Asimov’s Future History Volume 15

by Isaac Asimov

  “Maybe we’re smarter than we need to be anyway?”

  “What?” This surprised her.

  “I’ve been reading up on evolution. Not a front rank field anymore; everybody thinks we understand it.”

  “And in a galaxy filled with humans and little else, there isn’t much fresh material.”

  He had not thought of it that way before, but she was right. Biology was a backwater science. All the academic sophisticates were pursuing something called “integrative sociometrics.”

  He went on, laying out his thoughts. Plainly, the human brain was an evolutionary overshoot. Brains were far more capable than a competent hunter-gatherer needed. To get the better of animals, it would have been enough to master fire and simple stone tools. Such talents alone would have made people the lords of creation, removing selection pressure to change. Instead, all evidence from the brain itself said that change accelerated. The human cerebral cortex added mass, stacking new circuitry atop older wiring. That mass spread over the lesser areas like a thick new skin. So said the ancient studies, their data from museums long lost.

  “From this came musicians and engineers, saints and savants,” he finished with a flourish. One of Dors’ best points was her willingness to sit still while he waxed professorily longwinded–even on vacation.

  “And the pans, you think, are from before that time? On ancient Earth?”

  “They must be. And all this evolutionary selection happened in just a few million years.”

  Dors nodded. “Look at it from the woman’s point of view. It happened, despite putting mothers in desperate danger in childbirth.”

  “Uh, how?”

  “From those huge baby heads. They’re hard to get out. We women are still paying the price for your brains–and for ours.”

  He chuckled. She always had a special spin on a subject that made him see it fresh. “Then why was it selected for, back then?”

  Dors smiled enigmatically. “Maybe men and women alike found intelligence sexy in each other.”

  “Really?”

  Her sly smile. “How about us?”

  “Have you ever watched very many 3D stars? They don’t feature brains, my dear.”

  “Remember the animals we saw in the Imperial Zoo? It could be that for early humans, brains were like peacock tails, or moose horns: display items to attract the females. Runaway sexual selection.”

  “I see, an overplayed hand of otherwise perfectly good cards.” He laughed. “So being smart is just a bright ornament.”

  “Works for me,” she said, giving him a wink.

  He watched the sunset turn to glowering, ominous crimson, oddly happy. Sheets of light worked across the sky among curious, layered clouds. “Ummm...” Dors murmured.

  “Yes?”

  “Maybe this is a way to use the research the Ex Specs are doing, too. Learn who we humans once were–and therefore who we are.”

  “Intellectually, it’s a jump. In social ways, though, the gap could be less.”

  Dors looked skeptical. “You think pans are only a bit further back in a social sense?”

  “Ummm. I wonder if in logarithmic time we might scale from pans to the early Empire and then on to now?”

  “A big leap.”

  “Maybe I could use that Voltaire sim from Sark as a scaling point in a long curve.”

  “Look, to do anything you’ll need more experience with them.” She eyed him. “You like immersion, don’t you?”

  “Well, yes. It’s just...”

  “What?”

  “That Ex Spec Vaddo, he keeps pushing immersions–”

  “That’s his job.”

  “–and he knew who I was.”

  “So?” She spread her hands and shrugged.

  “You’re normally the suspicious one. Why should an Ex Spec know an obscure mathematician?”

  “He looked you up. Data dumps on incoming guests are standard. And as a First Minister candidate, you’re hardly obscure.”

  “I suppose so. Say, you’re supposed to be the ever-vigilant one.” He grinned. “Shouldn’t you be encouraging my caution?”

  “Paranoia isn’t caution. Time spent on nonthreats subtracts from vigilance.”

  By the time they went in for dinner she had talked him into it.

  6.

  Hot day in the sun. Dust tickles. Makes me snort.

  That Biggest, he walks by, gets respect right away. Plenty. Fems and guys alike, they stick out their hands.

  Biggest touches them, taking time with each, letting them know he is there. The world is all right.

