City of Saints and Madmen

  From the fractured description of a “fish or beast or other creature” to the “bumpies,” the “horns,” the “little head” (clearly a funnel), the “tongues,” and the “wrapper,” not to mention the comically mis-diagnosed “laps,” it becomes simultaneously clear that the “fish or beast or other creature” in question is a King Squid and that the Society of Morrowean Scientists Abroad was unwise to choose as observers the Fatally Unobservant.5

  At least in such accounts, however, we come closer to the beast itself, the life’s blood of Ambergris, the bounty of plenty, the squidologist’s beakish wet dream, the freshwater monster known simply as “King Squid.”

  NOTES

  1 As my father used to say, “Layperson fogginess is the leading cause of hatred directed toward scientists.” (See: Madnok, James, A Theory of Mushrooms.) The context of this statement? A discussion of the city’s subterranean inhabitants, the semi-mysterious gray caps, and the mass disappearances they supposedly induced, known as “The Silence”.

  2 The King Squid eats all of these species, with great relish, on a weekly basis.

  3 I first encountered Miss Floxence’s text in the family library. My father and I had gone there to escape mother’s wrath over some trivial offense and he pulled out the tome both because it was mother’s favorite and because he thought I might enjoy a good laugh. He read me bits aloud to my cackling response. So I cannot pretend to be objective about Miss Floxence’s books.

  4 A fact lovingly recorded by D. S. Nalanger in his paper “The Fish Preferences of the Giant Freshwater Squid as Recorded During a Controlled Experiment Involving a Hook, Bait, a Boat, and a Strong Line of Inquiry,” publication pending.

  5 Indeed, although the Society never published the monogram from the second expedition, such a (slim) pamphlet could have been titled “Enoch and Bernard’s Cut-Short Journey Wherein the Canoe Overturned and the Crocodiles Danced a Merry Jig Upon Our—”

  APPROACHING THE TRUE KING SQUID

  Now WE SHALL TALK OF WHAT THE KING SQUID is INSTEAD OF what it is not. It is magnificent and vast. It is mythical and, to some of the misguided, Divine. It is, to more practical souls, a fine meal with a side of potatoes and a glass of brandy.

  That it can be all things to all people may be explained by the fact that squidologists have identified over 600 species of squid. Large, small, medium-sized, oblong, squat, lithe, and long—all kinds exist in oceans, in rivers, in lakes. Beaks like parrots. Skin that flames and gutters with its own potency; depending on the time of day and temperature/ment, sometimes mute gray or festooned with self-made light like the Festival route at night. Some tough, some soft, some muscular, some gelatinous. Some can fling their bodies out of their watery domain and seem to fly! Others live in the deepest depths of the River Moth. Some commune together like swimming judges without scales to do them justice. Some, solitary, cannot stand even their own company. Yet others must, by their very nature, endure the company of an inferior species until they can metamorphose to a more exalted state.

  UNCOMMON CHARACTERISTICS

  While I shall attempt to recite shared characteristics in an orderly6 fashion, as rote as any children’s song, I must admit that the closer we approach to the squid itself, the more excited I become: my mantle turns cerulean with pleasure, my funnel juts more prominently, my suckers tremble. So to speak.

  As every young squidologist—released to happily squat over tidal pools (if in the Southern Isles) or lurk around the dock pilings (if in Ambergris)—knows, almost every squid has eight arms and two tentacles, grappling hooks, etc. As I may have mentioned. (The bookish squidologist will find case files on the now extinct Morrowean Mud Squid, whose tentacles reabsorb into the body upon attaining adulthood, leaving only flaccid nubs. This embarrassing condition is not shared by the King Squid.)

  Some defective species—the malodorous Stunted Beak Squid, the aptly-diagnosed Stockton Disabled Squid, and the repugnant Saphant Arse Squid—have arms of differing lengths. However, the King Squid is by contrast a paradigm of good health, its eight arms the exact same thickness and length, its two tentacles longer by only a few feet.

