Camouflage (29 page)

Russell offered to let her keep the bicycle, but she said no, she was too contaminated by civilization, and didn't want to either leave it outside or lug it up the stairs to her small apartment. She left it at his cottage and kissed him good-bye, firmly, and walked the few blocks home with the kiss fading on her lips.

The changeling pulled the shutters closed over its window and lay in the half-dark, listening to the click of the ceiling fan and the chatter of birds in the poinsiana tree outside.

It began to practice the language it didn't yet understand. With its glottis it made clicks exactly a twentieth of a second long, for ones, and carefully measured pauses, for zeros.

Early on in the message, there were three clusters of the sequence 000011110000, which were probably separators of some kind, and a fourth one just past midway. These divided the message into parts roughly 2:1:1:47:49. In analogy to human music, perhaps it was a two-verse song, preceded by three packets of information: the first identifying it as a song, and the other two giving the title and some technical information, like tempo and key signature. Or flavor and electrical charge.

There was no obvious pattern to the two verses, though each one had imbedded the cluster, or word, 01100101001011—three times in the first verse and four in the second. There were no other long repetitions. Short ones, like 0100101, had no statistical significance, but if they represented words in a human language, they could be common ones like "a" or "the." You'd expect that with the high Shannon entropy.

Not much to go on, analytically, but to the changeling it had some intuitive or subliminal meaning, evocative but frustrating, like a melody heard in childhood and almost totally forgotten.

The ceiling fan made a click each three-quarter second. The changeling used it as a metronome, or rhythm section. Its human glottis could "speak" about a third as fast as the artifact had; it lowered the pitch of its sounds by a factor of three.

It practiced quietly enough so that someone eavesdropping would hear something that sounded like noise from the fan's motor, which was exactly what the CIA woman in the next room concluded. They had moved in a few hours after Sharon had her first lunch with Russell.

It didn't take long for the changeling to memorize the forty-five—second sequence of clicks and silences that it wanted to sing back to the artifact. But of course it couldn't get in there without Russell, so it had to wait until dark, and then some. If Russell had met Jack for dinner, he probably wouldn't be out too late. Would he then go to the lab, or home? Usually, it knew, he would go home for some light reading, listening to music, and since he'd be tied to the lab most of the next day, that was probably what he'd do.

At nine, it put on a cute black outfit, short skirt and a clinging buckyball top that shimmered shifting rainbows like a blackbird's wing. It slipped out quietly and with precise timing, when it heard the CIA agent go into the bathroom. By the time the agent suspected Sharon's apartment was empty, the changeling had quickly walked the half mile to the cottages.

The blinds were drawn on number 5, but the light was on by his easy chair. The changeling could visualize him sitting there with his book and glass of wine; a soft harpsichord tinkled the Goldberg Variations.

She stepped out of her shoes and tapped on the door. When he opened it, she slipped inside and eased it shut behind her. "I'm impulsive. Are you?"

It took him a couple of seconds to nod, staring. "With you I could be."

The cottage was one big room with a divider setting off the "bedroom"; she led him there, turning out the reading lamp on the way.

"Just a second." He stopped to light a candle, as expected. In its light, she stripped out of the skirt with a Velcro rip and pulled off the buckyball thing. Underneath, she was wearing nothing but the hummingbird tattoo.

She sat on the bed and pulled him toward her, unbuttoning his silly shirt while he fumbled with his cutoffs. He wasn't quite erect; she took him in her mouth immediately, to enjoy the change of state. She teased him gently with her teeth, as she knew he liked, and then took advantage of not having a gag reflex—the changeling had no reflexes, as such—to engage him deeply, cradling him with one hand and urging him down to the bed with the other.

It was what Rae had done with him, the first time. Would his brain be working well enough to make that connection?

He reached down to help her but she was already moist, in control of that function, too. She crawled up onto the bed and straddled him, helping him in slowly with a circling motion, sighing with genuine pleasure. Being with him as Sharon had not been enough.

