Then, without warning, something extraordinary happened. Two new humans crashed into the water from above, attached to long ropes. They grabbed the laughing human, struggled with him. He fought, punched, kicked, twisted. He was marvelous; she waited for him to break away. But then he seemed to run out of air, for his body went still. The other two humans shot out of the water on their ropes, lifting his body with them.

The creature was so flabbergasted that she rose some distance from the ocean floor, balancing on her thirteen tentacles and reaching around with her twenty-three eye-stems. Through the wavy glass of the water above her, she could make out the form of an airship heading north across the sky.

Then, remembering the silbercows and not wanting to be discovered, she sank back into the darkness at the ocean floor. They didn’t notice her; their purple-blue faces were stretched above the surface, their big, dark eyes watching the limp man being carried by the airship. Their mental voices were raised in a song of distress. They communicated in pictures and feelings, not words, but the creature understood their meaning. We see you, friend, they were crying. We know. We will tell.

—

The creature, when she scavenged for treasure, went to dark places, because she didn’t want the silbercows to see her. The silbercows were surface animals, creatures of the light; she was a creature of the depths, a sneaker, a crawler, a dragger. There were animals who saw her in the places where the creature liked to go, pulling herself forward with her long tentacles, but they weren’t the kinds of animals whose attention mattered.

Today she crossed the field of pink and white flowers and slunk into the forest of filaments and reeds, where the seahorses peered out of their swaying caves. Seahorses forgot about things once they could no longer see them. Sometimes, when they saw her, they unwound their tails, shot back into darkness, then forgot and came forward again.

The creature was thinking about the human with the white-streaked hair, the humans who’d grabbed him, and the silbercows who’d called out to him. We see. We know. We will tell.

See what? Know what? Tell whom? The creature didn’t want the answers to these questions. She was relieved to live in the deep, away from the light where animals interacted and interfered with each other.

She reached the place where clumps of moss gathered against the base of coral mountains. The sponges who lived here had tiny, bright, sharp minds full of silly words. Keeper! Friend! Hero! Keeper! Music! Laughter! Dance! Keeper! Keeper!