Chapter 8
Venice, Italy
Marco
DANI AND I SAT there in stunned silence, looking first at each other and then at my father.
“That would make you twenty-four hundred years old,” I said finally.
“More or less.”
“But how? Why?”
“Those, my son, are questions with which I have struggled all my life. Over the course of a very long lifetime, I have gone from thinking I was cursed by the gods, to thinking I’m a freak of nature, along with a thousand other possibilities in between. In recent years, as scientific knowledge has advanced, I have come to believe that I may possibly represent the next step in the evolution of mankind.”
“Are you telling us that your children and their children are like you?” I said.
“All of my sons and all of my sons’ sons bear the same stigmata that you have obse
