David Zindell - The Idiot Gods

Nothing, it seemed, could cool my wrath of despair. The songs my grandmother poured into me – rich, sparkling, lovely – came the closest to helping me dive once more into the waters of pure being. So deep did I wish to dive, right down to the magical Silent Sea, lined with coral in bright colors of yellow, magenta, and glorre! So full of my grandmother’s love did I feel that I almost did – almost.

However, the harder my family worked to make me whole, the more keenly did I become aware of what I had lost. I partook of their quenging vicariously, which made me long all the more bitterly for my own. In the end, my family could do little more for me than reassure me of their devotion. All their stratagems of representing, simulating, dreaming, remembering, and even singing failed. All are quenging, yes, and yet are not – not unless done with an utter awareness that one is quenging in doing them.

‘Thank you,’ I said to my family, ‘you have done all that you could.’

It was a day of layered clouds in various shades of gray pressing down upon the sea. The waters had a brownish tint and seemed nearly lifeless, colored as they were with the umber tones of my family’s despondency.

‘What ails you?’ Caph cried out in frustration.

His anguish touched off my own, and I cried back, ‘The humans do!’

I could not help myself. I told Caph and the rest of my family of the call that I heard and all that I had so far concealed.

‘Poison is there in me, and fire!’ I said. ‘A harpoon has pierced me straight through! The humans have done this thing, and only the humans with their hideous, hideous hands can draw it out.’

‘How? How?’ Caph asked me.

‘We must journey to the humans,’ I said. ‘They are the cause of my sickness, and they must also be the cure.’

‘But how?’ Caph asked again. ‘You have not said how they could help you.’

‘I do not know how,’ I said. ‘That is why we must go to the humans and talk to them.’

Caph laughed at this, sending bitter black waves of sound rippling through the water.

‘Talk to the humans? What will we say to them? What do you expect them to say to you ?’

One could, of course, talk to a walrus, a crab, even a jellyfish. And each could talk back, in its own way. Caph, however, sensed that I was hinting at communicating with the humans on a higher level than that of the common speech of the sea.

‘We must ask the humans why they killed Pherkad,’ I said, ‘and how they set fire to water. We must speak to them, from the heart, as we speak to ourselves.’

Alnitak swam up and moved his massive body between Caph and me. ‘We could speak all we wish, but how could the humans possibly understand what we say?’

‘We can teach them our language,’ I said.

At this, Alnitak began laughing in bright madder bands of scorn, and so did Turais, Mira, Chara, and Caph. I might as well have suggested teaching a stone to recite the fundamental philosophical mistake. All things have language, yes, but everyone knew that only whales possess the higher orders of intelligence and the ability to reason and speak abstractly. Only whales make art out of music. And surely – surely, surely, surely! – whales alone of all creatures could quenge.

Baby Porrima, the most innocent of my family, asked me, ‘Do you really think the humans could be intelligent like us?’

Before I could answer, Caph said, ‘We have watched their winged ships that fly through the sky and land upon the water. Have we any reason to suppose that the humans are more intelligent than the geese who do the same, but with much more grace?’

‘I should not put their intelligence that high,’ my sister Nashira said in her bewildered but beautiful voice. ‘We have all beheld the ugliness of the metal shells that carry the humans across the water. Even a snail, though, within its perfectly spiraled shell, makes a more esthetically pleasing protection. I should say that the humans cannot be more intelligent than a mollusk.’

Her assessment, though, proved to be at the lower end of my family’s estimation of human intelligence. Dheneb argued that humans likely surpassed turtles in their mental faculties even though it seemed doubtful that they had figured out how to live as long. Chara placed the upper limit of the humans’ percipience near that of seals, who after all knew well enough not to swim in shark-darkened waters whereas the humans did not. My grandmother futilely reminded us that intelligence could not be determined from the outside but only experienced from within. Finally, after much discussion, my family reached a consensus that humans were probably about as smart as an octopus, whose grasping tentacles the humans’ hands somewhat resembled. Their generosity in according humans this degree of sentience surprised me, for the octopi are among the cleverest of the ocean’s creatures, even if they cannot speak in the manner of a whale.

In a way – but only in a way – my family played a game in this guessing in order to sublimate their disquiet. We all knew that humans possessed a strange, fell power. None of us, however, wanted to entertain the notion that this power might derive from anything like that which we knew as intelligence. None of us except me.

‘We cannot say if humans might learn to speak our language,’ I said, ‘unless we try to teach them.’

Everyone, of course, recognized the logic of my argument, and so it saddened me when my family rejected its conclusion.

After further discussion, my grandmother announced, ‘We cannot journey to the humans out of the remote possibility that they might be sentient enough for us to speak with them. It is too dangerous.’

Too dangerous! Would it be less dangerous to do nothing? The bear cried out through the water: Why did the ice melt around me? And Pherkad called to me in the bitter, beautiful tones of his death poem that told of his agony and the suffering of the entire world.

‘Very well,’ I said to my grandmother. ‘Then I will go to the humans alone.’

If a comet had struck the waves just then, the shock of it could not have been greater. No orca of our kind ever left his family.

My mother’s response cracked out swift and sure. In this instance, she had no need to confer with the rest of us.

‘You cannot leave us,’ she told me. ‘Would you tear out my heart and feed it to the sharks?’

‘You will always have my heart, as I do yours.’

‘You will die without me. And how can you think of abandoning your little brother? I need you to watch over him when I am quenging far away. You are the best caretaker I have ever known.’

‘I am sorry, Mother, but I must leave.’

My unheard-of willfulness occasioned another conclave, the longest that my family had ever held. For three days we talked as we journeyed through blue-gray water grown gelid and nearly still. Dheneb and Alnitak dove beneath icebergs so that in the denser waters of the deeps, they might hear their confidences more clearly. Turais and Chara visited with the Old Ones and drank in their wisdom, while Nashira sang again and again the melodies of the great songs that told of the deeds of the heroes of our people.

My grandmother meditated and dreamed and sang, too. She called my family to swim together. We breathed at the same moment and glided along side by side, synchronizing each beat of flipper and fluke and moving across the sea like a single wave. We breathed and let our thoughts ripple through us like a wave of shared blood as we quenged together – all save me. Like the still point of a storm, my grandmother served as the center around which all my family’s separate impulses and mentations turned and flowed and became as one:

‘Like the great north current,’ Alnitak said, ‘Arjuna will go where he will go.’