Timothy Zahn - Manta's Gift

Faraday nodded, his mind flashing back to that barely controlled fall so many years ago. He'd learned firsthand how hungrily the ionization in Jupiter's atmosphere could swallow radio signals.

"We'll just have to wait for him to wake up, then," he said.

"No," Hesse said.

Faraday frowned. "No?"

"I told you before, I don't want to have this conversation with other Qanska wandering around,"

Hesse said, glaring at the displays. "What if he were higher up? Could we get his attention then?"

Beach threw a sideways look at Faraday. "Probably," he said cautiously. "Are you suggesting...?"

"What else is it there for?" Hesse countered. "Bring him up."

Beach looked again at Faraday. "Colonel?"

"I gave you an order, Mr. Beach," Hesse said before Faraday could respond.

"Go ahead, Mr. Beach," Faraday confirmed.

Beach took a deep breath and turned to the panel between him and McCollum. The one they'd never used before... "Yes, sir."

"I hope this is a good idea," Faraday warned Hesse quietly. "The McCarthy setup was only supposed to be used in emergencies. We don't even know if the thing will work."

"I have full confidence in the Five Hundred's techs," Hesse said. "Mr. Beach, you'd better bring him all the way up to Level One."

"He's not supposed to be that high," Sprenkle put in.

"Just keep him away from the herds and there shouldn't be a problem," Hesse said.

"I'm not so sure," Sprenkle persisted. "The Qanska have shown a strong propensity for strict letter-ofthe- law thinking."

"Raimey's a special case, remember?" Hesse countered. "It'll be all right."

He looked back at Faraday. "It has to be done," he insisted. "You said yourself he's started thinking of himself as a Qanska. We need to realign any loyalties that might have drifted off-beam."

"And what if we can't?" Faraday asked. "What are you going to do, fire him?"

"I'm prepared to do whatever it takes," Hesse said, his voice grim. "But I don't anticipate any serious trouble. After all, he got into this in order to carve himself a big fat historical legacy. This is made to order."

"He's moving," Beach announced, his voice oddly strained. "Heading upward."

"Good," Hesse said. "I am curious, though, Colonel. Why did you name this thing after an old United States senator?"

"What are you talking about?" Faraday asked, frowning.

"The McCarthy setup," Hesse said. "It is named after Senator Joe McCarthy of the 1950s communist witch hunts, isn't it?"

"No," Faraday said, shaking his head. "It's named after Charlie McCarthy."

Hesse frowned. "Who was he?"

"An associate of Edgar Bergen's," Faraday said. "A wooden-head."

Hesse frowned even harder. "A what?"

Faraday looked at the displays, thinking back to the Golden Age vids he'd loved as a child. When life had been so much simpler.

And you never had to worry about whether you were betraying someone who had trusted you. "He was a ventriloquist's dummy," he told Hesse. "In other words... a puppet."

"Mr. Raimey?"

Raimey awoke with a start. Had someone actually called him by his old Earth name? Or had he just dreamed it?

"Mr. Raimey?"

He flicked his tails in annoyance. It was real, all right. It was them. "I'm here," he growled. "What do you want?"

There was a short pause, no doubt as their computers worked busily to decipher the tonals. Shaking the sleep out of his eyes, wondering why no one up there had bothered to learn the language, he looked around him.

And with a jolt came fully awake. This wasn't Level Three, where he'd gone to sleep. This was Level One.

Level One?

"Mr. Raimey, this is Hesse," Hesse's voice spoke up in the back of his brain. "Sorry to have wakened you, but we needed to talk to you privately."

"You could have called when I was already awake," Raimey growled, still trying to figure this out.

Had he been sleepwalking or something? He'd never done it before, not as a Qanska or even back when he was a human.

Unless the adults or the Protectors of his herd had always just nudged him back to the rest of the group before.

"We didn't want anyone else to even know we'd been in contact," Hesse said. "Do you remember when Colonel Faraday first recruited you for this job? He told you you'd go down in history as the first man to live in and study an alien culture."

"Of course I remember," Raimey said tartly. If this was one of Dr. Sprenkle's stupid memory tests, he was going to have some choice words to say to all of them.

"Good," Hesse said. "As it turns out, the truth is even more exciting than that. The Qanska—"

"Wait a ninepulse," Raimey cut him off. "What do you mean, 'the truth'? What was the rest of it, a lie?"

"No, no, not at all," Hesse said hastily. "It's just that there's more truth than we first told you."

"Oh, good—bonus truth," Raimey said sarcastically. "How nice. Why haven't I heard about this before?"

"It was a decision made at the highest levels," Hesse said. He was starting to sound a little rattled now. "I promise you, there was no intent to—what I mean—"

"It was decided we couldn't afford the risk of it leaking out to the Qanska," Colonel Faraday's calmer voice put in. "I'm sorry for the deception. You'll understand when you hear."

"I'm listening," Raimey said, keeping his voice neutral. Off to his left he could hear the distant squeaking of hungry babies beginning to awaken, along with the much deeper rumblings of Protectors telling them to be patient. There must be a herd that direction.

And he'd been told to stay away from herds. He'd better get this over with and drop back down where he belonged.

"We've been exploring Jupiter by telescope since Galileo, and by space probes since the late twentieth century," Faraday said. "In all that time, right up to the point where Chippawa and I literally ran into them, we never spotted even a hint that the Qanska existed."

"They live underneath the clouds," Raimey reminded him patiently. They'd dragged him out of a good sleep for this? "Of course you didn't see them."

"And we'd been using deep probes and tethered capsules for twenty years before we ran into them,"

Faraday went on as if Raimey hadn't spoken. "I've seen the data, and we had the planet pretty well bracketed."

"Which is a big help, considering that they keep mostly to the equatorial regions," Raimey pointed out.

"Well, we know that now," Faraday conceded. "We also know there are only a few million of them, far fewer than our first estimates."

"Which is maybe why you kept missing them?"

"Perhaps," Faraday said. "But perhaps not."

Raimey sighed. "I assume there's a point buried in here somewhere?"

"An extremely important point," Faraday assured him. "Even taking all the rest of it into account, those who have reviewed the data have come to the conclusion that the Qanska are not native to Jupiter."

Raimey frowned. "What do you mean, not native? Then where in hell did they—?"

He broke off as it suddenly struck him. "No," he murmured. "That's crazy."

"It's not crazy," Faraday said quietly. "There is a very strong probability that your Qanskan friends came here from somewhere outside our Solar System. Which means that they have a stardrive.

"And I'm afraid we want it."

"Wait a ninepulse," Raimey said, his head spinning like an eddy vortex. "This is crazy."

"I know it sounds that way," Faraday said. "But that's the inescapable conclusion. The Qanska weren't there when we started looking at Jupiter. They didn't arrive by huge colony or sleeper ships or anything else slower-than-light—"

"How do we know that?" Raimey cut him off. "They could have sneaked in when no one was looking. Astronomers don't spend all their time staring at the Outer System."