Idiot Gods, The

by Zindell, David

  I understood her strange but beautiful words! I sang back, and she understood me! For a long time, with the water streaming past us and flying off into air in a silvery spray, we spoke of poetry and pain and babies and the immense majesty of life. She described her delight in joining her dream with mine, and I told her of the Aurora Borealis which she had never seen.

  I swam with her toward the inextinguishable Northern Lights. With a mighty beat of my tail, I drove us up out of the water, and I began swimming up along the Aurora’s emerald arc. The sky deepened even as it opened out before us. Its startling blueness gave way to an enveloping black all full of light.

  To the stars I swam, with the human laughing and singing on top of me. Not one murmur of fear could I make out in her soft voice, even as we flew past Agathange and the lights of the universe began streaming past us like the notes of a great cosmic song. So many stars there were in the universe, almost as many as drops of water in the sea! Urradeth and Solsken, Silvaplana and the Rainbow Double – we touched the radiance of these fiery orbs and a myriad of others in our wild rush into the heart of creation. We spoke with words and songs and an even brighter thing to the deepest part of each other. Thus we came close to that perfect, starlit interior ocean, and we almost quenged together – almost.

  And then at last, as entire universes of stars began whirling past us and it seemed we might become lost, the human so close to me did fall into fear, a little. So did I. My grandmother had told me that no matter how far I swam from my family, I would always find my way home – but was that true? I did not have the courage to put her reassurance to the test. And so I allowed the pull of my birth world once again to take hold of me. We began falling back through space along the same sparkling route we had come – falling and falling down toward the waters of the world that the frightened human on my back called earth and I knew as Ocean.

  We splashed into cold, clear water. The jolt and shiver of my return awakened me from my dream. I knew that I had reentered normal consciousness because the forms and features of the world seemed at once less real than the magnificence of my dream and excruciatingly real in a way that could not be denied. I looked around me with my sonar and my eyelight, and I saw that I had entered a broad channel. To the east, great, toothed mountains jutted out of a mist-laden forest, while low, green hills covered the land to the west. I could not detect the human female who had accompanied me to the stars.

  And then, across the channel’s clear water, I thought I saw her standing on a flat wooden-like object and surfing the waves made by a speeding boat, the way that dolphins are said to do. I had never attempted such sport. Of course, I had surfed the great waves of the Blue Mountains and the waves of light flowing out from the stars beyond Arcturus, but would the much smaller wake produced by a human’s boat support the mass of an orca such as I?

  I had to discover if it would; I had to know if the human surfing behind the boat was the one from my dream. After taking a great breath of air, I dove and burst into furious motion, swimming as fast as I could. Water streamed around me. I drove my flukes so hard that my muscles burned, and I drew closer. I wondered what force propelled the boat almost flying on top of ocean above me? I flew now, too, swimming up so that I breached into the froth of the wave, just behind the surfing human. One of the other humans watching on the boat pointed a hand at me and shouted out an incomprehensible sound identical to one of the sounds made by the man on the ship: ‘Orca!’

  The human standing on the water turned to look at me.

  ‘Hello!’ I said through the spray. ‘Hello! Hello! My name is Arjuna!’

  I whistled and chirped and asked her if she remembered our journey to the stars. So long had we swum across the universe! Was she hungry, I asked her? Did she like salmon? I opened my mouth to show her my strong, white teeth which had caught so many salmon, and I promised that I would share with her all the fish she could eat.

  Again, the humans on the boat let loose a harsh bark that might have indicated distress: ‘Orca! Orca! Orca!’

  The surfing human looked ahead of her at the spreading wave, and behind her again – and then she fell, plunging into the surf. She made thrashing motions with her tentacle-like limbs, which brought her head up out of the water. In this way she swam, after a fashion.

