Mammoth Dawn (6 page)

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 Helen. 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.

O O O

When Alex rode up to the main Helyx complex, two of the ranch buildings were engulfed in flame. Fire crackled and roared, clean wood smoke 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.”

Recreating 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.

Helen 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 Helen, 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.

O O O

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 lawnmower. The baby mammoth moved on wobbly legs slick with its mother’s fluids—aware and healthy. Somber eyes accepted him in 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 Helen, 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 Helen. 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 Helen’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. Helen 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.

Mammoth Dawn
Full Novel Treatment and Proposal

Overview

Centered around the topical resurrection of majestic woolly mammoths, sabretooth tigers, and other prehistoric creatures that became extinct during the last great Ice Age,
Mammoth Dawn
is a plausible scientific and ecological thriller only one step away from current research in genetics and paleontology. The story is filled with modern scientific techniques, a sense of wonder, and is also a relevant cautionary tale about the damage being done to the ecosystem and the diversity of life on Earth.

A passionate billionaire scientist, Dr. Alex Pierce, and the intelligent and beautiful activist, Cassie Worth, have devoted their lives to recreating the lost past and protecting the future. They collect and maintain an ambitious “Library of Earth” to store the genetic information of currently endangered species in hopes of preserving much of Nature’s wealth before it becomes extinct.

As part of this work, Alex and Cassie use restored DNA taken from museums and preserved specimens to bring back wondrous extinct animals that have been eradicated through the callous mistakes of mankind—passenger pigeons, Tasmanian tigers, dodos. On a vast ranch in the wilds of Alaska, they have recreated an environment from the end of the last Ice Age, complete with dire wolves, sabretooth tigers, and a herd of woolly mammoths.

Though they are devoted to protecting the genetic diversity of Earth, Alex and Cassie must battle the human threats of radical “clean genes” terrorists, corrupt politicians, and a former Soviet power broker. They also face primal struggles against prehistoric beasts and harrowing Arctic storms. During his darkest hour, when left in disgrace by tragedies on his “Resurrection Preserve,” Alex is forced to participate in the first-ever modern mammoth hunt. This challenge pits Alex’s greatest enemies against each other, and against towering beasts from humanity’s shadowed past.

Unlike
Jurassic Park
, the real science in
Mammoth Dawn
is
imminent
, likely to be put into use within the next decade. Cloning mammoths is not only a plausible technique, but one that has been discussed much in recent scientific journals (as described below). In addition, the message of species preservation, ecological awareness, and the need for biodiversity is relevant to all readers.

The novel is coauthored by Kevin J. Anderson, #1 internationally bestselling author with 15 million copies of his books in print in 26 languages, and Gregory Benford, winner of the most prestigious awards in the field of science fiction, as well as respected visionary and PhD physicist. Dr. Benford proposed the “Library of Earth” project in a well-received paper published in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
.

With a commercial concept and strong emotional resonance,
Mammoth Dawn
is a roller-coaster story that swings from high-tech suspense and scientific speculation to primal struggles for survival. Based on the most recent, and often controversial, research into mammoth behavior, as well as cutting-edge genetic breakthroughs, this story will both surprise and fascinate readers.

Scientific Basis—Why Mammoths? Why Now?

Cloning mammoths is not only a plausible idea, but one likely to be put into use within the next decade. The precise techniques have been widely discussed in the scientific journals. The most difficult technical problems have already been overcome in this stunning new way to save endangered, even extinct, animals.

Preservation teams have shown that it is possible for one species to give birth to implanted embryos from a similar species. Now visionary zoologists have combined that method with cloning to enable a cow to carry and bring to birth the rare Asian gaur, an endangered type of ox.

Several research teams are already working to implant woolly mammoth DNA into an Asian elephant embryo, the mammoth’s nearest living relative. The resulting birth would be a mammoth-elephant hybrid. After several further generations crossed with mammoth DNA, the offspring would be genetically pure mammoths, brought back from extinction.

This dramatic possibility has found a fascinated audience in Richard Stone’s 2001 nonfiction book,
MAMMOTH: The Resurrection of an Ice Age Giant
(Perseus). This popular book (which treats the original Benford “Library of Earth” paper in some detail) follows on two full-length specials recently aired by the Discovery Channel—both of which garnered record-breaking audiences. These programs followed several teams who track down preserved mammoth carcasses, from which they derive a great deal of biological information. Most prominently, in both two-hour specials and in Stone’s book, the theme is
how to bring the mammoths back
.

