Idiot Gods, The

by Zindell, David

  ‘But where,’ Propus asked, ‘is home?’

  Alkurah said that there were good fishing waters far to the north, beyond the bays near the Institute where we had once dwelled: waters now empty because the clans of orcas who had thrived there had gone.

  ‘Why don’t we live there?’ she said. ‘I will lead the way.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I will swim with you.’

  I asked Old Father if he would accompany us. But he had other journeys to make.

  ‘I have been waiting and waiting to die,’ he said, ‘and now I can, oh, ho!’

  ‘I do not want you to die,’ I told him.

  ‘Grieve not for those who die, for life and death shall pass away. For we have been for all time, and we shall be for all time, I and thou and all forever and ever.’

  ‘I do not want you to die,’ I told him again.

  ‘Truly? Then perhaps I will not.’ He surfaced to spout a geyser of salt water high into the air. ‘Perhaps I will mate again, and watch my children grow into great whales. Perhaps I will find my way to the Silent Sea as you did. I have many questions I would ask the Seveners.’

  ‘Let me know what they say,’ I told him.

  ‘I will! I will! Let us meet again in a hundred more years, and I will tell you everything I have learned.’

  With a glint of amusement playing through his good eye, he said goodbye to me. Then he swam off toward the south in flurry of pounding flukes and a great rush of water.

  Alkurah and I turned north with the others to begin our last, long journey. We moved side by side through the sea, diving and breathing together almost as if we had been born to one family. The cold currents brought us fish to eat and gave us strength. The constellations – the Silver Salmon, the twinkling Albatross, the brilliant stars of the Seveners – lighted our way. Every mile and moment that we swam, Ocean called us deeper into life, and into our individual lives, which was the only place anyone could ever go.

  Such a song my planet had to sing! So many tastes, textures, and sights she had to give me! And all that I experienced after the Day of Death, each herring, strand of seaweed, and grain of sand, seemed at once agelessly old and marvelously new. I seemed new to myself, as if I could never return to my dreaded ways of perceiving and being again. What had happened with Mada had somehow, like the bracing touch of the waves, washed me clean.

  This did not mean, however, that I no longer hated the humans; in truth, their willful ignorance of their true nature and their desperate cruelties grieved me as much as they ever had. Like a scar left by a bloody harpoon, hate never really goes away. Two things only saved me from falling back into my desire to destroy the humans. First, I could now sound the source of my hatred and could zang its place in the world. Everything, even the particles of plastic I could taste oiling the sea’s salty tang, had a purpose. A plastic toy caught in the throat of a beautiful white bird might be an ugly thing, but were the atoms of carbon and oxygen that made up the toy’s substance also ugly? The very same atoms, born in the hearts of stars, formed themselves into my mother’s breath and made up the substance of me. Nothing ever came out of the universe’s omnipresent ocean that was not perfect solely through the validation of its own existence. When I cast zangs of sonance and seeing at all the forms the world had called out of itself, even the hideous and the horrible, bright reflections returned out of even the most unbearable parts of creation in a beauty almost too brilliant to behold.

  The second thing that buoyed me upward into the fresh air of new possibilities was my newly found love for the humans. This glorious and utterly ruthless force, too, could never go away. As Unukalhai had said, love hurts much more than hate – and my passion to sound both the grandeur and the dark caverns of the human heart ravished me. I could barely contain my anguish of desire to touch the humans’ souls as I had Mada’s body and to breathe into them the very breath of life. Such urgings moved me ever away from wrath into calmer and deeper seas. Although I still felt that I had nothing more to say to the humans, I wished that I could simply speak the truth of all my hope for them, and through the alchemy of the universe’s most magical force, the dreadful future I felt pulling at the world with all the power of a diseased moon would transmute into something wondrous and golden. How I wanted that to be! How I wished to convince myself that such miracles could be, and that we whales could call out of the humans the best part of themselves as a mother orca does the wisest child of the deep.

  As we swam north for league after league of blue, open ocean and the rising swells built stronger with the changing of the season, I felt this foolish desire rising ever more vast and powerful within me. Long days of clean, salty spray off the wind-whipped waves flowed into ever longer nights full of music and stars. The sea sang out in a voice of persuasion and promise that grew ever clearer. Now, in every drop of water, I did hear Baby Electra calling to me. She cried out in her death agony of slashing sharks’ teeth and crimson blood again and again. Strangely though, she also laughed with great gladness and whispered to me something that I had never quite known: that she, too, loved the humans, and would go on surfing with them every time a wave formed up out of water and carried the creatures of the sea along.

  It was the sweet tiralee of Baby Electra’s singing that awakened in me the realization that I must return to the Institute. I wished to taste once again the waters where she – and Zavijah and Menkalinan and the others – had suffered their mortal wounds. I wanted to look upon the beach where Gabi and Helen had died. As well, I needed to speak with the Institute’s other linguists, if any had remained after the day of slaughter. I had a story to tell, impossible though it might seem.

  In the Moon of Clouds, we swam into a bay that I remembered very well. Mountains shrouded in green fir and wisps of silvery mist framed the cove where I had killed a man. As if we were of the Others out stalking seals, we moved in a near-silence of fin and flipper through the bay’s quiet water. I could almost taste the blood – orca and human – that had spilled out of wounds too terrible to bear. Beneath the mirrorlike surface of the water, we found the bones of Zavijah and Salm sticking up from the bay’s muddy bottom like the spines of sunken ships. Although I zanged the bay’s every square inch, I could find no remnant of the human whose heart I had torn out.

  ‘I should never have left Zavijah and Salm alone that day,’ Alkurah said, singing over her sisters’ white skeletons. ‘I have often thought that it would have been much better if I, too, had died.’

  Who has not, I asked the sea, wondered the same thing?

  We swam into the cove, where we found Menkalinan’s remains, and we listened in the direction of the great domed house on the shore for any sound of the humans. Everything about that silent structure seemed dead. As we debated whether we really wished to venture into the concrete channel and gaze once more upon the Institute’s many once-glowing screens and speak to the revenants of the linguists who had once dwelled there, Unukalhai zanged a boat shushing through the water beyond the open mouth of the cove, far out in the bay. It was a little boat, he said, most likely a kayak.

  ‘Shall we flee?’ Alkurah said. ‘If the humans who have hunted you find you here, they will murder you.’

  ‘The humans who have hunted me,’ I said with the shape of a human smile at her naiveté forming in my mind, ‘would not try to harpoon me from a kayak. In any case, I will flee from the humans no more.’

  We waited below the surface of the cove for the kayak to approach. As it drew nearer, I listened to the rhythm of the paddle’s blades dipping through the water, nearly as soft as the touch of a feather. Memory stirred me. Like all rhythms and sounds I had ever heard, the whispering of the kayak through the water formed up into a pattern I could never forget.

  ‘Helen!’ I shouted.

  The human I loved the deepest had somehow returned from the dead. I surfaced in silence inches above the water so that my eye might affirm what my heart knew very well to be true. Drawing nearer and nearer, as the
paddle dipped left and right, a small woman with the blackest of faces and the brightest of eyes pointed the kayak toward the beach where she and Gabi had been shot. She seemed not to see me.

  ‘Helen! Helen!’ I shouted out into the air.

  As she turned toward me in astonishment, I breathed in deeply and dove. Down and down through the cobalt water I swam, then up and up. I launched myself high into space. My splash sent up a spray that soaked her red anorak; the wave that my body pushed out bounced her kayak about with such force that she had to fight to keep from turning under.

  ‘Arjuna!’ she cried out. ‘You have come back to me!’

  Again I leaped up, shouting and singing as I turned pirouettes in the cold air. I flipped over backward, moved from within by a joy I could not resist. I leaped over her boat and plunged into the water on the other side.

  ‘You are alive!’ I shouted, swimming up to the kayak. ‘Impossibly, perfectly, beautifully, beautifully alive!’

