Camouflage (17 page)

Muese, one of the native Samoan techs who had stayed behind, had dug a deep fire pit on the beach between the blast wall and the laboratory, and was roasting a pig, buried wrapped in taro leaves. He made a shallow pit in the afternoon and wrapped yams and potatoes in foil, and put a rack over the coals to grill chicken and fish.

Jack provided tubs of ice with drinks and a keg of beer, and invited all forty-eight employees of the project to the luau. There was no special reason to have a party, but no reason not to have one, either. Work would resume in earnest the next day.

Just before sundown, Muese dug up the pig and spent a half hour carving it, while others tended to the chicken and slabs of tuna and masimasi. The automatic security floodlights came on, less romantic than guttering torches, but good light to cook and eat by.

After the sumptuous meal, a group got together by the fire with guitars, a harmonica, a fiddle, and a tin whistle, and played improbable Irish and Welsh music, popular in the States. Russ and Jan sat apart with a bottle of cold white Burgundy wrapped in a wet towel.

"So what happens next," Russ said, "if we get out to Jupiter and still don't have anything?"

She shrugged. "More invasive procedures, I suppose. Jack must have ideas. He's not committing himself."

Russ finished off his glass but didn't pour another. "He has more than ideas. He has an offer. From China."

"He didn't say anything."

"Yeah. I only know because I was in the office when the machine decrypted it. He couldn't tell me not to watch."

"Let me guess. They want to bury the thing in chop suey."

"Not even close. Chop suey's American, anyhow."

"I know. What is it?"

"They'll cosponsor putting the artifact into orbit. Split the cost of a cluster of four Long March rockets."

"And once in orbit?"

"Take the big laser up with it, I guess. Try it at a hundred percent, safely off Earth."

She shook her head. "Remind me to be somewhere else when it's overhead."

"I think he can be talked out of it. It would mean taking government money." He refilled both of their glasses. "We have to come up with something else, though."

She stared at the containment dome. "We could just send it into the future."

"First we build a time machine."

"I mean one day at a time. Just put a fence around it and wait for science to catch up with it." She took a sip, still staring. "Suspend the project for ten, fifty, a hundred years."

"Jack would die first."

She nodded. "As would we all."

-31-

Washington, D.C., 1974

The chameleon decided to stay in one place and make a fortune. It had been wealthy in the past, spoils of war, but it had never been a rich capitalist, which sounded interesting.

It kept the core identity of a man who went to the office every morning, did his administrative work like a good drone, and then went home to his bachelor apartment, presumably to watch TV and read. He seemed uninterested in women, and most of his coworkers thought he was gay.

What the chameleon actually did at night was become young and gay, in both senses of the word. It dropped ten or fifteen years and pounds, which it could do in a painless second, and exchanged the office uniform for something eye-catching but tasteful. Then it either went on a date or went trolling for a new source of money.

It had three wealthy men paying regular "gifts," for discretion as well as services rendered, and made even more per month by picking up men and robbing them after sex. If they fought, it would sometimes have to kill them, but usually the threat of exposure was enough. It preferred to leave them alive, so it could identify them months or years later for a repeat performance, with a different face and body. There was a gay "scene" in Washington in the seventies, and the chameleon moved through it like an invisible predator.

It didn't prefer gay sex to straight; one was much like the other. It made less money as a woman, though, and as a gay prostitute it ate at better restaurants, and the other man still picked up the bill.

The seventies and eighties were good for the stock market, at least for conservative investors, and all of the money the chameleon made from sex and extortion went straight to its broker. After the first million, it became a broker itself, handling its various identities under yet another false one.

It didn't have a plan, in the sense of ambition. It watched its various fortunes grow and shrink and grow again like a horticulturist tending a garden, fertilizing in one season and pruning in the next.

It slowly became the richest creature in the world, though the wealth was scattered among a hundred identities and a thousand accounts. It started two small wars, as experiments, and profited from both, though not as well as it did in drugs and dot-coms.

