Foundation’s Fear

1.

He didn’t fully relax until they were sitting on a verandah of the Excursion Station, some six thousand light years away from Trantor.

Warily Dors gazed out at the view beyond the formidable walls. “We’re safe here from the animals?”

“I imagine so. Those walls are high and there are guard canines. Wirehounds, I believe.”

“Good.” She smiled in a way that he knew implied a secret was about to emerge. “I believe I have covered our tracks-to use an animal metaphor. I had records of our departure concealed.”

“I still think you are exaggerating-”

“Exaggerating an attempted assassination?” She bit her lip in ill-concealed irritation. This was a well-frayed argument between them by now, but something about her protectiveness always sat poorly with him.

“I only agreed to leave Trantor in order to study pans.”

He caught a flicker of emotion in her face and knew that she would now try to ease off. “Oh, that might be useful-or better still, fun. You need a rest.”

“At least I won’t have to deal with Lamurk.”

Cleon had instituted what he lightly termed “traditional measures” to track down the conspirators. Some had already wormholed away to the far reaches of the Galaxy. Others had committed suicide-or so it seemed.

Lamurk was staying low, pretending shock and dismay at “this assault on the very fabric of our Imperium.” But Lamurk still held enough votes in the High Council to block Cleon’s move to make Hari his First Minister, so the deadlock continued. Hari was numbed by the entire matter.

“And you’re right,” Dors continued with a brittle brightness, ignoring his moody silence, “not everything is available on Trantor-or even known about. My main consideration was that if you had stayed on Trantor you would be dead.”

He stopped looking at the striking scenery. “You think the Lamurk faction would persist…?”

“They could, which is a better guide to action than trying to guess woulds.”

“I see.” He didn’t, but he had learned to trust her judgment in matters of the world. Then, too, perhaps he did need a thoroughgoing vacation.

To be on a living, natural world-he had forgotten, in his years buried in Trantor, how vivid wild things could be. The greens and yellows leaped out, after decades amid matted steel, cycled air, and crystal glitter.

Here the sky yawned impossibly deep, unmarked by the graffiti of aircraft, wholly alive to the flapping wonder of birds. Bluffs and ridges looked like they had been shaped hastily with a putty knife. Beyond the station walls he could see a sole tree thrashed by an angry wind. Its topknot finally blew off in a pocket of wind, fluttering and fraying over somber flats like a fragmenting bird. Distant, eroded mesas had yellow streaks down their shanks, which as they met the forest turned a burnt orange tinge that suggested the rot of rust. Across the valley, where the pans ranged, lay a dusky canopy hidden behind low gray clouds and raked by winds.

A thin cold rain fell there, and Hari wondered what it was like to cower as an animal beneath those sheets of moisture, without hope of shelter or warmth. Perhaps Trantor’s utter predictability was better, but he wondered.

He pointed to the distant forest. “We’re going there?” He liked this fresh place, though the forest was foreboding. It had been a long time since he had even worked with his hands, alongside his father, back on Helicon. To live in the open

“Don’t start judging.”

“I’m anticipating.”

She grinned. “You always have a longer word for it, no matter what I say.”

“The treks look a little, well-touristy.”

“Of course. We’re tourists.”

The land here rose up into peaks as sharp as torn tin. In the thick trees beyond, mist broke on gray smooth rocks. Even here, high up the slope of an imposing ridge, the Excursion Station was hemmed in by slimy, thick-barked trees standing in deep drifts of dead, dark leaves. With rotting logs half buried in the wet layers, the air swarmed so close it was like breathing damp opium.

Dors stood, her drink finished. “Let’s go in, socialize.”

He followed dutifully and right away knew it was a mistake. Most of the indoor stim-party crowd was dressed in rugged safari-style gear. They were ruddy folk, faces flushed with excitement, or perhaps just enhancers. Hari waved away the bubbleglass-bearing waiter; he disliked the way it sharpened his wits in uncontrolled ways. Still, he smiled and tried to make small talk.

This turned out to be not merely small, but microscopic. Where are you from? Oh, Trantor-what’s it like? We’re from (fill in the planet)-have you ever heard of it? Of course he had not. Twenty-five million worlds…

Most were Primitivists, drawn by the unique experience available here. It seemed to him that every third word in their conversation was natural or vital, delivered like a mantra.

“What a relief, to be away from straight lines,” a thin man said.

“Um, how so?” Hari said, trying to seem interested.

“Well, of course straight lines don’t exist in nature. They have to be put there by humans.” He sighed. “I love to be free of straightness!”

Hari instantly thought of pine needles; strata of metamorphic rock; the inside edge of a half-moon; spider-woven silk strands; the line along the top of a breaking ocean wave; crystal patterns; white quartz lines on granite slabs; the far horizon of a vast calm lake; the legs of birds; spikes of cactus; the arrow dive of a raptor; trunks of young, fast-growing trees; wisps of high windblown clouds; ice cracks; the two sides of the V of migrating birds; icicles.

“Not so,” he said, but no more.

His habit of laconic implication was trampled in the headlong talk, of course; the enhancers were taking hold. They all chattered on, excited by the prospect of immersing themselves in the lives of the creatures roaming the valleys below. He listened, not commenting, intrigued. Some wanted to share the worldview of herd animals, others of hunters, some of birds. They spoke as though they were entering some athletic event, and that was not his view at all. Still, he stayed silent.

He finally escaped with Dors, into the small park beside the Excursion Station, designed to make guests familiar with local conditions before their immersion. Panucopia, as this world was called, apparently had little native life of large size. There were animals he had seen as a boy on Helicon, and whole kraals of domestic breeds. All had sprung from common stock, less than a hundred thousand years ago, on the legendary “Earth.”

The unique asset of Panucopia was nowhere near, of course. He stopped and stared at the kraals and thought again about the Galaxy. His mind kept attacking what he thought of as the Great Problem, diving at it from many angles. He had learned to just stand aside and let it run. The psychohistorical equations needed deeper analysis, terms which accounted for the bedrock properties of humans as a species. As…

Animals. Was there a clue here?

Despite millennia of trying, humans had domesticated few creatures. To be domesticated, wild beasts had to have an entire suite of traits. Most had to be herd animals, with instinctive submission patterns which humans could co-opt. They had to be placid; herds that bolt at a strange sound and can’t tolerate intruders are hard to keep.

Finally, they had to be willing to breed in captivity. Most humans didn’t want to court and copulate under the watchful gaze of others, and neither did most animals.

So here there were sheep and goats and cows and llamas, slightly adapted to this world but otherwise unremarkable, just like myriad other Empire planets. The similarity implied that it had all been done at about the same time.

Except for the pans. They were unique to Panucopia. Whoever had brought them here might have been trying a domestication experiment, but the records from 13,000 years before were lost. Why?

A wirehound came sniffing, checking them out, muttering an unintelligible apology. “Interesting,” he remarked to Dors, “that Primitivists still want to be protected from the wild by the domesticated.”

“Well, of course. This fellow is big.”

“Not sentimental about the natural state? We were once just another type of large mammal on some mythical Earth.”

“Mythical? I don’t work in that area of prehistory, but most historians think there was such a place.”

“Sure, but ‘earth’ just means ‘dirt’ in the oldest languages, correct?”

‘Well, we had to come from somewhere.” She thought a moment, then allowed slowly, “I think that natural state might be a pleasant place to visit, but…”

“I want to try the pans.”

“What? An immersion?” Her eyebrows lifted in mild alarm.

“As long as we’re here, why not?”

“I don’t…well, I’ll think about it.”

“You can bailout at any time, they say.” She nodded, pursed her lips. “Um.”

“We’ll feel at home-the way pans do.”

“You believe everything you read in a brochure?”

“I did some research. It’s a well-developed tech.” Her lips had a skeptical tilt. “Um.”

He knew by now better than to press her. Let time do his work. The canine, quite large and alert, snuffled at his hand and slurred, “Goood naaaght, suuur.” He stroked it. In its eyes he saw a kinship, an instant rapport that he did not need to think about. For one who dwelled in his head so much, this was a welcome rub of reality.

Significant evidence,he thought. We have a deep past together. Perhaps that was why he wanted to immerse in a pan. To go far back, beyond the vexing state of being human.

2.

“We’re certainly related, yes,” Expert Specialist Vaddo said. He was a big man, tanned and muscular and casually confident. He was a safari guide and immersion specialist, with a biology background. He did research using immersion techniques, but keeping the station going soaked up most of his time, he said.

Hari looked skeptical. “You think pans were with us back on an Earth?”

“Sure. Had to be.”

“They could not have arisen from genetic tinkering with our own kind?”

“Doubtful. Genetic inventory shows that they come from a small stable, probably a zoo set up here. Or else an accidental crash.”

Dors asked, “Is there any chance this world could have been the original Earth?”

Vaddo chuckled. “No fossil record, no ruins. Anyway, the local fauna and flora have a funny keypattern in their genetic helix, a bit different from our DNA. Extra methyl group on the purine rings. We can live here, eat the food, but neither we nor the pans are native.”

Vaddo made a good case. Pans certainly looked quasihuman. Ancient records referred to a classification, that was all: Pan troglodytes, whatever that meant in a long-lost tongue. They had hands with thumbs, the same number of teeth as humans, no tails.

Vaddo waved a big hand at the landscape below the station. “They were dumped here along with plenty of other related species, on top of a biosphere that supported the usual grasses and trees, very little more.”

“How long ago?” Dors asked.

“Over thirteen thousand years, that’s for sure.”

“Before Trantor’s consolidation. But other planets don’t have pans,” Dors persisted.

Vaddo nodded. “I guess in the early Empire days nobody thought they were useful.”

“Are they?” Hari asked.

