“It gives them all a cut of the profits if everyone behaves,” Russ said, “and nobody gets anything if anyone leaks anything. Not to mention the pack of lawyers that will descend to worry the flesh off his bones and then crack the bones.”

“Something like that will be in your nondisclosure statement, too. Jack is fair, I think, but not flexible.” Jan tapped on her notebook again. “Obviously, I think you’re hired. Have to pass it by Jack, who crashed a few hours ago and probably won’t be making decisions until tomorrow morning. But the two of us and Naomi really do all the tech and administrative hires.”

“So I just stay by the phone?”

Russ shook his head. “It’s not that big an island. We’ll find you.”

“You can run, but you can’t hide,” Naomi said, and smiled.

Apia, Samoa, 13 June 2021

Trying to crack the artifact’s code was the most interesting thing the changeling had ever done. If it could just be locked up in a room for awhile with the string of ones and zeros—and a data line to the outside—it could decipher the thing by itself. Whether that would take a week, a year, or a millennium, it didn’t know. Or much care.

But the others were fighting the clock. Jack wanted the thing cracked while it was still news, and so if the lid stayed on it, they would announce the communications breakthrough one day, and the translation the next.

To help guard the secret, he upped the ante: there was a million-dollar bonus to the person or team who broke the code, as long as its existence stayed secret. Otherwise, the prize went down to a hundred thousand.

The changeling wondered what the man’s logic was, or whether logic had anything to do with it. Why was he so sure there would be money in this? If the message just said, “Hi; here are some pretty pictures in return,” and gave up nothing more revolutionary than what had been given it—which was what the changeling and most of its coworkers expected—then how was Poseidon going to make a dime off it? T-shirts and action figures?

When the changeling broached that question to Naomi, she squinted and put a finger to her lips. “Ours is not to reason why,” she whispered.

The number of ones and zeros was 31,433, which was the product of a prime and a prime squared: 17x43x43. So it might be seventeen squares, each forty-three dots and dashes on a side, or forty-three rectangles, seventeen by forty-three, arranged in various ways. Or just one line of 31,433 bits of information.

Their computers could marshal powerful decryption tools, and no doubt if the government got into it, they would have much more sophisticated ones. But the assumption had to be that this was not a hidden message, at least not hidden on purpose.

This was where intuition came in, or maybe plain dumb luck. Twenty people were working on it, and they had twenty large flatscreens and five 1.5-meter cubes, for visualizing in three dimensions. Find something that looks like a coherent message, or at least part of one. The rooms they worked in looked like crossword-puzzle nightmares, white and black squares and cubes in constant chaotic dance.

The changeling “felt” something—it was not logic, certainly not numbers, but a sense that the thing really was trying to be clear. It was just so inhuman that humans couldn’t get it.

Maybe the changeling had become too human itself, to get it.

People hungry for the million were grinding themselves down on coffee and speed and no sleep, so Russ declared a “snow day.” Everybody stay home and sleep or otherwise relax. Jack had to go along with it. After five days, people were getting a little crazy.

The changeling spent its snow day walking up the hill with Russ. They agreed not to talk about the project at all.

“Up the hill” was the steep four-kilometer hike to Vailima, the mansion where Robert Louis Stevenson had spent his last years. Russ had been there a couple of times, and so was “native guide” to Rae.

The changeling probably knew more about Robert Louis Stevenson’s writing than everybody else on the project combined, by virtue of its English major some lives before. Rut it played dumb and let Russ educate it.

It decided that it had read Treasure Island, “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” and nothing else by Stevenson. So as they trudged up the hill, Russ told her the stories of Kidnapped and The Master of Ballantrae, and some of the complex story of Stevenson’s life on the island.

The changeling knew most of it, but was a good listener. How the great writer had come out here seeking relief from tuberculosis, and found not a cure, but a relaxed and relaxing style of life. He, or his wife, Fanny, imported a lot of things that made Vailima a transplanted corner of civilized Scotland: fine linens and china, a good piano that was rarely played, walls lined with books—even a fireplace, in case the Earth changed its orbit.

It would be a better story if Stevenson had written any of his classics here, but those were behind him. He did write five books, and threw great parties, for the Samoans as well as the Anglos and Europeans. He found people to love, a condition that Fanny may have been resigned to before they moved, and his last years were full of joy and ease.

The changeling was not seducing Russ; it was just being there. But that was sufficient. Russ had never been immune to attractive women, and he was at a stage in life that was like Stevenson’s, minus wife and illness, plus good genes and all the benefits of twenty-first-century medicine. His body and mind were young enough that a liaison with a thirty-year-old woman was not ridiculous to either of them. As they pounded uphill together, sweating and laughing, stopping for a beer at a little joint, the difference in age became a novelty rather than a barrier.

They walked through Stevenson’s mansion, shoes off, with a teen-aged Samoan guide who hadn’t read much of the author’s work, but knew everything about daily life in the mansion, and talked as if Stevenson had just stepped out for awhile, perhaps riding down to Apia to see what the latest freighter had brought in, or joining the native workers in farm chores or clearing brush—she claimed that in spite of his physical problems, he took special pleasure in working to exhaustion, because afterward he could sit and look at the beauty of the forest and the distant sea, and truly enjoy it, his busy brain stilled. After the guide left, Russ said that he hoped it was true, but doubted it.

Not for the first time, the changeling wished it had discovered humans before 1932. It would have been interesting to watch the centuries go by; see how people changed.

After the tour, they climbed farther up the mountain, to where Stevenson and Fanny were buried. On his stone, the familiar inscription:

“I wonder if he really meant that,” the changeling said. “ ‘Gladly die.’ Was he that ill? Or maybe he was talking about the natural order of things.”

“He was gravely ill,” Russ said, “but it wasn’t in Samoa. He wrote it in California, a long time before he got here and his health improved.”

The changeling took his hand and they looked at the stone for a few silent moments. “So what do you want to do for the rest of your snow day?” it said.