Animals. Was there a clue here?

Despite millennia of trying, humans had domesticated few creatures. To be domesticated, wild beasts had to have an entire suite of traits. Most had to be herd animals, with instinctive submission patterns which humans could co-opt. They had to be placid; herds that bolt at a strange sound and can’t tolerate intruders are hard to keep.

Finally, they had to be willing to breed in captivity. Most humans didn’t want to court and copulate under the watchful gaze of others, and neither did most animals.

So here there were sheep and goats and cows and llamas, slightly adapted to this world but otherwise unremarkable, just like myriad other Empire planets. The similarity implied that it had all been done at about the same time.

Except for the pans. They were unique to Panucopia. Whoever had brought them here might have been trying a domestication experiment, but the records from 13,000 years before were lost. Why?

A wirehound came sniffing, checking them out, muttering an unintelligible apology. “Interesting,” he remarked to Dors, “that Primitivists still want to be protected from the wild by the domesticated.”

“Well, of course. This fellow is big.”

“Not sentimental about the natural state? We were once just another type of large mammal on some mythical Earth.”

“Mythical? I don’t work in that area of prehistory, but most historians think there was such a place.”

“Sure, but ‘earth’ just means ‘dirt’ in the oldest languages, correct?”

‘Well, we had to come from somewhere.” She thought a moment, then allowed slowly, “I think that natural state might be a pleasant place to visit, but…”

“I want to try the pans.”

“What? An immersion?” Her eyebrows lifted in mild alarm.

“As long as we’re here, why not?”

“I don’t…well, I’ll think about it.”

“You can bailout at any time, they say.” She nodded, pursed her lips. “Um.”

“We’ll feel at home-the way pans do.”

“You believe everything you read in a brochure?”

“I did some research. It’s a well-developed tech.” Her lips had a skeptical tilt. “Um.”

He knew by now better than to press her. Let time do his work. The canine, quite large and alert, snuffled at his hand and slurred, “Goood naaaght, suuur.” He stroked it. In its eyes he saw a kinship, an instant rapport that he did not need to think about. For one who dwelled in his head so much, this was a welcome rub of reality.

Significant evidence,he thought. We have a deep past together. Perhaps that was why he wanted to immerse in a pan. To go far back, beyond the vexing state of being human.

“We’re certainly related, yes,” Expert Specialist Vaddo said. He was a big man, tanned and muscular and casually confident. He was a safari guide and immersion specialist, with a biology background. He did research using immersion techniques, but keeping the station going soaked up most of his time, he said.

Hari looked skeptical. “You think pans were with us back on an Earth?”

“Sure. Had to be.”

“They could not have arisen from genetic tinkering with our own kind?”

“Doubtful. Genetic inventory shows that they come from a small stable, probably a zoo set up here. Or else an accidental crash.”

Dors asked, “Is there any chance this world could have been the original Earth?”

Vaddo chuckled. “No fossil record, no ruins. Anyway, the local fauna and flora have a funny keypattern in their genetic helix, a bit different from our DNA. Extra methyl group on the purine rings. We can live here, eat the food, but neither we nor the pans are native.”

Vaddo made a good case. Pans certainly looked quasihuman. Ancient records referred to a classification, that was all: Pan troglodytes, whatever that meant in a long-lost tongue. They had hands with thumbs, the same number of teeth as humans, no tails.

Vaddo waved a big hand at the landscape below the station. “They were dumped here along with plenty of other related species, on top of a biosphere that supported the usual grasses and trees, very little more.”

“How long ago?” Dors asked.

“Over thirteen thousand years, that’s for sure.”

“Before Trantor’s consolidation. But other planets don’t have pans,” Dors persisted.

Vaddo nodded. “I guess in the early Empire days nobody thought they were useful.”

“Are they?” Hari asked.

“Not that I can tell.” Vaddo shrugged. “We haven’t tried training them much, beyond research purposes. Remember, they’re supposed to be kept wild. The original Emperor’s Boon stipulated that.”

“Tell me about your research,” Hari said. In his experience, no scientist ever passed up a chance to sing his own song. He was right.

They had taken human DNA and pan DNA-Vaddo said, waxing on enthusiastically-then unzipped the double helix strands in both. Linking one human strand with a pan strand made a hybrid.

Where the strands complemented, the two then tightly bound in a partial, new double helix. Where they differed, bonding between the strands was weak, intermittent, with whole sections flapping free.

Then they spun the watery solutions in a centrifuge, so the weak sections ripped apart. Closely linked DNA was 98.2 percent of the total. Pans were startlingly like humans. Less than two percent difference, about the same that separated men and women-yet they lived in forests and invented nothing.

The typical difference between individual people’s DNA was a tenth of a percentage point, Vaddo said. Roughly, then, pans were twenty times more different from humans than particular people differed among themselves-genetically.

But genes were like levers, supporting vast weights by pivoting about a small fulcrum.

“So you think they came before us?” Dors was impressed. “On Earth?”

Vaddo nodded vigorously. “They must have been related, but we don’t come from them. We parted company, genetically, six million years ago.”

“And do they think like us?” Hari asked.

“Best way to tell is an immersion,” Vaddo said. “Very best way.”

He smiled invitingly and Hari wondered if Vaddo got a commission on immersions. His sales pitch was subtle, shaped for an academic’s interest, but still a sales pitch.

Vaddo had already made available to Hari the vast stores of data on pan movements, population dynamics, and behaviors. It was a rich source, millennia old. With some modeling, here might be fertile ground for a simple description of pans as protohumans, using a truncated version of psychohistory.

“Describing the life history of a species mathematically is one thing,” Dors said. “But living in it…”

“Come now,” Hari said. Even though he knew the entire Excursion Station was geared to sell the guests safaris and immersions, he was intrigued. “I need a change, you said. Get out of stuffy old Trantor, you said.”

Vaddo smiled warmly. “It’s completely safe.”

Dors smiled at Hari tolerantly. Between people long-married there is a diplomacy of the eyes. “Oh, all right.”