I sought the wide, wide world for them. One day, with the wind out of the north and little chops of water moving brightly across the sea’s surface like millions of silvery fish, I caught hint of a distant booming and pings of human sonar. I swam toward this noise to verify its source. As I ventured west, the noise grew louder and louder. Soon other sounds nearly drowned it out. Nearly all of these came from the flutes of orcas. It did not take long for a family of the Others to approach me. They screamed as they swam, and called out to me and anyone else who happened to be listening the direst of warnings:
‘The humans come! Flee! Flee! Flee or be taken and die!’
So distraught was the mother of this small family that she did not mind when I turned to swim with them. Although I longed to hunt human beings, I did not want to encounter a ship of slavers that might capture me and return me to Sea Circus.
The mother and her four children – along with a brother and a niece – raced through the ocean without speaking. In the best of times, the Others do not converse as does my kind, and so can seem nearly non-social. Today, with the humans fast approaching from beyond the blue, curved horizon, the orcas I had encountered swam in a silent fury. The brother bore a wound in his side, from which trailed blood. One of the children moved in jerks and pauses as if disoriented. She zanged continually, but seemed unable to find her way in the sea without her mother’s help.
‘The humans come! Flee! Flee! Flee!’
This warning issued not from any of the orcas of the family I had joined, but rang throughout the wind-whipped waters ahead of us. Thunder boomed there, too, as pings of sonar raked my skin like vibrating knives. A few moments later, a stampede of cetaceans tore the sea with bitter sounds that told of their great numbers and their fright. Soon a tsunami of orcas, dolphins, humpbacks, seis, and blue whales came into view. They fled the still-unseen humans in a great wave of spasming, breathing, racing whale flesh.
‘Flee! Flee! Flee!’
I breached and looked out to the west from which these many whales came. My eyes seemed to have sharpened during my time with the humans, and I descried along the horizon huge angular gray shapes that could only be human ships. Smoke clouded the air above them. They moved with a frightening machine speed straight toward us.
‘Flee or be taken!’ the mother of the family I accompanied cried out. Her name was Lesath. ‘The humans come! The humans come!’
‘No,’ I called back to her. ‘The humans do come, but not to take you. They are hunting me.’
‘And who are you, Strange One?’
‘My name is Arjuna, of the Blue Aria Family of the Faithful Thoughtplayer Clan.’
‘I have heard of you!’ Lesath cried out. ‘You killed a human! The whole of the Day Gray Sea sings of this!’
I had little time to reflect on the unfortunate chance that some orca must have overheard my recounting my deed to Alkurah and Unukalhai in the bad moments when Baby Electra and I had fled the Institute for the supposed safety of the open sea. As inexorably as the explosion of a bomb, the news of what I had done had passed like a shockwave from orca to orca and family to family, and had filled the ocean. I could no more escape my infamy than I could the humans who came for me.
‘So many humans to hunt one whale?’ Lesath called out. ‘They must want you very badly, Manslayer!’
I would have slunk away to spare her and her family the humans’ revenge, but it was not clear in which direction I should swim. I thought to race toward the rapidly approaching ships and ram one of them as the deep gods themselves once had done. These ships, however, so huge and gray, I would not be able to sink, for surely they were wrought of iron.
And suddenly, I had no chance to think at all. Metallic sonar pings drilled the water like thousands of bullets of angry sound. From far below came the screech of the propellers of ships that moved like sharks beneath the sea’s surface. The big guns on one of the ships coughed out fire and smoke, and the air exploded. Guns boomed out again and again as the rush of fleeing cetaceans finally fell upon us. There were hundreds of them, mothers and fathers and sisters and sons, many bloodied and broken. All hurried away from the humans in a panic of confusion that caused them to bump and collide with each other and with us, in a most unwhalelike manner. The mass of their writhing bodies swept us along. Now the very water erupted in deafening explosions that drove away all plan or reason. I could not hear myself think. More explosions concussed the sea on every side, nearer, and I could not think but could only move away. I could not, however, find away; I could not hear the zangs of sonar that I aimed through the clouds of blood and the flotsam of flesh and feces that boiled all around me. Boom! Boom! Boom! – and then the entire world boomed into a red and terrifying silence. A huge humpback rammed into me, and I could not hear my own scream of pain.
