Find the Changeling

by Gregory Benford

  Eyes rolled back, white.

  A smoldering hole in her belly, now filling with red.

  Skallon turned, wooden. “You—”

  He struck at Fain with the edge of his hand, a downward chop at the gun arm. Fain turned. Skallon missed, lost his balance. He butted against the wall and rebounded, knee coming up in a kick. Fain danced away.

  “You…killer…insane…” Skallon said between clenched teeth, feet finding balance, looking for an opening.

  He lunged. Fain stepped aside. Skallon tripped on Fains outstretched boot and Fain clipped him cleanly on the back of the head. Skallon hit the floor and the world turned dark, dark and flecked with buzzing white spots. “Why … I …” he began.

  “I didn’t kill Joane, Skallon,” Fain said, puffing. “That’s the Changeling.”

  2

  Joseph Fain held the woman in his arms and pressed her to him.

  Something was wrong.

  He drew her down on the bed. She was half-clothed. He kissed her. It still wasn’t right.

  Something was missing. A yearning, a need.

  Before Joane had seemed outwardly calculating, even casual. But the touch of her was warm and smooth; his hands seemed to hum as they moved over her. Some quality of her skin gave off a radiance of its own. Her need to be loved—loved by these Earthers, these strange and exotic men from the stars—came through.

  Now there was something different. Had the deaths chilled the essence in her? Had Kish finally drawn some boundary, brought his masculine pride to bear?

  He shifted his hands. She clenched him firmly and yet there was a quality in the embrace of holding back. She was hard, unyielding. Her tongue entered his mouth. Her fist, clenched hard, hugged tight between his legs. It was all there, the same as before, but something in her had shifted.

  Fain moved mechanically, putting aside the confusion that now swarmed in his mind, and tried to focus on her. He remembered how she had come to him. After returning from the streets, still battered by the surfacing images of his father, of Scorpio, of days now dead, he had stopped at her room only long enough to say that the Changeling was dead. Her lined face was full of Danon s death and he went away. In his own room, shucking his robes, tired, he had signaled the orbiter to be ready for their return. Tomorrow. It would not be too soon. He intended to spend the remainder of the day resting and trying to find in the chaos swirling around some measure of genuine triumph. She could have left him that way. She could have stayed in her own room until he had gone. If she had done that, he would never have known. Was it because she (it) needed her (its) triumph, too?

  She’d said, “Skallon asked me to tell you he has returned.”

  “Where is he?” He lay on the bed, peering up at her. She seemed strangely tall and elongated, but it was only the angle of his vision.

  “He went to his room.”

  “Without seeing me?”

  “I think he hates you, Fain. He said he will stay on Alvea.”

  “With you, I suppose.”

  “He wants it that way.”

  “I won’t let him.”

  “It would be foolish if you did.”

  “He’d die.”

  “I know.”

  Then she removed some of her clothes. Fain took off what remained of his. They hugged. Kissed. Something was wrong—missing—and then he had known.

  Fain pulled his lips away from hers and rolled aside. He fought to be calm, to control his disgust. The taste of that thing was like a foul musk upon his lips. He felt too numb, too dead to really care. In a normal voice, he said, “I thought I heard something outside.”

  She laughed and tried to draw him close again. “It s just Kish.”

  “No.” He slipped away from her and whispered. “It might be Skallon. He could go over the edge. Stay here.” He got his heatgun and opened the door. He could have killed her right then but he had to be sure. He had been wrong once. He had massacred a roomful of innocent men because of his mistake. The hallway was empty. He heard her moving nervously on the bed arid quickly jammed the inject of Vertil he had palmed into the taut muscle of his forearm. He wasn’t really thinking now. He was acting instinctively. A roomful of burned men. A half-naked woman on his own bed. A Changeling. No, he wouldn’t think about any of it.

