Idiot Gods, The

by Zindell, David

  So rapt was I with the humans’ Net and all its many beheadings, bruisings, betrayals, poetry, and jokes that I did not notice that I was allowing the humans’ entertainments to fascinate me a little too much. One day, when Gabi donned a wet suit and climbed into the channel’s cold water to play with me as we sometimes had at Sea Circus, I asked her to do an unusual thing. She stroked my head as she tightened her legs against my sides and rode upon my back through the channel’s churned-up waters. Finally she consented in helping me to perform a most un-whalelike feat.

  An hour later, I came up out of the water onto the sloping concrete shelf at the channel’s far end nearest the human half of the great, domed house. Gabi held in her hand a brown, fat cigar. With a flick of her clever human fingers, she snatched a bit of yellow flame from the lighter in her other hand. Upon wrapping her lips around the huge cigar that her mouth could barely contain, she puffed at the flame and drew it in through the tip of the cigar until its tobacco ignited in a glow of cherry red and smoke. She then pushed the tapered, thinner end of the cigar into my blowhole and held it there.

  I, too, puffed in the cigar’s smoke. The hot, bitter gas shot straight to my lungs and burned inside me. I coughed and shuddered and breathed in deeply again – and again coughed and shuddered, both at lancinating agony of my aggrieved lungs and at the pleasure suffusing my nerves as the nicotine drug shot straight to my brain. Then Gabi took a turn in this narcotizing game, filling up her mouth with smoke before pushing the cigar back into my blowhole. For a long time I puffed and puffed at the burning cigar as a cloud of smoke hung heavy and gray over my head.

  It was thus that Helen found us, playing our smoking game together and enjoying a very basic human vice. So intent was I on absorbing every sensation of this novel experience that I barely registered the signature sound of her stately steps as she came into the dome and walked across the concrete. She stood on the deck a few feet away staring at us as if she could not believe the images that we had forced into her smoldering black eyes. Through her tense body ran a shudder very unlike the one that had delighted mine. Then she cried out, ‘What are you doing!’

  Apparently, Gabi had neither seen nor heard Helen approach. At the crack of Helen’s outraged voice, Gabi sprang to her feet even as she flung the cigar into the waters, where it died into a soggy stump in a ugly hiss.

  ‘I was just showing Arjuna how—’

  ‘What are you doing?’ Helen called out again.

  Unukalhai and Bellatrix, the only other orcas present that day, swam in a little closer to witness this scene.

  ‘Arjuna wanted me to help him understand what smoking is really like,’ Gabi said.

  Her hair clung tightly to her head like a helmet of sodden, orange curls, and her belly trembled – in both fear and anger, or so I thought.

  ‘He does not need to know.’

  ‘But he asked me to light a cigar for him.’

  ‘Did you ask me if that would be all right? Would you give a cigar to your own son?’

  ‘Is that how you think of him? You’re still treating these whales like children who need protecting, even from themselves.’

  I heard the truth of what she said, and so did Helen, whose lips pressed together like the two shells of a mussel. Her eyes flared with dark lights that she could not seem to contain. Then quick as a stingray’s tail, her hand lashed out and slapped Gabi across the face.

  Gabi said nothing as a livid outline of Helen’s fingers welted her pink skin. She seemed as unable to speak as I was – as Unukalhai and Bellatrix were, too. She stared at Helen. Tears flooded into her blue eyes. With a wipe of the sleeve of her wetsuit across her face and a stifled sob, she turned and ran across the deck into the humans’ half of the house.

  While my heart pounded in my chest like an angry fist – whether from the violence that Helen had unleashed upon Gabi or from the nicotine, I could not tell – Helen stood staring as upon a scene of herself that she did not want to behold. She struggled to breathe, and I felt her fighting back tears – and much else. She did not, could not, look at me. As her whole body began shaking, she too turned and ran into the house.

  During the following few days, I saw nothing of either Helen or Gabi. Although Unukalhai and I spoke of what had occurred with the other whales, we could make little sense of Helen’s outburst, or perhaps too much sense. Unukalhai, in words that proved prophetic, declared, ‘It may be that Helen neither dislikes Gabi nor wishes her harm. For the humans, striking each other comes as naturally as the wind blowing.’

