The Cuttlefish That Was Color-Blind

The cuttlefish was lying on a checkerboard.

Maya pressed her forehead to the glass. Somebody had set a tile of black and white squares on the floor of the tank, and the cuttlefish had spread itself flat across it and gone the exact same pattern. Black squares on its skin where the black squares were under it. White where white.

"That's not even hard for it," Soren said. He had his notebook open against his knee. "It does that in a second. Faster than I can write it down."

"Aunt Reyes said it's color-blind," Maya said.

Soren stopped writing.

The aunt was three tanks down with a long-handled net, scooping leftover shrimp shells off the surface. She did not turn around. "One kind of light cell in their eyes," she called back. "Just one. Means they only see in gray. Brightness, not color. Everybody finds that out and feels betrayed."

Maya looked at the checkerboard. Black and white. That was only brightness. The cuttlefish could be doing that with gray eyes, no problem.

Then Aunt Reyes lifted a different tile from a bucket and slid it through the feeding slot of the next tank along. A second cuttlefish drifted down onto it. This tile was not a checkerboard. It was orange and green, in big bold patches.

The second cuttlefish went orange and green.

Maya stood up so fast her knees cracked.

"It matched the colors," she said.

"It matched the colors," Soren said.

"It can't see the colors."

"It can't see the colors." He was writing again, fast, his tongue between his teeth. "Orange and green look the same gray to it. They have to. Same brightness, maybe. So how does it know which patch to turn orange and which to turn green?"

Aunt Reyes had stopped scooping. She was watching them now, the net dripping. "Honestly," she said, "that one keeps the scientists up at night too. I just clean the tanks."

Maya was not listening. She had gone very still, the way she did when something didn't fit and she could feel the not-fitting before she could say it.

"Soren. Where are its eyes."

"Top of the head. Both of them. Up here." He touched his own temple.

"And it's lying flat on the tile."

"Right."

"So its eyes are pointing up. Away from the tile. Away from the colors." Maya pressed her finger to the glass, low, near the floor of the tank. "The part of it that's touching the orange is its belly. Its skin. Not its eyes."

Soren looked at the cuttlefish. He looked at the tile. He looked at the cuttlefish again.

"You think its skin is seeing the colors," he said. "By itself."

"I think the eyes can't be doing it. So something else is."

Soren did the thing he always did before he believed something. He tried to break it. "Okay. But maybe it learned. Maybe it saw the tile drop in with its eyes first, before it landed, and remembered orange-here, green-there."

"Test it," Maya said.

"How?"

"Make it land somewhere it didn't see." She turned. "Aunt Reyes. Can you put a tile in but cover the cuttlefish's eyes while it lands? Like, put it down with a cup over its head?"

"I am not putting a cup on a cuttlefish at nine at night," Aunt Reyes said. But she was smiling, a little, and she set the net down. "There's a thing I can do, though. Watch."

She took the orange-and-green tile and, very slowly, slid it out from under the second cuttlefish and replaced it, while the animal hung there, with a tile that was the reverse. Green where orange had been. Orange where green had been. She did it from the side, behind the cuttlefish's line of sight, in the dark of the closed gallery, so the eyes on top of its head were looking at nothing but black water.

For one second the cuttlefish stayed orange-where-the-old-orange-was.

Then the patches on its skin began to swap. Slowly. Patch by patch. Orange draining out of one stretch of skin and welling up in another, like the body was reading the new floor without asking the head a single question.

"It didn't look," Soren whispered. "Its eyes never moved. It can't even see those two colors apart. And it still flipped."

"Because its skin doesn't care what its eyes think," Maya said. "Its skin is doing its own seeing."

Aunt Reyes had gone quiet behind them. When she spoke her cleaning voice was gone. "There are these proteins," she said. "Opsins. They're the things in your eye that catch light and tell color from color. Turns out the cuttlefish has them all over. In the skin. Spread out across the whole body." She gestured with the net at the tank. "So the question everybody asks is whether the skin is, you know. Looking. On its own. Without telling the brain."

"It is," Maya said.

"Maybe," said Aunt Reyes. "Nobody's sure yet. That's the honest answer. Nobody's sure."

Soren had stopped writing. He was holding the pen very still over the page.

"Maya," he said. "It sees a color its own eyes can't. With its skin. And the skin probably never tells it." He looked up. "So somewhere inside that animal there's seeing happening, and the animal doesn't even know it's happening."

Maya thought about that. She thought about her own arms. About all the skin on a person, the whole surface of a body, and the one small wet place at the front of the head where everybody agreed seeing was allowed to live.

"How would you even know," she said slowly, "if part of you was seeing something, and just never mentioned it."

Neither of them answered, because there was no answer, and that was the best part.

The cuttlefish finished its flip. Orange where the orange was now. Green where the green was now. A perfect match to a floor it had never once looked at.

Aunt Reyes flicked off the gallery lights to start locking up. In the dark the tank glowed faint blue, and the cuttlefish hung there, breathing, its whole skin turned down toward the colored tile like a face.

Maya put her hand flat against the cold glass and held it there until it left a print.