Find the Changeling

by Gregory Benford

  “Ah. Yes.” Skallon didn’t know how to tell her that he knew it all, but nobody on Earth any longer believed it. “You partake of the, ah, absolute monism.”

  “We prefer to call it, so Earthers will understand, a nondualism.”

  “Which implies something like, well, a cyclic universe.”

  “So it does. Perhaps.” She smiled. ‘That will be understood later.”

  Skallon made a show of digging into his meat. A sauce arrived and he heaped it on; it tasted vaguely of grannet nuts. He didn’t want to tell Joane that Gommerset’s data had been invalidated over five hundred years ago.

  The famous Four Hundred were apparently well-verified cases of hypnotic recall. Under ordinary hypnosis, they recalled details of past lives in uncanny detail. Wherever the details could be checked, they proved valid. There were ship builders for Ferdinand and Isabella, farmers in old East Anglia, midwives from the Rome of Claudius. And some subjects had not one recalled life, but many. Historians nailed down one case with twenty-seven checked identities.

  When Gommerset published his studies, religious revivals of eveiy shade swept Earth. Reincarnation seemed to be a simple, hard fact.

  “The subtle body passes on,” Joane said lightly, as though she were making simple social conversation. “We migrate to another transitory tenement.”

  “We call that—those ideas—the Nondualistic Phase,” Skallon muttered, chewing. He felt he had to say something. But he couldn’t lie to her.

  “Oh?” Polite interest.

  “Our intellectual historians call it that. It fits with the cyclic repeating model of Earth history. Gommerset—well, not him, but the response to his data-was a product of the collapse in the twenty-first century.”

  “Alvea is its flowering,” she said smoothly.

  “Um. So it is. The ramscoop ships spread Gommersetism before it was really checked. That was what really killed it, too—on Earth, I mean.”

  ‘‘No one believes there?”

  Skallon shook his head. “Without the ramscoops—or the faster-than-light transports, later—the Nondualistic Phase would’ve won out. Just the way it did in prehistoria—I mean, the really ancient societies of Earth. Most of Asia, that area…it’s a continent,” he added, realizing that she knew nothing of Earth’s geography. ‘Those nations stopped expanding, lost momentum, turned inward. Nondualistic sociometric is fine for that-it lacks the tension between two poles, so nothing happens.”

  “Nothing has to happen, my friend.” She put her hand over his. Her fingers were cool.

  “But things do. Events have their own dynamics. Unless Earth had gotten the ramscoops, we would’ve settled down to gradual poverty, no resources, the whole mess,” he said earnestly, jabbing the air with a forefinger.

  “You have no resources now.”

  “Yes, but we can get them. From you, from the other worlds. The Cooperative Empire concept is a whole new era in human history. A Nondualistic Earth couldn’t provide the advanced technology, the transport, the communication, the sociometric calculations and theory.”

  T wonder if we need them.”

  “Of course you do. Ramscoops are available to everyone, you have two in orbit now for loading. But they’re too slow to knit together the Cooperative Empire. There would be no true cross-cultural contacts without the faster than light ships. Alvea would be in a cultural dead end.” He didn’t add that it seemed to him Alvea was very nearly stagnant anyway. That was probably a passing effect, due to the plagues.

  “The ships destroyed your faith.”

  “No, the data did. Nobody could duplicate Gommerset’s results.”

  “Even using his Four Hundred?”

  “Well, those were obviously jigged-up. Somebody’d been tampering with their frontal lobes, for sure.”

  “Gommerset?”

  “Don’t know. He was dead by the time a complete analysis could be done.”

  “It is simpler to slander a dead man.”

  “Well, look. I don’t want to make a big point about this.”

  “You do not want to believe. Earth does not want to believe.”

  “Ah…” This time it was Skallon who reached out and took her hand. “Believe, not believe—hell, I don’t care!’

  “I think you do.”

  “If I die and come back in some other job, as an agrimech or something, fine. Nothing I can do about it. Same if I just wink out, pffffft. So I don’t worry.”

  “Everyone thinks of these things. Everyone yearns.”

