Idiot Gods, The

by Zindell, David

  Brooding upon such things made matters even worse. I seemed strange to myself. I could not quenge, and I did not know if I could any longer even love. I felt fearsome and new, as if I had been remade into some dreadful form that I did not want to behold.

  I began swimming again. I came upon a school of herring, each of whose scales were all silvery and streaked with faint gold and scarlet bands. I swam right into the school and stunned many of the fish with a slap of my tail. Others I immobilized with zangs of sonar or confused by blowing out clouds of bubbles. So ravenous was I that I nearly began eating without asking the doomed fish if they were ready to die. I finally remembered myself, however, and I did ask. The entire school, in their ones and their multitudes, said yes.

  The feast strengthened me and gave me new life. I might have died in my soul, while my harpooned heart bled out the best part of me – even so, my body and my force of will seemed to have gained a new power. I swam on at speed into the wild, endless sea.

  On a day of dead calm with the water stilled into a vast blue mirror, I heard cries from far off long before I encountered the whales who had made them. I swam toward this terrible keening. After a while, I intercepted two large humpbacks, the water streaming from their lumpy, barnacle-studded bodies whenever they breached for breath. They were moving as fast as they could in the direction from which I had come. I asked them what was wrong. In their very basic and nearly incomprehensible speech, they shouted: ‘Humans blood pain death!’

  Their panic communicated into me, and I considered turning around and joining them in their spasm of flight. Instead, I swam on straight toward the sea’s wavering horizon.

  Very soon, one of the humans’ gray ships appeared there. I swam in close enough to make out metal spines sticking up from the top of the ship; these reminded me of a conch shell’s many points and projections. Humans – the first I had ever seen! – stood on the top of the ship, near its head. They were tending to what looked like a long piece of seaweed that connected the ship to the bloody water. A shrieking sound like metal eating metal vibrated both ship and sea, and the seaweed thing began moving toward the ship. I zanged the seaweed and determined it was made of metal, like the ship. It continued moving, and soon the whale attached to it emerged from the water tail first, even as I had been born. A moment later, I caught sight of the bloody harpoon that had torn a great hole through the humpback’s body and had killed it. The harpoon, too, was made of metal, unlike the wooden one that had killed Pherkad.

  Upon this horror, panic seized me. The ship loomed above, vast and ugly, gray and angular, like a deformed mockery of one of the deep gods. How helpless I felt against this monster of metal! I wanted to fling myself away from this vile place as quickly as I could.

  How, though, could I do this? Was I not an orca of the Blue Aria Family of the Faithful Thoughtplayer Clan. Had not my mother, just before my birth, instructed me in the orcas’ ways?

  ‘Fear,’ she had told me, ‘might signal a need for prudence, but you may never act out of fear alone.’

  Had I not an urgent need for prudence? Why should I not evade this grotesque mountain of metal and the men upon it who might murder me?

  Then I felt strange and powerful vibrations pierce my body. High upon the ship, one of the humans stretched out one of his tentacles toward me. Sounds like a seal’s barks burst out from the hole his mouth made. The vibrations grew stronger, and I realized a thing: the humans had sonar! Somehow, these small-headed humans had sonar and were zanging me!

  Flight, then, would be futile. I knew from the old tales that the humans’ ship could move through the water more swiftly than I, perhaps not over short distances, but through mornings and afternoons of exhausting pursuit. With the ocean so peaceful and still, I would not even be able to find a wave that I might hide behind.

  I did not want to hide. Had I abandoned my family in order to do such a craven thing? Had Pherkad given his death poem to a coward? No, no, no! I had ventured into this strange realm of harpoons and metallic sonar so that I might talk to humans, not flee from the first of them who came my way. The worst they could do to me (or so I told myself) was to slay me as they had the humpback who hung all bloody and broken, suspended in the air. They might strike a real harpoon through my real heart; they might use their metal things to tear me apart before they ate me, but do not all beings thus someday die?

