“Jack, we agreed from the get-go. No government. No military applications.”

“We’d be amenable to that. It’s not what we’re looking for.”

“What are you looking for?”

“Half our team are exobiologists. It’s not so much a ‘what’… as a ‘who.’ “

Woods Hole, Massachusetts, 1935

The Berrys were surprised when their son didn’t want to go to Juilliard, which they certainly could have afforded. The changeling was interested in music, but its interest was not human, and it could be indulged anywhere. It could sit alone in the dark and play, in its mind, fantastic compositions that no human could play. With two extra imaginary hands, it could play a Bach fugue forward and backward at the same time. It often did things like that in the hours it had to feign sleep.

All it really knew of its origin was that it had come from the sea, and before taking human form it remembered having been for centuries a great white shark and a killer whale. There were other manifestations before that, and though the memories were vague, it seemed they had all been sea creatures of some sort.

Were there a lot of its kind? There was no way to tell. Others who had taken human form could pass for human indefinitely, appearing to age at a normal rate, “dying,” and resuming life as someone else.

Its readings in psychology indicated that its transition, while it was learning the difference between killer whale behavior and human behavior, cannot have been common. There were tales of “feral children,” supposedly raised by wolves or other animals, who might fit the pattern. He had plenty of time to investigate that.

There was no compelling reason for someone like it to become human. They could still be white sharks or killer whales—or coral reefs or rocks, if that made them content. The sea was a good hiding place.

So it decided that oceanography would be a reasonable place to start. If that didn’t pan out, it could study some other discipline, switch identity and do it again and again. Time was of no importance.

The leading edge of oceanographic research was Woods Hole, a new, privately endowed institution. It was in Massachusetts, so the changeling applied to several places in that commonwealth. Turned down by both Harvard and MIT, possibly because most of its high school courses had been taught by home tutors, it wound up going to the University of Massachusetts, majoring in oceanography. Woods Hole did take graduate students from there as summer interns, and that was its eventual plan.

Its academic performance was predictably irregular; it aced anything that had to do with logic or memorization, but didn’t do well in courses like literature or philosophy. It saw that many other students were that way, and most of them were shy loners, too.

After part of one semester of dormitory life, it moved out and got an apartment in town. That minimized the time and energy devoted to maintaining the Jimmy Berry facade, and gave it freedom to practice being other people, which it assumed would someday be a useful talent. After careful practice, it could become a different person of the same size in about ten minutes. Smaller or larger took twice as long or more, and was more painful and tiring. Once it became two children, though one had only average intelligence, and the other was dim-witted.

It had a cautious social life as Jimmy, going to a dance or the movies once or twice a month, always with a different girl. There was no shortage of dates for a handsome older California boy with money and family. There was no record of Jimmy’s peculiar past in regard to the opposite sex, and in 1935, sex never became an issue on the first and only date.

(The changeling realized it would sooner or later have to learn sexual etiquette, but decided to put it off until later. There was almost no reliable information on the subject in America at that time; people in movies and books made obvious sexual overtures, but never followed through. It knew that “Take off your clothes and put them on the dresser” would only work under certain conditions. You did have to wind up alone and in a state of undress together, but how you got there from the passionate kiss or arched eyebrow was a mystery.)

So its course was set: four years of work that shined in science and mathematics and language, but little else, which was good protective coloration, and then a couple of years on a master’s, then a doctorate and, eventually, Woods Hole.

It did get to work at Woods Hole for two summers, sailing the ketch Atlantis as a graduate intern. Every now and then, on days off, it would go to a deserted cove and spend an hour changing into a dolphin, to get back to the sea in a more personal, familiar way. These cold rich waters were another world from its Pacific home, and it learned a lot, some of which would direct its own research.

But before the doctorate came, war intervened.

The changeling saw people being drafted and assigned to whatever kind of job and place the military desired. But people who joined up were allowed to choose, within reason.

It wanted to study the Pacific, suspecting its origin must be somewhere out there. Danger wasn’t a factor; as far as it knew, it couldn’t die. So it joined the Marines, and asked for a Pacific assignment.

To most graduate students, it would be an annoyance and delay—not to mention the possibility of being shot or succumbing to some tropical disease. But to the changeling, time was just time, meaningless. Every new experience had been useful.

It didn’t tell the Marine Corps about college, which probably would have led to a desk job. So instead of being a marine science Marine, it became a plain foot soldier, grunt, jarhead. Pearl Harbor was a year away.

Eurasia, pre-Christian era

The changeling wasn’t alone on the planet. There was another creature, unrelated, who had lived on Earth longer than he could remember; who had lived thousands of lives, disappearing when he got too old, to reappear as a young man.

He was always a man, and usually a brute.

Call him the chameleon: an alpha male who never had sons, unless an adulterer cooperated. Unlike the changeling, he did have DNA, but it was alien; he could no more reproduce with a human than he could with a rock or a tree.

Also unlike the changeling, he seemed to be stuck in human form. It never occurred to him to wonder why this was so. But it didn’t occur to him for tens of millennia—not until the Renaissance—that he might have come from another world. He assumed that he was some sort of demon or demigod, but early on realized that it was a mistake to advertise the fact. He couldn’t be killed, not even by fire, but he did feel pain, and he felt it profoundly, in ways a human never could. At low levels it was pleasure, and he sought out varieties of that. But hanging and crucifixion were experiences he never wanted to do a second time. To be burned to ashes was agony beyond belief, and reconstructing yourself afterward was worse.

So after a few experiences that probably helped establish the myth of the vampire, the chameleon settled into routine existence, seriatim lives that were fairly ordinary.

He was usually a warrior, and of course a good one. Sometimes his career was cut short by being chopped in two or trampled or drawn and quartered. In the chaos of battle he could usually find a few minutes of darkness, to pull himself together, and then go off in search of another life. When his death and interment were witnessed by many, he had to fake a grave robbery or, reluctantly, a miracle.