Idiot Gods, The

by Zindell, David

  At first reading, it seemed a glorification of human selfishness and an exhortation that people should live solely for the furthering of their individual interests. The story concerned a family of wealthy men who desire to become even more wealthy and powerful. To achieve this end (at the expense of others), they hoard their wealth and remove this precious communal fuel from the grasp of others. This causes human societies to collapse. People begin to starve. The hoi polloi then finally perceive that they need the wealthy men and their money if they are to go on living their miserable lives. And so the wealthy men use the crisis that they themselves have generated in order to persuade the rest of humanity that they should be allowed to become even more wealthy.

  Upon my second reading of this apparently execrable book, however, I began to realize an extraordinary thing. The novel seemed to be a paean to greed and cruelty, suffused as it was with hate and a subhuman image of man. It seemed to put forth the crazy idea that the vilest of men acting out of the vilest of impulses would somehow create the best of all worlds. Of course, no sane person could believe such a lie. And that, I decided, must be the real point of the book. Anyone reading it – any woman or man of heart – would understand the terrible consequences of human selfishness and the essential depravity of the human race. And in doing so, they would be driven to find a better way for themselves and their world.

  What a genius was the author of this astonishing book! I had not imagined that humans could be so subtle in their writings, so persuasive and sublime. I admired the work all the more because the novel’s essential satire hid beneath reams of dreadful prose seemingly meant to be taken deadly seriously. In this, it reminded me of how the ancient alchemists had disguised the universal longing to realize great spiritual truths as a quest to transmute the base metal of lead into sacred gold. Thus the novel bespoke a deep, deep desire of humanity: that the killer apes who bestride every bit of earth on every continent must overcome their most selfish and base impulses and somehow transform their murderousness into something golden and good.

  Even as I congratulated myself on diving down into the secret heart of perhaps the greatest novel that any man or woman had ever typed, I had to admit that other works of literature puzzled me. Certainly not all of these could be taken as satire. I bemoaned the limitations of my cetacean sensibilities. I could not, for instance, tell the difference between the stories in the wondrous book called the Bible and humanity’s many myths. How was it that so many humans, with their smaller brains, found it obvious that the former expressed the deepest truths and facts of the human race while the latter contained nothing but fancies and falseness? What could these people see that I could not?

  The more that I read, the more I became confused about a related matter. I had a hard time zanging the difference between human heroes and monsters. The names of many men – almost always men – echoed throughout the Institute’s dome: Achilles, Alexander, Caesar, Elric, Aragorn, Valashu, Genghis Khan. All had murdered many. And it seemed that the greater the number of bodies cleaved bloody by their swords, the more that other men admired them and wished to accomplish similar feats.

  One blustery afternoon, with bullets of rain breaking upon the glass of the dome above the channel and its rows of seawashed screens, I spoke to Helen about this:

  ‘Do you find any irony,’ I asked her, ‘in your kind’s greatest killers being given the appellation of “Great”? Alexander the Great; Ashoka the Great; Cyrus the Great; Peter the Great; Herod the Great; Timur the Great; Sargon the Great.’

  ‘All those you mentioned,’ Helen said, puffing from a cigarette as she stood above me, ‘did many things besides leading others in battle, where many were unfortunately killed.’

  ‘What of the Viking called Eric Bloodaxe? I suppose that he got his name by building houses for the refugees from the depredations of others?’

  I chided myself for speaking so brusquely. I had opened my mouth to taste human sarcasm and had drunk a little too deeply.

  ‘You mustn’t suppose that everyone,’ Helen said to me, ‘admires Eric Bloodaxe or the Alexanders of the world.’

  I zanged a quickening of her pulse and a tightness of her slender chest, matched by her face’s hardening into a kind of mask that I could not read. She seemed bothered, as she always was, when our conversations veered toward human violence or war. And so she changed the subject under discussion – or rather, she segued into a side stream of it:

  ‘How do you orcas come by your names? I have never thought to ask you that.’

