I loved their eyes, so sad, so anguished, so liquid, so deep and dark yet bright with impossible hopes. I loved their hands, sensitive and caressing, itching to touch, needing to touch, to reach out, to shape the world that had shaped them. I loved their fingers that had scratched those parts of me that I would never be able to reach. Their monkey faces I loved as well: mobile and expressive, shaped by time and by themselves. I loved their little brains, like little seeds, ever ready to sprout and grow. I loved their slobbering dogs and their doggedness, the way they found infinite layers of courage in the face of the sickening insanities and the horrors that they made. Poems and paintings, the symphonies of Beethoven and the counterpoint play of Bach – these things I loved, too, as I did the glorious sounds of Mozart’s magic flutes and violas. And light shows and fountains, somersaults, double-lutzes, and backward, twisting dives. I loved wheelchairs that made mobile those who could not otherwise move. Who could not love the humans’ basic goodness, their sweetness and kindness, the gentleness with which they pressed their soft lips against the mouths of us whales? All things of fire did I love: the fires of their matches, of their hearts, of their eyes. I loved the fires of their heavens, reached only by rockets or by gazing upward along pillars of living flame. And their burning bushes and tigers burning, burning in the forests of the night. I loved their souls burning for connection to the ocean of stars that fill with glory the blackness of the night. The humans who give birth to dancing stars I loved with a red-hot ardor. I loved the whale warrior who had died in the freezing Antarctic sea, for surely he had given his life out of love in order to protect me. The humans’ children I loved even more: their innocence, enthusiasm, brio, and sheer zest as they screamed out their wild joy of life. Most of all, I loved the great dream of life that the humans had created. Astonishingly – agonizingly, impossibly – I even loved plastic, for this execrable but marvelously malleable material gave evidence that the humans could create something new that had never existed in all the universe.
I loved Mada. How could I not? As she moved before me, kicking the water with her feet, she held onto my tooth with her hand: her strange human hand that could deal out death as easily as it could touch me in love. Her black eyes opened upon all the terror of hate and love, as powerful in her as it was in me. And yet, she did not fear this terror; rather, she reveled in it as she did all the delights and dangers of the pounding surf. Her eyes were oceans of love, dark and mysterious, ablaze with the same fire that worked its magic in me. They drank me in and devoured me, and invited me to do the same.
‘Yes, I will,’ I told her.
I had broken the first covenant; I had broken the second and the third. How could I once more break this sacred promise, whose heart my grandmother knew as absolute truth and I called love?
‘Yes, yes, yes!’
I had one fate, and one only, and I must somehow come to love it even as I did Mada. I closed my teeth around her hand … gently. I wanted her to know that I would always be gentle with her.
‘How can I surf,’ she asked me, ‘if you won’t let me have my board?’
In the froth of the waves thirty feet from us, her board bounced about. In that direction, too, Alkurah and Unukalhai played with the surfers they had chosen, and they waited to see what I would do.
‘Let us surf together,’ I said to Mada.
I dropped down and came up beneath her. She spent some minutes lying face down on my back. Her belly worked hard in little spasmings to fill her lungs with air. When she had caught her breath, she pressed her lips to me in a long, long kiss. Her fingers stroked me, dancing in ten little delights along my skin. She laughed as if she could hold nothing inside. I knew that she very well knew what was to come. I prepared myself for the most difficult feat of my life.
‘Arjuna!’ Unukalhai called out to me from across the waves. ‘You are right to do what you do! Let us show the humans what is really inside us! Love hurts much more than hate!’
And Alkurah, playing with a surfer through the water’s spray said, ‘Let us then hurt the humans with all of our hearts.’
The other whales of her new family picked up her promise: ‘We will move as you move, Arjuna, think as you think, dream as you dream. Always, always, we will love as you love.’
