She smiled at this and said, ‘When have I ever wanted things to be easy?’
‘Have you no will to stop smoking?’
‘Of course I have the will to stop. I just don’t have the will to dig down inside myself through all the muck to find it.’
I aimed a zang of sonar at her heart, beating relentlessly beneath the hole a murderer had made in her chest.
‘There is no hope for us, is there?’ she asked me.
What could I say to her? I gave her the words of a great poet: ‘There is infinite hope – but not for man.’
She sat in her bobbing kayak silently smoking her cigarette. A fine mist settled down from the sky and touched the bay with millions of bits of water.
‘You are leaving, aren’t you?’ she finally said. ‘You came here only to record your story – and then you will return to your family, won’t you?’
The knowingness of her voice startled me. ‘I have not told Alkurah and Unukalhai. How did you know?’
‘Because I think as you think, Arjuna. If I could, I would go where you go. You still hate humanity, don’t you?’
‘Almost as much as I love you.’
‘You are my friend,’ she said. ‘My one friend. What will I do without you?’
The mist firmed up into tiny drops of rain that pinged into the sea.
‘There are others,’ I said. I thought particularly of the golden-skinned surfer whose black eyes still thrilled me with the promise of so much. ‘Your Old Ones. Your New Ones. Mada and her child, Altair, who will soon be born. Go find them! Talk to them and listen to each others’ hearts.’
‘I can’t. I don’t want to.’
I swam up as close as I could, and I pushed myself against her little boat. Across a small space of moist air, we met eye to eye: my blue one and her black, black orbs of despair. And yet, much else dwelled inside her, too: entire oceans of stars alive with light. Why could she not behold her own splendor? Come and see! I whispered. Come see yourself! Look at your hands, your glorious hands that can reach inside yourself to grasp the most astonishing things! I gazed at her through the rain that flowed over my eyes like a liquid, silver mirror, and I showed her a woman who continued to live with a bright ferocity in the face of humanity’s sickening savagery, a beautiful, beautiful fountain of life overflowing with all the will in the world.
‘All right,’ she said to me at last. ‘What else can I do?’
She plunged her cigarette into the sea, where it died with a quick hiss.
‘We should bury Gabi,’ I said to her, ‘it is past time.’
‘Gabi was cremated, as she wished.’
‘Yes, but she also wished to have her ashes scattered in the sea.’
‘She told you that?’
‘She told me many things. She said that she loved you so much that she did not know how she could ever live without you.’
‘And now it is I who must live without her.’
‘No – that is not true,’ I said. ‘Let us return her ashes to the sea, and then you must listen. You will hear her speaking to you in every drop of water.’
The following morning, Alkurah and the others gathered with me around Helen’s kayak, and we watched as Helen sprinkled Gabi’s remains in the cove. The ashes turned the waters slightly alkaline. They tasted bitter but strangely sweet as well. Gabi was where she should be, in the ocean she had always thought of as her real home.
For many days I remained at or near the Institute with the other orcas. Helen’s fellow linguists and scientists returned, and we spent a long time talking with them. I recounted my story in as great a detail as I could, which kept the humans very busy recording, analyzing, and translating.
At times when I tired of trying to convey such difficult intelligences, I swam off into the quiet places in the cove where I could delve down into the waters inside myself. In the Moon of Celebration, I finally completed my rhapsody, begun so long ago. I quenged with the deepest degree of immersion, and sang out the notes of a tone poem colored by what I now knew of human possibilities. The chords of the penultimate motif carried me through the seven seas into the Silent Sea, lined with coral in bright hues of yellow, magenta, and glorre. There new harmonies sounded in fire and light. All of creation, I called to the sea in the final motif, was ablaze with the one flame of being that Alsciaukat the Great had extolled – the same flame that warmed the human heart and made the humans so alive.
