The weathered surface of the chunk of exposed volcanic stone smoothed, and paled. Where before there was only stone, a horizontal slit opened. An eye. The rock slivered itself into two. Part of it extended, becoming a suckered arm that wound through the water toward where Ha sat with the screen in her hands. The delicate, tapered tip of the arm brushed the screen as if trying to feel, or taste, the symbols there. Then it surged forward, wrapping itself around the screen, tugging insistently on it. Ha let go.

There was no longer a stone. In front of her now, unfolded, with its arms contracted beneath itself, curled under it and in gentle contact with the sandy floor of the inlet—except for the one limb that held the screen—was the octopus. It brought the screen closer to its eye. As it did so, one of its other arms now extended, lengthening toward Ha where she sat as motionless as she could. The octopus turned the screen sideways, upside down. The other arm plucked the stylus from Ha’s fingers and moved it, looped in the suckered curls of its tip, toward its head.

For a brief second, it seemed the impossible would happen—that the octopus would bring stylus to palimpscreen and write. But the arm holding the stylus jabbed it into the sand as, simultaneously, a third and fourth arm poured toward Ha, their suckers playing over her hands and face, the surface of her suit, tasting her chemical makeup.

My emotional state? Can she taste that as well?

The octopus paled. It expanded, pulling itself vertical, flattening its mantle as it steadied itself in front of her. One of its arms still danced across her cheek, played across the edges of her dive mask.

The creature was easily as large as Ha. Larger. Its size was changeable, its elastic being contracting and expanding every moment, but Ha could see that its fully extended length was greater than her height.

And now the shapes began to flow across its body, a stream pouring through the chromatophores of its skin. Embedded in the flow was the six-shape sequence modeled out in bottles in the ocean sand, but that sequence was nothing more than one apparition in the stream.

At first the octopus limited itself to the black-and-white patterns, but then color came in as well, multiple lines of coruscating, coalescing, and dispersing form that streamed down its mantle, even down nearly to the tips of its arms, one of which had wound itself around her own right arm now, one of which still played at her mask, brushing her cheek, while another held the screen, and another rotated the stylus in its winding grip.

Iridophores in the octopus’s skin refracted light and the shapes glowed. They flashed into existence and disappeared, faster and slower.