Idiot Gods, The

by Zindell, David

  ‘You are not dying, are you?’

  ‘I died long ago, Arjuna. Now that I have found a place in life again, I must decide what to do, and for that, I must be alone.’

  ‘Then I must say farewell. I hope we will meet again.’

  ‘I doubt if we will. Those who seek the Seveners do not return.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Since they have not returned, who can know?’

  ‘I will return,’ I promised him, ‘having asked the Old Ones what must be done with the humans.’

  ‘When you find out,’ he said, ‘sing as loud a song as you can, and I will hear you. Then I will know what must be done, too.’

  We touched faces in order to seal this little covenant. Then Old Father breathed in a deep, deep breath and dove down into the water to continue his hunt for squid. He disappeared into a flowing blackness that seemed as dark and cold as death.

  I breathed, too, and turned in a different direction. South I would swim, for thousands of miles into unknown waters until I came at last upon the Sea of the Seven Silences.

  21

  In the Moon of the Three Sisters, I entered that broad swath of sea known as the Blue Desert. Few nutrients washed off the continents reach the center of the ocean, and thus few creatures that fish can eat dwell there. I would have to content myself with the few fish that I might find or perhaps a stray turtle. In this aridity of life, I would be hungry. If things went badly for me, I might even starve.

  For hundreds of miles of relentlessly calm and empty ocean, I pushed such thoughts aside, for I was full to overflowing with memories and questions. I still sang out to Baby Electra and listened for the tinkle of her small voice singing back. I wondered about the Seveners of whom Old Father had spoken. How could they look like many things? Were they shapeshifters like jellyfish? Could they change colors and hide among the fronds of red and pink coral as an octopus did? How could Old Father, who knew of these creatures, not know more about them? Didn’t the deep gods know nearly everything about the ocean, particularly the unknown beings who lived in unmapped places where no orca could go?

  As it was, I doubted the wisdom of my crossing the unknown Blue Desert, but I did not want to attempt longer and more circuitous routes that would take too many months to complete. I was in a hurry! How like a human I truly had become! And so day after day, I swam into the wavering, barren blueness that wrapped itself around the vast curve of the world.

  Of course, the desert through which I swam was only sometimes blue. On clear days, with the hydrogen bomb of the sun bright and burning in the sky, the blueness intensified into tones of azure, indigo, and aquamarine. On a few rare mornings, when the rays of light slanted down at precisely the right angle, the whole world lit up with scarlet or violet or a living gold so intense that it seemed to breathe its unbelievable hue into every sparkling drop of water. Twilight called forth cobalt from the cooling waves, while the falling night touched the sea with a pearly glow that gave way to the darker shades of charcoal and green, before turning nearly completely black. How I loved this pure, peaceful color! And how I loved it even more when the moon broke through the clouds and silvered the sea with a shimmer that spread outward from wave to wave toward those unexplored regions that called me ever on.

  So it was that I finally came to the most dreaded part of the desert: my people know it as the Plastic Sea. The ocean calls its currents to its center, around which they turn through the seasons in great thousand-mile gyres of water. All that floats in or on the water is swept inward toward this center. Driftwood, bits of shell, and dead kelp comprise some of this debris. Most of what I encountered, however, had been manufactured by human beings – and most of that part was made of plastic that the humans had dumped into the sea. As I entered the great swirl of garbage, I collided with egg cartons, razor handles, toilet plungers, enema bottles, pens, condoms, tape dispensers, artificial turf, and much, much else. This junk came in every color from the bright primary reds, greens, and blues of children’s discarded toys to the cracked black casings of remote electronics controls. How I hated this unnatural variegation! I dreaded as well the touch of plastic bags on my skin and the taste of all the tiny, ground-up, gray plastic particles that fouled my mouth.

  In truth, I had to take great care here not to swallow a mouthful of tainted water or to aspirate a killing fragment of plastic when I surfaced to breathe. No fish or other living creature did I dare to eat. The penalty for breaking the fast that I imposed upon myself became horrifyingly clear when one day I chanced upon an entire floating island of plastic.