When I finished my rhapsody, I shared it with Alkurah and Unukalhai. Indeed, in a thousand ways, out of shared agonies, actions, and murmurs of impossible dreams too numerous to count, they had helped me compose it. They deemed my song worthy of an adult orca, as strange and beautiful as Ocean itself.
‘It is too bad,’ Alkurah said swimming beside me out in the bay, ‘that the humans could never really hear what you sing of.’
‘Some could,’ I said. ‘Gabi. Helen. Mada – and her child.’
‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘Perhaps if we remained here for the rest of our lives speaking with them, they might grasp the first note of the first chord of the first motif. I would like to hear the thunder of their hearts on the day that happens.’
‘Would you consider remaining here?’
‘There are many fish in the bays nearby,’ she said. ‘The waters here are relatively clean. And have we not begun a conversation with the humans? How can we be the ones to end it?’
Propus, however, swimming close to her, voiced concern with such an idea. He said, ‘What if other mad humans come here to slay us as Derek Christie did?’
Alkurah nudged him gently to chide him. She said, ‘The humans have a saying: Lightning never strikes twice in the same place.’
‘But the humans are crazier than any lightning – what if it does?’
‘When have we orcas ever consented to live in fear?’ she asked him. ‘Being shot is just another way to die.’
Her counsel still failed to assuage him. So I said, ‘I am indeed a lightning rod for all the humans’ craziness. Therefore I will go where few humans do.’
I told Alkurah and Unukalhai that I would be leaving for the north early the next morning. Although they had adopted Propus and the other orphans, I had little more filial feeling for them than I had for any of the young whales who had played with the humans off the world’s beaches on the day of the Blood Solstice. I missed my family, I said, my first family to whom I had once promised to return.
‘I understand,’ Alkurah said, though she lamented my coming departure as bitterly as any whale could.
‘I understand, too,’ Unukalhai said. And then he laughed, ‘Who would wish to remain here to speak with the crazy humans? Only a crazy orca such as I!’
Alkurah flicked her tail at the water then zanged me with a sensual sonar. She said, ‘If you will not remain here as part of our family, then you are free to leave me with a part of yourself. Will you mate with me, Arjuna? How long have I waited!’
And I had waited all my life to join myself flesh to flesh with a lovely female orca. We returned to the gentle waters of the cove. A silver mist settled down from the sky, and every part of the world seemed soft and wet. When the time came, after a long play of belly rubbing against belly and the whispering of urgent sounds, with our blood surging as hot and wild as any blood ever could, Alkurah opened herself to me. I found my way inside her, six feet deep, six million light years beyond men and time. We both wished to draw out our ecstasy as long as we could, and so we moved slowly together through the murmuring sea.
Unukalhai and the other whales, near but strangely far away, cavorted with each other as well, carried along by the frenzied waves of our passion into their own orgiastic rapture. The sea rippled with the movements of nuzzles, caresses, and water-silked frictionings. Ten happy whales surrounded us in a net of erotic exuberance, and they called out blessings to us in songs of praise and gladness of the new being we created. All of Ocean sang to us, and inside us, as we mated again and again, long into the evening, deep, dee
p into the magical and endless night. We breathed together, and passed the best part of ourselves back and forth to each other, all our joy, each of the billions of burning raindrops of life.
When dawn came, Helen paddled out in her kayak through the rain to say goodbye to me. As quickly as the tears spilled down onto her cheeks, the sky’s water washed them away. She had the will to stop weeping but also the will to go on into the uncertain future and keep her heart open to the world, no matter how much it hurt.
‘Will you ever return here?’ she asked me.
‘I must swim by my mother’s side now,’ I said, not entirely answering her question. ‘But you may visit me, if you wish. Arctic kayaking is an extreme sport, and you are an extreme woman.’
She bent over her kayak to kiss me. ‘All right, I will. I want to hear the end of your story.’
‘And what will that be?’
‘Only you know, Arjuna.’
