Idiot Gods, The

by Zindell, David

  There came more smoke, more silence, more memory. The pain that billowed out from Helen’s chest to fill up the dome became so intense that I wanted to swim away from it, out into the soothing waters of the bay.

  ‘My sister was not so lucky,’ she told me. ‘In the eighth month of her pregnancy, her belly swelled as big as a melon, even as her arms and legs shrank into sticks while her unborn child grew and sucked the life out of her. The soldiers began raping her as they would a dog. They did not seem to mind when Bibi grew as dry inside as leather for they used the blood they tore from her to lubricate their efforts. The more she screamed, the more soldiers lined up behind her – they would say: “Listen to how much she enjoys us! We will all make her our bride!”’

  Listen! I said to myself. Listen, listen, Arjuna, though you will not want to hear what you must hear!

  ‘One day,’ Helen said, ‘a new company of soldiers came into the camp. Many were boys, no older than us. We were given to them. One boy – his ear had been shot off, and he could not have been older than eighteen – cried out that he was no dog to take Bibi from behind. He insisted on trying to mount her as he pinned her face to face beneath him. Her belly got in the way, though, and he began punching her there. I knew he was going to kill her. I should have let him – it would have been a blessing. Instead, I finally lost control of myself. Or perhaps I found my will to fight back. I fell on that boy as I had once seen a lioness jump on the back of a warthog. I managed to claw out his eye and bite off part of his remaining ear before the other soldiers used their rifle butts to beat me away from him.’

  It seemed that Helen could say no more. But then she reached down inside herself with a fist of black iron to deliver the rest of her terrible story.

  ‘While the soldiers held me,’ she said, ‘I waited for the boy I had mauled to kill me. However, he had a worse punishment in mind. I could see his mind – it was sick with a controlled fury – I could see it in the coldness of the single eye that remained to him. While blood ran down his face and his friends held Bibi, he drew out his knife. He cut pieces out of her and ate them while she screamed. Then he cut out her child, which twitched in his bloody hands. I think he would have torn off a piece of it, too, if his captain had not come up and slapped him away from Bibi. The captain, who was nearly as young as the rest of the boy soldiers, grabbed my sister’s child and flung it into the dirt. He screamed out: “Are we beasts, that we eat our meat alive?”’

  Helen inhaled through her cigarette, and continued speaking through the smoke: ‘The captain called for mercy. He ordered the soldiers to use their rifle butts to club Bibi to death – they did not like to waste their precious bullets. They cut her up and roasted her, along with her child, in a fire fueled by dried dung. They were starving, you see, and they were so hungry that I am sure they considered eating each other.’

  ‘What kept them,’ I asked, ‘from eating you?’

  ‘Irony did,’ she said with a forced laugh. ‘Have I told you how my life has been defined by it? I am sure that my sister’s fate would soon have been my own. That night, however, while the one-eyed boy was using his rifle to rape me, other soldiers attacked us. It had been war that had enslaved me, and it was war that freed me. In all the confusion and the dying, I escaped.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then came the bad year,’ she said. ‘I walked across a wasteland of burned villages, fly-blown corpses, and dust. I drank my own urine, and ate stinking carrion – I did very bad things in order to survive. I found my way to a camp – there were refugees there from a dozen tribes. I began translating when the inevitable disputes arose. When the doctors discovered that I had a gift for languages and already knew five, they managed to obtain a visa for me. They flew me overseas, and helped me gain admission to the university. I have not been back to my home.’

  In the years that followed, she said, she learned six additional languages, received advanced degrees, and lived for three years among the Pirahã humans deep in a rainforest. She became a professor at a famous university. There she met someone who knew someone who was the son of the rich, rich man who eventually donated the money that Helen had used to build the Institute.

  ‘It was my dream,’ she told me, ‘to use what I knew of human languages to understand cetacean language and speak with your kind. When I met Gabi at the conference, I finally saw a way that I might encourage a few orcas to take up residence at the Institute.’