  I reach out to him, too. Makes me feel good. I want to be like Biggest, to be big, be as big as him, be him.

  Fems don’t give him any trouble. He wants one, she goes. Hump right away. He’s Biggest.

  Most males, they don’t get much respect. Fems don’t want to do with them as much as they do with Biggest. The little males, they huff and throw sand and all that, but everybody knows they’re not going to be much. No chance they could ever be like Biggest. They don’t like that, but they are stuck with it.

  Me, I’m pretty big. I get respect. Some, anyway.

  All the guys like stroking. Petting. Grooming. Ferns give it to them and they give it back.

  Guys get more, though. After it, they’re not so gruff.

  I’m sitting getting groomed and all of a sudden I smell something. I don’t like it. I jump up, cry out. Biggest, he takes notice. Smells it, too.

  Strangers. Everybody starts hugging each other. Strong smell, plenty of it. Lots of Strangers. The wind says they are near, getting nearer.

  They come running down on us from the ridge. Looking for ferns, looking for trouble.

  I run for my rocks. I always have some handy. I fling one at them, miss. Then they in among us. It’s hard to hit them, they go so fast.

  Four Strangers, they grab two ferns. Drag them away.

  Everybody howling, crying. Dust everywhere.

  I throw rocks. Biggest leads the guys against the Strangers.

  They turn and run off. Just like that. Got the two ferns though and that’s bad.

  Biggest mad. He pushes around some of the guys, makes noise. He not looking so good now, he let the Strangers in.

  Those Strangers bad. We all hunker down, groom each other, pet, make nice sounds.

  Biggest, he come by, slap some of the ferns. Hump some. Make sure everybody know he’s still Biggest.

  He don’t slap me. He know better than to try. I growl at him when he come close and he pretend not to hear.

  Maybe he not so Big anymore, I’m thinking.

  7.

  He stayed with it this time. After the first crisis, when the Stranger pans came running through, he sat and let himself get groomed for a long time. It really did calm him.

  Him? Who was he?

  This time he could fully sense the pan mind. Not below him–that was a metaphor–but around him. A swarming scattershot of senses, thoughts, fragments like leaves blowing by him in a wind.

  And the wind was emotion. Blustering gales, howling and whipping in gusts, raining thoughts like soft hammer blows.

  These pans thought poorly, in the sense that he could get only shards, like human musings chopped by a nervous editor. But pans felt intensely.

  Of course, he thought–and he could think, nestled in the hard kernel of himself, wrapped in the pan mind. Emotions told it what to do, without thinking. Quick reactions demanded that. Strong feeling amplified subtle cues into strong imperatives. Blunt orders from Mother Evolution.

  He saw now that the belief that high order mental experiences like emotion were unique to people was... simply conceited. These pans shared much of the human worldview. A theory of pan psychohistory could be valuable.

  He gingerly separated himself from the dense, pressing pan mind. He wondered if the pan knew he was here. Yes, it did–dimly.

  Yet this did not bother the pan. He integrated it into his blurred, blunt world. Hari was somewha
t like an emotion, just one of many fluttering by and staying a while, then wafting away.

  Could he be more than that? He tried getting the pan to lift its right arm–and it was like lead. He struggled for a while that way with no success. Then he realized his error. He could not overpower this pan, not as a kernel in a much larger mind.

  He thought about this as the pan groomed a female, picking carefully through coarse hair. The strands smelled good, the air was sweet, the sun stroked him with blades of generous warmth...

  Emotion. Pans didn’t follow instructions because that simply lay beyond them. They could not understand directions in the human sense. Emotions–those they knew. He had to be an emotion, not a little general giving orders.

  He sat for a while simply being this pan. He learned–or rather, he felt. The troop groomed and scavenged food, males eyeing the perimeter, females keeping close to the young. A lazy calm descended over him, carrying him effortlessly through warm moments of the day.

  Not since boyhood had he felt anything like this. A slow, graceful easing, as though there were no time at all, only slices of eternity.

  In this mood, he could concentrate on a simple movement–raising an arm, scratching–and create the desire to do it. His pan responded. To make it happen, he had to feel his way toward a goal.

  Catching a sweet scent on the wind, Hari thought about what food that might signal. His pan meandered upwind, sniffed, discarded the clue as uninteresting. Hari could now smell the reason why: fruit, true, sweet, yes–but inedible for a pan.

  Good. He was learning. And he was integrating himself into the deep recesses of this pan-mind.

  Watching the troop, he decided to name the prominent pans, to keep them straight: Agile the quick one, Sheelah the sexy one, Grubber the hungry one... But what was his own name? His he dubbed Ipan. Not very original, but that was its main characteristic, Ias pan.

  Grubber found some bulb-shaped fruit and the others drifted over to scavenge. The hard fruit smelled a little too young (how did he know that?), but some ate it anyway.

  And which of these was Dors? They had asked to be immersed in the same troop, so one of these–he forced himself to count, though somehow the exercise was like moving heavy weights in his mind–these twenty-two was her. How could he tell? He ambled over to several females who were using sharp-edged stones to cut leaves from branches. They tied the strands together so they could carry food.

  Hari peered into their faces. Mild interest, a few hands held out for stroking, an invitation to groom. No glint of recognition in their eyes.

  He watched a big fern, Sheelah, carefully wash sand-covered fruit in a creek. The troop followed suit; Sheelah was a leader of sorts, a female lieutenant to Biggest.

  She ate with relish, looked around. There was grain growing nearby, past maturity, ripe tan kernels already scattered in the sandy soil. Concentrating, Hari could tell from the faint bouquet that this was a delicacy. A few pans squatted and picked grains from the sand, slow work. Sheelah did the same, and then stopped, gazing off at the creek. Time passed, insects buzzed. After a while she scooped up sand and kernels and walked to the brook’s edge. She tossed it all in. The sand sank, the kernels floated. She skimmed them off and gulped them down, grinning widely.

  An impressive trick. The other pans did not pick up on her kernel-skimming method. Fruit washing was conceptually easier, he supposed, since the pan could keep the fruit the whole time. Kernel-skimming demanded throwing away the food first, then rescuing it–a harder mental jump.

  He thought about her and in response Ipan sauntered over her way. He peered into Sheelah’s eyes–and she winked at him. Dors! He wrapped hairy arms around her in a burst of love.

  8.

  “Pure animal love,” she said over dinner. “Refreshing.”

  Hari nodded. “I like being there, living that way.”

  “I can smell so much more.”

  “Fruit tastes differently when they bite into it.” He held up a purple bulb, sliced into it, forked it into his mouth. “To me, this is almost unbearably sweet. To Ipan, it’s pleasant, a little peppery. I suppose pans have been selected for a sweet tooth. It gets them more fast calories.”

  “I can’t think of a more thorough vacation. Not just getting away from home, but getting away from your species.”

  He eyed the fruit. “And they’re so, so...”

  “Horny?”

  “Insatiable;”

  “You didn’t seem to mind.”

  “My pan, Ipan? I bailout when he gets into his hump-them-all mood.”

  She eyed him. “Really?”

  “Don’t you bailout?”

  “Yes, but I don’t expect men to be like women.”

  “Oh?” he said stiffly.

  “I’ve been reading in the Ex Spec’s research library, while you toy with pan social movements. Women invest heavily in their children. Men can use two strategies: parental investment, plus ‘sow the oats.” ‘She lifted an eyebrow. “Both must have been selected for in our evolution, because they’re both common.”

  “Not with me.”

  To his surprise, she laughed. “I’m talking in general. My point is, the pans are much more promiscuous than we are. The males run everything. They help out the females who are carrying their children, I gather, but then they shop around elsewhere all the time.”

  Hari switched into his professional mode; it was decidedly more comfortable when dealing with such issues. “As the specialists say, they are pursuing a mixed reproductive strategy.”

  “How polite.”

  “Polite plus precise.”