  ‘You will die young,’ my grandmother had told me. ‘Either that, or you will add something new to the Song.’

  It was time to prove her prophecy right. Gathering in her charm close to my heart, I swam up to the ship. I came up out of the water, spy-hopping so that the humans might better see me and hear my words:

  ‘My name is Arjuna, and I have journeyed far from my home that I might speak with you. So many things I have to say! So much I would ask you! Do you have names yourselves that you can share with me? Why are you here? Are you not creatures of the continents? Are there not enough animals there for you to eat? The animals of the sea are for themselves alone. We are that we might know joy. Do you know the same? Do you know the Song of Life? If you do, why do you make the ocean burn with a terrible fire? Why do you melt the world’s ice? Why did you kill my brother Pherkad?’

  I did not expect them to answer me or even understand what I said to them. If they really were sentient, however, I hoped they might at least grasp that I was trying to talk to them. Would they return the favor by giving their words to me?

  High above me, some of the humans made sounds and watched me while others continued drawing the humpback up through the air and onto the ship. The dead whale vanished from my sight, and I supposed that the humans had started the work of tearing him apart and eating him. Then one of the humans set a new harpoon in the metal thing that had connected the seaweed to the humpback. The human looked at me as the metal thing turned and the harpoon aligned in my direction.

  ‘Would you kill me, too?’ I called out to the humans. Then I remembered Pherkad’s final offer to me and my grandmother’s charm. ‘If you need my flesh, you might have it – let me help you!’

  I dove down into the water, then up and up. With a mighty beat of my tail, I breached and propelled myself out of the water and high into the air. Drops of water whipped from my body, and the wind thrilled my skin. Thus did I come as close to the humans as I could. Thus, in what might have been the last moments of my life, did I fly. Had I been able to quenge, I would have kept on soaring right up to the stars only to splash down into Agathange’s lovely ocean.

  For an eternity, I hung motionless in space, waiting for the humans to pierce me with their harpoon. At last I fell back into the sea. Had I not leaped high enough? Had I not turned my belly toward them so that the harpoon might more easily gain entrance to my vital organs? Again I pushed myself into the air, this time turning in a pirouette so that the humans might strike their harpoon wherever they wished. And again, and again, leaping and spinning and flying and splashing into the sparkling waters.

  After a while, I grew tired of repeating this feat. I noticed that the human who had been looking along the harpoon’s length had moved over to the others gathered on top of the ship at a lower point. I became aware that the humans above me were doing something peculiar with their murderous hands: they brought them together over and over, sending out loud cracks that sounded something like a whale’s tail slapping the surface of the sea. With their mouths and the flaps of flesh that covered their teeth, they made shrill sounds that somewhat mimicked a whale’s whistles. How their antics excited me! Perhaps, I thought, I really could teach these bizarre animals to speak.

  I began with the simplest and most basic of essentials, the first thing an orca learns long before he is born: one of the sets of sounds denoting the actuality of the ocean. I trilled out the variations on these sounds even as I slapped the water with my tail so that these small-headed creatures might have a visual representation of the magical substance of which I spoke. Again I trilled and whistled as clea
rly as I could, hoping with a great, glowing hope that the humans might at least somewhat duplicate the whistle’s pitch and overtones. Instead, they made other sounds altogether, and did something that appalled me.

  Two of them, working together, cast pieces of a humpback’s body into the water. I studied the barnacles covering gray skin and the bits of bloody fat that stuck to it. Why did they cast away good food? I did not know. Then I had a disturbing thought: they wanted to share it with me!

  ‘Thank you, humans, for your generosity,’ I chirped out. Then I told them of the First Covenant, which my people had made with the Others: ‘Thank you and thank you, but I may not eat the flesh of any animal who breathes air.’

