Find the Changeling

by Gregory Benford

  “Yes, of course. My wife. Yes, of course. Joane, more meat for our guests.”

  Fain turned back into the dining room. As he sat down, Skallon murmured in his ear, “You’ve just violated an important bit of etiquette. An Alvean woman serves no man except her husband.”

  Fain shrugged They already know I’m a savage.”

  The woman appeared with a plate of cooked meat, which she placed in front of Fain. She was alone, so Kish and Danon had apparently gone away by means of some back passage. As he ate, Fain found that he couldn’t take his eyes off Joane. She returned his stare from her place beside the kitchen door with what seemed to be a slight smile. Fain wondered, She looks at me like she knows all about me, but how could that be? The woman was an Alvean. Despite her broad hips, loose breasts, and thick pouting lips, she was a construct, a pseudo-human, a creature designed for life on this alien world.

  And Fain knew that he loathed all people like that.

  With an act of will, he drew his eyes away from the woman and focused on Skallon, who appeared to be half-asleep again. “Look,” he said, “I didn’t ask you down here just to introduce me to the natives. There are certain things I think we ought to discuss even before morning. We have to get our basic strategy clear. Changelings don’t sleep, you know, and they seldom bother to eat. It’s ahead of us already. We can’t afford to fall farther behind.”

  “So what do you suggest?” Skallon tried to appear interested through the obvious barrier of exhaustion.

  Fain glanced at the woman. Was this smart, talking in front of her? Well, she wasn’t the Changeling itself, and they never worked through spies. He had a feeling, even if he sent her away, she would find a means of listening. If the conversation interested her. From her slack demeanor and blank-eyed stare, he guessed that so far it did not.

  ‘To begin with,” Fain said, compromising only by lowering his voice somewhat, “We’ve got to think like a Changeling. Its job here—its only job—is disruption. What it’s going to do is set about that mission in the quickest, simplest, and most direct manner possible. Now you’re the expert on the local situation, but it seems to me that these plagues are by far the best thing it’s got working for it. All the time I was out today, I saw the signs everywhere—Alveans dying, dead, or scared to death of being dead.”

  “And they blame the Earth for it.”

  “Exactly,” Fain said. “So what I’m saying is that the Changeling is going to notice that, too. It’s not like it’s faced here with a hard concrete, permanent state of affairs. Alvea is like a brick wall, with a hollow place hidden somewhere in the middle. Push on all the wrong places and nothing will happen. Find the hollow place and you’ve got a broken wall.”

  “And the plagues are the hollow place?”

  “Sure. Don’t you agree?”

  Skallon nodded. “All of this was discussed back on Earth, but I’ve seen nothing here to make me disagree.”

  “Then I think we ought to follow our original line of attack. We know all the leaders of the planet will soon be gathering here.”

  “I’ve already seen a number of the high castes traveling through the streets. They sometimes use motor vehicles. No one else is permitted to occupy one.”

  “Then that’s where we’ll find the Changeling. In one of those meetings,” Fain said decisively. “He’ll be disguised as high caste.”

  Skallon nodded. “What we have to keep in mind is that he can tap anti-Earth sentiment if he can expose us. In fact, what we have to be careful about is…”

  But Fain wasn’t listening. The woman was leaning against the wall and as he watched she stretched, turning her neck with a slow, lazy grace. A languid, sensuous movement; it reminded him of the two Bateman daughters. The memory of them, and the warm, drifting time he spent, kept returning. He knew this could be a weakness, could disturb his concentration at a crucial time. But another fraction of him knew quite well this hunger for contact, for the exquisite supple sliding of skin next to his; it was a necessary counterbalance to the professional Fain he had made of himself.

  Through the long years of growing up and then of training, Fain had kept his private center, the gift his father had given him. That had enabled him to be the cold, level-headed Fain, a calculating machine with a rock-hard body. When the pressure mounted, Fain could always retreat to the place where the cold, clear truth dwelled. Fain could risk himself in deadly moments precisely because he held death in contempt. His father had given him that: a certainty beyond faith, a simple fact. Over the years he had learned by watching the men around him: ultimately, they would flinch from doing what was smart, because each had a limit, a boundary beyond which he would not put life on the line.

