Timothy Zahn: Manta's Gift

Unable to move his arms and legs. Unable to even feel them.

For a while Brianna's face had blocked out some of the sky. He could visualize her face in front of him now, wisps of her brown hair twitching restlessly in the wind around the edge of her bright red ski cap, the smooth skin of her forehead stressed and wrinkled. Her wide, sensuous mouth had been twisted into something ugly by her fear, her deep brown eyes squinting in agony of her own as tears ran down her cheeks and dripped onto his. She'd cried and gasped and pleaded with him over and over to be all right.

As if he'd had any choice in the matter.

And then the paramedics had come. None of them had cried or gasped or pleaded. But their foreheads had been wrinkled, too, as they eased him onto the rescue sled.

Alan and Bobbi had been in twice to see him since his arrival at the hospital. Mostly they'd smiled their false smiles, talked loudly with false cheer, and muttered platitudes with false hope. Each time they'd made their escape as quickly as they could.

He hadn't seen Brianna at all. He'd thought about her a lot during the long, silent hours; pictured her smiling face, her easy laughter and spontaneity, her quick and unjudgmental acceptance of everyone and everything that came her way. He'd wished desperately that she would come by and brighten his darkening existence, at least for a little while.

But she hadn't, and he doubted now that she ever would. Brianna was the outdoors type, heavily into sports and hiking and fresh air and sunshine.

A girl like that had no time for a cripple.

There was a tap on his open door. "Mr. Raimey?"

It was a man's voice, unfamiliar to him. Raimey's neck still worked; he could have turned his head to see who it was. He didn't bother. "Doctor, biotron whiz, or chaplain?" he asked shortly.

Not that it mattered. None of them could help him anyway. All that mattered was that it wasn't Brianna.

The voice didn't answer. He heard soft footsteps, and then a face loomed over him, interfering with his view of the ceiling. An older face, he saw from the wrinkles and the gray salting in the man's otherwise dark hair. Somewhere around fifty, probably.

Fifty years old, and walking casually around without a care in the universe. Raimey would have hated him if he'd had any emotional energy left to hate with.

"Mr. Raimey, my name is Jakob Faraday," the man said. "I'm with SkyLight International."

SkyLight International: the private company that effectively ran the bulk of the Solar System's space travel under contract to the Five Hundred. He could vaguely remember studying the setup briefly in one of his political economics courses. "Is that supposed to impress me?" he asked.

"I'm not here to be impressive," Faraday said mildly. "I'm here to talk to you about an opportunity."

Raimey snorted. "Forget it."

"Forget what?" Faraday asked.

"Your so-called opportunity," Raimey shot back. "I read the newsnets. You want me for that—what's it called—that alpha-link stuff you're playing with. Forget it. I'm not going to spend the rest of my life wired up in a lab somewhere seeing if you can run a space barge off my brain."

"Ah," Faraday said, nodding. "You have other plans, then?"

The flash of anger vanished like dust scattered on a pond. "Go away," he muttered. "Just get lost.

Okay?"

"I had a word with your doctors," Faraday said, as casually as if he were discussing the weather. He showed no signs of getting lost. "They seem reasonably optimistic about your chances."

"Oh, really?" Raimey bit out. "Which doctors were you talking to? Mine say I'm a cripple." It was the first time since the accident he'd spoken the word aloud. The sound of it was terrifying. "I'm paralyzed from the neck down. They can't repair it, they can't transplant into it, and there's too much damage for forced regrowth."

"There are always neural prosthetics," Faraday pointed out. "They're pretty good these days."

Raimey turned his head away. Neural prosthetics. Lumpy protuberances sticking out of his neck that would let him lurch around like Frankenstein's monster and manage to grip a spoon after a few months of practice. Even then, there was no guarantee he'd be able to hit his mouth with it.

And just enough of a sense of touch to let him know if he was walking on broken glass or sticking his hand in boiling water. Like being wrapped all over in a centimeter of velvet.

All over. Those special nights he'd had with Brianna, and Tiffany before her, and Jane before her, had been the last of that sort he would ever have.

Ever.

"Actually, I didn't come here to offer you test-dummy work," Faraday said. "I came to see if you'd like a chance for a life again."

"Really," Raimey growled. "And what'll this miracle cost? My immortal soul?"

"No," Faraday said. "Just your very mortal body."

Raimey turned his head back around, prepared to say something truly withering.

But Faraday wasn't smiling, or grinning, or leering. The man was deadly serious.

Or else he was just plain flat-out insane. "What are you talking about?" Raimey demanded cautiously.

The other didn't move a muscle, but Raimey had the sudden impression of a man settling in for the long run. Whatever angle he was working here, he figured he'd found his pigeon. And a captive audience, to boot.

And as curiosity and annoyance began to replace some of his self-pity, Raimey realized suddenly there was something familiar about Faraday's face. Something very familiar...

"Tell me, Mr. Raimey," Faraday said, "what did you plan to do after college?"

Automatically, Raimey tried to shrug. The muscles didn't even twitch. "What every other twenty-twoyear- old plans to do," he said, hearing the bitterness in his voice. "Make a life for myself."

"And a name, too?" Faraday suggested. "To excel in your chosen field? To be the best, or the brightest, or the most respected?" He paused, just slightly. "Or perhaps even the first?"

Raimey felt his forehead wrinkle. "Let's cut through the donut glaze, all right? What's this all about?"

"As I said, an opportunity," Faraday said, resting his hand on the edge of the sensor railing. A

polished wooden ring glinted subtly on his finger, Raimey noticed. Unusual jewelry. "Tell me, what do you know about the Qanska?"

The Qanska? "They're giant manta ray-shaped things that swim around in Jupiter's atmosphere,"

Raimey said, frowning. "We made contact with them about twenty years ago and have been talking ever since. There've been a couple of tries at trade agreements, but no one's ever figured out anything they could have that we might want...."

He trailed off as Faraday's face suddenly clicked. The chapter on the Qanska, and Balrushka's muleheaded but failed attempts to work out a trade deal. "You're Jakob Faraday," he breathed. "The Jakob Faraday."

"Of the tether-probe team of Chippawa and Faraday," Faraday agreed, a slight smile briefly touching the corners of his mouth. "First men ever to make contact with the Qanska."

The smile turned into an ironic twitch of the lip. "Such as it was."

"They cut your tether," Raimey said, trying hard to remember the details. Balrushka and his trade negotiations had been the real point of that chapter, with Chippawa and Faraday more a sidebar than anything else. "One of the Qanskan young ran into it, and one of the predators—"

"A Vuuka."

"Right—a Vuuka chewed through it," Raimey said. "Then one of the older Qanska caught you or something. They held a meeting, and decided to send you back up."

"Not bad," Faraday said. "You remember all the essentials, anyway. Now, let's try a real test. Do you remember the name of the man who finally cracked the Qanskan language code? Or the name of the two women who compiled the first English/Qanska tonal dictionary?"