—Iii—
Irina Malakova loved the sea. Simply sitting in it, treading water, or lying on her back on the surface literally washed away all the weighty cares and concerns of everyday life. Her love had only deepened when she had learned how to scuba dive. It became her release, her vacation, and her therapy. Her passion for the hobby sometimes exasperated her friends and family, but she didn’t care. Whenever she could find the time, she would go diving. Whenever she managed to scrape up enough money, she would book a trip to some faraway place with a strange-sounding name where the underwater scenery and its flora and fauna were new and exotic.
But not this new. Not this exotic. And certainly not this threatening.
The danger had initially manifested itself when, entranced by a patrolling moray free-swimming out of its customary hole in the reef, she had wandered away from her dive partner to follow the serpentine shape as it hunted along the rim of the steep coral drop-off. Her enchantment had only deepened when she had been lucky enough to see it actually catch and devour a brilliantly colored queen angelfish. Only then had she come back to reality long enough to realize two things: none of the other divers, including her partner, were in sight, and her tank was half-empty.
As she worked to retrace her route along the reef’s edge, her usual quiet confidence in her diving abilities gradually gave way to increasing concern. Hadn’t she come this way? Or had she first swam outward from that odd-shaped bommie? Despite the presence of deeper water below and the sky overhead, the reef seemed to take turns and twists she didn’t remember. Once, the sky itself seemed to contort crazily, as if she was swimming at an angle instead of parallel to the light. She was starting to get hungry, and dehydrated. Still there was no sign of the other seven divers from the boat.
Something was wrong. The reef itself was all wrong. Though the coral looked familiar enough, and the creatures that crawled over it, and the fish that swam among it, somehow it did not feel right, did not feel natural. Had she been down longer than she thought? Or deeper, and having come up too fast, was now suffering from the hallucinations that could be caused by nitrogen narcosis? She glanced at her left wrist. Though her dive computer appeared to be functioning normally, there were worse things than a complete failure of the vital device. Defective instrumentation supplying faulty information could be more dangerous than one that had gone dead and displayed no information at all.
Of one thing she was now certain: it was time to terminate the dive. Once on the surface, even if she did not see the dive boat, she could utilize everything from the blare of her dive alert horn to a bright orange safety sausage to a dark emergency slick contained in the breakable tube in her buoyancy compensator pocket. Ascending slowly, careful to rise no faster than the bubbles from the regulator in her mouth, she paused at ten feet for a four-minute safety stop before kicking the rest of the way to the surface.
Once her head was clear of the water she let the regulator fall from her mouth, inflated the BC, and sucked in fresh air. Turning a slow circle, she scanned the sun-filled horizon for the friendly silhouette of the dive boat. There was no sign of it. Its absence was no immediate cause for panic. Searching for her, it might have gone first around the other side of the island where she and the other divers had been dropped off.
Except there was no island.
She blinked. Everything was far, far more wrong than she had initially thought. Uninhabited and fringed with coconut palms, the island had been there, several hundred meters of solid ground extending to north and south. As she stared, the sun blazed down, heating the synthetic material of her black and blue diveskin. She spun wildly in the water, looking frantically to left and right.
Where was the island? Where was the dive boat? In every direction, on every horizon, there was nothing to be seen but flat blue-green sea.
Impossible, she thought as a fearful panic began to take hold. It was impossible. How could she have drifted so far? She had kept the reef on her left or right at all times. Could she have swam, underwater, from the island where the dive had commenced to a shallow reef so far distant that the first could no longer be seen? If that was the case, how could she be sure of finding her way back? If she descended and tried to retrace her route along the submerged reef, how could she be certain it would lead her in the right direction? For the first time in hundreds of dives, she found herself wishing she had carried a compass. But who needed a compass when one always dove with a group?
Now almost directly overhead following the late morning dive, the sun was no help in determining direction. She tried to stay calm. Keep your BC inflated, she told herself firmly. Deploy your safety sausage, crack the emergency vial and spread the surface slick, and wait for someone to find you. Let off periodic blasts from your dive alert horn. Don’t waste energy swimming to nowhere. Taking deliberate, deep breaths, she initiated the relevant emergency procedures. All the while, she fought not to think of sharks. As an avid diver, she loved being around sharks. But not like this. Not alone and trapped at the surface.
Of course, she wasn’t trapped. She still had a fair amount of air in her tank. But going down would solve nothing. Assuming her absence had been noted on the boat and they were now looking for her, it was imperative that she remain on the surface where she could be seen.
