Idiot Gods, The

by Zindell, David

  ‘This is not the best of times,’ Alkurah said, insisting on taking the lead in our discussion, ‘for me to speak of the humans. I do not understand why I have not become pregnant. My frustration presses at me like the walls of Sea Circus’s pools. I am angry again. I am afraid the humans have done something to me.’

  ‘What could the humans have done to your womb?’ Unukalhai said. ‘As for your anger, the humans would say your paralimbic brain must be malfunctioning.’

  ‘Oh, my poor paralimbic brain!’ Alkurah said, trying to let Unukalhai’s sarcasm push her into a more quickly flowing mirth. She failed. Then she aimed her voice at me. ‘Since you cannot please me with your phallus, I would like you to soothe me with your flute, as you did with my sister when the humans took Navi away.’

  For a while, with boats screaming above us, I sang to her of all the babies she would someday bear when we managed to reason with the humans and the world was made whole again.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, swimming closer to brush against me. ‘Now I am ready to speak of Helen.’

  Hyadum, much-scarred in her body if not her soul, said to us: ‘I have not known Helen as long as everyone else, but I have had surprisingly deep conversations with her. She does not seem to rest her mind upon religion, law, science or any other external structures that the humans have made to armor themselves against the world. I have known her always to think for herself.’

  ‘She certainly has her own view of the world,’ Salm said.

  ‘And she does not,’ Zavijah said, ‘expect anyone else to share it.’

  ‘She is a unique world to herself,’ Bellatrix added. ‘I cannot say the same for the other linguists and scientists with whom I have spoken.’

  ‘Unique, yes, perhaps,’ Alkurah said. This graceful orca, who longed so fiercely to be a mother, enjoyed taking in the seed of a conversation and quickening it into greater life. ‘And that is precisely the problem. Supposing what Arjuna says of her is true, it might be that of all the human race, only she is sapient.’

  ‘That is certainly not so,’ I said. ‘You have not read the words of Socrates, Sappho, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Hesse, Ramana or the Mother, have you?’

  ‘No, I have not,’ Alkurah said. ‘But let us then suppose that a few of the billions of humans are sapient. What is the good of finding a handful of pearls glimmering among all the garbage that floats on the sea?’

  Kitalpha, long and lean and wounded in his body nearly as badly as Hyadum, possessed a cheerful temperament and a will never to allow life’s difficulties to gloom him. He insisted on trying to laugh at any situation or account of woe. At the beginning of his adulthood, he had composed his rhapsody around the currents of humor and play to nearly an absurd and somewhat irritating degree. With such a spirit did he now infuse his buoyant voice:

  ‘Sapience and intelligence,’ he said, ‘are two different things, but one cannot swim very far into the former without the latter. How intelligent can the humans be when they do such stupid things? Why don’t we play a game to see who can cite the greatest human idiocy?’

  ‘A game! A game!’ Baby Electra called out, swimming close to me. ‘I love games!’

  ‘Very well,’ Kitalpha said, ‘then I will begin. The linguist called Sophia, who I wished lived up to her name, read this to me from a news story: A human male tested a nail gun on his own head.’

  ‘Pavel read this to me,’ Menkalinan said. ‘A male died after launching a fireworks rocket from the top of his head.’

  ‘I can do better!’ Zavijah said. ‘A Baby Kelly found the gun that his father had bought to protect him, and shot himself in the face.’

  ‘A male,’ Salm said, ‘climbed over the restraining wall at the zoo so that he could hug a tiger.’

  ‘Why is it,’ Hyadum asked, ‘the human males who do the stupidest things?’

  ‘Not all! Not all!’ Baby Electra said. ‘A female placed her newborn in its car seat on the roof of the car so that she could adjust the seatbelt. Then she became distracted and drove off with her baby on the roof.’

  ‘I can do better!’ Alkurah said. ‘A female, nearly as fat as a whale, rushed into a hospital complaining of—’

  ‘And what is a hospital?’ Hyadum asked.

