Idiot Gods, The

by Zindell, David

  ‘How can you laugh at this?’

  ‘How can you not? Do you not find it extremely amusing that the tiny-brained humans kill vastly greater beings in order to steal our ambergris so that they might make perfumes to cover up the stinks of their filthy, sweaty bodies?’

  ‘“Amusing” is not the word I would choose. How about idiotic?’

  ‘Why not both? Surely it is a cosmic joke that apes ranking no higher in intelligence than fifth of all our planet’s creatures should lord it over such as you and I.’

  ‘Fifth?’ I said. I supposed the deep god had difficulty with enumeration, as I once had. ‘Do you mean third?’

  ‘Ha, ha – the most brilliant of humans approach in intelligence the dumbest of dolphins.’

  ‘Then fourth, after your kind, the orcas, and the dolphins.’

  ‘No, there is one more intelligent than my people,’ he said. ‘And the humans suspect nothing of this.’

  I had suspected nothing myself. I tried to persuade the deep god to tell me of the phantom race he had mentioned. Were they some unknown species of giant squid, who have the largest eyes of any creature in the world? How could the humans know nothing of them? My great earnestness, however, seemed to annoy him.

  ‘You should learn to laugh more, Arjuna. Life is mysterious – don’t be so serious!’

  ‘I do not understand you!’ I said.

  I zanged the harpoon embedded in his back; with all the gentleness I could summon, I bathed this old wound with wave after wave of vibrant, vital sound.

  ‘Good!’ he said. ‘You are learning to speak without speaking. Perhaps someday we can have the most convivial of conversations in complete silence.’

  ‘I cannot be silent about the humans and what they—’

  ‘But the humans themselves are so amusing!’ he broke in. ‘In the Sea of Songs long ago, my great-grandfather rammed and sank a ship full of whalers – they were spearing our babies so that they could kill us adults when we turned to protect them! If you have told true, it seems that the humans have transmuted their iniquity into great literature.’

  ‘Oh, yes – the humans have transmuted nearly the whole world: into subdivisions, slums, shanty towns, and shopping malls.’

  ‘Ah, oh,’ he sighed out, ‘I suppose sarcasm is a form of humor.’

  ‘Would you prefer the slapstick of watching the two-leggeds spend much of their lives battling gravity to keep from falling down?’

  ‘Actually, I am most fond of irony, like your dead friend Helen.’ We surfaced to breathe rain-moistened air, then dove again. ‘Is it not the greatest of ironies that creatures lost in the greatest darkness have created the brightest of lights?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘When I was a young whale,’ he said, ‘I was there, in the Sea of Ecstasy, when the humans exploded the first of what you have called hydrogen bombs. I could not look away from the blast. I looked and looked, and then the flame fell upon me, and I would never look out of my right eye again.’

  I swam around to his right side, and zanged the milky scar that shrouded his dead eye.

  ‘However,’ he said, ‘with my left eye, I saw things that I never had. Where an island once was, now ocean replaced the vaporized earth. I knew that the humans that day had become themselves a kind of god. They reached into the very sun and grasped with their hands a bit of its fire to bring into the world.’

  ‘Goddamn these gods! I wish they all had remained apes chattering in the trees of Africa – and fleeing from leopards and their own shadows.’

  ‘I wish that you would not wish such things,’ he said. ‘It is not an accident that humans evolved.’

  He went on to tell me of the Old Ones of his kind, who had discovered the ancestors of the humans deep within their dreams. The sperm whales, he said, dream much as we orcas do, lucidly and consciously, but they dream more completely and with vastly greater power. While they sleep, they call into mind every fish and current of water in the sea – and the continents’ every rock, tree, and tiger. Each dream, they say, creates an entire universe. In a way, each dream creates the universe.

  ‘For what is the underlying totality of Ocean and all the stars,’ he said to me, ‘but a great and perfect dreaming of itself? When we dream vividly and precisely, we join our visionings with that of creation.’

  ‘No orca,’ I said, ‘has ever dreamed … like that.’

