The Idiot Gods
The Idiot Gods
David Zindell
Quite simply the best book about a whale since Moby Dick.The Idiot Gods is an epic tale told by an orca. David Zindell returns to the grand themes of Neverness in this uniquely moving book.An epic tale of a quest for a new way of life on earth, told by an orca.When Arjuna of the Blue Aria Family encounters three signs of cataclysm, he leaves his home in the Arctic Ocean to seek out the Idiot Gods and ask us why we are destroying the world. But the whales’ ancient Song of Life is beyond our understanding, and we know nothing of the Great Covenant between our kinds. Arjuna is captured, starved, tortured and made to do tricks in a tiny pool at Sea Circus.His love for a human linguist gives him hope, even as he despairs that other people twist his words and continue the worldwide slaughter. As the whales' beloved Ocean turns toward the Blood Solstice the fate of humanity hangs in the balance: for if Arjuna gains the Voice of Death he could destroy mankind. But if understanding can prevail, he may, through the whales’ mysterious power of quenging, create a new Song of Life and enable human evolution to unfold.
DAVID ZINDELL
The Idiot Gods
Copyright (#u7a8e0c5e-f41d-5e9f-8d52-aa8bcf427d3d)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2017
Copyright © David Zindell 2017
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David Zindell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007252275
Ebook Edition © July 2017 ISBN: 9780008223311
Version: 2017-05-22
Dedication (#u7a8e0c5e-f41d-5e9f-8d52-aa8bcf427d3d)
To Jane, for your courage, wisdom, friendship and splendor
Table of Contents
Cover (#u8c308dc5-7038-5eca-8375-8abe243c4ac9)
Title Page (#ue920b936-47aa-5dda-be3d-2a798b3c76d0)
Copyright (#ua850f676-a91b-5076-9807-774c2c03695e)
Dedication (#ud99207c7-8258-5784-ae01-b28014e2e0c1)
Part One: The Burning Sea (#uad7c7a06-6fda-569b-8394-75d5eaf14a41)
Translators’ Note (#u1f12427c-8720-59b5-aadf-9a0b1e4015a6)
Chapter 1 (#u57d6879b-cbf0-50fc-80e1-a07117dd4f5b)
Chapter 2 (#u140de97a-b8a3-5e4a-8ae9-0fb9378cecfa)
Chapter 3 (#ue92620d3-2673-5a9b-9072-13343af8a622)
Chapter 4 (#ue0bd6003-ea9a-5380-afe6-85ad8271f4de)
Chapter 5 (#u6f72172a-8d81-5924-9aa7-67768751726e)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Two: The Idiot Gods (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Three: A Covenant With Thee (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by David Zindell (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PART ONE (#u7a8e0c5e-f41d-5e9f-8d52-aa8bcf427d3d)
Translators’ Note (#u7a8e0c5e-f41d-5e9f-8d52-aa8bcf427d3d)
It was our privilege and happy destiny to enjoy the friendship of one of the most remarkable beings ever to have come out of our little blue and white planet. Many have tried to make the orca named Arjuna into a Buddha or a Jesus, but he certainly never thought of himself as such – and not even as a teacher. Despite all insistence to the contrary, he remains an orca, however extraordinary, with all an orca’s sometimes strange and disturbing sensibilities. It is true that those who spent time with him often forgot that they were conversing with a cetacean possessing a magnitude of intelligence that we are still trying to comprehend. The consciousness of all creatures differs so greatly, yet at its source remains one and the same, as of a white light shined through a prism and refracted it into radiances of red, yellow, violet, and blue. Arjuna’s consciousness, to the extent that it illuminates his communications, can often seem pellucidly and sanely human, and at other times, psychopathic or utterly alien. We who have translated his ‘words’ faced the problem of necessarily regarding a non-human being through very human eyes; we have tried to convey a sense of Arjuna’s magnificent soul without making him seem too human. It would be well for anyone to see Arjuna for what he really is: a whale who just wanted to talk to human beings.
That Arjuna, born in the cold ocean, could have learned to ‘speak’ various human languages many still doubt, even after the seemingly miraculous events the whole world witnessed. They say that we linguists and biologists of the Institute for Advanced Cetacean Studies either misconstrued basic hunting, mating, or warning cries as language or interpreted them through our natural wish to communicate with an obviously intelligent but nevertheless inarticulate animal. Human beings, these skeptics believe, are by definition the only of earth’s creatures capable of symbolic and therefore true language. Our harshest critics – and we should hesitate before calling then conspiracy formulators – have accused us of simply inventing our translations of the thousands of communications that the orcas of the Institute confided in us. They accuse us of conspiring to excite compassion for these great beings toward the vain hope of ‘saving the whales’. This account is not for those deniers. Even if one were to read Arjuna’s account as a fiction, however, one should keep in mind that fictions often reveal the deepest of truths. In many ways, this is the truest story we know, and Arjuna had the truest of hearts. Anyone eager to know more about his life will lose little in skipping this introduction and going right to the words Arjuna chose to convey it. It is indeed a remarkable story. In the end, it is his story, and ours: that of the whole human race.
We would like to say more about those words that Arjuna selected to denote meanings that human beings could comprehend. In no way should these be considered to be ‘whale words’; whales do not communicate to each other through what we know as words, but rather through sound pictures. Arjuna offers as good an explanation of cetacean language as we could hope, and we cannot improve it. Sadly, we know almost nothing of what we sometimes informally call Orcalish. To date, even with the aid of the fastest of computers and the most elegant of mathematical models, we have managed to identify and interpret perhaps a twelfth of a percent of the meanings of the thousands of orca utterances. It should be remembered that we human beings still have not learned to speak with the whales, though they have readily, if painfully, learned to speak with us.
How, then, did Arjuna and the other orcas of his adopted family accomplish such a feat? The Institute’s former chief linguist, Helen Agar, initially worked with him in developing a constructed language through which orcas and humans could communicate. Various utterances natural to orcas – whistles, trills, clicks, chirrups, pulsed calls, and pops – were agreed upon to represent the ninety-one syllables of the language that Arjuna named Wordsong. Helen Agar had no need to speak Wordsong to Arjuna, for he understood English (and many other human languages) very well; however, while engaged in natural communication with Arjuna and the other orcas, Helen chose to communicate in this imaginative language out of solidarity with the whales and the ideal of making the crude vowels and consonants of a human language somehow ‘sing.’ Only one of the Institute’s other linguists (Prasad Choudhary) reached fluency in this language that has been popularly mischaracterized as ‘Baby Orcalish.’ In reality, Wordsong is more like a spoken Morse Code. It assigns meanings to orca sounds usually employed by the orcas very differently. Anyone can ‘talk’ Morse Code, for instance saying, ‘Pop, pop, pop; sprong, sprong, sprong; pop, pop, pop,’ to denote the SOS message meaning ‘help.’ While conversing in Wordsong is much more difficult, the rules for doing so follow a similar principle. Alone of non-linguists, the orca trainer Gabrielle Jones did come to understand Wordsong when Arjuna spoke it to her, even if she was unable to speak it back to him. English remained her only language, and it was she who encouraged Arjuna to communicate to the human race in what has become a de facto, if very limited, world language.
Most of Arjuna’s story, then, he recorded in English through an extension and adaptation of the Wordsong’s syllabary to English. As English contains, by some counts, more than 15,000 syllables, not even Helen Agar came close to understanding Arjuna when he was speaking it. Instead, as we have continued to do, she relied on the Institute’s computers to translate Arjuna’s vocalizations into more or less standard English.
This last statement must be qualified. When Arjuna could not find the word he wanted in the language of Shakespeare, Blake, and Eliot, he turned to others, peppering his account with words from Spanish, Japanese, Diné, Arabic, and Basque – and even from Quenya, Fravashi, and one of the many dialects of Tlön. He particularly liked Chinese for its tones and !Xoon for its clicks. All these needed to be re-translated into English; and even his English needed extensive editing. While his locutions at times could be eloquent and even poetic, they contained many quirks, for instance incorporating his curious prejudice against using contractions. Because orcas in their own language, as far as we can understand, transcend time through obscuring the boundaries between past, present, and future, Arjuna liked to meld together different diction levels and styles from different periods of human history. Bizarrely, he rendered entire sections of his communication of the story of his life into somewhat turgid verse aping the Latinate cadences of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
All this needed smoothing into prose accessible to those Arjuna most wanted to address. [The Institute has published the original document in all its babel of magnificence for anyone capable of deciphering it in hopes of reaching a deeper understanding of Arjuna’s mind.] As well, we took the liberty of cutting many strained metaphors and converting sound imagery to sight imagery, which predominated throughout the original document in a ratio of 77 to 23. Human beings, as Arjuna realized very early, are creatures of sight, and he would not have minded our attempts to make his story as readable as possible.
We found it more difficult and too distracting in the published English document to add cites in the many places where Arjuna ‘borrowed’ the sensibilities or the words of human authors. [The entire footnoted document is available upon request.] Arjuna plagiarized without shame. He considered copying or paraphrasing another’s words as honoring dead authors. He had no sense of property, either intellectual or any other kind. The only thing orcas ‘own’ are the compositions of themselves, which they call rhapsodies – and in a way, not even those, since the songs of all orcas belong to their families in much the same way that their souls belong to the sea.
Similarly, we hesitated to cut or change the many repetitions, such as Arjuna’s overuse of the words ‘splendor’ and ‘song’ – and most particularly, ‘soul.’ Arjuna found it difficult to settle on a single English word that could encompass a fluid orca concept. Certainly, he meant by soul many of the same things we usually call by different names but regard as intrinsic to ourselves: personality, memory, mind. In no way, however, did he intend soul to connote some sort of immaterial or supernatural essence. He might just as easily have used the words song, water, or wave. For orcas, soul is a substance no different than the water that forms up on the surface of the sea from which the whales take their greater being. If the orcas could be said to have a goal that they seek to achieve, it would be the shaping of themselves into perfect waves that share the same water of life with all others. So vital is this imperative to bring forth the most beautiful manifestation of true nature that Arjuna speaks of the soul dozens of times. He liked to say that he was involved with the soul of humankind.
Of course, Orcas don’t mind repetition in their communications to each other. Or rather, the nature of the orcas’ ever-flowing language, as far as we understand it, makes boring repetitions nearly impossible, in much the same way it is impossible to step twice into the same surging stream. Each sound picture that an orca paints – even one so commonplace as that of a salmon – differs from all others in nuance, inflection, and the many colors of sound. The nearly infinite complexity of these sound pictures, like variations of themes in an open-ended cerebral symphony, engages an orca’s full attention at the same time that it discourages human examination. Sadly, human beings remain bound to essentially one-dimensional sequences of syllables spoken in time, and despite Arjuna’s assurances to the contrary, it is extremely unlikely that we will ever comprehend the three-dimensional language of the whales. We simply don’t have the mental machinery to do so.
More must be said about the human brain – its deficiencies and limitations – in comparison with the brains of orcas and other toothed whales. The mammalian brain has been built up by evolution in layers over millions of years. The foundational structure, the primordial paleocortex or reptile brain (called the rhinic), recalls the similar structures of the brains of fish, amphibians, and reptiles such as lizards and snakes. (Though it must be stressed that this does not imply that mammals evolved from reptiles, for instance, any more than humans did from chimpanzees. Both mammals and reptiles share a common ancestor in the Carboniferous period 300 million years ago.) The limbic lobe overlays this structure, as the supralimbic lobe does both. The outer lamination of brain matter is called the§ neocortex, whose growth over vast periods of time has enabled the leaps in intelligence of the mammals.
This ‘new brain’ – with its convolutions, fissures, and folds somewhat resembling those of a shelled walnut – is the pride of humanity. The brains of no other creature, it was thought for a long time, approach those of the human in differentiation, neural connectivity, sectional specialization, complexity, and power. Few of our kind have welcomed the discovery that the orcas’ (and other whales’) gyrification exceeds that of human beings. The surface area of a typical adult human’s neocortex measures about 2,275 cm
, while in dolphins, it is 3,745 cm
, and in orcas and sperm whales much greater. It is true that the orca neocortex is thinner than the human, but there is simply more of it folded up with greater complexity. To add insult to the injury of wounded human vanity is the fact that orca brains weigh in at three times the size of human brains – and the brains of sperm whales exceed in size our own by a factor of six.
For many decades, various scientists have thought to obscure this glaring and embarrassing reality. They have conjured up various ‘fudge factors’ in a desperate attempt to ensure than human beings will be number one in any ranking of species’ relative intelligence. Arjuna, in his account, with a simple thought experiment, demolishes the long-respected though ridiculous brain/body mass ratio as a measure of intelligence. (If this ratio proved true, the hummingbird would be the world’s smartest animal.) Realizing the limitations of the older metric, so-called scientists have invented a new one: the Encephalization Quotient (EQ), which measures the actual brain mass against the predicted brain mass for an animal of a given size. Of course, human beings with our large brains relative to our small bodies, again, come out on top. This, however, is not science; it is bosh. First, and most importantly, absent a method of universally measuring intelligence and correlating it with the EQ, it is just another voodoo statistic, sounding impressive but possessing no meaning. Second, while the EQ does an excellent job of fulfilling its purpose of distinguishing human intelligence from that of supposedly lesser beings, it fails in providing meaningful comparisons among other species. For example, the EQ of a capuchin monkey, about two, more than doubles that of supposedly much smarter gorillas and chimpanzees. Third, if some species are over-encephalized, mathematics necessitates that some species must be under-encephalized, therefore lacking the mental machinery to perform the basic cognitive functions necessary for survival. The usage of the EQ attempts to obscure the rather obvious fact that only a certain percentage of the brain is used to operate the gross functionings of the body, no matter how large (or small) that body might be. As it turns out, very little amounts of brain can account for rather amazing powers of muscle, bone, feather, and flesh. The peregrine falcon, the fastest bird in the sky, manages to perform its aerial acrobatics and compute its 250mph dives through the air to catch a darting dove by virtue of a brain the size of a peanut.
A better question, too little asked when considering what we think of as intelligence, would be to inquire how much of an animal’s brain can be devoted to the interconnectivity and association of ideas? In rats, this associative skill has been measured at approximately 10%. A cat tests out at 50% while a chimpanzee scores a 75%. Human beings, at 90%, thus need only 10% of our brains to operate our sensory and motive capabilities. What about the whales? The average associative skill measure estimated for cetaceans, at 96%, much exceeds our own, while orcas have available approximately 97.5% of their very large brains for a very wide range of cognitive functions.
More recently, Suzana Herculano-Houzel has argued in favor of another way to estimate intelligence, hitherto impossible to measure correctly. Citing the work of Williams and Herrup, she points out the reasonableness of assuming that the computational capacity of the brain should correlate with the absolute number of neurons in that brain, specifically in the neocortex, the supposed seat of animals’ higher cognitive abilities. How, though, to actually count the number of neurons in a brain?
In a brilliant piece of science, Herculano-Houzel succeeded in using detergent to dissolve the brains of various species to make a ‘brain soup’ in which neurons’ nuclei could be separated out and counted. The computations that resulted cleared up several mysteries. It turned out, for instance, that the elephant, with a brain more than three times as massive as that of the human being, does have more neurons; about 257 billion neurons compared to a human’s 86 billion. However, 98% of those neurons are to be found in the cerebellum; the elephant’s cerebrum contains a paltry 5.6 billion neurons compared to the 16 billion in the human cerebral cortex. That seems to explain our experience that human beings are a good deal smarter than the admittedly still-smart elephant. As Herculano-Houzel likes to say, ‘Not all brains are made the same.’ As she puts it, brains scale differently in different species and in different orders. The primate brain, and particularly the human brain, has evolved to pack more neurons more efficiently into a smaller volume, thus giving humans an advantage in intelligence over other species.
What, then, of the whales? Cetaceans share a rather close phylogenetic relationship with Artiodactyls such as pigs, deer, and giraffes. Based upon the scaling for those species, Herculano-Houzel predicted that the count of neurons in the much larger cerebral cortexes of several kinds of cetaceans would actually come out to a significantly lower number than that of humans. The largest cetacean cortex, that of the sperm whale, would contain fewer than 10 billion neurons, still much less than that of a human. It seemed that human beings’ ranking of number one would remain unchallenged.
There the matter stood until a whale hunt happened to deliver the brains of ten long-finned pilot whales into researchers’ hands. Using the techniques of optical dissector stereology, it was discovered that the neurons in the pilot whale neocortex numbered 37.2 billion – more than twice the human’s 16 billion. Heidi S. Mortensen, Bente Pakkenberg, and five others described the quantitative relationships in the delphinid neocortex in a paper published in Frontiers of Neuroanatomy. Their discovery should rank among the greatest in importance in the history of science. Instead, this very great breakthrough remains largely unknown. The cortical neurons of the orca have yet to be counted, but it would not be surprising if they topped out at over 75 billion.
As if all this weren’t enough to dethrone Man as the King of Creation, one more humbling discovery should be considered. In addition to the previously mentioned three primary structures of the mammalian brain – the rhinic, the limbic, and the supralimbic – cetaceans have evolved a fourth cortical lobe absent in any land mammal, human beings included. Although we do not yet know the precise functioning of this paralimbic lobe, it has been speculated that it integrates and enhances perceptions of sound, sight, taste, and touch. This would make sense of the orcas’ synesthetic powers, what Arjuna calls ‘the fiery splendor of sound and the music of light.’ It may also have something to do with orientation in space and time and the orcas’ perception that they can journey at will through the one as readily as the other.
Given the limitations of science and our ignorance of what really goes on inside the minds of whales, we believe that it would be as silly to try to calculate the cetaceans’ intelligence as it would be to count the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. Were one to attempt to do so, however, considering the enormous size of the cetacean brain, considering its differentiation, sectional specialization, neural connectivity, and complexity (to say nothing of various orca feats such as the truly astounding acquisition of numerous languages), it would be enticing to come up with a rather large number. If the average human IQ can be measured at 100, with Economics Nobel Prize winners at 153 and geniuses on the order of an Einstein or a Goethe perhaps coming out at around 200, then an orca would score five times that while a sperm whale topped out at over 2,000.
What do orcas do with such massive intelligence? We have already mentioned their astonishing ability to learn languages (a sponge absorbing water is not an inaccurate metaphor), and Arjuna has much to say about the musical/philosophical compositions that the orcas call rhapsodies. All the whales have powers of the mind of which we have only the dimmest of intimations. How else can the seeming Miracle of the Solstice be explained? The speed of sound in water at 20 degrees Celsius is 1,482 meters per second – far too slow to account for what otherwise can be explained only by positing some sort of instantaneous planetary communication.
That we must accept the existence of certain so far inexplicable abilities and phenomena in the lives of whales does not imply that we should not question Arjuna’s interpretation of some of them. What are we to make of the impossible creatures that he calls the Seveners? Certainly many strange species dwell as yet undiscovered in the vast reaches of the oceans. In many ways, we know much more about planets millions of miles from earth than we do the perpetually dark deeps of our own oceans. Could a complex animal assemble itself out of tiny multi-cellular organisms in a matter of minutes? Could such a creature possess the sort of intelligence that Arjuna accords it?
To the first question, we have a hint of an answer in the pyrosomes: colonies of thousands of zooids a few millimeters in size that associate with each other in huge, bioluminescent tubes up to twenty meters long and two meters in diameter – capacious enough to fit a grown human being inside. To the second question, we must incline toward a resounding ‘no’ because pyrosomes and any other conceivably similar species are not complex and lack anything resembling a brain.
And yet. And yet. Compendiums of findings about the Plantae kingdom (see Tompkins’s and Bird’s The Secret Life of Plants and Mancuso’s and Viola’s Brilliant Green) suggest that trees, flowers, ferns, mosses, and the like can be said to possess a real intelligence completely absent in a brain. And then there is the recent discovery of bacteria that might need to be classified as an entirely new and seventh kingdom of life. It seems that the species of Geobacter metallireducens and Shewanella, found in certain estuaries and other aquatic environments, have evolved to strip and deposit electrons from metals and various minerals, thereby essentially eating and breathing electricity. As well, they have the ability to interconnect with each other in ‘cables’ of thousands of individual cells. It is thought that this association is facilitated by ‘nanowires’ that are an extension of the cell membrane and which can conduct electricity in a biological circuit.
Might Arjuna’s Seveners be some sort of very intelligent colonial organism assembled from bacteria similar to Geobacter metallireducens and Shewanella? We have no evidence of that, and we are skeptical that such a creature either does or could exist. It seems much more likely that Arjuna encountered (and ate) some sort of organism whose tissues produce alkaloids similar to those found in Psilocybe cubensis or Lophophora willamsii. Very intense hallucinations would account for Arjuna’s insistence that what he experienced in the South Pacific was as real as his birth or any other event of his remarkable life.
Before closing this introduction to that life, we would like to say something about two terms that Arjuna uses at various times throughout his account. The first is the name he often used to describe human beings: the idiot gods. He thought long and deep before deciding on this sobriquet. At times, he thought it much more apt to call our species the mad gods or the insane gods. However, madness can too easily be associated with anger, and although Arjuna certainly saw human beings as afflicted with wrath, as a rabid dog is lyssavirus, he did not see this as humanity’s greatest sin. Neither did he think of our kind as purely insane. Rather, he perceived in our derangement of sense and soul a willful debilitation, as if we human beings are an entire race of sleepwalkers moving through a nightmare from which we refuse to awaken. We are, he once said, like lost children wandering through a dark landscape without markers or boundaries. He had great compassion for (and dread of) our innocence. Given the horrors that Arjuna recounts, that seems a strange word to apply to the human kind, but it motivates his choice to call us idiots. It is the holy fool kind of innocence of Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot as well as the deadly innocence of the young man Lone in Sturgeon’s The Fabulous Idiot, incorporated into the great work known as More Than Human. Of all humanity’s failings that Arjuna enumerates in such painstaking and painful detail, he counts as the very worst our refusal to embrace our best possibilities and so to live as gods.
The second term we would like to define is quenge, the most quintessential part of a whale’s true nature. Arjuna himself coined the word to represent a nearly ineffable cetacean sensibility and prowess. We would like to explain this strange word, though of course it remains inexplicable. One might as well try to describe a magnificent city on a hill, bright with sunlit cathedrals and great spires, to a band of cave-dwellers. The best course for anyone wishing to know more is to make one’s way into Arjuna’s story. But please do so with an open mind, and even more, with an open heart. Readers who reach the end without having any idea of what it is to quenge will have wasted their time – and Arjuna’s.
1 (#u7a8e0c5e-f41d-5e9f-8d52-aa8bcf427d3d)
The humans call me Arjuna, after the hero who spoke with the God of Truth, though they cannot say my real name any more than they can say why the starlit sea sings with such a hush, lovely fire or why they themselves are alive.
When I was a young whale unacquainted with human might and madness, I swam with my family through the icy waters near the top of the world – the world they call Earth and we call Ocean. Along the cold currents we hunted char and salmon and other fishes that schooled in never-ending silvery streams; along our fiery blood we sought ecstasies of creation even as we listened for the great and singular Song that sounds within all things. Sometimes, we gave voice to the deep, unutterable mysteries bound up in the chords of this song; more often we told tales of the glories of our Old Ones or the adventures of the newborn babies just beginning to speak. We held midnight feasts beneath the pink and emerald sprays of light raining down from the Aurora Borealis. During the long, long days of summer, we dove beneath the icebergs and we mated and played and loved and dreamed.
We quenged. Guided by our true nature, which always knows the intention of life and the way home, we followed the ocean’s song wherever it called us, listening always for its source. Great journeys we made! One fine day might find us visiting with the Old Ones in the turquoise swells of the Caribbean ten thousand years ago while on the next day we might wend our way along the arc of the Aurora and swim through ages yet to be up to the stars. We delved the deeps of oceans on worlds without number, daring each other to move ever further outward and inward beyond the limits of space and time. Down through unknown seas we plunged into the melodies of songs sung again and again since the world’s beginning – and into the souls of the stories that their singers poured forth with so much delight. Who could escape from the account of how Mother Maia fought off a hundred great white sharks in order to protect her children? Who could forget the epic of Aldebaran the Great’s circumnavigation of the globe in search of the perfect color of crimsong with which to paint his great tone poem? Who could resist the urge to become both bard and hero of one’s own story? Why else are we here? Are not our lives the very songs that sing the universe into creation?
Many of our best adventures came through dreams or revelations or even the babblings of babes still drinking milk; the worst came out of places so dark and disturbing that few wished ever to go there. It seemed that no whale could ever conceive them. Once, while we were making our way across the nearly infinite seas of Agathange east of earth, I nearly choked on reddened waters and caught a glimpse of a blue god and masses of belligerents slaughtering each other. Another time, on Tiralee, I learned of an eternal quest to find a golden conch shell said to hold entire constellations and oceans inside. I trembled at the vivacity of such visions, for I experienced them simultaneously as impossible and too real, as familiar and utterly strange.
How terrified I was at first of these wild wanderings! How confused, how desperate, how consumed! My mother, though, sleek and black and white and beautiful, swam always beside me with powerful, rhythmic strokes that told of the faith of her great, bottomless heart. She reassured me with murmurs of maternal encouragements as well as with clear, cool logic: was not water, she asked me, the unitive substance which ripples with the shimmering interconnectedness of all things? Was not I, myself, made of water, as was she and my uncles and my ancestors? How could I ever be separate from the sea which had formed me or fail to find my way home? Could I not hear, always, within my own heart the ringing of life’s great song?
Yes, I told her, emboldened by a growing fearlessness, yes, yes I could! Her love, onstreaming like the strongest of currents, filled me with joy. And so I quenged through the world and through the eternal musics which gave it form, moving always and ever deeper and deeper. The water flowed through my skin, and I flowed through the water, and the ocean and I were as one.
I do not remember my conception. Humans die in worry of what will become of them after the worms have eaten their bodies and they are gone; we whales live in wonder of what we were before we came to be. What we were is what we are and always will be: we are salt and seaweed, haddock and diatom and grains of sand glimmering among the fronds of red and purple coral. The ocean forms us out of itself, and each drop of water – each molecule – reverberates with an indestructible consciousness. As we quicken and grow within our mothers’ wombs, we gradually come into full consciousness of our indestructible selves and of the way we are both a tiny part and the entirety of the universe. And then one day, we realize that we are awake and aware – aware that there never could have been a time in which we did not exist.
This happened to me. After some months of life, I awakened to the thunder of my mother’s heart beating out a reassuring rhythm even as it beat into my veins the blood that we both shared. A human might think that I therefore woke up in a drumlike darkness, but it was not so. Everywhere – blazing through the salty amniotic waters and glimmering through my own tiny heart – there was light. Our Old Ones call this phenomenon the brilliance of sound. Do not light and sound emanate from the same essential source? Are they not both experienced within the tissues of our minds as reflections of the forms of the manifold world? Are there not many ways to see? Yes, yes, the fiery splendor of sound and the music of light! To see the world in all its astonishing perfection through waves and echoes of pure vivid sonance – yes, yes, yes!
From nearly the beginning, my mother spoke to me. Mostly, she duplicated the clicks by which she made out the icebergs and shoals, sharks and salmon: all the things of the ocean that a whale needed to perceive. In this way, she made sound pictures for me to see. Long before my birth, I knew the turnings and twisting of the coastlines of the world’s northernmost continents; I knew the rasp of ice and the raucousness of rock and the much softer sounds of snow. The dense, gelid winter sea seemed tinted with hues of tanglow and bluetone, while in the summer the waters came alive with the peals of a color I call glorre.
Sometimes, my mother spoke to me in simple baby speech, forming the basic utterances upon which more mature language would build. She told me simple stories and explained the intricacies of life outside the womb in a way that I could understand. I could not, of course, speak back for I had no air within my lungs and so could not make a single sound within my flute. I listened, though, as my mother told me of the cold of the water outside her that I could not feel and of the stars’ luster that I could not see. I learned the names of my family whom I would soon meet: my aunts Chara and Mira, my uncles Dheneb and Alnitak, my sister Turais and my cousins – and my grandmother, head of our family, whom a young whale such as I would never think to address by name.
When my mind ached with too much knowledge and I grew tired, my mother sang me to sleep with lullabies. When I awakened from dark dreams with a rumbling dread that I would be unable to face life’s difficulties, my mother told me the one thing that every whale must know, something more important than even the Song of Life and the ocean itself: that I had been conceived in love and my mother’s love would always fill my heart – and that no matter how far I swam or how much life hurt me, I would never be alone.
On the day of my birth, my mother instructed me not to breathe until Chara and Mira swam under me and buoyed me up to the surface. I came quickly, tail first, propelled out of my mother’s warm body through a cloud of blood and fear. The shock of the icy water pierced straight through me with a thrilling pain. I nearly gasped in anguish, and so I nearly breathed water and drowned. Mira and Chara, though, as promised pressed their heads beneath my belly and pushed me upward. Light blinded me: not the scintillation of roaring winds but rather the incandescence of the sun impossible to behold. It burned my eyes even as it warmed me in tingles that danced along my skin. The water broke and gave way to the thinness of the atmosphere. In astonishment, I drew my first breath. With my lungs thus filled with air, through my tender, untried flute, I spoke my first baby words in a torrent of squeaks and chirps that I could not contain. What did I say? What should a newborn whale say to the being who had carried and nourished him for so long? Thank you, Mother, for my life and for your love – it is good to be alive.
And so I tasted the sea and drank in the wonder of the world. Everything seemed fascinating and beautiful: the blueness of the sea ice and the shining red bellies of the char that my family hunted; the jewel-like diatoms and the starfish and the joyous songs of the humpbacks that sounded from out of deeps. All was new to me, and all was a marvel and a delight. I wanted to go on swimming through this paradise forever.
How deliciously the days passed as the ocean turned beneath the sun and through the seasons! With my mother ever near, I fattened first on her milk and then on the fish that she taught me to catch for myself. My mind grew nearly as quickly as my body. So much I needed to learn! The sea’s currents had to be studied and the migrations of the salmon memorized. My uncle Alnitak, greatest of our clan’s astronomers, taught me celestial navigation. From Mira I gained the first glimmerings of musical theory and practice, while my older sister Turais shared with me her love of poetics. My mother impressed upon me the vital necessity of the Golden Rule, less through words and songs than through her compassion and her generosity of spirit. As well, she guided me through the maelstrom of the many Egregious Fallacies of Thought and the related Fundamental Philosophical Errors. It took entire years and many pains for her to nurture within me a zest for the arts of being: plexure, zanshin, and shih. Once or twice, in the most tentative and fleeting of ways, I managed to speak of the nature of art itself with the Old Ones.
It was my grandmother, however, who held the greatest responsibility for teaching me about the Song of Life. I must, she told me, quenge deep within myself, down through the dazzling darkness into spaces that can contain the entire universe as a blue whale’s mouth contains a drop of water. As I grew stronger and swifter, I must make of myself a song of glory that found resonance with the song of the sea – and thus become a part of it. At least for a few magical moments, I must quenge with the gods. Was this not the calling of any adult orca? And so I must learn to sing with as great a prowess as I applied to swimming and hunting; only then would my grandmother and my other elders deem me to be a full adult. And only then would I be allowed to mate and make children of my own.
Of what, though, was I to sing? Over many turnings of light and dark, sunshine and snow, I considered the necessities of this composition. My rhapsody, as we call the songs of ourselves, must attain to the uniqueness and perfection of a single snowflake while simultaneously ringing with all the memories of the ocean out of which the snowflake had formed. It must tell of the past of the whole world and of the destiny of the teller.
What, I wondered, would be my destiny? In what way was I unique? Although I could not say, I gained a whisper of an answer to these questions from a prophecy that my grandmother made at my birth: that either I would die young or I would add something new to the Song, something marvelous and strange that had never been heard in all the long ages of our people.
From out of the humans’ oldest poem, these words echo through humanity’s much shorter ages – words that curiously accord with my grandmother’s instructions to me:
You are what your deep, driving desire is
As your desire is, so is your will;
As your will is, so is your deed;
As your deed is, so is your destiny.
Such deeds I wanted to do! – but what deeds? I did not know. Impossible notions came to me. I would journey to the yearly gatherings of the sperm whales, and I would coax these deep gods to reveal all their wisdom. I would crack apart icebergs with a shout from my lungs; I would put the Aurora’s fire into the mouths of the great, mute sharks, and I would teach the starfish to sing.
First, however, I had to apprehend my deepest desire. For many years, I applied myself to this task. I meditated, and I sang, and I grew ever vaster and more powerful, fed in my body by the sea’s fishes and in my soul through my family’s heartenings. I attained my full form, larger even than that of mighty Alnitak. My blood thundered with wild lightnings, and my testes burned with seed, and I dreamed of finding a lovely, young she-orca with whom to mate.
In this season of my discontent, in a time of hunger when the fish were few, there occurred three portents that changed my life. The first of these the humans would regard as a cliché – as wearisome as the slaughters that make up most of their histories. To me, however, the news that my cousin Haedi brought from out of vernal mists one day shocked me with its signal import. She swam up to my grandmother and told of a white bear standing on an ice floe far from the pack ice from which this tiny, floating island had splintered. Our whole family moved off south in order to witness this unheard-of misfortune. Turais’s newborn, little Porrima, remarked that she had never seen a bear.
Long before our eyes could make out this king of land animals, we sighted him with our sonar. How hopeless the situation of this great beast seemed! He made a pitiful figure, a smear of fur atop a bit of ice, forlorn and alone against the churning, gray swells of the sea.
My uncle Alnitak, long and powerful, always so precise with distances, seemed to point his notched dorsal fin at the bear as he said, ‘He could swim back to the ice if he dared – if he had the strength, it is barely possible that he might make it.’
We swam a little closer, our sides nearly touching each other’s, at one in our breath and in our thoughts. Then we dove in a coordinated flow of black and white beneath the surface, closer to the bear and his icy island. My mother zanged the bear with her sonar. This sense did not work very well on objects outside the water, but the clicks my mother made were powerful enough to pierce the bear’s fur, skin, and muscles and to reflect back through the water as images that we all shared.
‘Very well, then,’ my aunt Mira said, in her sad, plaintive voice. ‘The bear has starved and is much too weak to swim so many miles back to the ice.’
What else was there to say? Either the bear would die from the belly-gnawing ache of hunger or he would venture into the water and drown – or find his end in the feeding frenzy of a shark or between the jaws of one of the Others. At this, my grandmother turned back towards our usual fishing lanes. As she often said, each of us has a single destiny.
That might have been the end of the matter had I not chanced to recall a story told to me by Dheneb, who had once spoken with one of the Others. Apparently, when stalking seals, the ice bears were clever enough to cover their black noses with their white paws so that the seals did not detect them creeping forward across the snow fields. Why, I wondered, must such a cunning creature perish so ignominiously just because the ice had mysteriously melted around him?