  ‘And so you arranged for our escape,’ I said. ‘To help us, as you could not help your sister?’

  ‘Yes, it was something like that.’

  ‘And when Gabi spoke of your protecting us,’ I said, ‘it touched off the memory of how you could not protect Bibi.’

  ‘Yes, it was something like that.’ She lit another cigarette, and sat smoking deep in thought. ‘I very much despise, however, these kinds of analyses of behavior, as if we are automatons who process garbage in by spitting the same garbage back out. Yes, I survived a great trauma, and yes, various things – a quick color, a sound, something someone says – can send me back to the moment when they tortured Bibi. So what? Am I, then, to be reduced to a machine of iron levers and grinding gears that lacks free will? I will not be dehumanized in that way. I slapped poor Gabi, yes, and I suppose in that moment I was slapping away everyone and everything in the soldiers’ encampment that I failed to fight off. In the end, though, it was my choice – my will. I hurt Gabi because I could not find the will not to hurt her.’

  I floated in the quiet water, listening to her words as I let them sound and resound inside me. Finally, I said, ‘Does Gabi know everything that happened to you?’

  ‘She knows nothing of my past,’ she said. ‘I have never told anyone.’

  ‘But why don’t you tell her? Then she would understand and come back to us.’

  ‘I don’t want her to,’ she said. ‘In fact, I asked her not to return.’

  ‘But why, why?’

  ‘Those who batter,’ she said, ‘believe or say that they will never do so again. And I know that I would not – I would rather die than hurt Gabi. But what if I am wrong?’

  ‘But you are not wrong! I know that!’

  ‘I am sorry, Arjuna.’

  ‘Your torturers took so much from you – will you let them take Gabi away, too?’

  I felt the coldness begin to melt from her, as an ice floe gives parts of itself to the warmer water which encompasses it.

  ‘You hate them so much – almost as much as you hate yourself.’

  ‘I hate these kinds of analyses, too, which I have done a thousand times,’ she said. Despite her frosty words, she melted a little more, and tears touched her eyes.

  ‘But isn’t there a cure for such hatred – human hatred? Didn’t your Jesus say: “Forgive them, for they know not what they do”?’

  ‘He is not my Jesus. And the soldiers all knew exactly what they were doing. They wanted to be beasts.’

  She was crying freely now, and I knew that she felt glad that only I was present to witness her loosing her fierce hold upon herself.

  ‘No, I cannot forgive them,’ she said as her chest began to shake. ‘I will not.’

  ‘Even as you will not forgive yourself for not being able to forgive.’

  The sobs that exploded out of her shook her slender body with so much force that she could no longer sit up. She fell over to the concrete deck, and lay upon her back, covering her face and sobbing even more fiercely as she trembled and writhed. I felt the spasm that ripped through her belly and caused her to curl in upon herself like a human fetus in her mother’s womb. She rolled from side to side upon the lip of the deck; the whipping motion of her head flung out tears which pinged into the water. I feared that she would roll right into the channel where the shock of the cold might kill her.

  So hot she was! – so burningly, burningly, finally hot that I could zang the heat waves glistering from her black skin. So radiantly and agonizingly alive! I almost wished she would
fall into the gently lapping waves so that I could rise beneath her and bear her up to take fresh, clean breaths, to touch away her terrible aloneness and to call all her anger, despair, pity, and pain into me.

  A billion years passed. I waited for Helen to speak to me, waited and waited. Somehow, she sat up straight again against the earth’s torturous gravity, much as the first humans must have stood up from the forms of the apes they once had been. The tears had vanished. Her terrible will to be ever and only herself had returned, but a much subtler and gentler force (though no less powerful) had joined hands with it. I had never known her to be soft, so warm, so open, so sweet.