  ‘A dwelling where the humans go to obtain drugs, have diabetic limbs amputated, infect each other with their diseases, give birth, and die.’ Alkurah breached, as did the rest of us. She breathed in with greater force than usual, obviously hoping to cool the cynicism that nagged at her. ‘The female complained of pains in her belly, which she mistook for an inflamed appendix or cancer. But it turned out that—’

  ‘She was only pregnant!’ Baby Electra guessed, having a great deal of fun with Kitalpha’s game. ‘And she astonished herself, if no one else, by giving birth to a beautiful, healthy baby!’

  ‘But the baby,’ Unukalhai said, ‘did not remain beautiful for very long. She fattened on an ersatz milk of chemicals and sugar, and grew up to be even huger than her mother.’

  ‘She grew up,’ Salm said, ‘drinking sugared water and watching other humans drink sugared water on TV and then kill each other.’

  ‘No, she did not grow up at all,’ Unukalhai said. ‘The bullet that exploded out of her baby brother Kelly’s face pierced her head and killed her.’

  Kitalpha, for a moment playing with the concept of schadenfreude that I had taught him, imagined for this human female a much crueler and more likely fate: ‘No, she did grow up. She spent her life in rooms smaller than the pools of Sea Circus that you have told of. During the day, she sat in cubicles staring at a computer screen. When she got home, she sat staring at TV, eating pizza chased down with ice cream. In between cubicle and couch, she—’

  ‘Sat in traffic,’ Zavijah said, ‘with a billion other cars, and she breathed in gasoline fumes and listened to the music of horns honking.’

  ‘That is better than the music of acid rap,’ Baby Electra said.

  ‘And when she climbed out of her car and her day of rest and play came,’ Alkurah said, ‘she—’

  ‘Discovered some pretty dandelions in the grass of her yard,’ Salm said, ‘and so she climbed back into her automobile and went to the store where she bought liquid herbicides to kill—’

  ‘Her child,’ Kitalpha said, ‘who also survived a similar journey through traffic on the roof of her mother’s car only to grow up and drink by mistake the herbicides which her mother had stored in an empty bottle of sugared water. The doctor at the hospital who tried to save her by pumping the poison from her belly—’

  ‘Later complained to the other doctors that the female and child were two of the stupidest humans he had ever known.’ This came from Unukalhai, who believed that one could always find a stupider human being. ‘To assuage his guilt over not being able to save the child, that night the doctor drank a bottle of wine and passed out in front of his TV watching men collide with each other head-on in a battle over an ovoid ball. The next morning, he drove sweating and cursing through traffic to a place where he bought a new sports car and—’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘A car used in the human sport of driving so fast that—’

  ‘How fast?’

  ‘It can roll 200 miles per hour.’

  ‘How fast is that?’

  ‘As fast as a falcon can fly.’

  ‘And so the doctor in his car rolled at two hundred miles per hour toward—’

  ‘No, he did not. He joined a herd of traffic moving only five miles per —’

  ‘And how fast is that?’

  ‘About as fast as a wheelchair rolls,’ Unukalhai said. ‘And so the doctor had ample time to dream of a vacation racing on empty roads across the desert.’

  ‘The car made the doctor happy, yes?’ Baby Electra said. ‘Exchanging money for things always makes the humans happy, as when we give each other our songs.’

  ‘The car did not make the doctor happy,’ Unukalhai said. ‘Very little about his life did. When he complet
ed his journey home that day, he decided to exchange his wife for another—’

  ‘And what is a wife?’ Hyadum asked.

  ‘A single mate, the only other human that a human promises to mate with forever.’

  ‘How odious!’ Hyadum said. ‘How perverted!’

  ‘I wish I could buy a mate to impregnate me,’ Alkurah sighed out. Then she said to Unukalhai, ‘Can we assume that the doctor lived happily ever after with his new car and his new wife?’

  ‘We cannot assume that – only a very few humans are intelligent enough to figure out how to be happy. No, when the doctor discovered his new wife mating with a young, virile male, he decided that he hated his life, and so he—’

  ‘Began working twelve hours each day,’ Salm said, ‘in order to save enough money to retire to Italy where—’

  ‘And what is Italy?’ Zavijah asked.

  ‘A place where the humans eat pizza covered with octopus and drive sports cars two hundred miles per hour.’

