Idiot Gods, The

by Zindell, David

  We sang together for at least as long as one of those arbitrary sectionings of time that the humans call an hour; we sang of hope and indestructible seas and life. Then Alkurah nearly crushed all our hope with a simple question.

  ‘Do you trust the humans, Arjuna?’

  Did I trust them? Supposing that I had understood Gabi and Helen correctly, how could I be sure that the promised opening of the gates would not lead to new torments and new expectations that we should perform perhaps bizarre and terrible feats?

  ‘There is a place,’ I said to Alkurah and the others. ‘I know there is a place where we can speak to the humans without interruption or fear and they can speak to us. A place of fish and fresh air and wild waters. Helen will lead us there – we are to follow her boat. There, no one will shock us, or starve us, or humiliate us, or steal our babies. In this beautiful, beautiful place we will be safe.’

  Again, Alkurah voiced a concern, this one almost silly in its pettiness:

  ‘If we swim together to this place,’ she said to me, ‘I must go first, as it would be anywhere in the world.’

  I swallowed back a zang of mirth, and I said to her, ‘As always, Mother Alkurah, I will defer to your femininity.’

  ‘I will be a mother again,’ she whispered. ‘I will kemmer soon, before the moon is full.’

  ‘Yes, and you still need a phallus to fill you.’

  ‘Not a phallus,’ she said. ‘I will mate as we journey. The many males of the Sunbreathers or those of whatever clans we encounter – how I long to feel their phalluses inside me, one by one, slipping, gliding, pulsing, flowing with life and singing with sperm! I will gather it all within me! What a baby orca I will make!’

  ‘But not mine,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘We are family now, Arjuna.’

  Again, we all breathed together, drawing in the great rush of our assent: yes, yes, yes!

  Some nights later, when the moon swelled to its gravid, white fullness and the rising tide called to our blood with all the memories and dreams of our kind, Gabi appeared out of the shadows cast by the human-built structures that had confined us for so long, and she opened up gate after gate after gate.

  PART TWO

  The Idiot Gods

  10

  We swam out into cool waters glistening with the lights raining down from the sky. Gabi swam with us – or rather, she spent most of the first hours of our escape riding upon my back and upon Unukalhai’s back and Alkurah’s. None of us whales liked the touch of the black, plastic wet suit that she wore, but her delicate human body could not guard its heat from the icy grip of the sea without the aid of this covering of neoprene excrescence. Had I understood her correctly, that a naked human immersed in the ocean could die within moments? That did not seem possible. How hard it was to be human! Gabi’s vulnerability to the ocean’s life-giving touch highlighted the regrettable fact that humans and whales live in two nearly separate worlds.

  That humans can live at all between the rolling crests of the ocean’s swells should give pause to any whale contemplating these amazing creatures. With the full moon drawing us on like a luminous white orb of hope, we swam through a long channel of tainted water and then out into an even more polluted bay. The moon’s brilliance, though, seemed to purify the bay of its bitterness of chemicals and human waste. By the time we reached the open ocean, the water tasted almost as it should: of seaweed and sacred salt, of starlight and storms and the imperishable first life of our world that still flavored the silvery skins of countless fishes and tanged the rich, red blood of us whales.

  As Helen had promised, she waited for us with others of her kind in a large sailing boat just off the coast. I swam right up to it, taking care not to collide with the boat’s hard surface as it bobbed up and down with each rising and falling swell. Gabi performed a feat of climbing from the water up a rope that dangled from the boat’s side. She joined Helen and the other stranger-humans on the deck.

  ‘We have a long journey,’ Helen said to me. Her words carried out into the night and over the peaceful waters. They sounded as well from within the water, for she had affixed hydrophones to the boat’s timbers. ‘Please take a care, for at times we will need to use the engines.’

  She had explained to me something that I had only poorly understood: how the humans’ boats sometimes moved across the water at the touch of the wind but more often through the power of a whirling metal propeller that could cut a whale to meat.

