"The color of course you know––sky-blue in the main, with here and there blues lighter or darker from slate to peacock blue, from pale blue foam to deep marine. And the great eyes were quite Human-shaped, though the size of foot-lockers. And the tentacles you have met––each had groups of suckers-discs which were apparently quiescent unless the owner wished to cling."
"To put it bluntly, the aliens looked like gigantic cerulean octopuses."
"Their heads were large and bald and shiny above the single eye, and their mantles began where a chin should be, concealing their noses and mouths, or beaks, or whatever. Also to be glimpsed beneath the mantle's rippling edges was a mass of darker blue fur-like organs among which seemed to be some very small, delicate tentacles of unknown use."
"And their basically radial bodies were obviously in transition to a bilaterally symmetrical form––the four 'back' leg-tentacles were much larger and longer, to free the front four. In face if––as happened later––a small one wore a long robe with a good to conceal the shiny bald dome above the eye, it could pass for a large, somewhat top-heavy human form."
James Tiptree Jr., Second Going
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