“Have you talked this over with Jack?”
“Jack? No. He’s all for aliens from another planet. Especially since the thing with Rae, our ‘space alien.’ ”
“Which you don’t buy.”
“Well … I guess you can make a better scientific, or at least logical, case for extraterrestrial origin. But if so, why didn’t she just come forward and say ‘Take me to your leader’?”
“Maybe she was afraid.”
“She wasn’t afraid of me.”
“Maybe Jack.” The changeling smiled. “I take it she wouldn’t be the only one.”
“He’s a little scary sometimes.” He got up and turned the hot dogs. “Let’s burn the other side.”
She didn’t say anything while he repositioned the meat and buns. When he looked up she was staring out to sea, an odd thoughtful expression on her face.
“Sharon?”
It was a song. A song.
The changeling never stopped manipulating the ones and zeros. Pretending to be human only used a small part of its intelligence, so while it was carrying on bank business or being social, even concentrating on Russ, most of its being was swimming through the binary sea of the message.
The message itself wasn’t clear, but suddenly the changeling knew what it was.
A song in its native tongue. A language forgotten for a million years.
“Sharon? Are you all right?”
“Oh! Sorry.” She rubbed her face with both hands. “Sometimes I do that.”
He sat on the bench, not too close, and touched her hand. “Is it your parents?” She nodded her head in two short jerks. “I lost mine together, too, at least in the same week. I was quite a bit older than you, but it still hit me hard. Being alone.”
Her eyes brimmed and she wiped them. “You’re right. Alone.” He’s a wonderful man, it thought, but he doesn’t know what loneliness is.
He wanted to take her into his arms, but restrained himself. “Let me take you home.”
“No. It’s passed.” She flashed him a bright smile. “Let’s have another hot dog.” She peered into the empty beer bottle. “Maybe the beer makes me sentimental. I should have another.”
“Your wish is my command.” He opened two and passed her one. “Sentimental together.”
A song. A song about home. “Are they burnt enough?”
He touched one lightly. “Done to a turn.”
While they ate and chatted about deliberately inconsequential things, it made plans for the rest of the day and night. Especially night. Russell was in for a little surprise.
Tomorrow, they were almost certainly going to announce that the artifact had answered them, and perhaps release the binary sequence, so that a few million other people could try to figure it out.
People wouldn’t. It would be like someone who didn’t know what Braille was running a finger along a line of it, in a foreign language. A coded message, not coded for secrecy, but nevertheless unbreakable.
But by Tuesday, there would be outsiders all over the place. Reporters lucky enough to be in American Samoa would be on the spot by noon Monday. The Tuesday morning plane would be crowded with them, from America; Thursday, from Asia and Europe. Security would be tighter around the clock.
So it had until tomorrow morning.
“I don’t want to rush things,” Russell said, “but are you doing anything tonight? If I don’t have an excuse, Jack’s going to collar me at Aggie’s.”
She closed her eyes. Careful. “I wish I could. But I’m going out with a man from work.” She patted Russell’s knee. “Have to tell him I’m not interested. Free Monday and Tuesday, though.”
“We already have lunch Monday,” he reminded her.
“Dinner Tuesday, then.”
“I’ll make Sails reservations at eight, right away. There’ll be a lot of hungry reporters in town.”
The changeling nodded. “And I’ll know the big secret by then.”
“By ten tomorrow, if you listen to the news. Or you can wait and let me surprise you at lunch.”
“Maybe I’ll wait. I don’t suppose you’ll let me try to guess.”
“Nope.”
“You’ve discovered the president’s an alien.”
“Damn, you got it. Now we’ll have to kill you.”
“Oh, well. At least I found out early.”
They pedaled around Apia after lunch, stopping at the Maketi Fou, the normally crowded central market, for iced coconuts. On Sunday it was pretty lazy, the vendors chatting in clusters in shady spots, reluctantly coming over to take their money. He bought her a mother-of-pearl necklace she admired. She bought him a garish silk crimson lavalava and dared him to wear it to dinner.
The changeling wondered whether there would be a dinner date. Their relationship was about to enter uncharted territory.
Maybe he would have to kill her, in a sense. In the sense that she was Rae, was Sharon.
Russell offered to let her keep the bicycle, but she said no, she was too contaminated by civilization, and didn’t want to either leave it outside or lug it up the stairs to her small apartment. She left it at his cottage and kissed him good-bye, firmly, and walked the few blocks home with the kiss fading on her lips.
The changeling pulled the shutters closed over its window and lay in the half-dark, listening to the click of the ceiling fan and the chatter of birds in the poinsiana tree outside.
It began to practice the language it didn’t yet understand. With its glottis it made clicks exactly a twentieth of a second long, for ones, and carefully measured pauses, for zeros.
Early on in the message, there were three clusters of the sequence 000011110000, which were probably separators of some kind, and a fourth one just past midway. These divided the message into parts roughly 2:1:1:47:49. In analogy to human music, perhaps it was a two-verse song, preceded by three packets of information: the first identifying it as a song, and the other two giving the title and some technical information, like tempo and key signature. Or flavor and electrical charge.
There was no obvious pattern to the two verses, though each one had imbedded the cluster, or word, 01100101001011—three times in the first verse and four in the second. There were no other long repetitions. Short ones, like 0100101, had no statistical significance, but if they represented words in a human language, they could be common ones like “a” or “the.” You’d expect that with the high Shannon entropy.
Not much to go on, analytically, but to the changeling it had some intuitive or subliminal meaning, evocative but frustrating, like a melody heard in childhood and almost totally forgotten.
The ceiling fan made a click each three-quarter second. The changeling used it as a metronome, or rhythm section. Its human glottis could “speak” about a third as fast as the artifact had; it lowered the pitch of its sounds by a factor of three.
It practiced quietly enough so that someone eavesdropping would hear something that sounded like noise from the fan’s motor, which was exactly what the CIA woman in the next room concluded. They had moved in a few hours after Sharon had her first lunch with Russell.
It didn’t take long for the changeling to memorize the forty- five—second sequence of clicks and silences that it wanted to sing back to the artifact. But of course it couldn’t get in there without Russell, so it had to wait until dark, and then some. If Russell had met Jack for dinner, he probably wouldn’t be out too late. Would he then go to the lab, or home? Usually, it knew, he would go home for some light reading, listening to music, and since he’d be tied to the lab most of the next day, that was probably what he’d do.
At nine, it put on a cute black outfit, short skirt and a clinging buckyball top that shimmered shifting rainbows like a blackbird’s wing. It slipped out quietly and with precise timing, when it heard the CIA agent go into the bathroom. By the time the agent suspected Sharon’s apartment was empty, the changeling had quickly walked the half mile to the cottages.