Foundation's Fear (34 page)

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 ExSpecs 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 ExSpec 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 ExSpec 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.

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. Fems 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 fems, 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 fems. 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 fems 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 fems. 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.

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,
I as 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 fem, 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.