Find the Changeling

by Gregory Benford

  “Fain’s kind of sour on this approach. Anything new…”

  ‘The time for the Central Assembly has been advanced, they say.”

  “It’s not due for five days.”

  “It comes this afternoon.”

  “Oh.” Skallon nodded rapidly. “Any reason why?”

  “Unease, they whisper in the markets. Disruption. The plagues whittle away at our congruence.”

  “Um. Maybe so.”

  “What else?”

  “The Changeling,” Skallon said slowly. “The more centralized power and decision-making becomes, the easier it is to disrupt.”

  “By disguising himself as…?”

  “Anyone he likes.”

  Skallon crossed the square again. Ahead of him a woman whimpered, cried out, staggered, fell. A knot of men nearby looked at her sprawled body for a long moment and then began edging away. Skallon knelt and studied her glassy face. He tested for Vertil; the plate clouded pink.

  When he told Fain the older man grimaced. “So he’s using Vertil still. Must have a lot of it. While we’ve been eating dust he’s been scooting up through the Alvean hierarchy.”

  Skallon hesitated to tell him about the Central Assembly, and then hit upon the right approach.

  ‘This meeting is different. It’s more important, all castes are present. So we can get in. Doubluths send delegates.”

  “And they all know each other. We’ll stick out,” Fain said sourly.

  “Not for a while. Doubluths are scattered. Representatives come from several outlying districts. We can squeeze in.”

  “Um. Late afternoon?” Skallon nodded. “All right We’ll do it. There doesn’t seem much else we can try.” Fain petted Scorpio and said, “Help me get him into that damned cart. We’ll have to wheel him back to that stinkhole of a hotel.”

  “Good, good.” Skallon draped a cloak over Scorpio and managed to block the dog from view as they made him jump up into the crude wooden cart. T don’t think I can go back with you, though.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Danon and I are going to filter through the central section near the Great Hall. We need to know more about the timing of the Assembly.”

  “Um. I’m not hauling Scorpio back by myself.”

  “Well, all right, I’ll—”

  “Forget it.” Fain smiled. “Come here!” he called to a passing man. The man was a hot brownnut seller and, thinking he had made a sale, scurried over on his good leg. “Nuts. Two,” Fain murmured, breathing directly in the man’s wrinkled face.

  “You’re—” Skallon began.

  “Quiet.” Fain waved him away. The mans eyes glazed over after a moment and his knees sagged. “Stand!” Fain ordered in his rough Alvean accent.

  The man staggered, as though drowsy, but remained erect. No one in the busy square seemed to have noticed.

  ‘That is an unjustifiable risk.” Skallon whispered fiercely. “You shouldn’t even be prepped on Vertil.”

  Fain smiled without humor and shrugged off Skallon’s intent stare. “It’s a reasonable solution, right? We’ve got to split up, you said that yourself. So I arrange a little extra help. To pull that damned cart.”

  Fain pushed the man toward the cart. “Pick up the braces.” He turned back to Skallon, the wind billowing his tentlike Doubluth robes. “The Changeling isn’t the only one who can use this stuff. It’s a tool, Skallon. Remember that.”

  4

  Darkness swarms on the horizon. The blue frosted light of the fierce star seeps through clouds. It scatters among the brown-crusted stones of the houses, finds the Changeling scurrying like an Alvean through throngs, crowds, packed streets. It loves the odd song of these people, senses their slow rhythm of careworn pain. It rounds a corner, keeping well away from Fain. They flutter in the distance as it moves forward and back, always beyond reach. This is the Dance, the Art, this merciless murder of minutes, as time layers forces against the Norms. There is time in these masses of swollen faces, time to smell the aroma of the thin Alvean life. To lick of it. To spin amid its grinding logic. And yet always—as the Hotel looms—to focus on the men ahead, their thick reason, their brimming brains filled with the Lie. It has been to the Hotel before, has seeped in through cracks and half-opened windows, rubbed the flaking walls, felt what must happen here. The weave of Alvean and Earther is complex and worthy of tasting. Shall the Changeling take one of them? Shall it make an entrance, slip lightly into their small Dance? Yes. The idea rises and at once is true: yes. They are bags of decaying meat, teeth shiny, skin flecked with vast pores, a sheen of grease coating them, food wedged between teeth, worn with bruises and sores and calluses. They ooze. They stink. It loves them, wants to be them, must: have what world they know and can share. But which? The choice must extend the Dance, make it full and rich and long. But which shall he take? It walks the nearby streets, sucking in life, and thinking. Yes. But which?