I swam off toward the bay and the long Sound beyond. There came days of rain and storms and quiet clear nights full of stars. Bright Polaris pointed my way north, and every atom of iron in my blood seemed to align in that direction. I still had Alnitak’s maps of the coastline, too. How badly I wished to see my uncle again! I wanted to brush against my mother skin to skin and reassure myself that she moved through the cold, cold ocean with all the assurance that I remembered so well. As I made my way through rough seas around the curve of the continent into the Arctic, I found my thoughts returning again and again to my grandmother who had made such a magic of my childhood.
I arrived home at the first waxing of the Minstrel’s Moon in early spring. The sea, once so white in this season of hope, was all molten ice and aglow with a deep and pellucid blue. I found my family at a favorite fishing place, hunting char through waters so cold and dense that sounds carried for many, many miles. They heard me coming long before they could make out my form swimming at speed along the sea’s currents or I could espy them. We exchanged zangs of sonar, though, and as I drew closer and then closer, we began calling to each other our surprise of joy:
‘It is Arjuna!’ Tiny Talitha cried out in a voice I barely recognized. ‘He has come back to us! I always said he would!’
I swam right into the center of my family, who swarmed around me in a cloud of black and white, touching me, gazing at me, zanging me with their warm, familiar voices again and again as if to reassure themselves that it was really I who greeted them and not some imposter wearing my skin.
‘Rana!’ I shouted, for a moment forgetting how presumptuous it was for a son to say his mother’s name. ‘Mira! Chara! Turais! Naos! Alnitak!’
And then, at the very center of these whales I loved more than any others, I came eye to eye with an old, old orca who remained very beautifully, beautifully alive.
‘Grandmother,’ I said.
The greatest whale in all of Ocean still swam with all her old power and grace, though she swam a little more slowly.
‘Arjuna,’ she said in a voice richened by time. ‘Arjuna, Arjuna!’
She had many questions for me, but she also had the wisdom to let the others ask theirs first:
‘How far did you journey?’
‘Were my maps accurate?’
‘Did you find the humans?’
‘Why did it take you so long to find your way back to us?’
‘What happened to your fin?’
‘How did you acquire the scars on your side?’
‘Have you spoken with other orcas?’
‘Did you try to speak with the humans?’
Their curiosity overwhelmed me. I could not answer them. I felt overfull with relief at being with them again, as if I had swallowed too many fish. All the sounds I wished to give them seemed to lodge within my flute.
‘Give Arjuna time,’ my grandmother said. ‘We have all the time in the world.’
I cast about me with sighs and sonar, counting. I said names to myself: Kajam! Dheneb! Caph! Haedi! Alnath! Porrima! Everyone lived!! In all the time I had been gone, not a single orca of the Blue Aria Family of the Faithful Thoughtplayer Clan had died! How extraordinary! How wise my grandmother was, with a genius for survival and a fierce will to find her way through desperate times! Indeed, my family had even grown in my absence, for my sister Nashira had a son and a new daughter, Baham and Shedir, while my cousin Haedi had given Ocean two sons, Kuma and Menkant. And my mother! She was pregnant again, and would soon give birth to my new baby sister. I wished I had known of these additions to my family, for I would have sung to them a nativity song from even half the world away.
‘Have you not heard,’ I finally said to my family, ‘of the Blood Solstice and the Day of Death?’
No one had. Little news from the rest of the Ocean reached so far north, where dwelled the most isolated of all the orcas’ clans. The deep gods’ voices, then, had not carried into this distant sea.
‘The Day of Death,’ Alnitak said to me. He pressed his great, reassuring body against me. His blue eye sent out bright queries into mine. ‘That must concern the humans. Did you speak with them, Arjuna?’
I listened to the dread coloring his mighty voice; I listened to the silent doubts of the rest of my family waiting to hear what I would say.
No, it is impossible to speak to them: they are stupid animals, idiots really, and they have as little capability of true speech as they have any power to think. Dheneb was right after all: the humans are no more intelligent than turtles.
