Camouflage

—46—

The changeling regretted the impulse that had made it say it hadn’t ridden a bike in years. It had been riding since before Russell was born, and simulating clumsiness on a single-speed Schwinn was an Oscar-level performance.

“How you doing up there?” She was leading them up Logan Road, not too hilly and no traffic, Sunday morning.

“I’m getting the hang of it.” She stood up to crest the hills, and felt the gentle pressure of eyetracks on her butt. Maybe it shouldn’t have worn the form-fitting jogging outfit, which got some disapproving stares from people on their way to church. But it certainly kept Russell’s attention.

“All downhill from here. Just keep bearing to your left.”

“Yeah, I’ve run this way. The project’s down after the second light, V-something Road.”

“Vaiala-vini. We’ll make you a Samoan yet.”

“As long as I don’t have to like breadfruit.”

“Fuata. We’ll start out with hot dogs and move our way down the food chain. After turkey tails and mutton flaps, you’ll be begging for fuata.”

“Oh, I’ve got a freezer full of turkey tails. Deep-fried, you can’t beat ’em.” They laughed together, but there was an edge to it. They both knew the Samoan diet had been transformed by Western intrusion, all for the worse. Turkey tails and Big Macs, mutton flaps and corned beef—there weren’t many natives over thirty who were lean and heart-healthy.

Russell waved at the guard as they went through the project gate. They dropped the bikes, no locks, in front of the main building, and raided his office fridge for hot dogs and beer, and put them in a foam cooler. He found charcoal in a utility locker and went out to start the fire while Sharon changed.

She studied her body in the ladies’ room mirror and made a few minor adjustments here and there. She knew she had Russell hooked. The question was whether to reel him in. It might be better to play a waiting game, and let Michelle get closer to delivery.

Or maybe force the issue. Get Russ in bed, and see what comes up.

It was a nice bright red thong bikini. The changeling pulled out a few pinches of excess pubic hair and ate them. It arranged the top so it just showed the wing tips of the hummingbird tattoo. It slightly deepened its lumbar dimples, a feature she remembered Russell noticing in her Rae incarnation.

It closed in for the kill, first wrapping a lavalava around its waist. It could wear the revealing suit as long as at least its toes were in the water, but Samoans weren’t happy about insensitive tourists flaunting their charms on the way there.

Russell was wearing the same blue-jean cutoffs he’d bicycled in, changing it into a swimsuit by taking off his shirt and shoes. The changeling smiled at his familiar body, a little pudgy in spite of athletic legs and arms, skin almost milk white—he never went out into the sun without total sunblock; both his parents had had skin cancer. His body hair was a silky down of black and white mixed, no gray, and his only tattoo, not visible now, was a small do not open till Christmas tag attached to a big scar he’d gotten from an emergency appendectomy by a village doctor in the Cook Islands. How many other women had giggled at that the first time he undressed in front of them?

He noticed her own tattoo immediately. “Bird?”

“Hummingbird.” She pulled the top of her bra down almost to the aureole. Her breasts were small, which he liked.

“Very nice.” He smiled and turned his attention back to the grill, splashing the charcoal with 100 percent isopropyl alcohol from a lab bottle. He snapped a sparker at it and it ignited with a blue puff.

“How much longer?” the changeling said. “I’m famished.”

“At least twenty minutes.” He gestured at the small cooler on the picnic table. “Beer? Or swim.”

“Swim first. I’m all sticky.” She turned her back toward him to step out of the lavalava, which under other circumstances might have been a modest posture. She snatched her face mask, fins, and mouthgill off the table and ran for the water. “Last one in has to cook the hot dogs.” He stood and watched her run, with a growing smile. Then he jogged after her. She was already sitting in the shallows, only her head showing, when he splashed in.

“Oh well. I was going to cook them anyway.”

She got the fins on, then spit into her mask and rubbed the saliva around. “Any reefs out here?”

“None close in. Some outside the shark net.”

“Want to live dangerously?”

“Sure. I always wanted to see a fourteen-foot hammerhead up close.”

I was only nine feet. “That’s what bit the boat?”

“Not to worry. They harpooned it and shot it in shallow water. It attacked out of pain and confusion, most likely.” He splashed water in his mask. “I’ve seen lots of sharks and never had a problem.”