I determined that he should not die this way. An impulse sounded from within me and swelled like a bubble rising up through the water. I said, ‘Why don’t we push the bear’s island back to the pack ice?’
For a few moments no one spoke. Then Chara flicked her powerful flukes and said to me, ‘What a strange idea! You have always had such strange schemes and dreams!’
‘Thank you,’ I replied. ‘You are complimenting me aren’t you?’
‘Can you not hear in my voice the overtones of my appreciation for your innovatedness of thought?’
‘Sometimes I can, Aunt.’
‘If you listened hard enough at the interstices of my words, you would never doubt how much I value the freshness of your spirit.’
‘Thank you,’ I said again.
‘I value it, as we all do, almost as much as I cherish your compassion – compassion for a bear!’
I zanged the bear with my sonar, and I heard the quickened heart beats that betrayed his fear. Did he sense my family’s holding a conference beneath the waters near his island? What, I wondered, could the bear be thinking?
‘How often,’ I said to Chara, ‘has Grandmother averred that we must have compassion for all things?’
‘And we do! We do!’ she called out. ‘We sing to the diatoms and have family-feeling for the broken shells of the mollusks – even for the bubbles of oxygen in the water that long in their innermost part to be incorporated once again into an inspired young whale such as you who exalts the beauty of compassion.’
Alnitak, less loquacious than Chara, beat his flukes through the sun-dappled water and said simply, ‘I would relish the novelty and satisfaction of saving this bear, but it is too far for us to swim right now. Are we not, ourselves, weak with hunger?’
This was true. Days and days had it been since any of us had eaten! Where had the fish gone? No one could say. We all knew, however, that huge, lovely Grandmother had grown much too thin and my sister Turais had nearly lost her milk and could barely feed the insatiable little Porrima. And Mira, my melancholy aunt, worried about her child Kajam. If our luck did not improve, very soon Kajam would begin to starve along with the rest of us and would likely come down with one of the fevers that had carried off Mira’s first born to the other side of the sea. Her second born had died of a peculiar stomach obstruction, while her third had been born with a deformed tongue and jaw, which had made it impossible for the child to eat. Poor Mira now invested her hope for the future in the young and frail Kajam.
‘All right,’ I finally said, out of frustration, ‘then I will push the bear myself to the pack ice. Perhaps I will encounter fish along the way and return to lead you to them.’
Alarmed at the earnestness in my voice, my mother Rana swam up to me. Her streamlined form, nearly perfect in proportion, flowed through the water along with her concerned words: ‘There is much bravura in what you propose, but also the folly of misplaced pride. This cannot be the great deed you wish to do.’
Chara’s second daughter Talitha, who was only three years old and didn’t know any better, gave voice to one of the usually unvoiced principles by which we live: ‘But you cannot leave your family, cousin Arjuna!’
She loved me a great deal, tiny Talitha did. No words could I find for her. I did not really want to leave her.
We concluded our conference with a decision that I should remain with everyone else. Again my grandmother turned to abandon the bear to the tender mercies of the sea.
‘Wait!’ I cried out. A wild, wild idea rose out of the unknown part of me with all the shock of a tidal wave. ‘Why don’t we eat the bear?’
For a whale, the sea can never be completely quiet, yet I swear that for a moment all sound died into a vast silence. I might as well have suggested eating Grandmother.
Talitha again spoke of the obvious, something my elders knew that I knew very well: ‘But we cannot eat a bear! That would break the First Covenant!’
She went on to recount one of the most important lessons that she had learned: how long ago the orcas had split into two kindreds, one which ate only fish while the other hunted seals and bears and almost any animal made of warm blood and red meat. These Others, who looked much the same as any orca of my clan, almost never mingled with us. We had promised to leave each other alone and never to interfere with the different ways by which we made our livings. Even so, we knew each other’s stories and songs. If we killed the bear, the sea itself would sing of our desperate act, and the Others would eventually learn of how we had broken our covenant with them.
My grandmother moved closer to me through the cold water. Her eyes, as blue and liquid as the ocean, caught me up in her fondness for me and swept me into deeper currents of cobalt, indigo, and ultramarine, and the secret blue-inside-blue that flows within the heart of all things. She asked, ‘Do you remember what I said about you on the day you were born?’
‘You said many things, Grandmother.’
‘Yes, I did and these words I would like you to remember: How noble you are, in both form and faculty, Arjuna, how like an angel in action, and in apprehension like a god! The beauty of the world you are and all of my delight.’
I did remember her saying that. She told all her grandchildren the same thing.
‘How noble would it be,’ she now asked me, ‘for us to break our promise to the Others?’
‘But we are so hungry! They would not mind if we took a single bear.’
‘The Covenant is the Covenant,’ she told me, ‘whether or not you think the Others would mind.’
‘But we made it so long ago, in a different age. The world is changing.’
‘The world is always the world, just as our word is always our word.’
‘Can we never break our word, even as the ice breaks into nothingness while the world grows warmer?’
‘The ice has broken before,’ my grandmother reminded me.
For a while, she sang to me and our family of our great memories of the past: of ages of ice and times of the sun’s heat when the world had been cooler or warmer.
‘Yes, but something is different this time,’ I replied. ‘The world has warmed much too quickly.’
Although she could not deny this, she said, ‘The world has its own ways.’
‘Yes, and those ways are changing.’
Alnitak came closer and so did my mother, and through the turbid, gray waters we debated how the northern ice sheet could have possibly melted so much in the span of a few generations. As I was still a young, not-quite-adult whale, I should have deferred to my elders. I should have felt shame at my questioning of them. Who was I to think that I might have discerned something they had not? And yet I did, and I sensed something wrong in my family’s understanding. In this, I experienced a secret pride in my insight and in my otherness from people who had seemed so like myself in sensibility and so close to my heart.
‘It is the humans,’ I said. ‘The humans are warming the world with the heat we have felt emanating from their boats.’
‘That cannot be enough heat to melt the ice,’ Alnitak said.
‘Only a few generations ago,’ I retorted, ‘only a few humans dared the ocean in cockle shells that we could have splintered with one snap of our jaws. Now their great metal ships are everywhere.’
‘To suppose that therefore the humans can be blamed for the ocean’s warming,’ my grandmother said, ‘is a wild leap in logic.’
‘But they are to blame! I know they are!’
‘How can you be sure?’ And then, as if I was still a babe drinking milk, she chided me for making a basic philosophical error: ‘A correlation does not prove a causation.’
And chided I was. To hide my embarrassment (and my defiance), I took refuge in a little play: ‘Thank you for the lesson, Grandmother. I was just giving you the chance to exercise your love of pedagogy.’
‘Of course you were, my dear. And I do love it so! I have no words to tell you how much I look forward to the day when it is you who teaches me.’
‘I am sure that you could think of a few words, Grandmother.’
‘Well, perhaps a few.’
‘I await your wisdom.’
‘I can hear that you do,’ she said. ‘Then listen to me: it is a heavy responsibility being the wisest of the family – perhaps you could relieve me of it.’
‘No, I cannot,’ I said sincerely. ‘You know I cannot.’
‘Then will you let us leave this bear to his fate?’
All my life, my grandmother had warned me that my innate tenacity could harden into pertinacity if I allowed this. Did anyone know me as did my grandmother?
‘We are hungry,’ I said simply.
‘We have been hungry before.’
‘Never like this. Where have the fish gone? Not even the ocean can tell us.’
‘We will swim to a place where there are many fish.’
‘We would swim more surely with this bear’s life to strengthen us.’
‘Yes, and with our bellies full of bear meat, what shall we say to the Others?’
‘Why must we say anything at all?’
‘In saying nothing, we would say everything. How can a whale speak other than the truth?’
‘But what is true, grandmother?’
‘The Covenant is true – a true expression of our desire to live in harmony with the Others.’
‘But have you not taught me that the only absolute truth is that there is no absolute truth?’
Indeed she had. My grandmother relished self-referential statements and the paradoxes they engendered as an invitation for one’s consciousness to reflect back and forth on itself into a bright infinity that illuminated the deepest of depths.
‘Yes, I did teach you that,’ she said. ‘You were too young, however, for me to tell you that if there is no absolute truth, then we cannot know with certainty that there is no absolute truth.’
My grandmother played a deeper game than I – a game that could go on forever if I let it.
‘Then do you believe there is an absolute truth?’
‘You are perceptive, Arjuna.’
‘What is this truth then? Is it just life, itself?’
‘You really do not know?’
‘But what could be truer than life?’
In answer, my grandmother sang to me in a thunderous silence that I could not quite comprehend. I needed to answer her, but what should I say? Only words that would gnaw at her and lay her heart bare.
‘Look at Kajam,’ I called out. I swam over to him and nudged the child with my head. ‘He is so hungry!’
Kajam, small for his four years and thin with deprivation, protested this: ‘I am not too hungry to swim night and day as far as we must. Let us surface and I will show you.’
It had been a while since any of my family had drawn breath. Because the bear could do nothing about his plight, we had no need to conceal our conference beneath the water or to keep silence. And so almost as one, we breached and blew out stale air in loud, steamy clouds, and we drew in fresh breaths. To prove his strength, Kajam dove down and swam up through the water at speed; he breached and with a powerful beat of his tail, drove himself up into the air in a perfectly calculated arc that carried him over my back so that he plunged headfirst into the sea in a great splash. Everyone celebrated this feat. Almost immediately, however, Kajam had to blow air again. He gulped at it in a desperate need that he could not hide.
‘Listen to his heartbeats!’ I said to grandmother. ‘How long will it be before his blood begins burning with a fever?’
My grandmother listened, and so did my mother, along with Alnitak, Dheneb, and Chara. The third generation of our family listened, too: my sisters Turais and Nashira, my little brother Caph, and my cousins Naos, Haedi, and Talitha. Even Turais’s children, Alnath and Porrima, concentrated on the strained pulses sounding within the center of Kajam’s body. And of course Mira listened the most intently of all.
‘Compassion,’ my grandmother said to me, ‘impelled you to want to save this bear, and now you wish to eat him?’
‘Would that not be the easiest of the bear’s possible deaths?’
‘And compassion you have for Kajam and the rest of our family. We all know this about you, Arjuna.’
In silence, I tried to sense what my grandmother was thinking.
‘Now listen to my heart,’ she told me. ‘You persist in trying to persuade me in the same way that the wind whips up water. Am I so weak that you think mere words will move me?’
‘Not mere words, Grandmother. I know how you love Kajam. It is your own heart that will move you.’
‘But you believe that mine needs a nudge from yours?’
‘Not really. I think you wish that I would give voice to what you really want to do and so make it easier for you to do it.’
‘How kind of you to ease me into an agonizing dilemma! You can be cruel in your compassion, my beautiful, beloved grandson.’
In her wry laughter that followed, I detected a note of pride in the manner that I had tried to clear the way toward a decision that we both knew she had secretly wished (and perhaps resolved) to make all along. What was the First Covenant against the much greater pledge of life that Grandmother had made to her family? She would battle all the monsters of the deep in order to protect one of her babies.
We held a quick conference and made our plans. Alnitak pushed himself up out of the water, spy-hopping in order to get a better look at the bear. Dheneb did, too, and so did I. Did the bear recognize our kind and conclude that he was as safe sharing the sea with us as if we were guppies? Or might he mistake us for the Others? Who could say what a bear might know?
We had watched the Others stalking seals and other sea mammals, and so we knew many of the Others’ hunting techniques. We had also learned their stories, which provided many images to guide us. Of course, transforming an image in the mind into a coordinated motion of the body can take much practice. Did we have days and seasons and years to perfect a prowess of hunting dangerous mammals that our kind had never needed? No, we did not. Still, I argued, taking this bear should not prove too difficult.
Our whole family swam up to the bear and surrounded his ice floe. Respecting the ancient forms, I came up out of the water and asked the bear if he was ready to die. Bears cannot, of course, speak as we do, but this brave bear answered me with a glint of his eyes and a weak roar of acceptance: ‘Yes, I am ready.’
We all breathed deeply and dove. Alnitak, Dheneb, and my mother, chirping away in order to coordinate their movements, rose straight up through the water toward the far side of the ice floe. They needed only a single attack to push the floe’s edge up high into the air. The bear’s instincts took hold of him, and he scrambled to keep his purchase, digging his claws into the ice. Inexorably, though, he slid down the sun-slicked ice and toppled into the sea.
Chara and I were waiting for him there. He started swimming in a last desperation. For a legged animal, bears are good swimmers, much better than humans, but no creature of land or sea can outswim an orca. While Chara distracted the bear, I closed in through the gray waters’ churn and froth. I came in close enough to taste the bear’s wrath, and I tried to avoid a lucky score of his slashing teeth. Concentrated as I was on the bear’s jaws, which were not so different than my own, I did not see the bear swipe his paw at me until it was too late. Even through the water, the bear struck my head with a power that stunned me. The claws caught me over my eye and ripped into my skin. Blood boiled out into the water. Then Chara came at the bear from above. She fastened her jaws around his neck, pushing him down deeper into the water. I recovered enough to grasp the bear’s hindquarters. Then we held him fast in the cold clutch of the sea until he could keep his breath no longer, and he sucked in water and drowned.
After that, the rest of my family joined us. We tore the bear apart and divided him as fairly as we could. None of us had ever consumed a mammal, but the memory had been passed down to us: the Others described bear meat as tasting rich, red, tangy, and delicious. So it did. In the end, we ate the bear down to his white, furry paws and his black nose.
During the time that followed, the gash that the bear had torn into me healed into an unusual scar. Mira observed that it resembled the jags of a lightning bolt. Although I could not behold this mark directly, Mira made a sound picture of it for me. How ugly it looked, how disfiguring, how strange! The hurt of my heart for the bear (and for my grandmother) never really healed. Why had we needed to kill such an intelligent, noble animal? Had the bear felt betrayed by me, who had really wanted to help him? In ways that I did not understand I sensed that the bear’s death had changed me. I spent long hours swimming through the late spring waves, dotted with bits of turquoise ice. A new note had sounded within the long, dark roar of the sea. I became aware of it as one might recognize a background sound through the deepest organs of hearing yet remain unaware of being aware. It took many days for this note to grow louder. At first, I could hear only a part of it clearly, but that part worked to poison my thoughts and darken my dreams:
Something was wrong with the world! Something was terribly wrong!
Intimations of doom oppressed me. I tried to escape my dread through quenging. The world, however, would not allow me this simple solace for very long; it kept on whispering to me no matter where I tried to go.
On a day of ceaseless motion through the sempiternal sea, there occurred the second of the three portents. I was quenging with a delightful degree of immersion, working on a new tone poem that was to be part of the rhapsody by which I would establish my adulthood. The chords of the penultimate motif exemplifying Alsciaukat the Great’s philosophy of being had carried me through the many waters of the world into the mysterious Silent Sea, lined with coral in bright colors of yellow, magenta, and glorre. It was a place of perfect stillness, perfect peace. The aurora poured down from the heavens, feeding the ocean with a lovely fire so that each drop of water sang with the world’s splendor. The fire found me, consumed me with a delicious coolness, and swept me deep into the ocean’s song.
Then the blaze grew brighter like the morning sun heating up. A bolt of lightning flashed out and struck me above the eye, and burned into me with a hideous pain. The burning would not stop; it seared my soul. I shouted to make it go away, and I became aware of Alnitak and Mira and my mother shouting, too. Alnitak’s great voice sounded out the loudest: ‘The water is burning! The water is burning! The ocean is on fire!’
Upon this alarm, I opened both my eyes, and swam up with the rest of my family to join Alnitak, Mira, and my mother at the surface. I looked out toward the southern horizon. Black clouds, thick as a squid’s ink, blighted the blue sky. They billowed up from the red and orange flames that leaped along the roiling waters. Alnitak had told true: the ocean really was on fire.
Only once before, when lightning had ignited a tree on a distant rocky island, had I ever seen flame; never, though, had I beheld such terrible, ugly clouds as the monsters of smoke that this sea of flames engendered. Alnitak, bravest of our band, volunteered to swim out toward them to investigate.
We waited a long time for him to return, praying all the while that he would return. When he finally did, an evil substance clung like a squid’s suckers to his skin. Black as decayed flesh it was and slippery as fish fat, yet sticky, too. It tasted unnatural, hateful, foul.
‘The water is covered with it,’ Alnitak announced. ‘It is that which burns.’
I said nothing as to the source of this abomination. I did not need to, for my little brother Caph said it for me: ‘The humans have done this thing.’
And Chara’s daughter Haedi agreed, ‘They have befouled the ocean!’
‘If they could do that,’ Mira said, ‘they could destroy the world.’
Although my grandmother did not dispute this, she addressed Mira and the rest of the family, saying, ‘The Old Ones tell of a thunder mountain that once destroyed an island in the southern sea and set fire to the earth. The cause of this phenomenon of the sea that burns might be something like that.’
No one, however, believed this. No mountains had thundered, and the substance stuck to Alnitak’s skin tasted disturbingly similar to the excretions of the humans’ boats.
So, I thought, this explained the failure of the fish to teem and the melting of the ice caps. It had been the humans after all – it must be the humans! But why? Why? Why?
No answer did the ocean give me. But as I floated on its quiet waters watching the black clouds dirty the air, I knew that something truly was wrong with the world.
‘This is a bad place,’ my grandmother said. ‘Let us swim away from here to our old fishing lanes and hope that the salmon have returned.’
And so we swam. The note that had sounded upon the bear’s death began murmuring with a soft, urgent plangency as a she-orca calls to her mate. I heard it clearly now, though I still could not tell what it meant.
The third portent occurred soon after that on our migration westward, away from the burning sea. My mother sounded out a lone orca in the distance. And that disturbed us, for when do our kind ever swim alone? However, this orca proved to be not of our kind, but rather one of the Others: his dorsal fin pointed straight up, triangular and harsh like a shark’s tooth – so different from the graceful, arched fins of my clan. Instead of avoiding us as the Others usually do, this one swam straight toward us as if homing on prey.
He swam with difficulty, though, the beating of his flukes pulling him to the right as if he was trying to escape something on his left. When he drew close to us we all saw why: an object like a splinter of a tree stuck out of his side. His blood, darker and redder than even the bears’, oozed out of the hole that the splinter had made. None of us had ever seen such a thing before, though from the old stories we all knew what had happened to this lone orca.
‘The humans did this to me,’ he told me.
We could hardly understand him. He spoke a dialect thick and strange to our way of hearing. Because the Others do not want to alert the intelligent mammals that they stalk, they utter fewer words than do we when fishing. Consequently, in order to convey a similar amount of information, the Others’ word-sounds must be denser and more complex, stived with meaning like a crystalline array that seems to have more and more glittering facets the deeper one looks. As he told us of a terrible encounter with the humans, we all looked (and listened) for the meaning of his strange words:
‘The humans came upon us in their great ships,’ he told us, ‘and they began slaying as wantonly as sharks do.’
‘But why did they do this?’ my grandmother asked him. Of nearly everyone in our family, she had the greatest talent for speaking with the Others.
‘Who can know?’ Pherkad said, for such was the Other’s name. ‘Perhaps they wished to eat an orca within the shell of their ship, for they captured Baby Electra in one of their nets and took her out of the sea.’
I could not imagine being separated from the sea. Surely Electra must have died almost immediately, before the humans could put tooth to her.
‘We fought as hard as we could,’ Pherkad continued. ‘We fought and died – all save myself.’
My grandmother zanged Pherkad and sounded the depth and position of the object buried in his body.
‘You will die soon,’ she told him.
‘Yes.’
‘Your whole family is dead, and so you will die soon and be glad of it.’
‘Yes, yes!’
‘Before you die,’ my grandmother said, ‘please know that my family broke our trust with you in hunting a bear.’
‘I do know that,’ Pherkad said. ‘The story sings upon the waves!’
I did not really understand this, for I was still too young to have quenged deeply enough to have understood: how the dialect of the Others and of our kind make up one of the many whole languages, which in turn find their source in the language that sings throughout the whole of the sea. Even the tortoises, it is said, can comprehend this language if they listen hard enough, for the ocean itself never stops listening nor does it cease to speak.
Could there really be a universal language? Or was Pherkad perhaps playing with us in revenge for our breaking the Covenant? The Others, renowned for their stealth, might somehow have witnessed my family’s eating of the bear and all the while have remained undetected.
‘On behalf of my family, who are no more,’ he said to my grandmother, ‘I would wish to forgive you for what you did.’
‘You are gracious,’ my grandmother said.
‘The Covenant is the Covenant,’ he said. ‘However there are no absolute principles – except one.’
My brother Caph started to laugh at the irony in Pherkad’s voice, but then realized that doing so would be unseemly.
Then I said to Pherkad, ‘Perhaps we could remove the splinter from your side.’
‘I do not think so,’ he said, ‘but you are welcome to try.’
I moved up close to him through the bloody water and grasped the splinter with my teeth. Hard it was, like biting down on brown bone. I yanked on it with great force. The shock of agony that ran through Pherkad communicated through his flesh into me; as a great scream gathered in his lungs, I felt myself wanting to scream, too. Then Pherkad gathered all his dignity and courage, and he forced his suffering into an almost godly laugh of acceptance: ‘No, please stop, friend – it is my time to die.’
‘I am sorry,’ I said.
‘What is your name?’ he asked me.
I gave him my name, my true name that the humans could not comprehend. And Pherkad said to me, ‘You are compassionate, Arjuna. Was it you who suggested saving the bear?’
‘Yes, it was.’
‘Then you are twice blessed – what a strange and beautiful idea that was!’
Not knowing what to say to this, I said nothing.
‘I would like to sing of that in my death song,’ he told me. ‘Our words are different but if I give mine to you, will you try to remember them?’
‘I will remember,’ I promised.
My grandmother had often told me that my gift for languages exceeded even hers. She attributed that to my father, of the Emerald Sun Surfer Clan, whose great-great grandfather had been Sharatan the Eloquent. The words that Pherkad now gave me swelled with golden overtones and silvery tintinnabulations of sorrow counterpointed with joy. They filled me with a vast desire to mate with wild she-orcas and to join myself in nuptial ecstasy with the entire world. At the same time, his song incited within me a rage to dive deep into darkness; it made me want to dwell forever with the Old Ones who swim beyond the stars. By the time Pherkad finished intoning this great cry from the heart, I loved him like a brother, and I wanted to die along with him.
‘If you are still hungry,’ he said to me, ‘you may eat me as you did the bear.’
‘No, we will not do that,’ I promised him, speaking for the rest of my family.
‘Then goodbye, Arjuna. Live long and sing well – and stay away from the humans, if you can.’
He swam off, leaving me alone with my family. None of us knew where the Others went to die.
He never really left me, however. As the last days of spring gave way to summer’s heat, his words began working at me. Unlike the oil that had grieved Alnitak’s skin, though, the memories of Pherkad and the bear clung to me with an unshakeable fire. How ironic that I had promised not to eat Pherkad’s body, for it seemed that I had devoured something even more substantial, some quintessence of his being that carried the flames of his death anguish into every part of me!
A new dread – or perhaps a very old one called up out of the glooms of the past – came alive inside me. Like a worm, it ate at my brain and insinuated itself into all my thoughts and acts. Dark as the ocean floor it was, yet blinding as the sun – and I could not help staring and staring and being caught in its dazzle. It forced into my mind images of humans: an entire sea of humans, each of them standing on a separate ice floe. And all of these ungainly two-leggeds gripped splinters of wood in their hideous hands. Again and again, they drove these burning splinters into the beautiful bodies of baby whales and into me, straight through my heart.
Although I tried to escape this terrible feeling by swimming through the coldest of waters, it followed me everywhere. At the same time, it lured me back always into the burning sea where all was blackness and death. I could not draw a lungful of clean air, but only oil and smoke. I could not think; I could not sing; I could not breathe.
I could not quenge. Try as I might, I could not find my way into the ocean’s innermost part. The loss of life’s most basic gift stunned me and terrified me even more. Something was wrong with the world, I knew, and something was hideously, hideously wrong with me.
How I wanted to join Pherkad then! The humans might as well have stuck their wooden splinters into me. Better to fall blind, better to fall mute, better to fall deaf. If I could not quenge, what would be the point in remaining alive?
Upon this thought, the burning that had tormented me grew even worse. Gouts of flame torn from the sun seemed to have fallen upon me. Fire laid bare my tissues one by one and worked its way deep into the sinews of my soul. It opened me completely. In doing so, it finally opened me to the meaning of the note that had whispered so urgently when the bear had died and had cracked out like a lightning bolt after Pherkad had left us. Now I could hear Pherkad calling to me even as Baby Electra called along with the myriad voices of the Old Ones.
The whole world, it seemed, was calling, and I finally heard the sound of my destiny, or at least a part of it: that which I most dreaded doing, I must do. How, though, I asked the cold, quiet sea, could I possibly do it?
2 (#ulink_0ff6fca6-6657-5d60-97c5-e17b68885316)
I wish I could say that I leaped straight toward this destiny, as a dolphin breaches in a graceful arc and snatches a flying fish from the air. I did not. I doubted and hesitated, and I equivocated when I asked myself why I seemed to lack the courage to act. I tried not to listen to the call, even though I could not help but listen to its imperative tones during my every waking moment and even while I slept. It pursued me as a band of Others might hunt down a wounded sea lion. It seized me and would not let go.
I spent much time reflecting on my life and life in general. Had it not been, up to the moment I had met the bear, much like the life of any orca? Had I not had good fish to feast upon and the love of my family? Had there not been songs to sing and wonders to behold? Had anything at all been lacking in such a paradise?
And yet the ocean’s voice seemed to call me away from all my happiness – but what was it calling me toward? What did it want of me? I knew only that it had to do with my gift for languages, and I sensed that this gift would become a very great grief, and soon.
I might never have acted at all had it not occurred to me that my childhood contentment had already been destroyed. I could not quenge. I could not – no matter what I tried to do to restore myself to that most natural state.
At first, I tried to hide my affliction from my family. I might as well have tried to hide a harpoon sticking out of my side. One day, while my grandmother was reviewing the tone poem that I could no longer work on, she asked me to counterpoint the penultimate melody with Alsciaukat the Great’s Song of the Silent Sea. I could not. When I attempted to do so, I sounded as inept as a child.
‘Quenge down along the chord of the first universal,’ my grandmother said to me. ‘If you are to complete this composition, you must quenge deeper than you ever have.’
The concern in her soft voice tore the truth from me in a shout of anguish: ‘I cannot quenge at all, Grandmother!’
I told her everything. I explained how the bear would not stop roaring inside me, where his voice joined Pherkad’s cry of rage. All my thoughts, I said, had fixed on human beings as one’s teeth might close about a poisonous puffer fish. I could not expunge the images of the two-leggeds from my mind.
‘Then you must meditate with more concentration before you quenge,’ my grandmother said. ‘You must clear your mind.’
‘Do you think I have not tried?’
‘I am sure you have. Before doing so, however, you must also clear your heart.’
‘How can I? Poison is there, and fire! A harpoon has pierced me straight through!’
‘What, then, will soothe the poison and draw the harpoon? What will extinguish the flames that consume you?’
‘I do not know!’
This was another equivocation. I had a very good idea of what might restore me, even though I could not understand how it possibly could.
‘Strange!’ she said. ‘How very strange that you should believe you cannot find what cannot be lost. It is as if you are swimming so quickly in pursuit of water to cool the fire that you cannot feel the ocean that could put it out.’
‘I know! I know! But the very knowingness of my plight makes me want to escape it all the more and to swim ever faster.’
My words troubled my grandmother more than I had ever seen her troubled, even when Baby Capella had been stricken with the fever that had eventually killed her. My grandmother called for a conclave of the family. We sang long into the hours of the midnight sun, discussing what was wrong with me and what might be done.
‘I have never heard of an orca unable to quenge,’ Alnitak said. ‘One might as well imagine being born unable to swim.’
‘I have never heard of such a thing either,’ Mira agreed. ‘It does not seem possible.’
‘To quenge is to be, and not to quenge is to be not. But how could that which is ever not be?’
And my brother Caph added, ‘Is it not said that the unreal never is and the real never is not? What could be more real than quenging?’
‘Didn’t Alsciaukat of the Sapphire Sea,’ Turais asked, ‘teach that quenging can be close to madness? Perhaps Arjuna, in his attempt to ease his grieving over Pherkad, has tried to quenge too deeply.’
My practical mother bent her tail to indicate her impatience with these sentiments and said, ‘Are we to speculate all night on such things? Or are we to help my son?’
‘How can we help him?’ Mira said.
It turned out that Chara had heard a story that might have bearing on my situation. She told of how an orca named Vindemiatrix had once lost his ability to quenge due to a tumor growing through his brain.
‘Very well,’ Alnitak said, ‘but did the tumor destroy Vindemiatrix’s ability to quenge or merely impair his realization that he could not help but retain this ability no matter what?’
‘In terms of Arjuna’s life,’ Haedi asked, ‘is there a difference?’
Now it was my grandmother’s turn to lose patience. The taut tones in her voice told of her own dislike for useless conjectures: ‘It is not a tumor that grows in Arjuna’s brain – though we might make use of that as a metaphor.’
‘How, Grandmother?’ Porrima asked.
‘That which grows often may not be killed directly. Sometimes, though, it might be inhibited by other things that grow even more quickly.’
‘I have an idea!’ young Caph said. ‘Let us make a lattice of ideoplasts representing the situation so that Arjuna might perceive in the crystallization of the sounds the way back to himself.’
‘Good! Good!’ young Naos said. ‘Let us also make a simulation of quenging so that Arjuna might be reminded of what he thinks he has lost.’
‘And dreams,’ Dheneb added. ‘Let us help him dream more vividly of quenging when he sleeps.’
‘We should recount all our best moments of quenging,’ my sister Turais said, ‘so that Arjuna might remember himself.’
‘Very well,’ my grandmother said, ‘we shall do these things, and we shall sing to Arjuna, as we sing to a child to drive away a fever. We must sing as we have never sung before, for Arjuna is sick in his soul.’
And so my family tried to heal me. We swam on and on toward the ever-receding western horizon where dark clouds hung low over choppy seas. I felt the sun waxing strong as summer neared its solstice, though the clouds most often obscured this fiery orb.
Nothing, it seemed, could cool my wrath of despair. The songs my grandmother poured into me – rich, sparkling, lovely – came the closest to helping me dive once more into the waters of pure being. So deep did I wish to dive, right down to the magical Silent Sea, lined with coral in bright colors of yellow, magenta, and glorre! So full of my grandmother’s love did I feel that I almost did – almost.
However, the harder my family worked to make me whole, the more keenly did I become aware of what I had lost. I partook of their quenging vicariously, which made me long all the more bitterly for my own. In the end, my family could do little more for me than reassure me of their devotion. All their stratagems of representing, simulating, dreaming, remembering, and even singing failed. All are quenging, yes, and yet are not – not unless done with an utter awareness that one is quenging in doing them.
‘Thank you,’ I said to my family, ‘you have done all that you could.’
It was a day of layered clouds in various shades of gray pressing down upon the sea. The waters had a brownish tint and seemed nearly lifeless, colored as they were with the umber tones of my family’s despondency.
‘What ails you?’ Caph cried out in frustration.
His anguish touched off my own, and I cried back, ‘The humans do!’
I could not help myself. I told Caph and the rest of my family of the call that I heard and all that I had so far concealed.
‘Poison is there in me, and fire!’ I said. ‘A harpoon has pierced me straight through! The humans have done this thing, and only the humans with their hideous, hideous hands can draw it out.’
‘How? How?’ Caph asked me.
‘We must journey to the humans,’ I said. ‘They are the cause of my sickness, and they must also be the cure.’
‘But how?’ Caph asked again. ‘You have not said how they could help you.’
‘I do not know how,’ I said. ‘That is why we must go to the humans and talk to them.’
Caph laughed at this, sending bitter black waves of sound rippling through the water.
‘Talk to the humans? What will we say to them? What do you expect them to say to you?’
One could, of course, talk to a walrus, a crab, even a jellyfish. And each could talk back, in its own way. Caph, however, sensed that I was hinting at communicating with the humans on a higher level than that of the common speech of the sea.
‘We must ask the humans why they killed Pherkad,’ I said, ‘and how they set fire to water. We must speak to them, from the heart, as we speak to ourselves.’
Alnitak swam up and moved his massive body between Caph and me. ‘We could speak all we wish, but how could the humans possibly understand what we say?’
‘We can teach them our language,’ I said.
At this, Alnitak began laughing in bright madder bands of scorn, and so did Turais, Mira, Chara, and Caph. I might as well have suggested teaching a stone to recite the fundamental philosophical mistake. All things have language, yes, but everyone knew that only whales possess the higher orders of intelligence and the ability to reason and speak abstractly. Only whales make art out of music. And surely – surely, surely, surely! – whales alone of all creatures could quenge.
Baby Porrima, the most innocent of my family, asked me, ‘Do you really think the humans could be intelligent like us?’
Before I could answer, Caph said, ‘We have watched their winged ships that fly through the sky and land upon the water. Have we any reason to suppose that the humans are more intelligent than the geese who do the same, but with much more grace?’
‘I should not put their intelligence that high,’ my sister Nashira said in her bewildered but beautiful voice. ‘We have all beheld the ugliness of the metal shells that carry the humans across the water. Even a snail, though, within its perfectly spiraled shell, makes a more esthetically pleasing protection. I should say that the humans cannot be more intelligent than a mollusk.’
Her assessment, though, proved to be at the lower end of my family’s estimation of human intelligence. Dheneb argued that humans likely surpassed turtles in their mental faculties even though it seemed doubtful that they had figured out how to live as long. Chara placed the upper limit of the humans’ percipience near that of seals, who after all knew well enough not to swim in shark-darkened waters whereas the humans did not. My grandmother futilely reminded us that intelligence could not be determined from the outside but only experienced from within. Finally, after much discussion, my family reached a consensus that humans were probably about as smart as an octopus, whose grasping tentacles the humans’ hands somewhat resembled. Their generosity in according humans this degree of sentience surprised me, for the octopi are among the cleverest of the ocean’s creatures, even if they cannot speak in the manner of a whale.
In a way – but only in a way – my family played a game in this guessing in order to sublimate their disquiet. We all knew that humans possessed a strange, fell power. None of us, however, wanted to entertain the notion that this power might derive from anything like that which we knew as intelligence. None of us except me.
‘We cannot say if humans might learn to speak our language,’ I said, ‘unless we try to teach them.’
