Bear and His Daughter (20 page)

Her thoughts raced, and she licked her lips to cool the sere dryness cracking them. Her heart gave a desperate leap.

“Was it you?” she asked the porpoise.

“Yes,” she heard him say. “Yes, it was.”

Alison burst into tears. When she had finished sobbing, she took a Kleenex from her bag, wiped her eyes and leaned against the cool marble beside the tank.

Prepsychosis. Disorders of thought. Failure to abstract.

“This is ridiculous,” she said.

From deep within, from the dreaming place, sounded a voice.

“You’re here,” the porpoise told her. “That’s what matters now.”

Nothing in the creature’s manner suggested communication or even the faintest sentience. But human attitudes of engagement, Alison reminded herself, were not to be expected. To expect them was anthropocentrism—a limiting, reactionary position like ethnocentrism or sexism.

“It’s very hard for me,” she told the porpoise. “I can’t communicate well at the best of times. And an aquarium situation is pretty weird.” At a loss for further words, Alison fell back on indignation. “It must be awful for you.”

“It’s somewhat weird,” she understood the porpoise to say. “I wouldn’t call it awful.”

Alison trembled.

“But … how can it not be awful? A conscious mind shut up in a tank with stupid people staring at you? Not,” she hastened to add, “that I think I’m any better. But the way you’re stuck in here with these slimy, repulsive fish.”

“I don’t find fish slimy and repulsive,” the porpoise told her.

Mortified, Alison began to stammer an apology, but the creature cut her off. “The only fish I see are the ones they feed me. It’s people I see all day. I wonder if you can realize how
dry
you all are.”

“Good Lord!” She moved closer to the tank. “You must hate us.”

She became aware of laughter.

“I don’t hate.”

Alison’s pleasure at receiving this information was tempered by a political anxiety. The beast’s complacency suggested something objectionable; the suspicion clouded her mind that her interlocutor might be a mere Aquarium Porpoise, a deracinated stooge, an Uncle—

The laughter sounded again.

“I’m sorry,” Alison said. “My head is full of such shit.”

“Our condition is profoundly different from yours. We don’t require the same things. Our souls are as different from yours as our bodies are.”

“I have the feeling,” Alison said, “that yours are better.”

“I think they are. But I’m a porpoise.”

The animal in the tank darted upward, torpedolike, toward the fog-colored surface, then plunged again in a column of spinning, bubbling foam.

“You called me here, didn’t you?” Alison asked. “You wanted me to come.”

“In a way.”

“Only in a way?”

“We communicated our presence here. A number of you might have responded. Personally, I’m satisfied that it was yourself.”

“Are you?” Alison cried joyfully. She was aware that her words echoed through the great room. “You see, I asked because I’ve been having these dreams. Odd things have been happening to me.” She paused thoughtfully. “Like I’ve been listening to the radio sometimes and I’ve heard these wild things—like just for a second. As though there’s been kind of a pattern. Was it you guys?”

“Some of the time. We have our ways.”

“Then,” she asked breathlessly, “why me?”

“Don’t you know why?” the beast asked softly.

“It must have been because you knew I would understand.”

There was no response.

“It must have been because you knew how much I hate the way things are with us. Because you knew I’d listen. Because I need something so much.”

“Yet,” the porpoise said sternly, “you made things this way. You thought you needed them the way they are.”

“It wasn’t me,” Alison said. “Not me. I don’t need this shit.”

Wide-eyed, she watched him shoot for the surface again, then dive and skim over the floor of his tank, rounding smartly at the wall.

“I love you,” she declared suddenly. “I mean, I feel a great love for you and I feel there is a great lovingness in you. I just know that there’s something really super-important that I can learn from you.”

“Are you prepared to know how it is with us?”

“Yes,” Alison said. “Oh, yes. And what I can do.”

“You can be free,” the animal said. “You can learn to perceive in a new way.”

Alison became aware of Io standing beside her frowning up at her tears. She bent down and put her head next to the child’s.

“Io, can you see the dolphin? Do you like him?”

“Yes,” Io said.

Alison stood up.

“My daughter” she told her dolphin.

Io watched the animal contentedly for a while and then went to sit on a bench in the back of the hall.

“She’s only three and a half,” Alison said. She feared that communion might be suspended on the introduction of a third party. “Do you like her?”

“We see a great many of your children,” the beast replied. “I can’t answer you in those terms.”

Alison became anxious.

“Does that mean that you don’t have
any
emotions? That you can’t love?”

“Were I to answer yes or no I would deceive you either way. Let’s say only that we don’t make the same distinctions.”

“I don’t understand,” Alison said. “I suppose I’m not ready to.”

“As your perception changes,” the porpoise told her; “many things will seem strange and unfamiliar. You must unlearn old structures of thought that have been forced on you. Much faith, much resolution will be required.”

“I’ll resist,” Alison admitted sadly. “I know I will. I’m very skeptical and frivolous by nature. And it’s all so strange and wonderful that I can’t believe it.”

“All doubt is the product of your animal nature. You must rise above your species. You must trust those who instruct you.”

“I’ll try,” Alison said resolutely. “But it’s so incredible! I mean, for all these centuries you guys and us have been the only aware species on the planet, and now we’ve finally come together! It just blows my mind that here—now—for the first time…”

“What makes you think it’s the first time?”

“Good Lord!” Alison exclaimed. “It’s not the first time?”

“There were others before you, Alison. They were weak and fickle. We lost them.”

Alison’s heart chilled at his words.

“But hasn’t it ever worked?”

“It’s in the nature of your species to conceive enthusiasms and then to weary of them. Your souls are self-indulgent and your concentration feeble. None of you has ever stayed with it.”

“I will,” Alison cried. “I’m unique and irreplaceable, and nothing could be more important than this. Understanding, responding inside—that’s my great talent. I can do it!”

“We believe you, Alison. That’s why you’re here.”

She was flooded with her dreaming joy. She turned quickly to look for Io and saw her lying at full length on the bench, staring up into the overhead lights. Near her stood a tall, long-haired young man who was watching Alison. His stare was a profane irritation and Alison forced it from her mind, but her mood turned suddenly militant.

“I know it’s not important in your terms,” she told the porpoise, “but it infuriates me to see you shut up like this. You must miss the open sea so much.”

“I’ve never left it,” the animal said, “and your pity is wasted on me. I am here on the business of my race.”

“I guess it’s the way I was brought up. I had a lousy upbringing, but some things about it were good. See, my father he’s a real asshole but he’s what we call a liberal. He taught me to really hate it when somebody was oppressed. Injustice makes me want to fight. I suppose it sounds stupid and trivial to you, but that’s how it is with me.”

The dolphin’s voice was low and soothing, infinitely kind. “We know how it is with you. You understand nothing of your own behavior. Everything you think and do merely reflects what is known to us as a Dry Posture. Your inner life, your entire history are nothing more than that.”

“Good Lord!” Alison said. “Dry Posture.”

“As we work with you, you must bear this in mind. You must discover the quality of Dry Posture in all your thoughts and actions. When you have separated this quality from your soul, what remains will be the bond between us. At that point your life will truly begin.”

“Dry Posture,” Alison said. “Wow!”

The animal in the tank was disporting itself just below the surface. In her mounting enthusiasm Alison became increasingly frustrated by the fact that its blank, good-humored face appeared totally oblivious of her presence. She reminded herself again that the hollow dissembling of human facial expression was beneath its nature, and welcomed the opportunity to be divested of a Dry Posture.

The silence from which the dolphin spoke became charged with music.

“In the sea lies our common origin,” she heard him say. “In the sea all was once One. In the sea find your surrender—in surrender find victory, renewal, survival. Recall the sea! Recall our common heartbeat! Return to the peace of primordial consciousness!”

“Oh, how beautiful,” Alison cried, her own consciousness awash in salt flumes of insight.

“Our lousy Western culture is worthless,” she declared fervently. “It’s rotten and sick. We’ve got to get back. Please,” she implored the dolphin, “tell us how!”

“If you receive the knowledge,” the animal told her; “your life will become one of dedication and struggle. Are you ready to undertake such striving?”

“Yes,” Alison said. “Yes!”

“Are you willing to serve that force which relentlessly wills the progress of the conscious universe?”

“With all my heart!”

“Willing to surrender to that sublime destiny which your species has so fecklessly denied?”

“Oh, boy,” Alison said, “I surely am.”

“Excellent,” said the porpoise. “It shall be your privilege to assist the indomitable will of a mighty and superior species. The natural order shall be restored. That which is strong and sound shall dominate. That which is weak and decadent shall perish and disappear:”

“Right on!” Alison cried. She felt her shoulders squaring, her heels coming together.

“Millennia of usurpation shall be overturned in a final solution!”

“Yeah,” Alison said. “By any means necessary.”

It seemed to Alison that she detected in the porpoise’s speech a foreign accent—if not a Third World accent, at least the accent of a civilization older and more together than her own.

“So,” the porpoise continued, “where your cities and banks, your aquaria and museums now stand, there shall be rubble only. The responsibility shall rest exclusively with humankind, for our patience has been thoroughly exhausted. What we have not achieved through striving for equitable dialogue, we shall now achieve by striving of another sort.”

Alison listened in astonishment as the music’s volume swelled behind her eyes.

“For it is our belief,” the porpoise informed her “that in strife, life finds its purification.” His distant, euphonious voice assumed a shrill, hysterical note. “In the discipline of ruthless struggle, history is forged and the will tempered! Let the craven, the once-born, shirk the fray—we ourselves shall strike without mercy at the sniveling mass of our natural inferiors. Triumph is our destiny!”

Alison shook her head in confusion.

“Whoa,” she said.

Closing her eyes for a moment, she beheld with startling clarity the image of a blond-bearded man wearing a white turtleneck sweater and a peaked officer’s cap. His face was distended with fury; beside him loomed a gray cylindrical form that might have been a periscope. Alison opened her eyes quickly and saw the porpoise blithely coursing the walls of its tank.

“But that’s not love or life or anything,” she sobbed. “That’s just cruelty.”

“Alison, baby, don’t you know it’s all the same? Without cruelty you can’t have love. If you’re not ready to destroy someone, then you’re not ready to love them. Because if you’ve got the knowledge—you know, like if you really have it—then if you do what you have to do that’s just everybody’s karma. If you have to waste somebody because the universe wills it, then it’s just like the bad part of yourself that you’re wasting. It’s an act of love.”

In the next instant, she saw the bearded man again. His drawn, evil face was bathed in a sinister, submarine light, reflected from God knew what fiendish instruments of death.

“I know what you are,” Alison called out in horror: “You’re a fascist!”

When the beast spoke once more, the softness had vanished from its voice.

“Your civilization has afforded us many moments of amusement. Unfortunately, it must now be irrevocably destroyed.”

“Fascist!” Alison whimpered in a strangled voice. “Nazi!”

“Peace,” the porpoise intoned, and the music behind him turned tranquil and low. “Here is the knowledge. You must say it daily.”