To the sound of boats buzzing across the bay, like gigantic mechanical insects, we considered Zavijah’s words. And then Unukalhai picked up the theme of her rant: ‘The humans are mad for tools and could not live a single day without their technologies. They use tools to get their food and even to convey it to their mouths. They make tools for scratching their backs, tools for picking their teeth, and tools for masturbating. Tools help them to read and to rock their babies to sleep. They make tools to kill. They even make tools of themselves, the instrumenta vocalia, tools with voices, which is how the Romans call their slaves.’
‘And so many are slaves!’ Hyadum said. ‘Thirty millions right now, by their own count. Billions more slave away on farms and in factories and in the cages they call offices. Millions of other humans devour their labor, money, time, sweat, tears, hopes, and dreams.’
‘Yes, they are a truly cannibalistic species,’ Menkalinan said. ‘When the Maori discovered their cousin Moriori living peacefully across the waters of the Olivine Flow, their first impulse was to board their canoes, make war upon the Moriori, enslave them, and eat them.’
‘The Russian humans ate their own at Leningrad,’ Alkurah said. ‘Such horrors happen in all wars.’
We all swam about the cool water in silence as we considered this. High in the sky, the thunder of a warplane broke the blueness.
‘The humans are mad for war,’ Unukalhai said. ‘Genghis Khan, whose descendants populate the continents in the millions, declares that the greatest pleasure is to vanquish one’s enemies and drive them like cattle, to despoil them of wealth and see their dear ones bathed in tears, to take their horses and ravish their women.’
‘The humans adore slaughtering,’ Alkurah said. ‘One of their heroes declares that it is “well that war is so terrible, otherwise we would become too fond of it to love it.” To love it too much!’
‘But they hate war, too!’ Baby Electra said, playing the advocatus diaboli.
‘They say they do,’ Alkurah shrilled out. ‘But they lie. Yes, the humans wail and weep and lament war’s agonies, yet they continue to slay each other by the million. This killing takes precedence over all other human activities. They organize the whole of their lives around the prospect of human-inflicted death. Who does not pay taxes? If they really wanted to, of course, they could hold a council and agree to end war in a day. Instead, they build submarines and hydrogen bombs and ready themselves for the war that will put an end to their murderous, miserable, lying, sadistic, cannibalistic kind.’
Now, despite the noises that the humans about the bay inflicted on the world, the water through which we swam sparkled with a kind of reflective silence. It seemed that there was nothing more for anyone to say. Unukalhai, though, could not help repeating a theme that he had stressed through many miles and many years.
‘It is not just that the humans are mad for money, mad for drugs, tools, and war. Despite the few sapient women and men who may live among them, the humans are simply mad.’
We all agreed with this. Baby Electra, though, in the most deadly serious of mind games, decided again to advocate for the devil again, saying, ‘But the humans have made rockets that have taken them to the moon!’
Unukalhai laughed at this, and replied, ‘So what?’
‘And the humans,’ Baby Electra went on, ‘have built magnificent cathedrals.’
‘So what?’ Salm said.
‘They have made machines that can cast their voices anywhere in the world.’
‘So what?’ Zavijah said.
‘They have transplanted the hearts of the dead into the living.’
‘So what?’ Bellatrix said.
‘They have used lightning to raise the dead.’
‘So what?’ Menkalinan said.
‘They have split atoms, whatever atoms really are.’
And Kitalpha, his fine black skin cratered with burn scars, said, ‘So what?’
Whether by bad chance or design, Baby Electra had blundered in this last defense of the human race. Unukalhai immediately took advantage of her mistake.
‘And it is precisely through the fracturing and fissioning of the world’s matter,’ he said, ‘that the humans will unleash the lightning and hellfire that will destroy the world.’
