Page 19 - Three Adventures

Voyage of the Pomeranian

pass on through the language Tristan had taught me. From there the
kraken, unable to grasp the method used by their smaller brethren,
became increasingly reliant on them for direction in other areas of
daily life—including the endless search for food. The octopi, having
located prey too large for them to handle or not to their taste, were
perfectly willing to share the information with the slower-witted
squid.

What, I then enquired, did Tristan’s species derive from the
relationship?—for no animal in nature expends energy on another’s
behalf without recompense; in this I must agree with Mr. Spencer,
whose ideas are not yet accepted scientific creed but do, in my
opinion, fill an explanatory void. The answer, if I understood my
informant aright, was also protection. By drawing the kraken into the
octopi’s orbit, the latter created a living shield against predators small
enough to fear the giant squid but large enough to threaten the
octopods. The huge beasts were also of use in rearranging the sea
bottom to suit their smaller cousins’ need for dens, in a manner
suggestive of men employing elephants, with much larger brains but
far less intelligence than we bipeds, to move logs. Over time, each
octopus colony had developed its own herd of domesticated squid
requiring very little management.

This explanation, so detailed in its rendering and so much in
conformance with established knowledge and theory in the natural
sciences, raised my expectations once again: Tristan and his cohorts
could deliver a kraken to us at will. But this would require a skill in
animal husbandry rivaling our own selective breeding of birds and
mammals docile enough to serve our needs. Yet it is generally
accepted that such activity, occurring at an early stage in human
development, is a precursor of science in its application of observed
cause and effect. And that led me to ask Tristan why he apparently
had little interest in this vessel or its occupants and their purposes.
He replied that his kind already knew as much they needed to about
our kind.

For the first time I felt as if I truly were dealing with an alien mind.

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