The Idiot Gods. David Zindell
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