Screaming and chaos. Men slithering along the floor toward the safest possible place, though there was no safe place. Eiko lay facedown with his hands over his head as if they could protect him, as close to the starboard side as he could manage. Son crawled up next to him.

The recoilless rifle hammered over and over. The port wall of the barracks was a constellation of holes—it looked like Scorpius. The window the Indonesian was looking out of when he was shot was at the center of it.

I didn’t know his name. Didn’t care enough to know, even though he taught me how to gut yellowfish quickly enough to keep the guards from hitting me. I never cared enough. I still don’t.

Then the Klaxon went silent. The Sea Wolf was turning to port, hard, shoving Eiko against the starboard bulkhead of the barracks. Acceleration. The shudder of impact. Eiko was crawling across the floor, not thinking, moving to the port-side window.

Have to see. Have to know.

The Sea Wolf’s spotlights played across writhing chop. There. Off the port side. Dark shapes of men in the water. The gray ship slipping under, side staved in.

Rammed them. So daring, desperate. Something a human would do.

A pale face looked up out of the sea—black-bearded and wide-eyed. A chatter of bullets from the Sea Wolf’s gunwale pushed it down into red water.

The recoilless rifle hammered in fury, like a madman who continues to stab a corpse. The wheelhouse of the gray ship tore away in flame.

Madness. Not logic.

Moments later, the gray ship went under. Eiko saw its shadow for a moment, descending, the fire in its wheelhouse still burning beneath the water, like an oil lamp behind waxed paper. Then gone.

Madness.

The opaque, hardened glass of the wheelhouse. Its reinforced steel-plate door. Beyond it the mind full of sonar, maps of banks and shoals, trawling methods, and market prices. The mind also full of rage and violence.

What monsters have we made?

II Umwelt

Chapter 13

What matters to the blind, deaf tick is the presence of butyric acid. For the black ghost knifefish, it’s electrical fields. For the bat, what matters is air-compression waves. This is the animal’s umwelt: that portion of the world their sensory apparatus and nervous system allow them to sense. It is the only portion of the world that “matters” to them.

The human umwelt is structured according to our species’ sensory apparatus and nervous system as well. But the octopus will have an umwelt nothing like ours. In a sense (and I use that word purposefully) we will not exist in the same world.

—Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think

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