by Isaac Asimov
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.
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 t
here.
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.
She had a dozen thick branches lined up on the ground. She went to a nearby spindly tree and peeled bark from it in long strips. The noise made Ipan uneasy. Predators would be curious at this unusual sound. He scanned the forest for danger.
Sheelah came over to him, slapped him in the face to get his attention. She wrote with a stick on the ground: RAFT.
Hari felt particularly dense as he pitched in. Of course. Had his pan immersion made him more stupid? Did the effect worsen with time? Even if he got out of this, would he be the same? Many questions, no answers. He forgot about them and worked.
They lashed branches together with bark, crude but serviceable. They found two small fallen trees and used them to anchor the edge of the raft. I, Sheelah pointed, and demonstrated pulling the raft.
First, a warm-up. Ipan liked sitting on the raft in the bushes. Apparently the pan could not see the purpose of the raft yet. Ipan stretched out on the deck of saplings and gazed up into the trees as they swished in the warm winds.
They carried the awkward plane of branches down to the river after another mutual grooming session. The sky was filled with birds, but he could see no flyers.
They hurried. Ipan was skeptical about stepping onto the raft when it was halfway into the water, but Hari called up memories filled with warm feeling, and this calmed the quick-tripping heart he could feel knocking in the pan’s chest.
Ipan sat gingerlyon the branches. Sheelah cast off.
She pushed hard, but the river swept them quickly downstream. Alarm spurted in Ipan.
Hari made Ipan close his eyes. That slowed the breathing, but anxiety skittered across the pan mind like heat lightning forking before a storm. The raft’s rocking motion actually helped, making Ipan concentrate on his queasy stomach. Once his eyes flew open when a floating log smacked into the raft, but the dizzying sight of water all around made him squeeze them ti
ght immediately.
Hari wanted to help her, but he knew from the trip-hammer beating of Ipan’s heart that panic hovered near. He could not even see how she was doing. He had to sit blind and feel her shoving the raft along.
She panted noisily, struggling to keep it pointed against the river’s tug. Spray splashed onto him. Ipan jerked, yelped, pawed anxiously with his feet, as if to run.
A sudden lurch. Sheelah’s grunt cut off with a gurgle and he felt the raft spin away on rising currents. A sickening spin...
Ipan jerked clumsily to his feet. Eyes jumped open.
Swirling water, the raft unsteady. He looked down and the branches were coming apart. Panic consumed him. Hari tried to promote soothing images, but they blew away before winds of fright.
Sheelah came paddling after the raft, but it was picking up speed. Hari made Ipan gaze at the far shore, but that was all he could do before the pan started yelping and scampering on the raft, trying to find a steady place.
It was no use. The branches broke free of their bindings and chilly water swept over the deck. Ipan screamed. He leaped, fell, rolled, jumped up again.
Hari gave up any idea of control. The only hope lay in seizing just the right moment. The raft split down the middle and his half veered heavily to the left. Ipan started away from the edge and Hari fed that, made the pan step farther. In two bounds he took the pan off the deck and into the water–toward the far shore.
Ipan gave way then to pure blind panic. Hari let the legs and arms thrash–but to each he gave a push at the right moment. He could swim, Ipan couldn’t.
The near-aimless flailing held Ipan’s head out of water most of the time. He even gained a little headway. Hari kept focused on the convulsive movements, ignoring the cold water–and then Sheelah was there.
She grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and shoved him toward shore. Ipan tried to grapple with her, climb up her. Sheelah socked him in the jaw. He gasped. She pulled him toward shore.
Ipan was stunned. This gave Hari a chance to get the legs moving in a thrusting stroke. He worked at it, single-minded among the rush and gurgle, chest heaving... and after a seeming eternity, felt pebbles beneath his feet. Ipan scrambled up onto the rocky beach on his own.