The blinds were drawn on number 5, but the light was on by his easy chair. The changeling could visualize him sitting there with his book and glass of wine; a soft harpsichord tinkled the Goldberg Variations.
She stepped out of her shoes and tapped on the door. When he opened it, she slipped inside and eased it shut behind her. “I’m impulsive. Are you?”
It took him a couple of seconds to nod, staring. “With you I could be.”
The cottage was one big room with a divider setting off the “bedroom”; she led him there, turning out the reading lamp on the way.
“Just a second.” He stopped to light a candle, as expected. In its light, she stripped out of the skirt with a Velcro rip and pulled off the buckyball thing. Underneath, she was wearing nothing but the hummingbird tattoo.
She sat on the bed and pulled him toward her, unbuttoning his silly shirt while he fumbled with his cutoffs. He wasn’t quite erect; she took him in her mouth immediately, to enjoy the change of state. She teased him gently with her teeth, as she knew he liked, and then took advantage of not having a gag reflex—the changeling had no reflexes, as such—to engage him deeply, cradling him with one hand and urging him down to the bed with the other.
It was what Rae had done with him, the first time. Would his brain be working well enough to make that connection?
He reached down to help her but she was already moist, in control of that function, too. She crawled up onto the bed and straddled him, helping him in slowly with a circling motion, sighing with genuine pleasure. Being with him as Sharon had not been enough.
She smiled down on him, playing with his hair while he moved up and down inside her, and after a minute said, “I have a little trick.” She eased sideways and tilted a bit, raising her knee and straightening her leg, holding him in place. She slowly crabbed around, doing the same trick with the other leg, so that she was facing away, without having lost him in the process. “Still there?” Knowing that he was.
“How … did you do that?”
“Double jointed.”
She knew he liked this aspect, and enjoyed the internal difference herself, but mainly wanted to be facing the other direction for a few minutes. He clasped her with his hands and she used hers in a practiced way, trying to control his progress while she worked on her face.
When the time was right, she had an enthusiastic orgasm, and he ejaculated with desperate eagerness right afterwards. She eased down to her side and he rolled over, holding her spoon fashion.
After a minute he somewhat surprised her: “Rae?”
She slowly turned around in the circle of his arms with her new face, the old face.
She ran a finger down the bridge of his nose while he stared. “ ‘To see love coming, and see love depart.’ ”
“You … grew a new arm,” he said inanely. “But you’re the same inside.” For ninety years, the changeling realized, it had always been nurse Deborah inside, whenever it was a woman.
He explored her face with his hands, and then drifted down to the tattoo. “But except for the face…”
“I’m still Sharon. Changing bodies takes longer, and hurts.”
“Who … what…” He was still caressing her. “What are you?”
“ ‘Who’ I am is Sharon and Rae and a couple of hundred other people over the past century, and a number of animals and objects besides. The ‘what’ is difficult.”
“Another planet?”
“I don’t even know that. Your idea about my coming from the future isn’t inconsistent with my memories, which are vague before 1931. I think that’s when I first took human form.”
“What were you before that?”
“A variety of creatures. I was always in the sea—great white, killer whale; whatever was at the top of the local biome’s food chain. Pretty good survival instinct, I suppose.
“I could have been there as long as the artifact; the artifact might have brought me here—from the future, from another star, another dimension. I feel a compelling attraction to it.”
He nodded slowly. “So you seduced me, hoping I could—”
She kissed him on the cheek. “Which doesn’t mean I don’t love you,” she whispered. “You can love someone and use him. Or her.”
He didn’t say anything for a long moment. He smoothed a strand of hair off her forehead, and smiled. “You seem so feminine. As Rae, as Sharon, and now in between.”
“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?”