“Me, too. Maybe we never met a really hungry one.”

“Maybe.” He pointed. “There’s some reef out that way. I’ll hold up the net and you can swim under.”

“Okay.” They bit down on their mouthgills, and swam the hundred yards out to the net. They wriggled under it without any problem and proceeded out to the reef, the changeling naturally taking Russell’s hand when it was offered. They swam in easy unison, moving fast with powerful surges from the fins.

The reef wasn’t too impressive, compared to the dramatic one past the giant clam farm at Palolo, but it did have lots of brightly colored fish and a small moray eel, watching their intrusion with its customary sour expression. Russell found an octopus the size of his hand, and they passed it back and forth until it tired of the game and shot away.

Russ pantomimed eating and Sharon nodded. They headed back to the net, with a short detour to chase after a medium-sized ray, hand in hand.

“That was nice,” the changeling said, taking off her fins in knee- deep water, quite aware that when the suit was wet it left nothing to the imagination. “Especially the octopus.”

“That was lucky. ‘The soft intelligence,’ someone called them.”

“Jacques Cousteau.” His eyebrows went up. “My oceanography prof had his old book.”

As they waded ashore, Russell waved at a boy of six or seven who was sitting at their table with a bucket.

The bucket was half full of ice, with a large bowl of oka, the Samoan version of ceviche, fish marinated in lime juice and served with coconut cream and hot peppers. “Caught this morning, Dr. Russell.”

He peered into the bowl. “Skipjack?”

He shrugged. “Ten tala.”

“I don’t have any money with me.”

“I’ve got some.” The boy was staring at her crotch, transfixed. She wrapped the lavalava around her waist and pulled a few bills out of a pocket, and handed him a ten.

“Fa’afetai,” he said, giving her the bowl and backing away shyly. “Thank.”

“Afio mai,” she said, and he turned and ran with the money.

They watched him go and Russell laughed quietly. “They’re funny. Casual about nudity but conservative about clothing.”

She nodded. “I’ll never understand religion. Or fashion, for that matter.” She set the bowl on the table and fished through the grocery bag for a couple of plastic forks. “Appetizer?”

“Thanks. Let me put on the dogs first.” He smoothed the white pile of coals with a stick and got four hot dogs from the cooler.

The fish was cold and firm and spicy. “I could get used to this,” the changeling said. “How long have you lived here?”

“Got here last summer, when I came out with Jack Halliburton to set up the lab.” He arranged the hot dogs in a precise row. “I commuted for a couple of months, finishing up old business in Baja. Pretty much stuck here since the lab was finished and the artifact was in place.”

“You don’t like it?”

“As a place it’s okay. Vacation spot. Hard to do science here, though.” He sat down next to her and speared a piece of oka. “Even with modern communications, virtual conference room and all, it’s really isolated. You can break a fifty-cent part and be shut down for two days, waiting for the plane. And you miss … it sounds snobbish, it is snobbish, but I miss the company of like-minded people, people you don’t work with—scientists, artists, whatever.”

“I would have taken you for a loner.”

“Well, I am, or was. The place in Baja was miles from nowhere, and that’s one reason I leased it. But I could be in L.A. in an hour, and had an apartment just off the UCLA campus.”

“Where you seduced college girls. I know your type.”

He laughed and blushed. “Back when I had hair.” He got up to check the dogs. “I do miss the college-town atmosphere. Bookstores, coffeeshops, bars. The libraries on campus. The girls on campus.”

“It’s a nice campus. I stayed there for two weeks, diving in summer school.”

“Where?”

“A dorm.” The changeling knew where Jimmy Coleridge’s students stayed now. Where would it have been eleven years ago? “Maybe Con-way? Conroy.”

“Oh yeah. That’s close to where I stay.” He used tongs to rotate the hot dogs 180 degrees, then went to the cooler. “Beer? Or a glass of wine.”

“You have wine in there?”

“No, back in the fridge. Only take a minute.”

“That would be good. I’m not much of a beer drinker. Maybe when the dogs are done.”

“Keep an eye on ’em.” He jogged away.