  ‘So the doctor attained happiness after all?’

  ‘No, he did not. He never seemed to accrue enough money, and so he worked fourteen, sixteen, eighteen hours each—’

  ‘And how many hours in each day?’

  ‘Twenty, I think.’

  ‘So the doctor retired to Italy, and then he was happy?’

  ‘No – he worked himself sick with the disease of the hardening of the heart and the arteries that afflicts so many humans,’ Salm said. ‘His leg arteries grew so hard that his blood could not suffuse his feet, which died and began to rot. So one of his doctor friends—’

  ‘Had to cut off his blackened, gangrenous legs with chainsaws,’ Bellatrix said, ‘but he was so sick that—’

  ‘The other doctors connected him to tubes and oxygen and machines and put him in the dying room where—’

  ‘He found himself next to the female who had poisoned her daughter with herbicides,’ Alkurah said. ‘She, too, had no legs, and was dying of the diabetes disease that afflicts the humans when they drink too much sugar—’

  ‘What did they eat in the dying room?’ Hyadum asked.

  ‘The same foods humans always eat,’ Unukalhai said. ‘In a way, the doctor and the female began to eat each other in a mutual loathing that—’

  ‘Sartre said that hell is other humans. So, now in hell, the doctor—’

  ‘Out of sheer spite began a competition with the woman to see who could live the longest.’

  ‘They tried to live longer,’ Baby Electra said, ‘when they were not really living at all?’

  ‘The humans cannot bear the necessity of dying. And so the doctor and the female—’

  ‘She lived longer, didn’t she?’ Baby Electra said. ‘Females are tougher than males.’

  ‘Actually,’ Unukalhai said, ‘they died at the same time. It turns out that their fates were tied to their taxes.’

  ‘How can that be?’

  ‘You see, both the doctor and the woman considered themselves to be good, responsible adults.’ Unukalhai paused in agitation to pound his tail against the water. ‘The doctor had always consented to using some of his money to pay taxes that he hoped would go toward teaching stupid people not to be quite so stupid, but in reality would be used to—’

  ‘Encourage the makers of herbicides,’ Menkalinan said, ‘to make even more of their poison and others that would be used in war to kill—’

  ‘Millions of males and females,’ Alkurah said, ‘but that was not the worst of it because—’

  ‘The taxes also were used to build nuclear bombs that—’

  ‘Were no different than the bombs paid for by the taxes of other humans who—’

  ‘Humans have Others?’ Kitalpha asked.

  ‘For most humans, most humans are Others,’ Unukalhai moaned out. ‘The humans say this: “Every tribe against every tribe; every clan against the tribe; every family against the clan; every man against his family.”’

  ‘Yes,’ Alkurah said. ‘What Hobbes described as the war of all against all. So war—’

  ‘Came to the hospital and the dying room and the doctor and the fat female in the form of a nuclear bomb that—’

  ‘Killed them in a flash!’ Baby Electra cried out. ‘And that was end of the human race!’

  The silence that befell the waters of the Sound just then beckoned us to bask in its cool, pacific touch. Then Alkurah said, ‘Perhaps we should share our farce of human stupidity with Helen, that she might share it as a jeremiad with other humans.’

  ‘That would not be wise,’ Unukalhai said. ‘Our song did not end happily, and the humans do not like to think about death.’

  ‘No,’ Alkurah said. ‘They are fond of words that soften or obscure it. Especially when they inflict death on each other.’

  ‘Yes, it is amusing, is it not,’ Kitalpha said, ‘how the humans use the words “collateral damage” to mean—’

  ‘Murder,’ Hyadum said.

  ‘And when they say they need to “put a dog down”, they really mean—’

  ‘Murder,’ Baby Electra said.

  ‘And an execution is nothing but a—’

  ‘Formal murder.’

  ‘And “endangered species” means—’

  ‘Beings not yet completely murdered.’

  ‘And we could think of “nuclear deterrence” as—’

  ‘A threat of—’

  ‘No, a promise of—’

  ‘Total murder.’

  ‘Which might be as bad as “climate change”, which we might as well call—’

  ‘Planetary murder.’

