Movement and pause. Shift, extrapolate, innovate, return. She was lost in it. She knew, without glancing at Evrim or at Altantsetseg, that they were as well. They almost did not register the movement on-screen when the juvenile was joined by another octopus, and then another.

Larger and smaller, the newcomers began to form a crescent around the shape-singing one. The forms on the singer’s skin grew, now—larger and more distinct, inked dark and edged against a pearlite background of flesh, the pallid gaps between the figures longer. Was it moving to a crescendo?

And then came a single form, sharp and clear as a stamp or a tattoo on the skin of the singer. It lingered. Lingered like the drawn-out final note of a symphony:

It was ten seconds, fifteen, before it began to fade, black to gray to a ghost, then nothing—as if worn away by sun or wind.

And then the singer collapsed, shrank, receded into itself. It lost the stiff, elongated posture it had held during its performance. It became, once again, a being of any shape at all. And the crescent of audience closed in, arms reaching, stroking and tangling the arm-ends of the singer. Then moving away, drifting off. Reluctant? A sense of quietude to them.

But as they moved off, Ha saw it on their skins—again and again. Less defined, less articulated—like the echo of a crescendo in the mind of a concertgoer—but here scrawled on the surface. On that cephalopod flesh that is like a window to the mind itself. Minds in the sea. And etched on the mind-skin of each of them, as they drifted away:

A trace.

Chapter 29

What we must look for, to be successful in interspecies communication, are starting points: commonalities of perception where we can begin the difficult work of translation between two fundamentally different ways of being in the world.

We must look for concepts that approach the universal. Concepts such as “shelter,” “safety,” “community,” and even complexities like “cooperation” and “communication,” which would have to exist for any society. When we—if we—determine the signs that represent these concepts, we may find a foothold.

—Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think

29

THE LITTLE AUTOSKIFF bounced across the wave chop and moved out into the small inlet. There was hardly a need for the boat: they were traveling no more than a few hundred meters from shore. Ha could have walked in from the beach. But the boat was filled with mesh bags that would have been difficult to carry from shore, and anyway Altantsetseg had insisted on the boat.