  ‘We are named after stars,’ I said to her.

  Then I called out the sounds of my name, which her machines could record but her mind could not parse. And no syllables of Wordsong had I ever assigned to represent the music of the star that was sacred to me.

  ‘I wish I knew which star you meant by that.’

  ‘I wish I could take you there to look upon it.’

  ‘Can you point it out to me?’

  ‘I cannot point, Helen.’

  She laughed at this, a rare respite into an expression of humor that she seemed not to want to allow herself.

  ‘Perhaps you can point with your words, and I can help you.’

  That evening, the storm blew away to reveal a clean sky brilliant with many stars. We went outside, and Helen sat on a blanket that she spread over the beach while I floated upon the gentled waves. Helen had brought a book with her and a flashlight. Her eyes danced from sky to book and then back up along the lights of the heavens.

  ‘Do you see that bright orange star off to your left?’ I asked her.

  ‘I can see many bright stars,’ she said, letting her head fall backward toward her shoulders. ‘I cannot really make out their colors. How is it that you, with a whale’s eyes, can?’

  ‘Do you see the three stars lined up like diamonds on a ring?’

  ‘Might you mean Orion’s belt?’ she said, pointing upward.

  With my eyesight, so much poorer than a human’s, I tried to look along the line of her dark finger, made nearly invisible by the blackness of the night.

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ I said. ‘Now follow the three stars from the left to where they point toward the right.’

  ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘What am I looking for?’

  ‘Do you see that fat, red-orange star – the first really resplendent star in that direction?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. I think its name is Aldebaran.’

  I breathed in a cool, sweet, night air along with the sounds of Aldebaran which had tumbled from Helen’s lips like drops of starlight.

  ‘Is that the star for which you were named?’

  ‘No, it is not. Now look off to the left at about …’ I paused because the number I was about to tell her did not come easily to my mind. ‘Look at about 10 o’clock.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Do you see the hot, blue whale of a star?’

  ‘I see a star,’ she said, pointing to a slightly different patch of sky. ‘I do not know what it is called.’

  She used her thumb to coax a harsh white glare from her flashlight, which she aimed at the pages of her opened book.

  ‘I would suppose,’ she said, ‘that you are referring to Alnath. It is the twenty-eighth brightest star in the earth’s sky. Is that one yours?’

  ‘No,’ I told her. ‘Now look straight beyond that star toward the Coral Galaxy. You will come to a white double-star. That one is mine.’

  ‘I see stars near Alnath. I cannot see if any of them are doubles.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ I said, ‘but my star is not near Alnath but straight past it on a line from Ocean to the Coral.’

  ‘But if that is so,’ she said, ‘then Alnath’s radiance would obscure that of your star.’

  ‘Or,’ I said, ‘vasten it, as a mother’s love feeds the soul of a child.’

  ‘Are you sure there is a double-star there?’

  ‘Yes, I am sure.’

  ‘But how can you perceive what is invisible?
’

  ‘How can you not?’

  After that, our conversation went nowhere with words circling words, as when a dog chases its own tail.

  Some days later on a moonlit night, as I swam about the waters beneath the dome listening to a recording of perhaps the greatest poem that any human had ever written, Helen called me over to her. She sat on the deck above the channel and kicked her bare heels against the iridescent surface of one of the screens as she said, ‘I consulted an astronomer. He informed me that there is a double-star exactly where you said there would be.’

  ‘I am glad that he has looked upon it,’ I said, wondering why her voice had roughened with tension.

  ‘Do you understand the term “light-year”?’ she asked me.

  ‘Not really. I have left the study of astronomy to Unukalhai.’

  ‘It is the distance that light travels in a year.’

  ‘But light does not travel,’ I said. ‘Light always everywhere is.’

  ‘Perhaps you should study astronomy, too,’ she said with a strange smile. ‘It took many years for the light of your star to cross the galaxy and reach earth. By the time it did so, it became so faint that only the most powerful of telescopes could record it.’

  ‘Telescopes made of metal and glass that can hold light?’

  The tension in Helen’s voice twisted tighter, and she said, ‘The star has only recently been discovered and named. It has not yet been mentioned in any book or paper. It is impossible that you could have known of this star.’

  ‘But I have been there!’

  ‘What can you possibly mean by that?’

  ‘Have I not chosen the right words? Ju arrela do.’

  ‘I do not understand your use of “have been”,’ she said.

  ‘How not? Have been, as the past perfect of “is” connecting previous states of being to the perfect eternal now-moment which always is and in which all things everywhere always are.’

  Helen let loose a long sigh, which she sometimes did when she grew exasperated with me. She said, ‘Your “there” is so many light-years from earth that no rocket we’ve ever devised could conceivably reach it.’

  ‘But “there” cannot be reached by a rocket. It must be visited otherwise, and when it is, there becomes here – even as past, present, and future all ring together with the sound of the simple color that I have called glorre.’

  Helen sighed again, and sat shaking her head. ‘All right, Clever One, you have been to this star, though I do not understand how that can be.’

  ‘How could it not be, if it is my star?’

  ‘One either believes in science,’ she said as if talking to herself, ‘or one does not.’

  ‘But how could you hope to understand everything through science?’

  ‘I just want to understand how you knew of this star.’

  ‘I have already told you. It is the simplest thing in all the universe.’

  ‘It is anything but simple – you could not have known a double-star existed beyond Alnath, but you did.’

  ‘Do you not know that I exist? Can you not see me here talking to you?’

  ‘But that is precisely the point: You cannot have seen this star. It cannot be seen from earth with the naked eye.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘but it can be quenged with the naked soul. Many times my family has swum past it on our way to Agathange.’

  At this, Helen retreated into a deep, blue silence, and so did I. Her dark eyes flickered with little sparks of frustration. And yet I zanged a strange hope there, too, as if she really had understood what I had said and her eyes opened to let pass the light of Alnath, Diadem, Sharatan, and many other stars.

  ‘I have known for a long time,’ she said, ‘that I have a tendency to invest too much certitude in certain things that I think I know.’

  ‘For a human, you know a great deal.’

  ‘I wish that were so. I wish, too, that I was not so bound by beliefs, either received from others or those that I have acquired by myself.’

  ‘The first and last philosophical question, my grandmother once said, should be: “What is true?”’

  ‘I think I can see where your thoughts are leading,’ she said.

  I, too, thought she could, for she had a strange awareness of my awareness – and her own.

  And then she said, ‘One of our poets, Rimbaud, I think wrote this: “I would gladly give my life for anyone seeking the truth – and gladly murder anyone who claimed to have found it.”’

  ‘Yes!’ I cried out happily. ‘Except for the murder part – what a lovely sentiment!’

  ‘And a philosopher named Morris Berman said this: “How we hold things in the mind is infinitely more important than what is held there.”’

  ‘Yes, yes – you do understand!’

  ‘And Kierkegaard said this of another great philosopher: “If Hegel had written the whole of his Logic and then stated that it was merely an experiment in thought, then he certainly would have been the greatest philosopher who ever lived. As it is, he is merely a comic.”’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes!’

  ‘And Nietzsche stresses the necessity of perspectivism: that every claim, belief, intuition, idea, worldview or philosophy arises from the varying perspectives of the various individuals who hold them. It is impossible to free ourselves from perspectives. When we try to—’

  ‘That is exactly right!’ I said, so excited that I did not mind interrupting her. ‘I never dreamed humans could appreciate this!’

  ‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘I am no Rimbaud, Berman, Kierkegaard, or Nietzsche. I am struggling very hard to accept that there might be an entirely new aspect to reality that I never conceived.’

  ‘But you do struggle, and that is what I adore about you.’