Everyone, of course, recognized the logic of my argument, and so it saddened me when my family rejected its conclusion.
After further discussion, my grandmother announced, ‘We cannot journey to the humans out of the remote possibility that they might be sentient enough for us to speak with them. It is too dangerous.’
Too dangerous! Would it be less dangerous to do nothing? The bear cried out through the water: Why did the ice melt around me? And Pherkad called to me in the bitter, beautiful tones of his death poem that told of his agony and the suffering of the entire world.
‘Very well,’ I said to my grandmother. ‘Then I will go to the humans alone.’
If a comet had struck the waves just then, the shock of it could not have been greater. No orca of our kind ever left his family.
My mother’s response cracked out swift and sure. In this instance, she had no need to confer with the rest of us.
‘You cannot leave us,’ she told me. ‘Would you tear out my heart and feed it to the sharks?’
‘You will always have my heart, as I do yours.’
‘You will die without me. And how can you think of abandoning your little brother? I need you to watch over him when I am quenging far away. You are the best caretaker I have ever known.’
‘I am sorry, Mother, but I must leave.’
My unheard-of willfulness occasioned another conclave, the longest that my family had ever held. For three days we talked as we journeyed through blue-gray water grown gelid and nearly still. Dheneb and Alnitak dove beneath icebergs so that in the denser waters of the deeps, they might hear their confidences more clearly. Turais and Chara visited with the Old Ones and drank in their wisdom, while Nashira sang again and again the melodies of the great songs that told of the deeds of the heroes of our people.
My grandmother meditated and dreamed and sang, too. She called my family to swim together. We breathed at the same moment and glided along side by side, synchronizing each beat of flipper and fluke and moving across the sea like a single wave. We breathed and let our thoughts ripple through us like a wave of shared blood as we quenged together – all save me. Like the still point of a storm, my grandmother served as the center around which all my family’s separate impulses and mentations turned and flowed and became as one:
‘Like the great north current,’ Alnitak said, ‘Arjuna will go where he will go.’
‘Can one stop the turning of the ocean?’ Haedi added.
‘Do not the Old Ones say,’ Mira asked, ‘that each whale has a single destiny?’
‘How,’ Turais said, ‘can we ask Arjuna to go on swimming with us in so much pain? Who could bear the sadness of not being able to quenge?’
Mira, having fallen nostalgic, said, ‘Let Arjuna know his old joy again. Do you remember how when he was a baby he tried to talk to Valashu, the Morning Star?’
‘How could we forget that?’ Dheneb said. ‘How can we ever forget how he talked with Pherkad, who gave him his magnificent song?’
‘The Old Ones,’ Chara affirmed, ‘say that they have heard Arjuna’s great song. It must be that he will have returned from the humans in triumph to complete his rhapsody.’
The emotion of the last few days proved too much for Baby Talitha. She began crying even as my mother said: ‘I will want to die if Arjuna leaves us, but I think I would die if he remains and is so sad that he does not want to live.’
Finally, with all my family exhausted, my grandmother gathered all their many chords into a decision that had grown more and more obvious:
‘You must leave us,’ my grandmother said to me.
‘I cannot,’ I told her. I listened to Talitha crying and crying. ‘I cannot – but somehow I must.’
My family formed into a circle in the quiet silvery water, our heads touching so that the slightest pressure of our flutes would send our words sounding deep into each other.
‘Listen to me, Arjuna,’ my grandmother said. ‘No matter how far you journey, your heart will beat with ours and we will breathe the same breath. There is nowhere that you can go that we will not be.’
We broke apart and I prepared to leave. I gathered in those vital things that would help me on my way: Alnitak’s maps of the ocean and the heavens; Mira’s taxonomy of the sea’s manifold creatures; the epics composed by Aldebaran the Great; the music of Talitha’s laughter and reverberations of my mother’s first words to me. One thing only remained that I would need.
‘Come with me,’ my grandmother said to me. ‘Let us swim together for a while.’
We moved off away from the rest of our family. It was a cloudless day, and the low sun cast long rays of light down into the dark turquoise water. There, in the calm and clarity, in the heart of the ocean where one could hear its deepest secrets, my grandmother made a present that would protect me: she gave me a charm, alive with the most powerful of all magics, that I might never lose myself on my journey and would always find my way home.
After that, I swam toward the south and east. I swam so quickly at first that the icy sea did seem to cool my ire, if only a little. Soon I found myself racing through unknown waters. If I did not distance myself from my family with all the speed that I could summon, I feared that my courage would fail and I would turn back.
After a long time I grew tired. The muscles along my belly, tail, and flukes ached. I breached, blew out a great cloud of mist, and drew in a fresh breath. I dove down a little way into the water and hung suspended in motionlessness.
The sea about me tasted odd, perhaps flavored by unusual organisms or the upwelling of minerals that were unfamiliar to me. The waters were tinted a deep violet, with undertones of an eerie cerulean blue that I had never beheld. The entire ocean glowed – with sunlight from the cold-striated sky sifting down through the water, yes, but even more from the sonance that filled the ocean’s immensity and reverberated through every drop of it. I heard the faint singing of a humpback somewhere ahead of me and the thumping of my heart much nearer. From far away came the call that had summoned me on this journey. It sounded out as primeval as the first whale’s first breath, at once plosive and soft, reassuring and terrifying, horrible and beautiful. Into it I must venture, through an ocean whose quality had grown more and more mysterious. Through this unknown realm I must find my way where all was strange, various, and new, and the water itself somehow seemed too real.
For the first time in my life, I became aware of a kind of soul-eating silence: among all the purling sounds of the sea, I could detect not the slightest note made by one of my family. Of course, whenever I wished, I could go down inside myself and listen to Talitha’s giggles or my mother’s lullabies as clearly and with as much immediacy as if these two beloved people were singing right beside me. No difference could I hear in the actuality of volume, note, or timbre. It was not, however, the same, for I could not feel the sound waves emanating from my mother’s body, nor could I see her or touch her. My family seemed to have swum off to a distantly-remembered world and to have left me all alone.
In a wave of disquiet sweeping through me, I realized that an orca sundered from his family is an orca in danger of falling mad. If Alnitak, Chara, and the others did not swim beside me and sing to me, should I then sing to myself? Were my thoughts and words to return to me untouched by the minds of my family as if I had eaten and re-eaten the same food again and again? How could I ever heal myself with my own songs? How could I know myself without the sound of their love reflecting back a picture for me to see? Did the lightning scar still mark me above my eye? Had my mother really named me Arjuna on the day of my birth or was that memory just part of a dream, along with myself and all the rest of my life?
Brooding upon such things made matters even worse. I seemed strange to myself. I could not quenge, and I did not know if I could any longer even love. I felt fearsome and new, as if I had been remade into some dreadful form that I did not want to behold.
I began swimming again. I came upon a school of herring, each of whose scales were all silvery and streaked with faint gold and scarlet bands. I swam right into the school and stunned many of the fish with a slap of my tail. Others I immobilized with zangs of sonar or confused by blowing out clouds of bubbles. So ravenous was I that I nearly began eating without asking the doomed fish if they were ready to die. I finally remembered myself, however, and I did ask. The entire school, in their ones and their multitudes, said yes.
The feast strengthened me and gave me new life. I might have died in my soul, while my harpooned heart bled out the best part of me – even so, my body and my force of will seemed to have gained a new power. I swam on at speed into the wild, endless sea.
On a day of dead calm with the water stilled into a vast blue mirror, I heard cries from far off long before I encountered the whales who had made them. I swam toward this terrible keening. After a while, I intercepted two large humpbacks, the water streaming from their lumpy, barnacle-studded bodies whenever they breached for breath. They were moving as fast as they could in the direction from which I had come. I asked them what was wrong. In their very basic and nearly incomprehensible speech, they shouted: ‘Humans blood pain death!’
Their panic communicated into me, and I considered turning around and joining them in their spasm of flight. Instead, I swam on straight toward the sea’s wavering horizon.
Very soon, one of the humans’ gray ships appeared there. I swam in close enough to make out metal spines sticking up from the top of the ship; these reminded me of a conch shell’s many points and projections. Humans – the first I had ever seen! – stood on the top of the ship, near its head. They were tending to what looked like a long piece of seaweed that connected the ship to the bloody water. A shrieking sound like metal eating metal vibrated both ship and sea, and the seaweed thing began moving toward the ship. I zanged the seaweed and determined it was made of metal, like the ship. It continued moving, and soon the whale attached to it emerged from the water tail first, even as I had been born. A moment later, I caught sight of the bloody harpoon that had torn a great hole through the humpback’s body and had killed it. The harpoon, too, was made of metal, unlike the wooden one that had killed Pherkad.
Upon this horror, panic seized me. The ship loomed above, vast and ugly, gray and angular, like a deformed mockery of one of the deep gods. How helpless I felt against this monster of metal! I wanted to fling myself away from this vile place as quickly as I could.
How, though, could I do this? Was I not an orca of the Blue Aria Family of the Faithful Thoughtplayer Clan. Had not my mother, just before my birth, instructed me in the orcas’ ways?
‘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 (#ulink_8518e341-ee10-5e1d-a52d-2b2eee4ab4fa)
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?’
‘He’ll eat you if you don’t get your arm out of the water.’
‘No, if he was that hungry, he could’ve eaten Kelly when she wiped out. I don’t think orcas eat people.’
‘What do they eat?’
‘Seals and penguins and things like that.’
‘Do you think he’d eat some fish?’
‘Did you bring any fish?’
‘I’ve got a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.’
‘Did you ever give a dog peanut butter? They lick their teeth for like an hour ’cause they can’t get it off.’
‘We’re not going to give an orca peanut butter!’
‘What do you think he wants?’
I moved in as close to the boat as I could.
‘Listen! Listen! Listen!’ I said. I spoke as slowly as I could. ‘W-wait-wait-wait-A-wait-wait-wait-T-wait-wait-wait-E-wait-wait-wait-R!’
‘I don’t know, but it sounds like he’s in distress.’
‘I think he just wants attention. He’s a pushy little whale.’
‘Maybe we should play him some music. I hear whales like music.’
‘What kind?’
‘I don’t know – what do you have?’
One of the humans, with a hairy face and a second skin of sheeny blue, lifted a black object onto the wooden surface near the boat’s tail. He did something to it with the tentacles of his hands.
‘I hope he likes it.’
A great noise burst from the black object and broke through the air. The noise drove against my skin and set the very water around me humming. It took a few moments for me to realize that the noise comprised different strands of sound: human voices and howling vibrations and a relentless thumping like that of a heart beating with an insane rhythm.
Boom boom anger anger anger! Boom boom anger anger anger! Boom boom …
‘Please stop!’ I cried out. ‘It hurts my head, hurts my soul!’
I came up out of the water, spy-hopping, which brought my head nearly level with the booming black thing. I opened my mouth, thinking I might be able to snatch it from between the human’s hands and crush it between my jaws.
‘Look! Bobo is smiling! He likes it – turn it louder!’
Boom! Boom! Boom …
As other humans had set fire to the sea’s surface with their dirty oil, these humans made even the water itself sick with sound. Although I longed to speak with them – particularly with the yellow-haired female – I had to get away from them and their boat as quickly as I could. I dove, but at first that only exacerbated the torment of the hideous noise, for sound moves more quickly and completely through water than it does through air. Only by swimming as far as I could away from the boat would I be able to make the noise attenuate to a distant and tolerable irritation.
And swim I did. For the rest of that day, and during the days that followed, I explored the large bay I had entered. I never really escaped the noise of the humans, for they were everywhere on the bay and on the shore surrounding it. Many boats disturbed the bay’s blue waters, and most of them sent high-pitched, shrieking sounds piercing every nook and cove. From the forests rising up from the sea came a similar buzz and clash, as if the very air were being torn apart. From time to time, great trees broke into splinters and crashed to the earth. Humans dropped the bare spines of the tree’s corpses into the water with splash after tremendous splash.
How long, I wondered, would I be able to live amidst this cacophony without falling as insane as the humans themselves seemed to be? Could I bear another day, another hour, another moment? Somehow, I told myself, I had to bear it. In the way my mother had showed me many years before, I must learn to dwell within softer, interior sounds called up from memory or imagination, which would overpower all the human noise and drive it away.
It dismayed me that the humans fouled the pretty bay with things other than noise. I found floating on the water many objects that the humans cast from their boats. Some were second skins made of that highly shapeable substance the humans used for so many unfathomable purposes. Because I needed a name for this unnatural substance, I thought of it as excrescence. Excrescence composed most of the objects the humans handled, as it did the bodies of their boats. I zanged as well metallic and clear stone shells from which they drank various liquids. Everywhere I went, the water tasted of oils suppurating from their boats and from the bitter cream the humans rubbed into their skin.
Except for the ubiquitous excrescence, which could be found floating in island-like masses even on the northern oceans, the worst of the humans’ befoulment was the feces that poured from many streams into the bay. Why, I wondered, did humans drop their feces into water when they were creatures of the land? Why did they concentrate it into a brownish sludge? Did they wish to flavor the water through which they swam? That seemed to me unlikely, for when I put tongue to their feces, I detect traces of boat oil, excrescence, and other poisons that could only have tasted as unpleasant to the humans as they did to me.
I came across a hint of an answer to these questions as I was exploring a peninsula on the east side of the bay. Two tongues of land licked out from the peninsula’s tip into the water. On one of these tongues – treeless and covered with grass – humans stood striking shiny metal sticks against spherical white eggs which arced through the air before falling to earth and rolling across the grass. From time to time, one of the eggs, made of yet another kind of excrescence, would sail off the peninsula and plop into the water. Then the humans would call out such stridencies as ‘Goddamned ball is unbalanced!’ and other sounds that made no sense to me.
On the other bit of land, across a slip of water, trees grew out an expanse of grass. There humans reclined on second skins and cast other kinds of eggs at each other. They burned fish in fires, shouted out cries to each other, and they did a thing with feces that fascinated me.
Some sort of mammal – some looked like little wolves – accompanied many of the humans. Long strands probably made of excrescence connected the two-legged to four-legged. The little wolves would dart about, put nose to ground, and cause the humans’ limbs to jerk in whatever direction the wolves chose to move. Whenever the wolves arched their backs to defecate, the humans waited by their sides. At the completion of each defecation, the humans made cooing sounds as if pleased to receive what the wolves had given them. They gathered up the feces in clear skins of excrescence, which they carried proudly in their hands as the wolves led them on a continuation of their erratic journey across the grass.
Why, I wondered, did the humans gather up wolf feces? Did they eat it as snails eat the excretions of fish? Did they lick down the feces of their own kind? That could not be possible. And yet, when it came to humans, almost nothing seemed impossible. I could be sure of little more than the fact that humans collected feces of varying kinds. Perhaps when these collections grew too large, the humans vented some into the sea.
My puzzlement at the humans’ diet caused me to realize that it had been too long since I had eaten. I badly wanted and needed to catch a few salmon or perhaps some more delicious herring. However, the channel through which I swam formed a part of the traditional fishing grounds of the Truthful Word Painter Clan. I felt sure that these distant cousins of mine would not begrudge me a few mouthfuls of fish, but good manners dictated that I first ask permission before indulging in such a feast. I had to wait through many days of rumbling in my empty belly before I had a chance to do so. One clear night, with the moon-silvered waters around me rippling in a soft breeze, the orcas of the Scarlett Tiralee family of the Truthful Word Painter Clan swam into the channel and made my acquaintance.
Only six of them did I greet: Mother Agena and her three children, Diadem, Furud, and Mekbuda, and Agena’s sister Celaeno, who had recently given birth to Baby Kornephoros. When I asked after their health, Agena told me, ‘We are well enough now, though misfortunes have reduced our family, as you can see.’
We spent the rest of night recounting stories and telling of our respective families. I listened with great sadness as Agena described the agonizing death of her mother, who had perished before her time of a mysterious wasting disease. Agena’s first child had died in a collision with one of the humans’ boats while her second had succumbed to a fever. I related similar woes, though I tried to gloss over my relief that my family had prospered in the face of great trials largely due to my grandmother’s guidance. Together we sang songs of mourning and remembrance. Finally just after dawn with the sun red upon a cloud-heavy horizon, I told the Scarlett Word Painters of the white bear and the burning sea, and I explained why I had journeyed so far from home.
‘I have never imagined,’ Mother Agena said, ‘losing my ability to quenge. Would you not be better off dead?’
‘I would be, yes,’ I replied, ‘if I had no hope of regaining from the humans what they have taken from me.’
‘You are a wonder of a whale,’ Agena said to me. ‘You are inquisitive and strong and brave, but you are also prideful and not a little foolish to think that you have been called to speak with the humans. Such hubris, if you persist, will be punished.’
‘How so?’ I asked.
I did not wish to dispute an elder, particularly not a mother of another clan. I waited for Agena to say more.
‘Do you have any idea of how many of the Word Painters have tried to speak with the humans?’ Agena slapped her tail against the water and whistled out into the morning air. ‘I cannot say whether or not the humans have language or might be sentient, but this I know: if you cleave to them too closely, either their insanity will become yours or else they will murder you.’
This warning more or less ended our conversation, for how could I respond to such bitter despair that masqueraded as wisdom and even prophecy? I did not want to believe Mother Agena’s fraught words. I could not believe them. And so when it came time to part, I sang farewells and blessings with all the polite passion that I could summon.
‘Goodbye, Bright One, marked by lightning and beloved of the sea,’ Mother Agena said to me as she nudged the scar over my eye. ‘We will not remain in this unfortunate place, which was once our home. It is yours, if you wish. Therefore, you are welcome to all the fish you might find – if the humans let you take them.’
As she moved off with the Word Painters, I pondered the meaning of her last words. Her voice lingered in the water and broke apart into quaverings of ruin that I did not want to hear. I was hungry, and fish abounded all about me. I made my way into the sea’s inky forebodings to go find them.
4 (#ulink_ffb2b332-db4b-55f8-a8c7-b99c92b592ef)
For three days of wind and storm, I ranged about the channel hunting salmon to my belly’s contentment. I came across many boats. Most of these, while moving across the greenish surface of the bay, emitted a nearly deafening buzz from their underbellies, near their rear. How could these human things make such an obnoxious noise? An impulse drove me toward one of the boat’s vibrating parts, obscured by churning water and clouds of silvery bubbles. I wanted to press my face against this organ of sound as I might touch my mouth to the swim bladder of a toadfish to determine how it could be so loud. A second impulse, however, held me back. In a revulsion of ambivalence that was to flavor my interactions with the humans, I realized that I did not want to get too near the boat, which was made of excrescence as were so many of the things associated with the humans.
At other times, however, my curiosity carried me very close to these strange, two-legged beings. On a day of gentle swells, when the sky had cleared to a pale blue, I came upon a boat whose humans busied themselves with using strands of excrescence to pull salmon out of the sea. What a clever hunting technique! I thought. I swam in close to the boat to investigate.
One of the humans sighted me, and barked out what seemed to be the human danger cry: ‘Orca! Orca! Orca!’
How could I show them that I posed them no threat? Perhaps if I snatched a salmon from the excrescence strands and presented it to them, they would perceive my good intentions. I swam through the rippling water.
‘That damned blackfish is after our catch!’ A hairy-faced human called out.
His top half nearly doubled over the lower in that disturbingly human way of exercising their strangely-jointed bodies. When he straightened up, he clasped some sort of wooden and metallic stick in his hands.
‘What are you doing?’ his pink-faced companion called out.
‘Just shooting at that damned blackfish!’
‘I can see that – but what are you doing? Do you want to go to prison for killing a whale?’
‘Who would know? Anyway, I’m just going to have a little target practice to scare him off.’
‘Put your goddamned gun away!’
‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to kill him – unless he tries to take our salmon.’
A great noise cracked out; just beside me, the water opened with a small hole which almost immediately closed.
‘How did you do that?’ I shouted as I moved in toward the boat.
Again the stick made its hideous noise, and again the water jumped in response.
‘Once more!’ I said, taking a great liking to this game. ‘Make the water dance once more!’
I swam in even closer, and the holes touched the water scarcely a tongue’s lick from my face. What beguiling powers these humans had! Orcas can stun a fish with a zang of sonar, and the deep gods – who have the Great Voice, the voice of death – kill swarms of squid in this manner. No whale, however, can speak and make the very waters part.
‘If you shoot that orca,’ the pink-face called out, ‘I’m going to shoot you!’
The human holding the wood and metal stick lowered it, and the water moved no more.
‘Please, please!’ I said. ‘Let us play!’
If the humans, though, could not understand the simple word for water, how could they comprehend my more complex request? To show my gratitude that they had possessed the wit to play at all, I caught a salmon and swam right up to the edge of the boat.
‘I think he wants us to have it!’ the pink-faced human said. ‘He’s giving us his fish!’
I pushed up out of the water, with the salmon still thrashing between my teeth. Hands reached out to grasp it and take it from me. Then I dove and caught another salmon for the humans, and another. They seemed to like this game.
During the days that followed, I ranged the channel and played games with other humans. Some were as trifling as balancing pieces of driftwood on my face, while others demanded planning and coordination. The humans seemed titillated when I rose up from the deeps near their boats and flew unannounced high into the air. Many times, I surprised their littlest boats, propelled across the channel by lone humans pushing sticks through the water. It was great sport to leap over both boat and human in the same way that Kajam had once leaped over Alnitak’s back.
In the course of nearly all these encounters, the humans involved made various vocalizations, for they proved to be among the noisiest of animals. Their voices seemed to reach out to me with a terrible longing, as if the humans hoped to find in me some ineffable thing they could not appreciate within themselves. I sucked up every sound they made and examined their incessant barking and crooning for pattern and possible meaning:
‘Hey, look it’s Bobo! You can tell it’s him by the scar over his eye.’
‘I hear he likes to play.’
‘What a joyful spirit!’
‘He’s the spirit of my grandfather who has come to tell us something.’
‘I heard that some fisherman took shots at him.’
‘He was brought here for some purpose.’
‘Look in his eyes – there’s more there than in most people.’
‘Why is Bobo all alone? What happened to the rest of his pod?’
‘I think he’s lonely.’
‘When he looks at me that way, I can feel my soul dancing.’
As the days shortened toward another winter of cloud and storm, I felt a growing urge to understand the mystery of the humans. Buried inside me, like a pearl in an oyster, I felt a hard realization pressing against my softer tissues of doubt. More and more, I wanted to draw out the pearl and hold it up sparkling in the sun.
I wondered what might explain what I experienced in my forays up and down the channel. I assumed that the humans really did have a keen intelligence, though of a different and lesser quality than that of whales. They must have some sort of language, too, for how else could they organize so many complex activities? During quiet moments when the cold ocean stilled to a vast blue clarity, I could see the intelligence lighting up the humans’ eyes just as I could feel their desire to communicate with me. Do not the Old Ones say that the eyes sing with the sound of the soul?
My ancestors also tell of the forming of all things in the eternal creation of the world. From out of the oneness of water and its accompanying sound comes love, which can never be wholly distinct from its source. From out of love, in turn, emanate the sacred triadic harmonies of goodness, beauty, and truth. How could one ever marvel ecstatic at the beauty of the rising of the Thallow constellation over the starlit sea without the goodness of the heart to let in the tinkling luminosity? How know goodness absent the truth that all the horrors of life find validation in the love of life that all creatures embrace? The journey to the deepest of love, my grandmother once told me, must always lead through truth, beauty, and goodness. And of these, the waters of truth are much the hardest to navigate.
‘Only through quenging into utter honesty with ourselves,’ she had said, ‘can we hope to become more fully and consciously ourselves. Is this not what the world wants of us? If not, why did the sea separate itself into individual peals of life in the first place? That is why we must always tell the truth. For if we do not, the great song that we make of ourselves will ring false. But, Arjuna, who has the courage to really listen to the cry of one’s heart and to embrace the totality of one’s own being? Who can even behold it?’
It is a truth universally acknowledged among my kind that one can never hear completely the truth of one’s own soul. We cannot make out the ridges and troughs that form the seascapes of our deepest selves, any more than we can zang through miles of dark, turbid waters to study the bottom of the ocean. Then, too, the eye can never see itself, just as I could not look directly at the scar marking my forehead. Worst of all, we avoid doing so with a will toward the expunging of our best senses. As seals seek dark and narrow coves in which to flee the teeth of the orcas, we hide from our truest selves for we do not want to be devoured by the most primeval of all our passions.
‘What does any whale really want?’ my grandmother had asked. ‘Were we not born to be the mightiest of hunters? Do we not, in the end, pursue greater life in ourselves that we might know the infinitely vaster life of the world around us?’
We do, we do – of course we do! And yet in this glorious becoming of our greater selves, as streamlined and lovely as the orcas of Agathange, we must leave behind our lesser selves. This realization of the best and truest within us, though it yields eternal life, always feels like death. One thing only emboldens us to make the journey through life’s terrors and agonies to the end of time and the beginning of the world.
How, though, was I to achieve this greatest of purposes absent my family’s devotion and encouragement? How, without my mother, Alnitak, Mira, and everyone else, would I come by the pellucid honesty through which I would find my way through the great ocean of truth?
Although I had no answers to these questions, I knew what my grandmother would say: I must begin with the truth that I had grasped but which I was reluctant to really sink my teeth into. After playing many games with the humans, I not only hypothesized that they were intelligent, I zanged it in my heart. Why, though, had I not listened to what I had zanged so deeply?
I thought I knew the reason, and it had to do with an essential paradox: that only through looking out at all the manifold forms and features of the world can we ever apprehend the much stranger phenomena of ourselves. Just as we can see stars only against the blackness of the nighttime sky, so we need others to show us the many ways that we shine as unique sparks of creation. The greater the contrast in this relationship, the deeper the understanding.
For instance, were not females, such as lovely Mother Agena, a part of the great unknown? No other work of nature was more like a male orca such as I, and yet so utterly different. How should I then long to find myself within the wild, wet clutch of her body and even the wilder ocean of her soul? Would it not be, I wondered, that precisely in closing the difference between us and daring to enter the most dangerous place in the universe I would discover an exalted and ecstatic Arjuna whom I might otherwise not ever know?
So it was with the humans. To a whale such as I, their kind beckoned as the Great Other in whom I might discover secrets about myself that I had never suspected. Although it seemed absurd that the humans’ intelligence could in any way illuminate my own, I came to realize that I had been hiding from the truth that the humans had something precious to give me.
‘O Arjuna, Arjuna!’ I cried out, ‘that is why you have not wanted to believe what you have zanged so clearly!’
Even as I said these words, however, I knew that I was still evading myself, for I had carried through the waters a deeper reason for denying the humans’ obvious intelligence. To admit to myself that humans might have minds anything like those of whales would impel me to want to touch those minds – to need to touch them. How could I allow myself to be so weak? How could I bear the terrible truth that I was desperately, desperately lonely?
I had to bear it. I had to accept it, for my grandmother had also said this to me: ‘If you bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is inside you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.’
After that, I renewed my efforts to speak with the two-leggeds and enter their psyches. One day, when the clear cerulean sky almost perfectly matched the blueness of the sea, I came upon the boat carrying the humans I had first met in the bay. They waved their arms and whistled and called out their warning cry, which seemed completely absent of warning or apprehension:
‘Orca! Orca! Orca!’
‘Look, it’s Bobo! He’s come back to us!’
I swam up to their bobbing boat and said hello.
‘Lil’ Bobo,’ the longer of the two males said. ‘We’re sorry we scared you off last time. I guess you don’t like acid rap.’
The shorter of the males, who had blue eyes and golden hair like that of the female surfer who stood next to him, drank from a metallic shell and let out a belch. He said, ‘Who does like it? Why don’t we try something else?’
‘What about Radiohead?’ the longer male said.
The female surfer used her writhing fingers to pull back her golden hair. She lay belly-flat on the front of the boat, and dipped her hand into the water to stroke my head.
‘Let’s play him some classical music.’
‘I don’t have anything like that,’ the golden-haired male said. I guessed he must be the surfer’s brother.
‘I downloaded a bunch of classical a few weeks ago,’ the surfer said, ‘just in case.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know – I don’t really know anything about classical.’
‘Let me see,’ the longer male said.
He bent over, and when he straightened, he held in his hand a shiny metallic thing, like half of an abalone shell.
‘What about the Rite of Spring?’ he said. ‘That sounds like some nice, soft music.’
A few moments later, from another shiny object that seemed all stark planes and hard surfaces like so many human things, a beguiling call filled the air. In its high notes, I heard a deep mystery and the promise of life’s power, almost as if a whale were keening out a long-held desire to love and mate. Soon came crashing chords and complicated rhythms, which felt like a dozen kinds of fish thrashing inside my belly. Various themes, as jagged as a shark’s teeth, tore into one another, interacted for a moment, and then gave birth to new expressions which incorporated the old. Brooding harmonies collided, moved apart, and then invited in a higher order of chaos. Such a brutal beauty! So much blood, exaltation, splendor! The human-made sounds touched the air with a magnificent dissonance and pressed deep into the water in adoration of the earth.
‘What kind of crap is that?’ the golden-haired male said. ‘Turn off that noise before you drive Bobo away again!’
O music! The humans had music: strange, powerful, and complex!
And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the music died.
‘No, no!’ I cried out. ‘More, please – I want to hear more!’
The longer male’s fingers stroked the abalone-like thing for a few moments. He said, ‘What about Beethoven?’
A new music sounded. So very different from the first it was, and yet so alike, for within its simpler melodies and purer beauty dwelled an immense affirmation of life. As the sun moved higher in the sky and the surfer female on the boat stroked my skin, I listened and drank in this lovely music for a long, long time.
Finally, near the end of the composition, a great choir of human voices picked up a heart-opening melody. I listened, stunned. It was almost as if the Old Ones were calling to me.
O the stars! O the sea! They sang of joy!
This realization confirmed all that I had suspected to be true. Although the ability to compose complex music could not be equated with the speaking of language itself, does not all language begin in the impulse of the very ocean to sing?
‘All right, so he likes Beethoven. Let’s try Bach and Brahms.’
As the sun reached its zenith in the blue eggshell of the sky and began its descent into its birth place in the sea, the humans regaled me with other musics. I listened and listened, lost in a sweet, sonic rapture.
‘I think he loves Mozart,’ the shorter male said.
‘I think he loves me,’ the golden-haired surfer said. ‘And I love him.’
To the murmurs of a new melody, the female leaned far out over the boat and pressed her mouth against the skin over my mouth.
‘Bobo, Bobo, Bobo – I wish I could talk to you!’ she said.
‘I wish I could talk to you,’ I told her. I wished I could understand anything of what she or any human said. ‘Can you not even say water?’
I slapped the surface of the sea with my flukes, and carefully enunciated, ‘Water. W-a-t-e-r.’
‘It’s like he wants to talk to me,’ she said.
Having grown frustrated in my desire to touch her with the most fundamental of utterances, I drank in a mouthful of water and sprayed it over her face.
‘Oh, my God! You soaked me! How would you like it if I did that to you?’
Again, I sprayed her and said, ‘Water.’ And then she dipped her hand into the bay, brought it up to her mouth, and sprayed me.
‘So you like playing with water don’t you?’ she said. ‘Well, you’re a whale, so why shouldn’t you? Water, water, everywhere you go.’
Her hand, her hideous but lovely hand that had sent waves of pleasure rippling along my skin, slapped the water much as I had done with my tail. And with each slap, she made a sound with her mouth, which had touched my mouth: ‘Water, water, water.’
The great discoveries in life often come in a moment’s burst like the thunderbolt that flashes out of a long-building storm. I listened as the golden-haired surfer said to me, ‘I wish I could teach you to say water.’ And all the while her clever hand touched the sea in perfect coordination with the sound that poured from her mouth: ‘Water, water, water.’ I realized all at once that she was trying to teach me to speak, in the human way. I realized something else, something astonishing that would open the secret to communicating with these strange animals:
One set of sounds, one word! The humans do not inflect their words according to circumstance, context, or the art of variation! Not even our babies speak so primitively!
‘Water,’ the surfer said again. ‘You understand that, don’t you, Bobo?’
Water, water, water – she kept repeating the simple sequence of taps and tones with an excruciating sameness. I tried to return the favor, trilling out one of the myriad expressions for water in a single way: water.
‘I don’t understand you, though,’ she said to me. ‘I don’t think human beings will ever be able to speak whale.’
The brightness in the surfer’s blue eyes faded, as when a cloud passes over the moon. I feared that she did not understand me.
‘No one can speak to a whale,’ the longer of the males said. ‘They probably don’t even have real language.’
The surfer female looked at me. She thumped her hand against the smooth excrescence upon which she lay and said, ‘Boat.’ And so I learned another word. This game went on until dusk. I collected human words as a magpie gathers up colorful bits of driftglass: Shirt. Fork. Beer. Hair. Ice. Teeth. Lips.
Finally, as the sun sank down into the crimson and pink clouds along the western horizon, the female pressed her hand over her heart and said, ‘Kelly,’ which I supposed must be what the humans call their own kind. The longer of the two male kellies made a similar gesture and said, ‘Zach.’ I laughed then at my stupidity. They were obviously giving me their names.
I gave them mine, but they seemed not to understand what I was doing. Just as the underside of the boat roared into motion, Kelly said to me, ‘Goodbye, Bobo. I love you!’
The next day, and for the remainder of the late summer moon, I had similar encounters with other humans. Strangely, they all seemed to have taken up the game played by Kelly and Zach. I learned many more human words: Lightbulb. Fish. Rifle. Bullet. Knife. Dog. Life preserver. Surfboard. Mouth. Eyes. Penis. I learned many names, too: Jake. Susan. Nika. Keegan. Ayanna. Alex. Jillian. Justine. Most of these humans called me Bobo, and sometimes for fun I returned the misnomer by exercising a willful obtuseness in persisting to think of the humans as male or female kellies.
In the vocalizations of all these many kellies, I began to pick out words that I had mastered. However, the meaning of their communications still largely eluded me. Even so, I memorized all that the kellies said, against the day that I might make sense of what still seemed like gobbledygook:
‘Bobo is back! Hey Lilly, he seems to like talking to you the best. Maybe you can use this for your college essay.’
‘Maybe I can sell the rights to all this, and they can make a movie.’
‘They say Bobo is the smartest orca anyone has ever seen.’
‘I hear he understands everything you say.’
‘Of course he’s trying to communicate with us, and he’s been getting more aggressive, too.’
‘Hey, Bobo, how does it work to mate with a whale?’
‘I’m going to play him some Radiohead. I hear he likes that.’
‘Do you just poop and pee in the water and swim through it?’
‘What do you think Bobo – is there a God?’
