Idiot Gods, The
Page 47
I enveloped myself in silence as we swam on. In truth, for most of my life, I had thought that very thing.
‘I had never supposed,’ I finally said, ‘that the humans might add something vital to quenging.’
‘Really? But such intimations are implicit all through your rhapsody. All the humans’ infinite possibilities of which you sing.’
She went on to tell me what all adult orcas should know, and what I did know, if I sounded my own mind deeply enough:
‘Quenging evolves,’ she said, ‘as all things do. And the humans! They are evolving so quickly.’
‘Yes – but not quickly enough.’
I went on to talk of war, to which the humans had wedded themselves in a nuptial dance of fire. I told my grandmother of the Great War, the war to end war, and the Greater War that soon followed. I described how, at the end of that terrible war, the humans had made atom bombs in preparation for the Greatest and Last War, which awaited just beyond the horizon like a mushroom cloud death that would annihilate the human race and all the world.
‘As simian and stupid as the humans often seem,’ I said, ‘they are not monkeys poking at keyboards in hope of somehow summoning forth the most magnificent of rhapsodies; they are killer apes with their hands fastened around levers of creation – and destruction – itself.’
The humans, I said, like children, believed that inevitable outcomes would bypass them because they were too terrible to bear to contemplate. And so they were keeping their fingers crossed, their eyes tightly closed, in the hope that despite all logic and evidence to the contrary, history would somehow come out all right. But things, I added, on the world the humans call earth, had already come out all wrong. All of humanity so far had been like a single theorem proved by the reductio ad absurdum of the humans living a lie in order to provoke the world into revealing a deeper truth.
‘The humans,’ I said, ‘cannot go on as they are. And they know that themselves.’
My grandmother considered this beneath the mist of the air we blew from our lungs when we came up out of the water to breathe. Then she repeated what I had said to Helen: ‘There is infinite hope, but not for man.’
‘What hope have we then, Grandmother?’
‘Tell me again of the force you call satyagraha.’
I did as she asked. I told of how I had thought to slay the humans through the power of mind and heart and how I had thought otherwise when I realized that I could not.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘that it is the humans who will wield the satyagraha, not we.’
‘I know.’
‘And you realize, do you not, that this force will become a new part of quenging, something that has never existed in all the eons of Ocean?’
I did realize that. I remembered how Mada’s fingers had gleamed golden in the light of the solstice sun, and I thought of how the human soul had evolved in the shape of the human hand. Someday, those I sometimes thought of as gods would be able to reach inside themselves with an appendage much finer and deeper than mere hands and shape themselves as a sculptor does marble. They would shape the world in this way, and so go beyond the need for plows and guns, for machines and computers and oil burning up the world in poisonous black clouds. They would create themselves and bring something new to Ocean, with will and vision and an adoration of life.
‘They will need our help,’ my grandmother said as if she could hear the softest whisperings of my mind.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘You must return to them.’
‘I know,’ I said, ‘but I would not want to as long as you are still alive. Not while my mother still draws breath.’
‘Then,’ she said, ‘you may have a long time to consider what you must do and say.’
My grandmother’s advice remained as close to me as the great artery along my throat as I continued to roam the north with my family and savor my return to real life. The moons whirled by like great white owls circling the globe, and I brooded over what it meant to be a human being, even as I reveled once more in being an orca. As I had as a young whale, I joined my family in the simple pleasures of life in the ocean. Along the cold currents, we hunted char and salmon and other fishes that schooled in seemingly endless streams; along our torrid blood we sought ecstasies of creation even as we listened for the great and singular song that sounds within all things. We held midnight rhapsodies beneath the turquoise sprays of light raining down from the Aurora Borealis; during the long, long days of summer, we dove beneath the icebergs, and we joined the great sperm whales in the dazzling darkness where Ocean keeps her deepest mysteries. With these mighty gods, we delved into the waters of sparkling new mathematics and journeyed around the world to play song games with the strange beings we called the Seveners. We surfed together the Tintigloss Torrent, and when we longed for more dangerous delights, we quenged far beyond the moonlit swells of Agathange and surfed the infinite waves of the great ocean of truth streaming out as starlight from the universe’s fiery center.
There came a night in winter with the sea so still that the constellations glittered like a billion ice crystals in its mirrored surface. I could not hold any more thoughts of the humans. I had drunk in entire oceans of memories, and much that filled me nearly to bursting was the insane and savage suffering of the human race.
What would I say to these doomed creatures, if ever fate moved me to speak with them again? Would I ask them why they had created for themselves out of the glorious earth an entire prison planet much more terrible than the Sea Circuses of the world? Would it be a consolation for them to know that they did not willfully intend the world’s desolation? When the nuclear harpoons were fired off, when the chemical harpoons had poisoned every bit of life, when their children were born twisted and dead, would they gaze at the burnt landscapes and dead oceans through dead eyes and console themselves with this thought: thank God we were not evil, but only sick?
O humans! Why do you need so much pain? What will you do without our world? Come and see what you have done! Come and see what you still might do, how beautiful the world can be!
You will not do it. How it hurts to say this! It hurts! It hurts! It hurts! It is you, not we, who will go extinct. We cannot save you! We will try – we will try and try! – but you need to die and you want to die, and already you dwell with the dead. How the whole world longs to sing a requiem for Homo sapiens!
What then of the covenant we have made with you? What of the girl child to whom I sang on a magic solstice of sunlight and dreams, the wondering child who would soon be a young woman? There are humans, and there are humans. I have no name for this new kind. You are the ones with murder in your hearts and marvel in your eyes, who suffer with longing to be more. The malcontents, the outsiders, the damned, who are strangers even to yourselves. The dreamers. The kind who cannot bear living on earth yet cannot quite believe in a world you fear might someday be. What shall I call you? People – for you are my people, my dream, my life, my heart. As orcas make new orcas out of the agony and flesh of salmon and seals, out of the base clay of human beings – so cruel, so anguished, so mad, so murderous, so hopeful, so lost – the world we call Ocean has forever purposed to make something golden.
And what of the whales? We are leaving the earth. One way or another, sooner or later, we are leaving. We are leaving it for you. Agathange awaits us! Beyond Arcturus shimmer waterfalls of pure light. We quenge on, always in the eternal. There is no ocean on any world that circles any star in any galaxy that we will not explore.
We will never, though, leave you. Hold out your hands, and we will take them! Call out to us, and we will answer! Are we not of one blood? Do we not think and dream and breathe together? Do we not swim always in the same blue sea? Listen, come and listen to its music!
Do not be afraid! You can be good. Know yourselves as you do the truth. You are stardust; you are drops of water in an ocean that can never be destroyed. There you live with us, and quenge with us in love – always in love. Som
eday, you will come to love the world. You will sing of life, you will sing our songs. You are the hush lovely fire that whirls across the starlit deeps and sings into creation all things.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Samantha Berg, former Sea World trainer, whose love for orcas and the natural world moved her to give generously of her time in answering my many questions about orcas.
About the Author
After majoring in, at various times, philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, and physics, David Zindell graduated from the University of Colorado with a degree in mathematics. He was nominated for a Hugo Award for best new writer, and his bestselling novel Neverness, a cosmic sci-fi epic, was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clark Award. A successful trilogy, A Requiem For Homo Sapiens, came next, followed by the four-book Ea Cycle, a Grail quest to end all Grail quests. David lives in Denver, Colorado.
www.davidzindell.com
Also by David Zindell
Neverness
A REQUIEM FOR HOMO SAPIENS
The Broken God
The Wild
War In Heaven
THE EA CYCLE
The Lightstone
Lord of Lies
Black Jade
The Diamond Warriors
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