Page 21 - Three Adventures

Voyage of the Pomeranian

how an infant could learn the grown-ups’ language, and if he could
give me one elementary lesson.

He obliged, first giving me a long series of taps which I laboriously
translated as “the tank has thus-and-such dimensions (width, length,
depth), retains certain levels of salinity, turbidity and opacity, and to a
certain degree of certainty is safe or unsafe, good for hunting or not,
likely or not to yield a rock cave suitable for a den, and will require a
given upper and lower limit of time to traverse at full speed.” He
then told me to watch. His skin suddenly appeared to ripple, a
variation in color lasting a fraction of a second; I would have missed
it had I not been concentrating. In like manner the immature octopus
is spoon-fed equivalences in the two languages until it grasps the
method and is able to demonstrate its use.

Second (as if the foregoing were not sufficiently extraordinary; nay,
incredible!), the substance of that advanced means of
communication: it could or did include every branch of speculative or
empirical inquiry known to man. I asked for examples of the sort of
things a well-educated octopus might be expected to know. They
included not merely marine hydrology and a thoroughgoing mastery
of hydraulics, but taxonomy of undersea life and a profound
comprehension of octopus physiology and pathology—including
knowledge of the materia medica available to treat wounds and
diseases. Dinadan might not have died were Tristan able to locate a
certain venomous sea slug, he added parenthetically, but they were
imprisoned with no hope of access to any pharmacopoeia. I realized
that most of the science we had developed on dry land took into
account Earth’s atmosphere and the place our planet occupied in the
observable universe. Newton could not have discovered the laws of
motion had he spent his life underwater. But neither would he have
developed the theory next revealed by Tristan.

As we have our “heavens,” both astronomical and theological,
partaking of qualities derived from extrapolating observations made
on terra firma, so do the octopi derive an understanding of what lies
beyond their world from the qualities found within it. I asked Tristan
what he thought my world might be like, as he could have had no

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