  Then one cloudy afternoon, Helen returned and arranged to be alone with me. She sat as she often did, upon the edge of the concrete deck with her feet hanging down above the water. Her jet-black eyes invited a conversation that her lips struggled to initiate.

  I immediately asked, ‘Where is Gabi?’

  And she said, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Where is Gabi?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Where is Gabi, the one human whose heart I could be sure of?

  Then I loosed a long-ranged call similar to Zavijah’s futile cries to Baby Navi.

  ‘Why?’ I finally asked. ‘Why don’t you know? Have you not called to her?’

  ‘I have called a hundred times, but she will not answer.’

  ‘But have you not looked for her in all the many rooms of your house?’

  ‘She left three days ago, Arjuna. She is gone.’

  ‘Gone where?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe home.’

  ‘But this is her home! With me, and with Unukalhai, Alkurah and Electra – all her brothers and sisters!’

  ‘I told her that,’ Helen said, ‘but she would not listen.’

  ‘Why not? Why did she leave? Why are you humans so cruel to each other? Why, why, why?’

  She opened her mouth to speak, and then closed it again. She gazed at me eye to eye, but seemed not to want to perceive any of the anguish that sang out of me. Instead, her eyes’ black centers appeared to open upon a world far from the safe, quiet waters of the Institute.

  I tried to return us to the present, saying, ‘If my smoking cigars distresses you, I will never ask for help in doing so again.’

  ‘It does distress me.’

  ‘I, myself, however, might experience some distress of my own at having to abandon a new pleasure before I have fully explored it.’

  She laughed softly. ‘I know precisely how hard it is to give up smoking.’

  ‘You do? But you smoke every day.’

  ‘I smoke three cigarettes each day: one in the morning; one in the afternoon; one before bed. And once each year, I stop smoking altogether for three weeks before starting again.’

  ‘But why?’

  And then the answer to my question sounded inside me. I recalled a strange, strange book that I read.

  ‘You are taking inspiration from the mage known as Mega Therion, or—’

  ‘Aleister Crowley,’ she said, completing my statement. ‘I had forgotten that I had recommended his book on Magick to you.’

  ‘Yes, yes, you did.’ Aleister, I recalled, used to periodically addict himself to heroin so that he could exercise his will through the struggle to quit. I swam a long circle about the channel and returned to Helen. ‘Why do you not, then, simply smoke heroin?’

  ‘Because I could be imprisoned, if I did,’ she said. ‘And because heroin is slightly less addictive than nicotine.’

  ‘Why do you feel such need to strengthen your will?’

  ‘Without will, how can one face life and all its difficulties and do what must be done?’

  I zanged discords of a terrible stress tearing at the timbre of her voice, but I could not guess at its origin.

  ‘Of course one needs will,’ I said. ‘But when will is needed, will is always there, like water.’

  ‘Perhaps for you orcas.’

  ‘It must be so for you humans, too. Calling upon will is as natural as opening one’s mouth to take a drink.’
r />   ‘But so little of what my kind does,’ she said, ‘is natural.’

  ‘I know! I know! But I do not know why.’

  ‘Neither do I.’

  ‘I need to know. That is why I asked Gabi for help in smoking the cigar. I was only trying to do what you humans do.’

  ‘I do not want you to do what we do.’

  ‘But how can I understand anything of humans if I do not experience addiction?’

  Her sigh seemed as long as the soughing of the north wind that brings in a storm.

  ‘If I care for you, Arjuna, how can I allow you to do something that might harm you?’

  ‘Gabi was right: you do regard us as children who need protecting.’

  ‘I have thought about that,’ she said. ‘And only the second part of that statement is true.’

  ‘Yes, because you humans see yourselves as “stewards” of all the life of Ocean.’

  ‘That might once have been true of me,’ she admitted as a wry smile touched her lips. ‘Then I applied my will toward trying to overcome my species’ chauvinism and my own regrettable condescension.’

