Find the Changeling

by Gregory Benford

  “You must hide here for a while,” he murmured to the dog. Scorpio whimpered a bit, probably with fatigue, and curled up on the bed. Kish stepped aside and a woman entered the cramped room. She carried a bowl of ground meat that reeked of decay.

  “Is that food?” Skallon said sharply.

  “Yes. Good meat. Have him try it” Kish poked a finger in the woman’s back. She had stopped short in the doorway when she saw Scorpio.

  “It is all right,” Kish said softly to her. She wrinkled her brow and put the bowl on the bed beside Scorpio.

  “It stinks,” Skallon said. If the dog got itself poisoned here because of his neglect…and with Fain gone …

  “It is fresh.” the woman said softly.

  ‘The animal was slaughtered only this morning,” Kish said reassuringly.

  “Slaughtered?” Skallon realized that this meat was from a living thing that had walked around, foraged for its own food. The reddish mass wasn’t a slice from a protein gob. Incredible. Would it make Scorpio sick?

  The dog sniffed, licked, tasted. “Smell.” It ate a bit. “Good. Though.” Soon it was placidly eating.

  When they returned to Kish’s narrow “office,” which had no desk or writing slate visible, the big man nodded toward the slender woman. “I am rude. My wife. She knows of your, ah, work. We shall endeavor to make you comfortable while you are here on your important mission. We can assure you of every help in finding information for—”

  “Yes, yes, a nullaha thanks.” Skallon turned to the woman. “You are?”

  “Joane.” Her voice came from deep in her throat, husky and yet soft. She was not pretty. Her nose hooked down at the tip and the shadow from the overhead lamp made it seem longer still. Her mouth was not wide, but the lips flared out at the middle to give an impression of sensuality. Their red fullness tapered down to a slight upward curl at the ends, a perpetual half-smile that was framed by small wrinkles at the corners. Something about the woman caught Skallon’s attention, even though Kish was gesturing him to a seat> and to cover his hesitation he said, “You, you know I am …”

  “From Earth,” she murmured. “Of course. My husband has expected someone. We were told to be prepared. The Earth Consul sent word the day he departed.”

  “You will find we are steadfast,” Kish said earnestly. He flicked a small insect from a chair and gestured for Skallon to sit.

  “Your file says you were a trader,” he said, easing himself into the broad Alvean chair.

  “I found it unsuited to my tastes.” Kish smiled. “Joane, please bring wooded ale. Our friend seems pale.”

  “My makeup probably isn’t quite right,” Skallon said, watching her leave. “Your ‘tastes,’ eh? Meaning you failed at it?”

  “In a manner of speaking. You understand, I am sure. What was I to do?” He spread his hands. “Your Consul required information in those last days, yet he could not convey money to me without causing suspicion to fall upon us. No Earthman could venture into the streets in those dark days.” He glanced at Skallon. “Nor can one now.”

  “Things are that bad.”

  “Yes. But the Consul must have told his superiors.”

  “He did. His reports were discounted somewhat.”

  “Why?”

  “Isolated officials play up their troubles. It makes them look good.”

  “An odd practice. You place men here to observe. Then you do not believe what they tell you.”

  Skallon smiled. “It’s the way they play the game. Don’t ask me to justify it.”

  “But it is not a game.”

  “Played at more than ten parsecs distance? It’s hard to treat it otherwise.”

  “But the overlight cruisers can reach us in weeks of ship time. That must be how you came.”

  “Yes. They can send a few men like us, sure. Or an equivalent mass. But the important stuff—military hardware, raw materials, exports—even Earth can’t afford to boost those at faster than light”

  “I see. I had hoped …”

  Skallon leaned forward, elbows on knees, and peered intently at the fat man. It was hard to read the expression on a face wreathed in rolls of fat. Maybe the best idea was to watch the eyes, which seemed quick and glittering in a sea of brown. “You thought we’d come storming in here and sew things up?”

  “Well, I had thought idly…” Kish made a small gesture with his fingers, spreading them to indicate that what he said was of no moment.