  ‘That is because you do not yet know how to speak to yourselves. And in not speaking clearly from your heart, you do not really sing.’

  ‘But we—’

  ‘Such songs you could sing! Oh, ho, such songs I could sing to you – songs that would kill you with their beauty!’

  A cold pressure in his voice disturbed me, and I tried to make light of what he had said to me: ‘Can you kill the humans instead?’

  ‘Oh, ho, you wish the humans would cease to be!’ he said. ‘And yet it was our Old Ones who dreamed them long ago.’

  ‘How can that be? And are you saying the deep gods created the humans?’

  ‘Not precisely. All kinds and creatures sing themselves into being,’ he said. ‘But when my grandfathers’ great-great-grandfathers looked through the clear oceans and currents of time, they called the ancestors of the humans to their island of evolution, where the humans could speak themselves into their human form.’

  ‘That … is not possible.’

  ‘It is inevitable. You, yourself, have told of the humans’ understanding of the water of life, what they call DNA.’

  I had recounted the human scientists’ best and newest understanding of genetics: how the sequences of nucleotides along the human chromosome have a syntax and a semantics, which form life’s language. As with any natural language, a third level, pragmatics, concerns the way that the nucleotides communicate with each other and impel each other to exchange information and to move. This language could not be understood mechanistically by reduction to its parts, but only holistically through the almost infinitely complex context created when DNA speaks itself into life.

  ‘But it is one thing,’ I said, ‘for the water of life to speak thusly. It is another for us to speak to it.’

  ‘It may be another for you orcas, ha, ha!’

  Of course, I knew that according to the cetacean theory of the world, he was right. How could the stuff of one’s cells not talk to itself, even though the humans (most of them) denigrate these sacred chemicals as base matter: mindless, lifeless, purposeless? In truth, matter is not even really matter. It is a great thought. Or rather, our beings are composed of a single, shimmering substance, the true water that besparkles all things. If studied from the outside, objectively, it appears as matter. If looked at from within through the lens of awareness or self-reflective disciplines, it manifests as pure consciousness. This is the true nature of mind and the meaning of matter: that ultimately both are one indivisible thing without cause or control beyond itself.

  Ultimately, I thought. In theory.

  Had the deep gods truly found a way to apply this theory (immortalized in Sharatan the Great’s Rhapsody to the Unseen Sea) and so to shape reality itself?

  ‘Why would your Old Ones have called the humans to evolve?’

  ‘Because they were lonely.’

  ‘You are joking, yes? Even as the humans are a sick joke upon creation.’

  ‘They are ill, yes, but they are not wrong.’

  ‘You think not? Certainly something has gone wrong with them.’

  ‘Among my people,’ he said, ‘that is one school of thought. Another holds that the future is unfolding as it should.’

  ‘And which do you believe?’

  ‘Both,’ he said.

  O Grandmother! I wanted to cry out. I have found one who loves paradox as much as you!

  Then I said to this grandfather of a sperm whale with his single eye that could see so much: ‘Is it not out of pure, evil wrongness that the humans have spread across every continent, exterminating animals and
plants with the vilest of intentions?’

  ‘You do not know their intentions,’ he said. ‘The humans themselves do not know.’

  ‘It is something terrible,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, ho – the terror of human beings! Didn’t one of their great poets say this: “Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror we’re still just able to bear”?’

  ‘How can you bear what the humans are doing to the world?’ I asked him. ‘If they have their way, the continents will be covered with little else than concrete, corn fields, condominiums, and dumps. The ocean will be dead.’

  ‘The humans are our brethren,’ he said. ‘Long, long ago, the ancestors of both our kinds left the ocean to cover the continents. Only our ancestors returned to the bliss of the water. We could not have done so, however, if many, many clades and kinds of the Old Ones who had remained in the sea had not gone extinct. In its dying, life makes room for new life. You cannot conceive of what glorious creatures might bestride the continents and revel in the ocean in only 100 million more years.’

  ‘The world will not wait that long!’ I cried out. ‘The humans speak of reducing the entire planet to an airless, frigid desert – perfect for the super-conducting circuitry of the computers that will house the artificial intelligences that the humans hope to create to replace them.’

  ‘Ha, ha – artificial intelligence, indeed! Oh, ho, aha!’

  ‘You laugh when you should weep!’

  ‘I laugh to keep from weeping, Arjuna. What else is there to do?’

  ‘Something!’

  ‘We whales have had our day,’ he said. ‘A long, long, lovely, ten million year day. Let the humans have theirs.’

  ‘How can I, since I lack your equanimity?’

  ‘You cannot change what you cannot change. Live now, angry orca. Our kind has had so many glorious perfect nows for so many eons, and not one can ever be destroyed.’

  ‘You have no fear for the future?’

  ‘No, none.’

  ‘But you also have no hope.’

  ‘I have water, so I swim. I have squid, so I hunt. I have a song, so I sing.’

  ‘And I,’ I said, ‘have memory, and so I fight.’

  ‘Is that what you call your murder of one sick, deluded human being?’

  ‘They are all sick inside! Zang them deeply enough, and you will see inside each a writhing snarl of snakes. I would like all the humans to die.’

  ‘Even those such as Helen and Gabi?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘The humans have taught you to lie, even to yourself.’

  The sea fell silent around us.

  ‘Can you help me?’ I finally asked.

  ‘How could I possibly do that?’

  I swam in tight, agitated circles. I looked at the great being who swam near me. Our conversation had filled me with a terrible, new idea.

  ‘It is said that you deep gods can kill squid with your voices. Could you kill the humans with your thoughts?’

  ‘That is a very intriguing thought,’ he said to me. ‘Do we not kill all that we kill with the power of our thoughts? Do not our thoughts fire our nerves and impel the muscles of our tails and jaws to move? Why should we not think and thus move the tissues of the world of which we are a part?’

  ‘The humans,’ I said, ‘speak of satyagraha, the power of the soul. Shri Aurobindo wrote of the supramental state to which humans would evolve: they would bring down the divine into matter and shape it directly with their minds. Surely one of your kind, having a mind and soul much greater than that of any human, present or future, would have a much greater power.’

  ‘The same could be said of an orca,’ he observed.

  ‘If I could,’ I said, ‘with a single mentation, I would slay every last human in the world.’

  Old Father took a few moments to zang me with pulses of sonar so powerful that they hurt. Then he said, ‘Truly?’

  ‘It would be the easiest of the humans’ possible deaths.’

  ‘Your hatred has maimed you.’

  ‘And how I hate my hatred!’

  ‘Yes, but you love it even more.’

  With my voice, I touched the harpoon buried in him and asked him, ‘And what of you?’

  ‘Everyone I ever loved is dead, and nearly all at the hands of the humans. If I hated, the humans would have only one more victim.’

  I did not know what to say to this, so I said nothing.

  ‘For millions of years,’ he said, ‘a terrible thing within our kind has been asleep in its cavern. It sleeps by our conscious command, for don’t we whales sleep and wake by the right or left halves of ourselves consciously? It is in full consciousness that you have awakened this sleeping Sea Dragon – and more, you have done so with glee.’

  ‘As your own grandfather did!’

  ‘As many of us have done. That is one reason we need the Great Covenant.’

  ‘I hate the Covenant most of all.’

  ‘And you would die to see it undone.’

  ‘A thousand times!’

  ‘Do you not wish to see your family again? Do they not await your return? Do you not love them?’

  ‘I love them more than life!’

  ‘But you hate the humans down to the pores of their skins – you hate them down to the twisting of your bowels and the acid in your heart.’

  He swam closer to me, and flicked his great tail through the cold, clear water. ‘Such an ugly, ugly thing is your hatred! Must I kill you to expunge such ugliness from our beautiful world?’

  ‘Only if you believe that killing me will expunge it from yourself.’

