by Bill Schutt
Chapter 13
What an Octopus Knows
And the Lord hung a rainbow as a sign,
Won’t be water but fire next time.
—an old Christian spiritual, adapted from Sibylline prophecy
July 3, 1948, 2:00 a.m.
Santorini
Another “Only Hotel in Town,” Overlooking the Village of Akrotiri
By now sleep was a luxury—and for those who could get some, a difficult luxury.
Yanni, Mac, and Cousteau had taken the second shift of the night watch. Their new location was a dusty bed-and-breakfast on the outskirts of town, but it provided a reasonably good overlook in all directions. If one’s eyes were sharp enough, the crescent moon added more than ample illumination. So far, neither Dmitri nor anyone who might support the Russian had shown up. The townspeople also kept their distance and made it very clear that they expected the visitors to do the same. Mac had stepped within no more than two hundred feet of the little cluster of buildings around Akrotiri’s only road when a man on a balcony fired a rifle into the air. A push was as good as a shove, from that direction.
Out there in the fields, no one and nothing stirred, except for a farmer’s restless guard dog.
“What do you think they’ll do when you get Alan home to the States?” Cousteau asked.
Mac laughed quietly and said, “For a change, someone’s timing could not have been more perfect.”
“How so?”
“Last I heard, Hata had the blood of a quarter million Chinese civilians on his hands. They should have Nuremberged his ass, long ago. And yet General MacArthur sneaks him out of Japan and he gets assigned to us?”
“Sort of defines the American term SNAFU,” said Cousteau.
“Or at least some justice,” Yanni added.
“But your general will still be causing trouble, no?” Cousteau asked. “Powerful enough, isn’t he, to be making a good try at taking Truman’s job?”
“The Republicans have been putting him up to it. But whether he’s still in the race or not after last week’s convention, there’s no question Truman will be taking it as a personal slap in the face. And I don’t think ‘give-em-hell-Harry’ is a turn-the-other-cheek kind of guy.”
“No,” said Yanni. “Damned happy not to be in the general’s shoes right now. When it comes to giving hell—you just don’t want to piss off the guy who turned Hata even uglier than he already was—by dropping an atom bomb on him.”
“Speaking of ugly characters,” Mac said, “Jacques, how much have you been able to learn about the cephalopod brain?”
“How, actually, their brains work—we know almost nothing. We do not know—we do not even have a clue, not one solid clue—how our own brains form a conscious mind. And so, what a cephalopod knows? Even an ordinary octopus is smart. Maybe smart like a dolphin. Maybe something else, not like a dolphin. But definitely animaux superb.”
“The one that mimicked me at the dock had an amazing talent,” Yanni said, “but even the most common octopus or cuttlefish is able to do this kind of thing.”
“Correct,” said Cousteau. “I saw a tiny Indonesian species change color and shape in seconds—first mimicking a flatfish, then as I continued to approach, it became a very aggressive lionfish, with sharp fins splayed out toward me. It squirted ink at my face mask and dropped to the reef as a knob of coral.”
“I hadn’t heard of that one,” Mac said. “So, this would mean, long before some of them became our Kraken, they were already brainy enough to put on some pretty extreme displays?”
“Ever see a knob of coral pop out legs and run away? So, absolutely: that has to be brainy enough to be at least on a level with border collies, maybe even with dolphins and orangutans. It’s why you’ll never see me eating octopus. Too much the stench of cannibalism.”
“Same here,” said Yanni. “There’s a young scientist from the navy, studying a little baseball-size species at the same wing of the aquarium where I work. If he hadn’t marked and numbered them, we’d never have known that they like to climb out of the water and sneak from one tidepool to another—trading places. He’s convinced that they’re always watching him, and that they know when he’s watching them. They do the switcharoo between pools only when he isn’t looking. And when he is looking, they resist being removed from the rocks and the water because I don’t think they like being IQ tested in young Jason’s mazes. Sometimes they’ll cooperate and let themselves be fetched with a scoop net. And then they go really nuts. I’ve seen them jumping all-arms-out, springing from the net like tiny gymnasts bouncing from trampolines and making a run for it across the floor.”