“Not that I can tell.” Vaddo shrugged. “We haven’t tried training them much, beyond research purposes. Remember, they’re supposed to be kept wild. The original Emperor’s Boon stipulated that.”

“Tell me about your research,” Hari said. In his experience, no scientist ever passed up a chance to sing his own song. He was right.

They had taken human DNA and pan DNA-Vaddo said, waxing on enthusiastically-then unzipped the double helix strands in both. Linking one human strand with a pan strand made a hybrid.

Where the strands complemented, the two then tightly bound in a partial, new double helix. Where they differed, bonding between the strands was weak, intermittent, with whole sections flapping free.

Then they spun the watery solutions in a centrifuge, so the weak sections ripped apart. Closely linked DNA was 98.2 percent of the total. Pans were startlingly like humans. Less than two percent difference, about the same that separated men and women-yet they lived in forests and invented nothing.

The typical difference between individual people’s DNA was a tenth of a percentage point, Vaddo said. Roughly, then, pans were twenty times more different from humans than particular people differed among themselves-genetically.

But genes were like levers, supporting vast weights by pivoting about a small fulcrum.

“So you think they came before us?” Dors was impressed. “On Earth?”

Vaddo nodded vigorously. “They must have been related, but we don’t come from them. We parted company, genetically, six million years ago.”

“And do they think like us?” Hari asked.

“Best way to tell is an immersion,” Vaddo said. “Very best way.”

He smiled invitingly and Hari wondered if Vaddo got a commission on immersions. His sales pitch was subtle, shaped for an academic’s interest, but still a sales pitch.

Vaddo had already made available to Hari the vast stores of data on pan movements, population dynamics, and behaviors. It was a rich source, millennia old. With some modeling, here might be fertile ground for a simple description of pans as protohumans, using a truncated version of psychohistory.

“Describing the life history of a species mathematically is one thing,” Dors said. “But living in it…”

“Come now,” Hari said. Even though he knew the entire Excursion Station was geared to sell the guests safaris and immersions, he was intrigued. “I need a change, you said. Get out of stuffy old Trantor, you said.”

Vaddo smiled warmly. “It’s completely safe.”

Dors smiled at Hari tolerantly. Between people long-married there is a diplomacy of the eyes. “Oh, all right.”

3.

He spent mornings studying the pan data banks. The mathematician in him pondered how to represent their dynamics with a trimmed-down psychohistory. The marble of fate rattling down a cracked slope. So many paths, variables…

To get all this he had to kowtow to the station chief. A woman named Yakani, she seemed cordial, but displayed a large portrait of the Academic Potentate upon her office wall. Hari mentioned it and Yakani gushed on about “her mentor,” who had helped her run a primate studies center on a verdant planet some decades before.

“She will bear watching,” Dors said.

“You don’t think the Potentate would-”

“The first assassination attempt-remember the tab? I learned from the Imperials that some technical aspects of it point to an academic laboratory.”

Hari frowned. “Surely my own faction would not oppose-”

“She is as ruthless as Lamurk, but more subtle.”

“My, you are suspicious.”

“I must be.”

In the afternoons they took treks. Dors did not like the dust and heat and they saw few animals. “What self-respecting beast would want to be seen with these overdressed Primitivists?” she said.

He liked the atmosphere of this world and relaxed into it, but his mind kept on working. He thought about this as he stood on the sweeping verandah, drinking pungent fruit juice as he watched a sunset. Dors stood beside him silently.

Planets were energy funnels, he thought. At the bottom of their gravitational wells, plants captured barely a tenth of a percent of the sunlight that fell on a world’s surface. They built organic molecules with a star’s energy. In turn, plants were prey for animals, who could harvest roughly a tenth of the plant’s stored energy. Grazers were themselves prey to meateaters, who could use about a tenth of the flesh-stored energy. So, he estimated, only about one part in a hundred thousand of the lancing sunlight energy wound up in the predators.

Wasteful! Yet nowhere in the whole Galaxy had a more efficient engine evolved. Why not?

Predators were invariably more intelligent than their prey, and they sat atop a pyramid of very steep slopes. Omnivores had a similar balancing act. Out of that rugged landscape had come humanity.

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.”

Ex Spec 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 Or. 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 Ex Spec said, popping out the padded networks for their inspection. He ran through the controls, emergency procedures, 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 Ex Specs 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 Ex Spec. 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 electromagnetic 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 transmitted to chips embedded in the pan subject. Immersion.

The technology had ramified throughout the Empire, quite famously. 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 experienced 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, simpler, 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. Ferns 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 allover the Stranger sings warm in my nose and I j urnp up and down on him. We keep at it like that a long time. Not worried about the other Stranger corning 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 interfaces 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 appendices and sidebar notes, as though the biologists in the lonely outpost were embarrassed by it. Some was embarrassing: mating behavior, 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 anymore; 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 willingness 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 childbirth.”

“Uh, how?”

“From those huge baby heads. They’re hard to get out. We women 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.”

“I see, an overplayed hand of otherwise perfectly good cards.” He laughed. “So being smart is just a bright ornament.”

“Works for me,” she said, giving him a wink.

He watched the sunset turn to glowering, ominous crimson, oddly happy. Sheets of light worked across the sky among curious, layered clouds. “Ummm…” Dors murmured.

“Yes?”

“Maybe this is a way to use the research the Ex Specs are doing, too. Learn who we humans once were-and therefore who we are.”

“Intellectually, it’s a jump. In social ways, though, the gap could be less.”

Dors looked skeptical. “You think pans are only a bit further back in a social sense?”

“Ummm. I wonder if in logarithmic time we might scale from pans to the early Empire and then on to now?”

“A big leap.”

“Maybe I could use that Voltaire sim from Sark as a scaling point in a long curve.”

“Look, to do anything you’ll need more experience with them.” She eyed him. “You like immersion, don’t you?”

“Well, yes. It’s just…”

“What?”

“That Ex Spec Vaddo, he keeps pushing immersions-”

“That’s his job.”

“-and he knew who I was.”

“So?” She spread her hands and shrugged.

“You’re normally the suspicious one. Why should an Ex Spec know an obscure mathematician?”

“He looked you up. Data dumps on incoming guests are standard. And as a First Minister candidate, you’re hardly obscure.”

“I suppose so. Say, you’re supposed to be the ever-vigilant one.” He grinned. “Shouldn’t you be encouraging my caution?”

“Paranoia isn’t caution. Time spent on nonthreats subtracts from vigilance.”

By the time they went in for dinner she had talked him into it.

6.

Hot day in the sun. Dust tickles. Makes me snort.

That Biggest, he walks by, gets respect right away. Plenty. Fems and guys alike, they stick out their hands.

Biggest touches them, taking time with each, letting them know he is there. The world is all right.

I reach out to him, too. Makes me feel good. I want to be like Biggest, to be big, be as big as him, be him.

Fems don’t give him any trouble. He wants one, she goes. Hump right away. He’s Biggest.

Most males, they don’t get much respect. Fems don’t want to do with them as much as they do with Biggest. The little males, they huff and throw sand and all that, but everybody knows they’re not going to be much. No chance they could ever be like Biggest. They don’t like that, but they are stuck with it.

Me, I’m pretty big. I get respect. Some, anyway.

All the guys like stroking. Petting. Grooming. Ferns give it to them and they give it back.

Guys get more, though. After it, they’re not so gruff.

I’m sitting getting groomed and all of a sudden I smell something. I don’t like it. I jump up, cry out. Biggest, he takes notice. Smells it, too.

Strangers. Everybody starts hugging each other. Strong smell, plenty of it. Lots of Strangers. The wind says they are near, getting nearer.

They come running down on us from the ridge. Looking for ferns, looking for trouble.

I run for my rocks. I always have some handy. I fling one at them, miss. Then they in among us. It’s hard to hit them, they go so fast.

Four Strangers, they grab two ferns. Drag them away.

Everybody howling, crying. Dust everywhere.

I throw rocks. Biggest leads the guys against the Strangers.

They turn and run off. Just like that. Got the two ferns though and that’s bad.

Biggest mad. He pushes around some of the guys, makes noise. He not looking so good now, he let the Strangers in.

Those Strangers bad. We all hunker down, groom each other, pet, make nice sounds.

Biggest, he come by, slap some of the ferns. Hump some. Make sure everybody know he’s still Biggest.

He don’t slap me. He know better than to try. I growl at him when he come close and he pretend not to hear.

Maybe he not so Big anymore, I’m thinking.

7.

He stayed with it this time. After the first crisis, when the Stranger pans came running through, he sat and let himself get groomed for a long time. It really did calm him.

Him? Who was he?

This time he could fully sense the pan mind. Not below him-that was a metaphor-but around him. A swarming scattershot of senses, thoughts, fragments like leaves blowing by him in a wind.

And the wind was emotion. Blustering gales, howling and whipping in gusts, raining thoughts like soft hammer blows.

These pans thought poorly, in the sense that he could get only shards, like human musings chopped by a nervous editor. But pans felt intensely.

Of course,he thought-and he could think, nestled in the hard kernel of himself, wrapped in the pan mind. Emotions told it what to do, without thinking. Quick reactions demanded that. Strong feeling amplified subtle cues into strong imperatives. Blunt orders from Mother Evolution.

He saw now that the belief that high order mental experiences like emotion were unique to people was…simply conceited. These pans shared much of the human worldview. A theory of pan psychohistory could be valuable.

He gingerly separated himself from the dense, pressing pan mind. He wondered if the pan knew he was here. Yes, it did-dimly.

Yet this did not bother the pan. He integrated it into his blurred, blunt world. Hari was somewhat like an emotion, just one of many fluttering by and staying a while, then wafting away.

Could he be more than that? He tried getting the pan to lift its right arm-and it was like lead. He struggled for a while that way with no success. Then he realized his error. He could not overpower this pan, not as a kernel in a much larger mind.

He thought about this as the pan groomed a female, picking carefully through coarse hair. The strands smelled good, the air was sweet, the sun stroked him with blades of generous warmth…

Emotion. Pans didn’t follow instructions because that simply lay beyond them. They could not understand directions in the human sense. Emotions-those they knew. He had to be an emotion, not a little general giving orders.

He sat for a while simply being this pan. He learned-or rather, he felt. The troop groomed and scavenged food, males eyeing the perimeter, females keeping close to the young. A lazy calm descended over him, carrying him effortlessly through warm moments of the day.

Not since boyhood had he felt anything like this. A slow, graceful easing, as though there were no time at all, only slices of eternity.

In this mood, he could concentrate on a simple movement-raising an arm, scratching-and create the desire to do it. His pan responded. To make it happen, he had to feel his way toward a goal.

Catching a sweet scent on the wind, Hari thought about what food that might signal. His pan meandered upwind, sniffed, discarded the clue as uninteresting. Hari could now smell the reason why: fruit, true, sweet, yes-but inedible for a pan.

Good. He was learning. And he was integrating himself into the deep recesses of this pan-mind.

Watching the troop, he decided to name the prominent pans, to keep them straight: Agile the quick one, Sheelah the sexy one, Grubber the hungry one…But what was his own name? His he dubbed Ipan. Not very original, but that was its main characteristic, Ias pan.

Grubber found some bulb-shaped fruit and the others drifted over to scavenge. The hard fruit smelled a little too young (how did he know that?), but some ate it anyway.

And which of these was Dors? They had asked to be immersed in the same troop, so one of these-he forced himself to count, though somehow the exercise was like moving heavy weights in his mind-these twenty-two was her. How could he tell? He ambled over to several females who were using sharp-edged stones to cut leaves from branches. They tied the strands together so they could carry food.

Hari peered into their faces. Mild interest, a few hands held out for stroking, an invitation to groom. No glint of recognition in their eyes.

He watched a big fern, Sheelah, carefully wash sand-covered fruit in a creek. The troop followed suit; Sheelah was a leader of sorts, a female lieutenant to Biggest.

She ate with relish, looked around. There was grain growing nearby, past maturity, ripe tan kernels already scattered in the sandy soil. Concentrating, Hari could tell from the faint bouquet that this was a delicacy. A few pans squatted and picked grains from the sand, slow work. Sheelah did the same, and then stopped, gazing off at the creek. Time passed, insects buzzed. After a while she scooped up sand and kernels and walked to the brook’s edge. She tossed it all in. The sand sank, the kernels floated. She skimmed them off and gulped them down, grinning widely.

An impressive trick. The other pans did not pick up on her kernel-skimming method. Fruit washing was conceptually easier, he supposed, since the pan could keep the fruit the whole time. Kernel-skimming demanded throwing away the food first, then rescuing it-a harder mental jump.

He thought about her and in response Ipan sauntered over her way. He peered into Sheelah’s eyes-and she winked at him. Dors! He wrapped hairy arms around her in a burst of love.

8.

“Pure animal love,” she said over dinner. “Refreshing.”

Hari nodded. “I like being there, living that way.”

“I can smell so much more.”

“Fruit tastes differently when they bite into it.” He held up a purple bulb, sliced into it, forked it into his mouth. “To me, this is almost unbearably sweet. To Ipan, it’s pleasant, a little peppery. I suppose pans have been selected for a sweet tooth. It gets them more fast calories.”

“I can’t think of a more thorough vacation. Not just getting away from home, but getting away from your species.”

He eyed the fruit. “And they’re so, so…”

“Horny?”

“Insatiable;”

“You didn’t seem to mind.”

“My pan, Ipan? I bailout when he gets into his hump-them-all mood.”

She eyed him. “Really?”

“Don’t you bailout?”

“Yes, but I don’t expect men to be like women.”

“Oh?” he said stiffly.

“I’ve been reading in the Ex Spec’s research library, while you toy with pan social movements. Women invest heavily in their children. Men can use two strategies: parental investment, plus ‘sow the oats.”‘ She lifted an eyebrow. “Both must have been selected for in our evolution, because they’re both common.”

“Not with me.”

To his surprise, she laughed. “I’m talking in general. My point is, the pans are much more promiscuous than we are. The males run everything. They help out the females who are carrying their children, I gather, but then they shop around elsewhere all the time.”

Hari switched into his professional mode; it was decidedly more comfortable when dealing with such issues. “As the specialists say, they are pursuing a mixed reproductive strategy.”

“How polite.”

“Polite plus precise.”

Of course, he couldn’t really be sure Dors bailed out of Sheelah when a male came by for a quick one. (They were always quick, too-thirty seconds or less.) Could she exit the pan mind that quickly? He required a few moments to extricate himself. Of course, if she saw the male coming, guessed his intentions…

He was surprised at himself. What role did jealousy have when they were inhabiting other bodies? Did the usual moral code make any sense? Yet to talk this over with her was…embarrassing.

He was still the country boy from Helicon, like it or not.

Ruefully he concentrated on his meal of local “roamer-fleisch,” which turned out to be an earthy, dark meat in a stew of tangy vegetables. He ate heartily, and in response to Dors’ rather obviously amused silence said, “I’d point out that pans understand commerce, too. Food for sex, betrayal of the leader for sex, spare my child for sex, grooming for sex, just about anything for sex.”

“It does seem to be their social currency. Short and decidedly not sweet. Just quick lunges, strong sensations, then boom-it’s over.”

“The males need it, the females use it.”

“Ummm, you’ve been taking notes.”

“If I’m going to model pans as a sort of simplified people, then I must.”

“Model pans?” came the assured tones of Ex Spec Vaddo. “They’re not model citizens, if that’s what you mean.” He gave them a sunny smile and Hari guessed this was more of the obligatory friendliness of this place.

Hari smiled mechanically. “I’m trying to find the variables that could describe pan behavior.”

“You should spend a lot of time with them,” Vaddo said, sitting at the table and holding up a finger to a waiter for a drink. “They’re subtle creatures.”

“I agree,” said Dors. “Do you ride them very much?”

“Some, but most of our research is done differently now.” Vaddo’s mouth twisted ruefully. “Statistical models, that sort of thing. I got this touring idea started, using the immersion tech we had developed earlier, to make money for the project. Otherwise, we’d have had to close.”

“I’m happy to contribute,” Hari said.

“Admit it-you like it,” Dors said, amused. “Well, yes. It’s…different.”

“And good for the staid Professor Seldon to get out of his shell,” she said.

Vaddo beamed. “Be sure you don’t take chances out there. Some of our customers think they’re superpans or something.”

Dors’ eyes flickered. “What danger is there? Our bodies are in slowtime, back here.”

Vaddo said, “You’re strongly linked. A big shock to a pan can drive a back-shock in your own neurological systems.”

“What sort of shock?” Hari asked.

“Death, major injury.”

“In that case,” Dors said to Hari, “I really do not think you should immerse.”

Hari felt irked. “Come on! I’m on vacation, not in prison.”

“Any threat to you-”

“Just a minute ago you were rhapsodizing about how good for me it was.”

“You’re too important to-”

“There’s really very little danger,” Vaddo came in smoothly. “Pans don’t die suddenly, usually.”

“And I can bailout when I see danger coming,” Hari added.

“But will you? I think you’re getting a taste for adventure.”

She was right, but he wasn’t going to concede the point. If he wanted a little escape from his humdrum mathematician’s routine, so much the better. “I like being out of Trantor’s endless corridors.”

Vaddo gave Dors a confident smile. “And we haven’t lost a tourist yet.”

“How about research staff?” she shot back.

“Well, that was a most unusual-”

“What happened?”

“A pan fell off a ledge. The human operator couldn’t bailout in time and she came out of it paralyzed. The shock of experiencing death through immersion is known from other incidents to prove fatal. But we have systems in place now to short circuit-”

“What else?” she persisted.

“Well, there was one difficult episode. In the early days, when we had simple wire fences.” The Ex Spec shifted uneasily. “Some predators got in.”

“What sort of predators?”

“A primate pack hunter, Carnopapio grandis. We call them raboons, because they’re genetically related to a small primate on another continent. Their DNA-”

“How did they get in?” Dors insisted.

“They’re somewhat like a wild hog, with hooves that double as diggers. They smelled game-our corralled animals. Dug under the fences.”

Dors eyed the high, solid walls. “These are adequate?”

“Certainly. Raboons share DNA with the pans and we believe they’re from an ancient genetic experiment. Someone tried to make a predator by raising the earlier stock up onto two legs. Like most bipedal predators, the forelimbs are shortened and the head carried forward, balanced by a thick tail they use for signaling to each other. They prey on the biggest herd animals, the gigantelope, eating only the richest meat.”

“Why attack humans?”

“They take targets of opportunity, too. Pans, even. When they got into the compound, they went for adult humans, not children-a very selective strategy.”

Dors shivered. “You look at all this very…objectively.”

“I’m a biologist.”

“I never knew it could be so interesting,” Hari said to defuse her apprehension.

Vaddo beamed. “Not as involving as higher mathematics, I’m sure.”

Dors’ mouth twisted with wry skepticism. “Do you mind if guests carry weapons inside the compound?”

9.

He had a glimmering of an idea about the pans, a way to use their behaviors in building a simple toy model of psychohistory. He might be able to use the statistics of pan troop movements, the ups and downs of their shifting fortunes.

Pictured in system-space, living structures worked at the edge of a chaotic terrain. Life as a whole harvested the fruits of a large menu of possible path-choices. Natural selection first achieved, then sustained this edgy state.

Whole biospheres shifted their equilibrium points amid energetic flowthrough-like birds banking on winds, he thought, watching some big yellow ones glide over the station, taking advantage of the updrafts.

Like them, whole biological systems sometimes hovered at stagnation points. Systems were able to choose several paths of descent. Sometimes-to stretch the analogy-they could eat the tasty insects which came up to them on those same tricky breezes.

Failure to negotiate such winds of change meant the pattern forfeited its systemic integrity. Energies dissipated. Crucial was the fact that any seemingly stable state was actually a trick of dynamic feedback.

No static state existed-except one. A biological system at perfect equilibrium was simply dead.

So, too, psychohistory?

He talked it over with Dors and she nodded. Beneath her apparent calm she was worried. Since Vaddo’s remark she was always tut-tutting about safety. He reminded her that she had earlier urged him to do more immersions. “This is a vacation, remember?” he said more than once.

Her amused sidewise glances told him that she also didn’t buy his talk about the toy modeling. She thought he just liked romping in the woods. “A country boy at heart,” she chuckled.

So the next morning he skipped a planned trek to view the gigantelope herds. Immediately he and Dors went to the immersion chambers and slipped under. To get some solid work done, he told himself.

“What’s this?” He gestured to a small tiktok stationed between their immersion pods.

“Precaution,” Dors said. “I don’t want anyone tampering with our chambers while we’re under.”

“Tiktoks cost plenty out here.”

“This one guards the coded locks, see?” She crouched beside the tiktok and reached for the control panel. It blocked her.

“I thought the locks were enough.”

“The security chief has access to those.”

“And you suspect her?”

“I suspect everyone. But especially her.”

The pans slept in trees and spent plenty of time grooming each other. For the lucky groomer a tick or louse was a treat. With enough, they could get high on some peppery-tasting alkaloid. He suspected the careful stroking and combing of his hair by Dors was a behavior selected because it improved pan hygiene. It certainly calmed Ipan, also.

Then it struck him: pans groomed rather than vocalizing. Only in crises and when agitated did they call and cry, mostly about breeding, feeding, or self-defense. They were like people who could not release themselves through the comfort of talk.

And they needed comfort. The core of their social life resembled human societies under stress-in tyrannies, in prisons, in city gangs. Nature red in tooth and claw, yet strikingly like troubled people.

But there were “civilized” behaviors here, too. Friendships, grief, sharing, buddies-in-arms who hunted and guarded turf together. Their old got wrinkled, bald, and toothless, yet were still cared for.

Their instinctive knowledge was prodigious. They knew how to make a bed of leaves as dusk fell, high up in trees. They could climb with grasping feet. They felt, cried, mourned-without being able to parse these into neat grammatical packages, so the emotions could be managed, subdued. Instead, emotions drove them.

Hunger was the strongest. They found and ate leaves, fruit, insects, even fair-sized animals. They loved caterpillars.

Each moment, each small enlightenment, sank him deeper into Ipan. He began to sense the subtle nooks and crannies of the pan mind. Slowly, he gained more cooperative control.

That morning a female found a big fallen tree and began banging on it. The hollow trunk boomed like a drum and all the foraging party rushed forward to beat it, too, grinning wildly at the noise.

Ipan joined in. Hari felt the burst of joy, seethed in it.

Later, coming upon a waterfall after a heavy rain, they seized vines and swung among trees, out over the foaming water, screeching with delight as they performed twists and leaps from vine to vine.

They were like children in a new playground. Hari got Ipan to make impossible moves, wild tumbles and dives, propelling him forward with abandon-to the astonishment of the other pans.

They were violent in their sudden, peevish moments-in hustling females, in working out their perpetual dominance hierarchy, and especially in hunting. A successful hunt brought enormous excitement: hugging, kissing, pats. As the troop descended to feed, the forest rang with barks, screeches, hoots, and pants. Hari joined the tumult, danced with Sheelah/Dors.

He had expected to have to repress his prim meritocrat dislike of mess. Many meritocrats even disliked soil itself. Not Hari, who had been reared among farmers and laborers. Still, he had thought that long exposure to Trantor’s prissy aesthetics would hamper him here. Instead, the pans’ filth seemed natural.

In some matters he did have to restrain his feelings. Rats the pans ate headfirst. Larger game they smashed against rocks. They devoured the brains first, a steaming delicacy.

Hari gulped-metaphorically, but with Ipan echoing the impulse-and watched, screening his reluctance. Ipan had to eat, after all.

At the scent of predators, he felt Ipan’s hair stand on end. Another tangy bouquet made Ipan’s mouth water. He gave no mercy to food, even if it was still walking. Evolution in action; those pans who had showed mercy in the past ate less and left fewer descendants. Those weren’t represented here anymore.

For all its excesses, he found the pans’ behavior hauntingly familiar. Males gathered often for combat, for pitching rocks, for blood sports, to work out their hierarchy. Females networked and formed alliances. There were trades of favors for loyalty, kinship bonds, turf wars, threats and displays, protection rackets, a hunger for “respect,” scheming subordinates, revenge-a social world enjoyed by many people that history had judged “great.”

Much like the Emperor’s court, in fact.

Did people long to strip away their clothing and conventions, bursting forth as pans? A brainy pan would be quite at home in the Imperial gentry…

Hari felt a flush of revulsion so strong Ipan shook and fidgeted. Humanity’s lot had to be different, not this primitive horror.

He could use this, certainly, as a test bed for a full theory. Then humankind would be self-knowing, captains of themselves. He would build in the imperatives of the pans, but go far beyond-to true, deep psychohistory.

10.

“I don’t see it,” Dors said at dinner.

“But they’re so much like us! We must have shared some connections.” He put down his spoon. “I wonder if they were house pets of ours, long before star travel?”

“I wouldn’t have them messing up my house.”

Adult humans weighed little more than pans, but were far weaker. A pan could lift five times more than a well-conditioned man. Human brains were three or four times more massive than a pan’s. A human baby a few months old already had a brain larger than a grown pan. People had different brain architecture, as well.

But was that the whole story? Hari wondered.

Give pans bigger brains and speech, ease off on the testosterone, saddle them with more inhibitions, spruce them up with a shave and a haircut, teach them to stand securely on hind legs-and you had deluxe model pans that would look and act rather human.

“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 collapsed 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 tunnel’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 taste buds. 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 Ex Spec 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 anterior 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.”

“ Thebrain?” 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 allover him. On his back.

Some day I be Bigger.

12.

“When did you bailout?” 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 interests.”

“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.”

“Our worst sins are all our own, I fear.” He had not expected that his experiences here would shake him so. This was sobering.

“Not at all. Genocide occurs in wolves and pans alike. Murder is widespread. Ducks and orangutans rape. Even ants have organized warfare and slave raids. Pans have at least as good a chance of being murdered as do humans, Vaddo says. Of all the hallowed human hallmarks-speech, art, technology, and the rest-the one which comes most obviously from animal ancestors is genocide.”

“You’ve been learning from Vaddo.”

“It was a good way to keep an eye on him.”

“Better to be suspicious than sorry?”

“Of course,” she said blandly, giving nothing away.

“Well, luckily, even if we are superpans, Imperial order and communication blurs distinctions between Us and Them.”

“So?”

“That blunts the deep impulse to genocide.”

She laughed again, this time rather to his annoyance. “You haven’t understood history very well. Smaller groups still kill each other off with great relish. In Zone Sagittarius, during the reign of Omar the Impaler-”

“I concede, there are small-scale tragedies by the dozens. But on the scale where psychohistory might work, averaging over populations of many thousands of billions-”

“What makes you so sure numbers are any protection?” she asked pointedly.

“So far-”

“The Empire has been in stasis.”

“A steady-state solution, actually. Dynamic equilibrium.”

“And if that equilibrium fails?”

“Well…then I have nothing to say.” She smiled. “How uncharacteristic.”

“Until I have a real, working theory.”

“One that can allow for widespread genocide, if the Empire erodes.”

He saw her point then. “You’re saying I really need this ‘animal nature’ part of humans.”

“I’m afraid so. I’m trained to allow for it already.”

He was puzzled. “How so?”

“I don’t have your view of humanity. Scheming, plots, Sheelah grabbing more meat for her young, Ipan wanting to do in Biggest-those things happen in the Empire. Just better disguised.”

“So?”

“Consider Ex Spec Vaddo. He made a comment about your working on a ‘theory of history’ the other evening.”

“So?”

“Who told him you were?”

“I don’t think I-ah, you think he’s checking up on us?”

“He already knows.”

“The security chief, maybe she told him, after checking on me with the Academic Potentate.”

She graced him with an unreadable smile. “I do love your endless, naive way of seeing the world.”

Later, he couldn’t decide whether she had meant it as a compliment.

13.

Vaddo invited him to try a combat-sport the station offered, and Hari accepted. It was an enhanced swordplay with levitation through electrostatic lifters. Hari was slow and inept. Using his own body against Vaddo’s swift moves made him long for the sureness and grace of Ipan.

Vaddo always opened with a traditional posture: one foot forward, his prod-sword making little circles in the air. Hari poked through Vaddo’s defense sometimes, but usually spent all his lifter energy eluding Vaddo’s thrusts. He did not enjoy it nearly as much as Vaddo.

He did learn bits and pieces about pans from Vaddo and from trolling through the vast station library. The man seemed a bit uneasy when Hari probed the data arrays, as though Vaddo somehow owned them and any reader was a thief. Or at least, that was what Hari took to be the origin of the unease.

He had never thought about animals very much, though he had grown up among them on Helicon. Yet he came to feel that they, too, had to be understood.

Catching sight of itself in a mirror, a dog sees the image as another dog. So did cats, fish, or birds. After a while they get used to the harmless image, silent and smell-free, but they do not see it as themselves.

