Find the Changeling

by Gregory Benford

  Skallon found his way through remembered passages. He nudged open a door and found it was a kitchen. Joanes profile frowned at a pile of sweetmeats and then turned as he came in.

  “Why, morning greetings,” she said softly.

  “You are quite lovely in the sunlight there,” Skallon said, feeling a bit awkward. She did seem better-looking in sunlight, somehow.

  “Why, thank you. I enjoyed our speaking of last evening.”

  “Ah. Yes, I did, too. Is my, ah, partner…?”

  “He is eating. There.” She pointed at a portal. Skallon looked through and saw Fain methodically spooning in a dish of gray mush. Scorpio was chewing at something underneath the table. It was the same room they’d eaten in last night, though it appeared now a bit more orderly. Probably Joane had been up early to put things in better order. Skallon nodded to himself in satisfaction. These were good people, reliable.

  Fain looked up and studied him evenly, as though deciding something.

  “Get some food,” Fain said.

  “Good. Food,” Scorpio added. Skallon wondered if the dog was trying to make conversation. Was that possible? The dog didn’t seem smart enough to do it. But then, it was hard to tell.

  Joane gave him a plate of bubbling stuff, chunks of meat wallowing in a brownish paste, with anonymous vegetables afloat in it. He sat opposite Fain. After a few mouthfuls Fain slammed down a spoon, spattering the table top, and said, “Enough of that. I’m not eating this slop anymore.”

  “It’s what there is.”

  “I’m carrying emergency rations. With that and the local water—that’s awful stuff, too—I’ll make do.”

  “Alvean food is quite sophisticated, really. I don’t think this complannet is so bad, either.”

  “You’ll get sick from it.”

  “I doubt that. We took internal bacteriophase treatments before lifting Earthside. There is really—”

  “That meat last night tasted all right. But an hour ago I shat it all, undigested.”

  “Metaphase adjustment. In a day or two—”

  “Frang that. I’m going to crack open a protein stato. Where’s some water?”

  Fain banged his fist on the table and, when no one appeared, stamped out. In a moment Joane peered through the open portal and raised an inquiring eye brow. Skallon shrugged, pantomined rage, slammed his fist silently on the rough wood table, bared his teeth. She tittered. He shrugged and waved her back as Fain stormed back in through a side door, one hand clutching a canteen and the other thumbing open a protein bar.

  Skallon ate silently while Fain crunched his way through the bar. He was acutely conscious of Joane clattering dishes and pots in the kitchen. There was something about her that intrigued him. A certain way she lifted her head and turned it when she spoke. Now that he thought about it, her nose wasn’t really too long at all. It suited her face. Gave it balance, somehow.

  He probably shouldn’t have handed her that half-truth about being selected for this mission, out of the blue. Munching at the sour meat of the complannet, he remembered the last week of field training, when the idea had come to him and, without thinking about it very much at all, put it into practice.

  First he had rigged a smeller grenade, just a bit more salt-sensitive than necessary. When he dropped it on patrol, it activated, of course. Slocum was two hundred meters behind. Quick-witted Slocum, grim Slocum, the obvious prime candidate for Alvea. When the sniffer homed on him, Slocums screen came up fast, but a frag got through. A neat rip through the upper thigh. Slocum bled like an open faucet and whimpered in a strange little boys voice while they were waiting for the airborne medics to arrive.

  Then Ising, who was easier. A creature of habit was Ising.

  Every morning before a field exercise began, Ising cleaned the bore of his megaJoule torchgun. One morning there happened to be a whiff of Butyl vapor in it. The barrel blew open and a gout of flame gushed out. It set fire to a whole wall of the armory and caught Ising on the right arm, burning two deep holes through his insulation and leaving first-degree patches here and there. Ising took several weeks to regrow the tissue.