  “Send a huge bioadaptant team? Stop the plagues? Tailor some cures? I’d like to,” Skallon said with sudden intentness. “Believe me, I would. But there isn’t the justification, not in Earthside’s opinion.”

  “And by the time ramscoops could reach us…”

  “Yes. Decades. And no crew would sign on for such a long voyage—they’d go crazy.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “To maintain order.”

  “Things here are orderly.”

  “They won’t be for long.”

  And so Skallon told Kish about the Changeling. Word had filtered through the interstellar radio links, but Kish had no concept of how adroitly a Changeling could imitate any human being, of either sex. Kish could not possibly have known—because Earth kept the fact concealed—that the Changeling planet had begun a shift to the offensive. They were slipping into selected colony worlds, acting as apparently random saboteurs, stirring up chaos for its own sake. Five years ago, Changelings were caught on Revolium, a waterworld, and shipped directly Earthside by over-light cruiser. They cracked one, eventually, into fragments of a personality. At the core was a psychotic desire for disruption. A religion of sorts, lusting for the fiery fruits of chaos. The Changeling culture believed that only by bringing down all man’s orderings could the human race begin to see the universe as it truly was.

  The sociometricians had a theory for the Changelings, of course. They always did. Simply put, the Changelings’ mobile features made them acolytes of change. Their bodies ruled their minds.

  The analysis ignored, of course, that this was precisely the Channeling argument against rigid normal mankind. It didn’t matter. To earth, this threat of anarchy was even more dangerous than simple conquest. The Cooperative Empire was a precarious, fragile linkage; it could not bend far without breaking.

  “So he comes here to purge us of order?” Kish scoffed.

  “He or she, yes. And don’t laugh. Bar us, he’ll do it.”

  “Do what?” Joane appeared in the slightly skewed doorway, carrying a tray. Skallon gave her a condensed version of his tale while she thumped down heavy mugs of brown stuff and clattered out dry-baked vegetable shavings into bowls. Skallon tasted the bits of curling green and liked them. He ate a handful, noticed his throat drying from the salt, and pulled a draught of ale.

  “Awk!”—and he spattered it on the opposite wall, hawking and blowing to clear his mouth of the stinging stuff.

  “What…what’s that??”

  Kish nodded sagely. “None of the Consul’s staff could brook the real ale, either. Lore-strong, this stuff is.”

  “I’ll thank you to give me no more of it,” Skallon said stiffly.

  “Oh, of course not,” Kish said blandly.

  Skallon looked up from wiping his smarting mouth. Did he see a flicker of malice on that face? A tremor of a smile at this smug Earthman and his starships, who couldn’t swallow a man’s brew?

  Skallon grimaced and sat down again.

  8

  An hour later Skallon lay on his bed and watched the last blue fingers of light seep out of the night sky. He had begged off further talk with Kish and Joane, at least for the moment, because he was not sure exactly how much he should give away. Fain would not like it if a native found out too much of their operations.

  But now that he was here in a room, alone, he was bored. His meditation had taken twenty minutes and left him refreshed. He knew he could not sleep this early. Should he go upstairs and try Kish’s real ale again? Not that he could tr
uly blame Kish for a small gesture of self-assertion. Skallon was, after all, just another damned Earthman. He could certainly see the logic of an Alvean’s dislike of Earth. Alvean art and culture were saturated with it; elementary psychosocial analysis showed that.

  And as far as Skallon was concerned, the Alveans had a case. Alvea wasn’t a colony, no. Times were more subtle than that. What began as an effort to conform humans to Alvea had now become a handy economic tool. Military dominance by the Consortium across the stars was impossible, of course, unless you were willing to erase your opponent and ruin a planet. But why use ham-fisted weaponry when subtle forms of obligation were available? Alvea needed Earth-based bioengineering to correct genetic drift and ward off the worst effects of the native Alvean biochemistry. Only Earth had the techniques and vast technology to keep the Alveans adapting to this planet. Genetic stabilization was a necessity for each new generation, a cellular consummation devoutly to be wished. In return, Earth got rare minerals by robot ramscoop ships that flew below light speed. A cozy-Something rattled in the wall next to his ear.

