Camouflage

surprise you at lunch.”
    “Maybe I’ll wait. I don’t suppose you’ll let me try to guess.”
    “Nope.”
    “You’ve discovered the president’s an alien.”
    “Damn, you got it. Now we’ll have to kill you.”
    “Oh, well. At least I found out early.”
    T hey pedaled around Apia after lunch, stopping at the Maketi Fou, the normally crowded central market, for iced coconuts. On Sunday it was pretty lazy, the vendors chatting in clusters in shady spots, reluctantly coming over totake their money. He bought her a mother-of-pearl necklace she admired. She bought him a garish silk crimson lavalava and dared him to wear it to dinner.
    The changeling wondered whether there would be a dinner date. Their relationship was about to enter uncharted territory.
    Maybe he would have to kill her, in a sense. In the sense that she was Rae, was Sharon.
    Russell offered to let her keep the bicycle, but she said no, she was too contaminated by civilization, and didn’t want to either leave it outside or lug it up the stairs to her small apartment. She left it at his cottage and kissed him good-bye, firmly, and walked the few blocks home with the kiss fading on her lips.
    The changeling pulled the shutters closed over its window and lay in the half-dark, listening to the click of the ceiling fan and the chatter of birds in the poinsiana tree outside.
    It began to practice the language it didn’t yet understand. With its glottis it made clicks exactly a twentieth of a second long, for ones, and carefully measured pauses, for zeros.
    Early on in the message, there were three clusters of the sequence 000011110000, which were probably separators of some kind, and a fourth one just past midway. These divided the message into parts roughly 2:1:1:47:49. In analogy to human music, perhaps it was a two-verse song, preceded by three packets of information: the first identifying it as a song, and the other two giving the title and some technical information, like tempo and key signature. Or flavor and electrical charge.
    There was no obvious pattern to the two verses, though each one had imbedded the cluster, or word, 01100101001011—three times in the first verse and four in the second. There were no other long repetitions. Short ones, like 0100101, had no statistical significance, but ifthey represented words in a human language, they could be common ones like “a” or “the.” You’d expect that with the high Shannon entropy.
    Not much to go on, analytically, but to the changeling it had some intuitive or subliminal meaning, evocative but frustrating, like a melody heard in childhood and almost totally forgotten.
    The ceiling fan made a click each three-quarter second. The changeling used it as a metronome, or rhythm section. Its human glottis could “speak” about a third as fast as the artifact had; it lowered the pitch of its sounds by a factor of three.
    It practiced quietly enough so that someone eavesdropping would hear something that sounded like noise from the fan’s motor, which was exactly what the CIA woman in the next room concluded. They had moved in a few hours after Sharon had her first lunch with Russell.
    It didn’t take long for the changeling to memorize the forty-five–second sequence of clicks and silences that it wanted to sing back to the artifact. But of course it couldn’t get in there without Russell, so it had to wait until dark, and then some. If Russell had met Jack for dinner, he probably wouldn’t be out too late. Would he then go to the lab, or home? Usually, it knew, he would go home for some light reading, listening to music, and since he’d be tied to the lab most of the next day, that was probably what he’d do.
    At nine, it put on a cute black outfit, short skirt and a clinging buckyball top that shimmered shifting rainbows like a blackbird’s wing. It slipped out quietly and with precise timing, when it heard the CIA agent go into the bathroom. By the time the agent suspected Sharon’s apartment was empty, the changeling had quickly walked the half mile to the cottages.
    The blinds were drawn on number 5, but the light was on by his easy chair. The changeling could visualize himsitting there with his book and glass of wine; a soft harpsichord tinkled the Goldberg Variations.
    She stepped out of her shoes and tapped on the door. When he opened it, she slipped inside and eased it shut behind her. “I’m impulsive. Are you?”
    It took him a couple of seconds to nod, staring.