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Biggest came up fast, madder than before. Ipan scurried back, wanting desperately to run. Hari felt control slipping from him—and saw another rock. Suitable size, two paces back. He let Ipan turn to flee, then stopped him at the stone. Ipan didn’t want to hold it. Panic ran through him.
Hari poured his rage into the pan, forced the long arms down. Hands grabbed at the stone, fumbled, got it. Sheer anger made Ipan turn to face Biggest, who was thundering after him. To Hari, Ipan’s arm came up in achingly slow motion. He leaned heavily into the pitch. The rock smacked Biggest in the face.
Biggest staggered. Blood ran into his eyes. Ipan caught the iron scent of it, riding on a prickly stench of outrage.
Hari made the trembling Ipan stoop down. There were some shaped stones nearby, made by the fems to trim leaves from branches. He picked up one with a chipped edge.
Biggest shook his head, dizzy.
Ipan glanced at the sober, still faces of his troop. No one had ever used a rock against a troop member, much less Biggest. Rocks were for Strangers.
A long silence stretched. The pans stood rooted; Biggest grunted and peered in disbelief at the blood that spattered into his upturned hand.
Ipan stepped forward and raised the jagged stone, edge held outward. Crude, but a cutting edge.
Biggest flared his nostrils and came at Ipan. Ipan swept the rock through the air, barely missing Biggest’s jaw.
Biggest’s eyes widened. He huffed and puffed, threw dust, howled. Ipan simply stood with the rock and held his ground. Biggest kept up his anger-display for a long while, but he did not attack.
The troop watched with intense interest. Sheelah came and stood beside Ipan. It would have been against protocols for a female to take part in male dominance rituals.
Her movement signaled that the confrontation was over. But Hunker was having none of that. He abruptly howled, pounded the ground, and scooted over to Ipan’s side.
Hari was surprised. With Hunker maybe he could hold the line against Biggest. He was not fool enough to think that this one stand-off would put Biggest to rest. There would be other challenges and he would have to fight them. Hunker would be a useful ally.
He realized that he was thinking in the slow, muted logic of Ipan himself. He assumed that the pursuit of pan status-markers was a given, the great goal of his life.
This revelation startled him. He had known that he was diffusing into Ipan’s mind, taking control of some functions from the bottom up, seeping through the deeply buried, walnut-sized gyrus. It had not occurred to him that the pan would diffuse into him. Were they now married to each other in an interlocked web that dispersed mind and self?
Hunker stood beside him, eyes glaring at the other pans, chest heaving. Ipan felt the same way, madly pinned to the moment. Hari realized that he would have to do something, break this cycle of dominance and submission which ruled Ipan at the deep, neur ological level.
He turned to Sheelah. Get out? he signed.
No. No. Her pan face wrinkled with anxiety.
Leave. He waved toward the trees, pointed to her, then him.
She spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness.
It was infuriating. He had so much to say to her and he had to funnel it through a few hundred signs. He chippered in a high-pitched voice, trying vainly to force the pan lips and palate to do the work of shaping words.
It was no use. He had tried before, idly, but now he wanted to badly and none of the equipment worked. It couldn’t. Evolution had shaped brain and vocal chords in parallel. Pans groomed, people talked.
He turned back and realized that he had forgotten entirely about the status-setting. Biggest was glowering at him. Hunker stood guard, confused at his new leader’s sudden loss of interest in the confrontation—and to gesture at a mere fem, too.
Hari reared up as tall as he could and waved the stone. This produced the desired effect. Biggest inched back a bit and the rest of the troop edged closer. Hari made Ipan stalk forward boldly. By this time it did not take much effort, for Ipan was enjoying this enormously.
Biggest retreated. Fems inched around Biggest and approached Ipan.
If only I could leave him to the fems’ delights, Hari thought.
He tried to bail out again. Nothing. The mechanism wasn’t working back at the Excursion Station. And something told him that it wasn’t going to get fixed.
He gave the edged stone to Hunker. The pan seemed surprised, but took it. Hari hoped the symbolism of the gesture would penet rate in some fashion, because he had no time left to spend on pan politics. Hunker hefted the rock and looked at Ipan. Then he cried in a rolling, powerful voice, tones rich in joy and triumph.
Hari was quite happy to let Hunker distract the troop. He took Sheelah by the arm and led her into the trees. No one followed.
He was relieved. If another pan had tagged along, it would have confirmed his suspicions. Vaddo might be keeping track.
Still, he reminded himself, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
15.
The humans came swiftly, with clatters and booms.
He and Sheelah had been in the trees awhile. At Hari’s urging they had worked their way a few klicks away from the troop. Ipan and Sheelah showed rising anxiety at being separated from their troop. His teeth chattered and his eyes jerked anxiously at every suspicious movement. This was natural, for isolated pans were far more vulnerable.
The humans landing did not help.
Danger, Hari signed, cupping an ear to indicate the noise of flyers landing nearby.
Sheelah signed, Where go?
Away.
She shook her head vehemently. Stay here. They get us.
They would, indeed, but not in the sense she meant. Hari cut her off curtly, shaking his head. Danger. They had never intended to convey complicated ideas with their signs and now he felt bottled up, unable to tell her his suspicions.
Hari made a knife-across-throat gesture. Sheelah frowned.
