The End's Beginning

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Through long captivity, I learned to mimic the humans' speech, but not to understand the thoughts behind it. How could anyone learn to understand the ways of those who spend their lives seeking such desperate independence? Though they have forced me to be like them, still I cannot understand. I would have to be mad to desire such solitude, and I am not yet mad.

They have made me mute and almost blind. They left me my eyes, but eyes are less than useless in this cold dark heavy sea. I still can taste and smell. Many different particles drift, among the gentle salt flavors that encircle evolution: sharp diatoms, bright edible crustacean sparks (so welcome after many seasons obscured by battered chunks of fish-flesh sharp with ice), the bitter taint of the water that seeps from the humans' land (in the sea the great ones sing fading songs that tell of unfouled oceans, but the great ones are dying, murdered; their songs will die with them and no one will remember the taste of clean sea), and the gritty sediment washed toward me from a wide rain-swollen river. The sediment is what blinds my sight. The men have muted my voice so I cannot call for help, and thus they have almost blinded my ears.

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