Cassie had seen pictures in textbooks, of ranks of men in brown uniforms with rifles slung over their shoulders: the Allied Expeditionary Force, off … - Robert Charles Wilson

What is intelligence, exactly? Maybe that sounds like a simple question. We know—or think we know—what our own kind of intelligence is like. After all, we experience it on a daily basis.
But there are other kinds of intelligence. There is the intelligence of the hive—the complex behavior that arises from individually unintelligent organisms following a few simple behavioral rules in response to cues from the environment. And there is a kind of intelligence that inheres in the ecosystem as a whole. Evolution, over time, has created entities as diverse as crinoids and mushrooms and harbor seals and howler monkeys, all without a predetermined goal and without devoting even a moment of thought to the subject. You might even conclude that this kind of thoughtless intelligence is more powerful and patient than our own.

Don't tell me. It changed your life." I was smiling.
She smiled back. "It didn't even change my mind.

Last week the doctor at the Tilson Rural Clinic had shown him his X-rays, the too-easy-to-interpret shadows on his liver and lungs. Guilford had declined an offer of surgery and and last-gasp radiation therapy. This horse was too old to beat.