‘The phoenix,’ I said to this man whose moustache swept down over his lips like a brown broom, ‘is the perfect prophetic myth of the human race.’
‘Yes, a prophecy,’ he said. ‘How my kind longs to spread its golden wings and fly right through the flames!’
‘No, a myth only – and a deadly one at that. You will destroy yourselves, and Ocean, too.’
I had said this for many days and miles. Now I knew that all I feared would come to pass.
‘Our urge to death,’ the man said, ‘is only the shadow of the much deeper desire to fly up toward the sun. You are lost in the darkness, Arjuna, and you have forgotten how to live.’
‘How should I live, then?’
‘You must say “yes” to all that has been and all that must be.’
‘I cannot bear to think what must be.’
‘Then do not. Create instead what must be yourself.’
I dove down into the crystal water to consider this, and when I surfaced I spoke with other humans in other places. A lovely old woman called the Mother said that the divine could be brought down into the world instead of death, while mighty Beethoven laughed at this, for he had already done so in his great Song of Joy. I dove and surfaced, swam and breathed, and I rose up within the Sapphire Sea where I spoke with Alsciaukat and Sharatan the Great who had created immortal rhapsodies out of the songs of themselves. In the Darkmoon Basin, I listened as the great, white Ocean Father told of how his breaking of the Great Covenant had caused the humans to fear the wrath of whales; while in the Sea of Faith, the most cherished of all the deep gods, whom we call Ocean Mother, assured me that I must find within myself something much deeper and more terrible than mere wrath if I wished to destroy the human race.
‘Can they be destroyed?’ I asked Ocean Mother. ‘Can the soul force of the satyagraha be so great?’
‘It is greater than you can believe. With a single thought, the humans can be no more.’
‘What thought? And how can I think it?’
Ocean Mother, however, vanished from my sight, and I swam about looking for her. I swam right up to the place in the sea not far from the Institute where Baby Electra had left her blood in the water.
‘Arjuna!’ I heard her cry out.
I turned to look for her, and there she was.
‘Arjuna! Arjuna! Arjuna!’
The red hole in her side had widened and deepened to eat up most of her small body. Very little of her remained except her face and eyes and her lovely little voice.
‘I called to you!’ she said. ‘I called and called and called! Why did you never answer me?’
‘I did! Ten thousand times!’
‘There is so much I wanted to tell you.’
‘What?’
‘Everything.’
The hole in her went through her heart and straight through the entire planet where it opened on all the world’s oceans and continents. In its crimson-black emptiness, I heard voices of every otter, fish, and diatom in the sea – along with the cries of each leaf, sparrow, worm, and blade of grass. The voices grew louder and louder, like the winds of a hurricane, like the thunder in the sky.
‘No!’ I cried out.
‘Fate would not be fate if you could escape it,’ Baby Electra told me. ‘The fate of the world.’
‘What is this fate then? I still cannot completely see it.’
‘But you have seized it so fiercely, as it has you. It has to do with the human hand.’
‘Tell me what Ocean wants of the humans!’
‘Only what you yourself do, Arjuna. The world wants the humans to be no more.’
The hurricane closed in around us; the sky darkened to a hopelessly smothering black, and the wind churned up the waves fifty feet high. Electric-white bolts of lightning cracked out.
‘Then has the time come,’ I asked through the terrible noise, ‘to break the Great Covenant?’
‘I am sorry, brother, but I cannot answer your question.’
‘But I had hoped that the Old Ones would tell me of the Great Covenant.’
‘You have not yet spoken with the oldest of them, Arjuna. I must say goodbye so that you can.’
I raced through the raging sea, beating my flukes against the water with a savage force so that I might reach her and feel her baby skin soft against my own before she left me again. I rocketed through the water with such deafening speed that I propelled myself right into the eye of the storm, where blue skies caught up the color of the warm, gentle ocean. I breached, and breathed in the air over the Sea of the Seven Silences.
