There came a day when he sat by me and puzzled something out.
He said, ‘What book has something like this?’ Then he waited for a long time, thinking. ‘The way a termite can’t digest wood, you know, and microbes in the termite’s belly can, and what the termite eats is what the microbe leaves behind. What’s that?’
‘Symbiosis,’ I remembered. I remembered the words. Lone tore the content from words and threw the words away. ‘Two kinds of life depending upon one another for existence.’
‘Yeah. Well, is there a book about four-five kinds doing that?’
‘I don’t know.’
Then he asked, ‘What about this? You got a radio station, you got four-five receivers, each receiver is fixed up to make something different happen, like one digs and one flies and one makes noise, but each one takes orders from the one place. And each one has its own power and its own thing to do, but they are all apart. Now: is there life like that, instead of radio?’
‘Where each organism is a part of the whole, but separated? I don’t think so… unless you mean social organizations, like a team, or perhaps a gang of men working, all taking orders from the same boss.’
‘No,’ he said immediately, ‘not like that. Like one single animal.’ He made a gesture with his cupped hand which I understood.
I asked, ‘You mean a gestalt life-form? It’s fantastic.’
‘No book has about that, huh?’