Moby Dick, Ecoterrorist
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For July’s third, free to read and share, story, James Morrow sets sail to bring in a very different whale of a tale. ~ Julian and Fran, July 12, 2026
Moby Dick, Ecoterrorist
by James K. Morrow
The Chase—First Day
The leviathan sleeps. He permits neither the shrieks of the gulls nor the roaring of the waves to disturb him, since he must conserve his energy for the fight ahead. His massive brow bobs near the surface of the Pacific Ocean like an immense naval mine. The mighty lobes of his tail point toward the seabed. In his dreams, he cries out to his enemy.
“Hear me now, O wicked ship! Thou art marked for obliteration!”
These days the leviathan travels under an assumed name. Call him Mocha. His nemesis is the Orochi Daikaiju, a gargantuan steel-hulled vessel that departed from Yokohama the day before. Although the Panama Canal could easily accommodate an adult sperm whale, Mocha never considered taking that route from the Atlantic to the Pacific, for a dockworker would surely have spotted him and reported the intruder to his superiors. Instead, Mocha cruised west around Cape Horn, crossed the Tropic of Capricorn, and allowed the Humboldt Current to bear him north along the coast of Peru, every cell of his cetacean brain fixed on finding and sinking the Orochi Daikaiju.
The leviathan awakens. The sun hammers his brow. An oily and insidious aroma reaches his nasal complex.
“I smell thee, damned Daikaiju! Across a thousand miles of open water, thy stench betrays thy coordinates!”
Gifted with a longevity to match Methuselah’s, the leviathan has time on his side, yet he fears even eternity cannot appease the darkness within him. He will feel better after working his wrath on the Daikaiju, though other such aquatic colossi will inevitably come afterward, bent on the same baleful mission.
He breaks his fast by gulping down a pod of passing cuttlefish. Abruptly a broad-winged female albatross lands on his dorsal hump. So scarred is Mocha’s skin, he can barely feel the bird’s clawed feet.
“Your notoriety precedes you,” says the albatross. “You are the Albino Avenger, in pursuit of—what vessel do you chase today?”
“The Orochi Daikaiju, out of Yokohama.”
“I have spent three exhausting days fleeing catastrophic conditions at the South Pole. My continent is melting. Might I travel with you awhile?”
“Thou mayest.”
“Call me Bronwyn. Will you carry me to the equator?”
“If that is thy wish.”
Mocha will never forget the day he struck and killed his first wicked ship. No sooner had he destroyed the three-masted Mashpee than the world began making sense to him. The vile vessels kept coming, of course, the Mashpee’s sister ships, their captains consumed by blubber lust and the going price of ambergris. He chased and fought them all, staving in their bows with his mighty skull, sifting their timbers through his stalagmite teeth.
As the century turned, canvas yielded to steam, and then came diesel power and, worse, harpoons fired from cannons. Decade after decade, Mocha’s friends, lovers, and relations died by the tens of thousands. At first the steel sides and bulkheads of the new whaling ships deterred him, but he learned to swim furiously around these abominations, creating artificial maelstroms that capsized the ships and sucked them down.
Tail thrashing, pectoral fins churning, he begins the day’s journey. The albatross is not his only passenger. Caught in a mesh of harpoon lines, a one-legged madman is lashed to the leviathan’s left flank. Call him Abraxis. Impressively, he has assimilated Mocha’s longevity and mastered the leviathan’s techniques for storing and conserving oxygen. Together the interconnected aquatic mammals patrol the world’s oceans, not quite friends but no longer enemies.
It has taken decades for Captain Abraxis to reach a rapprochement with the universe. What mellowed him was his encounters with other obsessive whaling masters. There was Captain Bartlett, for example, who had periodically suspended the mission of the Narragansett to chase Crimson Jack, the great red squid who’d bitten off his right hand. And there was Captain Eliphaz of the Wampanoag, who regularly deferred his economic obligations to pursue Queen Proserpine, the immense moray eel who’d deprived him of his left foot. Abraxis detested his fellow amputees, not only because they were probably leading their crews to pointless deaths but also because killing sentient aquatic animals now seemed to him an obscene thing for people to be doing with their time.
Thus it happened that, throughout the twentieth century, Mocha prosecuted his reign of terror with the blessing of his former ivory-legged nemesis. The sailors always died, of course, drowned like rats, smashed by the leviathan’s flukes, or devoured by his entourage of sharks. Mocha’s power gave him pleasure. Did God, too, enjoy his forays into slaughter—the Great Flood, the torching of Sodom, the Ten Plagues? Mocha couldn’t say. When it came to theological matters, he was out of his depth.
Though not a sociable person, Abraxis would occasionally strike up a conversation with the captain of a passing ship—but only if the man’s commission was innocuous: piloting a vacation cruise, retrieving a sunken treasure, gathering scientific data. Invariably the captain would offer to cut him loose from the sea beast. Abraxis always demurred.
“This is my penance,” he would explain.
From these nautical tête-à-têtes Abraxis learned of a menace even more terrible than the whaling industry. Early in the twentieth century, Homo sapiens had been conquered by Combustioni internis, a race of mechanized parasites called autos, boasting astonishing variety within the species. Most probably these invaders had come from another planet, but conceivably they’d sprung from gaps in Earth’s crust or perhaps from a dimension beyond human ken. The parasites survived by devouring great quantities of refined petroleum and excreting the residue as nasty vapors, a cycle that was rapidly turning Earth into a toxic greenhouse. Day after day, the carbonized ordure dissolved the planet’s coral reefs, acidified its seas, and sterilized its coastal wetlands.
Upon learning about Combustioni internis, Mocha shifted focus, targeting the vessels that ferried the saabs, volvos, teslas, volkswagens, ferraris, and chevrolets from one continent to the next. The Charybdis technique he’d perfected for sinking steel-hulled whaling ships worked well for these new enemies. By circumscribing the Marseille Mermaid, the Charleston Selkie, the Stockholm Jormungand, and the Hamburg Kraken with a ferocious whirlpool, Mocha had sent them to the bottom along with their unholy cargos.
“Thy death is immutably decreed, Daikaiju!” he cries aloud, reaching a speed of fifteen knots. “Ye shall not escape, O pernicious autos! Prepare ye to sleep amongst the anemones!”
Built by human minions in thrall to Combustioni internis, the first auto carriers were clumsy and inefficient. Their cargo holds could be filled and emptied only via a crane that lowered and retrieved the parasites one by one through a hatch in the main deck. But eventually the lift-on, lift-off procedure was superseded by the roll-on, roll-off technique permitted by a generation of freighters resembling gigantic seagoing dumpsters, the hull of each such vessel boasting stern gates leading to the cargo hold.
The leviathan detested these behemoths, for they often proved immune to even the strongest Mocha-made maelstrom. On those few occasions when he’d capsized and sunk a roll-on, roll-off carrier, nearly six thousand autos had perished at a stroke, but usually his engagements with the dumpsters proved futile.
Mocha and Abraxis have devised an ingenious strategy for sinking the Orochi Daikaiju—pride of the fleet owned and operated by the Amalgamated Shipping Corporation—and thus eliminating its Combustioni internis parasites. Explosives are involved. Sailing under the flag of Panama, the master of the Daikaiju foolishly believes he’ll have no trouble bearing his 1,700 toyotas, 1,850 subarus, and 2,050 hondas through the Canal and thence to the port of New York.
“O abominable Daikaiju, I shall chase thee o’er the Guatemala Basin and o’er the Cocos Ridge and ’round Perdition’s flames until I see thee turn keel up and descend into the Devil’s deepest trench!”
The Chase—Second Day
Mocha swims through the night. Occasionally he breaches and surveys the South Pacific constellations. His vision is bifurcated, a split-level way of being in the world. Using first his right eye, then its nonconverging mate, he observes the celestial Sea Serpent of Vanuatu, the heavenly Octopus of Taumotu, and the Oyster of Santiago with her thousand bright pearls that are also stars.
Mocha had passed the previous month tooling around the British Isles, sucking up unexploded depth charges from the North Atlantic battles of World War II. A dozen aquatic bombs lie in the largest of the leviathan’s four stomachs, waiting to be spat out. The weapons rattle against each other, a din that distresses the hitchhiking albatross, though she is not about to complain.
The plan is simple. If the leviathan can sustain his present speed, he will catch the Daikaiju long before it sights the coast of Panama with its ingenious canal. Somewhere above Isla del Coco, three hundred and forty miles southwest of Costa Rica, Mocha will blow the floating dumpster out of the water.
In the late afternoon he swims past Española, southernmost of the Galápagos Islands, and encounters a cruise ship, the Alfred Russel Wallace out of Guayaquil. A stately human female, dressed smartly in a white jacket with gold piping, presents herself to Abraxis as Captain Juanita Ruíz and explains that the Wallace is a chartered touring vessel carrying fifty-two “climate policy influencers.” These passengers have just finished exploring the archipelago from whose volcanic soil had sprung the theory of evolution by natural selection.
“Shall we untie you from that whale?” asks Captain Ruíz.
“I would prefer you didn’t,” says Abraxis.
Bronzed by the sun, a young man appears and introduces himself as Denis Chao, one of the climate policy influencers. Captain Ruíz and Mr. Chao listen respectfully to Abraxis’s story. As he reveals the nature of the leviathan’s mission, their facial expressions shift from fascination to delight to incredulity to anger.
