'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.
'Its very variety, subtlety, and utterly irrational, idiomatic complexity makes it possible to say things in English which simply cannot be said in any other language. It almost drove me crazy? until I learned to think in it - and that put a new 'map' of the world on top of the one I grew up with. A better one, in many ways - certainly a more detailed one.
'But nevertheless there are things which can be said in the simple Arabic tongue that cannot be said in English.'
Jubal nodded agreement. 'Quite true. That's why I've kept up my reading of it, a little.'
'Yes. But the Martian language is so much more complex than is English - and so wildly different in the fashion in which it abstracts its picture of the universe - that English and Arabic might as well be considered one and the same language, by comparison. An Englishman and an Arab can learn to think each other's thoughts, in the other's language. But I'm not certain that it will ever be possible for us to think in Martian (other than by the unique fashion Mike learned it) - oh, we can learn a sort of a 'pidgin' Martian, yes - that is what I speak.
'Now take this one word: 'grok.' Its literal meaning, one which I suspect goes back to the origin of the Martian race as thinking, speaking creatures - and which throws light on their whole 'map' - is quite easy. 'Grok' means 'to drink.''
'Huh?' said Jubal. 'But Mike never says 'grok' when he's just talking about drinking. He-'
'Just a moment.' Mahmoud spoke to Mike in Martian.
Mike looked faintly surprised and said, ''Grok' is drink,' and dropped the matter.
'But Mike would also have agreed,' Mahmoud went on, 'if I had named a hundred other English words, words which represent what we think of as different concepts, even pairs of antithetical concepts. And 'grok' means all of these, depending on how you use it. It means 'fear,' it means 'love,' it means 'hate' - proper hate, for by the Martian 'map' you cannot possibly hate anything unless you grok it completely, understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you - then and only then can you hate it. By hating yourself. But this also implies, by necessity, that you love it, too, and cherish it and would not have it otherwise. Then you can hate - and (I think) that Martian hate is an emotion so black that the nearest human equivalent could only be called a mild distaste.'
Mahmoud screwed up his face. 'It means 'identically equal' in the mathematical sense. The human clich, 'This hurts me worse than it does you' has a Martian flavor to it, if only a trace. The Martians seem to know instinctively what we learned painfully from modern physics, that the observer interacts with the observed simply through the process of observation. 'Grok' means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the process being observed - to merge, to blend, to intermarry, to lose personal identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science - and it means as little to us as color means to a blind man.' Mahmoud paused. 'Jubal, if I chopped you up and made a stew of you, you and the stew, whatever else was in it, would grok - and when I ate you, we would grok together and nothing would be lost and it would not matter which one of us did the chopping up and eating.'
'It would to me!' Jubal said firmly.
'You aren't a Martian.' Mahmoud stopped again to talk to Mike in Martian.
Mike nodded. 'You spoke rightly, my brother Dr. Mahmoud. I am been saying so. Thou art God.'
Mahmoud shrugged helplessly. 'You see how hopeless it is? All I got was a blasphemy. We don't think in Martian. We can't'