“Tell him about the lights and the outflow,” Mac said.
Yanni smiled and shook her head. “Those little guys give you no respect. There were two or three that spent a lot of time with their eyes poking just above the surface, waiting for Jason or one of his assistants to walk by. Then, through their siphons, they would direct jets of water right into his ears and his eyes. They also seemed not to like the bright ceiling lights. So, they figured out how to turn off the lights by squirting jets of cold water at the hot bulbs—busting the glass. Seems they also wanted deeper water in their pools. At least, that’s what Jason thought was the reason for some of their mischief. He had noticed that they sometimes liked to stretch their bodies and their arms all the way down some tubes, almost to the outflow valves. But they weren’t doing it out of ‘like.’ One day when he goes out to bring back lunch, they reach down to the valves, shut them off, overflow the pools, and end up flooding his entire lab.”
“So,” Mac said, “you think even the primitive ones can reason?”
“I don’t know,” Yanni replied. “But aren’t you the one who’s always saying that I don’t know is always the best place for a scientist to begin?”
Mac nodded.
“Superb,” agreed Cousteau. “I have dissected many specimens, and although the cephalopod’s nervous system is still terra incognita, the mind of an octopus is far, far from being a wasteland.”
“And your dissections?” Mac asked. “How much do they reveal?”
“Oh—octopus, octopus,” Cousteau said grinning. “How much can we really know about an animal that has its brain so near its mouth—actually wrapped around its esophagus? As you saw in the tentacle from the Russian boat, much of the cephalopod nervous system is outside the brain. There are—what should I call them? Midget brains? Little bulbs of nerves—secondary nerve centers spread all around the body? That tentacle you studied: its clicking, its mimicking. Those were all evidencing a short-term memory in a part of the body completely cut away from the brain. And the skin itself: there are layers of mirrorlike cells and mini-sacks of pigment and receptors that in some ways work together like the retinas of your eyes. I think that’s how it can mimic the shapes and colors of objects behind it and completely out of direct eyesight. In some way, an octopus sees through its eyes and its skin.”
“It may also taste through its skin,” said Yanni. “In the lab, Jason showed that their arms can sense adrenaline and other chemicals. He thought this might be useful in the wild, where all an octopus has to do is reach an arm out of its den and taste what chemicals the nerves were releasing from a fish approaching either in pain or distress, or on the prowl.”
“You mean,” Mac asked, “that its skin can see you, and at the same time taste your fear?” He almost let out a long whistle of amazement, but was stopped by the immediate realization that he was on a night watch, and needed to keep the noise levels low. High-pitched sounds traveled far. The accidental cryptozoologist glanced out across a quarter million miles of space, at a crescent moon partly obscured by passing clouds.
“Now, Mac,” said Yanni, “just imagine something with a nervous system ten times greater. Maybe more.”
“Not sure I want to. That bishop’s view of Revelation might turn out to be a bit optimistic, if these things ever decide to go on the march. I keep thinking about an H.
G. Wells story that scared the hell out of me when I was a kid—octopuses from space in giant tripod war machines. Fortunately, it’s impossible to make a civilization underwater.”
“Impossible?” said Cousteau. “What makes you so certain, impossible?”
“You can’t have a civilization without the discovery of fire.”
“Who says this, so absolute? If you are able to use fresh-rising lava and volcanic springs in the deep—in almost the same way we control fire—why should you not be able to make metal? In fact, all of our gold and silver and even our diamonds seem to have been brought up through the earth’s crust and put together like condensed milk, by volcanoes. Down there, resources might just be lying around waiting to be picked up.”
“You mean, the cephalopods might already have everything they need?” said Mac.
