Camouflage (4 page)

This current teacher, Jefferson Sheffield, had been hired on Dr. Grossbaum's recommendation. His specialty was music for therapy, and under his patient tutelage many mentally ill and retarded people had found a measure of peace and grace.

Jimmy's performance on the piano had been like his idiot-savant talent with language: he could repeat anything Sheffield did, note for note. Left to his own devices, he would either not play or reproduce one of Sheffield's lessons with perfect fidelity.

This morning it improvised. It sat down and started playing with what appeared to be feeling, making up things that used the lessons as raw material, but transposed and inverted them, and linked them with interesting cadenzas and inventive chord changes.

He played for exactly one hour and stopped, for the first time looking up from the keyboard. Sheffield and most of the family and staff were sitting or standing around, amazed.

"I had to understand something," it said to no one in particular. But then it gave Deborah a look that made her tremble.

Dr. Grossbaum joined Sheffield and the family for lunch. The changeling realized it had done something seriously wrong, and retreated into itself.

"You've done something wonderful, son," Sheffield said. It looked at him and nodded, usually a safe course of action. "What caused the breakthrough?" It nodded again, and shrugged, in response to the interrogative tone.

"You said that you had to understand something," he said.

"Yes," it said, and into the silence: "I had to understand something." It shook its head, as if to clear it. "I had to
learn
something."

"That's progress," Grossbaum said. "Verb substitution."

"I had to find something," it said. "I had to be something. I had to be some ... one."

"Playing music let you be someone different?" Grossbaum said.

"Someone different," it repeated, studying the air over Grossbaum's head. "Make ... made. Made me someone different."

"Music made you someone different," Sheffield said with excitement.

It considered this. It understood the semantic structure of the statement, and knew that it was wrong. It knew that what made it different was new knowledge about that unnamed part of its body, how it would stiffen and leak something new. But it knew that humans acted mysteriously about that part, and so decided not to demonstrate its new knowledge, even though the part was stiff again.

It saw that Grossbaum was looking at that part, and reduced blood flow, to make it less prominent. But he had noticed; his eyebrow went up a fraction of an inch. "It's not all music," he said, "is it?"

"It's all music," the changeling said.

"I don't understand."

"You don't understand," the changeling looked at its hands. "It's all music."

"Life
is all music," Sheffield said. The changeling looked at him and nodded. Then it rose and crossed the room to the piano, and started playing, which seemed safer than talking.

It was awake at midnight, when the door eased open. Deborah closed it silently behind her and padded on bare feet to the bed. She was wearing oversized men's pajamas.

"You have clothes," it said.

"I just got up to get a glass of milk," she said, confusing it. The fluid it produced that way was not milk, and to fill a glass would take all night.

She read its expression almost correctly and smiled. "In case I get caught, silly."

A little moonlight filtered through the curtains. The changeling adjusted its irises and made it bright as day, watching her slowly unbutton the pajama top.

It noted the actual size and disposition of breasts, not the way they appeared when she was clothed. The pigmentation and placement of nipples and aureoles. (It had wondered about its own nipples, which seemed to have no function.)

She slipped into bed next to it, and it attempted to pull down the pajama bottoms.

"Naughty, naughty." She kissed it on the mouth and moved one of its hands to a breast.

The kiss was odd, but it was something it had seen, and returned with a little force.

"Oh my," she whispered. "You're hot." She reached down and stroked the part that had no name. "Aren't you the cat's pajamas."

That was pretty confusing. "No, I'm not."

"Just a saying." It moved both hands over her body, studying, measuring. Most of it was similar to the male body it inhabited, but the differences were interesting.

"Oh," she said. "More." It was studying the place that was most different. Deborah began to excrete fluid there. It went deeper. She moaned and rubbed its hand with the wet tissues there.

She closed her hand over the unnamed part, and stroked it softly. It wondered whether it was an appropriate time to leak fluid itself, and began to.

