Mammoth by John Varley Read Free Book Online Page B

They harvested six ooctyes that had been primed and ready for ovulation by two weeks of hormone therapy. Under the microscope they looked good, and two of them began to divide after being injected with the mammoth DNA. They decided to try an implant. They were well into the procedure when Howard Christian walked into the lab with a guy wearing a lot of fishing lures stuck into his clothes.
    “This is the mammoth-cloning project everybody seems to have heard so much about,” Christian said, perhaps a little petulantly. It had not exactly been top secret, but he didn’t like his projects to become the object of too much speculation before they showed results. That was because his projects had, fairly frequently, failed to show any results. He introduced Leland and Roger to his guest.
    “And this is Dr. Susan Morgan. Susan, Dr. Matthew Wright.”
    “Just Matt, please.”
    “And just Susan.”
Doctor of what?
she wondered.
    “Susan worked for the circus until a few weeks ago. Now, if this fertilization is successful she’ll be a nursemaid to this elephant for two years.”
    “Must be quite a change after the glamour of the circus,” Matt said with a smile. Susan thought he might be putting her on.
    “I don’t know. Shoveling elephant shit is just about as glamorous here as it is under the big top.”
    “We have a better grade of elephant shit here in California,” Leland offered.
    “No, that’s bullshit you’re thinking about,” Susan said.
    “I knew it was some sort of shit.”
    It was obvious that Howard Christian was eager to move on, but Matt asked a question, then another, and Christianpaused to listen to the answer, and before long he found himself observing the entire implantation procedure. Matt seemed utterly fascinated with every aspect.
    The three vets finished the implantation with Matt watching the ultrasound image over their shoulders as they positioned the probe and delicately inserted the tiny mass of tissue that hardly qualified as an embryo, but which in two years might grow to be the wonder of the century.
    Leland pulled the probe out of Queenie, sighed, and stretched.
    “Was it good for you, Roger?”
    “I could use a cigarette.”
    “Oh, sure,” Leland said. “Then you’ll turn right over and snooze, when what Queenie wants right now is a little cuddling.”
    Susan was busy injecting a dose of doxapram to bring Queenie back to full consciousness, but she looked up in time to see Wright and Christian going through a door in the wall that divided the building roughly in half, a door they’d all noticed and whose handle all of them had tried at one time or another, with no result.
    Susan wondered what was on the other side.

FROM “LITTLE FUZZY, A CHILD OF THE ICE AGE”
    Tsehe heard the song, and he came calling. Even though it was the wrong song.
    Woolly mammoths and Columbian mammoths were very much alike, but they were different in some important ways. One of these were the songs they sang during the mating season.
    We can’t understand the songs whales sing, but a humpback whale knows the difference between a dolphin song and a sperm whale song. Canaries sing one way, and crows sing another. Usually these different species ignore the songs of other species.
    But the two types of mammoth were very closely related, and Tsehe was feeling very confused and out of sorts, so the song sounded okay to him. When he found the female who was singing the song she didn’t look quite right, either. She didn’t have enough hair, for one thing. Since mammoth females kept growing until they were thirty years old or so, a mammoth could guess another mammoth’s age by her size, and since Columbian mammoths were a bit larger than woolly mammoths, Tsehe took the female mammoth to be older than she really was. Aside from her sparse coat, she looked like a real prize to Tsehe!
    Tsehe approached the female and began his courtship.
    Mammoths liked to stroke each other with their trunks, just like