Manta's Gift

SEVEN

The pressures at the bottom of Level Three were stiffer than anything Raimey had yet encountered.

But the temperature was pleasantly warm and there were interesting new foodstuffs to sample.

And best of all, for the moment at least, he was alone. Or at least, as alone as he ever got.

"It's not wise to be down here alone," Tigrallo warned from his perpetual spot at the edge of Raimey's vision. "And of all days, this one would be more properly spent with the others of the herd."

"They won't even miss me," Raimey told him shortly, straining to dive still deeper. To get away from the herd, and the Babies, the Midlings, and the other Youths.

And, most of all, to get away from Drusni.

"They'll be singing the Song of Change in less than a ninth-part," Tigrallo reminded him.

As if Raimey needed reminding. "I've already heard it," he said. "Twice."

"But you've never heard it sung for you," Tigrallo said.

"I'll become an adult whether they sing it or not," Raimey said. "Besides, I don't have a mother to sing it to me. I'd just be hearing it from strangers."

"They're hardly strangers," Tigrallo said with mild reproof. "Or at least, they shouldn't be."

"I know, I know," Raimey growled. Tigrallo had been on his tails forever about spending more time with the herd instead of off by himself.

"That's not what I meant," the Protector said gently. "I was simply trying to point out that there are many who will gladly sing the Song to you. To you, as well as to the other Youths who are without family."

Raimey flipped his tails. "Willingly, maybe, but not gladly. At least, not in my case."

"You know that's not true," Tigrallo said severely. With a flip of his tails, he moved closer to Raimey's side. "The Song isn't the real problem, is it, Manta? It's something else."

Raimey turned away from him, a dozen conflicting emotions and frustrations tearing through his stomach like baby Pakra fighting each other for the scraps of a kill. "It's nothing," he said. "I'm just not feeling like company today, that's all."

He tried to swim away, but Tigrallo stayed right with him. "Is it Drusni?" he asked.

Drusni. Raimey slashed viciously at the air with his tails. Drusni. Sweet, clumsy, caring, flippant, vibrant, maddening, radiant Drusni. Half the time she drove him crazy, the other half he couldn't stand to be away from her.

And try as hard as he could, he couldn't get her out of his mind.

"She's okay," he said, trying hard to sound casual. "Mostly, she's a pain in the throats."

For a moment Tigrallo was silent, but Raimey could feel the air currents as the Protector swished his tail back and forth. He kept his back to the other, not daring to look and see what kind of expression that tail-swishing might be taking. The last thing he needed right now was to have his personal Protector laughing at him.

"Perhaps," Tigrallo said at last. There was no amusement or condescension in his voice that Raimey could detect, not even in his hypersensitive state. "Perhaps not."

"Are you calling me a liar?"

"Not at all," Tigrallo said, deflecting the challenge calmly. "There may simply be more to it than even you realize."

He swished his tail again. "It's not so many dayherds since I was a Breeder myself, you know."

"I'm not a Breeder," Raimey insisted. "Not yet."

Tigrallo gave a shrug. "The Song of Change is merely a formality. Physically, you're certainly no longer a Youth."

Raimey grimaced. No, he certainly wasn't. He could feel the hormones swirling inside him, playing a mass game of tagabuck with his thoughts and emotions. It was very much like being fifteen again.

There was only one problem. These were alien hormones, driving him toward alien females. That alone was enough to make his skin crawl, in an eerily tingly sort of way.

All right; there were two problems, actually. He didn't want to be fifteen again.

"But ceremony or not, we should leave this place," Tigrallo went on. "Or, if you still insist on staying this deep, we should find a group of Breeders to swim with. It would be safer."

"I already told you I didn't want company," Raimey bit out. He turned back to the drifting food—

"Manta?" a clear voice called from somewhere above him. "Manta?"

It was, of course, Drusni.

Raimey's heart sank and leaped at the same time, an amazingly good trick. "Great," he muttered.

"Just what I needed."

"Manta?" she called again.

"Are you going to answer her?" Tigrallo prompted quietly.

For a long moment Raimey was tempted to say no. The atmosphere seemed especially murky today, and if he kept his mouth shut Drusni could search for a long time without finding him.

But then she might miss the ceremony, too. And everyone would blame him.

He shook his fins with frustration. No matter what he did, he wasn't going to win this one. "Over here," he called with a sigh.

"There you are," Drusni said, pushing her way into sight from above and settling in beside him.

"What are you doing down here?"

"Hunting for Pakra eggs," Raimey growled. "How did you find me?"

"Pranlo told me you'd been spending a lot of time down here lately," she said, flipping her tails.

"You okay?"

"I'm fine," he said. "What do you want?"

"I want you to come up, of course," she said, sounding surprised. "The Song of Change, remember?

It's going to be starting soon."

