Mammoth

24

IT was far and away the most amazing show Matt had ever seen.

He was familiar with the magic that could be done with computer-generated imagery. But he had never been to a major theme park, or a big stage show in Las Vegas or Broadway. He was not prepared for the hyperreality that could be created by live performers, clever lighting, smoke, mirrors, and thundering sound. When the giant mammoths strode over his head on the giant screens above him, he felt like an ant. He almost dropped his popcorn.

He had what he figured was one of the best seats in the house. In a football stadium he would be sitting on about the forty-yard line, five rows up from the field. Some would say the skyboxes were better but Matt couldn't believe it. They were way up there at the top of the stadium, right above the cheapest seats. That position would distort the perspective of the overhead screens, like sitting in the front row of a movie theater, and it was as far as you could get from the action on the floor. He supposed it was a status thing, sitting on a comfortable sofa with servants catering to you, surrounded by your rich and beautiful friends, eating fancy food. But why would you come here to eat French five-star cuisine? It was the circus, for crying out loud! A digitized, computer-controlled, steroid-pumped, and amphetamine-boosted version of the circus, but a circus all the same.

This circus was everything he remembered, to the tenth power, with the sole exception of the cotton candy. They didn't sell it. Probably too hard to clean up the mess from the deeply padded, rocking seats. He crunched down on another mouthful of something called Karamel Kettle Korn that was too sweet but close enough for rock and roll, and made a mental note to speak to Susan about the criminal lack of Kotton Kandy.

Then he remembered this would be her last day here, one way or the other. And he didn't figure they'd be serving a lot of circus snacks in jail.

Now cut that out, he told himself. Think positive.

His seat was one of the perks of Susan's job. She had a block of five seats for every performance. She said the practice was called "ice," and it was a long showbiz tradition which she had known from her earlier circus days, though she had never qualified for it. The headliners all demanded a certain amount of ice, and the number of seats you got was a measure of your importance, so they fought for it fiercely, like movie stars measuring the length of each other's Winnebagos. Up to twelve hours before a show she could give or sell them to anyone she chose. After that they went back into the lottery pool and she got the money, which was a nice piece of cash every night since she hardly ever had anyone she wanted to give them to.

Susan's other four seats had gone to a young couple who obviously could hardly believe their luck, not only winning the daily seating lottery but getting some of the best seats in the house. They had a boy named Dwight who was five or six, and a girl, Brittney, around nine years old. Matt couldn't help noting their reactions. They liked the movie on the tent ceiling but it was obvious they had seen things like that before. The children shivered and giggled when the cold air came blasting in. They liked the meteor shower and gasped when the arena shook in the simulated earthquake.

Then came the elephants, and Big Mama. Matt noticed the huge pachyderm's front legs were chained together and she tended to just stand there until prodded by metal-tipped sticks carried by her handlers. This stick, called an ankus, was a traditional tool of mahouts in Asia. Susan said it could cause damage by an unskilled trainer, but was an absolute necessity with even the gentlest, most socialized captive elephant to remind her who was the boss. The key was to apply it sparingly, lightly, and judiciously, and never, never, never think that it would protect you if the elephant really decided to do you damage.

Dwight was beside himself with delight when Big Mama appeared, and seemed awed by the girls in their gaudy costumes. Brittney smiled and watched it all with interest, but it was clear what she was waiting for. She was wearing a Fuzzy T-shirt and a Fuzzy hat with a fuzzy trunk sticking out in front and little woolly mammoth ears flapping at the sides, and waving a Fuzzy pennant.

There were a dozen of them now, all full-blooded Columbians, all the product of Big Daddy's semen and the egg cells harvested from the bodies of the slaughtered herd of cows, born to Indian elephant host mothers. The oldest of them were three years old now, "toddlers" tipping the scales at twenty-five hundred pounds. These came out first, followed in order by smaller and smaller and smaller youngsters, until the final pair, year-old infant twins weighing no more than nine hundred.

"It's Me-tu and U-tu!" Dwight shouted, and Matt realized that superstar Fuzzy had at least some competition in the hearts of the world's children. He knew that many if not most of the kids here could name all twelve of these animals.

Matt found himself on the edge of his seat, almost as agog as the children all around him, as the moment arrived for Fuzzy's appearance. The music swelled and quickened and reached a volume that was almost stunning, but was not loud enough to drown out the shriek from Brittney that almost broke Matt's eardrum.

Fuzzy entered in a typical elephantine lumbering gait, not as fast as he could go but fast enough so that Susan had to trot at a pretty good pace to stay beside him. Matt remembered Susan telling him that elephants—and now mammoths—were the only mammals that could neither run nor jump. Susan's limp was barely perceptible; if you weren't looking for it you'd never notice.

Fuzzy got to the center of the arena and stopped, turning in a circle to acknowledge the thunderous applause. He seemed absolutely calm, totally unimpressed by all the lights and noise. And why shouldn't he be? He was a veteran of show business; he had been performing since his first birthday in the previous incarnation of this big, permanent home: the Ringling Brothers traveling show, booked into the biggest stadiums and indoors arenas throughout the United States.

