Foundations Fear

Page 48

  “Look,” he said to Dors, “my point is that they’re close enough to us to make a psychohistory model work. ”

  “To make anybody believe that, you’ll have to show that they’re intelligent enough to have intricate interactions. ”

  “What about their foraging, their hunting?” he persisted.

  “Vaddo says they couldn’t even be trained to do work around this Excursion Station. ”

  “I’ll show you what I mean. Let’s master their methods together. ”

  “What method?”

  “The basic one. Getting enough to eat. ”

  She bit into a steak of a meaty local grazer, suitably processed and “fat-flensed for the fastidious urban palate,” as the brochure had it. Chewing with unusual ferocity, she eyed him. “You’re on. Anything a pan can do, I can do better. ”

  Dors waved at him from within Sheelah. Let the contest begin.

  The troop was foraging. He let Ipan meander and did not try to harness the emotional ripples that lapped across the pan mind. He had gotten better at it, but at a sudden smell or sound he could lose his grip. And guiding the blunt pan mind through anything complicated was still like moving a puppet with rubber strings.

  Sheelah/Dors waved and signed to him: This way.

  They had worked out a code of a few hundred words, using finger and facial gestures, and their pans seemed to go along with these fairly well. Pans had a rough language, mixing grunts and shrugs and finger displays. These conveyed immediate meanings, but not in the usual sense of sentences. Mostly they just set up associations.

  Tree, fruit, go, Dors sent. They ambled their pans over to a clump of promising spindly trunks, but the bark was too slick to climb.

  The rest of the troop had not even bothered. They have forest smarts we lack, Hari thought ruefully.

  What there? he signed to Sheelah/Dors.

  Pans ambled up to mounds, gave them the once-over, and reached out to brush aside some mud, revealing a tiny tunnel. Termites, Dors signed.

  Hari analyzed the situation as pans drifted in. Nobody seemed in much of a hurry. Sheelah winked at him and waddled over to a distant mound.

  Apparently termites worked outside at night, then blocked the entrances at dawn. Hari let his pan shuffle over to a large tan mound, but he was riding it so well now that the pan’s responses were weak. Hari/Ipan looked for cracks, knobs, slight hollows—and when he brushed away some mud, found nothing. Other pans readily unmasked tunnels. Had they memorized the hundred or more tunnels in each mound?

  He finally uncovered one. Ipan was no help. Hari could control, but that blocked up the wellsprings of deep knowledge within the pan.

  The pans deftly tore off twigs or grass stalks near their mounds. Hari carefully followed their lead. His twigs and grass didn’t work. The first lot was too pliant, and when he tried to work them into a twisting tunnel, they col­ lapsed and buckled. He switched to stiffer ones, but those caught on the tunnel walls, or snapped off. From Ipan came little help. Hari had managed him a bit too well.

  He was getting embarrassed. Even the younger pans had no trouble picking just the right stems or sticks. Hari watched a pan nearby drop a stick that seemed to work. He then picked it up when the pan moved on. He felt welling up from Ipan a blunt anxiety, mixing frustration and hunger. He could taste the anticipation of luscious, juicy termites.

  He set to work, plucking the emotional strings of Ipan. This job went even worse. Vague thoughts drifted up from Ipan, but Hari was in control of the muscles now, and that was the bad part.

  He quickly found that the stick had to be stuck in about ten centimeters, turning his wrist to navigate it down the twisty channel. Then he had to gently vibrate it. Through Ipan he sensed that this was to attract termites to bite into the stick. At first he did it too long and when he drew the stick out it was half gone. Termites had bitten cleanly through it. So he had to search out another stick and that made Ipan’s stomach growl.

  The other pans were through termite-snacking while Hari was still fumbling for his first taste. The nuances irked him. He pulled the stick out too fast, not turning it enough to ease it past the tun-nel’s curves. Time and again he fetched forth the stick, only to find that he had scraped the luscious termites off on the walls. Their bites punctured his stick, until it was so shredded he had to get another. The termites were dining better than he.

  He finally caught the knack, a fluid slow twist of the wrist, gracefully extracting termites, clinging like bumps. Ipan licked them off eagerly. Hari liked the morsels, filtered through pan tastebuds.

  Not many, though. Others of the troop were watching his skimpy harvest, heads tilted in curiosity, and he felt humiliated.

  The hell with this, he thought.

  He made Ipan turn and walk into the woods. Ipan resisted, dragging his feet. Hari found a thick limb, snapped it off to carrying size, and went back to the mound.

  No more fooling with sticks. He whacked the mound solidly. Five more and he had punched a big hole. Escaping termites he scooped up by the delicious handful.

  So much for subtlety! he wanted to shout. He tried writing a note for her in the dust, but it was hard, forcing the letters out through his suddenly awkward hands. Pans could handle a stick to fetch forth grubs, but marking a surface was somehow not a ready talent. He gave up.

  Sheelah/Dors came into view, proudly carrying a reed swarming with white-bellied termites. These were the best, a pan gourmet delicacy. I better, she signed.

  He made Ipan shrug and signed, I got more.

  So it was a draw.

  Later Dors reported to him that among the troop he was known now as Big Stick. The name pleased him immensely.

  11.

  At dinner he felt elated, exhausted, and not in the mood for conversation. Being a pan seemed to suppress his speech centers. It took some effort to ask ExSpec Vaddo about immersion technology. Usually he accepted the routine techno-miracles, but understanding pans meant understanding how he experienced them.