  Which left Skallon. A reasonably good candidate for the secondary slot on an Alvean team, when and if such a team was needed. But of course everyone had known for weeks that a crisis of some kind was brewing. Alvea was slipping out of control. The news that the Changeling had escaped put a different cast on things, of course. Skallon had thought the Institute would be asked for a team of Alvean specialists, to go there on superlight drop trajectories and firm up support for the usual Earth-export policy. He hadn’t really counted on the Changeling.

  “Does that stuff taste any better than complannet?” he asked Fain.

  “Urn. P’robly not.”

  “You’ll have to eat some of the local food, you know.”

  Guarded interest from Fain. “Why?”

  “As a disguise. You’ve noticed Alveans have a pungent smell about them?” Fain nodded. “Balajan weed. It’s in their diet. Not bad, really. A mild herb. But if you don’t smell of it, somebody is bound to notice and wonder why.”

  “We wont be here long enough for that to matter.”

  “Oh?”

  “I want to wrap this up right away. Finish eating and let’s get going.”

  “Where?”

  T want you to nose around the streets. Find out what important meetings are going on.”

  “Important in what way?”

  “For the Changeling. Whatever route would take him to the top of the power structure as fast as possible. That’s where we’ll find him.”

  “I see. All right. Ill find out, but I want to take Danon with me. He knows this city. He can tell me where I’m likely to pick up gossip, as distinct from news.”

  “Why not the older one?”

  “Kish?” Skallon thought a moment. “No, he’s not right. There’s some reason he’s a failure. I think he probably doesn’t have good judgment.”

  Fain nodded. “I figure the same. Then give the kid a wrist communicator. You can make better use of him that way and he can nose around on his own. Tell him to keep it hidden under his sleeve. We don’t want anyone to get the idea there are Earthers lurking around the city.”

  They went on eating. Skallon felt oddly pleased at Fain’s agreement with him. When he had finished breakfast he asked Joane, who had first suggested the idea, to call Danon. The boy agreed to lead him into Kalic’s markets and bazaars, to ferret out information. He gave Danon a spare wrist communicator and showed him how to operate it.

  Skallon lingered in the kitchen a moment afterward, exchanging an occasional word with Joane. She was cleaning up the greasy dishes, using cold water and a gray soap. It wasn’t until he and Danon were about to leave that Skallon remembered that Alvean women waited on no one other than their husbands. Yet she had served food to him and Fain. He wondered what it meant.

  2

  It draws oxygen from the Alvean air. Exhaling, shedding gases, it breathes out something more: control. The drug Vertil, stolen from the constricted, fearful laboratories of Earth.

  It imagines Fains expression at the moment of his discovery. It laughs, a rare gesture, tinkling sounds rippling out of its flexing throat. Inside itself, mixed with the surging red and white motes in its blood, is the power. How simple the Earthers are, to think control and power meant order. False, false. Power is a rare quantity, a scarce vintage. Power is life, is death, is in the moment. Control, it has long since learned, exists only in secluded, random nooks of the universe; elsewhere, cosmically, chaos dances and sings beside the fires of the ruby stars. The Norms’ greatest sin lies in their absurd concentration upon the nooks, their ignorance of the greater reality.

  The fat, gross, pig-snouted Alvean stands before it. Mind skimming over the instants as they tick by, it squints at the Alvean and ponders. It exhales: control. The Alvean will do as it says. Here, outside Kalic, it must take a disguise from this dim, impermanent creature. And it must ponder. />
  The image of Fain ripples before it, shimmering in the air. The Alvean cannot see Fain because the Alvean is a Norm, too, dumb and fuzzy and its blunted perception of the All. But Fain is there and floats before it, beckoning.

  The moment passes, another dawns. Here is the new: all three of them are strangers here, careless skaters on the smooth glass of simple Alvea. They will all err. They will fumble. How can this be the key?

  A moment passes, seconds die.

  It must be Fain. He is the strongest, the Changeling-killer. So Fain must finally be weak, Fain must crumble, Fain’s soft core must be found and stabbed by the One. He is serious, solemn. His image, flickering in the warm air between it and the groggy Alvean, is hard and unflinching.

