Idiot Gods, The

by Zindell, David

  ‘No,’ I said to Auva and Graffias, ‘I will stay and die with you.’

  It occurred to me that if the humans killed me in this lonely, southern sea, then I could never make a covenant with them.

  I believed that the humans in the killer boat with its grenade-tipped harpoons might soon kill all of us. And then a second boat crested the choppy waves to the west, and began converging upon us as well.

  ‘Now we are certainly lost!’ Auva cried out.

  We tried swimming faster but could not. Every muscle along my belly and flukes burned with a white-hot agony as I breached too often to suck in too many desperate breaths. The water thickened to what seemed a gelatinous mass that clung to my whole body and then hardened like a solid wall. The metallic shriek of the killer boat’s propellers tore into me and grew louder and then louder and louder.

  ‘Farewell,’ Auva said from what seemed far away – though she swam in a furious bunching of muscle and hopelessness scarcely ten feet away from me. ‘It was good to know you, Arjuna.’

  The killer boat loomed nearly right above us. I thought of the man on the beach outside the Institute: how quickly he had fired lead bullets into living whales and had used grenades to blow bloody red holes into Baby Electra’s body! What great sport the humans found in the slaughter of people who could not escape them! I heard the hooded humans on the deck shouting out their excitements. Then they fired the first harpoon. It missed us, and exploded into the water in an outrage of miscarried death.

  ‘Why do they not fire a second harpoon?’ Graffias called out above the whine of the boat’s propellers.

  Our hearts sounded together once, twice, many times. We waited upon a slender, bobbing ice floe of life for what seemed an hour. I did not, at first, have the answer to Graffias’ question. With my heart beating out little booms of doom that recalled the last moments of the white bear far away, I dove to escape the humans’ harpoons.

  I wished I could breathe water, but I could not. When I breached to blow out stale, stinging air, the shifting wind carried to me a bitterly remembered sound: ‘Bobo, Bobo, Bobo!’

  Two of the men on the ship had binoculars pressed to their tiny eyes. I knew they had recognized me. The white bear had cut a unique lightning-bolt scar into my forehead, and a murderer had blown off the tip of my dorsal fin.

  ‘The humans,’ I said to Auva and Graffias, ‘may want me more than you. Let us see if they have the hook of greed or vengeance buried in them.’

  I bade them to keep swimming south. Then I said farewell, and turned toward the east.

  As I listened to the blue whales racing away from me and singing out encouragements, the killer ship also turned east. No more harpoons did its humans fire. I saw the men on the deck wrestling with nets, and I realized that they meant to capture me.

  I felt sure that they would – and felt the burn of nylon ropes searing me even before the hated netting tightened around my skin. They would enslave me again, and return me to Sea Circus’s punishment pool. I felt fate closing on me, smothering me, negating me. I swam through open water that provided no protection or place of safety.

  Surely I would have been lost if the second boat had not veered to intercept the killer boat. For it proved to be a very different sort of vessel, manned – and womanned! – by very different sorts of humans. As it drew nearer, I made out the shape of diving dolphins painted on the iron hull side by side with the famous interlocking WW. On the Institute’s screens, I had watched the play and maneuver of these so-called Whale Warriors: the saviors of my people! Even as I now watched the new boat set a ramming course toward the killer boat.

  I should have fled then. I should have kept swimming – and swimming and swimming! – until I found myself in seas empty of human beings. On all of Ocean, however, there was no such place. And so I watched as the two floating monsters of metal steered this way and that, seeking and avoiding, charging and deflecting, and finally, in the roiling green waters that tossed them about, coming up side to side and colliding in a great clang of iron on iron.

  The shock of the impact knocked a man off the deck of the Whale Warriors’ ship. He plunged down into the water, where the shock of the cold would have killed him in minutes but for the strange-looking yellow wetsuit that he wore. This covering of plastic, though, did not save him. For just as he surfaced to cry out for help, the great angry waves hurled the two ships together again and crushed the man between them. I heard his bones break, and zanged the rupturing of his organs. It sounded almost like fingers popping air bubbles out of a strand of kelp. His bloody body slumped facedown in the rolling waves.