  ‘There is a saying,’ she told me. ‘“The child is the mother of the woman.” There is a woman I always wanted to be: fertile, generative, hopeful, alive. I will never have girls and boys of my own, now, but I have often thought of giving birth in a spiritual sense to something new. I still want to give back to the world, despite what was taken from me – because of what was taken, really. For years, I told myself that I wanted to help whales. But now I think I wanted to learn from you so that the rest of my people will not have to suffer as I did.’

  ‘How you suffer!’ I called out to her. ‘It goes on and on. One of your poets said this: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”’

  In defiance of her will, tears flooded her eyes once more. For a moment, she seemed lost in a vast, lightless sea.

  ‘Help me,’ she said. ‘All of us – help us wake up.’

  She told me that she needed to go outside and walk along the beach by herself. We said goodbye to each other. I swam out into the cove. Its cool waters carried in the dark moaning of the ocean along with the anguish of every creature that had ever lived. So much of that anguish had been wrought by human hands. I had read of much worse atrocities than the one which had befallen Helen (unbelievable as that seemed), but the immediacy of Helen’s reliving of her ordeal drove into me in a way that no history ever could. Her anguish opened me both to revulsion and an immense desire to take away her pain. My dread of the humans impelled me to want to gather up the other whales and flee the Institute as quickly as I could. Compassion, however, prevailed, and I decided that I could not leave Helen. I swam from the cove to the bay and then out into the Sound, where I found the other orcas in hot pursuit of a stream of salmon. They zanged my distress before I could give voice to it. Leaving aside the joy of the hunt (for a while), they surrounded me and touched me with their flippers and their faces. I told them of my conversation with Helen.

  ‘We can all hear how your heart beats with Helen’s,’ Alkurah said, speaking the thoughts of the rest of my adopted family. ‘However, as sad as her words are, they add nothing to what we already know of the humans and their inhumanity. Is not Helen’s story the story of the entire human race?’

  ‘If that is true,’ Menkalinan said, floating upside down, ‘then why should we waste our lives here trying to talk with the humans?’

  ‘Because,’ Baby Electra said, speaking boldly as no child of a proper family of orcas ever would, ‘none of us can say what the end of the humans’ story will be.’

  ‘But what other end,’ Menkalinan asked, ‘can murder lead to besides more and more murder?’

  ‘Perhaps the ending that we help write,’ Baby Electra said. ‘Who does not love a story that somehow comes out all right in the end?’

  ‘You want to save the humans?’ We all liked it that Menkalinan, so dispirited and nearly mute in Sea Circus’s tiny pools, had found his voice again. ‘But what is worth saving?’

  ‘Individual humans are,’ Baby Electra said. ‘Helen is – so is Gabi.’

  With a few flips of his flukes, Unukalhai swam in closer and said, ‘I have read of a great human. Hildegard von Bingen became in her person the Voice of the Living Light.’

  ‘That is something,’ Menkalinan admitted.

  ‘And Sappho wrote beautiful poems,’ Salm said, ‘that flowed as a counter-current to all the slaughter called down by warriors of her age.’

  ‘That is something,’ Menkalinan said.

  ‘The great mathematician Gödel,’ Kitalpha said, ‘proved that no consistent system of axioms can prove the truth of all relations that might arise out of that system.’

  ‘That is something.’

  Now Zavijah added her voice to the song of celebration that we were composing.

  ‘Scheherazade stayed the hand of the sultan who would slay her; she worked this miracle by beguiling him with wondrous stories for a thousand nights.’

  ‘That is something,’ both Menkalinan and Alkurah said.

  ‘Emily Dickinson wrote poems that told the truth of death,’ Hyadum said.

  Now Unukalhai joined Menkalinan and Alkurah in saying, ‘That is something.’

  ‘Beethoven composed his symphony calling forth the joy of life while he was nearly despairingly deaf.’

  ‘That is something.’

  ‘Helen Keller learned to write and to praise life’s glories while deaf and blind.’

  ‘That is something.’

  ‘Nhat Chi Mai immolated herself in order to set other humans’ hearts afire with the passion to end war.’

