The Idiot Gods

It was one thing for me to contemplate a natural death from starvation, for sometimes in the life of the sea, food could not be found and one must gracefully suffer the inevitable fate. But to deliberately suck in water would be to slay oneself in a most unnatural way, and would thus violate the sacred principle that no orca should ever harm an orca – not even oneself.

‘The covenants,’ I said to Baby Electra, ‘were made for the ocean of life. But we have come to the waters of death – of what use are the covenants here?’

I noticed that Alkurah and her sisters were listening to me intently. So was Menkalinan, Baby Electra and even tiny Navi. Unukalhai regarded me with a strange mixture of sorrow and astonishment. He joined Alkurah and the others in clicking and high-whistling as they zanged my heart in order to determine if passion might have swept my reason away.

‘Please!’ Baby Electra implored. ‘Don’t leave me!’

‘Then come with me,’ I said. I spoke to the others, too. ‘Let us all breathe water together and leave this terrible place.’

In the silence that stole over the small pool, the beating of many hearts sent waves of anxious sound humming through the water. Then Alkurah spoke out: ‘No, Arjuna, I want to live, so I will not do as you say.’

‘Nor I,’ Menkalinan added.

‘It would be wrong to break the Covenant,’ Baby Navi said.

Unukalhai let loose a low, pensive laugh and said, ‘That is a crazy idea, Arjuna – but not quite crazy enough.’

‘Very well,’ I said. ‘Very well.’

Baby Electra heard death in my voice, and she swam over to me and tried to cover my blowhole with her body.

‘No, Arjuna!’ she cried to me.

‘I cannot quenge,’ I said to her. ‘I cannot speak with the humans.’

‘Please, no!’

‘I will never see my family again.’

‘But I am your family now! We are the Hopeful Wordplayers of the Manmade Bitterblue Sea!’

How could I deny this and so deny what might be the last of Baby Electra’s hope?

‘If you leave me,’ she said, ‘I will never outswim my grief.’

I watched as old, scarred Bellatrix rammed her head against the wall of the pool, again and again.

‘Please eat, Arjuna! Please, please!’

I thought of my mother then, and of my grandmother and all my ancestors who had fought their way out of the wombs of the Old Ones just so they could taste the immense goodness of life. If I betrayed the sufferings they had endured in order to bring me into the ocean, all the life that had passed into me would be wasted. The gift my grandmother had given me at the outset of my journey would come to naught. So would Baby Electra’s love for me.

‘All right,’ I said, ‘I will eat the humans’ dirty fish.’

And so eat I did. I swam over to the humans where they stood along the sides of the pools, and allowed them to toss fish into my opened mouth. They played this game day after day. The orange-haired human named Gabi poured bucket after bucket of salmon and slimy smelt down my throat, and I swallowed again and again, and the fierce hunger that had a hold upon my belly and my brain went away. I fattened and grew stronger. It surprised me that the decaying fish could give me life – a kind of a life.

Yes, but what kind? The longer I remained in the humans’ pools, the more diminished I would become, at least when compared with my former self or with any wild-swimming whale. How long would it be before my proud dorsal fin collapsed like those of Alkurah, Menkalinan, and poor Bellatrix? How long before my very soul collapsed in upon itself like the body of a whale emptied of breath and sinking down beneath the crushing pressures of the deepest and darkest depths of the sea? How long before I began the inexorable descent in the horrifying process of my becoming like Bellatrix?

Aside from Baby Electra, who nursed a mad hope that we would somehow escape from the humans into the open sea, only Unukalhai of all the whales in the pools offered reasonable advice to me:

‘If we must dwell in the human world,’ he said one day, ‘we must take the spirit of that world into us so that we might become part of it and so live with less agony.’

Reasonable his wisdom might have been, but I felt it was wrong, and I resisted it.

‘Is it not enough,’ I said, ‘that we take in the humans’ fish and their poison? If we take in their spirit, too, we will become as crazy as they are.’

I gazed at the sad, limp fin drooping along Unukalhai’s back. I saw this pitiful degradation of flesh as an almost complete degradation of the spirit caused by Unukalhai’s internalization of the humans’ wants and their distasteful and despicable world. Who could accept such derangement of any orca’s natural form? And was not the acceptance itself a kind of madness?

‘Have I not told you many times,’ Unukalhai said, ‘that we must become insane? You did not believe me!’

‘I did not want to believe you!’

‘But you must, Arjuna. You must watch the humans, night and day.’ He let out a long, painful whistle. ‘You must drink in their sounds and dwell with them in your dreams. You must meditate on what it is to be human and try to become human in your own heart.’

‘I cannot! I do not want to!’

I pointed out that he had chided Alkurah and the Moonsingers for internalizing the humans’ cruelty, which they inflicted with raking teeth and rancor upon Baby Electra and the other whales.

‘And cruel you must become,’ Unukalhai told me, ‘to live among the humans. But not mindlessly and compulsively cruel, as they are cruel. You must not allow yourself to become helplessly and indiscriminately infected. Rather, you must choose your cruelties with a will and a design, and wear them upon yourself as the humans do their clothes. In such cruelty, you must apply the same art as you once did in creating the tone poems of your great composition.’

Something in the crystallization of his conception of cruelty sounded a warning in me. Something in Unukalhai – a poisoning of his blood or a worm in his brain – did the same. I sensed that he was keeping a secret, deep and dark, which gnawed at him and worked its way into every tissue and organ. What this secret might be, I could not guess and he did not say.

‘I do not want to become cruel,’ I told him. ‘I do not want the humans to touch my heart with their heartless hands.’

‘But they already have touched you, have they not?’

‘As they have touched you?’

‘Yes, Arjuna – in exactly the same way.’

‘I am sorry,’ I said.

‘Save your compassion for yourself – you will need it.’

‘Perhaps,’ I said. I floated at the surface of the little pool where we were being kept that night and opened my blowhole to take in a breath. ‘Perhaps I will suffer here like a blue whale being torn apart by sharks, over years instead of days. I will not, however, allow myself to become like the humans.’

‘You will not be able to help yourself.’

‘Yes, I will.’

‘You cannot escape them, any more than you can dislodge the harpoon they put in you when they speared your friend Pherkad.’

‘There is no harpoon in me!’ My voice exploded out of me in an unexpected and embarrassing shout, which thundered back and forth across the tiny pool. ‘Only my grandmother is there, and Alnitak, and my mother, and—’

‘The rest of your family, whom you will never see again. If you wish your life were otherwise, you will make yourself even more unhappy.’

‘I will see them again!’

‘No, you never will. The humans will make you do feats along with Alkurah, Salm, Electra, and me. You will see us, all the days of your life, until either we or you are dead.’

‘No, no, no!’ I beat the water with my flukes, trying to drive into this fundamental substance a little of my filthy rage. ‘I will never do the humans’ feats. I want nothing more to do with humans. I will escape them – and their pools of horror.’

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