  ‘Let us journey then,’ I sang out from the water, ‘for the moon is calling!’

  I had to translate what I said into true orca speech, for the other whales had not yet learned the simple new sounds that I created to represent human things and conceptions.

  ‘Let us journey!’ Alkurah, Salm, and Zavijah sang back to me. ‘For the wind is calling, too!’

  ‘Let us journey!’ Unukalhai, Menkalinan, Bellatrix, and Baby Electra said. ‘The stars are calling us home!’

  Helen and Gabi – and the other two-leggeds that abetted our escape from Sea Circus – probably never saw our accompanying their boat of whipping white sails north along the coast as a little miracle. Zavijah spoke of swimming off to find Baby Navi. She felt sure that if she searched the seven seas for him, high and deep, she would find him in some dark water crying out to her. Baby Electra longed to play with others of her kind and hunt seals again. Unukalhai, who had killed a man at another Sea Circus, wanted nothing more to do with the humans.

  We all shared this sentiment, of course, but I argued that through no fault of our own, our fates had become intertangled with those of the humans like strands of kelp in a stormy sea. We must follow our fate. The humans now knew that we could think and speak. They had listened to the yearning in our hearts, and they had set us free. Now they must come to apprehend not only the wonder of the whales but the much deeper wonder of the world that had given us life. Clearly, I said, the humans knew little of our shared planet, or otherwise, why would they struggle so fiercely to destroy it?

  ‘We must tell the humans of the world,’ I said to Alkurah and the others. ‘They know little of Ocean and how life must be.’

  Despite Zavijah’s wails about her lost Navi, neither Alkurah nor Salm had any hope that the remnants of their once mighty family could be reunited. Alkurah directed her thoughts toward creating a new family, which she tried to do with all the power in her strong, beautiful body when we encountered a family of the Gracious Wind Whistlers. Although she mated zestfully with two of the Wind Whistlers’ males, she was not pregnant – no one could say why. Baby Electra’s family, of course, had been slain during her capture, and so it had been with Menkalinan’s mother, brothers and sisters. Bellatrix, who had regained her power of speech, declined to tell us anything of her origins. It seemed certain, though, that everyone once dear to her had died. Unukalhai affirmed that he had suffered an identical sadness. Although he had spoken of the stars calling us home, he had nowhere to go, for a whale’s family is his home.

  Of all of us, only I might have returned to beloved ones. I thought often of my mother and my sisters and brothers – and of my Aunt Chara and my Uncle Alnitak and everyone else. I missed the peals of laughter of baby Porrima when she discovered new things! Most of all, I longed to swim with my grandmother again, and drink in her wisdom as I listened to the reassuring beating of her heart. I remembered each color and tone of the charm that she had bestowed upon me. I remembered, too, with a pain that called out from my own heart, that I had promised her that I would do a thing. Now, as I swam alongside a wooden boat named the Silver Swan, it seemed that I might really be able to do it. With such hope sending zests of breath through my flute and exciting my blood, how could I possibly turn away from the course ahead of me?

  I had also promised Alkurah and Electra and the other orcas who swam with me that they would be free again, and around this pledge, our new family coalesced. Often, on our journey northward through the increasingly cold waters, after we had fished in co
ncert and shared our meal, we sang together and gathered for a breathing. We shared the air blowing above the ocean’s wild, white crests, and as our lungs filled and expanded so did our sense of ourselves enlarge and fill us with a shared spirit. At times, as we relaxed into the song of ourselves, our minds became nearly as one. Then we breathed deeper, and we recalled how a family joins with something much greater in feeling the breaths of the Old Ones within. And deeper still, down in the quiet of our memories, we breathed in unison without world Ocean and we became even vaster. With bittersweet hurts that found out our lungs’ every cove and nook, we remembered how entire families of families of worlds drew in the fiery breath of the stars across the whole of the universe. In this way, we remembered ourselves and dwelled within each others’ beings, and so we nearly quenged.

