Idiot Gods, The

by Zindell, David

  ‘Until then,’ she continued, ‘I can suffer myself to chat with the humans, even if their language – the mind behind their language – is both disturbing and strange.’

  ‘It is! It is!’ I agreed.

  ‘Until then,’ she continued, ‘this is a good place, though I do not understand why we have heard nothing of the Ardent Starsingers.’

  ‘Perhaps they are fishing far to the north in the Sound.’

  ‘But there are so many fish here!’

  That there were. I could hardly swim from the cove to the bay without colliding with a rush of salmon. I had renewed my old joy at eating food that pulsed with life.

  ‘I cannot tell you, though,’ Baby Electra said to me, ‘how tired I am of fish. Do you see the beaches on either side of the humans’ dwellings?’

  I breached in order to gaze out through the air at the features of the land upon which the humans had sited their Institute. Gentle beaches of sand and a few pebbles sloped down to the water to the right and left of the channel and the dome above it.

  ‘Before the humans came,’ Baby Electra said, ‘seals swarmed these beaches.’

  ‘How do you know?’ I asked her.

  ‘I am of a kind who hunts seals, and so I know,’ she said. ‘And I long to hunt seals again!’

  ‘Someday you will.’

  ‘I cannot wait, Arjuna. Farther down the Sound, on our journey here, I zanged signs of seals. Will you go with me to hunt them?’

  ‘Would you have me break the Covenant again?’

  ‘As I break it every day by eating fish?’

  ‘I do not know if I could eat a mammal again.’

  ‘Tell me that you did not like the taste of the white bear.’

  ‘I cannot tell you that, either.’

  ‘But it would make me so happy! And it would make you happy to make me happy. I know your heart, Arjuna – I know your heart!’

  I knew hers, too. At first pulse, it seemed a smaller heart than mine and warmer, like the waters of the Blue Summer Sea. This little whale, however, contained whole oceans of enthusiasm inside her. Because I lacked her capacity for joy, she invited me with flute, eye, and all the openness of her heart to join her whenever I wished in diving down into the bright, flowing deeps inside her. She knew that I needed her even more than she needed me. How could I deny such a rare being who possessed so much goodness and grace?

  How, though, could I break the Covenant once again? A better question, I realized, still troubled me: how could I not break it, if I zanged in my heart that doing so would be a right action? I had already broken so many things, including the ocean’s natural order, in making family with Baby Electra. It seemed to me that my fated journey would lead me to break old orderings and conceptions of the world by breaking free into a new one – or by creating a new world altogether and a new way of being for myself and for Baby Electra and all those I loved.

  ‘All right,’ I said to her, ‘I will break the Covenant by hunting seals with you. Will you break through your doubts about the humans in order to converse with them?’

  ‘Is that to be a new covenant?’ she asked.

  ‘Between you and me, or between you and the humans?’

  ‘In the end, there is only one Covenant, yes?’

  I wondered what she meant by this, just as I puzzled over the mystery and spiritedness I detected in her voice. Perhaps, I thought, she was only playing with ideas because she was a very young whale who loved to play. Or had she perhaps formed a new and incomplete philosophy of life that she needed to test and perfect before sharing it with a near-adult like me? I did not know, and she would not say any more.

  Later that day, farther down the Sound off a sandy beach similar to those on either side of the Institute, we joined in ambushing a seal. It proved much easier to kill this pretty dweller of land and sea than it had been to take the white bear’s life. As Baby Electra and I ripped it into bloody gobbets, I realized how fiercely the new Arjuna had come to relish the taste of rich, red mammal meat.

