The Idiot Gods. David Zindell

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      Salm, younger and smaller than Alkurah, had a notch in her right flipper, and her dorsal fin flopped over upon her back in a most undignified way. So it was with quiet and moody Zavijah and her dorsal fin and with her baby, Navi. The whole family, I saw, suffered from the same horrifying affliction.

      ‘We are the last of the Moonsingers,’ Alkurah said, ‘of the Midnight Voyagers of the Emerald Sea. We were taken years ago and have been here at Hell Water ever since.’

      ‘Years ago!’ I cried out. ‘And the humans still have not eaten you?’

      ‘Eaten us?’ she said. She swam closer to take a look at me. ‘No, no, strange one – these humans are not whale eaters.’

      At this revelation, I should have experienced relief at having been delivered from a dreadful death. Instead, I sensed the closing-in of a different sort of danger and felt the intimations of an even more horrible fate.

      ‘Then why,’ I asked, ‘have the humans brought us here?’

      ‘Why, to perform feats.’

      ‘What sort of feats?’

      ‘Breaching and leaping, spy-hopping and gyrations. They like to stand on our backs while we swim about the pool.’

      ‘They … stand on your back, truly?’

      ‘Oh, yes, they do – as they do, and make us do, many other things.’

      ‘But why?’ I asked.

      ‘We do not know. The humans are insane.’

      ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But they must have reasons for what they do, insane though these reasons might be.’

      ‘Must they, really? The humans are not reasonable animals. Indeed, after many years of having to endure their ugly faces and their squawking day after day, I am convinced they are quite stupid.’

      ‘Perhaps their minds are so different from ours that they—’

      ‘You know little of humans, Strange One,’ Alkurah chided me. ‘Let us not speak of your speculations now. I was making introductions when you interrupted me.’

      ‘My apologies,’ I said. ‘I did not mean to be rude. Please continue.’

      Alkurah introduced a smallish male named Menkalinan from the Star Far Vermillion Sea. It surprised me to learn that Menkalinan, sulky and streaked with scars, was Navi’s father.

      ‘I see that you can be politely quiet when spoken to by a mother orca,’ Alkurah said to me. ‘I like that, for it shows that you have been well raised. But I can hear the disquiet of doubt in your silence.’

      In silence, I swam about the tepid water, and so spoke even louder.

      ‘You are wondering, I think,’ she said, ‘how my sister Zavijah could mate in such a place – and with such a pitiful male as Menkalinan, who can barely sing.’

      ‘Well, yes, I was wondering that very thing,’ I said. I studied Menkalinan’s flopped-over fin and the sad, furtive way that he propelled himself about the pool.

      ‘Of course,’ Alkurah said, ‘my sister did not mate with Menkalinan. The humans did things with their things, and they stole Menkalinan’s sperm and forced it into Zavijah.’

      At this, Zavijah said nothing, though she made a quick dart at Menkalinan as if to warn him away and drive off any thoughts he might have of inseminating her more naturally.

      ‘How could they do that?’ I said. So disgusted was I that I would have vomited, if there had been anything in my empty belly to vomit.

      A male only slightly smaller than I swam in close and fixed me with his wild, intelligent eye. He said, ‘The dolphins rape each other, and that is understandable, though detestable. But the humans rape those not of their kind. They are a low, low animal, though impossibly clever in an exasperatingly stupid way. One might say that their individual cunning, which covers them with a patina of sanity, in fact drives them en masse to a collective insanity.’

      I glanced up at the many humans standing about the pool. Some were indeed doing things with things, as most humans did most of the time. The others, though, were gazing down into the pool and watching us.

      ‘I am Unukalhai,’ the large male told me. Many scars streaked his sides, and his great fin lay nearly flat along his back. ‘Alkurah will not introduce me, so I will introduce myself.’

      Alkurah swam between me and Unukalhai as if to protect me from him. She said, ‘Do not listen to this whale of the Sorrowful Sea, for he is insane.’

      ‘Oh, I am insane, Dear One,’ Unukalhai said to Alkurah. ‘But one wonders why you think that you are not insane as well?’

      ‘Do not listen!’

      ‘Why do you not accept this?’ Unukalhai said to her.

      ‘Unukalhai,’ Alkurah told me, ‘is willfully insane, which makes him insane all the more.’

      Unukalhai laughed at this in the universal orca way. ‘Of course I am insane. In such an insane place as this, my acceptance of my plight is the only reasonable response.’

      ‘Do not listen! Do not listen! Do not listen!’

      Unukalhai laughed again and said to me, ‘Of course, I am not only insane. In my very eagerness to look upon, hear, taste, and embrace my insanity, I exercise a deeper sanity.’

      Upon a murmur of protest from Alkurah, her sisters Salm and Zavijah joined in to swim in close and surround Unukalhai. They nuzzled his sides, again and again. In the tightness of pool, he could not elude them or escape their attentions.

      ‘If the humans were not watching,’ a tiny voice spoke out, ‘the sisters would hurt him again and try to silence him.’

      These words came from a tiny orca, who swam alone near the corner of the pool. Her very thick accent and nearly impenetrable syntax identified her as one of the Others. The strange and unfamiliar lattices of sound that she built within the pool’s water seemed strangely familiar.

      ‘How many times have you hurt Unukalhai?’ the tiny orca said to Alkurah. ‘As many as the marks on his skin!’

      She went on to describe for me how Alkurah and her sisters often tormented Unukalhai (and the sad Menkalinan) by raking them with their teeth and opening up long, bloody wounds that cut through skin and blubber. It shocked me to hear this little whale speak of such a thing. No whale of my family or acquaintance had ever harmed another. Even more, for a very young orca to address an elder such as Alkurah so critically seemed almost impossibly rude. But then, the tiny whale was of the Others, who do not esteem our kind highly. And, as I would discover, she was as fearless as she was outspoken.

      Alkurah swam closer to the lone, unprotected whale. With even greater rudeness, she said, ‘I could kill you with one bite.’

      ‘Yes, but you will not. Then I would be beyond the humans’ torments – and therefore beyond yours.’

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