We might have ended our council there and then and gone off to fish and sing and enjoy the pleasures of the world before the inevitable apocalypse rained down its killing light from the peaceful sky. At that moment, though, a small incident occurred that had the very large effect of bringing our discussion and all that I had learned into an acute focus. A red boat speeding about the water cut off a white boat trying to angle close to us whales. Its driver had to veer in order to avoid a collision. He stopped his engines and called out in anger to the red boat’s driver, a large man with a porcine red face cratered with acne scars. His nostrils pointed almost straight out like the barrels of a sawed-off shotgun. His upper arm, sticking out of his neoprene vest, bore a tattoo of a coiled red dragon. I had seen similar tattoos in photos of the infamous Red Dragon Death Squads that had exterminated the Herero people. This ugly, ugly man should have reached deep into himself to grasp a bit of the beauty and brightness that all humans possess. He should have apologized for a carelessness that could have resulted in injury or death. Instead of proffering any sort of contrition or kind words, however, he stopped his boat as well and thrust out his middle finger and shoved it through the air at the other driver’s face. This man – dark and slender and furious – made the same motion with his finger. Both men began calling out curses to each other.
‘Watch what comes next!’ Baby Electra said from beside me. ‘I saw this scene in a movie. The Ugly-Face will pull out a gun and shoot the other man!’
That did not happen. The large man, with a final shove of his finger and the harshest of invectives concerning the other’s mother, settled on a thinly veiled threat to sodomize the other man to death. At this, the darker man’s face tightened with fear. He gunned his engines and drove off. The man with the cheeks and forehead as crimson as a boiled pig, rubbed his dragon tattoo and turned to stare at me and the other whales. I expected to see shame over his bullying actions burn his face. Instead, his lips curved up into a smile of victory. His eyes glistened. I could not help gazing into his small gray eyes and the awareness that consumed them with a smoldering pride. He knew, I thought, that he had been wrong. And the very knowing of his misdeed, rather than softening his heart, had impelled him to harden himself against the other man and the better angels of his own nature. And so as men do with each other, he had decided to become aggressive and cruel.
And with this realization, the shark that had dwelled inside me for too long screamed into new life. I could no longer keep the truth about human beings from myself.
They know! They know what they are doing to the world, and they know a better way, and they do not care!
Through the water that flowed across and through my skin and connected me heart and soul with the living beings of Unukalhai, Alkurah, Baby Electra and the rest of us – through the shared sapience of silence that rings at the center of all things – we all came into a shared understanding of human beings at the same moment. In wave upon wave of sickening realizations, the truth about the humans swelled and grew.
They secretly love what they do! Their destruction of the world gives them a sense of power over nature – and nature terrifies them. Deep down, they know themselves to be rather small naked apes, weak of jaw, slow of foot, without fang or claw or horn to defend themselves from the dragons that would devour them.
What hope could I have for the humans, even the most intelligent?
Baby Electra was the first of my adopted family to brush against me and console me. Then came Zavijah, Salm, Bellatrix, and Kitalpha. Hyadum ran her flipper across my face; Menkalinan, Unukalhai, and Alkurah made similar benedictions. As night fell and starlight touched the bay, we all consoled each other.
The shark that I had bespoken in sil
ence, however, now thrashed beside us wherever we swam. Truth – bright, cold, and terrible – like a shout of agony, like a gnashing of violash at the wind-whipped waves, tormented the water and rippled outward to the oceans of the world.
14
Long days of swimming and diving through the humans’ books in hope of discovering something about the humans that might redeem them followed – even as we whales cruised the fractured waters of the Sound in search of the meat of understanding. Storms blew in from the ocean. The sun died into dark nights of rain and mist, and fought its way to a wan rebirth through thick clouds each morning. With each mile that we swam – with every salmon that we caught or new book that we tucked into ourselves – the shark pursuing us seemed to grow stronger and stronger.
How was I to make sense of the truth that I could no longer ignore? What was I to do with it? I well remembered my mother once telling me that a truth does not become fully true until one acts upon it.