The public is fascinated by the idea. Mammoths have a deep emotional resonance with human beings. Prehistoric man very probably hounded them to extinction, so resurrection of this exterminated species carries a quality of justice. Mammoths have a majesty and mystery greater than any existing species.

Further, the concept of our novel intersects and dramatizes a major public controversy. Cloning itself, in any form, generates a knee-jerk resistance in many people; however, the question posed in
Mammoth Dawn
goes even deeper. The basic technique uses
cloning
in a way that disconnects it from the human cloning controversy, yet is sure to cause fireworks.

Vehement opponents have argued against restoring any extinct species, even those that were clearly eradicated by mankind—such as the dodo and the passenger pigeon. A recent
San Francisco Chronicle
editorial condemned the idea, taking the position echoed by our novel’s protesters. The concept of bringing back extinct species is a facet of biotech with real emotional resonance.

A fanciful glimpse of species resurrection has been used in
Jurassic Park
to the delight of many readers.
Mammoth Dawn
is much closer to reality and explores the issue as it will certainly occur, and
soon
—as a genuinely deep controversy, challenging our moral senses and our sense of wonder.

Prologue—The Hunt

Pleistocene Era, 10,000 B.C.—
We open with an ancient mammoth hunt. A team of prehistoric hunters sets a trap, taking position in a grassy glen above a steep bluff. The hunt has already gone on for most of the day, humans showing themselves just enough that the small herd of the ever-more-skittish woolly beasts moves away toward the dead-end cliff face.

The sky is thick with clouds, the air sharp with a bite of cold. One hunter remembers stories of when the mammoths were plentiful, when the tribe had killed entire herds and gorged themselves on the meat, leaving the carcasses to be devoured by scavengers. The primitive people had built magnificent houses out of mammoth tusks and bones and covered them with hide. But times are getting harder year after year, and mammoths are becoming difficult to find. Many of the straggler beasts in the sparse forests of the tundra are sick, dying from a disease. The tribe has been able to find the bones of many mammoths, but few live creatures. Now, the hunter scouts have found one remaining herd of healthy mammoths, and it is time for a great hunt. Perhaps the last one.

As the mammoths are driven into the funnel of the trap, the hunters gather and consume a special psychotropic fern from pouches tied to their waists. This rare fern (like peyote) pumps them up, connects them spiritually with the mammoths. Humans depend on the mammoths, greatly revering them, as did Native Americans with the bison. Storytellers have painted pictures on cave walls, worshipping these woolly gods, who are so necessary for survival.

The hunters set off. The whole tribe works together, women and children banging sticks and drums. Adolescents set perimeter fires to drive the mammoths forward. Then the hunters charge in with their spears.

The mammoths stampede toward the high cliff. At the base of the bluff lie asphalt seeps, a tar pit swamp. Even if the Pleistocene hunters kill only one mammoth, they would have enough food for weeks; instead, they want to have a hunt like the old days, when the tribe could feast and celebrate the bounty of the mammoth.
[NOTE: a compelling and controversial recent theory suggests that overhunting by humans was one of the primary causes for the demise of the woolly mammoth as well as other Ice Age beasts.]

In a terrible scene, the panicked herd rushes headlong over the cliffs. At the bluff edge, the biggest bull mammoth turns to face the hunters. One hunter, pumped up on the fern drug, faces the mammoth with his spear in a suicidal confrontation. The other hunters close in from the sides with their weapons. The bull mammoth rears, the hunters charge … and they all go over the cliff.

Already some tribe members are scrambling down into the swamps to retrieve their prey. There will be much butchering, skinning, preserving. Amidst the carnage, broken mammoths lie in the tar pit swamp. Some are still alive, thrashing and trumpeting their death cries. Hungry sabretooths and dire wolves stalk around the edges of the swamp, ready for the feast. Using torches, the Pleistocene tribe members try to drive them off, to defend their kill. But there is more here than the tribe could ever need.

The elders will tell the story of this day again and again, until great-grandchildren no longer believe it. Even with all the telltale signs, the cold, the disease, the dwindling herds, the Pleistocene hunters do not doubt that the magnificent mammoths will always be there.

