Manta's Gift (7 page)

A sudden ripple of heightened pressure ran along Raimey's body, starting at his feet—his tails, rather—and moving up past his head. "Sounds impressive," he commented. "Kind of sorry I missed it."

"You may eventually end up being the only person in the Solar System who did," Faraday said dryly. "I understand that The Stars Our Destination Society and the Solar Medical Association are having a bidding war for rights to the video."

"Great," Raimey said. "Maybe you can put a TV and permchip player on a rope and lower them down to me. Once I've got eyes again, that is."

He frowned as a sudden thought struck him. "Wait a second. If I don't have a human larynx anymore, how am I talking to you?"

"You're subvocalizing," Faraday said, sounding puzzled. "We've got a throatless mike wired into your speech center, with a connection to the antenna paralleling your artificial spinal cord. I thought they went through all that with you."

Another wave of pressure ran up along Raimey's body. "I guess I missed that lesson," he said. "What's this Qanska been eating, anyway? Chili and beans?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean I'm getting waves of pressure," Raimey told him. "Like she's passing gas or something."

"Sounds like it's time," a woman's voice said faintly in the background.

"Time for what?" Raimey demanded.

"What do you mean, time for what?" Faraday said. "Time for you to be born."

"She's started moving upward," Milligan reported, peering at the sensor displays. "We've got a couple of Nurturers standing by in case she needs help."

Faraday nodded, wondering yet again how an arrangement like this could ever have gotten started. Qanskan females about to give birth were often too heavy and weak to make their way up to the more rarefied regions of the upper atmosphere, the layer the Qanska called Level One. At the same time, though, newborn Qanska were too small and fragile for the denser atmosphere and pressure of Level Two, where those same expectant mothers tended to sink to just before the critical moment.

The solution was for one or two of the older females, called Nurturers, to stand by ready to help. If necessary, the Nurturer would swim beneath the mother and lift her up to Level One where she could have her baby.

The technique was clearly a common one among the Qanska. A variant of it had saved his and Chippawa's lives, in fact, back at that first momentous contact with the aliens. What Chippawa had taken to be remoras hanging onto the underside of a shark had actually been a group of younger Qanska lifting the older one up to meet and protect the
Skydiver
before it fell deep enough to be crushed.

It made sense, certainly. The question was how such an arrangement could have started in the first place, back before the Qanska developed this particular social structure. Was it pure instinct? That was the general consensus at human think tanks.

Except that the Qanska claimed not to have such things as instincts. Were they lying? Or were they just so naturally helpful to each other that the birth assistance could predate their social structure?

Or was the species so old that they'd simply forgotten what it was like before civilization?

There was a movement at the corner of his eye, and he turned to see Hesse step through the doorway. "You're just in time," Faraday greeted him. "Mr. Raimey's about to be born."

"We got him loaded just in time, I see," Hesse said. "I don't suppose anyone had a chance to run through his Qanska language lessons with him."

Faraday frowned at him. There was something edgy in the man's voice. "Hardly. He only woke up a few minutes ago. We barely had time to bring him up to date when the contractions started."

"That may be what finally woke him up, actually," McCollum commented, swiveling around to face them. "What's left of the pod sensors registered a couple of small contractions before he came around."

"Thank you, Ms. McCollum," Hesse said tartly. "I
was
watching the system monitors." He wiggled his fingers back over her shoulder. "As I believe you should be?"

The corner of McCollum's mouth twitched, and she turned back to her station without another word. "Take it easy, Mr. Hesse," Faraday said quietly. "These people haven't gotten much sleep in the past couple of weeks."

"Then they should learn to pace themselves." Hesse waved a hand. "Sorry. I'm just... I'm a little worried about whether he's going to be able to talk to them. They're going to want to ask him all kinds of questions as soon as he's born."

"I think they'll be willing to cut him a little slack," Faraday soothed. "After all, they don't know what to expect any more than we do."

"Or maybe they do," Hesse countered. "They know a lot more than they're letting on. And we know hardly anything about them."

"That's why Raimey's there," Faraday reminded him. "Now, you want to tell me what's
really
bothering you?"

