In her tank, Altantsetseg brought her knees up to her chest, pushed them back down, and spread her arms wide. Like she’s casting spells. Then her body relaxed, but the surface of her skin twitched with neural impulses.

It was silent enough outside to hear the waves again, the cacophony of jungle sound at their backs.

“It is over. She’ll be shifting to cleanup mode now. Keeping the oil and pollutants out of the water. We should go back to bed. There is nothing more to see here.”

But both Evrim and Ha stood for a moment more in front of the tank. Ha was visually tracing Altantsetseg’s scars. So many: Himalayan whorls of scar tissue, the Hindu Kush along a collarbone, earthquakes of muscle underneath.

“She took my macaroon, you know.”

“Sorry, what?”

“She took my macaroon. Just like she said she would. She broke into my room and stole it,” Evrim said. “It couldn’t have been anyone else. She has a passkey. You know, it’s good you are here. For many reasons. For one thing, Altantsetseg and I were beginning to get on one another’s nerves.”

Chapter 11

Symbols do not come from nowhere. Not at first. Early hieroglyphic systems have connections to the world. Even in the highly sophisticated and abstracted hanzi characters of the modern Chinese logographic system, we see the traces of those relations—like the character for person, 人, which depicts a figure, however simplified, recognizably related to a standing human.

Language is abstract, yes—but it emerges from real relations with real things in the world and bears the traces of that ancient relationship. These traces will be the keys to deciphering the symbols of another species—if only we can recognize them.

—Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think

11

IN THE EARLY DAWN, Ha walked down the road toward what had been the island’s port of Ben Dam. She had not slept all night. In her mind, ships burned. When she closed her eyes, she saw Altantsetseg in her tank: scars like mountain ranges on a topographic map, underwater ridges shuddering in connective liquid.

But this was not what had kept her awake. What kept her up was the puzzle of the shape the octopus had projected on its skin repeatedly. A sign—a symbol. It could mean anything at all—but it might, also, be connected to an original form, a real object in the world. And if it was, it could be a key. The shape appeared again and again in her mind: