The Idiot Gods. David Zindell
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