The changeling considered its position. This was a cusp. If it began a love affair with Russ—or restarted one—it would probably kill its chances for the job. But the job was only a stepping stone to get close to the artifact. Maybe Russ’s lover would have a better shot at that than the receptionist.

Why did it feel this drive to be in the physical presence of the thing? It had seen all the pictures, studied the data, read people’s frustrated inconclusions.

It remembered the feeling when it swam from Bataan to California. The inchoate feeling, the hesitation, when it passed over the Tonga Trench.

It felt that now, more strongly than ever. Something was taking form.

Russell came back with two long-stemmed glasses of white wine, already misted with humidity. “Drink it while it’s cold,” he said, handing one to her, and drank off a third of his in a gulp. “Ready in a minute.” He gave the hot dogs a quarter turn.

“So why didn’t you just move the thing to Baja? Why start from scratch here?”

“I wish.” He stared at the grill. “Partly the difficulty of moving the damned thing. Mostly political, though. Mexico’s too close to the United States, not just in miles, but politically and economically. Jack didn’t want Uncle Sam breathing down our neck. Mexican soldiers knocking on our door. Down our door.”

“They could do that?”

“Sure they could. Threat to hemisphere security.” He split two buns and set them on the grill. “Independent Samoa really is independent. And stable. Tonga was closer to the artifact’s original position, but we didn’t want to deal with the politics there.

“Jack studied surveys of the Samoan Islands, and wound up here by a process of elimination.”

“The first factor being ‘Is there a town?’ ”

He nodded. “They call it the only city in Samoa, but as you know, it’s not exactly Hong Kong. It’s really just a bunch of towns crowded together, but it does have a pharmacy, hardware store, and so forth.” He gestured toward the main building. “And this patch of land: it was undeveloped, privately owned, and on the water. Jack got in touch with the matai of the family that owned it and arranged to lease it. He even became a Samoan citizen.”

“Did he join the family, the aiga?”

“No, although he didn’t rule out the possibility. Technically, he’d have to share all his wealth with the family.” He raised an eyebrow. “That’s not in his nature.”

“You’ve known him a long time?”

“No. Not until … he got in touch with me about the submarine disaster that led to our finding the artifact.” The changeling knew, as Rae, that there was something secret going on there. Maybe it could tease the truth out of him in this incarnation.

“We never would have met, in the normal course of things. He was born into money, but chose a military career. I’m pretty far from either of those.” He inspected the hot dogs. “These two are done.” She held out paper plates and he installed buns and dogs on them, then repositioned the remaining two according to some arcane thermodynamic principle, and split two more buns to toast.

They silently went about the business of mustard and ketchup and relish, all out of small squeeze packets that Russell had liberated from various airports.

The changeling took a bite. “Good.” Bland, actually.

Russell shrugged. “Sometimes I’d kill for some plain American sidewalk vendor food. Bacteria and all.”

“You made money, though. As opposed to being born with it. You didn’t raise the Titanic with spare change.”

He shook his head, chewing. “Always use other people’s money. Sometimes I feel more like a pitchman than an engineer.” He paused to squirt another envelope of mustard into the bun. “Jack thinks, or claims to think, that there’s a huge fortune in this. Maybe someday, but probably not for him. He’s got a zillion eurobucks to earn back—and he’s old.”

“How about you?”

“I’m not so old.”

“I mean money. Do you expect to make a fortune yourself?”

“No; hell, no. I’m in it for the game.”

“That’s what I thought. Hoped.”

“Biggest thing in the twenty-first century. Maybe the biggest thing, all the way back.” He stared at the containment building. “Even if it’s not from another world. That would mean that our view of reality, our science, is wrong. Not just incomplete, but wrong.”

“Isn’t that true, no matter where it comes from?”

“In a way, no. Last century, a guy pointed out that a sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic…”

Arthur C. Clarke, the changeling didn’t say. It had met him at an Apollo launch in the 1970s.

“And that gives us an out. Our science could still be a subset of theirs. Like going back to Newton and showing him a hologram.”

He was so absorbed in his explanation he wasn’t aware of the man walking quietly up behind him. His shadow fell over him and he jumped, startled. “Jack!”

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to sneak up on you.”

“This is Sharon Valida. Jack Halliburton.”

The changeling extended its hand. “We’ve met, briefly. I work at the Pacific Commercial Bank.”

“And have a good memory for faces.”

Especially yours, the changeling thought.

“Hot dog?” Russell said.

“No, I’m headed for the hotel. I saw you here and wondered whether we might get together a little earlier tomorrow morning, before the … thing.”

“Like what, eight o’clock?”

“Eight would be fine. I’ll leave a message for Jan.” He nodded at the changeling. “Miss Valida. See you then, Russell.”

When he was out of earshot, the changeling said, “He always dresses like that?” White linen suit, Panama hat, Samoan shirt.

“Yeah, when he’s not working in the lab. Maybe a century out of date.”

“A few other rich old guys who come into the bank dress that way. My boss calls them his Somerset Maugham characters. Was he some actor?”

“Writer, I think.” He ate the last bite and stood up. “Ready for another?”

“Let it get a little burnt. Try a beer, though.”

“Excellent idea.” He took two Heinekens out and popped them.

She drank off her wine and accepted one. “Here’s to drunken debauchery on Sunday.” They clinked bottles together. “So … showing Newton a hologram.”

“Well, it’s occurred to me that this thing might not be from another planet. It might be from our own future.”

“Really? I thought you could only go the other way.”

“You know about that?”

“I saw a thing on the cube. Particle accelerator.”

“Yeah, they’ve been able to move a particle a fraction of a second into the future. Which is kosher; general relativity has always allowed that.”

“But not into the past?”

“That’s right—and it’s not just relativity; it’s causality, common sense. Cause and effect out the window.”

“But you think—”

“I know it’s like ‘one impossible thing happens, therefore anything impossible can happen.’ But it makes a screwy kind of sense. They sent this indestructible thing back a million years into the past, and put it where no one could find it. Then they went to dig it up…”

“And it wasn’t there!” She nodded rapidly. “So they sent this kind of robot back here to find out what happened.”

“Not a robot,” he said. “Definitely not a robot.”

“You knew her?”

He hesitated. “Pretty well. Or I thought I did. She was pretty human for a robot. Or transhuman, as I say, from the future.”

“Evolved from humans?”

“Bingo. It wouldn’t take millions of years, either. It’s only law and custom, not science, that keeps us from directing our own evolution now.”

The changeling considered this. It seemed to have memories going so far back that it always considered itself a visitor from the distant past. It could have been from the future, though, and lost the memory of that travel.

It knew that a way around the causality paradox might be that the time traveler not be allowed to take any information back in time. It had never thought of applying that to its own amnesia of the time before the centuries it had spent as a great white shark. It could have been sent back as a blank-slate creature that needed no memory to survive, and evolve.

“Have you talked this over with Jack?”

“Jack? No. He’s all for aliens from another planet. Especially since the thing with Rae, our ‘space alien.’ ”

“Which you don’t buy.”

“Well … I guess you can make a better scientific, or at least logical, case for extraterrestrial origin. But if so, why didn’t she just come forward and say ‘Take me to your leader’?”

“Maybe she was afraid.”

“She wasn’t afraid of me.”

“Maybe Jack.” The changeling smiled. “I take it she wouldn’t be the only one.”

“He’s a little scary sometimes.” He got up and turned the hot dogs. “Let’s burn the other side.”

She didn’t say anything while he repositioned the meat and buns. When he looked up she was staring out to sea, an odd thoughtful expression on her face.

“Sharon?”

It was a song. A song.

The changeling never stopped manipulating the ones and zeros. Pretending to be human only used a small part of its intelligence, so while it was carrying on bank business or being social, even concentrating on Russ, most of its being was swimming through the binary sea of the message.

The message itself wasn’t clear, but suddenly the changeling knew what it was.

A song in its native tongue. A language forgotten for a million years.

“Sharon? Are you all right?”

“Oh! Sorry.” She rubbed her face with both hands. “Sometimes I do that.”

He sat on the bench, not too close, and touched her hand. “Is it your parents?” She nodded her head in two short jerks. “I lost mine together, too, at least in the same week. I was quite a bit older than you, but it still hit me hard. Being alone.”

Her eyes brimmed and she wiped them. “You’re right. Alone.” He’s a wonderful man, it thought, but he doesn’t know what loneliness is.

