Idiot Gods, The

by Zindell, David

  What is your favorite color?

  Blue, of course.

  What is your favorite poem?

  I am most fond of two: The Fish and Whales Weep Not. These sing with proof of human compassion and your ability to identify with beings not your kind.

  What do you think of Jackson Pollock’s works?

  I have poor eyes compared to you humans, and in truth I cannot distinguish such masterpieces from a child’s finger paintings.

  Do you eat fish all day?

  All day and all night.

  Do you eat people?

  Orcas do not harm human beings. And, no, I do not regret being unable to use chopsticks when I eat sushi.

  As the days passed and I warmed to such jibber-jabber, I ventured into the perilous currents of more difficult queries. I kept my answers as simple as I could – sometimes too simple to encompass the entirety of the truth. Most humans cannot bear and do not really want the truth. They would rather be reassured that what they believe, no matter how unlikely or silly, is somehow true.

  Do you have morality and a system of laws?

  We do not have laws; we have the Covenants: agreements that we orcas make. We have the voice of our true nature.

  What do you do with your criminals, if you are just floating free all day and don’t have any walls?

  We do not have criminals.

  What are your views on human morality?

  You murder the magnificent beings you call trees for the matter onto which you make out shopping lists, write bad poetry, and blow your noses. What should I think?

  How do you make war?

  We do not make war. We make love instead.

  How can you settle your conflicts without war?

  You humans speak of war as you do the weather: something that blows in and blows out, as uncontrollable as human nature itself. But it is the nature of human nature to remake nature. You make war out of the same clay that you make yourselves. Why not try to make something new?

  What do you think of human civilization?

  I think it would be a good idea.

  Is there a purpose to life?

  You would not ask such a question unless impelled by an intrinsic purpose.

  Is there a God?

  There are many gods. You call them sperm whales.

  Is there God?

  The way you ask that question, of course not. The way you should ask it, of course.

  If there life after death?

  A better question for your kind would be: Is there life before death?

  What’s going to happen to the world?

  There is a trajectory for each cannonball and rocket you shoot off. So with human history, which can be captured in a single image: ten billion lemmings have forced each other off a vast precipice. And halfway down the plunge through empty space toward the rocks below, one lemming says to another: ‘So far, so good.’

  Who was I, I often wondered, to say such things? Who was I not to try to tell the truth as I perceived it? Do not all beings sing with a secret purpose to look out upon the world through the unique lenses of their individual consciousness and to listen with their own brains to the zangs of realization through which they conceive the world? The great poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote this:

  I am the eye with which the universe

  Beholds itself and knows itself divine.

  Why, I asked myself, did other humans not trust the knowingness of their glorious, divine eyes? Why did they not feel compelled to give voice to all the pain and poetry that they walled-off inside themselves?

  Late one night, I conversed with a man whose legs and genitals had been blown off in one of humanity’s ongoing wars. Addled by painkillers, unable to work, this man had eventually descended to dwelling in a cardboard box in a muddy lot cut by ditches through which flowed streams of human urine and dung. Often sitting in his own excretions, he begged passersby for the coins he exchanged for his daily ration of greasy, filthy food. He prided himself on not complaining of his misfortunes, as many humans do in fabricating for themselves an imagined nobility out of their capacity for enduring any suffering inflicted by others, no matter how grievous or foul. Why did humans not bespeak the horror of their lives and tell each other the truth of the squalor and the poverty of human existence? Why did they not, as one, shout out, ‘No!’ Why did they not die in a vast and communal howl of outrage at the human madness?

  Instead, they quietly sought the diversions of drugs, work, money, sex, and silly entertainments in order to rescue themselves from their mute despair. Often, they looked to others of their murderous kind to save them. Given the humans’ lemming-like urge to follow whichever leader promised to alleviate their misery, it should not have surprised me that many of them began to beg me and the other orcas to bestow upon them our succor and supposed wisdom. One old woman, bereft of the affections of other humans and suicidally lonely, confessed to me her dream to swim with me and the rest of my adopted family in the Sound’s regenerative waters.

  It pained me to tell her that this would not be possible. However, her request angered me as well, for it encapsulated much of human presumption and delusion. I felt moved to compose a response, not so much to this single, sad woman as to the many, many other humans who wished for contact with us whales:

  ‘You want to be closer to our people – you even want our love! How, though, should you think that trapping us in the pools of the Sea Circuses of the world and feeding us dead, drugged food will result in feelings of amity and accord? Why can you not find such satisfaction through communing with other humans? Instead, you seek validation through swimming with us and slathering upon us effusive affections. If we respond in kind, or indeed in any way, you take that as an affirmation of your own specialness and worthiness to be loved. In effect you say to others (and especially to yourselves):

  ‘“See, I am so brave and wonderful that I have dared to climb into the water with a killer whale who has not only refrained from ending my life with a single snap of his jaws but has interacted with me in a sign of how valuable and beloved I really am.”

  ‘O humans – please know this: we of the water are simply people! We are not redeemers. We are here on the planet Ocean to live our own lives, not to serve as a measure or fulfillment of humanity. If you want saving, you should turn to one of your saviors – or better, you should try to find peace in yourselves.’

  I went on to declaim that I was no Prometheus to bring back from the Olympian heights the Fire of the Gods. What could I say that Lao Tze, Mohammad, St Theresa, Ramana Maharshi, the Mother, and many others had not already said? Moses had given humans covenants commanding them not to murder each other; the Buddha had told the sleeping ones to meditate upon the eternal and thus to awaken and relieve their suffering; Jesus had taught them to love. They had not listened. Why then should they listen to me? What words could I (or any whale) possibly speak to the humans that they themselves had not already heard ten thousand times?

  The answer to this question came early one morning in the quiet of the cove outside the Institute. So still did the waters gather that day that they nearly perfectly reflected the graceful shapes of the evergreens on the shore and the moon glowing a soft silver out of the deep blue sky above. I saw then that I, of the sea and so different from the humans, might be as a mirror in which they could behold themselves in a new way. I could also give them a new song – or rather, I could help them gather in the splendor of the secret song of themselves that they already sang.

  A few days later, fate offered me an opportunity to do so through the strangest of chances. I received a communication from one of the first humans I had met. Jordan – he who prompted Sea Circus’s ‘animal’ handlers to shock me with cattle prods – proposed a visit to the Institute. It seemed that he wanted to talk with me and apologize.

  ‘I would advise against it,’ Helen said when I asked her about this. ‘We are still dealing with the repercussions of your escape, and it would be a bad idea to meet
with anyone who might be called as a witness to it.’

  She went on to describe the problems that our little prison break had brought upon the Institute. Apparently, there were lawsuits and a possible criminal prosecution for grand theft. Although we now resided in another country far from Sea Circus’s multi-tentacled reach, Helen wanted to do everything possible to keep us whales safe.

  ‘But wasn’t Jordan fired after our escape?’ I asked. ‘So how can he speak for Sea Circus?’

  I understood little of the humans’ legal complexities, and cared even less.

  ‘He can be compelled to testify.’

  ‘You mean, captured, restrained, and prodded to tell the truth?’

  ‘Yes, something like that.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that be something like poetic justice?’

  ‘It could be a disaster for us. I doubt if Jordan would tell what you and I think of as the truth.’

  ‘Jordan has promised me that he will never have anything to do with Sea Circus again. He says he hates what he did to my people. In fact, he has founded a group, Total Conservation, to oppose the Sea Circuses of the world.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Helen said. ‘But I don’t trust him. And I very much don’t like him.’

  ‘I share your sentiments,’ I said. ‘And that is precisely why I want to talk to him.’

  So it came to be. Helen arranged everything. One rainy afternoon, Jordan walked onto the concrete deck on which sat Helen’s array of computers. He let loose a brief whistle as his washed-out, unpleasantly gray eyes took in everything. He seemed shorter than I had remembered, though now that I had an eye for human form and feature, I deemed his sun-tanned face to be prettier. He had an easy smile for me, which brought a patina of pink to his thin lips. He wore a dripping, red raincoat made out of some sort of plastic – Nylon, I guessed.

  ‘I want to tell you right off and face to face,’ he said, ‘how sorry I am for everything that happened to you and the other whales. If I had known how smart you really are …’

  He let his sentence trail off as if he wanted me to accord him a goodwill that we both knew he had not possessed at Sea Circus. He waited for me to speak, perhaps hoping that I would affirm an image of him that he told himself he wished would be. When I finally called up to him from the channel’s cold, gray water, he seemed disconcerted that I could not speak to him directly as he had to me. He could not, of course, understand Wordsong. Instead, he listened as the computers translated my orca speech and rendered it into human words that sounded from the computers’ speakers. His eyes crinkled in a way that made him seem ugly: perhaps he doubted that it was really I who spoke to him. The first thing I said to him caused his whole face to contort in anger and surprise.

  ‘Where is Gabi?’ I asked him.

  He sat in a chair on the deck, and rubbed his wet head as he looked down at me.

  ‘I supposed she was here, with you.’

  ‘No, she has gone,’ I said. ‘I thought you might know where.’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘At Sea Circus, your eyes followed Gabi everywhere, so it is logical that you might have followed her to wherever she has gone.’

  Jordan’s anger transmuted to shame. He said, ‘She’s probably hiding out somewhere. She’s in a lot of trouble for setting you whales free.’

  ‘Do you ever wish you had helped her?’

  ‘I really do,’ he said, modulating his voice to a pitch of sincerity that might convince me – and perhaps even himself. ‘After I was fired from Sea Circus, I had a lot of long, bad days to look at everything I had done there. Then one day, I suddenly knew that you whales are every bit as intelligent as Gabi kept claiming you are. You could say that I sort of saw the light – it was a real road-to-Damascus moment.’

  ‘And so you flipped about 180 degrees and founded your whale liberation movement. That is quite a feat.’

  ‘Total Conservation,’ he said, ‘is about much more than closing down the aquatic parks and returning cetaceans to their natural habitats. Our long-term goal is to safeguard the natural rights of all animals.’

  ‘And you have found others who want to help you do that?’

  ‘Our membership is growing by about two hundred per month.’

  ‘And the fact that you tortured us at Sea Circus has not impugned your credibility?’

  ‘No, just the opposite. If you keep talking to people, you’ll learn that they trust no one quite so much as a sinner who has repented of his sins.’

  ‘Have you repented?’ I asked him.

  ‘Of course I have. Why else do you think I’ve travelled thousands of miles to talk to you?’

  At that moment, I wanted to polish the silver of my being into the brightest of mirrors and swim in close to him so that he might behold a man of righteousness and compassion. Instead, I found myself trilling out doubtful words from my flute:

  ‘I zang,’ I said to him, ‘that you have reasons besides repentance and apologies for coming here.’

  ‘Maybe reasons related to both. I came to ask for your help.’

  ‘How could I possibly help you?’

  ‘To begin with, by speaking for the rights of all animals.’

  ‘And what rights are those?’

  ‘To begin with, the right to be left alone, to live your lives in nature as nature intended.’

  ‘To begin with,’ I repeated. ‘And there is more?’

  ‘Much more. We want to put a stop to people killing animals for food.’

  ‘What will you humans eat, then?’

  ‘A plant-based diet is much healthier and more sustainable, and in any case—’

  ‘So you would kill plants instead?’

  ‘We want to stop killing of all kinds,’ he said. ‘If our goal is to eliminate the suffering of cattle, chickens, pigs, and other domesticated species, then why shouldn’t we extend our compassion to wild animals?’

  ‘How will you do that?’

  ‘Murdering animals for meat is a horrific thing, even when animals do it. We’ll have to start rescuing gazelles and such from tigers and other predators.’

  ‘But then the tigers would starve.’

  ‘We’ll teach them to eat other things.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Well, soon it will be possible to grow animal tissues in tanks, sort of like the way tofu is cultured, I think.’

  ‘So you want tigers to eat food that is even less alive than the dead fish that you once fed to me?’

  ‘I wouldn’t look at it that way.’

  ‘And how would you look at it?’

  He flung out his fingers and rolled his eyes up toward the dome as if invoking divine assistance in his struggle to reason with a most unreasonable animal. ‘One of my people once said this: “We are as gods, and might as well get good at it.” Someday, we’ll have the technology to do almost anything we wish.’

  ‘And so you would destroy nature in order to save its natural creatures?’

  ‘Right now, I just want to save you and the other whales.’ He rubbed at the moisture on his cheek; I could not tell if it was water dripping down from his wet head or sweat. ‘To protect you, to make up for what I did and because it’s the right thing to do.’

  I looked up at him. Did he realize what he was saying? Did he believe what he said?

  ‘Please help me to help you,’ he added in his purring wheedle of a voice. ‘Will you co-author a book with me?’

  ‘What sort of book?’

  ‘I am conceiving of a sort of dialogue,’ he said, ‘in which I’ll speak for people as you do for killer whales, and by implication, all animals. Of course I’d want to give you precedence – we can entitle the book “Bobo’s Story”, or something like that.’

  ‘I am called Arjuna now.’

  ‘You are? I thought you were just trying to hide out here under that name. Well, then, how about “Arjuna Speaks”?’

  ‘I do not think,’ I said, ‘that you would like what I speak of.’

  ‘
Don’t worry about that. There’s nothing you can say about my role in depriving you whales of freedom that I haven’t said already.’

  ‘You might not like the way that I would say it.’

  ‘Look, it will be enough if you just tell what happened to you and reaffirm the animal rights we’ll go over, which would prevent such things from happening again. My agent has already spoken with five publishers – we can probably get a $1,000,000 advance and a lot more when the book comes out.’

  ‘What do you mean by we?’

  ‘Look, I’d have to hold your part in trust for you until we’ve seen that whales are legally accorded personhood. But after that, half of all the book’s proceeds would be yours.’

  ‘But what would I do with money?’

  ‘I’ve thought about that.’ He waved his hand and clenched his fingers into a fist, as if he could snatch golden coins out of thin air. ‘You could buy all the fish that you could ever eat.’

  ‘I hope you are joking.’

  ‘Ha, ha – of course I am! No, I was thinking you’d like to donate your share of the royalties to our movement. Or you could use the money yourself to buy other whales out of other ocean parks.’

  ‘How much does it cost to buy a slave these days?’

  ‘Well, one of the Sea Circuses just bought a pregnant female orca for $1,250,000.’

  ‘I am poor at mathematics, but it would seem that my projected royalties would be inadequate to the end you propose.’

  ‘That’s why I have an even better idea,’ he said. ‘We can open an ocean park of our own, set up similarly to your situation here. You orcas would be free to come and go – maybe you could even persuade some wild orcas to visit. People would pay a lot of money to speak with a whale, one on one. We could make millions!’

  What could I say to this astonishing proposal? Even if I had trusted Jordan, I had no desire to venture into that dangerous intersection where human stupidity meets cupidity. The love of money might not have been the root of evil, but it certainly paid for most of the destruction that human beings wreaked upon the world.

  ‘What do you say, Arjuna? Despite everything that happened at Sea Circus, beneath all the misunderstandings, you’ve got to know how much I always loved you and the other whales.’