Part I—Mammoth Ranch

Modern day Siberia—same location.
We meet charismatic Gregor Galaev out at a paleontological site called “Mammoth Falls,” where teams are excavating a huge number of preserved bones and carcasses. Before the end of the chapter, the reader will know Gregor is our villain, a cultured and suave “godfather”-style power broker who has carved out his own empire here in isolated Siberia, a former Soviet Mafia figure who has changed his name and made a new life.

Mammoth Falls is a treasure trove that makes the La Brea Tar Pits seem like an
hors d’ouvre
. The diggers have already found numerous carcasses of woolly mammoths, sabretooths, dire wolves, Pleistocene horses: an entire prehistoric environment preserved by the asphalt seep, the anoxic marsh, and the Siberian cold. Thanks to new genetic techniques, DNA from these extinct creatures is intact and extractable—enough to make the site enormously profitable.

Though he keeps a low profile, Gregor runs numerous operations—both legal and illegal—between Russia and the US, via Alaska. He is wealthy and ambitious, wanting to be respectable even in America. Gregor has entered into a partnership with a young American visionary and scientist, Alex Pierce (whom we will meet in the next chapter); Alex has amassed a fortune through his genetic patents, and has now turned his resources to studies of extinction and protecting endangered species. Alex is particularly interested in extinct animals from the Pleistocene Age, hence his connection with Gregor and the Mammoth Falls fossil site, from which Alex obtains pristine research specimens.

Running the Mammoth Falls excavation is Gregor’s massive right-hand-man, nicknamed Psyk (Russian for “psycho”), a part-Eskimo, part-Siberian who spent time in Siberian gulags (and has the proud, detailed tattoos to prove it) before he fell in with Gregor Galaev. Psyk clings to a remnant of Eskimo mysticism, takes his life and his work at face value, and is totally loyal to Gregor. He looks like a thug, but is much deeper than that.

At the busy fossil dig, workers fill hoppers with cold, blackish muck, sorting brick-sized mammoth molars into bins, stacking tusks in a pile like firewood. Psyk finds a broken flint spearhead and is oddly stirred by this ancient site, as if he has been born into the wrong time and place. While Gregor is always looking to the future, Psyk is fascinated by the past.

While the two men stand at the base of the bluff, over which hunters once drove mammoth herds, Siberian workers slog around in the tar pit wearing rubber waders. They use scanners, hand-held pulse-detectors looking for anomalies in the bog.

With a flurry of excitement, the workers find a human body, naked, coated with smelly tar. They haul the corpse out of the marsh, jabbering that they may have found a perfectly preserved Pleistocene hunter. His hands are bound behind his back, his mouth gagged, his eyes still open and intact. Is it some indication of ritual sacrifice? The Moscow museum will pay handsomely for such an intact human cadaver. When they clean off the body, though, they are startled to see a modern
wristwatch
on the arm. Gregor and Psyk look at each other, sharing a smug smile.

A week earlier, one of the Mammoth Falls diggers had been caught selling fossil ivory tusks on the black market. Gregor has decided to send an appropriate warning to the other workers. He remembers standing in the moonlight watching, far enough away so the black splashes will not get on his clothes, as burly Psyk took great pleasure in drowning the man in tar.

Now the workers will talk in whispers, spreading the ominous story far and wide. And Gregor’s reputation will grow.

O O O

Mammoth Ranch, Montana—
Alex Pierce, the idealistic head of genetic research company Helyx, has set up an isolated ranch in Montana where he and his scientist wife Helen study extinction patterns and the loss of Nature’s genetic heritage, leaving vice presidents and CEOs to handle the “drudgery of the business world.” By dedicating his own resources—money acquired through successful genetic-engineering patents—Alex believes he can protect the Earth’s biodiversity, with no strings attached.

He and Helen have launched a huge undertaking, compiling a “Library of Earth,” a Noah’s Ark that will collect and preserve genetic information of endangered species. Alex sponsors teams of “genetic bounty hunters” who collect DNA samples from around the world. [Estimates of the number of species made extinct every year vary from a few dozen to thousands; all agree that we are currently in the midst of the biggest ongoing “extinction event” in millions of years, a tragedy that is sadly unnoticed by the man on the street.]