  “I don’t yearn to return in every station of life. But that’s what you think, isn’t it? Since you’ll have an infinite number—all right, a large number—of lives, why bother to change your social role now?”

  “Our way gives inner calm.”

  “I’d rather have the, the pleasure of new things.” He gazed at her seriously. His head buzzed slightly from the kerrin wine in his food. The room rippled with many intertwined conversations; the air was heady and filled with scents.

  “You need the calming, too. All do.”

  Skallon declined the mellow sweets that were provided for dessert, so they left the Communal early, before the crowd had swelled to its peak. From the muted noise of talking and eating, the crisp snap of the open fire, she led him into the back corridors of the hotel. They passed Fain’s room and Skallon felt an impulse to knock, but suppressed it. He needed rest, and the search in the Great Hall later would require all his alertness.

  Joane opened a rough-cut door for him, into what he at first thought was his room. But it was larger, the windows giving out upon the rear fields. The air in here was fresher than below and it cleared his head.

  She came to him as the door clicked shut. Joane was much smaller than Skallon but she seemed to engulf him, a scent rising between them of a new warm animal heat. He felt all elbows and knees. She murmured words as she kissed his neck; he could not understand them, could not focus on what he was doing.

  Gradually he relaxed. It was not like all the other times, when he had been conscious of each move, each gesture, the implications of what the woman wanted and expected of him. Now, with Joane, all flowed together. Clasps parted, limbs slid smoothly through and around each other. He tipped over, they both fell with dreamlike lightness (the gravity? he thought; but no, it wasn’t that) and coiled each into different forms, figures, enfoldings.

  In a drowsy slowness of time he watched her beneath him, the pink circle of her mouth enclosing him in a deep rhythm that sent waves up into a space between his mind and his heart. Something seemed to ache in him, distantly. A tremor of odd, displaced fear shot through him. He had been with women before, of course, done all these things…but now they seemed to have new resonances deep within him, they struck strange chords. He moved her, opened her, entered. Ah. A thudding rhythm. When he came it was as though a sound burst out of him. He expected to hear it echo in the close room. When he drove deep he felt a constricted explosion and wrenched into it, coming, driving, deep and shuddering. The scented spicy reek of Alvea opened to him, the wash of heaving sound, a silken sheen that spun him down into more recesses of Joane, farther into a measureless darkness that swallowed him up, gasping, and he clawed to a new shore of her, orgasm complete and panting, solidly full, murmuring in her ear, and she whispering in short rasping sibilant sounds to him, words that coaxed him further into a gentle soft rest where he lay, sucking air and eyes lidded, mumbling, dozing, falling into sleep with Joane wrapped in his arms, a blurred center for him to rest upon.

  7

  He awoke, nostrils filled with the heavy musty scent of Joane’s hair. He rolled slightly away from her and sat up. He felt thoroughly rested, though a glance at his watch said they had left the Communal less than an Earth hour before. The motion of sitting up caused a skittering rustle in a corner. Skallon saw two small animals, four-legged, pause and return his inspection, thick meaty tails twitching. Their mean little ferret eyes blazed up at him. They were ratlike, but larger. He wondered if
these creatures would attack. He decided not. Unless they were deranged from disease or hunger, advancing on a man would be suicidal. His logic was rewarded a moment later when the two twitched, glanced sidewise, and vanished in a blur of motion into a hole in the wall that looked impossibly small for them.

  “Hmmmm?” Joane’s eyes fluttered and she was awake.

  “I’ve got to go.”

  “Ummm. Where?”

  “Sniffing out the Changeling.”

  “Oh.”

  In the afternoon sun which streamed through the thick windows Joane seemed strangely light and airy, her skin a pearly luster. She was the same anonymous color as Skallon and Fain; indeed, the. same as everyone on Earth now, after centuries of homogenizing cross-currents in human cultures. The Gommerset believers who had colonized Alvea were primarily from Africa. Skallon had seen a few darker people in the streets, but even in as relatively minor and isolated a corner of the Cooperative Empire as this, all the races had been blended by time. Joane’s black hair was not the racial standard; it showed traces of brownish flecks as she stretched and groaned.