“I would beg you to spare the Daikaiju,” says Ruíz, “but not because I doubt the earth is imperiled. For centuries these islands have been assaulted by a cruel weather pattern, El Niño, so savage it heats up the Humboldt Current, and climate change is causing the phenomenon to increase in violence and frequency. When El Niño is at its peak, the fish population here drops off sharply, and the specter of famine haunts the mammals and birds that survive on sardines. Our malnourished sea lions can no longer nurse their pups. Our starving flightless cormorants die in their nests. Our blue-footed boobies stop laying eggs.”
“Global warming also accelerates the spread of invasive species—on Galápagos and everywhere else,” says Chao. “These days fire ants plague the archipelago. They eat the eggs of the giant tortoises and mercilessly attack the adults.”
“Few sights are more wrenching than a tortoise shambling across the beaches of Española, dropping her eggs while trying to escape the ants chewing on her legs,” says Ruíz.
“Despite these horrors, our trip to Galápagos has energized me and my fellow influencers,” says Chao. “Our future podcasts, blog posts, marches, protests, and lobbying efforts will have us celebrating the mind-boggling fact that all humans, animals, plants, fungi, and bacteria are bound together in a tapestry of shared chemistry and common ancestry.”
“Mind-boggling to you, but not to most people,” says Abraxis scornfully.
“And once everybody takes Darwin’s revelation to heart, they will see they have no right to defile the tapestry,” Chao persists. “Instead, all nations will come together and cleanse the biosphere of greenhouse gases.”
“Oh, give me a break,” mutters Bronwyn.
“Fish fingers,” says Abraxis.
“I beg you to reconsider your mission,” says Ruíz. “The officers and crew of the Daikaiju are innocent.”
“The hunt must go on,” says Abraxis.
Mocha punctuates the madman’s assertion by releasing a geyser of seawater from his blowhole. Captain Ruíz and Mr. Chao become saturated, an experience they do not appreciate.
“Prey on the autos if you must, but not the sailors!” shouts Ruíz, shedding salt water.
“Better a sacrificed crew than a sacrificial planet!” declares Abraxis as Mocha bears him away from Española. “But hear my promise! In due course the whale and I shall discuss the moral ambiguities of our mission and act accordingly!”
The leviathan accelerates, soon reaching thirty knots. He skirts Isla de San Cristóbal and cuts across the goose-egg latitude, pausing to bite into the equator and gulp down a dinner of shrimp.
As dusk descends, the usual retinue of sharks arrives, a dozen ancient and rapacious fish bent on exploiting Mocha’s modus operandi for their own benefit. They will follow him into the thick of the battle, the better to claim the meaty spoils of naval warfare.
Mocha sends Bronwyn on a scouting assignment. She returns with heartening news. The Orochi Daikaiju is exactly where they expected to find it, ten nautical miles west of Isla del Coco.
The leviathan plunges ahead. Shortly after moonrise he spots the boulevard of foam formed by the Daikaiju’s screws and keel. Bathed in lunar radiance, bubbles and spindrift dance on the waves.
“You promised Ruiz we would discuss the moral ambiguities of our mission,” says the madman.
“And indeed we shall—after we have accomplished it.”
The Chase—Third Day
The burning sun ornaments the tropical sky with streamers of red and gold. Mocha maintains his frenzied pace. Soon his left eye discloses Isla del Coco and its adjacent formations, arrayed across the horizon like teeth jutting from a tyrannosaur’s jawbone.
At noon Mocha reaches 6ºN, 87ºW along with the sharks, the perching albatross, and the attached Abraxis. A soft but steady rain mutes the sky and veils the sea.
“It’s near,” whispers the leviathan. “It’s very near.”
Now the misty curtains part, and the behemoth appears, all 62,200 tons of it, churning through the ocean like a sarcophagus built to inter an entire Egyptian dynasty.
“To the last I grapple with thee,” mutters Mocha.
The leviathan is dismayed, but not surprised, to behold two corporate cutters, the Privateer and the Expedient, escorting the Daikaiju. Abraxis reports that each vessel is armed with 76-mm guns and short-range missiles. Apparently the stockholders of Amalgamated Shipping, acting at the behest of Combustioni internis, have plotted to assassinate the Albino Avenger before he can create his signature maelstrom.
Taking a deep breath, Mocha forms a psychic bond with his largest stomach. A depth charge travels up his esophagus and comes to rest on his great trampoline of a tongue. He races toward the nearer escort, the Privateer, and vomits forth the canister. The projectile flies true, striking the hull amidships and detonating. Soon the cutter is listing to starboard and going down fast. Her sailors abandon ship, a stratagem of which the sharks approve.
Heady with success, Mocha summons another depth charge to his tongue, then takes aim at the Expedient. He spits out the canister. It strikes the prow, blowing open a hole with the diameter of an oil drum. Terrified sailors leap overboard. Minutes later the cutter sinks toward the Cocos Ridge, even as the sharks fall upon the human jetsam.
Better a sacrificed crew than a sacrificial planet. Mocha admires Abraxis’s motto, even though it evokes the vile chant, “a dead whale or a stove boat.”
The leviathan summons the balance of his arsenal to his throat. Perhaps these remaining charges will secure a final victory, perhaps not—he will soon find out. The behemoth’s prow and sides are formed of interlocking steel plates, each ten centimeters thick, so Mocha decides to attack from the rear. With any luck, he will shatter the enormous stern gates through which the autos enter and exit the hold.
The leviathan cruises along the behemoth’s starboard flank, passes the rudder, and turns 180 degrees. He fantails forward, spewing explosives.
“From Hell’s heart I stab at thee!”
The charges arc gracefully through the air, strike the stern, and detonate, blowing the gates off their hinges. Tons of seawater rush into the breach.
“For hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee!”
Mocha peers into the cavity, admiring what his strategy has wrought. But something strange is happening. Evidently Amalgamated Shipping realized that if the cutters failed to stop the Albino Avenger, the Daikaiju might go down, so they took measures to protect the Combustioni internis specimens. Frantically the sailors detach the autos’ stabilizing chains and inflate the powered pontoons affixed to their undercarriages. One by one, the parasites cruise free of the carrier, crashing through the waves under the impetus of outboard motors. The radio-controlled rudders send the autos on a southerly course toward Isla del Coco. Soon a flotilla spreads outward from 6ºN, 87ºW, as far as a whale’s eye can see, thousands of subarus, toyotas, and hondas bearing down on the island at fifteen knots like an immense amphibious landing force.
The Daikaiju slides beneath the sea. The sharks feast on the helpless crew. Screams shatter the air. The waves turn pink. The carrier’s death seems to Mocha a hollow victory, for the parasites are escaping in droves. Soon they will be on the beach and overrunning the island, safely beyond Mocha’s fury. Instead of succumbing to despair, he sounds and breaches, sounds and breaches, sounds and breaches, each time crashing down on the flotilla and sinking at least a dozen autos—but it’s obvious the majority will survive.
The leviathan refuses to abandon hope. “Know this, friends,” he tells Abraxis and Bronwyn. “A sacred solidarity obtains among sea monsters—at least when our bellies are full. Even as I speak, this ancient fellowship bears down on the autos.”
First Crimson Jack, paragon of cephalopods, appears on the scene, a prodigious gloopy mass, suckered tentacles wriggling in preternatural sine waves. Reaching the flotilla, he flogs the autos, lacerating their pontoons. Now a forty-foot moray eel arrives, the legendary Queen Proserpine. She closes on the autos and chews their pontoons to pieces with her pigeon spike teeth. In the space of an hour, all of the Daikaiju’s cargo has disappeared.
The monsters trade glances of mutual respect and instinctual suspicion. Under different circumstances, they would be maneuvering to eat one another, but today they are allies.
“This was a good fight,” says Crimson Jack.
“Worthy of its own constellation,” says Queen Proserpine.
“We are grateful to ye,” says Mocha.
“The earth is grateful,” squawks Bronwyn.
“A malign and inscrutable Providence is grateful,” wheezes Abraxis.
The leviathan swims away at twenty knots, the albatross soaring above him, the madman still fastened to his flank. By moonrise Mocha will have fallen asleep. His nightmares will find him harpooning himself in successive acts of atonement. When he awakens, his cetacean skin will collect the rising sun, while that same star burns away his remorse, and his cranium swells with pride and spermaceti. Once again he has joined the side of the giant tortoises, sea lions, flightless cormorants, and blue-footed boobies.
“The battle is won,” he tells the madman. “But the war goes on.”
“Next time we’ll arrange to have more huge cephalopods and immense eels on hand,” says Abraxis.
By Mocha’s lights, the madman’s words are at once prescient and wise. Marine gigantism is the hope of the future. Tentacles will in time save the world. You can never have too many squid.
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Thank you for joining our journey this week.
James Morrow has been writing speculative fiction ever since, at age seven, he dictated “The Story of the Dog Family” to his mother, who dutifully typed it up and bound the pages with yarn. Over the years, his efforts have earned him two World Fantasy Awards, two Nebula Awards, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire. The New York Times Book Review has called Morrow “a wildly imaginative and generous novelist who plays hilarious games with grand ideas.” He lives in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, with his wife and two extraterrestrials masquerading as border collies.
“Moby Dick, Ecoterrorist,” © James Morrow, 2019.
That was a GREAT riff on Meville!