Joe Haldeman: Camouflage

“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.”