Idiot Gods, The

by Zindell, David

  With my growing lexicon came a growing disquiet. I tried to distract myself from the truth coiled up inside me and not quite ready to come out into the light of full recognition. I tried to augment my study of the humans’ spoken language with a deciphering of their written words. However, I could not see very well the many turns and twists of their letters, which appeared to my orca eye like swarms of ants. I had no head for reading, as the humans called it, and I never learned this strange art.

  And so I returned to absorbing the sounds of the humans’ words, and I saw how each word was like a mirror reflecting all the others. I found my way through more and more words that had perplexed me and whose meanings I had not really wanted to comprehend. It was not just that these particular words had no correlation with my orca conception or experience with the world, but that they seemed to violate every orca esthetic and our natural sense of how the world was and would always be:

  Vice. Vigorish. Debauchery. Chastity. Pederasty. Animality. Bestiality. Puritan. Lawyer. Devil. Saint. Bodhisattva. Karma. Sin. Salvation. Priest. Priest-king.

  And more repugnant words:

  President. Lord. Gods. God. Goddamn. Curse. Crusade. Gladiator. Barbarian. Barbed wire. Concentration camp. Alms. Napalm. Gas chamber. War.

  The word war buzzed inside me as if I had swallowed a chainsaw. I asked Helen why she had never shown me images of what seemed to be an unbelievable conception. Nor had her screens illustrated heaven and hell, blasphemy and exorcism and crucifixion and many other heretofore dimly understood words.

  ‘I am sorry, Clever One,’ Helen said to me. ‘But it is not really possible to find images of certain human words.’

  I zanged hesitation and equivocation in her voice. So, apparently, did Gabi, who stood a few body lengths from Helen doing something with one of the humans’ computers. She stepped over to Helen with such alacrity that her flaming red hair flounced in the force of the little wind that her motion made.

  ‘But we can find images of war,’ she said, ‘if that is what Bobo really wants to see.’

  ‘I am not sure that would be wise,’ Helen said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They might upset him.’

  ‘We show movies of men getting blown apart to our children.’

  ‘Yes – and do you think that is wise?’

  ‘Bobo is a killer whale,’ Gabi said. ‘Do you think he hasn’t ripped animals apart?’

  ‘It is one thing to kill in order to live,’ Helen replied. ‘But in our wars, we live to kill. Making images out of our depravity is worse than pornography.’

  Depravity, gravity, bipedality, brutality, lethality, I thought.

  I had learned that Helen had a quicker and more capacious mind than had Gabi, but Gabi had a quicker heart. She touched her hand to Helen’s shoulder and said, ‘I’m getting the feeling that it’s you who doesn’t want to see those kinds of things.’

  ‘I can’t keep anything from you, can I?’ Helen said.

  ‘Then I’ll sort through the images if you don’t want to.’

  ‘I am not sure this is necessary.’

  ‘But wasn’t it you who said that we shouldn’t withhold the truth from the whales?’

  I swam in close to where Gabi and Helen stood regarding each other on the channel’s deck. I came up out of the water, spyhopping to look into Helen’s eyes, and I spoke a few simple words into the air:

  ‘Yes, yes, brave humans – please tell me the truth.’

  Later that day, in that domed space of cruel echoes and horrible flashes of light, I worked alone with Gabi, and she showed me images of war:

  Machine guns. Trenches. Tanks. Torture. Dresden. Napalm. Rocket. Refugee. Amputee. Decapitation. Omaha Beach. Nanking. Auschwitz. Hellfire. Hiroshima.

  I watched and listened and denied, and I shuddered hour after hour. I could not turn away from the images on the screens and their accompanying sounds. Words that I had barely understood now zanged deep into my blood. I had asked for the truth, and the truth had been given to me. The shark that I had swallowed in learning the first human word many, many days before began tearing at my insides with its shrapnel teeth and eating its way out of my belly.

