Stranger in a Strange Land

“No more so than they are to any of us. Or than Mike is to all the rest. Mike is too busy, has been, I should say, until the Temple burned—to do more than make sure that he shared himself all the way around.” Sam added, “If anybody is Mike’s wife, it’s Patty, although she keeps so busy herself that the relation is more spiritual than physical. Actually, you could say that both Mike and Patty are short-changed when it comes to mauling the mattress.”

Patty was not quite as far away as Ruth, but far enough. She looked up and said, “Sam dear, I don’t feel short-changed.”

“Huh?” Sam then announced, loudly and bitterly, “The only thing wrong with this church is that a man has absolutely no privacy!”

This brought a barrage of food in his direction, all from distaff members. He handled it all and tossed it back without lifting a hand… until the complexity of it apparently got to be too much and a plateful of spaghetti caught him full in the face—thrown, Jubal noticed, by Dorcas.

For a moment Sam looked like a particularly ghastly crash victim. Then suddenly his face was clean and even the sauce that had spattered on Jubal’s shirt was gone. “Don’t give her any more, Tony. She wasted it; let her go hungry.”

“Plenty more in the kitchen,” Tony answered. “Sam, you look good in spaghetti. Pretty good sauce, huh?” Dorcas’s plate sailed out to the kitchen, returned, loaded. Jubal decided that Dorcas had not been concealing talents from him—the plate was much more heavily filled than she would have chosen herself; he knew her appetite.

“Very good sauce,” agreed Sam. “I salvaged some that hit me in the mouth. What is it? Or shouldn’t I ask?”

“Chopped policeman,” Tony answered.

Nobody laughed. For a queasy instant Jubal wondered if the joke was a joke. Then he recalled that these his water brothers smiled a lot but rarely laughed—and besides, policeman should be good healthy food. But the sauce couldn’t be “long pig” in any case, or it would taste like pork. This sauce had a distinct beef flavor to it.

He changed the subject. “The thing I like best about this religion—”

“Is it a religion?” Sam inquired.

“Well, church. Call it a church. You did.”

“It is a church,” agreed Sam. “It fills every function of a church, and its quasi-theology does, I admit, match up fairly well with some real religions. Faiths. I jumped in because I used to be a stalwart atheist—and now I’m a high priest and I don’t know what I aim.”

“I understood you to say you were Jewish.”

“I am. From a long line of rabbis. So I wound up atheist. Now look at me. But my cousin Saul and my wife Ruth are both Jews in the religious sense—and talk to Saul; you’ll find it’s no handicap to this discipline. A help, probably… as Ruth, once she broke past the first barrier, progressed faster than I did; she was a priestess quite a while before I became a priest. But she’s the spiritual sort; she thinks with her gonads. Me, I have to do it the hard way, between my ears.”

“The discipline,” repeated Jubal. “That’s what I like best about it. The faith I was reared in didn’t require anybody to know anything. Just confess your sins and be saved, and there you were, safe in the arms of Jesus. A man could be too stupid to hit the floor with his hat… and yet he could be conclusively presumed to be one of God’s elect, guaranteed au eternity of bliss, because he had been ‘converted.’ He might or might not become a Bible student; even that wasn’t necessary… and he certainly didn’t have to know, or even try to know, anything else. This church doesn’t accept ‘conversion’ as I grok it—”

“You grok correctly.”

“A person must start with a willingness to learn and follow it with some long, hard study. I grok that is salutary, in itself.”

“More than salutary,” agreed Sam. “Indispensable. The concepts can’t be thought about without the language, and the discipline that results in this horn-of-plenty of benefits—from how to live without fighting to how to please your wife—all derive from the conceptual logic… understanding who you are, why you’re here, how you tick—and behaving accordingly. Happiness is a matter of functioning the way a human being is organized to function… but the words in English are a mere tautology, empty. In Martian they are a complete set of working instructions. Did I mention that I had a cancer when I came here?”

“Eh? No, you didn’t.”

“Didn’t know it myself. Michael grokked it, sent me out for the usual X rays and so forth so that I would be sure. Then we got to work on it together. ‘Faith’ healing. A miracle. The clinic called it ‘spontaneous remission’ which I grok means ‘I got well.’”

Jubal nodded. “Professional double-talk. Some cancers go away, we don’t know why.”

“I know why this one went away. By then I was beginning to control my own body. With Mike’s help I repaired the damage. Now I can do it without his help. Want to feel a heart stop beating?”