I felt nearly paralyzed, however, with a spreading weakness of will, as I imagined it would be if I had injected one of the humans’ narcotic drugs. A sense of helplessness flowed like an irresistible current straight into hopelessness. Again and again, I considered ceasing swimming altogether and allowing the shark to devour me. A single question aggrieved me: what was I to do to act upon the truth if there was nothing to be done?
In the punishment pool of Sea Circus, I had resolved to let perish – or to actively slay – those parts of myself that I knew to be either useless, antiquated, or inauthentic. I had not imagined, though, leaving behind certainties that I had seen as intrinsic to my soul. All my life, I had enjoyed a bright, singing faith in the essential goodness of life and in the health of nature that had engendered it. Nature, however, I now perceived, possessed a darkness that went much deeper than the horror of animals tearing apart animals and devouring each other in endless cycles of agony and death. For nature, perhaps insane in its deepest part as Unukalhai believed, had somehow brought forth out the bloody womb of time the crazed and very unnatural beings called humans. What if, I wondered, the true heart of nature pulsed with a power that had nothing to do with goodness and was as far beyond it as the Coral Galaxy is from Ocean? What if the madness of mankind inhered in all things?
After I had eaten the white bear – after I had been besmeared with the black oil of the burning sea and had shared the anguish of Pherkad’s harpoon – I had lost the power to quenge. I had conflated the seeking of a cure for my affliction with the seeking of a cure for the ill earth. In my innocence of faith, I had assumed that I would find a way to heal both myself and the world. What if, I now asked myself, the insane and bitter suffering of the world could not be cured? What would I do, how would I live, if Ocean itself must inevitably sicken and die?
A human’s answer to such desperation might have been: ‘Of course the world cannot be killed. And even if it could, we can always find a way to save it.’ I saw such optimism as naïve at best but more likely demoniac. Hadn’t the humans, out in the Journey of Death Desert where they had exploded the first nuclear bomb, taken bets as to whether the fireball would ignite the atmosphere and incinerate all life on earth? Yes, they had! Yes, they had! And yet. And yet. The world had not burned down to a blackened and radioactive wasteland. (Even if parts of Ocean were aflame night and day.) What if the humans, with their human eyes, equations, and eternal zest for the perilous and the new, could apprehend things that we whales could not?
This speculation – or rather, the possibility of its possessing some degree of validity – astonished me. For a long time, though I had hoped human beings might be capable of rationality and a kind of language, I had never seriously entertained the wild notion that some of the Two-Leggeds might be both scient and sapient. Even after I had begun speaking with Gabi, Helen, and others of their kind, I had regarded whales as possessing an intelligence vastly superior to that of the humans, who I supposed knew nothing of worth that we whales had not known for a million years. What if, however, I had been wrong? What if the deranged human beings not only had something to give to us whales but somehow had a strange and mysterious purpose in the world?
‘You can never fully know what you do not know,’ my Grandmother had once said to me.
Her words – along with the magic charm that she had given me – worked as a balm upon my troubled spirit. They drove away much of my despair. I aimed zangs of sharp inquiry at the shark that swam with me, blood to blood and flipper to fin. What is the truth of truth I asked myself? The cool, surging waters of the Sound murmured my Grandmother’s answer, now my own: The Great Ocean of Truth is as bottomless and blue as the waters of Agathange, into which a whale can always dive more deeply.
And so dive I did. Instead of fleeing and seeking out some imaginary pristine corner of the earth untouched by the hand of humanity – as the other whales and I wanted to do – I resolved to remain at the Institute. From my readings, I had learned of a vast pool of human knowledge that both included books and went far beyond them in content and reach. The humans, of course, having only the faintest of intimations of quenging, use a different though related metaphor for the noosphere in which they like to dip their feet. Instead of seeing the truth of all things as a single, superluminal substance that everywhere flows like water, they conceive of it as a collection of things, and they content themselves with fashioning nets with their minds in the hope of casting them out in order to capture here a prettier pebble and there a smoother shell. Hence their name for the Oceanic wisdom that should flow among all beings: the worldwide Net.
