Stranger in a Strange Land

«All right. Here it could be hallucination… if I grok correctly that we don't hang around when we discorporate. But in the case of Mars, there is either an entire planet all run by mass hallucination — or the straightforward explanation is correct … the one I was taught and all my experience led me to believe. Because on Mars “ghosts” are the most powerful and the most numerous part of the population. The ones still alive, the corporate ones, are hewers of wood and drawers of water, servants to the Old Ones.»

Jubal nodded. «Okay. I'll never boggle at slicing with Oc cam's Razor. While it runs contrary to my experience, mine is limited to this planet — provincial. All right, son, you're scared they might destroy us?»

Mike shook his head. «Not especially. I think — this is not a grokking but a guess — that they might do one of two things; either destroy us … or attempt to conquer us culturally, make us over into their own image.»

«But you're not fretted about us being blown up? That's a pretty detached viewpoint.»

«No. Oh, they might decide to. You see, by their standards, we are diseased and crippled — the things we do to each other, the way we fail to understand each other, our almost complete failure to grok with one another, our wars and diseases and famines and cruelties — these will be insanity to them. I know. So I think they will decide on a mercy killing. But that's a guess, I'm not an Old One. But, Jubal, if they decide to, it will be — » Mike thought a long time. « — a minimum of five hundred years, more likely five thousand, before anything would be done.»

«That's a long time for a jury to be out.»

«Jubal, the greatest difference between the two races is that Martians never hurry — and humans always do. They would much rather think about it an extra century or half dozen, to be sure that they grok all the fullness.»

«In that case, son, don't worry about it. If, in another five hundred or a thousand years, the human race can't handle its neighbors, you and I can't help it. However, I suspect that they will be able to.»

«So I grok, but not in fullness. I said I wasn't worried about that. The other possibility troubled me more, that they might move in and try to make us over. Jubal, they can't. An attempt to make us behave like Martians would kill us as certainly but not painlessly. It would be a great wrongness.»

Jubal took time to answer. «But, son, isn't that what you have been trying to do?»

Mike looked unhappy. «It was what I started out to do. It is not what I am trying to do now. Father, I know that you were disappointed in me when I started this.»

«Your business, son.»

«Yes. Self. I must grok each cusp myself alone. And so must you … and so must each self. Thou art God.»

«I don't accept the nomination.»

«You can't refuse it. Thou art God and I am God and all that groks is God, and I am all that I have ever been or seen or felt or experienced. I am all that I grok. Father, I saw the horrible shape this planet is in and I grokked, though not in fullness, that I could change it. What I had to teach couldn't be taught in schools; I was forced to smuggle it in as a religion — which it is not — and con the marks into tasting it by appealing to their curiosity. In part it worked as I knew it would; the discipline was just as available to others as it was to me, who was raised in a Martian nest. Our brothers get along together — you've seen, you've shared — live in peace and happiness with no bitterness, no jealousy.

«That alone was a triumph. Male-femaleness is the greatest gift we have — romantic physical love may be unique to this planet. If it is, the universe is a poorer place than it could be … and I grok dimly that we-who-are-God will save this precious invention and spread it. The joining of bodies with merging of souls in shared ecstasy, giving, receiving, delighting in each other — well, there's nothing on Mars to touch it, and it's the source, I grok in fullness, of all that makes this planet so rich and wonderful. And, Jubal, until a person, man or woman, has enjoyed this treasure bathed in the mutual bliss of minds linked as closely as bodies, that person is still as virginal and alone as if he had never copulated. But I grok that you have; your very reluctance to risk a lesser thing proves it … and, anyhow, I know it directly. You grok. You always have. Without needing the language of grokking. Dawn told us that you were as deep into her mind as you were into her body.»

«Unh … the lady exaggerates.»

«It is impossible for Dawn to speak other than rightly about this. And — forgive me — we were there. In her mind but not in yours … and you were there with us, sharing.»