Nova 4

NAOMI MITCHISON Out of the Waters

To Naomi Mitchison all life is one. In her lifetime circle of friends are her adopted tribes-people in Botswana and Lawrence of Arabia. Around her home in Scotland is a great farm where all animal life is respected, where the death of a small deer that invaded the kitchen garden is felt as much as that of a cow dead of bracken poisoning. It is not sentimentality at all but realism—for all life is one. As in this story.

It was of course their own doing. Not their fault; that would be meaningless. But when they crawled out of water, when they started to copulate on land, developing arms and legs and at last brains and hands, the thing was there. Communicating through air by voices they lost communication through mutually touching water; they lost the great echo belts far down round our liquid-enveloped mother; that made what followed almost inevitable. Almost, for they had a glimpse of what they had become before the end came to them. We tried to show them and teach them. At first, as with children, we played games with them, even allowed them to shut us into enclosing spaces to learn communication. Yes, we even tried to communicate through air by voices like themselves, though a few of them were learning our way. Strangely, they thought they were doing us a favor, they felt they were superior. A large deep sea octopus will sometimes do this, waving forty feet of suckers, and the same is true of some of the sharks, but it is not a very pleasant thing to communicate.

It had taken hundreds of years and terrible pain to get so far with them. They had come on our bigger cousins whom they called whales and murdered them with every possible cruelty. But our cousins too tried to show them better ways, the sacrifice of self, refusal to leave the gashed and bleeding, the screaming body of the harpooned child. They clustered round the ship, heavy with plunder of what had been living flesh; they attempted to communicate, to show forgiveness, to be willing to be friends. It was useless. For a time the slaughter was so terrible that we were compelled to hate them although it already seemed possible that there was a chance of fellow-feeling developing. But as the slaughter dwindled out hatred rationally dwindled with it. It is productive of nothing to continue hatred: a pity for them that they could never learn that lesson. Instead, they always had to have enemies. That had become a necessity to them.

Our forefathers and foremothers, whom we of today were then, thought about their land-living, handed fellows with brains as big as our own but with this terrible inheritance of enmity and violence. It was most extraordinary. These human men and women knowingly lived in intense discomfort, crowding all together in what they called cities, making cell structures out of cement, like corals without beauty. This they did although it had been put into them by their genes and from very far back, that each must have a piece of territory, a space that he or she owned exclusively. A strange thought but coming on to land had made it inevitable. Now the crowding and the wish fought with one another in their minds. The land which they supposed they owned gave them food of many kinds in great plenty, as well as beautiful and ingenious toys with which they could do many kinds of things that they took with great seriousness. But here too this pattern of ownership overcame sense in their use. The more they had the more afraid they became of some others of their own species taking it. Even when they became able to communicate with our fathers and mothers they could not drop out of these far back patterns, which might have been of use in the days when they were a struggling species, but had now become as stupid as sharp fangs on a grazer.

Remembering back into the body of my far back mother I know that she was determined in some way to save the land dwellers, all the more because it had become apparent to us that their toys had developed into objects of terrible danger, certainly for them, perhaps even for ourselves. She allowed herself to be caught in a net. The meshes were painful; they trapped and twisted her beautiful fins. But she succeeded in relaxing and in time was loosed into the water so that at least she could move; she was at that time expecting to give birth to a child.

It was not unpleasant in the space and there were others of the ones they called dolphins, many from other seas, who let her know what had been happening and how ill or well they had succeeded in their task of communication. There were several humans swimming with them whom they found pleasant, playful and eager to learn. These humans had set up useful toys to help with the problem; there was already some interchange of ideas, though both sides found the sounds made by the other somewhat ludicrous. The humans also saw to it that our food was plentiful and to our taste, so that one or two of us who were not genuinely set on perfecting communication became lazy and would only play. But none of the humans were attempting to hurt us. And my mother was assured by all her friends that she had no cause for anxiety. Insofar as she might need help at the birth of her child all was prepared.

All went well with this and the humans were particularly delighted with the child, which was a lively male; my back mother allowed them to touch and measure him and in this way became in closer sympathy with one of the male humans who was called something like Djon. After that she and he spent much time learning to converse, for their advanced communication might be called that. She liked to feel him when he swam beside her. His skin was thin and changed color and he needed to come up often to breathe; he was a good playmate. But he appeared to be anxious and often split-minded, as though part of his large brain was elsewhere on some other problem.

By now ourselves, the dolphins, were no longer kept in the enclosure but were out in the open sea. But naturally as our object was the furtherance of communication with humans, with a view ultimately to getting them into an easier and more sensible social and moral position, with regard both to ourselves and to other humans, we stayed with them. My back mother and Djon communicated for hours every day. Often he would ride on her back, which was a pleasure for both; apart from words each could sense if the other was tired or depressed or for that matter happy. She became more and more convinced that something was wrong, was making un-happiness, not only with him but with the rest of the humans. So did the rest of us.

And then gradually the whole picture became clear and horrifying. These humans supposed that they had an enemy; they feared and hated this enemy with something akin to madness. They thought that this enemy would attack them by water in huge and dangerous toys that went below the surface and which the humans could not see and therefore feared the more. The fear had sent our friend into wickedness, which they knew, themselves, was abhorrent. But others who had power over them had planned it. This plan was that we, the dolphins, should be made to feel friendly toward these enemy toys and should approach them. But each of us was to carry unknown to him or herself a deadly container that would burst, destroying not only the underwater thing of the enemy and all the humans inside it, but also the dolphin carrier of the deadly material and indeed any other inhabitant of the nearby water. No wonder Djon was unhappy. Because in his odd human way he had grown to love my back mother and indeed the other dolphins, and yet he thought he had to destroy her because of this insane hatred which fought with this love.

The child was still suckling but was beginning to eat fish and other normal food. She felt he could be left. The essential was to stop this madness. We too planned, while pretending to the humans that we were reacting as they wished. Several of us offered our services and our backs to be ridden for it was clear to us that the only way to intervene was to show these humans that the others whom they thought of as enemies were truly the same as themselves. Yet it was a long way to the land where the supposed enemy lived and we were doubtful of our powers. Then suddenly a new chance appeared. A large toy belonging to the enemy, as large as an island, had, they said, been sighted. It had done nothing dangerous as yet but they were afraid, oh, they were deathly afraid of these other humans so like themselves.

Quickly we got together, my back mother and those of the rest who were most anxious to help; all began to play with their special humans, got them to mount on their backs. Then they set off toward the enemy, eager to help toward human sanity, thinking they could explain to both sides. On they went, on, and became aware of mounting terror and anger and then that their riders thought that somehow they, the dolphins, had become part of the enemy, were owned by the enemy. This was so strange that at first they could make nothing of it. My back mother and her friends tried their hardest to communicate, to explain their purpose, but were met by intense anger and fear. One of them riding had a belt with a toy in it that spat fire and death; he took it out but Djon cried out to him that he was sure my back mother on whom he rode, whose sea smooth body he felt between his gripping legs was no spy, no enemy. They shouted at one another and the rest of us tried to make them hear us and we came nearer and nearer to the dark island of the enemy humans whom we wanted our friends to meet and understand. We thought that was possible. It was not.

Suddenly from the large toy of the enemy there came a noise crack, there came death. For the enemy, equally afraid, had thought that we and our riders were attacking them like a school of South Sea sharks. The foremost dolphin and his rider were both killed at once. One or two of us dived, slipping our riders off, but my mother knew that she could not take Djon to the depths since he was constantly having to breath air, and she would not leave him. In this way they died together, their blood in one stain. In this way my back mother again became one with the great ocean, with the deep echo-layers, with past and future and most, with the future that was still immature in her male child, who was in time my grandfather's grandfather.

In the next few years other attempts were made to bring sense into an increasingly mad human situation. With more difficulty and less success, although there were always a few humans who, in their dim way, understood the danger they were all in. Ten years. Twenty years; the long running of waves between one shore and its opposite, the land dwellers hoping to destroy one another. Our cousins the whales did what they could and the seals, who are not large brained and could not understand the urgency, helped a little, so that something came through to the few humans who lived in the very far, very old north, and to a few who for some odd human reason were engaged in digging out earth and making their elaborate, peculiar toys in the equally far south. But not to the many millions who crowded and feared in the cell cities and were not happy with the toys that they had made.

Thus the end came and we, forewarned, were in the deeps. Here and there was breathable unpoisoned air, though some of us died with the humans whom we had tried to protect from themselves. The land died; nothing could live there. And slowly the seas cleared and emptied of any human thing. There are no more of the dark, death-dealing, floating islands today. The waters are ours with their past and their future. We do not mean to leave them. A few humans are left in the two cold ends of our mother but we do not think they can meet. Not yet. Perhaps in a thousand years when the middle barrier of destruction eases a little. We hope so and we are trying to teach the few humans so that by that time they will become more dolphin-minded. Ourselves, going far below, can pass the barrier. We have had to start again to show these humans that they can trust us. If they can be brought to help themselves by understanding, we will tell each group that far away there are other humans, not enemies but infinitely to be loved and cherished. One day perhaps humans will start again knowing that out of the waters, from which they should never have come, helping will always be theirs.