Foundations Fear

Page 51

  Sit. Quiet. She did. He cupped a hand to his ear.

  Bad come?

  No. Listen—In frustration Hari pointed to Sheelah herself. Blank incomprehension in the pan’s face. He scribbled in the dust: LEARN FROM PANS. Sheelah’s mouth opened and she nodded.

  They squatted in the shelter of prickly bushes and listened to the sounds of the forest. Scurryings and murmurs came through strongly as Hari relaxed his grip on the pan. Dust hung in slanted cathedral light, pouring down from the forest canopy in rich yellow shafts. Scents purled up from the forest floor, chemical messengers telling Ipan of potential foods, soft loam for resting, bark to be chewed. Hari gently lifted Ipan’s head to gaze across the valley at the peaks…musing…and felt a faint tremor of reson­ ance.

  To Ipan the valley came weighted with significance beyond words. His troop had imbued it with blunt emotions, attached to clefts where a friend fell and died, where the troop found a hoard of fruits, where they met and fought two big cats. It was an intricate landscape suffused with feeling, the pan mechanism of memory.

  Hari faintly urged Ipan to think beyond the ridge line and felt in response a diffuse anxiety. He bore in on that kernel—and an image burst into Ipan’s mind, fringed in fear. A rectangular bulk framed against a cool sky. The Excursion Station.

  There. He pointed for Dors.

  Ipan had simple, strong, apprehensive memories of the place. His troop had been taken there, outfitted with the implants which allowed them to be ridden, then deposited back in their territory.

  Far, Dors signed.

  We go.

  Hard. Slow.

  No stay here. They catch.

  Dors looked as skeptical as a pan could look. Fight?

  Did she mean fight Vaddo here? Or fight once they reached the Excursion Station? No here. There.

  Dors frowned, but accepted this. He had no real plan, only the idea that Vaddo was ready for pans out here and might not be so prepared for them at the station. There he and Dors might gain the element of surprise. How, he had no idea.

  They studied each other, each trying to catch a glimmer of the other in an alien face. She stroked his earlobe, Dors’ calming ges­ ture. Sure enough, it made him tingle. But he could say so little…. The moment crystallized for him the hopelessness of their situation.

  Vaddo plainly was trying to kill Hari and Dors through Ipan and Sheelah. What would become of their own bodies? The shock of experiencing death through immersion was known to prove fatal. Their bodies would fail from neurological shock, without ever re­ gaining consciousness.

  He saw a tear run down Sheelah’s cheek. She knew how hopeless matters were, too. He swept her up in his arms and, looking at the distant mountains, was surprised to find tears in his own eyes as well.

  17.

  He had not counted on the river. Men, animals—these problems he had considered. They ventured down to the surging waters where the forest gave the nearest protection and the stream broadened, making the best place to ford.

  But the hearty river that chuckled and frothed down the valley was impossible to swim.

  Or rather, for Ipan to swim. Hari had been coaxing his pan on­ ward, carefully pausing when his muscles shook or when he wet himself from anxiety. Dors was having similar trouble and it slowed them. A night spent up in high branches soothed both pans, but now at midmorning all the stressful symptoms returned as Ipan put one foot into the river. Cool, swift currents.

  Ipan danced back onto the narrow beach, yelping in dread.

  Go? Dors/Sheelah signed.

  Hari calmed his pan and they tried to get it to attempt swimming. Sheelah displayed only minor anxiety. Hari plumbed the swampy depths of Ipan’s memory and found a cluster of distress, centered around a dim remembrance of nearly drowning when a child. When Sheelah helped him, he fidgeted, then bolted from the water again.

  Go! Sheelah waved long arms upstream and downstream and shook her head angrily.

  Hari guessed that she had reasonably clear pan-memories of the river, which had no easier crossings than this. He shrugged, lifted his hands palm up.

  A big herd of gigantelope grazed nearby and some were crossing the river for better grass beyond. They tossed their great heads, as if mocking the pans. The river was not deep, but to Ipan it was a wall. Hari, trapped by Ipan’s solid fear, seethed but could do nothing.

