in her dignity and pretended to the fiction that all the disparate whales in the pool somehow formed a single family, over which she presided as matriarch. Using her most authoritative voice, almost forcibly modulated to a reasonable calmness, she formally introduced the tiny whale to me:
‘This is Baby Electra from the—’
‘I know you!’ I called out to the little orca, carelessly interrupting Alkurah again. ‘That is, I know of you – I knew your brother Pherkad!’
I swam over to Baby Electra. So tiny she was, really not much more than a newborn. A long scar marked her left side, as if Alkurah had toothed her there. I liked her lovely symmetry of form and the warm, clear light which filled her dark eyes.
‘How could you have known Pherkad, how, how? Our kind do not naturally speak to Others such as you.’
I laughed at her boldness and at the irony of what she had said. I realized for the first time that the Others thought of my kind as the Others.
‘No natural occurrence,’ I said, ‘brought Pherkad and me together.’
I told Baby Electra of the Burning Sea of how I had tried to remove the harpoon from Pherkad’s flesh. I gave her Pherkad’s death song, which he had given to me.
‘O Pherkad!’ she called out. ‘O my brother, my sweet brave brother – the most beautiful whale in all the world!’
She began crying, and the terrible close waters of the pool shook with a lament almost beyond bearing.
‘O the stars! O the sea! Why is there so much pain?’
She wept for a long time. Finally, she composed herself and swam in close to me.
‘My family are all dead,’ she told me, ‘as your dear ones are to you, for you will never see them again.’
‘No, I will see them,’ I said, ‘on Agathange or in the timeless Cerulean Sea.’
‘No, I am sorry, you will not, for you will never quenge again. I’m so sorry, sorry, sorry.’
‘I will quenge again,’ I said.
While the other orcas listened, I told Baby Electra of my reason for making my journey and all that occurred upon it.
‘You say that before Pherkad went off to die,’ Electra forced out, ‘you came to love him like a brother?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘Well, I love you the same way, for you are brave and beautiful as he was.’
‘Thank you,’ I intoned, not knowing what else to say.
‘Will you be my brother, here in this horrible place?’
I made a quick decision, one of the best of my life.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I will.’
She moved up against my side as if to take comfort in my much larger body and to keep me between her and Alkurah and her sisters.
‘Then we are a family,’ she said. ‘I will try to speak with the humans as you have tried. Why don’t we call ourselves the Hopeful Wordplayers of the Manmade Bitterblue Sea?’
All the other whales had a good, long laugh at this. Then Zavijah mocked Baby Electra, saying, ‘If your naming talent goes no deeper than that, you had better continue to play with your words if you ever hope to speak with the humans.’
‘How could she speak with the humans,’ her sister Salm added, ‘when she can barely speak with us?’
‘It is a mystery,’ Zavijah said, ‘how you Others can even speak to each other in your ugly miscarriage of a language. What a sad fate that our family should have to listen to it!’
‘And a sadder fate,’ Alkurah agreed, ‘that we Moonsingers should have to dwell so closely with a misbegotten family composed of two kinds never meant to speak with each other. One might as well try to form a family of a human and a whale.’
At this, the pool crackled with the sound of the three sisters’ derisive laughter. Then Baby Navi, even tinier than Electra, broke away from nursing at Zavijah’s side and cried out, ‘Please stop – you are hurting my heart!’
Zavijah called to her sisters to cease their mockery, for as much as she seemed to despise Baby Electra, she loved her newborn Navi even more, and she could not bear for anything to hurt him. And her elder sister Alkurah, who loved Zavijah fiercely, could not bear anything that caused her to suffer.
‘So!’ Unukalhai said from the end of the pool where he floated. ‘This, Arjuna, is how it goes with insanity. The humans’ cruelty has made the Moonsingers insane with a cruelty most unbecoming in a whale. But you – you, you, you, and little Electra – have chosen a different way! Insane it is for our kind to try to make a family with one of the Others, but in just this sort of insanity, you might find a kind of salvation.’
His wisdom, crazy though it might be, clung to me like one of the humans’ noxious skin lotions and slowly worked its way inside me. Over the days that followed – long, boring days of swimming back and forth within the imprisoning waters and watching the humans teach the other whales their ‘feats’ – I considered the advice he had tendered me. In one sense, even to entertain the thought of falling insane seemed itself insane. From another vantage, however, what if Unukalhai was right? Could it be that a still pool of sanity dwelled within the typhoon of madness that pressed down upon all us whales and threatened to derange our finest sensibilities? And if so, how could one navigate the raging winds and waves of that stormy sea to find a place of peace?
In no other aspect of existence did the other orcas demonstrate their creeping dementia so disturbingly as in their acquiescence to the humans’ desires. Day after day, as the sun swam again and again like a flying fish over our pools, the humans continued doing things with things even as they conveyed their wishes to us and never ceased their irritating chattering:
‘Good girl, Mimu!’
‘Can you open your mouth for me?’
‘You’re cuter than a bug’s ear.’
‘You just love having your flipper tickled, don’t you, Gaga?’
‘Are you ready for a relationship session?’
‘Stick out your tongue for me, baby.’
‘You are sooo sweet, Tito, oh, yes you are, yes you are!’
‘Can you pee for me, sweetie?’
‘Are you ready to have some fun being a big surfboard for us?’
‘Meal time!’
‘Let’s see what you can do with these new toys.’
‘Good girl, Lala! You’re so happy, aren’t you?’
‘I’ve been dreaming about this since I was nine years old.’
‘What are we going to do
