Foundation’s Fear f-8

by Gregory Benford

  “What’s this?” He gestured to a small tiktok stationed between their immersion pods.

  “Precaution,” Dors said. “I don’t want anyone tampering with our chambers while we’re under.”

  “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 h
im and waddled over to a distant mound.

  Apparently termites worked outside at night, then blocked the entrances at dawn. Hari let his pan shuffle over to a large tan mound, but he was riding it so well now that the pan’s responses were weak. Hari/Ipan looked for cracks, knobs, slight hollows-and when he brushed away some mud, found nothing. Other pans readily unmasked tunnels. Had they, memorized the hundred or more tunnels in each mound?

  He finally uncovered one. Ipan was no help. Hari could control, but that blocked up the wellsprings of deep knowledge within the pan.

  The pans deftly tore off twigs or grass stalks near their mounds. Hari carefully followed their lead. His twigs and grass didn’t work. The first lot was too pliant, and when he tried to work them into a twisting tunnel, they collapsed and buckled. He switched to stiffer ones, but those caught on the tunnel walls, or snapped off. From Ipan came little help. Hari had managed him a bit too well.

  He was getting embarrassed. Even the younger pans had no trouble picking just the right stems or sticks. Hari watched a pan nearby drop a stick that seemed to work. He then picked it up when the pan moved on. He felt welling up from Ipan a blunt anxiety, mixing frustration and hunger. He could taste the anticipation of luscious, juicy termites.

  He set to work, plucking the emotional strings of Ipan. This job went even worse. Vague thoughts drifted up from Ipan, but Hari was in control of the muscles now, and that was the bad part.

  He quickly found that the stick had to be stuck in about ten centimeters, turning his wrist to navigate it down the twisty channel. Then he had to gently vibrate it. Through Ipan he sensed that this was to attract termites to bite into the stick. At first he did it too long and when he drew the stick out it was half gone. Termites had bitten cleanly through it. So he had to search out another stick and that made Ipan’s stomach growl.

  The other pans were through termite-snacking while Hari was still fumbling for his first taste. The nuances irked him. He pulled the stick out too fast, not turning it enough to ease it past the tunnel’s curves. Time and again he fetched forth the stick, only to find that he had scraped the luscious Termites off on the walls. Their bites punctured his stick, until it was so shredded he had to get another. The termites were dining better than he.

  He finally caught the knack, a fluid slow twist of the wrist, gracefully extracting termites, clinging like bumps. Ipan licked them off eagerly. Hari liked the morsels, filtered through pan taste buds. Not many, though. Others of the troop were watching his skimpy harvest, heads tilted in curiosity, and he felt humiliated.

  The hell with this,he thought.

  He made Ipan turn and walk into the woods. Ipan resisted, dragging his feet. Hari found a thick limb, snapped it off to carrying size, and went back to the mound.

  No more fooling with sticks. He whacked the mound solidly. Five more and he had punched a big hole. Escaping termites he scooped up by the delicious handful.

  So much for subtlety!he wanted to shout. He tried writing a note for her in the dust, but it was hard, forcing the letters out through his suddenly awkward hands. Pans could handle a stick to fetch forth grubs, but marking a surface was somehow not a ready talent. He gave up.

  Sheelah/Dors came into view, proudly carrying a reed swarming with white-bellied termites. These were the best, a pan gourmet delicacy. I better, she signed.

  He made Ipan shrug and signed, I got more.

  So it was a draw.

  Later Dors reported to him that among the troop he was known now as Big Stick. The name pleased him immensely.

  11.

  At dinner he felt elated, exhausted, and not in the mood for conversation. Being a pan seemed to suppress his speech centers. It took some effort to ask Ex Spec Vaddo about immersion technology. Usually he accepted the routine techno-miracles, but understanding pans meant understanding how he experienced them.

  “The immersion hardware puts you in the middle of a pan’s anterior cingulate gyrus,” Vaddo said over dessert. “Just ‘gyrus’ for short. That’s the brain’s main cortical region for mediating emotions and expressing them through action.”

  “ Thebrain?” Dors asked. “What about ours?”

  Vaddo shrugged. “Same general layout. Pans’ are smaller, without a big cerebrum.”

  Hari leaned forward, ignoring his steaming cup of kaff. “This ‘gyrus,’ it doesn’t give direct motor control?”

  “No, we tried that. It disorients the pan so much, when you leave, it can’t get itself back together.”

  “So we have to be more subtle,” Dors said.

  “We have to be. In pan males, the pilot light is always on in neurons that control action and aggression-”

  “That’s why they’re more violence-prone?” she asked.

  “We think so. It parallels structures in our own brains.”

  “Really? Men’s neurons?” Dors looked doubtful. “Human males have higher activity levels in their temporal limbic systems, deeper down in the brain-evolutionarily older structures.”

  “So why not put me into that level?” Hari asked.

  “We place the immersion chips into the gyrus area because we can reach it from the top, surgically. The temporal limbic is way far down, impossible to implant a chip.”

  Dors frowned. “So pan males-”

  “Are harder to control. Professor Seldon here is running his pan from the backseat, so to speak.”

  “Whereas Dors is running hers from a control center that, for female pans, is more central?” Hari peered into the distance. “I was handicapped!”

  Dors grinned. “You have to play the hand you’re dealt.”

  “It’s not fair.”

  “Big Stick, biology is destiny.”

  The troop came upon rotting fruit. Fevered excitement ran through them.

  The smell was repugnant and enticing at the same time, and at first he did not understand why. The pans rushed to the overripe bulbs of blue and sickly green, popping open the skins, sucking out the juice.

  Tentatively, Hari tried one. The hit was immediate. A warm feeling of well-being kindled up in him. Of course-the fruity esters had converted into alcohol! The pans were quite deliberately setting about getting drunk.

  He “let” his pan follow suit. He hadn’t much choice in the matter.

  Ipan grunted and thrashed his arms whenever Hari tried to turn him away from the teardrop fruit. And after a while, Hari didn’t want to turn away, either. He gave himself up to a good, solid drunk. He had been worrying a lot lately, agitated in his pan, and…this was completely natural, wasn’t it?

  Then a pack of raboons appeared, and he lost control of Ipan.

  They come fast. Running two-legs, no sound. Their tails twitch, talking to each other.

  Five circle left. They cut off Esa.

  Biggest thunders at them. Hunker runs to nearest and it spikes him with its forepuncher.

  I throw rocks. Hit one. It yelps and scurries back. But others take its place. I throw again and they come and the dust and yowling are thick and the others of them have Esa. They cut her with their punch-claws. Kick her with sharp hooves.

  Three of them carry her off.

  Our fems run, afraid. We warriors stay.

  We fight them. Shrieking, throwing, biting when they get close. But we cannot reach Esa.

  Then they go. Fast, running on their two hoofed legs. Furling their tails in victory. Taunting us.

  We feel bad. Esa was old and we loved her.

  Fems come back, nervous. We groom ourselves and know that the two-legs are eating Esa somewhere.

  Biggest come by, try to pat me.

  I snarl. He Biggest! This thing he should have stopped.

  His eyes get big and he slap me. I slap back at him. He slam into me. We roll around in dust. Biting, yowling. Biggest strong, strong and pound my head on ground.

  Other warriors, they watch us, not join in.

  He beat me. I hurt. I go away.

  Biggest starts calming down the warriors. Fems come
by and pay their respects to Biggest. Touch him, groom him, feel him the way he likes. He mounts three of them real quick. He feeling Biggest all right.

  Me, I lick myself. Sheelah come groom me. After a while I feel better. Forget about trouble.

  I not forget Biggest beat me though. In front of everybody. Now I hurt, Biggest get grooming.

  He let them come and take Esa. He Biggest, he should stop them.

  Some day I be allover him. On his back.

  Some day I be Bigger.

  12.

  “When did you bailout?” Dors asked.

  “After Biggest stopped pounding on me…uh, on Ipan.”

  They were relaxing beside a swimming pool and the heady smells of the forest seemed to awaken in Hari the urge to be down there again, in the valleys of dust and blood. He trembled, took a deep breath. The fighting had been so involving he hadn’t wanted to leave, despite the pain. Immersion had a hypnotic quality.

  “I know how you feel,” she said. “It’s easy to totally identify with them. I left Sheelah when those raboons came close. Pretty scary.”

  “Vaddo said they’re derived from Earth, too.

  Plenty of DNA overlap. But they show signs of extensive recent tinkering to make them predators.”

  “Why would the ancients want those?”

  “Trying to figure out our origins?”

  To his surprise, she laughed. “Not everyone has your same interests.”

  “Why, then?”

  “How about using raboons as game, to hunt? Something a little challenging?”

  “ Hunting? The Empire has always been too far from throwback primitivism to” He had been about to launch into a little lecture on how far humanity had come when he realized that he didn’t believe it anymore. “Um.”

  “You’ve always thought of people as cerebral. No psychohistory could work if it didn’t take into account our animal selves.”