Idiot Gods, The

by Zindell, David

  ‘Is this how you see – and hear – your language, by making such models?’

  ‘No, of course not. But the models are getting better, aren’t they?’

  ‘I do not know. When your machines translate the models into what you have identified as orca sounds, most of what comes out of your hydrophones is gibberish.’

  ‘But some is not?’

  ‘Of everything you have spoken to me this way, only an infinitesimal part of a myriad of myriads of gazillions of possibilities have made the slightest sense.’

  ‘We need more time.’

  ‘You need,’ I told her, ‘to understand how which qualities of tones relate to which others – and how they change significance and meaning as they interplay with each other. As it is, you choose the qualities and sounds that you deem the most important to model.’

  ‘But one must identify the variables to be modeled and weigh them according to their likely impact. That is the nature of creating a scientific model.’

  ‘But it is not, beautiful human,’ I said to her, ‘the nature of nature. Such models have nothing to do with how a person makes language and understands it.’

  Helen sat down above me on the lip of the deck. Her dangling feet nearly touched the undulating water. She continued to puff smoke from her cigarette, and she appeared to be deep in thought.

  ‘No,’ she finally said, ‘my models are anything but natural; however, they are all I have.’

  She went on to discuss her understanding of orca language and the difficulties that any translation would pose. To begin with, she said, Orcalish is very high context, full of irony, nuance, and what we whales call ‘negative speech’, in which the most important conveyances of meaning often occur in what is not spoken. To make matters worse, the very slightest of changes in sound – she called these inflections – result in changes of meaning. As she had already identified at least 4,689,554 inflections and almost none of the rules by which they applied, she hypothesized that our orca language contained hidden algorithms that she had so far not managed to model.

  ‘And then,’ she added, ‘there is the matter of these games of yours. What you call the art of thought, or the art of the soul – I am not sure how best to translate the concept. Perhaps rhapsody would do as well as any word.’

  She spoke of a dialect of human language known as Chinese, in which long ago a picture of a tree, for instance, brushed as black ink on white paper, had been simplified into a pictogram enfolding the entire meaning of tree, be it a cherry, a maple, an evergreen or some other kind. A similar process, she theorized, had obtained in Orcalish: our sound pictures became represented by sonograms, which in turn were further abstracted as pure aural symbols that she called sonic ideoplasts.

  ‘As I understand it,’ Helen said to me, ‘these ideoplasts are arrayed into the motifs and movements of the rhapsodies that each orca composes.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘the songs of ourselves and the songs of creation that make up the Song of Life.’

  ‘And each ideoplast can represent a word, idea, thought, emotion, story, philosophy, or song – or even entire assemblages of all those?’

  ‘It is something like that – yes, yes.’

  ‘And when an orca wishes to be accepted as an adult, you must compose a rhapsody that reveals some new beauty or truth about the world?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ I swam up close to her and chirruped nearly into her face. ‘Our families listen to our compositions and deem us adults or not. The Old Ones listen, too.’

  Helen took a long breath through her cigarette. She puffed out a ring of gray smoke that reminded me of the silvery bubble rings that Baby Electra like to blow.

  ‘Very well,’ she finally said, ‘but I still do not understand how these rhapsodies are supposed to relate all aspects of the cosmos to each other – past, present, and future.’

  ‘But how can a truly-made rhapsody not do this?’ I said. ‘Are not all aspects of creation related? And when a whale composes his part of the Song of Life, there is no time, as there is only the eternal now-moment when one quenges, which a whale must do in order to compose.’

  ‘This “quenge” of yours is an interesting word that you have coined for a concept that eludes me.’

  ‘It is not concept. It is … the power of being, the essence of being itself.’

  ‘And how did you apply this power in the rhapsody that you never finished?’

  What could I tell her that she would understand? I was not sure that I understood very well myself.