Human children had to be about two years old to do better.

Pans took a few days to figure out that they were looking at themselves. Then they preened before it shamelessly, studied their backs, and generally tried to see themselves differently, even putting leaves on their heads like hats and laughing at the result.

So they could do something other animals could not: get outside themselves, and look back.

They plainly lived in a world charged with echoes and reminiscences. Their dominance hierarchy was a frozen record of past coercion. They remembered termite mounds, trees to drum, useful spots where large water-sponge leaves fell, or grain matured.

All this fed into the toy model he had begun building in his notes: a pan psychohistory. It used their movements, rivalries, hierarchies, patterns of eating and mating and dying, territory, resources, and troop competition for them. He found a way to factor into his equations the biological baggage of dark behaviors, even the worst, like delight in torture, and easy exterminations of other species for short-term gain.

All these the pans had. Just like the Empire.

At a dance that evening he watched the crowd with fresh vision.

Flirting was practice mating. He could see it in the sparkle of eyes, the rhythms of the dance. The warm breeze wafting up from the valley brought smells of dust, rot, life. An animal restlessness moved in the room.

He quite liked dancing and Dors was a lush companion tonight. Yet he could not stop his mind from sifting, analyzing, taking the world before him apart into mechanisms.

The nonverbal template humans used for attract/approach strategies apparently descended from a shared mammalian heritage, Dors had pointed out. He thought of that, watching the crowd at the bar.

A woman crosses a crowded room, hips swaying, eyes resting momentarily on a likely man, then coyly looking away just as she apparently notices his regard. A standard opening move: Notice me.

The second is I am harmless. A hand placed palm up on a table or knee. A shoulder shrug, derived from an ancient vertebrate reflex, signifying helplessness. Combine that with a tilted head, which displays the vulnerability of the neck. These commonly appeared when two people drawn to each other have their first conversation-all quite unconsciously.

Such moves and gestures are subcortical, emerging far below the neocortex.

Did such forces shape the Empire more than trade balances, alliances, treaties?

He looked at his own kind and tried to see it through pan eyes.

Though human females matured earlier, they did not go on to acquire coarse body hair, bony eye ridges, deep voices, or tough skin. Males did. And women everywhere strove to stay young looking. Cosmetics makers freely admitted their basic role: We don’t sell products. We sell hope.

Competition for mates was incessant. Male pans sometimes took turns with females in estrus. They had huge testicles, implying that reproductive advantage had come to those males who produced enough sperm to overwhelm their rivals’ contributions. Human males had proportionally smaller testicles.

But humans got their revenge where it mattered. All known primates were genetically related, though they had separated out as species many millions of years ago. In DNA-measured time, pans lay six million years from humans. Of all primates, humans had the largest penises.

He mentioned to Dors that only four percent of mammals formed pair bonds, were monogamous. Primates rated a bit higher, but not much. Birds were much better at it.

She sniffed. “Don’t let all this biology go to your head.”

“Oh, no, I won’t let it get that far.”

“You mean it belongs in lower places?”

“Madam, you’ll have to be the judge of that.”

“Ah, you and your single-entendre humor.”

Later that evening, he had ample opportunity to reflect upon the truth that, while it was not always great to be human, it was tremendous fun being a mammal.

14.

They spent one last day immersed in their pans, sunning themselves beside a gushing stream. They had told Vaddo to bring the shuttle down the next day, book a wormhole transit. Then they entered the immersion capsule and sank into a last reverie.

Until Biggest started to mount Sheelah.

Hari/Ipan sat up, his head foggy. Sheelah was shrieking at Biggest. She slapped him.

Biggest had mounted Sheelah before. Dors had bailed out quickly, her mind returning to her body in the capsule.

Something was different now. Ipan hurried over and signed to Sheelah, who was throwing pebbles at Biggest. What?

She moved her hands rapidly, signing, No go.

She could not bailout. Something was wrong back at the capsule. He could go back himself, tell them.

Hari made the little mental flip that would bail him out.

Nothing happened.

He tried again. Sheelah threw dust and pebbles, backing away from Biggest. Nothing.

No time to think. He stepped between Sheelah and Biggest.

The massive pan frowned. Here was Ipan, buddy Ipan, getting in the way. Denying him a fern. Biggest seemed to have forgotten the challenge and beating of the day before.

First he tried bellowing, eyes big and white. Then Biggest shook his arms, fists balled.

Hari made his pan stand still. It took every calming impulse. he could muster.

Biggest swung his fist like a club. Ipan ducked. Biggest missed.

Hari was having trouble controlling Ipan, who wanted to flee. Sheets of fear shot up through the pan mind, hot yellows in the blue-black depths.

Biggest charged forward, slamming Ipan back. Hari felt the jolt, a stabbing pain in his chest. He toppled backward, hit hard.

Biggest yowled his triumph. Waved his arms at the sky.

Biggest would get on top, he saw. Beat him again. Suddenly he felt a deep, raw hatred.

From that red seethe he felt his grip on Ipan tighten. He was riding both with and within the pan, feeling its raw red fear, overrunning that with an iron rage. Ipan’s own wrath fed back into Hari. The two formed a concert, anger building as if reflected from hard walls.

He might not be the same kind of primate, but he knew Ipan. Neither of them was going to get beaten again. And Biggest was not going to get Sheelah/Dors.

He rolled to the side. Biggest hit the ground where he had been.

Ipan leaped up and kicked Biggest. Hard, in the ribs. Once, twice. Then in the head.

Whoops, cries, dust, pebbles-Sheelah was still bombarding them both. Ipan shivered with boiling energy and backed away.

Biggest shook his dusty head. Then he curled and rolled easily up to his feet, full of muscular grace, face a constricted mask. The pan’s eyes widened, showing white and red.

Ipan yearned to run. Only Hari’s rage held him in place.

But it was a static balance of forces. Ipan blinked as Biggest shuffled warily forward, the big pan’s caution a tribute to the damage Ipan had inflicted.

I need some advantage,Hari thought, looking around.

He could call for allies. Hunker paced nervously nearby.

Something told Hari that would be a losing strategy. Hunker was still a lieutenant to Biggest. Sheelah was too small to make a decisive difference. He looked at the other pans, all chattering anxiously-and decided. He picked up a rock.

Biggest grunted in surprise. Pans didn’t use rocks against each other. Rocks were only for repelling invaders. He was violating a social code.

Biggest yelled, waved to the others, pounded the ground, huffed angrily. Then he charged.

Hari threw the rock hard. It hit Biggest in the chest, knocked him down.

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 ferns 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, neurological 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 fern, 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. Ferns inched around Biggest and approached Ipan.

If only I could leave him to the terns’ delights,Hari thought.

He tried to bailout 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 penetrate 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 bailout 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 ANIMALS?

He had better arguments to back up his case. The slow accumulation 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 distance, 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 ruminate 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.

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 resonance.

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 gesture. 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 regaining 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 onward, 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 midmoming 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 followed 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 apprehension 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 attention. 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 gingerlyon 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 information, 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.

Thick hindquarters, propelling them in brisk steps. Short forelimbs, ending in sharp claws. Their large heads seemed to be mostly teeth. sharp and white above slit ted, wary eyes. A thick brown pelt covered them, growing bushy in the heavy tail they used for balance.

Days before, from the safety of a high tree, Ipan had watched some rip and devour the soft tissues of a gigantelope out on the grasslands. These came sniffing, working downslope in a skirmish line, five of them. Sheelah and Ipan trembled at the sight. They were downwind of the raboons and so beat a retreat in silence.

There were no tall trees here, just brush and saplings. Hari and Sheelah angled away downhill and got some distance, and then saw a clearing ahead. Ipan picked up the faint tang of other pans, wafting from across the clearing.

He waved to her: Go. At the same moment a chorus rose behind them. The raboons had caught the scent.

Their wheezing grunts came echoing through the thick bushes. Downslope there was even less cover, but bigger trees lay beyond. They could climb those.

Ipan and Sheelah hurried across the broad tan clearing on all fours, but they were not quick. Snarling raboons burst into the grass behind them. Hari scampered into the trees-and directly into the midst of a pan troop.

There were several dozen, startled and blinking. He yelled incoherently, wondering how Ipan would signal to them.

The nearest large male turned, bared teeth, and shrieked angrily. The entire pack took up the call, whooping and snatching up sticks and rocks, throwing them at Ipan. A pebble hit him on the chin, a branch on the thigh. He fled, Sheelah already a few steps ahead of him.

The raboons came charging across the clearing. In their claws they held small, sharp stones. They looked big and solid, but they slowed at the barrage of screeches and squawks coming from the trees. Ipan and Sheelah burst out into the grass of the clearing and the pans came right after them. The raboons skidded to a halt.

The pans saw the raboons, but they did not stop or even slow. They still came after Ipan and Sheelah with murderous glee.

The raboons stood frozen, their claws working uneasily.

Hari realized what was happening and picked up a branch as he ran, calling to Sheelah. She saw and copied him. He ran straight at the raboons, waving the branch. It was an awkward, twisted old limb, useless, but it looked big. Hari wanted to seem like the advance guard of some bad business.

In the rising cloud of dust and general chaos the raboons saw a large party of enraged pans emerging from the forest. The): bolted.

Squealing, they ran at full stride into the far trees.

Ipan and Sheelah followed, running with the last of their strength. By the time Ipan reached the first trees, he looked back and the pans had stopped halfway, still screeching their vehemence.

He signed to Sheelah, Go. They cut away at a steep angle, heading uphill.

19.

Ipan needed food and rest-if only to stop his heart from lurching at every minor sound. Sheelah and Ipan clutched each other, high in a tree, and crooned and petted.

Hari needed time to think. Autoservers were keeping their bodies alive at the station. Dors’ tiktok would defend the locks, but how long would a security officer take to get around that?

It would be smart to let them stay out here, in danger, saying to the rest of the staff that the two odd tourists wanted a really long immersion. Let nature take its course.

His thinking triggered jitters in Ipan, so he dropped that mode. Better to think abstractly. There was plenty out here that needed understanding.

He suspected that the ancients. who planted pans and gigantelope and the rest here had tinkered with the raboons, to see if they could turn a more distant primate relative into something like humans. A perverse goal, it seemed to Hari, but believable. Scientists loved to tinker.

They had gotten as far as pack-hunting, but raboons had no tools beyond crudely edged stones, occasionally used to cut meat once they had brought it down.

In another few million years, under evolution’s grind, they might be as smart as pans. Who would go extinct then?

At the moment he didn’t much care. He had felt real rage when the pans -his own kind!-hadturned against them, even when the raboons came within view. Why?

He worried at the issue, sure there was something here he had to understand. Psychohistory had to deal with such basic, fundamental impulses. The pans’ reaction had been uncomfortably close to myriad incidents in human history.

Hate the Stranger.

He had to fathom that murky truth.

Pans moved in small groups, disliking outsiders, breeding mostly within their modest circle of a few dozen. This meant any genetic trait that emerged could pass swiftly into all the members, through inbreeding. If it helped the band survive, the rough rub of chance would select for that band’s survival. Fair enough.

But the trait had to be undiluted. A troop of especially good rock throwers would get swallowed up if they joined a company of several hundred. Contact would make them breed outside the original small clan. Outbreeding: their genetic heritage would get watered down.

Striking a balance between the accidents of genetics in small groups, and the stability of large groups-that was the trick. Some lucky troop might have fortunate genes, conferring traits that fit the next challenge handed out by the ever-altering world. They would do well. But if those genes never passed to many pans, what did it matter?

With some small amount of outbreeding, that trait got spread into other bands. Down through the strainer of time, others picked up the trait. It spread.

This meant it was actually helpful to develop smoldering animosity to outsiders, an immediate sense of their wrongness. Don’t breed with them.

So small bands held fast to their eccentric traits, and some prospered. Those lived on; most perished. Evolutionary jumps happened faster in small, semiisolated bands which outbred slightly. They kept their genetic assets in one small basket, the troop. Only occasionally did they mate with another troop often, through rape.

The price was steep: a strong preference for their own tiny lot.

They hated crowds, strangers, noise. Bands of less than ten were too vulnerable to disease or predators; a few losses and the group failed. Too many, and they lost the concentration of close breeding. They were intensely loyal to their group, easily identifying each other in the dark by smell, even at great distances. Because they had many common genes, altruistic actions were common.

They even honored heroism-for if the hero died, his shared genes were still passed on through his relatives.

Even if strangers could pass the tests of difference in appearances, manner, smell, grooming, even then, culture could amplify the effects. Newcomers with different language or habits and posture would seem repulsive. Anything that served to distinguish a band would help keep hatreds high.

Each small genetic ensemble would then be driven by natural selection to stress the noninherited differences, even arbitrary ones, dimly connected to survival fitness…and so they could evolve culture. As humans had.

Diversity in their tribal intricacies avoided genetic watering down. They heeded the ancient call of aloof, wary tribalism.

Hari/Ipan shifted uneasily. Midway through his thinking, the word they had come in Hari’s thinking to mean humans as well as pans. The description fit both.

That was the key. Humans fit into the gigantic Empire despite their innate tribalism, their panlike heritage. It was a miracle!

But even miracles called out for explanation. Pans could be useful models for the gentry and the vast citizenry, the two classes encouraged to breed.

Yet how could the Empire possibly have kept itself stable, using such crude creatures as humans?

Hari had never seen the issue before in such glaring, and humbling, light.

And he had no answer.

20.

They moved on in spite of the blunt, deep unease of their pans.

Ipan smelled something that sent his eyes darting left and right. With the full tool kit of soothing thoughts and the subtle tricks he had learned, Hari kept him going.

Sheelah was having more trouble. The female pan did not like laboring up the long, steep gullies that approached the ridge line. Gnarled bushes blocked their way and it took time to work around them. Fruit was harder to find at these altitudes.

Ipan’s shoulders and arms ached constantly. Pans walked on all fours because their immensely strong arms carried a punishing weight penalty. To navigate both trees and ground meant you could optimize neither. Sheelah and Ipan groaned and whined at the soreness that never left feet, legs, wrists, and arms. Pans would never be far-ranging explorers.

Together they let their pans pause often to crumble leaves and soak up water from tree holes, a routine, simple tool use. They kept sniffing the air, apprehensive.

The smell that disturbed both pans got stronger, darker.

Sheelah went ahead and was the first over the ridge line. Far below in the valley they could make out the rectangular rigidities of the Excursion Station. A flyer lifted from the roof and whispered away down the valley, no danger to them.

He recalled what seemed a century ago, sitting on the verandah there with drinks in hand and Dors saying, If you stayed on Trantor you might be dead. Also, if you didn’t stay on Trantor…

They started down the steep slope. Their pans’ eyes jerked at every unexpected movement. A chilly breeze stirred the few low bushes and twisted trees. Some had a feathered look, burnt and shattered by lightning. Air masses driven up from the valleys fought along here, the brute clash of pressures. This rocky ridge was far from the comfortable province of pans. They hurried.

Ahead, Sheelah stopped.

Without a sound, five raboons rose from concealment, forming a neat half circle around them.

Hari could not tell if it was the same pack as before. If so, they were quite considerable pack hunters, able to hold memory and purpose over time. They had waited ahead, where there were no trees to climb.

The raboons were eerily quiet as they strode forward, their claws clicking softly.

He called to Sheelah and made some utterly fake ferocious noises as he moved, arms high in the air, fists shaking, showing a big profile. He let Ipan take over while he thought.

A raboon band could certainly take two isolated pans. To survive this they had to surprise the raboons, frighten them.

He looked around. Throwing rocks wasn’t going to do the trick here. With only a vague notion of what he was doing, he shuffled left, toward a tree that had been splintered by lightning.

Sheelah saw his move and got there first, striding energetically. Ipan picked up two stones and flung them at the nearest raboon. One struck on the flank but did no real harm.

The raboons began to trot, circling. They called to each other in wheezing grunts.

Sheelah leaped on a dried-out shard of the tree. It snapped. She snatched it up and Hari saw her point. It was as tall as she was and she cradled it.

The largest raboon grunted and they all looked at each other.

The raboons charged.

The nearest one came at Sheelah. She caught it on the shoulder with the blunt point and it squealed.

Hari grabbed a stalk of the shattered tree trunk. He could not wrench it free. Another squeal from behind him and Sheelah was gibbering in a high, frightened voice.

It was best to let the pans release tension vocally, but he could feel the fear and desperation in the tones and knew it came from Dors, too.

He carefully selected a smaller shard of the tree. With both hands he twisted it free, using his weight and big shoulder muscles, cracking it so that it came away with a point.

Lances. That was the only way to stay away from the raboon claws. Pans never used such advanced weapons. Evolution hadn’t gotten around to that lesson yet.

The raboons were all around them now. He and Sheelah stood back to back. He barely got his feet placed when he had to take the rush of a big, swarthy raboon.

The raboons had not gotten the idea of the lance yet. It slammed into the point, jerked back. A fearsome bellow. Ipan wet himself with fear, but something in Hari kept him in control.

The raboon backed off, whimpering. It turned to run. In midstride it stopped. For a long, suspended moment the raboon hesitated-then turned back toward Hari.

It trotted forward with new confidence. The other raboons watched. It went to the same tree Hari had used and, with a single heave, broke off a long, slender spike of wood. Then it came toward Hari, stopped, and with one claw held the stick forward. With a toss of its big head it looked at him and half turned, putting one foot forward.

With a shock Hari recognized the swordplay position.

Vaddo had used it. Vaddo was riding this raboon.

It made perfect sense. This way the pans’ deaths would be quite natural. Vaddo could say that he was developing raboon riding as a new commercial application of the same hardware that worked for pan riding.

Vaddo came forward a careful step at a time, holding the long lance between two claws now. He made the end move in a circle. Movement was jerky; claws were crude, compared with pan hands. But the raboon was stronger.

It came at him with a quick feint, then a thrust. Hari barely managed to dodge sideways while he brushed the lance aside with his stick. Vaddo recovered quickly and came from Hari’s left. Jab, feint, jab, feint. Hari caught each with a swoop of his stick.

Their wooden swords smacked against each other and Hari hoped his didn’t snap. Vaddo had good control of his raboon. It did not try to flee as it had before.

Hari was kept busy slapping aside Vaddo’s thrusts. He had to have some other advantage, or the superior strength of the raboon would eventually tell. Hari circled, drawing Vaddo away from Sheelah. The other raboons were keeping her trapped, but not attacking. All attention riveted on the two figures as they thrust and parried.

Hari drew Vaddo toward an outcropping. The raboon was having trouble holding its lance straight and had to keep looking down at its claws to get them right. This meant it paid less attention to where its two hooves found their footing. Hari slapped and jabbed and kept moving, making the raboon step sideways. It put a big hoof down among some angular stones, teetered, then recovered.

Hari moved left. It stepped again and its hoof turned and it stumbled. Hari was on it in an instant. He thrust forward as the raboon looked down, feet scrambling for purchase. Hari caught the raboon full with his point.

He pushed hard. The other raboons let out a moaning sound.

Snorting in rage, the raboon tried to get off the point. Hari made Ipan step forward and thrust the tip farther into the raboon. The thing wailed hoarsely. Ipan plunged again. Blood spurted from it, spattering the dust. Its knees buckled and it sprawled.

Hari shot a glance over his shoulder. The others had surged into action. Sheelah was holding off three, screeching at them so loudly it unnerved even him. She had already wounded one. Blood dripped down its brown coat.

But the others did not charge. They circled and growled and stamped their feet but came no closer. They were confused. Learning, too. He could see the quick, bright eyes studying the situation, this fresh move in the perpetual war.

Sheelah stepped out and poked the nearest raboon. It launched itself at her in a snarling fit and she stuck it again, deeper. It yelped and tumed-and ran.

That did it for the others. They all trotted off, leaving their fellow bleating on the ground. Its dazed eyes watched its blood trickle out. Its eyes flickered and Vaddo was gone. The animal slumped.

With deliberation Hari picked up a rock and bashed in the skull. It was messy work, and he sat back inside Ipan and let the dark, smoldering pan anger come out.

He bent over and studied the raboon brain. A fine silvery webbing capped the rubbery, convoluted ball. Immersion circuitry.

He turned away from the sight and only then saw that Sheelah was hurt.

21.

The station crowned a rugged hill. Steep gullies gave the hillside the look of a weary, lined face. Wiry bushes thronged the lower reaches.

Ipan puffed as he worked his way through the raw land cut by erosion. In pan vision the night was eerie, a shimmering vista of pale greens and blue-tinged shadows. The hill was a nuance in the greater slope of a grand mountain, but pan vision could not make out the distant features. Pans lived in a close, immediate world.

Ahead he could see clearly the glowing blank wall ringing the station. It was massive, five meters tall. And, he remembered from his tourist tour of the place, rimmed with broken glass.

Behind him came gasps as Sheelah labored up the slope. The wound in her side made her gait stiff, face rigid. She refused to hide below. They were both near exhaustion and their pans were balking, despite two stops for fruit and grubs and rest.

Through their feeble sign vocabulary, their facial grimacing, and writing in the dust, they had “discussed” the possibilities. Two pans were vulnerable out here. They could not expect to be as lucky as with the raboons, not tired and in strange territory.

The best time to approach the station was at night. Whoever had engineered this would not wait forever. They had hidden from flyers twice more since morning. Resting through the next day was an inviting option, but Hari felt a foreboding press him onward.

He angled up the hillside, watching for electronic trip wires. Of such technical matters he knew nothing. He would have to keep a lookout for the obvious and hope that the station was not wired for thinking trespassers.

Pan vision was sharp and clear in dim light for nearby objects, but he could find nothing.

He chose a spot by the wall shadowed by trees. Sheelah panted in shallow gasps as she approached. Looking up, the wall seemed immense. Impossible…

Slowly he surveyed the land around them. No sign of any movement. The place smelled peculiar to Ipan, somehow wrong. Maybe animals stayed away from the alien compound. Good; that would make security inside less alert.

The wall was polished concrete. A thick lip jutted out at the top, making climbing it harder.

Sheelah gestured to where trees grew near the wall. Stumps nearer showed that the builders had thought about animals leaping across from branches, but some were tall enough and had branches within a few meters of the top.

Could a pan make the distance? Not likely, especially when tired. Sheelah pointed to him and back to her, then held her hands out and made a swinging motion. Could they swing across the distance?

He studied her face. The designer would not anticipate two pans cooperating that way. He squinted up at the top. Too high to climb, even if Sheelah stood on his shoulders.

Yes,he signed.

A few moments later, her hands holding his feet, about to let go of his branch, he had second thoughts.

Ipan didn’t mind this bit of calisthenics, and in fact was happy to be back in a tree. But Hari’s human judgment still kept shouting that he could not possibly do it. Natural pan talent conflicted with human caution.

Luckily, he did not have much time to indulge in self-doubt. Sheelah yanked him off the branch. He fell, held only by her hands.

She had wrapped her feet securely around a thick branch and now began to oscillate him like a weight on a string. She swung him back and forth, increasing the amplitude. Back, forth, up, down, centrifugal pressure in his head. To Ipan it was unremarkable. To Hari it was a wheeling world of heart-stopping whirls.

Small branches brushed him and he worried about noise and then forgot about that because his head was coming up level with the top of the wall.

The concrete lip was rounded off on the inside, so no hook could find a grip.

He swung back down, head plunging toward the ground. Then up into the lower branches, twigs slapping his face.

On the next swing he was higher. All along the top of the wall thick glass glinted. Very professional.

He barely had time to realize all this when she let him go…

He arced up, hands stretched out-and barely caught the lip. If it had not protectively protruded out, he would have missed.

He let his body slam against the side. His feet scrabbled for purchase against the sheer face. A few toes got hold. He heaved up, muscles bunching-and over. Never before had he appreciated how much stronger a pan could be. No man could have made it here.

He scrambled up, cutting his arm and haunch on glass. It was a delicate business, getting to his feet and finding a place to stand.

A surge of triumph. He waved to Sheelah, invisible in the tree.

From here on it was up to him. He realized suddenly that they could have fashioned some sort of rope, tying together vines. Then he could lift her up here. Good idea, too late.

No point in delaying. The compound was partly visible through the trees, a few lights burning. Utterly silent. They had waited until the night was about half over; he had nothing but Ipan’s gut feelings to tell him when.

He looked down. Just beyond his toes razor wire gleamed, set into the concrete. Carefully he stepped between the shiny lines. There was room among the sharp glass teeth to stand. A tree blocked his vision and he could see little below him in the dim glow from the station. At least that meant they couldn’t see him, either.

Should he jump? Too high. The tree that hid him was close, but he could not see into it. He stood and thought, but nothing came to him. Meanwhile Sheelah was behind him, alone, and he hated leaving her where dangers waited that he did not even know.

He was thinking like a man and forgetting that he had the capability of a pan.

Go.He leaped. Twigs snapped and he plunged heavily in shadows. Branches stabbed his face. He saw a dark shape to his right and so curled his legs, rotated, hands out-and snagged a branch. His hands closed easily around it and he realized it was too thin, too thin

It snapped. The crack came like a thunderbolt to his ears. He fell, letting go of the branch. His back hit something hard and he rolled, grappling for a hold. His fingers closed around a thick branch and he swung from it. Finally he let out a gasp.

Leaves rustled, branches swayed. Nothing more.

He was halfway up a tree. Aches sprouted in his joints, a galaxy of small pains.

Hari relaxed and let Ipan master the descent. He had made far too much noise falling in the tree, but there was no sign of any movement across the broad lawns between him and the big, luminous station.

He thought of Dors and wished there were some way he could let her know he was inside now. Thinking of her, he measured with his eye the distances from nearby trees, memorizing the pattern so that he could find the way back at a dead run if he had to.

Now what? He didn’t have a plan.

Hari gently urged Ipan-who was nervous and tired, barely controllable-into a triangular pattern of bushes. Ipan’s mind was like a stormy sky split by skittering lightning. Not thoughts precisely, more like knots of emotion, forming and flashing around crisp kernels of anxiety. Patiently Hari summoned up soothing images, getting Ipan’s breathing slowed, and he almost missed the whispery sound.

Nails scrabbling on a stone walkway. Something running fast.

They came around the triangle peak of bushes. Bunched muscles, sleek skin, stubby legs eating up the remaining distance. They were well trained to seek and kill soundlessly, without warning.

To Ipan the monsters were alien, terrifying. Ipan stepped back in panic before the two onrushing bullets of muscle and bone. Black gums peeled back from white teeth, bared beneath mad eyes.

Then Hari felt something shift in Ipan. Ancient, instinctive responses stopped his retreat, tensed the body. No time to flee, so fight.

Ipan set himself, balanced. The two might go for his arms so he drew them back, crouching to bring his face down.

Ipan had dealt with four-legged pack hunters before, somewhere far back in ancestral memory, and knew innately that they lined up on a victim’s outstretched limb, would go for the throat. The canines wanted to bowl him over, slash open the jugular, rip and shred in the vital seconds of surprise.

They gathered themselves, bundles of swift sinew, running nearly shoulder to shoulder, big heads up-and leaped.

In air, they were committed, Ipan knew. And open. Ipan brought both hands up to grasp the canines’ forelegs.

He threw himself backward, holding the legs tight, his hands barely beneath the jaws. The wirehounds’ own momentum carried them over his head as he rolled backward.

Ipan rolled onto his back, yanking hard. The sudden snap slammed the canines forward. They could not get their heads around and down, to close on his hand.

The leap, the catch, the quick pivot and swing, the heave-all combined in a centrifugal whirl that slung the wirehounds over Ipan as he himself went down, rolling. He felt the canines’ legs snap and let go. They sailed over him with pained yelps.

Ipan rolled over completely, head tucked in, and came off his shoulders with a bound. He heard a solid thud, clacks as jaws snapped shut. A thump as the canines hit the grass, broken legs unable to cushion them.

He scrambled after them, his breath whistling. They were trying to get up, turning on snapped legs to confront their quarry. Still no barks, only faint whimpers of pain, sullen growls. One swore vehemently and quite obscenely. The other chanted, “Baaas’ard…baaas’ard…”

Animals turning in their vast, sorrowful night.

He jumped high and came down on both. His feet drove their necks into the ground and he felt bone give way. Before he stepped back to look, he knew they were gone.

Ipan’s blood surged with joy. Hari had never felt this tingling thrill, not even in the first immersion, when Ipan had killed a Stranger. Victory over alien things with teeth and claws that come at you out of the night was a profound, inflaming pleasure.

Hari had done nothing. The victory was wholly Ipan’s.

For a long moment Hari basked in it in the cool night air, felt the tremors of ecstasy.

Slowly, reason returned. There were other wirehounds. Ipan had caught these just right. Such luck did not strike twice.

The wirehounds were easy to see on the lawn. Would attract attention.

Ipan did not like touching them. Their bowels had emptied and the smell cut the air. They left a smear on the grass as he dragged them into the bushes.

Time, time. Someone would miss the canines, come to see.

Ipan was still pumped up from his victory. Hari used that to get him trotting across the broad lawn, taking advantage of shadows. Energy popped in Ipan’s veins. Hari knew it was a mere momentary glandular joy, overlaying a deep fatigue. When it faded, Ipan would become dazed, hard to govern.

Every time he stopped he looked back and memorized landmarks. He might have to return this way on the run.

It was late and most of the station was dark. In the technical area, though, a cluster of windows blossomed with what Ipan saw as impossibly rich, strange, superheated light.

He loped over to them and flattened himself against the wall. It helped that Ipan was fascinated by this strange citadel of the godlike humans. Out of his own curiosity he peeked in a window. Under enamel light a big assembly room sprawled, one that Hari recognized. There, centuries ago, he had formed up with the other brightly dressed tourists to go out on a trek.

Hari let the pan’s curiosity propel him around to the side, where he knew a door led into a long corridor. The door opened freely, to Hari’s surprise. Ipan strolled down the slick tiles of the hallway, quizzically studying the phosphor paint designs on the ceiling and walls, which emitted a soothing ivory glow.

An office doorway was open. Hari made Ipan squat and bob his head around the edge. Nobody there. It was a sumptuous den with shelves soaring into a vaulted ceiling. Hari remembered sitting there discussing the immersion process. That meant the immersion vessels were just a few doors away down-

The squeak of shoes on tiles made him turn.

Ex Spec Vaddo was behind him, leveling a weapon.

In the cool light the man’s face looked odd to Ipan’s eyes, mysteriously bony. Long, thin, the expression hard to read…

Hari felt the rush of reverence in Ipan and let it carry the pan forward, chippering softly. Ipan felt awe, not fear.

Vaddo tensed up, waving the snout of his ugly weapon. A metallic click. Ipan brought his hands up in a ritual pan greeting and Vaddo shot him.

The impact spun Ipan around. He went down, sprawling.

Vaddo’s mouth curled in derision. “Smart prof, huh? Didn’t figure the alarm on the door, huh?”

The pain from Ipan’s side was sharp, startling. Hari rode the hurt and gathering anger in Ipan, helping it build. Ipan felt his side and his hand came away sticky, smelling like warm iron in the pan’s nostrils.

Vaddo circled around, weapon weaving. “You killed me, you weak little dope. Ruined a good experimental animal. Now I got to figure what to do with you.”

Hari threw his own anger atop Ipan’s seething rage. He felt the big muscles in the shoulders bunch. The pain in the side jabbed suddenly. Ipan groaned and rolled on the floor, pressing one hand to the wound.

Hari kept the head down so that Ipan could not see the blood that was running down now across the legs. Energy was running out of the pan body. A seeping weakness moved up the body.

He pricked his ears at the shuffling of Vaddo’s feet. Another agonized roll, this time bringing the legs up in a curl.

“Guess there’s really only one solution-” Hari heard the metallic click.

Now, yes. He let his anger spill.

Ipan pressed up with his forearms and got his feet under him. No time to get all the way up. Ipan sprang at Vaddo, keeping low.

A tinny shot whisked by his head. Then he hit Vaddo in the hip and slammed the man against the wall. The man’s scent was sour, salty.

Hari lost all control. Ipan bounced Vaddo off the wall and instantly slammed his arms into the man with full force.

Vaddo tried to deflect the impact. Ipan brushed the puny human arms aside. Vaddo’s pathetic attempts at defense were like spiderwebs brushed away.

He butted Vaddo and pounded his massive shoulders into the man’s chest. The weapon clattered on the tiles.

Ipan slammed himself into the man’s body again and again.

Strength, power, joy.

Bones snapped. Vaddo’s head snapped back, smacked the wall, and he went limp.

Ipan stepped back and Vaddo sagged to the tiles. Joy.

Blue-white flies buzzed at the rim of his vision.

Must move.That was all Hari could get through the curtain of emotions that shrouded the pan mind.

The corridor lurched. Hari got Ipan to walk in a sideways teeter.

Down the corridor, painful steps. Two doors, three. Here? Locked. Next door. World moving slower somehow.

The door snicked open. An antechamber that he recognized. Ipan blundered into a chair and almost fell.

Hari made the lungs work hard. The gasping cleared his vision of the dark edges that had crept in, but the blue-white flies were still there, fluttering impatiently, and thicker.

He tried the far door. Locked. Hari summoned what he could from Ipan. Strength, power, joy.

Ipan slammed his shoulder into the solid door. It held. Again. And again, sharp pain-and it popped open.

Right, this was it. The immersion bay. Ipan staggered into the array of vessels. The walk down the line, between banks of control panels, took an eternity. Hari concentrated on each step, placing each foot. Ipan’s field of view bobbed as the head seemed to slip around on liquid shoulders.

Here. His own vessel.

Dors’ tiktok was ready for him. It had seen him coming and latched itself to the board, covering the vital controls.

Ipan bent to the tiktok’s punch panel. He jabbed at the keys, remembering the access code.

Ipan’s fingers were too broad. They could not hit a single key at a time.

The room of bleached light was getting fuzzy. He made Ipan try the code again, but the stubby fingers mashed several keys at once.

The blue-white flies flapped at the edges of his vision. Ipan’s hands whacked in frustration at the punch-pad.

Think.Hari looked around. Ipan wasn’t going to last much longer. A desk nearby had a writing slate and pen.

Leave a note? Hope the right people find it…

He made Ipan stagger to the desk, grasp the pen. An idea flickered as he tried to write: I NEED…

He turned and tottered back to the capsule.

Concentrate.

Gripping the pen, he punched down with the butt. It struck a key cleanly. The blue flies flickered in his vision.

The access code was hard to remember now. He worked on it one number at a time. Stab, poke, jab-and it was done. A light winked from red to green.

He fumbled with the latches. Popped it open.

There lay Hari Seldon, peaceful, eyes closed.

Emergency controls, yes. He knew them from the briefing.

He searched the polished steel surface and found the panel on the side. Ipan stared woozily at the meaningless lettering.

Hari himself had trouble reading. The letters jumped and fused together.

He found several buttons and servo controls. Ipan’s hands were worse now. It took three stabs with the pen to get the reviving program activated. Lights cycled from green to amber.

Ipan abruptly sat down on the cool floor. The blue-white flies were buzzing all around his head and now they wanted to bite him. He sucked in the cool dry air, but there was no substance in it, no help…

Then, without any transition, he was looking at the ceiling. On his back. The lamps up there were getting dark, fading. Then they went out.

22.

Hari’s eyes snapped open.

The recovery program was still sending electrostims through his muscles. He let them jump and tingle and ache while he thought. He felt fine. Not even hungry, as he usually did after an immersion. How long had he been in the wilderness? At least five days.

He sat up. There was no one in the vessel room. Evidently Vaddo had gotten some silent alarm but had not alerted anyone else. That pointed, again, to a tight little conspiracy.

He got out shakily. To get free he had to detach some feeders and probes, but they seemed simple enough.

Ipan. The big body filled the walkway. He knelt and felt for a pulse. Rickety.

But first, Dors. Her vessel was next to his and he started the revival. She looked well.

Vaddo must have put some transmission block on the system, so that none of the staff could tell by looking at the panel that anything was wrong. A simple cover story: a couple who wanted a really long immersion. Vaddo had warned them, but no, they wanted it, so…A perfectly plausible story.

Dors’ eyes fluttered. He kissed her. She gasped.

He made a pan sign, quiet, and went back to Ipan.

Blood was flowing steadily. Hari was surprised to find that he could not pick up the rich, pungent elements in the pan’s blood from smell alone. A human missed so much!

He took off his shirt and made a crude tourniquet. At least Ipan’s breathing was regular. Dors was ready to get out by then, and he helped her disconnect.

“I was hiding in a tree and then-poof!” she said. “What a relief. How did you-”

“Let’s get moving,” he said.

As they left the room, she said, “Who can we trust? Whoever did this-” She stopped when she saw Vaddo. “Oh.”

Somehow her expression made him laugh. She was very rarely surprised.

“ Youdid this?”

“Ipan.”

“I never would have believed a pan could, could…”

“I doubt anyone’s been immersed this long. Not under such stress, anyway. It all just-well, it came out.”

He picked up Vaddo’s weapon and studied the mechanism. A standard pistol, silenced. Vaddo had not wanted to awaken the rest of the station. That was promising. There should be people here who would spring to their aid. He started toward the building where the station personnel lived.

“Wait, what about Vaddo?”

“I’m going to wake up a doctor.”

They did-but Hari took him into the vessel room first, to work on Ipan. Some patchwork and injections and the doctor said Ipan would be all right. Only then did he show the man Vaddo’s body.

The doctor got angry about that, but Hari had a gun. All he had to do was point it. He didn’t say anything, just gestured with the gun.

He did not feel like talking and wondered if he ever would again. When you couldn’t talk you concentrated more, entered into things. Immersed.

And in any case, Vaddo had been dead for some time.

Ipan had done a good job. The doctor shook his head at the severe damage.

Alarms were ringing. He got an instant headache. The security officer showed up. He could see from her reaction that she had not been in on the plot. Can’t connect it to the Academic Potentate, then, he thought abstractly.

But how much did that prove? Imperial politics were subtle…Dors looked at him oddly the whole time. He did not understand why, until he realized that he had not even thought about helping Vaddo first. Ipan was himself, in a sense he knew deeply but could not explain.

But he understood immediately when Dors wanted to go to the station wall and call to Sheelah. They brought her, too, in from the far wild darkness.