  Skallon jerked upright and switched on the dim gas light. The wall was moving. More precisely, the wallpaper was bulging and pulsing with life.

  A flap of wallpaper had parted from the thin wall several centimeters higher up. Skallon pulled it back. Small black bugs showered down and scattered across his bed. There was a seething mass of them farther down; their frantic scrabblings were what he had heard.

  Skallon pulled away in disgust. But in a way the sight fascinated him. Insects had been strictly controlled on Earth long ago. None appeared in the barracks or dormitories. He took a small flashlight out of his pack and pointed it down the inside of the wallpaper. Wherever the beam struck, the six-legged creatures scrambled to get away.

  Well, that was some relief. All he had to do was sleep with the gas light on.

  Skallon snorted. He would have to get a better room. But for the moment a restless urge filled him, and he didn’t want to talk to Kish again. He had studied Alvea for years, and here he was lying around in a rotten, fetid hotel room when he could be out, seeing Kalic.

  Madness, or at least stupidity. Fain would be here soon and then Skallon’s time would be controlled. Even worse, Fain might well have killed the Changeling by now. A pickup drone could be on its way down from orbit.

  Skallon hesitated a moment. Then he tucked away the flashlight and began to put on his Doubluth robes.

  Four hours later, Skallon drifted back toward Maraban Lane and the Battachran Hotel, shuffling along on tired feet, itchy and aching from the Doubluth robes and the Alvean disguise, yet still reluctant to let go of the city and retire for the night. He had seen a lot. The delicate pinnacles of the holy centers probed the cloud-speckled sky behind him, signifying the city center; he had climbed all the way to the top, for the sprawling, smoke-shrouded nighttime view. Now the pinnacles seemed dignified and remote, as though made of something more than the rough-cut rock of a laser worker.

  He had spent a strange, haunting hour in a ceremonial field, watching a cremation. They placed the old, withered man securely on the pyre, and bound the arms. Skallon soon learned why. As the wood popped and smoked, the heat made muscles contract and the man’s legs began kicking. The body wriggled as songs spun upward around it. Then the belly exploded. The bang was startling even fifty meters away, where Skallon stood. It came at the exact peak of the song cycle, though he could not understand how the mourners could possibly have timed the effect.

  Death was a common theme in Kalic’s streets. Frail women nodded in their wicker chairs, slipping into the long unconsciousness. Men tottered along sidewalks, one hand braced for support against the buildings, loose ropes of flesh hanging from them when their robes brushed aside; they were losing body weight rapidly. An automatic defense against some diseases. The sicknesses were so new they had no names. The older ones—Rattling, Watereyes, Clenching Rot, Breathstealer—Earthmen had cured, Skallon had read about. For these strange plagues he could do nothing.

  But the people clearly thought Earth could help. A man in a cramped alehouse told him in rasping whispers of a special Earthside hospital, reportedly operating outside the city, where the diseases were being cured. Another cursed and pulled a gleaming knife, spitting out a tale of what he would do to any Earthers who showed themselves in Kalic again. His words met assent around the room. For the first time Skallon felt genuine fear that someone would notice a small wrong inflection in his speech or an error in his Doubluth robes, and find him out. He muttered an excuse and left, nearly tripping on his robes, and stumbled into the welcoming darkness of the city streets.

  In fact, he very nearly gave himself away on the street outside by tripping over his own feet. All his life he had walked over the reassuring flat surfaces of Earth, where everything was floored. Even the farms, where he spent some vacations, were beaten into planes and flats by centuries of rolling farm machinery. But here in Kalic no street lacked potholes, few had well-defined curbs. An intersection of two streets would allow a little space for a grassy patch. In the muted shadows these caught at Skallon’s feet; he had to learn to look down and navigate. Walking tired him. A block from the Battachran Hotel he decided to stop and rest a moment in a temple.

  A ruined gate, its hinges squeaking in a brush of wind, gave onto a courtyard. A round ablution tank swirled with stream water and hissed as bubbles rose in it. The shadowed courtyard of broken slabs caught light from an alehouse farther down the street. He sat and stared up at three ribbed arches that seemed tired themselves, one sagging a bit more than the others. A hanging lamp glowed blue and Alvea’s smaller moon, pocked and ruddy, rose over the temple’s creamy frieze. The moons iron oxides contrasted well, to Skallon’s eye, with the yellowing ninety-nine Names of the One inscribed on the frieze. He read off a few of the Names to himself, unconsciously falling into the rhythm of the hollow drumming that came from a street away, disturbed at times by shouts of dancing. As he did so one of the ivory-white pillars of the temple moved. Then another rippled in the wan light. Joane stepped out of the temple and into the wan pink moonlight. She was looking to the left and did not see him.

  “Joane.”

  “Oh! You startled me. You are the…”

  “Yes. Don’t say the word. Is there anyone else here?”

  “No. No, I do not think so. But you should not be here.”

  “Why?”

  “I…well, one must remove shoes and all jewelry before entering a temple.”

  “I did. See?”

  “Oh. I am sorry. I thought you would not know this.”

  “I know more than that small fact.”

  “Yes, you must, to have such a fine accent. Most Earthers did not trouble themselves. Still, it is unusual for an Earther to bother with a ceremony, even if he knows it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Consider. You thought there was no one in the temple. So did I. If you had kept your shoes and ornaments no one would have been here to see, in any case.”

  “The God of the ninety-nine Names would be here.”

  She looked at him closely, surprised. “So It would. A nice phrase, that. I shall remember it.”

  “Isn’t the Naming the whole purpose of this shrine?”

  Joane laughed, a liquid tinkling sound. “For me the purpose is rest.”

  “Why not relax at home?”

  “I wish to be alone at times.”

  “I am sorrowed that I disturbed you.” He stepped back into a well of shadow, as if to go.

  “No no. Stay. I am quite finished here in any case. And if you accompany me to the hotel it will please my husband.”

  Skallon sat upon a marbled banister. “How?”

  “He does not wish me to go out in darkness alone. He says the streets are becoming dangerous. Of course he is right. My sister was attacked some days ago, at sunset. They took her market basket and two days’ food.”

  “Plague victims?”

  “Most pro
bable. But if I return with a reliable escort such as yourself, my husband will not mind. Indeed, he would be honored.”

  “I see.” Skallon nodded. Neither of them made a move to rise and go back to the hotel. Joane crossed her palms. “Though I am not sure how reliable I might be,” he said to fill the silence.

  “But you are a special man. Someone worthy of sending across the stars/’

  “I’m not sure street fighting was what I was selected for.”

  “I do not doubt you could do so.”

  “Oh, probably.” He shifted his weight and looked up at the pink moon, now high above the frieze. ‘They increased my military training several months back. Somebody clearly had something like this in mind, I could tell that. My special asset is my academic work.”

  “Aca—?”

  “Is that the right pronunciation? Scholarly. Well, not exactly that. I studied Alvea.”

  “Out of concern for us?”

  “Ah, not precisely. Earth selects a certain fraction of the population to study in certain fields. So they’ll have someone always on hand who knows background. Several people for each planet.”

  “For diplomacy?”

  “Partially.” Skallon wondered how he was going to get this across. “As a reserve, I suppose. Here, for instance, all the Consul’s staff is now barred from Alvea.”

  “I heard they were accused of dishonesty.”

  “Um. Yes.” He decided to sidestep the point. “So Earth looked into its reserve pool, for this job. They needed someone fast.”

  “And you were most qualified.”

  “Well, the psycher noted that I wasn’t the most aggressive in the field training. Lacked confidence, they said. But when they discussed it with me, they called it cautious judgment’ Meaning they didn’t mind if I was that way.”

  “I see,” Joane said, “your superiors required discretion.”

  “Ha! They want me to keep out of the way and let Fain transact his business.”