  Breathing heavily, he went back into the room and closed the door. “I guess I’m spooked.” He went to the bed, leaned over. She rose up to meet his lips. He drew back before they touched. “Stand on your head and clap your hands,” he said. At the same time, he raised his heatgun out of sight behind his thigh where she couldn’t see it coming. She laughed and shook her head, letting long hair flutter like spores on the breeze. “Fain, you’re always crazy.”

  “Am I?”

  Then he shot her—it—through the belly.

  3

  —the bolt plunges searing burning into my oh God I fold around it trying to squeeze past its pressure and slip free as the fire thrusts into me taking claiming scorching blood and bile from me oh it won’t stop I can’t get—I—and the rushing darkness comes toward me now telling me again this part is ended—I have Danced too near—I was so close to a perfect form, a lush pinnacle—but pride takes—a bubble of blood bursts in my mouth as liquids evaporate licking hot from my guts and my intestines tumble out though my hands clutch at them, slimy things knotted tubes squeezing out between my warped fingers—slop and ooze—the shooting fierce pains—I spatter on the floor—pitching forward—dull ache, numbness works through my chest—I was a woman, a man, wanted too much, to be all and consume it, move through it—my self like worms twisting, headless, on the floor—the darkness—I shit myself in agony—the darkness rushes up through my legs—it—tightness—again I go into that place—another Dance—vessels burst—floor rising and rushing darkness—lancing pain—flame—shadows—I—

  4

  Skallon sobbed soundlessly, his chest heaving, and Fain knew there was no way to make him stop. So he talked. Fain had always hated people who talked when they couldn’t think of anything else to do, and now he was one of them.

  “Look,” he said, “it’s not Joane. Remember, when I was chasing the Changeling underground like an idiot? When it killed Scorpio. And came up through the kitchen. Well, it must have had more time than we thought. It must have killed Joane then, hidden the body. And assumed her identity. Sloughed away some body mass, somehow. Shaped itself. Made itself from man to woman. Christ, I don’t know…” His mouth sagged, and then he caught himself. “Somehow. Somehow. By the time I finally made it back to the surface, the thing was ready. It sent Kish chasing some innocent Doubluth and then had me follow. It knew … what I’d do. It set me up. Set me up to massacre the high castes, and it was laughing all the time. To it, life ‘ is a joke. Danon. Joane. You and me. The whole damned universe. But the Changelings are wrong, Skallon. It’s…”

  Skallon wasn’t listening. He stood over the body of the Changeling and wept. Skallon’s problem was that he cared. The Changeling didn’t. Fain didn’t. But Skallon did. So who was the better?

  Fain placed a hand gently on Skallon’s shoulder, thinking of flame and madness. “We’re going home tomorrow,” he said.

  5

  Two men in purple robes stood in a secluded meadow on the outskirts of Kalic. They peered at the sky. One clutched a signaling device in his hand. He told the other: “The ship is well programmed in the event of any emergency. It’ll just send down a smaller capsule, one I can pilot alone.”

  ‘Then there’s no problem,” Skallon said.

  “Not really,” Fain said. “But I think you’d better be damned sure. Once I’m gone, there’ll be no going back. If you do stay here, you’ll die, Skallon.”

  “I know.” Skallon shrugged listlessly. “But when? Five Earth years, ten? Who knows? I might well live to see another new year, another Fest.”

  “You’ll retain your disguise, I hope. Don’t do anything stupid like letting them know you’re from Earth. They’ll tear you
apart.”

  Skallon shook his head. “I don’t want to live another lie.”

  “You’d rather die?”

  “I’m going to do that anyway, aren’t I?”

  “Yes, yes, I suppose so.” Fain listened to the beeping of the signaling device in his hand. There was something clean and pure—something reassuring—in its steady rhythm: beep, beep, beep…

  “Look, Fain,” Skallon said, “its not that I haven’t thought about this. I won’t stay in Kalic. I would have, but Joane’s dead, so there’s no reason. I’ll find another place, a small village, one where they’ll accept me for what I am. Then I’ll work. I’ll live. I’ll write. I’ll study. What would I do on Earth? The same thing. But here at least I can be free.”

