Camouflage Read online

  Camouflage

  Joe Haldeman

  A million years prior to the dawn of Homo sapiens, two immortal, shapeshifting aliens roam the Earth with little memory of their origin or their purpose. Later in the year 2019, an artifact is discovered off the coast of Samoa, buried deep beneath the ocean floor. The mysterious find brings two alien beings—the “changeling” and the “chameleon”—together again, to ponder the meaning of the object and its relationship to each other. Both immortals try to seek each other out and use the artifact to find their origins, one harbouring good intentions while the other is extremely hostile.

  Won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 2005.

  Camouflage

  by Joe Haldeman

  For Ralph Vicinanza, faithful navigator

  The author gratefully acknowledges the help of Chris Nelson, our guide through the alien world of Samoa, and Cordelia Willis, for her knowledge of forensic technology and DNA matters.

  Prologue

  The monster came from a swarm of stars that humans call Messier 22, a globular cluster ten thousand light-years distant. A million stars with ten million planets—all but one of them devoid of significant life.

  It’s not a part of space where life could flourish. All of those planets are in unstable orbits, the stars swinging so close to one another that they steal planets, or pass them around, or eat them.

  This makes for ferocious geological and climatic changes; most of the planets are sterile billiard balls or massive Jovian gasbags. But on the one world where life has managed a toehold, that life is tough.

  And adaptable. What kind of organisms can live on a world as hot as Mercury, which then is suddenly as distant from its sun as Pluto within the course of a few years?

  Most of that life survives by simplicity—lying dormant until the proper conditions return. The dominant form of life, though, thrives on change. It’s a creature that can force its own evolution— not by natural selection, but by unnatural mutation, changing itself as conditions vary. It becomes whatever it needs to be—and after millions of swifter and swifter changes, it becomes something that can never die.

  The price of eternal life had been a life with no meaning beyond simple existence. With its planet swinging wildly through the cluster, the creatures’ days were spent crawling through deserts gnawing on rocks, scrabbling across ice, or diving into muck—in search of any food that couldn’t get away.

  The world spun this way and that, until random forces finally tossed it to the edge of the cluster, away from the constant glare of a million suns—into a stable orbit: a world that was only half day and half night; a world where clement seas welcomed diversity. Dozens of species became millions, and animals crawled up from the warm sea onto land grown green, buzzing with life.

  The immortal creatures relaxed, life suddenly easy. They looked up at night, and saw stars.

  They developed curiosity, then philosophy, and then science. During the day, they would squint into a sky with a thousand sparks of sun. In the night’s dark, across an ocean of space, the cool billowing oval of our Milky Way Galaxy beckoned.

  Some of them built vessels, and hurled themselves into the night. It would be a voyage of a million years, but they’d lived longer than that, and had patience.

  A million years before man is born and its story begins, one such vessel splashes into the Pacific Ocean. It goes deep, following an instinct to hide. The creature that it carried to Earth emerges, assesses the situation, and becomes something appropriate for survival.

  For a long time it lives on the dark bottom, under miles of water, large and invincible, studying its situation. Eventually, it abandons its anaerobic hugeness and takes the form of a great white shark, the top of the food chain, and goes exploring, while most of its essence stays safe inside the vessel.

  For a long time, it remembers where the vessel is, and remembers where it came from, and why. As centuries go by, though, it remembers less. After dozens of millennia, it simply lives, and observes, and changes.

  It encounters humanity and notes their acquired superiority— their placement, however temporary, at the top of every food chain. It becomes a killer whale, and then a porpoise, and then a swimmer, and wades ashore naked and ignorant.

  But eager to learn.

  —1—

  Baja California, 2019

  Russell Sutton had done his stint with the U.S. government around the turn of the century, a frustrating middle-management job in two Mars exploration programs. When the second one crashed, he had said good-bye to Uncle Sam and space in general, returning to his first love, marine biology.

  He was still a manager and still an engineer, heading up the small firm Poseidon Projects. He had twelve employees, half of them Ph.D.s. They only worked on two or three projects at a time, esoteric engineering problems in marine resource management and exploration. They had a reputation for being wizards, and for keeping both promises and secrets. They could turn down most contracts—anything not sufficiently interesting; anything from the government.

  So Russ was not excited when the door to his office eased open and the man who rapped his knuckles on the jamb was wearing an admiral’s uniform. His first thought was that they really could afford a receptionist; his second was how to frame a refusal so that the guy would just leave, and not take up any more of his morning.

  “Dr. Sutton, I’m Jack Halliburton.”

  That was interesting. “I read your book in graduate school. Didn’t know you were in the military.” The man’s face was vaguely familiar from his memory of the picture on the back of Bathyspheric Measurements and Computation; no beard now, and a little less hair. He still looked like Don Quixote on a diet.

  “Have a seat.” Russ waved at the only chair not supporting stacks of paper and books. “But let me tell you right off that we don’t do government work.”

