by Ian Watson
“If you had no hands to climb the wire fences? Only a sudden blinding vision came of the Nazi handymen?”
“We’ve spent a full century slaughtering kachalots, Comrade. They haven’t tried committing suicide before!”
“Maybe they didn’t interpret our actions the way we would? Maybe they thought we’d grow out of it? I don’t know. But what we finally did do, through our Jonah, is found a way of showing the exact nature of our minds to them.” Kapelka gestured at the pile of telex reports from coastlines of the world. “The result—”
Richard urged:
“We can rebuild the dolphin population. There must be hundreds scattered around in marine zoos. Even if we can’t do anything about the sperm whales.”
Katya shook her head vehemently.
“The dolphins will all hear the death-yantra, soon or late, it’ll go on being sung forever. That’s the last message of the whales. Their singing cows will haunt the sea with it…”
“You become a prophetess, little girl,” rumbled Orlov.
“For Chrissake can’t we stop these whales?” Richard exclaimed in frustration. “They haven’t all come ashore yet. Can’t we herd them back to the open sea somehow?”
“You want to herd the Gadarene swine?” Kapelka laughed brittlely.
“Far too easy to equate this with the Gadarene swine,” Katya scowled. “Many people will try to equate the two events, to soothe their consciences—especially if the human race learns anything from this. It may seem that our madness has conveniently passed over into them. We may feel exorcized. We will not be. Dostoevsky’s Possessed begins with those Gadarene swine. But those pigs weren’t aware why their deaths happened. The man Stavrogin in that book was. The whales are.” She glared defiantly round the room.
“Dostoevsky is politically confused—a mystical reactionary,” shrugged Orlov.
“This is getting us nowhere!” Richard seized hold of Tom Winterburn’s arm. “We must be able to herd whales, Tom! You must know, surely we’ve got some ultrasonic scaring machines? Or could we harpoon them with anaesthetic darts?”
“Covering every coastline in the world, Richard? Within a matter of hours? Talk sense, man.”
“Besides,” added Kapelka, “narkos—anaesthetics—it makes whales and dolphins die, unless you take great care. They must retain conscious control of their breathing. We had difficulty with this while we were mapping the model on to Jonah.”
“They’ll kill themselves whatever you do!” cried Katya. “They’ve chosen their silken cord, as Stavrogin did to hang himself, and strung it right round the world, and that cord’s made out of a song! You’d need to stop every baleen whale in the sea from singing.”
“Why can’t we fill the water with other sounds! Jam the song as we jam a radio broadcast!”
Winterburn smiled pityingly.
“And how many weeks would that take?”
Kapelka protested:
“Anyway, how do we know what this jamming may do to the baleen whales? Drive them all mad, perhaps! Then we should see the real giants coming ashore: the blues and finbacks. Dinosaurs would be puny dwarfs to them. That’s five per cent of the total protein content in the sea. We dare not risk it. At the moment those are still grazing safely.”
“We do nothing at all?”
“It’s their choice, Richard,” protested Katya. “Don’t you see? It’s Pavel’s choice!”
“Pavel is some creature in that house over there.” Richard jerked his thumb angrily at the sanatorium building. Images of the mind-cripple wearing striped pyjamas interposed between him and the Russian girl, impenetrable as a row of bars.
“It’s his requiem they’re singing in the sea.”
“You’re haunted again. You always will be, Katya,” he said sadly.
“I always will be,” she echoed. “Every one of us always will. So the baleen whales shall go on singing their song through the oceans. All our ships and submarines shall always hear it. We shall remember. Yet never really understand.”
• • •
As they sat staring at the verandah of the house, the hunched figure in the wheelchair was pushed out, by Mikhail, to soak up a late autumn patch of sunshine.