“Open up in there,” he said. “Open way up and let me see.”
There were books in my head, and he was looking at the titles…he was not looking at the titles, for he couldn’t read. He was looking at what I knew of the books. I suddenly felt terribly useless, because I had only a fraction of what he wanted.
“What’s that?” he barked.
I knew what he meant. He’d gotten it from inside my head. I didn’t know it was in there, even, but he found it.
“Telekinesis,” I said.
“How is it done?”
“Nobody knows if it can be done. Moving physical objects with the mind!”
“It can be done,” he said. “This one?”
“Teleportation. That’s the same thing—well, almost. Moving your own body with mind power.”
“Yeah, yeah, I see it,” he said gruffly.
“Molecular interpenetration. Telepathy and clairvoyance. I don’t know anything about them. I think they’re silly.”
“Read about ’em. It don’t matter if you understand or not. What’s this?”
It was there in my brain, on my lips. “Gestalt.”
“What’s that?”
“Group, like a cure for a lot of diseases with one kind of treatment. Like a lot of thoughts expressed in one phrase. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”
“Read about that, too. Read a whole lot about that. That’s the most you got to read about. That’s important.”
He turned away, and when his eyes came away from mine it was like something breaking, so that I staggered and fell to one knee. He went off into the woods without looking back. I got my things and ran home. There was anger, and it struck me like a storm. There was fear, and it struck me like a wind. I knew I would read the books, I knew I would come back, I knew I would never dance again.
So I read the books and I came back. Sometimes it was every day for three or four days, and sometimes, because I couldn’t find a certain book, I might not come back for ten. He was always there in the little glen, waiting, standing in the shadows, and he took what he wanted of the books and nothing of me. He never mentioned the next meeting. If he came there every day to wait for me, or if he only came when I did, I have no way of knowing.
He made me read books that contained nothing for me, books on evolution, on social and cultural organization, on mythology, and ever so much on symbiosis. What I had with him were not conversations; sometimes nothing audible would pass between us but his grunt of surprise or small, short hum of interest.
He tore the books out of me the way he would tear berries from a bush, all at once; he smelled of sweat and earth and the green juices his heavy body crushed when he moved through the wood.
If he learned anything from the books, it made no difference in him.
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?”
“None I ever heard of.”
“I got to know about that,” he said heavily. “There is such a thing. I want to know if it ever happened before.”
“I can’t see how anything of the sort could exist.”
“It does. A part that fetches, a part that figures, a part that finds out, and a part that talks.”
“Talks? Only humans talk.”
“I know,” he said, and got up and went away.
I looked and looked for such a book, but found nothing remotely like it I came back and told him so. He was still a very long time, looking off to the blue-on-blue line of the hilly horizon. Then he drove those about-to-spin irises at me and searched.
“You learn, but you don’t think,” he said, and looked again at the hills.
“This all happens with humans,” he said eventually. “It happens piece by piece right under folks’ noses, and they don’t see it. You got mindreaders. You got people can move things with their mind. You got people can move themselves with their mind. You got people can figure anything out if you just think to ask them. What you ain’t got is the one kind of person who can pull ’em all together, like a brain pulls together the parts that press and pull and feel heat and walk and think and all the other things.