"Oh no," she said; "oh my." She shucked off her pajama bottoms and slid up his body to clasp him there, with her own wet parts, and move up and down.

It was an extraordinary sensation, similar to what he had done alone earlier, but much more intense. It allowed the body's reflexes to take over, and they pounded together perhaps a dozen times, and then its body totally concentrated on that part, galvanized, and explosively excreted—three, four, five times, the pressure decreasing.

It breathed hard into the space between her breasts. She slid down to join her mouth with its. She inserted her tongue, which was probably not an offering of food. It reciprocated.

She rolled over onto her back, breathing hard. "Glad you remember something."

-7-

Apia, Samoa, 2019

They had a lot of company when two tugs began to tow the artifact toward the beach. Three military helicopters jockeyed for space with six from news organizations.

It was a perplexing sight. The artifact wasn't visible even from directly overhead, though the shroud over it had been removed. The titanium-mesh net that carried its mass kept it suspended a meter above the ocean floor, and the water was perfectly transparent.

A newsie photographer with diving gear jumped from a helicopter skid and went down beside it, and saw a sand-colored drape over a long cigar-shaped object. The drape fluttered once and revealed a shiny mirror surface. The mesh of the net was too fine for the newsie to reach through and expose it, but it was moving slowly enough for her to swim alongside and offer pictures and a running commentary, amusing for its lack of content, as the artifact hit the sandy floor and crunched through dead coral on its way to shore. It made a groove a meter deep in the sand, and the cables pulling it yanked tight and thrummed with the force of moving it.

When the tugs came gently aground, Greg and Naomi dragged a heavy cable through the light surf and dove with it, giving the newsie something to photograph. They cut through the mesh with a torch and pulled back the drape while the other two engineers worked their way down the cable with a large metal collar.

The collar, a meter round, supported four thick bolts. They slipped it over the shiny metal thing, and drove the bolts down with an air hammer, deafening in the water. When they were done, they took out earplugs and waved at the dazed newsie, and swam back along the cable.

A deeply anchored winch on the far side of the concrete slab growled into life, and the cable started to crawl out of the sea. When the cable sang taut, the growl increased in pitch and volume. People around the large machine could smell ozone and hot metal as it strained. But it won; the cable inched its way up the pad.

The artifact wormed slowly up through the surf. You wouldn't have to know anything about physics or engineering to see that there was something fundamentally strange going on—the thing's unearthly heaviness as it sledged through the damp sand; its mirror brightness.

The barrier of bright yellow DO NOT CROSS ribbon may have saved some lives. The cable started to fray where it was attached to the collar, then suddenly snapped, and a hundred meters of thick heavy cable whipped back with terrible speed. The broken end of it smashed through the window that protected the winch operator, Larry Pembroke, and sheared off his arm at the shoulder.

One of the Marine helicopters was down in less than a minute, and while the corpsman gave first aid they put the severed limb in a cooler full of beer and Cokes. They were in the air in another minute, streaking toward Pago Pago, where a surgical team was assembling. He'd be all right in a few months, though it would cost Poseidon, as the saying goes, an arm and a leg.

By the time the excitement had settled down, Russ and Jack had considered and discarded three plans for getting the heavy thing up on its slab. It lay there in the surf like a half-beached whale, weighing more than ten whales.

Since it seemed indestructible, Jack was in favor of using explosives—a large enough shaped charge would pitch it forward. Russ was totally against the idea, since there was no way of telling how delicate the artifact was inside. Nonsense, Jack said; the thing had gone through earthquakes under crushing pressure. If there was anything fragile inside, it was long since garbaged.

They asked Naomi, who had been a demolition engineer, and she said that intuitively it seemed impractical, and then did some numbers. No way. A free-standing shaped charge doesn't direct all its force in one direction. The side blast would make a crater so big it would swallow the concrete slab—and the explosion would probably shatter every window on this side of the island.

