horizon.
Very soon, one of the humans’ gray ships appeared there. I swam in close enough to make out metal spines sticking up from the top of the ship; these reminded me of a conch shell’s many points and projections. Humans – the first I had ever seen! – stood on the top of the ship, near its head. They were tending to what looked like a long piece of seaweed that connected the ship to the bloody water. A shrieking sound like metal eating metal vibrated both ship and sea, and the seaweed thing began moving toward the ship. I zanged the seaweed and determined it was made of metal, like the ship. It continued moving, and soon the whale attached to it emerged from the water tail first, even as I had been born. A moment later, I caught sight of the bloody harpoon that had torn a great hole through the humpback’s body and had killed it. The harpoon, too, was made of metal, unlike the wooden one that had killed Pherkad.
Upon this horror, panic seized me. The ship loomed above, vast and ugly, gray and angular, like a deformed mockery of one of the deep gods. How helpless I felt against this monster of metal! I wanted to fling myself away from this vile place as quickly as I could.
How, though, could I do this? Was I not an orca of the Blue Aria Family of the Faithful Thoughtplayer Clan. Had not my mother, just before my birth, instructed me in the orcas’ ways?
‘Fear,’ she had told me, ‘might signal a need for prudence, but you may never act out of fear alone.’
Had I not an urgent need for prudence? Why should I not evade this grotesque mountain of metal and the men upon it who might murder me?
Then I felt strange and powerful vibrations pierce my body. High upon the ship, one of the humans stretched out one of his tentacles toward me. Sounds like a seal’s barks burst out from the hole his mouth made. The vibrations grew stronger, and I realized a thing: the humans had sonar! Somehow, these small-headed humans had sonar and were zanging me!
Flight, then, would be futile. I knew from the old tales that the humans’ ship could move through the water more swiftly than I, perhaps not over short distances, but through mornings and afternoons of exhausting pursuit. With the ocean so peaceful and still, I would not even be able to find a wave that I might hide behind.
I did not want to hide. Had I abandoned my family in order to do such a craven thing? Had Pherkad given his death poem to a coward? No, no, no! I had ventured into this strange realm of harpoons and metallic sonar so that I might talk to humans, not flee from the first of them who came my way. The worst they could do to me (or so I told myself) was to slay me as they had the humpback who hung all bloody and broken, suspended in the air. They might strike a real harpoon through my real heart; they might use their metal things to tear me apart before they ate me, but do not all beings thus someday die?
‘You will die young,’ my grandmother had told me. ‘Either that, or you will add something new to the Song.’
It was time to prove her prophecy right. Gathering in her charm close to my heart, I swam up to the ship. I came up out of the water, spy-hopping so that the humans might better see me and hear my words:
‘My name is Arjuna, and I have journeyed far from my home that I might speak with you. So many things I have to say! So much I would ask you! Do you have names yourselves that you can share with me? Why are you here? Are you not creatures of the continents? Are there not enough animals there for you to eat? The animals of the sea are for themselves alone. We are that we might know joy. Do you know the same? Do you know the Song of Life? If you do, why do you make the ocean burn with a terrible fire? Why do you melt the world’s ice? Why did you kill my brother Pherkad?’
I did not expect them to answer me or even understand what I said to them. If they really were sentient, however, I hoped they might at least grasp that I was trying to talk to them. Would they return the favor by giving their words to me?
High above me, some of the humans made sounds and watched me while others continued drawing the humpback up through the air and onto the ship. The dead whale vanished from my sight, and I supposed that the humans had started the work of tearing him apart and eating him. Then one of the humans set a new harpoon in the metal thing that had connected the seaweed to the humpback. The human looked at me as the metal thing turned and the harpoon aligned in my direction.
‘Would you kill me, too?’ I called out to the humans. Then I remembered Pherkad’s final offer to me and my grandmother’s charm. ‘If you need my flesh, you might have it – let me help you!’
I dove down into the water, then up and up. With a mighty beat of my tail, I breached and propelled myself out of the water and high into the air. Drops of water whipped from my body, and the wind thrilled my skin. Thus did I come as close to the humans as I could. Thus, in what might have been the last moments of my life, did I fly. Had I been able to quenge, I would have kept on soaring right up to the stars only to splash down into Agathange’s lovely ocean.
For an eternity, I hung motionless in space, waiting for the humans to pierce me with their harpoon. At last I fell back into the sea. Had I not leaped high enough? Had I not turned my belly toward them so that the harpoon might more easily gain entrance to my vital organs? Again I pushed myself into the air, this time turning in a pirouette so that the humans might strike their harpoon wherever they wished. And again, and again, leaping and spinning and flying and splashing into the sparkling waters.
After a while, I grew tired of repeating this feat. I noticed that the human who had been looking along the harpoon’s length had moved over to the others gathered on top of the ship at a lower point. I became aware that the humans above me were doing something peculiar with their murderous hands: they brought them together over and over, sending out loud cracks that sounded something like a whale’s tail slapping the surface of the sea. With their mouths and the flaps of flesh that covered their teeth, they made shrill sounds that somewhat mimicked a whale’s whistles. How their antics excited me! Perhaps, I thought, I really could teach these bizarre animals to speak.
I began with the simplest and most basic of essentials, the first thing an orca learns long before he is born: one of the sets of sounds denoting the actuality of the ocean. I trilled out the variations on these sounds even as I slapped the water with my tail so that these small-headed creatures might have a visual representation of the magical substance of which I spoke. Again I trilled and whistled as clearly as I could, hoping with a great, glowing hope that the humans might at least somewhat duplicate the whistle’s pitch and overtones. Instead, they made other sounds altogether, and did something that appalled me.
Two of them, working together, cast pieces of a humpback’s body into the water. I studied the barnacles covering gray skin and the bits of bloody fat that stuck to it. Why did they cast away good food? I did not know. Then I had a disturbing thought: they wanted to share it with me!
‘Thank you, humans, for your generosity,’ I chirped out. Then I told them of the First Covenant, which my people had made with the Others: ‘Thank you and thank you, but I may not eat the flesh of any animal who breathes air.’
Two more of the humans above me came up to the edge of the ship. They carried an object which somewhat resembled a huge, white shell. After setting it down on the top of the ship, they began casting its contents toward me chunk by bloody chunk. It astonished me to see pieces of black and white hide and red muscle splash into the sea. These tidbits, I knew, could only have come from an orca – and probably one of Pherkad’s family. Could this be, I wondered, the last of Baby Electra?
‘What is wrong with you!’ I shouted. ‘Do you think that I am a cannibal, that I would eat one of my own?’
I told them of the Second Covenant, that an orca may not harm another orca.
‘Are you insane, that you would do such a thing!’ I shouted. ‘Cast yourselves into the ocean, and then we shall see what I eat!’
Of course, I would have done no such thing. For the Third Covenant, the sacred Great Covenant, forbade the orcas from harming humans, even though the humans might seek to harm them.
For a while, I waited amidst the carnage in the water as the humans instead began flinging their sounds at