The Link

Things are starting to fall into place. This morning I found the shiny crystal thing that our CIA-engineering puppy Bingo took from the man in the hat. I had guessed the crystal was some super chip, and that Bingo had simply taken it to another agent at the bowling alley, but there it was this morning, under the blankets where he sleeps. (I didn't touch it.)

And then all day today Bingo has seemed distracted, like he very much wanted to tell me something. When I went out this afternoon to do some yard work, he wanted to go along and supervise, unlike Willow, who has no interest in the yard and who now seems to be on permanent holiday (as am I) from projects around the house. That's OK. The yard really is a mess.

We were very encouraged to see new growth coming from the bare branches of our sad and cold-ravaged Turks cap bushes. Amazing, when you consider it, how the plant knows what to do. I'm reading a good book now called The Link, a present from my agent chief in Arizona. It has given me some new thoughts about how plants and animals adapt to change.

Most living things are pretty fragile--in the short term. My mango tree would soon die if it were moved only a few hundred miles to the north. I would certainly not make it through a winter in Minnesota. And yet all life on earth has always migrated, constantly (if slowly) adapting and adjusting. The book does a good job of explaining how the continents float on a big core a magma, always moving, north to south, east to west. The land, and the plants and animals on top, are always on the move. You adapt or move on.

Which brings up the matter of hybrid life forms, like the insidious cybernetic Sri Lanken biobot weevils, which have been absent form the yard since the freeze. Are they sleeping? Can they adapt? Does an artificial life even need to sleep? Are they just waiting for the Turks cap to recover so that they can continue to eat it (despite all my efforts to stop them)?

And then Bingo fixed his eyes on in the bushes. He froze, with that look he gets when he's uploading his visual stream to the central office. Why was he so intent in helping me today? And why this sudden interest in the yard and in the Turks cap?