Part 18 (1/2)

Porus had the first military elephants Alexander had ever seen. He studied the situation, then sent his men out at night to fire thousands of arrows into extremely sensitive trunks and underbellies.

The elephants went mad with pain and began killing the nearest men they could find, which happened to be their keepers and handlers. After his great victory, Alexander slaughtered the surviving elephants so that he would never have to face them in battle.

217 b.c.

The first clash between the two species of elephants. Ptolemy IV took his African elephants against Antiochus the Great's Indian elephants.

The elephants on Neptune weren't sure who won the war, but they knew who lost. Not a single elephant on either side survived.

Later that same 217 b.c.

While Ptolemy was battling in Syria, Hannibal took thirty-seven elephants over the Alps to fight the Romans. Fourteen of them froze to death, but the rest lived just long enough to absorb the enemy's spear thrusts while Hannibal was winning the Battle of Cannae.

”We have important things to talk about,” said the men. ”For example, Neptune's atmosphere is singularly lacking in oxygen. How do you breathe?”

”Through our noses,” said the elephants.

”That was a serious question,” said the men, fingering their weapons ominously.

”We are incapable of being anythingbut serious,” explained the elephants. ”Humor requires that someone be the b.u.t.t of the joke, and we find that too cruel to contemplate.”

”All right,” said the men, who were vaguely dissatisfied with the answer, perhaps because they didn't understand it. ”Let's try another question. What is the mechanism by which we are communicating? You don't wear radio transmitters, and because of our helmets we can't hear any sounds that aren't on our radio bands.”

”We communicate through a psychic bond,” explained the elephants.

”That's not very scientific,” said the men disapprovingly. ”Are you sure you don't mean a telepathic bond?”

”No, though it comes to the same thing in the end,” answered the elephants. ”We know that we sound like we're speaking English to you, except for the man on the left who thinks we're speaking Hebrew.”

”And what do we sound like to you?” demanded the men.”You sound exactly as if you're making gentle rumbling sounds in your stomachs and your bowels.”

”That's fascinating,” said the men, who privately thought it was a lot more disgusting than fascinating.

”Do you know what'sreally fascinating?” responded the elephants. ”The fact that you've got a Jew with you.” They saw that the men didn't comprehend, so they continued: ”We always felt we were in a race with the Jews to see which of us would be exterminated first. We used to call ourselves the Jews of the animal kingdom.” They turned and faced the Jewish s.p.a.ceman. ”Did the Jews think of themselves as the elephants of the human kingdom?”

”Not until you just mentioned it,” said the Jewish s.p.a.ceman, who suddenly found himself agreeing with them.

42 b.c.

The Romans gathered their Jewish prisoners in the arena at Alexandria, then turned fear-crazed elephants loose on them. The spectators began jumping up and down and screaming for blood-and, being contrarians, the elephants attacked the spectators instead of the Jews, proving once and for all that you can't trust a pachyderm.

(When the dust had cleared, the Jews felt the events of the day had reaffirmed their claim to be G.o.d's chosen people. They weren't the Romans' chosen people, though. After the soldiers killed the elephants, they put all the Jews to the sword, too.) *.

”It's not his fault he's a Jew any more than it's your fault that you're elephants,” said the rest of the men.

”We don't hold it against either of you.”

”We find that difficult to believe,” said the elephants.

”You do?” said the men. ”Then consider this: the Indians- that's the good Indians, the ones from India, not the bad Indians from America-wors.h.i.+pped Ganesh, an elephant-headed G.o.d.”

”We didn't know that,” admitted the elephants, who were more impressed than they let on. ”Do the Indians still wors.h.i.+p Ganesh?”

”Well, we're sure they would if we hadn't killed them all while we were defending the Raj,” said the men.

”Elephants were no longer in the military by then,” they added. ”That's something to be grateful for.”

Their very last battle came when Tamerlane the Great went to war against Sultan Mahmoud.

Tamerlane won by tying branches to buffaloes' horns, setting fire to them, and then stampeding the buffalo herd into Mahmoud's elephants, which effectively ended the elephant as a war machine, buffalo being much less expensive to acquire and feed.

All the remaining domesticated elephants were then trained for elephant fighting, which was exactly like c.o.c.k-fighting, only on a larger scale. Much larger. It became a wildly popular sport for thirty or forty years until they ran out of partic.i.p.ants.*

”Not only did we wors.h.i.+p you,” continued the men, ”but we actually named a country after you-the Ivory Coast.That should prove our good intentions.”

”You didn't name it afterus ,” said the elephants. ”You named it after the parts of our bodies that you kept killing us for.”

”You're being too critical,” said the men. ”We could have named it after some local politician with no vowels in his name.”

”Speaking of the Ivory Coast,” said the elephants, ”did you know that the first alien visitors to Earth landed there in 1883?”

”What did they look like?”

”They had ivory exoskeletons,” answered the elephants. ”They took one look at the carnage and left.”

”Are you sure you're not making this all up?” asked the men.

”Why would we lie to you at this late date?”

”Maybe it's your nature,” suggested the men.

”Oh, no,” said the elephants. ”Our nature is that we always tell the truth. Our tragedy is that we always remember it.”

The men decided that it was time to break for dinner, answer calls of nature, and check in with Mission Control to report what they'd found. They all walked back to the s.h.i.+p, except for one man, who lingered behind.

All of the elephants left too, except for one lone bull. ”I intuit that you have a question to ask,” he said.

”Yes,” replied the man. ”You have such an acute sense of smell, how did anyone ever sneak up on you during the hunt?”

”The greatest elephant hunters were the Wanderobo of Kenya and Uganda. They would rub our dung all over their bodies to hide their own scent, and would then silently approach us.”