She smiled down on him, playing with his hair while he moved up and down inside her, and after a minute said, "I have a little trick." She eased sideways and tilted a bit, raising her knee and straightening her leg, holding him in place. She slowly crabbed around, doing the same trick with the other leg, so that she was facing away, without having lost him in the process. "Still there?" Knowing that he was.

"How ... did you do that?"

"Double jointed."

She knew he liked this aspect, and enjoyed the internal difference herself, but mainly wanted to be facing the other direction for a few minutes. He clasped her with his hands and she used hers in a practiced way, trying to control his progress while she worked on her face.

When the time was right, she had an enthusiastic orgasm, and he ejaculated with desperate eagerness right afterwards. She eased down to her side and he rolled over, holding her spoon fashion.

After a minute he somewhat surprised her: "Rae?"

She slowly turned around in the circle of his arms with her new face, the old face.

She ran a finger down the bridge of his nose while he stared. " 'To see love coming, and see love depart.'"

"You ... grew a new arm," he said inanely. "But you're the same inside." For ninety years, the changeling realized, it had always been nurse Deborah inside, whenever it was a woman.

He explored her face with his hands, and then drifted down to the tattoo. "But except for the face..."

"I'm still Sharon. Changing bodies takes longer, and hurts."

"Who ... what..." He was still caressing her. "What are you?"

" 'Who' I am is Sharon and Rae and a couple of hundred other people over the past century, and a number of animals and objects besides. The 'what' is difficult."

"Another planet?"

"I don't even know that. Your idea about my coming from the future isn't inconsistent with my memories, which are vague before 1931. I think that's when I first took human form."

"What were you before that?"

"A variety of creatures. I was always in the sea—great white, killer whale; whatever was at the top of the local biome's food chain. Pretty good survival instinct, I suppose.

"I could have been there as long as the artifact; the artifact might have brought me here—from the future, from another star, another dimension. I feel a compelling attraction to it."

He nodded slowly. "So you seduced me, hoping I could—"

She kissed him on the cheek. "Which doesn't mean I don't love you," she whispered. "You can love someone and use him. Or her."

He didn't say anything for a long moment. He smoothed a strand of hair off her forehead, and smiled. "You seem so feminine. As Rae, as Sharon, and now in between."

"I prefer being female. But I was a Marine in World War Two, a male juggler in the circus. In the seventies I was a male astronomy graduate assistant at Harvard, a few years ahead of Jan; I graded Jan's papers when she took Atmospheres of the Sun and Stars. Small world."

"Did you ever meet Jack or me, before the project?"

"No. I knew about you, from the
Titanic
thing, of course; I was a marine biologist."

"As well as a Marine." He shook his head in wonder. "And now?"

The changeling pursed its lips. "Let me get us a glass of wine." He shifted to rise and she put a hand on his shoulder. "I know where it is."

She crossed to the kitchenette and felt his eyes on her; knew how she looked in the candlelight. "I wanted to take more time. Wanted you to fall in love with me as Sharon."

"You were on the right track."

She filled a crystal glass with red wine in the darkness. If he could have seen her face he would be startled, irises the size of quarters. "But I had to force the issue, I thought. Because of tomorrow."

"You know what's happening tomorrow?"

"Easy to guess. I know about the artifact's response, of course, as Rae. You decided to go public. I suppose to lure me out of hiding." She handed him the glass.

He took it without drinking. "Also to get a few million more people working on the sequence. Bigger computers." He sipped and handed the glass back to her. "Why didn't you just identify yourself? You'd be part of the project in a nanosecond, and we'd protect you from..." With a jerk of his head he indicated the people who had shot her.

"If you could." With the hack of her lingers she stroked the stubble on his cheek. "I know human nature, darling, maybe better than you do. An outsider with almost a century of observation."

"You know love."

"I've known it a few times. I know xenophobia, too. I've been black and Asian and Hispanic in America, in the times when white people could do or say anything to you. A white prisoner on the Bataan Death March. It was a powerful lesson, being hated and feared automatically because you're different." She sipped and put the glass on the end table by the candle. "There's nobody on this planet more 'different' than me."