  “I know that.” He eased himself into the chair and set his hat on the floor. “That’s one reason I’m here.” He unzipped a blue portfolio and took out a sealed plastic folder. He turned it sideways and pressed his thumb to the corner; it read his print and popped open. He tossed it onto Russell’s desk.

  The first page had no title but top secret—for your eyes only, in red block letters.

  “I can’t open this. And as I said—”

  “It’s not really classified, not yet. No one in the government, outside of my small research group, even knows it exists.”

  “But you’re here as a representative of the government, no? I assume you do own some clothes without stars on the shoulders.”

  “Protective coloration. I’ll explain. Just look at it.”

  Russ hesitated, then opened the folder. The first page was a picture of a vague cigar shape looming out of a rectangle of gray smears.

  “That’s the discovery picture. We were doing a positron radar map of the Tonga-Kermadec Trench—”

  “Why on earth?”

  “That part is classified. And irrelevant.”

  Russ had the Tooling that his life was on a cusp, and he didn’t like it. Ho spun around slowly in his chair, taking in the comfortable clutter, the pictures and the charts on the wall. The picture window looking down on the Sea of Cortez, currently calm.

  With his back to Halliburton, he said, “I don’t suppose this is something we could do from here.”

  “No. We’ve chosen a place in Samoa.”

  “Now, that’s attractive. Heat and humidity and lousy food.”

  “I tend to think pretty girls and no winter.” He pushed his glasses back on his nose. “Food’s not bad if you don’t mind American.”

  Russ turned back around and studied the picture. “You have to tell me something about why you were there. Did the Navy lose something?”

  “Yes
.”

  “Did it have people in it?”

  “I can’t answer that.”

  “You just did.” He turned to the second page. It was a sharper view of the object. “This isn’t from positrons.”

  “Well, it is. But it’s a composite from various angles, noise removed.”

  Good job, he thought. “How far down is this thing?”

  “The trench is seven miles deep there. The artifact is under another forty feet of sand.”

  “Earthquake?”

  He nodded. “A quarter of a million years ago.”

  Russ stared at him for a long moment. “Didn’t I read about this in an old Stephen King novel?”

  “Look at the next page.”

  It was a regular color photograph. The object lay at the bottom of a deep hole. Russ thought about the size of that digging job; the expense of it. “The Navy doesn’t know about this?”

  “No. We did use their equipment, of course.”

  “You found the thing they lost?”

  “We will next week.” He stared out the window. “I’ll have to trust you.”

  “I won’t turn you in to the Navy.”

  He nodded slowly and chose his words. “The submarine that was lost is in the trench, too. Not thirty miles from this … object.”

  “You didn’t report it. Because?”

  “I’ve been in the Navy for almost twenty years. Twenty years next month. I was going to retire anyhow.”

  “Disillusioned?”

  “I never was ‘illusioned.’ Twenty years ago, I wanted to leave academia, and the Navy made me an interesting offer. It has been a fascinating second career. But it hasn’t led me to trust the military, or the government.

  “Over the past decade I’ve assembled a crew of like-minded men and women. I was going to take some of them with me when I retired— to set up an outfit like yours, frankly.”

  Russ went to the coffee machine and refreshed his cup. He offered one to Halliburton, who declined.

  “I think I see what you’re getting at.”

  “Tell me.”

  “You want to retire with your group and set up shop. But if you suddenly ‘discover’ this thing, the government might notice the coincidence.”

  “That’s a good approximation. Take a look at the next page.”

  It was a close-up of the thing. Its curved surface mirrored perfectly the probe that was taking its picture.

  “We tried to get a sample of the metal for analysis. It broke every drill bit we tried on it.”

  “Diamond?”

  “It’s harder than diamond. And massive. We can’t estimate its density, because we haven’t been able to budge it, let alone lift it.”

  “Good God.”

  “If it were an atomic submarine, we could have hauled it up. It’s not even a tenth that size.

  “If it were made of lead, we could have raised it. If it were solid uranium. It’s denser than that.”

  “I see,” Russ said. “Because we raised the Titanic….”

  “May I be blunt?”

  “Always.”

  “We could bring it up with some version of your flotation techniques. And keep all the profit, which may be considerable. But there would be hell to pay when the Navy connection was made.”

  “So what’s your plan?”

  “Simple.” He took a chart out of his portfolio and rolled it out on Russ’s desk. It snapped flat. “You’re going to be doing a job in Samoa…”

  —2—

  San Quillermo, California, 1931

  Before it came out of the water, it formed clothes on the outside of its body. It had observed more sailors than fishermen, so that was what it chose. It waded out of the surf wearing white utilities, not dripping wet because they were not cloth. They had a sheen like the skin of a porpoise. Its internal organs were more porpoise than human.

  It was sundown, almost dark. The beach was deserted except for one man, who came running up to the changeling.

  “Holy cow, man. Where’d you swim from?”

  The changeling looked at him. The man was almost two heads taller than it, with prominent musculature, wearing a black bathing suit.

