Find the Changeling Read online

  “Fain?”

  “The other man with me. I sort of wonder how reliable those psychers were. I don’t feel reliable.”

  “I am certain you are.” Something simple and direct in the way she said it made Skallon believe it, too. Maybe she understood him better than he did himself.

  “The hotel,” he murmured, changing the subject for reasons he did not quite understand. “I’ll walk you back.”

  They made their way along a graveled track that intersected Maraban Lane, making a crunching noise that seemed to fill the darkness. Skallon took her arm as they negotiated the uncertain steps at the hotel courtyard. A single yellow lamp hung over the entrance portal. In a shadowed corner nearby Skallon saw a flicker of movement. The events in the railway car came flooding back into his mind. He fumbled beneath his Doubluth robes for a weapon. His hand found it but the butt snagged in the cloth. The shadows moved again. Skallon stepped away from Joane to clear his field of fire.

  “I asked you not to go out alone,” came a high-pitched voice.

  “Stand there!” Skallon blurted.

  “What?” A boy stepped out of the shadows.

  “Mother, I’ve been waiting for you. I really wish—”

  “Sir, this is our boy, Danon.” Joane draped an arm around the boy, who appeared to be about fourteen Earth years of age. Skallon nodded and made some conversation by way of introduction. He was momentarily taken aback. Joane did not look old enough to have a boy this age. Perhaps the shadows had hidden her wrinkles—lighting here was always dim, a significant change from the bleached-white corridors of Earth.

  The boy seemed protective of his mother and somewhat wary of Skallon. For his age that seemed to fit the standard psychological profile, Skallon thought to himself as they went into the hotel. In the foyer they parted, Joane giving him her hand in a cool, distant way. Danon nodded crisply. Skallon made the traditional parting phrases and picked his way down the cramped hallways, thinking about Joane.

  He pushed open the door to his room and was halfway inside before he noticed the figure sitting on the bed. He froze. The first thing that registered was not the man’s face, but the muddy boots smearing the white sheets.

  “About time,” Fain said.

  Part Two

  1

  Down only a few hours now, and Fain already hated this planet. It stank.

  He slipped through the thickening jungle. Twice now he had seen the darting blue bolts in the distance. Mother was eliminating some aircraft. Fain wished he was still in his suit, but there was nothing to be done about that. He would have taken Skallon’s, but the Alveans at the air base were probably watching for a suit, ready to zap it. So Fain would come in under cover, looking as harmless as possible. He slid his right hand under his Alvean robes and checked to be sure he could get his weapons out quickly, free of snags. Then he moved on.

  He wrinkled his nose in disgust. Everything smelled here. The forest had become more like a jungle. There were grotesque ferns, chunky things like mushrooms. The air was thick with pollen, seeds, and spores. His eyes watered constantly and his nose dripped mucus. A wet, warm mist blanketed the ground, and a heavy wind blew hard against his face. No, thought Fain, there was no place like Earth. A cliché, sure, but a damned accurate one. Fain had spent time on more than two dozen backworlds, and he hadn’t liked any of them. Revolium, for example, the scene of his grandest success, a waterworld where the inhabitants, more like fish than real men, smelled of weeds and brine. The planet wasn’t important. Fain had gone to Revolium to perform a service and he had come to Alvea to do the same. Jungle or giant ocean, endless desert or evergreen forest, cities, mountains, plains-only the job really mattered. Until it was done, he thought of nothing else.

  Still, he couldn’t help missing the Earth, wishing he were home. It was an emotion he didn’t like finding in himself. A good agent couldn’t afford strings. The truth was that he worried about himself. What if the execs were right? What if he had indeed lost something? The incident back there with the Vertil—five years ago that would never have happened. Changelings never grew soft. Maybe that was why Fain hated them the way he did. It was a form of hatred tinged with envy and admiration. When Fain killed this Changeling, he would learn something about himself. If he failed again, he would learn something, too.

