Timothy Zahn - Manta's Gift

Faraday peered around the room, floundering a little as he tried to put names to the faces. He'd been introduced to all three shifts when he'd first come aboard the station, of course. But in the ten and a half months since then their paths had seldom crossed, and he'd never been good with names and faces anyway. Two of the faces were complete blanks; the third he had a vague recollection of.

The fourth, in contrast, was almost painfully familiar.

"Mr. Milligan," he greeted the young man, stepping over to the sensor tech's chair. "You're up late."

"Pandre called in sick this evening," Milligan said. "I volunteered to sit Beta Shift for him."

"Um," Faraday said, pulling his chair over from his usual place by the command board and sitting down beside him. "Did Mr. Hesse approve?"

Milligan shrugged slightly. "Mr. Hesse mostly watches things with an eye toward politics. How Earth and the Five Hundred are affected. I didn't think this qualified."

"Mr. Hesse has a good eye for detail," Faraday pointed out, casting around for some way to stick up for the man. Hesse was Milligan's boss, after all. He deserved at least a surface layer of respect.

"That's very valuable in a manager. He also brings a strong enthusiasm for the project."

"He brings a strong enthusiasm for you, you mean," Milligan countered. "The project I'm not so sure about."

Faraday grimaced. He'd hoped it wasn't quite that obvious to everyone else. "One and the same, really."

"It is now," Milligan countered. "But what happens to us when you leave? More to the point, what happens to Raimey?"

Faraday had wondered about that himself. Often. "So what's the big secret?" he asked, running an eye across the sensor displays. "Things seem quiet enough."

"They're in sleep cycle," Milligan said. "Things were hopping pretty good an hour ago."

Faraday nodded. The Qanskan pattern seemed to be just under seven hours of wakefulness followed by just under three hours of sleep as they drifted along with the winds. It all synched perfectly with Jupiter's nine-point-eight-hour rotation.

Though why anyone down there should care about the planet's rotation in the first place was a mystery. Below the clouds, where all the Qanska lived, they got more heat and radiation from Jupiter's core than they did from the distant sun.

Still, experiments with Raimey had demonstrated that Qanskan eyes could easily pick out the sun's location, even through all that muck above them. Perhaps it was built into all living creatures to match their rhythms to their local star, no matter how great or minor its influence on their environment. "More reindeer games?" he asked.

Milligan blinked. "More what?"

" 'They never let poor Rudolph join in any reindeer games,' " Faraday quoted. "Didn't you ever watch the classics?"

"I liked taking TV sets apart more than I did watching them," Milligan said. "But, yeah, they were playing for a while. Raimey's definitely getting his act together, swimming-wise. Oh, and Tigrallo also had to chase away some more troublemakers."

"Vuuka?"

"No, those smaller ones. The whatcha-call-'em—"

"Sivra?" Faraday asked, frowning. Sivra usually weren't strong enough to swim their way up to Level One.

"No, the other ones," Milligan said. "Pakra. The scavengers who sometimes get delusions of predatorhood."

"Ah," Faraday said. "He didn't have any trouble with them, I presume?"

Milligan shook his head. "Not a bit."

"Good," Faraday said. "So I repeat: Why am I here?"

"I was playing around with the sensor data this afternoon," Milligan said, swiveling half around to tap some keys on his board. "Found something I wanted to show you."

One of the displays showing sleeping Qanska shifted to an overall view of the equatorial region of Jupiter the station was currently flying over. "Here's Raimey's herd, sitting smack dab on Jupiter's equator," Milligan said. "Here's the group of Protectors, running a little deeper but staying basically right below them. Here's the herd ahead of them; here's the herd behind them. Almost every Qanska we've ever seen has been running within a couple thousand kilometers of the equator."

"Right," Faraday said, cultivating his patience. They knew all this. "So?"

"So why?" Milligan asked. "They've got the whole creaking Jovian atmosphere to play around in.

Why do they all hug the equator that way?"

"Maybe they're just gregarious," Faraday said. "Or maybe it's more comfortable for them. They get more sunlight there than they would closer to the poles."

"Negligible," Milligan said flatly.

"Negligible to us," Faraday countered. "Maybe not to them."

"But a thousand kilometers?" Milligan said. "That's an incredibly narrow band, especially considering Jupiter's size. We sure went out and populated our whole world, and the sunlight makes a lot more difference to us than to them."

Faraday rubbed his eyes. "Mr. Milligan, why are we having this conversation right now?"

"Because I think this is something worth checking out," Milligan said. "I think we ought to send a couple of our deep probes into the higher latitudes to see what's out there."

Faraday glanced around the control board. None of the other three techs were looking at them, but they were obviously listening closely to the quiet conversation. "Why don't you bring this up tomorrow morning?" he suggested. "That way Mr. Hesse and I could hear it together."

Milligan's lips tightened. "Mr. Hesse has already made it clear that he wants to save as many probes as possible for when Raimey gets bigger and starts going deeper in the atmosphere."

Faraday nodded cynically. "In other words, you've already tried this pitch on him," he said. "And having struck out, you naturally came to me."

"Well, no, not really," Milligan hedged. "I haven't exactly suggested it. But from things he's said, its clear he's hell-bent on sticking to whatever grand scheme the Five Hundred have hatched. According to him, we're not in the pure-research business."

"He's right, we're not," Faraday murmured. "And those deep-probes cost nearly half a billion dollars each."

"Yeah, he's mentioned that, too," Milligan said sourly. "But this isn't just pure research, and it sure isn't just for the fun of it. We don't have any idea what's out there, except that the Qanska seem to be avoiding those areas. There could be masses of predators or other dangers, things that could directly impact the whole project."

"Nice speech," Faraday complimented him. "You've been practicing."

"It's something we need to know," Milligan insisted. He paused, just for a second—"Besides," he added, dropping his voice still lower, "it could be that the Qanska are hiding it out there."

Faraday looked up at the display. It. The Holy Grail, as Hesse liked to refer to it. The whole point of Project Changeling. "Or it could be that the Qanska simply cluster their young together for protection," he said. "Maybe once they're older and larger, they spread out more evenly over the planet."

"Maybe," Milligan said. "But we won't know until we take a look, will we?"

"Or until we let Raimey take a look," Faraday pointed out. "Let's give it a little longer, shall we?"

Milligan made a face. "In other words, no."

"In other words, not yet," Faraday corrected. "We can always take another look at our options after Raimey reaches adulthood and is out on his own."

"Which is at least two years away," Milligan muttered. "Longer if he gets picked for Protector duty."

"That's all right," Faraday soothed him. "We've got time. This is why Raimey's here, after all. Give him time, and he'll be able to do a far more efficient search than we ever can. Even with all this expensive hardware."

"Or at least he will once you tell him about it." Milligan looked sideways up at him. "When are you planning to tell him, by the way?"