Camouflage Read online

  The guards were brutal and stupid. If the changeling did anything outside of a certain range of behaviors, they would wrap it in a strait-jacket and throw it in the rubber room.

  It came to understand coercion and confinement. It could have slipped out of the straitjacket, prefiguring Plasticman, and kicked down the door like Superman. But there would be no education in that. It submitted to beatings and rapes—rich pretty boy who can’t tell on you. It learned something like sympathy for Dutch, though pain was just input to it, and humiliation was not yet in its emotional range.

  It listened to the other patients when they had social time together. That it responded in monosyllables, sometimes bizarre, went unnoticed. In fact, it was getting a slow, and somewhat skewed, version of the learning process that a human child would go through. It “grew up” by observation and assimilation.

  A large part of the puzzle was human linguistics, and the ultimately related problem of mimicking human thought processes. It took two years, but by the time “Jimmy” was twenty, no one was beating or raping him. He was moved into a clean, quiet part of St. Anthony’s, and after awhile was allowed to have visitors.

  His parents were so glad to see him acting “normal” that they overlooked the fact that he didn’t act like Jimmy at all. He was released into their care.

  The changeling had assimilated a wide range of behaviors, and a fairly sophisticated sense of which was appropriate at which time. To the Berrys, their son had become quiet and dignified and perhaps a little shy, which was a real advance over the brutal sodomist they’d tendered to St. Anthony’s.

  The changeling played piano for hours at a time, and it also spent a long time just watching the sea. It knew it was being observed and evaluated, this time by amateurs, and could deliver a nuanced performance.

  It had learned how to simulate the behavior of a teenager who had been troubled, but now was on the road to recovery. It had seen that that was the only way to get out of St. Anthony’s and move on to the next stage of development.

  This was the most complex creature it had ever imitated. Its successes gave it a pleasure like joy.

  —11—

  Apia, Samoa, 2020

  Once the artifact was seated on its pad, a gang of workers paid extra for speed and overtime began building the laboratory around it. The government moved in before the drywall was up.

  Halliburton and Russell had come down from their hotel lunch to take a look at the building’s progress. They crossed over the moat on a makeshift bamboo bridge and let a supervisor show them around the place. He claimed they could begin moving in equipment in four days; the trim and painting would be done in five. That was better than they’d contracted for.

  When they started to go back, there was a man in a white tropical suit waiting on the other side of the moat, an uncomfortable-looking guard at his side.

  “Mr. Halliburton, he—”

  Halliburton cut him off with a gesture. “Who are you and who are you working for?”

  “Dr. Franklin Nesbitt,” he said, “chief of NASA Advanced Planning.” He was a tanned muscular man with close-cropped white hair who stood absolutely still, except for offering his hand.

  Russell took it. “We’ve had correspondence.”

  “Of a sort,” Nesbitt said. “You basically said that whatever I was selling, you weren’t buying.”

  “That’s still true,” Halliburton said. “You have no jurisdiction here.”

  “Nor claim any. But I have an offer you might find interesting.”

  “No, you don’t. You’ve come a long way for nothing.”

  “Jack,” Russell said, “we can at least be civil.” To Nesbitt: “They’re serving tea at the hotel. It would be nice to talk to somebody who isn’t a reporter.” He called ahead while they walked to the Jeep, and by the time they got to the hotel their private dining room was set with crisp linens and heavy silver.

  An Irish woman brought in tea and trays of trimmed sandwiches and pastries.

  “My indulgence,” Russell said. “Jack is more like beer and potato chips.”

  “Total barbarian,” Halliburton said, snagging a watercress sandwich as he sat down. “So what do you have that’s so interesting? What do you have that’s interesting at all?

  The other two men waited while the woman poured tea and left. “General or specific?” Nesbitt said.

  “General,” Russell said.

  He rubbed his forehead, and for a moment you could see the seven time zones of jet lag.

  “Basically, and expecting initial rejection, I’m offering you our expertise for free.”

  “Right about that,” Jack said. “The rejection.”

  “If we did seek outside help,” Russ said, “why should it be you rather than the Europeans or Japanese?”

  “We’re older and larger—not in terms of money, true, but as a research organization.”

  “We are doing research here,” Jack said, peering doubtfully into a sandwich, “but we’re primarily a for-profit organization. One that doesn’t have the faintest idea of what it will find. But we have a good chance that it will be earth-shaking.

  “I’ve sunk most of a large fortune into this. I took on Dr. Sutton and his team because I felt I could trust them. In exchange for keeping their work secret, they are limited partners as well as salaried employees: if things go well, they all get a small percentage of what should be an astronomical return. If there’s any leak, anything, they all get nothing.”

  “We’re prepared to allow you to keep all financial returns from anything our people discover.”

  “People. That’s the problem, Dr. Nesbitt. As an organization, NASA can promise anything it wants. But if one of your people stumbles on an antigravity machine, I think he or she might trade a job with NASA for limitless wealth.”

  Nesbitt nodded amicably, tasted his tea, and sifted some sugar into it. “Your investment is, what, about a third of a billion eurodollars?”

  “Close enough.”

  “Then let me go from the general to the specific. We’re prepared to match your funds. Wipe the slate clean.”

  “In exchange for?” Russ asked.

  “A team of twelve researchers who would clear every publication with you, and also assign any present or future profits to you.” He looked at Jack over the rim of his teacup and sipped. “Up in my room I have a long contract to that effect, which I’m told covers everything. Also, dossiers of the twelve.”

  “Including you?”

  “I wish, but no. I’m just an administrator who loves science. I don’t think you’d be impressed by my physics B.S. from Arkansas.”

  Jack smiled. “Maybe more by that than by your MBA from Harvard.” He tapped his hearing aid. “Wonderful machines, these.”

  Nesbitt didn’t blink. “Is it tempting?”

  “Of course it is,” Jack said harshly.

  “Jack, we agreed from the get-go. No government. No military applications.”

  “We’d be amenable to that. It’s not what we’re looking for.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Half our team are exobiologists. It’s not so much a ‘what’ … as a ‘who.’ ”

  —12—

  Woods Hole, Massachusetts, 1935

  The Berrys were surprised when their son didn’t want to go to Juilliard, which they certainly could have afforded. The changeling was interested in music, but its interest was not human, and it could be indulged anywhere. It could sit alone in the dark and play, in its mind, fantastic compositions that no human could play. With two extra imaginary hands, it could play a Bach fugue forward and backward at the same time. It often did things like that in the hours it had to feign sleep.

  All it really knew of its origin was that it had come from the sea, and before taking human form it remembered having been for centuries a great white shark and a killer whale. There were other manifestations before that, and though the memories were vague, it seemed they had all been sea creatures of
some sort.

  Were there a lot of its kind? There was no way to tell. Others who had taken human form could pass for human indefinitely, appearing to age at a normal rate, “dying,” and resuming life as someone else.

  Its readings in psychology indicated that its transition, while it was learning the difference between killer whale behavior and human behavior, cannot have been common. There were tales of “feral children,” supposedly raised by wolves or other animals, who might fit the pattern. He had plenty of time to investigate that.

  There was no compelling reason for someone like it to become human. They could still be white sharks or killer whales—or coral reefs or rocks, if that made them content. The sea was a good hiding place.

  So it decided that oceanography would be a reasonable place to start. If that didn’t pan out, it could study some other discipline, switch identity and do it again and again. Time was of no importance.

  The leading edge of oceanographic research was Woods Hole, a new, privately endowed institution. It was in Massachusetts, so the changeling applied to several places in that commonwealth. Turned down by both Harvard and MIT, possibly because most of its high school courses had been taught by home tutors, it wound up going to the University of Massachusetts, majoring in oceanography. Woods Hole did take graduate students from there as summer interns, and that was its eventual plan.

  Its academic performance was predictably irregular; it aced anything that had to do with logic or memorization, but didn’t do well in courses like literature or philosophy. It saw that many other students were that way, and most of them were shy loners, too.

  After part of one semester of dormitory life, it moved out and got an apartment in town. That minimized the time and energy devoted to maintaining the Jimmy Berry facade, and gave it freedom to practice being other people, which it assumed would someday be a useful talent. After careful practice, it could become a different person of the same size in about ten minutes. Smaller or larger took twice as long or more, and was more painful and tiring. Once it became two children, though one had only average intelligence, and the other was dim-witted.

  It had a cautious social life as Jimmy, going to a dance or the movies once or twice a month, always with a different girl. There was no shortage of dates for a handsome older California boy with money and family. There was no record of Jimmy’s peculiar past in regard to the opposite sex, and in 1935, sex never became an issue on the first and only date.

  (The changeling realized it would sooner or later have to learn sexual etiquette, but decided to put it off until later. There was almost no reliable information on the subject in America at that time; people in movies and books made obvious sexual overtures, but never followed through. It knew that “Take off your clothes and put them on the dresser” would only work under certain conditions. You did have to wind up alone and in a state of undress together, but how you got there from the passionate kiss or arched eyebrow was a mystery.)

  So its course was set: four years of work that shined in science and mathematics and language, but little else, which was good protective coloration, and then a couple of years on a master’s, then a doctorate and, eventually, Woods Hole.

  It did get to work at Woods Hole for two summers, sailing the ketch Atlantis as a graduate intern. Every now and then, on days off, it would go to a deserted cove and spend an hour changing into a dolphin, to get back to the sea in a more personal, familiar way. These cold rich waters were another world from its Pacific home, and it learned a lot, some of which would direct its own research.

  But before the doctorate came, war intervened.

  The changeling saw people being drafted and assigned to whatever kind of job and place the military desired. But people who joined up were allowed to choose, within reason.

  It wanted to study the Pacific, suspecting its origin must be somewhere out there. Danger wasn’t a factor; as far as it knew, it couldn’t die. So it joined the Marines, and asked for a Pacific assignment.

  To most graduate students, it would be an annoyance and delay— not to mention the possibility of being shot or succumbing to some tropical disease. But to the changeling, time was just time, meaningless. Every new experience had been useful.

  It didn’t tell the Marine Corps about college, which probably would have led to a desk job. So instead of being a marine science Marine, it became a plain foot soldier, grunt, jarhead. Pearl Harbor was a year away.

  —12—

  Eurasia, pre-Christian era

  The changeling wasn’t alone on the planet. There was another creature, unrelated, who had lived on Earth longer than he could remember; who had lived thousands of lives, disappearing when he got too old, to reappear as a young man.

  He was always a man, and usually a brute.

  Call him the chameleon: an alpha male who never had sons, unless an adulterer cooperated. Unlike the changeling, he did have DNA, but it was alien; he could no more reproduce with a human than he could with a rock or a tree.

  Also unlike the changeling, he seemed to be stuck in human form. It never occurred to him to wonder why this was so. But it didn’t occur to him for tens of millennia—not until the Renaissance—that he might have come from another world. He assumed that he was some sort of demon or demigod, but early on realized that it was a mistake to advertise the fact. He couldn’t be killed, not even by fire, but he did feel pain, and he felt it profoundly, in ways a human never could. At low levels it was pleasure, and he sought out varieties of that. But hanging and crucifixion were experiences he never wanted to do a second time. To be burned to ashes was agony beyond belief, and reconstructing yourself afterward was worse.

  So after a few experiences that probably helped establish the myth of the vampire, the chameleon settled into routine existence, seriatim lives that were fairly ordinary.

  He was usually a warrior, and of course a good one. Sometimes his career was cut short by being chopped in two or trampled or drawn and quartered. In the chaos of battle he could usually find a few minutes of darkness, to pull himself together, and then go off in search of another life. When his death and interment were witnessed by many, he had to fake a grave robbery or, reluctantly, a miracle.

  In ancient times, he occasionally wound up being a warlord or even a king, by dint of superiority in battle and an instinct to advance. But that was always more trouble than it was worth, and made it almost impossible to arrange a private death and resurrection.

  Like the changeling, he was a quick study, but he was a sensualist, indifferent to knowledge. All he needed to know in order to survive, his body already knew. The rest was just for maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain that was too great to enjoy.

  He picked the right side in the Peloponnesian Wars, and went through several generations as a Spartan. Then he joined Alexander’s army and wound up settling in Persia. He spent a century or so as a Parthian before he eased into the Roman sphere.

  It was as a Parthian that he heard the story of Jesus Christ, which interested him. Killed in public and then resurrected, he was evidently a relative. He would keep an eye out for him.

  The chameleon entered the history books only once, and it was because of his interest in Christianity. In the third century, in Norborne, he was a captain of the Praetorian Guard, and was a little too open in his curiosity about the fellow immortal. An enemy reported him, and Diocletian had him executed as a closet Christian, by archers. But his girlfriend, Irene, wouldn’t leave him alone to die, and he “miraculously” recovered. Diocletian subsequently had him beaten to a pulp by soldiers with iron rods, whereupon Irene let him stay dead long enough to turn into a young soldier and escape, leaving behind the legend of Saint Sebastian.

  He worked as a farmhand and soldier in Persia until 313, when the Edict of Milan made it safe to be a Christian. When he heard about that, he dropped his plow and walked to Italy, robbing people along the way, just enough to get by.

  He didn’t like being so close to authority, so he went ba
ck to France and shuffled between Gallia and Germania for awhile, keeping an eye out for other immortals. Things got ugly in the 542 plague, so he made his way over to England as part of the Saxon invasion.

  England seemed more congenial than the Continent, as the Roman empire collapsed into chaos, and the chameleon lived many lifetimes there, first as soldier and farmer, but eventually learning a variety of trades: blacksmith, cobbler, butcher.

  In 1096, he went back to soldiering, following the Crusades down to Jerusalem and beyond. He fought on both sides for a century or so, and eventually, as an Arab, went back to Egypt and started walking south along the Nile.

  Making himself dark and tall, he became a Masai warrior, and it was the best life he’d yet encountered: lots of women and great food and, in exchange for a battle every now and then, sleep late in the morning and hunt for game with spears, which he enjoyed. He did that for several hundred years, still keeping an eye out for Christ or another relative, probably white.

  But the first white people who showed up were bearing guns and chains. He could have resisted and conveniently “died,” but he’d heard about the New World and was curious.

  The ride over was about the worst thing he’d ever experienced— right up there with being boiled in oil or flayed to death. He lay in chains for weeks, stuffed in an airless hold with hundreds of others, many of whom died and lay rotting until someone got around to throwing them overboard.

  It was a real chore. He thought about just bursting his chains, at night, and diving into the sea. He’d done that before, in Phoenicia, and swam dozens of leagues to shore. But Africa, after a few days under sail, would be months of swimming, so he’d just be trading one agony for another.

  So he allowed himself to be carried to America, and in a way enjoyed being put up on the block—he was by far the healthiest specimen off the ship, since metabolism was irrelevant to him, other than as a source of pleasure. The Georgia man who bought him, though, was cruel. He liked to whip the new boys into submission, so at the first opportunity, the chameleon killed him, and then turned into a white man and walked away.