  He remembered when it had started. Right after Revolium. He had met with Bateman, Vice President of the Consortium, up in the towers of Houston. Bateman puffed away at the butt of a natural cigarette. The habit was available only to men powerful enough to demand and receive the costly carcinoma treatments. “Congratulations, Fain,” said Bateman, rising from his desk and offering a gloved hand. “I knew if we had a man capable of bringing one back alive, it was you.”

  Fain didn’t like Bateman. The chances were good that fifteen years before Bateman had personally ordered the murder of a man named Dickson Fain. “I do my job.” Fain ignored the extended hand.

  Grinning thinly, Bateman sat. Past his left shoulder, a broad window revealed the glittering midnight skyline of the city. Fain knew it was a cozy distortion. Outside, the time was closer to noon.

  “You’ll want your reward,” Bateman said.

  Fain nodded. “You promised. In writing. I’ve got a copy. Anything I want costing less than three million list.”

  “A fair price.” Bateman smiled broadly. “Well, Fain, what is it? Have you made up your mind yet?”

  Fain knew exactly what he wanted. He’d known ever since he’d first maneuvered Bateman into making his open offer. “You have two daughters. I want five-year leases on both.”

  Bateman showed nothing. He had obviously never expected Fain to succeed on Revolium, but Fain had fooled him there. Fain was fooling him again now. Coolly, Bateman said, “I won’t do that, Fain.”

  He didn’t raise his voice. “You killed my father—”

  “—a clear traitor to the Consortium—”

  “—and now I’m demanding payment in kind. One daughter for one father.”

  “You said two.”

  “The other is for my services. My future services.”

  “You could be killed.”

  “Not when I’m worth more to the Consortium alive than dead. No other man knows the Changelings as I do. No other man could ever catch one.”

  Fain thought of the two women. Had it really started with them? Had loving them made him soft, or was it just coincidence? Neither were ringers. He had expected Bateman to try a trick, but the women’s prints had matched. Fain had contacts in the Consortium Data Bank that allowed him to be sure of that At first he had just hurt them. He’d had few women before and not enjoyed them much. In time he decided that these two were different. It wasn’t their VP status. Fain, through his idealistic, scientific monk of a father, had once held that. It was their attitude toward him: their fear and their admiration. When the lease had expired last month, the three of them had promised to see each other again. Fain didn’t know how much truth was involved in those shared vows. He did know that he wanted them again—them or some other women just like them.

  That was what disturbed him—that was the real change. Before the women, he had never entered a job with any thought for the future. Live or die, succeed or fail, the job itself had occupied the totality of his senses. Now, even with his eyes open, he kept seeing the women. Flashes of them: eyes, breasts, knees. He smelled them, too. Remembered their tastes. It had been this way for five years—five years of failure. He—knew he had to clear his mind. The lease—his revenge—was over. He had to get back to the way it had been before. If he didn’t, he knew he might well be dead. His usefulness to the Consortium was a thin thread. Bateman would love having him killed. Fain knew he had to prove himself here—and survive.

  Alvea didn’t much help. The dense undergrowth. The ludicrous ferns and stinking mushrooms. He moved swiftly, with instinctive ease. Ahead, with each step, things stirred and scampered in the high grass. Rodents and insects. Bugs and pests. Live th
ings. And the Changeling? Somewhere there ahead, too. Fain drove the women out of his mind. He forced his senses to flow outward, merging with the exterior world. This was his protection, his gift. He wouldn’t fail this time.

  He heard the bubbling stream before tall grasses parted to show the flashing green water. He paused briefly for a drink, then waded forward. The rocks were slippery. Overhead, a piercing cry ruptured the stillness of afternoon. Fain didn’t glance up. The bird was a smackwing; he knew it from quicktreatment. Ugly, but good meat, good food. Suddenly, he stopped, thumbed his pistol to silent mode, threw up his arm, fired. The bird cried out, banked to the left, disappeared over the jungle. A miss. A near miss, but a miss. Fain holstered his heatgun beneath his gown. He stood in the middle of the stream, water sweeping past his knees, and stared at his hands. He had never missed before—never.

  He found the body on the opposite bank.