‘They’re saying Bobo might hurt someone or injure himself, so they might have to capture him and sell him to Sea Circus.’
‘I love Bobo, and I know he loves me.’
‘If he’s so smart, how come he can’t speak a single word of English?’
How frustrated I was! Not only did I fail to form a single human word, I could not make a single human understand the simplest orca word for water. Upon considering the problem, I realized that much of my success in recognizing the few human words I had been taught lay in the curious power of the human hand. If the humans had not been able to touch or stroke the various objects they presented to me, how would I ever have learned their names?
With this in mind, I broadened my strategy of instructing the humans in the basics of orca speech. I opened my mouth and put tongue to teeth in order to indicate the part of the body that I then named. As well, I licked a human hand and said, ‘Tentacle,’ and with a beat of my flukes I flicked a salmon into one of their boats and said, ‘Fish.’ When that did not avail, I took to nudging various things with my head and calling out sounds that I desperately wished the humans might understand: Driftwood; kelp; sandbar; clam shell. Sadly, the humans still seemed unable to grasp the meaning of what I said – or even that I was trying to teach them.
One gray morning when the sea had calmed and flattened out like the silvery-clear glass that the humans made, I came upon a small boat gliding across the bay. Quiet it was, nearly as quiet as a stealth whale stalking a seal. A lone human male dipped a double-bladed splinter of wood into the water in rhythmic strokes. A violet and green shell of excrescence encased his head. I expected his boat to be made of one of this material’s many manifestations, but when I zanged the boat, I found it was made of skin stretched over a wooden skeleton. I swam in close to make the male’s acquaintance.
‘Hello, brave human, my name is Arjuna.’ I often thought of the humans as brave, for what other land animal who swims so poorly ventures out into the ocean – and alone at that? ‘What are you called?’
This male, however, unlike most humans, remained as quiet as his boat. I came up out of the water, the better to look at him. I liked his black eyes, nearly as large and liquid and full of light as my mother’s eyes. I liked it that he sat within a skin boat. I grew so weary of listening to the echoes of excrescence, which it seemed the humans called plastic.
‘Skin,’ I called out, touching my face to the body of his boat. ‘Your boat is covered with skin, as am I, as are you!’
I did not really think I could teach him this word, any more than I had been able to teach other humans other words. Having been thwarted so many times in my increasingly desperate need to communicate, I pursued accord with this male too strenuously. My pent-up desire to teach one human one orca sound impelled me to nudge the boat as I might one of my own family. It surprised me how insubstantial the boat proved to be. I looked on in dismay as the boat flipped over like a leaf tossed by a wave.
‘Hold your breath!’ I called to the human suspended upside down beneath the boat.
Although I assumed the human must know that he would drown if he breathed water, I could not be sure. I dove beneath the water to help him.
‘Hold onto me!’
I found the male beating his stick through the water. It would have been an easy thing for him to have grasped my fin or tail so that I could pull him around through the gelid sea to return him to the air. Instead, he began beating his stick at me. He thrashed about like a frightened fish. Silver bubbles churned the water. I caught the sound of the human’s heart beating as quickly as a bird’s wings. Through the froth and the fury of the human’s struggle, I gazed at his glorious eyes, grown dark and jumping with a dread of death. Now he did not seem so brave.
‘Wait, wait, wait!’ I told him. ‘I will save you!’
I pressed my head against his side; as gently as I could, I used my much greater substance to move his slight body around and up through the water. This had the effect of turning the boat still attached to him. A moment later, the human breached and choked in a great lungful of air. Water streamed from his face and from the blue plastic skin encasing him. He coughed and sputtered out a spray of spit, for he had sucked water into his blowhole.
After a while, his coughing subsided. His belly, though, tensed up as tight as the skin that covered his little boat. And he called out to me: ‘Goddamned whale! Why can’t you leave us alone?’
Why could I not speak with the humans, I wondered as I swam off in dismay? Through days of clouds and dark nights, I swam back and forth across the bay pondering this problem. I dove deep into the inky waters, believing that if I did so, I might somehow zang how I might talk to the humans – and how, indeed, I might sound the much deeper mystery of how anything spoke with anything at all. What was language, really? For the humans, it seemed nothing more than an arbitrary set of sounds that they attached like so many barnacles to various people, objects, and ideas. From where did these sounds, though, come? What principle or passion ordered them? Could it be, as I very much wanted it to be, that the human language had a deeper structure and intelligence that I could not quite perceive? And that a higher and secret language engendered all the utterances of every individual or every species in the world? And not just of our world, Ocean, but of other worlds such as Agathange, Simoom, and Scutarix? Might there not be, at the very bottom of things, concordant and melodious, a single and universal language through which all beings could communicate?
I felt sure that they must be. One evening, as I lay in deep meditation beneath many fathoms of cold water, it came to me with all the suddenness of a bubble bursting that my approach to speaking with the humans had been all wrong. Before trying to teach them the rudiments of orca speech, which their lips, tongues, and other vocal apparatus might not be able to duplicate, might it not be possible to share with them the impulse beneath language, even as they had shared their musics with me? Yes, I decided, it would be possible. And, yes, yes, I would share with the humans all that I had so far held inside: I would drink in the deepest of breaths and gather up the greatest of inspiration, and I would sing to the humans as no whale had ever sung before!
Some days later, I entered a cove in which floated a large fishing boat. The humans had covered the front of it with gray and white paints in a shape that looked something like the head of a shark. Buoyed as I was by bonhomie and zest for the newfound possibilities of my mission, I paid little attention to the peculiarities of this boat or to the many strands of excrescence that surrounded it like intertangled growths of kelp. Nets, the humans called these fish traps. Today, however, the empty nets had trapped not a single salmon. It seemed that the many noisy humans gesticulating atop the boat had not really come here to fish, but rather to make music for me.
And what music they made! And how they made it! I swam in toward the boat, drawn by the mighty Beethoven chords that somehow sounded from beneath the water. The density of this marvelous blue substance magnified the marvel of the music. Joy, pure joy, zanged straight through my skin. I moved even closer to the boat and to the music’s mysterious source beneath the rippling waves.
‘O what a song I have for you!’ I said to the humans. I knew that if I was to touch their hearts as they had touched mine, I must go deep inside myself to speak with the monsters and the angels that dwelled there. ‘Here, humans, here, here – please listen to this song of myself!’
I breached and breathed in a great breath in order to sing. Before the first sound vibrated in my flute, however, the boat began to shudder and shake and to issue sounds of its own. The air sickened with a clanking and grinding. Quicker than I could believe, the nets of excrescence began closing in on me from all sides, like a pack of sharks intent on a feeding frenzy. My heart leaped, not with song but with a fire like that which had burned the waters of the northern sea. I swam to the east, but encountered a web of excrescence in that direction. A dart to the west led straight into yet more netting. I dove, seeking a way beneath the closing nets, but I could not find an escape to the open ocean. In a rage to get away, I swam down through the bitter blue water and then hurled myself in steep arc into the air and over the shrinking sweep of the net. I plunged down with a great splash. For a moment, I thought I was free. It turned out, though, that I had landed within a second layer of netting, which quickly ensnared my tail and fins. The humans – the insightful, intelligent, and treacherous human beings – had considered very carefully how to trap a whale such as I.
As the net tightened around me and pulled me toward the boat and the flensing knives and the teeth that must await me there, I began singing a different song than I had intended: the thunderous and terrible universal song of death that I knew the humans would understand all too well.
5 (#ulink_251b8233-34e0-5db6-b150-ddaf59e658f9)
Water, the fundamental substance, exerts a fundamental force on all things. We of the starlit waves dwell within the ocean, and the ocean surges mighty and eternal within us. We are at one with water – and so we experience the fundamental force as a centering and a calling of like to like that suffuses our bodies with a delightful buoyancy of being. If we are taken out of the water – as the humans pulled me into the air with grinding gears and clanking chains – we continue to feel this force, but in a new and a dreadful way. The centering gives way to separation; the calling becomes a terrible crushing felt in every tissue of skin, nerve, muscle, and bone. It sickens one’s blood with an inescapable heaviness and finds out even the deepest fathoms of the soul.
I had never imagined becoming separated from the sea. To be sure, I had leaped many times into the near-nothingness of air or had played with launching myself up onto an ice floe, as the Others sometimes do when hunting seals. These ventures into alien elements, however, had lasted only moments. I had known that I would return to the water again before my heart beat a few times.
After the humans captured me, I felt no such certainty of deliverance from the crushing force that made breathing such a labor. In truth, the opposite of salvation seemed to be my fate. I could not understand why the humans delayed using their chainsaws to cut me into small pieces that their small mouths could accommodate. Were they not hungry? Would they not soon devour me as they had the many shiny salmon that they trapped in their nets?
The longer that I waited to die, the worse the crushing grew – and the more that I associated this dreadful force with death. I lay on the surface of the ship, and the strands of netting cut into my skin even as the hard, cold iron of the ship thrust up against my chest and belly. I lay within a canvas cocoon as metal bit against metal once more, and the humans lowered me onto a kind of ship that moved over the ground. I lay listening to the growl and grind of more metal vibrating from beneath me and up through my muscles and bones. I lay gasping against the land ship’s poisonous excretions as breathing became a burden and then an agony. I lay within a metal box as a white lightning of a roaring thunder fractured the water within me – and then a sickening sensation took hold of my heaving belly, and I lay within a pool of acid and half-digested fish bits that I had vomited out. I lay within the darkness of the foul, smothering box, and I lay within the much deeper darkness that found its way not just over my eyes and my flesh, but into my mind and my dreams and my blackened and soundless soul.
‘O Mother!’ I cried out. ‘Why did I fail you? Why did you fail me, by bringing me into life?’
I cried out as loud as I could, although it hurt to draw the cloying, slimy air into my lungs.
‘O Grandmother! Why did I not heed your wisdom?’
I cried out again, even though the echoes off the metal close all about me zanged my brain nearly to jelly and deafened me. I cried and cried, but no murmur of help came from without or sounded through the dead ocean within.
For a long time the humans moved me with their various conveyances – I did not know where. The last of these, another land ship, I thought, jumped and stopped, then speeded up with a growl and a belch of smoke, only to stop again, many, many times. I could discern no pattern to its noisy motions. It occurred to me that I should seek relief from all the crushing and the lurching by swimming off into sleep. For the first time in my life, I could sleep with all my brain and mind without breathing water and drowning. I could not sleep, however, even within the tiniest kernel of myself, even for a moment. For if I did sleep, I knew that I would die a different kind of death, becoming so lost within dreams of the family and the freedom I had left behind that I would never want to wake up.
At last, the land ship came to stop longer than any of the other stops. Human voices sounded from outside the metal skin that encased me. Then, from farther away, came other voices, fainter but much more pleasing to my mind: I heard birds squawking and sea lions barking out obnoxious sounds similar to those made by the humans’ dogs. A beluga, too, called out in the sweet dreamy beluga language. A walrus whistled as if to warn me away. Voices of orcas picked up this alarm.
The humans used their cleverness with things to lift me out of the land ship and lower me into a pool of water. How warm it was – too warm, almost as warm as a pool of urine! How it tasted of excrement and chemicals and decaying fish! Even so, it was water, no matter how lifeless or foul, and immediately the crushing force released its hold on my lungs, and I could breathe again. In a way, I was home.
‘Water, water, water!’ I shouted out.
My heart began beating to the wild rhythm of unexpected relief. I felt compelled to swim down nearly to the bottom of the pool and then up to leap high into the air before crashing back down into the water with a huge splash.
‘Yes, that’s right, Bobo!’ A voice hung in the air like a hovering seagull. ‘That’s why we rescued you, why you’re here. Good Bobo, good – very good!’
Humans stood around the edge of the pool. Many of them there were, and each encased in the colorful coverings that they call clothes. These humans, however, unlike those I had known in the bay, covered less of their bodies. I looked up upon bare, brown arms and horribly hairy legs sticking out of half tubes of blue or yellow or red plastic fabric. One of the females was nearly as naked as a whale, with only thin black strips to cover her genital slit and her milk glands.
‘Can you jump again for me?’ she said to me. From a plastic bucket full of dead, dirty fish, she removed a herring and tossed it into the water.
I swam over and nuzzled the herring. Although I was hungry, I did not want to eat this slimy bit of carrion.
‘Here, like this,’ she said.
She clamped her arms against her sides, then jumped up and kicked her feet in a clumsy mockery of a whale’s leap into the air.
‘If he’s as smart as they say he is, Gabi,’ one of the females standing near her said, ‘you’ll have him doing pirouettes in a month.’
‘Wow, look at the size of him!’ a male said. ‘They weren’t lying about how big he is.’
‘Yes, you are big, aren’t you, Bobo?’ the female said. ‘And in a few more months, you’re going to be our biggest star. Welcome to Sea Circus!’
My elation at being once again immersed in water vanished upon a quick exploration of my new environs. How tiny my pool of water was! I could swim across it in little more than a heartbeat. It seemed nearly as tight as a womb, though nothing about it nurtured or comforted. The pool’s walls seemed made of stone covered in blue paint. Whenever I loosed a zang of sonar to keep from colliding with one of the walls, the echoes bounced wildly from wall to wall and filled the pool with a maddening noise. I felt disoriented, abandoned, and lost within a few fathoms of filthy water. I could barely hear myself think.
I did not understand at first why the humans delayed in devouring me. Then, after half a day in the pool, I formed a hypothesis: the few humans I had seen could not possibly eat a whale such as I by themselves. Perhaps they waited for others of their kind to join the feast. Or perhaps they had captured and trapped me for a more sinister reason: here, within a pool so small that I had trouble turning around, they could cut pieces out of me over many days and thus consume me from skin to blubber to muscle to bone. It would take a long time for me to die, and the humans could fill their small mouths and bellies many times. Protected as the pool was by its hard, impenetrable walls, no sharks would arrive to steal me from the humans and finish me off. I would have nearly forever to complete the composition of my death song, which I had begun when trapped by netting in the bay.
I could not, however, sing. In such a place, who could give voice to the great mysteries and exaltations? In tainted water roiling with the cacophony of sonar crisscrossing the pool and fracturing into deafening zangs, who could prepare for the great journey into the quiet, eternal now-moment that underlies the beginning and end of time? No, no, I could not affirm life by opening myself to my inevitable death, and so I cried out in a rage at having come so far only to suffer such a despicable fate. I raged and raged as I cried out to my family who could not hear me, and I swam and I swam back and forth across the hated pool, back and forth, back and forth.
Such despair can derange the mind. Soon, I began hearing voices: the voices, I thought, of the other orcas trapped in other pools nearby. Surely the moans and murmurs of discontent that I heard must issue from real, living whales, mustn’t they? How, though, could I be sure that I was not hallucinating? In the distant lamentations that vibrated the walls about me and further poisoned the sounds of my pool, I could barely make out voices deformed by accents strong and strange:
‘Welcome, welcome, welcome!’
‘Go away, whale of the Northern Ocean! We do not want you here!’
‘Go away, if you can! But, of course, you cannot. You are trapped like a krill in the belly of a blue whale.’
‘You are trapped as we are trapped. Do not dispirit yourself by trying to keep alive your spirit.’
‘Do not listen to Unukalhai, for he is mad.’
‘Abandon all hope, you who have entered this place of hopelessness.’
‘Live, brave orca. It is all you can do!’
‘Die, strange one. Breathe water and die before your soul dies and you cannot die when it comes time to die.’
‘No, escape!’
‘Do not hope for escape. All who come here die.’
‘Quenge and escape before it is too late.’
‘Who can quenge in such a place? Die, die, die!’
‘Welcome, welcome, welcome!’
Soon, I met those orcas who had spoken to me and so confirmed their reality. My pool, as I discovered, joined with other pools, some much larger but still too small to move about comfortably. Between each pool, the humans had contrived doors which they somehow opened and shut as easily as I might my mouth. With the humans standing about the concrete beach of the largest of the pools, as the hot sun made the warm water even warmer, I made my way into the pool as tentatively as I might swim into a cave full of stingrays. There I mingled with the other orcas and made their acquaintance.
‘Hello, I am Alkurah,’ a large female said to me. Her speech rippled with curious inflections and had an odd though pleasant lilt to it. ‘And these are my sisters, Salm and Zavijah.’
Salm, younger and smaller than Alkurah, had a notch in her right flipper, and her dorsal fin flopped over upon her back in a most undignified way. So it was with quiet and moody Zavijah and her dorsal fin and with her baby, Navi. The whole family, I saw, suffered from the same horrifying affliction.
‘We are the last of the Moonsingers,’ Alkurah said, ‘of the Midnight Voyagers of the Emerald Sea. We were taken years ago and have been here at Hell Water ever since.’
‘Years ago!’ I cried out. ‘And the humans still have not eaten you?’
‘Eaten us?’ she said. She swam closer to take a look at me. ‘No, no, strange one – these humans are not whale eaters.’
At this revelation, I should have experienced relief at having been delivered from a dreadful death. Instead, I sensed the closing-in of a different sort of danger and felt the intimations of an even more horrible fate.
‘Then why,’ I asked, ‘have the humans brought us here?’
‘Why, to perform feats.’
‘What sort of feats?’
‘Breaching and leaping, spy-hopping and gyrations. They like to stand on our backs while we swim about the pool.’
‘They … stand on your back, truly?’
‘Oh, yes, they do – as they do, and make us do, many other things.’
‘But why?’ I asked.
‘We do not know. The humans are insane.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But they must have reasons for what they do, insane though these reasons might be.’
‘Must they, really? The humans are not reasonable animals. Indeed, after many years of having to endure their ugly faces and their squawking day after day, I am convinced they are quite stupid.’
‘Perhaps their minds are so different from ours that they—’
‘You know little of humans, Strange One,’ Alkurah chided me. ‘Let us not speak of your speculations now. I was making introductions when you interrupted me.’
‘My apologies,’ I said. ‘I did not mean to be rude. Please continue.’
Alkurah introduced a smallish male named Menkalinan from the Star Far Vermillion Sea. It surprised me to learn that Menkalinan, sulky and streaked with scars, was Navi’s father.
‘I see that you can be politely quiet when spoken to by a mother orca,’ Alkurah said to me. ‘I like that, for it shows that you have been well raised. But I can hear the disquiet of doubt in your silence.’
In silence, I swam about the tepid water, and so spoke even louder.
‘You are wondering, I think,’ she said, ‘how my sister Zavijah could mate in such a place – and with such a pitiful male as Menkalinan, who can barely sing.’
‘Well, yes, I was wondering that very thing,’ I said. I studied Menkalinan’s flopped-over fin and the sad, furtive way that he propelled himself about the pool.
‘Of course,’ Alkurah said, ‘my sister did not mate with Menkalinan. The humans did things with their things, and they stole Menkalinan’s sperm and forced it into Zavijah.’
At this, Zavijah said nothing, though she made a quick dart at Menkalinan as if to warn him away and drive off any thoughts he might have of inseminating her more naturally.
‘How could they do that?’ I said. So disgusted was I that I would have vomited, if there had been anything in my empty belly to vomit.
A male only slightly smaller than I swam in close and fixed me with his wild, intelligent eye. He said, ‘The dolphins rape each other, and that is understandable, though detestable. But the humans rape those not of their kind. They are a low, low animal, though impossibly clever in an exasperatingly stupid way. One might say that their individual cunning, which covers them with a patina of sanity, in fact drives them enmasse to a collective insanity.’
I glanced up at the many humans standing about the pool. Some were indeed doing things with things, as most humans did most of the time. The others, though, were gazing down into the pool and watching us.
‘I am Unukalhai,’ the large male told me. Many scars streaked his sides, and his great fin lay nearly flat along his back. ‘Alkurah will not introduce me, so I will introduce myself.’
Alkurah swam between me and Unukalhai as if to protect me from him. She said, ‘Do not listen to this whale of the Sorrowful Sea, for he is insane.’
‘Oh, I am insane, Dear One,’ Unukalhai said to Alkurah. ‘But one wonders why you think that you are not insane as well?’
‘Do not listen!’
‘Why do you not accept this?’ Unukalhai said to her.
‘Unukalhai,’ Alkurah told me, ‘is willfully insane, which makes him insane all the more.’
Unukalhai laughed at this in the universal orca way. ‘Of course I am insane. In such an insane place as this, my acceptance of my plight is the only reasonable response.’
‘Do not listen! Do not listen! Do not listen!’
Unukalhai laughed again and said to me, ‘Of course, I am not only insane. In my very eagerness to look upon, hear, taste, and embrace my insanity, I exercise a deeper sanity.’
Upon a murmur of protest from Alkurah, her sisters Salm and Zavijah joined in to swim in close and surround Unukalhai. They nuzzled his sides, again and again. In the tightness of pool, he could not elude them or escape their attentions.
‘If the humans were not watching,’ a tiny voice spoke out, ‘the sisters would hurt him again and try to silence him.’
These words came from a tiny orca, who swam alone near the corner of the pool. Her very thick accent and nearly impenetrable syntax identified her as one of the Others. The strange and unfamiliar lattices of sound that she built within the pool’s water seemed strangely familiar.
‘How many times have you hurt Unukalhai?’ the tiny orca said to Alkurah. ‘As many as the marks on his skin!’
She went on to describe for me how Alkurah and her sisters often tormented Unukalhai (and the sad Menkalinan) by raking them with their teeth and opening up long, bloody wounds that cut through skin and blubber. It shocked me to hear this little whale speak of such a thing. No whale of my family or acquaintance had ever harmed another. Even more, for a very young orca to address an elder such as Alkurah so critically seemed almost impossibly rude. But then, the tiny whale was of the Others, who do not esteem our kind highly. And, as I would discover, she was as fearless as she was outspoken.
Alkurah swam closer to the lone, unprotected whale. With even greater rudeness, she said, ‘I could kill you with one bite.’
‘Yes, but you will not. Then I would be beyond the humans’ torments – and therefore beyond yours.’
Alkurah said nothing to the implication that she reveled in the tiny whale’s suffering, for to do so would be to admit that she had plunged deeply into the insane. Instead, she gathered in her dignity and pretended to the fiction that all the disparate whales in the pool somehow formed a single family, over which she presided as matriarch. Using her most authoritative voice, almost forcibly modulated to a reasonable calmness, she formally introduced the tiny whale to me:
‘This is Baby Electra from the—’
‘I know you!’ I called out to the little orca, carelessly interrupting Alkurah again. ‘That is, I know of you – I knew your brother Pherkad!’
I swam over to Baby Electra. So tiny she was, really not much more than a newborn. A long scar marked her left side, as if Alkurah had toothed her there. I liked her lovely symmetry of form and the warm, clear light which filled her dark eyes.
‘How could you have known Pherkad, how, how? Our kind do not naturally speak to Others such as you.’
I laughed at her boldness and at the irony of what she had said. I realized for the first time that the Others thought of my kind as the Others.
‘No natural occurrence,’ I said, ‘brought Pherkad and me together.’
I told Baby Electra of the Burning Sea of how I had tried to remove the harpoon from Pherkad’s flesh. I gave her Pherkad’s death song, which he had given to me.
‘O Pherkad!’ she called out. ‘O my brother, my sweet brave brother – the most beautiful whale in all the world!’
She began crying, and the terrible close waters of the pool shook with a lament almost beyond bearing.
‘O the stars! O the sea! Why is there so much pain?’
She wept for a long time. Finally, she composed herself and swam in close to me.
‘My family are all dead,’ she told me, ‘as your dear ones are to you, for you will never see them again.’
‘No, I will see them,’ I said, ‘on Agathange or in the timeless Cerulean Sea.’
‘No, I am sorry, you will not, for you will never quenge again. I’m so sorry, sorry, sorry.’
‘I will quenge again,’ I said.
While the other orcas listened, I told Baby Electra of my reason for making my journey and all that occurred upon it.
‘You say that before Pherkad went off to die,’ Electra forced out, ‘you came to love him like a brother?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘Well, I love you the same way, for you are brave and beautiful as he was.’
‘Thank you,’ I intoned, not knowing what else to say.
‘Will you be my brother, here in this horrible place?’
I made a quick decision, one of the best of my life.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I will.’
She moved up against my side as if to take comfort in my much larger body and to keep me between her and Alkurah and her sisters.
‘Then we are a family,’ she said. ‘I will try to speak with the humans as you have tried. Why don’t we call ourselves the Hopeful Wordplayers of the Manmade Bitterblue Sea?’
All the other whales had a good, long laugh at this. Then Zavijah mocked Baby Electra, saying, ‘If your naming talent goes no deeper than that, you had better continue to play with your words if you ever hope to speak with the humans.’
‘How could she speak with the humans,’ her sister Salm added, ‘when she can barely speak with us?’
‘It is a mystery,’ Zavijah said, ‘how you Others can even speak to each other in your ugly miscarriage of a language. What a sad fate that our family should have to listen to it!’
‘And a sadder fate,’ Alkurah agreed, ‘that we Moonsingers should have to dwell so closely with a misbegotten family composed of two kinds never meant to speak with each other. One might as well try to form a family of a human and a whale.’
At this, the pool crackled with the sound of the three sisters’ derisive laughter. Then Baby Navi, even tinier than Electra, broke away from nursing at Zavijah’s side and cried out, ‘Please stop – you are hurting my heart!’
Zavijah called to her sisters to cease their mockery, for as much as she seemed to despise Baby Electra, she loved her newborn Navi even more, and she could not bear for anything to hurt him. And her elder sister Alkurah, who loved Zavijah fiercely, could not bear anything that caused her to suffer.
‘So!’ Unukalhai said from the end of the pool where he floated. ‘This, Arjuna, is how it goes with insanity. The humans’ cruelty has made the Moonsingers insane with a cruelty most unbecoming in a whale. But you – you, you, you, and little Electra – have chosen a different way! Insane it is for our kind to try to make a family with one of the Others, but in just this sort of insanity, you might find a kind of salvation.’
His wisdom, crazy though it might be, clung to me like one of the humans’ noxious skin lotions and slowly worked its way inside me. Over the days that followed – long, boring days of swimming back and forth within the imprisoning waters and watching the humans teach the other whales their ‘feats’ – I considered the advice he had tendered me. In one sense, even to entertain the thought of falling insane seemed itself insane. From another vantage, however, what if Unukalhai was right? Could it be that a still pool of sanity dwelled within the typhoon of madness that pressed down upon all us whales and threatened to derange our finest sensibilities? And if so, how could one navigate the raging winds and waves of that stormy sea to find a place of peace?
In no other aspect of existence did the other orcas demonstrate their creeping dementia so disturbingly as in their acquiescence to the humans’ desires. Day after day, as the sun swam again and again like a flying fish over our pools, the humans continued doing things with things even as they conveyed their wishes to us and never ceased their irritating chattering:
‘Good girl, Mimu!’
‘Can you open your mouth for me?’
‘You’re cuter than a bug’s ear.’
‘You just love having your flipper tickled, don’t you, Gaga?’
‘Are you ready for a relationship session?’
‘Stick out your tongue for me, baby.’
‘You are sooo sweet, Tito, oh, yes you are, yes you are!’
‘Can you pee for me, sweetie?’
‘Are you ready to have some fun being a big surfboard for us?’
‘Meal time!’
‘Let’s see what you can do with these new toys.’
‘Good girl, Lala! You’re so happy, aren’t you?’
‘I’ve been dreaming about this since I was nine years old.’
‘What are we going to do about Bobo?’
‘Jordan wants to breed him to Mimu.’
‘What do you think, Mimu? Are you ready to be a mother like your little sister?’
‘We’ve got to build him up first. He’s sooo thin.’
‘Aren’t you happy with your new toys, Bobo?’
‘Jordan special-ordered some char for him, but he wouldn’t even touch it.’
‘Please eat, baby. We love you!’
It quickly became clear to me that one of the humans was trying to teach me the first of my feats. Gabi, the other humans called her. Her orange, curly hair seemed to erupt from her head like snakes of fire. Her skin – red where the sun had licked it and like cream on those parts of her usually covered by her clothing – was mottled with little splotches of pigment that seemed to float across her face like bits of brown seaweed. I liked her eyes, large and kind and nearly as deep blue as cobalt driftglass. I saw in these lively orbs a dreaminess mated to a fierce dedication to apply her will toward whatever purpose she chose to embrace. It seemed important to her that I should eat. Whenever I swam near, she would kneel by the side of the pool with a fish in her hand, and she would open her mouth wide in an obvious sign that I should do the same. I did not, however, want to open my mouth. I feared that if I did so, Gabi would cast the dead fish onto my tongue, as other humans did with the other whales.
‘Come on, Big Boy,’ she said to me, ‘you have to eat. Please, Bobo, pleeease!’
Near the end of my fifth day of immurement in the humans’ filthy pools, Baby Electra rubbed up against my side as if to rub away my obduracy. She said to me, ‘Please, Arjuna – you have to eat!’
‘How can I eat slimy old fish?’
‘That is all we have.’
‘I will wait then until we have something else.’
‘If you do not eat, you will die.’
‘If I do eat, I will die.’
‘I do not understand you!’ Baby Electra said. ‘The speech of you Others is so difficult – as difficult as the way you think.’
‘My thought is no different than yours.’
‘Then you should think very clearly about eating. Could it be worse for you than it was for me?’
Baby Electra told of her first days among the humans and described her revulsion over eating fish of any kind, dead or alive.
‘I had only ever put tooth to seals, porpoises and a few humpback whales,’ she said. ‘I did not even think of fish as food.’
‘How, then, did you eat it?’
‘How did you eat the white bear?’
‘With great gusto, actually, though I must apologize for breaking our covenant with your kind.’
‘I forgive you,’ she said, ‘as Pherkad did. But I will not forgive you if you starve to death. I need you!’
The sheer poignancy with which she said this drove deep her vulnerability and made me want to weep.
‘Better death from starvation,’ I told her as gently as I could, ‘than the living death from eating dead food. I do not want to become like Unukalhai and Alkurah.’
‘Am I like them, Arjuna? Are you sure that eating what the humans give us would be so bad?’
Yes, I thought, yes, yes – I was sure! How should I go on without hunting for sweet salmon, char, and other free-swimming fish as my mother had taught me? To tear the life from a vital, thrashing animal, to feel that life pass within and join with one’s own, making one stronger, to feel complete in oneself the great web of life, perfect and eternal, and thus to know oneself gloriously and immortally alive – what joy, what wild, wild joy! How could I, how should I, live without that?
One day, the humans brought out an old orca that they had named Shazza, but whom we knew as Bellatrix. This huge grandmother of a whale would have acted as matriarch in Alkurah’s place but for Bellatrix’s dementia and a sadness so deep that surely the Great Southern Ocean must have wept in compassion for her. She joined the rest of us in the big pool, but she touched no one. Her great dorsal fin flopped over her side like a lifeless, decaying manta ray. Oozing sores pocked her face – apparently she had scoured off her skin by rubbing against the gates of the pools again and again. When the humans cast fish at her, she opened her mouth to reveal teeth that she had broken by gnawing on the stony side of the pool. After her meal, she floated near the pool’s center, barely moving. Her breathing was labored as mine had been when the humans had pulled me from the sea. She seemed nearly dead.
‘Do you see? Do you see?’ I said to Baby Electra. ‘Would you have me eat so that I could become like her?’
No, no – I would not eat! I had come to the humans with the best of intentions, hoping to talk to them and ask them why they were trying to kill the world. They had returned my goodwill by trapping me and bringing me to this place of living death. Would I not be better off if I were truly dead?
Later, I expressed this sentiment to Unukalhai. He beat the pool’s water with his flukes as if deep in contemplation. Then he said to me, ‘You are still thinking like a free whale.’
‘How should I think then? Like Bellatrix, who can no longer think at all?’
‘Why did you leave your family, Arjuna? Was it not to speak with the humans?’
‘Are you suggesting that I try once more to talk to them? How can I talk to animals who do such cruel things to people such as us?’
‘The humans are animals, indeed, and that is why you never will succeed in conveying our conceptions to them. It would be like expecting a clam’s shell to contain the sea.’ He paused to drink in a mouth of water and spray it out in a concentrated stream in the way that one of the humans had taught him. ‘However, you should recommence your efforts at communication, futile though they might be. To attempt the impossible is mad, is it not? And it is just this sort of madness that will save you.’
‘Save me for what? To spend the rest of my life eating dead food and swimming through poisoned water?’
I spoke of how the humans sprayed chemicals over various species of plants that grew among the grasses and flowers encircling two of the smaller pools. Whatever green, growing things these chemicals touched withered and died. Rains washed the chemicals into the pools, and the poison found its way into the big pool, in which the humans themselves swam with us when they participated in our feats. How was it, I wondered, that the humans did not taste this poison and so remove themselves to the dryness of land?
‘The humans kill plants,’ I said to Unukalhai, ‘for no apparent reason. In the bay, they killed many trees and cut them into pieces. Why should I want to be saved if I must live a degraded life surrounded by such an insane species?’
I went on to say that the humans loved death. They smothered the living waters of the ocean with oil and flame. They harpooned entire families of orcas just so they could capture the youngest and most helpless of our kind. They wore second skins of excrescence, as dead as the other things that they fabricated and manipulated with their murderous hands. They themselves ate dead food.
‘Why should I not, then,’ I asked Unukalhai, ‘want to leave this place?’
‘I understand, young Arjuna. You want to leave, but soon you will grow so hungry that you will want only to eat. And then you will eat, as the rest of us do, even though the fish are dead.’
I considered this for a while. The hot sun rained down its firelight upon the pool. I looked over at Bellatrix, floating like a felled tree and barely breathing. Big black flies buzzed around her blowhole.
‘Then before hunger makes a coward of me,’ I said to Unukalhai, ‘I will breathe water and drown.’
Salm and Zavijah overheard me say this, and they swam to the sides of the pool as if to escape my words. Alkurah did the same, though she hesitated and touched me with zangs of what felt like regret. Unukalhai circled around me restlessly. Even though on my first day in captivity he himself had advised me to do what I had just suggested, he could not countenance my actual suicide.
‘Baby Electra needs you,’ he told me. ‘And I have longed for a like spirit to talk to.’
Baby Electra swam up to me and brushed her baby-smooth skin against mine. ‘You cannot break the covenants!’ she said to me.