When I told Helen of my desire to sound the depths of all that the humans’ Net contained, she gazed at me with her bright, sad eyes, and said with a smile, ‘I will help you if I can. However, if you are thinking to find anything like wisdom on the Internet – much less the key to understanding humanity – I am afraid that you are going to be very disappointed.’
‘But the key must be there!’ I said to her. ‘Somewhere.’
She arranged for the Institute’s computers to interface with the Net, as it is used by the many humans who are blind. Thus we whales could surf from one pool of knowledge or experience to another by calling out the various names of the pools and listening to the verbiage recorded in each. Additionally – and here we orcas had an advantage over humans deprived of sight – we could drink in from any screen the images of those pools that contained various graphics side by side the written characters of the words that we could not read. In this way, we partook of an entire sphere of human activity that we had barely glimpsed.
What I discovered caught up in the humans’ vast Net on my first foray into it should not have shocked me, but it did. It seemed that the humans bought and sold through their far-reaching Net every conceivable sort of pelf (and much that was almost inconceivable): dustpans, diamonds, diapers, wolf urine, drill bits, bacteria, steaks, and kidneys. Histories were there as well, and philosophies, and symphonies such as Beethoven’s immortal Ninth, in whose soaring harmonies I had first heard the humans sing of joy.
Alongside great novels of nuance and irony dwelled the ravings of lunatics and endless waves of gossip shot through with little snarks of schadenfreude. I listened to stock predictions, climate predictions, suicide predictions. Countless movies I watched, as Baby Electra already had, and in too many of them, men slaughtered other men and blew up automobiles and buildings and even entire cities in flashes of hellish fire that hurt my eyes.
So far I had read only the best of what the humans had written; now I listened to the overwhelmingly more voluminous worst. It seemed that most humans were not really sapient at all, but rather non-sapient or even willfully anti-sapient. They were like cabbages in which one could peel back layer upon layer of foolish thoughts and conceits only to reveal nothing at their center. Had nature, I wondered, brought forth these human vegetables or had such malformed beings somehow twisted nature so that they could live in the diminished world that they had fitted to their shrunken spiri
ts? How terrible, how tragic, how sad! When I saw how most humans live – chock-a-block in tiny, ill-lit apartments, eating poisoned, dead food and breathing poisoned air, ever under the threat of war – I found reasons for their madness of inanity, for billions and billions of humans were forced to live lives little different than we whales had known in Sea Circus’ punishment pool.
Then one day, I stumbled into a new part of the humans’ noosphere and I began to have more hope. As any sapient species should, the humans took a great interest in sexual activity, and they devoted a great part of the Net to it. I could not understand, at first, why the humans seemed to want to hide away in the darkest corners of their Net what might have been millions upon millions of lascivious scenes. (Though it seemed that a clever child could find what was denigrated as pornography wherever she or he wished.) Then it came to me that the humans, loving war and death, hate life along with the sexual urge which engenders it. They feel ashamed of sex, as they do themselves. In all the mainstream movies that I had viewed up until this time, I had not seen one man thrust joyfully and graphically into one adored woman, whereas many, many movies portrayed men raping women or even hacking or blowing them to bits. It seemed that most humans would rather allow their children to look upon bloody dismemberments than a realistic display of erotic love.
The more I studied the humans’ sexuality, though, the clearer it also became why the humans attempted to bury their caresses and couplings beneath a shroud of darkness, for much of their sexing was very dark and had nothing to do with pleasure, procreation or love. I watched pornography in which men and women choked and tortured each other, whipped and manacled each other and treated each other as pieces of living meat. How astonishing the many contortions into which they could twist their sweaty, rubbery bodies in pursuit of carnal pleasure! How amazing their sexualizing of fruits and vegetables and other parts of the world, both living and dead! I had never imagined that a human being could mate with a goat.
Idiot Gods, The Page 25