Camouflage

“With you I could be.”
    The cottage was one big room with a divider setting off the “bedroom”; she led him there, turning out the reading lamp on the way.
    “Just a second.” He stopped to light a candle, as expected. In its light, she stripped out of the skirt with a Velcro rip and pulled off the buckyball thing. Underneath, she was wearing nothing but the hummingbird tattoo.
    She sat on the bed and pulled him toward her, unbuttoning his silly shirt while he fumbled with his cutoffs. He wasn’t quite erect; she took him in her mouth immediately, to enjoy the change of state. She teased him gently with her teeth, as she knew he liked, and then took advantage of not having a gag reflex—the changeling had no reflexes, as such—to engage him deeply, cradling him with one hand and urging him down to the bed with the other.
    It was what Rae had done with him, the first time. Would his brain be working well enough to make that connection?
    He reached down to help her but she was already moist, in control of that function, too. She crawled up onto the bed and straddled him, helping him in slowly with a circling motion, sighing with genuine pleasure. Being with him as Sharon had not been enough.
    She smiled down on him, playing with his hair while he moved up and down inside her, and after a minute said, “I have a little trick.” She eased sideways and tilted a bit, raising her knee and straightening her leg, holding him in place. She slowly crabbed around, doing the same trick with the other leg, so that she was facing away, without having lost him in the process. “Still there?” Knowing that he was.
    “How . . . did you do that?”
    “Double jointed.”
    She knew he liked this aspect, and enjoyed the internal difference herself, but mainly wanted to be facing the other direction for a few minutes. He clasped her with his hands and she used hers in a practiced way, trying to control his progress while she worked on her face.
    When the time was right, she had an enthusiastic orgasm, and he ejaculated with desperate eagerness right afterwards. She eased down to her side and he rolled over, holding her spoon fashion.
    After a minute he somewhat surprised her: “Rae?”
    She slowly turned around in the circle of his arms with her new face, the old face.
    She ran a finger down the bridge of his nose while he stared. “ ‘To see love coming, and see love depart.’ ”
    “You . . . grew a new arm,” he said inanely. “But you’re the same inside.” For ninety years, the changeling realized, it had always been nurse Deborah inside, whenever it was a woman.
    He explored her face with his hands, and then drifted down to the tattoo. “But except for the face . . .”
    “I’m still Sharon. Changing bodies takes longer, and hurts.”
    “Who . . . what . . .” He was still caressing her. “What are you?”
    “ ‘Who’ I am is Sharon and Rae and a couple of hundred other people over the past century, and a number of animals and objects besides. The ‘what’ is difficult.”
    “Another planet?”
    “I don’t even know that. Your idea about my coming from the future isn’t inconsistent with my memories, which are vague before 1931. I think that’s when I first took human form.”
    “What were you before that?”
    “A variety of creatures. I was always in the sea—greatwhite, killer whale; whatever was at the top of the local biome’s food chain. Pretty good survival instinct, I suppose.
    “I could have been there as long as the artifact; the artifact might have brought me here—from the future, from another star, another dimension. I feel a compelling attraction to it.”
    He nodded slowly. “So you seduced me, hoping I could—”
    She kissed him on the cheek. “Which doesn’t mean I don’t love you,” she whispered. “You can love someone and use him. Or her.”
    He didn’t say anything for a long moment. He smoothed a strand of hair off her forehead, and smiled. “You seem so feminine. As Rae, as Sharon, and now in between.”
    “I prefer being female. But I was a Marine in World War Two, a male juggler in the circus. In the seventies I was a male astronomy graduate assistant at Harvard, a few years ahead of Jan; I graded Jan’s papers when she took Atmospheres of the Sun and Stars. Small world.”
    “Did you ever meet Jack or me, before the project?”
    “No. I knew about you, from the Titanic thing, of course; I was a marine biologist.”
    “As well as