"I hadn't forgotten," Raimey said. "I just thought I'd give it a pass, that's all." He gestured upward.

"You'd better get back, though."

"Not without you," she said firmly. "This is our last big bite before adulthood. The Three Musketta, remember?"

"Musketeers," Raimey corrected her for about the ninetieth time since he'd introduced her and Pranlo to the term. "The Three Musketeers."

"Whatever," she said, not taking offense. "Come on, Manta, it'll be fun. I mean, adults honoring us and children looking up to us with awe? Think of the possibilities. We can play this one for all it's worth."

"You go play it," Raimey said stiffly. "I'm not interested."

"Oh, come on," she cajoled. "Don't you want to grow up to be one of the Wise someday? And get to go live on Level Eight?"

Raimey snorted. "Right. Level Eight. Where only the Wise can go, where there aren't any predators or scavengers, and where a Qanska can live as long as he can swim."

"Oh, good," Drusni said cheerfully. "You do pay attention during story circle. I've always wondered about that."

Raimey flipped his tails in a shrug. "Hey, I like the stories," he said. "Even the ones that sound like wishful thinking."

"Level Eight isn't wishful thinking," Drusni insisted. "Ask any Protector or Nurturer. They'll tell you about someone they know personally who lives down there."

"Or at least that they personally know a Counselor who claims to have talked to a Leader, who says he's seen a Wise," Raimey countered. "Sounds pretty bogus, if you ask me."

Drusni wiggled her fins. "If you think you can chase me off the subject by starting a different conversation, you're mistaken," she said primly. "Now, what about the Song of Change? Please?"

"I hate ceremonies," Raimey growled. But he could feel himself weakening in the glow of her gaze.

"Especially this kind. They're always so overpuffed."

"Why don't you try thinking of it like it's another story?" she suggested. "Just like story circle, only this one's set to music."

"But I don't like ceremonies."

"Please?" she asked again. "For me?"

Raimey ground his teeth together, trying hard not to look at her. But she was impossible not to look at. So radiant... "Drusni, look. I just—"

"Go!" Tigrallo barked, practically in Raimey's ear. "As fast as you can!"

The Protector flipped around so suddenly that the tip of one of his tails slapped across Raimey's back. Raimey rolled over to glare at him, opening his mouth to say something nasty.

The words jammed sideways in his throats. Swimming straight at them, coming into view through the haze like avenging ghosts, wiggled a whole group of small, eel-like creatures.

A pack of hunting Sivra.

"Go!" Tigrallo snarled again over his back. Flapping his fins defiantly, he threw himself straight into the center of the pack.

"You heard him," Raimey snapped at Drusni, righting himself and slapping at her side with the tip of his fin. "Get moving!"

She swam a couple of strokes away, then seemed to falter. "What about you?" she asked.

Raimey swore under his breath, his own fins locked in place with indecision. Rolling half over, he looked back at Tigrallo.

The sight froze his blood. The Protector could barely be seen through the cloud of Sivra now swarming madly around him. Raimey caught a glimpse of one of Tigrallo's fins as it flapped violently, the colorful pattern of stripes almost completely obscured by the predators clinging to it.

And bright yellow Qanskan blood was everywhere.

What do I do? the frantic thought raced through Raimey's mind. Should he run? Or should he try to help Tigrallo? The Song of Change they were preparing up above would presumably contain instructions for his new societal duties. But that Song hadn't been sung to him yet, and he hadn't paid very good attention the times he'd heard it sung to others of the herd.

He stiffened his fins. No. He wasn't just a simple-minded Qanska, who needed some ancient Song to tell him how to behave. He was human, too; and humans always knew the right thing to do. A

Protector's job was to guard Qanskan children, whether Babies, Midlings, or Youths.

But Raimey was no longer in any of those categories except in name. He was effectively an adult now... and being an adult didn't mean running like a coward when someone was in trouble. "Hold on, Tigrallo," he called, diving toward the mob scene below. "I'm coming."

"No!" Tigrallo bellowed. But it was a weak and hoarse bellow, full of pain and grim hopelessness.

"Go. Run."

"I'm coming," Raimey repeated. He leaned hard into the heavy air—

"Manta!" Drusni gasped from behind him. "Help!"

Raimey rolled over and looked back. Drusni, still lingering behind him instead of swimming for the herd like she'd been told, had been overtaken by two of the Sivra. Even as he flipped around and charged toward her, one of them got a grip on the trailing edge of her left fin.

She screamed; and as she did, Raimey felt fear and rage flood through him like twin waves of superheated air, giving him a strength he would never have guessed he could have. "I'm coming," he called, driving up toward her. "Hold on, I'm coming."

"Hurry!" Drusni pleaded, corkscrewing madly through the air as she tried to shake off the little predator hanging from her fin like a drab holiday streamer. The second Sivra was darting around her, trying to get a grip of his own.

He was still trying when Raimey ducked his snout and slammed forehead-first into him.

There was a sound like wet leather slapping onto rock, and with a forlorn little whistling moan the Sivra fell away into the gloom. Twisting around, Raimey caught the tail end of the other Sivra in his mouth and bit down as hard as he could.

Qanskan jaw muscles weren't designed for such things, and the bite wasn't nearly as hard as Raimey would have liked. But apparently it was hard enough. The Sivra let go of Drusni's fin and spun around toward this new assailant, screaming in rage and pain. For a stretched-out pulse of time they glared at each other: the five-meter Qanska almost-adult, and the half-meter hunting Sivra.

And then the pulse passed, and with a flip of his flat-snake body the Sivra attacked.

Raimey dodged, but he wasn't nearly as maneuverable as the smaller predator. Teeth raked across his back, drawing blood; and then, as he tried to twist away, the Sivra sank his teeth firmly into the front edge of his right fin.

A shiver of pain shot through him. But with the fury still flooding his blood, he hardly even noticed.

He continued his twist, rocking violently back and forth, trying to break the Sivra's grip. But the predator hung on doggedly.

And then something flashed past his eyes: Drusni's tails, slashing against the Sivra's body. "Manta!" he heard her gasp.

"Get away," he snarled at her. "Go."

"No!" she said, slashing at the Sivra again. "Not without you."

Raimey twisted again, harder this time. But the predator's grip didn't loosen. He came to a jerking halt, twisted back the other direction—

And then, through the pain, he suddenly felt something give. The Sivra wasn't letting go, exactly, but something about its grip felt different. Pausing in his thrashing, Raimey peered down along the edge of his fin.

The Sivra was still there. But at the point where it had grabbed Raimey's fin, its drab brownish body had taken on a new color scheme: blue, with edges of a dark red.

The same color scheme, in fact, as Raimey's own skin.

Raimey stared, so fascinated that for a moment he forgot the pain, the danger he was in, and even Drusni. He'd seen Qanskan skin growing up around attacking predators before; in fact, he'd seen it happen his very first day on this planet. But he'd never seen it happen with his own body.

It was the strangest thing to watch, and an even stranger thing to feel. Rather like a scab starting to itch, he decided, but with a strange sort of stretching sensation added to it as well. The skin had crept nearly halfway up the Sivra's length now, and the creature had stopped struggling. Dead, Raimey decided, though still managing to maintain a death-grip on his fin.

Of course, snugged into Raimey's self-growing cocoon, the Sivra's teeth didn't really have any choice but to stay where they were. No wonder older Qanska were so lumpy.

A slap on his other fin jolted him out of his fascinated reverie. "Manta, come on," Drusni panted.

"We've got to get out of here."

Raimey twisted over and looked behind him, suddenly remembering the deadly danger they were both in. If the other Sivra were still on the hunt—

But no. This particular pack of Sivra weren't going to be bothering him and Drusni. At least, not any time soon. They already had their meal well in hand.

He looked away from the predators' feast, sickened to his core. "Yes," he told Drusni quietly as he started swimming upward. "Let's go."

"What's happening?" Hesse demanded, hovering behind Beach with all the nervous anxiety of a mother hen watching her latest batch of eggs being readied for Sunday brunch. From the speaker, the gasps and panting and clipped instructions continued to flow, all of it overlaid with a thick layer of static. "Damn it all, what's happening?"

"I'm working on it, I'm working on it," Beach said, his fingers bouncing across his keyboard like twin kittens on a serious catnip high as he tried yet another sound-scrubbing program. "The relay probe's on its way down, but until it clears the cloud-layer turbulence I can't risk deploying the antennas. We're looking at ten more minutes, tops."

"He could be dead in ten minutes," Hesse shot back. "Damn it all. What did he think he was doing down there, anyway?"

"Avoiding the rest of the herd, probably," Sprenkle said. "If you think about it, he's been doing a lot of that since his mother's death."

"What are you talking about?" McCollum asked. "He and his friends have been practically joined at the fin for the past eight months."

"Agreed," Sprenkle said. "And all three have been pushing outward from the herd, with Raimey as the driving force. He's still running away; he's just taking a little company along with him."

"But isn't that normal?" McCollum argued. "They're nearly adults, preparing to go off on their own.

In a lot of Earth species, they'd have been kicked out of the herd already."

"And don't forget that Raimey's been an adult stuck in a kid's body ever since Day One," Milligan added. Like Beach, he was typing busily at his console, working the controls of the relay probe.

"He's going to be straining at the leash even harder."

"Pig drippings," Hesse said sourly. "If he was so anxious to be officially declared an adult, he'd be in the front row right now at that Song of Change ceremony. He's hotdogging, that's all. Seeing how deep he can go, and to hell with the consequences. The same idiot stunt he was pulling when he broke his stupid neck in the first place."

McCollum turned halfway around in her seat. "You're being very quiet, Colonel," she commented.

"Am I?" Faraday asked, gazing at the thrashing snow on the displays. "I was just thinking about Mirasni. Wondering if Raimey has ever really understood what she gave up so that he could be born in her son's body."

"I doubt it," Sprenkle murmured. "It's not the sort of question that's likely to even cross his mind.

Raimey's a fairly shallow character, when you come right down to it. His number-one focus in life has always been himself."

"Well, he sure picks odd ways to demonstrate it," Hesse said with a snort. "He goes charging off maverick from the herd, and thereby runs square into whatever the hell is going on down there.

Doesn't sound like self-preservation to me."

"True," Sprenkle agreed. "But self-absorption and self-preservation don't always go together."

Hesse frowned at him. "Are you suggesting he's become suicidal?"

"Not necessarily," Sprenkle said. "But that doesn't mean he might not give up without a fight if death came staring him in the face."

"Hell," Hesse muttered, looking back at the displays.

"Here we go," Milligan announced suddenly. "Probe's in range."

Faraday's eyes flicked across the displays. But there were only Raimey and Drusni, swimming hard, with no predators anywhere in sight. Whatever had happened, it looked like it was all over, and they'd made it through all right.

And then, a sudden cold thought squeezed at his throat, and he took a second look at the displays.

Raimey and Drusni were there. But Tigrallo was nowhere to be seen.

"Looks like they're heading up," Beach said.

"Is he all right?" Hesse demanded anxiously. "Ms. McCollum?"

"He's swimming smoothly, and I don't see any blood," McCollum reported, gazing at the images.

"Looks like there's something hanging off his fin now, but it seems to be covered with his own skin.

Probably a Sivra."

"They're still heading up," Milligan reported. "Looks like they're going all the way to Level One."

"I've got him on emscan now," Milligan added. "Heading for the herd, all right. Score one for the good guys."

"Better make that score two-thirds," Faraday corrected quietly. "Tigrallo's not with them."

There was a long, dark silence. "Oh, no," McCollum murmured.

"Maybe he's hanging back as rear guard," Beach suggested hesitantly.

"No," Milligan said. "I've got him on emscan from the probe. Or at least, what's left of him."

"Sivra," Beach muttered. "Damn little bastards."

"Any of them pursuing?" Hesse asked. Even he, Faraday noted, sounded subdued.

"No," Milligan said. "Everything looks clear."

"For now," McCollum said under her breath.

Milligan's lip twisted. "Yeah."

Hesse looked at Faraday. "That was close," he muttered. "Too close. We nearly lost everything."

"That was always the risk we took," Faraday reminded him, a small back corner of his mind noticing the irony in that statement. The risk they took? "The Five Hundred know that."

"Maybe they did once," Hesse said tightly. "I'm not so sure they do anymore."

Faraday frowned at him. The younger man's face had an expression of pinched intensity on it, a look Faraday had never seen there before. "What do you know that you're not telling us?" he asked.

Hesse threw him a sideways look, as if suddenly realizing what he was giving away. "I don't know anything," he said, the intensity smoothing out like someone was going over his face with a cement trowel. "I just know how to read politicians. Do you know offhand when the next Qanskan sleep cycle is?"

Faraday glanced at the clock, did a quick calculation. "About three hours. Why?"

Hesse nodded at the displays. "I think maybe we should go ahead and let Raimey in on what he's really doing down there."

About time, too. "You think it's best to do it when he's supposed to be sleeping?" Faraday asked.

"He speaks exclusively in tonals these days," Hesse reminded him. "I said it's time to let him in on the secret, not every Qanska who can eavesdrop on his half of the conversation."

"I suppose." Faraday pursed his lips. "Though maybe we ought to hold off a few more days now.

Tigrallo's been his closest companion for the past three years, probably some of the toughest and most challenging years Raimey's ever had to live through. Watching him die like that has to have been pretty traumatic."

"In that case, we'll be doing him a favor," Hesse growled. "Get his mind off his own troubles for a while."

"I was thinking more along the lines that he's probably feeling very Qanskan right now," Faraday said, trying hard to be diplomatic. "Dragging his thoughts back off Jupiter might be taken as something of an intrusion."

"All the more reason to do it now," Hesse said shortly. "It'll remind him that underneath all that alien skin, he's still a human being."

Faraday threw a glance at the back of Sprenkle's head. But it was clear the psychologist was going to keep whatever opinions he had to himself. "It's your call," Faraday said, turning back to Hesse. "Just make sure he's really alone. He's going to be called on the carpet for sure on this one, and the Leaders may want to hold him over past the sleep cycle for more questioning."

Hesse frowned. "What makes you think he's going to be in trouble?"

"You may know how to read politicians." Faraday looked up at the displays. "Me, I know how to read Qanska."