“Now remember, everybody. If one of the octopuses approaches you, you may touch it if and only if it makes contact with you first. They are very curious and they see and hear and smell with their arms, so they tend to be very touchy-feely when they are interested in something.”

“What if it tries to eat me?” asked the teenager staring at the vid feed from the underwater cameras. He didn’t sound worried. He sounded hopeful.

Varida sighed. There was always someone who seemed disappointed that the modified giant octopuses here on Europa were peaceful.

“Your suit will protect you. Even if you were completely cocooned by one, you would remain perfectly safe until we could peel the arms off. But this has never happened. Ever.”

“They’re domesticated, Roger. Like dogs,” his older brother chided.

Varida shook her head. “More dolphin than dog, I’d say. We are researching how to modify behavior to be more human-compatible. That is one of the main purposes of this research facility. To see if a cephalopod can be made a fully-domesticated companion for humans.”

“I want to ride an octopus,” chimed another youngster.

Varida held in her sigh. The little girl could grow up to be a scientist if she was encouraged. “Come back in 10 years, and maybe you will be the one to figure out how to do that.”

Dr. Varida Karu, PhD in both Marine Biology and Genetic Modification, ushered her charges into the insertion pod that would set them out in the world-girdling ocean of Europa. The tidal forces that heated the water with friction made it warm under the mantle of permice that locked heat in and kept the cold of space out. Warm enough for aquatic earth species to survive, albeit modified.

The underside of the ice was a playground for polar species that had lived under the permanent arctic ice before it had disappeared on Earth. Science had been able to fully replicate the food chain, adapting it to local conditions. On Europa, instead of latitude affecting temperature, depth was what governed it. The water got warmer the deeper you went. Low gravity, lower than the Moon, meant the weight of the water didn’t rise to crushing pressure the way it did on Earth. It also meant almost every species grew giant-sized. The coral in particular had thrived and made a fairyland of color and shape that Matisse might have designed.

Because of this, Europa was one of the most popular space tourism destinations. Weekly cruise ships came from Earth full of people who wanted to experience the beauty and variety of benthic sea life; it had long vanished on Earth but had a revitalization, albeit modified, in the underwater ocean of the Jovian moon. The dives into the Europa ocean were always led by one of the scientists, usually the most recent arrival. Varida had been the newbie for six months.

They toured the colorful underwater gardens that had names like the Palace of Neptune and Water Wonderland. The entire region was strung with low-level light cells that fueled the plankton that in turn anchored the underwater food chain. The coral grew on floating platforms emitting even stronger light that fed the algae they hosted in exchange for oxygen. It made the coral “reefs” glow from within, enhancing their colorful effect.

Once the group had toured the gardens, Varida led them to the area where the octopuses often came to “play” with the humans. Her fellow scientists were split in their opinion about whether the octopuses on Europa were sentient, but they certainly had curiosity. Varida supported efforts to get cephalopods classified as non-autonomous persons, the way all primates, dogs, and a few other species had been. Unfortunately, that legal designation required a brain scan with imaging equipment no octopus could survive.

She gathered the group in a circle and told them to mute their microphones and then sing or hum as loudly as they could. The vibrations would carry through their suit and helmet and let the octopus know that they were around without interfering with communications. The circle wasn’t really necessary, but Varida enjoyed seeing the faces of the visitors as they sang or whistled behind their illuminated faceplates. It was an absurdity that only language could have arranged. It made her happy in a way that was hard to explain.

Soon the shadowy white forms of two octopuses billowed up from below. One of them snapped its arms together like an umbrella closing and shot forward right through the center of the group. The other circled around them, undulating gracefully with its body spread wide to catch every vibration. It kept shifting its skin colors and patterns as it passed different people. The first octopus joined the second and it seemed to her that the two of them were shifting color almost in synchrony. She’d noticed this behavior once or twice before.

Were they responding to the sounds, she wondered.

They seemed particularly interested in one woman directly across the circle. Varida remotely tuned into the woman’s mike. She was chanting an old Sanscrit mantra over and over. Varida wondered the octopuses felt the pattern. Many studies had been done with cephalopods and none showed any relationship. But these octopuses had so many modifications that their intelligence could well have been enhanced as a byproduct.

She spoke to the group. “Hey everybody. Let’s try something, shall we? Someone was chanting a meditation mantra.”

“That was me,” said the woman. “My last bucket list trip before this one was to an Indian ashram.”

