“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.