  5

  They moved through the scattered stalls and gaudy, aged decorations of the Fest. The streets were laid out in the usual utilitarian grid, imposing a monotony on Kalic that the inhabitants seemed forever warring against. At each rectilinear intersection a small patch of flowering bushes formed the focus of streamers, filmy and thick with script writing. Each streamer anchored on a building, frequently in the mouths of yawning animal statuettes, gargoyles sporting strange wings, claws, human breasts, even ancient eye spectacles and crutches. Skallon could not puzzle out these weird beasts and when he asked Danon, the boy shrugged. “The ancients left them,” he said simply, as though that explained everything. “The early laser craftsmen?”

  “No.” Beneath his hood Danon screwed up his eyes toward the high pinnacles of an especially ornate building, heavily crusted with the grinning animals. Some looked very nearly like men. “The work is too smooth for that. Only a master can carve a scalloped curve with a laser. No, that is hand work.”

  “But surely laser buffers are common on Alvea.”

  “Oh. Uh, I don’t verstet the term.”

  “A small rotating disc. On one face are fixed tiny carbon dioxide lasers. Use it like a brush, just above the working surface. The many beams blend together. The more you press, the more stone ablates away.”

  “I see. Yes, I believe the carpenters …”

  “The jalantakii?”

  “Yes, yes. I have heard them talk about such crafts.”

  “They do this work still?”

  “They, they must Perhaps you do not understand…”

  “Oh, I do,” Skallon hastened to reassure the boy. Beneath Danon’s cowl his expression, half-shadowed, was difficult to read. “I understand the unique roles on Alvea.”

  “Earthers never seem to…”

  “Well, they are ignorant. Even Earthers are often stupid,” Skallon said expansively, to show he regarded the issue as a laughing matter.

  “We have noticed.”

  “In our own ancient days—almost prehistoria—some societies on Earth believed as you do. That individuals must live their lives in certain well-specified ways. That a man born as a tailor should die as a tailor.”

  “Tey lore?”

  “A maker of robes. Bulindaharin. There, that’s a robe shop on the corner.”

  Danon studied the cramped little store front, rich with displayed fabrics, as though he had just realized its function. “My father—Kish, I mean-has not told me of these.”

  “No need to. You’re not slaves to an immense mass of cultural data, the way we are. That’s your secret strength.” Skallon felt a certain satisfying pride at being able to tell a native Alvean something of his home world. But then, a mere boy would not be terribly sophisticated, particularly in an information-poor sociometric as this.

  “All lives come to all men at some time,” Danon said, with the tone of someone reciting chapter and verse.

  “The Twelfth Assertive, right?” Skallon beckoned Danon toward an open-air cafe, half-deserted, where men and women lounged and sipped drin
ks beneath the noonday sun. “I think I know them pretty well. Let’s have something.”

  Skallon plopped down awkwardly in a chair at the patio edge. Danon stopped, looked around, shuffled his feet to and fro.

  “Come on, sit.”

  “I would rather not.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, perhaps for you … But I am not of your caste.”

  “I don’t have a caste. Oh, I see-Doubluth, you mean? What does that matter?”

  ‘This is not the place appropriate for me, a server.”

  “Oh, oh, I see,” Skallon said in a suddenly hushed voice. “Where should we be?”

  “Over there.” Danon gestured unobstrusively—so as not to appear to order about a Doubluth, Skallon realized—at a smaller area nearby. The tables and seats were noticeably different, smaller and made of old plankings. It was also nearer the banging kitchen doors.

