Altantsetseg was grinning: an eerie square of teeth in that scarred face. A joke. She was telling a joke. It was almost impossible to discern the humor, between her flat affect and the modulated, inaccurate translator.

“Very funny. But in fact, the smiley face is a good example. Because, you see, that’s the core of the problem. What we are looking for is a symbol that has a root in reality. What would be its iconic or indexical base? We humans do see a smile in this figure. Because that’s one of our species’ most important indexes. A smile indicates happiness, friendliness, openness.”

“Means stupidity,” Altantsetseg interrupted. “In my culture. Simpleton smile without reason. Or American.”

“Right. And that’s another good example of a problem: cultural valence. The meaning of a smile isn’t universal. It can indicate embarrassment in some cultures, for example. But that’s not the point. The point is that we see a smile here because it has a relationship to the human face and the expression it can make. But the octopus doesn’t have a face like ours. That’s one of the things that is making it so hard for us to understand them. Their whole physical base is different from ours. We need to figure out the base set of metaphors from which they would build.

“But then, in that documentary—I saw it. I recognized it. It’s everywhere. What we are looking at, in that ‘smiley face,’ is an octopus’s garden: it’s the barrier of objects the octopus places outside the entrance to its den, the crescent of stone and shell the octopus uses to disguise and protect the entrance to its home. And it connected for me: That symbol is the line between inside and outside. Between home and the world. And this one,” she said, flipping back to the first page and stabbing her finger onto it,

“… could be a compound figure, with the barrier of home represented by the crescent, and the arrow leading away from it. It’s not ‘down,’ like I had originally thought it might be—it’s ‘out.’ Toward the tips of the tentacles. Away from eyes and mouth. Away from the center, out beyond the barrier of the garden.”

“Get out of my house,” Evrim said.

“Yes. Something like that. So—the last time we sent the submersible down to the shipwreck, when the octopus almost took it and smashed it? Like Altantsetseg said, I was hoping that the octopus would follow the submersible back here. Would connect it with us, here in the hotel—see that it was related to us and begin to watch us. And today, I went down to the beach and made my symbol.”

“Come in,” Evrim said.