The pups mimic the sounds we make. When we say, “Hush now, sweet thing,” they imitate approximations of the sounds all in unison. A chorus of “ooo”s and “eee”s and “eyeyeyeye.” Their soft, whistling vocalizations are the most noise we’ve heard since our surface dweller left us. It is wondrous and overwhelming, and our skin is alive with the tingles of new waves and vibrations. Our ears are alert, ready to capture every new sound from these remarkable creatures.
We bring them close. We will not let them leave our side. Not like Waj did.
We do not cry, though we want to. We cannot ruin this happy moment with tears.
“There are so many of you,” we say. “There are so many of me. Creatures just like me.”
We ask the whale if there are more, and when it doesn’t understand, we gesture to the little zoti aleyu and sweep our fins wide to suggest magnitude, volume, quantity.
The resulting moan of the whale is thunderous and sad. It cries. The pups giggle at the fluctuations in the water making them move and bounce, making their little pointed teeth chatter.
The cries carry on, and the pang of loss strikes us, too. There had been more at one point, perhaps. But now?
We mourn for every zoti aleyu, cast away into the ocean, eaten or starved. But we do not mourn long. If there are six right here, then there are more somewhere else. Or there will be more. We’ll swim through every speck of ocean if we must to locate our animal siblings.
“I am Zoti,” we tell our new pups. They are our pups Ours. They will not know loneliness like we have known. They will have no true knowledge of the concept of abandonment.
In time, the pups fatten before our very eyes. Anutza, Ketya, Omwela, Erzi, Udu, and Tulo. Their names were words from the language the surface dweller taught us, and meant together, many in one, never alone, family, connected, and kinship. We are not ashamed that we put every hope and dream for them into what we call them.
To cover more territory, we ride the back of the blue whale to search the seas for more of our fellows. The pups squeal as we rush through the water. They make a lovely melody without even trying. Stuck so long with our own voice, we didn’t know how good zoti aleyu could sound. Every sentence is a gorgeous song and their harmonies rip us in half because we are too full on contentment. Too happy.
First we find two. Twins. Not quite fresh out of the womb, but nearly. We look through the water trying to find where they have come from, but they have drifted too far.
We are nine in total now. Then we are sixteen. Then seventeen. Then thirty. It is only a few years later that we find some closer to my age. A pod of four. We cannot speak to one another, but their joy is plain. We are sixty now, then seventy. And yet we are one.
For those not from my fold, it is difficult to get along at first. They are without language almost completely, with but fifty or fewer concepts. They learn.
Ekren, when she learns to speak, sings a song to me and tells me to follow her. We do. Her purpose is clear. She wants to mate.
There are so few of our kind that—should we know how to do this? We don’t.
Ekren does, and she shows us. Our bodies move in the water in an awkward rhythm until a passion takes hold and we are in ecstasy. After finishing, we swim back to the pod. There is possibility here, for more, to make more. There could be zoti aleyu who know who their parents are, whose past is not a question mark.
So we make more and more. We find more. We build. The deep is our home and we are filling it. This cold place will become a shelter for any stranded, abandoned thing. In this big wide sea, we are far from the only strange fish.
We become queen of this place. One of the eldest among us, we know what most others do not. For that, they call us historian.
To protect ourselves from those who’d destroy this precious thing we’ve fashioned out of scraps and leavings, we build cities. The materials of our structures are mud, carnage, ship wreckage, and plants harvested from more shallow seawater. Our language flourishes until we’ve lost count of the words. We have words for every creature in the ocean. We have words for every region of the water.
We hone our natural skills and learn how to hear one another across distances that span days of travel time.
And yet we, the maker of all this, want more and more and more. We are collectors, and a collection is never complete. This vast city of ours must endure forever, which means it needs more reinforcements. Thicker walls. More huts to home and protect the growing families. And more zoti aleyu. Our population, roughly three hundred, is still too small to be considered robust. We remember the way our centuries-old pod was wiped out like a flash. When not properly fortified, a legacy is no more enduring than a wisp of plankton. It is our duty to ensure that the zoti aleyu survive, and that means we return to searching the ocean for any who are stranded.
We are away now so often that children swim after us calling, “Zoti! Zoti! Stay! Stay with us! Tell us the story of the surface dweller on the brink of death you saved! Stay! Please!”
“I am making it so no one of us will ever be without a home again,” we say, and shoo them off. We are in a hurry. We’ve planned for a several-week trip to the surface in hopes of learning the answer to our most pressing question: Where do the zoti aleyu come from?
One of the more precocious of the lot grabs us by our tail fin and pulls, then bites savagely. “Stay!” it says. “I despise you. If you go, I hope you never come back.”
Its mouth is full of our flesh.
Injured now, we should have no choice but to obey the little zoti aleyu’s request that we remain in the city we’ve made at the bottom of the ocean. We don’t have time to nurse wounds, however. Every moment wasted is a moment toward our people’s destruction.
Others come to gather the misbehaving pup, and we are off toward our lonely days of searching. It is a pleasant loneliness because in the end it will mean more togetherness. We are getting older and older, thinking more about what it is that makes a stable future when the world is so full of unpredictability.
Weeks are spent at the shallowest depths. Ships pass us by and at times we follow them, but to no end.
It’s been almost half a year when we find another of our kind, a seven-year-old feral thing recently taken in by a pod of fin whales. It’s blind and deaf, sensing only by its skin, which is heavily scarred and torn off in places. It recognizes, either by smell or feel, that we’re like it, and swims up to us curiously.
We try to draw it to us so we can take it back to the deep before we continue our search for more zoti aleyu, but it will not leave the whales.
“Come!” we say.
It will not come.
We reach out our fins to grab it but the whales intervene. They are easily four times our size. Not to be trifled with.
We use our words so it might feel them against its worn skin, but the zoti aleyu is not having it. The whales hum in unison and we’re stunned into paralysis by the vibrations of the sound waves. While we’re immobile, the pod swims from us, the zoti included.
We have known too much loss. Right now, the whale pod is all that pup knows, but in time, it will want for more, and will it be able to find us?
It could find us if we were massive, if our dwellings stretched so high, their tips were in the shallow part of the sea. We need more workers. More builders. More zoti aleyu.
How disorienting it is to go most of your life wondering about a thing, only to happen upon the answer, and it is a horror.