Camouflage, Page 3

  “Public record,” Russ said. “Good-bye, Sergeant Carson.” He turned and walked away.

  “But there’s no record of a ship ever going down there. Mr. Sutton? And now you have that shrouded float waiting out there … and the helicopters and tanks…”

  “Good day, Sergeant,” he said to the air, smiling. This is the way they’d wanted the publicity to start. Something mysterious? Who, us?

  By the time they unveiled the artifact, the whole world would be watching.

  —6—

  San Quillermo, California, 1932

  The changeling began to construct sentences on its own just after New Year’s, but nothing complex, and often it was nonsense or weirdly encoded. It still “wasn’t quite right,” as Jimmy’s mother nervously said.

  The changeling didn’t have to acquire intelligence, which it had in abundance, but it had to understand intelligence in a human way. That was a long stretch from any of the aquatic creatures it had successfully mimicked.

  It came from a race with a high degree of social organization, but had forgotten all of that millennia ago. On Earth, it had lived as a colony of individual creatures in the dark hot depths; it had lived as a simple mat of protoplasm before that. It had lived in schools of fish, briefly, but most of its recent experience, tens of thousands of years, had been as a lone predator.

  It had seen that predation was modified in these creatures; they were at the top of the food chain, but animal food had long since been killed by the time they consumed it. It naturally tried to understand the way society was organized in those terms: food was killed in some hidden or distant location, and prepared and distributed by means of mysterious processes.

  The family unit was organized around food presentation and consumption, though it had other functions. The changeling recognized protection and training of the young from its aquatic associations, but was ignorant about sex and mating—when another large predator approached, it had always interpreted that as aggression, and attacked. Its kind hadn’t reproduced in millions of years; that anachronism had gone the way of death. It didn’t know the facts of life.

  At least one woman was more than willing to provide lessons.

  When it knew it would be alone for a period, the changeling practiced changing its appearance, using the people it observed as models. Changing its facial features was not too difficult; cartilage and subcutaneous fat could be moved around in a few minutes, a relatively painless process. Changing the underlying skull was a painful business that took eight or ten minutes.

  Changing the whole body shape took an hour of painful concentration, and was complicated if the body had significantly more or less mass than Jimmy. For less mass, it could remove an arm or a leg, and redistribute mass accordingly. The extra part would die unless there was a reason to keep it alive, but that was immaterial; it still provided the right raw materials to reconstruct Jimmy.

  Making a larger body required taking on flesh; not easy to do. The changeling assimilated Ronnie, the family’s old German shepherd, in order to take the form of Jimmy’s overweight father. Of course Ronnie was dead when he was reconstituted; the changeling left the body outside Jimmy’s door, and the family just assumed it had gone there to say good-bye, how sweet.

  The changeling had seen Mr. Berry in a bathing suit, so about 90 percent of its simulation was accurate. The other 10 percent might have made Mrs. Berry faint.

  Similarly, the changeling could, in the dark privacy of Jimmy’s bedroom, discard an arm and most of a leg and make itself a piece of flesh that had a shape similar to that of the nurse Deborah, at least the form she apparently had under her uniform, severely corseted. But it had no more detail than a department store dummy. The times being what they were, it could have had free rein of the house and not found any representation of a nude female.

  It was still months away from being able to simulate anything like social graces, but to satisfy this particular desire, no grace was needed. Precisely at 7:30, Deborah brought in the breakfast tray.

  “Please take off your clothes,” it said, “and put them on the dresser.”

  Deborah may or may not have recognized the doctor’s voice. She managed not to drop the tray. “Jimmy! Don’t be silly!”

  “Please,” Jimmy said, smiling, as she positioned the lap tray. “I would like that very much.”

  “So would I,” she whispered, and glanced back to see that the door was almost shut. “How about tonight? After dark?”

  “I can see in the dark,” it said in her whisper, husky. She slid her hand into his pajamas, and when she touched the penis an unused circuit closed, and it enlarged and rose with literally inhuman speed.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “Midnight?”

  “Midnight,” it repeated. “Oh my God.”

  Her smile was a cross between openmouthed astonishment and a leer. “You’re strange, Jimmy.” She backed out of the room, mouthing “midnight,” and closed the door quietly.

  The changeling noted this new erect state and experimented with it, and the unexpected result suddenly clarified a whole class of mammalian behavior it had witnessed with porpoise, dolphin, and killer whale.

  The music teacher came for his twice-weekly visit, and was stupefied by the sudden change in Jimmy’s ability. The boy had been a mystery from the start: before the accident, he had taken piano lessons from age ten to thirteen, the teacher was told, but had quit out of frustration, boredom, and puberty. Or so the parents thought. He must have been practicing secretly.

  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 l
ooking 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.