David Zindell - The Idiot Gods

And so we swam. The note that had sounded upon the bear’s death began murmuring with a soft, urgent plangency as a she-orca calls to her mate. I heard it clearly now, though I still could not tell what it meant.

The third portent occurred soon after that on our migration westward, away from the burning sea. My mother sounded out a lone orca in the distance. And that disturbed us, for when do our kind ever swim alone? However, this orca proved to be not of our kind, but rather one of the Others: his dorsal fin pointed straight up, triangular and harsh like a shark’s tooth – so different from the graceful, arched fins of my clan. Instead of avoiding us as the Others usually do, this one swam straight toward us as if homing on prey.

He swam with difficulty, though, the beating of his flukes pulling him to the right as if he was trying to escape something on his left. When he drew close to us we all saw why: an object like a splinter of a tree stuck out of his side. His blood, darker and redder than even the bears’, oozed out of the hole that the splinter had made. None of us had ever seen such a thing before, though from the old stories we all knew what had happened to this lone orca.

‘The humans did this to me,’ he told me.

We could hardly understand him. He spoke a dialect thick and strange to our way of hearing. Because the Others do not want to alert the intelligent mammals that they stalk, they utter fewer words than do we when fishing. Consequently, in order to convey a similar amount of information, the Others’ word-sounds must be denser and more complex, stived with meaning like a crystalline array that seems to have more and more glittering facets the deeper one looks. As he told us of a terrible encounter with the humans, we all looked (and listened) for the meaning of his strange words:

‘The humans came upon us in their great ships,’ he told us, ‘and they began slaying as wantonly as sharks do.’

‘But why did they do this?’ my grandmother asked him. Of nearly everyone in our family, she had the greatest talent for speaking with the Others.

‘Who can know?’ Pherkad said, for such was the Other’s name. ‘Perhaps they wished to eat an orca within the shell of their ship, for they captured Baby Electra in one of their nets and took her out of the sea.’

I could not imagine being separated from the sea. Surely Electra must have died almost immediately, before the humans could put tooth to her.

‘We fought as hard as we could,’ Pherkad continued. ‘We fought and died – all save myself.’

My grandmother zanged Pherkad and sounded the depth and position of the object buried in his body.

‘You will die soon,’ she told him.

‘Yes.’

‘Your whole family is dead, and so you will die soon and be glad of it.’

‘Yes, yes!’

‘Before you die,’ my grandmother said, ‘please know that my family broke our trust with you in hunting a bear.’

‘I do know that,’ Pherkad said. ‘The story sings upon the waves!’

I did not really understand this, for I was still too young to have quenged deeply enough to have understood: how the dialect of the Others and of our kind make up one of the many whole languages, which in turn find their source in the language that sings throughout the whole of the sea. Even the tortoises, it is said, can comprehend this language if they listen hard enough, for the ocean itself never stops listening nor does it cease to speak.

Could there really be a universal language? Or was Pherkad perhaps playing with us in revenge for our breaking the Covenant? The Others, renowned for their stealth, might somehow have witnessed my family’s eating of the bear and all the while have remained undetected.

‘On behalf of my family, who are no more,’ he said to my grandmother, ‘I would wish to forgive you for what you did.’

‘You are gracious,’ my grandmother said.

‘The Covenant is the Covenant,’ he said. ‘However there are no absolute principles – except one.’

My brother Caph started to laugh at the irony in Pherkad’s voice, but then realized that doing so would be unseemly.

Then I said to Pherkad, ‘Perhaps we could remove the splinter from your side.’

‘I do not think so,’ he said, ‘but you are welcome to try.’

I moved up close to him through the bloody water and grasped the splinter with my teeth. Hard it was, like biting down on brown bone. I yanked on it with great force. The shock of agony that ran through Pherkad communicated through his flesh into me; as a great scream gathered in his lungs, I felt myself wanting to scream, too. Then Pherkad gathered all his dignity and courage, and he forced his suffering into an almost godly laugh of acceptance: ‘No, please stop, friend – it is my time to die.’

‘I am sorry,’ I said.

‘What is your name?’ he asked me.

I gave him my name, my true name that the humans could not comprehend. And Pherkad said to me, ‘You are compassionate, Arjuna. Was it you who suggested saving the bear?’

‘Yes, it was.’

‘Then you are twice blessed – what a strange and beautiful idea that was!’

Not knowing what to say to this, I said nothing.

‘I would like to sing of that in my death song,’ he told me. ‘Our words are different but if I give mine to you, will you try to remember them?’

‘I will remember,’ I promised.

My grandmother had often told me that my gift for languages exceeded even hers. She attributed that to my father, of the Emerald Sun Surfer Clan, whose great-great grandfather had been Sharatan the Eloquent. The words that Pherkad now gave me swelled with golden overtones and silvery tintinnabulations of sorrow counterpointed with joy. They filled me with a vast desire to mate with wild she-orcas and to join myself in nuptial ecstasy with the entire world. At the same time, his song incited within me a rage to dive deep into darkness; it made me want to dwell forever with the Old Ones who swim beyond the stars. By the time Pherkad finished intoning this great cry from the heart, I loved him like a brother, and I wanted to die along with him.

‘If you are still hungry,’ he said to me, ‘you may eat me as you did the bear.’

‘No, we will not do that,’ I promised him, speaking for the rest of my family.

‘Then goodbye, Arjuna. Live long and sing well – and stay away from the humans, if you can.’

He swam off, leaving me alone with my family. None of us knew where the Others went to die.

He never really left me, however. As the last days of spring gave way to summer’s heat, his words began working at me. Unlike the oil that had grieved Alnitak’s skin, though, the memories of Pherkad and the bear clung to me with an unshakeable fire. How ironic that I had promised not to eat Pherkad’s body, for it seemed that I had devoured something even more substantial, some quintessence of his being that carried the flames of his death anguish into every part of me!

A new dread – or perhaps a very old one called up out of the glooms of the past – came alive inside me. Like a worm, it ate at my brain and insinuated itself into all my thoughts and acts. Dark as the ocean floor it was, yet blinding as the sun – and I could not help staring and staring and being caught in its dazzle. It forced into my mind images of humans: an entire sea of humans, each of them standing on a separate ice floe. And all of these ungainly two-leggeds gripped splinters of wood in their hideous hands. Again and again, they drove these burning splinters into the beautiful bodies of baby whales and into me, straight through my heart.

Although I tried to escape this terrible feeling by swimming through the coldest of waters, it followed me everywhere. At the same time, it lured me back always into the burning sea where all was blackness and death. I could not draw a lungful of clean air, but only oil and smoke. I could not think; I could not sing; I could not breathe.