  Two more of the humans above me came up to the edge of the ship. They carried an object which somewhat resembled a huge, white shell. After setting it down on the top of the ship, they began casting its contents toward me chunk by bloody chunk. It astonished me to see pieces of black and white hide and red muscle splash into the sea. These tidbits, I knew, could only have come from an orca – and probably one of Pherkad’s family. Could this be, I wondered, the last of Baby Electra?

  ‘What is wrong with you!’ I shouted. ‘Do you think that I am a cannibal, that I would eat one of my own?’

  I told them of the Second Covenant, that an orca may not harm another orca.

  ‘Are you insane, that you would do such a thing!’ I shouted. ‘Cast yourselves into the ocean, and then we shall see what I eat!’

  Of course, I would have done no such thing. For the Third Covenant, the sacred Great Covenant, forbade the orcas from harming humans, even though the humans might seek to harm them.

  For a while, I waited amidst the carnage in the water as the humans instead began flinging their sounds at me. I understood nothing of their speech, if indeed there was anything of substance to understand. Could the humans truly be sentient? I felt certain that in trying to feed me parts of another orca, they had nearly proved their inanity. Perhaps Nashira had been right in her estimation that the humans had minds like those of mollusks.

  Why, then, should I continue my journey? Logic told me that these humans might be as different from others elsewhere as my family was from Pherkad’s kind, but what were the chances of that being true? Were not all humans human, just as all orcas were orcas? Would they not therefore think and act in more or less uniform ways?

  I might have turned back then but for three things: First, I knew how perilous it was to reason from perhaps unfounded assumptions and scant evidence. Second – and how this thought amazed me! – what if the humans had tried to feed me orca flesh because they themselves were cannibals who saw nothing wrong with humans putting tooth to each other? Perhaps they had never made a covenant among themselves that humans should not harm humans.

  The third thing that kept me from swimming back to my family was that the two-leggeds seemed to lose interest in me. They retreated from the edge of the ship, which coughed out a great roar from its underside and began moving off toward the west. Soon, I was alone in the ocean. The way south, the way towards more sensitive humans who might have the wit to learn a little language, lay open before me.

  3

  On my long voyage toward warmer waters, I had much time to ponder my first encounter with the humans. I revisited each sound and sensation of our bizarre interaction, savoring them as I might the taste of new fish. The new realm that I had entered, already unnerving in so many ways, seemed to grow ever stranger. At its heart lay a mystery that I somehow had to try to understand: What were human beings and how had they come to be?

  None of our natural histories accounted for these two-leggeds. Mira told of the taxa and the cladding of the fish, the flatworms, the jellied cnidarians and other sea creatures, but of the animals of the land, even the Old Ones knew little. For ages my ancestors had watched the helpless human apes hunting crabs and clams along the beaches of the continents. And then one day, scarcely a few generations ago, humans had taken to the sea in boats and ships and had begun hunting even the blue whales, who are the greatest animals ever to have lived on our world. How could such a thing have happened?

  ‘It is not natural,’ I heard my mother say to my grandmother as I relived one of their many conversations. ‘The humans do not seem to be a part of nature.’

  As I swam through flowing blue seas rich with herring, squid, sponges, and kelp, I thought about my mother’s words. What did it mean to be natural? Was a shark more natural than a human because most of this ancient fish’s activities consisted of basic functions such as hunting, eating, excreting, and mating? Were humans unnatural because they seemed to spend most of their lives doing things with the multifarious objects they had made with their hands? Was it their very ability to make things such as monstrous metal ships that made them unnatural?

  ‘Even a snail,’ my sister Nashira had said, ‘within its perfectly spiraled shell makes a more esthetically pleasing protection.’

  Snails make shells, and walruses make tusks, and all aquatic animals make the substance of their bodies out of the substance of the sea – but they do not make things other than themselves and their offspring. They do not make harpoons, nor do they set fire to the sea.

  ‘The humans,’ I said to my mother as if she swam beside me, ‘make things that change nature.’

  ‘Even so,’ my grandmother broke in, ‘if the humans came out of nature even as we did, how can they be called unnatural?’