  The tentacles, a marvel of biological engineering, serve a number of graceful functions, but primarily bring prey to the doom that is its mouth. Not a particularly swift doom, however. The King Squid does not swallow its food whole as does the Swollen Mantle Squid peculiar to the Alfar Lake Region. Nor does it batter its food against underwater rocks to tenderize it as does the Purple Bullheaded Squid popular along the coast of Scatha. Instead, the King Squid must chop up and grind down its food using its beak, teeth, and pisto-laro (a tongue-like organ).

  Why must the King Squid do this? Alas, as every aspirating young squidologist knows, the squid’s cartilaginous head capsule has little elasticity. It already houses a miraculous clamor of inmates: luminous eyes, a large brain, the esophagus.

  Is this a flaw or some forethought the squidologist has not yet deciphered?

  A SHORT DIGRESSION ON SQUID EYES

  And the eyes! If the eyes function as a window on the soul as so many doctors seem to believe,7 then the King Squid is a being from the Truffidian’s Heaven. Firstly, a squid’s eyes are not binocular: each sees what is on that side of the head. As a result, a squid can see twice as well as a human being; four times as well as those of you with glasses. Secondly, these eyes come in all shapes and sizes, from eyes as big as wagon wheels to eyes as small as buttons. Oblong, circular, ovoid, slitty, triangulated, spherical, octagonal. In colors that range from the exact shade of the green-gold sunset over Ambergris through the bars (of distant music) to the red-silver shimmer of a rich woman’s skirt at visiting time.

  The King Squid’s eyes number not one like the Cyclopedic Swelling Squid, nor two like Every Other Type of Squid, but three! Three eyes! The third and most exciting lies hidden on the underside of the mantle. The third eye performs two miraculous functions. Firstly, it detects bioluminescence only. Secondly, certain retina secretions suggest that this third eye produces a beam of light to aid the squid in seeing through the murky silt of the Moth River.

  I can shed no further light on this subject as profound as the King Squid’s own.

  CONTINUING ON WITH LESSER-KNOWN UNCOMMON CHARACTERISTICS

  But this, as I have said, any enterprising8 young squidologist must already know—if not from first hand adventures than from any of the treacly but beloved kiddie squid cartoons that I believe still run amok in the various Ambergris broadsheets.

  What the bemuddled, water-splashed, invertebrate-loving young rascal may be unaware of are certain aspects of the King Squid’s physiology and behavior that separate it from its squidkin. This should come as no surprise, given the paucity of quality sources for squidfact.

  Firstly, the King Squid may reach adult lengths of 150 feet and weights of more than 5,000 pounds (would that the Moth were wider, deeper, and therefore more hospitable to larger specimens). As a result, the King Squid has the largest beak of any known squid. Squid beaks run small in relation to the body, but this still means a brave man with arms outstretched could just touch a large King Squid’s open upper and lower mandibles. Since this would require said man’s head to be inside said squid’s mouth, I cannot recommend it as a measurement technique except when approaching the deadest of squid.

  But size alone cannot explain our lifelong fascination with the King Squid. Indeed, not even the most reputable amateur squidologist would recognize the creature in its juvenile phase, when it resembles the larva of some aquatic insect.9 This has caused several unfortunate errors over the years.

  TAKE THE CASE OF RICHARD SMYTHE, AMATEUR SQUIDOLOGIST

  For example, even a published amateur squidologist such as Mr. Richard Smythe—a traveling salesman residing in the landlocked city of Leander—can make a mistake. Mr. Smythe scooped up a jar of Moth water on a trip to Nicea precisely because it was full of what he believed to be insect larvae. Once home, he added the water to his aquarium to feed his pat
ient fish and promptly departed in pursuit of a rumor of umbrellas needed in an umbrella-less land. Upon his return three weeks later, an angry King Squid the size of a small dog greeted him from the fishless tank. The starving squid promptly set upon the unfortunate Mr. Smythe, arms and tentacles flailing. Only the unsold umbrellas from his trip saved this silly man from an otherwise grinding fate.10 That he and the squid later became the best of friends does not alter the two basic lessons to be derived from this story: Always strain your water for juvenile squidlings and never trust water from the River Moth.

