.
“It’s a start,” she said. Her large, wonder-filled eyes stared at Alex as he touched the thick reddish fur on the young mammoth’s sturdy shoulders. He knew he should tell her about Susan, but he wasn’t ready to deal with the questions … or the sympathy. He couldn’t think of anything to say.
“I want to name him Adam,” she continued. “Seems appropriate.”
The rest of the herd huddled together in the naked night, while Bullwinkle stood near Majestica’s carcass. He twitched his trunk, snorting steam plumes in the waning moonlight. Alex imagined the big bull was as anguished at losing his mate as he himself was over Susan. He heard a low, guttural note in its sighs and wheezes that had not been there before.
He turned away. Shared grief was little comfort.
The big animals clustered together, calmer now, as light seeped into the valley. Tall, powerful, magnificent. Back from extinction. Distantly, hollowly, a part of Alex thought that the throwback Evos were a portion of humanity that might be better off extinct. Not these creatures. Not these strong and wonderful miracles that his wife had brought forth from dreams.
Alex stood among the herd and looked at young Cassie, seeing her resolve undampened. She was saying something, but he could not hear, somehow.
In Susan’s memory, he promised himself that he would carry on this project. Even though he might have to move to the ends of the Earth, where he and the mammoths could be safe …
Somehow.
Adam tottered off toward the herd. It waddled in the grass, lit by thin rays of sun, bleached of all color. Bullwinkle saw the small moving thing and sent a blaring trumpet salute. The herd answered with a chorus of bellows and huffs.
In this moment Alex felt his own life slip into insignificance, one more mote beneath the hard stars. One more member of a newcomer species, a mere vessel. His best work lay forever in the past now, but he could still make some difference.
The fog around him cleared, just a bit, letting in the glow of the east. Susan could live only through these creatures, through her work. He would have to speak and care and fight for his wife’s memory, too, and for all of her legacy, living and dead.
Clouds were moving in, he noticed absently. It was a shrouded dawn, though it could turn bright.