But it was true, and everyone agreed on it: Fuzzy the baby mammoth was the reason all this was here, and without him it might very well all dry up and blow away. Everybody had a great time at all the surrounding attractions with all their bells and whistles, they enjoyed the first act of the circus performances, which featured the very cream of lion tamers, clowns, jugglers, and daring aerialists, they got a big kick out of the opening of the second act with its giant overhead hi-def screens and its elephants and Big Mama... but what most people came here to see was the world's darling, Little Fuzzy. "Most people" meaning those who could afford it. Fuzzy's show was put on twice a day, except Mondays—separate ticket required, and that ticket was three times what you paid to get in, and that wasn't cheap—so not everyone who visited the park on a given day would get in to the show.
The operators went to a two-tiered system within a week of the opening day: reservations and a much higher price for the skyboxes and front rows, and a lottery of park attendees, who won the privilege of paying for the open seats. An hour before showtime scalping was strictly dog-eat-dog, with crying children and parents sometimes coming to blows.
Twelve shows a week, and practically everyone in the world wanted to get in, even the hard-core environmentalists who opposed the park, the circus, and everything it stood for. Everyone, that is, except for Susan Morgan, who had to be at every one of them.
Twelve shows a week.
She had been doing it for one year, and it was starting to look like a life sentence.
SUSAN left the elephant/mammoth compound at eleven P.M., one hour after the end of the final show of the night. She climbed up into the cab of her super-heavy-duty Dodge pickup, emblazoned on the door with a magnetic smiling baby mammoth logo of Fuzzyland. The beast burst into life with a rumble of its huge 6.2-liter diesel engine.
Now she traveled the route visitors took from the entrance and parking lots, but in reverse, and by pathways visitors never saw. Off to her left she could sometimes glimpse the maglev rail perched on its big concrete pylons, but usually it was concealed behind rows of trees or high fences. Cenozoic Park was, for the most part, a world of illusion—that's what the trees and fences were designed to hide, because the magic went out of the trick if you knew exactly how it was done. Back here, there was no illusion, just utilitarian blacktop and concrete and nondescript cheap sheet-metal buildings that housed the workshops and electrical boards that kept the machines running, pumps that kept plants and animals and visitors watered, and storage warehouses that fed the insatiable appetites of the thousands who entered every day, from cotton candy mix to tons of frozen hamburger patties to bottles of champagne to Cenozoic Park bumper stickers and T-shirts to Little Fuzzy refrigerator magnets and rubber keychains.
"Hey, you, how about moving that piece of crap?"
"Friggin' air conditioner broke down again," Fred called out. He stopped the mechanical monster, made it turn and lower its head until it was staring right through her windshield, and then it opened its mouth and roared. There was a little bear in it, and some elephant trumpeting, and maybe even a hint of Star Wars Wookiee, something whipped up in the sound labs. It was sure loud enough.
After the Indricothere had slouched across the road and the crossing alarm shut down, Susan drove past the phony redwoods and skirted the Ice Dome, to the employees' gate. The guard waved her through. A short drive through real forest and she passed by the Animal Vigil one hundred yards from the arch of the main park entrance, the closest they could get without being on private property. They had been there round the clock from opening day. This late there were only half a dozen of the hardest of the hard core, but on weekends there were often a hundred or more. They were not allowed to pitch tents—twice temporary encampments had been torn down by park security. They were forbidden to build fires and on a rainy Oregon day they could be a lugubrious sight, but their morale apparently remained high and even tonight they were slowly marching up and down on the dirt path they had beaten down, chanting slogans and carrying signs:
CIRCUS = CRUELTY
MEAT IS MURDER
ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS
FREE WOOLLY!
Not even the mighty Howard Christian could prevent them from doing that, though he had tried, and they had vowed to stay there until the place closed down. Since Fuzzyland had been pronounced the most successful entertainment extravaganza since Disney World, Susan figured they had a long wait in store. Or maybe not....
The sight of her truck with its Fuzzyland logo on the side set them off, shaking fists and shouting slogans. She sped down the road and through the blossoming commercial strip of Zigzag, then another mile down to a side road and two miles into the hills. Around a bend, up a steep grade, and there it was. Her hideaway.
She pulled up the short gravel driveway and parked next to her huge fifth-wheel trailer. It was what was called a "garage" model. She could drive up a ramp at the back in her dune buggy. Andrea had suggested she should have something to do, some activity or hobby, on her Mondays off. She had chosen off-roading. Other than that, she didn't have much of a life. She got out and wearily mounted the twenty steps to the deck.
Her weariness went away instantly, though, when she saw the man sitting with his back against the glass wall next to her front door, right there under the porch light.
His clothes were well used, just short of ragged, jeans and high-top sneakers, a blue down vest, and a flannel lumberjack shirt. There was a small backpack sitting beside him, with canteen and bedroll. His hair was long, black streaked with gray, and fell forward around his face. He seemed to be asleep.
He might be one of those animal rights protesters, he had the look. Should she call the sheriff? And wait half an hour or more for them to get here?
The hell with it.
"Hey, get up and get out of here," she said.
Matt Wright looked up and smiled uncertainly.
"Can we talk for a moment first?" he asked.
She just stood there for a moment, then slowly walked the three steps between them and slapped his face as hard as she could.
21
HOWARD Christian reached into his pocket and took out a peanut, cupped it in his palm, and held it through the heavy horizontal steel I-beams toward the most famous animal that had ever lived, the most beloved creature that ever walked on four legs—or maybe even on two, for that matter.
Little Fuzzy. His Little Fuzzy.
In the darkness of the far side of the enclosure a darker shadow stirred, as Howard had known it would. This was supposed to be Fuzzy's sleep time, though neither elephants nor mammoths needed a lot of sleep, sometimes having to feed as much as twenty hours per day to support their enormous bulk on the low-energy foods they consumed—and as much as sixty percent of that went right through their sixty-foot guts undigested to emerge as a cornucopia for dung beetles.
Fuzzy slept lightly and his hearing or sense of smell was uncanny.
He always knew when Howard had entered the building, and he always smelled the peanuts.
Now he shambled over to the mammoth-proof fence and the soft, moist tip of his trunk probed Howard's hand with infinite delicacy. There was a snuffling sound and the peanut was sucked up, the nostrils pinched, and the trunk snaked up above the pendulous lower lip and Fuzzy blew the tiny morsel into his mouth and crunched it. Immediately his trunk was held out for more.