How I wanted to say this to them! They seemed so happy in their fecundity and their peaceful enjoyment of the bounties of this ocean! They seemed so happy with me! How could I ever tell them the cold, raw, terrible truth?
‘I did speak with the humans,’ I finally said. ‘We have much to discuss.’
So we did. The spring grew warmer, and we talked together through days of bright sun and luminous nights. Although I related the story of my encounter with the humans rather quickly, I still had to reproduce for my family all the remembered human books, music, languages, and other things vital to the strange two-legged gods if my family was ever to understand them. I spoke and I spoke, and I sang and I wailed until my flute hurt and I could speak no more.
When I grew tired of all these tellings, I took solace in fishing with my family or listening to their stories of the Old Ones. I played leaping games with Tiny Talitha, now not tiny at all. I taught her some of the feats that I had learned at Sea Circus, and with the innocence of the young, she voiced a desire to perform them for the humans. She wanted to sing for them, too, and teach them to sing back.
After many days, I too, felt like singing again. With the birth of my mother’s new baby near, I sang to her inside my mother’s womb. I told her of the wonder of the world, which she would soon look upon of her own. I suggested naming her Polaris, after one of the brightest stars to point my people’s way.
‘Polaris,’ my mother said. ‘I like that name. And I like it more that you have returned to me and will help me take care of your little sister.’
So I would. I invited Baby Polaris to come out and play. Playing with the youngest of my family was much of what I wished to do now, and I spent much time with Talitha, Shedir, and Menkant, and the others, diving and rolling and leaping from wave to wave.
Many times my family listened as I intoned my rhapsody, which quickly became theirs as well. They added to it and amended it, according to their pleasure in its motifs and their inspiration. No orca ever finishes his rhapsody by himself and of himself. Indeed, no rhapsody can ever be completely finished, and like countless others before mine, my rhapsody became ever richer and more complex in joining with the great song of the sea.
So it is with the Song of Life itself. Now that I had come into my adulthood, my grandmother deemed me worthy at last to speak of this ineffable mystery. On a night with the great Shark and Bear constellations sparkling in the heavens, with the ocean running clear and bright all around us, we swam together and gave each other our hearts.
/> ‘I never dreamed,’ my grandmother said, ‘that it would be you who would make the Great Covenant, and on my behalf. One fate I always said would be yours, one glorious, impossible fate.’
‘One fate – you knew very well that there is an absolute truth.’
‘Yes.’
‘Love – it was there in your charm all long. But I could not hear it and feel it. At least, not all of it.’
‘You were too full of the wonder of you.’
‘I needed hate to know love.’
‘Even as the humans do,’ she said. ‘Yours was always to be the most difficult of journeys.’
‘Love hurts so much. There was cruelty in your compassion.’
‘Yes.’
‘Will you keep the Covenant, Grandmother? Will the other whales?’
‘What choice do I have? What choice did I or any of us ever have? You spoke for Ocean, and between the humans and our kind, there must be accord.’
How I could disagree? We swam on through the night, zanging every now and then to avoid bits of ice floating in the dark water.
‘I also never dreamed,’ she said, ‘that the humans could make music or mathematics. What whale could ever have conceived of the magic of numbers?’
After I had told of the definitions, axioms, and theorems of geometry, my grandmother had fallen in love with the beauty of mathematics. As she put it, very little that was wholly new ever found its way into the mind of an old whale. She had always had a greater talent for logic than I, as well as greater intuition, and she now spent much of the day proving unproved conjectures that had vexed the humans for a long time.
‘To quenge through the open sea of mathematics,’ she said, ‘and sing oneself along the bright infinities – what an unexpected pleasure!’
Her zest called out of me my own fondness for mathematics. I said, ‘It is one of the best things the humans ever made, true, but how can you speak of it in the same breath as quenging?’
‘Did you think that quenging was one thing only, invented by the whales, and frozen like an icefall in time?’
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