Margaret felt the unmistakable signs of her waking temper starting to boil and bubble. Who was this arrogant warmonger to talk, sitting there and looking so smug, this hypocrite with his guns and child soldiers and army uniforms? Talking down to her, singling her out personally, as if he knew everything about her and her personal choices. She clenched her fists on the table and set her jaw tight, doing her utmost to bite back her rising anger.
‘Well listen now, you can’t simply tar everyone with the same brush!’ she protested. ‘I’ll have you know that I recycle! My partner Ting and I, we only eat what’s in season, each of us drives a Prius, and we do a lot of biking and walking too. And you’re talking about livestock and methane? Well, don’t you dare accuse me of funding factory farms with my choices. No sir! I only purchase organic, locally raised, pasture-fed, free-range meat, dairy and eggs. It’s a damn sight better than, than yuppies and conservatives, and well, those people who go out and poach wildlife from the jungle, like they do here! And we sure as hell don’t eat at fast-food chains, not ever! I’m a medical doctor for God’s sake, I know—’
‘You and your personal habits are not the issue here, Doctor,’ the General growled with gravid authority, as that strange and terrifying fire flared up again in his dark eyes. ‘And I’m sorry to say that any of us at this table could easily tear apart each and every one of those ultimately useless acts of “green” consumerist addiction in which you so proudly participate. For these things are, indeed, meaningless in the greater scheme of things. Forget about those trivialities for the present, and just try to understand what I am explaining to you, instead of reacting with knee-jerk defences and offended anger. Tell me, were I to tell you that my foot was rotting with gangrene, would you simply advise me to put a band-aid on it?’
I certainly would, and then I’d happily watch you suffer and die a slow, agonising death.
Margaret realised, with a shock of icy panic, that she had completely forgotten about the General’s mind-reading abilities. She really hoped he hadn’t read that particular thought.
‘Of course not,’ she huffed, only realising after the words came out how haughty her tone sounded. ‘I’d suggest amputation of the foot, or perhaps even the entire lower leg, depending on how advanced the infection had become.’
The General smiled strangely.
‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘Do you now understand my analogy? Human beings, with their cultures of waste, exploitation, devastation and consumerism, are a virus—’
‘Actually, gangrene is caused by a bacterial infection, not a virus,’ Margaret interrupted, allowing her argumentative nature to get the better of her common sense.
The General paused for a moment and glared at her, and she could not help but cower beneath his withering gaze. An eerie terror crept through the very marrow of her bones, and with its chilling passage she began to understand that this man, no, this thing, this monster, hurling its terrible glare like a fiery spear into the depths of her being, was immensely powerful, beyond the scope of anything of which her imagination could possibly conceive. She bit her quivering lower lip and stared at the table, gripping the edges of it with trembling hands.
‘That little factoid is of no importance,’ the General growled. ‘Do not interrupt me again.’
Margaret nodded, still biting her lip and gripping the edge of the table. The General, however, seemed to calm down, and the boiling steam in his eyes withdrew to the dark place within him where it hissed and sizzled on glowing coals, subsiding temporarily from view.
‘The Earth is a living thing,’ he said calmly. ‘Are you familiar with what is now known as the Gaia hypothesis, first touched on in the eighteenth century by James Hutton, and postulated as a cogent theory by James Lovelock in the sixties?’
‘I, er, I think I’ve heard of something like that,’ Margaret answered, a degree of uncertainty clouding her voice.
‘Well let me make it clear, lest you harbour any confusion regarding the theory: it states that the Earth is not merely a dead lump of conglomerate elements and minerals hurtling through space. Instead, the Earth is a superorganism: a self-regulating entity that is alive.’
‘Well, er, that seems a little absurd to me. I can tell you that the conditions necessary for defining something as being “alive”, are—’
The General interrupted her with a slow, dry laugh that reverberated through the expansive chamber. The sound ran along the rounded stone walls and disappeared down the stairways like a flock of startled crows alighting from a shaken tree.
‘Dr Green … the almost childlike certainty you possess in your convictions is quite amusing. I do not mean to insult you, but surely after everything you have seen over the past few days, surely your mind must be opening, even just a little, to the acceptance of possibilities that are beyond the very narrow scope of what you have read in your academic journals and medical textbooks? You have seen me change form, before your very eyes, from man into elephant. This alone must surely defy every single dogma contained in those little periodicals of yours. No? Not yet? Are you still convinced, like most of your arrogant kind, that you know everything, that all that is to be discovered about this great and wondrous mystery called “life” has already been tagged, bagged and documented? Please Doctor, just for once, allow your mind to break free of the rusty shackles that imprison it, and try to open your thoughts up to new possibilities, possibilities beyond anything of which your myopic culture could possibly conceive. Therein lies true knowledge, true
