Thick hindquarters, propelling them in brisk steps. Short fore limbs, ending in sharp claws. Their large heads seemed to be mostly teeth, sharp and white above slitted, wary eyes. A thick brown pelt covered them, growing bushy in the heavy tail they used for balance.
Days before, from the safety of a high tree, Ipan had watched some rip and devour the soft tissues of a gigantelope out on the grasslands. These came sniffing, working downslope in a skirmish line, five of them. Sheelah and Ipan trembled at the sight. They were downwind of the raboons and so beat a retreat in silence.
There were no tall trees here, just brush and saplings. Hari and Sheelah angled away downhill and got some distance, and then saw a clearing ahead. Ipan picked up the faint tang of other pans, wafting from across the clearing.
He waved to her: Go. At the same moment a chorus rose behind them. The raboons had caught the scent.
Their wheezing grunts came echoing through the thick bushes. Downslope there was even less cover, but bigger trees lay beyond. They could climb those.
Ipan and Sheelah hurried across the broad tan clearing on all fours, but they were not quick. Snarling raboons burst into the grass behind them. Hari scampered into the trees—and directly into the midst of a pan troop.
There were several dozen, startled and blinking. He yelled inco herently, wondering how Ipan would signal to them.
The nearest large male turned, bared teeth, and shrieked angrily. The entire pack took up the call, whooping and snatching up sticks and rocks, throwing them at Ipan. A pebble hit him on the chin, a branch on the thigh. He fled, Sheelah already a few steps ahead of him.
The raboons came charging across the clearing. In their claws they held small, sharp stones. They looked big and solid, but they slowed at the barrage of screeches and squawks coming from the trees.
Ipan and Sheelah burst out into the grass of the clearing and the pans came right after them. The raboons skidded to a halt.
The pans saw the raboons, but they did not stop or even slow. They still came after Ipan and Sheelah with murderous glee.
The raboons stood frozen, their claws working uneasily.
Hari realized what was happening and picked up a branch as he ran, calling to Sheelah. She saw and copied him. He ran straight at the raboons, waving the branch. It was an awkward, twisted old limb, useless, but it looked big. Hari wanted to seem like the ad vance guard of some bad business.
In the rising cloud of dust and general chaos the raboons saw a large party of enraged pans emerging from the forest. They bolted.
Squealing, they ran at full stride into the far trees.
Ipan and Sheelah followed, running with the last of their strength. By the time Ipan reached the first trees, he looked back and the pans had stopped halfway, still screeching their vehemence.
He signed to Sheelah, Go. They cut away at a steep angle, heading uphill.
19.
Ipan needed food and rest—if only to stop his heart from lurching at every minor sound. Sheelah and Ipan clutched each other, high in a tree, and crooned and petted.
Hari needed time to think. Autoservers were keeping their bodies alive at the station. Dors’ tiktok would defend the locks, but how long would a security officer take to get around that?
It would be smart to let them stay out here, in danger, saying to the rest of the staff that the two odd tourists wanted a really long immersion. Let nature take its course.
His thinking triggered jitters in Ipan, so he dropped that mode. Better to think abstractly. There was plenty out here that needed understanding.
He suspected that the ancients who planted pans and gigantelope and the rest here had tinkered with the raboons, to see if they could turn a more distant primate relative into something like humans. A perverse goal, it seemed to Hari, but believable. Scientists loved to tinker.
They had gotten as far as pack-hunting, but raboons had no tools beyond crudely edged stones, occasionally used to cut meat once they had brought it down.
In another few million years, under evolution’s grind, they might be as smart as pans. Who would go extinct then?
At the moment he didn’t much care. He had felt real rage when the pans—his own kind!—had turned against them, even when the raboons came within view. Why?
He worried at the issue, sure there was something here he had to understand. Psychohistory had to deal with such basic, funda mental impulses. The pans’ reaction had been uncomfortably close to myriad incidents in human history.
Hate the Stranger.
He had to fathom that murky truth.
Pans moved in small groups, disliking outsiders, breeding mostly within their modest circle of a few dozen. This meant any genetic trait that emerged could pass swiftly into all the members, through inbreeding. If it helped the band survive, the rough rub of chance would select for that band’s survival. Fair enough.
But the trait had to be undiluted. A troop of especially good rock throwers would get swallowed up if they joined a company of several hundred. Contact would make them breed outside the ori ginal small clan. Outbreeding: their genetic heritage would get watered down.
Striking a balance between the accidents of genetics in small groups, and the stability of large groups—that was the trick. Some lucky troop might have fortunate genes, conferring traits that fit the next challenge handed out by the ever-altering world. They would do well. But if those genes never passed to many pans, what did it matter?
With some small amount of outbreeding, that trait got spread into other bands. Down through the strainer of time, others picked up the trait. It spread.
This meant it was actually helpful to develop smoldering animos ity to outsiders, an immediate sense of their wrongness. Don’t breed with them.
So small bands held fast to their eccentric traits, and some prospered. Those lived on; most perished. Evolutionary jumps happened faster in small, semi-isolated bands which outbred slightly. They kept their genetic assets in one small basket, the troop. Only occasionally did they mate with another troop—often, through rape.
The price was steep: a strong preference for their own tiny lot.
They hated crowds, strangers, noise. Bands of less than ten were too vulnerable to disease or predators; a few losses and the group failed. Too many, and they lost the concentration of close breeding. They were intensely loyal to their group, easily identifying each other in the dark by smell, even at great distances. Because they had many common genes, altruistic actions were common.
They even honored heroism—for if the hero died, his shared genes were still passed on through his relatives.
Even if strangers could pass the tests of difference in appearances, manner, smell, grooming, even then, culture could amplify the ef fects. Newcomers with different language or habits and posture would seem repulsive. Anything that served to distinguish a band would help keep hatreds high.
Each small genetic ensemble would then be driven by natural selection to stress the noninherited differences, even arbitrary ones, dimly connected to survival fitness…and so they could evolve cul ture. As humans had.