When I dove down again, the Sevener in all his frenzy of bright colors floated in the water watching me.
‘You!’ I shouted. ‘How did you get outside me?’
‘Inside, outside; heaven, hell; future, past; yes, no; love, hate – it is all one.’
I swam about in tight, tormented circles. The whole of Ocean seemed strange to me.
‘We are not on Ocean,’ the Sevener said, at one with all that I thought and felt. ‘Can you not tell the waters of Agathange?’
Yes, I could! As I watched, as I zanged and listened, the waters that washed through me deepened to a dazzling blue so intense and all-enfolding that they seemed composed of nothing but the perfect essence of blueness itself. It was a blue-blue inside an ever deeper and rapturous blue that opened upon the deepest color of all. The waters of all worlds, my grandmother once told me, flow into each other. And always toward a single hue.
‘It is quiet!’ I said.
It was so quiet, I told the Sevener, that I could almost hear the silence that sings with all songs.
‘You never will, Arjuna,’ he said, ‘until you quieten your soul, which shrieks out in tongues of fire.’
‘Please tell me of the covenant then!’
‘Tell yourself.’
‘You know! Old Father spoke of beings greatest in mind of all Ocean’s creatures. You Seveners are those beings.’
In silence, he listened to my heart’s long, lonely beats and thus answered me.
‘Can the Covenant be broken?’ I asked.
‘Do you think the humans will agree to break it?’
‘But they did so long ago – for how many centuries have the humans been slaughtering my kind?’
‘You have not yet spoken to them with all your soul.’
‘I have spoken until my breath grew empty and I had no more to speak! Can I speak to the whalers of the past? What can I say to the humans who live now if they will not listen?’
‘The Great Covenant,’ he said, ‘was not made with the humans of the present or the past, but with those who dwell in the future.’
Suddenly, the ocean seemed too blue.
‘That cannot be!’
‘The humans,’ he said, ‘are waiting for you to say yes or no before making a common cause with the whales.’
‘I do not understand!’
‘And the whales! They are, and always have been, of a single mind and heart: yours, Arjuna. The Covenant can be broken only if you will it.’
‘But what does my will have to do with anything?’
‘It was you who made/will make the Great Covenant,’ he told me. ‘You are the will of the whole world, and you will decide its fate.’
‘No!’
My heart beat out a burst of red thunder as I screamed out in protest. I wanted to dash forward and tear the Sevener to pieces again. My cry, however, shattered the sea’s peace and propelled me light years across black space into the waters of Ocean. I returned to my planet with a cold shock of the sickening unreality of the too-real. I looked about and zanged desperately, but it seemed that the Sevener had gone.
‘Where are you?’ I called out.
No one called back. I was alone in a sea whose utter silence swallowed me in a black, screaming nothingness of the great and everlasting No.
22
In the long, aquamarine days of sun and contemplation that followed my ordeal with the Sevener, I tried to make
sense of what the creatures of Ocean had told me. I tried to make sense of myself. Thoughts vied with each other for predominance one moment, and in the next they schooled to make war with all that I felt and desired. My confusion gathered like a cloud of flies buzzing about my head. I did not know what I should do.
Could the Sevener, I wondered, possibly exist? Had I really spoken with an actual living, thinking being or only with some colorful phantom conjured up out of the wild imaginings of my own poisoned mind? This puzzlement I resolved almost immediately, as much as such questions ever can be. The great sage Zhuangzi, upon awakening from a dream in which he flitted about brightly colored flowers as a butterfly, said this: ‘Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming that I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming that I am a man.’ How can we ever distinguish the real from what is not?
Only, my grandmother had once instructed me, on one of our difficult excursions to Agathange, by the real’s overwhelming sense of reality. Somehow, we always know. When I recalled speaking with the Sevener and all the others, every sound, sight, and sensation still rang out with a perfect clarity.
No, I told myself, I really had listened to the council of Ocean’s many creatures. Had all of them told truly? What if the Sevener, like one of the trickster gods of the humans, had tried to fool me into believing the impossible or the absurd? How could it be that I had or will have made the Great Covenant at some distant time in the future in which I did not yet exist?
This was the first of three paradoxes that I puzzled over as I dived down through the pellucid water to swim among the coral and the anemones. The humans might have spent years trying to solve such ultimately unsolvable questions. I did not want to do that. I had experiences denied to the humans. In quenging, all the present, past, and future melts into a single moment beneath time, and there all things gather to speak with each other. It seemed perfectly reasonable to me, in a translogical sort of way, that my future self and the selves of orcas and humans yet to be had somehow formed a covenant that the sea peoples of the past had agreed to honor.
I brooded more over a second and more personal paradox. Who was I, I asked myself, to speak for Ocean? I was no Old One; I had yet even to complete my rhapsody, and I had recently failed to reach the last of the Seven Silences. And yet I somehow felt as vast and unitary as Ocean itself while retaining all the newly inflamed prejudices, conceits, and spites of a little black and white whale whom I called Arjuna.
A third paradox distressed me the most. The Sevener had told me that I would do a thing almost diametrically opposed to that which I most desired.
‘If I will make and always will have made the Great Covenant,’ I said to a turtle swimming by me through a cloud of bubbles, ‘then surely this is my fate.’
Could anyone ever change his fate? How could anyone, knowing what is to come, simply accept the unacceptable?
Why would I collaborate with the humans about anything ever again? I could think of ways such an agreement might come to pass. If I contacted the humans, they might try to seduce me with promises of animal rights that they would never keep. They might capture me again, and in my drugged dementia, I might make promises myself that I would not otherwise. Or I might simply grow old, and my resolve might weaken. I was still as raw as flayed flesh with the memory of Baby Electra’s death still flensing me – what if someday, however, my wrath cooled and I hated no more?
So, then, I should act now – if I truly had the will to do so. Hadn’t the Sevener implied that I possessed the freedom to decide the fate that would bind me even as it presently did many others? And yet he had also stated that I would make a covenant that the world no longer seemed to want. Ocean – my planet, my conscience, my mother, my life – had voiced her desire that the humans should be no more. How, then, should I, speaking for the whales, make with the humans a mutual accord? How could I go against the will of the world?
In the end, I could not. I decided that I would not allow anything anyone said to constrain me. I would not be fortune’s fool. If the stars pointed me in a direction that seemed wrong to follow, then I would defy those stars, no matter how compellingly their gravity called me on.
Near the end of the Moon of Shadows, with the Sea of the Seven Silences as still as a vast, silver-blue mirror, there came a quiet morning when I tired of endless worrying about causes and effects. I knew – or thought I did – what my will impelled me to do. Out of various notions and intelligences, imperatives and memories, a hazy plan began forming inside me. I could not execute this plan alone. I must speak to other orcas and sea peoples of the vast and inexpugnable hurt that we must inflict on the human race.
I swam south for day after day of broodings and desperate dreams. The ocean grew colder, the nights full of anguish soon to be. I made my way through the Misty Sea and the Celadonian Flow. In the Albatross Moon, I came to the Great Wall of Water. There the surgings of warmer seas and the cold, cold current that swirls around the southernmost continent meet in a dangerous convergence that few creatures can pass. I was an orca, however. There is no place on Ocean that my people do not go. I intended to keep swimming south right through the gelid blue channels between the icebergs until I found those whales who had the greatest cause to hate the humans.
I searched for my people through the Misty Sea and the Sea of Penguins. I found many who seemed eager to listen to what I had to say. In the Sea of the Midnight Sun, just beyond the Amethyst Whirl, I exchanged stories with the huge orcas of the Carnelian Canticle Family of the Grateful Moonsingers. I told of the Sevener and the three paradoxes that troubled me. The Moonsingers’ matriarch, the bemused old Mother Sheliak, allowed me to brush up against her skin and touch the many scars marking her body, and she recounted how she had acquired each of them. The others of her family cried out their alarm that one of my kind – indeed, any orca not of their clan – should cavort so intimately with Mother Sheliak. She laughed at their concerns, saying, ‘We know why Arjuna has come to us. Who in Ocean does not? He is not here to harm us, unless he does so with his silver voice, urging us on to our doom.’