  Laughter, then, will kill Fain. A thousand pinpricks of jibes and taunts will vex and rub him, stretching thin his vaulted calm, his sharp judgment.

  Seeing this, knowing it of and in the moment as the seconds die and are born before its eyes, the Changeling scuffs its feet in fevered desire. Yes, here it is. The eternal Way.

  Fain and Skallon blunder ahead. Already they are in Kalic. They do not suspect that they are allies of the One, that they will in the end of the Dance help the Changeling to cut Alvea from the Earther fold. It will use these Earthers against themselves. All, through a singing skipping taunting that will echo in Fain’s clotted mind. The Changeling cannot free Alvea by itself; this secret the Earthers do not know. It needs them for this final work of the One, and joy and mirth will be the end of them.

  The Changeling snorts and mutters, glee building inside. Fain and Skallon will not see the weight as it falls toward them, for they are blind. They cannot dance. For them all is order and plan. They sense not the One which lies below the simple toys of reason, they ken not the lilting song of intuition. The Earthers have long ago separated the left hemispheres of their brains from the right hemisphere, achieving a frail control of the world, casting it into words and forms. An illusion. A furious fiction. It is reason which is the dream, a lazy dream of the One. Order is false. In the Changeling the left and right hemispheres are united again, as men once were. There is no analytical dominance, no tyranny of the word over the All. Their reason is the mind divided against itself, held in the once-convenient chains of old Earth, the false dreams of subject/object; she/it; us/they; person/world; right/ wrong: cutting the world into pieces when it so yearns to be healed, to be the One. To percieve is to separate and to separate is to die. The law of life is to merge, to know, to enfold, to sum.

  The Changeling feels the new sum coursing through him, flowing power. The pigsnouted Alvean shivers as the drug wrestles with his mind, wins, brings a temporary peace to his house of false order.

  Exhaling, the Changeling grins again. “Undress,” it commands. It feels a need for the dull purple robes of this caste. A Doubluth. It knows this world and the absurd beliefs of its people. The Changeling has slept under the quicktreatments, studied the illusions these Alveans are infested with. That the escaping soul of the dying man passes into the waiting shell of the as yet unborn. Of course, souls do not exist. There is no birth; there is no death. All is the One, and the One Itself is mere illusion, the fine flecks of illusion from which the world rises, in triumph. These Norms, these Alveans, will learn. With Earthers gone forever—and the Changeling senses this ahead, coming, coming, a fruition—there will be time and place to reveal the true underpinning of Nothing that is the World. Time—itself a falsity—will bring the One to them. The illusion of the plagues now kills these Alveans daily. Death is a leveler. It brings truth nearer. Like sex, it is a lie which, swiveling, reveals the true illusion.

  The air hums around the Changeling. Singing, singing. Dancing. Yes.

  It kills the naked Alvean.

  3

  From inside the sculpted Ganjanaten Hall came a thumping boom, a chorus of voices equally high and low, a plink plink of thin-stringed instruments. The procession wound past the stall where Skallon and Fain squatted. A gust of wind stirred dust from the feet of the marchers, sending it skyward like tan smoke, and then into the eyes of Skallbn as he studied the swaying lines.

  “Anything?” Fain whispered. He put a hand on Scorpio’s head. Skallon could not tell whether the gesture was one of affection or a reminder to the dog to keep its head down, out of view of the Alveans.

  “No. Sign.” Scorpio sniffed. “Dust. Makes. Smell. Hard. To. Tell.”

  “I know, I know,” Fain said sharply. “You said yourself you couldn’t get a reliable fix unless you could pick up the scent.”

  “Correct. But.”

  “Never mind,” Fain cut in. “How sure are you you’re really picking up each scent? There’s the dust, and that incense stuff.”

  “Very. Sure. We. Are.

  Aug—Aug…”

  “Augmented,” Skallon put in.