I surfaced, and some ships closed on the maddened mass of whales; the iron machines moved in from the east, northeast, and west. How fast they moved – faster than a stunned and wounded whale could swim!
‘Swim south!’ I called out. No one could hear me; I could not hear myself. ‘Swim, before it is too late!’
I moved off toward the clear water in the direction that I had named. I hoped that more ships did not await us there. Lesath and her family followed me. So did some of the other whales. Many, however, dazed and bruised, fled toward the north. A few actually charged toward the ships in the east as if they could not perceive them; and many – far too many cetaceans! – stopped moving out of sheer exhaustion or dropped off into dying or death.
After a while, we reached a place of peace – if only a relative and temporary one. The water grew clear again, and I could not feel the drumbeat of exploding bombs. I looked around at all the many whales schooling together as for safety. I saw Lesath’s family of Others and perhaps four families of orcas of my own kind. Some humpbacks swam side by side with a few belugas. There were some minkes and blue whales, too. I could not count the number of dolphins who braved the company of the Others, who in more normal times might have attacked them. Never, I thought, in all the histories or the rhapsodies of my people had I ever heard of such a gathering.
And the humans will capture or kill all of them to get to me!
As my head cleared, a little, I called to mind the images of the many ships that I had seen on one of the Institute’s screens. Words – human words – for the parts of these ships came to me: Turret. Jackstaff. Conning tower. Gun-mount. Siren brackets. Chaff launchers. Flight deck. Flying shark. Rocket launcher. Search radar. Depth charges.
The flotilla that had destroyed so many whales, then, was no assemblage of fishing boats sent after me but rather a fleet of warships. Had the humans, I wondered, instigated yet another of their mass killing sprees that had caught up us whales by bad chance? I could not recall seeing a single ship reduced to a flaming hulk. No, I thought, remembering, surely these death ships troubled the waters in practice for battle. War games, the humans called such exercises. They found such violence to be fun! How different we whales are! We play games with words and ideas, with eros, and with songs; sometimes when the moon is full and rings out the music of the spheres, we like to play games with games.
The humans do not hunt me!
How foolish I had been to think that the humans would have sent hundreds of ships to execute a single orca! How vain! The monstrosity of my vanity approached that of the humans themselves. This realization caused me to laugh long and bitter and deep. I laughed and I laughed at myself until it hurt. Then I looked around at all the wounded whales, and I laughed no more.
Near me, scarcely a few body lengths away in the water, a baby dolphin whimpered to her mother, who could not console her for the baby’s jaw had been blown off. A humpback glided by bearing a hole blown out of her side that reminded me of the bloody divot that the shark had bitten out of Baby Electra. So many whales the humans had hurt in their games! So many of my people blown to bits, blown to hell, blown to kingdom come, blown to smithereens.
> We waited in the quiet water for our hearing to return, and after what seemed an eternity of waves breaking against savaged skin, for many of us it mostly did. Others, though, remained deaf. One of these, an old orca named Marfak, said that he did not wish to live absent the comforting sounds of his family and helpless in the water. He announced, ‘I will find an island with a broad beach, and I will lay myself on the sand until I die. Then the humans might feel my despair and witness their handiwork that caused it.’
‘The humans never feel such things,’ an orca named Alioth said. ‘And I doubt that they would recognize in you the work of their own hands.’
Marfak, of course, could not understand these words, but he somehow seemed to intuit them. He said, ‘Someday, the humans might feel something – someday.’
And with that he swam off to find his island.
‘The humans do feel,’ I said, after he had gone, ‘many, many things. Only a few of them, though, sense how desperately the world despairs of them.’
‘And who are you,’ an orca from the Emerald Murmurers asked me, ‘that you speak so surely of what animals such as the humans feel?’
‘He is Arjuna the Manslayer,’ Lesath declared, introducing me. ‘It is said that he spoke with the humans before he killed one.’
‘What!’ Alioth said. He was long and quick and unmarked by the humans’ depth charges. ‘How could he speak with the humans who cannot speak?’
‘What?’ a little dolphin called out. ‘What are you orcas saying?’
‘I cannot understand you!’ one of the humpbacks added. ‘Can you not speak the one and true language?’
I had a hard time conversing with all the people around me. The various orca families of my kind spoke with thick and different accents, while the dialects of the Others were much harder to understand. The humpbacks, of course, spoke the nearly incomprehensible words of their own sweetly-songed humpback language, and so it was with the blue whales, the minkes, and all the others. Some of us wished that one of the deep gods might act as interpreter, for it was said that the Great Ones the humans call sperm whales can fathom all languages, and indeed, all things. The deep gods, however, do not speak with lesser beings.
‘There is only one true language,’ I said to the humpback, ‘and no one in Ocean has yet spoken it. We must create this language ourselves.’
Over the next few days, I went among the assembled whales and gathered in the various sound pictures that each kind painted with its flutes. In the way that I had learned from Helen and the other linguists in the study of human languages, I analyzed and listened for the deep structures of meaning that formed up in colorful harmonics. I looked for the overlap and interplay of speech patterns. The other whales helped me in this game. Sound by sound, word by word, we sculpted together a sort of crude but wondrously vivid pidgin tongue through which we could speak to each other.
‘This language,’ I said to Lesath and a humpback named Bilbudidundun, ‘lacks nuance and fluidity, but it is a beginning.’
I went among the orcas, dolphins, humpbacks, and all the others, and I touched their wounds with my voice as gently as I could. We related to each other our many stories. One of the dolphins (the brother of the child whose jaw had been destroyed) wanted to know everything about my journey from the Sea of Ice to the humans’ punishment pools at Sea Circus – and beyond. He took a particular interest in the carnage at the Institute that had left Baby Electra so vulnerable to the sharks. Even after I had done so a few times, he inveigled me to recount once more the story of her death.
‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘how baby Electra charged the sharks to save you.’
The other whales had other concerns. With the whole hodge-podge clan gathered around us, Alioth said, ‘It may be that the humans in the swarm of ships that killed so many of us were not hunting you, or us. Other humans, however, are sure to do so. You have killed a man, and so how can the humans look away from your breaking of the Great Covenant?’
He regarded me as many of the whales did: with a mixture of awe, fear, admiration, and dread.
‘Perhaps the time has come,’ I said, ‘for the Great Covenant to end.’
A cacophony of very disparate voices burst out into the water in a colorful cloud of moans, shrills, trills, and squeaks. Clearly, most of the whales about me had never contemplated such an outrageous idea.
‘Let us suppose that you are right,’ a blue whale with an unsayable name announced as she contemplated this. Her stomach had been blown open by a depth charge, and she was dying. ‘All things do have an ending. If the Great Covenant is to be no more, however, how is it upon a single orca of the Blue Aria Family of the Faithful Thoughtplayer to decide this?’
‘I have not decided anything,’ I said. ‘I have only wondered.’
‘Of course you have only wondered,’ the great blue whale said to me. ‘You are only an orca, so how could you do more than kill wantonly and wonder at your deed? Only the deep gods would know if the Covenant should be broken.’
‘Were the deep gods here,’ I replied, ‘I would speak with them – or try to.’
I swam in close to her, and brushed up against her side. So huge she was, so magnificent, so beautiful! How her great heart boomed from deep inside her and sent waves of sweet sonance pouring over me! I touched her as perhaps no orca had ever touched a blue whale, as I would a beloved and dying elder of my own family. I knew she could sense how her mortal wound grieved me. Her own grief at what had happened to her and the other whales as a result of the humans’ war games seemed to change into a wholly different substance. As if I had drunk sparkling clean water, I felt her trust pass into me.
‘I believe you might be able to speak with the deep gods,’ she said. ‘There is one – the oldest whale in the ocean – who could tell you of the Great Covenant.’
‘Have you seen her?’ I asked.
‘I have never swum near him,’ she said. ‘However, I have listened to the accounts of others. The eldest of the deep gods dwells in waters far away.’
‘Where? Where?’ I asked her.
‘It is said that in the Moon of High Summer, he hunts alone in the Long Song Sea.’
‘Then I will journey there,’ I said.
In the human way, I did a quick calculation. I had two months to reach this distant northern water.
‘I wish I could accompany you,’ she said. ‘Although it would make me sad to see you die – almost as sad as I am to soon be leaving you.’
‘But my wounds are healing,’ I said. ‘Why should I die?’
‘Because the one of whom I have spoken will most likely kill you.’
‘Does he fear orcas that much?’
‘He fears nothing on this world – or any other,’ she told me. ‘No, he would slay you, I think, for disturbing his solitude.’
I felt a shudder run through her as death bit into her and began dragging her away from me.
‘Of course,’ she said, ‘I might be wrong. If you are completely truthful with him and find something interesting to say, the deep god might decide to help you.’
‘Who can ever speak the complete truth?’
‘You can,’ she said. ‘If you do not, you will speak to me in the waters of Agathange.’
And with that, she died. None of the orcas swimming near us thought to violate her flesh. When they and the rest of us whales left this place, it would take a long while for the sharks to scavenge her great blue body.
After that, the time came for us many whales, in our different kinds, to swim our different ways. In the language we had crafted together, we promised each other that if ever again we chanced to meet along the blue byways of the sea, we should act as friends do, neither hunting nor fleeing nor ignoring. Could the hungry orcas of the few Others who eyed the dancing dolphins keep this little covenant? Could the humpbacks and the seis? Only time would tell. In the singing hope that our remarkable camaraderie had engendered, I said goodbye to the battered whales. Then I turned toward a long journe
y and a conversation with a very great whale about a much greater covenant.
20
On a fine evening of brilliant stars and clear water, I set my sight on the North Star and found the sparkling eyes of the Osprey constellation gazing at it from the west. I followed those two stars, listening intently for any sound of the human ships. None could I detect. The fleet of warships must have sailed off into other seas to play their cruel games.
For many days and nights of relentless swimming along strange currents, I made my way toward the Long Song Sea. I hunted as I journeyed, but I did not encounter any great numbers of salmon or other fish, and so I often went hungry. My empty belly growled its discontent even as my mind felt overfull with thoughts and memories. Sometimes, with the sun poised low in the sky and its rays brightening the water to a warm blue, I felt sure that I did hear Baby Electra calling to me. Dear, sweet, doomed Gabi spoke to me, too. So did Helen. Sometimes I heard my mother singing songs of yearning and calling me home. Often I wished to turn toward her lovely voice and leave behind the hate that drove me, as I might discard my daily droppings. Even more, though, I needed to hear the deep god’s words and perhaps find in them a way that I could hurt the humans deep in their souls. This, I told myself, was my fate. And so I swam on through luminous seas ringing with compelling sounds; I swam through storms and murmurs of anguish and through the blood of Baby Electra and the beautiful blue whale, which left in my mouth an ineradicable and bitter taste.
I had much time to think, and to think deeply. Much of my brooding concerned the humans. How desperately I still sought to understand them! How pitifully poorly I did! One day, with the wind out of the north and little white-capped waves breaking apart and leaving their foam like a delicate painting on the surface of the sea, I chanced to think of the humans’ mathematics. It came to me that certain humans would try to analyze the ocean’s beguiling brushstrokes through equations and models built by their computing machines. Of all the human disciplines I had encountered at the Institute, I had most abhorred mathematics. How not? What whale needs numbers, ratios, and triangles? What whale can easily perceive the tiny, squiggly visual symbols that represent mathematical ideas? Then, too, does not mathematics form the basis of human science upon which rests all technology? And was not the humans’ murderous technology of machines, poisons, bombs, and fires destroying the world?
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