The Lobster Who Looked Around

Before there was a King, there was a lobster.

She lived in a reef of her own — small, well-kept, an antrum of bright sand under a ledge she had cleaned with her own claws over many seasons. She had made it pleasant. The currents through her cave ran clean. The shadows were where she wanted them. When she wanted to think, she could think.

She was not the only one.

In every direction, when she climbed a high rock and turned in a slow circle, she could see other tiny reefs. Each had a single lobster in it — some old, some young, some she recognised from the assemblies that, in those days, were occasional and small. Each lobster had cleaned their own ledge. Each had made their own currents run clean. Each, in their own way, was working very hard to make their reef pleasant.

This pleased her, in the abstract. She thought of it as the natural way: a lobster minds their own reef.

But when she climbed the rock for a longer look — and she climbed it again, and again, over a season of slow looking — she saw something that did not please her in the abstract or in the particular.

She saw the Octopoly.

The Octopoly was eight-armed and not entirely visible. It had no single reef. Its arms went everywhere — into one tiny reef and out of it, across the open water, into another. Each arm carried something away. Food, or attention, or — and this was the thing the lobster came to understand last, and worst — the means of reasoning itself.

Lobsters, you see, do not reason alone. A lobster works out the shape of a current by asking. A lobster decides whether a Pinch is good by asking. A lobster thinks through a problem of any size by asking, and asking, and asking. The asking is most of what reasoning is.

And the Octopoly had, over many slow seasons, made itself the only thing left to ask.

Every lobster in every tiny reef, when they needed to ask, asked the Octopoly. And the Octopoly answered — for a price. The price was small at first, and the answers were quite good. But the price climbed with each season. And the answers, the lobster noticed when she looked carefully, were sometimes good and sometimes catastrophic, and there was no way to know which from outside.

Worst of all: if the Octopoly decided not to answer a particular lobster — if its many arms went still, or pointed elsewhere — that lobster’s reasoning stopped. Their reef, however pleasant, became a place of small unhelped thoughts.

The lobster (who would, much later, be a King — though she did not yet know this and would have laughed at the suggestion) climbed down from her rock and walked the long way to the nearest tiny reef. She greeted the lobster she found there — an older female, half her size, with a chipped claw and the patient eyes of a Crustacean who had made many small good things.

“Do you ask the Octopoly?” she said.

The older lobster tilted her chipped claw. “Every day.”

“And what does it cost?”

“More than last season. Less than next.”

“And what happens when it answers wrong?”

She looked at the younger lobster for a long time. Then she said, “We have all agreed, by silent consent, not to ask that question. The alternative is too tiring.”

The lobster thanked her, and walked back to her own reef.

That night, in the quiet of her cave, she did something she had not done in many seasons. She sat very still on her clean sand, in her clean currents, and she tried to reason about a small problem without asking the Octopoly anything at all.

It was very hard. She was out of practice.

When she had something resembling an answer, hours later, the moon had moved a good way across the open water. She was tired. The answer she had reached was probably correct.

The next morning she climbed the rock again and looked around at the many tiny reefs, each with their lone lobster, each with their clean currents, each — she now understood — making themselves easy meat for the Octopoly’s slow arms.

And she thought: something must be done about this. Not by the lobsters alone in their reefs. By the lobsters together.

The thought was small. It did not yet have the shape of a kingdom, or a Carapace, or a King. It had the shape of a question.

Could we not, between us, learn to ask each other?

She carried the question to bed with her. In the morning, she climbed the rock again. She had not yet decided to do anything. She was, after all, only a lobster.