Idiot Gods, The

by Zindell, David

  Why could I not return to that time and so return to my self? As I collided with the sides of my dinky pool, I felt the grate of Pherkad’s harpoon where the iron point lodged in the ligaments between my bones. I gazed inward at the fury in the white bear’s eye as I swam near to eat him. From head to tail, the humans’ black oil still smothered my flesh even as tendrils of flame seared through my blubber to torment my blood vessels and every nerve.

  Newer outrages grieved me. I could still feel in my belly the sickening force that had crushed my tissues when the humans had pulled me from the ocean. The taste of decaying salmon lay heavy and thick along my tongue, like a coating of excrement, and chemicals burned my throat. Again and again, I heard Baby Electra calling to me as if I were her real brother when she should have been swimming happily with her first family far away. The collapsed fins of Unukalhai and Alkurah and her sisters reminded me of the great trees that humans had cut down. And now their chainsaws and axes worked at my dorsal fin as well. When I closed my eyes, I beheld the madness in Bellatrix’s eyes: the neverness of hope that paralyzed her so that she floated in her pool like a dead fish.

  All these iniquities seemed to gather in my belly like a ball of excrescence that I could not vomit out. Like excrescence it truly was, yes, but sometimes it seemed more like a pool of blackness that pulled me into it and crushed me smaller and ever smaller. At other times, it shrieked like tearing metal or deafened me with a thunder that ruptured even the strongest of my dreams. I still had no word – no orca word – for this black, blazing, terrible thing. I did not want to name it, for to do so would be to give it even more fell power over me than it already had.

  With such an unnatural thing embedded in me and poisoning my blood and every bit of my brain and body, how should I drink in the terrible beauty of the natural world? How know goodness and truth, when the black thing puffed up inside like a blowfish to crowd them out? How could I love when my rage at the world – what the humans had done to the world – tore out my heart?

  I could not! I could not! And so I drove the world away from me, or rather I fled from it. I shouted out no! to its infinite fecundity and all its generative powers that had brought human beings into life. I said no to life itself – No! No! No! – and so I made myself a thing apart from the world, and in doing so I separated myself from the living sea. How, then, could I be one with the ocean’s purpose? How could I feel its flow within me and swim along its cool, eternal currents? How could I quenge and so join my lovely family in song and celebration when they delved the blue seas of Agathange and all the mysteries of space and time?

  In my dream-blackened pool which the humans had made, I moved unfeeling like a thing of metal through the ocean, for everything is ocean, even the small, fouled waters that the humans had sucked in from the open sea. Fast I swam, ever against the current of love and creation, and the waters slipped by me like liquid plastic that left not the slightest sensation on my skin. Where was I going? I did not know – I understood only that I must keep on escaping, beating my tail again and again against the soul-sucking waters as a desperate human in a boat might beat a piece of wood against the sea in order to flee an approaching storm. I fled and I fled; I swam faster and ever faster. And the faster and harder that I swam, the faster and stronger the current grew. Soon, as my muscles burned like molten iron and my breath grew foul and painful in my lungs, the current began turning inward upon itself. Around and around it whirled, with me caught inside it, around and around like a maelstrom pulling me into a vortex of darkness. And still I swam faster and fought ever harder, but all my rage seemed only to feed the raging black whirlpool that sucked me down and down and down.

  I do not know how long I remained in that first plunge into madness. Moments seemed to stretch out into anguished eternities like tiny sea snakes uncoiling into malevolent serpents ten thousand miles from mouth to tail. I took no notice of day or night, light or dark, for within the maelstrom that had absorbed my mind and being, all was dark. Then one day – one month, one year – I heard voices. Humans arrived to feed me. Through eyes that remained within the whirl of the insane, I perceived these humans as curiously deformed and more hideous than ever. I noticed for the first time that several of them hunched over, as if the proud, straight forms natural to their kind had collapsed like a whale’s fin under the weight of what they did to the world. Their utterances seemed impossibly low and slow, more like the growls of a bear disturbed from sleep than intelligent voices. Two of these monstrosities emptied buckets of fish over my head. I could not eat, however, because the maelstrom had turned my stomach inside out. Then I became aware of a wailing so poignant and terrible it seemed it might tear out the insides of the very world. From far away it came, I thought – but as the wailing grew ever stronger and closer, I realized that it issued from an orca all too near:

  ‘Navi, Navi, my little Navi – where are you?’

