Eyes Like Sky And Coal And Moonlight (27 page)

Thoughts of Gaja flickered across Matthew’s mind as he shuffled the cards.

“
What’s she doing walking around then?” he said.

Joe shrugged. “Hey, I seen elephants do all sorts of things. Who says they think like you or me?”

Jumbo didn’t mind the circus, although he still didn’t like the smell of the tigers. Matthew knew it, and he always took care to make sure the big cats were safely stowed away, twenty cars up the line, before they boarded Jumbo’s car. It was custom-built for him, painted crimson and gold, with double doors in the middle to let him enter.

He didn’t feel hungry anymore. Whenever he was hungry, food was there.

“
Gotta keep up your strength, you’re the star of the show,” Matthew said. He brought him fruit and hay, and handfuls of peanuts.

It was a good life. The children came and petted him, and Matthew would help him lift the bravest ones to his back, clinging there like fleas. At night Matthew slept in his stall with him, and would talk into the night, the small voice washing over him as he swayed into sleep.

“
You can’t go to Toronto,” Gaja said.

“
You show up after three years and your first words are, ‘Don’t go to Toronto?’” Matthew said. “Where have you been?”

She looked the same as ever. He’d swear it was the same dress.

“
Walking up and down the earth,” she said. “Does it matter?”

“
I thought we had… I mean I thought we were.”

“
It was nice,” Gaja said. “It was very nice. But I can’t get attached.”

“
Attached, is that what you call it? Simple human decency would have meant saying goodbye, at least!”

“
I’m telling you not to go to Toronto.”

“
But why?”

“
I can’t tell you.”

Matthew laughed. “And I should go to that prick Barnum and say we can’t go because some woman’s got her knickers in a twist?”

She looked down. “Can’t you just trust me?”

“
Are you the Queen of the Elephants, that I should trust you?”

“
Not the Queen,” she said. “Just a goddess who saw the plight of the animals she loved.”

“
Not even the right kind of elephant, is he? African rather than Indian. You’re insane!”

“
Please,” she begged. “They’re all my children. Please. I thought if you loved me you’d listen and we could prevent it. You can’t let it happen.”

He turned away. “Go away, Miss Laxmi. I have no reason to listen to you.”

Barnum was there the next day with a long thin skeleton of a man. “Wanted to introduce the two of you,” he said. Matthew started to hold out his hand but Barnum said, “No, no! Him and Jumbo, I mean. This is Henry Ward. He’s a taxidermist from Rochester. Stuffed all sorts of things for me. He wants to be the one to stuff Jumbo.”

Ward was gazing up at the elephant, enraptured.

“
Anything ever happens, we telegraph him immediately so he can save the skin and skeleton,” Barnum said.

“
That’s macabre,” Matthew said, appalled. A chill ran down his spine.

“
It’s good business practice, that’s what it is,” Barnum declared.

Matthew led Jumbo and the smallest elephant in the circus, Tom Thumb, along the tracks to the waiting cars, through the darkness lit by flickering torches. Overhead the incurious stars glimmered like a dancer’s spangles across the sky. The trio were the last to board. The small elephant squealed and danced along, still happy from his performance. Jumbo rested his trunk for a moment on his companion, perhaps to calm him, or perhaps only to show affection. They paced along the tracks, steep embankments on either side, the blare and glare of the Big Top behind them and the sounds of the departing crowd, the last visitors leaving with the smell of cotton candy on their hands and glamour pervading their minds to haunt their dreams that night.

When he heard the chill whistle of the express train behind him, his first thought was, “But there’s none scheduled.” The ground shook underneath his feet and he heard the roaring of the coal engine, the screech of the brake, applied too late, too fast. Then all was chaos. The train crashed into Tom Thumb, scooping him onto its cowcatcher—elephant catcher was Matthew’s next thought—pushing him screaming along the track before he rolled down the embankment.

“
Run!” Matthew shouted but Jumbo shied away from the slope, trying to flee and unable to see the gap in the fence in his panic.

Train and elephant met. Jumbo was driven to his knees, a massive blow to the earth that Matthew felt to his bones. The train shuddered, its length crumpling, falling away from the tracks.

All thoughts vanished from Matthew’s mind. He knelt beside the groaning, dying elephant, sobbing. The trunk crept around his waist and the two held onto each other until Jumbo’s grip slackened. Matthew clung to his friend in desperation, but the light in the massive eyes died away.

“
It’s taken three years,” Henry Ward announced to the Powers’ Hotel banquet room, filled with journalists. “But at last Jumbo’s remains are preserved. All of you have received a piece of the trunk, suitably inscribed for the occasion, but I have another surprise for you. You’ll note the jelly before you. It is a most unusual dish. In the course of preparing the body, I accumulated a pound and a half of powdered ivory. The cook here used it to create the dish, allowing each of you to assimilate a little of the mighty creature.”

He held up his champagne glass. “To Jumbo. Mightiest of his race,
Loxodonta Africana
.”

“
Did you hear that?” one newspaperman said to another.

“
What, the toast?”

The man frowned, shaking his head. He was a slight, dapper man, his waistcoat figured with a print of green elephants. “Maybe not hear, but feel. Like a vibration shaking the floor, some sound too deep for the human ear. Maybe a train is passing outside.”