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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David Zindell
Quite simply the best book about a whale since Moby Dick.The Idiot Gods is an epic tale told by an orca. David Zindell returns to the grand themes of Neverness in this uniquely moving book.An epic tale of a quest for a new way of life on earth, told by an orca.When Arjuna of the Blue Aria Family encounters three signs of cataclysm, he leaves his home in the Arctic Ocean to seek out the Idiot Gods and ask us why we are destroying the world. But the whales’ ancient Song of Life is beyond our understanding, and we know nothing of the Great Covenant between our kinds. Arjuna is captured, starved, tortured and made to do tricks in a tiny pool at Sea Circus.His love for a human linguist gives him hope, even as he despairs that other people twist his words and continue the worldwide slaughter. As the whales' beloved Ocean turns toward the Blood Solstice the fate of humanity hangs in the balance: for if Arjuna gains the Voice of Death he could destroy mankind. But if understanding can prevail, he may, through the whales’ mysterious power of quenging, create a new Song of Life and enable human evolution to unfold.
DAVID ZINDELL
The Idiot Gods
Copyright (#u7a8e0c5e-f41d-5e9f-8d52-aa8bcf427d3d)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2017
Copyright © David Zindell 2017
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017
David Zindell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007252275
Ebook Edition © July 2017 ISBN: 9780008223311
Version: 2017-05-22
Dedication (#u7a8e0c5e-f41d-5e9f-8d52-aa8bcf427d3d)
To Jane, for your courage, wisdom, friendship and splendor
Table of Contents
Cover (#u8c308dc5-7038-5eca-8375-8abe243c4ac9)
Title Page (#ue920b936-47aa-5dda-be3d-2a798b3c76d0)
Copyright (#ua850f676-a91b-5076-9807-774c2c03695e)
Dedication (#ud99207c7-8258-5784-ae01-b28014e2e0c1)
Part One: The Burning Sea (#uad7c7a06-6fda-569b-8394-75d5eaf14a41)
Translators’ Note (#u1f12427c-8720-59b5-aadf-9a0b1e4015a6)
Chapter 1 (#u57d6879b-cbf0-50fc-80e1-a07117dd4f5b)
Chapter 2 (#u140de97a-b8a3-5e4a-8ae9-0fb9378cecfa)
Chapter 3 (#ue92620d3-2673-5a9b-9072-13343af8a622)
Chapter 4 (#ue0bd6003-ea9a-5380-afe6-85ad8271f4de)
Chapter 5 (#u6f72172a-8d81-5924-9aa7-67768751726e)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Two: The Idiot Gods (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Three: A Covenant With Thee (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by David Zindell (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PART ONE (#u7a8e0c5e-f41d-5e9f-8d52-aa8bcf427d3d)
Translators’ Note (#u7a8e0c5e-f41d-5e9f-8d52-aa8bcf427d3d)
It was our privilege and happy destiny to enjoy the friendship of one of the most remarkable beings ever to have come out of our little blue and white planet. Many have tried to make the orca named Arjuna into a Buddha or a Jesus, but he certainly never thought of himself as such – and not even as a teacher. Despite all insistence to the contrary, he remains an orca, however extraordinary, with all an orca’s sometimes strange and disturbing sensibilities. It is true that those who spent time with him often forgot that they were conversing with a cetacean possessing a magnitude of intelligence that we are still trying to comprehend. The consciousness of all creatures differs so greatly, yet at its source remains one and the same, as of a white light shined through a prism and refracted it into radiances of red, yellow, violet, and blue. Arjuna’s consciousness, to the extent that it illuminates his communications, can often seem pellucidly and sanely human, and at other times, psychopathic or utterly alien. We who have translated his ‘words’ faced the problem of necessarily regarding a non-human being through very human eyes; we have tried to convey a sense of Arjuna’s magnificent soul without making him seem too human. It would be well for anyone to see Arjuna for what he really is: a whale who just wanted to talk to human beings.
That Arjuna, born in the cold ocean, could have learned to ‘speak’ various human languages many still doubt, even after the seemingly miraculous events the whole world witnessed. They say that we linguists and biologists of the Institute for Advanced Cetacean Studies either misconstrued basic hunting, mating, or warning cries as language or interpreted them through our natural wish to communicate with an obviously intelligent but nevertheless inarticulate animal. Human beings, these skeptics believe, are by definition the only of earth’s creatures capable of symbolic and therefore true language. Our harshest critics – and we should hesitate before calling then conspiracy formulators – have accused us of simply inventing our translations of the thousands of communications that the orcas of the Institute confided in us. They accuse us of conspiring to excite compassion for these great beings toward the vain hope of ‘saving the whales’. This account is not for those deniers. Even if one were to read Arjuna’s account as a fiction, however, one should keep in mind that fictions often reveal the deepest of truths. In many ways, this is the truest story we know, and Arjuna had the truest of hearts. Anyone eager to know more about his life will lose little in skipping this introduction and going right to the words Arjuna chose to convey it. It is indeed a remarkable story. In the end, it is his story, and ours: that of the whole human race.
We would like to say more about those words that Arjuna selected to denote meanings that human beings could comprehend. In no way should these be considered to be ‘whale words’; whales do not communicate to each other through what we know as words, but rather through sound pictures. Arjuna offers as good an explanation of cetacean language as we could hope, and we cannot improve it. Sadly, we know almost nothing of what we sometimes informally call Orcalish. To date, even with the aid of the fastest of computers and the most elegant of mathematical models, we have managed to identify and interpret perhaps a twelfth of a percent of the meanings of the thousands of orca utterances. It should be remembered that we human beings still have not learned to speak with the whales, though they have readily, if painfully, learned to speak with us.
How, then, did Arjuna and the other orcas of his adopted family accomplish such a feat? The Institute’s former chief linguist, Helen Agar, initially worked with him in developing a constructed language through which orcas and humans could communicate. Various utterances natural to orcas – whistles, trills, clicks, chirrups, pulsed calls, and pops – were agreed upon to represent the ninety-one syllables of the language that Arjuna named Wordsong. Helen Agar had no need to speak Wordsong to Arjuna, for he understood English (and many other human languages) very well; however, while engaged in natural communication with Arjuna and the other orcas, Helen chose to communicate in this imaginative language out of solidarity with the whales and the ideal of making the crude vowels and consonants of a human language somehow ‘sing.’ Only one of the Institute’s other linguists (Prasad Choudhary) reached fluency in this language that has been popularly mischaracterized as ‘Baby Orcalish.’ In reality, Wordsong is more like a spoken Morse Code. It assigns meanings to orca sounds usually employed by the orcas very differently. Anyone can ‘talk’ Morse Code, for instance saying, ‘Pop, pop, pop; sprong, sprong, sprong; pop, pop, pop,’ to denote the SOS message meaning ‘help.’ While conversing in Wordsong is much more difficult, the rules for doing so follow a similar principle. Alone of non-linguists, the orca trainer Gabrielle Jones did come to understand Wordsong when Arjuna spoke it to her, even if she was unable to speak it back to him. English remained her only language, and it was she who encouraged Arjuna to communicate to the human race in what has become a de facto, if very limited, world language.
Most of Arjuna’s story, then, he recorded in English through an extension and adaptation of the Wordsong’s syllabary to English. As English contains, by some counts, more than 15,000 syllables, not even Helen Agar came close to understanding Arjuna when he was speaking it. Instead, as we have continued to do, she relied on the Institute’s computers to translate Arjuna’s vocalizations into more or less standard English.
This last statement must be qualified. When Arjuna could not find the word he wanted in the language of Shakespeare, Blake, and Eliot, he turned to others, peppering his account with words from Spanish, Japanese, Diné, Arabic, and Basque – and even from Quenya, Fravashi, and one of the many dialects of Tlön. He particularly liked Chinese for its tones and !Xoon for its clicks. All these needed to be re-translated into English; and even his English needed extensive editing. While his locutions at times could be eloquent and even poetic, they contained many quirks, for instance incorporating his curious prejudice against using contractions. Because orcas in their own language, as far as we can understand, transcend time through obscuring the boundaries between past, present, and future, Arjuna liked to meld together different diction levels and styles from different periods of human history. Bizarrely, he rendered entire sections of his communication of the story of his life into somewhat turgid verse aping the Latinate cadences of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
All this needed smoothing into prose accessible to those Arjuna most wanted to address. [The Institute has published the original document in all its babel of magnificence for anyone capable of deciphering it in hopes of reaching a deeper understanding of Arjuna’s mind.] As well, we took the liberty of cutting many strained metaphors and converting sound imagery to sight imagery, which predominated throughout the original document in a ratio of 77 to 23. Human beings, as Arjuna realized very early, are creatures of sight, and he would not have minded our attempts to make his story as readable as possible.
We found it more difficult and too distracting in the published English document to add cites in the many places where Arjuna ‘borrowed’ the sensibilities or the words of human authors. [The entire footnoted document is available upon request.] Arjuna plagiarized without shame. He considered copying or paraphrasing another’s words as honoring dead authors. He had no sense of property, either intellectual or any other kind. The only thing orcas ‘own’ are the compositions of themselves, which they call rhapsodies – and in a way, not even those, since the songs of all orcas belong to their families in much the same way that their souls belong to the sea.
Similarly, we hesitated to cut or change the many repetitions, such as Arjuna’s overuse of the words ‘splendor’ and ‘song’ – and most particularly, ‘soul.’ Arjuna found it difficult to settle on a single English word that could encompass a fluid orca concept. Certainly, he meant by soul many of the same things we usually call by different names but regard as intrinsic to ourselves: personality, memory, mind. In no way, however, did he intend soul to connote some sort of immaterial or supernatural essence. He might just as easily have used the words song, water, or wave. For orcas, soul is a substance no different than the water that forms up on the surface of the sea from which the whales take their greater being. If the orcas could be said to have a goal that they seek to achieve, it would be the shaping of themselves into perfect waves that share the same water of life with all others. So vital is this imperative to bring forth the most beautiful manifestation of true nature that Arjuna speaks of the soul dozens of times. He liked to say that he was involved with the soul of humankind.
Of course, Orcas don’t mind repetition in their communications to each other. Or rather, the nature of the orcas’ ever-flowing language, as far as we understand it, makes boring repetitions nearly impossible, in much the same way it is impossible to step twice into the same surging stream. Each sound picture that an orca paints – even one so commonplace as that of a salmon – differs from all others in nuance, inflection, and the many colors of sound. The nearly infinite complexity of these sound pictures, like variations of themes in an open-ended cerebral symphony, engages an orca’s full attention at the same time that it discourages human examination. Sadly, human beings remain bound to essentially one-dimensional sequences of syllables spoken in time, and despite Arjuna’s assurances to the contrary, it is extremely unlikely that we will ever comprehend the three-dimensional language of the whales. We simply don’t have the mental machinery to do so.
More must be said about the human brain – its deficiencies and limitations – in comparison with the brains of orcas and other toothed whales. The mammalian brain has been built up by evolution in layers over millions of years. The foundational structure, the primordial paleocortex or reptile brain (called the rhinic), recalls the similar structures of the brains of fish, amphibians, and reptiles such as lizards and snakes. (Though it must be stressed that this does not imply that mammals evolved from reptiles, for instance, any more than humans did from chimpanzees. Both mammals and reptiles share a common ancestor in the Carboniferous period 300 million years ago.) The limbic lobe overlays this structure, as the supralimbic lobe does both. The outer lamination of brain matter is called the§ neocortex, whose growth over vast periods of time has enabled the leaps in intelligence of the mammals.
This ‘new brain’ – with its convolutions, fissures, and folds somewhat resembling those of a shelled walnut – is the pride of humanity. The brains of no other creature, it was thought for a long time, approach those of the human in differentiation, neural connectivity, sectional specialization, complexity, and power. Few of our kind have welcomed the discovery that the orcas’ (and other whales’) gyrification exceeds that of human beings. The surface area of a typical adult human’s neocortex measures about 2,275 cm
, while in dolphins, it is 3,745 cm
, and in orcas and sperm whales much greater. It is true that the orca neocortex is thinner than the human, but there is simply more of it folded up with greater complexity. To add insult to the injury of wounded human vanity is the fact that orca brains weigh in at three times the size of human brains – and the brains of sperm whales exceed in size our own by a factor of six.
For many decades, various scientists have thought to obscure this glaring and embarrassing reality. They have conjured up various ‘fudge factors’ in a desperate attempt to ensure than human beings will be number one in any ranking of species’ relative intelligence. Arjuna, in his account, with a simple thought experiment, demolishes the long-respected though ridiculous brain/body mass ratio as a measure of intelligence. (If this ratio proved true, the hummingbird would be the world’s smartest animal.) Realizing the limitations of the older metric, so-called scientists have invented a new one: the Encephalization Quotient (EQ), which measures the actual brain mass against the predicted brain mass for an animal of a given size. Of course, human beings with our large brains relative to our small bodies, again, come out on top. This, however, is not science; it is bosh. First, and most importantly, absent a method of universally measuring intelligence and correlating it with the EQ, it is just another voodoo statistic, sounding impressive but possessing no meaning. Second, while the EQ does an excellent job of fulfilling its purpose of distinguishing human intelligence from that of supposedly lesser beings, it fails in providing meaningful comparisons among other species. For example, the EQ of a capuchin monkey, about two, more than doubles that of supposedly much smarter gorillas and chimpanzees. Third, if some species are over-encephalized, mathematics necessitates that some species must be under-encephalized, therefore lacking the mental machinery to perform the basic cognitive functions necessary for survival. The usage of the EQ attempts to obscure the rather obvious fact that only a certain percentage of the brain is used to operate the gross functionings of the body, no matter how large (or small) that body might be. As it turns out, very little amounts of brain can account for rather amazing powers of muscle, bone, feather, and flesh. The peregrine falcon, the fastest bird in the sky, manages to perform its aerial acrobatics and compute its 250mph dives through the air to catch a darting dove by virtue of a brain the size of a peanut.
A better question, too little asked when considering what we think of as intelligence, would be to inquire how much of an animal’s brain can be devoted to the interconnectivity and association of ideas? In rats, this associative skill has been measured at approximately 10%. A cat tests out at 50% while a chimpanzee scores a 75%. Human beings, at 90%, thus need only 10% of our brains to operate our sensory and motive capabilities. What about the whales? The average associative skill measure estimated for cetaceans, at 96%, much exceeds our own, while orcas have available approximately 97.5% of their very large brains for a very wide range of cognitive functions.
More recently, Suzana Herculano-Houzel has argued in favor of another way to estimate intelligence, hitherto impossible to measure correctly. Citing the work of Williams and Herrup, she points out the reasonableness of assuming that the computational capacity of the brain should correlate with the absolute number of neurons in that brain, specifically in the neocortex, the supposed seat of animals’ higher cognitive abilities. How, though, to actually count the number of neurons in a brain?
In a brilliant piece of science, Herculano-Houzel succeeded in using detergent to dissolve the brains of various species to make a ‘brain soup’ in which neurons’ nuclei could be separated out and counted. The computations that resulted cleared up several mysteries. It turned out, for instance, that the elephant, with a brain more than three times as massive as that of the human being, does have more neurons; about 257 billion neurons compared to a human’s 86 billion. However, 98% of those neurons are to be found in the cerebellum; the elephant’s cerebrum contains a paltry 5.6 billion neurons compared to the 16 billion in the human cerebral cortex. That seems to explain our experience that human beings are a good deal smarter than the admittedly still-smart elephant. As Herculano-Houzel likes to say, ‘Not all brains are made the same.’ As she puts it, brains scale differently in different species and in different orders. The primate brain, and particularly the human brain, has evolved to pack more neurons more efficiently into a smaller volume, thus giving humans an advantage in intelligence over other species.
What, then, of the whales? Cetaceans share a rather close phylogenetic relationship with Artiodactyls such as pigs, deer, and giraffes. Based upon the scaling for those species, Herculano-Houzel predicted that the count of neurons in the much larger cerebral cortexes of several kinds of cetaceans would actually come out to a significantly lower number than that of humans. The largest cetacean cortex, that of the sperm whale, would contain fewer than 10 billion neurons, still much less than that of a human. It seemed that human beings’ ranking of number one would remain unchallenged.
There the matter stood until a whale hunt happened to deliver the brains of ten long-finned pilot whales into researchers’ hands. Using the techniques of optical dissector stereology, it was discovered that the neurons in the pilot whale neocortex numbered 37.2 billion – more than twice the human’s 16 billion. Heidi S. Mortensen, Bente Pakkenberg, and five others described the quantitative relationships in the delphinid neocortex in a paper published in Frontiers of Neuroanatomy. Their discovery should rank among the greatest in importance in the history of science. Instead, this very great breakthrough remains largely unknown. The cortical neurons of the orca have yet to be counted, but it would not be surprising if they topped out at over 75 billion.
As if all this weren’t enough to dethrone Man as the King of Creation, one more humbling discovery should be considered. In addition to the previously mentioned three primary structures of the mammalian brain – the rhinic, the limbic, and the supralimbic – cetaceans have evolved a fourth cortical lobe absent in any land mammal, human beings included. Although we do not yet know the precise functioning of this paralimbic lobe, it has been speculated that it integrates and enhances perceptions of sound, sight, taste, and touch. This would make sense of the orcas’ synesthetic powers, what Arjuna calls ‘the fiery splendor of sound and the music of light.’ It may also have something to do with orientation in space and time and the orcas’ perception that they can journey at will through the one as readily as the other.
Given the limitations of science and our ignorance of what really goes on inside the minds of whales, we believe that it would be as silly to try to calculate the cetaceans’ intelligence as it would be to count the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. Were one to attempt to do so, however, considering the enormous size of the cetacean brain, considering its differentiation, sectional specialization, neural connectivity, and complexity (to say nothing of various orca feats such as the truly astounding acquisition of numerous languages), it would be enticing to come up with a rather large number. If the average human IQ can be measured at 100, with Economics Nobel Prize winners at 153 and geniuses on the order of an Einstein or a Goethe perhaps coming out at around 200, then an orca would score five times that while a sperm whale topped out at over 2,000.
What do orcas do with such massive intelligence? We have already mentioned their astonishing ability to learn languages (a sponge absorbing water is not an inaccurate metaphor), and Arjuna has much to say about the musical/philosophical compositions that the orcas call rhapsodies. All the whales have powers of the mind of which we have only the dimmest of intimations. How else can the seeming Miracle of the Solstice be explained? The speed of sound in water at 20 degrees Celsius is 1,482 meters per second – far too slow to account for what otherwise can be explained only by positing some sort of instantaneous planetary communication.
That we must accept the existence of certain so far inexplicable abilities and phenomena in the lives of whales does not imply that we should not question Arjuna’s interpretation of some of them. What are we to make of the impossible creatures that he calls the Seveners? Certainly many strange species dwell as yet undiscovered in the vast reaches of the oceans. In many ways, we know much more about planets millions of miles from earth than we do the perpetually dark deeps of our own oceans. Could a complex animal assemble itself out of tiny multi-cellular organisms in a matter of minutes? Could such a creature possess the sort of intelligence that Arjuna accords it?
To the first question, we have a hint of an answer in the pyrosomes: colonies of thousands of zooids a few millimeters in size that associate with each other in huge, bioluminescent tubes up to twenty meters long and two meters in diameter – capacious enough to fit a grown human being inside. To the second question, we must incline toward a resounding ‘no’ because pyrosomes and any other conceivably similar species are not complex and lack anything resembling a brain.
And yet. And yet. Compendiums of findings about the Plantae kingdom (see Tompkins’s and Bird’s The Secret Life of Plants and Mancuso’s and Viola’s Brilliant Green) suggest that trees, flowers, ferns, mosses, and the like can be said to possess a real intelligence completely absent in a brain. And then there is the recent discovery of bacteria that might need to be classified as an entirely new and seventh kingdom of life. It seems that the species of Geobacter metallireducens and Shewanella, found in certain estuaries and other aquatic environments, have evolved to strip and deposit electrons from metals and various minerals, thereby essentially eating and breathing electricity. As well, they have the ability to interconnect with each other in ‘cables’ of thousands of individual cells. It is thought that this association is facilitated by ‘nanowires’ that are an extension of the cell membrane and which can conduct electricity in a biological circuit.
Might Arjuna’s Seveners be some sort of very intelligent colonial organism assembled from bacteria similar to Geobacter metallireducens and Shewanella? We have no evidence of that, and we are skeptical that such a creature either does or could exist. It seems much more likely that Arjuna encountered (and ate) some sort of organism whose tissues produce alkaloids similar to those found in Psilocybe cubensis or Lophophora willamsii. Very intense hallucinations would account for Arjuna’s insistence that what he experienced in the South Pacific was as real as his birth or any other event of his remarkable life.
Before closing this introduction to that life, we would like to say something about two terms that Arjuna uses at various times throughout his account. The first is the name he often used to describe human beings: the idiot gods. He thought long and deep before deciding on this sobriquet. At times, he thought it much more apt to call our species the mad gods or the insane gods. However, madness can too easily be associated with anger, and although Arjuna certainly saw human beings as afflicted with wrath, as a rabid dog is lyssavirus, he did not see this as humanity’s greatest sin. Neither did he think of our kind as purely insane. Rather, he perceived in our derangement of sense and soul a willful debilitation, as if we human beings are an entire race of sleepwalkers moving through a nightmare from which we refuse to awaken. We are, he once said, like lost children wandering through a dark landscape without markers or boundaries. He had great compassion for (and dread of) our innocence. Given the horrors that Arjuna recounts, that seems a strange word to apply to the human kind, but it motivates his choice to call us idiots. It is the holy fool kind of innocence of Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot as well as the deadly innocence of the young man Lone in Sturgeon’s The Fabulous Idiot, incorporated into the great work known as More Than Human. Of all humanity’s failings that Arjuna enumerates in such painstaking and painful detail, he counts as the very worst our refusal to embrace our best possibilities and so to live as gods.
The second term we would like to define is quenge, the most quintessential part of a whale’s true nature. Arjuna himself coined the word to represent a nearly ineffable cetacean sensibility and prowess. We would like to explain this strange word, though of course it remains inexplicable. One might as well try to describe a magnificent city on a hill, bright with sunlit cathedrals and great spires, to a band of cave-dwellers. The best course for anyone wishing to know more is to make one’s way into Arjuna’s story. But please do so with an open mind, and even more, with an open heart. Readers who reach the end without having any idea of what it is to quenge will have wasted their time – and Arjuna’s.
1 (#u7a8e0c5e-f41d-5e9f-8d52-aa8bcf427d3d)
The humans call me Arjuna, after the hero who spoke with the God of Truth, though they cannot say my real name any more than they can say why the starlit sea sings with such a hush, lovely fire or why they themselves are alive.
When I was a young whale unacquainted with human might and madness, I swam with my family through the icy waters near the top of the world – the world they call Earth and we call Ocean. Along the cold currents we hunted char and salmon and other fishes that schooled in never-ending silvery streams; along our fiery blood we sought ecstasies of creation even as we listened for the great and singular Song that sounds within all things. Sometimes, we gave voice to the deep, unutterable mysteries bound up in the chords of this song; more often we told tales of the glories of our Old Ones or the adventures of the newborn babies just beginning to speak. We held midnight feasts beneath the pink and emerald sprays of light raining down from the Aurora Borealis. During the long, long days of summer, we dove beneath the icebergs and we mated and played and loved and dreamed.
We quenged. Guided by our true nature, which always knows the intention of life and the way home, we followed the ocean’s song wherever it called us, listening always for its source. Great journeys we made! One fine day might find us visiting with the Old Ones in the turquoise swells of the Caribbean ten thousand years ago while on the next day we might wend our way along the arc of the Aurora and swim through ages yet to be up to the stars. We delved the deeps of oceans on worlds without number, daring each other to move ever further outward and inward beyond the limits of space and time. Down through unknown seas we plunged into the melodies of songs sung again and again since the world’s beginning – and into the souls of the stories that their singers poured forth with so much delight. Who could escape from the account of how Mother Maia fought off a hundred great white sharks in order to protect her children? Who could forget the epic of Aldebaran the Great’s circumnavigation of the globe in search of the perfect color of crimsong with which to paint his great tone poem? Who could resist the urge to become both bard and hero of one’s own story? Why else are we here? Are not our lives the very songs that sing the universe into creation?
Many of our best adventures came through dreams or revelations or even the babblings of babes still drinking milk; the worst came out of places so dark and disturbing that few wished ever to go there. It seemed that no whale could ever conceive them. Once, while we were making our way across the nearly infinite seas of Agathange east of earth, I nearly choked on reddened waters and caught a glimpse of a blue god and masses of belligerents slaughtering each other. Another time, on Tiralee, I learned of an eternal quest to find a golden conch shell said to hold entire constellations and oceans inside. I trembled at the vivacity of such visions, for I experienced them simultaneously as impossible and too real, as familiar and utterly strange.
How terrified I was at first of these wild wanderings! How confused, how desperate, how consumed! My mother, though, sleek and black and white and beautiful, swam always beside me with powerful, rhythmic strokes that told of the faith of her great, bottomless heart. She reassured me with murmurs of maternal encouragements as well as with clear, cool logic: was not water, she asked me, the unitive substance which ripples with the shimmering interconnectedness of all things? Was not I, myself, made of water, as was she and my uncles and my ancestors? How could I ever be separate from the sea which had formed me or fail to find my way home? Could I not hear, always, within my own heart the ringing of life’s great song?
Yes, I told her, emboldened by a growing fearlessness, yes, yes I could! Her love, onstreaming like the strongest of currents, filled me with joy. And so I quenged through the world and through the eternal musics which gave it form, moving always and ever deeper and deeper. The water flowed through my skin, and I flowed through the water, and the ocean and I were as one.
I do not remember my conception. Humans die in worry of what will become of them after the worms have eaten their bodies and they are gone; we whales live in wonder of what we were before we came to be. What we were is what we are and always will be: we are salt and seaweed, haddock and diatom and grains of sand glimmering among the fronds of red and purple coral. The ocean forms us out of itself, and each drop of water – each molecule – reverberates with an indestructible consciousness. As we quicken and grow within our mothers’ wombs, we gradually come into full consciousness of our indestructible selves and of the way we are both a tiny part and the entirety of the universe. And then one day, we realize that we are awake and aware – aware that there never could have been a time in which we did not exist.
This happened to me. After some months of life, I awakened to the thunder of my mother’s heart beating out a reassuring rhythm even as it beat into my veins the blood that we both shared. A human might think that I therefore woke up in a drumlike darkness, but it was not so. Everywhere – blazing through the salty amniotic waters and glimmering through my own tiny heart – there was light. Our Old Ones call this phenomenon the brilliance of sound. Do not light and sound emanate from the same essential source? Are they not both experienced within the tissues of our minds as reflections of the forms of the manifold world? Are there not many ways to see? Yes, yes, the fiery splendor of sound and the music of light! To see the world in all its astonishing perfection through waves and echoes of pure vivid sonance – yes, yes, yes!
From nearly the beginning, my mother spoke to me. Mostly, she duplicated the clicks by which she made out the icebergs and shoals, sharks and salmon: all the things of the ocean that a whale needed to perceive. In this way, she made sound pictures for me to see. Long before my birth, I knew the turnings and twisting of the coastlines of the world’s northernmost continents; I knew the rasp of ice and the raucousness of rock and the much softer sounds of snow. The dense, gelid winter sea seemed tinted with hues of tanglow and bluetone, while in the summer the waters came alive with the peals of a color I call glorre.
Sometimes, my mother spoke to me in simple baby speech, forming the basic utterances upon which more mature language would build. She told me simple stories and explained the intricacies of life outside the womb in a way that I could understand. I could not, of course, speak back for I had no air within my lungs and so could not make a single sound within my flute. I listened, though, as my mother told me of the cold of the water outside her that I could not feel and of the stars’ luster that I could not see. I learned the names of my family whom I would soon meet: my aunts Chara and Mira, my uncles Dheneb and Alnitak, my sister Turais and my cousins – and my grandmother, head of our family, whom a young whale such as I would never think to address by name.
When my mind ached with too much knowledge and I grew tired, my mother sang me to sleep with lullabies. When I awakened from dark dreams with a rumbling dread that I would be unable to face life’s difficulties, my mother told me the one thing that every whale must know, something more important than even the Song of Life and the ocean itself: that I had been conceived in love and my mother’s love would always fill my heart – and that no matter how far I swam or how much life hurt me, I would never be alone.
On the day of my birth, my mother instructed me not to breathe until Chara and Mira swam under me and buoyed me up to the surface. I came quickly, tail first, propelled out of my mother’s warm body through a cloud of blood and fear. The shock of the icy water pierced straight through me with a thrilling pain. I nearly gasped in anguish, and so I nearly breathed water and drowned. Mira and Chara, though, as promised pressed their heads beneath my belly and pushed me upward. Light blinded me: not the scintillation of roaring winds but rather the incandescence of the sun impossible to behold. It burned my eyes even as it warmed me in tingles that danced along my skin. The water broke and gave way to the thinness of the atmosphere. In astonishment, I drew my first breath. With my lungs thus filled with air, through my tender, untried flute, I spoke my first baby words in a torrent of squeaks and chirps that I could not contain. What did I say? What should a newborn whale say to the being who had carried and nourished him for so long? Thank you, Mother, for my life and for your love – it is good to be alive.
And so I tasted the sea and drank in the wonder of the world. Everything seemed fascinating and beautiful: the blueness of the sea ice and the shining red bellies of the char that my family hunted; the jewel-like diatoms and the starfish and the joyous songs of the humpbacks that sounded from out of deeps. All was new to me, and all was a marvel and a delight. I wanted to go on swimming through this paradise forever.
How deliciously the days passed as the ocean turned beneath the sun and through the seasons! With my mother ever near, I fattened first on her milk and then on the fish that she taught me to catch for myself. My mind grew nearly as quickly as my body. So much I needed to learn! The sea’s currents had to be studied and the migrations of the salmon memorized. My uncle Alnitak, greatest of our clan’s astronomers, taught me celestial navigation. From Mira I gained the first glimmerings of musical theory and practice, while my older sister Turais shared with me her love of poetics. My mother impressed upon me the vital necessity of the Golden Rule, less through words and songs than through her compassion and her generosity of spirit. As well, she guided me through the maelstrom of the many Egregious Fallacies of Thought and the related Fundamental Philosophical Errors. It took entire years and many pains for her to nurture within me a zest for the arts of being: plexure, zanshin, and shih. Once or twice, in the most tentative and fleeting of ways, I managed to speak of the nature of art itself with the Old Ones.
It was my grandmother, however, who held the greatest responsibility for teaching me about the Song of Life. I must, she told me, quenge deep within myself, down through the dazzling darkness into spaces that can contain the entire universe as a blue whale’s mouth contains a drop of water. As I grew stronger and swifter, I must make of myself a song of glory that found resonance with the song of the sea – and thus become a part of it. At least for a few magical moments, I must quenge with the gods. Was this not the calling of any adult orca? And so I must learn to sing with as great a prowess as I applied to swimming and hunting; only then would my grandmother and my other elders deem me to be a full adult. And only then would I be allowed to mate and make children of my own.
Of what, though, was I to sing? Over many turnings of light and dark, sunshine and snow, I considered the necessities of this composition. My rhapsody, as we call the songs of ourselves, must attain to the uniqueness and perfection of a single snowflake while simultaneously ringing with all the memories of the ocean out of which the snowflake had formed. It must tell of the past of the whole world and of the destiny of the teller.
What, I wondered, would be my destiny? In what way was I unique? Although I could not say, I gained a whisper of an answer to these questions from a prophecy that my grandmother made at my birth: that either I would die young or I would add something new to the Song, something marvelous and strange that had never been heard in all the long ages of our people.
From out of the humans’ oldest poem, these words echo through humanity’s much shorter ages – words that curiously accord with my grandmother’s instructions to me:
You are what your deep, driving desire is
As your desire is, so is your will;
As your will is, so is your deed;
As your deed is, so is your destiny.
Such deeds I wanted to do! – but what deeds? I did not know. Impossible notions came to me. I would journey to the yearly gatherings of the sperm whales, and I would coax these deep gods to reveal all their wisdom. I would crack apart icebergs with a shout from my lungs; I would put the Aurora’s fire into the mouths of the great, mute sharks, and I would teach the starfish to sing.
First, however, I had to apprehend my deepest desire. For many years, I applied myself to this task. I meditated, and I sang, and I grew ever vaster and more powerful, fed in my body by the sea’s fishes and in my soul through my family’s heartenings. I attained my full form, larger even than that of mighty Alnitak. My blood thundered with wild lightnings, and my testes burned with seed, and I dreamed of finding a lovely, young she-orca with whom to mate.
In this season of my discontent, in a time of hunger when the fish were few, there occurred three portents that changed my life. The first of these the humans would regard as a cliché – as wearisome as the slaughters that make up most of their histories. To me, however, the news that my cousin Haedi brought from out of vernal mists one day shocked me with its signal import. She swam up to my grandmother and told of a white bear standing on an ice floe far from the pack ice from which this tiny, floating island had splintered. Our whole family moved off south in order to witness this unheard-of misfortune. Turais’s newborn, little Porrima, remarked that she had never seen a bear.
Long before our eyes could make out this king of land animals, we sighted him with our sonar. How hopeless the situation of this great beast seemed! He made a pitiful figure, a smear of fur atop a bit of ice, forlorn and alone against the churning, gray swells of the sea.
My uncle Alnitak, long and powerful, always so precise with distances, seemed to point his notched dorsal fin at the bear as he said, ‘He could swim back to the ice if he dared – if he had the strength, it is barely possible that he might make it.’
We swam a little closer, our sides nearly touching each other’s, at one in our breath and in our thoughts. Then we dove in a coordinated flow of black and white beneath the surface, closer to the bear and his icy island. My mother zanged the bear with her sonar. This sense did not work very well on objects outside the water, but the clicks my mother made were powerful enough to pierce the bear’s fur, skin, and muscles and to reflect back through the water as images that we all shared.
‘Very well, then,’ my aunt Mira said, in her sad, plaintive voice. ‘The bear has starved and is much too weak to swim so many miles back to the ice.’
What else was there to say? Either the bear would die from the belly-gnawing ache of hunger or he would venture into the water and drown – or find his end in the feeding frenzy of a shark or between the jaws of one of the Others. At this, my grandmother turned back towards our usual fishing lanes. As she often said, each of us has a single destiny.
That might have been the end of the matter had I not chanced to recall a story told to me by Dheneb, who had once spoken with one of the Others. Apparently, when stalking seals, the ice bears were clever enough to cover their black noses with their white paws so that the seals did not detect them creeping forward across the snow fields. Why, I wondered, must such a cunning creature perish so ignominiously just because the ice had mysteriously melted around him?
I determined that he should not die this way. An impulse sounded from within me and swelled like a bubble rising up through the water. I said, ‘Why don’t we push the bear’s island back to the pack ice?’
For a few moments no one spoke. Then Chara flicked her powerful flukes and said to me, ‘What a strange idea! You have always had such strange schemes and dreams!’
‘Thank you,’ I replied. ‘You are complimenting me aren’t you?’
