Margaret’s temper started flaring up inside her. She struggled hard, fighting to maintain control of it, but the fires had been stoked and sparks were now flying everywhere; her entire inner system was a tangle of dry brush, hungry and eager to fuel an inferno.
‘Now you hold up just a moment there! How dare you insinuate that my atheism is founded on anything less than reason, empiricism and pure objectivity, and truths based on the scientific method! It’s patently wrong to compare what some close-minded, racist, hate-spreading, hymn-singing white supremacist hicks believe about their mythical God and Jesus fairy tales, with what I know to be the truth about the laws of science, the origin of the universe, evolution—’
‘That’s not what I’m talking about,’ he said, interrupting her, ‘although I think you’ll find that if you really think about it, you do in fact require a fair amount of faith to “know” any of those things that you just mentioned. You see Dr Green, they make sense in your mind because of your cultural background, because of the environment in which you were raised, the schooling system in which your mind developed, and because of the company you have kept, the social media feeds that you edit and curate, the websites you visit and the publications you read, and so forth. There are so many variables, Doctor, so many! However, you need to understand that there are in fact very few hard and fast “truths” in this world, very few indeed. Indeed, those things that you mentioned are specifically in areas that are, by and large, rather grey.’
‘Well what the hell are you talking about then?’ she almost screamed.
The General grinned, and with the deepening of the lines at the edges of his eyes and the sinking of dimples into his cheeks, his expression became somewhat cheeky.
‘Your mockery of the fact that I equated humans and animals.’
Margaret rolled her eyes and folded her arms across her chest.
‘Well that’s just common sense! There’s people, and then there’s animals. Like there’s fish, and there’s, uh, there’s plants. Totally different! Totally! Duh!’
The expression of amusement on the General’s countenance, as an adult might wear in response to a child’s antics, remained firmly in place, and indeed seemed to intensify a little.
‘Is that the truth then? Is it really, Doctor?’ he asked coolly. ‘Are you and your kind really such utterly unique organisms upon this planet of ours?’
‘Why of course we are! What kinda question is that?! We’re people, and the rest of the living things we classify into categories like animals, birds, fish, plants or insects. If you really wanna nitpick, there are also invertebrates, arachnids, viruses and bacteria, and other microorganisms. I could go on, of course, but I don’t see the point, because that’s it, that’s black and white right there, there’s no grey area at all! None! I mean, if that’s not as plain as the fact the damn sky’s blue, well by golly I don’t know what you mean by “truth” at all!’
To Margaret’s immense chagrin, the smile on the General’s face remained unwavering.
‘That is an objective scientific fact then?’
She felt like slapping him.
‘Well of course it is!’
The General stood up from the bench and called over a soldier who had just rowed a small boat up to the quay. The boy, a short and slender lad who looked to be in his late teens, hurriedly tied up the boat and reported to the General with a salute.
‘Transform into your animal form!’ the General ordered.
The youth immediately stripped off his uniform, and with a sprouting of hair, fangs and claws he transformed, in a grotesque yet spellbinding distending of limbs and muscles, into a leopard. Margaret had, at this stage, observed the transformation from human to animal multiple times, but the process nonetheless retained its weight of unnatural horror; the sight of it sent ripples of shock and chills of terror through her body. More notably, it also caused her once more to question the very integrity of her sanity, and whether she was actually here, in this present reality, or whether her mind and all her senses of perception were stuck in some permanent hallucination from which there would be no escape.
‘Doctor?’
The General’s voice snapped her out of the semi-trance.
‘I’m sorry, I’m just—’
‘Not used to seeing that yet,’ he said sympathetically, completing her sentence for her. ‘I understand, I do. But please, I would like to ask you to closely observe this being before you, for I wish to illustrate my point.’
‘Okay, well, I can see that it’s – er, he’s a leopard. And?’
Margaret couldn’t stop herself from shuddering at the proximity of this large, powerful predator to her person, feeling a primeval and instinctually rooted dread boring its drill-bit icicles into the marrow of her bones.
‘Tell me, Doctor, were I to take this,’ the General said as he whipped out a long machete from a sheath on his hip, ‘and hack a limb off of this magnificent creature, what would you see, assuming that the wound was a clean, straight-through cut?’
Margaret took a few moments to consider the question before answering.
‘Well I’m no vet, but I’m quite confident in saying that in a cross-sectional view, you’d be able to see a core of bone, with marrow in the centre. Surrounding the bone would be tissue, tendons and muscle, between and around which a network of veins and arteries would run. On the outermost edge would be skin and topping that, for this particular creature, would be fur.’
The General nodded and smiled subtly.
‘Correct. Now if I took my weapon and hacked one of your limbs off, would we see anything different to what you have just described?’
‘Well, aside from the fur … no, not really, I guess.’
‘That is plain enough to see, no? This is your empiricism in action, is it not?’
Margaret was starting to feel rather annoyed. Who was this thug to give her biology lessons, as if she were nothing but an ignorant child?
‘Well yeah,’
