Some wiring and components had been stressed too much, and it hadn’t been easy on the human components, either. So they took a few days off while replacement parts were assembled and shipped from various countries, and everybody took a short vacation over on the more old-fashioned island Savai’i.
After you’d seen the famous blowholes, there wasn’t a lot to do unless you were a surfer with a death wish, so they mostly walked around enjoying the peacefulness. Some of them watched or played cricket. Jan engaged an old woman to teach her how to paint the traditional siapo cloth, and she spent a couple of afternoons doing that, making souvenir placemats for her grandchildren while listening to the hypnotic ocean crash, sipping the local fruit juice, not thinking about much. Trying not to.
They stayed at the venerable Safua Hotel, which was actually just a bunch of cottages around a central fale, where a buffet feast was offered for supper and an automated bar served as a social focus.
There was no cube on the island, by law, so the evening entertainment was homemade. Russ and Naomi played chess while most of the others listened to a pickup band of local kids who alternated modern music with traditional Samoan. They tried to teach everybody how to dance Samoan style, with little success except, surprisingly, Jack. He mumbled something about Hawaii when he was in the service.
After three days they got word that all the replacement equipment had arrived, and installation would be complete the next morning. So they took a light plane back to Apia—the ferry over having been a little rough for most of them—and with binoculars could occasionally see rays and sharks in the transparent water.
Muese, one of the native Samoan techs who had stayed behind, had dug a deep fire pit on the beach between the blast wall and the laboratory, and was roasting a pig, buried wrapped in taro leaves. He made a shallow pit in the afternoon and wrapped yams and potatoes in foil, and put a rack over the coals to grill chicken and fish.
Jack provided tubs of ice with drinks and a keg of beer, and invited all forty-eight employees of the project to the luau. There was no special reason to have a party, but no reason not to have one, either. Work would resume in earnest the next day.
Just before sundown, Muese dug up the pig and spent a half hour carving it, while others tended to the chicken and slabs of tuna and masimasi. The automatic security floodlights came on, less romantic than guttering torches, but good light to cook and eat by.
After the sumptuous meal, a group got together by the fire with guitars, a harmonica, a fiddle, and a tin whistle, and played improbable Irish and Welsh music, popular in the States. Russ and Jan sat apart with a bottle of cold white Burgundy wrapped in a wet towel.
“So what happens next,” Russ said, “if we get out to Jupiter and still don’t have anything?”
She shrugged. “More invasive procedures, I suppose. Jack must have ideas. He’s not committing himself.”
Russ finished off his glass but didn’t pour another. “He has more than ideas. He has an offer. From China.”
“He didn’t say anything.”
“Yeah. I only know because I was in the office when the machine decrypted it. He couldn’t tell me not to watch.”
“Let me guess. They want to bury the thing in chop suey.”
“Not even close. Chop suey’s American, anyhow.”
“I know. What is it?”
“They’ll cosponsor putting the artifact into orbit. Split the cost of a cluster of four Long March rockets.”
“And once in orbit?”
“Take the big laser up with it, I guess. Try it at a hundred percent, safely off Earth.”
She shook her head. “Remind me to be somewhere else when it’s overhead.”
“I think he can be talked out of it. It would mean taking government money.” He refilled both of their glasses. “We have to come up with something else, though.”
She stared at the containment dome. “We could just send it into the future.”
“First we build a time machine.”
“I mean one day at a time. Just put a fence around it and wait for science to catch up with it.” She took a sip, still staring. “Suspend the project for ten, fifty, a hundred years.”
“Jack would die first.”
She nodded. “As would we all.”
—31—
The chameleon decided to stay in one place and make a fortune. It had been wealthy in the past, spoils of war, but it had never been a rich capitalist, which sounded interesting.
It kept the core identity of a man who went to the office every morning, did his administrative work like a good drone, and then went home to his bachelor apartment, presumably to watch TV and read. He seemed uninterested in women, and most of his coworkers thought he was gay.
What the chameleon actually did at night was become young and gay, in both senses of the word. It dropped ten or fifteen years and pounds, which it could do in a painless second, and exchanged the office uniform for something eye-catching but tasteful. Then it either went on a date or went trolling for a new source of money.
It had three wealthy men paying regular “gifts,” for discretion as well as services rendered, and made even more per month by picking up men and robbing them after sex. If they fought, it would sometimes have to kill them, but usually the threat of exposure was enough. It preferred to leave them alive, so it could identify them months or years later for a repeat performance, with a different face and body. There was a gay “scene” in Washington in the seventies, and the chameleon moved through it like an invisible predator.
It didn’t prefer gay sex to straight; one was much like the other. It made less money as a woman, though, and as a gay prostitute it ate at better restaurants, and the other man still picked up the bill.
The seventies and eighties were good for the stock market, at least for conservative investors, and all of the money the chameleon made from sex and extortion went straight to its broker. After the first million, it became a broker itself, handling its various identities under yet another false one.
It didn’t have a plan, in the sense of ambition. It watched its various fortunes grow and shrink and grow again like a horticulturist tending a garden, fertilizing in one season and pruning in the next.
It slowly became the richest creature in the world, though the wealth was scattered among a hundred identities and a thousand accounts. It started two small wars, as experiments, and profited from both, though not as well as it did in drugs and dot-coms.
It left dot-coms a year before they tanked, but then, instead of pushing its advantage, left the money to marinate for a year or decade or two. Something would come along.
Maybe money could accomplish what research had not, finding another one like himself. Humans were no challenge to kill.
—32—
The changeling settled into the Gippsland campus of Monash University in 1997, and spent four years earning a double degree in marine biology and biotechnology. It enjoyed Melbourne, but often spent its free time in the water, being a subject as well as a student of marine biology, and enjoying fresher fish than any sushi chef could offer.
Its academic performance was flawless, Monash being no more difficult than Harvard or MIT, and it accepted a full scholarship to James Cook University in Queensland, where it spent four years getting its M.S. and Ph.D. in marine biology, specializing (naturally enough) in the behavior of marine animals.
It took its fresh doctorate to AIMS, the Australian Institute of Marine Science, where it began researching “wonky holes,” the fisherman’s name for muddy holes that foul trawling nets near reefs. Many kilometers offshore, they turned out to be fresh water percolating from subterranean streams—a natural process that was having an unnatural effect on the reefs, because the water carried nutrients from farms, which fed algae, attracting fish. Fishermen kept the locations of wonky holes secret, because they attracted schools of fish—an easy day’s catch was worth the occasional fouled net.