Current, she told herself. Maybe she had been caught up in some kind of unusual and powerful inshore current and it had swept her far from where she and her fellow divers had entered the water. It was true that she had gone off a little ways on her own. But she had felt no surge, experienced no dislocation. Could she have fallen asleep and then become caught up in a current, to finally awaken unaware of what had transpired? Such incidents had been documented, had been known to happen to exceptionally relaxed divers.
Surely she had been missed by now. Surely her dive partner or someone among the crew would have noted and reported her failure to return to the dive ladder at the stern of the boat. Surely.
She clung to that thought all the rest of the day and on into the night, until darkness and exhaustion overcame her. The gentle swell rocked her to sleep as ably as any consoling hand.
She knew no sharks had found her during the night because she was still intact when she awoke. A quick scan of her surroundings revealed the continuing and increasingly distressing absence of islands and boat. If an island, any island, had been close at hand, she could have swam for it. If nothing else, an island would have coconuts, which (if she could manage to open them) promised food and water.
Thinking of food and water while adrift on a landless sea was not conducive to her continued mental health.
The tropical sun, so often a welcome visitor on her vacations, had turned into an unresponsive, remorseless, soul-sucking antagonist. While the thin suit-integrated hood of her diveskin provided some protection from the direct unrelenting rays, the synthetic fabric’s dark color also absorbed heat. By afternoon she was half-delirious.
At least, she thought crazily, I can always splash cool water on my face. It was her last conscious thought before she passed out for the night.
Her second morning adrift brought no relief. Pivoting in the water to keep her face pointed away from the rising sun, she slipped the regulator into her mouth and started kicking feebly toward a point of reef that rose to within a few feet of the surface. If she was not too weak, she could try standing on it for awhile. While it would not make her that much more visible to any searching boat, it would allow her to stimulate different muscles in her legs.
She stood thus, with only her upper body out of the water, for as long as she could maintain her balance. Despite the heat, she dared not slip out of the diveskin for fear of becoming sunburned. When her thigh muscles could stand it no longer, she slipped reluctantly back into the water, letting her inflated buoyancy compensator carry her wherever it might.
She had the regulator in her mouth when she passed out. It was still there when she felt herself being pulled under, though the sight of the big cuttlefish that was dragging her downward nearly caused her to spit it out as she screamed.
* * *
Memory of her abandonment and desperate situation vanished as she contemplated her remarkably revised circumstances. Apparently, she no longer needed the regulator, nor the pressure hose attaching it to the aluminum air tank, nor the contents of the tank itself. Or her rubber fins, or any of the other accoutrements that were normally required to keep a human being alive and mobile while underwater. If the touch of her own fingers were to be believed, she had sprouted gills, along with webbing between her fingers and toes and fishy fins on the backs of her calves. Almost as amazing as her new gills were the altered lenses of her eyes. Though open wide, they did not burn, and she found herself able to see as clearly as if she was still wearing her mask.
She had been transformed. By the same process that had transformed the one-eyed spear-carrying male who was staring curiously at her? Her attention flicked back and forth between him and the shark-toting cuttlefish drifting nearby. Was it the same colorful cephalopod that had initially dragged her under? As if they were not enough to ponder, there was also the gentle giant of an octopus hovering nearby and the pair of two-foot long squid who kept darting in to cop exploratory feels of her emerald green swimsuit and its contents.
She realized with a start that she was no longer cold. She ought to be on the verge of hypothermia. The water surrounding her might be bathtub warm, but body heat would still migrate from ninety-eight point six degrees internal to dissipate in eighty-eight degree seawater. Everything about her body had been altered. No, not altered, she corrected herself. Adjusted. Fine-tuned. In the most literal sense of the term, she had undergone a sea change. The alternative having been a slow death from exposure or drowning, she was in no hurry to question the transformation.
His skin color darkening to a black-flecked beige, the octopus appeared to be consulting with the two squid. That was insane, of course. Almost as insane as her male counterpart swimming suddenly toward her, halting, and asking in clipped no-nonsense tones, “What happened to you, demon?”
She understood him. Clearly. Underwater. She was not sure which was more remarkable: the fact that she could now hear clearly at depth, that his words were comprehensible, or that she hardly reacted at all when he lifted up the patch that covered his left eye and began to use a finger to wipe out the empty socket. Was she capable of replying? Surely her words would not be understood. Shaping her lips around a response, she found that when she opened her mouth to speak she did not drown. This was reassuring.
“I—I’m not a demon.”
Lateral fins rippling to propel it forward, the big cuttlefish let the dead blacktip it had been holding float free. Though its tentacles made it longer than she was, it weighed considerably less. Of course weight here, she reflected, did not have the same meaning as it did on land. Was it going to grab her again? And if so, should she resist?
Glint did not grab her. “If you’re not a demon,” he declared, “then what are you?”
She could understand cuttlefish chat. Why should she be surprised? Was this all a heat-induced dream from which she would shortly awaken, to find herself floating once more alone and abandoned on the surface of an apathetic sea? Until then, she decided, she might as well go literally with the flow.
“Yes.” The male with the spear confronted her in a manner brusque enough to be considered threatening. “You must be a demon. You were found breathing void.”
“Void?” She looked bewildered. “Oh, you mean air. Yes, that’s what people breathe. Or rather, that’s what I used to breathe.” She looked over at Oxothyr. “That thing did something do me.”
The shaman’s boneless mantle bobbed slightly toward her—an octopodian bow. “The ‘thing’ respectfully acknowledges your thanks,” he replied dryly. “Without my intervention you would have surely suffocated.”
A talking octopus. A talking cuttlefish. I’m dreaming for sure, she told herself. If only she didn’t feel so—so—overtly wet. Could she be sweating in her sleep, inside her restrictive diveskin?
“I’m a human being.” A hint of desperation had crept into her voice. She turned to the spear-carrier. “A person, just like—well, maybe not just like you.”
“A merson?” Chachel frowned. “It is true that you look like one now, but that is thanks to Oxothyr’s miraculous intercession. Before, you looked like a demon. The dead of your kind are known to us, albeit they are found very rarely.”
“Dead …?” It was her turn to look confused. “Oh, you mean drowned. You call yourselves ‘mersons’?”
“We do not ‘call’ ourselves anything.” Be it demon or mage-inveigled changeling, he was finding this creature less and less to his liking. “Merson is what we are. Do you have a name, dem—do you have a name?”
“Irina.” She did not see any point in giving her full name.
“I am Chachel.” He gestured to his left. “This is my friend and hunting companion, Glint. You have been save-transformed by the esteemed shaman Oxothyr, whose skills are celebrated throughout the length and breadth of the Keleagh Plain and even unto the depths beyond. And you still have not explained what happened to you.”
She nodded understandingly. Apparently the gesture meant the same in her dream as it did anywhere else. “I was diving—I am diving. I got separated from the rest of the group, I don’t know how. We were diving around an island. I went off by myself, which I know I shouldn’t have done, but I did it. When I surfaced there was no sign of the island, the dive boat, or my fellow divers. All I can think is that I fell asleep or otherwise lost consciousness for awhile, got caught in a strong current, and swept away. I’m not sure how long I spent drifting until now—a day, two days, a week. It was hot, and I think I lost my mind for awhile. I don’t know. All I do know is that I’d really, really like to wake up.”
“You are not asleep.” The cuttlefish, she noted, seemed more sympathetic to her condition than did the human—the merson, she corrected herself.
Why can’t I wake up?
She started to cry—only to discover that she couldn’t. How do you cry underwater? She felt herself sobbing, but no tears oozed from the corners of her eyes. Or if they did, she could neither sense nor feel them. What did the body need with moistening, cleansing tears when one’s eyes were permanently submerged?
The merson came even closer. He did not have to brandish the bone spear he was holding in order to intimidate her. It was enough that he held onto it.
“Do you think we are fools here? Sandrift is a small community but we are not provincial. Those of us who live in this corner of the plain are as aware of the wider world as those who dwell in the cities. Rumors of unpleasantness drift down to us from far to the north. Tales of ravaged societies and dead mersons, of unnatural alliances forged in the service of a threat implacable.” The point of the spear suddenly dipped toward her. “You are a spy!”
Startled, she drew back. Her webbed feet and the narrow fins on the backs of her calves propelled her effortlessly, seemingly of their own accord. Always an excellent swimmer, her altered self had taken to their use without instruction.
“A—what?” The dream had turned unpleasant again. “A spy for who? I’m not a spy. I’m a dental assistant, I live in a condominium with one and a half baths, a single garage, two aquariums, and a partial bay view, I have more than one occasional boyfriend, I …”
It was not necessary to see tears to realize that she was on the verge of a complete breakdown. Hands over her face, her crying emerged from her mouth in the form of sporadic disturbances to the water column. Chachel and Glint experienced her sobbing as periodic pulses against their skin.