  Once seated, Skallon let Danon order for them—a correct gesture, he remembered from his faxes—and soon was sipping a greenish bowl of mild, frosted syrup. Banks of skeleton fronds clattered high over their heads. The street nearby was a steadily growing surge of people and small steam carts. The exodus homeward for the long afternoon had begun. Kalic would sort itself, for the intense hours of the day, into hearthside groups. After the midday they would return to a caste grouping, for laboring. To Earthers this always seemed an unnecessary luxury and a dreadful waste of time. Skallon understood the social reasons for it, but even to him the logic appeared a bit thin. Centuries ago, genetic alterations made Alveans immune to the high ultraviolet flux. So why keep the anachronism of the midday refuge-seeking?

  “Is anything in this crowd—” he swept a hand toward the murmuring street traffic “—unusual?”

  “If you mean, would the Changeling stand out…no.” Danon drank his syrup eagerly, not looking up. “I think we will learn little in the streets now.”

  Skallon thought, That’s for me to decide, and then realized the boy was merely trying to be helpful. “Why did you recommend we do this after leaving the square, then?”

  Danon peered at him impassively. “It kept us away from that…creature. And from…”

  Skallon laughed. “And Fain?” He sucked noisily and heartily at his syrup, and then, recalling that on Alvea this was a gesture of contempt for the cuisine, looked around guiltily. No one seemed to have noticed. Thick-necked Alveans continued their low mutter of conversation. “You don’t like the dog or its master, eh?”

  “It is a strange one.”

  “You mean Fain, or Scorpio?” Skallon asked merrily.

  Danon smiled. “The croaking animal. Is it truly the only way to find this other kind of man?”

  “No, not really. But the dog noses into things, can move around, and doesn’t need repairs. We’ve got lots of gear that will ferret out a Changeling. But it’s heavy. On an operation like this, carrying everything on our backs, Scorpio is handy. You know, Scorpio wouldn’t seem so alien if you’d grown up with dogs. The Alvean colonizers decided dogs were unholy, according to what I read. They’re really quite nice, though.”

  “Fain likes the…animal?”

  “Sure. Who else can he afford to like?”

  “I find that difficult to believe.”

  “It’s true. Dogs are a great luxury item on Earth. Fain gets one for free—it’s walking, talking equipment. And they’ve been through a lot, killed a number of Changelings together. If men and dogs had still been working together when the Alvean settlers left Earth—herding, hunting, things like that—maybe the ancient working stocks of dogs would’ve come to Alvea.”

  “I am glad they did not.”

  “Um.” Skallon mused for a moment, reflecting that he had a lingering respect for Scorpio. Perhaps that feeling alone marked him as, basically, an eternal Earther. He could never shake free of his origins.

  6

  Fain was in a sour mood when Skallon returned to the Battachran Hotel. Skallon had left Danon at a nearby government office to eavesdrop on conversations. It seemed a pointless exercise. The Changeling was subtle, and surely would not cause a great stir before revealing its plans. But Danon was enthusiastic and leaving the boy where something might conceivably happen gave Skallon something to report to Fain.

  Not that it did any good. Fain looked at Skallon for a long moment, slitting his eyes slightly so that crow’s feet showed far back into his temples. ‘The kid’s useless, Skallon.”

  “Perhaps. But we need a guide. He’s small. He won’t be noticed. Until Alveans formally enter their caste-roles they are nothing.”

  “How about Kish?”

  Skallon snorted. “I thought we agreed he’s unreliable. No judgment. And as I was saying, he’s in a formal caste-role. As a server, an innkeeper, he cannot even approach some other castes. Not now, in a holy time.”

  “Uh huh.” Fain lost interest. “Where’s Scorpio?”

  “Asleep.”

  “He’s been sleeping most of the time since we got here.”

  Fain’s head snapped up, rigid. He scowled at Skallon. “He’s not a normal dog. Not one of those puffy little doll dogs for old ladies with money to waste.”

  “I know, but—”

  “Scorpio’s got to strain every sense he has to tell a Changeling. Changeling skin fluids smell nearly the same as humans. We—”

  “I agree. Let him sleep. We’ll need him at the Great Hall this afternoon. Look—” he tried to find another subject “—come on and have lunch.”

