Mike barely hesitated over his answer. 'Kissing girls is a goodness,' he explained very seriously. 'It is a growing-closer. It beats the hell out of card games.'
Their applause frightened him. But he could feel that Jill and Dorcas were not frightened, that indeed they were both trying to restrain that incomprehensible noisy expression of pleasure which he himself could not learn. So he calmed his fright and waited gravely for whatever might happen next.
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.'
Mahmoud strongly doubted if Harshaw did, but he went on smoothly, 'Since I myself am already in that relationship to him, I must ask to be considered a member of the family. I know your name, and I have guessed that this must be Mr. Caxton - in fact I have seen your face pictured at the head of your column, Mr. Caxton; I read it when I have opportunity - but let me see if I have the young ladies straight. This must be Anne.'
'Yes. But she's cloaked at the moment.'
'Yes, of course. I'll pay my respects to her when she is not busy professionally.'
Harshaw introduced him to the other three? and Jill startled him by addressing him with the correct honorific for a water brother, pronouncing it about three octaves higher than any adult Martian would talk but with sore- throat purity of accent. It was one of the scant dozen Martian words she could speak out of the 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 slightly - perhaps these people would turn out not to be mere uncircumcised barbarians after all? and his young friend did have strong intuitions. Instantly he offered Jill the correct honorific in response and bowed over her hand.
Jill saw that Mike was obviously delighted; she managed, slurringly but passably, to croak the shortest of the nine forms by which a water brother may return the response - although she did not grok it fully and would not have considered suggesting (in English) the nearest human biological equivalent? certainly not to a man she had just met!
However, Mahmoud, who did understand it, took it in its symbolic meaning rather than its (humanly impossible) literal meaning, and spoke rightly in response. But Jill had passed the limit of her linguistic ability; she did not understand his answer at all and could not reply, even in pedestrian English.
But she got a sudden inspiration. At intervals around the huge table were placed the age-old furniture of human palavers-water pitchers each with its clump of glasses. She stretched and got a pitcher and a 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 her in Martian, saw that she did not understand him and translated, 'Who shares water shares all.' He took a sip and started to hand the glass back to Jill - checked himself, looked at Harshaw and offered him the glass.
Jubal said, 'I can't speak Martian, son - but thanks for water. May you never be thirsty.' He took a sip, then drank about a third of it. 'Ak!' He passed the glass to Ben.
Caxton looked at Mahmoud and said very soberly, 'Grow closer. With the water of life we grow closer.' He wet his lips with it and passed it to Dorcas.
In spite of the 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?'
'I grok its fullness? or I would have refused to drink.'
'All right. May you always drink deep. May our eggs share a nest.' Tears started down her cheeks: she drank and passed the glass hastily to Miriam.
Miriam whispered, 'Pull yourself together, kid,' then spoke to Mike, 'With water we welcome our brother,'-then