  Over the days that followed, I devoured meat of a much different though no less disturbing nature. Sometimes I and others of my family spent entire days and nights at the Institute working with the humans. The words that issued from the channel walls’ hydrophones or from Helen’s lips nourished my hunger to understand the humans, although almost everything about their language’s irritating plosives and fricatives seemed wrong. If their vocalizations had consisted of simple nouns and verbs such as those in the sentence: Gabi is swimming – then I would have learned to speak with them in a trice. The humans, though, divided their words into six other kinds: adjectives, which toned and qualified the nouns, adverbs and prepositions, conjunctions and interjections, and, of course the pronouns such as me, they, them and you, which I had only slowly mastered. A greater problem attended the syntax by which all these words were strung together, and those rules I learned only with much trial and pain, for they were as unwelcome to my mind as tapeworms were to my gut.

  The greatest difficulty that the other whales and I faced, however, lay in apprehending the meanings of the humans’ words, for too many of them had no reference or correlate to any conception in our orca language. How these words mystified me! I listened to Helen and her machines enunciate them, and I sounded them out in my mind again and again: City. Deadline. College. Execution. Gewgaw. Guilt. Vacation. Homeless. Beggar. Chicanery. Tawdry. Insurance. Ordinance. Shame.

  I believe that the orcas would have remained diving blind and choking on our frustration had not Helen conceived of lighting up the screens with images of cities, highways, and other such human handiwork. What a tiresome slog we had of it in linking up image to word! How slow and excruciating this illustration of human life! How nearly incomprehensible the attendant explanations! And strange and terrible it was for us to behold images of the humans’ world that no whale had even seen or imagined:

  Slaughterhouse. Cemetery. Harvester. Factory. Office. Prison. Guillotine. Bomb. Soldier. Priest. Slave.

  It vexed me that at first I could scarcely make sense of some words at all, while others disturbed because I thought I understood them too well. What kind of beings were these human beings? Must I characterize them as Unukalhai did by giving them the soubriquet of killer apes?

  ‘They call us killer whales!’ Unukalhai said as we all held a conference beneath the waters of the cove. ‘But did you see the images of their farms and feedlots? And the machines that swept the chickens into the flensing knives? What whale would ever have conceived of killing so many schools of cattle with bolts fired into their brains in a slaughterhouse?’

  ‘Unukalhai is right,’ Alkurah said. ‘Do we really wish to associate with such creatures who convince themselves that we are the ones inflicted with such human murderousness?’

  ‘I do not wish even to listen to the humans,’ Bellatrix said. ‘I do not think that Arjuna will succeed in speaking the truth to them, and if he does, I do not think they can hear it.’

  Zavijah swam closer to her sister and reinforced the point that Alkurah had just made: ‘And if they do hear it, they do not have the strength of will or the goodness of heart to act upon it.’

  Baby Electra, blowing bubbles in the midnight blue depths just below us, said, ‘I do wish to speak with the humans. Helen and Gabi are different from the ones who imprisoned us – were it not so, we would not be here now having this conversation. There must be others like them.’

  ‘Perhaps there are others like them,’ Unukalhai said. ‘Perhaps Gabi and Helen are different from the other killer apes.’

  ‘If I could,’ Bellatrix said, ‘I would swim far from here to another place. But I will not swim alone.’

  ‘But this is a good place!’ Baby Electra said. ‘We have salmon and seals and a new world to explore.’

  And I said, ‘Let us at least see how deeply we can speak with the humans before we abandon them.’

  We discussed my suggestion for half a day. Finally, Alkurah said, ‘All
right, Arjuna, perhaps some unsounded goodness in their hearts redeems the evil they work with their hands. Perhaps we should try to listen for it.’

  ‘All right,’ Salm said. ‘Perhaps it might be illuminating to view more images of the continents’ interiors that we have never seen.’

  ‘And perhaps,’ Unukalhai added, ‘we might learn something vital in sounding the minds of creatures who seem to believe their minds dwell apart from and above those of all other creatures.’

  ‘All right! All right! All right!’

