Idiot Gods, The

by Zindell, David

  ‘If I do end up dying soon,’ Baby Electra said as she swam with her ragged, pained gate, ‘I would rather be eaten by sharks than shot in the head like Menkalinan, even though his death was quick.’

  ‘No one is going to eat you,’ I told her.

  I think she would have smiled at this, had orcas been able to smile. The humans speak of the right to life, and I certainly had the right to try to protect her. But her life did not belong to her; it belonged to Ocean, which at any time might come to reclaim it.

  At one with my thoughts, she asked me: ‘What do you think is wrong with the humans?’

  ‘Many things,’ I said.

  ‘But what is the one thing … that lies at the bottom of those many things?’

  ‘To ask such a question is to oversimplify things and thus to think like the humans themselves.’

  ‘I am sorry – I have spent too much time with them. As have you.’

  I swam close to her through the calm ocean, always keeping the sharks in sight. I said, ‘Something has smothered the human soul. If I could identify a single cause of this, I would say that the humans do not know why they are alive.’

  ‘But they know what they need to do to live,’ Baby Electra said. ‘They know that they must love each other – and must love the world with all their heart and with all their soul and with all their strength, and must feel its will at one with their own. They know that they must live with the right intention and the right view toward creation. They know how to practice right concentration. Their own Buddha has taught them. They know that they must see themselves in all things, and all things in them: that thou art, their sages have said. Above all, they know that they must drink deeply from life’s source and become so overfull that they forget themselves – and thus remember who they really are.’

  The sharks following us might have been intelligent, but they could not follow the stream of our conversation – and I lamented that few humans seemed able to do so either.

  ‘Why do the humans,’ Baby Electra continued, ‘not do what they know they must do?’

  ‘Because they are afraid,’ I said.

  ‘Of what?’ she asked. ‘What on earth can harm them?’

  ‘It is true,’ I said, ‘that they think of themselves as masters of the earth. That, however, is a derangement of their minds. Deep in their bellies, they are still frightened monkeys swinging through the jungle from tree to tree and afraid to let go.’

  ‘Because they would fall!’

  ‘No, they would fly.’ We surfaced to draw breath, and I whistled toward the sky above us. Its infinite blueness was broken only by the white contrails of a jet thundering high in the atmosphere. ‘How they long to fly not in machines of metal but in their souls!’

  We gulped in great lungsful of air, and dove. Baby Electra swam alongside me.

  ‘The humans,’ I said, ‘are children afraid to grow up.’

  ‘Tell me more,’ she said, keeping my body between her and the two sharks that hunted us.

  ‘The humans are acorns,’ I said, ‘who dread destroying themselves in becoming oak trees.’

  ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘They are turtles who keep their heads inside the safety and darkness of their shells rather than daring to extend them out into the light.’

  ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘They are flowers afraid to blossom.’

  ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘They are salmon afraid to spawn.’

  ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘They are dreams afraid to be real.’

  ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘They are the glories of the beginning of a beautiful terror that they could gladly bear.’

  ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘They are afraid of quenging and becoming true gods.’

  ‘Tell me … Here they come, Arjuna! Here they come!’

  Again, the sharks charged us. I moved left and then right, turning back and forth so quickly it seemed that the sea would tear the flippers from my body. One of the sharks managed to slip in close to Baby Electra. Before I could return to her, the shark opened his huge mouth to take a bite out of her with his many triangles of teeth, each serrated like the humans’ saws. Baby Electra did her best to jerk herself out of the way at the last moment. Teeth raked her open wound, and she screamed. I raced closer to drive her tormentor away, giving the other shark a chance to slip in behind me. There came another scream, and blood boiled out into the water. I rammed one of the sharks, but this glancing blow did not really harm him. At the same moment, teeth ripped open the skin of my tail. I turned and troubled the smaller shark. It was hard to see because much blood clouded the water. I whipped back and forth, back and forth, and I clipped a bit of flesh from the larger shark. The sea shrieked to the slashing of teeth and the flashing of flipper and fin that sliced the water. Again, Baby Electra screamed, and I turned to see the smaller shark close its mouth upon the ragged, red flesh of her wound and rip from her a huge piece of meat. Quick as a blink the shark bit again, enlarging the hole in Baby Electra, and again – and again she screamed out her anguish and helplessness. I moved against the shark to ram him and seize him with my teeth. He saw me coming, however, and swam off followed by the other shark.

  ‘You are bleeding,’ Baby Electra said to me in an agonized voice that squeaked out of her.

  The sharks had opened wounds along my tail and head, and had bitten off a piece of my fluke. They had done much worse to Baby Electra. Blood flowed freely from the hole in her. I did not want to believe how huge it had grown.

  ‘They are waiting,’ she said, speaking of the sharks.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Waiting for you to weaken with loss of blood before they attack again.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Every time you try to incapacitate one of them, the other has a chance to work at me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If you did kill one of the sharks, the other would kill me.’

  ‘That accurately encapsulates our dilemma.’

  ‘If you keep on this way, you will die with me.’

  ‘No, I will not – and you are going to live.’

  ‘That is a beautiful thought,’ she said. ‘And you are a beautiful whale.’

  ‘I am your brother,’ I said, ‘and you are my sister.’

  ‘I know. Then tell me, Brother, what happens when we die?’

  I winced at the whimper of terror I heard in her voice. Then I told her things that she would have been told when she had grown a little older.

  ‘There is no true death,’ I said. ‘Each being …’

  I tried to bathe the whole of her in waves of healing sound as I told her that each being, each thing, each act – from whales to rocks to the joy a mother feels at giving birth to her child – dwells only and always in a single instant of time. All these moments themselves, this infinitude of bright, marvelous moments as perfect as nautilus shells shining in the sun, exist eternally. They can never be destroyed.

  ‘Each moment since your conception, each self that you ever were, remains alive: all the many Baby Electras that have swum through the seas in life’s gladness.’

  She had only moments to think about this, and she said, ‘Then why can’t I live now my other selves?’

  ‘Because of time,’ I said. ‘We journey from one moment to another, swept along by the current of time, which moves in one direction only. We cannot easily go backward, in our bodies.’

  ‘I want to go back! I want to see my mother again! Where is she?’

  ‘In the same place you last saw her. She has not ceased to be, any more than a once-visited sea ceases to exist simply because you have left it.’

  ‘I want to live with her again! And with you, Arjuna, always and forever, as on the day we met.’

  ‘You can, through the perfect memory of quenging.’

  ‘But I cannot quenge! And even when I was able to, I did not have this ability.’

  ‘You are still a baby. Although qu
enging is always perfect in itself, part of its perfection is that it grows ever more perfect the deeper and vaster it becomes.’

  ‘But how can that be? And who has such perfect memory?’

  ‘The Old Ones do. They can live in all times and all places, in a moment, at once.’

  ‘But they cannot live in the future where they are not. Where I will never be now.’

  ‘But they can and do, because they are. All things always are.’ We surfaced to breathe together. ‘The future contains the past as the sea does you – and in you lives every seal, salmon, and whisper of love that has ever passed within. Your heart will go on beating in each drop of water in every ocean on every world and in the bright thunder of the stars that have yet to be born. Nothing can ever be subtracted from creation.’

  This last conversation occurred in what the humans would have calculated to be a few seconds but which we measured with the precious moments of our lives. Then Baby Electra pressed close to me. She took strength from the beating of my heart, as I did from hers.

  After another moment, she said to me, ‘How I love the world, Arjuna! How I love you!’

  Even as her life’s blood rushed out of her, I could feel her gathering in her courage to face the final test of any orca: to die well, despite the horror and pain of the circumstances – to die saying yes to her life.

  ‘Here they come, Arjuna!’ she cried out. ‘Here they come!’

  The two sharks exploded into motion, swimming straight towards us.

  ‘And here I go! Here I go!’

  Baby Electra then did an astonishing thing. Almost before I could think, she moved away from my side and drove herself through the water to meet the sharks head on. She was much smaller than I and so could accelerate more quickly through the reddened sea. By the time I gained full speed, she had nearly reached the sharks. Because she would die no matter what I did, I knew that she hoped I would swim off and so save myself. I still wanted, however, to save her.

  ‘It hurts!’ she screamed to me. ‘It hurts so bad!’

  The sharks closed on her, slashing, savaging, biting, and tearing at already torn tissues. Baby Electra met them with a fury of her own, but her tiny jaws did little damage. Just as I finally reached her, she cried out to me, ‘I am not afraid any more!’

  I rammed the smaller shark in the side hard enough to fracture his liver. He swam off in a stunned agony. I turned on the larger shark, which was not quite so large as I. As he ripped huge chunks out of Baby Electra, lost in a frenzy of bloodlust and feasting, I grabbed him up in my teeth. In a maneuver that my grandmother had taught me, I flipped the shark upside down. Suspended in the water thus in tonic immobility, he could not gather water to his gills, and so he could not breathe. I held the shark fast in my jaws, grinding down in my rage of grief. I waited through many, many heartbeats for him to drown.

  At last, I swam up to Baby Electra. Miraculously, although torn open in many places, gushing blood, she still lived.

  ‘I am quenging, Arjuna! I am quenging!’

  She spoke her last words to me in a soft, lovely voice. Then she died. The sea drank in the blood that continued welling up from her many wounds.

  ‘Quenge, Sister, quenge,’ I said. ‘The ocean is yours.’

  I lingered a moment before I swam away and left her there. Few humans conceive of what it is like to be an orca; they do not really understand that our living place is also our burial place in the great Ocean that is a single, immortal, planetary being. In death, Baby Electra had been interred in life – even as I found myself entombed by my outrage at her perishing.

  So it was that I swam after the shark that I had wounded. Out of my lust for vengeance, unknown among my kind, I swam through the sea’s maddened waters pursuing this beautiful, innocent creature. When I caught up to the shark, I killed him as I had his companion. I left him floating upside down. Except for the two sharks, I had never killed fish and not eaten them.

  How could I eat when my belly churned to bursting with a meat so black and foul that I wanted to vomit it out? How I wished to destroy yet again the creatures that had killed Baby Electra! As my wrath deepened, I realized that I should direct it not at the sharks who had only done what sharks do, but at the man who did with rifle and grenades what no living thing should ever do. It was he – and the humans themselves – that I hated.

  Hated. In a sonic boom of horrible understanding, I realized that I had a name for the dreadful, new emotion that had come alive within me after Pherkad died. Strangely, in all the long days since that terrible day, as I learned many words in many languages, I had thought of hatred as a purely human phenomenon, as natural and unique to human beings as building war ships and making harpoons with the human hand. Now I knew that I hated just as stupidly as the humans themselves did; in truth, I hated a million times more. It was hatred – hot, dark, and bottomless – that had destroyed my ability to quenge.

  So much about the humans I hated! I hated their fishhooks and boats and nets, their concrete and chlorine. I hated tasers, lasers, phasers, razors, whale gazers, and self-praisers. Slavery I hated with a black and bitter bile, as I did their machines and smokes and flames and noises. I hated clocks that tore the humans away from the joy of golden moments and clothing that cut them off from life. The wailing of their babies given gin or sugar to soothe them – who could not hate such things? I hated their swarms and herds and huddled masses that manufactured the consensus reality that numbed their minds. And more, much more, I hated the dimwitted, censoring, sniveling, little totalitarians who told others what they must believe and say. As well I hated flea bombs and atom bombs, corn fields and killing fields, celluloid murders and digital deaths. I hated the murder of their children’s hopes. And pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, genocides, suicides, matricides I hated along with the hands that wrought them. I hated their hardened hearts. I hated their lying, soul-sucked eyes, their deformed ears, their mouths full of excuses and resentments. Their obesity I hated almost as much as I did their emaciation. I hated their eyelids, closed to that which they did not wish to see, as I did their anuses, the ten billion anuses that befouled the waters of the world. I hated their breasts full of poisons. I hated the very pores of their skin, which oozed sweat and chemicals and insincerity and fear.

  How I hated and hated and hated and hated! I hated my own hatred, and most of all, I hated my hating of it.

  As I moved off away from that place of blood and death into wild waters moaning with a pain that had no cure, a single question cannibalized my thoughts: What would I do with all this hate? I could not return to the Institute, nor could I bear to swim once more in the icy ocean at the top of the world with my first family. As full as I was with the evil elixir that I had drunk freely, I could not bring myself to poison those I loved. I simply did not belong in the company of people.

  No, my future must dwell with the humans. I had tried to move them through logic, reason, and even wit, despite knowing that the humans, most of them, had walled themselves away from such things. Now I must try a different approach. The wind whispered to me disquieting thoughts, and the ocean roared like a wounded bear in my blood. I heard fate calling me on.

  I would swim after the humans, I decided. I would seek them out across the Blue Desert and the Darkmoon Basin and round the Summer Sea. I would pursue them through the Magenta Shallows and on the Vermillion Sands and along the coastlines of their continents. I would sing for them a rhapsody in red. I would hunt them in their hopes’ last goodness and in their desperate dreams, down and down through nightmare to the cold, crushing hell of their ten billion damned and bleeding souls.

  19

  I swam. I killed fish and ate them. I excreted. I breathed, and I remembered. I slept. I dreamed. I swam some more. Ocean spun me around and around through long days of dark thoughts and nights that seemed forever suspended between death and morning. To where did I swim? I did not know.

  Although I still had the maps of the heavens and the world that
my uncle Alnitak had given me, I cast them aside, for no colorful finger of coral, no shining constellation, could point my way. I thought of Baby Electra nearly every waking moment; she still lived inside me, at least. She did not seem to dwell in any of the billions of water droplets that broke across my skin like uncountable tiny, silvery bombs, although I had promised she would sing in each one. Neither did Zavijah nor Pherkad nor my great-grandmother nor any of the Old Ones accompany me. Even Helen and Gabi were gone. Alone and lost, I called to the many people I had loved. I called and called, listening for the slightest hint of a murmur of response, but no one called back to me. The living sea, usually so bright with sound, had fallen as silent as iron.

  How fiercely I wanted to join those who had abandoned me for happier seas! How I longed to die! I might gladly have done so, beaching myself on the sands of some lonely island, but I was afraid – afraid not of the extinction of my puny self and the black hole of time’s ending that would swallow me up. No, I feared another thing. What if the humans were right, after all, in their belief in the transmigration of souls? What if it was my karma to be reborn, not as a snail or a snake or even a dog but rather as a full, breathing, bedeviled, raving human? The horror of such a possibility made me want to swim on forever – and hate kept me alive.

  My rage for revenge, burning like a hot liquor along my blood, took some of the sting out of my many wounds and diverted my attention from the loss of the tip of my fluke that the shark had bitten off. It made me want to go down inside myself to consider more important matters. The deeper I dived, the stranger my soul looked to me, like a reef composed of razor-sharp knives of violet and orange and other colors that did not dwell together easily. Two opposing desires tore at each other: As much as I still wanted to find a cure for the world’s pain (at least the twisted, unnatural torment that the humans had brought into the world), even more I wanted to cause the humans the bitterest of suffering.