David Zindell - The Idiot Gods

I swam up to their bobbing boat and said hello.

‘Lil’ Bobo,’ the longer of the two males said. ‘We’re sorry we scared you off last time. I guess you don’t like acid rap.’

The shorter of the males, who had blue eyes and golden hair like that of the female surfer who stood next to him, drank from a metallic shell and let out a belch. He said, ‘Who does like it? Why don’t we try something else?’

‘What about Radiohead?’ the longer male said.

The female surfer used her writhing fingers to pull back her golden hair. She lay belly-flat on the front of the boat, and dipped her hand into the water to stroke my head.

‘Let’s play him some classical music.’

‘I don’t have anything like that,’ the golden-haired male said. I guessed he must be the surfer’s brother.

‘I downloaded a bunch of classical a few weeks ago,’ the surfer said, ‘just in case.’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know – I don’t really know anything about classical.’

‘Let me see,’ the longer male said.

He bent over, and when he straightened, he held in his hand a shiny metallic thing, like half of an abalone shell.

‘What about the Rite of Spring?’ he said. ‘That sounds like some nice, soft music.’

A few moments later, from another shiny object that seemed all stark planes and hard surfaces like so many human things, a beguiling call filled the air. In its high notes, I heard a deep mystery and the promise of life’s power, almost as if a whale were keening out a long-held desire to love and mate. Soon came crashing chords and complicated rhythms, which felt like a dozen kinds of fish thrashing inside my belly. Various themes, as jagged as a shark’s teeth, tore into one another, interacted for a moment, and then gave birth to new expressions which incorporated the old. Brooding harmonies collided, moved apart, and then invited in a higher order of chaos. Such a brutal beauty! So much blood, exaltation, splendor! The human-made sounds touched the air with a magnificent dissonance and pressed deep into the water in adoration of the earth.

‘What kind of crap is that?’ the golden-haired male said. ‘Turn off that noise before you drive Bobo away again!’

O music! The humans had music: strange, powerful, and complex!

And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the music died.

‘No, no!’ I cried out. ‘More, please – I want to hear more!’

The longer male’s fingers stroked the abalone-like thing for a few moments. He said, ‘What about Beethoven?’

A new music sounded. So very different from the first it was, and yet so alike, for within its simpler melodies and purer beauty dwelled an immense affirmation of life. As the sun moved higher in the sky and the surfer female on the boat stroked my skin, I listened and drank in this lovely music for a long, long time.

Finally, near the end of the composition, a great choir of human voices picked up a heart-opening melody. I listened, stunned. It was almost as if the Old Ones were calling to me.

O the stars! O the sea! They sang of joy!

This realization confirmed all that I had suspected to be true. Although the ability to compose complex music could not be equated with the speaking of language itself, does not all language begin in the impulse of the very ocean to sing?

‘All right, so he likes Beethoven. Let’s try Bach and Brahms.’

As the sun reached its zenith in the blue eggshell of the sky and began its descent into its birth place in the sea, the humans regaled me with other musics. I listened and listened, lost in a sweet, sonic rapture.

‘I think he loves Mozart,’ the shorter male said.

‘I think he loves me,’ the golden-haired surfer said. ‘And I love him.’

To the murmurs of a new melody, the female leaned far out over the boat and pressed her mouth against the skin over my mouth.

‘Bobo, Bobo, Bobo – I wish I could talk to you!’ she said.

‘I wish I could talk to you,’ I told her. I wished I could understand anything of what she or any human said. ‘Can you not even say water?’

I slapped the surface of the sea with my flukes, and carefully enunciated, ‘Water. W-a-t-e-r.’

‘It’s like he wants to talk to me ,’ she said.

Having grown frustrated in my desire to touch her with the most fundamental of utterances, I drank in a mouthful of water and sprayed it over her face.

‘Oh, my God! You soaked me! How would you like it if I did that to you?’

Again, I sprayed her and said, ‘Water.’ And then she dipped her hand into the bay, brought it up to her mouth, and sprayed me.

‘So you like playing with water don’t you?’ she said. ‘Well, you’re a whale, so why shouldn’t you? Water, water, everywhere you go.’

Her hand, her hideous but lovely hand that had sent waves of pleasure rippling along my skin, slapped the water much as I had done with my tail. And with each slap, she made a sound with her mouth, which had touched my mouth: ‘Water, water, water.’

The great discoveries in life often come in a moment’s burst like the thunderbolt that flashes out of a long-building storm. I listened as the golden-haired surfer said to me, ‘I wish I could teach you to say water.’ And all the while her clever hand touched the sea in perfect coordination with the sound that poured from her mouth: ‘Water, water, water.’ I realized all at once that she was trying to teach me to speak, in the human way. I realized something else, something astonishing that would open the secret to communicating with these strange animals:

One set of sounds, one word! The humans do not inflect their words according to circumstance, context, or the art of variation! Not even our babies speak so primitively!

‘Water,’ the surfer said again. ‘You understand that, don’t you, Bobo?’

Water, water, water – she kept repeating the simple sequence of taps and tones with an excruciating sameness. I tried to return the favor, trilling out one of the myriad expressions for water in a single way: water.

‘I don’t understand you, though,’ she said to me. ‘I don’t think human beings will ever be able to speak whale.’

The brightness in the surfer’s blue eyes faded, as when a cloud passes over the moon. I feared that she did not understand me.

‘No one can speak to a whale,’ the longer of the males said. ‘They probably don’t even have real language.’

The surfer female looked at me. She thumped her hand against the smooth excrescence upon which she lay and said, ‘Boat.’ And so I learned another word. This game went on until dusk. I collected human words as a magpie gathers up colorful bits of driftglass: Shirt. Fork. Beer. Hair. Ice. Teeth. Lips.

Finally, as the sun sank down into the crimson and pink clouds along the western horizon, the female pressed her hand over her heart and said, ‘Kelly,’ which I supposed must be what the humans call their own kind. The longer of the two male kellies made a similar gesture and said, ‘Zach.’ I laughed then at my stupidity. They were obviously giving me their names.

I gave them mine, but they seemed not to understand what I was doing. Just as the underside of the boat roared into motion, Kelly said to me, ‘Goodbye, Bobo. I love you!’

The next day, and for the remainder of the late summer moon, I had similar encounters with other humans. Strangely, they all seemed to have taken up the game played by Kelly and Zach. I learned many more human words: Lightbulb. Fish. Rifle. Bullet. Knife. Dog. Life preserver. Surfboard. Mouth. Eyes. Penis. I learned many names, too: Jake. Susan. Nika. Keegan. Ayanna. Alex. Jillian. Justine. Most of these humans called me Bobo, and sometimes for fun I returned the misnomer by exercising a willful obtuseness in persisting to think of the humans as male or female kellies.