That was the first thing the changeling had said that wasn't the truth. But it couldn't know that there was someone stranger nearby.

"I have the message partly figured out," she continued. "Not as a Drake algorithm; certainly not as a verbal translation. It seems to be something like a song, and I think it's addressed to me. I want to go answer it."

"Tonight?"

"It has to be tonight. That's why I rushed this."

Russell sat up slowly. "I suppose the guard would let me take you in. But then what? Most likely, nothing will happen. Will you join the team then? As our resident Martian?"

"Sure. But only you and Jack and Jan would know I wasn't sweet little Sharon from Hawaii, sleeping with the boss."

He rubbed her back. "The night guard is going to be either Simon or Theodore. They'd both recognize Rae. Can you become Jan? Her face, that is?"

"Easy. Five minutes." She got up.

Russell touched her hip. "Wait. Can I watch?"

The changeling turned. "No one's ever seen me do it." Russell nodded. "Okay." It sat back down, facing him.

It winced and there was a slight grinding noise as the cheekbones became more prominent and moved in closer to the nose. The chin lost its dimple and elongated. Wrinkles and laugh lines grew, and the skin under the eyes sagged. The eyes snapped from pale blue to brown. The hair grew to shoulder length and turned white, and then spread out and wove itself into a French braid.

"How can you do that? The hair, it isn't living tissue."

"I don't know how I can do any of it." She stood and spread her arms. The skin of her beautiful body rippled and faded to dead white, and turned into a nylon jumpsuit. The skin on her hands grew age spots and wrinkles.

He rubbed the nylon on her arm between thumb and forefinger. "You can make synthetics."

"Metals, anything. Back in the sixties I spent a week as a motel television set. That was educational."

"Transmutation of elements?"

She smiled at his expression. "I know. I have a pretty recent doctorate in astrophysics. The wildest edge of physics can't explain it.

"I think the only constraint is mass. If I turn into a person or thing considerably heavier or lighter, I have to gain or lose flesh. You wouldn't want to watch me consume a leg of lamb. Or an unabridged dictionary."

"That's how you could lose an arm and keep going?"

"Yes. That hurt, because it was an outside agent, and a surprise. If I had to detach an arm to lose weight, it would take a couple of minutes, and look pretty strange, but it wouldn't hurt."

He leaned back and shook his head, staring. "Are there more than one of you?"

"If there is, I haven't found her. I can
become
more than one individual; given an hour, I could split this body into three children. But the personality, the intelligence, becomes distributed, and weakened. I made myself be a school of fish once. Each individual fish was pretty dumb."

"So you haven't reproduced that way. By fission, like an amoeba."

"In fact, I have some sort of instinct against it. When I'm split, I'm anxious to get back together.

"I've wondered sometimes how they do it at home—wherever or whenever I came from. Maybe they don't reproduce at all. Why would immortals have to?"

"You can't
know
you're immortal, can you?"

"Not until I survive the heat death of the universe, no. But I've been through a lot and always seem to recover." She stood and carried the candle to the bureau mirror, and inspected her transformation. "Shall we go?" she said in Jan's voice.

"In a minute. Some of us have to dress."

They were only ten minutes from the project site. They said hello to a few people out enjoying the night air or sitting on their porches, no doubt adding grist to the rumor mill—people did suspect a romantic attachment between the two senior researchers.

The guard was Theodore, a large cheerful Chinese-Samoan. "Nervous about tomorrow, Professors?"

"You know about tomorrow?" Russ said.

"Just that there's something; something big. Simon told me."

"They probably know in Pago Pago," the changeling said.

"He told me it was a secret."

"Still is, I hope." Russell gestured. "We're going into the artifact room."

"Okay." He reached down and clicked something. "It's clear."

They went in by the reception desk and walked down a silent corridor to a blast door covered with warnings. Russ unlocked it with his handprint, and the heavy door sighed open.