  “And alone. They won’t like you, Skallon—you’ll never be one of them. It’s not easy being that much alone. It hurts, and what’s much worse, it soon starts to hurt so much that you quit being able to hurt at all.”

  ‘That’s you, Fain—it isn’t me.”

  “I hope so. But you did love her, didn’t you? Joane?”

  “I slept with her, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You know it’s not what I mean.”

  “Then what is? That you slept with her, too? I know that—I knew it all along.”

  “Then you’re wrong. Joane never slept with me.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “I tried—sure, I tried—I’m only human. She turned me down. Believe her if you don’t believe me. She wouldn’t lie to you.”

  “What do you know about it?” But the anger had left Skallon’s voice—the lingering bitterness. Maybe he did believe Joane. “You could stay, too, Fain.”

  He started to laugh, but Skallon wasn’t being tunny. The idea was something he had never considered. Stay here? Among these pseudos? Sure, and do what? Work? Marry? Relax? Live? “It’s a sweet idea, Skallon, but it’s not for me. This is your world, but mine’s up there—the old blue Earth. Besides, if we both disappear, somebody’s going to wonder. I can go back and cover for you. I can tell the necessary lies.”

  “Then what do you do? Hunt more Changelings?”

  He hadn’t thought about that. Slowly, Fain shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think I’m finished doing that. When I get back, maybe I’ll just retire.”

  “If they’ll let you.”

  “There is that, but…here, wait a minute, Skallon. Let me tell you something. It’s incredible, but…well, I didn’t know it until yesterday. I knew it, but I didn’t know that I did. I killed a bug. Squashed it with my foot. I don’t know why that did it. Maybe it was seeing such an insignificant creature dead and knowing that it was just as important—just as complete—as any human being. It was a life, a soul, and I had killed it-Fain paused. He knew he wasn’t making sense and, feeling a muddy confusion, reached instinctively inward, groping for the center he had always carried. It was gone. This time there was no reassuring cold presence from deep within. The calm, serene center had dispersed, broken, spilled its contents into his conscious mind.

  Fain shook his head. The musky odor of Alvea teased his nostrils, drawing his attention back to Skallon and the alien landscape surrounding them. “I had a father once. He was an exec VP in the research arm of the Consortium.”

  “Is he disappointed in how you turned out?”

  “He probably would be, if he could, but he’s dead. They killed him. That’s what I want to tell you about. He was a geneticist, a damned good one. He discovered something. He believed in Consortium Equilibrium, too. So when he got this result he came immediately to the levels above him and told them. He expected praise, promotions, the works. Instead, they said he was wrong. They said he hadn’t done his work well enough. A special scientific panel nailed him for it. They slapped him on the wrist, lightly, and sent him home.” I see.

  That wasn’t the end of it. He didn’t quit the way they said he should. He checked his figures. Repeated his experiments. And he was right. He was positive he was right. And he told them so again.”

  ‘Told them what?”

  “One time they could tolerate, but not twice. Once is a mistake and twice is treason. That’s what they called him—a traitor. He never got another hearing, no second panel, nothing. They burned him down in front of me. Flamed him. When I watched him dying, I knew why.”

  “But they didn’t kill you.”

  “They didn’t think I knew. And they still don’t All that information got tied off while I was in massive psychotherapy, recovering from watching my father die. They destroyed his notes, his papers, his comlogex files, so there’s no way of proving it. To cover their public image, they took the surviving boy and paid to have him patched up. Later, they put him to work. The information was buried so deep ordinary scanners didn’t pick it up. Some specialist did me a big favor, driving it down deep. He must have known that was the only way I could survive. So he took the pressure that knowledge generates, and he turned it into something that protected me, made me able to think like a machine when I had to, something that would keep me alive.”

  “And living is that important to you, Fain.” A thread of contempt ran through Skallon’s voice.

