David Zindell - The Idiot Gods

Zavijah called to her sisters to cease their mockery, for as much as she seemed to despise Baby Electra, she loved her newborn Navi even more, and she could not bear for anything to hurt him. And her elder sister Alkurah, who loved Zavijah fiercely, could not bear anything that caused her to suffer.

‘So!’ Unukalhai said from the end of the pool where he floated. ‘This, Arjuna, is how it goes with insanity. The humans’ cruelty has made the Moonsingers insane with a cruelty most unbecoming in a whale. But you – you, you, you, and little Electra – have chosen a different way! Insane it is for our kind to try to make a family with one of the Others, but in just this sort of insanity, you might find a kind of salvation.’

His wisdom, crazy though it might be, clung to me like one of the humans’ noxious skin lotions and slowly worked its way inside me. Over the days that followed – long, boring days of swimming back and forth within the imprisoning waters and watching the humans teach the other whales their ‘feats’ – I considered the advice he had tendered me. In one sense, even to entertain the thought of falling insane seemed itself insane. From another vantage, however, what if Unukalhai was right? Could it be that a still pool of sanity dwelled within the typhoon of madness that pressed down upon all us whales and threatened to derange our finest sensibilities? And if so, how could one navigate the raging winds and waves of that stormy sea to find a place of peace?

In no other aspect of existence did the other orcas demonstrate their creeping dementia so disturbingly as in their acquiescence to the humans’ desires. Day after day, as the sun swam again and again like a flying fish over our pools, the humans continued doing things with things even as they conveyed their wishes to us and never ceased their irritating chattering:

‘Good girl, Mimu!’

‘Can you open your mouth for me?’

‘You’re cuter than a bug’s ear.’

‘You just love having your flipper tickled, don’t you, Gaga?’

‘Are you ready for a relationship session?’

‘Stick out your tongue for me, baby.’

‘You are sooo sweet, Tito, oh, yes you are, yes you are!’

‘Can you pee for me, sweetie?’

‘Are you ready to have some fun being a big surfboard for us?’

‘Meal time!’

‘Let’s see what you can do with these new toys.’

‘Good girl, Lala! You’re so happy, aren’t you?’

‘I’ve been dreaming about this since I was nine years old.’

‘What are we going to do about Bobo?’

‘Jordan wants to breed him to Mimu.’

‘What do you think, Mimu? Are you ready to be a mother like your little sister?’

‘We’ve got to build him up first. He’s sooo thin.’

‘Aren’t you happy with your new toys, Bobo?’

‘Jordan special-ordered some char for him, but he wouldn’t even touch it.’

‘Please eat, baby. We love you!’

It quickly became clear to me that one of the humans was trying to teach me the first of my feats. Gabi, the other humans called her. Her orange, curly hair seemed to erupt from her head like snakes of fire. Her skin – red where the sun had licked it and like cream on those parts of her usually covered by her clothing – was mottled with little splotches of pigment that seemed to float across her face like bits of brown seaweed. I liked her eyes, large and kind and nearly as deep blue as cobalt driftglass. I saw in these lively orbs a dreaminess mated to a fierce dedication to apply her will toward whatever purpose she chose to embrace. It seemed important to her that I should eat. Whenever I swam near, she would kneel by the side of the pool with a fish in her hand, and she would open her mouth wide in an obvious sign that I should do the same. I did not, however, want to open my mouth. I feared that if I did so, Gabi would cast the dead fish onto my tongue, as other humans did with the other whales.

‘Come on, Big Boy,’ she said to me, ‘you have to eat. Please, Bobo, pleeease!’

Near the end of my fifth day of immurement in the humans’ filthy pools, Baby Electra rubbed up against my side as if to rub away my obduracy. She said to me, ‘Please, Arjuna – you have to eat!’

‘How can I eat slimy old fish?’

‘That is all we have.’

‘I will wait then until we have something else.’

‘If you do not eat, you will die.’

‘If I do eat, I will die.’

‘I do not understand you!’ Baby Electra said. ‘The speech of you Others is so difficult – as difficult as the way you think.’

‘My thought is no different than yours.’

‘Then you should think very clearly about eating. Could it be worse for you than it was for me?’

Baby Electra told of her first days among the humans and described her revulsion over eating fish of any kind, dead or alive.

‘I had only ever put tooth to seals, porpoises and a few humpback whales,’ she said. ‘I did not even think of fish as food.’

‘How, then, did you eat it?’

‘How did you eat the white bear?’

‘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?’