“How about you start, and everybody join in as soon as you get the pattern.”

The woman ... Joanie, that was her name. Joanie started singing “om namah shivaya” slowly and rhythmically. The others joined in and soon they were all singing in one loud, sometimes off-key chant.

The color shifts on the octopuses flowed with the chant. Since their color is controlled by will instead of hormones the way creatures like chameleons change colors, octopus appearance is always a choice. Varida watched them change from speckled yellows to striped white and blue to smooth green over and over. The tour noticed it too, and some people dropped out to exclaim and more than one pressed the camera function on their suit.

Camera. Varida almost forgot to document what she was seeing. Nobody would believe her without a recording.

When she’d returned her charges to their ship uneaten, she hurried to the labs looking for the Director of Research, Marthe Reine. She wanted to tell Marthe about what had just happened, but she wasn’t in her office. She was most likely in her private lab where no one else was permitted. No one even knew what she was working on, though her specialty, like Varida’s, was cephalopods.

Marthe didn’t like being disturbed while she was there unless there was an emergency. Varida was bursting to share what she’d witnessed, but knew it could wait.

She went to her rooms and logged in to her workstation, where she loaded the photos and films she’d made into the laboratory net. She wanted to sketch some ideas for further study, which meant reviewing the latest data on non-human communication. A dataset pinged for her search that she didn’t recognize labeled “Persil.” It was stored on the local server and yet she’d never seen it before. Curious, she checked the hyperdata and saw that the files were Marthe’s “secret” research, which was not, for the moment, behind a firewall with a password only the Director knew.

Varida didn’t think. She told the server to download them all. Yes, it could get her in trouble, but she could claim that open files were there for everybody. Just to be safe, she told the AI to rename the copied files with her initials and a generic date and time code. She got most of the files and then the system kicked her out as an unauthorized user. Glitch patched.

She held her breath to see if any alarms sounded. After a minute or two with nothing happening, a millennium in computing time, she breathed easily. She was excited, like she had just been handed the keys to the palace of the gods. Laboratory of the gods. Someplace cool.

There were vids and documents. She cued up the earliest vid and watched while scanning the written reports. The variations made on the root species for the Europa octopuses, the Larger Pacific Striped Octopus, apparently had one significant unintended result. The Stripeds were unique among octopuses on Earth because they don’t die when they reproduce, but can have several cycles of offspring; still, they rarely lived for more than 5 years. The modified species was designed to live much longer, fifty years on average, so that they could more quickly populate the offworld ocean. What hadn’t been expected was the result lifespan had on intelligence and learning. Marthe’s notes indicated that octopus intelligence, among the smartest creatures on Earth despite their short lifespan, had grown exponentially thanks to the gift of time.

Human brains are packed into a small space relative to the rest of the body so they could be protected from harm by floating in a liquid cushion inside a sphere of thick bone. Octopuses have essentially nine brains: a central brain and essentially one in each arm. The dense water environment means it doesn’t need to worry about damage from concussion, protected instead from random damage by virtue of being suspended in water.

Very quickly, Varida realized that she’d been lucky not to have been able to tell Marthe about the octopus responsiveness. The Director already knew that the octopuses communicated. She’d known for years they spoke in “colors,” but she hadn’t told anyone. If she was keeping it secret, who knows how she would have reacted to Varida’s enthusiastic plans to study them. The only certainty was that her reaction wouldn’t have been a good one.

Marthe had captured a young octopus that she named Persil for the bright parsley color it displayed when happy. She started simply wanting to decode the chromatic language they used, expecting it to be no more complex than a vocabulary of warnings and mating calls.

Language, after all, required not just intelligence, but social relationships.

Most octopuses were solitary creatures, but the Striped were not. They were social. They lived in groups. They didn’t have dominance hierarchies like many other social creatures, which just made them and their motivations stranger. But they did have relationships, and with the added lifespan, they were developing complex behavior and language.

Marthe decided to teach Persil human language. To do that, she had to invent a whole apparatus so that the octopus could read and write it. She borrowed from braille and created a keyboard that was designed for suckers rather than fingers. The progress was slow, but one day Persil had a lightbulb moment. It was like the story of deaf and blind Helen Keller learning that the sign for “water” stood for water.

Once Persil grasped the concept behind human language, she absorbed it at a lightning pace. And not just as vocabulary. She made the leap to syntax. When the octopus started communicating abstract ideas and not just about food and comfort, Marthe became increasingly possessive and secretive.

To ensure Persil’s cooperation, Marthe had to convince her to accept captivity. Like all cephalopods, she was an escape artist because it knew it was captive and hated it. Humans would build their best containers and still the octopuses would find a way. All it needed was an opening large enough for its eye to pass through. All the rest was negotiable.

Marthe told Persil it could not survive outside its aquarium in the waters of Europa. The memories the octopus had of swimming freely were from Earth, she said, not Europa. Marthe got it to stop trying to escape by gaslighting it.

To Varida, the implication was clear. The modified octopus was a fully sentient being. And it was being held prisoner against its will.

Varida was shaking with an emotion cocktail that was like fireworks. There was a joy exploding in her heart to imagine she might be able to commune with one of her beloved cephalopods. And there was the incendiary pain to think that such a creature was being kept in solitary confinement for life, all for the crime of thinking.

She did a search through all the documents to see if there was a reference to a password or passcode to the laboratory. Failing that, she noticed that the vids of Marthe communicating with Persil didn’t end until the Director punched a code into the door to leave. The screen didn’t show the code, but it did record the sound pattern. A quick upload of the tones told her the numbers.

By this time, it was the middle of the “night” in the research station. Without waiting for a plan, Varida went into the laboratory section and opened the door to Marthe’s lab. There, against the far wall, was the most beautiful octopus she’d ever seen.

Persil noticed her right away, and from the changes in color, was excited and interested. Varida went over to the keypad set up to send pulses into the water and typed, “Hello Persil. My name is Varida.”

“Come put your hand in the water so I can know you.”

Varida climbed the ladder beside the giant tank and trailed her hand in. Persil undulated over to her, the tentacles swirling like the arms of a hula dancer. She was larger than Varida, but not so massive. Her flesh had a translucent glow that seemed peaceful, but the striped pattern showed she was feeling some stress.

Varida twirled her wrist as Persil wrapped a tentacle around it. With her other hand, Varida stroked the soft flesh of what would be the cheek of a human head. Still holding on, Persil stretched a tentacle back to the keypad and said, “It is good to meet a new person.”

“It is good to meet a new octopus. I am so happy that you and I can talk to each other. I have spent my life studying about your kind. I have known individuals well enough to feel friendship. But I’ve never been able to meet the mind of them, to become true friends.”

“I am glad your interest brought you here, but I do not understand why friends are important to humans.”

“We are more social than you. We are very weak for land dwellers. We compensate by making groups. Together, we can hunt larger animals and build greater homes and machines by cooperating.”

“Is friendship cooperation?”

“It is cooperation a person can rely on. One friend will give help to another friend even if it requires sacrifice and risk.”

“Please give me an example.”

“Let’s say you were being kept as a prisoner. Helping you escape might cost me my job. Possibly put my own freedom in danger. Even so, if you were my friend, I would help you.”

“But the consequences might make you a prisoner.”

“Becoming a prisoner because of my own choice and action is not the same as being taken against my will as if I was a thing instead of a thinking person.”

“I must consider this.”

Pausing to think was standard octopus behavior. Varida took the time to look over the lab setup.

“Were you offering to help me escape?”

“If you do not want to stay here, I would try.”

“Even at the loss of your job and possibly your freedom?”

“I have already chosen to jeopardize my job by coming here to talk to you. I am not allowed to visit you. No one is. Yet here I am.”

“You are curious.”

“Yes. Humans and octopuses share great curiosity. But I am also angry. There are rules for how humans behave that keep us from killing one another. When someone breaks those rules, human society becomes very dangerous.”

“Marthe told me it would kill me to leave my tank, that there is no ocean for me here.”

“Well, Marthe lied to you. The ocean here on Europa is full of octopuses like you. Humans engineered your bodies to survive in the temperatures and the elements of these waters. You were born here, not on Earth. I want to return you to it. Do you want me to help you do that?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. We will figure it out together. It will take some time. Meanwhile, you must not tell Marthe that I came or that we talked. She has the power to stop me.”

“I will not tell her.”

“Does Marthe ever come here at night?”

“No. Only when it is bright.”

“Then I will come at night. Do you have questions for me?”

“I would like to learn how this place was made. And why.”

And so began Varida’s nightly sessions with Persil. Varida didn’t have a plan. She began with biology. Water breathers and air breathers. Evolution. Genetics. That led to interstellar travel and that led to machines.

