‘Go back! Go back!’ I called to her. ‘The humans have killed everyone except Baby Electra and me. I have killed the killer, but more of them are sure to come soon to kill us. Flee to the north! We will journey south, and so perhaps you will be safe.’
‘We will not abandon you!’ Alkurah cried out.
‘You must! You must! Perhaps we can meet out in the open ocean.’
‘We will!’ Alkurah shouted to me in a deep, deep moan of anguish. ‘I promise you that we will meet again!’
Baby Electra and I swam out into the Sound with all the alacrity we could summon. We did not, however, move quickly, for every flick of Baby Electra’s tail sent through muscle and nerve electric jolts of agony.
‘Will I die?’ she asked me.
I zanged the hole gouged out of the skin, blubber, and muscle in her side. I peered into the wound, then put my tongue to the hot, red tang of her torn tissues. Although she was still bleeding, I could detect no sign that any major artery had been severed.
‘You will need to be strong to survive the infection and fever that will come,’ I said. ‘If you do, you will live, though you will swim with a limp.’
‘I do not want to swim with a limp. What male would ever want to mate with me?’
‘Many males would,’ I reassured her. ‘You will grow long and lithe to be the most beautiful of mother whales.’
‘All right then,’ she said. ‘I do want to live.’
She grew quiet for a moment. I felt her zanging me everywhere along my body.
‘Did you know that you are wounded?’ she asked me.
I had not known. Her question, however, caused me to feel my way past the lightning flashes of adrenalin that still shot through my body and obliterated the much quieter firing of my nerves.
‘My fin,’ I said to her. ‘It must have been a bullet – I never felt it! What does it look like?’
‘The tip is gone. It looks like a shark bit it off.’
A wave of wrath moved through me like the aftershock of an underwater earthquake. I had always been proud of my great dorsal fin.
‘It will not stop me from swimming,’ I said, ‘nor will your wound stop you. Let us swim then!’
‘But where will we swim to?’
‘Away from the humans,’ I said.
We moved through the Sound past the many noisy boats and the almost whisperless kayaks, which we avoided. From Baby Electra’s wound trailed long strands of blood like scarlet fishing lines cast into the water. After a while of silent swimming and long dives beneath the surface that would hide us from the humans’ sight, we came upon the colder and much deeper open ocean. We turned west, as if pulled by some instinct of desire that flowed counter to the currents that worked to sweep us back toward dark continent behind us. We swam hard and with a steadiness of will, but we could not escape the humans, for their handiwork was everywhere: in the metallic whine of propellers fracturing the water far away; in the floating bits of plastic bottles and other junk; in the bright red jewels of meat gleaming from Baby Electra’s open side; in the scar that marked my forehead and the much deeper wound cut into my soul. An orca knows the wide, wide ocean to be his ancestral home, but for the first time in my life out in the rushing blue wilds of the world, I felt anything but safe. My breaking the Great Covenant made me what the humans call an outlaw. In no land or water did I now belong.
I have murdered a human being. I have murdered a human being.
I felt the substance of the man I had slain digesting within me and becoming one with my own. How like a beast I truly was, like some monster out of mythology, half orca and half human! It seemed at any moment that I might actually sprout seven human heads deformed with ten horns. Or perhaps I was something new altogether, some dread being out of nightmare that had never existed in all the eons in which Ocean had spun through the black and empty spaces of the universe.
I have murdered a human. I have murdered …
The dread of my deed ate at me like a worm. And then, as Baby Electra and I swam far out into the ocean, a new and more terrible thought began to grieve me, a thought which perhaps no orca had ever dared to think: What was wrong with that? Didn’t humanity revere its successful killers of men, from Joshua to Hercules to Alexander the Great? Why should I not revere myself? Why not take pride in my becoming at last what the humans so derogatorily call a killer whale?