  I did not know why I swam toward this great mat of water cans, cups, blankets, buckets, spoons, and rubber ducks. Perhaps I wanted to view this sacrilege close-up in order to emblazon the image in my mind instead of fleeing immediately into less polluted parts of the sea. As I drew nearer, I noticed a bright yellow plastic raft of a kind the humans might use to sun themselves, bobbing up and down on the surface of a gentle lake. The raft had an aluminum ladder that could be levered into the water and adjustable back supports so that the humans could incline in relaxation while drinking their beers. Between the supports was a blue pop-up table with beverage holders. On this day of hot sun and lonely ocean, however, the table held a very different object.

  An albatross, it seemed, had put down here to die. It lay on the blue table rotting in the sun. Its bill was cracked and discolored, and the eye sockets were empty of the bright jewels they had once contained. Time – or other birds – had eaten it down to little more than its exposed bones and greasy gray feathers that had once been a brilliant white. At the center of this mess of a once-magnificent being, held within by the curve of its white ribs, gleamed pieces of plastic in colors of red, blue, and yellow: they were little people, I saw, with little plastic hands and grinning faces. Some human child had once played with them. Somehow these toys had found their way to the ocean, and the dumb, beautiful bird had mistaken them for something to eat.

  ‘Why did you have to die this way?’ I asked the albatross. ‘Why? Why? Why?’

  ‘You know why,’ she said from her final perch on the blue plastic – and from the blue sky above us where once she had soared.

  ‘Did it hurt badly to die this way?’

  ‘It hurt very badly. My belly grew full of hard things that would not move, and each breath became an agony.’

  I felt the mere hint of the beginning of the unbelievable torture that would be mine if I chanced to swallow pieces of plastic along with any fish I gulped down – or if I swallowed the wrong fish that had dined as this poor bird had. I remembered yet again how my sister Mira’s baby had died.

  ‘I am sorry that the humans’ excrescence has hurt you,’ I said. ‘So sorry, sorry, sorry!’

  ‘You cannot help it, strange whale. No one can.’

  ‘It must be helped! Somehow, there must be a way.’

  ‘Please tell me if you find it. I will be here waiting, at the center of the sea.’

  I swam away from this sad sight in a stunned silence. The waves washed torn-up shredded syringes and bloody bandages over my skin as I continued my journey southward. The wrongness of the albatross’s death stuck in my throat like a plastic drum full of acids that I could not dislodge. For many miles and months, ever since I had killed the white bear and had spoken with Pherkad in the far north where the ocean had caught fire, the world had seemed wrong to me. Until this day, I had attributed the twisting of all things natural and good to something wrong within the humans themselves. I saw that in the innocence of my first flush of hatred, I had not hated deeply enough, and so I had not fully understood the depth of the humans’ fell power. I realized that they did not simply manufacture evil as they did plastics, pesticides, and other poisons. No, with a will to master all of creation and use it for their own purposes, they reached into the heart of the world to grasp an essential and inextricable wrongness bound up with all things. It was the world itself I should hate – even as I hated the humans all the
more for showing me the possibilities I had never wanted to see.

  I might have pitied the humans, for they suffered from the horrible things that their hands wrought out of the earth’s cruel clay as surely as did the birds and the whales. Human babies, too, choke on plastic. Plastic compounds disrupt their endocrine systems and cause cancer, maimed brains, and twisted limbs and organs. Phthalates poison their boy babies and give them penises so tiny that when the time comes they have difficulty mating. The humans, of course, do not care about even their own most innocent ones, much less those of beings they deride as ‘animals’, and so why should I have cared if the humans suffered all the pains of hell and found themselves unable to breed ever more of their pestilential millions? Why should I feel the slightest pang of sorrow at their incipient extinction? Indeed, my encounter with the albatross drove away every drop of natural compassion I had ever had. None of my old desire to help the humans help themselves remained. I simply wanted them dead.