  I liked the way that she could make fun of herself and examine her motives.

  ‘When do you think you might succeed?’ I asked her.

  ‘When do you think you might succeed in going beyond your surety of the superiority of whales?’

  ‘Touché,’ I said, wishing that I could smile in the human manner. Then the mood changed, and I zanged a few poignant words into her. ‘We orcas have protected ourselves quite well for millions of years. All we need is for you to leave us alone, and we will do even better for millions more.’

  ‘I wish we would leave you alone,’ she said. ‘I wish we could.’

  Sadness seeped back into her like water filling the holes of a sponge. She fell silent again. I somehow knew that she was thinking of Gabi and feeling the hurt of her hand that had cracked across Gabi’s face. And she knew that I knew what she was thinking, even as we both came into full awareness of our shared suffering and held each other close within our hearts.

  ‘I wish we could leave ourselves alone,’ she said to me. ‘But you are right, my perceptive, cetacean friend. I am afraid that we humans are naturally cruel.’

  ‘I understand,’ I said, ‘that your kind has known nothing but war for ten thousand years – and more. You have been bound by chains of trauma, nets of karma.’

  This provoked a slight smile from her. She said, ‘Yes, the karma of cruelty.’

  ‘And the cruelty of karma.’

  I looked up at her and drank the sheen of her skin, so smooth and black and alive with the dark songs of history singing from far away out of the distant past.

  ‘As many books as I have read, I still do not understand human slavery.’

  ‘And what makes you think I do?’

  ‘Men threaten others with dismemberment and death to make them provide sustenance and other things?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said in a quiet voice, ‘that is the core of slavery.’

  ‘But why would humans force others to do what they easily could themselves? It is a joy to get food.’

  ‘Not the way we get it.’

  I had seen images of men and women stooping over cabbages in a vast field of baked, brown earth, and I knew that she was right.

  ‘Why would men and women,’ I asked, ‘permit themselves to be enslaved? Would it not be better to die?’

  ‘It is easy to suppose so until one is faced with death.’

  ‘I think you humans fear death nearly as much as you do life. That is why you have made slaves of each other.’

  ‘Only a few are slaves any more.’

  ‘Is thirty million a few? Remember how bad I am with numbers.’

  ‘It is probably thirty million. Still, when considered against the earth’s entire population, the percentage of people in actual slavery is only a fraction of what it once was. In ancient Rome—’

  ‘I think you are all slaves,’ I said. ‘Everyone on earth is part of a single planetary system of money and commerce, people buying and selling labor, telling others what to do and being told. Everyone is slave or master – or some part of each. And the masters are more slaves than those they own and control, for they live always in fear of losing their wealth and power and becoming poor and powerless. And so they create a bondage of cruelty for themselves, which orders every aspect of their existence. Thus they die in their souls and become burned-up, twisted, shrunken things.’

  She gazed at me from the deck a few feet above me. She asked, ‘Is that how you see us?’

  ‘I see an entire species that lives off itself. Like sharks devouring each other, you eat each other’s labor, money, time, sweat, tears, hopes, and dreams.’

  Helen’s lips tightened as I said this. I sensed her desire to hold a burning cigarette to them so that she could breathe in the nicotine drug that might soothe her a little even as it cannibalized her consciousness.

  ‘Is that how you see me?’ she asked softly.

  With an eye on her seamless black skin, I said, ‘Your ancestors were slaves, yes?’

  Her laughter began as a tingling warmth of outrage deep in her throat long before it worked its way down into her belly and began to build. It came up out of her in a force both frightening and volcanic. Bitterness boiled blackish-red within it, along with irony, memory, and the kind of cosmic humor necessary to melt away the anguish of life. Her belly shook and shook as one paroxysm of laughter after another took hold of her. Her mouth widened in an upward curve, and the skin crinkled into deep fissures around her eyes, which flooded with tears that she could not contain.

