The Idiot Gods

‘Fear,’ she had told me, ‘might signal a need for prudence, but you may never act out of fear alone.’

Had I not an urgent need for prudence? Why should I not evade this grotesque mountain of metal and the men upon it who might murder me?

Then I felt strange and powerful vibrations pierce my body. High upon the ship, one of the humans stretched out one of his tentacles toward me. Sounds like a seal’s barks burst out from the hole his mouth made. The vibrations grew stronger, and I realized a thing: the humans had sonar! Somehow, these small-headed humans had sonar and were zanging me!

Flight, then, would be futile. I knew from the old tales that the humans’ ship could move through the water more swiftly than I, perhaps not over short distances, but through mornings and afternoons of exhausting pursuit. With the ocean so peaceful and still, I would not even be able to find a wave that I might hide behind.

I did not want to hide. Had I abandoned my family in order to do such a craven thing? Had Pherkad given his death poem to a coward? No, no, no! I had ventured into this strange realm of harpoons and metallic sonar so that I might talk to humans, not flee from the first of them who came my way. The worst they could do to me (or so I told myself) was to slay me as they had the humpback who hung all bloody and broken, suspended in the air. They might strike a real harpoon through my real heart; they might use their metal things to tear me apart before they ate me, but do not all beings thus someday die?

‘You will die young,’ my grandmother had told me. ‘Either that, or you will add something new to the Song.’

It was time to prove her prophecy right. Gathering in her charm close to my heart, I swam up to the ship. I came up out of the water, spy-hopping so that the humans might better see me and hear my words:

‘My name is Arjuna, and I have journeyed far from my home that I might speak with you. So many things I have to say! So much I would ask you! Do you have names yourselves that you can share with me? Why are you here? Are you not creatures of the continents? Are there not enough animals there for you to eat? The animals of the sea are for themselves alone. We are that we might know joy. Do you know the same? Do you know the Song of Life? If you do, why do you make the ocean burn with a terrible fire? Why do you melt the world’s ice? Why did you kill my brother Pherkad?’

I did not expect them to answer me or even understand what I said to them. If they really were sentient, however, I hoped they might at least grasp that I was trying to talk to them. Would they return the favor by giving their words to me?

High above me, some of the humans made sounds and watched me while others continued drawing the humpback up through the air and onto the ship. The dead whale vanished from my sight, and I supposed that the humans had started the work of tearing him apart and eating him. Then one of the humans set a new harpoon in the metal thing that had connected the seaweed to the humpback. The human looked at me as the metal thing turned and the harpoon aligned in my direction.

‘Would you kill me, too?’ I called out to the humans. Then I remembered Pherkad’s final offer to me and my grandmother’s charm. ‘If you need my flesh, you might have it – let me help you!’

I dove down into the water, then up and up. With a mighty beat of my tail, I breached and propelled myself out of the water and high into the air. Drops of water whipped from my body, and the wind thrilled my skin. Thus did I come as close to the humans as I could. Thus, in what might have been the last moments of my life, did I fly. Had I been able to quenge, I would have kept on soaring right up to the stars only to splash down into Agathange’s lovely ocean.

For an eternity, I hung motionless in space, waiting for the humans to pierce me with their harpoon. At last I fell back into the sea. Had I not leaped high enough? Had I not turned my belly toward them so that the harpoon might more easily gain entrance to my vital organs? Again I pushed myself into the air, this time turning in a pirouette so that the humans might strike their harpoon wherever they wished. And again, and again, leaping and spinning and flying and splashing into the sparkling waters.

After a while, I grew tired of repeating this feat. I noticed that the human who had been looking along the harpoon’s length had moved over to the others gathered on top of the ship at a lower point. I became aware that the humans above me were doing something peculiar with their murderous hands: they brought them together over and over, sending out loud cracks that sounded something like a whale’s tail slapping the surface of the sea. With their mouths and the flaps of flesh that covered their teeth, they made shrill sounds that somewhat mimicked a whale’s whistles. How their antics excited me! Perhaps, I thought, I really could teach these bizarre animals to speak.