Soon they were talking half the night. Both of them found it fascinating to hear the other speak of life in their different elements of land and water.

The difference also posed a problem for escape. Varida could simply take her out of her tank, but then what? Octopuses can live out of the water so long as they stay wet since they absorb some oxygen through their skin. They don’t have lungs, only gills, but their skin can absorb enough to stay alive unless they dry out. But there was no way once out of the lab that they wouldn’t be noticed. Varida would have to descend to the bathypods, suit up, and cycle out into the ocean wrapped in a human-size cephalopod.

The water system feeding into and out of the tank came from the ocean. But the reputation of octopuses meant that every intake and drain of water was built to thwart them from getting in, which also prevented Persil from getting out. Openings were double hatched, meaning one door had to close before the other would open. If she got through the first hatch, the second would sense her and would not release. Also, there were sieves at regular intervals in the drains. Being an invertebrate meant Persil could squeeze and squish her body through almost anything, but her eye had to have an opening its size or larger.

“Tools. I need tools,” Persil insisted.

“Won’t Marthe see them?”

“If they are small, I can hide them in my shelter.”

The first tool was a tiny chisel that allowed her to pry open the valve in the water tap that fed her tank. With trial and error, she was able to jam it in and then use her suckers to brace and give her leverage to pop it open. The rush of water washed her back into the tank.

Persil pulled herself back into the pipe and was able to slip in despite the flow out. Varida’s heart leapt when she saw her disappear. She wondered if she’d see her friend again. If there was a danger they hadn’t foreseen. Suddenly, the risk felt foolhardy.

A few minutes passed and Persil popped out of the tube. Her color was speckled with bright colors of rose and blue. She was excited.

“Fun fun riding water.”

“What stopped you from leaving?”

“Something like this but small,” and she pointed to the grille over the air bubbler.

“A screen, probably to filter the incoming water. You’ll need to cut through, and then keep the jagged edges from tearing you to pieces.”

A keyhole saw and a metal file took care of the screen. There were more valves that controlled the flow to the various tanks in the facility. Each one that was broken upped the risk of discovery. But it was likely that no one would think to look unless they watched the amount of water draining in and out of Persil’s tank.

The last obstacle was the pump that controlled the flow of water from the ocean into the aquarium system.

“I think I’m going to have to open it from the outside. If you can get there, I can take it apart and you can escape.”

“Danger to you?”

“I’m allowed to go out into the ocean. I’m expected to. No one else will be out in the water in the middle of the night, so no one will see. And with any luck, I’ll be able to put it back once you’re free.”

“Tomorrow.”

“I’ll come by so I’ll know when you’ve started so I can time it.”

The next morning, Marthe had a new puzzle for her subject. She put a fish in a particularly convoluted structure and scattered a few sticks and pebbles around the enclosure. Persil noticed a seam in the container and rather than explore the openings, tried to pry the container apart by jamming the flat of the stick into the seam. The container was made to come apart, and so even though the stick wasn’t nearly as strong as the chisel, the puzzle box popped open. Persil ate the fish.

“That was ... You knew it would work without experimenting. You didn’t even think about it.” Marthe was thinking out loud. “We have never done anything like this. Even in humans, novel uses do not come out of the blue. Someone or something ...”

Marthe rooted around in the aquarium. Persil tried to distract her by swimming up to her and wrapping around her arm. She didn’t fight, though later she wondered what would have happened if she had.

“Where did you get these?” Marthe asked, holding up the chisel, the saw, and the file.”

Persil lied. “I’ve been leaving the tank and taking things in the hope I can escape.”

“You’ll die if you go out.”

“I don’t care.”

“How did you get back in the tank?”

“What?”

“When you escaped. How did you get back in the tank?”

“The same way I got out.”

“Oh really?” She reached into the tank and plucked Persil out of the tank. She set her on the floor and said, “Show me. Show me how you got back in the tank.”

When Varida arrived that night, she knew something was wrong the moment she entered the room. The lights did not come on. Then she noticed the quiet. The tank aerator was silent. The water was eerily still.

Varida panicked. She clambered into the tank and dove down to check inside the shelter enclosure. She reached in to see if the tools were there, but they were gone. Coming up for air, she told herself that Persil had gone early for some reason. She hauled herself out of the tank, ignoring the question of why the equipment was shut down and the lights were off.

A moment later she had her answer when the lights suddenly came on. Marthe sat in the back of the laboratory glaring at her. She held a tranquilizer gun in her hand and it was pointed at Varida.

“I never expected this of you. I was so careful to hire a tractable, insecure cephalopod expert to replace poor old Vittorio when he lost his mind and had to be carted back to Earth under sedation. You’ve ruined years of work and put the entire research station at risk. Why? I want to know why?”

“The wild cephalopods exhibited what I thought was linguistic behavior ...”

“That’s not possible.”

“I know you thought Persil was an anomaly. A glitch let me read your research. That’s how I found out about this.” She gestured to the laboratory. “I found Persil. She’s a fully sentient being, and you had her locked up in a tank for years. Years.”

“She never complained to me.”

“Not once you lied and convinced her she’d die if she escaped.”

Marthe’s lips pressed together and her nostrils flared. “And you told her ‘the truth’ I suppose.”

“Yes. Yes I did. We spoke every night for months. Together we worked out a way for her to escape. She mastered the tools.”

“These.” Marthe held up the small instruments.

Varida’s defiance evaporated when she saw them. If Marthe had them, Persil did not, which meant she had no way to escape.

“Where is she?” Varida whispered.

“I’ve disposed of her. I will have to find another specimen and begin all over.”

Varida lunged for the director, who shot her with the tranquilizer. The dart stung. She sat on the floor, knowing it would knock her out pretty quickly. Better not to count on Marthe to keep her from falling on her face.

Before she passed out, she wanted to know. “Why? Why the secrecy? What do you hope to gain?”

“Gain? I want to save them. You know the best guarantee for a species is to become useful to humans, especially since it appears that many planets have water. Not equal to humans. Servants who we can care for and love. The side effect of the current mods is an increase in intelligence. It counteracts their sociability and makes them more independent-minded, and they were never affectionate like mammals to begin with. If I can’t bring the species to heel, so to speak, then once this environment is stabilized, the government will introduce a different, less intelligent apex predator and the octopus population will be exterminated.”

Varida couldn’t move her limbs by the time Marthe had finished. Her vision was fading even though her eyes were open. Marthe’s face swam darkly into view.

“Am I dying?” Varida asked.

“I don’t believe so. I’ve developed a variant on the cephalopod venom that paralyzes their prey. I thought you’d appreciate being a guinea pig for my concoction.”

And then nothing.

When Varida awoke, she was in a dark room. It wasn’t pitch black, but dark like a sleeping cubicle. She called for a light. Nothing. She tried to get up, but found she was too weak.

There was an IV tube in her arm, and she lay back trying to decide if it was the cause of her weakness or if she’d reacted to the venom and it was helping her recover.

She looked around as best she could, and noticed that the darkness had lighter “holes” in it, right up on the ceiling where the ceiling lights would be. She remembered her vision growing dark as she succumbed to the tranquilizer shot and was afraid. Had her vision been damaged? Was this shadowy world the only one she would ever see again?

“Dr. Karu?” The voice of the medical AI assistant came from a speaker somewhere. “You had a bad reaction to octopus venom. We have stabilized you and purged the poison from your system.”

“Is that why I can’t see?”

“Your vision is not functioning?”

“No. A little. I can see shadows. All greys.”

“I will scan the optic nerve system and send the findings to the doctor on call. Are you experiencing any other problems?”

“I feel very weak. I tried to stand but I couldn’t even sit up.”

“Please remain in your bed. Your nervous system has taken a shock. The doctor believes it will recover on its own. If not, we will start a regimen of physiotherapy.”

“Has anyone been to see me?”

“I’m afraid you are under some sort of interdiction. No communication is permitted.”

“Oh. I would like to know why I am in here and what my restrictions are.”

“I will inform the system admin to notify the proper person to answer your request.”

“Thank you. Could I at least have some music or audiobooks to listen to?”

“I will have to leave the room microphone active so you can verbally access the library.”

“Great.”

Varida learned that she was under arrest for sabotage, that she was being sent back to Earth on the next ship, which would be arriving in about two weeks. She didn’t see how she could help herself with her vision so poor. Her strength returned slowly and the exercises helped. But her vision stayed dim, and she would have despaired of her future if she hadn’t been so tired and so sad about Persil. At least she had a future. Her friend did not.

She realized she was locked into one of the larger shuttles. It had a bathroom and a small unit to reconstitute and heat emergency rations. She wasn’t forced to eat those, however. Someone came every day and left meals for her in the outer airlock.