  ‘There was a day,’ I said, ‘an hour, a moment – one of the signal moments of my life. I was deep into my rhapsody’s penultimate motif. The ideoplasts exemplifying Alsciaukat the Great’s philosophy of being sprayed out with an almost perfect beauty like a cloud of diamonds, rubies, and pearls. The motif’s chords carried me through the seven seas of knowing to the mysterious Silent Sea, lined with coral-like ideoplasts of yellow, magenta, and glorre. The sound there was vast – the music was. I could hear how Alsciaukat’s philosophy resonated with the phases of the moon in its progression from first tooth to crescent to half sphere to full. This insight in turn sent echoes of correspondence to illuminate the Second Sonnet of the Sun that Aldebaran of the Silver Song Surfers had once composed. In the spiral structure of this sonnet, I beheld both the spiral shell of the whelk and our galaxy’s spiral arms. The colors of the rhapsody rang with the movement toward the spirality of many things. I swam along the spiral path that we whales follow from our world to Agathange. I relived the double-spiral of life on earth and Ocean in its journey from the pure beingness in the past to its becoming, now and in eons still unborn. Two glittering arms of life I sang of: the creatures of the water and those which walk upon the land. And just at the moment when my song should have grown as vast and deep as the Silent Sea itself and I should have heard and seen how life on our world should move up the golden spiral, my voice failed me. Because I could not quenge, I lacked the power to zang how the future must and will be – and so I could not finish my composition.’

  Helen had remained almost completely still as I tried to explain to her the nature of sonic ideoplasts, orca language, and our rhapsodies. She moved with a start and a jerk of her hand, however, when her cigarette finally burned down to her fingers. The force of her shaken hand flung the burning bit of tobacco into the channel’s water, which extinguished its fire with a quick hiss.

  ‘Thank you for explaining all that to me,’ she said, ‘though I hope you will not think less of me if I admit that I understood little of it.’

  ‘How could I think less of you than you are? You are quite intelligent, for a human.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I suppose that I must accept that as a compliment.’

  ‘What is a compliment?’ I asked as I scooped the dead cigarette stump into my mouth in order to taste it.

  ‘Well, it is a compliment to your intelligence that you have helped me to see just how complex your language is. I am afraid it might be too complex for a human ever to apprehend.’

  I knew enough about the colors of the human words to hear sadness and longing in her voice. I said to her, ‘Someday I will paint a picture of our utterances for you, and you will understand what I will say.’

  ‘How will you do that?’

  ‘You will see, you will hear, how emotion and sense are bound up in symbol – and each symbol flowing and sharing sense with every other.’

  ‘I hear your words, Beautiful One. I hear your words.’

  ‘You will hear the sound pictures I say to you.’ I spoke into the water, and her machines tried to record my utterances’ every wave form of every tone. ‘You will zang the variegations of emotion, meaning, and ideas, as a painting jumps with different colors and areas of light and dark.’

  ‘O that it would be so!’ she said to me. ‘But how will this miracle come about?’

  ‘I do not know! I do not know!’

  Helen conjured up another cigarette and sat tapp
ing it against her fingers. After a while, she said, ‘I would not like to stake everything on a miracle. However, I like even less giving up. Therefore, it has occurred to me that we might create a language together.’

  She explained that while she could speak English to me and quite easily be understood, every sound I made had to be translated through one of her computers if we were to talk together.

  ‘What if, however,’ she said, ‘we could agree that one set of your natural orca sounds would represent a distinct syllable?’

  ‘But there are trillions of syllables in English!’

  ‘Actually, there are about 15,000 usable English syllables, but that is still far too many for me – or anyone – to have to parse. Sometimes I think I should have begun speaking to you in Japanese.’

  ‘Why – is that a simpler dialect of English?’

  ‘Actually, it is its own language, unintelligible to speakers of English or any other language.’ She touched the cigarette to her lips, then drew it away. ‘And while it contains about 90 syllables and so would be suitable to representation by a syllabary, it is also full of conceptions and conventions – you would think of them as flavors – that are uniquely Japanese.’

  ‘And English does not have these solely English tastes?’

