‘You, and your peers, seem to force all the manifold possibilities of a true science,’ I said, ‘into a very limited perspective of the gross reduction of living reality to its material parts. Those of you who congratulate yourselves on being the most advanced of your kind restrict yourselves to a single, opaque lens to fit over your eyes. It is as if cataracts have made you blind.’
He waved his hand in front of his face as if shooing away a cloud of flies. His next words indicated that he had taken to heart nothing of what I said.
‘Science,’ he informed me, ‘might not yet have all the answers, but it is the only verifiable – and hence meaningful – way of asking the right questions.’
‘But those questions are nearly always asked through the voices of materialism, mechanism, and reduction. Has it occurred to you that the only aspects of the universe that such an approach will reveal are those that are materialistic, mechanistic, and reductionist?’
‘Has it occurred to you,’ he countered, ‘that the universe really is nothing more than matter and energy, which we can understand through, and only through, analysis?’
I suddenly felt like launching myself out of the pool and landing on top of him. Instead I said, ‘And analyzing as you scientists do, every year you understand more and more about less and less until someday you will know everything about nothing.’
‘An amusing thought,’ he said, unamused. ‘But the reality is just the opposite. We understand more and more of the big questions all the time. Science has no limits, and is the single source of our knowledge about the world.’
‘And yet you know nothing of the most important thing in the world, which is quenging.’ I turned a circle about the channel, then returned to him. ‘It is funny to me and the other whales, in a perverse and tragic sort of way, that you scientists never seemed to have imagined anything like it. Thus you do not begin to see a glimmer of a ray of the unfortunate truth: that you humans will never apprehend the essence of reality absent an ability to quenge.’
I could almost hear the stream of words pouring through his head – almost. Then he said, ‘This quenging of yours is an interesting idea.’
As I had with Helen, I explained to him, ‘It is not an idea – it is a prowess, a sense, a way of being. In a way, it is pure being, the essence of isness in itself. And of everywhereness.’
‘I understand from your descriptions that quenging is something like clairvoyance, out-of-body experiences, and telepathy – and has just about as much validity.’
‘You doubt, of course. If you quenged with us whales, you would not.’
‘I suspect that would be like sharing in the same dream – and such an experience would have about as much reality.’
‘You do not believe the ocean of dreams is real?’
‘Dreams are most likely confused brain patterns.’
‘And love – what of love?’
‘Mostly hormones. The scans we’ve made of those who say they’re in love suggest that dopamine looses an electrical storm within the brain’s most primitive structures, as it similarly triggers people’s most primitive drives: thirst, hunger, the craving for drugs.’ He smiled coldly as if to reassure me of his cynicism. ‘This is why new love resembles mania, dementia, and obsession. Love, as most people think of it, has no ontological reality.’
‘And so, you believe, with quenging?’
‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.’
‘And you arrogate to yourself the definition of what is extraordinary and what is not?’ I remembered that in one of his books he had referred to human beings as lumbering robots. ‘We whales find it extraordinary – and mad – that you believe consciousness somehow emerges from the mechanistic interactions of dead and mindless matter.’
Again, he appeared not to have heard me. He said, ‘What evidence can you present for this phenomenon of quenging?’
‘Why, there is all the evidence in the world! Let me call in the other whales, and they will tell you of their own experiences.’
‘I might as well,’ he said, falling back on the fallacy known as the Ostrich Effect, ‘listen to testimonials of nature worshippers who claim to have seen water sprites, devas or unicorns.’
Again, I came up out of the water to spy-hop so that I could get a better look at him.
‘You did not come here to help me quenge or even to try to understand what quenging is, did you?’ I swallowed back the ball of fury that gathered in my throat. ‘This is just a silly exercise in debunking, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, no,’ he said as if speaking to an audience somewhere else. ‘This is quite a serious exercise in debunking.’
Late the following evening, I swam with Unukalhai out in the moonlit bay. I spoke with him of my many conversations with the religionaries. The waters had fallen nearly silent with the soft, bright hue of tintigloss. The slow shushing of our gliding bodies accompanied the murmurs of our voices.
‘The humans,’ he said to me, ‘have weak minds, and will believe almost anything.’
‘I have not even told you,’ I said, ‘of the Logos of Science. Its initiates teach that long ago, the humans choked our world with many billions more of men and women than dwell on the continents now. Then a kind of god, called Xemu, came to earth to save it and dropped hydrogen bombs into volcanoes, which caused eruptions and the fracturing of the continents. Billions upon billions of humans died.’
‘That is very interesting,’ he said. ‘It makes me think.’
‘Then there are those atheists,’ I said, ‘whose belief in the non-existence of the divine flows nearly as fervently as the faith of many a believer. And yet the atheists do not believe that their disbelief constitutes an even more powerful kind of belief.’
‘That makes me think even more,’ he said. ‘It would seem that the more the atheists denounce a religion, the more fanatically the faithful embrace it.’
‘I am not sure that I like what I think you are thinking.’
‘I think you are thinking exactly what I am thinking,’ he said, ‘and you do not have to like it to be engaged by the thought.’