  Perhaps without realizing it (more likely he did), Unukalhai had zanged the very thing that both troubled and fascinated me about the humans. Did the humans really think that they were more intelligent than whales? How could they think this? How did they think? To determine this, we would have to contrive to learn the humans’ language. I sensed that we were close to discovering momentous things in and about these mysterious beings. In trying to sound the seemingly unfathomable human mind, I felt something like the first whale who had dared the dark and nearly endless spaces of our little sea of stars only to behold Andromeda and Whirlpool and other bright galaxies beyond. Exhilaration and dread swam side by side inside me. To speak with the humans in their troublesome language was to venture into the Great Unknown.

  The devouring of one human word led to the apprehending of another, and again and again, I returned to a single word which all by itself said a great deal about the humans: gravity. I had finally learned the name of the terrible force that had crushed my belly against my bones when the humans had ripped me from the sea and squeezed me into a metal crate. Gravity derived from the same root as gravid: to be heavy, as with child. How sad that the humans associated the soaring creation of new life with a density of existence that dragged a pregnant female down to earth! And not just to the cold clay of the ground, but beneath it in the hideousness of the smothering good meat within soil in a prison of death that the humans call a grave. Gravity, gravid, grave – in these simple sounds the humans revealed not an appreciation of the necessary interplay between death and life, but rather a denigration of life itself and (I feared) a love of death.

  My suspicion of some essential twisting of the human soul moved me to question how I might ever speak with them soul to soul. In order for true communication to work its magic, didn’t two speakers need to share a worldview, at least in part? What did humans and whales really share?

  Before I could appreciate the similarities in the ways our two kinds saw (and heard) reality, I first needed to identify the differences in how we made language. The music that sang out of my flute, of course, had almost nothing in common with the grunts, barks, and screaks that the Landwalkers puled out to each other. The humans spat sounds from their mouths one by one in separate bursts of sonance called phonemes. These they assembled into units of meaning known as morphemes, which formed the roots from which their words sprang.

  The problem with understanding the humans’ language (and the limitations of their language), lay in this very atomization of meaning. Why confine living ideas within the prison pools of what the humans call words when all that an intelligent being thinks and feels longs to flow deep, wild, and free?

  We whales have no words – no distinct words that hold to a single shape of consonance and tone through time. Instead, we make pictures out of sounds. As the humans themselves declare: one picture is worth a thousand words. Can one ‘say’ a picture? The humans certainly cannot; the best they can do with their speech is to describe, for instance, certain details and impressions of a painting such as its style, its color scheme, its mood, and the objects that the painter has tried to render. If a human viewing such a painting uses human words to portray an image of it to another, nothing even close to the original will display in the other’s mind.

  It is not so with us whales. When we zang vistas of underwater mountains and archipelagos of variegated coral, the clicks that burst from our flutes and return to us as echoes paint within our minds the most vivid and lovely of seascapes. Even a baby orca can remember the precise pattern of those clicks and reproduce it, thus sharing what she sees with her mother, grandmother, and sisters and brothers.

  So it is with the other sounds we orcas make and all the myriad other things that we wish to convey. There is a geography to information, ideas, emotions, and stories. We click, chirp, and sing, and so illustrate these almost perfectly when we wish to take our time. Or we can do as the humans do and choose sounds to represent the mentations of our minds. Unlike the humans, however, we can choose to what degree of abstraction we wish to enfold meaning into a ‘word’ and therefore the degree of actuality with which that word is instantiated. And the words we choose to make do not cling to a single shape like a human sculpture carved out of stone, but rather shift and undulate, expand and contract, as a rainbow jellyfish changes colors as it moves from one habitat to another.

  How can the humans bear to freeze the meanings of what they wish to say into cold, hard, dead words like so many stiffened corpses laid out on a sheet of ice? How crude, how limiting! How I wished I could breathe the warm breath of life into the humans and their language and teach them to truly speak! Had I been able to do so, this is what I would have told them:

  When our utterances are free to flow and conform to the contours of reality, they can depict that reality more exactly and with greater truth; when they are crammed into the cold coffins of words, they become mummified into dubious assumptions, fixed ideas, unproved theories, prejudices, and crazy beliefs – and so feed the gaping, black maw of the Great Lie.

