This missive was received from an unnamed cetacean research center. I include the attached note directly.
The highly speculative translation contained herein will not be published in any research journal, due to the uncertainty of the accuracy of the translation, as well as the explosive nature of the contents. Internal dissension in the research team prevents even the association of researchers’ names with the paper. Nevertheless, the content is considered important enough that it must be shared. There are unanswered questions implicit in the material, for which we have not yet found answers; those have become the focus of our next research.
The few footnotes are our own, consisting of interpolations of passages which may not be removed without leaving the content in chaos.
Within this sacred medium through which we move, let it be known to one and all, the strainers and the toothed, the breachers and the lurkers, even those who munch upon their cousins and all those who sing throughout the seas, that a tale from our recent plague has come within our realm of understanding, and through assiduous study we, the blues, have partially deciphered it.
They call this tale of horror and heroism Moby Dick[1]. We will treat upon this shocking name later.
This macabre story records, finally, the motivations of those who are merely parasites upon our oceans and swimmers of same, those who left and never returned, whose ancient forbears grew legs to walk upon the land. Following an unattached male of this species, a transcriptor of the tale and one with which we confess some feelings of brotherhood, we see, through repeated usage, how they name the individuals of their species; the rivalries of the males, fighting for dominance in more physical ways than our melodious competitions; the rhythms of their life, their groupings, the long separations of the mated pairs as well as the desperate lives of those unmated. It brings to the fore the pressures of survival, and how they have molded their species into conformance with the niche chosen for it.
The tale is literally bathed in horror, but the novelty of the tale obscures the atrocity until it is brought to the fore. The singer of this tale seeks a quiet place to rest his mind, some place to find a holy cessation of thought. He is introduced to just such an eddyless cove and seeks the blessed state, but is almost immediately interrupted by the intrusion of a similarly intentioned cousin. This one, unlike the tale-singer, has decorated his hide with scarrings, blackened patterns of stories, no doubt beyond our ken, brought into stark relief by the light of a single lamp.
And so the singular song of evil begins.
The very lamp that lights their resting place is fueled by our holy blanket against the cold depths[2], liquified through heat, then lit afire to decant its brilliance for the convenience of these… parasites.
For those of our cousins uncertain as to the visual aspect of such a lamp, consider the tales told of the mountains of the deep, spitting liquid rock, the lifeblood of the holder of our medium; this is fire, and this emits light. As proof of the holiness of our blankets, the oil rendered from them is set afire in order to emit light. But not for holy reasons unless, as we debate, they have a reverence for the brilliant orb in the sky. But this tale is not a time for philosophy.
The tale then describes, from novel visual angles, an early specimen of those contraptions which they build to float upon the surface of our sacred home, and this may be considered instructive as to their methods. But the scholarly mood of the tale is quickly broken in the most monstrous way, as the men in their “ship” encounter one of us.
They set upon a venerable male as he rests upon the surface, gulping down the sacred air to resuscitate himself for his hunt. And now the old one has himself become the hunted. Cruel shaped and purified metal, called harpoons and lances, are driven into our brother, and as we watch, he soon spouts out his life force and gives himself back to the great living sea.
But even this last selfless act is denied to him. In a scene so repulsive that many of us turned away our eye, veritably damaged at the atrocity, our cousin is callously butchered, hauled onto the vessel, and there chopped and cooked until his very blanket of life has become an oil.
The oil for their infernal lamps.
With effort, we strive to see this from their side: through these efforts, this loathsome harvest, the males accumulate resources and prestige. We do not know how females also accumulate the necessary prestige that presages mating; we only see a bit of that for the male of the species. Or so we tentatively predict; our store of knowledge is relatively small.
But all this is swept away in the horror of the tragedy. However, in some ways, the following scenes have an abominable aspect that’s even worse, as they chronicle the state of mind (as we think they have such) of their leader, and it’s an unreasoned hatred of our kind. True, he has incurred some injury that is accounted to us, but as it was suffered during their hunting of our kind, what of it? The righteous creature does not expect to escape to the next stage unscathed; it is the badge one bears in the great hunts, just as some of our cousins hunt the great many-arms, and suffer for it. This leader, this Captain Ahab, as they call him, is diseased in the mind and dangerous, having lost the true way. Indeed, in a scene in which his kind call out to him for succor, he refuses his aid, for such is his immoral rage, his anger at the just realities of being, that he must pursue the one who brought him injury, even though the injury was nobly inflicted, as if the injury was an insult to a holy creature.
At this juncture, we look to to our own mythos, and return to a point we earlier bypassed. We believe this tale is, indeed, named for one of our mythic great male rogues, Moby Dick[3], a prodigious and furious white who turned the clam inside out, hunting the very parasites who hounded him, and in his lonely pursuit, acquiring many grievous wounds and scars. But, as our forebears have passed down the tale, for Moby Dick it was not a fury at the honorable pricks of the hunted, but their unslaked hunger for death and more death; ruthlessly taking calves, mothers, and males all. This act concentrated his fury until all he lived for was the death of these parasites, and so he became a great defender of our kind, rampaging until he met his end in some lonely, unchronicled ocean.
We speculate upon the purpose of the parasite’s tale, for in the end Moby Dick triumphs, a few more scars in his holy hide, leaving only the carrier of the tale to survive and convey it to the rest of his kind. Is it cautionary? Let not thy pride, thy conception of self, drive you to murder your prey in defiance of the ways of your kind?
But we have a balm for our grief. The sight of Moby Dick, however crudely rendered, destroying the hated parasite, reminds ourselves that even a rogue, an unmated male made of fury and storm, has his role in the great song of life.
1A guess based on the content of their missive; further, but with less confidence, we suppose the movie of 1956, as the novel would be less likely to survive in their context, and some material they mention suggests the 1956 version.
2This must be a reference to the blanket of blubber all whales grow.
3A phonetic rendition is impossible, nor are the constituent elements of the nominative other known words, such as Baker; we substitute the human name to retain cohesion.
