Manta's Gift

by Timothy Zahn

  "Is something wrong?" Faraday's voice shouted back.

  "Yeah, there's something wrong," Raimey snapped. "I'm being bounced around like a preppie at a bar. They didn't say anything about shaking my teeth out."

  "It's all right," Faraday said. It was impossible to tell for sure over the wind, but it sounded to Raimey like there was a new rigidness in the other's voice. "You're in sort of a holding pattern right now."

  "Holding? For what?"

  "For whom," a new, rather Germanic voice put in. "The Qanska who are supposed to meet you don't seem to have arrived yet."

  "Terrific," Raimey growled. "What the hell do we do now?"

  "Just sit tight," Faraday said. "Maybe they went to the wrong place. We're looking for them."

  "Yes, but..." Raimey broke off, frowning. There was an odd pressure against his skin. "Faraday?" he called. "Faraday!"

  "Yes, Mr. Raimey, I'm here."

  "There's something happening," Raimey told him tightly. "What are you doing?"

  "Just stay calm," the Germanic voice said; and there was definitely a tightness in his tone. "It's under control."

  A strange tingling joined the strange pressure sensation. "What do you mean, it's under control? What exactly—?"

  And then, like the ground on that Aspen ski slope, it suddenly hit him. "You've started it!" he gasped. "My skin—you've started dissolving my skin!"

  "Take it easy," the German said.

  "Take it easy?" Raimey snarled. "What the hell are you doing? You said the Qanska aren't even here yet!"

  "We thought they were," Faraday said. "We saw a group of them swimming upward in your direction—"

  "You jumped the gun!" Raimey cut him off. His body—his helpless, paralyzed body—was being disintegrated all around him. "Damn you, anyway."

  "Mr. Raimey, pull yourself together," the German said. "I mean—"

  "Oh, that's funny," Raimey shouted. "That's real funny."

  "He didn't mean it that way," Faraday said. "Look, there's a good wide timing margin built into the operation—"

  "What operation?" Raimey countered. The tingling was getting stronger, and he could visualize his skin vaporizing away, layer by layer. Next would be his muscles, then his organs, then his bones—

  "There they are!" another voice shouted suddenly. "Twenty-two by fourteen. Coming up fast."

  "Maneuvering to intercept," someone else said.

  "You hear that?" Faraday called. "They're here. It's going to be all right."

  The pitch and direction of the noise outside changed as the pod shifted direction.

  And as it did so, the tingling sensation faded away. Was his skin all gone? "Hurry," Raimey pleaded. His voice sounded strange. Was his larynx going, too? "Please. Hurry."

  "Deploying remote surgical pod," another voice called.

  "Intercepting," the first voice said. "Birth canal insertion..."

  There was a sudden thump, a fresh sensation of pressure, and the sound of the wind faded away. "You're in," Faraday said. "It won't be long now."

  "It's too late," Raimey called, his voice a bare whisper now. The last gasp of a dissolving throat.

  "Mr. Raimey, hang on," the German insisted.

  "Go to hell," Raimey murmured. "All of you, go to hell."

  He closed his eyes, and the universe went black.

  THREE

  There was an odd buzzing in the back of his brain as Raimey drifted back toward consciousness. An odd buzzing, and an even odder sensation tingling through his arms and legs.

  It was another minute, and a couple more levels up toward fully awake, before it occurred to him that he hadn't felt anything in those limbs for the past eight months.

  He tried to blink his eyes open. He couldn't tell if it worked. His eyes felt funny, too.

  And open or closed, there was nothing to see but darkness. Had he gone blind? "Hello?" he called tentatively.

  There was a slight pause. The buzzing sound in his head cut off, to be replaced by a softer humming. The hum cut off in turn—"Mr. Raimey?" an unfamiliar voice said. "Oh, wow. Hang on—just a second."

  The humming came back. Idly, Raimey started counting off the seconds, trying to keep track of them on his fingers. Strangely, though, he didn't seem to have any fingers. Trying to blink his eyes again—he still couldn't see anything—he gave up on the count and instead tried to take inventory of his situation.

  There was precious little for him to work with. He could still feel the pressure of the capsule around him, and there was a deep rumbling sound that seemed to come from nowhere in particular. Aside from that, there was only that sensation of having arms and legs again.

  Phantom limb syndrome, perhaps? But that would mean that the limbs were actually gone. He'd only been unconscious for a few minutes; surely the destruction of his body couldn't be that far along already.

  Unless that was also why he couldn't see anything. Maybe his eyes were gone, too.

  A disembodied brain, floating in a tangle of nutrient pipes. It was like something from a bad medical drama.

  Only it was reality. His reality.

  What in the world was he doing?

  The hum vanished again. "Mr. Raimey, this is Colonel Faraday," a voice said. It didn't sound very much like Faraday. Or at least not the way he'd sounded when Raimey had had ears. Were his ears gone too? "How do you feel?"

  "Well, nothing hurts, anyway," Raimey said. "That's one hell of an anesthetic you're using. Are we going to get on with this soon?"

  Faraday cleared his throat. "Actually, it's all over."

  Raimey tried to blink his sightless eyes. "That's impossible," he protested. "I can still feel the capsule. There's pressure all around me."

  "What you feel is the womb of your Qanskan mother," Faraday said. "Is the pressure more or less uniform around you? Are there any gaps, or places where it feels stronger?"

  Raimey concentrated on the sensation. "Neither, I don't think," he said. "It all seems pretty even."

  "Good," Faraday said. "That means the connections to your sensory nerves were all done correctly. I should warn you that your skin will probably feel a little odd until you get used to it. Actually, everything's going to feel a little odd, especially your vision and hearing."

  "What vision?" Raimey said tightly. "I can't see anyth—oh."

  "That's because you're still inside—"

  "Yeah, yeah, I got it," Raimey said crossly, feeling stupid. "How did the operation go, anyway?"

  "As far as everyone could tell from here, it went fine," Faraday said. "The remotes worked perfectly, and all the relevant Qanskan physiology was where the surgeons expected it to be. Of course, there's no way to know how they did on the motor-nerve connections until you're out."

  Raimey tried flexing his muscles. "Well, for what it's worth, it feels like I can move my arms and legs. Though I guess I can't call them that anymore, can I?"

  "The proper terms are fins and tails," Faraday said. "Fortunately, with the Qanska swallow-type split tail you at least get two legs' worth of movement and feeling. That should be easier to adjust to than a single, fish-type tail would have been."

  "I guess we'll find out." Raimey said. "The rest of me feels okay, I guess. How long did the operation take, anyway? I thought it was supposed to last a whole bunch of hours."

  "Try seventy-three of them," Faraday said. "We started with the surgeons working in three-hour shifts, then backed it off to two."

  "Seventy-three hours?" Raimey echoed. He would have sworn he'd only been unconscious a few minutes. "I was out for three days?"

  "Six, actually," Faraday said. "You slept another three after it was over."

  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.