  “Cat got your tongue, little guy?”

  Mammals can be killed easily with a blow to the brain. The changeling grabbed his wrist and pulled him down and smashed his skull with one blow.

  When the body stopped twitching, the changeling pinched open the thorax and studied the disposition of organs and muscles. It reconfigured itself to match, a slow and painful process. It needed to gain about 30 percent body mass, so it removed both arms, after studying them, and held them to its body until they were absorbed. It added a few handfuls of cooling entrails.

  It pulled down the bathing suit and duplicated the reproductive structure that it concealed, and then stepped into the suit. Then it carried the gutted body out to deep water and abandoned it to the fishes.

  It walked down the beach toward the lights of San Guillermo, a strapping handsome young man, duplicated down to the fingerprints, a process that had taken no thought, but an hour and a half of agony.

  But it couldn’t speak any human language and its bathing suit was on backward. It walked with a rolling sailor’s gait; except for the one it had just killed, every man it had seen for the past century had been walking on board a ship or boat.

  It walked toward light. Before it reached the small resort town, the sky was completely dark, moonless, and spangled with stars. Something made it stop and look at them for a long time.

  The town was festive with Christmas decorations. It noticed that other people were almost completely covered in clothing. It could form more clothing on its skin, or kill another one, if it could find one the right size alone. But it didn’t get the chance.

  Five teenagers came out of a burger joint with a bag of hamburgers. They were laughing, but suddenly stopped dead.

  “Jimmy?” a pretty girl said. “What are you doing?”

  “Ain’t it a little cool for that?” a boy said. “Jim?”

  They began to approach it. It stayed calm, knowing it could easily kill all of them. But there was no need. They kept making noises.

  “Something’s wrong,” an older one said. “Did you have an accident, Jim?”

  “He drove out with his surfing board after lunch,” the pretty girl said, and looked down the road. “I don’t see his car.”

  It didn’t remember what language was, but it knew how whales communicated. It tried to repeat the sound they had been making. “Zhim.”

  “Oh my God,” the girl said. “Maybe he hit his head.” She approached it and reached toward its face. It swatted her arms away.

  “Ow! My God, Jim.” She felt her forearm where it had almost fractured it.

  “Mike odd,” it said, trying to duplicate her facial expression.

  One of the boys pulled the girl back. “Somethin’ crazy’s goin’ on. Watch out for him.”

  “Officer!” the older girl shouted. “Officer Sherman!”

  A big man in a blue uniform hustled across the street. “Jim Berry? What the hell?”

  “He hit me,” the pretty one said. “He’s acting crazy.”

  “My God, Jim,” it said, duplicating her intonation.

  “Where’re your clothes, buddy?” Sherman said, unbuttoning his holster.

  It realized that it was in a complex and dangerous situation. It knew these were social creatures, and they were obviously communicating. Best try to learn how.

  “Where’re your clothes, buddy,” it said in a deep bass growl.

  “He might have hit his head surfing,” the girl who was cradling her arm said. “You know he’s not a mean guy.”

  “I don’t know whether to take him home or to the hospital,” the officer said.

  “The hospital,” it said.

  “Probably a good idea,” he said.

  “Good idea,” it said. When the officer touched its elbow it didn’t kill him.

  —3�
��

  Mid-pacific, 2019

  It worked like this: Poseidon Projects landed a contract from a Sea World affiliate—actually a dummy corporation that Jack Halliburton had built out of money and imagination—to raise up a Spanish-American War—era relic, a sunken destroyer, from Samoa. But no sooner had they their equipment in place than they got an urgent summons from the U.S. Navy—there was a nuclear submarine down in the Tonga Trench, and the Navy couldn’t lift it as fast as Poseidon could. There might be men still alive in it. They covered the five hundred miles as fast as they could.

  Of course Jack Halliburton knew that the sub had ruptured and there was no chance of survivors. But it made it possible for Russell Sutton to ply down the length of the Tonga and Kermadec Trenches. He made routine soundings as he went, and discovered a mysterious wreck not far from the sub.

  There was plenty of respectful news coverage of the two crews’ efforts—Sutton’s working out of professional courtesy and patriotism. Raising the Titanic had given them visibility and credibility. With all the derring-do and pathos and technological fascination of the submarine story, it was barely a footnote that Russ’s team had seen something interesting on the way, and had claimed salvage rights.

  It was an impressive sight when the sub came surging out of the depths, buoyed up by the house-sized orange balloons that Russ had brought to the task. The cameras shut down for the grisly business of removing and identifying the sailors’ remains. They all came on again for the 121 flag-draped caskets on the deck of the carrier that wallowed in the sea next to the floating hulk of the sub.

  Then the newspeople went home, and the actual story began.

  —4—

  San Quillermo, California, 1931

  They put a white hospital robe on it and sat it down in an examination room. It continued the safe course of imitative behavior with the doctors and nurses and with the man and woman who were the real Jimmy’s father and mother, even duplicating the mother’s tears.