He glanced at the boy again, with his father on the dock, smiling and squinting up at something, the swirling terror of what he had seen coming off the gangplank at Kanlıca already gone.

But it is so difficult to stay afraid.

“Instead, you take stupid risks,” he said out loud. “And play at games you don’t even know the rules of.”

Chapter 35

Communication is communion. When we communicate with others, we take something from them into ourselves, and give them something of ours.

Perhaps it is this thought that makes us so nervous about the idea of encountering cultures outside the human. The thought that what it means to be human will shift—and we will lose our footing.

Or that we will finally have to take responsibility for our actions in this world.

—Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think

35

“AND SO THEY ARE NOT SPEAKING to one another?” Kamran was on the balcony, in sunglasses against a bright day. His white T-shirt had a hole in it, where the seam was coming loose from the collar.

“Nothing so dramatic as that—but there is a worsening of tension between Evrim and Altantsetseg. I feel it.”

“I imagine it will pass.”

“What makes you say that?”

“With only the three of you there, they’ll need someone to talk to. You have me, but neither one of them has a line out that you know of.”

“No.”

“So they’ll come around. They’ll have to. Either that, or…”

“Or what?”

“Or murder each other. Or divide the island between themselves, and spend years building a rock wall down the middle of it.”

“You’re in a funny mood today.”

“Up all night again at the lab. Too much coffee. You know.”

“Making progress?”

“Maybe. Or I might be just torturing graduate students. Hard to say. But tell me about this sign. The new one.”

Ha drew it on a piece of palimpscreen and held it up to the oculus. “Two crescents, facing outward. If I were going to guess, it means friendship, or unity, or stands for the tribe, or something like that. If the crescent is the garden, then this could be two octopuses, looking out in different directions, inside a circle made by their protective gardens.”

“‘Safety’ or ‘home’?”

“Maybe in that general category.”

“But no idea what the previous two signs mean—the lighter ones.”

“No.”

“You’re frustrated.”

“I am.”

“So talk about it.”

“It’s just knowing how little progress I’ll be able to make. Even during years here. And I don’t feel like I will have years, before…”

“Go on and say it.”

“Before this is taken from me. Handed over to teams of linguists, semioticians, a hundred kinds of specialists and their neural-network assistants. It won’t be mine anymore. It will become about computational power, mapping the system. And I’m afraid, as well…” Tell him.

“Tell me.”