  Sheelah paced the shore. She huffed in frustration and looked at the sky, squinting. Her head snapped around in surprise. Hari fol­ lowed her gaze. A flyer was swooping down the valley, coming their way.

  Ipan beat Sheelah to the shelter of trees, but not by much. Luckily the gigantelope herd provided a distraction for the flyer. They cowered in bushes as the machine hummed overhead in a circular search pattern. Hari had to quell Ipan’s mounting appre­ hension by envisioning scenes of quiet and peace while he and Sheelah groomed each other.

  The flyer finally went away. They would have to minimize their exposure now.

  They foraged for fruit. His mind revolved uselessly and a sour depression settled over him. He was quite neatly caught in a trap, a pawn in Imperial politics. Worse, Dors was in it, too. He was no man of action. Nor a pan of action, either, he thought dourly.

  As he brought a few overripe bunches of fruit back to their bushes by the river, he heard cracking noises. He crouched down and worked his way uphill and around the splintering sounds. Sheelah was stripping branches from the trees. When he approached she waved him on impatiently, a common pan gesture remarkably like a human one.

  She had a dozen thick branches lined up on the ground. She went to a nearby spindly tree and peeled bark from it in long strips. The noise made Ipan uneasy. Predators would be curious at this unusual sound. He scanned the forest for danger.

  Sheelah came over to him, slapped him in the face to get his at­ tention. She wrote with a stick on the ground: RAFT.

  Hari felt particularly dense as he pitched in. Of course. Had his pan immersion made him more stupid? Did the effect worsen with time? Even if he got out of this, would he be the same? Many questions, no answers. He forgot about them and worked.

  They lashed branches together with bark, crude but serviceable. They found two small fallen trees and used them to anchor the edge of the raft. I, Sheelah pointed, and demonstrated pulling the raft.

  First, a warm-up. Ipan liked sitting on the raft in the bushes. Apparently the pan could not see the purpose of the raft yet. Ipan stretched out on the deck of saplings and gazed up into the trees as they swished in the warm winds.

  They carried the awkward plane of branches down to the river after another mutual grooming session. The sky was filled with birds, but he could see no flyers.

  They hurried. Ipan was skeptical about stepping onto the raft when it was halfway into the water, but Hari called up memories filled with warm feeling, and this calmed the quick-tripping heart he could feel knocking in the pan’s chest.

  Ipan sat gingerly on the branches. Sheelah cast off.

  She pushed hard, but the river swept them quickly downstream. Alarm spurted in Ipan.

  Hari made Ipan close his eyes. That slowed the breathing, but anxiety skittered across the pan mind like heat lightning forking before a storm. The raft’s rocking motion actually helped, making Ipan concentrate on his queasy stomach. Once his eyes flew open when a floating log smacked into the raft, but the dizzying sight of water all around made him squeeze them tight immediately.

  Hari wanted to help her, but he knew from the trip-hammer beating of Ipan’s heart that panic hovered near. He could not even see how she was doing. He had to sit blind and feel her shoving the raft along.

  She panted noisily, struggling to keep it pointed against the river’s tug. Spray splashed onto him. Ipan jerked, yelped, pawed anxiously with his feet, as if to run.

  A sudden lurch. Sheelah’s grunt cut off with a gurgle and he
felt the raft spin away on rising currents. A sickening spin…

  Ipan jerked clumsily to his feet. Eyes jumped open.

  Swirling water, the raft unsteady. He looked down and the branches were coming apart. Panic consumed him. Hari tried to promote soothing images, but they blew away before winds of fright.

  Sheelah came paddling after the raft, but it was picking up speed. Hari made Ipan gaze at the far shore, but that was all he could do before the pan started yelping and scampering on the raft, trying to find a steady place.

  It was no use. The branches broke free of their bindings and chilly water swept over the deck. Ipan screamed. He leaped, fell, rolled, jumped up again.

  Hari gave up any idea of control. The only hope lay in seizing just the right moment. The raft split down the middle and his half veered heavily to the left. Ipan started away from the edge and Hari fed that, made the pan step farther. In two bounds he took the pan off the deck and into the water—toward the far shore.

  Ipan gave way then to pure blind panic. Hari let the legs and arms thrash—but to each he gave a push at the right moment. He could swim, Ipan couldn’t.

  The near-aimless flailing held Ipan’s head out of water most of the time. He even gained a little headway. Hari kept focused on the convulsive movements, ignoring the cold water—and then Sheelah was there.

  She grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and shoved him toward shore. Ipan tried to grapple with her, climb up her. Sheelah socked him in the jaw. He gasped. She pulled him toward shore.

  Ipan was stunned. This gave Hari a chance to get the legs moving in a thrusting stroke. He worked at it, single-minded among the rush and gurgle, chest heaving…and after a seeming eternity, felt pebbles beneath his feet. Ipan scrambled up onto the rocky beach on his own.

  He let the pan slap himself and dance to warm up. Sheelah emerged dripping and bedraggled, and Ipan swept her up in his thankful arms.

  18.

  Walking was work and Ipan wasn’t having any.

  Hari tried to make the pan cover ground, but now they had to ascend difficult gullies, some mossy and rough. They stumbled, waded, climbed, and sometimes just crawled up the slopes of the valley. The pans sniffed out animal trails, which helped a bit.

  Ipan stopped often for food, or just to gaze idly into the distance. Soft thoughts flitted like moths through the foggy mind, buoyant on liquid emotional flows which eddied to their own pulse. Pans were not made for extended projects.

  They made slow progress. Night came and they had to climb trees, snagging fruit on the way.

  Ipan slept, but Hari did not. Could not.

  Their lives were just as much at risk here as the pans’, but the slumbering minds he and Dors attended had always lived this way. To the pans, the forest night seeped through as a quiet rain of in­ formation, processed as they slept. Their minds keyed vagrant sounds to known nonthreats, leaving slumber intact.

  Hari did not know the subtle signs of danger and so mistook every rustle and tremor in the branches as danger approaching on soft feet. Sleep came against his will.

  In dawn’s first pale glow Hari awoke with a snake beside him. It coiled like a green rope around a descending branch, getting itself into striking position. It eyed him and Hari tensed.

  Ipan drifted up from his own profound slumber. He saw the snake, but did not react with a startled jerk, as Hari feared he might.

  A long moment passed between them and Ipan blinked just once. The snake became utterly motionless and Ipan’s heart quickened, but he did not move. Then the snake uncoiled and glided away, and the unspoken transaction was done. Ipan was unlikely prey, this green snake did not taste good, and pans were smart enough to be about other business.

  When Sheelah awoke they went down to a nearby chuckling stream for a drink, scavenging leaves and a few crunchy insects on the way. Both pans nonchalantly peeled away fat black land leeches which had attached to them in the night. The thick, engorged worms sickened Hari, but Ipan pulled them off casually, much the way Hari would have retied loosened shoelaces.

  Luckily, Ipan did not eat them. He drank and Hari reflected that the pan felt no need to clean himself. Normally Hari vapored twice a day, before breakfast and before dinner, and felt ill at ease if he sweated—a typical meritocrat.

  Here he wore the shaggy body comfortably. Had his frequent cleansings been a health measure, like the pans’ grooming? Or a rarefied, civilized habit? He dimly remembered that as a boy on Helicon he had gone for days in happy, sweaty pleasure and had disliked baths and showers. Somehow Ipan returned him to a simpler sense of self, at ease in the grubby world.

  His comfort did not last long. They sighted raboons uphill.

  Ipan had picked up the scent, but Hari did not have access to the part of the pan brain that made scent-picture associations. He had only known that something disturbed Ipan, wrinkling the knobby nose. The sight at short range jolted him.