I began with the simplest and most basic of essentials, the first thing an orca learns long before he is born: one of the sets of sounds denoting the actuality of the ocean. I trilled out the variations on these sounds even as I slapped the water with my tail so that these small-headed creatures might have a visual representation of the magical substance of which I spoke. Again I trilled and whistled as clearly as I could, hoping with a great, glowing hope that the humans might at least somewhat duplicate the whistle’s pitch and overtones. Instead, they made other sounds altogether, and did something that appalled me.

Two of them, working together, cast pieces of a humpback’s body into the water. I studied the barnacles covering gray skin and the bits of bloody fat that stuck to it. Why did they cast away good food? I did not know. Then I had a disturbing thought: they wanted to share it with me!

‘Thank you, humans, for your generosity,’ I chirped out. Then I told them of the First Covenant, which my people had made with the Others: ‘Thank you and thank you, but I may not eat the flesh of any animal who breathes air.’

Two more of the humans above me came up to the edge of the ship. They carried an object which somewhat resembled a huge, white shell. After setting it down on the top of the ship, they began casting its contents toward me chunk by bloody chunk. It astonished me to see pieces of black and white hide and red muscle splash into the sea. These tidbits, I knew, could only have come from an orca – and probably one of Pherkad’s family. Could this be, I wondered, the last of Baby Electra?

‘What is wrong with you!’ I shouted. ‘Do you think that I am a cannibal, that I would eat one of my own?’

I told them of the Second Covenant, that an orca may not harm another orca.

‘Are you insane, that you would do such a thing!’ I shouted. ‘Cast yourselves into the ocean, and then we shall see what I eat!’

Of course, I would have done no such thing. For the Third Covenant, the sacred Great Covenant, forbade the orcas from harming humans, even though the humans might seek to harm them.

For a while, I waited amidst the carnage in the water as the humans instead began flinging their sounds at me. I understood nothing of their speech, if indeed there was anything of substance to understand. Could the humans truly be sentient? I felt certain that in trying to feed me parts of another orca, they had nearly proved their inanity. Perhaps Nashira had been right in her estimation that the humans had minds like those of mollusks.

Why, then, should I continue my journey? Logic told me that these humans might be as different from others elsewhere as my family was from Pherkad’s kind, but what were the chances of that being true? Were not all humans human, just as all orcas were orcas? Would they not therefore think and act in more or less uniform ways?

I might have turned back then but for three things: First, I knew how perilous it was to reason from perhaps unfounded assumptions and scant evidence. Second – and how this thought amazed me! – what if the humans had tried to feed me orca flesh because they themselves were cannibals who saw nothing wrong with humans putting tooth to each other? Perhaps they had never made a covenant among themselves that humans should not harm humans.

The third thing that kept me from swimming back to my family was that the two-leggeds seemed to lose interest in me. They retreated from the edge of the ship, which coughed out a great roar from its underside and began moving off toward the west. Soon, I was alone in the ocean. The way south, the way towards more sensitive humans who might have the wit to learn a little language, lay open before me.

3

On my long voyage toward warmer waters, I had much time to ponder my first encounter with the humans. I revisited each sound and sensation of our bizarre interaction, savoring them as I might the taste of new fish. The new realm that I had entered, already unnerving in so many ways, seemed to grow ever stranger. At its heart lay a mystery that I somehow had to try to understand: What were human beings and how had they come to be?

None of our natural histories accounted for these two-leggeds. Mira told of the taxa and the cladding of the fish, the flatworms, the jellied cnidarians and other sea creatures, but of the animals of the land, even the Old Ones knew little. For ages my ancestors had watched the helpless human apes hunting crabs and clams along the beaches of the continents. And then one day, scarcely a few generations ago, humans had taken to the sea in boats and ships and had begun hunting even the blue whales, who are the greatest animals ever to have lived on our world. How could such a thing have happened?

