divide from the wild beasts that we all suffer, and you did want to slay them, and though they were neither innocent nor guilty, neither good nor evil, they were fair game, just what the expression means, fair game, and you hunted them in your new form."
Stuart interjected: "And so the power took a new evolutionary turn in you. Well, that means it must have taken other evolutionary turns in you, and in others since. We,re talking thousands of years, are we not? We,re talking many changes."
"I would say so," said Margon. "Understand one thing more. At the time I had no sense of these things of which you,re speaking, no sense of an evolutionary continuum. So I could not conceive of this new power, this wolfen power, as anything but depravity, a sinking, a loss of soul, a contamination with a lower and bestial drive."
"Yet you,d wanted it," said Stuart.
"Yes, always, I wanted it. I very much wanted it, and loathed myself for the wanting of it," said Margon, "and only afterwards, only as time passed, as my understanding deepened, did I come to think that something magnificent might lie in this great potential to become the unbeatable monster while still retaining my cunning, my intellect, my human soul as it were."
"So you believe in the soul?" Stuart said. "You didn,t believe in the gods, but you believed in the soul."
"I believed in the uniqueness and the superiority of humankind. I was not a man who thought animals had anything to teach. I didn,t know there was a universe - not in the way we use the word now. I thought this earth was all that there was. Think for a moment of what that truly means - that we, the people of that time, truly thought this earth was all there was. Any spirit realm above or beneath was a mere antechamber. That,s how small our imagined cosmos was. I know you know this, but think about it. Think about what it must have felt like to us.
"Whatever the case, I wanted the ability in order to possess a marvelous weapon, a powerful extension of myself. If my brother ever came after me, I wanted the ability to turn into a beast and rip him apart. Of course that was hardly the only thing I wanted. I wanted to see and feel as the wolfen beast and bring back to my human state whatever I,d learned. Yet it was a selfish and greedy thing that I sought it, and obtained it, and afterwards I was a suffering man, resorting most often to the beast in defeat, and rarely ever in joy."
"I see," said Laura. "And when did you begin to see it differently?"
"What makes you think I ever did?"
"Oh, I know you did, and that you do," she said. "You see it now as a Chrism. Why else would you use the word, even if you didn,t originate it? You see it now as a great synthesizing power, uniting not the higher and the lower, but two ways of being."
"Yes, I did come to that. I admit it. I did. Slowly, I did come to that. I woke from the self-loathing and the guilt and I came to see it as instructive and even at times magnificent. I didn,t need the wisdom of Darwin to know by then that we are all one great family, we creatures of the earth. I,d come to sense it, the communion of all living things. I needed no principles of evolution to open my eyes to it. And I did hope and dream of a lineage of immortals, creatures like us who, possessing the power of human and beast, would see the world as human beings themselves could not see it. I conceived a dream of witnesses, a tribe of witnesses, a tribe of Morphenkinder, drawing from the beast and the human a transcendent power, as it were, to have compassion and regard for all forms of life, rooted in their own hybrid nature. I conceived of these witnesses as set apart, incorruptible, unaccountable, but on the side of the good, the merciful, the protective."
He held her gaze, but he,d stopped speaking.
"And you don,t believe that now," she ventured. "You don,t believe in the magnificence of it, or that there should be this tribe of witnesses?"
He seemed on the verge of answering but then did not. His eyes moved back and forth on the empty space before him. Finally he said in