  “It happened to us awfully fast, didn’t it?” Skallon said.

  “Next time we can take longer.”

  “No, I mean … we met only yesterday.”

  “Oh. Well, I gave a clear sign.”

  “At lunch?”

  ‘This morning.”

  “Ah. When you served me breakfast.”

  “Yes. You know Alvea.”

  “So you knew I would take it the correct way.”

  “Of course.” Her voice again had that calm certainty in him that Skallon had sensed the first evening, at the temple. She smiled.

  “It was wonderful.”

  “It was.” She leaned over and kissed him, her breasts swaying. “You are a fine man. I knew that when first we spoke.”

  “I hope I have not…you see, I am not totally wise about your customs … I simply…”

  “You worry about Kish.”

  “Yes.”

  “What he will say. If he should be told. How we do these things.”

  “Yes. All that.”

  “Do not worry about Kish.”

  Skallon thought that she was certainly right. He would be here a few days, maybe a little longer. No need to get knee deep in Alvean entanglements. No point in it at all.

  “You are a Hon in the barnyard.” She kissed him again.

  Skallon smiled. “Maybe. It for sure smells like a barnyard around here.

  “ I will tell you of Kish.

  “ While he got dressed, she did.

  Skallon found Fain on a side porch of the hotel, pacing.

  “Where were you?”

  “Resting.”

  “Not in your room.”

  ‘That’s right.” Skallon didn’t volunteer anymore and Fain didn’t ask. Danon came shuffling onto the porch, scuffing up a film of dust as he chewed on a stalk of some purplish plant. Skallon recognized it as a cooked qantimakas. “Okay, Danon’s here. Let’s go.”

  “You’re on the bounce today, Skallon,” Fain said with surprising bitterness.

  Skallon ignored the tone of the words. “What’s wrong?”

  “We need Scorpio to pick out the Changeling in a crowd. It’ll be impossible, just using our instrument diagnostic packages.”

  “Sure.”

  “Scorpio’s sick.”

  Fain kicked at a porch railing and the wood splintered, cracked, revealed a rotten seam like a brown thread running its entire length.

  “Huh?” He glanced at Danon, who shrugged, a universal gesture. “How?”

  “Eating this crap food. He liked that rotten meat, gobbled it down. Now he’s shat a boxfull of the stuff all over himself.”

  “Oh. Try something from the kit? We’ve got lots of bioreactants. They’re for humans, but some of them—”

  T gave him three. No results.”

  “Well, they take time. The system—”

  “We haven’t got time. The damned Changeling is out there and we sit here, pinned down to this fleabag hotel. Look—” He gestured sweepingly at the bumpy, jumbled street of houses on either side of the hotel. They seemed to crowd together, all odd corners and misaligned walls. Kilometers beyond jutted the pinnacles of Kalic center. They were straight and erect, solid chunks of rock. Clearly more important than this scruffy street. The tallest was the Great Hall. “He’s out there. Probably running the whole damned half-breed planet by now. And we—”

  “Let’s go on without the dog.”

  Fain looked at him blankly. “Impossible.”

  “We can at least identify some suspects. Then Scorpio can nail the right one. Or we can use the instruments.”

  “I don’t like it,” Fain said. He absent-mindedly kicked again at the porch railing, staggering slightly backwards in the bulky Doubluth disguise. ‘Too chancy.” But clearly he was thinking it over.

  “We must go soon,”’ Danon put in. “The Assembly will be—”

  “Look, I think it’s too risky,” Fain said abruptly, ignoring Danon. “The Changeling’s got Vertil. You know what that means? We’ve lost every advantage we had, plus Scorpio.”

  ‘The instruments—”

  “Frange the instruments. Take too long to set up. Can be thrown off by anything, even the smell of cooking food. A Changeling will be klicks away by the time you’ve got everything plugged in.”

  “Not if one of us is holding a gun to his head.”