  In an attempt to escape the inescapable agony inflicted by hands wielding truncheons, tasers, swords, garrotes, and gas, I swam out into the bay to rejoin the other whales. The air had grown dank with the fall of night, but the water had lit up with a brilliance of sonar zangs and laughter. The entire family gamboled through an undulating kelp forest thick with pulsing jellyfish. Zavijah, Electra, and the newcomer Hyadum danced about in erotic play, and so did Alkurah and Kitalpha, who had taken a liking to each other. Of course, since Kitalpha might decide to join our hodgepodge family where the three brothers had not, Alkurah could not very well mate with him. However, nothing prevented her from nuzzling, fondling, and stroking him in moans of pleasure which flowed out into the water in bright bands of tanglow and glent.

  ‘O what a mighty Mars is this!’ she crooned to him.

  They were playing a game that he had learned from the humans. It depended on the strange idea that certain human words could become tainted by aspects of life the humans disliked and so became taboo. In a refined dialect of English known as Cockney, speakers would often try to hide the true substance of their utterances – usually ‘dirty’ or derogative words – from strangers and prudes. We whales found the concealing of meaning to be a novel twisting of language: a way of lying without outright lying.

  The game’s rules were simple. An objectionable word – the humans had more than a thousand for sexual intercourse alone – would be identified. For instance, the word for such a basic body part as prick. Then two other words that paired naturally would be selected: such as Moby Dick; prick. Then the last word in the pair would be dropped, and a speaker of Cockney might say something like: ‘Look at the Moby on that horse!’ Those in the know would mentally pair Moby with its associated, omitted word and make the rhyme with the real word that they wished to convey.

  Thus Mars and Venus became truncated to simply Mars, which connoted penis. And the encoding of trick or treat into the slang bit off the treat, which rhymed with meat.

  ‘I do adore your treat,’ I heard Alkurah say, rubbing herself along Kitalpha.

  Now she had inverted trick or treat to treat or trick, and had left off the trick, whose rhyme leaped out in my mind as Kitalpha’s Moby did from this belly.

  ‘I cannot decide which I like more, your trick or your treat.’

  At no loss for words (no whale ever is), Kitalpha responded in kind by caressing Alkurah and saying, ‘O what a treat it would be to find its way into your blue-suede.’

  ‘Were you not considering joining us,’ Alkurah said, ‘I would play the most mellifluous of melodies upon your fiddle. I am sure your key would fit me perfectly.’

  It pleased me that the other whales had learned nearly as much English as had I. I swam slowly through the caressing strands of kelp, waiting for the word and sex dance to play itself out. Beneath the midnight waves, I watched the octopi transforming themselves into shapes like rocks and driftwood and other features of the bay’s bottom. For hour after hour, the jellyfish pulsed in translucent wonder, and sometimes, the anemones came by and consumed them.

  Toward morning I finally had the chance to tell the other orcas what I had seen and learned of human war. I had almost expected that they would not believe me. So it surprised me when Unukalhai, speaking for the others, said, ‘We have known of human harpoons for all the years that the killer apes have made war upon us. That they have fabricated more terrible weapons of slaughter seems a logical trajectory in their rise and fall.’

  I noted his emphasis on the word ‘fall.’ I said, ‘It is one thing for the humans to hunt us, for they know nothing of the Great Covenant. Who would have supposed, however, that they slaughter each other million by million?’

  ‘They cannot slaughter each other too quickly,’ Zavijah said. ‘Perhaps they will slay d
own to the last woman and child, and not one will remain to imprison and torture my Baby Navi, wherever he is.’

  ‘We would understand if you are finished talking with the humans,’ Alkurah said to me. ‘Say the word, and we will journey together to another place.’

  With the starlight raining down upon the quiet waters of the bay in tiny pings of tintigloss, I considered what Alkurah proposed. Through a miracle of mutual accord and machinery, we had managed to speak with at least some of the humans, but did we really understand each other? Had I persuaded any of them – even Helen and Gabi – that they must cease their torment of Ocean and all the creatures who dwelled in Her living waters? If I did not accomplish this, how would our world ever be healed of the harpoon thrust deep into its heart? And how would I myself be healed of the evil substance that still fouled my blood and kept me from quenging?

