Idiot Gods, The

by Zindell, David

  Other creatures I queried as well. I swam among intricate coral reefs and through clouds of seaweed, and I asked my question of a huge leatherback turtle and a white shark – and of a whipray, colored like a leopard, and some pale purple salps and even a flower urchin. ‘Where can I find the Seveners?’ I asked some swaying Pink Lace. And to a viperfish, I said, ‘Won’t you please tell me what the creature I seek looks like?’

  No one could help me. In growing frustration, I approached a stone fish, the most venomous fish in the sea. With an eye on his spines tipped with poison, I asked for his help, and he said, ‘Go away, killer whale – you do not belong here.’

  Where did I belong, I wondered? Had I journeyed across half the world to find the sea empty of the one thing I most desperately sought?

  One day, after I wasted my breath trying to obtain some useful intelligence from a water flea, I came upon a dolphin family, whose matriarch consented to talk to me. After a long exchange of stories, she told me: ‘I have lived in these waters all my life, and I have never seen anything like the creature you have described.’

  ‘But that is just it!’ I said. ‘I have not described anything, for I do not know what the Seveners look like – only that they look like many things.’

  ‘But do not all things look like themselves?’

  ‘The pyrosomes do not.’

  We discussed how creatures nearly as tiny as grains of sand occasionally assembled into colonial organisms in great, glowing, blue-green tubes nearly as long as a minke whale.

  ‘Then the pyrosomes,’ the mother dolphin said, ‘look like two things, not many. And I have never heard that eating them can induce visions.’

  ‘They cannot,’ I said. I admitted that I had taken a few bites of a pyrosome I had found floating through the water not far from here.

  ‘Have you considered the possibility, venturesome orca, that the one you call Old Father tricked you and no such creature actually exists? The deep gods do not like orcas.’

  ‘That would be quite a trick: to send me around the world on a wild goose chase.’

  ‘Perhaps he wished to punish you for your killing of the human, of which the whole ocean sings.’

  ‘Old Father hates the humans more than I do.’

  ‘How sad that you must hate!’ the mother dolphin said to me. ‘I, myself, rather like the few humans I have met, though you might be right that it would be best if they were all to die. If you manage to speak with these chimerical Seveners, will you please find me and tell me of your vision? I would like to know what we dolphins should do.’

  After that futile conversation, I swam about with the eels and the jellyfish, and I called out to a creature that might or might not exist. I gave my song of longing to the pellucid waters, and I zanged the sponges, the anemones, and the red and white-striped serpent stars for unknown organisms they might conceal. I cried out for knowledge, certainty, companionship, help. Through schools of razor fish and clouds of tiny zooids that tickled my skin, I swam and cried out loud and long until my breath burned my lungs and my voice gave out.

  ‘Where are you?’ I said with my mind when I could no longer speak. ‘Why won’t you answer me?’

  I floated in the turquoise sea with the waves rolling far above me. A mandarin fish swam by, and I marveled at its yellow and orange body, aswirl with blue and green markings, like a psychedelic painting come to pulsing, twitching, eye-catching life.

  ‘O bizarre and beautiful fish!’ I shouted inside. ‘Tell me of the strange Seveners, you who are so strange yourself!’

  ‘Shhh!’ the fish implored me as she pivoted to dart away. ‘Hush now, for you are in the Sea of the Seven Silences, and you have not quietened yourself even to the first one.’

  Exhausted as I was, dispirited, distraught, and alone, I fell as quiet as I could. I started meditating as my mother had taught me. I turned the hearing parts of myself away from the soughing wind and the faroff moaning currents and the other sounds of the outer world.

  The little mandarin fish pivoted once more to regard me through the cloud of zooids hanging about the suddenly stilled water.

  As I held in and quietened my breath, I entered into the Second Silence, and the mandarin fish swam a little closer to me, and it seemed that even the living cloud of zooids moved in my direction. I did not want to dwell upon that curious phenomenon, for I very badly needed to quieten my mind, and this I managed to do. The Third Silence, like the softness of my mother’s adoration, enclosed me. Now I began to dream, and to dream of tasting the sweetness of silence within my dream, and the great cloud of unknowing of the world outside me began to shift and swirl and open. So, too, I saw with an unsleeping eye, did the cloud of zooids, which moved closer to me. Deep within the Fourth Silence, I became aware of all the eddies of the sea and the little movements of the world, without in any way losing the awareness of my own awareness and the quiet, shimmering infinities of perception that it contained. Time slowed way down, and entire years passed between heartbeats. Paradoxically, however, the cloud of zooids quickened its motions.

  I prepared myself to enter the Fifth Silence, but I found it difficult to quieten my heart, which throbbed with all the warmth and poignancy of lost joy that I held within. My attention drifted toward the cloud of zooids. The little specks of life drew in closer to each other, making the cloud denser and darker in its grayness. I gazed at the contracting ball as my heart continued pounding out its relentless rhythm. In very little outer time – but eons to the watching part of me – the ball shrank to the size of a turtle and began organizing itself into a different shape. Cells flowed and swirled and formed up into tissues that wrapped around each other and extruded into five tentacle-like arms. Its skin, if I could call it that, came alive with tones of yellow and orange, blue and green; the colors pulsed and twitched and caught my eye – but only for a moment. For this nearly instantaneous mimicry of the mandarin fish’s markings seemed as nothing compared to a greater miracle: set into the newly made creature’s ‘head’ – bulbous and large like that of an octopus – were two eyes as large and bright as those of my mother. Or my own. In truth, they were my eyes, a nearly exact replication of the two orbs that I had studied so many times during the scientists’ mirror tests. I swam in closer, and I gazed into the bright black centers of blue, blue eyes that seemed too hot, too angry, wild, and pained.

  ‘You are one of the Seveners!’ I said to the creature.

  What else could he be? In all the seas through which I had swum, I had never heard of a kind of life that could transform itself in this way.

  ‘Yes,’ the creature finally answered me in the silence of his eyes so like my own.

  ‘Do you know why I have come here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it true that the eating of your flesh affords visions?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Could this dumb, doomed creature say nothing else? I continued gazing into his eyes. Dark lights flickered there. Their sparkle recalled a much greater radiance, and I could not help thinking of a hydrogen bomb’s hellfire – or the brilliance of a star.

  ‘Are you ready to die?’ I asked the Sevener.

  He said yes, and I moved forward. Just before my jaws closed about him, however, he called, ‘Are you ready?’

  I ate him down to the little finger-like grasping appendages at the tips of his tentacles, down to his heart and his damned, fiery eyes. I had never tasted any flesh so bitter. It burned in my belly as if I had swallowed red hot lava that the earth vented into the sea. I wanted to retch and vomit out the entirety of this poisonous creature. Instead, I fought my way up to the sea’s surface so that I could breathe.

  The salty air cooled the agony inside me, a little. It did nothing to quieten my heart, which raged and resounded with the most terrible (but beautiful) of all my desires. Death, like the cold, black crush of the ocean many miles deep, closed in on me. I could barely move, barely feel, barely think, barely breathe.

  For endless ages of uni
verses of dark, dark eons – with the scintillant noonday sun hung like an explosion of yellow and white in the deep blue sky – I swam ever nearer to that total darkness of sound and life that had always called to me. For all beings comes a time when being itself becomes unbearable and we wish to be no more. We are all made of water, and the sea’s water moves with the urge to form up into unique waves of experience in adoration of the sea, but each droplet longs always and through every moment of life to flow back into its source. As I now began to flow. I swam on and on through that still point in time and space, and I called continually to Baby Electra and to Gabi and my great-grandmother, who were so breathlessly and agonizingly close to answering me. Soon, I knew, I would join them – so very, very soon.

  There came a moment when my heart’s desperate desires softened so that I could hear other things. I realized that I could never have reached the sea’s Fifth Silence on my own. Now, with my soul beginning to sing its true song, I needed only to quieten this part of myself, and I would be almost home.

  ‘I am Arjuna Manslayer of the Blue Aria Family of the Faithful Thoughtplayers of the world my grandmothers’ great-great-grandmothers knew as Ocean!’

  The world’s cool waters folded themselves around me. They tasted fresh and clean. All the past was here, all the pure, perfect present; all the future gathered in one golden, waiting moment and whirled about its timeless center like the winds of a storm. Ocean swelled within me, and I heard the diatoms singing from half the world away, and I felt the flick of a northern humpback’s flipper as a flutter of my heart. Then the whole sea caught fire: with flames of amethyst, with rose, pearl, saffron, secret blue, and viridian – the water everywhere iridescing, luminescing. The world opened with the bright, bright sounds of tintigloss, tanglow, and crimsong. I was inside this sea of songs and it was inside of me.

  I want to live.

  With this simple affirmation, I drew in a long breath, and I felt the breath of the ocean revive me. Beautiful, beautiful strength poured into my blood and flowed into every part of me. I dove down into the sea. It’s azure waters opened into an immense clarity. So silent it was! I looked for any remnant of the Sevener but it seemed that I had consumed him completely. The mandarin fish, however, in all her lovely colors, remained watching me.

  ‘I want to live,’ I said to this strange little fish.

  ‘Then live,’ she answered me.

  ‘I want to live as I was born to live,’ I said ‘but the humans will not let me.’

  ‘What are humans, strange orca?’

  ‘I wish I knew,’ I said.

  I swam deeper, and I came across a coffin fish, like a pink balloon covered in spines. I asked him if he had ever seen a human being.

  ‘No, and I do not want to,’ he said. ‘The humans capture my kind and put us in tanks.’

  ‘How could you possibly know that? And how could you possibly speak to me, you whose brain is no bigger than your eye?’

  ‘But what do brains have to do with real speaking, brainy orca? There is only one true language, and it speaks from the heart of all things.’

  I knew that this was so. And though I had come to speak dozens of languages, cetacean and human, the deepest of communications had always eluded me. Ocean, with all its creatures, spoke to itself not through breath or sound or symbols, but rather through the universal knowingness that flows from the heart of being to the heart of all things. In my quick exchange with the coffin fish, I realized that I had always known this one language, but only now was I truly learning to speak it.

  ‘I will not let the humans put you in a tank,’ I promised this spiny fish.

  ‘Good! But how will you stop them from doing that?’

  I puzzled over this as I swam on. The water grew warm and then unbearably hot. I came to a place in the world of boiling water. A dog, shaved naked to its bare, pink skin, yelped and screamed and frantically flailed her paws to lever herself out of the hell of a black pot in which a human had immersed her.

  ‘Help me! Help me!’ she screamed. ‘Please help me, Arjuna!’

  ‘How do you know my name?’

  ‘The whole world knows your name.’

  ‘Yes, the Manslayer.’

  ‘No, you are the one who speaks to man. Speak, Arjuna, and tell them to stop.’

  ‘But what are they doing?’

  ‘They are making Dog Torture Soup. They believe that my agony will render my meat more succulent.’

  I listened as the doomed dog screamed and screamed.

  ‘The humans tricked us!’ the dog cried out to me. ‘They promised my people meat, companionship, and even love, but they made us slaves. We want to be wolves again! Help us, please – help me!’

  ‘How can I do that?’

  ‘You can kill the humans for me, for I cannot bear to think of killing them myself.’

  Again, I swam on. I spoke with a red and white hermit crab who hid from the humans and with some tiny shrimp who concealed themselves among the anemones. These little, pink pulsings of life told how the taste of the sea had grown bitter, and they asked me to make the water sweet again. So it was with a snake eel and an orange fangtooth, who had the face of a demon. An egret swooping low over the waves blamed the poisoning of its food on the human beings, and I could not disagree.

  I swam up north for a moment, and a salmon asked me, ‘Where have all my people gone?’ Farther north, where the icebergs melted, a white bear told me, ‘I am the last of my kind, and you should kill me now so that I do not have to be alone.’