He wanted to take her into his arms, but restrained himself. “Let me take you home.”

“No. It’s passed.” She flashed him a bright smile. “Let’s have another hot dog.” She peered into the empty beer bottle. “Maybe the beer makes me sentimental. I should have another.”

“Your wish is my command.” He opened two and passed her one. “Sentimental together.”

A song. A song about home. “Are they burnt enough?”

He touched one lightly. “Done to a turn.”

While they ate and chatted about deliberately inconsequential things, it made plans for the rest of the day and night. Especially night. Russell was in for a little surprise.

Tomorrow, they were almost certainly going to announce that the artifact had answered them, and perhaps release the binary sequence, so that a few million other people could try to figure it out.

People wouldn’t. It would be like someone who didn’t know what Braille was running a finger along a line of it, in a foreign language. A coded message, not coded for secrecy, but nevertheless unbreakable.

But by Tuesday, there would be outsiders all over the place. Reporters lucky enough to be in American Samoa would be on the spot by noon Monday. The Tuesday morning plane would be crowded with them, from America; Thursday, from Asia and Europe. Security would be tighter around the clock.

So it had until tomorrow morning.

“I don’t want to rush things,” Russell said, “but are you doing anything tonight? If I don’t have an excuse, Jack’s going to collar me at Aggie’s.”

She closed her eyes. Careful. “I wish I could. But I’m going out with a man from work.” She patted Russell’s knee. “Have to tell him I’m not interested. Free Monday and Tuesday, though.”

“We already have lunch Monday,” he reminded her.

“Dinner Tuesday, then.”

“I’ll make Sails reservations at eight, right away. There’ll be a lot of hungry reporters in town.”

The changeling nodded. “And I’ll know the big secret by then.”

“By ten tomorrow, if you listen to the news. Or you can wait and let me surprise you at lunch.”

“Maybe I’ll wait. I don’t suppose you’ll let me try to guess.”

“Nope.”

“You’ve discovered the president’s an alien.”

“Damn, you got it. Now we’ll have to kill you.”

“Oh, well. At least I found out early.”

They pedaled around Apia after lunch, stopping at the Maketi Fou, the normally crowded central market, for iced coconuts. On Sunday it was pretty lazy, the vendors chatting in clusters in shady spots, reluctantly coming over to take their money. He bought her a mother-of-pearl necklace she admired. She bought him a garish silk crimson lavalava and dared him to wear it to dinner.

The changeling wondered whether there would be a dinner date. Their relationship was about to enter uncharted territory.

Maybe he would have to kill her, in a sense. In the sense that she was Rae, was Sharon.

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.

In the anteroom there were two complex data consoles. He sat down at the larger one and typed a few lines. “Okay … I’ve turned off the cameras for maintenance. That’ll be fun to explain.”

“I’ll look at it on the way out,” the changeling said. “I think I can cover it.”

“Computers, too?”

“MIT. I’ve had a long time to study things.” It opened a locker. “Should we suit up?”

“Don’t have to. Nothing nano going on.” He put his hand on another door. “Open for me,” he said quietly, evenly, and it slid away into the jamb in absolute silence. It was an airlock chamber. An identical door, without the ID plate, was on the other side.

They stepped inside and he said, “Close.”

The door behind closed, but the one in front didn’t open. “There are two people in the airlock,” the room said. “I need a speech pattern from the one who is not Russell Sutton.”

“I’m Jan,” the changeling said. “Open for me.” The door slid open and they stepped into the long corridor that connected the artifact room to the main building. Fluorescent lights winked on as the door slid silently shut. The windowless metal walls were full of clutter; people had put up cartoons and drawings with refrigerator magnets, and a galaxy of magnetized words coalesced into clusters of poetry, not all of it obscene.

One block of wall several meters long contained 31,433 ones and zeros, patiently inked in black Magic Marker.

A final blast door, thick as a bank vault, that opened on to the artifact room, was halfway open. As they passed through it, a bank of floodlights over the artifact came on with a crackling sound. In bright relief, they saw the artifact on its pylons, the big laser, the two useless horizontal microscope machines, the array of communication devices— and a man standing with folded arms. The chameleon. “Jack?” Russ said.