‘It is not natural,’ I heard my mother say to my grandmother as I relived one of their many conversations. ‘The humans do not seem to be a part of nature.’

As I swam through flowing blue seas rich with herring, squid, sponges, and kelp, I thought about my mother’s words. What did it mean to be natural? Was a shark more natural than a human because most of this ancient fish’s activities consisted of basic functions such as hunting, eating, excreting, and mating? Were humans unnatural because they seemed to spend most of their lives doing things with the multifarious objects they had made with their hands? Was it their very ability to make things such as monstrous metal ships that made them unnatural?

‘Even a snail,’ my sister Nashira had said, ‘within its perfectly spiraled shell makes a more esthetically pleasing protection.’

Snails make shells, and walruses make tusks, and all aquatic animals make the substance of their bodies out of the substance of the sea – but they do not make things other than themselves and their offspring. They do not make harpoons, nor do they set fire to the sea.

‘The humans,’ I said to my mother as if she swam beside me, ‘make things that change nature.’

‘Even so,’ my grandmother broke in, ‘if the humans came out of nature even as we did, how can they be called unnatural?’

Because my grandmother loved recursion and paradox, I said, ‘Then let us say that humans are that part of nature for which it is natural to be unnatural.’

With that definition, I left the matter, although a gnawing feeling in my belly warned me that I had not bitten nearly deep enough into humanity’s soul, which might be beyond understanding. Someday, I sensed, and perhaps soon, I would need to reexamine all my assumptions if I continued my journey.

I decided I must. My course took me along an ancient route used by my ancestors. I navigated by the currents and the configuration of the coastlines, by the pull of the earth upon my blood and by the push of my family’s songs that sounded in my head – and, of course, I found my way by the stars. The Stingray constellation pointed its reddish tail toward storied fishing grounds while the blue lights of the Great Crab came into sight whenever I breached for breath on a cloudless night. And always, the north star shone behind me, reminding me from which direction I had come and toward which I must someday return.

I encountered storms whose icy winds made mountains out of water, and I journeyed on through long days of hot sun and lengthening nights. I warned away sharks who wanted to steal my catch of salmon; I made my way through yet more storms and surfed along great waves. Nothing about the ocean deterred me, for was I not of the water and an orca at that? Rarely did I cease moving, and I never slept.

That is, I never slept completely, for had I done so, I would have breathed water and drowned. Always I remained at least half awake, the right part of me aware of the sea’s features and my movements while my left half slept – or the reverse. Through undulations of seaweed brushing my sides and cold currents raking my skin with claws of ice, I watched myself sleeping, and I listened to myself dream.

What dreams I had! Many were of eating or speaking or mating. Too many concerned the humans. In the foods that humans fed me with their hands in the more disturbing of these dreams, I tasted flavors new to me along with the dearly remembered sweetness of my mother’s milk. I sang a strange song with the first of the beautiful she-orcas who would bear my children; I listened in wonder to my grandmother’s death poem, which somehow rang out from the mouth of a human being whose face I could never quite behold.

One dream in particular moved me. It began with a human feeding me a salmon whose insides were poisoned from the same black oil that had fouled the burning sea. The fish hardened in my belly like a lump of metal. It seemed to grow as massive as a marlin inside me, and its density pulled me down in the water – and down and down. The world began narrowing into darkness. I held my breath against the dread of the ocean’s immense pressures that would soon crush me to a purplish pulp. I felt myself suffocating as the pull of the earth forced me into a tunnel that grew tighter and tighter. Soon, I knew, the whole of my body and my being would be squeezed smaller than a jellyfish, a diatom, an atom of sand. My awareness would shrink into a single point in space and time. I would die a horrible death all alone at the bottom of the sea.

‘No, no, no!’ I shouted to my family who could not hear me.

I did not want to die by myself in silent darkness; even more, I did not want to return to being again and once again find myself forced into the endless, bloody tunnel of life. How bitterly I cried out in protest in being born anew into a doomed world whose every ocean and continent was choked with the burning black oil of death.

‘Grandmother! Grandmother!’ I cried. ‘How can you let this be?’

How, I asked myself, could I let it be?

I could not. And so I called out as loud as I could to my sleeping self. With a start and a shock of reality rushing in, I felt myself awakening within my dream. Now the whole sea sang with brilliant sound, and light devoured darkness. I could move wherever I willed myself to move, and I could dream whatever I desired to dream.

I swam up through the brightening layers of water, and up and up. I breached, blew out stale breath, and drew in a great lungful of air that tasted fresh and clean. I swam toward the great eastern sun. I came upon a beach where many humans frolicked in the breaking waves.

One of the females swam to me. Except for the hair on her head and between her legs, she was all golden skin from her face to her feet, and her eyes were as bright as black pearls. She climbed on top of my back and pressed the flesh of her inner legs against my skin. I swam some more with this female gripping me and caressing me with her soft, human hands. She sang to me a soft, lovely human song.

I understood her strange but beautiful words! I sang back, and she understood me! For a long time, with the water streaming past us and flying off into air in a silvery spray, we spoke of poetry and pain and babies and the immense majesty of life. She described her delight in joining her dream with mine, and I told her of the Aurora Borealis which she had never seen.

I swam with her toward the inextinguishable Northern Lights. With a mighty beat of my tail, I drove us up out of the water, and I began swimming up along the Aurora’s emerald arc. The sky deepened even as it opened out before us. Its startling blueness gave way to an enveloping black all full of light.

To the stars I swam, with the human laughing and singing on top of me. Not one murmur of fear could I make out in her soft voice, even as we flew past Agathange and the lights of the universe began streaming past us like the notes of a great cosmic song. So many stars there were in the universe, almost as many as drops of water in the sea! Urradeth and Solsken, Silvaplana and the Rainbow Double – we touched the radiance of these fiery orbs and a myriad of others in our wild rush into the heart of creation. We spoke with words and songs and an even brighter thing to the deepest part of each other. Thus we came close to that perfect, starlit interior ocean, and we almost quenged together – almost.

And then at last, as entire universes of stars began whirling past us and it seemed we might become lost, the human so close to me did fall into fear, a little. So did I. My grandmother had told me that no matter how far I swam from my family, I would always find my way home – but was that true? I did not have the courage to put her reassurance to the test. And so I allowed the pull of my birth world once again to take hold of me. We began falling back through space along the same sparkling route we had come – falling and falling down toward the waters of the world that the frightened human on my back called earth and I knew as Ocean.

We splashed into cold, clear water. The jolt and shiver of my return awakened me from my dream. I knew that I had reentered normal consciousness because the forms and features of the world seemed at once less real than the magnificence of my dream and excruciatingly real in a way that could not be denied. I looked around me with my sonar and my eyelight, and I saw that I had entered a broad channel. To the east, great, toothed mountains jutted out of a mist-laden forest, while low, green hills covered the land to the west. I could not detect the human female who had accompanied me to the stars.

And then, across the channel’s clear water, I thought I saw her standing on a flat wooden-like object and surfing the waves made by a speeding boat, the way that dolphins are said to do. I had never attempted such sport. Of course, I had surfed the great waves of the Blue Mountains and the waves of light flowing out from the stars beyond Arcturus, but would the much smaller wake produced by a human’s boat support the mass of an orca such as I?

I had to discover if it would; I had to know if the human surfing behind the boat was the one from my dream. After taking a great breath of air, I dove and burst into furious motion, swimming as fast as I could. Water streamed around me. I drove my flukes so hard that my muscles burned, and I drew closer. I wondered what force propelled the boat almost flying on top of ocean above me? I flew now, too, swimming up so that I breached into the froth of the wave, just behind the surfing human. One of the other humans watching on the boat pointed a hand at me and shouted out an incomprehensible sound identical to one of the sounds made by the man on the ship: ‘Orca!’

The human standing on the water turned to look at me.

