a while, I waited amidst the carnage in the water as the humans instead began flinging their sounds at me. I understood nothing of their speech, if indeed there was anything of substance to understand. Could the humans truly be sentient? I felt certain that in trying to feed me parts of another orca, they had nearly proved their inanity. Perhaps Nashira had been right in her estimation that the humans had minds like those of mollusks.
Why, then, should I continue my journey? Logic told me that these humans might be as different from others elsewhere as my family was from Pherkad’s kind, but what were the chances of that being true? Were not all humans human, just as all orcas were orcas? Would they not therefore think and act in more or less uniform ways?
I might have turned back then but for three things: First, I knew how perilous it was to reason from perhaps unfounded assumptions and scant evidence. Second – and how this thought amazed me! – what if the humans had tried to feed me orca flesh because they themselves were cannibals who saw nothing wrong with humans putting tooth to each other? Perhaps they had never made a covenant among themselves that humans should not harm humans.
The third thing that kept me from swimming back to my family was that the two-leggeds seemed to lose interest in me. They retreated from the edge of the ship, which coughed out a great roar from its underside and began moving off toward the west. Soon, I was alone in the ocean. The way south, the way towards more sensitive humans who might have the wit to learn a little language, lay open before me.
On my long voyage toward warmer waters, I had much time to ponder my first encounter with the humans. I revisited each sound and sensation of our bizarre interaction, savoring them as I might the taste of new fish. The new realm that I had entered, already unnerving in so many ways, seemed to grow ever stranger. At its heart lay a mystery that I somehow had to try to understand: What were human beings and how had they come to be?
None of our natural histories accounted for these two-leggeds. Mira told of the taxa and the cladding of the fish, the flatworms, the jellied cnidarians and other sea creatures, but of the animals of the land, even the Old Ones knew little. For ages my ancestors had watched the helpless human apes hunting crabs and clams along the beaches of the continents. And then one day, scarcely a few generations ago, humans had taken to the sea in boats and ships and had begun hunting even the blue whales, who are the greatest animals ever to have lived on our world. How could such a thing have happened?
‘It is not natural,’ I heard my mother say to my grandmother as I relived one of their many conversations. ‘The humans do not seem to be a part of nature.’
As I swam through flowing blue seas rich with herring, squid, sponges, and kelp, I thought about my mother’s words. What did it mean to be natural? Was a shark more natural than a human because most of this ancient fish’s activities consisted of basic functions such as hunting, eating, excreting, and mating? Were humans unnatural because they seemed to spend most of their lives doing things with the multifarious objects they had made with their hands? Was it their very ability to make things such as monstrous metal ships that made them unnatural?
‘Even a snail,’ my sister Nashira had said, ‘within its perfectly spiraled shell makes a more esthetically pleasing protection.’
Snails make shells, and walruses make tusks, and all aquatic animals make the substance of their bodies out of the substance of the sea – but they do not make things other than themselves and their offspring. They do not make harpoons, nor do they set fire to the sea.
‘The humans,’ I said to my mother as if she swam beside me, ‘make things that change nature.’
‘Even so,’ my grandmother broke in, ‘if the humans came out of nature even as we did, how can they be called unnatural?’
Because my grandmother loved recursion and paradox, I said, ‘Then let us say that humans are that part of nature for which it is natural to be unnatural.’
With that definition, I left the matter, although a gnawing feeling in my belly warned me that I had not bitten nearly deep enough into humanity’s soul, which might be beyond understanding. Someday, I sensed, and perhaps soon, I would need to reexamine all my assumptions if I continued my journey.
I decided I must. My course took me along an ancient route used by my ancestors. I navigated by the currents and the configuration of the coastlines, by the pull of the earth upon my blood and by the push of my family’s songs that sounded in my head – and, of course, I found my way by the stars. The Stingray constellation pointed its reddish tail toward storied fishing grounds while the blue lights of the Great Crab came into sight whenever I breached for breath on a cloudless night. And always, the north star shone behind me, reminding me from which direction I had come and toward which I must someday return.
I encountered storms whose icy winds made mountains out of water, and I journeyed on through long days of hot sun and lengthening nights. I warned away sharks who wanted to steal my catch of salmon; I made my way through yet more storms and surfed along great waves. Nothing about the ocean deterred me, for was I not of the water and an orca at that? Rarely did I cease moving, and I never slept.
That is, I never slept completely, for had I done so, I would have breathed water and drowned. Always I remained at least half awake, the right part of me aware of the sea’s features and my movements while my left half slept – or the reverse. Through undulations of seaweed brushing my sides and cold currents raking my skin with claws of ice, I watched myself sleeping, and I listened to myself dream.
What dreams I had! Many were of eating or speaking or mating. Too many concerned the humans. In the foods that humans fed me with their hands in the more disturbing of these dreams, I tasted flavors new to me along with the dearly remembered sweetness of my mother’s milk. I sang a strange song with the first of the beautiful she-orcas who would bear my children; I listened in wonder to my grandmother’s death poem, which somehow rang out from the mouth of a human being whose face I could never quite behold.
One dream in particular moved me. It began with a human feeding me a salmon whose insides were poisoned from the same black oil that had fouled the burning sea. The fish hardened in my belly like a lump of metal. It seemed to grow as massive as a marlin inside me, and its density pulled me down in the water – and down and down. The world began narrowing into darkness. I held my breath against the dread of the ocean’s immense pressures that would soon crush me to a purplish pulp. I felt myself suffocating as the pull of the earth forced me into a tunnel that grew tighter and tighter. Soon, I knew, the whole of my body and my being would be squeezed smaller than a jellyfish, a diatom, an atom of sand. My awareness would shrink into a single point in space and time. I would die a horrible death all alone at the bottom of the sea.
‘No, no, no!’ I shouted to my family who could not hear me.
I did not want to die by myself in silent darkness; even more, I did not want to return to being again and once again find myself forced into the endless, bloody tunnel of life. How bitterly I cried out in protest in being born anew into a doomed world whose every ocean and continent was choked with the burning black oil of death.
‘Grandmother! Grandmother!’ I cried. ‘How can you let this be?’
How, I asked myself, could I let it be?
I could not. And so I called out as loud as I could to my sleeping self. With a start and a shock of reality rushing in, I felt myself awakening within my dream. Now the whole sea sang with brilliant