  “The immersion hardware puts you in the middle of a pan’s an­ terior cingulate gyrus,” Vaddo said over dessert. “Just ‘gyrus’ for short. That’s the brain’s main cortical region for mediating emotions and expressing them through action. ”

  “The brain?” Dors asked. “What about ours?”

  Vaddo shrugged. “Same general layout. Pans’ are smaller, without a big cerebrum. ”

  Hari leaned forward, ignoring his steaming cup of kaff. “This ‘gyrus,’ it doesn’t give direct motor control?”

  “No, we tried that. It disorients the pan so much, when you leave, it can’t get itself back together. ”

  “So we have to be more subtle,” Dors said.

  “We have to be. In pan males, the pilot light is always on in neurons that control action and aggression—”

  “That’s why they’re more violence-prone?” she asked.

  “We think so. It parallels structures in our own brains. ”

  “Really? Men’s neurons?” Dors looked doubtful.

  “Human males have higher activity levels in their temporal limbic systems, deeper down in the brain—evolutionarily older structures. ”

  “So why not put me into that level?” Hari asked.

  “We place the immersion chips into the gyrus area because we can reach it from the top, surgically. The temporal limbic is way far down, impossible to implant a chip. ”

  Dors frowned. “So pan males—”

  “Are harder to control. Professor Seldon here is running his pan from the backseat, so to speak. ”

  “Whereas Dors is running hers from a control center that, for female pans, is more central?” Hari peered into the distance. “I was handicapped!”

  Dors grinned. “You have to play the hand you’re dealt. ”

  “It’s not fair. ”

  “Big Stick, biology
is destiny. ”

  The troop came upon rotting fruit. Fevered excitement ran through them.

  The smell was repugnant and enticing at the same time, and at first he did not understand why. The pans rushed to the overripe bulbs of blue and sickly green, popping open the skins, sucking out the juice.

  Tentatively, Hari tried one. The hit was immediate. A warm feeling of well-being kindled up in him. Of course—the fruity esters had converted into alcohol! The pans were quite deliberately setting about getting drunk.

  He “let” his pan follow suit. He hadn’t much choice in the matter.

  Ipan grunted and thrashed his arms whenever Hari tried to turn him away from the teardrop fruit. And after a while, Hari didn’t want to turn away, either. He gave himself up to a good, solid drunk. He had been worrying a lot lately, agitated in his pan, and…this was completely natural, wasn’t it?

  Then a pack of raboons appeared, and he lost control of Ipan.

  They come fast. Running two-legs, no sound. Their tails twitch, talking to each other.

  Five circle left. They cut off Esa.

  Biggest thunders at them. Hunker runs to nearest and it spikes him with its forepuncher.

  I throw rocks. Hit one. It yelps and scurries back. But others take its place. I throw again and they come and the dust and yowling are thick and the others of them have Esa. They cut her with their punch-claws. Kick her with sharp hooves.

  Three of them carry her off.

  Our fems run, afraid. We warriors stay.

  We fight them. Shrieking, throwing, biting when they get close. But we cannot reach Esa.

  Then they go. Fast, running on their two hoofed legs. Furling their tails in victory. Taunting us.

  We feel bad. Esa was old and we loved her.

  Fems come back, nervous. We groom ourselves and know that the two-legs are eating Esa somewhere.

  Biggest come by, try to pat me. I snarl.

  He Biggest! This thing he should have stopped.

  His eyes get big and he slap me. I slap back at him. He slam into me. We roll around in dust. Biting, yowling. Biggest strong, strong and pound my head on ground.

  Other warriors, they watch us, not join in.

  He beat me. I hurt. I go away.

  Biggest starts calming down the warriors. Fems come by and pay their respects to Biggest. Touch him, groom him, feel him the way he likes. He mounts three of them real quick. He feeling Biggest all right.

  Me, I lick myself. Sheelah come groom me. After a while I feel better. Forget about trouble.

  I not forget Biggest beat me though. In front of everybody. Now I hurt, Biggest get grooming.

  He let them come and take Esa. He Biggest, he should stop them.

  Some day I be all over him. On his back.

  Some day I be Bigger.

  12.

  “When did you bail out?” Dors asked.

  “After Biggest stopped pounding on me…uh, on Ipan. ”

  They were relaxing beside a swimming pool and the heady smells

  of the forest seemed to awaken in Hari the urge to be down there again, in the valleys of dust and blood. He trembled, took a deep breath. The fighting had been so involving he hadn’t wanted to leave, despite the pain. Immersion had a hypnotic quality.

  “I know how you feel,” she said. “It’s easy to totally identify with them. I left Sheelah when those raboons came close. Pretty scary. ”

  “Vaddo said they’re derived from Earth, too. Plenty of DNA overlap. But they show signs of extensive recent tinkering to make them predators. ”

  “Why would the ancients want those?”

  “Trying to figure out our origins?”

  To his surprise, she laughed. “Not everyone has your same in­ terests. ”

  “Why, then?”

  “How about using raboons as game, to hunt? Something a little challenging?”

  “Hunting? The Empire has always been too far from throwback primitivism to—” He had been about to launch into a little lecture on how far humanity had come when he realized that he didn’t believe it anymore. “Um. ”

  “You’ve always thought of people as cerebral. No psychohistory could work if it didn’t take into account our animal selves. ”