David Zindell - The Idiot Gods

‘Can one stop the turning of the ocean?’ Haedi added.

‘Do not the Old Ones say,’ Mira asked, ‘that each whale has a single destiny?’

‘How,’ Turais said, ‘can we ask Arjuna to go on swimming with us in so much pain? Who could bear the sadness of not being able to quenge?’

Mira, having fallen nostalgic, said, ‘Let Arjuna know his old joy again. Do you remember how when he was a baby he tried to talk to Valashu, the Morning Star?’

‘How could we forget that?’ Dheneb said. ‘How can we ever forget how he talked with Pherkad, who gave him his magnificent song?’

‘The Old Ones,’ Chara affirmed, ‘say that they have heard Arjuna’s great song. It must be that he will have returned from the humans in triumph to complete his rhapsody.’

The emotion of the last few days proved too much for Baby Talitha. She began crying even as my mother said: ‘I will want to die if Arjuna leaves us, but I think I would die if he remains and is so sad that he does not want to live.’

Finally, with all my family exhausted, my grandmother gathered all their many chords into a decision that had grown more and more obvious:

‘You must leave us,’ my grandmother said to me.

‘I cannot,’ I told her. I listened to Talitha crying and crying. ‘I cannot – but somehow I must.’

My family formed into a circle in the quiet silvery water, our heads touching so that the slightest pressure of our flutes would send our words sounding deep into each other.

‘Listen to me, Arjuna,’ my grandmother said. ‘No matter how far you journey, your heart will beat with ours and we will breathe the same breath. There is nowhere that you can go that we will not be.’

We broke apart and I prepared to leave. I gathered in those vital things that would help me on my way: Alnitak’s maps of the ocean and the heavens; Mira’s taxonomy of the sea’s manifold creatures; the epics composed by Aldebaran the Great; the music of Talitha’s laughter and reverberations of my mother’s first words to me. One thing only remained that I would need.

‘Come with me,’ my grandmother said to me. ‘Let us swim together for a while.’

We moved off away from the rest of our family. It was a cloudless day, and the low sun cast long rays of light down into the dark turquoise water. There, in the calm and clarity, in the heart of the ocean where one could hear its deepest secrets, my grandmother made a present that would protect me: she gave me a charm, alive with the most powerful of all magics, that I might never lose myself on my journey and would always find my way home.

After that, I swam toward the south and east. I swam so quickly at first that the icy sea did seem to cool my ire, if only a little. Soon I found myself racing through unknown waters. If I did not distance myself from my family with all the speed that I could summon, I feared that my courage would fail and I would turn back.

After a long time I grew tired. The muscles along my belly, tail, and flukes ached. I breached, blew out a great cloud of mist, and drew in a fresh breath. I dove down a little way into the water and hung suspended in motionlessness.

The sea about me tasted odd, perhaps flavored by unusual organisms or the upwelling of minerals that were unfamiliar to me. The waters were tinted a deep violet, with undertones of an eerie cerulean blue that I had never beheld. The entire ocean glowed – with sunlight from the cold-striated sky sifting down through the water, yes, but even more from the sonance that filled the ocean’s immensity and reverberated through every drop of it. I heard the faint singing of a humpback somewhere ahead of me and the thumping of my heart much nearer. From far away came the call that had summoned me on this journey. It sounded out as primeval as the first whale’s first breath, at once plosive and soft, reassuring and terrifying, horrible and beautiful. Into it I must venture, through an ocean whose quality had grown more and more mysterious. Through this unknown realm I must find my way where all was strange, various, and new, and the water itself somehow seemed too real.

For the first time in my life, I became aware of a kind of soul-eating silence: among all the purling sounds of the sea, I could detect not the slightest note made by one of my family. Of course, whenever I wished, I could go down inside myself and listen to Talitha’s giggles or my mother’s lullabies as clearly and with as much immediacy as if these two beloved people were singing right beside me. No difference could I hear in the actuality of volume, note, or timbre. It was not, however, the same, for I could not feel the sound waves emanating from my mother’s body, nor could I see her or touch her. My family seemed to have swum off to a distantly-remembered world and to have left me all alone.

In a wave of disquiet sweeping through me, I realized that an orca sundered from his family is an orca in danger of falling mad. If Alnitak, Chara, and the others did not swim beside me and sing to me, should I then sing to myself? Were my thoughts and words to return to me untouched by the minds of my family as if I had eaten and re-eaten the same food again and again? How could I ever heal myself with my own songs? How could I know myself without the sound of their love reflecting back a picture for me to see? Did the lightning scar still mark me above my eye? Had my mother really named me Arjuna on the day of my birth or was that memory just part of a dream, along with myself and all the rest of my life?

Brooding upon such things made matters even worse. I seemed strange to myself. I could not quenge, and I did not know if I could any longer even love. I felt fearsome and new, as if I had been remade into some dreadful form that I did not want to behold.

I began swimming again. I came upon a school of herring, each of whose scales were all silvery and streaked with faint gold and scarlet bands. I swam right into the school and stunned many of the fish with a slap of my tail. Others I immobilized with zangs of sonar or confused by blowing out clouds of bubbles. So ravenous was I that I nearly began eating without asking the doomed fish if they were ready to die. I finally remembered myself, however, and I did ask. The entire school, in their ones and their multitudes, said yes.

The feast strengthened me and gave me new life. I might have died in my soul, while my harpooned heart bled out the best part of me – even so, my body and my force of will seemed to have gained a new power. I swam on at speed into the wild, endless sea.

On a day of dead calm with the water stilled into a vast blue mirror, I heard cries from far off long before I encountered the whales who had made them. I swam toward this terrible keening. After a while, I intercepted two large humpbacks, the water streaming from their lumpy, barnacle-studded bodies whenever they breached for breath. They were moving as fast as they could in the direction from which I had come. I asked them what was wrong. In their very basic and nearly incomprehensible speech, they shouted: ‘Humans blood pain death!’

Their panic communicated into me, and I considered turning around and joining them in their spasm of flight. Instead, I swam on straight toward the sea’s wavering horizon.

Very soon, one of the humans’ gray ships appeared there. I swam in close enough to make out metal spines sticking up from the top of the ship; these reminded me of a conch shell’s many points and projections. Humans – the first I had ever seen! – stood on the top of the ship, near its head. They were tending to what looked like a long piece of seaweed that connected the ship to the bloody water. A shrieking sound like metal eating metal vibrated both ship and sea, and the seaweed thing began moving toward the ship. I zanged the seaweed and determined it was made of metal, like the ship. It continued moving, and soon the whale attached to it emerged from the water tail first, even as I had been born. A moment later, I caught sight of the bloody harpoon that had torn a great hole through the humpback’s body and had killed it. The harpoon, too, was made of metal, unlike the wooden one that had killed Pherkad.