The Idiot Gods. David Zindell
‘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