The Idiot Gods by David Zindell

Author:David Zindell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780008223311
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2017-04-19T04:00:00+00:00

14

Long days of swimming and diving through the humans’ books in hope of discovering something about the humans that might redeem them followed – even as we whales cruised the fractured waters of the Sound in search of the meat of understanding. Storms blew in from the ocean. The sun died into dark nights of rain and mist, and fought its way to a wan rebirth through thick clouds each morning. With each mile that we swam – with every salmon that we caught or new book that we tucked into ourselves – the shark pursuing us seemed to grow stronger and stronger.

How was I to make sense of the truth that I could no longer ignore? What was I to do with it? I well remembered my mother once telling me that a truth does not become fully true until one acts upon it.

I felt nearly paralyzed, however, with a spreading weakness of will, as I imagined it would be if I had injected one of the humans’ narcotic drugs. A sense of helplessness flowed like an irresistible current straight into hopelessness. Again and again, I considered ceasing swimming altogether and allowing the shark to devour me. A single question aggrieved me: what was I to do to act upon the truth if there was nothing to be done?

In the punishment pool of Sea Circus, I had resolved to let perish – or to actively slay – those parts of myself that I knew to be either useless, antiquated, or inauthentic. I had not imagined, though, leaving behind certainties that I had seen as intrinsic to my soul. All my life, I had enjoyed a bright, singing faith in the essential goodness of life and in the health of nature that had engendered it. Nature, however, I now perceived, possessed a darkness that went much deeper than the horror of animals tearing apart animals and devouring each other in endless cycles of agony and death. For nature, perhaps insane in its deepest part as Unukalhai believed, had somehow brought forth out the bloody womb of time the crazed and very unnatural beings called humans. What if, I wondered, the true heart of nature pulsed with a power that had nothing to do with goodness and was as far beyond it as the Coral Galaxy is from Ocean? What if the madness of mankind inhered in all things?

After I had eaten the white bear – after I had been besmeared with the black oil of the burning sea and had shared the anguish of Pherkad’s harpoon – I had lost the power to quenge. I had conflated the seeking of a cure for my affliction with the seeking of a cure for the ill earth. In my innocence of faith, I had assumed that I would find a way to heal both myself and the world. What if, I now asked myself, the insane and bitter suffering of the world could not be cured? What would I do, how would

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