  I moved in closer to her. I saw that she could not be the human who had ridden upon my back, for her hair was nearly as yellow as a lemon fish, and the skin of her face and lower appendages was as creamy as mother’s milk. The rest of her, however, was as black as the black parts of me. How beautiful, I thought, this variegation of light and dark! However, when I swam in and nudged her with my face, desiring the pleasure of flesh slicking flesh, I felt only a spongy roughness that repelled me. Puzzled, I zanged the human up and down her body. I heard the echoes of a second skin, a much softer skin, just beneath this black outer covering. Could it be, I thought, that humans make a false skin to protect them as they fabricate other unnatural things?

  As I debated carrying or pushing this rather helpless human back to the land, the boat turned and moved our way. I watched as she swam over to it and used her limbs in the manner of an octopus to fasten onto the boat and pull herself out of the water. She stood with three others of her kind, the water running off her ugly, false skin. The humans next to her displayed similar coverings, though of flimsier substance and in colors of blue, green, purple, and bright red.

  ‘It is an orca!’ one of the humans said. ‘Look at the size of him!’

  I understood nothing of the meaning of the ugly sounds they made – if indeed they meant anything at all. Even so, I determined to memorize every tone, patter, and inflection in case all their squealing and barking proved to be something like true language.

  ‘My name is Arjuna,’ I told them, ‘of the Blue Aria family of the Faithful Thoughtplayer Clan. I have journeyed far to talk with you – will you try to talk with me?’

  ‘Oh my God, he’s huge! What a bodacious bohemeth!’

  ‘I think you mean behemoth.’

  ‘Whatever. Let’s just call him Bobo.’

  ‘Hey, lil’ Bobo, what are you doing all alone chasing after surfers?’

  The humans gathered at the edge of the boat. One lay flat on its surface and lowered a hand toward the water.

  ‘I failed,’ I said, moving even closer, ‘to speak with other humans on the northern ocean. That might have been because they truly could not learn what I tried to teach them, as might prove true with you. Or perhaps the problem lies in an insufficiency of patience on my part, or worse, a failure of my imagination. But one cannot imagine what one cannot imagine. And what seems strange to me past all understanding is how you – or, I should say, your cousins the whale hunters – could not understand the simplest of significants for the most common substance on the world that we share.’

  I slapped the surface of the sea with both flipper and tail, even as I said, ‘Water!’ To emphasize the word, I took in a mouthful of water and sprayed it out so that it wetted the human lying on the boat.

  ‘Water! Water! Water!’

  ‘Oh my God, he soaked me! Looks like Bobo wants to play!’

  ‘Water. Water. Water.’ Now I spoke more slowly, as slow as I could, and I toned down the harmonies so that even a jellyfish might hear them. ‘Water. Water. Water. Water. Water.’

  ‘It’s almost like he’s trying to tell us something!’

  Did her utterances signify anything? I could not tell. Even so, I continued memorizing them for later review – and I contemplated each spike and wave of each of their grunts as they made them. I noticed that whenever these humans phonated, they opened their mouths to let the sounds out, as anuses let go of waste. How bizarre! How awkward! How undignified!

  Thinking that it might help to imitate them, I opened my mouth even as I pushed out the sacred sound from the flesh higher on my head: ‘W-a-t-e-r!’

  ‘Look at those teeth! I’ll bet he’s hungry. What do you think an orca eats?’r />
  ‘He’ll eat you if you don’t get your arm out of the water.’

  ‘No, if he was that hungry, he could’ve eaten Kelly when she wiped out. I don’t think orcas eat people.’

  ‘What do they eat?’

  ‘Seals and penguins and things like that.’

  ‘Do you think he’d eat some fish?’

  ‘Did you bring any fish?’

  ‘I’ve got a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.’

  ‘Did you ever give a dog peanut butter? They lick their teeth for like an hour ’cause they can’t get it off.’

  ‘We’re not going to give an orca peanut butter!’

  ‘What do you think he wants?’

  I moved in as close to the boat as I could.

  ‘Listen! Listen! Listen!’ I said. I spoke as slowly as I could. ‘W-wait-wait-wait-A-wait-wait-wait-T-wait-wait-wait-E-wait-wait-wait-R!’

