Whether you're large or small, it's hard to be unseen.

It's much easier to be recognized as something you aren't---something for which your watcher is looking, because they've seen it before. I am halfburied in sand, and so my skin becomes the colour of sand. The water is not still, and so my skin ripples gently like sand grains shifting in the current. The fish is still too far away. I know a lot about how other creatures see. The eyes of a fish, for instance, are very different from mine. The peripheral vision of a fish is very good at picking up motion, and triggering an instinctive response to flee. But the peripheral vision is too stupid to see things that aren't there, so when the fish looks away from me I blend in. not trying to trick it. The fish's mind is not like mine either, and not nearly as good. The fish's mind looks out through the middle of its eye. It's just dumb enough to fool, and just smart enough to be fooled. I wait until the fish's eye looks toward me before I move. I send faint pulses of darkness down my mantle and all eight tentacles. I call this pattern look at me. The fish looks at me. but all it sees is the pattern. I change the pattern to come to me. The patterns of light and dark on my skin talk to places in the fish's small, simple brain and change the way it sees the world. For the fish, only directions that lead to me exist. It is free to swim in any direction it chooses, as long as it comes toward me. The closer it comes, the more of its field of view my tentacles fill and the more control I have over what it sees and what it thinks. When it is within a quarter of the length of my body I wrap it in my tentacles. Even now its mind does not realise there is danger, but it struggles regardless: a lot of the things a fish does don't involve its mind. I draw it in to my beak and inject venom, and it quickly weakens. Holding the fish so it has no choice but to watch me, I flash another pattern through its eyes into its brain: die now, die now, die now. Soon it is dead and limp. I could eat the fish here, but it will be safer to go back to my home, a cave in the rocks. I swim close to the rocky bottom so I have cover from passing dolphins and sharks. A dolphin's mind is much better than a fish's mind. Maybe as good as mine, though very different from either. That's one thing that makes a dolphin dangerous; it's too smart to be easy to trick. A shark's mind is like the mind of a fish but simplified. That's one thing that makes a shark dangerous: it's too stupid to trick. But a shark or a dolphin is a bit larger than I am, so as long as I stay close to small gaps in the rocks I'm reasonably safe. I remember sharks and dolphins used to be much larger than I was, not so long ago. That's true of a lot of things: I had to move out of my old home, for instance, because it was too small, although at one time it had been quite comfortable and I'm good at getting into small places. Since I moved to my new home, though, it seems to be happening faster. It comes to me that rather than everything else getting smaller it might be that I am getting bigger. I wonder why I've never thought that before. Perhaps my mind is getting better, as I grow bigger, and I've only now become smart enough to have that thought. If I become larger and smarter, perhaps some day I won't need to fear sharks and dolphins at all. My new home is an interesting place. It is one of several caves, each a perfectly circular and very long tube. I went looking once for the end of mine but gave up. The walls are made of a different kind of stone from most of the rocks around here; it is like coral mixed with sand. A current flows out of each

cave, and the water tastes strange. That used to bother me a little, but I've got used to it. I suppose my body has adapted. At night you can see that the water coming out of some of the caves glows a faint blue. I eat the fish and go to sleep to digest it. When I wake my home is even smaller and I feel ravenous. It's night and low tide, which means there will be lots of pools in the rocks just above the ocean's edge. I leave the ocean and walk across the rocks on my tentacles. I'm getting better at this; I used to just sit on the rock and drag myself, but now my tentacles are much stronger and I can support my body clear of the rock, which is much faster. Also I can breathe air for much longer than I once could. I almost don't see the rock pools. They're tiny, and the creatures that live in them are far too small to be worth catching. In the distance I see rocky pillars thrusting up into the air like coral, covered in glowing spots. It's interesting, and I'd like to look at it, but it's too far away to go tonight. But just above the rocks is a flat expanse of land with green vegetation on it. and there are four-legged animals grazing. I stop before I frighten them and try look at me. It seems to work, so I pick out one I think I can drag home and use come to me on that one. I don't even have to drag it down to the water; I just let it follow my come to me out to sea until it's tired and starts to sink. I wrap it in my tentacles and inject venomit hardly struggles at all. less than a fish would. When I wake I'm hungry again. I go back to the same place and call the rest of the four-legs out into the water, and eat them all. When I wake from that I'm almost too big to fit in my home. If I had hard bones inside inc. like fish, I would be stuck, but fortunately all my body is soft and I can squeeze my way out. The land seems an cosier place to get food than the ocean. So I decide to swim along the coast until I get to the land coral I saw in the distance. Ill find a home there, and there must be animals living amongst the coral so I won't have to travel far to get food. On my way I see a couple of sharks and a dolphin, so I make come to me patterns and cat them all. But even together they're too small to be a filling meal. The land coral colony turns out to be built around an inlet, so I swim in and raise my body above the water to see what it looks like. By daylight the land coral looks a lot like the rock from which the long caves were made, and it's full of little cavities. I reach inside one of the cavities and pull out a small creature. It walks on two legs and waves the other two in the air. I wonder if it's making a soundmy hearing hasn't really adapted to air yet. Perhaps these creatures made the land coral, by secreting it or somethingbut they could just as easily be parasites, or harmlessly sheltering in it. Ill have to understand these things if I'm to live here, but there'll be time for that after I find a home. So far none of the cavities has been large enough. The two-legs is too small to be worth eating so I drop it and walk on. stepping between the coral pillars or climbing on them as seems most convenient. There's a lot of dusttiny pieces of land coral suspended in the air like sediment in turbid water. I'm wondering why when all at once I know because I sec the dust being made. A pillar ahead of me tumbles against the one next to it, and both shatter into pieces. Through the gap where the pillars had been I can see waterit's another arm of the inlet I've been following. And in the water is a creature. It's bigger than I am, which makes it vast compared with any other animal I've seen today. It's long and slenderstreamlined and its skin looks rough. It opens its mouth to take a bite out of another land