In the corner of the room at an obscure table, Gaja Laxmi sat. She took a spoonful of the pale green jelly, sprinkled with flecks of white, and ate it deliberately, her tears falling to the white tablecloth like slow warm rain.

I was doing some freelance writing that involved researching P.T. Barnum’s acquisition of Jumbo the elephant, and found the actual story too fascinating not to get used in a piece of speculative fiction. All details of the story, with the exception of Gaja Laxmi, are drawn from history, including the jelly made with the powdered ivory from Jumbo's remains.

This story originally appeared in
Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show
. I had not thought it overly experimental, especially for a genre story, but a slush reader blogged in a derogatory fashion about it – which was an odd experience, particularly since the magazine subsequently took it. Personally, I think we need
more
stories from non-human POVs.

IGMS found the original title too long and truncated it. I've taken the liberty of restoring it.

In Order to Conserve

1.

In order to conserve color, the governments first banned newspaper inserts, the ones where dresses and dishwashers and plastic toys and figurines of gnomes with wary smiles tumbled across glossy surfaces. Readers faced columns of type interspersed with dour black and white line drawings, no slick sheets cascading on their laps as they unfolded the newsprint to gaze at the reports of latest developments in The Color Crisis. Others turned to the Internet, monochromatic monitors scrolled by blogs denouncing the Administration, the liberals, the conservatives, the capitalists, alien spiders, and a previously obscure cult known as the Advanced Altar of the Rainbow Serpent.

The change had been almost imperceptible at first. Only artists, fashion designers and gardeners noticed the dimming of shades, the shadows of reds, blues, purples that blossomed from less verdant stems. They brought the shift to the attention of white-coated scientists, who measured the changes in angstroms, then announced that laboratory results proved it true. Somewhere, somehow, color, once thought an inexhaustible natural resource, was running out, and doing so quickly.

The National Guard quelled the initial panic, while their counterparts did the same in other countries. Marching along in their drab uniforms, they shook hands with the populace and rescued black and white cats from birch trees. Waving for the cameras, they smiled that all was well before having them shut down and bundled away by nervous newsfolk, breaking up crowds that had gathered to discuss the situation. Color TVs were piled in broken heaps on on street corners, awaiting pick-up by the shadow-hued trucks that lumbered and clanked their way through early morning beneath a colorless sky.

As the months passed, more stringent measures were introduced and more and more things were rationed out with booklets of black on black stamps. People tried to use the rarer colors, magenta, fuchsia, pale lavender, but even so, the fashion industry unwillingly made black and white houndstooths, seersuckers, plaids, and ginghams the next statement of style. Grade school students were introduced to the fine art of cross hatching. Studios set to work, uncolorizing old movies.

Color became totally contraband. The majority of police car paint jobs were unchanged. Taxi cabs, on the other hand, turned gray striped with silver, a gleaming paint that reflected a thousand shades of concrete.

You would have thought that people would have mobbed art museums, to stare at the last canvases ever touched by color, but attendance fell off. People didn’t want to be reminded of what they were missing, and security guards, their eyes welling deep with tears, moved among the lonely paintings before going to collect their last paychecks.

2.

An acute scientist, whose hobby was the cello, was the first to notice the decline in sound. The blackberry finches and house sparrows that flocked to her feeder each morning to feast on thistle seed were morose, silently pecking at each other. Sighing, she picked up the telephone, then changed her mind and bicycled away to send a telegram to the White House.

Teachers were forced to come up with new classes to replace band, orchestra, and music appreciation. Playground shouts were monitored. The uniformed guards held up placards to the students: “Conservation begins with you!” and taught sign language during the lunch hours.

Flashing white lights took the place of bells and buzzers. Audiences, after watching their black and white movies, took flashlights out of the purses and pockets and flicked them on and off to demonstrate approval.

Mimes were still unpopular.

People thought, and thought again, before they said anything. Therapy sessions often consisted of fifty minutes of silence, therapist and patient staring at each other, signaling with raised eyebrows, hesitant smiles, gentle nods, and at times inexplicable tears signaling some breakthrough.

The scientists wrote furious notes to each other, denouncing various theories for the shortages. Jeanne Dixon predicted that the San Andreas Fault would open and Elvis swagger forth, flanked by Jim Morrison and John Lennon, bringing with them new supplies of color and sound that would swell forth across the world like a nuclear explosion of color, expanding outward in concentric rings in a single joyous shout while the Angel Gabriel blew back-up saxophone.

“
Silence is silver,” read the billboards. “Walk softly and carry a big gray stick.”

3.

When imagination began to ebb, the government again took active measures. Some philosophers and scientists pointed out that in order to solve the problem, creative thinking would be necessary. Death squads were immediately dispatched to their houses.

But still, overall there was a surprisingly lack of protest, if anyone had bothered to think much about it. Polls showed no one cared enough to vote.

Sure, it sounded good to protest creativity’s absence, but there were benefits to not thinking too hard. Pluses to not worrying about things too much.

The television programs were still the same, after all: a black and white flicker, with dialogue in a slow scroll along the bottom of the screen, hazy snow hovering around the edge as through to signal the arrival of some gray winter of the soul.