  As I continued southward through long days of sun and star-filled nights, I worried that my hardening myself to all things human would wall me off from what beauty was left in the world and all the fish, squid, oysters, seals, and whales who continued coming into life that they might behold it. I did not feel very sane. I called out continually to the sparkling waves, hoping to hear Baby Electra call back. Surely she swam somewhere near me. I wished I could speak with other orcas who might give back to me newly inflected the zangs of understanding that I shared with them – and so I might be able to perceive if I was thinking and feeling wrongly. Where were Alkurah and Unukalhai, I wondered? How far from me, it seemed, was my grandmother! How I longed to hear her voice again!

  In such a state, I finally emerged from the Plastic Sea and continued my passage of the Blue Desert. I chanced upon a tiger shark, and killed it. Although ravenous, I ate it slowly and with great care, making sure that I ingested no part of its viscera, which might conceal pieces of hated plastic. I tried not to think about the bitter pill of knowledge that I had swallowed while interacting with Helen’s computers at the Institute: with every bloody gobbet of flesh I consumed – whether fish, fowl, bear, seal, or human – I absorbed into my tissues all the mercury, cadmium, lead, dioxins, and other poisons that the humans spew into the rivers and oceans. Sane I might become if only I could speak with the Old Ones, but deep inside where my heart beat tainted blood to every cell of my body, I would always be at least a little sick.

  In the Moon of Mourning Lights, soon after I fought my way out of the Plastic Sea, I left the Blue Desert altogether. I veered west into the Fallaways, and in this rush of fecund currents, I came across schools of arrowfish, many of which I gulped down gratefully. I continued swimming, and I edged the dreaded Wailing Waters. Dark stories I had heard of these seas, and darker ones I would soon endure as well, for I came upon a family of dolphins who fled toward more peaceful places. At first, these strange dolphins were reluctant to approach me, much less to speak to me, but I called to them in the language that the peoples of the sea and I had created in the wake of the humans’ war games. I gave these darting dolphins my name and my story.

  ‘I am lonely,’ I said to them. ‘May I have your company?’

  The dozen dolphins, it seemed, had also survived a war, but one that the humans had intentionally visited upon them. Mother Merope, oldest of the pretty, wounded dolphins told me about this:

  ‘Our whole clan,’ she said, ‘was dining happily on rainbow fish in the Crimson Bay, which we used to call the Bay of Play. All the families of the Adoringly Transchordant Purple Pralltriller Clan!’

  I smiled inside at this, for dolphins give themselves these kinds of pretentious names and others even more ridiculous, such as the Sun Surfing Tintinnabulating Fabulists and the Gladsome Too-Blue Courteous Romancers. It was as if they somehow intuited the humans’ misconceptions of them and turned repressed longings and utopian fancies into names.

  ‘The humans,’ Mother Merope explained as her bloodied brethren drew in around her, ‘sealed off the bay with nets, which closed in tighter and tighter around us, driving us into a cove where we could barely move. The humans motored their boats right into us, and they laughed when the propellers tore our babies apart. They leaned over the boats, and clubbed many of us to death. Others they speared or slit our throats. They caught our dead ones (and some of the living) with hooks, and pulled us toward the beach, where other humans cut us apart.’

  Mother Merope paused in her account as a baby dolphin nestled in the hollow of her belly for comfort. Then she continued, ‘I do not know why the humans spared my family – some of us, for we few are all that remains of the Ecstatically Sapphire Song Singers. Perhaps they had enough meat, or perhaps they simply grew tired of killing.’

  ‘The humans never grow tired of killing,’ I said. I told them about Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Nanking, and the Battle of the Somme. ‘They have killed many more of their own kind than they have sea people.’

  ‘I have heard, Arjuna,’ she said, ‘that you have killed a human.’

  ‘That is true.’

  ‘How coldly you speak of breaking the Great Covenant!’

  ‘That is also true. Would you like it more if I spoke with all the wrath that burns me?’

  ‘I would like it better if you did not speak of killing the humans at all.’