  ‘Of course it does – any language does. That is why I would like for us to make a new language together, one that will partake of the tastes of many languages.’

  She described to me a language called Esperanto, constructed out of elements of phonology, grammar, and vocabulary drawn from various languages around the earth – most of them what she called the Indo-European languages. Millions of the humans spoke it. It served as a sort of world language for those loath to employ English for such a purpose.

  ‘The language I am thinking of,’ she told me, ‘would make use of a much broader base of languages. Japanese and Chinese – Arabic and Tagalog, many others. Most of all, it would incorporate those few elements of your orca language that we do understand. As we develop the language, we can add in additional features.’

  ‘And I would speak this language to you?’

  ‘Yes – though I will not be able to speak it back. And if I am to understand you, we will need to encode each sequence of chirps and whistles and the like in the most basic of ways. You must simplify these sounds nearly to point of triviality if I am to understand them.’

  ‘And I must lay out these sounds one by one like gridlocked automobiles on a highway, yes?’

  ‘Yes, you must.’

  ‘And I must do this slooooowly?’

  ‘I am afraid so.’

  ‘That will be soooo boring!’

  ‘You can enliven the process – and the language – by trying to figure how to incorporate such conceptions as quenge.’

  ‘I have already told you, quenge is not a concept, but rather a—’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know: it is the essence of being. You must find a way to make this essence clear and comprehensible, and to infuse it into the words of our language.’

  ‘Yes, yes – I will!’ I said. ‘Somehow, I will make every word of our language sing!’

  I suggested naming this new language Wordsong, and she agreed to that.

  ‘When can we begin creating Wordsong?’ I asked her.

  ‘Well, I should take a few days to—’

  ‘Now!’ I shouted to her. ‘The essence of being is always now, so why don’t we begin while passion moves us?’

  As soon as we finished the first of what would become our wordstorming sessions, I raced out into the cove to speak with the other whales. All except Baby Electra considered my hope of using Wordsong to help Helen learn Orcalish to be both foolish and futile. As Unukalhai observed, ‘We might learn the humans’ language, after a fashion, but the humans will never make sense of our ideoplasts and hear our rhapsodies, not with a thousand ears and a myriad of myriad of machines.’

  Soon after that, five strange orcas swam into the bay. Two of them, Hyadum and Kitalpha, were sister and brother of the Golden Chord Family of the Ardent Starsinger Clan. Three brothers named Acrux, Gacrux, and Becrux accompanied them. They were also Starsingers, but of the family of Turquoise Romancers. None of the new whales moved very gracefully or quickly, for various wounds had cut their bodies with deep scars. Half of Hyadum’s great dorsal fin seemed to have been bitten off while long ridges of hard cicatrices marred her black skin. Divots pocked Kitalpha’s back. It looked as if the flesh had been scooped – or burned – right out of him. As for the three brothers, their wounds went deeper: although they did not say so outright, it soon became obvious that they were bereft over the recent death of their mother.

  ‘We heard that orcas from other clans, and even other kinds,’ Kitalpha said, zanging Baby Electra with his sonar, ‘had come to this place in order to speak with the humans.’

  ‘That is so,’ Alkurah said, ‘and you are welcome to try to do as we do, for these are your waters. In truth, it is you who should welcome us.’

  ‘That might once have been true,’ Hyadum said in the saddest voice I had ever heard, ‘but our family has left these waters – or, I should say, the waters have left us.’

  In this way, she spoke of death, and in the silences that broke her lamentation, we learned that not only were Hyadum and Kitalpha the last of the Golden Chord Family, but that all the other orcas of the Ardent Starsingers save the brothers Acrux, Gacrux, and Becrux had been wiped out.

  ‘Tell us what happened,’ Alkurah said to Hyadum.

  ‘It is a long story,’ Hyadum said.