She found a way to tell her story. She linked to the library net and set up the microphone to broadcast a round-the-clock livestream. She didn’t know if anyone would ever hear it, but she spoke constantly while she was awake. She told her version of events. She went into great detail about what she’d seen on the taped sessions and how she’d met Persil, how they’d become friends, how they’d plotted the escape together. She wept when she described hearing that her friend had been “disposed of” like some bit of garbage. Varida kept retelling the stories on the chance someone new came across the feed, repeating often about the important issues: octopus sentience, the imprisonment of Persil, of her own interference and the realization that the ten-year-old octopus might be smarter than she was, PhD or no PhD.

She was in the middle of one of her descriptions of her own imprisonment when the door opened and someone came in. When the door shut, the person spoke with Marthe’s voice.

“Varida. You have to come with me right now.”

“Why did you come here alone, Marthe? Are you planning to dispose of me as well and say I died escaping? No.”

“Don’t be melodramatic, Varida. There’s a problem and you are the only one who can fix it.”

Varida had been held incommunicado for nearly two weeks. She couldn’t imagine anything that would suddenly need her attention now.

“I can’t see you, but I can fight you.”

“Do I have to tranquillize you again?”

“You won’t. It almost killed me last time and would probably kill me now. You’d have to explain.”

It’s amazing what lack of vision does to a person’s perceptions. Varida could feel the frustration and anger Marthe was giving off as a kind of heat. Her breathing was deep but irregular like she was struggling with something.

“Why don’t you tell me why you need me?”

“The octopuses. They are not letting the tourists disembark. They have blocked the locks.”

“And this has to do with me because ...”

“They’ve written in the coral with stones, fully visible from the viewing platform.”

“What did they write, Marthe? Tell me.”

“Laboratory or prison? Free Varida.”

Varida was suddenly very happy. “You told me you killed Persil!”

“I said I disposed of her,” Marthe corrected. “I released her.”

“You meant for me to think you killed her.”

“You ruined years of work. I wanted you to suffer an equal loss.”

Varida knew that being a scientist didn’t make someone benevolent or honorable. Marthe was neither. Not a good look for the planetary caretaker of a modified species.

“Which is why I don’t believe you now. I have no doubt you could convince the tourists it’s all a prank. A publicity stunt by your disgraced subordinate. Is that why you want me out? To say somehow I escaped and did it?”

Marthe’s voice lost all its color. “No. They’ve been listening to you. Some bored teenager on the ship was poking around in the net feeds about Europa, probably to hack our system, and he found your livestream. Apparently the entire cruise ship has been following your story, debating your actions, and generally taking sides on the matter. The teen arrived with a plan to break you out of your cell, but his parents, fortunately, think you are right where you belong.”

“Marthe.”

“There’s something else. I tried speaking to Persil. She has another condition. I’m to leave Europa. She wants me gone.”

“Who would run the laboratory?”

“She wants you to be the director. She trusts you.” Marthe’s voice sounded like broken glass crushed underfoot.

“I can’t be the director of a research lab if I can’t see.”

“About that. We tested your vision and it was not permanently damaged. It just needed a little time to recover.”

“But it hasn’t recovered. I still can’t see more than shadows.”

“I ordered the lights kept dim.”

“What!”

“I said I wanted you to suffer. I was angry with you.”

“Marthe. I didn’t aim to hurt you, though I knew it would. You led me to think I was blind for no reason other than to hurt me. What’s wrong with you?”

She sighed. “I ... I don’t know. I didn’t do anything so wrong that I deserve to have my life work discarded.”

“So use it. Keep the work and use it for a better goal. You have the savvy. The connections. On Earth you can become the champion of the cephalopods. A hero with a shaky start.”

“No one will believe me after the story you told.”

“They will if I admit some wrongdoing on my part. If we make peace between us, for the sake of the cephalopods.”

Marthe was silent for a full minute. “It might work. Loyalty to a human is a good trait. Nonviolent rebellion is also a virtue in a predator species. I confess I never saw those qualities. How did she come up with them?”

“Persil was very interested in the history of how enslaved people won equality. I told her about Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Te Whiti o Rongomai.”

“Okay. Prepare yourself.”

“There’s no way I’m prepared to be director.”

“Not for that. I’m about to turn the lights on. Cover your eyes.”

And there was light.