‘Go ahead and think it, then.’
‘But I should keep the thought to myself?’
‘I cannot keep you from speaking.’
‘Good, good – for I very much do want to speak my thought.’ He blew out a breath, and sucked in the cold, clean air through the nostril at the top of his head. ‘Let us imagine a religion based upon a belief so seemingly impossible that the atheists would be sure to rant and rave until they grow hoarse.’
‘As you have said,’ I reminded him, ‘most humans will believe almost anything – even the impossible.’
‘Especially the impossible.’
‘Sadly, that is so.’
‘Then what if we persuaded the humans to believe something so outrageous that it would make the atheists gnash their teeth?’
‘What could be more outrageous than an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving God who creates creatures crazed by the zest to mate and then punishes them with everlasting hellfire when they mate with the wrong person or in the wrong sort of way?’
‘This might be,’ he said. ‘Let us combine elements of the faiths you have spoken of in order to create a syncretic worldwide religion. We can tell the humans that we orcas are angels sent from God to save them from themselves.’
‘That might not be so far from the truth.’
‘All religions,’ he said, ‘must contain some secret spark of the truth, otherwise they would not be believed – and otherwise they would not draw swarms of humans to them, like moths to a flame.’
‘I cannot say I feel very comfortable with the simile you have just chosen.’
‘Then let me suggest another.’ He touched his flipper to my side to emphasize what he said next. ‘Let us imagine the flowering of a new religion that attracts millions with its nectar. We can elaborate on Hinduism and Catholicism – the Church of Euthanasia and the Human Extinction Movement,
too. And Scientism, of course: we can inform the manswarms that simulations of the mechanisms of a hundred variables across fifty dimensions of analysis, or some other such gibberish, prove that life on this world is doomed – as if Ocean has no say in Her own fate. We will tell the humans that it is time for them to leave their doomed, polluted planet. We are to lead them to a better place. We will inveigle their chemists to cook in their factories a poison as sweet as honey yet more deadly than the venom of what the humans call the box jellyfish. Then there will dawn a day – the Day of Death – when the humans in their millions and billions will drink the sweet sacrament of poison prepared for them. They will do so believing with the last gasp of their billions of breaths what we have told them: that they will be reborn as immortal orcas in the image of God. We of the Angelic Cetacean Host will then lead the humans up to Agathange, where they will be reunited with God.’
We had swum from the bay clear out into the deeper currents of the Sound. My heart sent out little booms of ringlent into the rushing waters.
‘What you have just told me – this is just a thought experiment, yes?’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘It is just a way of imagining how the humans might take a little solace before reducing their numbers.’
‘It is dangerous,’ I said, ‘for an orca even to entertain such imaginings.’
He knew exactly what I was thinking, which negated any necessity for my giving voice to what troubled me. He spoke of it himself.
‘Yes, I once killed a human,’ he said. ‘That was the worst day of my life. I was insane then.’
‘And now you are sane?’
‘Now I am your brother, and you will not let me see the world as I once did, will you?’
‘Not as long as your heart is with mine as mine is with yours.’
Again, he touched me with his flipper. ‘We can always create another, less drastic, religion. Perhaps something like Unity Science. How the humans envy us and the joy of our lives! They are desperate to quenge, though they barely intimate what quenging really is and cannot conceive its grandeur.’
‘I, too, am desperate to quenge,’ I told him.
‘As am I. I think I will never do so again, however, until we have at least found a way to point humans in the direction of Agathange.’
Of all those who came to the Institute to speak of their religions, only one actually said or did anything that helped me in my quest to once more quenge. A Rastafarian, his black hair compressed into long clumps of felt, his ebony skin gleaming nearly as beautifully as Helen’s, sat above me on the deck as he played his guitar and sang for me through most of the evening. I finally gave him permission to wade out into the waters lapping the shelf, where I met him and allowed him to touch my head. He lit up a long, fat ganja cigar, which he held to my nostril, even as Gabi had done with her tube of tobacco. Almost immediately, I wanted to laugh and sing and melt back into the waters of the ocean that had once given me form.
As I became more and more well-known in the human noosphere, particularly that part embraced by the Net, many humans decided that they did not want to help me – or actually promised me harm. A rumor that it was Helen who actually composed the words that we whales spoke infected thousands of humans overnight almost like a viral disease. She was accused of perpetrating a conspiracy to put forth a radically socialistic agenda as out of the ‘mouths’ of obviously non-intelligent orcas. Some humans threatened to prosecute her for fraud. The worst of those uncomfortable with what had occurred at the Institute threatened to drop bombs on it and blow Helen and us whales into bloody bits.
Helen, who had confronted very real monsters eye to eye (and tooth to ear), dismissed as cowards the faceless phantoms who haunt the darker strands of the Net. She said to me, ‘You are a celebrity now. All famous people who try to do good things receive death threats. That is how you know you are doing good things.’
Her seeming blitheness did not mean that she neglected to safeguard us whales. Indeed, at times she could be too protective of us. One morning, I informed her that I wished to speak with a popular evangelist. She opposed inviting him to the Institute, saying, ‘Why this man, Arjuna? He is the worst of the worst.’