  I waited for more humans to be propelled into the sea. I hoped I might be able to kill a few of them before the ships or the water did. The ships, however, drew apart from each other even as the waves bounced them about. Shouts and wails split the air and rippled the water. As the women and men on the Whale Warriors’ ship began the rescue of the lifeless man, I gave up and swam off toward the icebergs in the south.

  For many days afterward, I could not blink away the image of the dead human nor could I escape the cries of his friends who mourned him. How strange were these humans! What whale would ever sacrifice his life to save another of a different kind – or even of a different clan? Had the mangled man, in his pitiful covering of yellow plastic, truly deserved such a fate? Was it even possible for a human to do brave, good things? It seemed to me that whenever they tried to bring forth the highest in themselves, they were always crushed – or shot or hanged or crucified.

  The more that I considered the matter, however, the more I felt certain that the Whale Warriors’ motives for sailing into this icy sea were not just good and brave. Surely the dead man had wanted to – needed to – see himself as a sort of hero. He wanted to save the whales! In his beneficence and magnanimity, so great that he had given his very life, I made out the hidden hand of a king bestowing boons upon his subjects. Was not the saving of others yet another way of exerting power over them? Did not all humans take some part of their identity and their deeper sense of being human from their power to shape the world: the power of life and death itself? No matter how hard the humans tried to do otherwise, it seemed that their actions brought forth from the world more and more death.

  In the clash of the two ships crushing the life out of the whale warrior’s heart, I heard the breaking of any remaining hope that the humans as a whole race would cease making war upon each other – and upon the world. I perceived as well the impossibility of the humans ever being truly good. So it was that out of the newly reached depths of my disdain for all things human, I conceived of an intensification of my plan to hurt them. I called this the Day of Death.

  I spoke of this to a gathering of the Midnight Sun Singers in the Seal Sea. Five families assembled to greet me: The Red Chanters, the Tanglow Rhapsodists, The Crimsong Rhapsodists, The Emerald Whistlers, and the Golden Sun Breathers. After I finished a long soliloquy stating the reasons why the Great Covenant should be broken, the great-grandmother of the Midnight Sun Singers swam as close to me as her daughters would allow. Hundreds of orcas – more than I had ever seen meeting together in one place – fanned out in a circle from the center that Grandmother Minkara and I formed.

  ‘I have long wondered,’ she said, ‘if the humans’ blood tastes as good as that of seals. If we do as you say, Arjuna, the humans will begin slaughtering us like seals.’

  ‘They already do, in one way or another. Soon all whales will be wiped out.’

  Grandmother Minkara aimed a soft zang at her daughter Pleione, who nursed a newly born baby named Botein.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we will be, but how soon? It might be that Baby Botein would have the chance to grow up and father children on his own.’

  At this, Baby Botein swallowed back a whimper of protest, and pressed up against Pleione’s black and white side.

  ‘Perhaps Baby Botein will be able to father children,’ I said. ‘But their grandchildren will not. Would it
not be better for us all to go over now rather than dying by parts: poisoned, harpooned, starved, trapped, and doomed to suffer the dying of our beloved Ocean, too?’

  The Midnight Sun Singers drew in tight together as they considered this. The water filled with their voices.

  ‘Let us agree,’ I said, ‘as I hope whales around the world will agree, that on the day of the Blood Solstice, we will attack the humans and kill as many of them as we can before they turn to kill us. The humans have an expression: to go out in a blaze of glory. If we cannot exterminate them, then would it not be better to die together as one?’

  From very near me in the freezing blue water, Grandmother Minkara gazed at me with her hot, hot blue eye. And then she said, ‘You speak of death, but in your desolation, I also zang a murmur of hope. It suffuses each of your words as salt does water.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘in the war that must follow, the humans will perceive us acting together even as they themselves do. If we cannot slay all of them, then at least we can slay the illusion that they alone of all the world’s creatures are intelligent.’