  At first he thought the Alvean was dead. But no, the breathing was strong, if uncertain. The pulse was steady, if too quick. There was no indication of any sort of wound. An Alvean soldier, fatter—if possible—than the other two. Unconscious.

  Fain sat back on his haunches, listening intently now to every distant sound. A lone man in the middle of the jungle, unconscious but neither dead nor wounded. Something to do with the Changeling, but—

  The idea chilled him. He slipped a plate from his robes and held it in front of the man’s lips. In a moment the plate clouded a rosy pink.

  Fain stood up. Someone had drugged this Alvean with Vertil, apparently made use of him, and then left him here to recover.

  But only he and Skallon had Vertil on this planet. It was outlawed here. So, impossible as it seemed, this sleeping Alvean meant that the Changeling, too, had a Vertil supply.

  So the odds were different now, vastly different. And suddenly the fear blew through him like a cold wind.

  Oh my God no no, he had screamed, running into the room. The hollow roar of the flame gun filled the house. The flames were already halfway around his father, burning through his clothes. Swarming up toward the face. His father covered his face with both hands and rocked backward. One of the assassins fired again.

  Licking flames. A ball of light that struck his father in the chest and exploded over him.

  Then the scream. Shrill, high. Agony and despair.

  Fain took three steps into the room and someone smashed him in the chest with the butt of a weapon. Oh please God no what are you, why— Then he saw the chevrons, the bits of cloth that meant this was all legal, there was no mistake, that his father had to die here today.

  His father, awash in fire.

  The hands came down as though the burning man knew there was no escape, no point in trying. The face was contorted, clenched. The mouth gaped in a silent scream. The figure stiffened. The flames spread over him, chewing. Then his eyes opened slowly, as if he were forcing them, struggling for one last look at the world. Fain’s father looked out at his son and swayed. His hair burst into orange flame. Acrid smoke. The crisp burning sound. Licking, snapping flames. His fathers lungs filling again to scream. In the burning man’s eyes there was something ageless. He looked at Fain, gazing out through his agony, and between the two of them there passed the recognition, the knowledge. Then his father toppled backward, arms jerking, and the final scream came.

  Fain stood rigid, bathed in sweat.

  Whenever the fear came he fled from it, ran away into the past. Back to the burning, falling man. Back to the three assassins, making sure their job was done and his father couldn’t be revived in a healant unit. Doing their grisly work on the living room rug. Brushing aside the babbling boy.

  It was in the dark hours that followed, as the house filled with police and officials and relatives, that the glacial calm descended on him, never to leave. A cold, serene knowledge. He had seen death and in that final haunted look from his father he had seen the answer to death. His father had given Fain something that would carry him through life and make him unlike the others.

  It was to that secret center, where the cold clear truth dwelled, that Fain returned. The fear had seized him for a moment there, but now it was gone. The Changeling held a huge edge over them. It had neutralized the only concrete advantage he and Skallon had brought to Alvea. Very well: the problem was different, now. But inside Fain knew that he had nothing to lose here, truly. The best the Changeling could do was kill him. That was all. And knowing that gave Fain the key edge he had always had over everyone—over man, over Changelings, everything.

  Fain cradled his heatgun and went on. The moment had passed. He had moments like it before, especially during the past five years, but they had never really mattered. This one would fade and disappear, too. He was sure of that.

  He had gone three kilometers when he heard the first gunshots booming in the damp air.

  2

  Crouching among pungent leaves, breathing through his lips to keep from gagging, Fain studied the landscape ahead. It was the Alvean air base. In one corner, piled at the edge of a cracked concrete runway, there were nine reconnaissance airships. Two were burning. Of the seven wooden buildings, three were on fire. As he watched, a huge, round, squat Alvean staggered out of one of the burning buildings. The man held a primitive pistol high in his hand. He ran, waddling, and fired twice into the air. Then he fell on his face.

  Vertil. Fain knew already what had happened. The Changeling, in his guise of General Nokavo, had infiltrated the base. He had sent two uninfected soldiers away to kill Fain and Skallon and had then gone about his usual task. He had created chaos. The Vertil must have made it very easy. Apparently, the effects of the Vertil were now wearing off. Fain could see sprawled bodies everywhere he looked. When the Al-veans awoke, if they ever did, they would remember little of what had occurred.