‘Can you not hear in my voice the overtones of my appreciation for your innovatedness of thought?’
‘Sometimes I can, Aunt.’
‘If you listened hard enough at the interstices of my words, you would never doubt how much I value the freshness of your spirit.’
‘Thank you,’ I said again.
‘I value it, as we all do, almost as much as I cherish your compassion – compassion for a bear!’
I zanged the bear with my sonar, and I heard the quickened heart beats that betrayed his fear. Did he sense my family’s holding a conference beneath the waters near his island? What, I wondered, could the bear be thinking?
‘How often,’ I said to Chara, ‘has Grandmother averred that we must have compassion for all things?’
‘And we do! We do!’ she called out. ‘We sing to the diatoms and have family-feeling for the broken shells of the mollusks – even for the bubbles of oxygen in the water that long in their innermost part to be incorporated once again into an inspired young whale such as you who exalts the beauty of compassion.’
Alnitak, less loquacious than Chara, beat his flukes through the sun-dappled water and said simply, ‘I would relish the novelty and satisfaction of saving this bear, but it is too far for us to swim right now. Are we not, ourselves, weak with hunger?’
This was true. Days and days had it been since any of us had eaten! Where had the fish gone? No one could say. We all knew, however, that huge, lovely Grandmother had grown much too thin and my sister Turais had nearly lost her milk and could barely feed the insatiable little Porrima. And Mira, my melancholy aunt, worried about her child Kajam. If our luck did not improve, very soon Kajam would begin to starve along with the rest of us and would likely come down with one of the fevers that had carried off Mira’s first born to the other side of the sea. Her second born had died of a peculiar stomach obstruction, while her third had been born with a deformed tongue and jaw, which had made it impossible for the child to eat. Poor Mira now invested her hope for the future in the young and frail Kajam.
‘All right,’ I finally said, out of frustration, ‘then I will push the bear myself to the pack ice. Perhaps I will encounter fish along the way and return to lead you to them.’
Alarmed at the earnestness in my voice, my mother Rana swam up to me. Her streamlined form, nearly perfect in proportion, flowed through the water along with her concerned words: ‘There is much bravura in what you propose, but also the folly of misplaced pride. This cannot be the great deed you wish to do.’
Chara’s second daughter Talitha, who was only three years old and didn’t know any better, gave voice to one of the usually unvoiced principles by which we live: ‘But you cannot leave your family, cousin Arjuna!’
She loved me a great deal, tiny Talitha did. No words could I find for her. I did not really want to leave her.
We concluded our conference with a decision that I should remain with everyone else. Again my grandmother turned to abandon the bear to the tender mercies of the sea.
‘Wait!’ I cried out. A wild, wild idea rose out of the unknown part of me with all the shock of a tidal wave. ‘Why don’t we eat the bear?’
For a whale, the sea can never be completely quiet, yet I swear that for a moment all sound died into a vast silence. I might as well have suggested eating Grandmother.
Talitha again spoke of the obvious, something my elders knew that I knew very well: ‘But we cannot eat a bear! That would break the First Covenant!’
She went on to recount one of the most important lessons that she had learned: how long ago the orcas had split into two kindreds, one which ate only fish while the other hunted seals and bears and almost any animal made of warm blood and red meat. These Others, who looked much the same as any orca of my clan, almost never mingled with us. We had promised to leave each other alone and never to interfere with the different ways by which we made our livings. Even so, we knew each other’s stories and songs. If we killed the bear, the sea itself would sing of our desperate act, and the Others would eventually learn of how we had broken our covenant with them.
My grandmother moved closer to me through the cold water. Her eyes, as blue and liquid as the ocean, caught me up in her fondness for me and swept me into deeper currents of cobalt, indigo, and ultramarine, and the secret blue-inside-blue that flows within the heart of all things. She asked, ‘Do you remember what I said about you on the day you were born?’
‘You said many things, Grandmother.’
‘Yes, I did and these words I would like you to remember: How noble you are, in both form and faculty, Arjuna, how like an angel in action, and in apprehension like a god! The beauty of the world you are and all of my delight.’
I did remember her saying that. She told all her grandchildren the same thing.
‘How noble would it be,’ she now asked me, ‘for us to break our promise to the Others?’
‘But we are so hungry! They would not mind if we took a single bear.’
‘The Covenant is the Covenant,’ she told me, ‘whether or not you think the Others would mind.’
‘But we made it so long ago, in a different age. The world is changing.’
‘The world is always the world, just as our word is always our word.’
‘Can we never break our word, even as the ice breaks into nothingness while the world grows warmer?’
‘The ice has broken before,’ my grandmother reminded me.
For a while, she sang to me and our family of our great memories of the past: of ages of ice and times of the sun’s heat when the world had been cooler or warmer.
‘Yes, but something is different this time,’ I replied. ‘The world has warmed much too quickly.’
Although she could not deny this, she said, ‘The world has its own ways.’
‘Yes, and those ways are changing.’
Alnitak came closer and so did my mother, and through the turbid, gray waters we debated how the northern ice sheet could have possibly melted so much in the span of a few generations. As I was still a young, not-quite-adult whale, I should have deferred to my elders. I should have felt shame at my questioning of them. Who was I to think that I might have discerned something they had not? And yet I did, and I sensed something wrong in my family’s understanding. In this, I experienced a secret pride in my insight and in my otherness from people who had seemed so like myself in sensibility and so close to my heart.
‘It is the humans,’ I said. ‘The humans are warming the world with the heat we have felt emanating from their boats.’
‘That cannot be enough heat to melt the ice,’ Alnitak said.
‘Only a few generations ago,’ I retorted, ‘only a few humans dared the ocean in cockle shells that we could have splintered with one snap of our jaws. Now their great metal ships are everywhere.’
‘To suppose that therefore the humans can be blamed for the ocean’s warming,’ my grandmother said, ‘is a wild leap in logic.’
‘But they are to blame! I know they are!’
‘How can you be sure?’ And then, as if I was still a babe drinking milk, she chided me for making a basic philosophical error: ‘A correlation does not prove a causation.’
And chided I was. To hide my embarrassment (and my defiance), I took refuge in a little play: ‘Thank you for the lesson, Grandmother. I was just giving you the chance to exercise your love of pedagogy.’
‘Of course you were, my dear. And I do love it so! I have no words to tell you how much I look forward to the day when it is you who teaches me.’
‘I am sure that you could think of a few words, Grandmother.’
‘Well, perhaps a few.’
‘I await your wisdom.’
‘I can hear that you do,’ she said. ‘Then listen to me: it is a heavy responsibility being the wisest of the family – perhaps you could relieve me of it.’
‘No, I cannot,’ I said sincerely. ‘You know I cannot.’
‘Then will you let us leave this bear to his fate?’
All my life, my grandmother had warned me that my innate tenacity could harden into pertinacity if I allowed this. Did anyone know me as did my grandmother?
‘We are hungry,’ I said simply.
‘We have been hungry before.’
‘Never like this. Where have the fish gone? Not even the ocean can tell us.’
‘We will swim to a place where there are many fish.’
‘We would swim more surely with this bear’s life to strengthen us.’
‘Yes, and with our bellies full of bear meat, what shall we say to the Others?’
‘Why must we say anything at all?’
‘In saying nothing, we would say everything. How can a whale speak other than the truth?’
‘But what is true, grandmother?’
‘The Covenant is true – a true expression of our desire to live in harmony with the Others.’
‘But have you not taught me that the only absolute truth is that there is no absolute truth?’
Indeed she had. My grandmother relished self-referential statements and the paradoxes they engendered as an invitation for one’s consciousness to reflect back and forth on itself into a bright infinity that illuminated the deepest of depths.
‘Yes, I did teach you that,’ she said. ‘You were too young, however, for me to tell you that if there is no absolute truth, then we cannot know with certainty that there is no absolute truth.’
My grandmother played a deeper game than I – a game that could go on forever if I let it.
‘Then do you believe there is an absolute truth?’
‘You are perceptive, Arjuna.’
‘What is this truth then? Is it just life, itself?’
‘You really do not know?’
‘But what could be truer than life?’
In answer, my grandmother sang to me in a thunderous silence that I could not quite comprehend. I needed to answer her, but what should I say? Only words that would gnaw at her and lay her heart bare.
‘Look at Kajam,’ I called out. I swam over to him and nudged the child with my head. ‘He is so hungry!’
Kajam, small for his four years and thin with deprivation, protested this: ‘I am not too hungry to swim night and day as far as we must. Let us surface and I will show you.’
It had been a while since any of my family had drawn breath. Because the bear could do nothing about his plight, we had no need to conceal our conference beneath the water or to keep silence. And so almost as one, we breached and blew out stale air in loud, steamy clouds, and we drew in fresh breaths. To prove his strength, Kajam dove down and swam up through the water at speed; he breached and with a powerful beat of his tail, drove himself up into the air in a perfectly calculated arc that carried him over my back so that he plunged headfirst into the sea in a great splash. Everyone celebrated this feat. Almost immediately, however, Kajam had to blow air again. He gulped at it in a desperate need that he could not hide.
‘Listen to his heartbeats!’ I said to grandmother. ‘How long will it be before his blood begins burning with a fever?’
My grandmother listened, and so did my mother, along with Alnitak, Dheneb, and Chara. The third generation of our family listened, too: my sisters Turais and Nashira, my little brother Caph, and my cousins Naos, Haedi, and Talitha. Even Turais’s children, Alnath and Porrima, concentrated on the strained pulses sounding within the center of Kajam’s body. And of course Mira listened the most intently of all.
‘Compassion,’ my grandmother said to me, ‘impelled you to want to save this bear, and now you wish to eat him?’
‘Would that not be the easiest of the bear’s possible deaths?’
‘And compassion you have for Kajam and the rest of our family. We all know this about you, Arjuna.’
In silence, I tried to sense what my grandmother was thinking.
‘Now listen to my heart,’ she told me. ‘You persist in trying to persuade me in the same way that the wind whips up water. Am I so weak that you think mere words will move me?’
‘Not mere words, Grandmother. I know how you love Kajam. It is your own heart that will move you.’
‘But you believe that mine needs a nudge from yours?’
‘Not really. I think you wish that I would give voice to what you really want to do and so make it easier for you to do it.’
‘How kind of you to ease me into an agonizing dilemma! You can be cruel in your compassion, my beautiful, beloved grandson.’
In her wry laughter that followed, I detected a note of pride in the manner that I had tried to clear the way toward a decision that we both knew she had secretly wished (and perhaps resolved) to make all along. What was the First Covenant against the much greater pledge of life that Grandmother had made to her family? She would battle all the monsters of the deep in order to protect one of her babies.
We held a quick conference and made our plans. Alnitak pushed himself up out of the water, spy-hopping in order to get a better look at the bear. Dheneb did, too, and so did I. Did the bear recognize our kind and conclude that he was as safe sharing the sea with us as if we were guppies? Or might he mistake us for the Others? Who could say what a bear might know?
We had watched the Others stalking seals and other sea mammals, and so we knew many of the Others’ hunting techniques. We had also learned their stories, which provided many images to guide us. Of course, transforming an image in the mind into a coordinated motion of the body can take much practice. Did we have days and seasons and years to perfect a prowess of hunting dangerous mammals that our kind had never needed? No, we did not. Still, I argued, taking this bear should not prove too difficult.
Our whole family swam up to the bear and surrounded his ice floe. Respecting the ancient forms, I came up out of the water and asked the bear if he was ready to die. Bears cannot, of course, speak as we do, but this brave bear answered me with a glint of his eyes and a weak roar of acceptance: ‘Yes, I am ready.’
We all breathed deeply and dove. Alnitak, Dheneb, and my mother, chirping away in order to coordinate their movements, rose straight up through the water toward the far side of the ice floe. They needed only a single attack to push the floe’s edge up high into the air. The bear’s instincts took hold of him, and he scrambled to keep his purchase, digging his claws into the ice. Inexorably, though, he slid down the sun-slicked ice and toppled into the sea.
Chara and I were waiting for him there. He started swimming in a last desperation. For a legged animal, bears are good swimmers, much better than humans, but no creature of land or sea can outswim an orca. While Chara distracted the bear, I closed in through the gray waters’ churn and froth. I came in close enough to taste the bear’s wrath, and I tried to avoid a lucky score of his slashing teeth. Concentrated as I was on the bear’s jaws, which were not so different than my own, I did not see the bear swipe his paw at me until it was too late. Even through the water, the bear struck my head with a power that stunned me. The claws caught me over my eye and ripped into my skin. Blood boiled out into the water. Then Chara came at the bear from above. She fastened her jaws around his neck, pushing him down deeper into the water. I recovered enough to grasp the bear’s hindquarters. Then we held him fast in the cold clutch of the sea until he could keep his breath no longer, and he sucked in water and drowned.
After that, the rest of my family joined us. We tore the bear apart and divided him as fairly as we could. None of us had ever consumed a mammal, but the memory had been passed down to us: the Others described bear meat as tasting rich, red, tangy, and delicious. So it did. In the end, we ate the bear down to his white, furry paws and his black nose.
During the time that followed, the gash that the bear had torn into me healed into an unusual scar. Mira observed that it resembled the jags of a lightning bolt. Although I could not behold this mark directly, Mira made a sound picture of it for me. How ugly it looked, how disfiguring, how strange! The hurt of my heart for the bear (and for my grandmother) never really healed. Why had we needed to kill such an intelligent, noble animal? Had the bear felt betrayed by me, who had really wanted to help him? In ways that I did not understand I sensed that the bear’s death had changed me. I spent long hours swimming through the late spring waves, dotted with bits of turquoise ice. A new note had sounded within the long, dark roar of the sea. I became aware of it as one might recognize a background sound through the deepest organs of hearing yet remain unaware of being aware. It took many days for this note to grow louder. At first, I could hear only a part of it clearly, but that part worked to poison my thoughts and darken my dreams:
Something was wrong with the world! Something was terribly wrong!
Intimations of doom oppressed me. I tried to escape my dread through quenging. The world, however, would not allow me this simple solace for very long; it kept on whispering to me no matter where I tried to go.
On a day of ceaseless motion through the sempiternal sea, there occurred the second of the three portents. I was quenging with a delightful degree of immersion, working on a new tone poem that was to be part of the rhapsody by which I would establish my adulthood. The chords of the penultimate motif exemplifying Alsciaukat the Great’s philosophy of being had carried me through the many waters of the world into the mysterious Silent Sea, lined with coral in bright colors of yellow, magenta, and glorre. It was a place of perfect stillness, perfect peace. The aurora poured down from the heavens, feeding the ocean with a lovely fire so that each drop of water sang with the world’s splendor. The fire found me, consumed me with a delicious coolness, and swept me deep into the ocean’s song.
Then the blaze grew brighter like the morning sun heating up. A bolt of lightning flashed out and struck me above the eye, and burned into me with a hideous pain. The burning would not stop; it seared my soul. I shouted to make it go away, and I became aware of Alnitak and Mira and my mother shouting, too. Alnitak’s great voice sounded out the loudest: ‘The water is burning! The water is burning! The ocean is on fire!’
Upon this alarm, I opened both my eyes, and swam up with the rest of my family to join Alnitak, Mira, and my mother at the surface. I looked out toward the southern horizon. Black clouds, thick as a squid’s ink, blighted the blue sky. They billowed up from the red and orange flames that leaped along the roiling waters. Alnitak had told true: the ocean really was on fire.
Only once before, when lightning had ignited a tree on a distant rocky island, had I ever seen flame; never, though, had I beheld such terrible, ugly clouds as the monsters of smoke that this sea of flames engendered. Alnitak, bravest of our band, volunteered to swim out toward them to investigate.
We waited a long time for him to return, praying all the while that he would return. When he finally did, an evil substance clung like a squid’s suckers to his skin. Black as decayed flesh it was and slippery as fish fat, yet sticky, too. It tasted unnatural, hateful, foul.
‘The water is covered with it,’ Alnitak announced. ‘It is that which burns.’
I said nothing as to the source of this abomination. I did not need to, for my little brother Caph said it for me: ‘The humans have done this thing.’
And Chara’s daughter Haedi agreed, ‘They have befouled the ocean!’
‘If they could do that,’ Mira said, ‘they could destroy the world.’
Although my grandmother did not dispute this, she addressed Mira and the rest of the family, saying, ‘The Old Ones tell of a thunder mountain that once destroyed an island in the southern sea and set fire to the earth. The cause of this phenomenon of the sea that burns might be something like that.’
No one, however, believed this. No mountains had thundered, and the substance stuck to Alnitak’s skin tasted disturbingly similar to the excretions of the humans’ boats.
So, I thought, this explained the failure of the fish to teem and the melting of the ice caps. It had been the humans after all – it must be the humans! But why? Why? Why?
No answer did the ocean give me. But as I floated on its quiet waters watching the black clouds dirty the air, I knew that something truly was wrong with the world.
‘This is a bad place,’ my grandmother said. ‘Let us swim away from here to our old fishing lanes and hope that the salmon have returned.’
And so we swam. The note that had sounded upon the bear’s death began murmuring with a soft, urgent plangency as a she-orca calls to her mate. I heard it clearly now, though I still could not tell what it meant.
The third portent occurred soon after that on our migration westward, away from the burning sea. My mother sounded out a lone orca in the distance. And that disturbed us, for when do our kind ever swim alone? However, this orca proved to be not of our kind, but rather one of the Others: his dorsal fin pointed straight up, triangular and harsh like a shark’s tooth – so different from the graceful, arched fins of my clan. Instead of avoiding us as the Others usually do, this one swam straight toward us as if homing on prey.
He swam with difficulty, though, the beating of his flukes pulling him to the right as if he was trying to escape something on his left. When he drew close to us we all saw why: an object like a splinter of a tree stuck out of his side. His blood, darker and redder than even the bears’, oozed out of the hole that the splinter had made. None of us had ever seen such a thing before, though from the old stories we all knew what had happened to this lone orca.
‘The humans did this to me,’ he told me.
We could hardly understand him. He spoke a dialect thick and strange to our way of hearing. Because the Others do not want to alert the intelligent mammals that they stalk, they utter fewer words than do we when fishing. Consequently, in order to convey a similar amount of information, the Others’ word-sounds must be denser and more complex, stived with meaning like a crystalline array that seems to have more and more glittering facets the deeper one looks. As he told us of a terrible encounter with the humans, we all looked (and listened) for the meaning of his strange words:
‘The humans came upon us in their great ships,’ he told us, ‘and they began slaying as wantonly as sharks do.’
‘But why did they do this?’ my grandmother asked him. Of nearly everyone in our family, she had the greatest talent for speaking with the Others.
‘Who can know?’ Pherkad said, for such was the Other’s name. ‘Perhaps they wished to eat an orca within the shell of their ship, for they captured Baby Electra in one of their nets and took her out of the sea.’
I could not imagine being separated from the sea. Surely Electra must have died almost immediately, before the humans could put tooth to her.
‘We fought as hard as we could,’ Pherkad continued. ‘We fought and died – all save myself.’
My grandmother zanged Pherkad and sounded the depth and position of the object buried in his body.
‘You will die soon,’ she told him.
‘Yes.’
‘Your whole family is dead, and so you will die soon and be glad of it.’
‘Yes, yes!’
‘Before you die,’ my grandmother said, ‘please know that my family broke our trust with you in hunting a bear.’
‘I do know that,’ Pherkad said. ‘The story sings upon the waves!’
I did not really understand this, for I was still too young to have quenged deeply enough to have understood: how the dialect of the Others and of our kind make up one of the many whole languages, which in turn find their source in the language that sings throughout the whole of the sea. Even the tortoises, it is said, can comprehend this language if they listen hard enough, for the ocean itself never stops listening nor does it cease to speak.
Could there really be a universal language? Or was Pherkad perhaps playing with us in revenge for our breaking the Covenant? The Others, renowned for their stealth, might somehow have witnessed my family’s eating of the bear and all the while have remained undetected.
‘On behalf of my family, who are no more,’ he said to my grandmother, ‘I would wish to forgive you for what you did.’
‘You are gracious,’ my grandmother said.
‘The Covenant is the Covenant,’ he said. ‘However there are no absolute principles – except one.’
My brother Caph started to laugh at the irony in Pherkad’s voice, but then realized that doing so would be unseemly.
Then I said to Pherkad, ‘Perhaps we could remove the splinter from your side.’
‘I do not think so,’ he said, ‘but you are welcome to try.’
I moved up close to him through the bloody water and grasped the splinter with my teeth. Hard it was, like biting down on brown bone. I yanked on it with great force. The shock of agony that ran through Pherkad communicated through his flesh into me; as a great scream gathered in his lungs, I felt myself wanting to scream, too. Then Pherkad gathered all his dignity and courage, and he forced his suffering into an almost godly laugh of acceptance: ‘No, please stop, friend – it is my time to die.’
‘I am sorry,’ I said.
‘What is your name?’ he asked me.
I gave him my name, my true name that the humans could not comprehend. And Pherkad said to me, ‘You are compassionate, Arjuna. Was it you who suggested saving the bear?’
‘Yes, it was.’
‘Then you are twice blessed – what a strange and beautiful idea that was!’
Not knowing what to say to this, I said nothing.
‘I would like to sing of that in my death song,’ he told me. ‘Our words are different but if I give mine to you, will you try to remember them?’
‘I will remember,’ I promised.
My grandmother had often told me that my gift for languages exceeded even hers. She attributed that to my father, of the Emerald Sun Surfer Clan, whose great-great grandfather had been Sharatan the Eloquent. The words that Pherkad now gave me swelled with golden overtones and silvery tintinnabulations of sorrow counterpointed with joy. They filled me with a vast desire to mate with wild she-orcas and to join myself in nuptial ecstasy with the entire world. At the same time, his song incited within me a rage to dive deep into darkness; it made me want to dwell forever with the Old Ones who swim beyond the stars. By the time Pherkad finished intoning this great cry from the heart, I loved him like a brother, and I wanted to die along with him.
‘If you are still hungry,’ he said to me, ‘you may eat me as you did the bear.’
‘No, we will not do that,’ I promised him, speaking for the rest of my family.
‘Then goodbye, Arjuna. Live long and sing well – and stay away from the humans, if you can.’
He swam off, leaving me alone with my family. None of us knew where the Others went to die.
He never really left me, however. As the last days of spring gave way to summer’s heat, his words began working at me. Unlike the oil that had grieved Alnitak’s skin, though, the memories of Pherkad and the bear clung to me with an unshakeable fire. How ironic that I had promised not to eat Pherkad’s body, for it seemed that I had devoured something even more substantial, some quintessence of his being that carried the flames of his death anguish into every part of me!
A new dread – or perhaps a very old one called up out of the glooms of the past – came alive inside me. Like a worm, it ate at my brain and insinuated itself into all my thoughts and acts. Dark as the ocean floor it was, yet blinding as the sun – and I could not help staring and staring and being caught in its dazzle. It forced into my mind images of humans: an entire sea of humans, each of them standing on a separate ice floe. And all of these ungainly two-leggeds gripped splinters of wood in their hideous hands. Again and again, they drove these burning splinters into the beautiful bodies of baby whales and into me, straight through my heart.
Although I tried to escape this terrible feeling by swimming through the coldest of waters, it followed me everywhere. At the same time, it lured me back always into the burning sea where all was blackness and death. I could not draw a lungful of clean air, but only oil and smoke. I could not think; I could not sing; I could not breathe.
I could not quenge. Try as I might, I could not find my way into the ocean’s innermost part. The loss of life’s most basic gift stunned me and terrified me even more. Something was wrong with the world, I knew, and something was hideously, hideously wrong with me.
How I wanted to join Pherkad then! The humans might as well have stuck their wooden splinters into me. Better to fall blind, better to fall mute, better to fall deaf. If I could not quenge, what would be the point in remaining alive?
Upon this thought, the burning that had tormented me grew even worse. Gouts of flame torn from the sun seemed to have fallen upon me. Fire laid bare my tissues one by one and worked its way deep into the sinews of my soul. It opened me completely. In doing so, it finally opened me to the meaning of the note that had whispered so urgently when the bear had died and had cracked out like a lightning bolt after Pherkad had left us. Now I could hear Pherkad calling to me even as Baby Electra called along with the myriad voices of the Old Ones.
The whole world, it seemed, was calling, and I finally heard the sound of my destiny, or at least a part of it: that which I most dreaded doing, I must do. How, though, I asked the cold, quiet sea, could I possibly do it?
2 (#ulink_0ff6fca6-6657-5d60-97c5-e17b68885316)
I wish I could say that I leaped straight toward this destiny, as a dolphin breaches in a graceful arc and snatches a flying fish from the air. I did not. I doubted and hesitated, and I equivocated when I asked myself why I seemed to lack the courage to act. I tried not to listen to the call, even though I could not help but listen to its imperative tones during my every waking moment and even while I slept. It pursued me as a band of Others might hunt down a wounded sea lion. It seized me and would not let go.
I spent much time reflecting on my life and life in general. Had it not been, up to the moment I had met the bear, much like the life of any orca? Had I not had good fish to feast upon and the love of my family? Had there not been songs to sing and wonders to behold? Had anything at all been lacking in such a paradise?
And yet the ocean’s voice seemed to call me away from all my happiness – but what was it calling me toward? What did it want of me? I knew only that it had to do with my gift for languages, and I sensed that this gift would become a very great grief, and soon.
I might never have acted at all had it not occurred to me that my childhood contentment had already been destroyed. I could not quenge. I could not – no matter what I tried to do to restore myself to that most natural state.
At first, I tried to hide my affliction from my family. I might as well have tried to hide a harpoon sticking out of my side. One day, while my grandmother was reviewing the tone poem that I could no longer work on, she asked me to counterpoint the penultimate melody with Alsciaukat the Great’s Song of the Silent Sea. I could not. When I attempted to do so, I sounded as inept as a child.
‘Quenge down along the chord of the first universal,’ my grandmother said to me. ‘If you are to complete this composition, you must quenge deeper than you ever have.’
The concern in her soft voice tore the truth from me in a shout of anguish: ‘I cannot quenge at all, Grandmother!’
I told her everything. I explained how the bear would not stop roaring inside me, where his voice joined Pherkad’s cry of rage. All my thoughts, I said, had fixed on human beings as one’s teeth might close about a poisonous puffer fish. I could not expunge the images of the two-leggeds from my mind.
‘Then you must meditate with more concentration before you quenge,’ my grandmother said. ‘You must clear your mind.’
‘Do you think I have not tried?’
‘I am sure you have. Before doing so, however, you must also clear your heart.’
‘How can I? Poison is there, and fire! A harpoon has pierced me straight through!’
‘What, then, will soothe the poison and draw the harpoon? What will extinguish the flames that consume you?’
‘I do not know!’
This was another equivocation. I had a very good idea of what might restore me, even though I could not understand how it possibly could.
‘Strange!’ she said. ‘How very strange that you should believe you cannot find what cannot be lost. It is as if you are swimming so quickly in pursuit of water to cool the fire that you cannot feel the ocean that could put it out.’
‘I know! I know! But the very knowingness of my plight makes me want to escape it all the more and to swim ever faster.’
My words troubled my grandmother more than I had ever seen her troubled, even when Baby Capella had been stricken with the fever that had eventually killed her. My grandmother called for a conclave of the family. We sang long into the hours of the midnight sun, discussing what was wrong with me and what might be done.
‘I have never heard of an orca unable to quenge,’ Alnitak said. ‘One might as well imagine being born unable to swim.’
‘I have never heard of such a thing either,’ Mira agreed. ‘It does not seem possible.’
‘To quenge is to be, and not to quenge is to be not. But how could that which is ever not be?’
And my brother Caph added, ‘Is it not said that the unreal never is and the real never is not? What could be more real than quenging?’
‘Didn’t Alsciaukat of the Sapphire Sea,’ Turais asked, ‘teach that quenging can be close to madness? Perhaps Arjuna, in his attempt to ease his grieving over Pherkad, has tried to quenge too deeply.’
My practical mother bent her tail to indicate her impatience with these sentiments and said, ‘Are we to speculate all night on such things? Or are we to help my son?’
‘How can we help him?’ Mira said.
It turned out that Chara had heard a story that might have bearing on my situation. She told of how an orca named Vindemiatrix had once lost his ability to quenge due to a tumor growing through his brain.
‘Very well,’ Alnitak said, ‘but did the tumor destroy Vindemiatrix’s ability to quenge or merely impair his realization that he could not help but retain this ability no matter what?’
‘In terms of Arjuna’s life,’ Haedi asked, ‘is there a difference?’
Now it was my grandmother’s turn to lose patience. The taut tones in her voice told of her own dislike for useless conjectures: ‘It is not a tumor that grows in Arjuna’s brain – though we might make use of that as a metaphor.’
‘How, Grandmother?’ Porrima asked.
‘That which grows often may not be killed directly. Sometimes, though, it might be inhibited by other things that grow even more quickly.’
‘I have an idea!’ young Caph said. ‘Let us make a lattice of ideoplasts representing the situation so that Arjuna might perceive in the crystallization of the sounds the way back to himself.’
‘Good! Good!’ young Naos said. ‘Let us also make a simulation of quenging so that Arjuna might be reminded of what he thinks he has lost.’
‘And dreams,’ Dheneb added. ‘Let us help him dream more vividly of quenging when he sleeps.’
‘We should recount all our best moments of quenging,’ my sister Turais said, ‘so that Arjuna might remember himself.’
‘Very well,’ my grandmother said, ‘we shall do these things, and we shall sing to Arjuna, as we sing to a child to drive away a fever. We must sing as we have never sung before, for Arjuna is sick in his soul.’
And so my family tried to heal me. We swam on and on toward the ever-receding western horizon where dark clouds hung low over choppy seas. I felt the sun waxing strong as summer neared its solstice, though the clouds most often obscured this fiery orb.
Nothing, it seemed, could cool my wrath of despair. The songs my grandmother poured into me – rich, sparkling, lovely – came the closest to helping me dive once more into the waters of pure being. So deep did I wish to dive, right down to the magical Silent Sea, lined with coral in bright colors of yellow, magenta, and glorre! So full of my grandmother’s love did I feel that I almost did – almost.
However, the harder my family worked to make me whole, the more keenly did I become aware of what I had lost. I partook of their quenging vicariously, which made me long all the more bitterly for my own. In the end, my family could do little more for me than reassure me of their devotion. All their stratagems of representing, simulating, dreaming, remembering, and even singing failed. All are quenging, yes, and yet are not – not unless done with an utter awareness that one is quenging in doing them.
‘Thank you,’ I said to my family, ‘you have done all that you could.’
It was a day of layered clouds in various shades of gray pressing down upon the sea. The waters had a brownish tint and seemed nearly lifeless, colored as they were with the umber tones of my family’s despondency.
‘What ails you?’ Caph cried out in frustration.
His anguish touched off my own, and I cried back, ‘The humans do!’
I could not help myself. I told Caph and the rest of my family of the call that I heard and all that I had so far concealed.
‘Poison is there in me, and fire!’ I said. ‘A harpoon has pierced me straight through! The humans have done this thing, and only the humans with their hideous, hideous hands can draw it out.’
‘How? How?’ Caph asked me.
‘We must journey to the humans,’ I said. ‘They are the cause of my sickness, and they must also be the cure.’
‘But how?’ Caph asked again. ‘You have not said how they could help you.’
‘I do not know how,’ I said. ‘That is why we must go to the humans and talk to them.’
Caph laughed at this, sending bitter black waves of sound rippling through the water.
‘Talk to the humans? What will we say to them? What do you expect them to say to you?’
One could, of course, talk to a walrus, a crab, even a jellyfish. And each could talk back, in its own way. Caph, however, sensed that I was hinting at communicating with the humans on a higher level than that of the common speech of the sea.
‘We must ask the humans why they killed Pherkad,’ I said, ‘and how they set fire to water. We must speak to them, from the heart, as we speak to ourselves.’
Alnitak swam up and moved his massive body between Caph and me. ‘We could speak all we wish, but how could the humans possibly understand what we say?’
‘We can teach them our language,’ I said.
At this, Alnitak began laughing in bright madder bands of scorn, and so did Turais, Mira, Chara, and Caph. I might as well have suggested teaching a stone to recite the fundamental philosophical mistake. All things have language, yes, but everyone knew that only whales possess the higher orders of intelligence and the ability to reason and speak abstractly. Only whales make art out of music. And surely – surely, surely, surely! – whales alone of all creatures could quenge.
Baby Porrima, the most innocent of my family, asked me, ‘Do you really think the humans could be intelligent like us?’
Before I could answer, Caph said, ‘We have watched their winged ships that fly through the sky and land upon the water. Have we any reason to suppose that the humans are more intelligent than the geese who do the same, but with much more grace?’
‘I should not put their intelligence that high,’ my sister Nashira said in her bewildered but beautiful voice. ‘We have all beheld the ugliness of the metal shells that carry the humans across the water. Even a snail, though, within its perfectly spiraled shell, makes a more esthetically pleasing protection. I should say that the humans cannot be more intelligent than a mollusk.’
Her assessment, though, proved to be at the lower end of my family’s estimation of human intelligence. Dheneb argued that humans likely surpassed turtles in their mental faculties even though it seemed doubtful that they had figured out how to live as long. Chara placed the upper limit of the humans’ percipience near that of seals, who after all knew well enough not to swim in shark-darkened waters whereas the humans did not. My grandmother futilely reminded us that intelligence could not be determined from the outside but only experienced from within. Finally, after much discussion, my family reached a consensus that humans were probably about as smart as an octopus, whose grasping tentacles the humans’ hands somewhat resembled. Their generosity in according humans this degree of sentience surprised me, for the octopi are among the cleverest of the ocean’s creatures, even if they cannot speak in the manner of a whale.
In a way – but only in a way – my family played a game in this guessing in order to sublimate their disquiet. We all knew that humans possessed a strange, fell power. None of us, however, wanted to entertain the notion that this power might derive from anything like that which we knew as intelligence. None of us except me.
‘We cannot say if humans might learn to speak our language,’ I said, ‘unless we try to teach them.’
Everyone, of course, recognized the logic of my argument, and so it saddened me when my family rejected its conclusion.
After further discussion, my grandmother announced, ‘We cannot journey to the humans out of the remote possibility that they might be sentient enough for us to speak with them. It is too dangerous.’
Too dangerous! Would it be less dangerous to do nothing? The bear cried out through the water: Why did the ice melt around me? And Pherkad called to me in the bitter, beautiful tones of his death poem that told of his agony and the suffering of the entire world.
‘Very well,’ I said to my grandmother. ‘Then I will go to the humans alone.’