Hovering nearby, Oxothyr had observed the exchange in silence. Now he glided forward, his body a uniform sienna from which thrust bobbing, sucker-lined arms held in loose coils. Behind him, Sathi and Tythe had discovered an errant blue-armed spralaker. Having successfully cornered the crab in a crevice in the rocks, they fought to see who would get to eat it. As they argued, the abject crustacean tried to fend them off with its comparatively useless claws while uttering, “Nonononono!” in a voice as pitiful as it was small.
A tentacle capable of tearing out her throat slid around Irina’s neck. Its touch was at once rubbery and reassuring.
“Whatever this changeling is, wherever it is from,” Oxothyr declared with sincerity, “she is no spy. Spies are calm, controlled creatures. This female is as confused in her apposite merson form as she was in the earlier one that breathed void.”
Grumbling, Chachel returned his spear to vertical again and backed off. “Then if she is not a demon and not a spy, what is she?”
“Lost, I should think.” Another arm came up and the tip touched Irina’s lips. “Restrain yourself, female, or you will swallow more than you can breathe.”
Choking back sobs (it was perfectly possible to cough underwater, she discovered), Irina fought to regain control of her emotions. There was something mesmerizing about the intelligent, cephalopodan eyes that peered back into her own. The dark, S-shaped pupils imparted a sense of serenity she had encountered only twice before; once in the approving gaze of a much-admired professor and later in the course of a romantic relationship that had lasted, alas, all too briefly. She ought to have found it completely alien, that octopodal stare. Allowing herself to be drawn in by it, she found only reassurance and encouragement. A backbone, it seemed, was not a prerequisite for compassion.
“That’s better, my dear.” Letting his comforting tentacles slide off her exposed skin, the sage drifted away from her so he could address them all.
“I think the female’s supposition is correct. From what she has told us, I believe she was indeed caught up in a current. Not the predictable daily current that runs back and forth between Yellecheg and Singarol, nor even the powerful Jinakaloach that sometimes roars southward along the shelf, but one of those periodic mysterious currents that appears only when the flows of the entire realworld undergo a sudden shift.”
As she listened to the sage’s careful appreciation of what had happened to her, a captivated Irina ceased her crying.
“There are currents that run between homes,” Oxothyr continued, “and currents that run between mountains. There are powerful water forces that groom the outer shelves and others that can sweep the unwary into the void itself when the mirrorsky is seriously disturbed. Flows can drag a swimmer into the deep or thrust them into caves from which they cannot escape. And then there are those currents that only but rarely catch and carry the unknowing not merely between seas but between worlds.” Raising an arm, he gestured at the watching Irina.
“It is my opinion that this female void-breather, whom I have made into a whole merson, is one such unfortunate.”
As the shaman’s words began to sink in, Irina refused to accept them. “That’s crazy. This is all crazy. I was diving in the ocean. It’s the same ocean. You—you people are legends.” Her gaze traveled from Oxothyr to Glint to the two arguing squid. “Maybe more than legends.”
“No.” Chachel had little sympathy for anyone who refused to accept reality, however harsh it might be. “You are the legend. Or were. Now you are normal.” His spear point gestured in Oxothyr’s direction. “You have yet to properly thank the shaman for saving your life.”
“Perhaps,” the kindly octopod murmured to Irina, “you are right, in some way that neither of us realizes. Oshenerth is a very large place indeed. The largest of all places. Currents that flow from your part to ours may also flow in the opposite direction.”
She seized on it. “Then there’s a chance—I could get home?”
“The universe does not operate according to chance,” he corrected her authoritatively.
“Could—would—you help me?” She held up a webbed hand. “You changed me so I wouldn’t die here. Thank—thank you. You would have to change me back or I would die when I returned to my own ocean. At least, I imagine I would.”
Nearby, Glint shook his head sadly. “She wants to breathe void.” He could not imagine what it might feel like to inhale nothing but nothingness, and did not want to.
“I regret that I am occupied with other matters.” Eight arms formed a loose halo around the shaman. “Rumors and stories drift down to Sandrift from the far north, from the Dark Sea where the tarazok reside. They speak of unsettling changes, of migrations unnatural and forced. These concerns have been much on my mind of late.” Sympathy for her situation dwelled in his voice as well as in those remarkable limpid cephalopodan eyes.
Observing the female, Chachel thought disgustedly to himself. Tridacna’s toes—the thing is going to start crying again. But the changeling did not.
“I can’t ask you to defer work that you think important just for me,” Irina mumbled. “Maybe—maybe if I help you in it, you’ll be able to find time to help me?”