  ‘If it lets you, you mean. It’s got Vertil, remember? It can use Alveans against us. Hell, it’s even worse than that. It can interrogate an Alvean under the Vertil, pick up all the information it needs—then take the Alvean’s place. That’s the only trouble Changelings had on Earth—they didn’t know what their assumed identities were supposed to do, how they acted.”

  “Okay, it’s tough. But we’ve got to do it.”

  “Yeah,” Fain said sullenly. He turned and looked at Kalic.

  Fain’s outburst had shaken Skallon more than he wanted to show. Probably it was the dog’s falling sick; anyway, something had gotten under Fain’s skin. For the first time Skallon realized how hopelessly outclassed they were in this operation. Two men, obviously unsuited for working together,. against a Changeling. Earth must have been stupid to try this maneuver. Skallon knew it was a desperation move, that they’d probably fail and be picked up again, but even so, things hadn’t looked this bad when they’d landed.

  …Fail and be picked up…It suddenly struck Skallon that, if they didn’t get to the Changeling in time and Alvea disintegrated into weary disorder, Earth might cut its losses and not bother to pick them up. Why expend an expensive overlight cruise on two failures?

  But if he and Fain were stuck here, they’d die. They weren’t adapted for Alvea. There were delicate biological adjustments they lacked, and of course, the increased ultraviolet flux. A few years and they would sicken. If they weren’t knifed by anti-Earthers first. And—

  Fain spun around from the railing. “We go. Let’s try it.” Something had been restored in his voice. It had regained its edge of authority.

  “Great.” Skallon motioned to Danon. They went out a side entrance of the hotel, moving swiftly.

  Skallon looked back, hoping to wave good-bye to Joane, but he sighted no familiar face at a window. He had wanted to talk to her more. She was quite sensitive, with that business about serving him breakfast. On Earth a girl would’ve simply given him a tap and a feel, maybe a murmured invitation and her bunk number. Then, next break, they’d meet and undress without a word, and she’d rock herself to a grunting completion, using him as a convenient fleshy ram. Afterward they’d gossip impersonally, perhaps agree to meet and hump again, but just as likely never give each other another passing glance in a corridor. But here on Alvea, a woman served a meal, and that was nothing and everything. Oh Alvea, men and women were not yet highly civilized, neurosis-free animals. He thought again, wistfully, of Joane’s delicate touch as she caressed hi
m. Incredible, that so much had happened to him, that a whole new world lay open before him, in just a matter of two days. He recalled the artful way she had coaxed him on over lunch. It did not occur to him that, when she had served that first breakfast to him, she had also waited on Fain.

  8

  “But this is the best route, the only way of reaching the Great Hall quickly,” said Danon, squirming in Fains tight grasp. “To go another way would require entering those streets frequented by the beasts.”

  Fain understood the meaning of that—he had once accidentally stumbled upon such a street and its thick odor of manure—but still shook his head. Clutching the boy’s arm, he turned to Skallon. “I don’t think it’s wise. There are too many people out today. Anyone could be the Changeling and we’d never know.”

  “So?” said Skallon calmly. “We’re disguised—he won’t recognize us.”

  Fain knew that wasn’t true—after the air base, the Changeling would surely know him again—but that wasn’t why he wanted to avoid these streets. No, the Changeling had nothing to do with it. The reason was simply the mass of people found here, hundreds of them, walking, strolling, standing, talking. In his life, Fain had never endured such a great clot of humanity—pseudo men or otherwise—in such a limited space. It made him uncomfortable, nervous, too easily spooked. He had never liked people coming close to him, and he especially didn’t like Alveans touching him. “There’s got to be another way.”

  Skallon shrugged. “Danon ought to know the city better than we do and—” Skallon peered at the dark yellow sun, dust-cloaked, hugging the horizon “—were already late.”

  “All right.” Seeing no alternative, Fain released the boy, who immediately danced ahead, slipping between the broad wobbling bellies of two approaching Alveans. More slowly, Fain and Skallon followed. The Alveans, nodding slightly, made way for them, but there were others—many, many others, Fain observed—beyond.

  ‘The boy is bright,” Skallon said. “You don’t know what an immense help he’s been to me during my observations of the city. He’s really as quick-witted as most grown men on Earth.”