If a comet had struck the waves just then, the shock of it could not have been greater. No orca of our kind ever left his family.
My mother’s response cracked out swift and sure. In this instance, she had no need to confer with the rest of us.
‘You cannot leave us,’ she told me. ‘Would you tear out my heart and feed it to the sharks?’
‘You will always have my heart, as I do yours.’
‘You will die without me. And how can you think of abandoning your little brother? I need you to watch over him when I am quenging far away. You are the best caretaker I have ever known.’
‘I am sorry, Mother, but I must leave.’
My unheard-of willfulness occasioned another conclave, the longest that my family had ever held. For three days we talked as we journeyed through blue-gray water grown gelid and nearly still. Dheneb and Alnitak dove beneath icebergs so that in the denser waters of the deeps, they might hear their confidences more clearly. Turais and Chara visited with the Old Ones and drank in their wisdom, while Nashira sang again and again the melodies of the great songs that told of the deeds of the heroes of our people.
My grandmother meditated and dreamed and sang, too. She called my family to swim together. We breathed at the same moment and glided along side by side, synchronizing each beat of flipper and fluke and moving across the sea like a single wave. We breathed and let our thoughts ripple through us like a wave of shared blood as we quenged together – all save me. Like the still point of a storm, my grandmother served as the center around which all my family’s separate impulses and mentations turned and flowed and became as one:
‘Like the great north current,’ Alnitak said, ‘Arjuna will go where he will go.’
‘Can one stop the turning of the ocean?’ Haedi added.
‘Do not the Old Ones say,’ Mira asked, ‘that each whale has a single destiny?’
‘How,’ Turais said, ‘can we ask Arjuna to go on swimming with us in so much pain? Who could bear the sadness of not being able to quenge?’
Mira, having fallen nostalgic, said, ‘Let Arjuna know his old joy again. Do you remember how when he was a baby he tried to talk to Valashu, the Morning Star?’
‘How could we forget that?’ Dheneb said. ‘How can we ever forget how he talked with Pherkad, who gave him his magnificent song?’
‘The Old Ones,’ Chara affirmed, ‘say that they have heard Arjuna’s great song. It must be that he will have returned from the humans in triumph to complete his rhapsody.’
The emotion of the last few days proved too much for Baby Talitha. She began crying even as my mother said: ‘I will want to die if Arjuna leaves us, but I think I would die if he remains and is so sad that he does not want to live.’
Finally, with all my family exhausted, my grandmother gathered all their many chords into a decision that had grown more and more obvious:
‘You must leave us,’ my grandmother said to me.
‘I cannot,’ I told her. I listened to Talitha crying and crying. ‘I cannot – but somehow I must.’
My family formed into a circle in the quiet silvery water, our heads touching so that the slightest pressure of our flutes would send our words sounding deep into each other.
‘Listen to me, Arjuna,’ my grandmother said. ‘No matter how far you journey, your heart will beat with ours and we will breathe the same breath. There is nowhere that you can go that we will not be.’
We broke apart and I prepared to leave. I gathered in those vital things that would help me on my way: Alnitak’s maps of the ocean and the heavens; Mira’s taxonomy of the sea’s manifold creatures; the epics composed by Aldebaran the Great; the music of Talitha’s laughter and reverberations of my mother’s first words to me. One thing only remained that I would need.
‘Come with me,’ my grandmother said to me. ‘Let us swim together for a while.’
We moved off away from the rest of our family. It was a cloudless day, and the low sun cast long rays of light down into the dark turquoise water. There, in the calm and clarity, in the heart of the ocean where one could hear its deepest secrets, my grandmother made a present that would protect me: she gave me a charm, alive with the most powerful of all magics, that I might never lose myself on my journey and would always find my way home.
After that, I swam toward the south and east. I swam so quickly at first that the icy sea did seem to cool my ire, if only a little. Soon I found myself racing through unknown waters. If I did not distance myself from my family with all the speed that I could summon, I feared that my courage would fail and I would turn back.
After a long time I grew tired. The muscles along my belly, tail, and flukes ached. I breached, blew out a great cloud of mist, and drew in a fresh breath. I dove down a little way into the water and hung suspended in motionlessness.
The sea about me tasted odd, perhaps flavored by unusual organisms or the upwelling of minerals that were unfamiliar to me. The waters were tinted a deep violet, with undertones of an eerie cerulean blue that I had never beheld. The entire ocean glowed – with sunlight from the cold-striated sky sifting down through the water, yes, but even more from the sonance that filled the ocean’s immensity and reverberated through every drop of it. I heard the faint singing of a humpback somewhere ahead of me and the thumping of my heart much nearer. From far away came the call that had summoned me on this journey. It sounded out as primeval as the first whale’s first breath, at once plosive and soft, reassuring and terrifying, horrible and beautiful. Into it I must venture, through an ocean whose quality had grown more and more mysterious. Through this unknown realm I must find my way where all was strange, various, and new, and the water itself somehow seemed too real.
For the first time in my life, I became aware of a kind of soul-eating silence: among all the purling sounds of the sea, I could detect not the slightest note made by one of my family. Of course, whenever I wished, I could go down inside myself and listen to Talitha’s giggles or my mother’s lullabies as clearly and with as much immediacy as if these two beloved people were singing right beside me. No difference could I hear in the actuality of volume, note, or timbre. It was not, however, the same, for I could not feel the sound waves emanating from my mother’s body, nor could I see her or touch her. My family seemed to have swum off to a distantly-remembered world and to have left me all alone.
In a wave of disquiet sweeping through me, I realized that an orca sundered from his family is an orca in danger of falling mad. If Alnitak, Chara, and the others did not swim beside me and sing to me, should I then sing to myself? Were my thoughts and words to return to me untouched by the minds of my family as if I had eaten and re-eaten the same food again and again? How could I ever heal myself with my own songs? How could I know myself without the sound of their love reflecting back a picture for me to see? Did the lightning scar still mark me above my eye? Had my mother really named me Arjuna on the day of my birth or was that memory just part of a dream, along with myself and all the rest of my life?
Brooding upon such things made matters even worse. I seemed strange to myself. I could not quenge, and I did not know if I could any longer even love. I felt fearsome and new, as if I had been remade into some dreadful form that I did not want to behold.
I began swimming again. I came upon a school of herring, each of whose scales were all silvery and streaked with faint gold and scarlet bands. I swam right into the school and stunned many of the fish with a slap of my tail. Others I immobilized with zangs of sonar or confused by blowing out clouds of bubbles. So ravenous was I that I nearly began eating without asking the doomed fish if they were ready to die. I finally remembered myself, however, and I did ask. The entire school, in their ones and their multitudes, said yes.
The feast strengthened me and gave me new life. I might have died in my soul, while my harpooned heart bled out the best part of me – even so, my body and my force of will seemed to have gained a new power. I swam on at speed into the wild, endless sea.
On a day of dead calm with the water stilled into a vast blue mirror, I heard cries from far off long before I encountered the whales who had made them. I swam toward this terrible keening. After a while, I intercepted two large humpbacks, the water streaming from their lumpy, barnacle-studded bodies whenever they breached for breath. They were moving as fast as they could in the direction from which I had come. I asked them what was wrong. In their very basic and nearly incomprehensible speech, they shouted: ‘Humans blood pain death!’
Their panic communicated into me, and I considered turning around and joining them in their spasm of flight. Instead, I swam on straight toward the sea’s wavering horizon.
Very soon, one of the humans’ gray ships appeared there. I swam in close enough to make out metal spines sticking up from the top of the ship; these reminded me of a conch shell’s many points and projections. Humans – the first I had ever seen! – stood on the top of the ship, near its head. They were tending to what looked like a long piece of seaweed that connected the ship to the bloody water. A shrieking sound like metal eating metal vibrated both ship and sea, and the seaweed thing began moving toward the ship. I zanged the seaweed and determined it was made of metal, like the ship. It continued moving, and soon the whale attached to it emerged from the water tail first, even as I had been born. A moment later, I caught sight of the bloody harpoon that had torn a great hole through the humpback’s body and had killed it. The harpoon, too, was made of metal, unlike the wooden one that had killed Pherkad.
Upon this horror, panic seized me. The ship loomed above, vast and ugly, gray and angular, like a deformed mockery of one of the deep gods. How helpless I felt against this monster of metal! I wanted to fling myself away from this vile place as quickly as I could.
How, though, could I do this? Was I not an orca of the Blue Aria Family of the Faithful Thoughtplayer Clan. Had not my mother, just before my birth, instructed me in the orcas’ ways?
‘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 (#ulink_8518e341-ee10-5e1d-a52d-2b2eee4ab4fa)
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?’
‘He’ll eat you if you don’t get your arm out of the water.’
‘No, if he was that hungry, he could’ve eaten Kelly when she wiped out. I don’t think orcas eat people.’
‘What do they eat?’
‘Seals and penguins and things like that.’
‘Do you think he’d eat some fish?’
‘Did you bring any fish?’
‘I’ve got a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.’
‘Did you ever give a dog peanut butter? They lick their teeth for like an hour ’cause they can’t get it off.’
‘We’re not going to give an orca peanut butter!’
‘What do you think he wants?’
I moved in as close to the boat as I could.
‘Listen! Listen! Listen!’ I said. I spoke as slowly as I could. ‘W-wait-wait-wait-A-wait-wait-wait-T-wait-wait-wait-E-wait-wait-wait-R!’
‘I don’t know, but it sounds like he’s in distress.’
‘I think he just wants attention. He’s a pushy little whale.’
‘Maybe we should play him some music. I hear whales like music.’
‘What kind?’
‘I don’t know – what do you have?’
One of the humans, with a hairy face and a second skin of sheeny blue, lifted a black object onto the wooden surface near the boat’s tail. He did something to it with the tentacles of his hands.
‘I hope he likes it.’
A great noise burst from the black object and broke through the air. The noise drove against my skin and set the very water around me humming. It took a few moments for me to realize that the noise comprised different strands of sound: human voices and howling vibrations and a relentless thumping like that of a heart beating with an insane rhythm.
Boom boom anger anger anger! Boom boom anger anger anger! Boom boom …
‘Please stop!’ I cried out. ‘It hurts my head, hurts my soul!’
I came up out of the water, spy-hopping, which brought my head nearly level with the booming black thing. I opened my mouth, thinking I might be able to snatch it from between the human’s hands and crush it between my jaws.
‘Look! Bobo is smiling! He likes it – turn it louder!’
Boom! Boom! Boom …
As other humans had set fire to the sea’s surface with their dirty oil, these humans made even the water itself sick with sound. Although I longed to speak with them – particularly with the yellow-haired female – I had to get away from them and their boat as quickly as I could. I dove, but at first that only exacerbated the torment of the hideous noise, for sound moves more quickly and completely through water than it does through air. Only by swimming as far as I could away from the boat would I be able to make the noise attenuate to a distant and tolerable irritation.
And swim I did. For the rest of that day, and during the days that followed, I explored the large bay I had entered. I never really escaped the noise of the humans, for they were everywhere on the bay and on the shore surrounding it. Many boats disturbed the bay’s blue waters, and most of them sent high-pitched, shrieking sounds piercing every nook and cove. From the forests rising up from the sea came a similar buzz and clash, as if the very air were being torn apart. From time to time, great trees broke into splinters and crashed to the earth. Humans dropped the bare spines of the tree’s corpses into the water with splash after tremendous splash.
How long, I wondered, would I be able to live amidst this cacophony without falling as insane as the humans themselves seemed to be? Could I bear another day, another hour, another moment? Somehow, I told myself, I had to bear it. In the way my mother had showed me many years before, I must learn to dwell within softer, interior sounds called up from memory or imagination, which would overpower all the human noise and drive it away.
It dismayed me that the humans fouled the pretty bay with things other than noise. I found floating on the water many objects that the humans cast from their boats. Some were second skins made of that highly shapeable substance the humans used for so many unfathomable purposes. Because I needed a name for this unnatural substance, I thought of it as excrescence. Excrescence composed most of the objects the humans handled, as it did the bodies of their boats. I zanged as well metallic and clear stone shells from which they drank various liquids. Everywhere I went, the water tasted of oils suppurating from their boats and from the bitter cream the humans rubbed into their skin.
Except for the ubiquitous excrescence, which could be found floating in island-like masses even on the northern oceans, the worst of the humans’ befoulment was the feces that poured from many streams into the bay. Why, I wondered, did humans drop their feces into water when they were creatures of the land? Why did they concentrate it into a brownish sludge? Did they wish to flavor the water through which they swam? That seemed to me unlikely, for when I put tongue to their feces, I detect traces of boat oil, excrescence, and other poisons that could only have tasted as unpleasant to the humans as they did to me.
I came across a hint of an answer to these questions as I was exploring a peninsula on the east side of the bay. Two tongues of land licked out from the peninsula’s tip into the water. On one of these tongues – treeless and covered with grass – humans stood striking shiny metal sticks against spherical white eggs which arced through the air before falling to earth and rolling across the grass. From time to time, one of the eggs, made of yet another kind of excrescence, would sail off the peninsula and plop into the water. Then the humans would call out such stridencies as ‘Goddamned ball is unbalanced!’ and other sounds that made no sense to me.
On the other bit of land, across a slip of water, trees grew out an expanse of grass. There humans reclined on second skins and cast other kinds of eggs at each other. They burned fish in fires, shouted out cries to each other, and they did a thing with feces that fascinated me.
Some sort of mammal – some looked like little wolves – accompanied many of the humans. Long strands probably made of excrescence connected the two-legged to four-legged. The little wolves would dart about, put nose to ground, and cause the humans’ limbs to jerk in whatever direction the wolves chose to move. Whenever the wolves arched their backs to defecate, the humans waited by their sides. At the completion of each defecation, the humans made cooing sounds as if pleased to receive what the wolves had given them. They gathered up the feces in clear skins of excrescence, which they carried proudly in their hands as the wolves led them on a continuation of their erratic journey across the grass.
Why, I wondered, did the humans gather up wolf feces? Did they eat it as snails eat the excretions of fish? Did they lick down the feces of their own kind? That could not be possible. And yet, when it came to humans, almost nothing seemed impossible. I could be sure of little more than the fact that humans collected feces of varying kinds. Perhaps when these collections grew too large, the humans vented some into the sea.
My puzzlement at the humans’ diet caused me to realize that it had been too long since I had eaten. I badly wanted and needed to catch a few salmon or perhaps some more delicious herring. However, the channel through which I swam formed a part of the traditional fishing grounds of the Truthful Word Painter Clan. I felt sure that these distant cousins of mine would not begrudge me a few mouthfuls of fish, but good manners dictated that I first ask permission before indulging in such a feast. I had to wait through many days of rumbling in my empty belly before I had a chance to do so. One clear night, with the moon-silvered waters around me rippling in a soft breeze, the orcas of the Scarlett Tiralee family of the Truthful Word Painter Clan swam into the channel and made my acquaintance.
Only six of them did I greet: Mother Agena and her three children, Diadem, Furud, and Mekbuda, and Agena’s sister Celaeno, who had recently given birth to Baby Kornephoros. When I asked after their health, Agena told me, ‘We are well enough now, though misfortunes have reduced our family, as you can see.’
We spent the rest of night recounting stories and telling of our respective families. I listened with great sadness as Agena described the agonizing death of her mother, who had perished before her time of a mysterious wasting disease. Agena’s first child had died in a collision with one of the humans’ boats while her second had succumbed to a fever. I related similar woes, though I tried to gloss over my relief that my family had prospered in the face of great trials largely due to my grandmother’s guidance. Together we sang songs of mourning and remembrance. Finally just after dawn with the sun red upon a cloud-heavy horizon, I told the Scarlett Word Painters of the white bear and the burning sea, and I explained why I had journeyed so far from home.
‘I have never imagined,’ Mother Agena said, ‘losing my ability to quenge. Would you not be better off dead?’
‘I would be, yes,’ I replied, ‘if I had no hope of regaining from the humans what they have taken from me.’
‘You are a wonder of a whale,’ Agena said to me. ‘You are inquisitive and strong and brave, but you are also prideful and not a little foolish to think that you have been called to speak with the humans. Such hubris, if you persist, will be punished.’
‘How so?’ I asked.
I did not wish to dispute an elder, particularly not a mother of another clan. I waited for Agena to say more.
‘Do you have any idea of how many of the Word Painters have tried to speak with the humans?’ Agena slapped her tail against the water and whistled out into the morning air. ‘I cannot say whether or not the humans have language or might be sentient, but this I know: if you cleave to them too closely, either their insanity will become yours or else they will murder you.’
This warning more or less ended our conversation, for how could I respond to such bitter despair that masqueraded as wisdom and even prophecy? I did not want to believe Mother Agena’s fraught words. I could not believe them. And so when it came time to part, I sang farewells and blessings with all the polite passion that I could summon.
‘Goodbye, Bright One, marked by lightning and beloved of the sea,’ Mother Agena said to me as she nudged the scar over my eye. ‘We will not remain in this unfortunate place, which was once our home. It is yours, if you wish. Therefore, you are welcome to all the fish you might find – if the humans let you take them.’
As she moved off with the Word Painters, I pondered the meaning of her last words. Her voice lingered in the water and broke apart into quaverings of ruin that I did not want to hear. I was hungry, and fish abounded all about me. I made my way into the sea’s inky forebodings to go find them.
4 (#ulink_ffb2b332-db4b-55f8-a8c7-b99c92b592ef)
For three days of wind and storm, I ranged about the channel hunting salmon to my belly’s contentment. I came across many boats. Most of these, while moving across the greenish surface of the bay, emitted a nearly deafening buzz from their underbellies, near their rear. How could these human things make such an obnoxious noise? An impulse drove me toward one of the boat’s vibrating parts, obscured by churning water and clouds of silvery bubbles. I wanted to press my face against this organ of sound as I might touch my mouth to the swim bladder of a toadfish to determine how it could be so loud. A second impulse, however, held me back. In a revulsion of ambivalence that was to flavor my interactions with the humans, I realized that I did not want to get too near the boat, which was made of excrescence as were so many of the things associated with the humans.
At other times, however, my curiosity carried me very close to these strange, two-legged beings. On a day of gentle swells, when the sky had cleared to a pale blue, I came upon a boat whose humans busied themselves with using strands of excrescence to pull salmon out of the sea. What a clever hunting technique! I thought. I swam in close to the boat to investigate.
One of the humans sighted me, and barked out what seemed to be the human danger cry: ‘Orca! Orca! Orca!’
How could I show them that I posed them no threat? Perhaps if I snatched a salmon from the excrescence strands and presented it to them, they would perceive my good intentions. I swam through the rippling water.
‘That damned blackfish is after our catch!’ A hairy-faced human called out.
His top half nearly doubled over the lower in that disturbingly human way of exercising their strangely-jointed bodies. When he straightened up, he clasped some sort of wooden and metallic stick in his hands.
‘What are you doing?’ his pink-faced companion called out.
‘Just shooting at that damned blackfish!’
‘I can see that – but what are you doing? Do you want to go to prison for killing a whale?’
‘Who would know? Anyway, I’m just going to have a little target practice to scare him off.’
‘Put your goddamned gun away!’
‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to kill him – unless he tries to take our salmon.’
A great noise cracked out; just beside me, the water opened with a small hole which almost immediately closed.
‘How did you do that?’ I shouted as I moved in toward the boat.
Again the stick made its hideous noise, and again the water jumped in response.
‘Once more!’ I said, taking a great liking to this game. ‘Make the water dance once more!’
I swam in even closer, and the holes touched the water scarcely a tongue’s lick from my face. What beguiling powers these humans had! Orcas can stun a fish with a zang of sonar, and the deep gods – who have the Great Voice, the voice of death – kill swarms of squid in this manner. No whale, however, can speak and make the very waters part.
‘If you shoot that orca,’ the pink-face called out, ‘I’m going to shoot you!’
The human holding the wood and metal stick lowered it, and the water moved no more.
‘Please, please!’ I said. ‘Let us play!’
If the humans, though, could not understand the simple word for water, how could they comprehend my more complex request? To show my gratitude that they had possessed the wit to play at all, I caught a salmon and swam right up to the edge of the boat.
‘I think he wants us to have it!’ the pink-faced human said. ‘He’s giving us his fish!’
I pushed up out of the water, with the salmon still thrashing between my teeth. Hands reached out to grasp it and take it from me. Then I dove and caught another salmon for the humans, and another. They seemed to like this game.
During the days that followed, I ranged the channel and played games with other humans. Some were as trifling as balancing pieces of driftwood on my face, while others demanded planning and coordination. The humans seemed titillated when I rose up from the deeps near their boats and flew unannounced high into the air. Many times, I surprised their littlest boats, propelled across the channel by lone humans pushing sticks through the water. It was great sport to leap over both boat and human in the same way that Kajam had once leaped over Alnitak’s back.
In the course of nearly all these encounters, the humans involved made various vocalizations, for they proved to be among the noisiest of animals. Their voices seemed to reach out to me with a terrible longing, as if the humans hoped to find in me some ineffable thing they could not appreciate within themselves. I sucked up every sound they made and examined their incessant barking and crooning for pattern and possible meaning:
‘Hey, look it’s Bobo! You can tell it’s him by the scar over his eye.’
‘I hear he likes to play.’
‘What a joyful spirit!’
‘He’s the spirit of my grandfather who has come to tell us something.’
‘I heard that some fisherman took shots at him.’
‘He was brought here for some purpose.’
‘Look in his eyes – there’s more there than in most people.’
‘Why is Bobo all alone? What happened to the rest of his pod?’
‘I think he’s lonely.’
‘When he looks at me that way, I can feel my soul dancing.’
As the days shortened toward another winter of cloud and storm, I felt a growing urge to understand the mystery of the humans. Buried inside me, like a pearl in an oyster, I felt a hard realization pressing against my softer tissues of doubt. More and more, I wanted to draw out the pearl and hold it up sparkling in the sun.
I wondered what might explain what I experienced in my forays up and down the channel. I assumed that the humans really did have a keen intelligence, though of a different and lesser quality than that of whales. They must have some sort of language, too, for how else could they organize so many complex activities? During quiet moments when the cold ocean stilled to a vast blue clarity, I could see the intelligence lighting up the humans’ eyes just as I could feel their desire to communicate with me. Do not the Old Ones say that the eyes sing with the sound of the soul?
My ancestors also tell of the forming of all things in the eternal creation of the world. From out of the oneness of water and its accompanying sound comes love, which can never be wholly distinct from its source. From out of love, in turn, emanate the sacred triadic harmonies of goodness, beauty, and truth. How could one ever marvel ecstatic at the beauty of the rising of the Thallow constellation over the starlit sea without the goodness of the heart to let in the tinkling luminosity? How know goodness absent the truth that all the horrors of life find validation in the love of life that all creatures embrace? The journey to the deepest of love, my grandmother once told me, must always lead through truth, beauty, and goodness. And of these, the waters of truth are much the hardest to navigate.
‘Only through quenging into utter honesty with ourselves,’ she had said, ‘can we hope to become more fully and consciously ourselves. Is this not what the world wants of us? If not, why did the sea separate itself into individual peals of life in the first place? That is why we must always tell the truth. For if we do not, the great song that we make of ourselves will ring false. But, Arjuna, who has the courage to really listen to the cry of one’s heart and to embrace the totality of one’s own being? Who can even behold it?’
It is a truth universally acknowledged among my kind that one can never hear completely the truth of one’s own soul. We cannot make out the ridges and troughs that form the seascapes of our deepest selves, any more than we can zang through miles of dark, turbid waters to study the bottom of the ocean. Then, too, the eye can never see itself, just as I could not look directly at the scar marking my forehead. Worst of all, we avoid doing so with a will toward the expunging of our best senses. As seals seek dark and narrow coves in which to flee the teeth of the orcas, we hide from our truest selves for we do not want to be devoured by the most primeval of all our passions.
‘What does any whale really want?’ my grandmother had asked. ‘Were we not born to be the mightiest of hunters? Do we not, in the end, pursue greater life in ourselves that we might know the infinitely vaster life of the world around us?’
We do, we do – of course we do! And yet in this glorious becoming of our greater selves, as streamlined and lovely as the orcas of Agathange, we must leave behind our lesser selves. This realization of the best and truest within us, though it yields eternal life, always feels like death. One thing only emboldens us to make the journey through life’s terrors and agonies to the end of time and the beginning of the world.
How, though, was I to achieve this greatest of purposes absent my family’s devotion and encouragement? How, without my mother, Alnitak, Mira, and everyone else, would I come by the pellucid honesty through which I would find my way through the great ocean of truth?
Although I had no answers to these questions, I knew what my grandmother would say: I must begin with the truth that I had grasped but which I was reluctant to really sink my teeth into. After playing many games with the humans, I not only hypothesized that they were intelligent, I zanged it in my heart. Why, though, had I not listened to what I had zanged so deeply?
I thought I knew the reason, and it had to do with an essential paradox: that only through looking out at all the manifold forms and features of the world can we ever apprehend the much stranger phenomena of ourselves. Just as we can see stars only against the blackness of the nighttime sky, so we need others to show us the many ways that we shine as unique sparks of creation. The greater the contrast in this relationship, the deeper the understanding.
For instance, were not females, such as lovely Mother Agena, a part of the great unknown? No other work of nature was more like a male orca such as I, and yet so utterly different. How should I then long to find myself within the wild, wet clutch of her body and even the wilder ocean of her soul? Would it not be, I wondered, that precisely in closing the difference between us and daring to enter the most dangerous place in the universe I would discover an exalted and ecstatic Arjuna whom I might otherwise not ever know?
So it was with the humans. To a whale such as I, their kind beckoned as the Great Other in whom I might discover secrets about myself that I had never suspected. Although it seemed absurd that the humans’ intelligence could in any way illuminate my own, I came to realize that I had been hiding from the truth that the humans had something precious to give me.
‘O Arjuna, Arjuna!’ I cried out, ‘that is why you have not wanted to believe what you have zanged so clearly!’
Even as I said these words, however, I knew that I was still evading myself, for I had carried through the waters a deeper reason for denying the humans’ obvious intelligence. To admit to myself that humans might have minds anything like those of whales would impel me to want to touch those minds – to need to touch them. How could I allow myself to be so weak? How could I bear the terrible truth that I was desperately, desperately lonely?
I had to bear it. I had to accept it, for my grandmother had also said this to me: ‘If you bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is inside you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.’
After that, I renewed my efforts to speak with the two-leggeds and enter their psyches. One day, when the clear cerulean sky almost perfectly matched the blueness of the sea, I came upon the boat carrying the humans I had first met in the bay. They waved their arms and whistled and called out their warning cry, which seemed completely absent of warning or apprehension:
‘Orca! Orca! Orca!’
‘Look, it’s Bobo! He’s come back to us!’
I swam up to their bobbing boat and said hello.
‘Lil’ Bobo,’ the longer of the two males said. ‘We’re sorry we scared you off last time. I guess you don’t like acid rap.’
The shorter of the males, who had blue eyes and golden hair like that of the female surfer who stood next to him, drank from a metallic shell and let out a belch. He said, ‘Who does like it? Why don’t we try something else?’
‘What about Radiohead?’ the longer male said.
The female surfer used her writhing fingers to pull back her golden hair. She lay belly-flat on the front of the boat, and dipped her hand into the water to stroke my head.
‘Let’s play him some classical music.’
‘I don’t have anything like that,’ the golden-haired male said. I guessed he must be the surfer’s brother.
‘I downloaded a bunch of classical a few weeks ago,’ the surfer said, ‘just in case.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know – I don’t really know anything about classical.’
‘Let me see,’ the longer male said.
He bent over, and when he straightened, he held in his hand a shiny metallic thing, like half of an abalone shell.
‘What about the Rite of Spring?’ he said. ‘That sounds like some nice, soft music.’
A few moments later, from another shiny object that seemed all stark planes and hard surfaces like so many human things, a beguiling call filled the air. In its high notes, I heard a deep mystery and the promise of life’s power, almost as if a whale were keening out a long-held desire to love and mate. Soon came crashing chords and complicated rhythms, which felt like a dozen kinds of fish thrashing inside my belly. Various themes, as jagged as a shark’s teeth, tore into one another, interacted for a moment, and then gave birth to new expressions which incorporated the old. Brooding harmonies collided, moved apart, and then invited in a higher order of chaos. Such a brutal beauty! So much blood, exaltation, splendor! The human-made sounds touched the air with a magnificent dissonance and pressed deep into the water in adoration of the earth.
‘What kind of crap is that?’ the golden-haired male said. ‘Turn off that noise before you drive Bobo away again!’
O music! The humans had music: strange, powerful, and complex!
And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the music died.
‘No, no!’ I cried out. ‘More, please – I want to hear more!’
The longer male’s fingers stroked the abalone-like thing for a few moments. He said, ‘What about Beethoven?’
A new music sounded. So very different from the first it was, and yet so alike, for within its simpler melodies and purer beauty dwelled an immense affirmation of life. As the sun moved higher in the sky and the surfer female on the boat stroked my skin, I listened and drank in this lovely music for a long, long time.
Finally, near the end of the composition, a great choir of human voices picked up a heart-opening melody. I listened, stunned. It was almost as if the Old Ones were calling to me.
O the stars! O the sea! They sang of joy!
This realization confirmed all that I had suspected to be true. Although the ability to compose complex music could not be equated with the speaking of language itself, does not all language begin in the impulse of the very ocean to sing?
‘All right, so he likes Beethoven. Let’s try Bach and Brahms.’
As the sun reached its zenith in the blue eggshell of the sky and began its descent into its birth place in the sea, the humans regaled me with other musics. I listened and listened, lost in a sweet, sonic rapture.
‘I think he loves Mozart,’ the shorter male said.
‘I think he loves me,’ the golden-haired surfer said. ‘And I love him.’
To the murmurs of a new melody, the female leaned far out over the boat and pressed her mouth against the skin over my mouth.
‘Bobo, Bobo, Bobo – I wish I could talk to you!’ she said.
‘I wish I could talk to you,’ I told her. I wished I could understand anything of what she or any human said. ‘Can you not even say water?’
I slapped the surface of the sea with my flukes, and carefully enunciated, ‘Water. W-a-t-e-r.’
‘It’s like he wants to talk to me,’ she said.
Having grown frustrated in my desire to touch her with the most fundamental of utterances, I drank in a mouthful of water and sprayed it over her face.
‘Oh, my God! You soaked me! How would you like it if I did that to you?’
Again, I sprayed her and said, ‘Water.’ And then she dipped her hand into the bay, brought it up to her mouth, and sprayed me.
‘So you like playing with water don’t you?’ she said. ‘Well, you’re a whale, so why shouldn’t you? Water, water, everywhere you go.’
Her hand, her hideous but lovely hand that had sent waves of pleasure rippling along my skin, slapped the water much as I had done with my tail. And with each slap, she made a sound with her mouth, which had touched my mouth: ‘Water, water, water.’
The great discoveries in life often come in a moment’s burst like the thunderbolt that flashes out of a long-building storm. I listened as the golden-haired surfer said to me, ‘I wish I could teach you to say water.’ And all the while her clever hand touched the sea in perfect coordination with the sound that poured from her mouth: ‘Water, water, water.’ I realized all at once that she was trying to teach me to speak, in the human way. I realized something else, something astonishing that would open the secret to communicating with these strange animals:
One set of sounds, one word! The humans do not inflect their words according to circumstance, context, or the art of variation! Not even our babies speak so primitively!
‘Water,’ the surfer said again. ‘You understand that, don’t you, Bobo?’
Water, water, water – she kept repeating the simple sequence of taps and tones with an excruciating sameness. I tried to return the favor, trilling out one of the myriad expressions for water in a single way: water.
‘I don’t understand you, though,’ she said to me. ‘I don’t think human beings will ever be able to speak whale.’
The brightness in the surfer’s blue eyes faded, as when a cloud passes over the moon. I feared that she did not understand me.
‘No one can speak to a whale,’ the longer of the males said. ‘They probably don’t even have real language.’
The surfer female looked at me. She thumped her hand against the smooth excrescence upon which she lay and said, ‘Boat.’ And so I learned another word. This game went on until dusk. I collected human words as a magpie gathers up colorful bits of driftglass: Shirt. Fork. Beer. Hair. Ice. Teeth. Lips.
Finally, as the sun sank down into the crimson and pink clouds along the western horizon, the female pressed her hand over her heart and said, ‘Kelly,’ which I supposed must be what the humans call their own kind. The longer of the two male kellies made a similar gesture and said, ‘Zach.’ I laughed then at my stupidity. They were obviously giving me their names.
I gave them mine, but they seemed not to understand what I was doing. Just as the underside of the boat roared into motion, Kelly said to me, ‘Goodbye, Bobo. I love you!’
The next day, and for the remainder of the late summer moon, I had similar encounters with other humans. Strangely, they all seemed to have taken up the game played by Kelly and Zach. I learned many more human words: Lightbulb. Fish. Rifle. Bullet. Knife. Dog. Life preserver. Surfboard. Mouth. Eyes. Penis. I learned many names, too: Jake. Susan. Nika. Keegan. Ayanna. Alex. Jillian. Justine. Most of these humans called me Bobo, and sometimes for fun I returned the misnomer by exercising a willful obtuseness in persisting to think of the humans as male or female kellies.
In the vocalizations of all these many kellies, I began to pick out words that I had mastered. However, the meaning of their communications still largely eluded me. Even so, I memorized all that the kellies said, against the day that I might make sense of what still seemed like gobbledygook:
‘Bobo is back! Hey Lilly, he seems to like talking to you the best. Maybe you can use this for your college essay.’
‘Maybe I can sell the rights to all this, and they can make a movie.’
‘They say Bobo is the smartest orca anyone has ever seen.’
‘I hear he understands everything you say.’
‘Of course he’s trying to communicate with us, and he’s been getting more aggressive, too.’
‘Hey, Bobo, how does it work to mate with a whale?’
‘I’m going to play him some Radiohead. I hear he likes that.’
‘Do you just poop and pee in the water and swim through it?’
‘What do you think Bobo – is there a God?’
‘They’re saying Bobo might hurt someone or injure himself, so they might have to capture him and sell him to Sea Circus.’
‘I love Bobo, and I know he loves me.’
‘If he’s so smart, how come he can’t speak a single word of English?’
How frustrated I was! Not only did I fail to form a single human word, I could not make a single human understand the simplest orca word for water. Upon considering the problem, I realized that much of my success in recognizing the few human words I had been taught lay in the curious power of the human hand. If the humans had not been able to touch or stroke the various objects they presented to me, how would I ever have learned their names?
With this in mind, I broadened my strategy of instructing the humans in the basics of orca speech. I opened my mouth and put tongue to teeth in order to indicate the part of the body that I then named. As well, I licked a human hand and said, ‘Tentacle,’ and with a beat of my flukes I flicked a salmon into one of their boats and said, ‘Fish.’ When that did not avail, I took to nudging various things with my head and calling out sounds that I desperately wished the humans might understand: Driftwood; kelp; sandbar; clam shell. Sadly, the humans still seemed unable to grasp the meaning of what I said – or even that I was trying to teach them.
One gray morning when the sea had calmed and flattened out like the silvery-clear glass that the humans made, I came upon a small boat gliding across the bay. Quiet it was, nearly as quiet as a stealth whale stalking a seal. A lone human male dipped a double-bladed splinter of wood into the water in rhythmic strokes. A violet and green shell of excrescence encased his head. I expected his boat to be made of one of this material’s many manifestations, but when I zanged the boat, I found it was made of skin stretched over a wooden skeleton. I swam in close to make the male’s acquaintance.
‘Hello, brave human, my name is Arjuna.’ I often thought of the humans as brave, for what other land animal who swims so poorly ventures out into the ocean – and alone at that? ‘What are you called?’
This male, however, unlike most humans, remained as quiet as his boat. I came up out of the water, the better to look at him. I liked his black eyes, nearly as large and liquid and full of light as my mother’s eyes. I liked it that he sat within a skin boat. I grew so weary of listening to the echoes of excrescence, which it seemed the humans called plastic.
‘Skin,’ I called out, touching my face to the body of his boat. ‘Your boat is covered with skin, as am I, as are you!’
I did not really think I could teach him this word, any more than I had been able to teach other humans other words. Having been thwarted so many times in my increasingly desperate need to communicate, I pursued accord with this male too strenuously. My pent-up desire to teach one human one orca sound impelled me to nudge the boat as I might one of my own family. It surprised me how insubstantial the boat proved to be. I looked on in dismay as the boat flipped over like a leaf tossed by a wave.
‘Hold your breath!’ I called to the human suspended upside down beneath the boat.
Although I assumed the human must know that he would drown if he breathed water, I could not be sure. I dove beneath the water to help him.
‘Hold onto me!’
I found the male beating his stick through the water. It would have been an easy thing for him to have grasped my fin or tail so that I could pull him around through the gelid sea to return him to the air. Instead, he began beating his stick at me. He thrashed about like a frightened fish. Silver bubbles churned the water. I caught the sound of the human’s heart beating as quickly as a bird’s wings. Through the froth and the fury of the human’s struggle, I gazed at his glorious eyes, grown dark and jumping with a dread of death. Now he did not seem so brave.
‘Wait, wait, wait!’ I told him. ‘I will save you!’
I pressed my head against his side; as gently as I could, I used my much greater substance to move his slight body around and up through the water. This had the effect of turning the boat still attached to him. A moment later, the human breached and choked in a great lungful of air. Water streamed from his face and from the blue plastic skin encasing him. He coughed and sputtered out a spray of spit, for he had sucked water into his blowhole.
After a while, his coughing subsided. His belly, though, tensed up as tight as the skin that covered his little boat. And he called out to me: ‘Goddamned whale! Why can’t you leave us alone?’
Why could I not speak with the humans, I wondered as I swam off in dismay? Through days of clouds and dark nights, I swam back and forth across the bay pondering this problem. I dove deep into the inky waters, believing that if I did so, I might somehow zang how I might talk to the humans – and how, indeed, I might sound the much deeper mystery of how anything spoke with anything at all. What was language, really? For the humans, it seemed nothing more than an arbitrary set of sounds that they attached like so many barnacles to various people, objects, and ideas. From where did these sounds, though, come? What principle or passion ordered them? Could it be, as I very much wanted it to be, that the human language had a deeper structure and intelligence that I could not quite perceive? And that a higher and secret language engendered all the utterances of every individual or every species in the world? And not just of our world, Ocean, but of other worlds such as Agathange, Simoom, and Scutarix? Might there not be, at the very bottom of things, concordant and melodious, a single and universal language through which all beings could communicate?
I felt sure that they must be. One evening, as I lay in deep meditation beneath many fathoms of cold water, it came to me with all the suddenness of a bubble bursting that my approach to speaking with the humans had been all wrong. Before trying to teach them the rudiments of orca speech, which their lips, tongues, and other vocal apparatus might not be able to duplicate, might it not be possible to share with them the impulse beneath language, even as they had shared their musics with me? Yes, I decided, it would be possible. And, yes, yes, I would share with the humans all that I had so far held inside: I would drink in the deepest of breaths and gather up the greatest of inspiration, and I would sing to the humans as no whale had ever sung before!
Some days later, I entered a cove in which floated a large fishing boat. The humans had covered the front of it with gray and white paints in a shape that looked something like the head of a shark. Buoyed as I was by bonhomie and zest for the newfound possibilities of my mission, I paid little attention to the peculiarities of this boat or to the many strands of excrescence that surrounded it like intertangled growths of kelp. Nets, the humans called these fish traps. Today, however, the empty nets had trapped not a single salmon. It seemed that the many noisy humans gesticulating atop the boat had not really come here to fish, but rather to make music for me.
And what music they made! And how they made it! I swam in toward the boat, drawn by the mighty Beethoven chords that somehow sounded from beneath the water. The density of this marvelous blue substance magnified the marvel of the music. Joy, pure joy, zanged straight through my skin. I moved even closer to the boat and to the music’s mysterious source beneath the rippling waves.
‘O what a song I have for you!’ I said to the humans. I knew that if I was to touch their hearts as they had touched mine, I must go deep inside myself to speak with the monsters and the angels that dwelled there. ‘Here, humans, here, here – please listen to this song of myself!’
I breached and breathed in a great breath in order to sing. Before the first sound vibrated in my flute, however, the boat began to shudder and shake and to issue sounds of its own. The air sickened with a clanking and grinding. Quicker than I could believe, the nets of excrescence began closing in on me from all sides, like a pack of sharks intent on a feeding frenzy. My heart leaped, not with song but with a fire like that which had burned the waters of the northern sea. I swam to the east, but encountered a web of excrescence in that direction. A dart to the west led straight into yet more netting. I dove, seeking a way beneath the closing nets, but I could not find an escape to the open ocean. In a rage to get away, I swam down through the bitter blue water and then hurled myself in steep arc into the air and over the shrinking sweep of the net. I plunged down with a great splash. For a moment, I thought I was free. It turned out, though, that I had landed within a second layer of netting, which quickly ensnared my tail and fins. The humans – the insightful, intelligent, and treacherous human beings – had considered very carefully how to trap a whale such as I.
As the net tightened around me and pulled me toward the boat and the flensing knives and the teeth that must await me there, I began singing a different song than I had intended: the thunderous and terrible universal song of death that I knew the humans would understand all too well.
5 (#ulink_251b8233-34e0-5db6-b150-ddaf59e658f9)
Water, the fundamental substance, exerts a fundamental force on all things. We of the starlit waves dwell within the ocean, and the ocean surges mighty and eternal within us. We are at one with water – and so we experience the fundamental force as a centering and a calling of like to like that suffuses our bodies with a delightful buoyancy of being. If we are taken out of the water – as the humans pulled me into the air with grinding gears and clanking chains – we continue to feel this force, but in a new and a dreadful way. The centering gives way to separation; the calling becomes a terrible crushing felt in every tissue of skin, nerve, muscle, and bone. It sickens one’s blood with an inescapable heaviness and finds out even the deepest fathoms of the soul.
I had never imagined becoming separated from the sea. To be sure, I had leaped many times into the near-nothingness of air or had played with launching myself up onto an ice floe, as the Others sometimes do when hunting seals. These ventures into alien elements, however, had lasted only moments. I had known that I would return to the water again before my heart beat a few times.
After the humans captured me, I felt no such certainty of deliverance from the crushing force that made breathing such a labor. In truth, the opposite of salvation seemed to be my fate. I could not understand why the humans delayed using their chainsaws to cut me into small pieces that their small mouths could accommodate. Were they not hungry? Would they not soon devour me as they had the many shiny salmon that they trapped in their nets?
The longer that I waited to die, the worse the crushing grew – and the more that I associated this dreadful force with death. I lay on the surface of the ship, and the strands of netting cut into my skin even as the hard, cold iron of the ship thrust up against my chest and belly. I lay within a canvas cocoon as metal bit against metal once more, and the humans lowered me onto a kind of ship that moved over the ground. I lay listening to the growl and grind of more metal vibrating from beneath me and up through my muscles and bones. I lay gasping against the land ship’s poisonous excretions as breathing became a burden and then an agony. I lay within a metal box as a white lightning of a roaring thunder fractured the water within me – and then a sickening sensation took hold of my heaving belly, and I lay within a pool of acid and half-digested fish bits that I had vomited out. I lay within the darkness of the foul, smothering box, and I lay within the much deeper darkness that found its way not just over my eyes and my flesh, but into my mind and my dreams and my blackened and soundless soul.
‘O Mother!’ I cried out. ‘Why did I fail you? Why did you fail me, by bringing me into life?’
I cried out as loud as I could, although it hurt to draw the cloying, slimy air into my lungs.
‘O Grandmother! Why did I not heed your wisdom?’
I cried out again, even though the echoes off the metal close all about me zanged my brain nearly to jelly and deafened me. I cried and cried, but no murmur of help came from without or sounded through the dead ocean within.
For a long time the humans moved me with their various conveyances – I did not know where. The last of these, another land ship, I thought, jumped and stopped, then speeded up with a growl and a belch of smoke, only to stop again, many, many times. I could discern no pattern to its noisy motions. It occurred to me that I should seek relief from all the crushing and the lurching by swimming off into sleep. For the first time in my life, I could sleep with all my brain and mind without breathing water and drowning. I could not sleep, however, even within the tiniest kernel of myself, even for a moment. For if I did sleep, I knew that I would die a different kind of death, becoming so lost within dreams of the family and the freedom I had left behind that I would never want to wake up.
At last, the land ship came to stop longer than any of the other stops. Human voices sounded from outside the metal skin that encased me. Then, from farther away, came other voices, fainter but much more pleasing to my mind: I heard birds squawking and sea lions barking out obnoxious sounds similar to those made by the humans’ dogs. A beluga, too, called out in the sweet dreamy beluga language. A walrus whistled as if to warn me away. Voices of orcas picked up this alarm.
The humans used their cleverness with things to lift me out of the land ship and lower me into a pool of water. How warm it was – too warm, almost as warm as a pool of urine! How it tasted of excrement and chemicals and decaying fish! Even so, it was water, no matter how lifeless or foul, and immediately the crushing force released its hold on my lungs, and I could breathe again. In a way, I was home.
‘Water, water, water!’ I shouted out.
My heart began beating to the wild rhythm of unexpected relief. I felt compelled to swim down nearly to the bottom of the pool and then up to leap high into the air before crashing back down into the water with a huge splash.
‘Yes, that’s right, Bobo!’ A voice hung in the air like a hovering seagull. ‘That’s why we rescued you, why you’re here. Good Bobo, good – very good!’
Humans stood around the edge of the pool. Many of them there were, and each encased in the colorful coverings that they call clothes. These humans, however, unlike those I had known in the bay, covered less of their bodies. I looked up upon bare, brown arms and horribly hairy legs sticking out of half tubes of blue or yellow or red plastic fabric. One of the females was nearly as naked as a whale, with only thin black strips to cover her genital slit and her milk glands.
‘Can you jump again for me?’ she said to me. From a plastic bucket full of dead, dirty fish, she removed a herring and tossed it into the water.
I swam over and nuzzled the herring. Although I was hungry, I did not want to eat this slimy bit of carrion.
‘Here, like this,’ she said.
She clamped her arms against her sides, then jumped up and kicked her feet in a clumsy mockery of a whale’s leap into the air.
‘If he’s as smart as they say he is, Gabi,’ one of the females standing near her said, ‘you’ll have him doing pirouettes in a month.’
‘Wow, look at the size of him!’ a male said. ‘They weren’t lying about how big he is.’
‘Yes, you are big, aren’t you, Bobo?’ the female said. ‘And in a few more months, you’re going to be our biggest star. Welcome to Sea Circus!’
My elation at being once again immersed in water vanished upon a quick exploration of my new environs. How tiny my pool of water was! I could swim across it in little more than a heartbeat. It seemed nearly as tight as a womb, though nothing about it nurtured or comforted. The pool’s walls seemed made of stone covered in blue paint. Whenever I loosed a zang of sonar to keep from colliding with one of the walls, the echoes bounced wildly from wall to wall and filled the pool with a maddening noise. I felt disoriented, abandoned, and lost within a few fathoms of filthy water. I could barely hear myself think.
I did not understand at first why the humans delayed in devouring me. Then, after half a day in the pool, I formed a hypothesis: the few humans I had seen could not possibly eat a whale such as I by themselves. Perhaps they waited for others of their kind to join the feast. Or perhaps they had captured and trapped me for a more sinister reason: here, within a pool so small that I had trouble turning around, they could cut pieces out of me over many days and thus consume me from skin to blubber to muscle to bone. It would take a long time for me to die, and the humans could fill their small mouths and bellies many times. Protected as the pool was by its hard, impenetrable walls, no sharks would arrive to steal me from the humans and finish me off. I would have nearly forever to complete the composition of my death song, which I had begun when trapped by netting in the bay.
I could not, however, sing. In such a place, who could give voice to the great mysteries and exaltations? In tainted water roiling with the cacophony of sonar crisscrossing the pool and fracturing into deafening zangs, who could prepare for the great journey into the quiet, eternal now-moment that underlies the beginning and end of time? No, no, I could not affirm life by opening myself to my inevitable death, and so I cried out in a rage at having come so far only to suffer such a despicable fate. I raged and raged as I cried out to my family who could not hear me, and I swam and I swam back and forth across the hated pool, back and forth, back and forth.
Such despair can derange the mind. Soon, I began hearing voices: the voices, I thought, of the other orcas trapped in other pools nearby. Surely the moans and murmurs of discontent that I heard must issue from real, living whales, mustn’t they? How, though, could I be sure that I was not hallucinating? In the distant lamentations that vibrated the walls about me and further poisoned the sounds of my pool, I could barely make out voices deformed by accents strong and strange:
‘Welcome, welcome, welcome!’
‘Go away, whale of the Northern Ocean! We do not want you here!’
‘Go away, if you can! But, of course, you cannot. You are trapped like a krill in the belly of a blue whale.’
‘You are trapped as we are trapped. Do not dispirit yourself by trying to keep alive your spirit.’
‘Do not listen to Unukalhai, for he is mad.’
‘Abandon all hope, you who have entered this place of hopelessness.’
‘Live, brave orca. It is all you can do!’
‘Die, strange one. Breathe water and die before your soul dies and you cannot die when it comes time to die.’
‘No, escape!’
‘Do not hope for escape. All who come here die.’
‘Quenge and escape before it is too late.’
‘Who can quenge in such a place? Die, die, die!’
‘Welcome, welcome, welcome!’
Soon, I met those orcas who had spoken to me and so confirmed their reality. My pool, as I discovered, joined with other pools, some much larger but still too small to move about comfortably. Between each pool, the humans had contrived doors which they somehow opened and shut as easily as I might my mouth. With the humans standing about the concrete beach of the largest of the pools, as the hot sun made the warm water even warmer, I made my way into the pool as tentatively as I might swim into a cave full of stingrays. There I mingled with the other orcas and made their acquaintance.
‘Hello, I am Alkurah,’ a large female said to me. Her speech rippled with curious inflections and had an odd though pleasant lilt to it. ‘And these are my sisters, Salm and Zavijah.’
Salm, younger and smaller than Alkurah, had a notch in her right flipper, and her dorsal fin flopped over upon her back in a most undignified way. So it was with quiet and moody Zavijah and her dorsal fin and with her baby, Navi. The whole family, I saw, suffered from the same horrifying affliction.
‘We are the last of the Moonsingers,’ Alkurah said, ‘of the Midnight Voyagers of the Emerald Sea. We were taken years ago and have been here at Hell Water ever since.’
‘Years ago!’ I cried out. ‘And the humans still have not eaten you?’
‘Eaten us?’ she said. She swam closer to take a look at me. ‘No, no, strange one – these humans are not whale eaters.’
At this revelation, I should have experienced relief at having been delivered from a dreadful death. Instead, I sensed the closing-in of a different sort of danger and felt the intimations of an even more horrible fate.
‘Then why,’ I asked, ‘have the humans brought us here?’
‘Why, to perform feats.’
‘What sort of feats?’
‘Breaching and leaping, spy-hopping and gyrations. They like to stand on our backs while we swim about the pool.’
‘They … stand on your back, truly?’
‘Oh, yes, they do – as they do, and make us do, many other things.’
‘But why?’ I asked.
‘We do not know. The humans are insane.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But they must have reasons for what they do, insane though these reasons might be.’
‘Must they, really? The humans are not reasonable animals. Indeed, after many years of having to endure their ugly faces and their squawking day after day, I am convinced they are quite stupid.’
‘Perhaps their minds are so different from ours that they—’
‘You know little of humans, Strange One,’ Alkurah chided me. ‘Let us not speak of your speculations now. I was making introductions when you interrupted me.’
‘My apologies,’ I said. ‘I did not mean to be rude. Please continue.’
Alkurah introduced a smallish male named Menkalinan from the Star Far Vermillion Sea. It surprised me to learn that Menkalinan, sulky and streaked with scars, was Navi’s father.
‘I see that you can be politely quiet when spoken to by a mother orca,’ Alkurah said to me. ‘I like that, for it shows that you have been well raised. But I can hear the disquiet of doubt in your silence.’
In silence, I swam about the tepid water, and so spoke even louder.
‘You are wondering, I think,’ she said, ‘how my sister Zavijah could mate in such a place – and with such a pitiful male as Menkalinan, who can barely sing.’
‘Well, yes, I was wondering that very thing,’ I said. I studied Menkalinan’s flopped-over fin and the sad, furtive way that he propelled himself about the pool.
‘Of course,’ Alkurah said, ‘my sister did not mate with Menkalinan. The humans did things with their things, and they stole Menkalinan’s sperm and forced it into Zavijah.’
At this, Zavijah said nothing, though she made a quick dart at Menkalinan as if to warn him away and drive off any thoughts he might have of inseminating her more naturally.
‘How could they do that?’ I said. So disgusted was I that I would have vomited, if there had been anything in my empty belly to vomit.
A male only slightly smaller than I swam in close and fixed me with his wild, intelligent eye. He said, ‘The dolphins rape each other, and that is understandable, though detestable. But the humans rape those not of their kind. They are a low, low animal, though impossibly clever in an exasperatingly stupid way. One might say that their individual cunning, which covers them with a patina of sanity, in fact drives them enmasse to a collective insanity.’
I glanced up at the many humans standing about the pool. Some were indeed doing things with things, as most humans did most of the time. The others, though, were gazing down into the pool and watching us.
‘I am Unukalhai,’ the large male told me. Many scars streaked his sides, and his great fin lay nearly flat along his back. ‘Alkurah will not introduce me, so I will introduce myself.’
Alkurah swam between me and Unukalhai as if to protect me from him. She said, ‘Do not listen to this whale of the Sorrowful Sea, for he is insane.’
‘Oh, I am insane, Dear One,’ Unukalhai said to Alkurah. ‘But one wonders why you think that you are not insane as well?’
‘Do not listen!’
‘Why do you not accept this?’ Unukalhai said to her.
‘Unukalhai,’ Alkurah told me, ‘is willfully insane, which makes him insane all the more.’
Unukalhai laughed at this in the universal orca way. ‘Of course I am insane. In such an insane place as this, my acceptance of my plight is the only reasonable response.’
‘Do not listen! Do not listen! Do not listen!’
Unukalhai laughed again and said to me, ‘Of course, I am not only insane. In my very eagerness to look upon, hear, taste, and embrace my insanity, I exercise a deeper sanity.’
Upon a murmur of protest from Alkurah, her sisters Salm and Zavijah joined in to swim in close and surround Unukalhai. They nuzzled his sides, again and again. In the tightness of pool, he could not elude them or escape their attentions.
‘If the humans were not watching,’ a tiny voice spoke out, ‘the sisters would hurt him again and try to silence him.’
These words came from a tiny orca, who swam alone near the corner of the pool. Her very thick accent and nearly impenetrable syntax identified her as one of the Others. The strange and unfamiliar lattices of sound that she built within the pool’s water seemed strangely familiar.
‘How many times have you hurt Unukalhai?’ the tiny orca said to Alkurah. ‘As many as the marks on his skin!’
She went on to describe for me how Alkurah and her sisters often tormented Unukalhai (and the sad Menkalinan) by raking them with their teeth and opening up long, bloody wounds that cut through skin and blubber. It shocked me to hear this little whale speak of such a thing. No whale of my family or acquaintance had ever harmed another. Even more, for a very young orca to address an elder such as Alkurah so critically seemed almost impossibly rude. But then, the tiny whale was of the Others, who do not esteem our kind highly. And, as I would discover, she was as fearless as she was outspoken.
Alkurah swam closer to the lone, unprotected whale. With even greater rudeness, she said, ‘I could kill you with one bite.’
‘Yes, but you will not. Then I would be beyond the humans’ torments – and therefore beyond yours.’
Alkurah said nothing to the implication that she reveled in the tiny whale’s suffering, for to do so would be to admit that she had plunged deeply into the insane. Instead, she gathered in her dignity and pretended to the fiction that all the disparate whales in the pool somehow formed a single family, over which she presided as matriarch. Using her most authoritative voice, almost forcibly modulated to a reasonable calmness, she formally introduced the tiny whale to me:
‘This is Baby Electra from the—’
‘I know you!’ I called out to the little orca, carelessly interrupting Alkurah again. ‘That is, I know of you – I knew your brother Pherkad!’
I swam over to Baby Electra. So tiny she was, really not much more than a newborn. A long scar marked her left side, as if Alkurah had toothed her there. I liked her lovely symmetry of form and the warm, clear light which filled her dark eyes.
‘How could you have known Pherkad, how, how? Our kind do not naturally speak to Others such as you.’
I laughed at her boldness and at the irony of what she had said. I realized for the first time that the Others thought of my kind as the Others.
‘No natural occurrence,’ I said, ‘brought Pherkad and me together.’
I told Baby Electra of the Burning Sea of how I had tried to remove the harpoon from Pherkad’s flesh. I gave her Pherkad’s death song, which he had given to me.
‘O Pherkad!’ she called out. ‘O my brother, my sweet brave brother – the most beautiful whale in all the world!’
She began crying, and the terrible close waters of the pool shook with a lament almost beyond bearing.
‘O the stars! O the sea! Why is there so much pain?’
She wept for a long time. Finally, she composed herself and swam in close to me.
‘My family are all dead,’ she told me, ‘as your dear ones are to you, for you will never see them again.’
‘No, I will see them,’ I said, ‘on Agathange or in the timeless Cerulean Sea.’
‘No, I am sorry, you will not, for you will never quenge again. I’m so sorry, sorry, sorry.’
‘I will quenge again,’ I said.
While the other orcas listened, I told Baby Electra of my reason for making my journey and all that occurred upon it.
‘You say that before Pherkad went off to die,’ Electra forced out, ‘you came to love him like a brother?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘Well, I love you the same way, for you are brave and beautiful as he was.’
‘Thank you,’ I intoned, not knowing what else to say.
‘Will you be my brother, here in this horrible place?’
I made a quick decision, one of the best of my life.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I will.’
She moved up against my side as if to take comfort in my much larger body and to keep me between her and Alkurah and her sisters.
‘Then we are a family,’ she said. ‘I will try to speak with the humans as you have tried. Why don’t we call ourselves the Hopeful Wordplayers of the Manmade Bitterblue Sea?’
All the other whales had a good, long laugh at this. Then Zavijah mocked Baby Electra, saying, ‘If your naming talent goes no deeper than that, you had better continue to play with your words if you ever hope to speak with the humans.’
‘How could she speak with the humans,’ her sister Salm added, ‘when she can barely speak with us?’
‘It is a mystery,’ Zavijah said, ‘how you Others can even speak to each other in your ugly miscarriage of a language. What a sad fate that our family should have to listen to it!’
‘And a sadder fate,’ Alkurah agreed, ‘that we Moonsingers should have to dwell so closely with a misbegotten family composed of two kinds never meant to speak with each other. One might as well try to form a family of a human and a whale.’
At this, the pool crackled with the sound of the three sisters’ derisive laughter. Then Baby Navi, even tinier than Electra, broke away from nursing at Zavijah’s side and cried out, ‘Please stop – you are hurting my heart!’
Zavijah called to her sisters to cease their mockery, for as much as she seemed to despise Baby Electra, she loved her newborn Navi even more, and she could not bear for anything to hurt him. And her elder sister Alkurah, who loved Zavijah fiercely, could not bear anything that caused her to suffer.
‘So!’ Unukalhai said from the end of the pool where he floated. ‘This, Arjuna, is how it goes with insanity. The humans’ cruelty has made the Moonsingers insane with a cruelty most unbecoming in a whale. But you – you, you, you, and little Electra – have chosen a different way! Insane it is for our kind to try to make a family with one of the Others, but in just this sort of insanity, you might find a kind of salvation.’
His wisdom, crazy though it might be, clung to me like one of the humans’ noxious skin lotions and slowly worked its way inside me. Over the days that followed – long, boring days of swimming back and forth within the imprisoning waters and watching the humans teach the other whales their ‘feats’ – I considered the advice he had tendered me. In one sense, even to entertain the thought of falling insane seemed itself insane. From another vantage, however, what if Unukalhai was right? Could it be that a still pool of sanity dwelled within the typhoon of madness that pressed down upon all us whales and threatened to derange our finest sensibilities? And if so, how could one navigate the raging winds and waves of that stormy sea to find a place of peace?
In no other aspect of existence did the other orcas demonstrate their creeping dementia so disturbingly as in their acquiescence to the humans’ desires. Day after day, as the sun swam again and again like a flying fish over our pools, the humans continued doing things with things even as they conveyed their wishes to us and never ceased their irritating chattering:
‘Good girl, Mimu!’
‘Can you open your mouth for me?’
‘You’re cuter than a bug’s ear.’
‘You just love having your flipper tickled, don’t you, Gaga?’
‘Are you ready for a relationship session?’
‘Stick out your tongue for me, baby.’
‘You are sooo sweet, Tito, oh, yes you are, yes you are!’
‘Can you pee for me, sweetie?’
‘Are you ready to have some fun being a big surfboard for us?’
‘Meal time!’
‘Let’s see what you can do with these new toys.’
‘Good girl, Lala! You’re so happy, aren’t you?’
‘I’ve been dreaming about this since I was nine years old.’
‘What are we going to do about Bobo?’
‘Jordan wants to breed him to Mimu.’
‘What do you think, Mimu? Are you ready to be a mother like your little sister?’
‘We’ve got to build him up first. He’s sooo thin.’
‘Aren’t you happy with your new toys, Bobo?’
‘Jordan special-ordered some char for him, but he wouldn’t even touch it.’
‘Please eat, baby. We love you!’
It quickly became clear to me that one of the humans was trying to teach me the first of my feats. Gabi, the other humans called her. Her orange, curly hair seemed to erupt from her head like snakes of fire. Her skin – red where the sun had licked it and like cream on those parts of her usually covered by her clothing – was mottled with little splotches of pigment that seemed to float across her face like bits of brown seaweed. I liked her eyes, large and kind and nearly as deep blue as cobalt driftglass. I saw in these lively orbs a dreaminess mated to a fierce dedication to apply her will toward whatever purpose she chose to embrace. It seemed important to her that I should eat. Whenever I swam near, she would kneel by the side of the pool with a fish in her hand, and she would open her mouth wide in an obvious sign that I should do the same. I did not, however, want to open my mouth. I feared that if I did so, Gabi would cast the dead fish onto my tongue, as other humans did with the other whales.
‘Come on, Big Boy,’ she said to me, ‘you have to eat. Please, Bobo, pleeease!’
Near the end of my fifth day of immurement in the humans’ filthy pools, Baby Electra rubbed up against my side as if to rub away my obduracy. She said to me, ‘Please, Arjuna – you have to eat!’
‘How can I eat slimy old fish?’
‘That is all we have.’
‘I will wait then until we have something else.’
‘If you do not eat, you will die.’
‘If I do eat, I will die.’
‘I do not understand you!’ Baby Electra said. ‘The speech of you Others is so difficult – as difficult as the way you think.’
‘My thought is no different than yours.’
‘Then you should think very clearly about eating. Could it be worse for you than it was for me?’
Baby Electra told of her first days among the humans and described her revulsion over eating fish of any kind, dead or alive.
‘I had only ever put tooth to seals, porpoises and a few humpback whales,’ she said. ‘I did not even think of fish as food.’
‘How, then, did you eat it?’
‘How did you eat the white bear?’
‘With great gusto, actually, though I must apologize for breaking our covenant with your kind.’
‘I forgive you,’ she said, ‘as Pherkad did. But I will not forgive you if you starve to death. I need you!’
The sheer poignancy with which she said this drove deep her vulnerability and made me want to weep.
‘Better death from starvation,’ I told her as gently as I could, ‘than the living death from eating dead food. I do not want to become like Unukalhai and Alkurah.’
‘Am I like them, Arjuna? Are you sure that eating what the humans give us would be so bad?’
Yes, I thought, yes, yes – I was sure! How should I go on without hunting for sweet salmon, char, and other free-swimming fish as my mother had taught me? To tear the life from a vital, thrashing animal, to feel that life pass within and join with one’s own, making one stronger, to feel complete in oneself the great web of life, perfect and eternal, and thus to know oneself gloriously and immortally alive – what joy, what wild, wild joy! How could I, how should I, live without that?
One day, the humans brought out an old orca that they had named Shazza, but whom we knew as Bellatrix. This huge grandmother of a whale would have acted as matriarch in Alkurah’s place but for Bellatrix’s dementia and a sadness so deep that surely the Great Southern Ocean must have wept in compassion for her. She joined the rest of us in the big pool, but she touched no one. Her great dorsal fin flopped over her side like a lifeless, decaying manta ray. Oozing sores pocked her face – apparently she had scoured off her skin by rubbing against the gates of the pools again and again. When the humans cast fish at her, she opened her mouth to reveal teeth that she had broken by gnawing on the stony side of the pool. After her meal, she floated near the pool’s center, barely moving. Her breathing was labored as mine had been when the humans had pulled me from the sea. She seemed nearly dead.
‘Do you see? Do you see?’ I said to Baby Electra. ‘Would you have me eat so that I could become like her?’
No, no – I would not eat! I had come to the humans with the best of intentions, hoping to talk to them and ask them why they were trying to kill the world. They had returned my goodwill by trapping me and bringing me to this place of living death. Would I not be better off if I were truly dead?
Later, I expressed this sentiment to Unukalhai. He beat the pool’s water with his flukes as if deep in contemplation. Then he said to me, ‘You are still thinking like a free whale.’
‘How should I think then? Like Bellatrix, who can no longer think at all?’
‘Why did you leave your family, Arjuna? Was it not to speak with the humans?’
‘Are you suggesting that I try once more to talk to them? How can I talk to animals who do such cruel things to people such as us?’
‘The humans are animals, indeed, and that is why you never will succeed in conveying our conceptions to them. It would be like expecting a clam’s shell to contain the sea.’ He paused to drink in a mouth of water and spray it out in a concentrated stream in the way that one of the humans had taught him. ‘However, you should recommence your efforts at communication, futile though they might be. To attempt the impossible is mad, is it not? And it is just this sort of madness that will save you.’
‘Save me for what? To spend the rest of my life eating dead food and swimming through poisoned water?’
I spoke of how the humans sprayed chemicals over various species of plants that grew among the grasses and flowers encircling two of the smaller pools. Whatever green, growing things these chemicals touched withered and died. Rains washed the chemicals into the pools, and the poison found its way into the big pool, in which the humans themselves swam with us when they participated in our feats. How was it, I wondered, that the humans did not taste this poison and so remove themselves to the dryness of land?
‘The humans kill plants,’ I said to Unukalhai, ‘for no apparent reason. In the bay, they killed many trees and cut them into pieces. Why should I want to be saved if I must live a degraded life surrounded by such an insane species?’
I went on to say that the humans loved death. They smothered the living waters of the ocean with oil and flame. They harpooned entire families of orcas just so they could capture the youngest and most helpless of our kind. They wore second skins of excrescence, as dead as the other things that they fabricated and manipulated with their murderous hands. They themselves ate dead food.
‘Why should I not, then,’ I asked Unukalhai, ‘want to leave this place?’
‘I understand, young Arjuna. You want to leave, but soon you will grow so hungry that you will want only to eat. And then you will eat, as the rest of us do, even though the fish are dead.’
I considered this for a while. The hot sun rained down its firelight upon the pool. I looked over at Bellatrix, floating like a felled tree and barely breathing. Big black flies buzzed around her blowhole.
‘Then before hunger makes a coward of me,’ I said to Unukalhai, ‘I will breathe water and drown.’
Salm and Zavijah overheard me say this, and they swam to the sides of the pool as if to escape my words. Alkurah did the same, though she hesitated and touched me with zangs of what felt like regret. Unukalhai circled around me restlessly. Even though on my first day in captivity he himself had advised me to do what I had just suggested, he could not countenance my actual suicide.
‘Baby Electra needs you,’ he told me. ‘And I have longed for a like spirit to talk to.’
Baby Electra swam up to me and brushed her baby-smooth skin against mine. ‘You cannot break the covenants!’ she said to me.
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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David Zindell
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Quite simply the best book about a whale since Moby Dick.The Idiot Gods is an epic tale told by an orca. David Zindell returns to the grand themes of Neverness in this uniquely moving book.An epic tale of a quest for a new way of life on earth, told by an orca.When Arjuna of the Blue Aria Family encounters three signs of cataclysm, he leaves his home in the Arctic Ocean to seek out the Idiot Gods and ask us why we are destroying the world. But the whales’ ancient Song of Life is beyond our understanding, and we know nothing of the Great Covenant between our kinds. Arjuna is captured, starved, tortured and made to do tricks in a tiny pool at Sea Circus.His love for a human linguist gives him hope, even as he despairs that other people twist his words and continue the worldwide slaughter. As the whales′ beloved Ocean turns toward the Blood Solstice the fate of humanity hangs in the balance: for if Arjuna gains the Voice of Death he could destroy mankind. But if understanding can prevail, he may, through the whales’ mysterious power of quenging, create a new Song of Life and enable human evolution to unfold.