It left dot-coms a year before they tanked, but then, instead of pushing its advantage, left the money to marinate for a year or decade or two. Something would come along.

Maybe money could accomplish what research had not, finding another one like himself. Humans were no challenge to kill.

-32-

Melbourne, Australia, 1997

The changeling settled into the Gippsland campus of Monash University in 1997, and spent four years earning a double degree in marine biology and biotechnology. It enjoyed Melbourne, but often spent its free time in the water, being a subject as well as a student of marine biology, and enjoying fresher fish than any sushi chef could offer.

Its academic performance was flawless, Monash being no more difficult than Harvard or MIT, and it accepted a full scholarship to James Cook University in Queensland, where it spent four years getting its M.S. and Ph.D. in marine biology, specializing (naturally enough) in the behavior of marine animals.

It took its fresh doctorate to AIMS, the Australian Institute of Marine Science, where it began researching "wonky holes," the fisherman's name for muddy holes that foul trawling nets near reefs. Many kilometers offshore, they turned out to be fresh water percolating from subterranean streams—a natural process that was having an unnatural effect on the reefs, because the water carried nutrients from farms, which fed algae, attracting fish. Fishermen kept the locations of wonky holes secret, because they attracted schools of fish—an easy day's catch was worth the occasional fouled net.

Investigating this phenomenon gave the changeling its first opportunity to see itself as a great white shark. AIMS was using underwater videocams to monitor fish populations, and one weekend the changeling went out to visit a camera site. It grabbed the bait box, used to attract smaller fish, in its powerful jaws, and crunched it flat, thrashing around in a natural reaction to the strange metallic flavor. It made for some great footage, which had gone all over the oceanographers' world by the time the changeling had turned back into a human and returned to the lab.

"Ugly customer," it said when it saw the tape, to predictable response: "No, it's
beautiful,
can't you see? It's just being a shark." Actually, it was engaging in unsharklike behavior at the time, analyzing the difference in the ocean's flavor around the wonky holes: slightly acidic fresh water. Bad for coral in the long run, though in the short run it was like an all-you-can-eat buffet for the small creatures that fed on algae and plankton, and the larger ones that fed on them, and on up the food chain to the fisherfolk who cursed the wonky holes for mucking up their nets, but kept returning.

In the long run, though, the wonky holes were one of several interlocking factors that were destroying the offshore parts of the Great Barrier Reef, which was bad for tourism as well as fishing. The changeling made them his specialty, and being a part-time shark gave him a huge advantage over other researchers: he could smell out wonky holes in the early stages of development, before they had attracted enough fish to draw the attention of humans. So he did "productive" analysis in reverse: he found relationships between fishing patterns near the shore and the formation of wonky holes, and scientifically predicted where to find the small ones.

This eventually led to a selective reforestation program—the excess percolation of fresh water was indirectly caused by the absence of trees, which would normally store large quantities of water after a rainfall, to harmlessly evaporate back into the clouds.

By this time its identity, as James "Jimmy" Coleridge, had been well established, a Californian who had adopted Australia with enthusiasm. At twenty-seven, Jimmy was considered quite a prodigy in the small world he'd mastered. James Cook University offered "the Wonky Hole Man" a tenure-track professorship, and the changeling took it with some enthusiasm, seeing it as a good platform from which to observe the overall situation of marine science in the Pacific.

Somewhere out here was the answer.

Young Dr. Coleridge was popular with his students, both the undergraduates in the general oceanography courses and the graduate students who worked with him in Special Problems in Marine Ecologies. It wooed and married one of its graduate students, Marcia, a beautiful blonde from Tasmania.

She dropped out of course work to become a faculty wife, a position for which she was not particularly well suited. She drew a lot of the wrong kind of attention from the faculty husbands, and obviously enjoyed it, flirting with more and more energy as her marriage failed to provide her with children—a reasonable enough ambition, but hard to realize if your husband has no gender and is not really human.

