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"True," I said with a little shrug. "Rather crude, isn't it?"
He gave another soft laugh.
"No. Not really. It's as if eighteen hundred years of Western civilization have produced an innocent. "
"An innocent? You can't be speaking of me. "
"There is so much talk in this century of the nobility of the savage," he explained, "of the corrupting force of civilization, of the way we must find our way back to the innocence that has been lost. Well, it's all nonsense really. Truly primitive people can be monstrous in their assumptions and expectations.
They cannot conceive of innocence. Neither can children. But civilization has at last created men who behave innocently. For the first time they look about themselves and say, `What the hell is all this!"'
"True. But I'm not innocent," I said. "Godless yes. I come from godless people, and I'm glad of it. But I know what good and evil are in a very practical sense, and I am Typhon, the slayer of his brother, not the killer of Typhon, as you must know. "
He nodded with a slight lift of his eyebrows. He did not have to smile anymore to look human. I was seeing an expression of emotion now even when there were no lines whatsoever in his face.
"But you don't seek any system to justify it either," he said. "That's what I mean by innocence. You're guilty of killing mortals because you've been made into something that feeds on blood and death, but you're not guilty of lying, of creating great dark and evil systems of thought within yourself. "
"True. "
"To be godless is probably the first step to innocence," he said, "to lose the sense of sin and subordination, the false grief for things supposed to be lost. "
"So by innocence you mean not an absence of experience, but an absence of illusions. "
"An absence of need for illusions," he said. "A love of and respect for what is right before your eyes. "
I sighed. I sat back in the chair for the first time, thinking this over, what it had to do with Nicki and what Nicki said about the light, always the light. Had he meant this?
Marius seemed now to be pondering. He too was sitting back in his chair, as he had been all along, and he was looking off at the night sky beyond the open doors, his eyes narrow, his mouth a little tense.
"But it wasn't merely your spirit that attracted me," he said, "your honesty, if you will. It was the way you came into being as one of us. "
"Then you know all that, too. "
"Yes, everything," he said, dismissing that. "You have come into being at the end of an era, at a time when the world faces changes undreamed of. And it was the same with me. I was born and grew to manhood in a time when the ancient world, as we call it now, was coming to a close. Old faiths were worn out. A new god was about to rise. "
"When was this time?" I asked excitedly.
"In the years of Augustus Caesar, when Rome had just become an empire, when faith in the gods was, for all lofty purposes, dead. "
I let him see the shock and the pleasure spread over my face. I never doubted him for a moment. I put my hand to my head as if I had to steady myself a little.
But he went on:
"The common people of those days," he said, "still believed in religion just as they do now. And for them it was custom, superstition, elemental magic, the use of ceremonies whose origins were lost in antiquity, just as it is today. But the world of those who originated ideas -- those who ruled and advanced the course of history -- was a godless and hopelessly sophisticated world like that of Europe in this day and age. "
"When I read Cicero and Ovid and Lucretius, it seemed so to me. " I said.
He nodded and gave a little shrug.
"It has taken eighteen hundred years," he said, "to come back to the skepticism, the level of practicality that was our daily frame of mind then. But history is by no means repeating itself. That is the amazing thing. "
"How do you mean?"
"Look around you! Completely new things are happening in Europe. The value placed upon human life is higher than ever before. Wisdom and philosophy are coupled with new discoveries in science, new inventions which will completely alter the manner in which humans live. But that is a story unto itself. That is the future. The point is that you were born on the cusp of the old way of seeing things. And so was I. You came of age without faith, and yet you aren't cynical. And so it was with me. We sprang up from a crack between faith and despair, as it were. "
And Nicki fell into that crack and perished, I thought.
"That's why your questions are different," he said, "from those who were born to immortality under the Christian god. "