Hesse's lips compressed briefly. "I'm sorry. It's just..."

He sighed in resignation. "The Council has instructed me to reprimand you for your behavior during pre-insertion activities," he said, the words coming out in the monotone of direct quotation. "Specifically, for suggesting to Mr. Raimey that he could still call everything off."

"I see," Faraday said, nodding. So that was why Hesse had come in here acting like he had a bad taste in his mouth.

A taste that was rapidly transferring itself to Faraday's own tongue. "Did they happen to notice that he
didn't
back out?"

"I'm just the messenger boy, Colonel," Hesse said. "I'm sure they noticed that. They notice everything."

"Do they also micromanage everything?" Faraday asked. "Because if that's what they're planning, they might as well move up here to Prime for the duration and do it properly. Housing shouldn't be a problem—my quarters will be empty, for a start."

Hesse grimaced. "Try to understand how they feel, Colonel. The Five Hundred have put a lot of time and money into Project Changeling. They're naturally a little nervous."

"And I've put my name and prestige into it," Faraday countered with precisely measured force. "And I didn't come out here to be a figurehead or puppet. You tell them that. Either I'm running this show, or I'm not. There's no middle ground."

Hesse sighed again. "Yes, sir. I'll tell them."

"Good," Faraday said, turning back to the monitors. Generally speaking, his Living Legend status was a pain in the neck, hanging around his shoulders like a set of runner's weights.

But occasionally, when wielded just right, those weights could become a reasonably effective weapon.

It wouldn't hold them for long, of course. Not politicians; certainly not politicians at the very upper level of System government. But it should hold them long enough for him to get this project up and running, and to set Raimey on a steady course. Faraday hadn't expected to be here much longer than that, anyway.

He looked up at the monitor, his throat feeling suddenly tight. Jupiter. Heat, and twisting magnetic fields, and pressure.

Lots of pressure. Tons and tons of impersonal, inexorable pressure. Pressure that had almost killed him once.

And Raimey was about to slide right out into it.

Surreptitiously, Faraday rubbed his myrtlewood ring, and with an effort shoved the memories back under the mental sod where he'd tried to bury them. He didn't consider himself particularly claustrophobic, but Jupiter was a special case. A hand that had been once burned, after all, was forever afterward sensitive to heat.

No, he wouldn't be here long. Not long at all. "Whoa," McCollum spoke up suddenly from her station. "Colonel; Mr. Hesse? I do believe we've started."

Raimey could remember, as a child, listening to his grandmother talk about the birth process, or the "miracle of childbirth," as she'd called it. He couldn't speak for the human equivalent; but from his current point of view, at least, the Qanskan version of the miracle left a lot to be desired.

At first it was just the pressure waves, getting stronger and more frequent until Raimey began to feel like the last glob of toothpaste in a tube from which the owner was determined to get his full money's worth. But as the minutes ticked by, he noticed he was starting to feel hotter, as well. In fact, he was starting to feel uncomfortably warm....

"Mr. Raimey?"

Raimey tried to blink his eyes. Had he actually dozed off there? "I'm here," he said, trying to shift his shoulders around to help him wake up.

That was a mistake. Somehow, for some inexplicable reason, the movement sent a ripple of nausea flooding through him. He could feel his eyes bulging as the mists began to rise across his brain—

"Hold still, Mr. Raimey," Faraday said urgently. "Don't move at all. Just hold perfectly still."

"What is it?" Raimey demanded, relaxing his muscles and letting his body float.

"It's your umbilical cord," Faraday said. "It seems to be shutting down."

Involuntarily, Raimey's muscles tightened again. His reward was a fresh wave of nausea. "It can't be," he insisted. "I'm not out yet. I can't even see the outside."

"We know," Faraday said. "We don't know if this is something normal or whether we've got a problem. Your life-support system has a small oxygen reserve; we're feeding you a trickle from that to keep you from blacking out. But your best bet is to stay as still as you can, conserve your oxygen, and hang on."

"Terrific," Raimey muttered. "I was better off paralyzed."

"Colonel?" the woman's voice he'd heard earlier came dimly from the background. "We've got something happening, big time. I think she's ready."

"Mr. Raimey?" Faraday called. "Get ready. We think this is it."

"I'm glad
you
think so," Raimey bit out. "I hate to break it to you—" He broke off as a fresh wave of pressure hit him.

But this wave wasn't like any of the previous ones. Instead of a rippling movement along his body, this one was all around him, squeezing down hard as if his surrogate mother was trying to crush him. Not even a chance of muscle movement now. He could feel his eyes bug out further as the taste of claustrophobia bubbled in his throat—

And then, without warning, the pressure around his head and shoulders abruptly vanished.

And like a mustard-slick sausage being squeezed at one end of its wraparound, he slid forward through the birth canal and shot out into the open air.

The open air, and a virtual explosion of light and color.

It was dazzling. Far above him, the undersides of the Jovian clouds were a violent swirl of color, with hues stretching across a spectrum he'd never seen in any picture or video of Jupiter. Jupiter, hell—he couldn't recall seeing such a range and variety of colors even amid the lush landscape of Earth. The other Qanska gathered around him, far from being the drab brown-gray of the
Skydiver's
records, were patterned in brilliant stripes and spots of red, green, yellow, and blue that reminded him of exotic tropical fish. Even the wind flowing around him showed subtle colors, like the fluid sculptures he'd played with as a child.

It would have been impressive enough just dropping into it from a probe or shuttle. Coming out of the total darkness and isolation of a Qanskan womb, it literally took his breath away.

"Mr. Raimey? What's happening?"

Raimey took a cautious breath. Then another, and another. His alien lungs and artificial life-support system both seemed to be working just fine now. "I'm clear," he called back, stretching out with his arms and legs.

A stretch that instantly became an awkward flailing. His arms weren't arms at all, he remembered belatedly, but the pectoral, mantalike fins of a Qanska. What he'd been thinking of as his shoulders were the leading edges of those fins; and what he'd thought of as his legs were twitching around haphazardly as the long flukes of his split tail.

He'd known all this going in. He'd studied Qanskan physiology and Qanskan structure, and he'd endured endless and usually boring speculations on what it might be like to become a Qanska.

Not a single minute of it had prepared him for this.

"Hell in buckets," he growled under his breath, trying to bring his body under control. He'd done a lot of swimming as a kid, but none of those movements were of the least bit of use here. For a moment his flailing turned him sideways to the prevailing westerly wind, and he winced at the sudden roar and pressure in his left ear. His momentum continued him on through the turn, and the roaring dropped to acceptable levels as he ended up facing into the wind.

Spreading his fins wide, he tried to hold position, but succeeded only in overcompensating and spinning around the other way. He winced again as the wind roared into his right ear this time, and changed his goal to completing the turn and putting the wind at his back. But again, his unfamiliarity with his own muscles and joints betrayed him, and he wound up snout-down, belly-first to the wind like an upside-down kite. From somewhere nearby he heard a rolling rumbling sound, like punctuated thunder.

And suddenly, a brightly colored object came out of nowhere to slam hard into his left side, spinning him off course like a wayward billiard ball.

"Hey!" he yelled, fighting hard to regain his balance. The momentum of the impact had rolled him partially over onto his side, and he twisted his whole body as he tried to get a look at whoever this idiot was who was playing games with him—

And as he did so, something big and dark and torpedo-shaped shot through the space he'd just vacated. There was another roll of punctuated thunder—

"Raimey, get out of there!" Faraday snapped. "You've got a Vuuka on your tail!

"Move it, or be lunch!"

FOUR

"A Vuuka?" Raimey gasped, twisting back around to look at the torpedo shape that had overshot him.

It was a Vuuka, all right. A relatively small one, a detached part of his brain pointed out, no more than five meters long.

Five meters' worth of predator, compared to about a meter's worth of Raimey. A single bite on the fly, like he'd been coming in for, and Raimey would have been ripped in half. Belatedly, he realized that the Qanska who had slammed into him so annoyingly had in fact saved his life.