  Of course, he couldn’t really be sure Dors bailed out of Sheelah when a male came by for a quick one. (They were always quick, too–thirty seconds or less.) Could she exit the pan mind that quickly? He required a few moments to extricate himself. Of course, if she saw the male coming, guessed his intentions...

  He was surprised at himself. What role did jealousy have when they were inhabiting other bodies? Did the usual moral code make any sense? Yet to talk this over with her was... embarrassing.

  He was still the country boy from Helicon, like it or not.

  Ruefully he concentrated on his meal of local “roamer-fleisch,” which turned out to be an earthy, dark meat in a stew of tangy vegetables. He ate heartily, and in response to Dors’ rather obviously amused silence said, “I’d point out that pans understand commerce, too. Food for sex, betrayal of the leader for sex, spare my child for sex, grooming for sex, just about anything for sex.”

  “It does seem to be their social currency. Short and decidedly not sweet. Just quick lunges, strong sensations, then boom–it’s over.”

  “The males need it, the females use it.”

  “Ummm, you’ve been taking notes.”

  “If I’m going to model pans as a sort of simplified people, then I must.”

  “Model pans?” came the assured tones of Ex Spec Vaddo. “They’re not model citizens, if that’s what you mean.” He gave them a sunny smile and Hari guessed this was more of the obligatory friendliness of this place.

  Hari smiled mechanically. “I’m trying to find the variables that could describe pan behavior.”

  “You should spend a lot of time with them,” Vaddo said, sitting at the table and holding up a finger to a waiter for a drink. “They’re subtle creatures.”

  “I agree,” said Dors. “Do you ride them very much?”

  “Some, but most of our research is done differently now.” Vaddo’s mouth twisted ruefully. “Statistical models, that sort of thing. I got this touring idea started, using the immersion tech we had developed earlier, to make money for the project. Otherwise, we’d have had to close.”

  “I’m happy to contribute,” Hari said.

  “Admit it–you like it,” Dors said, amused. “Well, yes. It’s... different.”

  “And good for the staid Professor Seldon to get out of his shell,” she said.

  Vaddo beamed. “Be sure you don’t
take chances out there. Some of our customers think they’re superpans or something.”

  Dors’ eyes flickered. “What danger is there? Our bodies are in slowtime, back here.”

  Vaddo said, “You’re strongly linked. A big shock to a pan can drive a back-shock in your own neurological systems.”

  “What sort of shock?” Hari asked.

  “Death, major injury.”

  “In that case,” Dors said to Hari, “I really do not think you should immerse.”

  Hari felt irked. “Come on! I’m on vacation, not in prison.”

  “Any threat to you–”

  “Just a minute ago you were rhapsodizing about how good for me it was.”

  “You’re too important to–”

  “There’s really very little danger,” Vaddo came in smoothly. “Pans don’t die suddenly, usually.”

  “And I can bailout when I see danger coming,” Hari added.

  “But will you? I think you’re getting a taste for adventure.”

  She was right, but he wasn’t going to concede the point. If he wanted a little escape from his humdrum mathematician’s routine, so much the better. “I like being out of Trantor’s endless corridors.”

  Vaddo gave Dors a confident smile. “And we haven’t lost a tourist yet.”

  “How about research staff?” she shot back.

  “Well, that was a most unusual–”

  “What happened?”

  “A pan fell off a ledge. The human operator couldn’t bailout in time and she came out of it paralyzed. The shock of experiencing death through immersion is known from other incidents to prove fatal. But we have systems in place now to short circuit–”

  “What else?” she persisted.

  “Well, there was one difficult episode. In the early days, when we had simple wire fences.” The Ex Spec shifted uneasily. “Some predators got in.”

  “What sort of predators?”

  “A primate pack hunter, Carnopapio grandis. We call them raboons, because they’re genetically related to a small primate on another continent. Their DNA–”

  “How did they get in?” Dors insisted.

  “They’re somewhat like a wild hog, with hooves that double as diggers. They smelled game–our corralled animals. Dug under the fences.”