  ‘I am stuck within a certain perspective,’ she said.

  ‘Of course you are. The eye cannot see itself – and you cannot climb out of your own eyeballs.’

  ‘Just so. However, perhaps I can borrow the eyesight of others in order to behold the world from many perspectives.’

  ‘Yes – why else did Ocean call into life all the squid, tuna, whales, and other creatures if not to look out through our many millions of eyes and behold the beautiful, beautiful totality of creation?’

  She smiled and said, ‘Why do you think I invited you here? Perhaps we can help each other to see.’

  ‘I would like that,’ I said. Possibilities opened outward before me like a panorama of bright, whirling galaxies, and I swelled with a bright, shining hope for human beings. ‘I would like to look through one of your telescopes. And perhaps to give you a new lens through which to view the world.’

  After we had finished congratulating each other on the perspicacity of our willingness to try to perceive each other through our respective perspectives, Helen yawned and said, ‘It is growing late.’

  ‘Yes, you should sleep,’ I told her. And then, ‘What did your astronomer name my star?’

  ‘Do you want the official or the familiar name?’

  ‘The one without numbers.’

  ‘Arjuna,’ she said, ‘after the hero of the Mahabharata who spoke with the god Vishnu.’

  ‘Then,’ I said to her, ‘you should call me Arjuna.’

  At last, I had a name that would mean something when the humans uttered it, a very human name, which by good fortune could easily be articulated through the syllables of Wordsong: Ar-ju-na. The despicable human syllables of Bo-bo I could now leave far behind me as I had the little pools of Sea Circus. Might the humans now listen to me as with new ears when I spoke of matters of the greatest urgency? So many things I still had to tell them! So many things I still wanted to ask them: Did they really believe all the unbelievable things they felt certain must be true? What did they really know about the world? And (the strangest thought of all) could they possibly be the ‘knowing ones’ that their name for themselves proclaimed them to be, the Homo sapiens whom we orcas might come to acknowledge as what we thought of as reall
y and truly sapient?

  13

  I spent the next day reading Nietzsche. In the evening, I related our conversation to Unukalhai as we swam together among the underwater rocks out in the bay. I told him of my near-certainty that Helen was truly scient – and thus possessed the openness of mind to at least listen to any arguments we might make concerning the fate of the world that we shared.

  ‘It is good that she is scient,’ he said. ‘I never thought to find that a human could be so. It would be better, of course, if she were also sapient, truly sapient – how easy our task would be if all Homo sapiens lived up to their name.’

  Unukalhai had chosen the humans’ own flattering description of their mostly unknowing species to signify the kind of knowingness that we had supposed only whales share. Sapience, as we orcas think of it, has everything to do with the awareness of one’s own knowing – and even more, the awareness of that awareness.

  To be sapient is to be open to any truth about oneself or the world, no matter how wondrous or terrible. Sapience has a radiant quality, as of a ray of light shining down through currents of ever deeper understanding or reflecting back and forth between a tessalation of the mind’s mirrors of itself until it grows almost impossibly bright. In the most sapient of moments, awareness deepens into an infinite recursion of seeing that becomes ever vaster and clearer. Sapience is therefore an essential part of quenging, a faculty of both mind and soul that seeks out the limits of that faculty and pushes ever against them.

  ‘Helen plays,’ I said, ‘at her role of being a scientist, as she plays at life itself – I think. If only I could speak in our language with her! If only she would let me into her mind! I am sure that something very great swims in its deeps, some self-conception and will to be only herself that resonates with the songs that we sing of ourselves.’

  Later that afternoon, Unukalhai and I held a conference out in the bay with the other orcas. It was a fine day of bright sun and white wisps of clouds that seemed brushed across the sky’s blueness as if the world had taken up the art of painting. The frothy wakes of many speeding boats zigzagged the even bluer water. Beneath the surface (and the humans who had come to watch us), we spoke of human sapience and other things.