So sang the orcas of the Scarlett Song Keepers and the Grateful Bluenight Listeners, and the sea rang with their cries. In the shallows to the south where many humans waded in the spent waves, the dolphins darted between startled women and men, and they leaped about in a great and happy play. Children’s laughter shrilled out to match the dolphins’ whistles. Two of the dolphins passed a giggling girl back and forth in the water as they might a beach ball. Flippers and arms and legs and flukes glistened in the morning sun.
‘Let’s surf together!’ Mada said to me.
Behind us, farther out in the sea, one of the deep gods breached in a mighty leap that seemed to carry him a mile into the sky. It looked like Old Father. Up and down the beaches, I knew, along all the continents of Ocean, other great whales and dolphins and orcas would be losing themselves in the great and unstoppable tsunami of love that swept around the world. It had come time, after so many days and eons, for a moment of celebration.
‘All right,’ I told Mada, ‘let us surf.’
We waited together in the swelling sea for the perfect wave. The sounds of whales and humans playing rippled through the water in colors of pearlpurl and amberymn. We rose and fell with wave upon wave sparkling in the morning sun. Then the sea called up a great, flowing part of itself that we could not resist. I swam hard to let its curling, powerful sweep catch me up and carry me along toward the thousands of humans cheering and calling amazement from the shore. Mada pushed herself up, and stood on my back. Her feet pressed into me with sureness and wisdom, sensually, knowingly, flesh communicating with flesh where spirit desired to go.
We spent at least a year on that long, endless, first ride through the spray flung out by the wave and through the much clearer and warmer substance that moved us. The sun opened the sky with its fire and caressed us with ten thousand fingers of flame. Mada laughed as she danced up and down my spine. I moved to the slightest nuance of pressure of her touch. In this way, we surfed together the ocean of our world until the beach loomed too close and the great wave was spent.
Other waves, though, in their flowing infinitude, arose from the deeps. I swam out to sea again with Mada on my back. While waiting for the next perfect surge of water, Mada and I played together. She dove off me, and swam beneath me, and I took my turn doing the same. I swam upside down as she lay spread-eagled on top of me, belly pressing against belly, her fingers soft against my flipper’s skin. She pulled at me with urgency and invitation, as if she wanted me to touch the inside of her with the same fire that passed back and forth from her blazing, black eyes into mine.
‘I’ve never felt so safe in the sea!’ she said to me.
Neither had I. We rolled about in the surging of the waves. Her heart beat against mine, and her breath fell over me in a cool, little wind, and all the sounds of the sea came together in a rhapsody of crimsong.
As gently as I could, I felt my way inside her with the touch of pure sonance. Her heart pulsed out hot, hot blood in endless booming beats, and the rush of plasm in her trillions of cells called to the same surging within me. I zanged her every tissue and torment, and dwelt within her breath, and in her loneliness and her joy. I spoke deep into her womb where the wildest part of her lived and called out in triumph and exaltation. She called to me from this red, raging center with a single sound that was just the sound of life itself: plangent, painful, lovely, long, and deep. All smaller sounds were there, every tiralee, murmur, moan, plaint, and whisper of love that could ever be. She kept calling to me as if she could never stop, forever calling me home to a place I had always been. And so we sang together, and breathed together, and knew each other true. As salt deliquesces in a warm mist and returns in a tinkle of rain to the sea, we love
d each other, and vanished into each other as we became one.
After ten thousand years had passed, I became aware that Ocean was asking me in the thunder of its surf the same question that she had always asked, of me and every living thing.
‘Yes!’ I cried out in an agony of an answer – but in joy, too. ‘Yes, yes, a trillion, trillion times yes!’
Only then did I realize the monstrousness of the mistake I had made. We want the humans to be no more! I had thought Ocean had said this in the Sea of the Seven Silences. But I had misheard her will. Out of the wrongness of the world, out of the wrongness of myself, in the neverness where dwells the desperate power of life’s ultimate negation, I had overshouted better and truer voices, and I had supplied the great ‘No’ of my own.
