“Easy. Five minutes.” She got up.
Russell touched her hip. “Wait. Can I watch?”
The changeling turned. “No one’s ever seen me do it.” Russell nodded. “Okay.” It sat back down, facing him.
It winced and there was a slight grinding noise as the cheekbones became more prominent and moved in closer to the nose. The chin lost its dimple and elongated. Wrinkles and laugh lines grew, and the skin under the eyes sagged. The eyes snapped from pale blue to brown. The hair grew to shoulder length and turned white, and then spread out and wove itself into a French braid.
“How can you do that? The hair, it isn’t living tissue.”
“I don’t know how I can do any of it.” She stood and spread her arms. The skin of her beautiful body rippled and faded to dead white, and turned into a nylon jumpsuit. The skin on her hands grew age spots and wrinkles.
He rubbed the nylon on her arm between thumb and forefinger. “You can make synthetics.”
“Metals, anything. Back in the sixties I spent a week as a motel television set. That was educational.”
“Transmutation of elements?”
She smiled at his expression. “I know. I have a pretty recent doctorate in astrophysics. The wildest edge of physics can’t explain it.
“I think the only constraint is mass. If I turn into a person or thing considerably heavier or lighter, I have to gain or lose flesh. You wouldn’t want to watch me consume a leg of lamb. Or an unabridged dictionary.”
“That’s how you could lose an arm and keep going?”
“Yes. That hurt, because it was an outside agent, and a surprise. If I had to detach an arm to lose weight, it would take a couple of minutes, and look pretty strange, but it wouldn’t hurt.”
He leaned back and shook his head, staring. “Are there more than one of you?”
“If there is, I haven’t found her. I can become more than one individual; given an hour, I could split this body into three children. But the personality, the intelligence, becomes distributed, and weakened. I made myself be a school of fish once. Each individual fish was pretty dumb.”
“So you haven’t reproduced that way. By fission, like an amoeba.”
“In fact, I have some sort of instinct against it. When I’m split, I’m anxious to get back together.
“I’ve wondered sometimes how they do it at home—wherever or whenever I came from. Maybe they don’t reproduce at all. Why would immortals have to?”
“You can’t know you’re immortal, can you?”
“Not until I survive the heat death of the universe, no. But I’ve been through a lot and always seem to recover.” She stood and carried the candle to the bureau mirror, and inspected her transformation. “Shall we go?” she said in Jan’s voice.
“In a minute. Some of us have to dress.”
They were only ten minutes from the project site. They said hello to a few people out enjoying the night air or sitting on their porches, no doubt adding grist to the rumor mill—people did suspect a romantic attachment between the two senior researchers.
The guard was Theodore, a large cheerful Chinese-Samoan. “Nervous about tomorrow, Professors?”
“You know about tomorrow?” Russ said.
“Just that there’s something; something big. Simon told me.”
“They probably know in Pago Pago,” the changeling said.
“He told me it was a secret.”
“Still is, I hope.” Russell gestured. “We’re going into the artifact room.”
“Okay.” He reached down and clicked something. “It’s clear.”
They went in by the reception desk and walked down a silent corridor to a blast door covered with warnings. Russ unlocked it with his handprint, and the heavy door sighed open.
In the anteroom there were two complex data consoles. He sat down at the larger one and typed a few lines. “Okay … I’ve turned off the cameras for maintenance. That’ll be fun to explain.”
“I’ll look at it on the way out,” the changeling said. “I think I can cover it.”
“Computers, too?”
“MIT. I’ve had a long time to study things.” It opened a locker. “Should we suit up?”
“Don’t have to. Nothing nano going on.” He put his hand on another door. “Open for me,” he said quietly, evenly, and it slid away into the jamb in absolute silence. It was an airlock chamber. An identical door, without the ID plate, was on the other side.
They stepped inside and he said, “Close.”
The door behind closed, but the one in front didn’t open. “There are two people in the airlock,” the room said. “I need a speech pattern from the one who is not Russell Sutton.”
“I’m Jan,” the changeling said. “Open for me.” The door slid open and they stepped into the long corridor that connected the artifact room to the main building. Fluorescent lights winked on as the door slid silently shut. The windowless metal walls were full of clutter; people had put up cartoons and drawings with refrigerator magnets, and a galaxy of magnetized words coalesced into clusters of poetry, not all of it obscene.
One block of wall several meters long contained 31,433 ones and zeros, patiently inked in black Magic Marker.
A final blast door, thick as a bank vault, that opened on to the artifact room, was halfway open. As they passed through it, a bank of floodlights over the artifact came on with a crackling sound. In bright relief, they saw the artifact on its pylons, the big laser, the two useless horizontal microscope machines, the array of communication devices— and a man standing with folded arms. The chameleon. “Jack?” Russ said.
—47—
The thing that was Jack nodded. “Please do come in.” He clicked an infrared signaler, and the bank vault door boomed shut.
“The guard didn’t say—”
“I asked him not to.”
“You expected us, then.” Russ put a hand on the changeling’s shoulder.
“Oh, yes. In a way, I’ve expected you for a long time.” He was looking at the changeling. “Jan. Sharon. Rae. You really were a television set once?”
They both stared at him, speechless.
“I’ve had a microcamera in your bedroom, Russell, since you first moved into the fale. It’s often been entertaining, but never so much as tonight.” Russ opened his mouth, twice, but no words came out.
The changeling crossed her arms. “So you know what I am.”
“Actually, no.” It spread its own arms, palms up, and in an instant became a duplicate of Russell, still in Jack’s shorts and T- shirt.
“My God,” Russell said.
“That’s good,” she said.
“You can’t do it, can you? I watched you take several minutes just to change your face. But you’ve only had a century of practice.”
“How much practice have you had?”
“Since the Stone Age, I think. But I can’t remember it ever not being instantaneous.” It changed back into Jack and walked toward her.
“Do you know where we’re from?” she asked.
“I don’t think we’re a ‘we,’ dear. I can’t become a television set or a great white shark or even a female. I can look like any man, but that’s my limit. We’re two different species.”
“But maybe from the same planet, or time.”
“Or dimension, whatever.” He stood directly in front of the changeling and studied her. “I’ve been looking for someone like you for thousands of years.”
“So the project,” Russell said, “it was just a lure, to find—”
“Yes and no. The artifact is real.” He didn’t take his eyes off the changeling. “I discovered it years before the submarine had its accident.”
“Which was no accident,” the changeling said.