What I love about orcas was that it is usually unnecessary to say the necessary. This time, however, I felt it vital to state what nearly all my people had come to believe: ‘It is time,’ I said, ‘to break the Great Covenant.’
It is one thing to think a thought; it is another to voice it in a shock of realization of an imperative that cannot be denied.
‘I am ready to break it,’ Mother Sheliak said.
‘And I am, too,’ her younger sister Alathfar affirmed.
‘And I,’ her daughter Muscida said.
How could the other orcas of the Carnelian Canticle Family – I counted fifteen of them, including the tiny Baby Gomeisa – say otherwise?
‘When I was a child,’ Mother Sheliak said, ‘the humans killed my aunt Taygetta by mistake – they were hunting the same minke whales that we pursued. But when the harpoon exploded into Taygetta, she screamed just as loudly as did any of the minkes. I think I hate the humans’ carelessness even more than I do their malice. I will be glad to put my teeth into them, should the chance arise.’
Alathfar, however, opined that the Moonsingers and the other clans in the Sea of the Midnight Sun would likely have few opportunities to slay the humans.
‘Their iron ships are too great to sink,’ she said, ‘and the humans seldom swim this sea’s waters, which kill them with cold after only a few breaths.’
‘I have heard that in the Sea of Seals,’ Mother Sheliak said, ‘many humans have come with tiny boats.’
I had heard of that, too. Iceberg kayaking in the world’s coldest and wildest of waters had become the humans’ newest extreme sport.
‘The humans will come here to kayak with the whales,’ I said. ‘It will be enough that you kill them as you can – and that you agree to the principle that when the time comes, we should kill all the humans in Ocean that we can find.’
Mother Sheliak and the
whole of the Carnelian Canticle Family consented to this, and I said goodbye. I swam on. During long, long days of bright sunshine and dark urgings, I had similar conversations with similar families of orcas. In the Krill Circle, teeming with clouds of shrimplike creatures that the baleen whales gulp down, I spoke as well to the minkes, seis, humpbacks, and fins who hunt in that cold sea. Two blue whales – their names were Auva and Graffias – allowed me to accompany them for a while. Grumpy old Graffias dreaded all orcas, and described to me how a family of them had once killed a beloved aunt, stripping off her blubber in pinkish-white gouts and ripping out her tongue, as great in weight as an elephant. Auva, however, could not see the harm in a lone orca swimming and speaking with them.
‘You say,’ she murmured to me, ‘that you have never killed a whale – and yet you would kill the humans?’
For two days and short nights, we cruised the Krill Circle, feasting and talking about the human beings and their murderous ways. At dawn on the third day, some of the very humans under discussion spotted us from one of the helicopters sent out from the mother ship that processed whale corpses into dog food. The blades of the helicopter sent down an ill wind to ripple the glazy blue water. Soon, a killer boat appeared on the horizon. The specter of this death ship – with its gray metal, burning oil, and harpoon cannons – caused Graffias and Auva to begin fleeing toward the imaginary safety of the icebergs to the south.
‘Bad luck,’ Auva said. ‘You have brought us bad luck.’
‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘My fate is joined to that of the humans like hooks and eyes – a fishhook through the eye.’
‘These humans do not hunt orcas,’ Auva said. ‘Swim away from us now, and save yourself.’
I considered this as we moved in a flurry of beating flukes and water slicing across our skin like knives of ice. The blues could swim nearly as quickly as I could, and more quickly than the killer boat could propel itself over the sea – but only for a short time. We burned fish and krill to fire our quickly tiring bodies, whereas the killer boat burned fuel made from black oil: poisonous, explosive, and seemingly inexhaustible.
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