He towered over his retinue of youngsters. Susan had told Matt that Fuzzy had recently passed the two-ton mark, and was seven feet tall.

The producers of the show had rejected the glitter and glitz of the elephant corps for Fuzzy and the baby mammoths. There were no jeweled and feathered crowns, no spangled blankets, no howdahs or ankle bracelets or painted toenails for the mammoths. This was better, Matt decided. These creatures from the distant past would have been diminished by circus trappings. The mammoths were as nature had created them... albeit a lot cleaner than they would have been in the wild. These were undoubtedly some of the most pampered animals in the world. Their coats were shampooed daily and combed out and conditioned for hours. Their diets were monitored with the care usually reserved for a rocket launch, and they got thorough veterinary exams every week. Circuses in Japan and China and Russia had standing offers of twenty million dollars for any one of them. Howard had told Susan he would have sneered at fifty million. He intended to keep a total monopoly on live mammoths for the foreseeable future.

The Columbian babies were all as cute as could be, with their short yellow-gold fur. But Fuzzy wore a coat that would have made an Italian movie starlet proud. Glossy black with copper highlights, with a gentle wave that Matt supposed was natural—he had a vision of Fuzzy being done up every night with hair curlers the size of oil drums, and had to laugh—it ranged from only four or five inches on his trunk and around his face to a full three feet long on his sides and belly. The whole glorious pelt waved as he walked, and it was hard to imagine a more appealing animal. Elephants, with their thick, wrinkled, dusky hides inspired awe but Matt had never been inspired to reach out and stroke the skin of any of Susan's elephants. Fuzzy, even at this distance, just made you ache to get close to him and run your fingers through all that fur. He was like a two-ton puppy.

Nobody seemed to care. It was enough to see Fuzzy. Matt figured the crowd would go wild if he just stood there and ate hay. When one of the youngsters lifted his tail and unceremoniously dropped a steaming load of dung near the center of the ring, the audience, and especially the children, went wild with delight. They liked it even more when a troop of incompetent clowns scurried out and made a hilarious botch of cleaning up the mess. There must be something universal about toilet humor, Matt decided, because he was laughing, too.

When Fuzzy and his entourage finally left the arena the show was essentially over, but nobody moved. The final attraction was about to unfold, the nightly Super Lottery, and Matt realized, with a bit of a shock, that this was the part of the show he was really here for.

Compared to the Super Lottery, a private papal audience was no big deal.

There were certainly a few people sitting around Matt who would be indifferent to the chance to enter Fuzzy's private quarters, get the chance to stroke his big furry flanks, maybe feed him a handful of his specially formulated mammoth treats. But even they wouldn't miss the opportunity to brag to their friends about how they got to hobnob for thirty minutes with the world's most famous animal celebrity.

Obviously the whole throng couldn't pet the animal, all those reaching hands would eventually wear him down like a pencil eraser. Howard had wanted Fuzzy installed in a glass environment so that the entire departing crowd could at least file by and see him on their way out, but Susan had vetoed that. To Matt's considerable surprise, Susan had vetoed a lot of Howard's more intrusive ideas, and he still wasn't sure how she got away with that. But she had given in to the idea of letting a small group—families with children only, she had insisted—spend a short time with Fuzzy after the shows. She had suggested a lottery and the show's producers had eagerly agreed, as just one more way to heighten the excitement.

So now the ringmaster announced the Super Lottery, and asked everyone to get out their tickets. Matt took his from his pocket with a hand that was suddenly moist and shaky. Everything depended on this.

The ticket wasn't a little stub of cardboard, but a souvenir in itself. It was plastic, three by four inches. There was a screen that showed a picture of Fuzzy striding across a grassy plain, and some buttons beneath the screen. After the lottery it became a handheld game, but right now it was a magic talisman. Searchlights began crisscrossing the crowd at random as the music built once again.

Even before the names were announced Matt heard loud shouting far above him, and he turned around to see a man and woman and two boys standing and holding their tickets triumphantly above their heads. The tickets were flashing red. The spotlights converged on them and the rest of the audience applauded. The Williamsons were met by uniformed ushers at the aisle, and led to an exit, still followed by spotlights.

Three more families were announced, one with just a single child, another with six children, the last a family from Japan with three kids who were so astonished Matt wondered if they might pass out. Matt began to worry. They must be reaching capacity now, there could only be one more family chosen.

Matt knew something nobody else in the audience knew, though some suspected, which was that the lottery could be fixed.

It was openly announced that only families with children were eligible, of course. Naturally most people suspected that the families of the rich and powerful had a big edge, but no one had been able to prove it, and Susan had told Matt that it wasn't true.

