‘What kind,’ Lone whispered, ‘am I, then?’
A full minute later he yelled, ‘ What kind? ’
‘Shut up a while. He doesn’t have a way to say it… uh… Here. He says he is a figure-outer brain and I am a body and the twins are arms and legs and you are the head. He says the ‘I’ is all of us.’
‘I belong. I belong. Part of you, part of you and you too.’
‘The head, silly.’
Lone thought his heart was going to burst. He looked at them all, every one: arms to flex and reach, a body to care and repair, a brainless but faultless computer and—the head to direct it.
‘And we’ll grow, Baby. We just got born!’
‘He says not on your life. He says not with a head like that. We can do practically anything but we most likely won’t. He says we’re a thing, all right, but the thing is an idiot.’
So it was that Lone came to know himself; and like the handful of people who have done so before him he found, at this pinnacle, the rugged foot of a mountain.