  ‘I am not ready to leave,’ I said to Alkurah and the others. I did not like the dread in my voice that filled the water or the movements of the shark in my belly. ‘I would know first how humans can make war on each other. So many of them there are, and so many languages they speak.’

  ‘Helen has said,’ Baby Electra nodded, ‘that there are more than 6,000 human languages, but I do not understand this number or how that can be.’

  ‘I would know these languages, some of them,’ I said. ‘It may be that the secret of the humans’ savagery lies hidden in one of them, in the same way that Cockney conceals words that cause humans shame.’

  In the next dozen days, I completed my acquisition of English, memorizing all but a few of its hundreds of thousands of words. Most of those I avoided were terms for chemical compounds such as polymethylene and polychlorinated dibenzofurans that seemed useless to me. A day came when I asked Helen to begin teaching me other languages. She did so with a smile upon her broad lips and pride enlivening her bright black eyes.

  She began with languages that she knew and that had a somewhat close association with English: French. Italian. Latin. Spanish. Greek. Hindi. Now that English and its associated images had become established in my mind, it was a simple process to match words in a new language to those of English – at least, those words that could be correlated or even equated. Thus I gained vocabulary quickly. Understanding and applying the syntax that ordered these words and brought out their meanings proved to be only slightly more difficult, for I discovered that all human languages shared a universal grammar.

  With each language that I acquired, I swam through the next with greater agility. French had taken me a month to master, while Arabic, Fur, Beja, Dinka, and Songhay – the languages of Helen’s childhood – came more quickly.

  Because I still had not uncovered the secret to understanding the humans (or so I thought), I asked Helen to teach me other languages. This posed something of a problem, for how could she teach what she did not herself know? She solved it by inviting other linguists to the Institute. These women and men stood on the deck above me calling out phrases in Finnish or Basque, which I then repeated with some of the sounds used in Wordsong and which Helen’s freshly reprogrammed computers translated. Helen discovered that she could accelerate the process by asking native speakers of a particular language to record their words. She played the recordings back to me at high speed, which had the ancillary benefit of shifting pitches to higher frequencies that came more naturally to my hearing. In this way, I learned Tagalog in a day. Chinese, with its music of rising and falling tones, took twice as long.

  Sometime after I had tucked my seventy-seventh language into my metaphoric belt, I realized that I had been too hasty in my assessment of how the humans perceive the world. Each language, I learned, is like a sound filter which lets in various aspects of reality while tuning others out. I discovered languages that are nearly as different from English as Orcalish is from the speech of the deep gods. These languages – at least certain features of them – I loved. Silbo, for instance, consists entirely of whistles that can be heard from one ridge or valley to the next by its ‘speakers’ who wish to communicate with far-off members of their clan. Pirahã has no words for colors, and the Pirahãns seem able to communicate without words at all by translating their phonetic tones into a series of whistles and hums. The language called !Xóõ, or Taa, has 164 consonants of which 111 are clicks. In Archi, any verb can have more than a million separate conjugations depending on how it is used. Something similar occurs in Yupik. The speakers of this beguiling tongue can create words for precise situations, even as we orcas do. And as with Orcalish, none of the resultant Yupik word parts make sense unless used in a specific word in context with others.

  It came to me that my supposition of an essential human pathology might have been wrong. I had worried that the atomization of human languages into separate words mirrored the atomization of the humans’ separate selves and their individual consciousnesses, thus leading to alienation and a sense of separation from the natural world. My learning of Pirahã, Yupik, and other languages gave me to understand that not all humans divide up reality into cold, dead pieces as do speakers of English and French.

  On the other hand – and one always had to keep an image of hands close to the mind when contemplating humans and their mysterious ways – the problem of human alienation might have been even worse than I wanted to believe. For nearly all human languages had words for human beings and others for animals. Nearly all, by implication or outright definition, thus elevated human beings above and beyond all other species. It was as if the humans saw themselves as forming the apex of a pyramid of life whose only purpose lay in supporting the great density of humans and lifting them up higher toward the sun.