  He ran forward. One building so far spared from the fire stood bedecked with a half-dozen colorful flags. Fain assumed this must make it local headquarters and he aimed his trajectory that way. A bullet whizzed past his ear, Fain zigzagged and thought he spied a flash of motion high in a wooden tower opposite the headquarters building. The Changeling? Not likely. Probably an Alvean sniper, crazed with Vertil. He didn’t alter his course. He didn’t use his own heat-gun. A second bullet cut into the ground far to his left. Fain knew he had guessed correctly. No Changeling would ever miss twice.

  Fain, not missing a step, hurled his shoulder against the bolted door of the headquarters building. The wood split like plaster and he tumbled inside. Losing his balance, tumbling, Fain bounced off a shoulder, rolled to his knees, and aimed his heatgun. “Make a move—any move—and I will kill you.”

  “Aye, sir.” The Alvean grinned widely. Spittle washed his lips, and he bowed from his broad waist.

  The General has intimated your immediate arrival.”

  Fain stood. “Place your hands on your head, turn three times, flap your arms, and make a sound like a bird—a smackwing.”

  The Alvean unquestioningly performed as directed.

  Fain nodded, not relaxing. If he needed any confirmation of his expectations, here it stood—in the flesh—at least one hundred kilos’ worth.

  “Now stand still.” Fain searched the Alvean, turning him easily from left to right. He seemed to be unarmed. The room itself, apparently some sort of foyer, was a mess of scattered paper and broken furniture. There was one door in the opposite wall and Fain never took his eyes off it.

  He backed away from the Alvean and said, ‘Tell me precisely what has occurred here.” Despite the open door, he couldn’t hear a thing from outside. The shooting had stopped and only a faint odor of smoke remained. “How did this trouble begin?”

  The Alvean shook his head defensively and showed one pale palm, a gesture of some sort. ‘There is no trouble here, good sir. Only our Supreme Commander, General Nokavo, has ordered a search for traitors.”

  ‘Then why are you shooting at each other? Burning your own buildings?”

  “Why, to find the
traitors, of course.” The Alvean spoke with the wide-eyed sincerity that Vertil most often produced. Once under the influence, no Alvean could possibly understand why his distorted world-view did not make perfect sense to everyone.

  “Who told you who the traitors were? Was that General Nokavo, too?”

  “Oh, no.” The Alvean shook his head vigorously, jowls quivering. “General Nokavo merely pointed out that each man’s best friend must be suspected of treachery. He named no names at all.”

  ‘That was fair of him,” Fain said drily. “And where might he be now? General Nokavo? Once he’d told you his secret, did he just happen to leave?”

  “Oh, no. General Nokavo has remained in his office throughout, supervising the search for traitors.”

  “His office?”

  The Alvean swiveled and pointed to the opposite door. “Through there.”

  Fain nodded. It wasn’t what he had expected. If anything, it was too easy—the Changeling just sitting here waiting for him to arrive. Fain knew there had to be a catch, but he also knew he had no choice but to go straight ahead. If the Changeling was waiting, it wouldn’t wait for long.

  “Show me to him,” said Fain.

  The Alvean bowed. Turning obediently, he first stumbled a step, then wavered, then finally got a grip on the door. Fain could tell that the effects of the Vertil were wearing off. Any moment now and this man would collapse in a stupor. That was only one more reason for haste.

  The Alvean opened the door—it was unlocked—and stepped through.

  His heatgun ready, Fain followed.

  This room was neat and clean. There were local books, bound pamphlets, and a wide plush couch and chair.

  There’s no one here.”

  “General Nokavo’s office is there.” The Alvean pointed toward the ceiling.

  Fain ducked back for cover. He cursed himself for failing to see the open square of the trapdoor the moment he’d entered the room. If the Changeling was up there, if it wasn’t deliberately taunting him, he knew he ought to be dead now.