He bent down and made Ipan take a stick. He had not been able to make Ipan write before, but necessity drove him now. Slowly he made the rough hands scratch out the letters. In soft loam he wrote WANT US DEAD.
Sheelah looked dumbfounded. Dors had probably been operating under the assumption that the failure to bail out was a temporary error. It had lasted too long for that.
The noisy, intrusive landing confirmed his hunch. No ordinary team would disturb the animals so much. And nobody would come after them directly. They would fix the immersion apparatus, where the real problem was.
THEY KEEP US HERE, KILL PANS, THAT KILLS US. BLAME ON ANIM ALS?
He had better arguments to back up his case. The slow accumu lation of small details in Vaddo’s behavior. Suspicions, at least, about the security officer. Dors’ tiktok would block the officer from overriding the locks on their immersion capsules, and from tracing the capsule’s signal to Ipan and Sheelah.
So they were forced to go into the field. Letting them die in an “accident” while immersed in a pan might just be plausible enough to escape an investigation.
The humans went about their noisy business. They were enough, though, to make his case. Sheelah’s eyes narrowed, the big brow scowled.
Dors-the-Defender took over. Where? Sheelah signed.
He had no sign for so abstract an idea, so he scribbled with the stick, AWAY. Indeed, he had no plan.
I’LL CHECK, she wrote in the dirt.
She set off toward the noise of humans deploying on the valley floor below. To a pan the din was a dreadful clanking irritation. Hari was not going to let her out of his sight. She waved him back, but he shook his head and followed.
The bushes gave shelter as they got a view of the landing party below. A skirmish line was forming up a few hundred meters away. They were encircling the area where the troop had
been. Why?
Hari squinted. Pan eyesight was not good for distance. Humans had been hunters once, and one could tell by the eyes alone.
Now, nearly everybody needed artificial eye-adds by the age of forty. Either civilization was hard on eyes, or maybe humans in prehistory had not lived long enough for eye trouble to rob them of game. Either conclusion was sobering.
The two pans watched the humans calling to one another, and in the middle of them Hari saw Vaddo. Each man and woman carried a weapon.
Beneath his fear he felt something strong, dark.
Ipan trembled, watching the humans, a strange awe swelling in his mind. Humans seemed impossibly tall in the shimmering dis tance, moving with stately, swaying elegance.
Hari floated above the surge of emotion, fending off its powerful effects. The reverence for those distant, tall figures came out of the pan’s dim past.
That surprised him until he thought it over. After all, animals were reared and taught by adults much smarter and stronger. Most species were like pans, spring-loaded by evolution to work in a dominance hierarchy. Awe was adaptive.
When they met lofty humans with overwhelming power, able to mete out punishment and rewards—literally life and death—something like religious fervor arose in them. Fuzzy, but strong.
Atop that warm, tropical emotion floated a sense of satisfaction at simply being. His pan was happy to be a pan, even when seeing a being of clearly superior power and thought. Ironic, Hari thought.
His pan had just disproved another supposedly human earmark: their self-congratulatory distinction of being the only animal that congratulated itself.
He jerked himself out of his abstractions. How human, to rumin ate even when in mortal danger.
CAN’T FIND US ELECTRONICALLY, he scratched in the sand.
MAYBE RANGE SHORT, she wrote.
The first shots made them jerk.
The humans had found their pan troop. Cries of fear mingled with the sharp, harsh barks of blasters.
Go. We go, he signed.
Sheelah nodded and they crept quickly away. Ipan trembled.
The pan was deeply afraid. Yet he was also sad, as if reluctant to leave the presence of the revered humans, his steps dragging.
16.
They used pan modes of patrolling.
He and Dors let their basic levels take over, portions of the brain expert at silent movement, careful of every twig.
Once they had left the humans behind, the pans grew even more cautious. They had few natural enemies, but the faint scent of a single predator changed the feel of the wild.
Ipan climbed tall trees and sat for hours surveying the open land ahead before venturing forth. He weighed the evidence of pungent droppings, faint prints, bent branches.
They angled down the long slope of the valley and stayed in the forest. Hari had only glanced at the big color-coded map of the area all guests received and had trouble recalling much of it.
Finally he recognized one of the distant, beak-shaped peaks. Hari got his bearings. Dors spotted a stream snaking down into the main river and that gave them further help, but still they did not know which way lay the Excursion Station. Or how far.
That way? Hari signed, pointing over the distant ridge.
No. That, Dors insisted.
Far, not.
Why?
The worst part of it all was that they could not talk. He could not say clearly that the technology of immersion worked best at reasonably short range, less than a hundred klicks, say. And it made sense to keep the subject pans within easy flyer distance. Certainly Vaddo and the others had gotten to the troop quickly.
Is, he persisted.
Not. She pointed down the valley. Maybe there.
He could only hope Dors got the general idea. Their signs were scanty and he began to feel a broad, rising irritation. Pans felt and sensed strongly, but they were so limited.
Ipan expressed this by tossing limbs and stones, banging on tree trunks. It didn’t help much. The need to speak was like a pressure he could not relieve. Dors felt it, too. Sheelah chippered and grunted in frustration.
Beneath his mind he felt the smoldering presence of Ipan. They had never been together this long before and urgency welled up between the two canted systems of mind. Their uneasy marriage was showing greater strains.