Idiot Gods, The

by Zindell, David

  Before I had the opportunity to do so, however, as I was working with a new linguist whom Helen had invited to the Institute, I chanced upon a new word whose like I had never zanged: schadenfreude. Until that day I had avoided learning German, for I saw it as the language of Wagner and his bombastic music and Auschwitz. But if I was to craft a new language for the humans, shouldn’t I understand one that contained such a disturbing conception as schadenfreude? Schadenfreude: to take joy at the disasters that befall others.

  So alien to my orca mind was this perverting of joy that I could barely think the thought. I considered swimming at speed straight into one of the channel’s hideous screens in order to ram it from my head. How could any sentient being celebrate another’s pain?

  True, many creatures of the sea inflict wounds or even death on others of their kind in their pursuit of females or prey. They do so, though, only from their deep urge to mate and eat, not from any desire to wreak suffering upon another, much less to relish it. True, we orcas do know great joy when we slay a salmon or a seal, but not because our ecstasy derives from another being’s agony. If we could slay and eat without causing suffering, we would.

  How different the humans were! How angry, how bitter, how sick!

  At first, I wanted to attribute the conception of schadenfreude to something vile in the Germans and their language, and so hope that the madness of the word had passed other peoples by. It was not so. I discovered that schadenfreude had a universal appeal. It resonated so deeply with a chord inside many humans that speakers of other languages such as English, French, Russian, and Swedish had adopted the word with glee.

  With glee! Human beings took a sick joy in the taking of joy at the anguish of others! Some even thought this was cute. I considered the implications of schadenfreude to be cataclysmic: for the word itself in its harsh sounds bespoke a great wrongness at the center of the human heart.

  How I wished I was wrong in my zanging of this wrongness! How I hoped to find that all languages shoot out from a single fountain of truth, as marvelous to behold as the white, yellow, red, and blue stars that spray out from the galactic center! Why should the languages of the humans be any different from those of the whales, or indeed, of any creature or thing? Does not each grain of sand and each water molecule sing of the universe’s immense beauty and goodness? How could it not be so with human beings?

  Why, I asked the waters through which I swam, did the humans sing so passionately of glory and war? How had the worm of sadism twisted its way inside them? Why had the sludge of resentment of others befouled their blood? What would keep the gangrene of their bitterness of life from rotting their hands, their hearts, and their souls, and all that they touched?

  I wondered if there might be some deeper sanity, pattern, or purpose beneath the humans’ seeming madness – something so deep that I could not as yet zang it. If that were so, how would I ever be able to see what I could not see?

  ‘You know the truth,’ I heard my Grandmother whisper to me through the quiet water. ‘If a whale has the courage to dive down deeply enough, he can always hear it.’

  When I listened inside myself, I heard only the shriek of a crazy-making cacophony, like a hundred symphonies blaring out simultaneously from brass horns, cymbals, and other raucous instruments. However, I could feel the truth quivering with vicious life inside me. The shark thrashed in my belly and would never again be stilled.

  What was I to do? It seemed to me that I had only three choices: I could hope the foolish hope that the bitter burn of the acid of my own furor would somehow kill the shark. I could allow it to eat its way through me and so be destroyed. Or I could simply open my mouth and let it out.

  12

  My agonizing over the humans and their ways occasioned many conversations with Unukalhai and the other orcas. We re-argued debates that had been old long before the humans came down from the trees of their mother continent and abandoned the primeval forest and their monkey-like cousins who lived there. Many of our explorations centered around questions of basic epistemology: What is truth? How do we recognize and know it? How do we open our minds in order to accept what we know? And how do we then act upon the gnosis that has suffused every cove and corner of our being?

  We often spoke together of such things out in the moon-washed waters of the bay when the sleep-drugged humans collapsed into the totality of their nightly unconsciousness. After much discussion, it became clear that we did not really know very much about the humans and their world. We had depended on so little to inform us of the humans: the lexicons of many dictionaries, the instruction of Helen and other linguists, and those images and sounds that Helen allowed us to take in from the ever-glowing and ever-blaring screens. Did they really, for instance, dwell in vast cities, each of which contained more human beings than all the orcas who lived in the sea? Had they really set fire to children with napalm and used a similar flame to sail up to the moon? And what of schadenfreude? Did this terrible word perhaps resonate with chords that we orcas could not hear? We all longed for a better and more direct experience of the manswarms that crowded the interiors of the dark, unknown continents. Short of regrowing legs and retracing the steps of our ancestors who had left the land eons before, however, we would never look upon the humans beyond the world’s seas and coasts with our own eyes and sonar, unless it was from the vantage of the pools of Sea Circus and other such places.

  How, then, were we ever to know the truth about humans? Part of the answer to this question, we decided, might lie in one of the artifacts crafted by human hands and inspired by human minds. We all had at least some experience of books. Our acquisition of words in the many languages that we learned often led to questions that Helen and the other linguists answered through reading from one book on another. It was a natural next step for us whales to answer questions ourselves through choosing which books to ‘read’ on our own.