But she suggested a kind of explosive that is truly linear: a rocket engine. If they could strap a booster from a small spaceship onto it and—if it were a kind they could shut off!—they could drag it up onto the slab by brute force.

And think of the visuals.

They got the other engineers together and hashed out the details. They'd need a kind of chute, to keep it going in a straight line, and the booster would have to be a kind that could be carefully controlled. The thing was pointed straight at Aggie Grey's Hotel, and it would be bad publicity to demolish a century-old landmark full of tourists, where Jack had finally taught the bartender how to make a decent martini.

But the scheme would be great publicity if it worked. They called the American, French, and British space agencies, but China underbid everyone by half: a mere thirty million eurobucks. Jack called some people and found he could underwrite a quarter of it by granting an exclusive news franchise. By lunchtime the next day they were joined by a Chinese lawyer with a short contract and a big notebook of specifications.

They could have their rocket in eight days. Jack grumbled about that—they'd be old news by then—but it's not exactly like buying a car off the lot. And the artifact wasn't going anywhere.

-8-

 San Quillermo, California, 1932

"Jimmy" had made a little too much noise during its sexual initiation, and although Mr. Berry was secretly relieved that his boy was doing
something
normal, he obeyed his wife's wishes and fired Deborah, slipping her a hundred-dollar bill as she left. That was a year's rent for her: more than adequate compensation.

The changeling was becoming human enough to be slightly annoyed to find her replaced by another male, but it had learned enough from the one encounter that its simulation of a woman would fool anyone but a thorough gynecologist.

Dr. Grossman wondered whether Jimmy's astounding musical performance extended into related areas of motor control, and so for the next meeting he brought along a friend who was an artist—and also a beautiful woman. He wanted to observe the boy's reaction to that, as well as his skill with a pencil.

Jimmy did show some special interest when they were introduced. She was a stunning blonde who matched his own six feet.

"Jimmy, this is Irma Leutij. Everyone calls her Dutch."

"Dutch," it repeated.

"Hello, Jimmy," she said in the husky voice she automatically used with attractive men. She calculated that Jimmy was about five years her junior, wrong by a thousand millennia.

"We want to do an experiment with drawing," Grossbaum said. "Dutch is an artist."

The changeling knew the sense of the word "experiment," and was cautious. "Artist ... experiment?"

"Do you like to draw?" Dutch said.

It shrugged in a neutral way.

Grossbaum snapped open his briefcase and took out two identical drawing tablets and plain pencils. He gestured toward the breakfast-room table. "Let's sit over there." Jimmy followed them and sat down next to Dutch. The psychiatrist put open tablets and pencils in front of them and sat down opposite.

"What shall I draw?" Dutch said. "Something simple?"

"Simple but precise.Maybe a cube in perspective."

She nodded and did it, nine careful lines in four seconds.

"Jimmy?" He pushed the pencil toward the boy.

The changeling was cautious, remembering people's reaction to the piano playing. It could have duplicated the woman's actions exactly, but instead slowed down to a crawl.

Grossbaum noted the speed. He also noted that Jimmy's cube was a precise copy, even to its position on the page and accidental overlap of two lines, less than a millimeter. An expert artist could have done it if you asked for an exact copy. The slow compulsive precision would be appropriate for an idiot savant.

But as far as he could find, reading and talking to people, you had to he born with that condition—no normal person had ever become an idiot savant from a blow on the head or a stroke.

"Let me draw him," Dutch said, "and see whether he draws me."

"It's an idea," he said doubtfully. The boy would probably just copy his own portrait, precisely.

Dutch turned the page back and picked up her pencil and stared at Jimmy.

It returned her stare, unblinking. She smiled and it smiled. When she began to draw, though, it didn't do anything but watch.

She finished the simple portrait in a couple of minutes, and turned the tablet around to show it to Jimmy.

The changeling studied the picture. The left ear was a half-inch low, and so was the chin. Having seen her use the eraser, it applied it and corrected her work, completely redrawing the whole ear and chin. It added a small mole she had missed.