“Think upon this: There are more active volcanoes in the oceans than we have on land. The biggest mountain on earth is not Everest. She is but a child, compared against Hawaii.”
“But try pulling a cart with wheels underwater,” Mac wondered. “How do you build a civilization without wheels?”
“Who needs wheels down there, when you can fly so easily? And if you need something other than flight, try hydraulics.”
Tripods? Mac snorted inaudibly, and then said, almost cheerily, “Wow. Things that really make you stop, and go, ‘Hmmm . . .’”
“For all we know,” said Cousteau, “there’s so much more we don’t know. For all we know—”
“For all we know,” Mac said, rubbing early morning dew from his neck and his arms, “Dmitri could be right. We may end up having to destroy them.”
“The Kraken may be alien to our way of thinking,” began Cousteau’s objection. “Something that can taste your fear or pain from several yards away? Perhaps even see you and the world with its whole body? But I think your Bishop Marinatos and even the Greek police sergeant would now be asking, ‘Who should play God? Who should say those minds are not worth trying to understand?’”
Yanni noticed it first. She slowly lifted a bag of salt, then said, “Don’t move, either of you. Now, look slowly to my left.”
Mac turned his head, very carefully. Twenty feet away, and as if reading his nightmares of old, stood one of the cephalopods—motionless, on tentacles bunched together into a thick-legged tripod. Its skin—all reflective chromatophores and slicked with morning dew—glistened in a hundred thousand points of back-scattered starlight. This Kraken stood only half as tall as Mac, looking like a mere pup compared to what they had encountered at the dock. Its more compact form surely added to its stealth, but Mac did not believe this excused his carelessness in letting one of the beasts sneak up on them while he distracted himself with talk.
“Yanni?” he whispered. “You ready to throw some salt?”
Before she could answer, three silvery-yellow flashes blazed forth out of the dark, each about the same shape and height of the intruder, and about twice as far away.
Within that flashing interval, the creature moved—much faster than the full-sized versions they had seen at the dock and along the donkey trail. But it did not require speed to fool human observers. The three flashes had reflexively turned the heads of the humans and focused their full attention in their direction, just long enough to allow the nearest intruder to go dark and disappear among its distracting brethren, rendering human eyes unable to follow its movements.
In the next second, this dark intruder and two others emitted new disorienting flashes, and a pattern became perceptible, alarmingly so. They flashed on and off alternately, approximately each second, with the nonflashing individuals either advancing or retreating while “running dark” between the flashers. Mac estimated that there must have been seven or eight of them, taking turns flashing and moving.
Within an interval of no more than twenty flash cycles, McQueen and Nesbitt were at Mac’s side and hurling salt bags. Whether any of the salt actually struck home seemed doubtful, but none of the group would ever know for sure.
Even before the first bag flew, the creatures were spread out, flashing more quickly than a ship’s Morse lamp—and just as quickly they were gone. However, the Kraken did not depart without throwing something back at them. An object rocketed over Mac’s head, struck the wall behind him, and exploded like a clay pot. It was a clamshell, spinning wildly when it came at him—wider than the length of his hand, and massive enough to have dug into his skull had it been aimed to do more than put a fright into him. Nesbitt and McQueen seemed to have been more specifically targeted. The biologist from Plum Island had been clipped in one arm by a shell thrown like a spinning discus; three others had torn into a leg, each with enough force to require stitches.
McQueen also received a leg wound, but it was the object that dislocated his shoulder and knocked him to the ground that left him staring in blank incredulity—for it was a disk forged from copper.
“D-did they make this?” the private asked Nesbitt.
“I think so,” she said. “You’re the one who digs up Roman ships,” she added, handing the object over to Cousteau. “This new, or ancient?”
“Difficult to be sure. I’ve seen many Greek and Roman ingots, but never shaped like this. It could be something they found in an old wreck and learned how to throw like clamshells. But it’s not shaped for stacking in a ship’s hold, and it looks too aerodyn—”
“Tools,” Mac said. “They make tools, Jacques.”
