Mammoth Dawn (8 page)

Alex has developed this project because of Helen’s dream, and he promises to keep it alive. Thanks to their work, a genuine mammoth has finally been born—the first in more than five thousand years—and Alex will nurture that dream, in Helen’s honor. He will find a place where he can continue his work.

Part II—The Resurrection Preserve

Five years later.
High in the cloud forests of Ecuador, Cassie Worth climbs a rugged slope to where she has learned a giant Andean condor is nesting. Only 80 of the huge birds survive; zoo specimens have died, and the species looks doomed. Zach Browder climbs with her, anxious to be with Cassie. As they climb, she thinks of Sinbad stories and his adventures with the giant Roc. Reaching the nest, like a fortress made of branches, they find the mother condor gone, the eggshell smashed, and a recently dead fledgling. Grim, Cassie takes her samples, confident that the genetic material will help the species to live again.

As they descend, it becomes apparent that there is friction between Cassie and Zach. He’s ready to pack up their camp and head down into the Amazon rainforests in eastern Ecuador, but Cassie is ready to go home. They have been out in the wilds for much of the past several years, running from specimen to specimen. She and Zach have been lovers, bound by a common goal but without getting emotionally closer. Cassie feels that she should go help Alex Pierce with the
real
work, back in his huge new preserve in Alaska.…

After the Montana disaster, Cassie went off on her own, securing a few university grants and stipends from private foundations, but she and her crusaders rapidly stalled for lack of funding. She remembers sitting with Zach in the middle of a very small, very empty apartment decorated in orange crates, cinderblocks and plywood. They are both dejected; the money has run out, and unless they find a sponsor, all their work will be for nothing. Checkbooks clamp tight as soon as the philanthropists smell a note of desperation in a cause. “Looks like we’re as extinct as the animals we’re trying to save,” says Zach.

Unexpectedly Alex Pierce appears at her apartment door. He looks much harder, older—but still the man Cassie remembers. “I can’t let all of Helen’s work just die because of my grief. I need you back, both of you. We have to continue the Library of Earth project. It’s got to be done.”

He has purchased a giant chunk of Alaskan wilderness and entered into a business partnership with Gregor Galaev to create a “Resurrection Preserve,” far from protesters and prying eyes. Galaev has also purchased an estate of his own (Zach thinks the two men are fashioning themselves as feudal lords in Alaska).

Cassie sees that Alex is no longer so cocky and aloof, no longer laughing at stupidity in the world. Before, he and his wife had paid far too little heed to the violence inherent in the Evo cause; they underestimated the lengths to which the protesters would go. Full of hubris, they did whatever they wanted to do, ignoring the warnings of others. But Alex will never make such a mistake again.

So Cassie agrees, knowing that Helyx Corp can fund all of the expeditions she had hoped for—like this one in Ecuador. Zach comes along so he can be with her, but he is immature, considering it an adventure or a game.

After bagging the Andean condor specimen, Cassie says she is tired of running from her true obligations. Their relationship has cooled, and Zach had hoped that the Ecuador trip would rekindle Cassie’s feelings for him, but the opposite has happened. She tells him they are through, that she is accepting a position in Alaska to help Alex with the work in the Preserve. Zach has always known Cassie’s unspoken attraction for Alex and is jealous. Rather than leaving her for good, though, Zach also accepts a job at the Preserve, where he can still be close to her. He also has ideas of how he can work the system.…

O O O

Alex, haunted by the setbacks he has suffered, stands in an observation room in the Alaskan Preserve. Pickup surveillance screens track the animals around the sonic fence line. On one screen, a herd of mammoths munches on marshy growth; on another, a full-grown sabretooth cat sprawls in the sun on a flat rock. Alex has been called a modern-day Noah, but he isn’t doing his work to impress anybody, just to honor Helen’s memory.

His business partner Gregor Galaev has helped him to create this wondrous place. The only apparent failure so far has been the reintroduction of dire wolves: Once a most successful species, packs of ferocious dire wolves have not fared well in Alaska. Physically stronger and with more powerful teeth and jaws than modern wolves, dire wolves could bring down large animals such as bison and North American camels. Alex has already ushered the hybrids through several generations until he turned the dire wolves loose within the Preserve wilderness. Most of them apparently died, though. For some species, he decides, extinction is not reversible after all.