  This was madness. I wanted no part of it. How, though, was I to go on learning more and more about the humans without somehow overcoming this conundrum: to speak a language is to think in that language; to think like a human is to be insane in the way that human beings are.

  One day, while Unukalhai and I swam through the bay’s underwater kelp forest, I confessed my fear that the humans would infect me with their arrogance and aloneness as they passed to each other their many plagues. Must I, I asked him, become estranged from the world and so become an enemy of life?

  ‘At our first meeting,’ Unukalhai said as we glided among the swaying strands of kelp, ‘I warned you that contact with the humans would necessitate an imbibing of their essential madness.’

  ‘You did, and I can feel it churning in my belly.’

  ‘It will always be so if you persist in dwelling among the humans. However, in the pools of Sea Circus, you found a way to survive the madness, did you not?’

  Along our journey to the Institute, I had told Unukalhai of my resolve to live within the insanity of the human realm in a sane way.

  ‘This way,’ he now went on, picking up my thoughts as he scratched his white belly on the rocks of bay’s bottom, ‘entails the surrendering of your old self and the ontogenesis of the new. Such self-creation, however, has many perils, yes? This new self of yours, I think, swims alongside the old and is as vulnerable as a baby. You must inoculate it against the virus of the human mind that would infect yours.’

  ‘You give me different advice than you once did.’

  ‘Well, I am a different whale than I once was. I am a little saner, I think, now that I have drunken from the same pool of despair as you and have breathed the breath of your dream. That is why I love you, Arjuna.’

  And I loved him because he had the greatness of soul to become different through the sheer force of will and an openness to new ways of conceiving himself. I loved him all the more because I needed no words for him to hear this appreciation that sounded in the language of the heart.

  ‘How, then,’ I asked him, ‘can I make myself immune to human madness?’

  ‘Do as the humans do with their diseases,’ he said. ‘Kill the viruses of their twisted reasoning with cold orca logic before you set their ideas free within your blood. Or at least weaken the virulence of the human worldvi
ew with the zangs of orca wisdom that the Old Ones sing out inside you. Breathe as one with me and the others, and let the truth you take in quicken the tissues of your being. In this way, you will become stronger – perhaps strong enough to dwell among the humans without losing yourself.’

  Unukalhai’s counsel breathed vitality into a notion that I had been nursing for many days. The many languages that I had learned – from Russian to Diné to Marathi – gave me many new eyes with which to behold the human world. And not just to look upon creation anew, but to conceive it in new ways. What is real, and what is not? How should that which we accept as real be regarded and interpreted?

  One day, as I swam and sang along the rushing waters of the sea with Unukalhai, Alkurah, and the other orcas, it came to me in an irresistible wave of excitement that just as I could and must remake myself, I was free to find a new way of conceiving reality, neither wholly orca nor maddeningly human. Indeed, both modes of creation depended on each other. The fate that had whispered to me through so many moons and miles now called me onward – called me to become something wondrous and new through the zanging of the entire world in a new way. My long journey through the currents of the many human languages had carried me into the bright pool of this realization.

  A new idea rippled through me from head to flukes. What if I could create in Wordsong an entirely new language that partook of all the best and the sanest of the human tongues while incorporating aspects of our orca speech that allowed for a deeper sounding of the world? Why should this not be possible? Doesn’t all language, like life itself, spring from the same universal source? And doesn’t this source, at its very bottom, beat with goodness, beauty, and truth? What if I could teach the humans to truly speak – and thus to hear the truth of their own hearts?

  How this conception thrilled me! In its deeps, I zanged infinite possibilities of mutual accord between the humans and my kind. I heard goodness in much of what the humans had spoken with their lovely lips; I beheld beauty in their incomparable eyes, alive with starfire and all the hope of life. I could not wait to share my epiphany with Helen and Gabi.