  ‘I don’t know, but it sounds like he’s in distress.’

  ‘I think he just wants attention. He’s a pushy little whale.’

  ‘Maybe we should play him some music. I hear whales like music.’

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘I don’t know – what do you have?’

  One of the humans, with a hairy face and a second skin of sheeny blue, lifted a black object onto the wooden surface near the boat’s tail. He did something to it with the tentacles of his hands.

  ‘I hope he likes it.’

  A great noise burst from the black object and broke through the air. The noise drove against my skin and set the very water around me humming. It took a few moments for me to realize that the noise comprised different strands of sound: human voices and howling vibrations and a relentless thumping like that of a heart beating with an insane rhythm.

  Boom boom anger anger anger! Boom boom anger anger anger! Boom boom …

  ‘Please stop!’ I cried out. ‘It hurts my head, hurts my soul!’

  I came up out of the water, spy-hopping, which brought my head nearly level with the booming black thing. I opened my mouth, thinking I might be able to snatch it from between the human’s hands and crush it between my jaws.

  ‘Look! Bobo is smiling! He likes it – turn it louder!’

  Boom! Boom! Boom …

  As other humans had set fire to the sea’s surface with their dirty oil, these humans made even the water itself sick with sound. Although I longed to speak with them – particularly with the yellow-haired female – I had to get away from them and their boat as quickly as I could. I dove, but at first that only exacerbated the torment of the hideous noise, for sound moves more quickly and completely through water than it does through air. Only by swimming as far as I could away from the boat would I be able to make the noise attenuate to a distant and tolerable irritation.

  And swim I did. For the rest of that day, and during the days that followed, I explored the large bay I had entered. I never really escaped the noise of the humans, for they were everywhere on the bay and on the shore surrounding it. Many boats disturbed the bay’s blue waters, and most of them sent high-pitched, shrieking sounds piercing every nook and cove. From the forests rising up from the sea came a similar buzz and clash, as if the very air were being torn apart. From time to time, great trees broke into splinters and crashed to the earth. Humans dropped the bare spines of the tree’s corpses into the water with splash after tremendous splash.

  How long, I wondered, would I be able to live amidst this cacophony without falling as insane as the humans themselves seemed to be? Could I bear another day, another hour, another moment? Somehow, I told myself, I had to bear it. In the way my mother had showed me many years before, I must learn to dwell within softer, interior sounds called up from memory or imagination, which would overpower all the human noise and drive it away.

  It dismayed me that the humans fouled the pretty bay with things other than noise. I found floating on the water many objects that the humans cast from their boats. Some were second skins made of that highly shapeable substance the humans used for so many unfathomable purposes. Because I needed a name for this unnatural substance, I thought of it as excrescence. Excrescence composed most of the objects the humans handled, as it did the bodies of their boats. I zanged as well metallic and clear stone shells from which they drank various liquids. Everywhere I went, the water tasted of oils suppurating from their boats and from the bitter cream the humans rubbed into their skin.

  Except for the ubiquitous excrescence, which could be found floating in island-like masses even on the northern oceans, the worst of the humans’ befoulment was the feces that poured from many streams into the bay. Why, I wondered, did humans drop their feces into water when they were creatures of the land? Why did they concentrate it into a brownish sludge? Did they wish to flavor the water through which they swam? That seemed to me unlikely, for when I put tongue to their feces, I detect traces of boat oil, excrescence, and other poisons that could only have tasted as unpleasant to the humans as they did to me.

  I came across a hint of an answer to these questions as I was exploring a peninsula on the east side of the bay. Two tongues of land licked out from the peninsula’s tip into the water. On one of these tongues – treeless and covered with grass – humans stood striking shiny metal sticks against spherical white eggs which arced through the air before falling to earth and rolling across the grass. From time to time, one of the eggs, made of yet another kind of excrescence, would sail off the peninsula and plop into the water. Then the humans would call out such stridencies as ‘Goddamned ball is unbalanced!’ and other sounds that made no sense to me.

