Walking was work and Ipan wasn’t having any.

Hari tried to make the pan cover ground, but now they had to ascend difficult gullies, some mossy and rough. They stumbled, waded, climbed, and sometimes just crawled up the slopes of the valley. The pans sniffed out animal trails, which helped a bit.

Ipan stopped often for food, or just to gaze idly into the distance. Soft thoughts flitted like moths through the foggy mind, buoyant on liquid emotional flows which eddied to their own pulse. Pans were not made for extended projects.

They made slow progress. Night came and they had to climb trees, snagging fruit on the way.

Ipan slept, but Hari did not. Could not.

Their lives were just as much at risk here as the pans’, but the slumbering minds he and Dors attended had always lived this way. To the pans, the forest night seeped through as a quiet rain of information, processed as they slept. Their minds keyed vagrant sounds to known nonthreats, leaving slumber intact.

Hari did not know the subtle signs of danger and so mistook every rustle and tremor in the branches as danger approaching on soft feet. Sleep came against his will.

In dawn’s first pale glow Hari awoke with a snake beside him. It coiled like a green rope around a descending branch, getting itself into striking position. It eyed him and Hari tensed.

Ipan drifted up from his own profound slumber. He saw the snake, but did not react with a startled jerk, as Hari feared he might.

A long moment passed between them and Ipan blinked just once. The snake became utterly motionless and Ipan’s heart quickened, but he did not move. Then the snake uncoiled and glided away, and the unspoken transaction was done. Ipan was unlikely prey, this green snake did not taste good, and pans were smart enough to be about other business.

When Sheelah awoke they went down to a nearby chuckling stream for a drink, scavenging leaves and a few crunchy insects on the way. Both pans nonchalantly peeled away fat black land leeches which had attached to them in the night. The thick, engorged worms sickened Hari, but Ipan pulled them off casually, much the way Hari would have retied loosened shoelaces.

Luckily, Ipan did not eat them. He drank and Hari reflected that the pan felt no need to clean himself. Normally Hari vapored twice a day, before breakfast and before dinner, and felt ill at ease if he sweated-a typical meritocrat.

Here he wore the shaggy body comfortably. Had his frequent cleansings been a health measure, like the pans’ grooming? Or a rarefied, civilized habit? He dimly remembered that as a boy on Helicon he had gone for days in happy, sweaty pleasure and had disliked baths and showers. Somehow Ipan returned him to a simpler sense of self, at ease in the grubby world.

His comfort did not last long. They sighted raboons uphill.

Ipan had picked up the scent, but Hari did not have access to the part of the pan brain that made scent-picture associations. He had only known that something disturbed Ipan, wrinkling the knobby nose. The sight at short range jolted him.

Thick hindquarters, propelling them in brisk steps. Short forelimbs, ending in sharp claws. Their large heads seemed to be mostly teeth. sharp and white above slit ted, 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 incoherently, 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 advance 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. The): 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.

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!-hadturned 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, fundamental impulses. The pans’ reaction had been uncomfortably close to myriad incidents in human history.

Hate the Stranger.

He had to fathom that murky truth.