“I know Octopolis and Octlantis. I spent a season there studying them. But there’s no evidence of culture at those sites. There are basic interactions—dominance by larger males, herding of females. Nothing else. There’s nothing that indicates any sort of a developed grammar, or symbolic communication. They would need to have developed a level of consistency in their signaling that hasn’t been observed—unless there’s a study I haven’t read.”

“I doubt there is,” Evrim said.

“I doubt it as well.”

“You don’t believe it, then. You don’t believe in what we brought you here to confirm.”

Ha shook her head. “No. I want to believe it, but I think the simpler explanation is true. What you have here is a combination of superstition, rumor, and strange behavior from what might be only one or two particularly intelligent octopuses. Con Dao is fertile ground for rumors. Everyone who lives here…”—she corrected herself—“who lived here, I mean, saw ghosts. When I visited here as a child you couldn’t speak to a local without ghosts coming into the conversation: the ancestral spirit of Vo Thi Sau combing her long black hair in Hang Duong Cemetery, the starved dead wandering in the shadows between the trees. The stories go on and on. Too many people died in the prisons here for there not to be stories of ghosts. The residents lived in a world half composed of spirits. This archipelago is ripe for weird cryptozoology.”

“But you wrote an entire book on cephalopod communication. Now you’re saying it isn’t possible.”

“No—I wrote a whole book speculating on what such a thing might look like. I wrote a book that took science and mixed it with a whole lot of ideas about what might be. And I wrote that book because I think it might be possible. Somewhere, at some point in time. But at the core, I’m a scientist. I can speculate all I want—play around with ideas, hypothesize—that’s a part of the job, right? But when it comes down to asking me to believe the stories here…”

When was the last time she had spoken with someone else for this long, besides Kamran? She could not think of a recent time.

Maybe the octopus isn’t the only one who leads a solitary life.

How did the joke go in her book? Ah yes:… More inclined to cannibalize its own kind than band together with them. Doomed to a senescent death after a haphazard sexual encounter … sounds like one or two scientists I know.

She smiled to herself. “Well, it’s a tall order. That’s all.”

“What would fill that … what did you call it? That tall order?” Evrim asked.