  “Yes. For. That.”

  Skallon was sure Fain knew the dog’s capabilities better than Scorpio did; it was interesting to see events get under Fain’s skin.

  “We’re not getting anywhere here,” Fain muttered.

  “We’ve eliminated the Lutyen Communing,” Skallon pointed out. “And now the Mahindras. That’s something.”

  “Not enough.”

  The final knots of paraphernalia passed: brass bells and hollow sounding gongs; chiming metalworks; Camjen-burners like grotesque lamps; a giant, slender-handled spoon for the doling out of the consecrated nectar of browned sweets, shreds of tulsu leaf, milky ganjan stalks. The swarthy Mahindras—mostly carpenters, as their caste and rolelives decreed—passed by solemnly, swaying to the singsong rhythms that boomed out from the Ganjanaten Hall.

  “Anything?” Fain said again.

  “Nothing. No. Sign.”

  “Damn.” Fain slammed a fist into the dirt beside him.

  Danon’s idea had seemed a good one at first: set up a simple beggar’s or worshiper’s stall (they served both purposes, usually) near the entrances of the great gathering halls, and observe the processions as they wound in for the meetings. But they’d seen nothing. Scorpio picked up no sign of the Changeling. Skallon began to regret taking Danon’s advice. He and the boy had set out from the hotel to sift through gossip from the marketplaces. They’d found nothing remarkable, and then Danon thought of this device. Skallon had returned to the hotel to help Fain carry the dog through busy streets in a concealing cart. Danon had fetched a stall and set it up, leaving it at the appropriate spot for them to find while he patroled the area, looking for unusual persons.

  ‘Where’s that kid?” Fain said as the last member of the procession shuffled by. A straggling crowd of office-seekers and hangers-on followed until the vast metal doors of the Hall banged closed in their faces, sending up a wail of supplication.

  “These are damned hard times,” Skallon said. “It’s forbidden to plead with the vernal equinox delegates that way. But people follow them right into the Hall.”

  “Yeah,” Fain said. “Where’s that kid? This idea of his isn’t worth a damn.”

  “Over there.” Skallon pointed across the vast square to a milling throng of peasants, a swirl of tattered rainbow robes. “Watching.”

  “Get him over here.”

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  “Why not?” Fain said with surprise.

  “If we want to keep him a free agent, unidentified with us, we shouldn’t all be seen together in public.”

  “Hell, the Changeling can’t be everywhere at once.”

  “He has the Vertil. He can send out as many runners and spies as he likes.”

  Fain shrugged. Clearly he didn’t think Skallon’s opinion counted for very much. “Go find out what the kid’s turned up, then.”

  Skallon walked across the immense square, trying to look as casual as he could. The sun reflected off the faceted high gables of the Hall and cast multiple shadows of the tower at the square’s center. The noon sun had begun to raise a brittle dry smell from the flagstones. His thic
k-soled shoes slapped smartly and he noticed that the Alveans nearby made no such noise as they walked. He would have to learn the trick; maybe it had something to do with the low gravity and the curious rolling gait most of the obese natives acquired.

  Danon was lounging in a shadowed portico, smiling at Skallon as he approached. The boy wore a formal robe, tailored well for his size, a pleasing array of webbed blue and green. The weave was appropriate for workers in service, which of course Danon would be when he came to maturity.

  “The wind blows against us,” Skallon said as he stepped into the bluish shadows beside Danon. He liked this particularly Alvean mode of expression, combining an obvious physical fact with an implication of their overall state.

  “I wish I had a clearer idea of what we are seeking.”

  “So do we.”

  “In these bleak times the unusual is commonplace.”

  ‘It will pass,” Skallon said, without for a moment believing it. Danon seemed an overly serious boy, his face lined more deeply than other children his age. Skallon felt he ought to lift the boy’s spirits somehow.

  “I heard a whisper in the market stalls just now. It may be false, of course,” Danon said hesitantly.