Stranger in a Strange Land

By what did happen next he was saved from further questions, answerable or not, and was granted a great joy; he saw a familiar face and figure just entering by a side door, “My brother Dr. Mahmoud!” Mike went on talking in overpowering excitement—but in Martian.

The Champion’s staff semanticist waved and smiled and answered in the same jarring language while hurrying to Mike’s side. The two continued talking in unhuman symbols, Mike in an eager torrent, Mahmoud not quite as rapidly, with sound effects like a rhinoceros ramming an ironmonger’s lorry.

The newsmen stood it for some time, those who operated by sound recording it and the writers noting it as local color. But at last one interrupted. “Dr. Mahmoud! What are you saying? Clue us!”

Mahmoud turned, smiled briefly and said in clipped Oxonian speech, “For the most part, I’ve been saying, ‘Slow down, my dear boy—do, please.’”

“And what does he say?”

“The rest of our conversation is personal, private, of no possible interest to others, I assure you. Greetings, y’know. Old friends.” He turned back to Mike and continued to chat—in Martian.

In fact, Mike was telling his brother Mahmoud all that had happened to him in the fortnight since he had last seen him, so that they might grok closer—but Mike’s abstraction of what to tell was purely Martian in concept, it being concerned primarily with new water brothers and the unique 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 Mike since less had happened in the interim to him, by Martian standards—one Dionysian excess quite un-Martian and 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 was not ready to discuss. No new water brothers.

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

Harshaw looked him over as he shook hands with him. Chap looked and sounded like a huntin’, shootin’, sportin’ Britisher, from his tweedy, expensively casual clothes to a clipped grey moustache… but his skin was naturally swarthy rather than ruddy tan and the genes for that nose came from somewhere close to the Levant. Harshaw did not like fake anything and would choose to eat cold compone 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 most American professional men were under-educated and narrow, mere technicians. He held a vast but carefully concealed distaste for all things American. Their incredible polytheistic babel of religions, of course, although they were hardly to be blamed for that… their cooking (cooking!), their manners, their bastard architecture and sickly arts… and their blind, pathetic, arrogant belief in their superiority long after their sun had set. Their women. Their women most of all, their immodest, assertive women, with their gaunt, starved bodies which nevertheless reminded him disturbingly of houris. Four of them here, crowded around Valentine Michael—at a meeting which certainly should be all male. But Valentine Michael had offered him all these people—including these ubiquitous female creatures—offered them proudly and eagerly as his water brothers, thereby laying on Mahmoud a family obligation closer and 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 direct observation of what it meant to Martians and did not need to translate it clumsily and 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 extreme poverty (by Earth standards); he had dipped into—and had guessed at far more—of their cultural extreme wealth; and had grokked quite accurately the supreme value that Martians place on interpersonal 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 simply hoped that these Yanks were not complete bounders.

So he smiled warmly and shook hands firmly. “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.”