  In the nightmare moments when I had banged my head bloody in Sea Circus’s punishment pool, I had never hoped to know again such mutuality of thought and feeling. I troubled myself over this. Could an orca, I wondered, have two families? Could any orca, such as one of the Others like Baby Electra, truly join a family of a different kind who hunted fish? Following this logic on its incredible course, I wondered a hard-to-imagine thing: might it be possible for a beluga or one of another species of whale to share their minds with us and open their hearts with so much passion that we would want to think of them as family, too?

  ‘What is a family?’ Baby Electra asked me one day as we pushed our way through wind-whipped, choppy seas. Even though she was very young, her mind swam toward the deeply philosophical and often resonated with my own. ‘Are you and I really brother and sister, Arjuna?’

  ‘You are as much a sister to me as Turais or Nashira, who I hope would call you sister, too.’

  ‘We are! We are!’ Baby Electra called out, sending high-pitched sounds toward the Silver Swan which sailed on behind us. ‘That is because we love each other.’

  ‘And because we share a purpose.’

  ‘And even more, because when we swim together we are safe.’ Electra zanged me with a stream of sonar. She asked, ‘Do you feel safe with Gabi and Helen?’

  ‘I want to feel safe.’

  ‘I do,’ Baby Electra said. ‘I know that we will be all right. Such determination I see in Helen’s eyes! So much courage I zang in her heart! And how hard she tries to speak with us! It is almost as if she wishes she were a whale.’

  ‘I have thought that very thing,’ I told her.

  For a while she swam on in silence. Then she asked me, ‘Arjuna, what is a human being?’

  During our long journey, I had similar conversations with Alkurah, Menkalinan, and even Bellatrix. We agreed that of all the mysteries that had ever emerged out of the bloody, red womb of the world, the humans were the most mysterious. Menkalinan, who had nearly given up opposing the humans in the dreadful pools that so recently had constrained us, had also abandoned much of his curiosity about them. Not so Unukalhai. Now that his life had a new course, he declared his intention to apply his analysis of the troubled orca mind to the obviously much greater madness of human beings.

  Our days and nights turned about such ponderings as we spoke together and swam together and paused in our conversations to share a few simple words with the humans on their boat. Once again, we of the fluke and fin became creatures of the sea, diving beneath the waves in search of deep sounds, zanging fish with our voices, and singing songs of glory to the music of the currents and to the waves’ ever-shifting colors of purple, teal, emerald, and aquamarine. At night, the brilliant stars pointed our way. And with the rising of mornings glowing with promises, we spoke of a new way of conceiving the world. We moved together, we fished together, and we played together. The sunlight warmed our lovely black skin when we breached for life-giving breath even as the ocean cooled the burning in our white bellies to taste the language of the humans and perhaps finally to understand the answer to Baby Electra’s question. Through storms we swam, and we surfed the great swells that wind and moon had called up from the ocean’s heart, and with each mountainous beat of water, our hope swelled all the more, for a great adventure lay before us, and at last our fiery orca hearts were at one with the pulse of the sea.

  After many days, we entered a long sound dividing two great masses of forested land. Helen named this great tongue of water for us, calling it, appropriately, ‘Long Sound.’ From the map that Alnitak had given me, I knew it as the home of the Ardent Starsinger Clan. We spent more days accompanying the Silver Swan as it sailed up the Sound past many bays that took big bites out of the land to the east and west. At times, fine mists settled down from the sky like gray eyelids that deprived the humans of their sight, and then the Silver Swan did not dare to split the waters with its propeller or to fly upon the wind. When the mists blew away, we began moving again, always toward the north star. Then a day came when we turned east into a broad bay teeming with salmon. Where the bay’s far end pushed against a hilly country rising up to become low, green mountains enveloped in mist, three fingers of land reached into the bay as if to set an earthly grip upon the waves. We followed the boat into a cove between two of the fingers. And there, on the cove’s southern bank, the humans had built a set of structures that Helen called the Institute.

