Camouflage

the tape, to predictable response: “No, it’s beautiful, can’t you see? It’s just being a shark.” Actually, it was engaging in unsharklike behavior at the time, analyzing the difference in the ocean’s flavor around the wonky holes: slightly acidic fresh water. Bad for coral in the long run, though in the short run it was like an all-you-can-eat buffet for the small creatures that fed on algae and plankton, and the larger ones that fed on them, and on up the food chain to the fisherfolk who cursed the wonky holes for mucking up their nets, but kept returning.
    In the long run, though, the wonky holes were one of several interlocking factors that were destroying the offshore parts of the Great Barrier Reef, which was bad for tourism as well as fishing. The changeling made them his specialty, and being a part-time shark gave him a huge advantage over other researchers: he could smell out wonky holes in the early stages of development, before they had attracted enough fish to draw the attention of humans. So he did “productive” analysis in reverse: he found relationships between fishing patterns near the shore and theformation of wonky holes, and scientifically predicted where to find the small ones.
    This eventually led to a selective reforestation program—the excess percolation of fresh water was indirectly caused by the absence of trees, which would normally store large quantities of water after a rainfall, to harmlessly evaporate back into the clouds.
    By this time its identity, as James “Jimmy” Coleridge, had been well established, a Californian who had adopted Australia with enthusiasm. At twenty-seven, Jimmy was considered quite a prodigy in the small world he’d mastered. James Cook University offered “the Wonky Hole Man” a tenure-track professorship, and the changeling took it with some enthusiasm, seeing it as a good platform from which to observe the overall situation of marine science in the Pacific.
    Somewhere out here was the answer.
    Young Dr. Coleridge was popular with his students, both the undergraduates in the general oceanography courses and the graduate students who worked with him in Special Problems in Marine Ecologies. It wooed and married one of its graduate students, Marcia, a beautiful blonde from Tasmania.
    She dropped out of course work to become a faculty wife, a position for which she was not particularly well suited. She drew a lot of the wrong kind of attention from the faculty husbands, and obviously enjoyed it, flirting with more and more energy as her marriage failed to provide her with children—a reasonable enough ambition, but hard to realize if your husband has no gender and is not really human.
    Moody and volatile, she became Jimmy’s Tasmanian Devil, and it was inevitable that other men would try to tame her.
    When she became pregnant in the spring of 2008, a lot of people suspected what her husband knew for sure.
    The changeling didn’t relish the prospect of complicating its life with children, so it was happier than most husbands would be when it turned out that the newborn’s father was obviously of a different race. (How different, only Jimmy knew.) Some people admired the calm way he took it, and his magnanimity on giving her a no-fault divorce and blessing her remarriage to the only black man in their circle of friends. Other people thought it was a shameful abdication of his rights as a man. Even in Queensland, they wouldn’t say “white man,” but that’s what many of them were thinking.
    The scandal might have retarded his advance at JCU, so when an offer came for a full professorship at the University of Hawaii, Jimmy snapped it up like the hungry shark he used to be, on weekends.
    T he changeling decided to stay in the Jimmy Coleridge persona for a while. Having studied and taught in Australia for thirteen years gave it a slightly exotic accent and manner, having honed its twenty-first-century social skills in the tropical north. Jimmy was popular with the male faculty and students as a hale-fellow-well-met, who never got more than pleasantly tipsy but could drink anyone under the table. Of course to the changeling gin was as harmless as rocket fuel or hydrochloric acid.
    Coleridge carried a respectable class load, with two graduate courses and a seminar as well as the large lecture class in Introductory Oceanography, which had room for 150 students and was always oversubscribed. He turned out papers with gratifying regularity, as