‘Gosh, I could never do that,’ Margaret remarked. ‘I’m absolutely petrified of heights.’
‘Sometimes the best way to get over a fear is to confront it head-on, Doctor,’ the General said with a strange smile. ‘But nonetheless, I digress. Come, let us keep moving. We still have much of the city to see.’
***
‘Could we please just sit down and rest for a while?’ Margaret gasped, drenched with perspiration. ‘We must’ve walked ten miles all over this place!’
‘I’m sorry, I did not mean to unnecessarily exert you,’ the General, who had not even broken a sweat after almost two hours of brisk walking and talking, replied. ‘Let us go and sit down by the dock on the river.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, wiping a film of perspiration off of her forehead with the sleeve of her combat fatigues.
‘Come this way, it’s only a five-minute walk. I’ll have one of my troops bring us food and beverages. Would you care for tea? Coffee? Red wine, perhaps?’
‘I could do with a cuppa joe, thanks.’
‘Of course.’
The General called out to a pair of teen boys who were practicing an acrobatic-looking form of unarmed combat on a patch of thick grass nearby. The two immediately ceased their activity and stood at attention when the General barked an order at them in his alien-sounding tongue. They scurried away immediately to carry out his instructions.
‘They will be back shortly with refreshments. Ah, and there is our destination,’ he said, pointing at a small wooden quay extending out into the water, alongside which there was a stone bench overlooking the river.
‘Thank goodness for the seat, General,’ Margaret commented, after the pair of them had reached the bench. ‘My legs are killing me! Don’t get me wrong now, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed seeing your city, but it’s been a lotta walking, and I ain’t no spring chicken, if you know what I mean.’
The General smiled.
‘I forget sometimes that you mortals lack our strength and stamina.’
Despite the constant tension and fear that crept and crawled like a mass of termites beneath her skin, Margaret had actually enjoyed seeing the sights of this strange city of antiquity, restored to its former glory. The architecture was unlike anything she had seen, and the seamless manner in which the buildings were integrated into the landscape was quite astounding. Also, aside from the weapons the soldiers carried – mostly AK-47 assault rifles – almost nothing that had been manufactured in a factory seemed to exist here.
‘A good number of my friends back home would be really interested in how things run in this place,’ she remarked to the General.
‘How so?’
‘Well, you appear to have an almost entirely self-sufficient, off-the-grid closed-circuit system here. I have to admit, I’m really impressed by that. That’s no mean feat right there. I have a number of friends who are into green living, you know, off-the-grid kinda operations, all about sustainability and such, but they still gotta buy solar panels, items made with plastic, and all kinds of other stuff manufactured in factories, using oil-based technology and materials.’
The General nodded.
‘It is good that your friends are doing these things, but we in T’Kalanjathu are merely making use of technologies that existed long before the era of industrialisation. It may seem revolutionary to you, but in fact it is not so remarkable. You humans of the twentieth century have grown up in the paradigm of the Oil Age, the Industrial Age, the age of mass production, the Green Revolution … and, of course, the era of the great global economy. You mortals, with your short lifespans and lack of ability to truly understand the true scope of history and time, tend to forget that these things, around which your collective existence seems to revolve, did not exist for almost the entirety of humankind’s time on this planet. But these things, these concepts, these paradigms that have sprung up in the blink of an evolutionary eye, these are the very things that have really tipped the balance. Nay, let me rephrase that: they have destroyed all balance completely.’
Margaret was quick to add a point to the General’s list.
‘You forgot to mention the age of modern medicine, General. That’s my specialty, of course.’
‘Excellent point, Dr Green, excellent point,’ he acknowledged with a nod. ‘All of these things came together in what you could call “a perfect storm”, a storm that enabled your kind to explode with a meteoric rise in numbers, and expand your territories across this entire planet, to its every last corner.’
Margaret turned to face the General with a look that was half incredulous and half defiant.
‘You’re talking about it as if people are just animals, like deer populations getting outta control in the woods without hunters to regulate ‘em.’
The General laughed loudly and abruptly.
‘My dear Doctor!’ he exclaimed when his laughter subsided. ‘I thought you were not religious?’
Margaret huffed indignantly, taking offence at this seemingly condescending remark.
‘What?! I’m not! Like I told you before, I’m an atheist! And what’s more, I don’t see what religion has to do with what I just said. There’s no connection at all!’
The General grinned before he replied. Margaret bristled at his patronising attitude, but managed to hold her tongue in check.
‘You may not believe in any supernatural deities, Dr Green, but what you take for “truth” is merely another belief system. Yes, your faith, just like Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism or Buddhism or any other number of “isms”, is based on philosophies that are bound to the very same systems that put those religions in place. Every one of you human beings is in thrall to a belief system just as silly and ungrounded in objectivity as the religions you atheists enjoy
