The Idiot Gods

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‘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 understand, young Arjuna. You want to leave, but soon you will grow so hungry that you will want only to eat. And then you will eat, as the rest of us do, even though the fish are dead.’

I considered this for a while. The hot sun rained down its firelight upon the pool. I looked over at Bellatrix, floating like a felled tree and barely breathing. Big black flies buzzed around her blowhole.

‘Then before hunger makes a coward of me,’ I said to Unukalhai, ‘I will breathe water and drown.’

Salm and Zavijah overheard me say this, and they swam to the sides of the pool as if to escape my words. Alkurah did the same, though she hesitated and touched me with zangs of what felt like regret. Unukalhai circled around me restlessly. Even though on my first day in captivity he himself had advised me to do what I had just suggested, he could not countenance my actual suicide.

‘Baby Electra needs you,’ he told me. ‘And I have longed for a like spirit to talk to.’

Baby Electra swam up to me and brushed her baby-smooth skin against mine. ‘You cannot break the covenants!’ she said to me.

It was one thing for me to contemplate a natural death from starvation, for sometimes in the life of the sea, food could not be found and one must gracefully suffer the inevitable fate. But to deliberately suck in water would be to slay oneself in a most unnatural way, and would thus violate the sacred principle that no orca should ever harm an orca – not even oneself.

‘The covenants,’ I said to Baby Electra, ‘were made for the ocean of life. But we have come to the waters of death – of what use are the covenants here?’

I noticed that Alkurah and her sisters were listening to me intently. So was Menkalinan, Baby Electra and even tiny Navi. Unukalhai regarded me with a strange mixture of sorrow and astonishment. He joined Alkurah and the others in clicking and high-whistling as they zanged my heart in order to determine if passion might have swept my reason away.

‘Please!’ Baby Electra implored. ‘Don’t leave me!’

‘Then come with me,’ I said. I spoke to the others, too. ‘Let us all breathe water together and leave this terrible place.’

In the silence that stole over the small pool, the beating of many hearts sent waves of anxious sound humming through the water. Then Alkurah spoke out: ‘No, Arjuna, I want to live, so I will not do as you say.’

‘Nor I,’ Menkalinan added.

‘It would be wrong to break the Covenant,’ Baby Navi said.

Unukalhai let loose a low, pensive laugh and said, ‘That is a crazy idea, Arjuna – but not quite crazy enough.’

‘Very well,’ I said. ‘Very well.’

Baby Electra heard death in my voice, and she swam over to me and tried to cover my blowhole with her body.

‘No, Arjuna!’ she cried to me.

‘I cannot quenge,’ I said to her. ‘I cannot speak with the humans.’

‘Please, no!’

‘I will never see my family again.’

‘But I am your family now! We are the Hopeful Wordplayers of the Manmade Bitterblue Sea!’

How could I deny this and so deny what might be the last of Baby Electra’s hope?

‘If you leave me,’ she said, ‘I will never outswim my grief.’

I watched as old, scarred Bellatrix rammed her head against the wall of the pool, again and again.

‘Please eat, Arjuna! Please, please!’

I thought of my mother then, and of my grandmother and all my ancestors who had fought their way out of the wombs of the Old Ones just so they could taste the immense goodness of life. If I betrayed the sufferings they had endured in order to bring me into the ocean, all the life that had passed into me would be wasted. The gift my grandmother had given me at the outset of my journey would come to naught. So would Baby Electra’s love for me.

‘All right,’ I said, ‘I will eat the humans’ dirty fish.’

And so eat I did. I swam over to the humans where they stood along the sides of the pools, and allowed them to toss fish into my opened mouth. They played this game day after day. The orange-haired human named Gabi poured bucket after bucket of salmon and slimy smelt down my throat, and I swallowed again and again, and the fierce hunger that had a hold upon my belly and my brain went away. I fattened and grew stronger. It surprised me that the decaying fish could give me life – a kind of a life.

