Idiot Gods, The

by Zindell, David

  The farther I swam toward the Eyes of the Osprey and the Long Song Sea, the more it seemed that I must venture into the great ocean of mathematics if ever I was to delve into the human soul. I had ‘read’ but not really absorbed many books on various mathematical topics, and their symbols, definitions, axioms, and theorems gathered inside me like a bellyful of undigested stones. I realized that if I wished, I could vomit up the stones one by one in order to behold them. I could do this hateful thing in order to better hate the humans.

  Somewhere in the great gray surge of the Skua Sea, I realized that I could replace each of the humans’ mathematical symbols with the same sonic ideoplasts that we whales use to compose our tone poems and our rhapsodies. Was not all mathematics built upon ideas and an inherent logic shared by all sapient beings? Was not mathematics, at its bottom, a crystalizing and enfolding of language into a precise and jewel-like form? And if it was possible to speak such a strange yet fundamental language, as I was beginning to, then might not a whale just as well sing into being entire new worlds of glittering relationships and conceptions?

  To my astonishment, I found that mathematics was alive with the most beautiful of musics. One day, as I breathed between the waves of the Dreaming Sea, I heard all the numbers ringing as the stars ring – and each note led up and outward in a great silvery arpeggio of sound into the deeps of the universe. I knew then that I could count to infinity, if I had both desire and time. After that, mathematics came easily. I found an unexpected pleasure in proving that any even number greater than two could be expressed as the sum of two primes. I felt 99% certain that I had made no mistake in my proof.

  Such an elegance there was in mathematics! So many possibilities did I behold in the cruel, two-handed beings who had created such a wonder! What other miracles of mind and soul might be theirs if they were to let go of their murdering ways? That they could not – would not – let go I felt certain. And so in an irony that my dear, departed Helen would have appreciated, instead of admiring the humans for discovering mathematics, I hated them all the more for failing to discover the deepest of all oceans and thus turning away from their inherent splendor.

  In such a state of bitter antinomy, I finally entered the currents of the Long Song Sea. Cold were the waters here that streamed down from the northern ocean, though no icebergs could I detect. The gray waves carried the wind’s soughing and swelled with a great loneliness. Somewhere, far beneath me in the dark ocean, the lone deep gods found their way through a gelid, lightless silence in search of the great squid that fed them. I could not dive into the crushing, killing depths to greet them. Instead, I swam along the thin tissues of the surface waters, waiting for one cachalot or another to surface.

  I listened, too. In dense, clear seas, the deep gods’ voices, traveling through deep water sound channels, could sometimes be heard from a thousand miles away. No other being in the Ocean – or on earth – speaks with such force. The sound of a hungry cachalot searching for prey cracks out louder than the peak noise of a hard rock concert or the roar of a jet airplane taking off. Some say that it breaks through the water like the explosion of a rifle shot three feet from one’s ear.

  I did not intend to get quite so close to the one I hunted. If the blue whale had told true, then one, and only one, of the deep gods claimed the center of the Long Song Sea as his own. If I could locate this center in the wild, unknown waters that surged around me, then surely the eldest of the deep gods should not be hard to find.

  For half of a month, however, even though I swam in long, slow spirals looking and listening as hard as I could, I did not detect the slightest trace of him. What if he had got caught up and killed in one of the humans’ war games? Or what if a whaler had slaughtered him and boiled him down for his oil? Then, too, the ocean is vast. What if I listened and looked through endless green waves for the rest of my life and still did not find the one I sought?

  Then one day, with gray clouds nearly touching the sea from above and cold, upwellings of water streaming all about me, there came a faint sound from far away. I had trouble perceiving its direction. I turned first one way and then another, listening. I swam, and the sound grew into a whisper. I swam further toward what I perceived as its source. My heart beat so loud in my ears, however, that it seemed to drown out the whisper, which broke apart. Silence filled the ocean as I swam on. I continued listening, and I watched, and I waited. In the silence between heartbeats, I listened with a stillness of mind for the long cerulean song of the sea. The whisper came again, now louder! I swam toward it as gracefully as I could, not wanting any clumsy motion of fin or fluke to drive it away. I swam for many moments of time suspended in that bright, clear ocean beyond and beneath time, which cannot be measured in minutes or hours or days.

  There came a moment when the whisper rang through the water with such a force that I could not fail to follow it. I knew it to be the zang of sonar of a deep god. I swam toward it with all the strength that I could summon from weary muscles and a body that still ached with many wounds. I swam, and I swam, for a mile, for a hundred – I did not care. I would have swum right off curve of the world in pursuit of this sound that called to me and promised so much.

  At last, I reached a place where powerful sonar zangs rose up through the water from far beneath me and shivered the skin of my belly and the bones of my spine. I ceased swimming. I waited. In the deeps below, I thought, more than a mile down in an inky black cavern of water that only the deep gods would dare to delve, the one of whom I had been told battled and tore apart a giant squid. Or perhaps he only meditated and remembered, alone in silent darkness. Did he know that I listened for him as I bobbed up and down like a little black and white buoy on the sea’s surface waves? Would he care that I wished to speak with him? How long must I wait to find out? The moments of my life paid out like a coiled harpoon line, and stretched out to many minutes and then to more than an hour.

  And then something shifted in the water, and I felt a flutter of an eddy as delicate as the beating of a butterfly’s wings. He rises! I thought. He rises! He did not, however, rise quickly, for doing so would have taken him through the layers of the sea’s pressures with a speed that could kill even a deep god. I waited some more. At last, he breached, and I made my way to the surface to breathe with him. He blew out stale, steamy air with nearly the force of an erupting geyser. How huge he was, the largest of his kind I had ever seen! He was more than twice my length and many times as massive. Scars cut his great, blunt, wrinkled head, and the broken shaft of a harpoon stuck out of his back. A white carapace of scar tissue covered his blind right eye; it looked something like the cataracts that cloud many human eyes but even more like burned and hardened flesh. The deep god turned to regard me with his good eye, and he zanged me with his sonar with an unexpected softness that suggested he did not want to hurt me.

  Then he spoke to me. His voice rang out rich, powerful, and pure. It stunned me with its clarity – even as I realized that the deep god painted for me the most vivid and clear of sound pictures, whose complexity I could not comprehend. I spoke back, and the deep god seemed to listen. His response came in a brilliant array of sonic ideoplasts, colored by a deep and bottomless laughter. He turned to show me his massively muscled tail as if either to strike me with this killing club or to swim away from me. He did neither. He drew in a huge breath, and pushed his head into the water, which brought his great tail into the air, pointing up toward the sun. Then he dove and disappeared into the gloom beneath us. I understood that I had interrupted one of his feeding cycles and that he still had squid to hunt.

  Over the next few days, we repeated such encounters. Finally, the time came when I zanged the deep god’s belly and saw that it was full of freshly-caught and still writhing squid. He paused to speak with me for a longer time, and I suggested that we create together a mutual language, even as the many whales and I had done at the gathering. The deep god laughed at this. He responded to me in a spray of jeweled sounds so bright a
nd multifaceted that their liquid shimmer nearly deafened me. He spoke on and on through the golden burn of the sun and the silvery coolness of the moon with a patience that astonished me nearly as much as it shamed me.

  I spoke, too. I told him of Pherkad and everything that had happened in my journeys. Did he understand any of my words? I could not tell. I spoke of the humans, relating much of the knowledge I had gained through their books and the Net. I recounted scenes from my favorite novels. I explained how I had learned the languages of the humans, though they had only the faintest inkling of mine. So it would have to be with us, I said, but this time in reverse. If we could fashion no lingua franca in which to converse, then he would have to learn my orca speech, for I could not quite follow the movements of beguiling ideoplasts that danced out of his flute.

  His response to this was to laugh all the harder. Something in the sound of his great voice resonated with the much quieter one whispering inside me. I felt like laughing, too – why, I did not know. I should have been totally frustrated – and I was, I was! I had chanced my very life, or at least its purpose, on speaking with this very old whale. I should have despaired at the way the meanings of the deep god’s utterances eluded me.

  Then, strangely, as I began laughing, too, I felt myself moving forward into a shared understanding of something fundamental. The essential structures of our two languages, I saw, formed up into very similar patterns of meanings. As I had tried to explain to Helen, the chords of speech that we orcas make resonate with meaning only in relation to each other. The sperm whales had only deepened this dynamic by adding a whole, new layer of resonance: They made higher, meta-meanings through the juxtaposition and echo of meanings themselves. Thus the import and gist of what a deep god said could shift as quickly as rays of light dancing along a play of water droplets. It would be impossible to apprehend the beautiful but maddening complexity of the deep gods’ language without appreciating this.

  I spent the next forty days and nights trying to do exactly that. There came a day when I realized that I would never be able to speak as the deep gods themselves do, for my little brain simply could not hold the totality of their language. On that day, however – storm clouds schooled in the west even as the sea held calm – I also realized that I could speak to this great, patient deep god, after a fashion. I began by telling him my name.

  ‘Arjuna, Arjuna,’ he repeated as if putting tongue to a new kind of fish distasteful to him. Then aimed his voice at me, and said, ‘Why?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked him.

  His good eye closed as if in disappointment.

  ‘Why?’ he asked me again.

  Why what? Why was I here? Why were we alive? Why is there something we call the universe rather than nothing? Why did this deep god put to me such a simple question that could have no simple answer?

  ‘Why?’ he said a third time.

  I felt him tensing his muscles for another dive. I somehow sensed – perhaps this was only a guess – that his query was more a test of my intelligence than an attempt to gather information from me. Did I have the wit to perceive a whole reef of meaning from a single sprig of coral? Why – why should this deep god deign to talk to me if I did not?

  ‘I have come here,’ I told him, ‘to discuss the humans and the Great Covenant.’

  ‘Then discuss that with yourself.’

  He drew in a huge breath, and made to dive.

  ‘Wait!’ I cried out. ‘I have spoken with the—’

  ‘I do not care about the humans, and I care even less about you.’

  ‘But I need to ask—’

  ‘You cannot save the world, Arjuna. Try, if you wish, to save yourself.’

  How had he known what I would ask him? Could he hear my thoughts? Or could he perceive in the seed of my wonderings the whole organism into which it might grow?

  ‘You are—’

  ‘Rude?’ he asked me. ‘Arrogant? Dismissive? How—’

  How else should he be to a simple-minded orca who had disturbed his solitude? But, no – that how question was too obvious. How, how, how? I heard buried in this abrupt sound a subtler and almost silent resonance.

  ‘How would I like you to be?’ I asked him. His eye gleamed with surprise.

  ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Well … how?’

  I thought about this. I told him of a character in one of the humans’ books.

  ‘As I perceive, laughter comes quickly to your mind and flute,’ I said. ‘The one with whom I hope to speak finds laughter in all things, especially in himself.’

  ‘Go on,’ he laughed out.

  ‘Well, you can be stern, even harsh, but you are essentially kind.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘You love the truth, though you believe that no mind can encompass all of it.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘You try to perceive this truth through a million million eyes, even though you have only two.’

  ‘One, actually, that works. Go on.’

  ‘You are wise and caring, but in pursuit of the truth, you do not mind causing others – and yourself – the most bitter of pain. You call this mental anguish of new realizations the anglsan.’

  ‘Oh, ho! I like that word – go on.’

  ‘The highest purpose, you teach, is to say yes to life in its totality and to live each moment, even the terrible ones, with joy.’

  For a while, as the sea sloshed gray and mountainous around us, I told him more of the traits of the great teacher that I invited him to be. When I had finished, he said, ‘Now that is a game I might enjoy. I will be an alien come to teach the weak-minded humans how to be greater, all the while concealing the fact that I am actually a human myself masquerading as a wiser and more intelligent being.’

  ‘It should not be exactly a masquerade,’ I said. ‘In truth, you have become a greater being, yes? Your patience, your wisdom, your tenderness – these cannot be an act. You must find these things inside yourself, and bring them forth.’

  ‘Ha, ho! Must I, then? Well, young orca who thinks of himself as human, do not worry: I am large; I contain multitudes. So let us play.’

  I blew out an old breath and drew in a new. The deep god had consented to talk to me! I must be careful of what I said.

  ‘I would like to know your name,’ I told him.

  ‘I do not have a name, as you think of names, and if I did, you would not be able to say it. Why don’t you call me Old Father?’

  ‘Yes – I was about to suggest that myself.’

  ‘And you, Arjuna – should I call you by your name for your star? Or would you prefer … Manslayer?’

  His voice zanged my blood with teeth of ice. How had he known? Had he heard my thoughts? Had I betrayed myself through certain emotions that I had allowed to color the sounds of my utterances?

  In my silence, he sussed out these questions and many more. He said, ‘Oh, ho, Arjuna of the Blue Aria Family of the Faithful Thoughtplayer Clan! I had heard that you might be swimming my way. The whole ocean sings of you.’

  ‘Sings in what language?’ I asked. ‘Do you understand the speech of the humpbacks and the blue whales – and my own?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘Then you could have conversed with me in Orcalish any time you wished!’

  ‘Of course I could. But of course I will not, ha, ha!’

  ‘Very well, then, Old Father. I have come to you to—’

  ‘You seek answers to questions that you believe you cannot answer yourself.’

  ‘Is it that obvious to you?’

  ‘Once every few generations,’ he said, ‘one of your kind comes to us seeking wisdom and truth.’

  ‘That is strange,’ I said. ‘I did not know your kind spoke to mine.’

  ‘I did not say that we did.’

  ‘You do not like us orcas very much, do you?’

  ‘Should we? You eat our babies.’

  ‘My kind,’ I said, ‘eat only fish.’

  ‘Aha! Then you a
re a strict pescavarian, are you?’

  I hesitated in my response. I let a few waves break over me.

  ‘Out of necessity,’ I told him, ‘I once ate a white bear.’

  ‘Oh, Arjuna – oh, oh, oh! The things we must do from necessity!’

  ‘I would never eat one of your kind!’

  ‘No? Did you not eat seals and a human? Were these deeds done out of necessity?’

  ‘Some things are necessary … in a different way.’

  ‘Oh, ho – that is so very true! Shall we discuss how necessary it is to understand how very unnecessary many seeming necessities really are?’

  ‘I would like to speak to you of the humans.’

  ‘Then speak well, Arjuna.’

  ‘And if I do not?’

  ‘You know.’

  His good eye, so full of patience and mirth, gleamed with other things, too. His immense tail flicked the water ever so gently.

  ‘I will speak as well as I can,’ I promised.

  For days of wind and rains and agitated white-capped waters, I told him more of my many experiences of the humans, and he asked me many questions. I recited poems to him and the words of hundreds of books. I spoke to him all my memory and everything I had learned.

  ‘Good, good!’ he said to me. ‘You have told me many things I did not know. So, the humans have hunted us not just for our meat, but for oil to fill their lamps! They burn our bodies to give them light! I always suspected the humans had some secret and sinister purpose in their pursuit of my kind, ha, ha!’