  She nursed her baby as she regarded me. The other dolphins swam close to get a better look at me – or perhaps to protect Mother Merope should I prove to be a murderer of dolphins as well as humans.

  ‘That is,’ she continued, ‘I would once have liked that, for I would have been horrified to even think of an orca killing a human. Now, I am horrified that such thoughts fail to horrify me. And so I would like it best if you broke the Covenant again – and again, and again, and again! Kill all the humans if you can – if the Old Ones will speak to you and tell you how!’

  I bade that bitter dolphin goodbye, and continued my journey. Along the way, I encountered other peoples who expressed similar sentiments. In the Sea of Ecstasy, not far from the bomb-blasted island that Old Father had told of, I fell in with a family of humpbacks who let me swim with them. I spoke with them about all things human, but they believed little of what I said. When we came to the black lava remnants of the destroyed island – the humans call it Enewetak – one of the humpbacks said to me, ‘Only Ocean can shape the features of the earth. It is not possible that the humans could have done such a thing – is it?’

  I explained as best I could to these innocent whales how the humans contemplated doing much, much worse: igniting the atmosphere in a hydrogen-fusing hurricane of fire that would race around the planet killing all things or creating a black crush of matter so dense that the world would collapse into it.

  ‘The humans love death,’ I said. ‘Even more, they love wielding the power over life and death.’

  ‘If that is true,’ the eldest of the humpbacks said, ‘then wouldn’t it be better for us of the sea to die now before the world itself does? And best of all if you found a way to kill the humans before they kill the entire universe?’

  With such plaints lingering in my mind, I swam on. There came long days of desperate dreams and nights full of brilliant stars that gave a bit of their faroff fire to the lonely waters. Waves built and crested and carried me along into wonderings about the terrible purposes of the past and beautiful futures that might never be. In the long, dark, dazzling roar of the indestructible ocean, I listened for whisperings that might point the way toward what I should do if ever I gained the power to do it.

  After much thinking and swimming – and swimming and swimming and swimming! – I made my way into the great Equatorial Current and let its warm, salty rush sweep me eastward for many miles. Then I turned south and eased into the turquoise Ocean of Islands. Here I came across great schools of fish good to eat and many more dolphins. I passed into the Opah Waters and through the Dreaming Shallows.

  In the Coral Sea, I paused to rest and to ma
rvel at the beauty that Ocean had brought forth. I glided along with clouds of purple passion fish and angel fish sporting such bright yellow scales that their hues seemed to leap off them and explode into my eyes. I floated with translucent jellyfish and lazed among the urchins and the feather stars, whose many delicate fingers reached out from their centers like rays of red, blue, and gold. I zanged the sponges and the crinoids and the coral in colors of scarlet, tangerine, teal, and a shocking pink. I sang to all these creatures. I told them my dreams and why I had come here.

  Many days later, when I had drunk in my fill of this sea’s beauty and the last of the wounds to my flesh had healed, I continued my journey. I swam along the curve of a reef greater in glory than anything the humans had ever built. The Moon of Promises spoke its soft radiance into the evening waters and called me ever southward until I finally came to that strange place in the ocean known as the Sea of the Seven Silences.

  How often I had heard my grandmother and Alnitak sing of this mysterious sea, although they had visited its azure waters in dreams and stories only! Here, it was said, was the center of all waters, out of which the ocean eternally creates itself. At its still point could be found a quiet so calm that its sound was deafening – a quiet so deep that one could hear the stars whispering in soft tones of white and blue fire, along with the voices of the faroff clans of orcas on Agathange. If a whale such as I listened carefully enough, he might even hear his own soul.

  At first, however, I could hear little more than the rumbling of my empty belly, for I was very hungry. And so I spent some days fishing. I came across a big, fat opah, as oval as a serving plate and colored a steely blue, with red and green markings. It fairly flew through the water, beating its pectoral fins like wings. We had a good chase of it. Before I asked the doomed fish if he was ready to join his ancestors, I inquired as to the nature and whereabouts of the Seveners. However, he could tell me nothing. I ate his delicious meat as quickly as I could, and then moved on.