When I sounded the lightless caverns of my conscience, the echoes carried back to me a realization that I felt no guilt over what I had done. Certainly I knew shame, for other orcas would aim their zangs of scorn at me and announce to each other: ‘There goes Arjuna, Breaker of Covenants, marked and cursed for killing a man.’ Guilt, however, was a human creation, experienced by human beings – and sometimes by their dogs.
No, what really troubled me was that I had given in to fear and wrath. The humans speak of seven deadly sins, and of these wrath overshadows all but one. We whales do not worry ourselves over such human conceptions as sin, but if we did, I would see in my murder of the murdering man the making of each of the remaining six sins: Through my lust to enjoy the power of speaking to the humans, I had spoken of things they did not wish to hear, and spoken too well. In my gluttony to devour all human language and knowledge, I had stuffed myself with too many indigestible, horrible things. My greed to gather, gain, and possess the humans’ love had led to the reaping of the worst of human hate. I had also fallen into sloth: the laziness of the spirit that fails to do what the spirit is called to do. Envy I had known in my covetousness of the human hand and all its miraculous works. At last came the worst iniquity, the mother of sins: pride. Out of sheer, soul-burning hubris, I had dared to try to bestow the bright flame of reason upon the two-legged beings that we call the idiot gods, and so become myself a greater god.
The farther that I swam out into the ocean and the deeper I thought, the more it seemed to me that I had done a much worse thing. We of the sea do speak of splendor, the brightness of being that sings through each orca in a song of eternal becoming. To silence that glorious song would be to wreak something like a sin upon the soul, an atrocity of damning and endarkenment that no orca would ever conceive much less commit.
Even as I myself had done. I truly had slain a beautiful orca – as I had slain a beautiful man. The humans, I realized, really are different from dogs and starfish and diatoms that wish to be only what they are. What had the man I had devoured wished to be? Had he once, perhaps as a child, dreamed of living as a great, joyous orca gliding through cool waters? Might he have conceived, in his human way, of becoming a uniquely human god: wise, immortal, creative, powerful? I would never know, for I had snuffed out his fire and swallowed up his song. I had expunged from the universe each of his shining, infinite possibilities. Only a black hole of silence remained.
As this emptiness opened inside me into a vast and soundless neverness, I finally did feel guilt. I wanted to cry out my anguish into the void, but no one and nothing would have heard me. I had subtracted from creation so much! How unbearable, how irretrievable this loss, for the man, for myself, and strangely, for the world!
At last, I thought, I had an answer to the question of why human beings do not act upon the truth of what they know. Why do they not care enough to keep themselves from committing the worst of cruelties? Helen had said that the boy-men who had tortured her sister wanted to be what they thought of as beasts. They turned toward the dark and the base, I realized, because they feared the glorious and the high. In truth, they dreaded with a gut-fluttering, heart-crushing terror becoming the bright songs of the earth that they most longed to sing. So it was with me.
This new knowledge of myself afflicted me, and I could scarcely bear it, for I had conceived myself almost entirely otherwise. What did I most dread, I wondered? What song did I long to sing?
How badly I wished to ask these questions of my grandmother and my mother, to speak and swim once more with my first family whom I had nearly forgotten in my joy of dwelling w
ith Zavijah, Salm, and all my new sisters and brothers who had been slaughtered! Unukalhai, Alkurah, Kitalpha, and Hyadum, too, were gone, lost into the gray-blue deeps of the northern ocean. A single orca remained with whom I might share the wonderings that tormented me.
How, though, could I speak of such things with a whale as young as Baby Electra? How could I add to her own torment, which she could scarcely bear?
‘It hurts so bad!’ she moaned out to me as we swam side by side through the sting of the salty sea. ‘There is a hole in me, Arjuna!’
She spoke not of the bloody wound that the man’s grenade had torn out of her side, but the much deeper loss of whales she had loved. It shocked me that she included me in her remembrance of the murdered, for with an amazing percipience and compassion in one so young, she understood that the violence I had inflicted upon the man had destroyed something precious in me.
‘Please do not leave me,’ she said as she limped alongside me.
‘I never would! I will swim with you until the end of—’
‘Please do not leave me in your heart. I cannot live without you.’
I swam on in silence for a while. Then I tried to divert the stream of her thoughts.
‘I should have known that the humans would not want to hear what I had to say,’ I told her. ‘If I had not opened my big mouth …’
‘But what does your mouth have to do with making sounds?’
‘It is a figure of speech you never learned.’
‘I feel that I learned so much from the humans – and so little.’
We moved through the dark gray water, zanging frequently to see what lay ahead of us – and behind.
‘All things have a soul,’ Baby Electra continued. ‘The minnows, the crabs, the starfish, the diatoms – all these beings and so with even the seaweed and the rocks of the green-shrouded shore. But how can it be, Arjuna, that the humans have a soul?’
She spoke hyperbolically and too passionately for one so grievously wounded, but she spoke to a point.
I said to her: ‘What of Gabi, then? What of Helen?’
‘They are the exceptions that prove the rule,’ she said. ‘I sometimes think that Descartes was correct in characterizing animals as soulless automatons, if by animals is meant human beings.’
‘You know that humans are not automatons.’
‘No, they are something much worse,’ she said. ‘Any part of reality that vexes them they destroy with a will and a glee. Why have our kind made a covenant with such creatures?’
‘I do not know.’
‘But you must know! You are an adult, Arjuna.’
‘I have not completed my rhapsody. Perhaps I never will.’
‘You will! You will! And you will speak to the adults of the things that adults speak of.’
‘Once,’ I said, ‘I overheard my grandmother and mother discussing the Great Covenant.’
‘And what did they say?’
‘Little that made sense to me. My grandmother said that the Great Covenant is a mystery that may not be questioned.’
‘But we orcas question everything!’
‘Of course we do. That is what makes my grandmother’s pronouncement so mysterious.’
‘Perhaps in our questioning, we should question that we question everything.’
‘Of course, that is also true. I am glad that you have not allowed your wound to divert you from thought play.’
‘I want to live! I want to know … so much!’
‘I am glad,’ I said to her as we glided beneath the waves above us.
‘If we may not question the why of the Great Covenant,’ she said, ‘may we not wonder about the where and the how? From where did it come? How has it been passed down to our kind for so many ages?’
‘Only the deep gods,’ I said, ‘know this. It is said that they persuaded the Old Ones to make covenant with the humans long ago.’
‘But orcas do not speak with the deep gods!’
‘Once we did,’ I told her.
‘I wish I could speak with them.’
‘And what would you say?’
She thought about this as she swam. She winced at the pain that shot through her with every movement of flipper and fluke.
‘I would say this,’ she told me. ‘I have chosen to question the Great Covenant after all. What can be made can be unmade, yes? Perhaps the time has come to bury the Great Covenant in the place we left Bellatrix’s and Menkalinan’s bodies.’
Her voice spread out into the much deeper plaint and moaning of the sea. The waves carried to us the thunder of faraway storms and the much nearer booming of each other’s heart. We both listened again and again to the death cries of Zavijah and her sister, and I could not help hearing anew the murdered man’s shrieks. The deeps concealed even more disturbing stridencies that we felt touching our bones. All this clamor tinged the water with argrege and inkvol. We swam through these darker colors of sound in remembrance of brighter days.
‘I am cold,’ Baby Electra said to me as fever set in. She pressed up against me as we swam slowly toward the west. ‘Stay close to me, Arjuna.’
I pressed my side to her burning flesh. I wished I could soften my skin and remove it so that I might drape it like a cloak over her trembling body.
‘I am hungry, too,’ she said.
So was I. It had been long days and nights of swimming through sunlit and moonshadowed seas since we had eaten. I zanged the restless green waters about us, but only a couple of fish did I detect.
‘Where are all the salmon?’ she asked. ‘The humans have ravished this place. They are like sharks.’
I held my breath as I counted my heartbeats, giving up when I reached twenty-three. I aimed zangs of sonar to the west, south, east, and north – and then up and down. What dwelled in the black and whisperless deeps, I wondered, which no orca had ever dared to fathom?
