The Idiot Gods. David Zindell
out stale air in loud, steamy clouds, and we drew in fresh breaths. To prove his strength, Kajam dove down and swam up through the water at speed; he breached and with a powerful beat of his tail, drove himself up into the air in a perfectly calculated arc that carried him over my back so that he plunged headfirst into the sea in a great splash. Everyone celebrated this feat. Almost immediately, however, Kajam had to blow air again. He gulped at it in a desperate need that he could not hide.
‘Listen to his heartbeats!’ I said to grandmother. ‘How long will it be before his blood begins burning with a fever?’
My grandmother listened, and so did my mother, along with Alnitak, Dheneb, and Chara. The third generation of our family listened, too: my sisters Turais and Nashira, my little brother Caph, and my cousins Naos, Haedi, and Talitha. Even Turais’s children, Alnath and Porrima, concentrated on the strained pulses sounding within the center of Kajam’s body. And of course Mira listened the most intently of all.
‘Compassion,’ my grandmother said to me, ‘impelled you to want to save this bear, and now you wish to eat him?’
‘Would that not be the easiest of the bear’s possible deaths?’
‘And compassion you have for Kajam and the rest of our family. We all know this about you, Arjuna.’
In silence, I tried to sense what my grandmother was thinking.
‘Now listen to my heart,’ she told me. ‘You persist in trying to persuade me in the same way that the wind whips up water. Am I so weak that you think mere words will move me?’
‘Not mere words, Grandmother. I know how you love Kajam. It is your own heart that will move you.’
‘But you believe that mine needs a nudge from yours?’
‘Not really. I think you wish that I would give voice to what you really want to do and so make it easier for you to do it.’
‘How kind of you to ease me into an agonizing dilemma! You can be cruel in your compassion, my beautiful, beloved grandson.’
In her wry laughter that followed, I detected a note of pride in the manner that I had tried to clear the way toward a decision that we both knew she had secretly wished (and perhaps resolved) to make all along. What was the First Covenant against the much greater pledge of life that Grandmother had made to her family? She would battle all the monsters of the deep in order to protect one of her babies.
We held a quick conference and made our plans. Alnitak pushed himself up out of the water, spy-hopping in order to get a better look at the bear. Dheneb did, too, and so did I. Did the bear recognize our kind and conclude that he was as safe sharing the sea with us as if we were guppies? Or might he mistake us for the Others? Who could say what a bear might know?
We had watched the Others stalking seals and other sea mammals, and so we knew many of the Others’ hunting techniques. We had also learned their stories, which provided many images to guide us. Of course, transforming an image in the mind into a coordinated motion of the body can take much practice. Did we have days and seasons and years to perfect a prowess of hunting dangerous mammals that our kind had never needed? No, we did not. Still, I argued, taking this bear should not prove too difficult.
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.
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