Cousteau was turning the copper disk over and over in his hands, as if he were a child with a great new toy.
“Jacques?”
“One thing is certain,” Cousteau said. “I’m not getting any sleep tonight.”
“Yeah,” Mac agreed. “Alan’s lost world, Bishop Marinatos’s dragons of Revelation—and now right on top of it all, your mollusk tool-maker theory looking real. Gotta admit, I didn’t see that coming.”
5.33 Million b.c.
The Lost World of the Mediterranean
4,000 Years after First Contact
The tall descendants of Seed’s clan still had their streams of red water at the cleft in the mountain. Twice yearly, following the seasonal rains, they drove molluskan livestock seventy miles along migration routes between the mount of Santorini and the northern foothills of Crete. In accordance with tradition, they were forever exiled from the lowland forests and marshlands south of Crete, and across the Devil’s Hole. The south belonged to elephant snails, and to monsters whose heads were lion’s manes of snakes.
Seed, the child of Proud One, had lived a hundred and forty years. Some of her clan’s descendants lived even longer among the red hills, from which flowed streams of both hot and cold water.
The generations four millennia beyond Seed stood taller, more thinly boned, and more agile. Though the Stone-thrower clans, living on the African highlands in the south, far outnumbered the bonobos, they apparently avoided the deep Mediterranean oases. Only once, long ago, had a troop of Stone-throwers reached the red cleft—and by then it was a battle of crude rocks against exquisitely cut spear points and arrowheads.
At this moment in time, both primate populations were a mere blemish upon the earth, totaling no more than seventy thousand individuals. In the marshes beyond Crete, the cephalopod Canal-builders were scarcely more populous than Seed’s descendants. There was no means of predicting, quite yet, whether any of these three sentient species would survive on the planet, much less rise to dominate it.
On an otherwise ordinary morning, four millennia after the expulsion, She Who Leads awoke to a series of jolts stronger than any she had felt before. The world’s tallest bamboo shoots swayed, dropping a hail of tree snails. Water splashed up from the streams. Dust rose up from the hills. And then, silence. Menacing silence.
Something in the air itself was changing—changing fast—but She Who Leads took care to conceal from her clan the deep sense of sorrow and helplessness that suddenly afflicted her instincts.
Yet independently, othe
rs sensed it as well.
“We leave. We leave uphill now!” The three elders of what had begun evolving into a separate caste of medicine-keepers were tearing strips of red growth from submerged rocks, handing them off to others and tucking them under arms. In a hurried combination of both hand signals and shrieked vocalizations, they called out for a pilgrimage into the hills—“Now! Take nothing but the red life. Now!”
She Who Leads hesitated for a moment, and scores of her people looked simultaneously to her, also suddenly hesitant. Throughout life, the matriarch’s instincts had proved to be a proper guide. She watched the first rays of dawn piercing through veils of quake-generated dust, looked around, and tore nervously at the short hairs on her forearm. Uphill, and north, she knew they would find no trees or water until they had climbed very high. By late morning, along the Santorini foothills, the sun would be a fire in the sky, with not a single bush for shade and the shimmering air hot enough to draw all the moisture from one’s mouth, and from one’s eyes.
We can’t go that way, she thought. Uphill and north were death. But other pathways seemed no better. Crete’s mountain valleys provided food during only part of the year. And, though the rains fell more reliably in other directions and oases were more numerous, so were the monsters. Without the protection of the desert, panther snails and possibly even the canal builders would find them.
Up, she decided—into the nearest mountain, north. May die. But the only way is the mountain—up. The streams and the tall plants that had sustained them were about to become a terrifying wilderness, lost forever. Her instinct of this was made all the more alarming by a gradual blackening of the western sky.
She Who Leads waved a hand in the direction the medicine-keepers had pointed. “To the mountain, our clan,” she commanded. “Go up from this place, and bring nothing except water and the red life.”
