David Zindell - The Idiot Gods

And what music they made! And how they made it! I swam in toward the boat, drawn by the mighty Beethoven chords that somehow sounded from beneath the water. The density of this marvelous blue substance magnified the marvel of the music. Joy, pure joy, zanged straight through my skin. I moved even closer to the boat and to the music’s mysterious source beneath the rippling waves.

‘O what a song I have for you!’ I said to the humans. I knew that if I was to touch their hearts as they had touched mine, I must go deep inside myself to speak with the monsters and the angels that dwelled there. ‘Here, humans, here, here – please listen to this song of myself!’

I breached and breathed in a great breath in order to sing. Before the first sound vibrated in my flute, however, the boat began to shudder and shake and to issue sounds of its own. The air sickened with a clanking and grinding. Quicker than I could believe, the nets of excrescence began closing in on me from all sides, like a pack of sharks intent on a feeding frenzy. My heart leaped, not with song but with a fire like that which had burned the waters of the northern sea. I swam to the east, but encountered a web of excrescence in that direction. A dart to the west led straight into yet more netting. I dove, seeking a way beneath the closing nets, but I could not find an escape to the open ocean. In a rage to get away, I swam down through the bitter blue water and then hurled myself in steep arc into the air and over the shrinking sweep of the net. I plunged down with a great splash. For a moment, I thought I was free. It turned out, though, that I had landed within a second layer of netting, which quickly ensnared my tail and fins. The humans – the insightful, intelligent, and treacherous human beings – had considered very carefully how to trap a whale such as I.

As the net tightened around me and pulled me toward the boat and the flensing knives and the teeth that must await me there, I began singing a different song than I had intended: the thunderous and terrible universal song of death that I knew the humans would understand all too well.

Water, the fundamental substance, exerts a fundamental force on all things. We of the starlit waves dwell within the ocean, and the ocean surges mighty and eternal within us. We are at one with water – and so we experience the fundamental force as a centering and a calling of like to like that suffuses our bodies with a delightful buoyancy of being. If we are taken out of the water – as the humans pulled me into the air with grinding gears and clanking chains – we continue to feel this force, but in a new and a dreadful way. The centering gives way to separation; the calling becomes a terrible crushing felt in every tissue of skin, nerve, muscle, and bone. It sickens one’s blood with an inescapable heaviness and finds out even the deepest fathoms of the soul.

I had never imagined becoming separated from the sea. To be sure, I had leaped many times into the near-nothingness of air or had played with launching myself up onto an ice floe, as the Others sometimes do when hunting seals. These ventures into alien elements, however, had lasted only moments. I had known that I would return to the water again before my heart beat a few times.

After the humans captured me, I felt no such certainty of deliverance from the crushing force that made breathing such a labor. In truth, the opposite of salvation seemed to be my fate. I could not understand why the humans delayed using their chainsaws to cut me into small pieces that their small mouths could accommodate. Were they not hungry? Would they not soon devour me as they had the many shiny salmon that they trapped in their nets?

The longer that I waited to die, the worse the crushing grew – and the more that I associated this dreadful force with death. I lay on the surface of the ship, and the strands of netting cut into my skin even as the hard, cold iron of the ship thrust up against my chest and belly. I lay within a canvas cocoon as metal bit against metal once more, and the humans lowered me onto a kind of ship that moved over the ground. I lay listening to the growl and grind of more metal vibrating from beneath me and up through my muscles and bones. I lay gasping against the land ship’s poisonous excretions as breathing became a burden and then an agony. I lay within a metal box as a white lightning of a roaring thunder fractured the water within me – and then a sickening sensation took hold of my heaving belly, and I lay within a pool of acid and half-digested fish bits that I had vomited out. I lay within the darkness of the foul, smothering box, and I lay within the much deeper darkness that found its way not just over my eyes and my flesh, but into my mind and my dreams and my blackened and soundless soul.

‘O Mother!’ I cried out. ‘Why did I fail you? Why did you fail me , by bringing me into life?’

I cried out as loud as I could, although it hurt to draw the cloying, slimy air into my lungs.

‘O Grandmother! Why did I not heed your wisdom?’

I cried out again, even though the echoes off the metal close all about me zanged my brain nearly to jelly and deafened me. I cried and cried, but no murmur of help came from without or sounded through the dead ocean within.

For a long time the humans moved me with their various conveyances – I did not know where. The last of these, another land ship, I thought, jumped and stopped, then speeded up with a growl and a belch of smoke, only to stop again, many, many times. I could discern no pattern to its noisy motions. It occurred to me that I should seek relief from all the crushing and the lurching by swimming off into sleep. For the first time in my life, I could sleep with all my brain and mind without breathing water and drowning. I could not sleep, however, even within the tiniest kernel of myself, even for a moment. For if I did sleep, I knew that I would die a different kind of death, becoming so lost within dreams of the family and the freedom I had left behind that I would never want to wake up.

At last, the land ship came to stop longer than any of the other stops. Human voices sounded from outside the metal skin that encased me. Then, from farther away, came other voices, fainter but much more pleasing to my mind: I heard birds squawking and sea lions barking out obnoxious sounds similar to those made by the humans’ dogs. A beluga, too, called out in the sweet dreamy beluga language. A walrus whistled as if to warn me away. Voices of orcas picked up this alarm.

The humans used their cleverness with things to lift me out of the land ship and lower me into a pool of water. How warm it was – too warm, almost as warm as a pool of urine! How it tasted of excrement and chemicals and decaying fish! Even so, it was water, no matter how lifeless or foul, and immediately the crushing force released its hold on my lungs, and I could breathe again. In a way, I was home.

‘Water, water, water!’ I shouted out.

My heart began beating to the wild rhythm of unexpected relief. I felt compelled to swim down nearly to the bottom of the pool and then up to leap high into the air before crashing back down into the water with a huge splash.

‘Yes, that’s right, Bobo!’ A voice hung in the air like a hovering seagull. ‘That’s why we rescued you, why you’re here. Good Bobo, good – very good!’

Humans stood around the edge of the pool. Many of them there were, and each encased in the colorful coverings that they call clothes. These humans, however, unlike those I had known in the bay, covered less of their bodies. I looked up upon bare, brown arms and horribly hairy legs sticking out of half tubes of blue or yellow or red plastic fabric. One of the females was nearly as naked as a whale, with only thin black strips to cover her genital slit and her milk glands.