Yes, but what kind? The longer I remained in the humans’ pools, the more diminished I would become, at least when compared with my former self or with any wild-swimming whale. How long would it be before my proud dorsal fin collapsed like those of Alkurah, Menkalinan, and poor Bellatrix? How long before my very soul collapsed in upon itself like the body of a whale emptied of breath and sinking down beneath the crushing pressures of the deepest and darkest depths of the sea? How long before I began the inexorable descent in the horrifying process of my becoming like Bellatrix?

Aside from Baby Electra, who nursed a mad hope that we would somehow escape from the humans into the open sea, only Unukalhai of all the whales in the pools offered reasonable advice to me:

‘If we must dwell in the human world,’ he said one day, ‘we must take the spirit of that world into us so that we might become part of it and so live with less agony.’

Reasonable his wisdom might have been, but I felt it was wrong, and I resisted it.

‘Is it not enough,’ I said, ‘that we take in the humans’ fish and their poison? If we take in their spirit, too, we will become as crazy as they are.’

I gazed at the sad, limp fin drooping along Unukalhai’s back. I saw this pitiful degradation of flesh as an almost complete degradation of the spirit caused by Unukalhai’s internalization of the humans’ wants and their distasteful and despicable world. Who could accept such derangement of any orca’s natural form? And was not the acceptance itself a kind of madness?

‘Have I not told you many times,’ Unukalhai said, ‘that we must become insane? You did not believe me!’

‘I did not want to believe you!’

‘But you must, Arjuna. You must watch the humans, night and day.’ He let out a long, painful whistle. ‘You must drink in their sounds and dwell with them in your dreams. You must meditate on what it is to be human and try to become human in your own heart.’

‘I cannot! I do not want to!’

I pointed out that he had chided Alkurah and the Moonsingers for internalizing the humans’ cruelty, which they inflicted with raking teeth and rancor upon Baby Electra and the other whales.

‘And cruel you must become,’ Unukalhai told me, ‘to live among the humans. But not mindlessly and compulsively cruel, as they are cruel. You must not allow yourself to become helplessly and indiscriminately infected. Rather, you must choose your cruelties with a will and a design, and wear them upon yourself as the humans do their clothes. In such cruelty, you must apply the same art as you once did in creating the tone poems of your great composition.’

Something in the crystallization of his conception of cruelty sounded a warning in me. Something in Unukalhai – a poisoning of his blood or a worm in his brain – did the same. I sensed that he was keeping a secret, deep and dark, which gnawed at him and worked its way into every tissue and organ. What this secret might be, I could not guess and he did not say.

‘I do not want to become cruel,’ I told him. ‘I do not want the humans to touch my heart with their heartless hands.’

‘But they already have touched you, have they not?’

‘As they have touched you?’

‘Yes, Arjuna – in exactly the same way.’

‘I am sorry,’ I said.

‘Save your compassion for yourself – you will need it.’

‘Perhaps,’ I said. I floated at the surface of the little pool where we were being kept that night and opened my blowhole to take in a breath. ‘Perhaps I will suffer here like a blue whale being torn apart by sharks, over years instead of days. I will not, however, allow myself to become like the humans.’

‘You will not be able to help yourself.’

‘Yes, I will.’

‘You cannot escape them, any more than you can dislodge the harpoon they put in you when they speared your friend Pherkad.’

‘There is no harpoon in me!’ My voice exploded out of me in an unexpected and embarrassing shout, which thundered back and forth across the tiny pool. ‘Only my grandmother is there, and Alnitak, and my mother, and—’

‘The rest of your family, whom you will never see again. If you wish your life were otherwise, you will make yourself even more unhappy.’

‘I will see them again!’

‘No, you never will. The humans will make you do feats along with Alkurah, Salm, Electra, and me. You will see us, all the days of your life, until either we or you are dead.’

‘No, no, no!’ I beat the water with my flukes, trying to drive into this fundamental substance a little of my filthy rage. ‘I will never do the humans’ feats. I want nothing more to do with humans. I will escape them – and their pools of horror.’