‘It is precisely such people,’ I said, ‘who rise to positions of power in the human world.’
‘But there are hundreds of influential Christians who try to actually listen to what Jesus said and make their religion one of peace. Why should you want to talk to a fanatic who preaches pure poison?’
‘You call him a fanatic,’ I said, ‘but I must tell you that all humans who take their beliefs too seriously seem like fanatics to us whales.’
‘I am afraid that Reverend Pusser takes his beliefs very seriously – at least people believe he does.’
‘Beliefs are the eyelids of the mind,’ I said. ‘Eyes can be opened.’
‘Do you really believe you can change Reverend Pusser’s mind?’
‘I would like to try.’
‘As you did with Jordan?’
Had I been human, I would have flushed with shame.
‘For one with such a small brain,’ I said to her, ‘you can be discomfittingly insightful.’
‘Coming from one with such an overgrown brain,’ she said, as we basked in the warm gaze of each other’s eyes, ‘I will regard that as an unprecedented compliment.’
‘Although I failed to reason with Jordan,’ I said, ‘speaking with him did no harm.’
‘This preacher is different – he is dangerous.’
‘Shall I fear he will preach me a silly sermon? Just make sure he does not bring any harpoons with him.’
I would reason with this revered man, I promised myself – somehow I must reason with him. Did he not preach that humans were made in the image of God? Would he not, somewhere in his mind, therefore revere the divine reason with which all beings are imbued?
17
Soon after that, a large man thick in the shoulders like a bull strode onto the deck above the channel where I turned circles in the water as I waited for him. His wool suit had the soft sheen of silk, and he seemed to wear it as a kind of armor against any sort of low regard or disrespect. As he sat on the chair prepared for him, he had to unbutton the jacket to accommodate his bulging belly. Very large pores pitted his skin, as if a wildcatter had drilled for oil across his cheeks. Through these obscene holes poured sweat, grease, and an insincerity that spread out in a shiny patina from his hairline to his chin. The whole of his face, red and lumpy, had an angry and pummeled look, as if he had fought one too many battles, either with words or fists. His blue eyes blazed – I could think of no other word – with a fervor to exert his will and make sure that he always got his way.
‘I want to thank you for agreeing to meet with me.’ His voice boomed out into the dome like the explosion of a cannon. ‘I never dreamed a man could sit talking face to face with a whale – instead of being swallowed by one.’
He laughed at his joke, and looked at me as if expecting that I might somehow do the same. Was he following some sort of script that called for him to soften his audience with a little humor before moving on to more serious matters?
‘Wasn’t Jonah,’ I said, ‘actually swallowed by a large fish?’
‘Have you read the Bible?’ he asked me with an unpleasant blending of irritation and surprise. ‘I was told you whales had learned to read, though that’s hard to believe.’
‘If you have read the Bible, then you must believe much more miraculous things.’
‘I like the way you think, Arjuna,’ he said, ‘and I am prepared to admit that you do think and can speak your thoughts, as miraculous as that seems.’ He drew out a packet of square, white papers, and used one to wipe at his nose. ‘I guess you could say that one way or another, I’ve come here to talk about miracles.’
‘I had thought you wanted to help me quenge.’
‘That may be. If possible, I’d love for us to quenge together in Jesus.’
His simple stateme
nt gave me pause. Did he have any idea what he was saying?
‘However,’ he continued, ‘I don’t know if that will be possible because I don’t know what you really are.’
‘I am … that I am,’ I said. ‘As you are, and everything is.’
‘I have to tell you that what you just said troubles me in many ways, as I’m pretty sure you know.’ Now he blew the clogs in his nose into the square of paper, which he crumpled in his fist. ‘You are obviously intelligent – maybe even as intelligent as a man.’
‘O, thank you, man!’
‘And maybe more so. That is what concerns me.’
‘In cetacean society, we consider it a privilege to speak with those more intelligent, that some part of their intelligence might illuminate us.’
‘I’ve always prided myself on having an open mind,’ he said, ‘but I’ve always known better than to try to outtalk Satan.’
‘Is that what you think I am?’
I could not have been more astonished if he had fallen down and kissed the water at the second coming of Jesus Christ.
‘As I said,’ he continued, ‘I don’t know. Many are claiming that you are Satan, or one of his servants.’
‘You cannot really believe that Satan is a real being and not just an invention of the makers of your Christian myth?’
‘Satan’s greatest deception,’ he said, ‘is to convince people that he doesn’t exist.’
‘I am an orca,’ I said, ‘born of orcas in our Ocean going back a million years.’
‘I’m sure you know that the world was created little more than six thousand years ago,’ he said. ‘And Satan can take on any form he wishes.’
‘You might as well suppose I am an angel in disguise.’
‘Satan was once the greatest of angels before his envy of Adam caused him to defy the Lord.’
And I, I thought, am the greatest of fools for talking with such a fool.
‘You cannot really believe the things you say,’ I told him, ‘can you? Not deep inside, where a flame of sanity surely must burn.’
Idiot Gods, The Page 31