  ‘That is all right,’ Alkurah replied, brushing up against this stranger in order to give her a little comfort. Since Alkurah’s release from Sea Circus, her essential kindness had leaped out in much the same way that a tone painting’s positive and negative spaces can suddenly reverse themselves upon the invocation of single right thought. ‘We have days and days in which to listen.’

  After the Starsingers had related their woes, and we told them ours, we asked them to join us in our endeavor of speaking with the humans. Kitalpha and Hyadum assented to what seemed to them an intriguing though somewhat repellent notion. The three brothers of the Turquoise Romancers, however, declined our invitation. They wanted nothing more to do with the humans. They would keep on swimming, Acrux told us, until they came to pristine seas empty of humans.

  ‘I do not think you will find any such seas,’ I said, ‘but if you do, I would like to know where they are.’

  ‘I think you will find the death you seek,’ Alkurah said to them, ‘so before you go, will you fill me with your life that I might remember you?’

  She told them that she would kemmer the following morning, and asked them to delay their journey. They agreed to this. For three days, the cove rippled with the motions of their bodies and rang out with cries of pleasure. The brothers sang to Alkurah the most beautiful and compelling of songs. As they mated with her one after the other through long hours of light and dark, her strong, clear voice sang back and sweetened the waters: ‘Again, again, beautiful whales, again! Fill me again until I can hold no more and I burst!’

  When it finally came time for them to leave, we all felt sad at the quietening of the sea. We wished Acrux, Gacrux, and Becrux well, and watched them swim off. Then, as Alkurah savored their seed and the music they had given her, as she swam about the cove doing little leaps of happiness and singing of a mighty mating, I decided to return to my acquisition of the humans’ language – and to the creation of a new one with Helen.

  For days and days I listened to the words of the language called English and gave back the sounds that Helen and I had agreed would equate to them. We both felt impatient for me to speak Wordsong to her, but for the present we still needed to rely on her computer’s translation of what I said into English. It occurred to both of us that the better that I understood English, the more help I would be in our mutual construction of Wordsong, for the learning of one language opens gateways to others. And so I s
et about trying to drink in and comprehend as many strange and nearly incomprehensible English words as I could:

  Mathematics. Computer. Phone. Hyperbola. Hyperbole. Engine. Mechanics. Technics. Electron. Neutron. Proton. Quark. Freon. Argon. Neon. Phlogiston. Pentagon. Cyclotron. Jargon. Walkathon.

  Alkurah’s embrace of a gladsome fecundity seemed to have called in an early spring. With the warming of the air and the water, and with our world’s equipoise in its eternal dance about the sun, the herring arrived in all their myriad millions. Even as we orcas feasted upon them, the glittering schools of fish spawned, for they, too, felt all the urges of life’s most urgent season. They could not escape us, even though each school broke into a frenzy of motion when we approached, roiling the water in a whirling silver cloud as each herring sought safety in its center. And we could not get away from them. The shallows of the bay and its various nooks and coves turned a milky white with herring sperm. White herring eggs, like billions of tiny pearls, encrusted the rocks and deadwood and everything else that touched the water. The gulls swooped down in screeching, flapping white flocks to eat the eggs. Beneath the water, sunflower stars scavenged the dead herring that had sifted down to the coves’ bottom.

  The other scientists and their interns – I hoped I used these words correctly – had a hard work of keeping the channel’s screens scrubbed clean of eggs and sperm so that we orcas could continue our studies. We needed, however, to continue matching images of the humans’ world to their words, and this we did. A day came when Helen announced that I had learned 15,000 words, and in late spring, she let me know that my word count had doubled that figure, and so I surpassed the working vocabulary of the Shakespeare. After that, the humans’ words rushed into my mind with all the fury and force of the herring, filling me with a whirl of understanding:

  Tenure. Leisure. Woozy. Wizard. Skullduggery. Vulgarity. Tame. Tattletale. Money. Invisible Hand. Wealth. Plutocrat. Poverty. Debt. Bank. Banker. Bankruptcy. Eviction. Homeless. Hypothermia. Corpsicle. Maniacal. Mankind.