  In another water I spoke with some clams and kelp; in a quick return to the Sea of the Seven Silences, I queried a coralline sponge as to his opinion of what I should do with the humans. I swam on and came across a mauve stinger. How lovely was this deadly creature! Her diaphanous blue dome covered the pinkish rose center, beneath which floated the frilly vermillion mouth lobes. She spoke to me in a bioluminescent light show, and she said, ‘I am dying, Arjuna. All my people are dying.’

  ‘Do you hate the humans?’ I asked her.

  ‘What is hate?’ she said.

  I felt uniquely qualified to answer this question, and this I did.

  ‘No, I do not hate,’ she said. ‘Such emotions are for your kind. But I would sting all the humans to death, if I could. They are killing everything that can be killed.’

  ‘They have not killed me … yet.’

  ‘That is because they are waiting for you to kill them. Will you, Arjuna?’

  ‘I cannot! I cannot break the Great Covenant.’

  ‘You can if the Old Ones say you can.’

  ‘But where are the Old Ones? I still cannot speak with them!’

  ‘Why, they are right here,’ the beautiful jellyfish said to me. ‘Can you not see them, hear them?’

  As I quietened the ringing chords of my progression through time, the Sixth Silence enveloped me. I blinked my eyes, and found myself again in the cold, cold northern ocean. Pherkad swam beside me, and the hated harpoon still stuck out of the bloody hole in his white and black flesh.

  ‘Brother!’ I cried to him. ‘I have missed you!’

  We brushed against each other, and he said, ‘I have never stopped calling to you, for our hearts belong to each other.’

  ‘How can I hear you now, then?’

  ‘How can you not?’

  ‘Because I cannot quenge! Will you tell me how?’

  ‘You have never stopped quenging, Arjuna. When I died, you lost only your ability to perceive that you quenged, as all things always do.’

  ‘I do not understand you!’

  ‘That is because you lost your way among the humans.’

  ‘I wish I had never seen one!’

  ‘That is too bad, for the only way that you will ever find yourself again is through the humans.’

  ‘I do not want to.’

  ‘Talk to them, brother. You never really have.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Talk to them now.’

  ‘But I came
here to speak with the Old Ones.’

  ‘Then speak – they are waiting for you.’

  ‘The humans cannot be Old Ones!’

  The water moved, and again I blinked, and in Pherkad’s place beside me, Gabi now swam, her hair floating in the water in long, red strands. Her eyes – a much lighter blue than mine – drank in the whole of me, and I found myself inside her.

  ‘I loved you,’ she said, ‘from the moment I saw you trying to fight your way out of the punishment pool.’

  ‘And I … must now hate you. As I do all things human.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Arjuna! Sorry I couldn’t save you.’

  ‘But it was I who could not save you! At least I killed your killer.’

  ‘Do you really want to kill all of us?’

  ‘Your kind are so hateful! Killer apes who taught me—’

  ‘I was pregnant when I died. Had I lived, you might have adored the part that died with me.’

  I gathered sounds of anguish in my flute to respond to her, but before I could sing my compassion, the water moved again and carried me along. I found myself in a part of Ocean that formed itself as a clear, blue mountain lake six thousand feet above men and time. On its rocky shore stood a lonely, lonely man with deep, deep eyes.

  ‘What are these beings that you hate so much, Arjuna?’ he asked me. ‘Man is a bridge between ape and god. What have you done to help my kind over?’

  ‘What can I do?’

  ‘Everything. You have seen how we are stuck on the bridge.’

  ‘Yes – and so you would blow it up!’

  ‘But how can we be new unless we had first become ashes?’

  ‘And ashes are all you will leave of the world!’

  His kind, I said, were dying to unleash a final conflagration that would race around the continents and seas in a fireball that would wipe out Homo sapiens and the sick, foul, old world along with it. I am become death, one of the greatest of humans had said. The humans hated themselves even more than I did, and they longed for death. And so out of all the bombs and missiles that they had been building for so long, they would fashion a planetary funeral pyre. Out of the hell of nuclear war – somehow, they hoped – would emerge a new species.