No, the cheating was only applied in favor of guests of organizations like the Make-A-Wish Foundation, kids with terminal diseases or terrible injuries. This had been Andrea de la Terre's idea, and it had been noticed, but who was going to complain? There had never been an outraged editorial or expose, and there never would be.

But the fact that the lottery could be fixed meant that it could be fixed for anyone. It was all up to whoever controlled the lottery computer.

"And the last family of the night..."

It seemed the air pressure dropped a bit from all the people inhaling at once.

"...is Jerry and Melissa Myers, and their children, Brittney and Dwight!"

To Matt's right the Myers family was bathed in light and Brittney was proving, incredibly, that she had hardly begun to demonstrate the power of her lungs earlier in the show. Matt was showered with Karamel Kettle Korn as she threw her half-eaten jumbo box into the air. He glanced at his ticket, which was flashing red, too, then he slipped it back into his pocket and joined in the thunderous applause. Then in an instant he was engulfed in the biggest human traffic jam he had ever seen, as all the people who had not dared to leave while they still had a chance were suddenly seized by visions of gridlock in the parking lots, long lines for trains, and the tantrums of cross and exhausted children. He sat and waited for a bit as his feet were stepped on by the shuffling mass, then when his aisle was clear he got up and followed the directions Susan had given him. EVENTUALLY he reached a point where the wide exit corridors branched beneath a sign that read:

The crowd went one way and he went another. At last he had some elbow room. Fifty feet down a hall lined with a plastic jungle filled with capering mechanical monkeys and the standard whoops, caws, roars, and yelps of a 1930s jungle epic he came to a velvet rope barrier manned by a young fellow in safari khakis and helmet, who took Matt's flashing ticket, glanced at it, and handed it back, stifling a yawn. Theme park workers put in long hours for not much pay; this one looked more than ready to ride the train back to Portland.

Around one last bend and there was the inner sanctum. Compared to the rest of the theme park it was rather prosaic. It was a big room, as befitted the big animal Fuzzy had become, divided roughly in half by a stout fence of steel I-beams that would have stymied Big Mama in an escape attempt, much less Fuzzy. Not that Fuzzy showed any signs of discontent. He was close to the fence, facing it, extending his trunk over and over to take the mammoth treats held out in the hands of the lucky lottery children. The kids were on the far side of a less substantial railing, designed to keep them two feet back from their idol; an easy reach for Fuzzy's trunk but too far for a child to reach out and touch his legs or side.

Susan stood beside Fuzzy on the other side of the heavy fence. Between the two fences was the male assistant handler, an old friend of Susan's, who guarded a gate through which he would let groups of two or three children to a caged enclosure where they could actually reach out and stroke Fuzzy's fur. Most of the children did this in absolute, awed silence, so delicately and tentatively that it was as if they feared their tiny hands could somehow hurt the giant beast. Matt noticed that one of the kids, a girl of about seven, was careful to keep her left side turned away from the people she was with. He glimpsed a hideous burn, and a nose that was in the process of being reconstructed. The look of sheer delight on the undamaged side of the girl's face made the back of Matt's throat burn, and he had to turn away.

What am I doing here? Is this a good idea?

But it was too late for that.

Susan caught his eye, and unobtrusively turned her head and gestured toward a door off to Matt's left. He nodded, trying not to glance too obviously at the cameras set high in the walls of the enclosure. Once inside, he switched on the lights.

This was Susan's office, and it was much like any office anywhere, dominated by various data systems. There were a few old-fashioned filing cabinets, a coffeemaker, and a microwave. He noticed there were fluorescent lights in the ceiling but they hadn't come on. Instead, a series of attractive lamps at each work area gave the room a warmth unusual for a place like this.

One wall facing her desk was a grid of screens displaying various parts of the mammoth compound. On one Matt could see the children still gathering around Fuzzy. On another was a view of Big Mama's quarters. Two attendants were shoveling hay and fruit into her gigantic manger, while another used a machine a little like a Zamboni to muck out the floor, spray and mop it, and spread fresh straw, all in one operation. All three workers seemed to be keeping a wary eye on the irascible old matriarch, though she was securely chained.

He had been coasting along on the pleasurable high he got from watching the circus show, but now the whole improbable plan, which he had been trying not to think about too much, came crashing back into his consciousness.

Could it work?

Well... yes, the first part, anyway. He was dubious about their long-term chances, but there hadn't been time to fill him in on every detail of that part. But the parts Susan had laid out for him seemed well thought out, as he would have expected of her.

Once more he asked himself why he was doing this.

One reason was obvious, and that was his love for Susan. If she wanted to do this, if she thought it was the right thing to do, then that was good enough for him. There was a second reason he thought they might succeed, but he hadn't figured out how to tell her that one yet. In fact, he hadn't had time to reconcile himself to the insanity of the idea.

The third reason was simple. Any robbery of this magnitude could only be carried out with help from the inside. Susan herself was the person with the most unquestioned access to Fuzzy, but even that would not have been enough, alone.

There was another insider.