Camouflage

changeling paused longer than it needed. “One, Occam’s razor: it didn’t understand that the first series was a code. It was just being like a mynah bird. But the second‘message’ . . . the factor of ten is interesting, but maybe it, or whatever manufactured it, had ten appendages.
    “I’ll ask the obvious. Have you done Zipf analysis? Shannon entropy?”
    Jan and Russ looked at each other, and Naomi chuckled.
    “The Zipf slope is minus one,” Russ said quietly, “so the message isn’t just noise.” Dolphin calls and human languages generate a slope of minus one; it can’t occur by chance.
    “The Shannon entropy is scary,” Jan said. “It’s twenty-sixth order.”
    “Wow,” the changeling said, excitement growing. Human languages only had ninth-order complexity. Dolphins were fourth order. “So it didn’t make up its own version of the Drake message?”
    “We hoped for that,” Russ said, “but it doesn’t meet the first requirement: the two primes that would tell us the proportions of the information matrix.”
    “We did the obvious,” Jan said, still testing.
    The changeling stared at her. “Assumed the matrix would be the same size as yours, or the product of two other primes. But that didn’t work.”
    “Not quite,” Russell said. “We finally figured out that it’s three primes multiplied together. That sort of ups the ante.”
    Jan nodded and leaned forward, elbows on the table. “You know, this organization is only weakly hierarchical. That is, Russ and Jack Halliburton call the shots; direct and define what the rest of us are going to do. At the working level, well, it’s pretty chaotic. That’s the way we want it.
    “This isn’t like some R&D enterprise, where you can assign duties and work to a timetable. We’re all wandering in the dark, in a sense, going on intuition.
    “Even old people like Russ and me know that education and experience can get in the way of intuition. When wehire people at your level, it’s with the understanding that, although much of your work will be routine, there’s always room for your input. The woman you may replace was always coming up with off-the-wall ideas, and sometimes they were helpful.”
    “Why did she leave?” the changeling asked.
    “Illness in the family, her daughter. She might be back once things settle down, but it looks like a long watch.”
    “Meanwhile, we need someone like you,” Russ said. “You’re not likely to . . . this is embarrassing. But the woman she replaced had to leave to have a baby. Likewise, we’re about to lose our receptionist to motherhood.”
    “I can’t have children,” the changeling said, not adding except by fission . It reddened and touched its lips.
    “We didn’t mean to pry,” Jan said, giving Russ a sharp look.
    “Of course not, no.” He looked like a man who desperately needed some papers to shuffle through. Instead, he studied the inside of his empty coffee cup.
    “Oh, I’m not sensitive about it,” the changeling said. “It’s only biology. Simplifies my life.
    “If I do get the job, what would the job be, at this stage? It doesn’t sound like gas chromatography or spectroscopy are on the menu right now.”
    “Not now, not anymore.” Russ took the cup over to the coffee urn and filled it. “Your CV mentioned cryptography.”
    “One course and some reading.” A lot more, actually, in another life. When it had studied computer science at MIT, everyone was interested in it.
    Jan tapped twice on her notebook and studied the screen. “It’s not on your transcript.”
    “I just sat in. My advisor vetoed it as frivolous. She would’ve killed me if she’d known I was doing that rather than advanced differential equations.”
    “Been there,” Jan said.
    “Might have been a lucky choice,” Russ said. “It’s what you’ll be doing for awhile, I think.
    “With this pesky data string from the artifact, we’re dividing into two groups. One, the one you’d be in, will try to decipher the message. The other’s keeping after the artifact with a series of more complex messages, along the lines of the first one. That’ll be Jan’s group.”
    “You’re keeping it in house? Keeping the government out?”
    “Absolutely. We’re a profit-making corporation, and there just might be an obscene profit in whatever this thing has to say. Better be, to justify what Jack’s sunk into it.”
    “If we were in the States,” Jan said, “the government might be