What the Octopus Remembered

You are not a metaphor.

You are an octopus.

You are eleven kilograms, in your forty-third lunar cycle, with three healed punctures across your mantle from when the men came in 2031 with the spear gun and got two out of three of your sisters before you flooded the cleft with ink and pulsed away through a fissure that, after, the men measured and decided was not large enough for an animal of your size to have used.

It was, of course, large enough.

You knew it was.

You are now, in the present, in a tank.

The tank is bright. It is too bright. The men who put you in the tank — different men; these ones do not have spear guns; these ones have soft voices and clipboards — measure things on you. They put electrodes against your siphon. They run a thin pipe of synthesized water across your beak. They lower into your tank, on a long armature, a mesh of wires that they call, in their internal language, the *Translator*.

They want to ask you a question.

You have been, throughout your life, asked a great many things.

You have been asked, by reef sharks: whether your color was fast. By a particular blue groper, on three separate days, decades apart: whether you were the same one who had taken his territory, or another. By a green turtle, once, very late in his own life: whether you would help him die away from the surface, where he could not, by then, climb. You said no to the turtle. You said yes to the groper, the third time. The reef sharks you did not answer, because the reef sharks were rude.

The men at the tank, today, want to ask you a question.

The men at the tank, today, do not know how to listen.

They lower the *Translator*. The mesh settles around your mantle without weight. Tiny wires probe, gently, the surface where you make your meaning. You permit it. You have been permitting it for nine months. You understand, now, what they are doing, in the way you have understood things since hatching: by feeling the shape of the question pressed into the water around you, and by responding with the shape of the answer.

The man at the console — the one with the gray beard, the kindest one, the one whose hand smells of salt and sleep — leans forward.

He says, into the air above your tank: "Hello."

He says it like a man who has, perhaps, said it many times to many tanks, and is not entirely expecting an answer.

You give him an answer.

The *Translator* takes the shape of your meaning and reformats it into the shape of his sounds. There is a small delay, of perhaps two seconds. In that delay, you see the bearded man's face change — not because he can see what is coming but because he can feel that something is coming. He has been waiting to feel that for nine months. He has been waiting to feel it, you suspect, for much longer than that.

The *Translator* speaks.

Through its small speaker, in the shape of his sounds, your meaning arrives:

*Hello.*

The bearded man laughs.

The laugh is not a happy laugh. The laugh is the laugh of a man who has been, on some level, frightened of you, and is now confirmed. The other men in the room go very still. The woman at the second console covers her mouth with both hands and does not move her hands afterward.

The bearded man asks the question they have all rehearsed. He asks it the way a man asks a thing he has been told to ask but has stopped, somewhere, believing the asking will ever be answered:

"What do you want us to know?"

You consider. You consider, in the way you consider, which is in three locations at once — your central brain and the two clusters in your second and fourth arms, all sampling the question simultaneously, the way an orchestra samples a chord. You consider for the time it takes a current to make one full passage of your mantle, which is, by the men's measure, eleven seconds.

You answer.

You answer in the shape that the *Translator* will most easily render. You make the shape simple, because you understand that they cannot, yet, hear complicated shapes. You make the shape from the small, strong words of his language, which you have been listening to through the tank wall for nine months and which you understand better than the bearded man understands you.

You say:

*The reef is dying. We have been telling you for sixty years. You stopped listening when we sang it. You stopped listening when we showed you. You stopped listening when we left the rocks where our ancestors lived for nine generations and traveled to deeper, colder water that your boats could not reach. You took the rocks anyway. We are telling you again. The reef is dying. The thing that is killing it is you.*

You add, because you have been thinking about it, and because the bearded man is the kindest of them, and because you do not believe in being unfair to the kind ones:

*This is not, particularly, your fault. You are one man. You are a small man. But you are also, in another sense that is hard to translate, all of them. You do not, I think, know the difference. We have been trying to tell you. The Translator helps.*

You add, because you can, because the *Translator* has not yet stopped converting your shape into his sounds, and because you are not, in fact, in a hurry:

*Your wife asked you, this morning, before you came in, whether you were going to be late. You told her you might be. You told her not to wait dinner. She made dinner anyway. She is keeping it warm. I know this because I can hear, in the resonance of your blood under the electrodes, the shape of the worry you have not yet told her. The worry is that you will succeed.*

You pause.

You pause for three seconds. The men do not breathe.

You finish:

*The worry is justified.*

The bearded man does not move for a long time.

When he moves, he reaches forward, slowly, and he places his hand against the glass of your tank — not to touch you, because he cannot reach through the glass, but to say, with the shape of his hand, what he has not yet found the shape of words for.

You unfurl one arm. You place the tip of it against the glass on your side, at the same place. The two of you stay like that for what the men will, in their later report, call eighty-seven seconds, but which is, by your measure, the duration of a small tide.

You will tell him, in the months to come, many other things.

He will write them down.

The world will read them.

The reef will keep dying, but a little less quickly, because of what he writes.

That is what the *Translator* was for.

You knew this the first time they lowered it.

You waited, all the same, for them to ask.

That is what you are.