“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.