"Oh, nonsense, am I the only one with a memory for unpleasant things?" asked Thibault.
"It,s not the chronicle of the Morphenkinder I want to reveal here," said Margon. "I am saying this." He looked pointedly at Stuart, who was reaching again for the potatoes. "You are creatures of body and soul, wolfen and human, and balance is indispensable to survival. One can kill the gifts one is given, any of them and all of them, if one is determined to do so, and pride is the parent of destruction; pride eats the mind and the heart and the soul alive."
Reuben nodded vigorously. He took a deep drink of the red wine. "But surely you,ll agree," said Reuben, "that human experience pales in comparison to the wolf experience, that every single aspect of the wolf experience is more intense." He hesitated. Morphenkinder, Morphengift - these were beautiful words.
But he remembered the words he had chosen for this himself when he was entirely alone: the Wolf Gift.
Yes, it was a gift.
"We don,t exist at maximum intensity all the time, do we?" Margon replied. "We sleep, we doze, we meditate - we discover ourselves in our passions and our disasters, but also in our slumber, and in our dreams."
Reuben conceded that.
"This music you,re playing for us, this piano music by Satie. This is not Beethoven,s Ninth, is it?" Margon asked.
No, and it,s not Brahms,s Second Symphony either, Reuben thought, remembering his musings of last night.
"So how many nights is the change going to just come over me," asked Stuart, "whether I want it or not?"
"Try really fighting it," said Thibault. "You might be surprised."
"It,s too soon for you to resist it," said Margon. "It will come on you every night for perhaps fourteen days. Now, with Reuben he learned to control it after what? - the tenth? But only because he had yielded to it so completely before."
"Yes. That,s probably so," said Thibault.
"But it,s always been a fortnight in my experience," said Felix. "After that, the power is infinitely more controllable. For many, seven nights in any one month is enough to maintain vigor and sanity. Of course, you can learn to keep it down indefinitely. There is often a discernible personal rhythm to it, an individual cycle; but these responses vary greatly, and of course the voices of those in need of protection - the voices can provoke us anytime. But in the beginning, you need that fortnight because the Chrism is still working on your cells."
"Ah, the cells, the cells," said Reuben. "What were those words that Marrok used?" He turned to Laura.
"The pluripotent progenitor cells," said Laura. "He said that the Chrism worked on these cells and triggered the mutation."
"Well, of course," said Stuart.
"Or so we theorize," said Felix, "with the feeble insights we have today." He took a deep drink of his wine, and sat back. "We reason that those are the only cells which can be responsible for the changes that take place in us - that all humankind has the potential to be Morphenkinder - but that,s based on what we now know of human chemistry, which is more than we knew twenty years ago, or twenty years before that, and so forth and so on."
"Nobody has yet clearly defined what happens," said Thibault. "In the early days of modern science, we attempted to grasp things with the new critical vocabulary at our disposal. We had such high hopes. We outfitted laboratories, hired scientists under clever ruses. We thought we,d finally learn all there was to know about ourselves. We learned so little! What we know is what you,ve observed in yourselves."
"It involves glands, hormones, surely," said Reuben.
"Indisputably," said Felix, "but why and how?"
"Well, how did it start?" Stuart asked. He smacked the table with his hand. "Has it always been with us, I mean with human beings? Margon, where did all this begin?"
"There are answers to those questions ...," said Margon under his breath. He was reticent, obviously.
"Who was the very first Morphenkind ever?" asked Stuart. "Come on, you must have a Genesis myth. You have to tell us these things. Cells, glands, chemicals - that,s one thing. But what,s the history of this? What,s the tale?"
Silence. Felix and Thibault were waiting for Margon to answer.
Margon was considering. He appeared troubled, and for a moment lost in his thoughts.
"The ancient history isn,t all that inspiring," said Margon. "What,s important now is that you learn how to use these gifts."