Moody and volatile, she became Jimmy's Tasmanian Devil, and it was inevitable that other men would try to tame her.

When she became pregnant in the spring of 2008, a lot of people suspected what her husband knew for sure.

The changeling didn't relish the prospect of complicating its life with children, so it was happier than most husbands would be when it turned out that the newborn's father was obviously of a different race. (How different, only Jimmy knew.) Some people admired the calm way he took it, and his magnanimity on giving her a no-fault divorce and blessing her remarriage to the only black man in their circle of friends. Other people thought it was a shameful abdication of his rights as a man. Even in Queensland, they wouldn't say "white man," but that's what many of them were thinking.

The scandal might have retarded his advance at JCU, so when an offer came for a full professorship at the University of Hawaii, Jimmy snapped it up like the hungry shark he used to be, on weekends.

The changeling decided to stay in the Jimmy Coleridge persona for a while. Having studied and taught in Australia for thirteen years gave it a slightly exotic accent and manner, having honed its twenty-first-century social skills in the tropical north. Jimmy was popular with the male faculty and students as a hale-fellow-well-met, who never got more than pleasantly tipsy but could drink anyone under the table. Of course to the changeling gin was as harmless as rocket fuel or hydrochloric acid.

Coleridge carried a respectable class load, with two graduate courses and a seminar as well as the large lecture class in Introductory Oceanography, which had room for 150 students and was always oversubscribed. He turned out papers with gratifying regularity, as well; between his social life and academic life, some wondered when he had time to sleep.

He pretended to sleep, of course, sometimes in the arms of a graduate student or young professor, which didn't harm his reputation. He wrote most of his papers in that mode, eyes closed and mind in high gear.

In the tenth year of his tenure, 2019, everything changed. Like everyone else, he read and saw the news about the strange artifact that Poseidon Projects had brought up from the Tonga Trench. Unlike most people, the changeling felt a shock of recognition.

It immediately got in touch with the project, and hit an absolute wall: no hiring. Every position filled by people who'd been in it from the start. Thanks, but no thanks. You can read our published data and do your own work.

Of course the changeling knew they wouldn't publish all the data. They were in pursuit of profit, not knowledge.

For the first time in its life it considered revealing its true nature. Want a consultant who can
really
help you with aliens?

But not yet.

-33-

Apia,
Samoa, 30 may 2021

Europa, under its ice surface, was not too difficult. They considered not trying it at all, since the environment—cold saline solution under pressure—wasn't all that different from the Tonga Trench, where it evidently had been since approximately the dawn of time. Of course that also was a good argument
for
doing it. The artifact might respond to the familiar.

It showed no gratitude for Old Home Week, though, sitting as passively as ever, mirroring the ambient temperature but not otherwise acknowledging their efforts. It was a good test for the containment dome's integrity, which was going to be challenged by Jupiter, but otherwise did nothing other than raise the blood pressure of the observers along with the water pressure inside.

After Jan had finished her familiar algorithm, they depressurized and drained the dome, and prepared it for Io, the innermost of the four large moons, the Galilean satellites.

Io's atmosphere is exotic and variable, but thin almost to the point of being a vacuum. It can get up to about a hundred nanobars and down to one (the air on the top of Mount Everest is 330 million nanobars). The fact that it's a poisonous mixture of sulfur dioxide and sodium isn't relevant to human survival; a human would freeze solid in the middle of explosive decompression, not having time to notice that the air smelled bad.

Still, it was possible that Io's surface conditions were not unusual in the universe, so they went ahead with the model, a frigid near-vacuum with a scattering of frozen sulfur dioxide on the floor. They varied the temperature from 100 degrees K. to 130 degrees, enough for some of the sulfur dioxide to sublimate, and then fall back as snow.

The artifact faithfully mirrored the changes in temperature, but otherwise ignored the investigation.