Stranger in a Strange Land (31 page)

“It's my thought that we'll go to that conference room right now.”

“Doctor, you don't understand. They are stringing wires and things, the room is swarming with reporters and—”

“Very well. We'll chat with 'em.”

“No, Doctor. I have instructions—”

“Youngster, you can take your instructions, fold them until they are all comers—and shove them in your oubliette. We are here for one purpose: a public conference. If the conference is not ready, we'll see the press—in the conference room.”

“But—”

“You're keeping the Man from Mars standing on a windy roof.” Harshaw raised his voice. “Is there anyone smart enough to lead us to this conference room?”

Sanforth swallowed and said, “Follow me, Doctor.”

The conference room was alive with newsmen and technicians but there was a big oval table, chairs, and several smaller tables. Mike was spotted and Sanforth's protest did not keep the crowd back. Mike's flying wedge of Amazons got him to the big table; Jubal sat him against it with Dorcas and Jill flanking him and the Fair Witness and Miriam seated behind him. Then Jubal made no attempt to fend off questions or pictures. Mike had been told that people would do strange things and Jubal had warned him to take no sudden actions (such as causing persons or things to go away, or stop) unless Jill told him to.

Mike took the confusion gravely; Jill was holding his hand and her touch reassured him.

Jubal wanted pictures, the more the better; as for questions, he did not fear them. A week of talking with Mike had convinced him that no reporter could get anything out of Mike without expert help. Mike's habit of answering literally and stopping would nullify attempts to pump him.

Most questions Mike answered with: “I do not know,” or “Beg pardon?”

A Reuter's correspondent, anticipating a fight over Mike's status as an heir, tried to sneak in his own test of Mike's competence: “Mr. Smith? What do you know about the laws of inheritance?”

Mike knew that he was having trouble grokking the human concept of property and, in particular, the ideas of bequest and inheritance. So he stuck to the book—which Jubal recognized as “Ely on Inheritance and Bequest,” chapter one.

Mike recited what he had read, with precision and no expression, for page after page, while the room settled into silence and his interrogator gulped.

Jubal let it go on until every newsman there knew more than he wanted to know about dower and curtesy, consanguinean and uterine,
per stirpes
and
per capita.
At last Jubal said, “That's enough, Mike.”

Mike looked puzzled. “There is more.”

“Later. Does someone have a question on another subject?”

A reporter for a London Sunday paper jumped in with one close to his employer's pocketbook: “Mr. Smith, we understand you like girls. Have you ever kissed a girl?”

“Yes.”

“Did you like it?”

“Yes.”

“How did you like it?”

Mike hardly hesitated. “Kissing girls is a goodness,” he explained. “It beats the hell out of card games.”

Their applause frightened him. But he could feel that Jill and Dorcas were not frightened; they were trying to restrain that noisy expression of pleasure which he could not learn. So he calmed his fright and waited.

He was saved from further questions and was granted a great joy; he saw a familiar figure entering by a side door. “My brother Dr. Mahmoud!” Mike went on in overpowering excitement—in Martian.

The
Champion's
semantician waved and smiled, answered in the same jarring language while hurrying to Mike. The two continued talking in unhuman symbols, Mike in eager torrent, Mahmoud not as rapidly, with sounds like a rhinoceros ramming a steel shed.

The newsmen stood it for some time, those who used sound recording it and writers noting it as color. At last one interrupted. “Dr. Mahmoud! What are you saying?”

Mahmoud answered in clipped Oxonian, “For the most part I've been saying, ‘Slow down, my dear boy—do, please.' ”

“And what does
he
say?”

“The rest is personal, private, of no possible int'rest. Greetings, y'know. Old friends.” He continued to chat—in Martian.

Mike was telling his brother all that had happened since he had last seen him, so that they might grok closer—but Mike's abstraction of what to tell was Martian in concept, it being concerned primarily with new water brothers and the flavor of each . . . the gentle water that was Jill . . . the depth of Anne . . . the strange not-yet-fully-grokked fact that Jubal tasted now like an egg, then like an Old One, but was neither—the ungrokkable vastness of ocean—

Mahmoud had less to tell since less had happened to him, by Martian standards—one Dionysian excess of which he was not proud, one long day spent lying face down in Washington's Suleiman Mosque, the results of which he had not yet grokked and would not discuss. No new water brothers.