‘Hello!’ I said through the spray. ‘Hello! Hello! My name is Arjuna!’

I whistled and chirped and asked her if she remembered our journey to the stars. So long had we swum across the universe! Was she hungry, I asked her? Did she like salmon? I opened my mouth to show her my strong, white teeth which had caught so many salmon, and I promised that I would share with her all the fish she could eat.

Again, the humans on the boat let loose a harsh bark that might have indicated distress: ‘Orca! Orca! Orca!’

The surfing human looked ahead of her at the spreading wave, and behind her again – and then she fell, plunging into the surf. She made thrashing motions with her tentacle-like limbs, which brought her head up out of the water. In this way she swam, after a fashion.

I moved in closer to her. I saw that she could not be the human who had ridden upon my back, for her hair was nearly as yellow as a lemon fish, and the skin of her face and lower appendages was as creamy as mother’s milk. The rest of her, however, was as black as the black parts of me. How beautiful, I thought, this variegation of light and dark! However, when I swam in and nudged her with my face, desiring the pleasure of flesh slicking flesh, I felt only a spongy roughness that repelled me. Puzzled, I zanged the human up and down her body. I heard the echoes of a second skin, a much softer skin, just beneath this black outer covering. Could it be, I thought, that humans make a false skin to protect them as they fabricate other unnatural things?

As I debated carrying or pushing this rather helpless human back to the land, the boat turned and moved our way. I watched as she swam over to it and used her limbs in the manner of an octopus to fasten onto the boat and pull herself out of the water. She stood with three others of her kind, the water running off her ugly, false skin. The humans next to her displayed similar coverings, though of flimsier substance and in colors of blue, green, purple, and bright red.

‘It is an orca!’ one of the humans said. ‘Look at the size of him!’

I understood nothing of the meaning of the ugly sounds they made – if indeed they meant anything at all. Even so, I determined to memorize every tone, patter, and inflection in case all their squealing and barking proved to be something like true language.

‘My name is Arjuna,’ I told them, ‘of the Blue Aria family of the Faithful Thoughtplayer Clan. I have journeyed far to talk with you – will you try to talk with me?’

‘Oh my God, he’s huge! What a bodacious bohemeth!’

‘I think you mean behemoth.’

‘Whatever. Let’s just call him Bobo.’

‘Hey, lil’ Bobo, what are you doing all alone chasing after surfers?’

The humans gathered at the edge of the boat. One lay flat on its surface and lowered a hand toward the water.

‘I failed,’ I said, moving even closer, ‘to speak with other humans on the northern ocean. That might have been because they truly could not learn what I tried to teach them, as might prove true with you. Or perhaps the problem lies in an insufficiency of patience on my part, or worse, a failure of my imagination. But one cannot imagine what one cannot imagine. And what seems strange to me past all understanding is how you – or, I should say, your cousins the whale hunters – could not understand the simplest of significants for the most common substance on the world that we share.’

I slapped the surface of the sea with both flipper and tail, even as I said, ‘Water!’ To emphasize the word, I took in a mouthful of water and sprayed it out so that it wetted the human lying on the boat.

‘Water! Water! Water!’

‘Oh my God, he soaked me! Looks like Bobo wants to play!’

‘Water. Water. Water.’ Now I spoke more slowly, as slow as I could, and I toned down the harmonies so that even a jellyfish might hear them. ‘Water. Water. Water. Water. Water.’

‘It’s almost like he’s trying to tell us something!’

Did her utterances signify anything? I could not tell. Even so, I continued memorizing them for later review – and I contemplated each spike and wave of each of their grunts as they made them. I noticed that whenever these humans phonated, they opened their mouths to let the sounds out, as anuses let go of waste. How bizarre! How awkward! How undignified!

Thinking that it might help to imitate them, I opened my mouth even as I pushed out the sacred sound from the flesh higher on my head: ‘W-a-t-e-r!’

‘Look at those teeth! I’ll bet he’s hungry. What do you think an orca eats?’