“Yeah, and maybe it’s just biding its time, waiting for the right moment to spring on us.”
“Don’t give it that much credit, George. It’s a fucking jellyfish. You act like it’s the town bully. It’s just an animal, a creature, it doesn’t think or plot. It’s a lower form of life… it reacts, right, Cushing?”
Cushing nodded. “That’s it. It just reacts to stimuli. I can’t imagine it being intelligent, even as smart as a mouse.”
George knew he was being ridiculous, had suddenly transformed into the weak link in the chain, but he wasn’t backing down. Not now. “How the hell would you know, Cushing? I mean, really, how could you possibly know? This isn’t the sort of jellyfish from back home. Its evolution was probably completely different. Maybe it does think. Maybe it can plot. What then?”
“Then we’re probably fucked, George,” Gosling said. “Any more questions?”
“Let’s just take it easy now.” Cushing was looking from one to the other. “Relax here. Giving a jelly intelligence is a real leap, George. I suppose it’s possible, but not likely. For all we know, it may be damaged as Gosling says. It may not have any fight left in it. .. or life for that matter. Although, jellyfish are certainly not organized the way we are and damage to them and damage to us are two different things.”
George sighed. They were right. Of course they were right. “Dammit
… it’s just that this waiting, it’s getting under my skin.”
“There’s not much else we can do,” Gosling said. “For all we know, it may just swim off.”
But Cushing said, “I don’t think so.”
And pointed.
By then, they were all watching. Seeing that noxious jellyfish suddenly pump itself into life like a leaky beach ball filling with air. It rose up, that bell breaking the surface, wearing a crown of weeds. The floats and bladders it wore like some kind of pulsating necklace were coming up, too. A few fleshy and convoluting tentacles emerged, skimming over patches of weed.
If it was dead… it looked damn healthy.
The bell was round and tight and bloated-looking. From a distance, slicked in a scum of that filthy water, it looked like wet vinyl. Right away, as if it could hear them speaking, the bell lit with colors. First it went purple, like some especially moist and succulent plum, immediately fading to a sort of blushed violet and then magenta. But it didn’t stop there. It went the deep, blood-red of port wine, then coral and the blinding neon yellow of wet chrome.
George watched those colors, amazed by them. Under any other circumstances, the jellyfish would have been a real marvel of nature. Something he might have paid to see at an aquarium. But now it was just deadly and deceptive and he wished some giant foot would come down and smash it the way things like that deserved to be smashed.
But those colors… George was certainly no invertebrate zoologist or physiologist and what he knew about the behavioral mechanics of lower species you could’ve kept in a thimble, yet he was certain that there was more to these colors than simple chemical reactions. He just couldn’t get past the idea that this thing was somehow trying to communicate with them in its own utterly alien way.
Could color variation be considered a language? It was ludicrous, of course, at least in the human frame of reference where languages had to be spoken, written, or even broken into mathematical symbols or telemetry… but what if? Was the idea really that absurd? Wasn’t language essentially an organized, systematic grouping of sounds or letters or even images as in pictographic alphabets? The jelly was able to reproduce all the primary colors and literally hundreds, if not thousands, of variations in-between. Couldn’t each separate color be considered a representation of thought much like separate configurations drawn on paper were?
George looked at it, really looked at the thing out there.
Although he had no idea what it was he was doing, he opened himself up to it. Let those colors come into him, let them fill him and, subconsciously almost, he began to equate different colors with different thoughts. The language of color. It was alien and insane.. . but why not? He watched those colors and felt like they were watching him, too. And as he received, he sent, he transcribed his own thoughts into brilliant swaths of radiant color: Just go away, you have to go away. Maybe you honestly mean no harm and maybe you were only defending yourself against Soltz… but you’re dangerous to us, to our kind. So just… please… go… away…
“It’s going under,” Cushing said.
It sank beneath the sea taking its tentacles and floats with it. They could see it, just beneath the surface, a shifting and oily mass expanding and spreading out, pulsing. Then it began to move at the raft. Began to move fast.
“Shit,” Gosling said.
