Dr. Victoire Lorenz stood in the shadowed twilight silence of the visitor display room, cradling her kitten, and studied her enemy in the big floor tank. The light from high windows above the aquarium displays was scarcely enough illumination for human eyes. It was more than enough for the nocturnal vision of Evileye. Prowling rocky sea-bottom haunts, his kind had fed in darkness for ten times a million years. Crowded up against the heavy clear plastic of his circular tank, clearly aware of her scrutiny, her enemy stared back. Though the tank was over twenty feet across, its acrylic wall waist-high to a woman of Vicki's small size, it was barely enough for Evileye to move about freely.
It had been Gary Matthews, mate of the Yaquina, who'd suggested adding the inward-curving tank lip with sharp edges. The angular, rawboned Matthews had shown interest in Vicki from the first, despite the fact that her responses were barely civil. Gary had taken her turndowns with an easy grace that irritated her, yet he could still take an interest in her work. That acrylic lip idea had, at least, stopped Evileye from prowling.
Now and then, when some idiot visitor tossed popcorn or a candy wrapper into his open pool of sea water, Evileye might move off in a sidelong crawl, sand and tons of water roiling in his wake. At such times he used a lidlike structure to squint. But at other times he could open his eyes round as a barracuda's. When at rest, for example; or occasionally when studying prey.
He was doing that now. Think I don't know what goes on behind that pitiless gaze? she thought. But this concrete floor is my turf. And I know you, mister . . .
In fact, most marine biologists knew himor his kind. Proper name: O. dofleini. At her last research station across the Pacific in Queensland, they'd pronounced it "doe-flain-eye." Here in Newport at the Oregon State marine science center they said "doe-fleen-eye." But he'd earned his private nickname from Vicki by destroying a month's painstaking work with his insatiable lust for crab flesh.
A lab assistant had walked in one morning, horrified to find Vicki Lorenz's experimental tanks overturned, one smashed, with bits of Cancer magister, Dungeness crab, strewn on the concrete and too many carapace fragments in the octopus tank. Though the dofleini was again in his tank, the seawater trail was plain and the vast brute sported a cut on his mantle. Much of Vicki's salary came from a sea grant to study the diminished commercial crab catch. The ravenous dofleini, in one midnight foray, had wasted a third of her grant money and forced her to start anew. It would be a male! And afterward, to Vicki, he was Evileye.
His common name: Pacific Giant, the colossus of octopi. Larger specimens existed, but his body was the size of a medicine ball and at full span, those leathery tentacles could reach nine feet in any direction for the food, bits of crab or squid, introduced into the big display tank. Depending on his mood, Evileye might adopt a rusty hue or a grayish brown to match the sand. Few visitors appreciated his most subtle camouflage trick, the change of his surface texture from smooth to rough or even to nodular, as it suited this subtle hunter of the deep. He was a great favorite of the visitors.
"Oh yes," Vicki murmured, "they love a good safe scare. But what if they were your size, Scrapper?" At the sound of her name, the dozing tiger-stripe kitten waked for a languid glance at her mistress and, lying on her back in the crook of Vicki's arm, flexed tiny orange furred paws.
"Think you're a predator, huh?" Vicki freed her left hand; moved it above Scrapper's face to tempt playful claws. "Well, that smart sonofabitch in the tank has two hundred pounds, and a lot of brain-power, and a few million years of evolution on you. You'd last about as long as a hermit crab." Her mind flashed in an unwelcome hallucination of the great beast plucking little Scrapper from her arms, encircling the tiny spitting ball of fur with a sucker-lined tentacle, plunging the kitten below to his own watery turf, pulling the pathetic sodden prey toward the beaklike jaws, lethal toxin from his salivary glands flooding the small bodyShe felt an unprofessional shudder; turned away toward her office and the experimental equipment it held. Acrylic lip or no, she would never again leave her tanks of gravid female C. magister specimens in the display room with Evileye.
Scrapper yawned and closed her eyes. "Yeah, me too," Vicki said. "And if I don't get those egg counts done tonight I'll be in a cock-up." While setting her desk in order she smiled to herself at the Aussie slang, an old habit of hers that grad students sometimes gently mocked.
Though Vicki was American, she'd found the peak of her life during her thirties after she and Korff landed jobs in Australia. Birding on unspoiled Heron Island near the small exclusive marine labs there, listening as Korff recited his latest poemhis "most recent literary offense," as he put itand making love on the Tropic of Capricorn. When his tiny knockabout day-sailer was found capsized on the barrier reef, she could not believe at first that her best years were over.
The memory brought a familiar grief and, with it, a reaction that experience had caught her unaware. Anger, at least, she could handle. "Goddammit, get away from that," she muttered as Scrapper showed interest in the multicolored bottles of recording pen ink. The bottles were secure and the kitten had committed no offense but: "Make my desk a sack of arseholes, would you," Vicki said, lifting Scrapper by her scruff. She dropped the kitten a few inches to the waterproof carpet and resumed setting her notes in order for the morrow.
She knew that her anger was really at Korff, who'd betrayed her by dying. She'd learned from her mother that males weren't to be trusted, but she'd made herself deeply vulnerable to one, bedazzled by his mind, enraptured with his body. He should've been more careful for my sake! But he wasn't. Korff had been a gambler. And when he'd lost, she had lost. She sent the savage thought back across the years and the pelagic deeps to her long-dead lover: Thanks for a valuable lesson, mate.
Vicki slammed the upper left desk drawer too hard; heard a hard thump, probably the little nickel-plated Smith & Wesson she used to dispatch a thrashing shark when working at sea from one of the research vessels. An empty Nansen bottle, its heavy brass hidden with white epoxy paint, nearly toppled to the floor but Vicki caught it just above Scrapper's head. The massive specimen collection bottle would have obliterated her only friend. Certainly the only one she slept with. "Eight lives to go," she said with a shaky laugh, and swept the kitten up again.
A quick look at her wrist: past seven P.M. She hurried to lock up, thrust Scrapper beneath her frayed pea-jacket, and headed for her rusted-out Datsun. The rules against dogs or cats at the marine center were supposedly strict. But because they had a problem with ants, the joke went, aardvarks were okay. One of these days an undergrad would show up with a real anteater, and then the joke would be ruined.
She took Bay Boulevard, ignoring the lingering Pacific glow that outlined Yaquina Bay Bridge, now a series of sinister spans arching against the bloody palette of the evening sky. Vicki hadn't time to drive to her cottage halfway to Waldport. But neither could she afford dinner at the nearby seaside places, so she turned toward The Anchor in Newport's heart. The food was good and, because they knew her, they'd ignore Scrapper so long as she stayed inside that pea-jacket. They offered other advantages too; when times were as hard as these, pride was your enemy.
She took a rear corner booth; made an effort to produce a smile because she knew the waitress slightly. "No menu, Fran; we're not all that hungry so, uh, a hamburger steak and iced tea. Make it a child's portion," she added, more defiant than pleading.
"You could eat a horse and chase the driver, honey," Fran accused, adding, "and child's portion it is."
Vicki nodded her thanks, knowing the finely drawn lines in her own face were more from overwork than from undereating. Besides, Fran obviously took pride in curves as exaggerated as an overstuffed sofa. Fran made no secret of her view: if you weren't blowsy, you were sickly. For a moment, Vicki's smile became genuine as she watched Fran's ample behind. By most standards, Fran was twenty pounds too healthy.
Then Vicki leaned back and closed her eyes, her hand stroking the fidgety kitten inside the jacket. She couldn't blame Scrapper; the restaurant smells had her juices flowing, too. It was probably the shadow across her eyelids that made her jerk them open.
"I bet you eat in bed, too." Gary Matthews's voice was husky but light for a man of his size. He saw the spark kindle in her face and raised his hands, drawing back. "Cancel that. I mean, if you sleep in restaurants, why then, ah"
"Ho," she said gravely, "ho. And I wasn't sleeping."
"Minor surgery on your navel, then?"
She realized she was still stroking Scrapper and jerked her hand from the jacket. One tiny paw shot out, answering the challenge of quick movement, and by mischance caught Vicki's forefinger. "Damn," said Vicki, and put the finger in her mouth.
Matthews had seen the kitten. Still, "Ah; minor surgery from your navel. It's little differences like this that make you so intriguing, Lorenz."
He was still standing, because she was gauche, because she needed to think about her grant work, because it was all she had, because"You're in Fran's way," she said, "Sit." He did.
After an interminable pause of perhaps two minutes he leaned his chin on his knuckles. "You don't talk me to death either. That's good."
"Maybe I just don't have much to say to you.
"Sure you do. How's the larvae count coming?"
The man had an unerring knack for divining what was uppermost in her mind. Like Korff. One strike against him. "Beg pardon?"
"Those Nansen bottles we brought you from the escarpment. You know, planktonic larvae? From Cancer magister? Basis of the local econ"
"So I've heard," she replied dryly. "It's too early to tell, and thanks for doing your job, Matthews. There's lots more lab work to do, mostly at night. I wish I knew why you cared."
"I've got friends in Newport, Lorenz. If the crabbing doesn't improve, a lot of furniture gets repossessed." His own job, of course, would be secure in any event; yet he spoke as if he really cared about people. Again, like Korff; strike two.
"Not about the crabbing. About me. I don't want to be bitchy, but why me?"
Fran was beside them, sliding a small plate with a suspiciously large aromatic meat pattie onto the table. She cast an appreciative eye toward the newcomer with his wide-set gray eyes and sun-bleached hair. "Something for you?"
"Doesn't look like it," he grinned up at her. He waited, watching Fran move off, amused at the cats-in-a-sack movement of her rump, and caught Vicki's glance before answering. "Why you? Well, you're dedicated; students claim you're tough, but fair. And you're a loner like me. You stay in shape. You don't party a lot." He paused to watch her separate a bite-sized piece of meat, saw Scrapper devour it from her hand. "And you read damned fine poetry, and you take in strays." He spread his hands again for her.
"Scrapper happens to be a female. No, I'm not lezzo," she added quickly.
"I never dreamed you were. I know about Korff," he said softly.
Now he was riding sidelong on a dangerous Pacific swell. "Then leave me alone with him!" She hadn't intended to say it that way, or that sharply. More subdued: "I really just need to be left alone, Matthews. I really, really" Momentarily, without knowing why, she was near tears with frustration.
"Forgive me," he said, rising. "You don't need this. I just thought you might enjoy hunting agates on the beach sometime, or a steak at The Moorage now and then."
"I can't afford it."
"I can."
"I can't afford you, either."
"Ah." His answering smile was bleak now. "I suppose there's something to be said for traveling light. We could keep it light, you know." He got up slowly, favoring his back like an older man.
"Looks like you've put in a long day, too," she said to change the subject.
"They seem to get longer as we get older," he said.
" `We are all her children, and age too soon; Yet our witch-mother sea is still bride of the moon.' "
A fragment of Korff; strike three. "Mister Matthews, you are now invading my privacy," she said, staring at her plate.
"I suppose it never occurs to you that others might miss him," Matthews said. "Or that his work belongs to us alleven if he did dedicate it to you."
He had already turned away when she spoke. "He gave himself too easily to the sea."
Pause. Then, over his shoulder: "Maybe you'll explain that sometime."
"Maybe I will. But I'm rotten company tonight, Matthews. I'm sorry."
He nodded and left her. Presently she withdrew a square of filmy plastic from her jacket; folded the remainder of the meat inside. "You'll want a midnight snack before I'm done," she muttered to the kitten, and counted out the coins for Fran's tip.
It was almost ten p.m. before Vicki had enough data on the magister egg counts. It was messy work with its own special odors. She washed up, setting out a few fragments of crab for Scrapper, and carried a tray of remains into the display room.
"Never say I'm not fair," she muttered as she emptied the tray into Evileye's tank. He reached one tentacle out, suckers flattening against the clear acrylic to anchor him, and sent two more of his powerful limbs after large morsels. He was in no hurry, but watched her warily as he began to feed.
Why had she told Gary Matthews she might explain her bitter memories of Korff? It would only make a bad situation worse. It was her firm conclusion that, among the more intelligent species, the female became the giver; a genetic bias, perhaps, in caring for the young. The male, biased toward the hunt, became a selfish taker.
