Stranger in a Strange Land, Page 23

  “Uh . . . damn it, he’s incompetent.”

  “Of course. He can’t manage property because he doesn’t believe in its mystique—any more than I believe in his ghosts. Ben, all that Mike owns is a toothbrush—and he doesn’t know he owns that. If you took it, he would assume that the ‘Old Ones’ had authorized the change.”

  Jubal shrugged. “He is incompetent. So I shan’t allow his competency to be tried—for what guardian would be appointed?”

  “Huh! Douglas. Or one of his stooges.”

  “Are you certain, Ben? Consider the makeup of the High Court. Might not the appointee be named Savvonavong? Or Nadi? Or Kee?”

  “Uh . . . you could be right.”

  “In which case the lad might not live long. Or he might live to a ripe age in some pleasant garden more difficult to escape from than Bethesda Hospital.”

  “What do you plan to do?”

  “The power the boy nominally owns is too dangerous. So we give it away.”

  “How do you give away that much money?”

  “You don’t. Giving it away would change the balance of power—any attempt would cause the boy to be examined on his competence. So, instead, we let the tiger run like hell while hanging onto its ears for dear life. Ben, let me outline what I intend to do . . . then you do your damnedest to pick holes in it. Not the legality; Douglas’s legal staff will write the double-talk and I’ll check it. I want you to sniff it for political feasibility. Now here’s what we are going to do—”

  XIX.

  THE MARTIAN DIPLOMATIC DELEGATION went to the Executive Palace the next morning. The unpretentious pretender to the Martian throne, Mike Smith, did not worry about the purpose of the trip; he simply enjoyed it. They rode a chartered Flying Greyhound; Mike sat in the astrodome, Jill on one side and Dorcas on his other, and stared and stared as the girls pointed out sights and chattered. The seat was intended for two; a warming growing-closer resulted. He sat with an arm around each, and looked and listened and tried to grok and could not have been happier if he had been ten feet under water.

  It was his first view of Terran civilization. He had seen nothing in being removed from the Champion; he had spent a few minutes in a taxi ten days earlier but had grokked none of it. Since then his world had been bounded by house and pool, garden and grass and trees—he had not been as far as Jubal’s gate.

  But now he was sophisticated; he understood windows, realized that the bubble surrounding him was for looking out of and that the sights he saw were cities. He picked out, with the help of the girls, where they were on the map flowing across the lap board. He had not known until recently that humans knew about maps. It had given him a twinge of happy homesickness the first time he had grokked a human map. It was static and dead compared with maps used by his people—but it was a map. Even human maps were Martian in essence—he liked them.

  He saw almost two hundred miles of countryside, most of it sprawling world metropolis, and savored every inch, tried to grok it. He was startled by the size of human cities and their bustling activity, so different from the monastery-garden cities of his own people. It seemed to him that a human city must wear out almost at once, so choked with experience that only the strongest Old Ones could bear to visit its deserted streets and grok in contemplation events and emotions piled layer on endless layer in it. He had visited abandoned cities at home on a few wonderful and dreadful occasions, then his teachers had stopped it, grokking that he was not strong enough.

  Questions to Jill and Dorcas enabled him to grok the city’s age; it had been founded a little over two Earth centuries ago. Since Earth time units had no favor for him, he converted to Martian years and numbers-three-filled-plus-three-waiting years (34 + 33 = 08 Martian years).

  Terrifying and beautiful! Why, these people must be preparing to abandon the city to its thoughts before it shattered under the strain and became not . . . yet, by mere time, the city was only-an-egg.

  Mike looked forward to returning to Washington in a century or two to walk its empty streets and try to grow close to its endless pain and beauty, grokking thirstily until he was Washington and the city was himself—if he were strong enough by then. He filed the thought as he must grow and grow and grow before he would be able to praise and cherish the city’s mighty anguish.

  The Greyhound driver swung east in response to rerouting of unscheduled traffic (caused, unknown to Mike, by Mike’s presence), and Mike saw the sea.

  Jill had to tell him that it was water; Dorcas added that it was the Atlantic Ocean and traced the shore line on the map. Mike had known since he was a nestling that the planet next nearer the Sun was almost covered with the water of life and lately he had learned that these people accepted this richness casually. He had taken the more difficult hurdle of grokking the Martian orthodoxy that water ceremony did not require water; water was symbol for essence—beautiful but not indispensable.

  But Mike discovered that knowing in abstract was not the same as physical reality; the Atlantic filled him with such awe that Jill said sharply, “Mike! Don’t you dare!”

  Mike chopped off his emotion and stored it. Then he stared at water stretching to horizon, and tried to measure it until his head was buzzing with threes and powers of threes and superpowers of powers.

  As they landed on the Palace Jubal called out, “Remember, girls, form a square around him and don’t be backward about planting a heel or jabbing an elbow. Anne, you’ll be cloaked but that’s no reason not to step on a foot if you’re crowded. Or is it?”

  “Quit fretting, Boss; nobody crowds a Witness—and I’m wearing spike heels and weigh more than you do.”

  “Okay. Duke, send Larry back with the bus as soon as possible.”

  “I grok it, Boss. Quit jittering.”

  “I’ll jitter as I please. Let’s go.” Harshaw, the four girls with Mike, and Caxton got out; the bus took off. The landing flat was not crowded but it was far from empty. A man stepped forward and said heartily, “Dr. Harshaw? I’m Tom Bradley, senior executive assistant to the Secretary General. You are to go to Mr. Douglas’s office. He will see you before the conference starts.”

  “No.”

  Bradley blinked. “I don’t think you understood. These are instructions from the Secretary General. Oh, he said that it was all right for Mr. Smith to come with you—the Man from Mars, I mean.”

  “No. We’re going to the conference room. Have somebody lead the way. In the meantime, I have an errand for you. Miriam, that letter.”

  “But. Dr. Harshaw—”

  “I said, ‘No!’ You are to deliver this to Mr. Douglas at once—and fetch his receipt to me.” Harshaw signed across the flap of an envelope Miriam handed to him, pressed his thumb print over the signature, handed it to Bradley. “Tell him that he must read this at once—before the meeting.”

  “But the Secretary General desires—”

  “The Secretary desires to see that letter. Young man, I am endowed with second sight. I prophesy that you won’t be here tomorrow if you waste time getting it to him.”

  Bradley said, “Jim, take over,” and left, with the letter. Jubal sighed. He had sweated over that letter; Anne and he had been up most of the night preparing draft after draft. Jubal intended to arrive at an open settlement—but he had no intention of taking Douglas by surprise.

  A man stepped forward in answer to Bradley’s order; Jubal sized him up as one of the clever young-men-on-the-make who gravitate to those in power and do their dirty work. The man smiled and said, “The name’s Jim Sanforth, Doctor—I’m the Chief’s press secretary. I’ll be buffering for you from now on—arranging press interviews and so forth. I’m sorry to say that the conference is not ready; at the last minute we’ve had to move to a larger room. It’s my thought that—”

  “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 s
peak 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?”