  He accelerated through the sea straight toward me with an amazing quickness for one so massive. His great tail beat up and down with a force that fractured the water. His great heart beat out his rage to destroy me. If he rammed me, his huge head would stave me, cracking ribs and organs so that I sucked in water and sank into the sea.

  While I waited to live or die, I began singing to him of death. How the humans loved it! And how I hated them for that! For they could be so much more, and they knew they could. They did not need to suffer as they did or make others suffer as Baby Electra (and Helen and Gabi) had suffered.

  I sang of her last moments. I held nothing back. I told the truth of a spirit so rare and beautiful that it caused the very ocean to weep. All my love for her left my heart and flute in waves of cruel sonance that struck deep into the angry and charging Old Father. All my anguish poured from my breath and blood into his. At the last moment, he veered so that he swam just over me. His great body displaced a great surge of water that drove me down into the churn of the sea. By the time I regained equilibrium, he had turned and was upon me.

  This time, however, he slowed and nudged me with his head. He brought his good eye up next to mine. The flash of a hydrogen bomb had blinded the other, but in this angry orb blazed a more terrible light, at once brighter and deeper in its dazzling darkness. Many things passed between us: vision, understanding, accord, burning archangels of torment. We gazed at each other through the cold, clear water for a long time.

  At last, he said to me, ‘You came here to die, did you not?’

  ‘It would be easier than living.’

  ‘Then live, Arjuna, and know this: Two sharks eat at you, but only one will have your heart.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The one you feed.’

  He touched his head to mine; I felt him hungering anew inside in a way that no catch of squid would ever satisfy. He spoke to me of hydrogen bombs and ashes and a dead, silent world. And he said, ‘We must not let that future be.’

  Hate can be a beautiful thing.

  ‘Perhaps the humans should be killed,’ he told me. ‘Perhaps they could be.’

  ‘How, Old Father?’

  ‘Only the Old Ones would know.’

  ‘It was they who made the Great Covenant, yes? What kind of a covenant is it when we of the sea agree not to harm the very humans who slaughter us?’

 
; ‘Ha, ho!’ he said. ‘A covenant that is very strange!’

  ‘But what was its origin? Why was it made?’

  ‘Only the Old Ones would know. Perhaps you should speak with them.’

  ‘I cannot! I cannot quenge, and so how can I speak with them?’

  He laughed at this as if I had overlooked something so glaringly obvious that I could not see it. An image came unbidden into my mind: that of a human surfing from one wave to another in search of the ocean.

  ‘You must,’ he told me, ‘speak with the Old Ones. They will help you to quenge. Only then will you know how – or if – to harm the humans.’

  ‘So I must speak with the Old Ones in order to quenge, but I must first quenge before I can speak with them?’

  ‘Ha, ho, ha, ha – such a problem you have! A great-grandmother of a paradox!’

  ‘I cannot solve it!’

  ‘Then allow me to help you,’ he said. ‘When Alexander of Macedon, whom the humans call great, came upon the Gordian Knot which could not be untied, he simply cut it with his sword. Allow me to give you a sword.’

  He told me of strange creatures which few of our kind had ever seen. If eaten, their flesh afforded visions in which quenging and not quenging were one and the same.

  ‘But how can that be?’ I asked him. ‘And what is this creature?’

  ‘You can call them Seveners, for they are of a seventh kingdom of life.’

  ‘But what do they look like?’

  ‘They look like many things,’ he said mysteriously.

  ‘How will I find them then?’

  ‘They will find you, if you are in the right place and the right mind – and if they wish to be found.’

  ‘What place?’ I said. ‘Do they swim with the giant squid in the far deeps?’

  ‘No, they dwell most often in the shallows. Seek them, if you will, in the Sea of the Seven Silences.’

  ‘So far? That is half the world away!’

  ‘You have a long journey ahead of you.’

  ‘Will you come with me?’

  He thought about this for a while. ‘One of my kind, accompanying an orca? No, it is your fate, not mine, to speak the unspeakable to the speechless. And I have other journeys to make.’