  Because my grandmother loved recursion and paradox, I said, ‘Then let us say that humans are that part of nature for which it is natural to be unnatural.’

  With that definition, I left the matter, although a gnawing feeling in my belly warned me that I had not bitten nearly deep enough into humanity’s soul, which might be beyond understanding. Someday, I sensed, and perhaps soon, I would need to reexamine all my assumptions if I continued my journey.

  I decided I must. My course took me along an ancient route used by my ancestors. I navigated by the currents and the configuration of the coastlines, by the pull of the earth upon my blood and by the push of my family’s songs that sounded in my head – and, of course, I found my way by the stars. The Stingray constellation pointed its reddish tail toward storied fishing grounds while the blue lights of the Great Crab came into sight whenever I breached for breath on a cloudless night. And always, the north star shone behind me, reminding me from which direction I had come and toward which I must someday return.

  I encountered storms whose icy winds made mountains out of water, and I journeyed on through long days of hot sun and lengthening nights. I warned away sharks who wanted to steal my catch of salmon; I made my way through yet more storms and surfed along great waves. Nothing about the ocean deterred me, for was I not of the water and an orca at that? Rarely did I cease moving, and I never slept.

  That is, I never slept completely, for had I done so, I would have breathed water and drowned. Always I remained at least half awake, the right part of me aware of the sea’s features and my movements while my left half slept – or the reverse. Through undulations of seaweed brushing my sides and cold currents raking my skin with claws of ice, I watched myself sleeping, and I listened to myself dream.

  What dreams I had! Many were of eating or speaking or mating. Too many concerned the humans. In the foods that humans fed me with their hands in the more disturbing of these dreams, I tasted flavors new to me along with the dearly remembered sweetness of my mother’s milk. I sang a strange song with the first of the beautiful she-orcas who would bear my children; I listened in wonder to my grandmother’s death poem, which somehow rang out from the mouth of a human being whose face I could never quite behold.

  One dream in particular moved me. It began with a human feeding me a salmon whose insides were poisoned from the same black oil that had fouled the burning sea. The fish hardened in my belly like a lump of metal. It seemed to grow as massive as a marlin inside me, and its density pulled me down in the water – and down and down. T
he world began narrowing into darkness. I held my breath against the dread of the ocean’s immense pressures that would soon crush me to a purplish pulp. I felt myself suffocating as the pull of the earth forced me into a tunnel that grew tighter and tighter. Soon, I knew, the whole of my body and my being would be squeezed smaller than a jellyfish, a diatom, an atom of sand. My awareness would shrink into a single point in space and time. I would die a horrible death all alone at the bottom of the sea.

  ‘No, no, no!’ I shouted to my family who could not hear me.

  I did not want to die by myself in silent darkness; even more, I did not want to return to being again and once again find myself forced into the endless, bloody tunnel of life. How bitterly I cried out in protest in being born anew into a doomed world whose every ocean and continent was choked with the burning black oil of death.

  ‘Grandmother! Grandmother!’ I cried. ‘How can you let this be?’

  How, I asked myself, could I let it be?

  I could not. And so I called out as loud as I could to my sleeping self. With a start and a shock of reality rushing in, I felt myself awakening within my dream. Now the whole sea sang with brilliant sound, and light devoured darkness. I could move wherever I willed myself to move, and I could dream whatever I desired to dream.

  I swam up through the brightening layers of water, and up and up. I breached, blew out stale breath, and drew in a great lungful of air that tasted fresh and clean. I swam toward the great eastern sun. I came upon a beach where many humans frolicked in the breaking waves.

  One of the females swam to me. Except for the hair on her head and between her legs, she was all golden skin from her face to her feet, and her eyes were as bright as black pearls. She climbed on top of my back and pressed the flesh of her inner legs against my skin. I swam some more with this female gripping me and caressing me with her soft, human hands. She sang to me a soft, lovely human song.