  In a way, the absorption of a book’s meat into one’s body and brain proved to be a better way of understanding the humans’ world than was a direct experience of it. Books could embrace more of the world than any one being could ever apprehend. Then, too, books are doorways to the mind – to the minds of others and the mind of the cosmos itself. Is not the life of the mind, in a sense, more immediate than any of the quotidian happenstances of journeying, speaking, eating, excreting, and the like? Are not the minds of others like lenses that let in aspects of reality that one might not be able to perceive oneself? And don’t these cognitive lenses also therefore concentrate and intensify that which is known and make it more real?

  So it is with us whales, who have the rhapsodies of our Old Ones and the Song of Life. The humans have the distillation of their species’ knowledge, wisdom, failures, experiences, and realizations into books. So many, many books – there might have been a million of them! We whales who had survived the pools of Sea Circus, along with Kitalpha and Hyadum, resolved to drink in as many of these books as we could.

  How, though, were we to accomplish this feat? We could not read as the humans do, for our eyes could not sort out the chaos of markings by which the humans presented the sounds and words of their various languages. Helen helped us overcome this limitation. Once we had conveyed to her our desire and our ensuing frustration, she provided the substance of books to us in the simplest of ways: she and Gabi – the other linguists, too – would sit along the concrete rim of the channel reading aloud to us whales waiting below in the water that lapped in from the bay. Through the Moon of Midnight Wanderings and the Moon of Hope, the humans gave us words from their books.

  One evening, after Gabi had recited the story of how the humans had long ago looked up from the planet that we share and had reached out their hands toward the stars, we whales held a conclave out in the private waters of a cove across the Sound. And Baby Electra, who could be as dramatic as she was impatient, called out from beneath the midnight moon: ‘This is going so slowly! For the humans to read us their books will take a million years.�
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  ‘I do not know why we bother,’ Alkurah said. ‘So much of what we have heard cannot be true. Who has ever seen one of these dragons that fly on wings like those of birds and breathe out fire? What whale, in all the eons that we have explored all the waters of Ocean, has ever encountered a creature as hideous as a mermaid?’

  She, like the rest of us, had trouble distinguishing the humans’ fictions from more factual accounts of their kind. When I reminded her that Gabi’s reading about dancing dragons surely must belong to the realm of fiction, Alkurah zanged a long whistle toward the sky and said, ‘Very well. But what is a whale to think of Gabi’s assertion that the humans have journeyed to the moon? How could they have swum up so high if they cannot quenge and therefore open the superluminal waters of space and time?’

  ‘It may be,’ I said, preparing myself to speak words that astonished me, ‘that the making and reading of the humans’ fictions is a kind of quenging. Or, at least, a pale echo of it.’

  ‘But how can you think that?’ Baby Electra called out. ‘Quenging concerns the knowing of truth. The becoming of all that is real and thus the being of all things. A fiction, by the definition that I learned, is necessarily false.’

  ‘It may be,’ I said, ‘that the humans have found a way, a way we never imagined, of using the false to reveal the true, much as their machines tear through the tissues of the earth in order to uncover diamonds and gold.’

  This, I went on to say, would accord with all we knew of human perversity and the paradox of their kind: the way they twisted good into evil and yet managed, for instance, to make out of the murder of trees the papery substance on which they inscribed their wondrous books.

  ‘What truth, then,’ Alkurah asked me, zanging the round, red orb that hung low in the sky, ‘can the humans twist out of the obvious fabulation of fire-breathing ships that rocket up to the moon? And that men have walked on the moon? That has to be a lie. The humans so often lie.’

  ‘But we have seen these rocket ships!’ Baby Electra said. ‘The images of them that Gabi has shown us.’

  ‘Images can be fancied,’ Alkurah said, ‘in the same way that the humans concoct their fictions.’

  ‘It may be,’ I said, ‘that we still do not know enough about the humans to know what is real and what is not. We need to read more.’

  ‘I would not want ever again to read one of their fictions,’ Alkurah said.

  ‘Then perhaps the learning of the humans’ history,’ I said, ‘would be more to your liking.’

  ‘It would! It would! As much as I would like to learn anything about the humans!’

  We had discovered that much as the humans divide up their conception of reality and freeze it into inert, icy words, they section off their knowledge of the world into fragments of understanding that they call disciplines.

  ‘All right, then,’ I said, ‘as Baby Electra has observed, there are millions of books and many, many disciplines. Why don’t we divide up our researches, even as the humans do?’

  The other orcas agreed to this. I would delve as deeply as I could into human literature, religion, and linguistics, while Unukalhai applied his mind to psychology and what the humans thought of as science. Alkurah, who had the keenest eyes of any of us, was to take in the humans’ visual arts in addition to their histories. Zavijah would be responsible for anthropology and medicine, and Salm for economics and ecology. Bellatrix would listen to the humans’ music. As well, she would try to understand semiotics. To Kitalpha went the study of that strange conception called mathematics, and to Hyadum, politics and law. Baby Electra, who actually liked watching the images flickering across the Institute’s many screens, would try to make sense of the jumble of songs, shriekings, stories, murders, gossip, opinions, conceits, and contests that compose the humans’ popular culture. We realized, of course, that it would be a kind of madness to restrict ourselves to learning only specific disciplines, and so we decided that whenever necessary, any of us would be free to venture where our knowledge quest led us without worrying that we might be impinging on another’s territory.