coral pillar and there are rows and rows of brutal triangular teeth. I've got a good mind, but right now I'm only thinking with the most simple part of it. And it's screaming shark. Of course the creature's not exactly like a shark. It's much bigger, and it has learnt to walk on land by changing its pectoral fins into legs. But I know what it once was. and as it looks at me I think it knows what I once was. Probably it chased me, or would have liked to, when we swam together in the blue glow of strange- tasting water. It's changed as much as I have, but a piece of each of us is still what we once were. The shark takes another bite from the land coral. Small two-legged creatures drop from it to the ground belowwithout water to support them they drop very quickly and don't move afterwards. If this goes on the shark will destroy all the land coral and I'll have nowhere to live. I decide to try to scare it off. Spreading my tentacles to make myself look big I slip into the water. The fins look slow and clumsy; I'm confident I can dodge it if it comes for me. Mistake. It doesn't even use the fins. The big tail propels it forward faster than I expect and its mouth closes on a tentacle. If it were smart it would take me into a death roll, spinning me over and over the way a moray eel would. But it isn't smart enough to do that. Instead there's an instant of agony and it shears off twothirds of the tentacle. The mouth is open again, for a second bite. I squirt out a jet of ink and dodge to one side. This trick works well against predators that track by sight, but I don't know if the shark really does. Mixed with the black cloud of ink there's a blue cloud of my blood, and the shark can probably follow me by that. My hearts are racing and I try to calm them down, to give the amputated tentacle a chance to stop bleeding. The shark breaks through the cloud of ink not far away and spots me. It turns fast and I realise that if I stay in the water I'm going to be shark foodit's a better swimmer than me as well as bigger, and it has those mineralised teeth that can bite so much more effectively than my beak. I scurry up a hillside beside the water. It's covered in low growths of land coral and I run around them. The shark runs after me on its belly, ploughing through some coral and sliding over the others. Ahead the pillars are taller and the shark begins to lose interest. I can see it doesn't like going very far from the water, or in amongst land coral too high to slide over. I stop at the edge of the taller area, and spread my seven surviving tentacles wide. Look at me. Look at me. Come to me. Come to me. The shark comes closer and I step back, deeper into the coral. It's an easy pattern to make, because the shark half-wants to chase me anyway, but I have to improvise for the missing tentacle. I notice twolegged creatures falling from the nearby pillars, as the come to me makes them step out of the coral. But I can't worry about that at the momentone mistake in the pattern and the shark might be on me. There are long gaps between the pillars, straight or mostly so. They are filled with two-legs: either live and scurrying or dead and broken. And there are larger crawling creatures: small ones of many colours, larger ones coloured dull green-brown with a long arm or eye stalk. A few have been broken open and I see dead two- legs inside. The land seems almost as complicated a place as the water: how long will it take me to understand it?

We're deep into the tall coral now and the shark is feeling unhappy. It can move all right as long as it follows the gaps, but it can't turn around without demolishing all the pillars and that takes time. I sense the shark is about to give up, despite the come to me. I dodge to one side, using a small gap it can't fit through and come at it from the side where it cannot bite. I hang on and try to inject venom, but the skin is tough and hurts my suckers. It turns on the spot, trying to get at me, but it can't turn fast enough to throw me off. Pillars tumble around us; dust is everywhere, coating my mantle grey and making it hard to sec, and a great chunk of falling coral misses me by half the length of my body. I hang on, looking for a weak point. The shark makes for the water, travelling in a straight line downhill. Its labours have tired it, and it gulps air, expelling through its gills. I wait for the gills to open and thrust my beak inside, injecting venom into the first soft tissue I find. Now the shark rolls over, trying to crush me, but I am soft and cannot easily be damaged in that way. I pump all the venom I have into its gills, hoping that the good blood circulation there will take it quickly to the creature's heart. The shark continues down the hill toward the water, moving more slowly. I try to slow it up, dragging my own body along the ground. At the water's edge it becomes so weak that it cannot continue on against my resistance. I hold my tentacles in front of its eyes and triumphantly tell it, die now, die now, die now. It's a long time before it does. I slowly look up. My body aches from bruises and cuts, and the missing tentacle hurts even where it isn't any more. I've left streaks of blue blood on pillars all through the colony. I need to find a home, in which to lie and recover, and regrow my tentacle. All the two-legs I can sec are lying on the ground broken. I suppose that's because of the die now pattern. But a stream of the larger brown-green creatures is crawling down the hill toward me. The arm of every one is pointing at me. No matter how good your mind is, it's hard to see something as it really is. It's much easier to see it as another of something you've seen before. I wonder what they see. when they see me. I suppose I'll find out, sooner or later. They're quite close now.