by J M Hemmings
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 scoffing at.’
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 arou
nd 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,’ she responded, at once realising that her tone was dangerously snappy and sarcastic, but at the same time feeling like she was unable to stop the rollercoaster that had begun to roll. ‘Gee, thanks for the seventh-grade biology lesson! Seven years in med school certainly didn’t teach me any of that!’
The General wore an odd smile on his visage, and the condescension writ across his face and sparkling in his eyes was plain to see. This only served to stoke Margaret’s fury with an even greater vigour.
‘Allow me to persist for a few moments with my “seventh grade biology lesson”, if you will,’ he continued.
Margaret wanted to explode, wanted to jump up from this bench and storm off in disgust … but where would she go? She was a prisoner here. There would be no escape for her, not yet, at least. Until she had devised a solid plan to liberate herself from this vast penitentiary, she was, unfortunately, stuck fast. With gritted teeth and an angry vein pulsing in her forehead, she swallowed her fury and tried to smile as she replied to the General.
‘Fine, sir. Please do continue.’
There was no mistaking the hostility in those words. The General, however, remained calm and collected in the face of the scorn directed his way.
‘Yes, persist I will my dear, persist I will. Now tell me,’ he continued, prodding the tip of his machete into the leopard’s side, at the spot where his heart was located, ‘if I were to make an incision here, what would I find?’
‘Well like I said, I’m no veterinary expert, but I do believe that that’s where the feline heart is.’
‘Correct. Now if I were to make a similar incision right here,’ he said, whipping his machete across with terrifying speed and stopping the point mere centimetres from Margaret’s chest, causing her to jump in her seat and let out an abrupt shriek of fright, ‘what would I find?’
Margaret swallowed slowly before answering, taking a moment to try to steady her abruptly frayed nerves.
‘You’d, uh, you’d also find a heart.’
‘What is the function of this organ, both in the leopard and in yourself?’
‘It pumps and circulates blood, and provides nutrients and oxygen to the … now look,’ she continued, bristling with annoyance and impatience, ‘what’s the point of these questions?’
The General did not answer her, but instead persisted with illustrating his example.
‘Yes, that is the basic function. All of these things can be shown to be significant similarities, can they not? Four limbs, as possessed by both your kind and this leopard, for various functions of locomotion. A mouth to take in liquid and solid nutrients to fuel the ever-moving machine. Eyes, ears and a nose to filter and interpret a glut of information pouring in, in a never-ending deluge, from the world that surrounds the organism. And now I must ask yet another question: what lies at the very centre of this, an organ whose function is to both process all of this information and to regulate these systems?’
‘A brain.’
The General flashed her a beaming grin of triumph, his teeth almost unnaturally white in the morning light against his deep, almost bluish-ebony skin.
‘Yes, Dr Green. A brain. Were I to remove this leopard’s cranium and yours, what differences would I find?’
‘Um, er, well … differences in the size of the brain, for one thing. And that’s an important difference! Ha! Yeah General, a real important difference!’
‘Oh, I don’t think that you’ll find that its size and mass is nearly as consequential as you may think. How much does the average human brain weigh?’
‘About three pounds, I believe.’
‘And how much does an elephant’s brain weigh?’
‘Okay, way more, but you’re dead wrong if you think that brain size on its own is a determiner of intelligence!’
‘I know that. You’re going to tell me now that the brain weight to overall body weight ratio is a far more accurate scale to use, are you not?’
‘Yes! Checkmate, General! Humans are by far at the top of that chart!’
The General grinned, and his expression was almost boyishly mischievous; he appeared to be enjoying this.
‘No, your kind is not, actually. There are plenty of animals with higher brain-weight-to-body-weight ratios than yourselves. The humble tree shrew, for example, beats you humans outright.’
‘Well … well … I’d like to see a damn tree shrew do a math problem, or write a symphony, or build a hospital!’
The General laughed.
‘Hahaha! Now we are getting somewhere, aren’t we?’
Margaret shot the General a sour look.
‘I don’t think we’re getting anywhere,’ she retorted with flat bluntness. ‘In fact, I don’t get why we’re having this discussion at all. There doesn’t seem to be a point to any of this.’