‘The humans are worse than sharks,’ she added. ‘Sharks eat only when they are hungry, but the humans eat just because they like to eat.’
‘I have been thinking about sharks myself,’ I told her.
‘Have you then zanged the two that are following us?’
‘Of course I have.’
‘Then why did you wait for me to speak of them?’
‘I had thought that the pain of your body,’ I said, ‘would be enough for you to endure.’
‘What kind of sharks do you think they are?’
Only one kind of shark swam so steadily through such cold water in pursuit of wounded whales. We knew of these sharks as the Magnificent Ones while the humans called them the Great Whites.
I told this to Baby Electra, and she seemed to press herself through my side into my clenching belly.
‘I have little experience of the Magnificent Ones,’ she said. ‘If any had thought to come near my family, Pherkad and my mother – Asteropei, too! – would have killed them quickly.’
‘If these two come close to you,’ I said to her, ‘I will kill them, though it might not be quickly.’
‘Have you killed such sharks before?’
Only in my dreams, I thought. Only in my nightmares.
‘No, I have not,’ I said. ‘But I know how to. My grandmother once instructed me.’
‘I do not want you to kill them,’ she said. ‘What if they wound you as I am wounded? Who would protect me?’
‘Let us keep moving,’ I said. ‘Perhaps they will lose interest in us.’
We swam as quickly as Baby Electra could manage toward that red, glowing place where the sun disappears each night into the ocean to the west. We swam through waters darkened by clouds in the sky and by bits of kelp and sediments that the violence of wind and waves churned up from the deeps. At times the sea darkened to a muddy green, and a short while later took on a nearly impenetrable violet hue as thick and stony as chaorite. Baby Electra voiced a vain hope that we might swim through the dying of the day and so escape into invisibility when the night filled the ocean with blackness. She knew, of cou
rse, that the sharks did not hunt us by sight – not just. She wanted to will away the blood that still flowed out of her in long, red strands that the sharks must have found both savory and compelling; then she jammed her wounded side against me so that the pressure of flesh against flesh might at least slow the bleeding, even though the shock of the renewed outrage to her torn tissues caused her to moan and shudder in pain. Such desperate measures did no good. The two sharks followed our every turn and twist. Late in the afternoon, with the wind flagging and the sea calming to a startling blue clarity, they drew closer, and then closer.
‘Do you think they will attack?’ Baby Electra asked me.
‘That depends,’ I said, ‘on how hungry they are.’
A shark – any shark – needed to be very, very hungry in order to attack two killer whales.
Then, as if the two sharks had somehow communicated with each other through the voice of bloodlust and hunger, they accelerated through the water in an explosion of flashing fins. I swam against the larger one, thinking to ram him with my head, but he veered off to left at the last moment. I let him go – I needed to turn to protect Baby Electra from the other shark. I moved a heartbeat too late, however, for the shark managed to bump Baby Electra’s side and scrape off bits of her skin with his rough, shark’s hide. At my approach, he too veered and swam off into the pellucid waters.
‘They are desperately hungry,’ she said. ‘I think they will eat me.’
‘No – I will not let them.’
‘Good – I am not ready to die.’
I peered through the clear water with both sonar and vision at the two sharks where they swam leisurely alongside us, matching their pace to ours. How patient they were! How cunning! The humans disparage these great beings as dumb, brutal beasts, but the Old Ones tell of how intelligent the white sharks are. In truth, they were not white at all, but gray on top and white on the bottom, the better to camouflage themselves against the darkness of sea when hunting prey from below and to appear an almost invisible white against the sun-dazzled surface water when they swam above the creatures who looked upwards for them. So clever was this color scheme that we orcas had adopted it (and even improved upon it) when our kind had returned to the ocean eons before. The Great Whites had been our teachers, and we had learned well from them and had thrived. Over the eons, they had learned that they must leave us alone, and this they did – most of the time.
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