Alex can’t allow himself any doubts about the resurrection project, because that would mean Helen may have died for nothing. In his heart, though, he realizes that if they had just moved a little slower, been more attentive to the raw nerves they were jabbing, then the tragedy might not have happened.

At first, Alex had tried to bring the Evos to justice, but though many were arrested and convicted, Kinsman—the obvious ringleader—managed to walk. Witnesses disappeared, evidence went missing, convenient “technicalities” were found during trials. Incomprehensibly to Alex, media coverage was
sympathetic
to the protesters; there seems to be a deep, ingrained resistance to bringing back extinct animals. But Alex still passionately believes he is doing a
good
thing.

Kinsman himself continues to cause trouble by rallying like-minded Luddites in Washington, DC. Hearings are coming up. Kinsman will push the Evo cause. Alex plans to be there, too, unannounced—he wants to state his own case, and look Kinsman in the eye as he does it.

O O O

Geoffrey Kinsman is dressed as an American tourist in Japan, waiting in line to see the successful and popular dwarf mammoth project. The Japanese team (Alex’s rivals in Part I) has achieved their goal of bringing back the extinct species of “mini-mammoths” that died out only a few thousands of years ago.

As Kinsman stands among the excited members of the crowd, he intensely searches for any evidence of diseases. Angry, he sees a definite threat here. He is still scarred and hardened from the deadly Evo raid on the Montana Ranch, but what had appeared to be a total victory now seems to amount to nothing. Alex Pierce continues his research, only farther away in the Alaskan wilderness. But at least Alex keeps his work in extreme isolation—this Japanese team, on the other hand, treats their mammoth abominations like circus elephants, providing them to zoos around the world, letting the public get very close. Too close.

He is concerned that these animals have been restored complete with the genetic flaws or retroviruses that led to their extinctions in the first place. In addition, Kinsman resents the very concept that someone would go to all the work to resurrect an extinct species, just to keep them in zoos. The dwarf mammoth he sees does not look particularly healthy, and the Japanese are very cagy about revealing their survival and success rates. He wants to discover the truth, but has no way of compelling the Japanese researchers to share their statistics. If he had the right evidence or samples, he has powerful, like-minded friends who could see that the Resurrection Preserve is shut down in Alaska.

Kinsman is driven to find proof that he has been correct in his objections all along, and that means more than just scientific acceptability. If he can show that he was right all along, then he can justify his unintentional killing of Helen Pierce when the Montana assault got out of hand. He tries to gather incontrovertible proof that the formerly extinct mammoths do indeed pose a threat to humanity. Then he might be viewed as a savior, not a paranoid crackpot. He thinks of how many terrible retroviruses could be lurking in prehistoric DNA, plagues extinct for thousands of years, and now brought back through the meddling of man.

Kinsman is horrified to see children riding on the backs of mini-mammoths in a carnival at the Tokyo zoo. What if there is a disease endangering anyone exposed to it? He can’t wait to face the Senate committee, which is a perfect platform to raise the fears of the public.

O O O

An unmarked cargo plane lands at night on an isolated airstrip in distant Samarkand. The plane is met by the vehicles, guards, and escorts of a powerful clan leader, Uruk Bey. Bey is dressed in colorful garb, heavy jewels, dueling daggers as well as a small pistol. His black eyes, though, seem the most dangerous part of him.

The aircraft hatch opens and Gregor Galaev emerges, impeccably dressed, looking completely fresh even after the long flight. Gregor greets the rugged clan leader as they walk around the cargo plane. Bey looks very eager, his black eyes hungry. Gregor and Bey are both avid big-game hunters and they have bagged several prize specimens together.

Inside the cargo hold, Gregor unveils a large reinforced cage that contains a breeding pair of dire wolves, powerful and muscular wolf-precursors from the Pleistocene Era. The black-furred predators look fierce, stockier than modern wolves, with golden eyes. They snarl and try to bite the cages; the bars already show silvery marks where their fangs have worked on the metal during the long flight. Uruk Bey is impressed. He laughs heartily. The dire wolves will be wonderful guardians, running wild around his walled citadel. In a few years, after several litters, he might even have enough to choose one for a very special hunt. Uruk Bey looks as wolfish as the predators in the cage.

Gregor has smuggled the beasts out of the Resurrection Preserve. He has tightened his ties with the loner Alex in a mutually beneficial relationship. Many of the artificially bred dire wolves have died out in the wild, and the species has not been as fecund as expected in their new environment. Even Alex, with his careful tallies of species and reintroduction patterns, won’t notice these two missing. Gregor feels no compunction against slipping a few of the animals out for discerning collectors and fellow hunters, such as Uruk Bey. After all, the Preserve is Gregor’s investment, too.

Uruk Bey takes his dire wolves, motioning for his guards to drive a flatbed cargo truck up to the plane, surrounded by military jeeps. Gregor stands by, watching as handlers drive the old truck, which toils along an unpaved road into the Samarkand hills, where the clan leader lives in his citadel. The black-market money Gregor just received for these two animals alone would have bought him an entire city in the old Soviet Union.…

O O O

After returning from Ecuador with the condor sample, Cassie and Zach get to work on the preserve. Alex congratulates both of them on a job well done. Cassie is obviously attracted to him, and Zach is sour, knowing she has slipped through his fingers, but they are not young Turk students any more. He wants to keep world hopping, happy-go-lucky and feeling superior because he is doing Meaningful Work. To him, the Library of Earth project is a feather in his cap, a trophy, but it is truly the dream that drives Cassie’s life.

No longer just a spunky ranch hand with an intuitive feel for animals, she is now an expert in her field. Cassie is in charge of the Library of Earth database, a high-tech storage area for genetic samples. Already, viable cells have been preserved from thousands of endangered species, but even with all the resources of Helyx, they can never keep pace with the rate at which humans are wiping out species worldwide. “So many extinctions every year!”

O O O

Alex is called to Washington, DC to defend his work, though after the Montana debacle and the obviously corrupt investigation of the Evos, he doesn’t trust the altruism of the government. Alex meets with his lawyer Randall Levay, planning their strategy. The two walk through the DC zoo, talking about the impending hearings. Their conversation takes place in front of a new exhibit full of giant pandas, which had once been on the verge of extinction. Thanks to cloning technology similar to what the Helyx Corp is using, the slow-to-reproduce pandas have been brought back to viable numbers again. Helen would have been so pleased to see this.…

Kinsman, dressed in fine clothes and looking professional and businesslike, gives his testimony to a Senate committee investigating genetic research. He is confident in his speech, very reasonable; he has given such “sermons” many times before. He speaks to a panel chaired by Sylvia Chesney, an ambitious, attractive Senator from Alaska. Kinsman talks about the dangers of unknown retroviruses “hidden by the labors of time” being reintroduced to the environment, “thanks to the bull-in-a-china-shop work of Helyx and others.”

He makes a passionate case that numerous diseases could be buried within the DNA of certain species, retroviruses to which no human being has any immunity. “By squeezing mammoths out of a test tube, Helyx Corp will also bring back everything else buried in their very genes, horrible diseases that could well jump species, just like AIDS jumped from monkeys to humans, like Ebola came out of a cave in Africa. Can we afford to take that risk?”

Helyx’s crack lawyer Randall LeVay vehemently objects to this alarmist scenario, pointing out that “Mr. Clean Genes” has no basis whatsoever for his paranoid imaginings. Despite Kinsman’s repeated investigations and studies, he has yet to find any evidence of unusual diseases.

Then, like Bill Gates testifying at the Microsoft trial, Alex arrives unannounced to a media-circus in front of Senator Chesney’s committee. Nobody is more surprised to see him there in person than the Senator herself. Glaring daggers at Kinsman, he responds to the supposed dangers of “rescuing innocent species from the abyss of extinction. Human greed and short-sightedness have wiped numerous species from the face of the Earth. Now, human ingenuity can rectify those wrongs.”

Alex is a charismatic defender. He brings his own genetic samples taken from woolly mammoths at his Resurrection Preserve and insists they’re clean. Cassie Worth has run extensive analyses of his mammoths and has found no evidence of any retrovirus.