The Idiot Gods

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

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: