Camouflage Part 25

"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. 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 what it was. it was.

A song in its native tongue.A language forgotten for a million years. 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 pa.s.sed." 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 pa.s.sed 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."

"d.a.m.n, 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 cl.u.s.ters 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 would have to kill her, in a sense. In the sense that she was Rae, was Sharon. 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 cl.u.s.ters 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 a.n.a.logy 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 t.i.tle 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 cl.u.s.ter, or word, 01100101001011-three times in the first verse and four in the second. There were no other long repet.i.tions. 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, a.n.a.lytically, 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 gla.s.s 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, unb.u.t.toning 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 o.r.g.a.s.m, and he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed 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 a.s.sistant 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 t.i.tanic t.i.tanic thing, of course; I was a marine biologist." 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s.

He took it without drinking. "Also to get a few million more people working on the sequence. Bigger computers." He sipped and handed the gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s on the end table by the candle. "There's n.o.body 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.