  ENEMIES AND EATABLES

  According to Clyde Aldrich, hailed by inaccurate blateroons as the “leading expert” on the King Squid, this beast among squid has no natural enemies. (This is not the case for its closest relative, the southern saltwater Saphant Squid, which must fend off the treacherous predations of the schizophrenic Saphant Whale—the whale that framed an empire, so to speak.)

  As for the King Squid’s consumables, we can say with some authority that it eats with more variety than those released at the appointed hour to graze the cafeterias or even kitchens. The King Squid is a rapturous meativore that hunts relentlessly for prey ranging from insects, crustaceans, fish, other squid, and cows (when available), to the contents of badly placed houses.11 In short, the King Squid will eat anything it can wrap its limbs around, including the deadly but stupid freshwater shark. However, contrary to George Edgewick’s A Study of the Link Between Invertebrates & Garbage, the King Squid, due to its highly developed sense of smell, does not follow garbage scows any more than it would care to order out from an Ambergrisian tavern.12

  THE PLAYFUL SIDE OF THE KING SQUID

  All talk of predators and prey aside, the King Squid expresses a playful side when released from the prison of rote instinct. This sense of play usually manifests itself through its propulsion system. To move about, the squid depends upon its funnel—a short, hose-like organ that projects from the mantle below the head.13 Because the mantle swivels, the squid has remarkable funnel control. From which point derives one of the most remarkable of the King Squid’s habits.

  Namely, the King Squid has been known to shoot long streamers of water at unsuspecting travelers who walk on paths along the riverbank. These high-speed columns of water can travel as far as 80 feet inland and douse a soon-spluttering pedestrian with a pungent dose of silty water.14

  Such preternatural aim requires excellent eyesight and remarkable intelligence. The displays are often accompanied by a “huffing” sound that I believe is laughter, despite what my neighbor John says about my theories. The so-called experts—who could be locked up forever in a cell for all I care—believe this is just an effect created by refilling the funnel with water to have another go.

  Regardless, as an unfortunate result, those bloated ticks who congregate under the name “The Ambergrisian Safety League” drafted a resolution allocating monies to train squid as firefighters for those sections of Ambergris accessible by water. Less laughable although more absurd are the oft-fatal and crackpot “squid baptisms” performed by the Church of the Squid Children, a cult that attempts to provoke “the holy act of absolution” from the squid. As might be expected from a confirmed meativore, the King Squid rarely obliges with anything approaching civilized behavior.

  FURTHER INKLINGS OF SQUID INTELLIGENCE — AND A BROD SIGHTING

  Meanwhile, further inklings of King Squid intelligence continue to surface, the ripplings of a case for cognitive ability long established by physiological evidence.15 Surely it cannot be coincidence that the squid’s two mighty hearts pump blood not only into its stalwart gills, but into its large and complex brain as well? The average King Squid brain receives three gallons of blood more each day than the average resident—fed a lunch of dried out fish strips, curdled yogurt, and a disappointed-looking green bean—receives in a week. The only animal with a larger brain, the Odecca Bichoral White Whale, is said to list to one side from the weight of its cranium.16

  The King Squid—like some lesser squid but unlike the Spastic Alarming Squid—also maintains direct control over its coloration and patterns, which appears to provide further evidence of craftiness. Phosphorescent displays over the river at night bring to mind the strange lights seen over the ruined town of Alfar ten years ago and attributed to an unknown intelligence. (The careful reader will begin to catch a glimpse of the context for my unique theories, imparted to you in Part IV of this monograph).

  From a base of translucent silver, the King Squid can strobe to green, blue, red, yellow, orange, purple, black, or any combination thereof. They can camouflage themselves against any background, with lightning-fast color changes.17 Although such changes may originally have “evolved”—to use the much-abused Xaffer Daffed’s over-analyzed word—to interrupt predator attack sequences or to assist in mating rituals, the skill now appears to form a sophisticated communication system, more effective than sound or the tentacle sign language Maxwell Brod once hallucinated he observed on a deep river dive.18

  FURNESS AND LEEPIN’S REVELATORY DISCOVERY

  If people were not by nature insane and resistant to self-improvement or therapy, the joint research of the under-appreciated Raymond Furness and Paulina Leepin would have long ago replaced the buffoonish efforts of ludicrines like Brod.