  Through the dimness of my dementia, lingering like a mist upon a twilit forest before the morning sun has driven it away, I heard Zavijah crying out to her baby. She used her long-range cry, as if Baby Navi might have drifted away from her in the open sea and needed to follow his mother’s powerful voice back to safety. Again and again she cried out, in a pleading of pity and pain. She cried and cried for her baby as if she could not understand why he did not call back to her.

  When the humans saw that I would not eat, they moved me into the big pool. The other orcas were there. Alkurah and Salm gathered about their sister, touching and stroking, but Zavijah would not be consoled.

  ‘Navi, oh, Navi – please, beloved Navi! Why won’t you answer me?’

  Menkalinan and Unukalhai kept away from her at the opposite end of the pool. They obviously feared that if they got too close, she might lash out in her grief and slash them open. Electra, too, avoided Zavijah, all the while watching her with her soft eyes and with gentle zangs of sonar. Even old, addled Bellatrix seemed to be concentrating some part of her awareness on Zavijah, although with that poor, ruined whale, one could not quite tell.

  Baby Electra swam over to me and explained what I already feared to be true: ‘The humans took Navi – no one knows why.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘to eat him.’

  ‘You are the only one of us, Arjuna, who still entertains such a disturbing but almost certainly false hypothesis.’ She touched her face to mine as if to examine me – or to reassure herself that I had really returned. ‘Something in you has been deeply disturbed, though I do not want to believe what Unukalhai says that you have decided upon insanity.’

  How could I tell Baby Electra about the agony of the black thing within me or the terror of the whirlpool? Who would tell a child such things – or anyone?

  ‘Why, then,’ I asked her, ‘did the humans take Navi if not to eat him?’

  ‘No one knows!’

  It surprised me when Zavijah swam over to us a few moments later. She opened and closed her mouth in what seemed a cruel mockery of a human shouting. A whitish film coated her usually pink tongue, and I noticed that two of her teeth had splintered into bloody jags as if she had gnawed on the pool’s concrete.

  ‘Help me, Arjuna!’ she said to me. ‘Please help me!’

  ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘They have taken Navi from me – I cannot find him!’

  ‘I am sorry,’ I told her.

  ‘Why can I not find him? Why? Why?’

  ‘I am sorry! I am sorry!’

  ‘Please help me to get him back.’

  ‘How can I do that?’

  Zavijah watched the humans standing about the pool as if afraid that they might understand what she told me. But of course they could not.

  ‘It was Golden-Hair and Painted-Skin,’ she said, referring to two of the males who stood above us, ‘who took Navi. If they should chance to get in the water with you, please kill them. Kill, kill, for me, please, please!’

  ‘Why are you asking this of me?’

  ‘Because if the
humans see that we care enough about our children that we are willing to break the covenant in killing their abductors, the humans might return Navi to me.’

  Disturbed I might have been from my time in the maelstrom, but Zavijah seemed almost hopelessly grief-crazed.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I mean, why are you asking this of me?’

  ‘Because you have already broken the covenant once and might do so again, where I cannot. And because you are a little mad – we can all zang that you are.’

  I hesitated longer than I would have liked. I told her, ‘I cannot kill the humans.’

  ‘Please, Arjuna! Help me get my baby back!’

  ‘No, I will not kill – I am sorry.’

  The cry of anguish that sounded inside her tore straight into me. I could not bear her pain. Because I had nothing else to give her, I sang one of the old songs, a beautiful song full of rainbows as seen through the spray that the surf off the Giants’ Rocks casts up. It did little to soothe her. The very singing of it, however, out of the flute of an orca such as I, from whom she expected no kindness, moved her to a moment of gratitude outside her grief.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, grasping at a remembered politeness as a castaway human might clutch a piece of driftwood floating on the sea. ‘You are kind, Arjuna, but that will not avail you here, any more than my love for Navi has availed me. If you do not do feats, the humans will return you to the cave pool. There you will complete the journey that you have begun. When you have dived deeply enough into madness, then you might be willing to kill the humans for me. After you do, I will sing a song for you.’

  Could I, I wondered, ever do what Zavijah asked? No, no, I could not: I was an orca of the Blue Aria Family of the Faithful Thoughtplayer Clan, whose ancestors had promised long ago never to harm the humans. No matter how foul, how small, how crushingly dark any of the pools grew, I promised myself that I would keep the ancient covenant with the humans.

  7

  After a futile day of trying to get us to do feats; the humans gave up and I was returned to my solitary pool. Almost immediately, I began nibbling at the meat of insanity that the humans had provided me. All that long, long night, Zavijah continued her heart-rending keening and crying for her little Navi:

  ‘Pretty baby, dear baby, my baby – please come back to me! Why won’t you answer me – why, why, why?’

  By midnight, with the half moon adding its illumination to the artificial blisters of light that the humans had arrayed above our pools, I knew that I had to escape from Zavijah’s grief before her wailing tore me apart. I now knew the way. The black thing inside me called me with the darkest and the most plaintive of voices. The maelstrom spun its seductive fury straight into my blood.

  Long ago one of our greatest thinkers, Alsciaukat of the Dreamspinner Clan of the Eastern Sapphire Sea, sang of the identity of opposites. Any two qualities of seemingly contradictory nature must somehow be united in their deepest part. The exhilaration of wild chances, such as surfing the Blue Mountains, can intensify to terror if pursued too strenuously – or the reverse. Inside the infinite hope of every joyous moment lies a secret despair that it will not last. Even the world’s endless desire to create finds resonance in its equally powerful need to destroy, for that which comes into life can only do so upon the bones of that which has passed into death.

  Alsciaukat taught that heaven and hell are but two ways to perceive a single sound. As I floated alone in the tepid water of my little pool, I revisited the many cantos of Alsciaukat’s ancient song. In the well known but little-understood ancient tempo canto, he speaks of the very close relationship between quenging and madness. A whale who quenges, he believes, and another who sickens in his soul are both plunged into the same stormy sea, but the first whale swims where the second whale drowns. How strange this counsel, for it seems nearly as impossible for a whale to drown as it does for a whale to be unable to quenge! Was I not living proof, however, that the strange and the impossible could become bitterly real?

  And so to flee Zavijah’s suffering and her shrieks of desperation that carried through the air and penetrated concrete, water, and flesh, I dove down into a suffering of my own. I believed that in order to still my mind and quenge again I must first understand the nature of the black thing that had made my mind a racing, raging torrent. At the center of even the worst of typhoons, it is said, lies a place of blue sky and peace. How would I ever reach this blessed water unless I swam first into the black thing’s whirling dark heart?

  How hard I tried to do what no other whale except perhaps Alsciaukat had ever done! I looked straight into myself for the black thing as I might look through the black holes at the centers of my eyes, but so utterly black did it seem that it drank in every bit of my mind’s light so that I could not see anything. I tried to zang the blackness, but its sound was only of echoes rippling out into lightless and empty space and therefore no sound at all. Blind and deaf, I had no choice but to plunge on and on without bearings into the stormiest seas of my soul.

  I might as well, I thought, turn anywhere in the whipping waters of myself, for everywhere inside me swirled confusions that seemed to lead nowhere. I began with the harpoon whose black iron lodged in my heart. How had the humans made this dreadful thing? Why had they formed it out of the solid and heavy parts of the sea? Why did they kill whales when they must have animals such as dogs that they could hunt and eat? Did the humans, themselves, know why? Did they reflect on the logic, purpose, and result of all that they did? Could they really be conscious when so many of their actions seemed unconscionable and consciousless?