  “That glop? I’ll eat protein packs.”

  “Okay.”

  Skallon walked around the hotel checking all the entrances and exits. It was an elementary precaution, since he had become disoriented in the night before, arriving late and tired. The Battachran was an old, rambling assembly of stone and wood, some parts seemingly balanced precariously on crumbling foundations. The lighter gravity made architecture simpler, more airy and fluid. He skirted around an immense fetid trash heap at the back. Evidently garbage collection occurred infrequently, or maybe never.

  Flies lifted as a swarm from the tangled waste and moved off like a buzzing dust cloud. The amber fog trailed behind a small party of mourners eating their ritual fruit, a kind of blue pomegranate. The bier was of oily wood, the corpse wrapped in a dusky rag. The party marched slowly across the broken ground behind the Battachran, taking their time. One occasionally banged a deep bass gong. On a distant hill loomed the Alvean burial markers, triangles tilted this way and that in hummocky fields.

  “Come. Rest.”

  He turned. Joane stood beside him, holding a half-filled pail of slops.

  “Here, let me—” Before he could move she pitched the contents onto the heap. She smiled and beckoned him inside.

  The sudden change from Alvea’s sunlight to the un-lighted corridors blinded him momentarily. She took his hand—a silken feel, cool—and led him a few steps. Then a door opened and he blinked.

  It was the round, high-ceilinged Communal he had seen that morning. Fully twenty people crowded around the small tables, eating and talking at once. Oil lamps flickered their light over swarthy, lined faces. Each man or woman seemed a study in character, so different were each of them. On Earth an unblemished, smooth face was the ideal. Thanks to cosmetic treatments, most people attained it for nearly all their lives. Women of twenty and sixty were often indistinguishable. Joane tugged at his hand and when he looked at her, her beauty seemed all the more attractive because he knew that in time it would erode and wither and vanish.

  It was the traditional Communal. For those who did not purchase a meal from the hotel the room had an array of cooking pots, toasting forks, clinker coal fires in small black vessels. The work of tending fires, sweeping and clearing was done by the hotel, but otherwise there was no supervision. In ancient times access to a Communal meant life itself, shelter from the spitting star. Joane led him to a table and sat, saying, “I must oversee the kitchen labor, but we can talk betweentimes. Lunch, then?” Skallon n
odded. “Your preference?”

  He described an Alvean meal, from memory. She frowned at one or two dishes and remarked that they were very old, but she would see. She left him for a moment and Skallon eavesdropped on conversations nearby. A knot of women brooded over a relative, driven to distraction and poverty by the plagues, who was reduced to eating damaged vegetables and wore newspapers for underclothes and made trousers from a grain sack, giving up his robes.

  Skallon noticed a chirruping note and found its source: a songbird in a tiny plastic cage, blind. He remembered that Kalic had been extensively mined some centuries ago until men discovered the region was riddled with vast domes of poison gas. Even now occasional seams buckled and split and the Communals, buried deep, were first affected. The bird was sensitive and would die before the people lost consciousness.

  Alvea seemed in some ways like Earth, and in others vastly different. There were no crust deposits left to gobble on Earth; Skallon was sure even a deadly gas would’ve been turned to some use on Earth by now.

  Kish appeared, slapping patrons on the shoulder and making ritual hand gestures of welcome. Kish greeted Skallon without any extra show and then abruptly moved away as Joane approached. “The first ladling,” she said and set a plate of ruddy, spiced meat before him.

  “Why did Kish leave?”

  “He leaves me to my life,” she murmured simply, and sat. “You don’t feel constraint?”

  “How?”

  “Your role. Granted, you’re married to an innkeeper. But you’re not pinned to that for life.”

  “That is my station.”

  “Until death?” Skallon looked up from cutting the meat, which was unexpectedly thick and heavy. “You believe you will…” he rummaged for the right phrase. “…Be everything, everyone, eventually?”

  “It is proven.”

  “Gommerset’s Four Hundred.”

  “Yes, and research since then. Research conducted here on Alvea. But surely you know and understand this. Otherwise you would not sense Alvea as you do.”