“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.