The Treasure of Lei Fong Wu

Chapter Fifteen

Wash just stared at the beast. He’d been doing that for ten minutes, ever since he returned from paying their docking fees and buying a temporary merchant permit from the port master.

It was huge. Four tons of furry prehistoric pachyderm, its ancestors raised from extinction from the arctic steppes of Earth-That-Was in a feat of Twenty-First Century gee-whiz genetics. A lot of glacially frozen animals had been brought back, before the Exodus, as scientific curiosities or playthings for the rich. When humans abandoned Earth-That-Was they had been included in the gene bank with everything else – but this one was notable.

Tusks of pure ivory, the size of a hickory tree. A thick, wooly matte of hair that stank the way no other animal stank. Big, soulful eyes, that were nonetheless tiny in its – his, he suddenly noted as the beast turned around – face. Feet the size of fuel cells. Ears like shaggy sails. A trunk like . . . a convenient simile eluded him. There was nothing else like that in the ‘verse.

He had seen a giant sloth, once, at the Boros Metropolitan Zoological Gardens, from a hundred feet and an electric barrier away, but this was the first time that he had ever seen a mastodon. Or smelled one.

Zoe studied him as he stared, intrigued. She had rarely seen Wash pay this much attention to anything that wasn’t flight- , dinosaur- , or sex-related.

“Johnny says they raise them here,” she said, watching him with interest. “He schooled himself in them growin’ up, seein’ as how they were so important to the old country. Wuhan’s greatest export. Biggest source o’ natural ivory in the ‘verse. Whole herds of them, wrangled like sheep with horses and hovercraft out on the plains to the west. Bunch o’ Mongols and Manchus and Tibetans herd ‘em. Use ‘em as transport, construction equipment, meat, hide, everythin’. Very big in their culture. Even got a big temple to Ganesh in town.”

“That’s . . .” Wash said, at a loss for words.

The mas