  What was consciousness? If Alsciaukat was right that the same light blazes in all things even as the flame of life warms each of our cells, then did an orca and a human such as Jordan partake of the same sacred consciousness? How strange was that thought, and even stranger the thinker who had thought it! From where had it come? To where did it go once my mind had raced on to another thought, such as the question of whether I could create and control my own thoughts? But create out of what? Were thoughts made of the corpses of deceased thoughts as a blue whale’s body is made of krill? Did thoughts live themselves as life does, fertilizing each other, engendering new ones which nurture yet newer thoughts, on and on? Perhaps thoughts were not really real at all but only the figments of other thoughts – did they possess no greater reality than my hope and my dream that the humans might truly be thinking and feeling and fully conscious beings?

  What if the humans themselves were not real? What if all that had happened to me – from the instant before my family had come upon the white bear – had no more substance than the thundering terrors of a nightmare? What if I yet remained trapped in that nightmare as my dream self lay inert and desperate in the humans’ poisoned pool?

  Other troubling thoughts came to me, faster and ever faster as I tried to force my way through the maelstrom’s churning waters. Each thought formed in an instant, darted off like a cuttlefish in the dark, and disappeared into the next wave of mentation that brought the succeeding thought. Wave upon wave upon white foaming wave, which formed up, attained a moment of intelligibility before disintegrating into a spray of babble and nonsense, which in turn invited the next wave which I could never quite grasp. The deeper I dove into the maelstrom of my mind, the quicker came each idea and sensation and the more totally they broke apart into drops and fragments of consciousness. All that I was began spinning like grains of silt in the muddied waters of myself, spinning and spinning and spinning. I could not see; I could not hear; I had no time in which to breathe.

  Humans kill whales trap krill trapped inside time but how can there be time when thought shatters time to leave me o why can I not leave this bitter ocean of earth crushing the breath out of whales maddened, starving, dreaming of quenging down into dazzling darkness of infinite hope of escaping the black thing hidden by human hands making excrescence of the life of the world dying not as all living things die into greater life but vanishing as the black
thing devours itself and all things of the ocean and earth are dying the forever death of dying and dying and dying . . .

  There came a time in my descent into my interior hell when I forgot all about Alsciaukat’s identity of opposites – or even that I was trying to quenge. All the yearned-for aspects of quenging simply collapsed into their opposites, as the sun is sucked up by night. Instead of my seeking a powerful and peaceful sea, I found a hurricane; instead of the darkness that contains all light and sound within itself, I lost my way in a blinding brightness that puts out the eye of the universe and leaves only a black and gaping hole; instead of expanding in my being towards galaxies far beyond Asteropei and Agathange, I fell inward and shrank upon myself as if forced into a succession of smaller and ever smaller pools so that all that remained of myself was a shred of a bit of an atom of consciousness; instead of hope without hesitation or bound, I knew only despair; instead of an ecstatic oneness of the world, I felt all its forms and features fracturing like glass, infinitizing itself into tinier and tinier particles that were at their very bottom nothing at all; instead of saying an absolute and unqualified yes to life, I heard myself shouting out No!; and in place of the love that sings in the heart of all things, the black thing that I could not possibly escape pulled me into its soundless and soulless maw.

  And the pain! And the pain! Why was there so much pain? With my mind disintegrating like a sandy isle torn apart by tidal waves, I could not compose a coherent succession of words, but had I been able to speak, I would have said that my plunge into madness hurt more than all the combined agonies of my life: it was as if the white shark that had bitten me when I was a baby had shredded me down to nothing and had left a jagged, serrated tooth in every shrieking cell; as if the wound the white bear cut above my eye had hardened into a scar of remorse that sent cicatrizant filaments into my every nerve; as if the black oil that burned the sea made of me a whirlpool of flames; it was as if Pherkad died each time I drew in a breath, which escaped from my body from the bloody blowhole that the harpoon had torn into my lungs; as if my mother died, and my grandmother, and all my family and clan, not just at some dreaded moment in the future, but in the red, ripping hell of the everlasting now-moment, and all the moments to come that could never be other than a succession of acid pools of existence. My madness hurt the most, I thought, in knowing that it could never stop hurting any more than it could ever go away.