He stopped Mike presently and offered his hand to Jubal. “You're Dr. Harshaw. Valentine Michael thinks he has introduced me—and he has, by his rules.”

Harshaw looked him over as he shook hands. Chap looked like a huntin', shootin', sportin' Britisher, from tweedy, expensively casual clothes to clipped grey mustache . . . but his skin was swarthy and the genes for that nose came from somewhere near the Levant. Harshaw did not like fakes and would choose cold cornpone over the most perfect syntho “sirloin.”

But Mike treated him as a friend, so “friend” he was, until proved otherwise.

To Mahmoud, Harshaw looked like a museum exhibit of what he thought of as a “Yank”—vulgar, dressed too informally for the occasion, loud, probably ignorant, and almost certainly provincial. A professional man, too, which made it worse, as in Dr. Mahmoud's experience American professional men were under-educated and narrow, mere technicians. He held a vast distaste for all things American. Their incredible polytheistic babel of religions, their cooking (
cooking!!!
), their manners, their bastard architecture and sickly arts—and their blind, arrogant belief in their superiority long after their sun had set. Their women. Their women most of all, their immodest, assertive women, with gaunt, starved bodies which nevertheless reminded him disturbingly of houris. Four of them crowded around Valentine Michael—at a meeting which should be all male—

But Valentine Michael offered these people—including these ubiquitous female creatures—offered them proudly and eagerly as his water brothers, thereby laying on Mahmoud an obligation more binding than that owed to the sons of one's father's brother—since Mahmoud understood the Martian term for such accretive relationships from observation of Martians and did not need to translate it inadequately as “catenative assemblage,” nor even as “things equal to the same thing are equal to each other.” He had seen Martians at home; he knew their poverty (by Earth standards); he had dipped into—and had guessed at far more of—their cultural wealth; and grokked the supreme value that Martians placed on inter-personal relationships.

Well, there was nothing else for it—he had shared water with Valentine Michael and now he must justify his friend's faith in him . . . he hoped that these Yanks were not complete bounders.

So he smiled warmly. “Yes. Valentine Michael has explained to me—most proudly—that you are all in—” (Mahmoud used one word of Martian.) “—to him.”

“Eh?”

“Water brotherhood. You understand?”

“I grok it.”

Mahmoud doubted if Harshaw did, but went on smoothly, “Since I am in that relationship to him, I must ask to be considered a member of the family. I know your name, Doctor, and I have guessed that this must be Mr. Caxton—I have seen your face pictured at the head of your column, Mr. Caxton— but let me see if I have the young ladies straight. This must be Anne.”

“Yes. But she's cloaked.”

“Yes, of course. I'll pay my respects to her later.”

Harshaw introduced him to the others . . . and Jill startled him by addressing him with the correct honorific for a water brother, pronouncing it three octaves higher than any Martian would talk but with sore-throat purity of accent. It was one of a dozen words she could speak out of a hundred-odd that she was beginning to understand—but this one she had down pat because it was used to her and by her many times each day.

Dr. Mahmoud's eyes widened—perhaps these people were not mere uncircumcised barbarians . . . his young friend
did
have strong intuition. Instantly he offered Jill the correct honorific in response and bowed over her hand.

Jill saw that Mike was delighted; she managed to croak the shortest of nine forms by which a water brother may return the response—although she did not grok it and would not have considered suggesting (in English) the nearest human biological equivalent . . . certainly not to a man she had just met!

Mahmoud, who did understand it, took its symbolic meaning rather than its (humanly impossible) literal meaning, and spoke rightly in response. Jill had passed her limit; she did not understand his answer and could not reply even in English.

But she got an inspiration. At intervals around the table were water pitchers each with its clump of glasses. She got a pitcher and tumbler, filled the latter.

