The Idiot Gods. David Zindell
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?
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,’