  Fain had no limit. Certainty cleared the vision, made him a fraction better than the others. Death was nothing. Fain knew that the essential core of himself would not die, could not. He would live on.

  Precisely how he knew this was, to Fain, an enduring riddle. His father had told him something, showed him things…the images blurred, ran together, were lost. The doctors said it was the trauma of his fathers death that brought it on. Fain was not so sure. He dimly recalled wandering the streets on the night of his fathers death, walking endlessly through concrete canyons slick and dark with rain. Someone found him as dawn broke above the tall buildings.

  Of that night and the weeks which followed he now carried only tattered memories. He knew he had spent weeks in a psychomatrix center, and that the doctors had worked on him. When he awoke one morning the world seemed different, less fuzzy and disordered; later that day, they told him his recovery was complete. Somehow they had erased the clenching fear and dread he felt whenever he thought of his father. But in its place was the clear certainty, something beyond faith.

  He knew he would not die. Irrational, he knew—or thought he knew. But there it was: absolute faith in his own destiny, his infinite life. Somehow this cold sureness masked whatever his father had done for him. Somehow it connected with the burning man’s eyes, locked in that last hail between father and son, a signal across the abyss. Somehow. But Fain could not unknot the knowledge. In curing him they had sealed in something that, in a strange way, made it possible for him to live. To work.

  He could never discuss this with others. They would not understand that his abiding inner certainty made him what he was. He had tried a few times to explain it, to get it out in halting, awkward sentences. But the tangle inside tripped his tongue, sent him stumbling away from the subject, his face suddenly reddening, and his eyes averted, his throat rasping as the words choked him. So he had learned to carry it inside, a relentless burden. And once Fain had acquired a reputation for being tough, sure, unflinchingly professional, it became even harder. Others began to lean on him. They depended on his lead. What do you think of…? they would say. That’s the tricky part of the operation, give it to Fain. We haven’t got anybody else who can handle it. So in the end, when he saw his safety was threatened by always having to be the pivot point, he quit working in teams. He became a loner. Somehow, then, the balance of things shifted in him. Working alone had its own pleasures and its own costs. It was to escape that burden, not to flee the pall of death that hung over his profession, that Fain wanted the release of women. Their openness. Their acceptance. The warm enclosing musk of them.

  Joane yawned and turned delicately, rising for a moment on her toes the way he had seen Alvean women do. With animal grace she padded softly into the kitchen. Fain watched her go. Skallon talked on, but Fain heard nothing.

  Just before Joane disappeared through the doorway, she turned with a deft movement and met his gaze directly. Her eyes glittered. Then she winked. It came so quickly, and then was gone, that Fain was not perfectly sure it had happened.

  5

  Supple, it moves in lonely splendid isolation through streamers of dank jungle. A shadow, flickering. Soft padding of hooves, a slide of scaly flesh. Reek of salty trickling sweat as it slips through tangled vines, rippling their
stalks in the breathless heat of this new, sticky air. Alien, yes. But nothing was truly strange to it. All forms were a mold. All could be played with. It could ease into the world of the darting greyrat, sample its muzzy universe, echo its thin squeak. It could make its hand into a leaping image of the greyrat. And an instant later, be the warped man who sighted down a long tube at the rat, pinning it with a firebolt, forever. Sing the rasping laugh of temporary victory, of an instant’s vision. Sip of it and breathe it in and then gone, gone, slipping away into new plastic muses. Tasting the lives around, always tasting probing, knowing with zest…

  Two Norms follow. It saw the falling awkward capsule and knows there must be two. Norms from Earth, the worst of all Norms. Weak, fearful, cautious creatures—else why did they love their machines so? Machines were crutches. Men who used them quake at the life of the One.

  Norms breathe out a falsely ordered pattern of lies—and all patterns are lies—and say it is reality. Only the One can know the truly real. Only the One can stand away and say, dancing on the moment, That is firm and true; this is false and elusive. Witness! The Norms, in their fear, never guess at this. Norms lunge in terror away from the uncertain, the beautifully unknowable, the universe of loving flux, where for each embodied eye at each fresh second nothing is ever again the same. By their refusal, Norms fail. Uncertainty is strength, was strength, will be strength all times flowing into One. Change is the constant, words slip free of meaning and the One, who sees this, must emerge the dancing victor. The Norms may follow. But they will never move ahead.

  It loves this jungle. The vaulting plants, the towering crusted grasses. Life runs and darts everywhere. Fountains of buzzing airflowings, scurrying black-ribbed beetles, bounding hoppers, softly pattering rodents. Strange snouts and beaks and clickings of tiny teeth. In the solid sky winds rake at clouds and a huge thin bird wheels past, shattering the serene moment with a shrill barking cry. In the canyon of ferns, the manform pauses to stare, raises a fist in sudden greeting exultation at this raw lovely changing moment. The dancing singing moment, yes. Hail! Fist wriggles, makes four fingers, then six, thumbs knotting into a hard wedge. That is life; life is that—change, divine chaos. Only death itself, the rude redness hovering behind all, is stable and certain, never different, though of course death, too, is illusion.

  It brings death but blesses life. In the face of change, the changeless must perish, for that is their heritage. The Norms must die. The Norms do not know.

  Knowing everything, it plans nothing. The Alvean air base, glimpsed from the air in flight, is a suitable destination. The Vertil, gift from another, is a probable weapon. There are possible maneuvers but no certain tactics. With chaos as a goal, the paths to take are infinite. Through the jungle, it walks sometimes on four legs, sometimes on three, occasionally on two. It slithers, crawls, hops and, when a flowing stream is reached, swims with the swiftness of a fish.

  “I wish to see General Nokavo,” it says, assuming the bright robes and gross fat of the highest bureaucratic caste. The soldier at the gate blinks in the face of such grandeur.

  “Your name, blessed sir?”

  T am—” it thinks, though it does not consider “—Fain.”

  “You will follow me please, blessed Fain.”

  “Aye, you are a faithful fellow.” A name—it has none. No, rather it has born hundreds and will, before the unspoken moment of extinction, bear many more. Fain is a name it has heard. The killer of change. The one who acts in the name of stasis. A contradiction, yes, but so perhaps is the Norm Fain. He is one of those who follow. It knows this again without the need for consideration.

  “Stand still, place your hands upon your head, shut your eyes, do not speak.”

  Alone with General Nokavo, it probes the squat mans mind. Questions dissolve into the air. It learns of the powers of this puny base, its antique weapons, its lazy rhythms. But these limitations are unimportant. The armed Alveans can provide some help, still.

  It orders the General, and he in turn orders his men. Into the copters, and off. Seek the Earthers. They will be here, within this radius. Vector on them. Be clever, be swift. Kill them.

  They will fail, of course. These Alveans are as children compared with Fain.

  The Vertil is working well. The General, however, is growing weak, confused. He blunders while speaking to an underling. Then he weaves groggily. A bad sign.

  Regretfully, but swiftly—justice requires it—the Changeling plucks the weapon from the General’s tight belt. Levels it. Fires.

  The body is simple to hide. The Changeling eats more of the General’s foods, which it finds tucked into a small antechamber. The Alveans have their starchy gruel everywhere, if hunger should strike. Or perhaps it has religious significance. Little matter. It sucks in the mealy repast, happy to add mass and strength to itself.

  It assumes the robes and identity of the dead General. It summons the troops. One battalion it orders to attack. The enemy? The redoubt at the end of the landing strip. They are traitors.

  Yes: The world explodes into gunfire and brassy explosions. Men run and die. Confusion lives.

  High in the tower, it watches the fire and smoke, the flowing blood and changeless death. A gaudy, colorful play. Useful, but not enough. This will work once, perhaps twice, but no more.

  It creaks, and shifts its willing bones. Born in a certain shape, it no longer recalls that form. It is not Fain, Nokavo, anyone. In the forest seen below, the lone figure of a man steathily approaches. Squat, dark, Alvean. Master of disguise, it laughs. So the true Fain has come at last to observe the work of the masters. (But Fain comes alone. It is disturbed by this show of strength.)

  “Make a move—any move—and I will kill you,” says Fain.

  “Aye, sir.” It grins broadly, spittle washing lips, and bows from a broad waist. “The General has intimated your immediate arrival.”

  Fain stands. “Place your hands on your head, turn three times, flap your arms, and make a sound like a bird—a smackwing.”

  Doing as ordered, it feels a flash of hate and thinks, Fain must die. But—no—a second thought: Fain knows death too well—he does not fear it. Fain fears only himself. He must be destroyed, not killed.

  “I want you to climb the ladder ahead of me,” says Fain. “That’s an order. You must obey.”

  T must obey.” Planning nothing, it climbs the ladder. The body of General Nokavo lies above. If Fain finds that, then Fain will know—he will guess the nature of the changing identities that swirl around him. Fain hates that which is different. It senses his strong disgust.

  And, sensing that, knowing what will wound Fain the deepest, it falls, a hundred reeking kilos of brown, transient, unreal flesh.

  Part Three

  1

  Skallon drifted up from fuzzy, hollow sleep. He heard the familiar murmur of people around him, his fellow bunk mates in the Institute dormitories. He knew if he concentrated he could pick out the angry mutterings of the gambling circle, where fools lost their weeklies in an hour. Or eavesdrop on the daily grunting coupling in the bunk next to his, where a pale girl wrapped thin calves around the latest sullen, groggy man as he ploughed dumbly into her, out again, in with a fresh thrust, a rhythm she seemed to accept without effort, working, sighing, in and out, eyes dim and glazed, not hearing the rattle of cups on metal piping nearby, the shallow rasping laugh from the line of three men, naked, who waited in line beside her bunk for their turn. She was always ready in the morning, before getting up for a job where she would be narrow-eyed and encased in a shimmer of steely efficiency. The girl gasped occasionally in a quick, fervid, clenching way. Skallon thought vaguely that he might roll onto her himself when the rest were done, ease himself of a pressing tension—but then, swimming higher into consciousness, he recoiled from the idea as he always had before, knowing the impulse was part of him but not wanting to acknowledge it now, clutching at the rumpled sheets and rolling over, burying himself away from the sounds as the stiffness between
his legs seeped away. To silence the thought he concentrated on the dulled murmur of the long room, hauling himself up to wakefulness, opened an eye…

  The peeling wallpaper, tawny sunlight, spiced air of Alvea flooded in upon him.

  He sucked in air. The dormitory slipped away and he was here, on Alvea at last. The thin girl who serviced all comers each morning was only a sour memory—and yes, he had done her once, he recalled, when he was fuzzed from sleep; she hadn’t said a word. Instead of her there was Joane, and rather than another day in the tape plexes, he could step outside this grimy room and find Alvea itself.

  He heaved himself up and gasped. A chorus of aches sang at each motion he made. Incredible, considering that Alvea had slightly less gravity than Earth. But, Skallon remembered, he had to acquire a new gait and habits of movement. New muscles creaked as he got dressed. That, plus the clumsy padding to make him appear fat, and the bulky Doubluth robes themselves. Still, the aches surprised him. He was in excellent physical condition, he knew. He prided himself on that. Skallon felt an odd twinge of vulnerability. Maybe this was what it was like when you got old.

  He shook off the mood and left the cramped room. The hotel did not seem so mysterious and dirty as it had at night. Perhaps someone had swept up or something. He followed his nose to the kitchen. He came to a thick wooden door and pushed it open. A babble of voices washed over him. A dozen people sat on stools around an immense fire, gingerly holding cups that steamed in the morning cool beneath the oil lamps. A few eyes found him, studied him for a moment, and returned to their business. The room was nearly round, high-ceilinged, and musty. No windows let in the day.

  Skallon nodded and let the door bang closed without entering. This must be the Communal, the social center of every home and hostel. It was an archaic institution, a holdover from the ancient times when men were slowly adapting to the high ultraviolet flux from Alvea’s sun. In the very beginning it had sometimes been necessary for the entire population of a city to repair underground for considerable lengths of time, and more than likely Kalic contained, beneath its streets and houses, a complex system of caverns and tunnels for that purpose. The communal dated from a somewhat later time when, during the midday hours, the early colonists took shelter in a windowless room, usually, for convenience, in the basement. There was no need to eliminate windows, of course; ordinary glass topped the ultraviolet. But the psychological effect of being completely inside, buried and safe in a man-created cranny, had been important. So the long noontimes, the immense rich lunches and sleeping it off afterward became an Alvean custom, even long after genetic adaptation made Alveans invulnerable to their spitting sun.