Symbiography Read Online Free PDF Page B

usual on the patio, where it sat and grew cold until the serving-cart rolled out at dusk to clear the table and chase away the gathered song birds. The Dreamer spent the entire afternoon and well into the night watching antique television commercials from the Late Industrial Age. He learned that Mercury and Ford and Buick were the names given to cars by the romantic mercenaries of that time. Imagine, names for machines! The relics from the snakeskin pouch were likewise identified: along with ballbearings and spark plugs, the Nomad included among his treasures a vacuum tube, three automotive fuses, a flashlight bulb and a tiny six-pointed metal star which had once been used by children in a ball-game known as “jacks.”
    The Dreamer stared through the glass partition at the unconscious form stretched on his back for diagnosis in the automated clinic. Sondak only half-listened to the medical report. The computer told him that his “guest” was free from any contagious diseases and suffered only from malnutrition and the annoyance of four different species of body-vermin. Although full-grown, the Nomad stood no taller than the average ten-year-old City child and weighed even less; a frail body, marked with savage scars which froze the battle-agony of his wounds forever into his flesh.
    “How old is he?” Sondak asked.
    The computer’s answer comes instantaneously: “Bone tissue analysis indicates no more than fifteen or sixteen years.”
    “So young …” The Dreamer contemplated the lean, weathered features of his captive, who appeared to have experienced more in a few short years than he had in over a century of living. Sondak frowned, troubled by the implications of this momentary self-awareness. He saw, as if for the first time, the strict limits of his cloistered life. He felt imprisoned by a wall of books. The pleasures he took: berry-picking, puttering in the garden, surprising rabbits and deer while walking in the woods, eating organic foods, watching the sunset, all seemed tame when confronted by the scar-striped body of the young Nomad. Par Sondak’s adventuring took place in the shadowy realm of dreams; how pale his most stirring Renaissance fantasy appeared when he compared the cloak-and-dagger posturing of his wicked Cardinals and condottiere with even one day of life among the nomadic desert tribes.
    In the end, Sondak’s scholarly nature overcame his dissatisfaction. For hundreds of years, the City’s enlightened citizenry had ignored the Nomads exiled outside her air-conditioned walls. More was known about the lichens growing on Mars than about this forgotten portion of mankind. Any research was in the tradition of Mendel and Darwin and Czolwirtzki. The quest for knowledge was itself a great adventure.
    The Dreamer’s house possessed equipment which would allow him to sample the Nomad’s dreams if he desired. Not one secret of this savage subconscious need elude him. But Sondak had more ambitious intentions. Before leaving the automated clinic, he gave the computer orders to begin preparations for surgery. The operation was a simple one. Cerebral mini-probe implantation could be accomplished in less than half-an-hour.
    The Dreamer waited in his library. He stood, gazing into the fire, letting his thoughts ride on the snake’s-tongue flicker of the flames like a boat adrift on a shifting sea. The computer would announce when everything was ready. Even now, the Nomad youth was being transported to the north, hundreds of kilometers from Sondak’s house. In the clinic, the boy had been immunized against every known disease, his teeth treated for decay, his blood refortified and his enzymes renewed. A thorough overhaul ensured that each of his parts would operate as efficiently as the wafer-thin neural-probe wired into his frontal lobe.
    Along with the gift of restored health, Sondak added a few useful tools: the tungsten-bladed carving knife which never needed sharpening; a pocket solar-torch,