Robert Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land

“Or medicinal alcohol,” Nelson added. “Don’t let him pull your leg, Jubal. Stinky drinks anything—and always regrets it.”

“I do regret it,” Mahmoud said earnestly, “because I know it is sinful.”

“Then don’t needle him about it, Sven,” Jubal said brusquely. “If Stinky gets more mileage out of his sins by regretting them, that’s his business. My own regretter burned out from overload during the market crash in ’29 and I’ve never replaced it—and that’s my business. To each his own. How about victuals, Stinky? Anne probably stuffed a ham into one of those hampers—and there might be other unclean items not as clearly recognizable. Shall I check?”

Mahmoud shook his head. “I’m not a traditionalist, Jubal. That legislation was given a long time ago, according to the needs of the time. The times are different now.”

Jubal suddenly looked sad. “Yes. But for the better? Never mind, this too shall pass and leave not a rack of mutton behind. Eat what you will, my brother—God forgives necessity.”

“Thank you. But, truthfully, I often do not eat in the middle of the day.”

“Better eat, or the prescribed ethanol will do more than relax you. Besides, these kids who work for me may sometimes misspell words but they are all superb cooks.”

Miriam had come up behind Jubal with a tray bearing four drinks, orders having been filled at once while Jubal ranted. “Boss,” she broke in, “I heard that. Will you put it in writing?”

“What?” He whirled around and glared at her. “Snooping! You stay in after school and write one thousand times, ‘I will not flap my ears at private conversations.’ Stay until you finish it.”

“Yes, Boss. This is for you, Captain… and for you, Dr. Nelson and this is yours, Dr. Mahmoud. Water on the side, you said?”

“Yes, Miriam. Thank you.”

“Usual Harshaw service—sloppy but fast. Here’s yours, Boss.”

“You put water in it!”

“Anne’s orders. She says you’re too tired to have it on the rocks.”

Jubal looked long-suffering. “You see what I have to put up with, gentlemen? We should never have put shoes on ’em. Miriam, make that ‘one thousand times’ in Sanskrit.”

“Yes, Boss. Just as soon as I find time to learn it.” She patted him on the head. “You go right ahead and have your tizzy, dear; you’ve earned it. We’re all proud of you.”

“Back to the kitchen, woman. Hold it—has everybody else got a drink? Where’s Ben’s drink? Where’s Ben?”

“They have by now. Ben is phoning in his column. His drink is at his elbow.”

“Very well. You may back out quietly, without formality—and send Mike in. Gentlemen! Me ke aloha pau ole!—for there are fewer of us every year.” He drank, they joined him.

“Mike’s helping. He loves to help—I think he’s going to be a butler when he grows up.”

“I thought you had left. Send him in anyhow; Dr. Nelson wants to give him a physical examination.”

“No hurry,” put in the ship’s surgeon. “Jubal, this is excellent Scotch—but what was the toast?”

“Sorry. Polynesian. ‘May our friendship be everlasting.’ Call it a footnote to the water ceremony this morning. By the way, gentlemen, both Larry and Duke are water brothers to Mike, too, but don’t let it fret you. They can’t cook… but they’re the sort to have at your back in a dark alley.”

“If you vouch for them, Jubal,” van Tromp assured him, “admit them and tyle the door. But let’s drink to the girls while we’re alone. Sven, what’s that toast of yours to the flickas?”

“You mean the one to all pretty girls everywhere? Let’s drink just to the four who are here. Skim!!” They drank to their female water brothers and Nelson continued, “Jubal, where do you find them?”

“Raise ’em in my own cellar. Then just when I’ve got ’em trained and some use to me, some city slicker always comes along and marries them. It’s a losing game.”

“I can see how you suffer,” Nelson said sympathetically.

“I do. I trust all of you gentlemen are married?”

Two were. Mahmoud was not. Jubal looked at him bleakly. “Would you have the grace to discorporate yourself? After lunch, of course—I wouldn’t want you to do it on an empty stomach.”

“I’m no threat, I’m a permanent bachelor.”

“Come, come, sir! I saw Dorcas making eyes at you… and you were purring.”

“I’m safe, I assure you.” Mahmoud thought of telling Jubal that he would never marry out of his faith, decided that a gentile would take it amiss—even a rare exception like Jubal. He changed the subject. “But, Jubal, don’t make a suggestion like that to Mike. He wouldn’t grok that you were joking—and you might have a corpse on your hands. I don’t know… I don’t know that Mike can actually think himself dead. But he would try… and if he were truly a Martian, it would work.”

“I’m sure he can,” Nelson said firmly. “Doctor—‘Jubal,’ I mean—have you noticed anything odd about Mike’s metabolism?”

“Uh, let me put it this way. There isn’t anything about his metabolism which I have noticed that is not odd. Very.”

“Exactly.”

Jubal turned to Mahmoud. “But don’t worry that I might invite Mike to suicide. I’ve learned not to joke with him, not ever. I grok that he doesn’t grok joking.” Jubal blinked thoughtfully. “But I don’t grok ‘grok’—not really. Stinky, you speak Martian.”

“A little.”

“You speak it fluently, I heard you. Do you grok ‘grok’?”

Mahmoud looked very thoughtful. “No. Not really. ‘Grok’ is the most important word in the Martian language—and I expect to spend the next forty years trying to understand it and perhaps use some millions of printed words trying to explain it. But I don’t expect to be successful. You need to think in Martian to grok the word ‘grok.’ Which Mike does and I don’t. Perhaps you have noticed that Mike takes a rather veering approach to some of the simplest human ideas?”

“Have I! My throbbing head!”

“Mine, too.”

“Food,” announced Jubal. “Lunch, and about time, too. Girls, put it down where we can reach it and maintain a respectful silence. Go on talking, Doctor, if you will. Or does Mike’s presence make it better to postpone it?”

“Not at all.” Mahmoud spoke briefly in Martian to Mike. Mike answered him, smiled sunnily; his expression became blank again and he applied himself to food, quite content to be allowed to eat in silence. “I told him what I was trying to do and he told me that I would speak rightly; this was not his opinion but a simple statement of fact, a necessity. I hope that if I fail to, he will notice and tell me. But I doubt if he will. You see, Mike thinks in Martian—and this gives him an entirely different ‘map’ of the universe from that which you and I use. You follow me?”

“I grok it,” agreed Jubal. “Language itself shapes a man’s basic ideas.”

“Yes, but—Doctor, you speak Arabic, do you not?”

“Eh? I used to, badly, many years ago,” admitted Jubal. “Put in a while as a surgeon with the American Field Service, in Palestine. But I don’t now. I still read it a little… because I prefer to read the words of the Prophet in the original.”

“Proper. Since the Koran cannot be translated—the ‘map’ changes on translation no matter how carefully one tries. You will understand, then, how difficult I found English. It was not alone that my native language has much simpler inflections and more limited tenses; the whole ‘map’ changed. English is the largest of the human tongues, with several times the vocabulary of the second largest language—this alone made it inevitable that English would eventually become, as it did, the lingua franca of this planet, for it is thereby the richest and the most flexible—despite its barbaric accretions… or, I should say, because of its barbaric accretions. English swallows up anything that comes its way, makes English out of it. Nobody tried to stop this process, the way some languages are policed and have official limits… probably because there never has been, truly, such a thing as ‘the King’s English’—for ‘the King’s English’ was French. English was in truth a bastard tongue and nobody cared how it grew… and it did!—enormously. Until no one could hope to be an educated man unless he did his best to embrace this monster.