‘The nose like a beet. I’ve seen it.’
‘Like an extra-boiled, extra-swollen beet,’ she amended. ‘No job.’
‘No girl,’ he guessed.
She smiled and said,’ She stuck by him. They have a little ceramics business now. He stays in the back.’
He had a vague idea of where the business had come from. ‘Janie, I’ll take your word for it. There were lots of ‘em. But—why me? You went all out for me.’
‘Two good reasons. First, I saw him do that to you in town, make you charge his image in the glass, thinking it was him. It was the last piece of casual viciousness I ever wanted to see. Second, it was—well, it was you.’
‘I don’t get you.’
‘Listen,’ she said passionately, ‘we’re not a group of freaks. We’re Homo Gestalt, you understand? We’re a single entity, a new kind of human being. We weren’t invented. We evolved. We’re the next step up. We’re alone; there are no more like us. We don’t live in the kind of world you do, with systems of morals and codes of ethics to guide us. We’re living on a desert island with a herd of goats!’
‘I’m the goat.’
‘Yes, yes, you are, can’t you see? But we were born on this island with no one like us to teach us, tell us how to behave. We can learn from the goats all the things that make a goat a good goat, but that will never change the fact that we’re not a goat! You can’t apply the same set of rules to us as you do to ordinary humans; we’re just not the same thing!’