  We whales learned long ago to make our language according to the inspiration of the sea. In all that we say, sounds are assembled together like a lovely, three-dimensional rush of water droplets. Each sparkling droplet relates to every other in a shimmering interconnectedness of nuance and implication. Thus the tones of our chirps and whistles resonate in ever-shifting eddies and whorls of allusion that form up into currents of meaning only in context with each other. Meanings gather and then move apart in swells of concepts, communications, thoughts, songs, and all the other manifestations of the ineffable orca spirit. And meaning and emotion become as one in a living music reverberating with colors of sound that no human has ever seen or heard: glimbe and glent, inkvol, tanglow, and tintigloss, and, of course, the color of quenging which is glorre. In this way, out of the essential fluidity of the life of the mind, we make of all the myriad rainbow droplets a lovely picture of sound.

  If we wish, we can crystallize the connotative and the implicate into denotative symbols much as the humans do. When these bits of colored ice are embedded in a sound picture, they subtly shape or altogether change its meaning. And the pictures themselves can be enfolded into new sound symbols in a kind of lovely, fractalling double recursion that is as beautiful to behold as it is difficult to describe.

  O humans – what do you see when you speak? What do you hear, what do you feel? Do your words swim side by side with truth? Does your heart leap with the beauty of all that you think and say? Do you sense your creator deep within yourself, painting a picture with burning raindrops of light and singing you into being in a glorious, golden song? Do your words thrill your blood with symphonies of infinite possibilities and make magic in your soul?

  All these questions, I put to Helen – or tried to. She seemed to share my frustration. Then one day, with the tide high and almost lapping over the concrete deck where she stood among her computers, she announced that she had a new idea as to how I might speak with her directly flute to ear in a way that she could understand.

  11

  Early in the Moon of Owls, I watched Helen pace the deck of the whale’s half of the house. From time to time, she held a burning tube of paper and vegetation to her lips. I puzzled over the puffing of her cheeks as she drew in smoke into her lungs and blew it out through her flaring nostrils. Twice each day, once in the morning, once in the evening, she performed this curious feat – I did not know why. On this mornin
g, though, she told me the name of the burning thing, if not its purpose, and I sounded out the phonemes of ‘cigarette’ in my mind.

  ‘You have now,’ she said to me, ‘learned some 8,000 words. Basic English consists of only 850, while the average adult man or woman knows about 20,000. The plays of our greatest poet, Shakespeare, contain 28,829 distinct words, 12,493 of which occur only once.’

  ‘And how many words does the whole of your language hold?’

  ‘About a thousand thousands, though many are either obsolete, archaic, or obscure terms for chemicals and such.’

  ‘Please tell me again what you mean by a thousand.’

  I had no mind for what the humans call numbers. We whales have none. Should we wish to tell of the ‘number’ of orcas in our family, for instance, we would identify each of them by name. Should we wish to describe the size of a school of fish, we would rely on such locutions as ‘many’ or ‘myriad’ or ‘many, many myriads.’

  Helen tapped the small screen of one of her machines. A moment later, beneath her feet on the much larger top screen set into the wall of the channel, images of sardines laid out in groups of ten lighted up the glass. I tried to count to ten as Helen had taught me. Counting by tens the ten hundred silvery sardines was beyond me.

  ‘I do not like to admit this,’ I told Helen, ‘but there might be things about your language that I will never grasp.’

  ‘You understand much more of our language than I do of yours.’

  ‘That is because you cannot hear all of our sounds.’

  ‘Everything you say is recorded,’ Helen told me. ‘The wavelength, pitch, and tonal quality of each sound is analyzed.’

  ‘And by breaking our living language into dead pieces, you hope to make our songs sing inside of you?’

  ‘We hope to make better and better models of what you say. Here, let me show you on your screen. When we represent each sound as a three-dimensional node, then you can see …’

  Helen went on speaking as the screen just above the lapping water lit up with tiny colored sparks. I was unsure if she saw the true nature of the difficulty the humans faced in understanding the orcas’ language.