  ‘What will that avail us?’

  ‘Perhaps nothing, for us orcas,’ I said. ‘Perhaps the humans will wipe out all of us. If they do, however, they will slay something vital in their own souls. When the soul dies, the body soon follows. The body of humans, seeing what it has done, is sure to turn on itself. The humans will destroy themselves in a last war. The orcas will die with them, but at least Ocean will be saved.’

  The water grew quiet. None of the hundreds of orcas breathed. Only Baby Botein, whispering in fear, made any sound at all.

  Then Grandmother Minkara said to me, ‘That is not the whole of your hope, is it?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘it is not.’

  I told her, and all of the Midnight Sun Singers, of the soul force called satyagraha that we whales might wield to make the humans be no more.

  ‘It is possible,’ I said, ‘just barely possible that if all the whales in Ocean on a single day begin killing the humans with our teeth, we might become a single people and so break through the ice of our restraint to a new power of being. Then we will kill the humans with our minds.’

  ‘Do you think we can really do that?’ Grandmother Minkara asked.

  ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘We are killer whales, are we not? Is there anything on Ocean we cannot evolve to kill?’

  For most of the next two days, the Sun Singers considered all that I had said. Most of them wished to confer with me individually, swimming in close to exchange words, zanging me softly or even brushing up against me with their great bodies. When we had assured each other that we were of one heart, Grandmother Minkara spoke for all her clan, saying, ‘All right, Arjuna – we will wait for the Blood Solstice and we will join you on this Day of Death.’

  With this promise, I swam off to speak with other whales in other seas. I would never see Grandmother Minkara again, and after the morning of the red, red day that I had appointed, I would never hear from her either. For surely I, leading the first wave of the assault upon the humans, would die. Indeed, I must die. If I truly had become human upon my killing of Gabi’s murderer, then I must now perish along with the rest of humanity.

  Only for a moment did I question this fate; only for a single breath of doubt did I wonder if I might really be a whale at heart. And then human – all-too-human – words sounded inside me. Of course I was one of them! Only a human would have twisted the noble, non-violence concept of satyagraha into a calling to commit genocide. Only a human would ever have conceived of something so hateful, so evil, so monstrously egoic as wiping out the entire human race.

  With my course now assured, I set out on the longest journey I had ever made. I needed to speak with as many of the world’s whales as I could, in every ocean. I swam through the various waters encircling the southern continent, and then up toward the Sea of Sharks, where I sang of death with the Sapphire Minstrel Family. As the Moon of Mourning melted away into a silvery wisp and then reformed itself into the Red Moon of Memories, I crossed the glowing Tiralee Sea, which echoed with the many colors of tintigloss. In the Sea of Shadows, I met with the Venerable Deep Divers. Mother Subra, the clan’s new matriarch (old Grandmother Ascella having recently died), reaffirmed Ocean’s wish that the humans should be no more. She, too, made promises to me, saying, ‘We will await the Blood Solstice, Arjuna. We will move as you move, think as you think, dream as you dream, breathe as you breathe.’

  Long days of hard travel through sun and storm died into nights full of stars which called me ever on. How I wished I could find my way up to these guiding lights a last time! How I longed to swim with my faroff family in the north as I had when I was young. Did my grandmother, I wondered, still live? Did my mother cry out to me in those terrible moments when the missing of those we adore gathers in our lungs like a deep breath of water? Did great, gracious Alnitak think of me, finding my way around the world through the gift of his maps of the heavens and the oceans, or had he long since given up hope of my return? Had my family heard of my aspirations for the humans? What would happen to my family when the whole of Ocean pointed its northern pole toward the sun on the Blood Solstice and the Day of Death began?

  Though none spoke of it, all the orcas with whom I conversed dwelled in discontent with this last question. Who would ever wish to leave our beautiful, blue planet? Who could bear the awakening from the great dream of life’s going on forever and finding itself anew uncountable times in the depths of its inextinguishable love for all of Ocean? How could any of us long live with the contemplation of red waters empty of all the beautiful people who had raced and dived and hunted and mated in joy and the deepest delight?

  ‘It is coming!’ Mother Elnath said to her family of the Hopeful Whistlers after I had spoken with her. We swam together near the center of the Magenta Shallows. ‘The Blood Solstice is coming, and on that day, we will move as Arjuna moves, think as he thinks, dream as he dreams. We will dive with him, and die with him. We know what is in his heart – we can feel his heart!’

  The seis with whom I conferred voiced similar sentiments, and so did the grays and the blue whales. The humpbacks composed lovely and haunting songs of the way the world must be. Even the dolphins consented to join in the solstice gathering. In the Barracuda Basin’s pellucid turquoise waters, I swam with the large clan of the Amorously Ecstatic Music Makers. I helped them make nets out of bubbles by swimming with them in an ever-tightening spiral in which we trapped a large school of fish. After we had feasted but before the wild mating and the dalliances began, many of the dolphins cried out to me, ‘We can feel your heart, Arjuna, we can feel you heart! We will make of this a music that has never been!’

  So I swam through seasons and songs, listening always to the surging seas, which rang with the voices of my people. I moved with the currents and the constellations, with the sun and the wind, and the Moon of Yearning gave way to the Moon of Enchantments, which yielded to the great yellow Mystics’ Moon. I rounded the Cape of Hope and the Cape of Despair; I made my way along the coastlines of the continents, and I crossed the Turtle Sea. It was there in greenish waters silted with too many plastic fragments that I came upon a deep god who had news for me.

  This great whale, so full of spermaceti and anticipation, informed me that Alkurah and Unukalhai had been searching the seas for me. They had heard of the Day of Death, and they wished to join me. I told the deep god of a place that we might rendezvous just before the solstice: an island off the coast of the darkest continent. The deep god agreed to call out with his huge voice to others of his kind many miles away. In this manner, my message would be relayed from whale to whale through the streaming and reverberant waters of the ocean.

  I swam very hard toward the meeting place and the day that I had named. I breathed hot, tropical air and then the cooler breezes of more temperate climes. I tasted salt and fish, raindrops and gasoline and the blood-sweet tang of my last desperate hope.

 
One bright evening, I trembled with awe at a purpose far beyond my own as a great glister of light burst like a blinding whiteness out of the black chasm beyond the Greater Krill Constellation. This radiance sent by the Old Ones to push back the night – the humans would call it a supernova – pointed the way toward my fate. Stars streamed like glowing diatoms all around me; sparkling bits of shell swirled along my skin through long, impatient days. On and on I journeyed as Ocean turned its seas toward sun after rising sun, and the whole of my world moved silently through the empty spaces above and beneath me.

  There came a morning of cottony white clouds and blue sky when I sighted the island that I had spoken of. I swam toward it, and sounded its rocky contours. The whales waiting off the island’s coast called out to me. I met them in the shallows where big breaking waves washed white foam onto a pebbly beach.

  ‘Alkurah!’ I called back as I swam closer. ‘Unukalhai!’

  Through water cloudy with bits of broken seaweed, the three of us came together in a reunion of pounding flukes and skin gliding over skin. We sang out in a violet joy so intense that it hurt. Again and again, we touched each other, and zanged each other, and we breathed together as we once had done.

  ‘You are so thin!’ Alkurah said to me. ‘Look what the humans have done to your fin!’

  Her voice touched the very tip of my proud dorsal fin, which had been blown into bloody fragments by the human’s bullet.

  ‘And you,’ I said to Alkurah, brushing against her side, ‘have new scars.’

  So did Unukalhai. Before they could recount their adventures, six other orcas appeared out of the murky water to make my acquaintance, for Unukalhai and Alkurah had not come here alone. Alkurah introduced these new orcas: Hadar, Castor, Pollux, Kuma, Azha, and Propus. Most of them had been orphaned in the same war games that had nearly killed me. Alkurah, who missed her sisters Zavijah and Salm with a keening pain that seemed only to have intensified during the many days since the slaughter at the Institute, had assembled the hapless whales into a new family.