Go. We go,he signed.
Sheelah nodded and they crept quickly away. Ipan trembled.
The pan was deeply afraid. Yet he was also sad, as if reluctant to leave the presence of the revered humans, his steps dragging.
16.
They used pan modes of patrolling.
He and Dors let their basic levels take over, portions of the brain expert at silent movement, careful of every twig.
Once they had left the humans behind, the pans grew even more cautious. They had few natural enemies, but the faint scent of a single predator changed the feel of the wild.
Ipan climbed tall trees and sat for hours surveying the open land ahead before venturing forth. He weighed the evidence of pungent droppings, faint prints, bent branches.
They angled down the long slope of the valley and stayed in the forest. Hari had only glanced at the big color-coded map of the area all guests received and had trouble recalling much of it.
Finally he recognized one of the distant, beak-shaped peaks. Hari got his bearings. Dors spotted a stream snaking down into the main river and that gave them further help, but still they did not know which way lay the Excursion Station. Or how far.
That way?Hari signed, pointing over the distant ridge.
No. That,Dors insisted.
Far, not.
Why?
The worst part of it all was that they could not talk. He could not say clearly that the technology of immersion worked best at reasonably short range, less than a hundred klicks, say. And it made sense to keep the subject pans within easy flyer distance. Certainly Vaddo and the others had gotten to the troop quickly.
Is,he persisted.
Not.She pointed down the valley. Maybe there.
He could only hope Dors got the general idea. Their signs were scanty and he began to feel a broad, rising irritation. Pans felt and sensed strongly, but they were so limited.
Ipan expressed this by tossing limbs and stones, banging on tree trunks. It didn’t help much. The need to speak was like a pressure he could not relieve. Dors felt it, too. Sheelah chippered and grunted in frustration.
Beneath his mind he felt the smoldering presence of Ipan. They had never been together this long before and urgency welled up between the two canted systems of mind. Their uneasy marriage was showing greater strains.
Sit. Quiet.She did. He cupped a hand to his ear.
Bad come?
No. Listen-In frustration Hari pointed to Sheelah herself. Blank incomprehension in the pan’s face. He scribbled in the dust: LEARN FROM PANS. Sheelah’s mouth opened and she nodded.
They squatted in the shelter of prickly bushes and listened to the sounds of the forest. Scurryings and murmurs came through strongly as Hari relaxed his grip on the pan. Dust hung in slanted cathedral light, pouring down from the forest canopy in rich yellow shafts. Scents purled up from the forest floor, chemical messengers telling Ipan of potential foods, soft loam for resting, bark to be chewed. Hari gently lifted Ipan’s head to gaze across the valley at the peaks… musing…and felt a faint tremor of resonance.
To Ipan the valley came weighted with significance beyond words. His troop had imbued it with blunt emotions, attached to clefts where a friend fell and died, where the troop found a hoard of fruits, where they met and fought two big cats. It was an intricate landscape suffused with feeling, the pan mechanism of memory.
Hari faintly urged Ipan to think beyond the ridge line and felt in response a diffuse anxiety. He bore in on that kernel-and an image burst into Ipan’s mind, fringed in fear. A rectangular bulk framed against a cool sky. The Excursion Station.
There.He pointed for Dors.
Ipan had simple, strong, apprehensive memories of the place. His troop had been taken there, outfitted with the implants which allowed them to be ridden, then deposited back in their territory.
Far,Dors signed.
We go.
Hard. Slow.
No stay here. They catch.
Dors looked as skeptical as a pan could look. Fight?
Did she mean fight Vaddo here? Or fight once they reached the Excursion Station? No here. There.
Dors frowned, but accepted this. He had no real plan, only the idea that Vaddo was ready for pans out here and might not be so prepared for them at the station. There he and Dors might gain the element of surprise. How, he had no idea.
They studied each other, each trying to catch a glimmer of the other in an alien face. She stroked his earlobe, Dors’ calming gesture. Sure enough, it made him tingle. But he could say so little…The moment crystallized for him the hopelessness of their situation.
Vaddo plainly was trying to kill Hari and Dors through Ipan and Sheelah. What would become of their own bodies? The shock of experiencing death through immersion was known to prove fatal. Their bodies would fail from neurological shock, without ever regaining consciousness.
He saw a tear run down Sheelah’s cheek. She knew how hopeless matters were, too. He swept her up in his arms and, looking at the distant mountains, was surprised to find tears in his own eyes as well.
17.
He had not counted on the river. Men, animals-these problems he had considered. They ventured down to the surging waters where the forest gave the nearest protection and the stream broadened, making the best place to ford.
But the hearty river that chuckled and frothed down the valley was impossible to swim.
Or rather, for Ipan to swim. Hari had been coaxing his pan onward, carefully pausing when his muscles shook or when he wet himself from anxiety. Dors was having similar trouble and it slowed them. A night spent up in high branches soothed both pans, but now at midmoming all the stressful symptoms returned as Ipan put one foot into the river. Cool, swift currents.
Ipan danced back onto the narrow beach, yelping in dread.
Go?Dors/Sheelah signed.
Hari calmed his pan and they tried to get it to attempt swimming. Sheelah displayed only minor anxiety. Hari plumbed the swampy depths of Ipan’s memory and found a cluster of distress, centered around a dim remembrance of nearly drowning when a child. When Sheelah helped him, he fidgeted, then bolted from the water again.
Go!Sheelah waved long arms upstream and downstream and shook her head angrily.
Hari guessed that she had reasonably clear pan-memories of the river, which had no easier crossings than this. He shrugged, lifted his hands palm up.
A big herd of gigantelope grazed nearby and some were crossing the river for better grass beyond. They tossed their great heads, as if mocking the pans. The river was not deep, but to Ipan it was a wall. Hari, trapped by Ipan’s solid fear, seethed but could do nothing.
Sheelah paced the shore. She huffed in frustration and looked at the sky, squinting. Her head snapped around in surprise. Hari followed her gaze. A flyer was swooping down the valley, coming their way.
Ipan beat Sheelah to the shelter of trees, but not by much. Luckily the gigantelope herd provided a distraction for the flyer. They cowered in bushes as the machine hummed overhead in a circular search pattern. Hari had to quell Ipan’s mounting apprehension by envisioning scenes of quiet and peace while he and Sheelah groomed each other.
The flyer finally went away. They would have to minimize their exposure now.
They foraged for fruit. His mind revolved uselessly and a sour depression settled over him. He was quite neatly caught in a trap, a pawn in Imperial politics. Worse, Dors was in it, too. He was no man of action. Nor a pan of action, either, he thought dourly.
As he brought a few overripe bunches of fruit back to their bushes by the river, he heard cracking noises. He crouched down and worked his way uphill and around the splintering sounds. Sheelah was stripping branches from the trees. When he approached she waved him on impatiently, a common pan gesture remarkably like a human one.