  The largest of these buildings connected the sea to the land in an ingenious way. Somehow, the humans had contrived to dig a channel into the earth and rocks of the finger of land. They had lined the channel with concrete that reminded me too well of the concrete walls of Sea Circus’s pools. And over the channel, they had built a great, silver dome like one half of a moon. Helen called this structure a house. Humans – those on the boat and others whom we had yet to meet – lived there and in the smaller rectilinear cottages constellated around the big house.

  Helen invited us to share the big house with her and the others – or rather, to dwell at our pleasure in half of it, for we soon discovered that the house was divided into two parts. Upon swimming from the cove into the concrete-walled channel, I looked up at the dome’s many three-pointed panes of glass that let in the light of the sun. With my eyes, I followed the curve of this amazing structure and saw that at the channel’s landward end, just beyond a broad concrete beach, a great wall split the dome into two parts. The human part, Helen had explained, contained the rooms in which the humans slept and worked and defecated and cooked their meals. From her description, I zanged that these rooms were quite small, something like the compartments of a spiral shell in which a nautilus lives. It gave me pause to think that the humans spent most of their moments dwelling inside contained spaces no larger than Sea Circus’s punishment pool.

  The whales’ half of the dome consisted of little more than that wide channel and the broad concrete beaches that lined on it either side. At the channel’s far end nearest the human part of the house, a smooth, concrete beach sloped down into the water. Here, we whales could come up out of the sea onto land should we desire to touch the humans or speak with them flute to face. The humans had placed various kinds of machines along the banks of the channel – and into the walls of the channel itself. Many hydrophones pocked the walls like huge, round barnacles. As well, the tricky-handed humans had set into the concrete many strips of screens nearly as large as the one that cast its wavering images upon the onlookers who crowded the metal chairs above Sea Circus’s big pool. These screens were built in rows along three levels. As the day’s tide rose and fell, the humans could light up one level of screens or another, above or below the water’s surface as they chose. Thus we whales, if we so chose, could augment our study of the humans’ language by watching what the humans called TV.

  ‘You will be safe here,’ Helen told us. She stood on the channel’s concrete beach calling words down into the lapping water where we whales gathered. ‘You need only work when you want to work. You may come and go as you please.’

  What pleased most of us most of the time was to swim out through channel and cove into the bay where we fished and frolicked and converse
d and sang: all the things that free whales do. Sometimes, like a real family, we journeyed together, making days-long explorations up and down the cold, misted waters of Long Sound. Alkurah sought males of the Ardent Starsingers with whom she might mate, while Baby Electra looked for seals to hunt.

  In truth, of all of us, it seemed that only I had a flaming desire to speak with the humans. Unukalhai sought verbal intercourse with the Covered Ones with some degree of passion, but more from a curiosity to discover if he could use their own words to penetrate and presume upon their psyches than any longing to truly understand them. Alkurah found no Starsingers, and she tried to assuage her frustration by exchanging a few words with the two-legged creatures that she had supposed to be irredeemably stupid. Her sister Zavijah could scarcely call up a click or a whistle, so greatly did Navi’s loss grieve her. Bellatrix would not talk to the humans at all, and so it was with the shy, dispirited Menkalinan. Baby Electra, who drank in the humans’ words like one of the mysticeti scooping up mouthfuls of krill, did so mostly in emulation of me.

  ‘I admit that I like talking with the humans,’ she said to me one day while we lazed about the waters of the cove. ‘I like learning how they think – and that they can think. I never imagined playing such a game.’

  ‘It is more than a game,’ I said to her.

  ‘Perhaps it is,’ she said swimming slow circles around me. ‘And perhaps you will somehow persuade the Hairy Ones to stop their torture of all that moves and grows.’

  ‘But you do not believe this is possible?’

  ‘I believe in you. And so I must believe in your purpose and hope that I will someday come to share it.’

  She rubbed up against me. We both liked it that she took comfort in the sheer mass of my presence.