A look of anger flashed across the General’s eyes, and storm clouds billowed behind the mountain ranges that were his dark irises.
‘No,’ he hissed in a soft but unmistakably menacing tone. ‘No, of course you don’t. Of course you won’t … you humans are all the same, the lot of you. I could tell you things – show you things – that would undo every bit of cultural brainwashing your mind has been subjected to from the moment you entered the vast and tragic illusion that is your First World existence – I could show you these things, and open your mind to vast possibilities, possibilities that are so far beyond the scope of your crude and limited mortal perspective that it would seem to you that you had only just emerged from a state of infancy … but no, your mind is closed. Closed and rusted shut, like a complex machine of iron rotted and fused into a brown, unusable lump by decades of seaside air. No hatchet or crowbar could get through the crusty mass of oxidised metal that surrounds that slowly calcifying organ inside your skull.’
‘What?!’ Margaret yelled, her cheeks flushed with the redness of indignation. ‘How dare you accuse me of being close-minded! This is not the first time you’ve said that either! And I’ve already told you, I’m—’
‘YOU ARE CLOSE-MINDED, MORTAL! JUST LIKE ALL OF YOUR WRETCHED KIND!’
The vociferous volume of the General’s eruptive roar shut Margaret down immediately. Once again, she felt an almost paralysing terror washing over her as a sense of the vastness of this being’s true might overpowered her senses.
‘I’m … I’m sorry,’ she heard herself whimper, the shameful sound dribbling out of her quivering lips, and then echoing with the faintness of a blurred memory.
The General glowered at her for a few moments, his eyes aflame with righteous indignation. Then, as abruptly as it had flared up his temper subsided, and he continued with the example he had been trying to illustrate.
‘I apologise for that uncalled-for outburst,’ he said calmly, his voice assuming a gentler tone. ‘Please, allow me to continue explaining my theory.’
‘I, uh … it’s okay, go on,’ she murmured, her words fraught with unease. She hoped that the General wouldn’t notice how much her hands were shaking.
‘Now, I’d like you to think carefully about everything we’ve just agreed upon, regarding the similarities of the biological and anatomical makeup of your kind to the thousands upon thousands of other mammals, birds, fish and reptiles who occupy this planet. Is there anything really significant that sets you apart?’
‘Not really I guess, but
the fact that we use tools and—’
‘I said, is there anything in terms of your biological and anatomical makeup that sets you apart?’
Margaret was finding it quite difficult to concentrate with the leopard sitting mere inches from her, its baleful amber eyes locked in an uncomfortable stare with her own. She looked away before answering the General’s question, fearful of the latent threat of violence emanating constantly from the majestic feline.
‘Okay, no. No there isn’t. Biologically and anatomically, we are not unique. We’re just the same as any other mammal really. But our intelligence—’
The General sighed softly and narrowed his eyes.
‘Your supposed “intelligence”, short-sighted in scope as it is, is unique to your kind, in a sense. Inventiveness and tool use, yes, your kind has perfected these aspects of evolutionary behaviour. But it is not tool use, which itself is widespread throughout the animal kingdom, that brought your species to dominate this planet. No. Language, writing and storytelling form the triumvirate of power, the solid foundation that allowed you humans to become self-proclaimed emperors of the earth. But hand in hand with the acquisition of those things came other, uglier things.’
‘Uglier? How can you say that? Look at the works of wonder and beauty the inventiveness of the human spirit has created over the years, General. Look at this place you’re in! This city came about as a result of your people’s hard work and ingenuity! Surely you can’t disparage the glorious achievements of your own culture?’
The General gazed around him at the great and ancient city and castle, nestled here in the magnificence of this primeval jungle valley.
‘You are right,’ he conceded. ‘There is great beauty in many things wrought by the hands of the human primate. Despite this, I must maintain my stance; I believe that there is more ugliness than beauty in the “intelligence” of your kind, if one was to weigh those two concepts on a set of scales.’
The leopard rumbled an approving bark at this, causing Margaret to squeak embarrassingly with fright.
‘I’m s-, sorry,’ she stammered, staring apprehensively at the huge cat. ‘Look, I’m not used to being so c-, close to a wild animal. Could you … could you change back please, back into a, er, person?’