Camouflage

nondisclosure form.”
    “But only a little more,” Jan said. “There’s not that much to tell.”
    “You got a bachelor’s in astronomy,” Russ said, “and then you quit?”
    “Marriage,” the changeling said, “and when it didn’t work out, he left me with too much debt for me to go back to being a student.” This was a part of its autobiography that would stand up to computer search, but not much beyond that. The “husband” had conveniently dropped off the map, and its state and federal tax forms were precisely hacked, as were employment records for the two low-level lab technician jobs.
    It had gone to some trouble to find two Los Angeles firms that were so large and mobile that Rae might credibly not be remembered personally.
    “I did some checking,” Naomi said. “Your professors at Berkeley had a high opinion of you.”
    The changeling gave her a level gaze. “And they wondered why I hadn’t gone on.”
    “And why you became a lab tech.”
    “I had the training, from summer jobs. There aren’t any jobs in astronomy.”
    “That’s for sure,” Jan said. “More than half the Ph.D.s are doing something unrelated to astronomy.”
    “I knew that when I chose the major,” the changeling said. “My advisor advised me to learn how to flip hamburgers.”
    Jan laughed. “That’s what my advisor told me, back in the eighties. So there’s always hope.”
    “Do you plan to go back?” Russ asked. Under the circumstances, a question with no right answer.
    “I keep up my reading at the library, A.J. and Aph.J., ” it said carefully. “My interest in astronomy is undiminished, especially globular clusters and star formation.” It realized it was sounding too much like a college professor, but it had been a professor a lot longer than it had been a lab technician. Or a dwarf or a prostitute, for that matter. “But it would be hard to go back to being a student. I’ve been a working woman for too long.” Thirty-one of the past ninety-four years, if being a female shark counted.
    “The SETI aspect of working here fascinates me,” it continued. “I never had any course work in it, except as part of radio astronomy. So it would be interesting as a learning experience, even if nothing ever comes of it.”
    He nodded and exchanged another look with Jan. “You know what we’ve been doing the past couple of months.”
    “The planetary environments thing. I saw the Nova show about Venus; that was incredible.”
    “Well . . .” Russ put his fingertips together and tapped twice. “This is secret. The whole world will know before long, but we’re still sorting out what to say, the timing. You can keep a secret.”
    “Absolutely.”
    “We got a response from the artifact.”
    The changeling articulated a variety of physiological reflexes, that for a change reflected its actual state: pupilsdilating, sweat popping, a sharp intake of breath: “During the Jupiter simulation?”
    Jan nodded. “Jupiter. At first we thought it was just a glitch. You know we use pi squared as the factor from one frequency to the next?”
    “Yes; that was interesting.”
    “What the artifact did was repeat the message, the first half of it, but at ten times the frequency.”
    The changeling nodded. “So it knows digits.”
    “It may know how many digits we have,” Russ said.
    “At first we thought it was a transmission mistake,” Jan said. “It was the acoustic phase, tapping out the message. It’s done automatically, with a small solenoid-driven hammer. The response, ten times faster, was in the middle of our stock message.”
    “It was recorded but initially ignored,” Russ said. “One of the techs, Muese, was analyzing it as a kind of feedback noise—that’s happened before—and then realized it had to have come from the artifact.”
    “We were up in the infrared by then,” Jan said, indicating a distance with one hand over the other, “but we went back to the acoustic mode, returning the faster signal it had sent. It responded with a long burst, twelve minutes.”
    “Saying?”
    Russ shook his head. “We don’t have the faintest. Not a clue. But it’s not random.”
    They seemed calm, but the changeling could hear their pulses. Jan spoke carefully. “You’d think an intelligent creature, an intelligence of some kind, would respond in the same code.” She looked at the pretty woman with a studied casualness that said this is a test . “Why do you suppose it didn’t?”
    The