  “You misunderstand. Living isn’t of the slightest importance to me. When Scorpio died, the old walls inside me started to crumble, and when I squashed that bug, they broke. The knowledge drifted up into my mind, out of my gut. I found out I’d been using that knowledge all along. Now I know why I believed. I knew then—and I know now—that life and death are utterly meaningless phenomena. I know what my father discovered and proved. He rechecked all the old data. He made new computations of his own. He used mathematics and genetics and he got data nobody had ever thought of looking for. He found out that crazy old Gommerset was right. So my father was burned down, knowing that it didn’t mean a damn thing. I know that, too. When a man dies he is certain to be born again.”

  “Fain, you can’t…” Skallon clutched Fain’s robe, as if to draw the truth out of him.

  Gently, Fain pushed Skallon back. “It’s the truth, Skallon. Believe it. Believe me.”

  “Then you must tell others. Men have to know, Fain. You and I can…I’ve sensed it, too. We’ve got to tell.”

  “No.” Fain studied the colors around them. He felt strangely serene, drained. “Nobody deserves to know that. Look at me. Look at this planet. Once you know what we know, nothing else is important. Nothing. It doesn’t matter for you. You’re staying here.” He looked straight at Skallon. “And you’re going to die. For the rest of them…well, aren’t they going to find out soon enough?”

  In the musky, heavy air the lines around Fain’s eyes softened. The world was a thin film suspended over one vast fact. It was amazing, really, that humans could skate so surely over that thin layer. They seldom broke through, seldom discovered the abyss of certainty that lay under all the noise and distractions. And perhaps that was what the random dance of the Changeling meant. To cherish the lush chaos of the world, to spin and swoop through it. Because beneath it lay a sureness that rubbed away all the awful illusions. The Changelings remembered, so only the Changelings could embrace delicious death.

  Fain laughed hollowly. He gave Skallon a last affectionate shove. “You d better go.”

  He looked up. Above, a sleek bullet broke through ripe, knotted clouds. It gleamed. Mother was right on time.

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  Also By Gregory Benford

  Jupiter Project

  Jupiter Project (1975)

  Against Infinity (1983)

  Galactic Centre

  In the Ocean of Night (1976)

  Acro
ss the Sea of Suns (1984)

  Great Sky River (1987)

  Tides of Light (1989)

  Furious Gulf (1994)

  Sailing Bright Eternity (1995)

  Other Novels

  Deeper Than the Darkness (1970) (aka The Stars in Shroud)

  If the Stars Are Gods (1977) (with Gordon Eklund)

  Shiva Descending (1980) (with William Rotsler)

  Timescape (1980)

  Find the Changeling (1980) (with Gordon Eklund)

  Artifact (1985)

  The Heart of the Comet (1986) (with David Brin)

  Iceborn (1989) (with Paul A Carter)

  Chiller (1993) (writing as Sterling Blake)

  Cosm (1998)

  The Martian Race (1999)

  Eater (2000)

  Beyond Infinity (2003)

  The Sunborn (2005)

  Collections

  In Alien Flesh (1986)

  Matter's End (1990)

  Worlds Vast and Various (1999)

  Immersion, and Other Short Novels (2002)

  Dedication

  For Charles N. Brown

  Gregory Benford (1941 – )

  A leading writer of “Hard SF”, Gregory Albert Benford was born in Alabama in 1941. He received a BSc in physics from the University of Oklahoma, followed by an MSc and PhD from the University of California, San Diego. His breakthrough novel, Timescape, won both the Nebula and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards, and he has been nominated for the Hugo Award four times and the Nebula twelve times in all categories. Benford has undertaken collaborations with David Brin and Arthur C. Clarke among others and, as one of the “Killer Bs” (with Brin and Greg Bear) wrote one of three authorised sequels to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. He has also written for television and served as a scientific consultant on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Gregory Benford lives in California, where he is currently Professor of Plasma Physics and Astrophysics at the University of California, Irvine, a position he has held since 1979.