  ‘That is a great deal,’ Bellatrix and Salm said, joining their voices to those of the others.

  And then I said, ‘The Princess Mirabai spoke with the blue God of Truth and Compassion, and sang praises of unconditional love.’

  ‘That is everything,’ we all said together.

  There, in the blue waters of the Sound, in the sound of our mutual affirmation and accord, we decided to remain at the Institute. My purpose had passed like the little lightning of an eel into the other orcas – even as my original impulse in contacting the humans had evolved. No longer did I wish merely to speak with them and ask them to stop wounding the world. Now, I wanted to help them find a way to stop wounding themselves. Then, perhaps, they would have no need to rape the continents and oceans of the world, much less to destroy it.

  How, though, was I to touch off a transformation that my brain perceived to be impossible even as my heart impelled me to try to work a miracle?

  15

  An answer to this question – a potential answer – came to me late one blustery night with the rain playing in tympanic irridescence on the dome’s glass panels like millions of tiny fingers on a tabla drum. While one half of my brain slept, the other half and my glazed eye surfed the Net in a sort of desultory hypnosis. I chanced upon an interstice of two of the Net’s humming strands: a site where many, many humans gathered each day and each moment in order to speak with each other. The cacophony that sounded out of this site brought me fully awake. I realized that although I had left my birth family in the far north in order to talk to the humans, I had so far exchanged words with only Gabi, Helen, and a few highly educated linguists. Did such an accomplishment constitute a true communication with humanity? Could Helen and Gabi speak for the rest of their barbaric, babbling kind?

  It would be a logical development of my mission to the humans if I could speak with any or all of them. I asked Helen how I might do this. My request disconcerted her. Early one morning, she sat above the channel’s turbid gray waters, and told me, ‘I don’t know if that would be wise.’

  ‘Why not? Why should it be otherwise?’

  ‘It would announce to the whole world what we are doing here. It is much too soon to popularize the results of this—’

  ‘Experiment?’

  ‘Experience. Or call it a breakthrough, if you like that word better.’

  ‘I do not very much like human words at all,’ I said. ‘However, let us remain with the one you chose. How am I to break through human illusion – all your obduracy and idiocy – if I cannot speak with the rest of you?’

  ‘More than two thousand years ago,’ she said, ‘the Buddha, too, tried to shatter people’s illusions. What makes you think you can do such a thing?’

  ‘I do not, really. But I have to try. You asked for my help,
Helen.’

  ‘I had a bad moment.’ I noticed that she did not have with her any cigarettes to smoke. The time of the year had come for her to quit. ‘I should not have asked you to do the impossible.’

  ‘It may be,’ I said, ‘that the impossible is not only possible but inevitable.’

  ‘How I wish that were true!’

  ‘I will make it true.’

  ‘How very full of hubris you are!’

  Hubris: a word of the ancient Greeks for the overweening pride of a hero who dares to steal the fire of the gods. Though that fire might be used to ignite the human heart to the greatest of purposes, the gods always punish anyone who attempts to rise to their heights.

  ‘I would rather say,’ I told her, ‘that I am full of hope.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘I will make that true, as well.’

  ‘If we make public what we are doing here,’ she said, ‘it will create many problems.’

  ‘I once read this description of Homo sapiens: the problem-solving animal.’

  She touched her lips with two of her fingers as if to hold a cigarette to them – either that, or to help her think.

  ‘There is much to consider here,’ she said. ‘And I am going to need a few days to consider it.’

  One morning, in which the waters of the cove fronting the Institute wavered with various shades of green, gray, and cobalt blue, Helen informed me that she had arranged for me to speak with other humans. Word got out that an orca could understand English and wanted to talk to people. Overnight, it seemed, a zillion of the Hairy Ones clamored to send their words crackling through the Institute’s computers and hydrophones. I engaged in dozens of dialogues each day. So many questions the humans had for me! So many answers they wanted me to give them!

  At first, I tried to field the more innocuous queries, as silly as many of them were: