Legends Of The Whale
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Legend of The Lost Whale
There is on record, in the literatures of science, a whale who sang at a pitch higher than others of his kind could hear. He swam alone.
It is not known if he could hear their singing; or if he felt shunned by their lack of response. Perhaps he was thought to be rude and stand-offish by those whose paths he crossed.
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Legend of the Lusty Whale
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The Tale of Tail and the Promiscuous Whale
Herewith the story of a randy whale, an Arctic lover of antic bent in a wantonly cetacean way. Deep fathoms of common doubt pooled in the podsong within the cow and bull herds, concerns about his quickie whale-time capers that left problems in their wake.
At the end of a long life troubled by scandal, as he drifted from them ~~~ dying, they all agreed that, all-in-all, he had indeed made the best use of his one and only life.
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Legend of Lester, the Lesser Whale
The story is told of Lester, a whale of modest anonymity in a pod of moderate size. Lester neither strove harder nor dove deeper than other whales, nor did he stay under longer than average. The echoless tones of hiSong were as vacuous as they were forgettable, unremarkable but for the blandness of his drone.
It came to pass, in the way of things and time, that a whaling ship took the slow and unfortunate Lester. By means of communication available specifically, and only, to whales, it was learned (thence, to all the whole Ocean) that more ambergris and spermaceti had been mined from Lester than from any whale in the whole of history. Within a hundred years Lester became the Lesson of Inner Worth used by all the mothers of whaledom teaching virtue to their young.
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Legend of the Listing Whale
There was a single whale of a rare and vanishing breed who began to swim at a slant one day, with a floating stance that canted slightly to port. He leaned left.
It was later discovered that his affliction wasn’t genetic or disease related, but that the blubbery old salt was a sot. He had discovered a sunken galleon full-laden with sweet wines on one of his dives, and he'd got the secret taste for it.
Tuns of aged Madeira stacked in rocking wracks; gallons, m'dear, doing time in purgatory before reaching paradise, properly decanted. Old ports banked in cask rows three and four high, and tho vintage wine with an Ocean Water mixer may be an abomination for some, what is the taste of brine to a whale after all?
Punishment for the hoarding was inevitable, and proved as severe as it was just. The day came when he crushed the last flagon into shards and then there was none. And tho he searched 'til his dying day, he never found another to match the bounty of that ship.
All that remained for him was the terrible cravings of a destabilizing habit until... that too was gone with his passing. Thus it is listed in the Annals of Oceanic Serendipity that his people made the Protected Numbers List when the listing whale died.
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Legend of the Last Whale
It began as retaliatory bursts of energy hundreds of miles above earth. It was the day that the machines died and fell from the sky. With the collective soul of machines fried, society soon followed. Far out on the vast sea, the delicately wired whales were crippled, too, by the electromagnetic pulse. And tho their circuits were merely scrambled instead of fried, the effect on whales was the same.
Seemingly singing as before, yet unable to understand or be understood… it made them crazy, and it drove them apart. From behind the unbreachable walls of their enforced solitude, they scattered in terror. Whales of every species fell into isolation, where they withered without progeny, and all died alone.
Against statistically predictable odds, there was a whale who escaped the Disordering. And it was that same whale who broadcast on a different channel; it was the same whale who swam and sang alone.
He had long grown used to the solitude that proved fatal to his kind. Deprived of company, he made a diversion out of diving deeper than the others. It was by chance of this that he escaped the scrambling pulse. Buffered by protective waters while plying the stygian deep, he rose to find his world changed, out of reach as ever, but forever beyond a hope.
There followed years while he searched the post-Disordering for a fellow whale willing to survive, someone else who dove too deep that fatal, fateful day. Years of disappointed search came to an end when the last voice died, and the last whale taught himself to lie.
Many were the dives when he thought how easy it would be to not bother with the swim up for air. But if I survived then perhaps another lives, he learned to tell himself. And self-convinced, he rose to breach, and to swim another day.
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