  I touched the tears flooding her eyes. My voice broke into amberymn-whispered fragments, and I touched these glistening tears of pain and happiness with the gentlest sounds I could find. She reached out to trace her ebony finger along the scar on my forehead; then she felt the ragged edge of my fin whose tip had been blown off.

  ‘What has happened to you?’ she said.

  The other whales swam up, and Helen began weeping openly to see Alkurah and Unukalhai whole and unharmed. We had a great deal to discuss, she said. Just as we began a conversation, however, Pollux zanged a school of salmon out in the bay, and Alkurah said that we must not neglect an opportunity to eat. I promised Helen to return soon. I swam out with the others, and we began slaughtering the salmon. It was good to fill up with a favorite food again. While the others were still hunting and feasting, I turned back to the cove so that I might speak to Helen alone. Some hungers are worse than those that grieve the belly.

  I found Helen sitting in her kayak and smoking one of her skinny brown cigarettes. With every puff, she seemed to breathe in hard thoughts and memories which her lungs absorbed and then cast back out in smoky clouds of pain. Her eyes seemed not to live within her face but rather dwelled upon the empty beach which held her gaze.

  ‘I saw you shot dead there,’ I said as I swam up to her. ‘So I do not understand how you can be here smoking your life away.’

  ‘I was dead,’ she said to me. ‘By the time the paramedics reached me, my heart had stopped. After they had resuscitated me, they said that they had never seen anyone so far gone they were able to bring back.’

  ‘Back to this place,’ I said, zanging the quiet waters. ‘You do not seem happy to be here.’

  ‘What would you like me to tell you? When I was shot, there was a tunnel of light – one might say it drew me on to Agathange.’

  ‘Truly?’

  Something like a blending of cosmic humor and hell flashed in her eyes. ‘One might say that, but I cannot, however badly I might wish it were so. No, Arjuna, there was only neverness, one of your favorite words. Not exactly nothing, but rather a nothing so deep and dark and profound that it becomes something – a black thing that swallows up everything that ever was or could be.’

  I listened to the waves lapping at the skin of her little boat. Then I asked, ‘Does it still hurt?’

  She nodded her head, and touched her red anorak where it covered her chest.

  ‘They had to take out part of my lung. Breathing is painful.’

  She drew in a long breath through her burning cigarette as if daring the world to give her even more pain.

  ‘Your doctors could not have saved Gabi,’ I said, remembering her terrible wound.

  ‘No, she died almost immediately. I have her ashes in an urn up at the house.’

  We talked about what else had happened on the day when we had last seen each other – and after. I told her of the deaths of Bellatrix, Menkalinan, Zavijah, and Salm. I described how Baby Electra had faced down two sharks in order to save me.

  ‘For a long time,’ Helen said, ‘I worried that you were dead; I did not know if you had been shot, though none of the images we analyzed much later showed damage beyond the wounds to your tail and fin.’

  She explained that the man who had wreaked such slaughter on ‘her’ whales had set up a camera on the beach and had filmed himself working his murders.

  ‘His name,’ she said, ‘was Derek Christie – he suffered from narcissism and various personality disorders.’

  I let the sounds of her human-formed syllables play through my memory. The murderer’s last name instantly brought forth the image of a red-faced, beefy man.

  ‘Reverend Pusser,’ I said, ‘as much as said I was the anti-Christ and hinted that bad things were going to happen to me. Derek Christie, then, was one of his men?’

  ‘No,’ Helen said, laughing softly through a mist of smoke. ‘He was no Christian. He had belonged to Total Conservation before it split apart.’

  ‘Jordan’s group? Then Jordan wanted us whales dead?’

  ‘No, it was just the opposite. After the radicals took over Total Conservation and began blowing up chemical factories, Jordan founded another group, Save the Ocean.’ She motioned with her hand toward the Sound and the open sea beyond. ‘He has had more success with that – and, it seems, a change of heart.’

  ‘How can that be? Stone surrounds his heart.’

  ‘And you have been the water that washes away mountains. Jordan has actually funded other conservation groups, such as the Whale Warriors.’

  ‘Jordan has?’ I formed the stuttering syllables of Wordsong that indicated a sort of bitter, astonished laughter. ‘Then I do not understand why the Christie man would have wanted to blow up whales.’

  ‘Neither do I, really. Derek made another film in which he tells his story. It seems that when he heard your diatribe against animal rights, he came to see you as one of the biggest threats to his cause.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said with the taste of the man’s blood still in my mouth, ‘an animal speaking out against the rights that you humans deign to accord us animals.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said. Her laughter grew darker in color to match my own; the tobacco-tinged timbre of her voice touched upon a humor so vast and deep it seemed that no human could ever hold it. ‘Derek made it clear in his film: he loved all animals, and had sworn to die to protect them. He was able to kill the other whales, as he tried to kill you, only because he came to regard you as human.’

  We had drifted closer to the beach – so close I could make out its individual pebbles and grains of sand. How many of them, I wondered, had been reddened with Helen’s and Gabi’s blood! How long would it be before the clouds that moved in from the sea cast down enough rain to wash clean this human beach which had endured the very best and worst of humanity?

  You cannot love one thing without loving everything.

  ‘I must have watched the film of your grabbing Derek a thousand times,’ Helen said. ‘The whole world saw that film.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And the whole world – the human world – has hated and hunted me ever since.’

  I told her of the whalers in the Antarctic who had tried to harpoon me.

  ‘We learned of that, too,’ she said. ‘But it is very strange, Arjuna. For all your knowledge of human beings, for all your insight, there are things about us you understand so poorly.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘I neglected to emphasize the sacrifice of the whale warrior who died to save me. How many humans, though, possess such valor?’

  ‘Very few,’ she admitted. ‘But I was not speaking of that. You should know that after you killed Derek, millions flooded the Internet with messages of sympathy and support. Nearly everyone regards you as a hero.’

  I laughed even harder. I gazed off at the misty, green foothills, and thought of the teeming millions of humanity that swarmed the cities and the continents beyond.

  ‘Only you humans,’ I said, ‘make heroes of murderers.’

 
‘Nevertheless, a hero you are,’ she said. ‘You were filmed and identified surfing with that young woman. Everything has changed since then.’

  She told me that the hunting of whales had been outlawed everywhere in the world and that in many places whales had been declared to be persons. All the Sea Circuses were sure to be closed. The Institute’s other scientists were off testifying to lawmakers who would decide the cetaceans’ fate.

  ‘That is good,’ I said, listening to little waves lap their tongues of water over the beach. ‘That is very good – but it will not really matter.’

  I told her that the humans would keep on pulling fish from the sea and dumping into it all their poisons until the whales had starved down to skeletons like those of Zavijah and Salm and all of Ocean was dead.

  ‘I know,’ Helen said. ‘I know.’

  She puffed at her cigarette. Because it had burned down to little more than a glowing butt, she drew out a fresh cigarette and used the red-hot tip of the old one to light it.

  ‘Is that why you did not go with the others to testify?’

  ‘It has been hard for me to travel. In any case, I have a lifetime of work to do here, translating everything you whales said and writing books.’

  ‘Would you like to write down my story? I have a lot to tell you.’

  As the world turned about its center and the clouds thickened above us, I recounted my journey around the world. I described my encounter with the Sevener and my wild idea of loosing a wave of murderous satyagraha upon the world.

  ‘After Baby Electra died,’ I explained, ‘I wanted to kill all humans everywhere. If I had thought you were still alive, I would have wanted to kill you.’

  ‘I understand,’ she said. ‘When I found out I had not died – not for good, at least – I felt the same way. Sometimes I still do.’

  She blew a ring of smoke into the air, and then stuck her finger through the swirling gray gases.

  ‘There are easier ways to die,’ I said, aiming a spritz of water at her cigarette, which she quickly covered with her hand.