  After she had regained control of herself and sat using her hand to wipe her face, she looked at me and said, ‘I am slower today than I usually am. It took me a long time to see that your bringing up slavery was aimed at offering me an excuse for slapping Gabi. Those chains of trauma that you spoke of.’

  ‘Yes, the hurts of the generations inflicted on the helpless, who cannot help inflicting the same upon others.’

  ‘How very, very presumptuous of you!’

  ‘Then your ancestors were not slaves who had to swallow rivers of blood and violence?’

  She laughed again, not quite so unrestrainedly, but with more bitterness and irony. At last she said, ‘My family owned slaves. My great-grandfather did, before slavery became illegal – at least officially.’

  I took in this news and said, ‘I am sorry I presumed, Helen.’

  ‘That is all right.’ She wiped at her eyes again. ‘You have presumed less than all the people who try not to let the color of my skin prejudice their opinion of me even as they feel sure that my skin must be significant in ways that they do not like to imagine.’

  ‘I should not have presumed at all,’ I said. ‘I think that I could read books and surf the Net for a billion years, and still not understand you humans.’

  ‘I do not understand them myself.’

  ‘It may be,’ I went on, ‘that you have somehow eluded the trauma and escaped the karma of the entire human slave system.’

  ‘I have been very lucky in very many ways.’

  Attuned to the truth of myself and my many evasions of it, I heard sincerity in her words even as I zanged the deeper lie that they concealed.

  ‘You have never spoken of your family before today,’ I said. ‘I know nothing of your land or how or why you came to this place.’

  My mother once informed me that polite conversation should include silences that invite in others to speak. I remained as silent as a star while I held Helen’s eyes in the light of my own. Her belly trembled as if she wanted to laugh again – or weep. I sensed in her the same shark that had fought its way out of me. Her throat tightened into a narrow tube of pain even as her fingers clenched into a fist. How she struggled to keep from speaking! How desperately she wanted to speak!

  ‘Tell me,’ I said to her. Sometimes silence needs the help of words. ‘Tell me why you think you struck G
abi.’

  A million years passed. Helen’s breathing slowed to pressured intervals of indrawn air as her will clamped down upon her lungs with its icy fingers. A nearly inhuman coldness spread out from her heart to touch her eyes, her lips, and every aspect of her being. It was a coldness as total as the bitter blue northern ocean and as empty as the black void between the galaxies that starlight has nearly abandoned. When she finally turned her head my way, I hardly recognized the merciless woman who stared at me.

  ‘My family,’ she said, breaking the silence, ‘had a big white house on a hill overlooking the fields of coffee and sesame where our servants worked – we never thought of them as slaves. We were rich and relatively happy. Then war came. I was twelve, and my sister Bibi was ten.’

  Quiet took hold of her again. It seemed that each word that she spoke was like a nail being pounded through the skull of memory, and the fewer words she gave me, the less her agony would be.

  ‘I cannot say that the soldiers who captured us,’ she continued, ‘killed my family out of a sense of shared injustice with our servants, for they shot them, too, those who did not escape into the hills. The soldiers certainly wanted vengeance, however, on my family, or my tribe – or perhaps the entire human race.’

  Although it was a cloudy mid-afternoon and not her appointed time for smoking, she drew out a cigarette and ignited it. Clouds of smoke swirled around her head before disappearing into the salty sea air of the dome.

  ‘The soldiers kept Bibi and me for three years,’ she said, in between puffs of her cigarette. ‘We moved from one camp to another. Sometimes we slept in dirty huts, but more often on the bare ground. We cooked for the soldiers, gathered firewood or dried dung, carried water, and cleaned their filthy clothes. We had to pretend to like the filthy things they did to us, else we would be beaten. When I became pregnant, I had no idea who the father was. I rejoiced when I miscarried, though before my capture I had wanted more than anything to have my own house and be the mother of many children. I began to worry that my next pregnancy would kill me, for we lived in filth of one kind or another night and day, and we never had enough to eat. I need not have worried, however. It is strange how life answers our prayers. The gonorrhea I contracted did not give me the death that I feared and secretly longed for, but it sufficed to scar my insides and make me sterile.’