  On the other bit of land, across a slip of water, trees grew out an expanse of grass. There humans reclined on second skins and cast other kinds of eggs at each other. They burned fish in fires, shouted out cries to each other, and they did a thing with feces that fascinated me.

  Some sort of mammal – some looked like little wolves – accompanied many of the humans. Long strands probably made of excrescence connected the two-legged to four-legged. The little wolves would dart about, put nose to ground, and cause the humans’ limbs to jerk in whatever direction the wolves chose to move. Whenever the wolves arched their backs to defecate, the humans waited by their sides. At the completion of each defecation, the humans made cooing sounds as if pleased to receive what the wolves had given them. They gathered up the feces in clear skins of excrescence, which they carried proudly in their hands as the wolves led them on a continuation of their erratic journey across the grass.

  Why, I wondered, did the humans gather up wolf feces? Did they eat it as snails eat the excretions of fish? Did they lick down the feces of their own kind? That could not be possible. And yet, when it came to humans, almost nothing seemed impossible. I could be sure of little more than the fact that humans collected feces of varying kinds. Perhaps when these collections grew too large, the humans vented some into the sea.

  My puzzlement at the humans’ diet caused me to realize that it had been too long since I had eaten. I badly wanted and needed to catch a few salmon or perhaps some more delicious herring. However, the channel through which I swam formed a part of the traditional fishing grounds of the Truthful Word Painter Clan. I felt sure that these distant cousins of mine would not begrudge me a few mouthfuls of fish, but good manners dictated that I first ask permission before indulging in such a feast. I had to wait through many days of rumbling in my empty belly before I had a chance to do so. One clear night, with the moon-silvered waters around me rippling in a soft breeze, the orcas of the Scarlett Tiralee family of the Truthful Word Painter Clan swam into the channel and made my acquaintance.

  Only six of them did I greet: Mother Agena and her three children, Diadem, Furud, and Mekbuda, and Agena’s sister Celaeno, who had recently given birth to Baby Kornephoros. When I asked after their health, Agena told me, ‘We are well enough now, though misfortunes have reduced our family, as you can see.’

  We spent the rest of night recounting stories and telling of ou
r respective families. I listened with great sadness as Agena described the agonizing death of her mother, who had perished before her time of a mysterious wasting disease. Agena’s first child had died in a collision with one of the humans’ boats while her second had succumbed to a fever. I related similar woes, though I tried to gloss over my relief that my family had prospered in the face of great trials largely due to my grandmother’s guidance. Together we sang songs of mourning and remembrance. Finally just after dawn with the sun red upon a cloud-heavy horizon, I told the Scarlett Word Painters of the white bear and the burning sea, and I explained why I had journeyed so far from home.

  ‘I have never imagined,’ Mother Agena said, ‘losing my ability to quenge. Would you not be better off dead?’

  ‘I would be, yes,’ I replied, ‘if I had no hope of regaining from the humans what they have taken from me.’

  ‘You are a wonder of a whale,’ Agena said to me. ‘You are inquisitive and strong and brave, but you are also prideful and not a little foolish to think that you have been called to speak with the humans. Such hubris, if you persist, will be punished.’

  ‘How so?’ I asked.

  I did not wish to dispute an elder, particularly not a mother of another clan. I waited for Agena to say more.

  ‘Do you have any idea of how many of the Word Painters have tried to speak with the humans?’ Agena slapped her tail against the water and whistled out into the morning air. ‘I cannot say whether or not the humans have language or might be sentient, but this I know: if you cleave to them too closely, either their insanity will become yours or else they will murder you.’

  This warning more or less ended our conversation, for how could I respond to such bitter despair that masqueraded as wisdom and even prophecy? I did not want to believe Mother Agena’s fraught words. I could not believe them. And so when it came time to part, I sang farewells and blessings with all the polite passion that I could summon.