Camouflage (7 page)

-13
-

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 back 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.

That was an amusing time. His version of English was almost a thousand years old, so he had to masquerade as an idiot while he learned how to communicate. He walked north, again robbing and murdering for sustenance, when he knew he wouldn't be caught.

He kept moving north until he got to Boston, and settled in there for a few hundred years.

-14-

Apia, Samoa, 2020

Little green men," Halliburton said, staring at Nesbitt. "You've been reading the tabloids."

"The thing is at least a million years old," Russell said.

Nesbitt nodded. "But it's obviously a
made
thing."

"Maybe not," Russell said. "It could be the product of some exotic natural force."

"Assume not, though. If some intelligence made it a million or some millions of years ago ... well, we can't say anything about their motivation, but if they're like humans at all, there's a good chance the thing is inhabited in some sense."

"Still alive after a million years," Halliburton said, stacking up two little egg salad sandwiches.

"We're still alive after more than a million years."

"Speak for yourself, spaceman."

"I mean humanity, since we evolved from
Homo erectus
. We've been traveling through space in a closed environment, growing from a few individuals to seven billion."

"It's a point," Russ said. "That thing is a closed environment, in spades."

"Your eight billion little green men are going to be
tiny
green men."

"Well, it's probably not full of little hamsters in space suits," Nesbitt said. "It may not be inhabited in the sense of carrying individuals. It could have some equivalent of sperm and eggs, or spores—or it could be basically information, like a von Neumann machine."

"Oh, yeah. I sort of remember that," Russ said.

"I don't," Halliburton said. "German?"

"Hungarian, I think. It's an early nanotech idea. You send little spaceships out to various stars. Each one is a machine, programmed to seek out materials and build two duplicates of itself, which would take off for two other stars."

"Yeah," Russ said, "and after a few million years, every planet in the galaxy would have been visited by one of these machines. The fact that there obviously isn't one on Earth is offered as proof that there's no other space-faring life in this galaxy."

"That's a stretch."

Russ shrugged. "Well, the galaxy is thousands of millions of years old. The logic is that the project would be relatively simple to set up, and then would take care of itself."

"But you see the hole in that logic," Nesbitt said.

"Sure," Jack said. "I see where you're going. The argument assumes we would know the machine was here."

"It might well be hidden," Nesbitt said, "hidden in a place where it wouldn't be found except by other creatures with high technology."

Jack rubbed the stubble on his chin. "You're right there. No pearl diver's gonna find that thing and bring it up."

"And bringing it out of that environment into this one might be a signal that life on the planet has evolved sufficiently to initiate the next course of action."

"Make contact with us."

"Maybe. Or maybe eliminate us as rivals." He looked at both of them in turn. "What if a creature like Hitler had started the project? Genghis Khan? And they were at least
humans.
There are plenty of animals who simplify their existence by eliminating their
own
kind who threaten their primacy. We ourselves have destroyed whole species— smallpox and malaria—for our health."

"It's far-fetched," Halliburton said.

"But even if the probability was near zero, the stakes are so high that the problem should be addressed."

"Hm." Jack tapped his teacup with his spoon and the woman appeared. "Sun's over the yardarm, Colleen." She nodded and slipped away. "So how are your twelve people supposed to save humanity from alien invasion?"

"We discussed moving the whole operation to the lunar surface."

"Holy cow," Russ said.

"It would make the Apollo program look like a science fair project," Nesbitt said. "No one has a booster that can orbit one-tenth that thing's mass. And we couldn't send it up piecemeal."

Jack squinted, doing numbers. "I don't think it could be done at all. Mass of the booster goes up with the square of the mass of the pay-load. Strength of materials. Goddamn thing'd collapse."

"And you see the implications of that. Someone got that thing here from a lot farther away than the moon."

"That's still just an assumption," Russ said, "and I still lean toward a natural explanation. It probably was formed here on Earth, by some exotic process."

Nesbitt's temper rose for the first time. "Pretty damned exotic! Three times as dense as plutonium—and that's if it were the same stuff through and through! What if the goddamned thing's hollow? What's the shell made of?"

"Neutronium," Russ said. "Degenerate matter. That's my guess, if it's hollow."

"Baloney-um is what we called it in school," Jack said. "Make up the properties first; find the element later."

Colleen rolled in a cart with various glasses and bottles. "Gentlemen?" The NASA man stuck to tea, Russ took white wine, Jack a double Bloody Mary.

"So what does your dynamic dozen propose?" Jack asked as the woman left the room.

He leaned forward. "Isolation. More profound than extreme bio-hazard. The environment the military uses in developing..."

"Nanoweapons," Russ supplied. "Of course we're not
actually
developing them. Just learning how to defend ourselves against them, if somebody else does."

"Well, it's not just the military. Everybody developing nanotech uses similar safeguards to keep the little things isolated.

"We'd cover the lab building your crew is finishing now with an outside layer, sort of an exoskeleton. Basically a seamless metal room almost the same size as the lab. To enter, you have to go through an airlock. The atmospheric pressure inside is slightly lower than outside. The airlock's also a changing room; nobody ever wears street clothes into the work area."

"I don't think our people would enjoy working under those constraints," Russ said. "Feels like government interference."

"You could also see it as taking advantage of the government. We give you the functional equivalent of lunar isolation—air and water recycled, power sources independent of the outside."

"Plus getting back all the capital we've put in, to date?" Jack said, looking at Russ.

"That's right," Nesbitt said. Russ nodded almost imperceptibly.

Jack squeezed some more lime into his Bloody Mary. "I guess we'll look into your contract. Have our lawyers look into it. Maybe make a counteroffer."

"Fair enough." Nesbitt stood. "I'll go up and fetch it. I think you'll find it clear and complete."

What they wouldn't find was a little detail about the "independent power source": As a public health measure for the planet, its plutonium load could be command-detonated from Washington, turning the whole island into radioactive slag.

-15-

Amherst, Massachusetts, February 1941

The changeling could have avoided the draft by simulating any number of maladies or deficiencies; one out of three American men were rejected. Like a lot of men, for various reasons, he avoided it by joining the Marines.

The Corps was not enthusiastic about recruits like Jimmy Berry, no matter how good they would look on a recruiting poster. He was tall, strong, handsome, healthy, and obviously from a rich family. He was probably lying about not having gone to college, to get out of being assigned to Officer Candidate School. He would be hard to break, which would make it that much harder to break the other shitbirds. And they had to be broken before they could be built anew as Marines.

They called him Pretty Boy and Richie Rich. But he was a little more of a problem than they'd anticipated. On their way to their first day in barracks, a big drill sergeant called him out of ranks—"You march like a fuckin' girl"—and made him do fifty push-ups, which he did without breaking a sweat. Then the sergeant sat on his back and said, "Fifty more." He did these with no obvious effort.

So the first night, the drill sergeant organized a "blanket party" for the annoying shitbird. He got three more big sergeants and three big corporals to throw a blanket over the sleeping Jimmy and beat some respect into him.