“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 him 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 col lapsed 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 tun-nel’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 tastebuds.
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 ExSpec 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 an terior 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.”
“The brain?” 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.”