‘We want,’ the waves washing over Mada and me roared out, ‘the humans to be more.’
Yes, I cried out, yes, yes! How very, very soon they must vanish into a new form!
The keenings of the orcas and dolphins up and down the beaches affirmed this, and the godlike laughter of many humans told that they wanted the same thing.
‘But how can that be?’ I cried out.
It was Mada’s unborn child who answered me. As I dwelled inside Mada’s womb with this wild sprig of humanity, she sang to me of all her hope for life. She was nothing but hope and life and all the human genius for reaching out into life’s infinite possibilities. I sang back to her. I bathed her blood and her wondering brain in the songs of my people. I spoke to the deep, listening part of her in the one language that underlies all others. She would be born in bright sun and salt water to the music of the whales. She would understand our voices. She would speak to us in a new voice, even as she would bespeak herself and all the humans that they might find their way to become more and ever more beautifully more.
‘We will help you,’ I said. Altair, I named her, after a star close to Ocean. ‘Life is so hard.’
‘And we will help you,’ she promised me. She was all the promise of the world. ‘We will move as you move, think as you think, dream as you dream. Our life will be in yours, and your life in us.’
So it was that we made a covenant between our two kinds, the true great covenant to love in the face of even deep, deep hurts and death.
Mada, who would be the mother of millions, seemed to know exactly what occurred between me and the child inside her. She looked at me through the sea. She gave me a magic mirror, then, made from the liquid reflection of her dark eyes and all the waters of love: in this silvered sphere of splendor, I would always be able to see the best of the humans I encountered. And with the mirror, I might show the humans the glorious, golden shape of what they must become.
The giving of this gift, so alike in spirit to my grandmother’s charm, seemed to focus the rays of light pouring down from the golden sun of the Blood Solstice: when humans and whales felt our blood beating through the arteries of the ocean from a single heart. Our kinds swam together and sang and wept together long into the afternoon of this Day of Death: when the humans’ sense of estrangement from the world finally died and they knew they were not alone.
‘Let’s surf together again,’ Mada said to me.
We waited along the line of whitecaps for the day’s biggest wave. It rolled in from the open ocean like a great blue god. Just as the wave crested and reached the fullness of its power, I beat my tail hard against the water and drove us up into the air. The sky deepened as it opened out before us. Such a sky I had never seen! It was our sky: shimmering, magical, alive. Mada moved with me in perfect poise, and I felt us both sensing that something great was about to happen: a delicate balance between the nowness of the moment and the onstreaming unfolding of time yet to be. Then the sky gelled to a deep, deep glorre. It did not seem possible that such a color could exist. It pulled us onward, devoured us, drew us ever deeper into its astonishing perfection.
The drops of water flung from the wave sparkled like millions of stars. Past constellations without number we soared far beyond lightspeed through the one ocean that gives the brilliance of its deepest sound to creation. I might have been content to dive down into the peaceful waters of Agathange and rest for a while in peace, but Mada was not. She was human, after all, and would never cease moving as long as breath filled her lungs.
She spoke to me in the shared zest of our blood: ‘There is so much more to see!’
Yes, I whispered, there is. And so I sang with her, and I surfed with her, and we quenged together across the bright universe whose shimmering song can never end.
24
There came a time late in the day when the sun plunged into the glowing, numinous waters, and I had to say goodbye to Mada. Her eyes flowed with salt water as she informed me that she would return to this beach the following year for another surfing competition. Would I return here as well, she asked me? I listened to the ocean calling up wave upon wave and sending out the sound of glorre to every part of the world. Then I promised this daring human being that one way or another, we would meet again.
During the days that followed what some of the humans would come to call Whale Demonstration Day, the deep gods passed their voices from one to another around the world. So we learned that other orcas and dolphins along every coast had indeed played with the humans much as Mada and I had done. On a bright morning, I gathered with Alkurah’s new family far out to sea to discuss what had happened. Unukalhai offered an explanation for what might seem a miracle of instantaneous communication much more profound than the long-range callings of the deep gods:
‘Every time you enjoined us to kill the humans,’ he said, ‘we knew that you were speaking metaphorically – at least we hoped you were. And we did kill something, did we not? Did you see the looks on the humans’ faces? They doubt now, Arjuna – doubt that they are as superior as they have always assumed.’
I wondered if all the whales whom I had consulted had ‘known’ what Unukalhai insisted he had been aware of all along. Alkurah perhaps wondered the same thing, though she had no desire to dispute him. Instead, she voiced what the whales of her new family – and many others – were thinking:
‘We knew,’ she said, ‘as all whales do, that in the end there would have to be a choice between love and hate. We also knew what was in your heart, Arjuna – the heart of the world.’
Does not the world, she said, hear the sound of its one desire in every drop of water and breaking instant of time?
‘Perhaps you did,’ I said, ‘though I did not know it myself.’
‘We are your family,’ Alkurah said. ‘How could you expect to know yourself as well as we do?’
‘But you could not have known that I would make a covenant with the humans! I had promised all of Ocean that I would not!’
They had no answer for me, but Ocean did. This came in the sound of a great, great voice that moved the waters from far away. We zanged one of the deep gods swimming toward us. Soon he came into sight. So, I thought, when he came close enough that I could make out his blinded eye, I really had seen Old Father leap from the sea during the peace games with the humans. It seemed that he had been listening to all that we said.
‘You did not make the covenant with the humans alone,’ he told me. ‘While you danced with the female you call Mada, all of Ocean hung suspended in time, yearning to spin one way or another. Your will was like a baby’s breath that sets into motion a hurricane thousands of miles away. Could you not feel the will of the whole world in what you said and did?’
‘Yes,’ I told him, ‘I could.’
The other whales understood almost nothing of what Old Father and I said together, and I had to translate for them. Propus, a young male Alkurah had adopted (his birth family had been slaughtered during one of the humans’ slaving expeditions), could not contain his awe at listening to one of the deep gods speak. He also had difficulty accepting what must now come. He said to me:
‘It is one thing, Arjuna, to play with those we hate. It is another to love them. How ca
n we do that?’
And Azha, another orphaned whale, said this:
‘Two days ago, in a way I cannot explain, when one of the little humans scratched my back, I did feel a kind of love for them – for a moment. But now I feel nothing of that.’
How should I answer her? Again, I opened my grandmother’s charm. And I told Propus that love is only the conscious, heartfelt, and actively directed desire to do good to another. It is a force, not a feeling, though it engenders in us the strongest of feelings.
Unukalhai laughed at this. He said, ‘On the day we met, Arjuna, I told you that you must become a little mad if you wished to dwell among the humans. And now, all this talk of loving them: the greatest madness of all! Must I do this thing? Ha, it is funny beyond words, but I suppose I must!’
And I must, too. None of Alnitak’s maps showed the way toward where I must now go. Could I continue saying yes to the truth I had found lighting up Mada’s eyes and pulsing within her womb? Did I have the intelligence – the sheer will – to move past all my hate for the humans and continue my journey ever deeper into my heart?
‘What should we do now?’ little Propus asked.
It was a good question, in a way, the only really important question. The whales of Ocean had turned away from slaying the humans with our jaws and the teeth of our minds in favor of a different kind of death. The satyagraha we had called up from the deeps within us truly had killed the humans’ murderous innocence – or rather, had touched off the long course of its dying. It would be years, however, before Mada’s unborn child and others like her grew into motherhood and began having children of their own. What should we do until these new humans learned to navigate the most dangerous of seas and made Ocean their own?
‘Go home,’ I said to Propus and the others. ‘It is time to go home.’
What more could I say to the humans? What we had done with them on the beaches of the world had spoken more loudly than any whale’s utterance ever could.
Idiot Gods, The Page 44