The Idiot Gods

‘But we made it so long ago, in a different age. The world is changing.’

‘The world is always the world, just as our word is always our word.’

‘Can we never break our word, even as the ice breaks into nothingness while the world grows warmer?’

‘The ice has broken before,’ my grandmother reminded me.

For a while, she sang to me and our family of our great memories of the past: of ages of ice and times of the sun’s heat when the world had been cooler or warmer.

‘Yes, but something is different this time,’ I replied. ‘The world has warmed much too quickly.’

Although she could not deny this, she said, ‘The world has its own ways.’

‘Yes, and those ways are changing.’

Alnitak came closer and so did my mother, and through the turbid, gray waters we debated how the northern ice sheet could have possibly melted so much in the span of a few generations. As I was still a young, not-quite-adult whale, I should have deferred to my elders. I should have felt shame at my questioning of them. Who was I to think that I might have discerned something they had not? And yet I did, and I sensed something wrong in my family’s understanding. In this, I experienced a secret pride in my insight and in my otherness from people who had seemed so like myself in sensibility and so close to my heart.

‘It is the humans,’ I said. ‘The humans are warming the world with the heat we have felt emanating from their boats.’

‘That cannot be enough heat to melt the ice,’ Alnitak said.

‘Only a few generations ago,’ I retorted, ‘only a few humans dared the ocean in cockle shells that we could have splintered with one snap of our jaws. Now their great metal ships are everywhere.’

‘To suppose that therefore the humans can be blamed for the ocean’s warming,’ my grandmother said, ‘is a wild leap in logic.’

‘But they are to blame! I know they are!’

‘How can you be sure?’ And then, as if I was still a babe drinking milk, she chided me for making a basic philosophical error: ‘A correlation does not prove a causation.’

And chided I was. To hide my embarrassment (and my defiance), I took refuge in a little play: ‘Thank you for the lesson, Grandmother. I was just giving you the chance to exercise your love of pedagogy.’

‘Of course you were, my dear. And I do love it so! I have no words to tell you how much I look forward to the day when it is you who teaches me.’

‘I am sure that you could think of a few words, Grandmother.’

‘Well, perhaps a few.’

‘I await your wisdom.’

‘I can hear that you do,’ she said. ‘Then listen to me: it is a heavy responsibility being the wisest of the family – perhaps you could relieve me of it.’

‘No, I cannot,’ I said sincerely. ‘You know I cannot.’

‘Then will you let us leave this bear to his fate?’

All my life, my grandmother had warned me that my innate tenacity could harden into pertinacity if I allowed this. Did anyone know me as did my grandmother?

‘We are hungry,’ I said simply.

‘We have been hungry before.’

‘Never like this. Where have the fish gone? Not even the ocean can tell us.’

‘We will swim to a place where there are many fish.’

‘We would swim more surely with this bear’s life to strengthen us.’

‘Yes, and with our bellies full of bear meat, what shall we say to the Others?’

‘Why must we say anything at all?’

‘In saying nothing, we would say everything. How can a whale speak other than the truth?’

‘But what is true, grandmother?’

‘The Covenant is true – a true expression of our desire to live in harmony with the Others.’

‘But have you not taught me that the only absolute truth is that there is no absolute truth?’

Indeed she had. My grandmother relished self-referential statements and the paradoxes they engendered as an invitation for one’s consciousness to reflect back and forth on itself into a bright infinity that illuminated the deepest of depths.

‘Yes, I did teach you that,’ she said. ‘You were too young, however, for me to tell you that if there is no absolute truth, then we cannot know with certainty that there is no absolute truth.’

My grandmother played a deeper game than I – a game that could go on forever if I let it.

‘Then do you believe there is an absolute truth?’

‘You are perceptive, Arjuna.’

‘What is this truth then? Is it just life, itself?’

‘You really do not know?’

‘But what could be truer than life?’

In answer, my grandmother sang to me in a thunderous silence that I could not quite comprehend. I needed to answer her, but what should I say? Only words that would gnaw at her and lay her heart bare.

‘Look at Kajam,’ I called out. I swam over to him and nudged the child with my head. ‘He is so hungry!’

Kajam, small for his four years and thin with deprivation, protested this: ‘I am not too hungry to swim night and day as far as we must. Let us surface and I will show you.’

It had been a while since any of my family had drawn breath. Because the bear could do nothing about his plight, we had no need to conceal our conference beneath the water or to keep silence. And so almost as one, we breached and blew out stale air in loud, steamy clouds, and we drew in fresh breaths. To prove his strength, Kajam dove down and swam up through the water at speed; he breached and with a powerful beat of his tail, drove himself up into the air in a perfectly calculated arc that carried him over my back so that he plunged headfirst into the sea in a great splash. Everyone celebrated this feat. Almost immediately, however, Kajam had to blow air again. He gulped at it in a desperate need that he could not hide.

‘Listen to his heartbeats!’ I said to grandmother. ‘How long will it be before his blood begins burning with a fever?’

My grandmother listened, and so did my mother, along with Alnitak, Dheneb, and Chara. The third generation of our family listened, too: my sisters Turais and Nashira, my little brother Caph, and my cousins Naos, Haedi, and Talitha. Even Turais’s children, Alnath and Porrima, concentrated on the strained pulses sounding within the center of Kajam’s body. And of course Mira listened the most intently of all.

‘Compassion,’ my grandmother said to me, ‘impelled you to want to save this bear, and now you wish to eat him?’