  We set to our new work with determination if not complete enthusiasm. The sheer volume of the humans’ books daunted us. So many pools of knowledge beckoned us to drink from them! And the reading aloud of books, as Gabi and the others practiced it, progressed so excruciatingly slowly:

  ‘Call wait wait wait me wait wait wait-almost-forever wait wait Ishmael …’

  Helen, who had shaped much of her life around the solving of problems, overcame ours by playing for us books that other humans far away had recorded on their various contraptions and playing them at high speed, just as she had the lists of vocabulary that we had memorized. Thus the voices to which we listened came out as high and squeaky, as if the human speakers had breathed in helium from one of their balloons. Helen also discovered that most of us orcas could drink in from two to ten books simultaneously, depending on their language, content, and complexity. We each took up stations in parts of the channel, and claimed one of the screens as personal territory. We each tuned out the words of another’s book that issued from a screen’s associated hydrophone. For one of the two-leggeds therefore to enter the whales’ half of the domed Institute when Alkurah, Unukalhai, Baby Electra, and the rest of us busied ourselves in reading in this way was to be plunged into a madhouse of cries, calls, shrills, and shrieks. For us of the sea, however, it was like swimming to another world.

  As we absorbed more and more books, another problem arose from the didactic deeps. It seemed to be the nature of books that the reading of one led to a desire to plunge into another in an ocean of interconnecting currents of knowledge that partook of the marvelous complexity of one of our rhapsodies. We could, not, however, read whatever books that our journeys into the human noosphere called us to request of Helen, for it turned out that only a fraction of all books ever written had been rendered into human voices.

  ‘I would like,’ I said to Helen one day, ‘to read “Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex”.’

  What I actually spoke were orca trills and chirrups that Helen mentally translated into the syllables of Wordsong:

  Ju quavo lati shido li myushina e tlöno li bodo nadla Esekes.

  ‘I see,’ she said in plain English, ‘but what if that particular title has not been recorded?’

  I zanged undertones of stress in her controlled and well-modulated voice – and zanged as well a hint of evasion.

  ‘So many books have not been recorded! But this one I need to read.’

  ‘I will see what I can do.’

  ‘Can you not simply ask another of your kind to record this book? There are so many millions of you! More, I think, than all the books in the world.’

  ‘It is not so simple,’ she said. ‘There might be a question of copyright.’

  Because I knew of this word but did not really understand it, I said, ‘You mean the right of some entity to claim a part of the noosphere of all human knowledge and to keep it from others much as a barbarian in the desert guards a well from others who are thirsty?’

  ‘It would be kinder to say that copyright keeps the well full and protects if for others.’

  ‘Kinder, perhaps, but I think less true.’

  ‘There is also the matter of compensation,’ she said. ‘Most people who record books for others wish to be paid for their efforts.’

  ‘Can you not find such people then and pay them?’

  ‘We have nearly exhausted our budget for the year by bringing in the other linguists. I am afraid we haven’t much money left.’

  I thought about this for a while. Then I said, ‘Please tell me again about money.’

  As many times as Helen had tried to explain the concept to me, I still did not really grasp it. Words such as fiduciary, debt, leverage, medium, exchange, fungible, account, store, and value spun about in my mind like so much debris caught in a whirlpool. Although I had experienced money in vari
ous of its physical forms – paper, coins, gold, cigarettes, and others – its meaning seemed always to elude me like a silvery rocket fish swimming always just a little faster than I did.

  Most often, I thought of money as a kind of symbolic and actual excrescence (the humans sometimes make their money out of plastic). Like plastic, money has served many purposes and is wholly artificial. It possesses a sort of spiritual taint to match the physical unpleasantness of a dirty dollar bill. And the humans excrete it everywhere in a clog of pollution that cloys every aspect of their societies. The humans dream of money and work for it. They invest it and gamble it away. They trade for it in the precious and non-refundable coin of vitality and time. Nearly everywhere on earth, men and women scheme for it, lie for it, cheat for it, murder for it. Aside from making war and sex and consuming food and water and the very earth itself, the getting of money seemed to be the primary human activity.

  Sometimes, however, I saw money as something like what we whales know as love. It passes from human to human like a marvelous substance that binds them into close relationships. The humans speak of debts and credits – was this not similar to the gratitude I felt toward my family and their obligation to me? The humans spend their money (even as we do love) on the things they value most: cars, TVs, houses, rifles, tanks. Upon the births of their babies, they give money to invest and grow much as we feed our youngest ones milk.

  While Salm tried to comprehend the mystery (and the madness) of money through her study of economics, even as Baby Electra did by watching movies, I sought understanding of the humans’ shekels, shillings, dollars, and drachmas in literature. One night, as a shark-shaped cloud gnawed at the moon high above the Institute, I chanced upon a great novel, one that a great number of humans held in the highest esteem.