She looked Mahmoud in the eye, said earnestly. “Water. Our nest is yours.” She touched it to her lips and handed it to Mahmoud.

He answered in Martian, saw that she did not understand and translated, “Who shares water shares all.” He took a sip and started to return it—checked himself and offered Harshaw the glass.

Jubal said, “I can't speak Martian, son—but thanks for water. May you never be thirsty.” He drank a third of it.
“Ah!”
He passed it to Ben.

Caxton looked at Mahmoud and said soberly, “Grow closer. With water of life we grow closer.” He sipped it and passed it to Dorcas.

In spite of precedents already set Dorcas hesitated. “Dr. Mahmoud? You do know how serious this is to Mike?”

“I do, miss.”

“Well . . . it's just as serious to us. You understand? You . . . grok?”

“I grok its fullness . . . or I would have refused to drink.”

“All right. May you always drink deep. May our eggs share a nest.” Tears started down her cheeks; she drank and passed the glass hastily to Miriam.

Miriam whispered, “Pull yourself together, kid,” then spoke to Mike, “With water we welcome our brother,”—then added to Mahmoud, “Nest, water, life.” She drank. “Our brother.” She offered him the glass.

Mahmoud drank what was left and spoke, but in Arabic:
“ ‘And if ye mingle your affairs with theirs, then they are your brothers.' ”

“Amen,” Jubal agreed.

Dr. Mahmoud looked quickly at him, decided not to inquire whether Harshaw had understood; this was not the place to say anything which might lead to unbottling his own troubles, his doubts. Nevertheless he felt warmed in his soul—as always—by water ritual . . . even though it reeked of heresy.

His thoughts were cut short by the assistant chief of protocol bustling up. “You're Dr. Mahmoud. You belong on the far side, Doctor. Follow me.”

Mahmoud smiled. “No, I belong here. Dorcas, may I pull up a chair and sit between you and Valentine Michael?”

“Certainly, Doctor. I'll scrunch over.”

The a.c. of p. was almost tapping his foot. “Dr. Mahmoud,
please!
The chart places you on the other side of the room! The Secretary General will be here any moment—and the place is still simply
swarming
with
reporters
and goodness knows who else . . . and I don't know
what
I'm going to do!”

“Then do it someplace else, bub,” Jubal suggested.

“What? Who are you? Are you on the list?” He worriedly consulted a seating chart.

“Who are
you?”
Jubal answered. “The head waiter? I'm Jubal Harshaw. If my name is not on that list, you can tear it up. Look, buster, if the Man from Mars wants Dr. Mahmoud by him, that settles it.”

“But he
can't
sit here! Seats at the conference table are reserved for High Ministers, Chiefs of Delegations, High Court Justices, and equal ranks—and I don't know
how
I can squeeze them in if any more show up—and the Man from Mars, of course.”

“ ‘Of course,' ” Jubal agreed.

“And of course Dr. Mahmoud has to be near the Secretary General—just back of him, so that he'll be ready to interpret. I must say you're not being helpful.”

“I'll help.” Jubal plucked the paper out of the official's hand. “Mmm . . . lemme see now. The Man from Mars will sit opposite the Secretary General, near where he happens to be. Then—” Jubal took a pencil and attacked the chart. “—this half, from
here
to
here
, belongs to the Man from Mars.” Jubal scratched cross marks and joined them with a thick black arc, then began scratching out names assigned to that side of the table. “That takes care of half of your work . . . because I'll seat anybody on our side.”

The protocol officer was too shocked to talk. His mouth worked but only noises came out. Jubal looked at him mildly. “Something the matter? Oh—I forgot to make it official.” He scrawled under his amendments:
“J. Harshaw for V. M. Smith.”
“Trot back to your top sergeant, son, and show him that. Tell him to check his rule book on official visits from heads of friendly planets.”

The man opened his mouth—left without stopping to close it. He returned on the heels of an older man. The newcomer said in a no-nonsense manner, “Dr. Harshaw, I'm LaRue, Chief of Protocol. Do you actually need half the main table? I understood that your delegation was quite small.”