The End's Beginning
by Vonda N. McIntyre
This story copyright 1978 by Vonda N. McIntyre. This copy was
created for Jean Hardy's personal use. All other rights are reserved. Thank
you for honoring the copyright.
Published by Seattle Book Company,
www.seattlebook.com.
* * *
Through long captivity, I learned to mimic
the humans' speech, but not to understand the thoughts behind it. How could
anyone learn to understand the ways of those who spend their lives seeking such
desperate independence? Though they have forced me to be like them, still I
cannot understand. I would have to be mad to desire such solitude, and I am not
yet mad.
They have made me mute and almost blind.
They left me my eyes, but eyes are less than useless in this cold dark heavy
sea. I still can taste and smell. Many different particles drift among the
gentle salt flavors that encircle evolution: sharp diatoms, bright edible
crustacean sparks (so welcome after many seasons obscured by battered chunks of
fish-flesh sharp with ice), the bitter taint of the water that seeps from the
humans' land (in the sea the great ones sing fading songs that tell of unfouled
oceans, but the great ones are dying, murdered; their songs will die with them
and no one will remember the taste of clean sea), and the gritty sediment washed
toward me from a wide rain-swollen river. The sediment is what blinds my sight.
The men have muted my voice so I cannot call for help, and thus they have almost
blinded my ears.
No longer can I sing against the
tides. The men attached a machine to me that emits an ugly squeak. Though the
metallic sound mixes and melds erratically with the din that fills the ocean, it
is sufficient for navigation (they tested this quite carefully). But the beauty
is gone from my home. Even the stones are opaque.
I
break the surface to breathe. It is dark, and the water sparkles in the
moonlight. I slow to look around, for it has been a long time since I have seen
the ocean or the sky. I rest with my back and eyes above the warm caressing
water. But soon the men realize I have stopped, and they send a signal that
forces me onward. I cannot resist it. I do not even have the satisfaction of
trying, failing, to overcome pain. There is no pain, only compulsion as
inescapable as the glass and concrete walls that held me prisoner.
While I was going nearly mad from solitude, I
dreamed of being freed and swimming out into the wide sweet ocean. My mate would
come with our people, and we would sing and leap and copulate and rejoice in my
freedom. But I cannot call, I cannot sing. There is no freedom or rejoicing.
And my mate will never find me, but will wait and
search in vain near the human-built where they imprisoned me. No one could know
that the men put wet smelly things all around me (I thought they were trying to
cover my skin as they cover their own) and put me in a box and put the box in
one of their metal creatures. (The humans have a terrible need to put things
inside things, to overcome the inevitable randomness of life. People know
better.) The metal creature rose up in the air and took me from the Middle Ocean
to the Wide Ocean, and that is where I am now, swimming along the sun's track to
reach the Sunset Land. When I reach it, I will die.
My body has stopped aching from the way the men cut
it. I am healed, but I still can feel the scar. The heavy weight of metal inside
me disturbs my balance. They do not understand how much it hurts that I can no
longer play. I cannot sing, I cannot leap. The men must have no art at all.
I hear the faint pulses of a whale's song, nearly
obliterated by the harsh scream and chatter of the men's water machines. This
song is fading and distorted; it has carried perhaps halfway across the Wide
Ocean. It is useless for information, but it is an illusion of companionship.
For the next few hours, whenever the cacophony becomes too painful or the single
sound of my navigation devices bores me to distraction, I will be able to seek
and find the low long tones of the great one's singing. In other days it could
have told its stories from halfway around the world.
Now when the great ones are not singing about the
taste of the sea they sing of its sounds. A hundred years ago a song sung at
midnight would reach a place in full daylight, though by the time the song
traveled that far the destination would be in darkness and the source in day.
The natural sounds of the sea were no impediment to the songs, which slipped
through choruses of grunts and bubbles, splashes and cries, even the chatter of
smaller people, my own kind. The whales were never parted from each other, no
matter how far they separated. Now they are solitary, lonely creatures who
cannot learn fear.
I swim, I swim. The men's signal
will not let me rest. There is a schedule. Schedules are for men and machines,
not for people. But now I am a machine, or little better. What else is a machine
but a creature with no will?
The machine inside me
is cold.
If I could find my people I could tell
them-- even mute, I could tell them by sight and
motion-- to stop me. Perhaps if they held me back long enough the
humans would abandon me.
I might still have to
die... but the men will kill me with the machine when I reach the end of my
journey. Nothing would keep them from destroying me if I could not finish the
mission. Destroying me would be safer for the men, who would think I had been
captured by their enemies. If my kind stopped me and the machine exploded, I
would not be the only one to die. So I must cease hoping to find anyone to help
me.
I hear the low grumble of a killer whale, a
sound that is almost the only thing we ever feared. But it is not searching,
simply lounging in the midnight sea. It must know I am here, but it is not
hungry now. The men call it killer whale but that species has no taste for human
flesh, only for small people.
I do not wish to do
the men's will. If the loss were only my life I could accept it, I think, if
there were any reason I could understand. But my life's end will be a signal for
the men to begin killing each other. They no longer kill each other only. This
time when they begin the killing they will kill the world as well.
They have been practicing destruction on small
southern islands. When they stop practicing they will send their machines to
explode on the earth like storms, and the dust from them will spread over land
and sea alike, poisoning everything. We who die quickly will be the fortunate
ones.
If I could sing, I would taunt the killer
whale and it would kill me. But I cannot attract its attention and the men will
not let me deviate far enough from my path to tease it, nip its flanks, provoke
it to fury.
The men's command urges me on. I will
tire sooner than I would have before I was imprisoned, but I have not yet
reached my limits. The moon disappears behind a cloud and the sea turns black
and bright in patches. The moon's light overpowered the glow of luminescent
plankton, but in the darkness they stream in glimmering streaks against the
water. I pass beneath them, swim up and leap through them. I fling drops of
glowing spray in all directions. I come down flat, clumsily. I have forgotten my
balance again.
I wonder if there are others like me,
swimming toward the men's human enemies, trying to imagine the wish to kill a
member of one's own species. Or am I the only one directed across the sunless
sea? Have I the lonely duty of beginning the destruction?
If there are others, we all have similar fears. I
wonder if any of us will be clever or lucky enough to discover a way to stop.
The clouds that covered the moon are thick and
ominous. I can see the scatter of rain across the ocean's smooth swells. Now the
rain is upon me, and I slow as much as I dare. I love to float just beneath the
surface and feel the raindrops on my back.
Fresh and
salt water mix in a delicious pattern of textures on my skin. But the effect
only occurs when I stand still. The signal forces me to continue; the patterns
disappear. I can feel only the seawater stroking my sides and back as I swim on.
A dull throb grows louder. It is the sound of a
ship's engines, almost in my path. At first I cannot see it, but finally its
lights appear on the horizon as I propel myself toward it. Could this be my
destination? I thought I was being sent to a harbor, so I had hoped for a few
more hours of life.
Now I can see the ship clearly.
It is a fishing boat.
Perhaps it will stop me. The
humans' way to hunt fishes is to find a place where people are feeding and herd
us into their nets. The fish flee before us. We are a convenient marker, very
useful to the humans, but when the nets close in there is no way for us to
escape. We are captured and we drown. Many of us have been murdered this way;
the men kill our youngest, those whose inexperience leaves them vulnerable to
panic. The nets give a cruel death.
I swim straight
at the trawler, staying near the surface. If the nets are out they are invisible
at this distance; the men's sound-maker will not form a sensitive enough picture
to show them to me.
How strange to think that men
will prevent me from carrying out the task given me by other men...
I can smell and taste the cold metal hull and the
hot-metal hot-oil of the propellers and engines. And now I can even hear the
murky curtain of fish-nets, spread like great wings, sweeping the sea as they
approach. I have avoided them so many times before .
In a few moments my life will end. My people may be
safe for a short time after I die-- yet I want to live. I must give
up my life, but I will not do it happily, nor even bravely. The nets will close
around me and panic with them, and I will thrash and struggle and silently cry
out as the ropes and wires cut into me.
The nets are
just before me. I touch them, and the hard mesh scrapes my skin.
Suddenly my body wrenches away, turning too swiftly,
convulsed by the signal. Unwillingly I dive and turn, circle the ship and
fishing nets, and flee.
How can the men know so much
about what is going on this far out in the ocean? Can they know where every ship
is, and where each creature swims?
I move onward
with powerful involuntary strokes of my tail, frightened to realize how close a
control the men have over me, yet relieved to have even a few more minutes.
But there is no joy left in me. The men have given
me a terrible gift that will be paid for in the lives of people. Even if the men
do not begin to kill each other and the world because of my actions, if I finish
this task all the air-breathers in the sea will be under more suspicion. Already
the undersea machines kill us if we come too close. We have learned to avoid
them, but we cannot avoid every human machine. There are too many of them, and
our foolish young ones court pleasure and death riding their bow-waves.
The taste of land grows stronger now, and the water
is much shallower. The metal sounds that guide me echo loudly, quickly. The
water is thick with the waste of humans and their creatures. People never visit
this bay anymore.
Driven onward, my whole body
quivers with weariness and fear. I am only a presence within it, able to guide
myself around the worst islands of trash and poison, but little more. If I could
shut off my hearing as I can close my eyes I would, and know nothing more until
the end.
I am the only living creature in a desert
world.
As I round a point of land the cry and groan
of machinery washes over me, a wave of sound opposing the waves of the sea. I am
swimming into a harbor full of ships and other things important to men. I
surface, breathe the heavy air, listen to the air-borne sounds. The lights are
bright before me.
I dive again. That is another
compulsion the men have put into me, to stay beneath the surface as much as
possible. They would have given me gills if they could.
This maze of shapes and echoes is not a place people
would come of their own free will, though with my own voice I would not be so
confused. Each note would tell me something new about my surroundings.
A shape is coming toward me.
These men have discovered me. They realize I am a
creature of the other men, and they are sending a weapon to kill me. I surge
forward, seeking to outrun it.
Of a sudden I cease
fleeing. This is what I have sought: death by some other means than the plan of
the men who captured me.
The shape comes closer and
I swim as slowly as I am able. I do not want to die.
The shape does not move like a machine.
And now I can see it, through the darkness and the
murk. This is no man-weapon.
If I were free I could
never swim so calmly onward, waiting for the shark. Its ancestors slaughtered
mine when people decided to return to the sea. We in turn learned how to kill
the only creatures we ever hated.
Better the killer
whale, the nets, the weapons of men. I can smell the cold beast now. It will
writhe in a frenzy at the first taste of my blood. It will kill me with whatever
its tiny brain grasps as joy, for it knows my people are its only challenge in
the sea. Except the men. And there is no defense for people or for sharks
against the men.
The shark will stop me, but I
cannot stop the men from killing themselves. When they have suicided, when their
poisons have murdered all the people, the shark will remain, as it has remained
for millions of years, as it will remain until the end of the world.
This is the end's beginning.
Published by Alexandria Digital
Literature. (http://www.alexlit.com/)
Return to .