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.