  We swam along quietly, saying nothing as we moved through a slip of water warmed by the stuttering, smoking engines of the many boats whining about the Sound. After a while, Alkurah said to me, ‘Arjuna, you did not join our game. Do you disagree with our assessment of human stupidity?’

  ‘No, I do not,’ I said. ‘The humans are stupid, and too often become only stupider as they grow older: their adults do not even know how to defecate without sitting on a toilet.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘They are stupid as a race. There is a male – we might as well think of him as a male – who leads others on a journey straight towards a cliff that the humans can see all too clearly ahead of them.’ I paused to blow out some old air and take a new breath. ‘When the male reaches the edge of the cliff and looks down at the sharp rocks below, he will convey to all the others his surprise that they have gotten to the very place that they were going.’

  Alkurah considered this and said, ‘And?’

  ‘Despite all this, I believe that we have to act as if we have hope for them, even if hope flees from us more quickly than the setting sun.’

  Unukalhai let loose a long whistle of respect for what I had said, then voiced a doubt, shared by all of us, including myself: ‘If it were only stupidity that afflicts the humans, we might find a way to illuminate them. But I am afraid that something is wrong with their hearts.’

  ‘Too true,’ Menkalinan said from beside Bellatrix. ‘What can we do about that?’

  ‘Sing as brightly as we can,’ I said.

  ‘But the humans hear so little of what we say! Can a glimmer light up the desolation they have made of their own souls?’

  ‘So dark, dark, dark is the song that the humans sing!’ Baby Electra said as she swam close to me. ‘Darker than inkvol, more disturbing than violash.’

  ‘What is wrong with the humans?’ Zavijah said. ‘Why must they taint and torture?’

  ‘They keep birds in cages,’ Salm said, ‘so small that they cannot spread their wings. They cut off the birds’ beaks so that the maddened creatures cannot eat each other before the humans eat them.’

  ‘They make entertainments of cruelty,’ Zavijah said. ‘They laugh together convivially around dinner tables where they relish such dishes as the san zhi er, the triple screaming. Into pretty bowls they put newly born baby rats, who scream once as they are grabbed up by chopsticks and a second time whe
n they are dipped into sauce. And scream a third time when …’

  Zavijah stopped speaking and let her silence speak more loudly then any lament ever could.

  ‘At least the humans practice such barbarisms in nourishing themselves, which all creatures must do,’ Alkurah said. ‘But I have read something almost unbelievable about the men who have hunted us with their harpoons. They murder us not for our meat to consume, but for parts of our bodies such as ambergris that they make into perfumes. They cut us down to our blubber, which they boil into oil that they use to grease the gears of their machines. They burn our bodies in their lamps to give themselves light.’

  ‘I can believe almost anything,’ Zavijah said, ‘of a people who took my baby Navi away.’

  ‘Can you believe this?’ Unukalhai asked her. ‘One of their greatest philosophers, Rene Descartes, argues that the soul is the feeling and experiencing part of one’s being. Because an animal by definition obviously has no soul, a dog or dolphin, for instance, cannot suffer. If boiled in oil, a dog’s screams and writhings result purely from a mechanical response of an essentially soulless mechanism that cannot feel real pain.’

  Alkurah breached with the rest of us and slapped her tail against the water with a crack and a splash. She said, ‘The humans cannot feel the sufferings of their own kind. They make lampshades of flesh flayed from the bodies of those they have murdered. They cast the screaming babies of those they despise into the air and catch them on bayonets.’

  ‘They have numbed their sensibilities,’ Zavijah said, ‘with fear and wrath. They drink in images of violence from their hellishly glowing screens and so stupefy themselves on simulations of reality and other intoxicants. They are mad for drugs – whatever drugs really are. They take coffee drugs to wake up in the morning and pills to sleep at night. Alcohol drugs help them relax after the torment of their daily work and enable them to socialize with others of their kind. They face the insanities of the human world by gulping anxiety drugs, and they poison their bodies with powerful chemical drugs to kill the cancers that grow from all the chemicals they dump into their water. They have fabricated a drug to excite their diseased, drained-out males to enjoy erections.’