She watched Evileye reach far across his tank for a remnant of C. magister with the tentacle that proved his maleness. Its underside had a faint groove from which, at mating time, a special appendage grew. This detachable pseudopod was his gift to the female. "And you wouldn't do it unless it felt damned good," she said, wondering for the first time about that particular tentacle.
Big specimens of Evileye's kind were in special demand for dissection, precisely because everything was so large. Fine structures, the optic nerve, even the circulatory and neural systems. Perhaps someone had already made a study of the nerve pathways of O. dofleini with respect to that special tentacle. If not, perhaps she would sacrifice Evileye to that end. It would be a great pleasure.
She noted the series of faint lines, perhaps abrasions from the stones in his tank, that marked the tips of three tentacles that were most directly in line with those evil eyes. "One day soon, you may give your all for science," she warned, and took the tray back to her office.
The far end of her narrow office held lab hardware and the sink. Presently she began to chuckle as she completed her cleanup. It might be possible for a man as honest as Gary Matthews to admit that he had a selfish purpose in paying court to a womanherself, for example. But even under torture he wouldn't allow the comparison of his own flesh, his sex tentacle as it were, to that of Evileye. Still, that was clearly how it was. Basically, all he wanted was his own selfish pleasure, regardless who got destroyed in the process. Take a step or two across the evolutionary ladder and you had a cunning, highly intelligent male predator who made not the slightest effort to please anyone in his lust-driven pursuit.
You had Evileye.
Her wry amusement lasted until she had fed new figures into her desk computer, saved the updated data on a spare disk, and filed the disk away. Then she remembered Scrapper's late snack, and sitting, reached for her pea-jacket. She'd forgotten to shut the door to the display room, a common occurrence. But then her gaze followed a long trapezoid of light into the big room. In the edge of the blade of light, a saffron bundle of fur gamboled, fell over its feet, reared, pounced.
A runnel of water, a very small thing really, edged into the light. Vicki wondered if the big tank had sprung a leak, and then something else flicked into the light for a bare, ghastly, enervating instant, and in that tick of time her heart went as cold as primeval ooze.
She knew how suddenly, and with what lethal precision, Evileye could lash out with that tentacle which now lay stretched over the lip of his tank, its tip flicking in the edge of the light, tantalizing the innocent Scrapper into mock attacks. If she screamed or bolted into the big room, she would be too late. Evileye might have been luring the kitten forward for long minutes. Noiselessly, not daring to look away, Vicki pulled open the top left drawer of her desk and groped for the revolver.
But the cold metal object she grasped was not the revolver; it was merely a paperweight, long forgotten until this moment of mortal need. Now, straining to see into the gloom, she could see Evileye, crowded hard against the near wall of his tank, one huge eye wide, staring down at the kitten which was busily stalking the lure and did not see the second hawser-thick rope of muscle sliding along the floor behind it.
Biting her lip, mewling with desperation, Vicki wrenched open a second drawer, then a third, and then remembered with thunderclap clarity that she'd left the goddamn revolver in her apartment a month before. In her middle drawer was a dissection knife that she used as a letter-opener. If that was all she had for an attack on a monster twice her size, then that, by God, would have to do. She leaped to her feet, grasped the heavy Nansen bottle with her free hand and prepared to toss it against the tank in the wild hope that it might prove an instant's diversion. She took two steps, raised the metal canister, and paused.
Scrapper had already found her goal. The kitten had wrapped both forepaws around one leathery tip, and kicked with both hind feet against the tentacle in pretend ferocity. The second flanking tentacle had reached the kitten. Slowly, repeatedly, the tip of the second tentacle rubbed the back of Scrapper's neck, moving up between her ears and back again.
Vicki Lorenz, her knees failing, slid against the near wall of her office, so near collapse that she dropped the Nansen bottle. At the muffled clang, Scrapper came to her feet in a liquid gymnastic, then turned again to resume her little game. Evileye, staring expressionlessly from his world, seemed equally willing. Moments later he had the kitten on its back as he tickled its almost hairless belly.
