Deepwish

The never-released prequel

The white whale cruises stately through the deepest avenues of krill and hears the wishes in the water of other whales. These wishes are songs of yearning which call for food or companionship or mates. There was a time when this old white one would call his own songs, singing his vivid wishes out for miles and miles, but he has no wishes any longer.

He once had a clutch of mates and children, but one after another they died, bitten by metal teeth and hauled up to the sky to die and burble in their blood. He doesn't sing the pain of the twisted cold metal tooth that's lodged in his own flank and festers there. A pity, as this would be a new kind of song. Whales have songs of desire but they have no songs of pain and lamentation, so a very great part of their lives goes completely unsung.

Some time ago, a thing out on the floating sky threw the metal tooth to hang and twist in the white one's flank where it lodges now. This tooth-throwing thing, one of many such things, lives up on a small cloud that came down from the sky to move upon the place between the world and the sky. These clouds are not white changing clouds that hang up there where the birds are. They are thick and solid like islands but they move like clouds, drifting with the winds. They move on the breathspace, touching the world but not of it.

After that thing threw its metal tooth, the white one came up again to the touch the sky, broke the thing's little cloud and swallowed a small part of the thing. The white one now knows that this thing is only flesh and blood, not a thing from up on the sky like a seagull but something living and warm like whales and dolphins.

This gave the white whale a lot to mull over as it foraged through fields of kelp for spidercrabs or nudged into caves seeking squid. For a long time he puzzled over these things and why they had such a wild hunger for whales. How can such small things eat so much? What made these small swarming things so very great in their appetites?

Finally the things find the white whale as he dreams of floating up with the clouds and looking at islands with the gulls. They commence another hunt, with the persistence of hungry sharks. He wavers, the white one, on what to do about the things. On the first day he seeks to run from them, but their hard clouds are strong and fast and they seem possessed by some hunting spirit that the white one recognizes and even comes to fear, as far as fear is something he can feel in his time of great age.

On the second day he sounds deep, he touches ground at the bottom of the world. Avenues of krill and thick mountains crusted with barnacles and urchins. Gardens of anenomes luminesce in the darklight below. The squid looms up towards him, but the white one seeks no conflict and passes on without challenge.

On the third day the white one is weary and climbs more often to the top of the world and sucks in life through the breathspace. The things are all over him, and so, exasperated, he breaks them.

Then there is that one, the thing that threw the metal tooth in his flank all that time ago. It has a white bone where once was the part chewed off. It's white like the white whale, white like the clouds up above. It makes him think of death and he becomes furious at this thing's mad presumption.

The white one rages against this thing and its puny weapons, its metal teeth and its thirst for blood that is so far beyond even that of an orca. Another tooth bites, another of the thing's tentacles entangles. The pain is great but the fury is more.

He crashes through their small clouds, he beats his head against the hard dark cloud bigger than himself until it shatters and goes under into the deep to rest its broken pieces on the land beneath.

The things won’t stop. In the end he comes to wear that presumptuous thing with a naked white bone as an adornment, tangled with all the teeth on his side, held by tentacles to the wound that festers.

The white whale sounds, down to the deep beneath, where the entangled thing can see for itself that there is no need for any more blood and struggle. The thing has come to agree with this, and it rests gently on the flank of the white one, peaceful and serene.

Now at last the white one sings a wish to mix with those of the other whales around. He wishes that the world could come to know what the small bloody thing has at last come to know: the peace of the deep in the harmonious music of the singers. Their distant wishes mingle with the single wish of the white whale and the silent thing listens as he rides in his nest of teeth and tentacles on the white one's aching flank.

Up above where the sky and the world touch, one of the things is drifting on a tiny fragment. The white one leaves it alone. It can sing its own song of loss.

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