Foundations Fear

Page 45

  That fact had to matter greatly in any psychohistory. The pans, then, were essential to finding the ancient keys to the human psyche.

  Dors said, “I hope immersion isn’t, well, so hot and sticky. ”

  “Remember, you’ll see the world through different eyes. ”

  “Just so I can come back whenever I want and have a nice hot bath. ”

  “Compartments?” Dors shied back. “They look more like caskets. ”

  “They have to be snug, madam. ”

  ExSpec Vaddo smiled amiably—which, Hari

  sensed, probably meant he wasn’t feeling amiable at all. Their conversation had been friendly, the staff here was respectful of the noted Dr. Seldon, but after all, basically he and Dors were just more tourists. Paying for a bit of primitive fun, all couched in proper scholarly terms, but—tourists.

  “You’re kept in fixed status, all body systems running slow but normal,” the ExSpec said, popping out the padded networks for their inspection. He ran through the controls, emergency proced­ ures, safeguards.

  “Looks comfortable enough,” Dors observed grudgingly.

  “Come on,” Hari chided. “You promised we would do it. ”

  “You’ll be meshed into our systems at all times,” Vaddo said.

  “Even your data library?” Hari asked.

  “Sure thing. ”

  The team of ExSpecs booted them into the stasis compartments with deft, sure efficiency. Tabs, pressers, magnetic pickups were plated onto his skull to pick up thoughts directly. The very latest tech.

  “Ready? Feeling good?” Vaddo asked with his professional smile.

  Hari was not feeling good (as opposed to feeling well), and he realized part of it was this ExSpec. He had always distrusted bland, assured people. Both Vaddo and the security chief, Yakani, seemed to be unremarkable Greys. But Dors’ wariness had rubbed off. Something about them bothered him, but he could not say why.

  Oh, well, Dors was probably right. He needed a vacation. What better way to get out of yourself?

  “Good, yes. Ready, yes. ”

  The suspension tech was ancient and reliable. It suppressed neuromuscular responses, so the customer lay dormant, only his mind engaged with the pan.

  Magnetic webs capped over his cerebrum. Through electromag­ netic inductance they interwove into layers of the brain. They routed signals along tiny thread-paths, suppressing many brain functions and blocking physiological processes.

  All this, so that the massively parallel circuitry of the brain could be inductively linked out, thought by thought. Then it was trans­ mitted to chips embedded in the pan subject. Immersion.

  The technology had ramified throughout the Empire, quite fam­ ously. The ability to distantly manage minds had myriad uses. The suspension tech, however, found its own odd applications.

  On some worlds, and in certain Trantorian classes, women were wedded, then suspended for all but a few hours of the day. Their wealthy husbands awoke them from freeze-frame states only for social and sexual purposes. Over a half century, the wives experi­ enced a heady whirlwind of places, friends, parties, vacations, passionate hours—but their total accumulated time was only a few years. Their husbands died in what seemed to the wives like short order, indeed, leaving a wealthy widow of perhaps thirty. Such women were highly sought, and not only for their money. They were uniquely sophisticated, seasoned by a long “marriage. ” Often these widows returned the favor, wedding husbands whom they revived for similar uses.

  All this Hari had taken in with the sophisticated veneer he had cultivated on Trantor. So he thought his immersion would be comfortable, interesting, the stuff of stim-party talk.

  He had thought that he would in some sense visit another, sim­ pler, mind.

  He did not expect to be swallowed whole.

  4.

  A good day. Plenty of fat grubs to eat in a big moist log. Dig them out with my nails, fresh tangy sharp crunchy.

  Biggest, he shoves me aside. Scoops out plenty rich grubs. Grunts. Glowers.

  My belly rumbles. I back off and eye Biggest. He’s got pinched-up face so I know not to fool with him.

  I walk away, I squat down. Get some picking from a fem. She finds some-fleas, cracks them in her teeth.

  Biggest rolls the log around some to knock a few grubs loose, finishes up. He’s strong. Fems watch him. Over by the trees a bunch of fems chatter, suck their teeth. Everybody’s sleepy now in early afternoon, lying in the shade. Biggest, though, he waves at me and Hunker and off we go.

  Patrol. Strut tall, step out proud. I like it fine. Better than humping, even.

  Down past the creek and along to where the hoof smells are. That’s the shallow spot. We cross and go into the trees sniff-sniffing and there are two Strangers.

  They don’t see us yet. We move smooth, quiet. Biggest picks up a branch and we do, too. Hunker is sniffing to see who these Strangers are and he points off to the hill. Just like I thought, they’re Hillies. The worst. Smell bad.

  Hillies come onto our turf. Make trouble. We make it back.

  We spread out. Biggest, he grunts and they hear him. I’m already moving, branch held up. I can run pretty far without going all-fours. The Strangers cry out, big-eyed. We go fast and then we’re on them.

  They have no branches. We hit them and kick and they grab at us. They are tall and quick. Biggest slams one to the ground. I hit that one so Biggest knows real well I’m with him. Hammer hard, I do. Then I go quick to help Hunker.

  His Stranger has taken his branch away. I club the Stranger. He sprawls. I whack him good and Hunker jumps on him and it is wonderful.

  The Stranger tries to get up and I kick him solid. Hunker grabs back his branch and hits again and again with me helping hard.

  Biggest, his Stranger gets up and starts to run. Biggest whacks his ass with the branch, roaring and laughing.

  Me, I got my skill. Special. I pick up rocks. I’m the best thrower, better than Biggest even.

  Rocks are for Strangers. My buddies, them I’ll scrap with, but never use rocks. Strangers, though, they deserve to get rocks in the face. I love to bust a Stranger that way.

  I throw one clean and smooth. Catch the Stranger on the leg. He stumbles. I smack him good with a sharp-edged rock in the back.

  He runs fast then. I can see he’s bleeding. Big red drops in the dust.

  Biggest laughs and slaps me and I know I’m in good with him.

  Hunker is clubbing his Stranger. Biggest takes my club and joins in. The blood all over the Stranger sings warm in my nose and I jump up and down on him. We keep at it like that a long time. Not worried about the other Stranger coming back. Strangers are brave sometimes, but they know when they have lost.

  The Stranger stops moving. I give him one more kick.

  No reaction. Dead maybe.

  We scream and dance and holler out our joy.

  5.

  Hari shook his head to clear it. That helped a little.

  “You were that big one?” Dors asked. “I was the female, over by

  the trees. ”

  “Sorry, I couldn’t tell. ”

  “It was…different, wasn’t it?”

  He laughed dryly. “Murder usually is. ”

  “When you went off with the, well, leader—”

  “My pan thinks of him as ‘Biggest. ’ We killed another pan. ”

  They were in the plush reception room of the immersion facility. Hari stood and felt the world tilt a little and then right itself. “I think I’ll stick to historical research for a while. ”

  Dors smiled sheepishly. “I…I rather liked it. ”

  He thought a moment, blinked. “So did I,” he said, surprising himself.

  “Not the murder—”

  “No, of course not. But…the feel. ”

  She grinned.
“Can’t get that on Trantor, Professor. ”

  He spent two days coasting through cool lattices of data in the formidable station library. It was well equipped and allowed inter­ faces with several senses. He patrolled through cool digital labyrinths.

  Some data was encrusted with age, quite literally. In the vector spaces portrayed on huge screens, the research data of millennia ago were covered with thick, bulky protocols and scabs of security precautions. All were easily broken or averted, of course, by present methods. But the chunky abstracts, reports, summaries, and crudely processed statistics still resisted easy interpretation. Occasionally some facets of pan behavior were carefully hidden away in appen­ dices and sidebar notes, as though the biologists in the lonely out­ post were embarrassed by it. Some was embarrassing: mating be­ havior, especially. How could he use this?

  He navigated through the 3D maze and cobbled together his ideas. Could he follow a strategy of analogy?

  Pans shared nearly all their genes with humans, so pan dynamics should be a simpler version of human dynamics. Could he then analyze pan troop interactions as a reduced case of psychohistory?

  Security Chief Yakani opened confidential files which implied that pans had been genetically modified about ten thousand years before. To what end Hari could not tell. There were other altered creatures, “raboons” particularly. Yakani took such an interest in his work that he became suspicious she was keeping an eye on him for the Potentate.

  At sunset of the second day he sat with Dors watching bloodred shafts spike through orange-tinged clouds. This world was gaudy beyond good taste, and he liked it. The food was tangy, too. His stomach rumbled, anticipating dinner.

  He remarked to Dors, “It’s tempting, using pans to build a sort of toy model of psychohistory. ”

  “But you have doubts. ”

  “They’re like us but they have, well, uh…”

  “Base, animalistic ways?” She smirked, then kissed him. “My prudish Hari. ”

  “We have our share of beastly behaviors, I know. But we’re a lot smarter, too. ”

  Her eyelids dipped in a manner he knew by now suggested polite doubt. “They live intensely, you’ll have to give them that. ”

  “Maybe we’re smarter than we need to be anyway?”

  “What?” This surprised her.

  “I’ve been reading up on evolution. Not a front rank field any­ more; everybody thinks we understand it. ”

  “And in a galaxy filled with humans and little else, there isn’t much fresh material. ”

  He had not thought of it that way before, but she was right. Biology was a backwater science. All the academic sophisticates were pursuing something called “integrative sociometrics. ”

  He went on, laying out his thoughts. Plainly, the human brain was an evolutionary overshoot. Brains were far more capable than a competent hunter-gatherer needed. To get the better of animals, it would have been enough to master fire and simple stone tools. Such talents alone would have made people the lords of creation, removing selection pressure to change. Instead, all evidence from the brain itself said that change accelerated. The human cerebral cortex added mass, stacking new circuitry atop older wiring. That mass spread over the lesser areas like a thick new skin. So said the ancient studies, their data from museums long lost.

  “From this came musicians and engineers, saints and savants,” he finished with a flourish. One of Dors’ best points was her will­ ingness to sit still while he waxed professorily longwinded—even on vacation.

  “And the pans, you think, are from before that time? On ancient Earth?”

  “They must be. And all this evolutionary selection happened in just a few million years. ”

  Dors nodded. “Look at it from the woman’s point of view. It happened, despite putting mothers in desperate danger in child­ birth. ”

  “Uh, how?”

  “From those huge baby heads. They’re hard to get out. We wo­ men are still paying the price for your brains—and for ours. ”

  He chuckled. She always had a special spin on a subject that made him see it fresh. “Then why was it selected for, back then?”

  Dors smiled enigmatically. “Maybe men and women alike found intelligence sexy in each other. ”

  “Really?”

  Her sly smile. “How about us?”

  “Have you ever watched very many 3D stars? They don’t feature brains, my dear. ”

  “Remember the animals we saw in the Imperial Zoo? It could be that for early humans, brains were like peacock tails, or moose horns: display items to attract the females. Runaway sexual selection. ”