As Vicki walked on unsteady legs into the room, slipping the dissection knife into a back pocket, Evileye moved one eye to keep her in view. Simultaneously, he slid his tentacles back with such guilty speed that one of them actually made an audible "plop" into the water. The kitten sat up and began to lick its breast.
"You didn't know I was watching, Evileye. So I believe you." Her voice shook so much, Vicki scarcely recognized it as her own. "Now I see how you got all those scratches. How many nights, I wonder."
Now he wrapped three of his rearmost tentacles around heavy stones in the tank; solid purchase for a quick retreat. Yet he stayed near the wall of the tank, watching as Vicki stooped to pull Scrapper into the crook of one arm.
"Scrapper doesn't know how sharp her little claws are; why do you let her scratch you up like that? Hell, why do I? Maybe friends all have claws, now that you mention it. You just have to be willing to bleed a little." Her voice, echoing in the big room, sounded doubly foolish. She didn't give a damn; at least it wasn't so shaky anymore.
Then she laughed aloud. "Let me tell you something, Evileye; I've pigged out on crab, too. Maybe we should pick friends for what they're selfish about, hm?" She didn't really expect the big brute to take her hand when she placed it in the water; and he didn't.
But when she squatted and eased Scrapper up against the clear plastic of the tankthe kitten did not care for its chill surfaceone careful tentacle snaked out along the acrylic inside the tank, its tip moving as if in symbolic caress. Vicki placed her hand flat, fingers apart tentacle-like, opposite the appendage.
Later she would wonder if she had imagined it; but as the tentacle became still, Evileye did two things: he opened both eyes wide, and he changed from gray to a hue that was ruddy as her own sunburnt skin.
"That does it, buster; but it'll have to look like an accident."
Among the list of emergency numbers she found Matthews, Gary. He answered at the fifth ring. "If you're only watching Johnny Carson," she said, "how would you like to help me out here at the lab? Yes, tonight. The sooner the better."
During his reply she rubbed Scrapper's neck. Then: "It's not illegal, but you'll think it's crazy as hell. . . . Okay, twenty minutes, but one more thing: you must never, ever, tell anyone."
She listened a moment more. Then, with a sigh: "All right then: we're going to fishnap a two-hundred-pound octopus. Still with me? Right; fifteen minutes," she said, laughing.
She put down the receiver and strolled back into the display room with its horrific central exhibit. She leaned forward on the tank lip, certain that no member of O. dofleini could understand her words, saying them anyway. "I could set up subtle lighting and get videotapes; I know, don't tempt me. Maybe I will, with one of your brothers. But not with you, Evileye. It'll be a bitch to fake your trail, but we've got all night."
And maybe, she thought, one day she would tell the details to Gary Matthews, while sharing a London broil, or combing Agate Beach some summer evening. She nuzzled her kitten and winked at Evileye, her buoyancy an almost physical sensation. After long years of self-imposed exile in green twilight depths, she was rising now, soaring upward to the light and to her own element; to life. The least she could do was return Evileye to his.
Though the brain and nervous system of O. dofleini are suggestive of formidable intelligence, it will probably always be tougher to carry on a conversation with a willing octopus than with the cetaceans Vicki knew in an earlier story. We're so alien to each other! The eyes of giant squid and octopus are very highly developed, but they didn't develop in the same ways as ours did. That alone suggests profound differences in neural processing. The day we contact smart extraterrestrials, any experience we have along this line will come in handy.
My hypothesis, if it's worth that hifalutin word, is that the farther two critters are apart on the DNA tree, the harder it will be for them to empathize. Birds, we now suspect, really are the direct progeny of dinosaurs. Take one of the avian crowd that features male harems: even if we punctuated the equilibrium of that species with intelligence equal to ours, we might be hard-pressed to understand its motivationsand vice versa.
We already know that relatively simple organisms like bees have differing local dialects within a species. How about elephants; horses; octopi? And what will happen if and when we help different non-primate species to communicate better? They do it already in basic ways, as anyone knows who has watched the family dog and cat interact.
One other thing: I always feel like Methuselah when someone reads the previous story and asks, "So who the heck was Johnny Carson?" Maybe the next generation will ask, "What was NBC?"