Glint’s body rippled with laughter: it was blue. Chachel almost smiled. The shaman’s startling response killed both the cuttlefish’s color and the merson’s expression.
“I accept your offer, though I have no notion how you might help.” The octopus flashed an appreciative pattern of stripes. “In a time when disturbing changes are in the water, an entirely different outlook on reality might be welcome. As I ponder them, I will try to find time to consider your unfortunate circumstances and see what might be done about them.”
This time it was the visitor who swam toward the octopus. She proffered a hand. “Thank you! Right now, I guess all I have to offer is my thanks.”
The mage studied the extended arm. “Am I supposed to do something with that?”
“It’s how my kind seal an agreement. We shake hands.”
“If I had one, I would comply.” Oxothyr flashed mild amusement. “Fortunately, my grasp is not so limited as those of mersons.” Reaching out with a tentacle, he wrapped the end of it around her fingers. She could feel the suction from its suckers. The sensation was not unpleasant.
The shaman withdrew his arm. “The question remains; what are we to do with you now? You cannot stay with me. As I mentioned, I am consumed with other worries. Nor do I have the proper company to offer you.” One eye flicked to his right.
Sage he was not, but Chachel was immediately defiant. “No one stays with me, revered one. Not merson, not manyarm, and certainly not a changeling demon.”
“Who would want to stay with you?” Glint whispered under his breath—and he was Chachel’s best friend.
Oxothyr considered. One could tell he was deep in thought from the line of dark bands that ran in measured waves through his boneless body. As he mulled possibilities, Irina felt something tickle the small of her back.
Whirling in the water column, she found herself confronted by the shaman’s multiarmed assistants. Tentacles waving, Sathi and Tythe hovered before her. Having been granted an unexpected reprieve, the spralaker they had cornered in a rock crevice hastened to flee via the nearest available crack in the surrounding coral wall.
“Looks like a merson now,” Sathi observed thoughtfully, “but still talks funny.”
“Say something funny,” Tythe urged her.
“I wish I could.” Irina managed a smile.
“So many teeth.” Zooming in sharply, Sathi made her flinch. Tentacle-tips reached out to poke all around the rim of her mouth. It felt as if she was being probed by a clutch of educated worms. “Like all mersons.”
“Beak is better,” Tythe agreed. His skin flushed pink with orange dots.
“You know, you two are kind of cute.” Reaching out, she began to caress the nearest squid, starting behind Tythe’s head and stroking back along the mantle toward the tail. The manyarm responded by staying motionless in the water while alternating bands of dark blue and purple ran through his body, following the touch of her webbed fingers. Admiring the dramatic color changes the cephalopod accomplished without effort, she found herself thinking of the phenomenon as visual purring.
“I don’t care what you do with me,” she told Oxothyr. As she shifted her attention to Sathi, the two squid began pushing and shoving as each sought the caress of her soft but firm fingertips. “I’ll do whatever you want. I’m just happy to be alive.” Holding up her other hand, she marveled at the webbing that now connected its fingers. “Even if you had to change me into something—weird.”
Oxothyr snapped out his contemplation. “I am sure we can find some kindly soul to take you in. In the meantime, I forget my manners. You must be famished.”
“I am,” she admitted readily. “It’s been days since I had anything to eat or drink.”
Glint flashed confusion. “What is ‘drink’? Is it like an oyster?”
“No,” she started to explain, “it’s …” She stopped. In this world, none of her new acquaintances drank. If anything, their world drank them. Come to think of it, in the course of her dreamlike transformation her thirst had also vanished. Parting her lips, she sucked in a mouthful of salty water. There was no sensation of quenching. The utter absence of thirst, of any desire to drink, was unsettling—and not a little liberating. But she was still hungry.
“I have all manner of victuals,” a gracious Oxothyr assured her. “Sathi! Tythe!” The two curious squid immediately snapped to attention; parallel to the mirrorsky, tentacles held out straight in front of them. “How would you like yours prepared?” Oxothyr asked her. “My kitchen is a simple one, but I myself am very fond of spices.”
“I’m hungry enough to eat a whole mackerel raw!” she told him. Which, the sage’s comment about spices notwithstanding, was quite possibly to be the case. It was self-evident that she was going to have to get used to eating uncooked food. A good thing, she mused, that she liked sushi. She turned to her rescuers, merson and cuttlefish.
“You’ll stay and eat with me, won’t you? There are so many questions I need to ask.”
“Ask them of one whose business it is to dispense answers.” His tone curt as ever, Chachel spun and finned back toward the entrance to the shaman’s home. “I have wasted enough time here.”
“Yes,” murmured Glint, “you mustn’t let courtesy and company, conversation or conviviality, keep you from an afternoon of solitary melancholic contemplation.”
The merson stabbed his spear in the manyarm’s direction, a half-hearted thrust the agile cuttlefish avoid easily. Then the gruff one-eyed merson was gone, swallowed up by the blackness of the tunnel. Altered among marvels, transformed in body and perception, a bewildered Irina still found time to wonder at the source of the merson’s undeviating irritability.
“He doesn’t like me,” she muttered.
“He doesn’t like anybody.” Sidling up alongside her, Glint turned a reassuring maroon. “And nobody likes him. Except me.”
She eyed the hovering cephalopod. “Why do you like him?”
“Haven’t you heard?” Lateral fins rippling like strips of clear plastic held horizontal in a steady breeze, the cuttlefish moved forward to gaze after his departed companion. “I’m mad. Why else would I go on pair-hunts with an insufferable outcast like Chachel and risk the jeers of my peers?”
“You strike me as perfectly sane.” Extending an arm, she used her fingers to stroke him the same way she had the shaman’s assistants. His color and body pattern changed immediately in response to her touch.
“Ummm … a little lower and to the right. That’s it,” he hummed as he drifted closer to her. “Just behind my siphon.”
Food soon appeared in plenty. While Irina devoured everything that was set before her and the two squid used their tentacles to wave off (and occasionally eat) the small fish and krill-like crustaceans who occupied the same ecological niche as terrestrial flies, she periodically interrupted her meal to ask questions of Glint. Having retired to his study to brood on the meaning of the disturbing rumors from the north, Oxothyr was no longer available to supply answers. Irina did not mind. She actually preferred to query the cuttlefish. Despite his unambiguous friendliness, the great bulk and penetrating gaze of the octopodal shaman was more than a little intimidating.
As she nibbled her way through the salty center of a decapitated butterfish (everything here was salty, she mused), she finally thought to ask Glint directly about what had been troubling her ever since their first meeting.
“What’s wrong with your friend? With Chachel? Why is he so rude to everyone? And why is he, as you said, an ‘insufferable outcast’?”
“He’s not rude.” Fragments of chitinous shell spiraled lazily downward from beneath the cuttlefish’s mouth as he methodically demolished a crab. “He’s brusque. He is an outcast because that’s the life he’s chosen for himself. The reason’s the same, I think, for the ‘insufferable’ part.”
“But why?” Sitting on a shelf of plate coral that grew outward from the inner wall of the greeting chamber, she found herself using her teeth to scrape the last bits of flesh from bone as naturally as a chef preparing the ingredients for a chowder. “He’s more than unfriendly: he’s openly hostile. Why? I never did him any harm.”
Finishing the last of his crab, Glint turned toward her. As he spoke, he used his sensitive tentacles to clean the area around his beak. Indicative of his sudden seriousness, his body turned a dark yellow.
“It’s not you,” the cuttlefish explained in a tone turned suddenly somber. “It was a mob that made him what he is. It all happened many years ago.”
So solemn was the cephalopod’s manner that Irina felt compelled to set the remainder of her own meal aside. “A ‘mob’?”
“That’s what is called a school of sharks.” Pivoting, Glint used both hunting tentacles to gesture back the way they had come. “In Chachel’s case, they were mostly oceanic whitetips and makos, working together as a gang.” Reflecting his feelings, his body turned white with unsightly black splotches. “It was ugly, it was bloody. I know: I was there.”
Sitting cross-legged on the pale blue shelf, illuminated by the light that was still pouring in through the open top of the chamber, Irina stared at the cuttlefish. “You were there? But that’s impossible. Your—you people—only live a couple of years or so, and Chachel is at least my age.”
One eye regarded her intently. “What are you saying? My people live as long as yours.”
“Maybe here they do.” She considered thoughtfully. “That might explain why despite showing so much intelligence, cuttlefish like you, and octopods like Oxothyr, and squid where I come from, don’t have any higher skills like communication. They don’t live long enough to learn. I wonder—if you took an octopus from where I come from, from my ocean, and extended its lifespan by a factor of ten or twenty, how much knowledge would it be able to acquire? How smart could it become? As smart as its older counterparts here?”
“Ask Oxothyr. He is ‘of an age.’” Pivoting, Glint gestured upward toward the open water and the mirrorsky above. “I will tell you how Chachel became the way he is.…”