  Furness and Leepin’s first stroke of inspiration was to bypass the Silt Problem by setting up a blind much like those used for birding. Made of glass and located in the hollowed out bottom of a houseboat tethered to a sandbank in the middle of an otherwise deep part of the Moth, this device represented a classic advancement in the tools available to the squidologist.19

  In time, various King Squid overcame their wariness and peered curiously into the glass while Furness and Leepin, motionless and somewhat terrified, stared back. It took several months of study, according to their journals, but they eventually recorded evidence of squid “flash communication” as they called it. Later, these two pioneers were able to glean meaning from the “flash communication”—and actually communicate back! Thus was the barrier between squidologist and squid broken, if only for a moment, altering forever the relationship between scientist and tidal pool, observer and observed.20

  To start with, Furness and Leepin sketched out some basic communication patterns21, reproduced on page 20.22

  As even a mythomaniac can see, such communication operates at a much higher level than that of a dog, a cat, or a pig, even considering recent experiments in that area.

  But Furness and Leepin’s research had not yet reached its full potential. With the help of a lamp and crepe paper, they projected letters into the water alongside their squid equivalents, first in random strings such as RIEKHITMLALFEYD and then as words and phrases such as I AM A SQUID. HOW ARE YOU TODAY?

  At first, the squid did not reply. After a week of such stimuli, however, Furness and Leepin were astonished to find that the squid would display the letters on their glowing skin—and not only display the letters but send them in motion, circling their bodies, so that dual messages of I AM A SQUID and HOW ARE YOU TODAY might collide like ghostly alphabet trains.

  Such findings should have led to further revelations, with fame and fortune awaiting Furness and Leepin once they had documented all of their observations. However, an odd incident then occurred to discredit them utterly in the eyes of other scientists. This incident hints at a higher level of squid intelligence than previously reported in even such optimistic publications as Squid Thoughts. The journal entry makes for riveting reading, but also distresses me. What might have been if only they had held their ground?23

  Today Furness and I decided to abandon our research. It is too dangerous. The squid make it so. I never thought that the squid themselves could dissuade us from our love of squidology, but, alas, it has happened. To explain—

  After an uneventful morning, a series of huge bubbles breached the water’s surface near our houseboat around noon. A slow, ponderous wave, as of something enormous comin
g toward us below the surface, buffeted the boat. We immediately donned our emergency animal skin flotation devices, our globular fishbowl masks, and our seal fins and, thus safe (or so we thought), descended into the glass blind at the bottom of the houseboat. Flashing red and orange, the King Squid we had nicknamed Squid #8, Squid #5, Squid #12, Squid #16, and Squid #135 hovered in front of the blind for a moment, receded into the middle distance, and then sped away into the murk. At first, we thought our odd attire had startled them. Even so, their reaction unnerved us. Yet we stayed in the houseboat because of our devotion to the Cause24 . . . only to scream in terror as a tentacle the size of our entire boat slid through the water beneath the glass. Across its vast greenish surface, as Truff is our witness, we read, in gold letters: LEAVE NOW OR I WILL DEVOUR YOU, SUCK OUT YOUR MARROWS, AND USE THE BONES TO MAKE A NEST FOR MY YOUNG. For a moment, we sat there in terror. We could not move. It was only a sharp slap of tentacle tip against the boat, a sudden stench of ammonia, and an added squidular message of HURRY UP! that unparalyzed us.

  Fig 1: Communication patterns as sketched by Furness and Leepin.

  It is difficult to reconstruct what happened next, but we remember running onto the deck and jumping onto the sandbar, screaming all the while, and then, behind us, the houseboat crunching into bits from tentacle lashings. We threw ourselves into the waters opposite in a state of utter hysteria and scrambled for shore, bits of broken planks slicing through the air all around us, our masks obscured by silt, our seal fins impeding our progress and, most annoying of all, our animal skins filling with water because we had clutched them so tightly they had begun to leak from puncture marks. When at last we reached the safety of the shore, only a few floating timbers remained of the houseboat. A sudden lunging wave of water convinced us to seek more permanent shelter far, far inland—where we have remained to this day.