And they win, in the end. They think their way to a solution, even as the seas around them go sour with poisons and the land burns to sand. They build a global network of vast abyssal walls and ditches and ridges. They create whole artificial mountain ranges, mounded up by no other means than clutches of tentacles controlled by genius minds. They alter the currents of the seas to create safe zones, cool zones, oxygenated nurseries. They suffer, but they survive, and because of their efforts countless other marine species also live, even the poor, forsaken trilobites.

On the land, things are worse than they might otherwise be, because the orthocones don’t care about it and use it as their heat sink. Whatever life has clawed its way out from their tentacled shadow simply dies off. In the end the world lurches out of the dying times and into a better future, where terrestrial life will never amount to much—and where the seas are ruled by the orthocones in their wisdom.

Where are they now, though, those towering minds of the oceans? Where are their spaceships, their industries, and will they ever put a squid on the moon? Nowhere and nothing are the works of the orthocones. Nowhere save in the constant murmur of their erudite consideration. They never leave the sea, which is the medium of their thought. Even though they have reshaped the world to their liking and for their survival, they did it by hand. They have no technology; despite their many dextrous arms they barely craft tools. Our ape ancestors of three million years gone were greater makers than these cephalopods will ever be. These intellects will never look up and see the stars, yet they effortlessly understand and communicate profound truths about the nature of existence that we cannot grasp, and we are the poorer for it. They have gone beyond us to a realm of contemplation that we, the ape-children with our bloodied stone axes, are not fit for.

3.

I

Lee Pryor sat on her bed in her studio apartment in Hemel—the one that her parents still contributed towards despite all their grumbling. She stared at the knees of her jeans, trying to work out just what this might turn out to be.

Not for one moment had she considered not going. The phone line hadn’t been great, but she knew Mal’s voice. And really, what was the plausible alternative? That, four years later, parties unknown were trolling her?