Mike remained in his trance; there was still much to grok, loose ends and bits and pieces to be puzzled over and fitted into his growing pattern—all that he had seen and heard and been at the Archangel Foster Tabernacle (not just the cusp he had encountered when he and Digby had come face to face alone), why Bishop Senator Boone had made him warily uneasy without frightening him, why Miss Dawn Ardent had tasted like a water brother when she was not, the texture and smell of the goodness he had incompletely grokked in the jumping up and down and the wailing—

Jubal’s stored conversation both coming and going—Jubal’s words troubled him more than other details; he studied them with great care, compared them with what he had been taught as a nestling, making great effort to bridge between his two languages, the one he thought with and the one he now spoke and was gradually learning to think in, for some purposes. The human word “church” which turned up over and over again among Jubal’s words gave him most knotty difficulty; there was no Martian concept of any sort to match it—unless one took “church” and “worship” and “God” and “congregation” and many other words and equated them all to the totality of the only world he had known during most of his growing-waiting . . . then forced the concept back awkwardly into English in that phrase which had been rejected (but by each differently) by Jubal, by Mahmoud, by Digby.

“Thou art God.” He came closer to understanding it in English himself now, although it could never have the crystal inevitability of the Martian concept it stood for. In his mind he spoke simultaneously the English sentence and the Martian word and felt closer grokking. Repeating it like a student telling himself that the jewel is in the lotus he sank into nirvana untroubled.

Shortly before midnight he speeded up his heart, resumed normal breathing, ran down his engineering check list, found that all was in order, uncurled and sat up. He had been spiritually weary; now he felt light and gay and clear-headed, eager to get on with the many actions he saw spreading out before him.

He felt a puppyish need for company almost as strong as his earlier necessity for quiet. He stepped out into the upper hall, was delighted to encounter a water brother. “Hi!”

“Oh. Hello, Mike. My, you look chipper.”

“I feel fine! Where is everybody?”

“Everybody’s asleep but you and me—so keep your voice down. Ben and Stinky went home an hour ago and people started going to bed.”

“Oh.” Mike felt mildly disappointed that Mahmoud had left; he wanted to explain to him his new grokking. But he would do so, when next he saw him.

“I ought to be asleep, too, but I felt like a snack. Are you hungry?”

“Me? Sure, I’m hungry!”

“Good. You ought to be, you missed dinner. Come on, I know there’s some cold chicken and we’ll see what else.” They went downstairs, loaded a tray lavishly. “Let’s take it outside. It’s still plenty warm.”

“That’s a fine idea,” Mike agreed.

“Warm enough to swim if we wanted to—this is a real Indian summer. Just a second, I’ll switch on the floods.”

“Don’t bother,” Mike answered. “I’ll carry the tray, I can see.” He could see, as they all knew, in almost total darkness. Jubal said that his exceptional night-sight probably came from the conditions in which he had grown up, and Mike grokked that that was true but he grokked also that there was more to it than that; his foster parents had taught him to see. As for the night being warm enough, he would have been comfortable naked on Mount Everest, but he knew that his water brothers had very little tolerance for changes in temperature and pressure; he was always considerate of their weakness, once he had learned of it. But he was eagerly looking forward to snow—seeing for himself that each tiny crystal of the water of life was a unique individual, as he had read—walking barefoot in it, rolling in it.

In the meantime he was equally pleased with the unseasonably warm autumn night and the still more pleasing company of his water brother.

“Okay, you carry the tray. I’ll switch on just the underwater lights. That’ll be plenty to eat by.”

“Fine.” Mike liked having light coming up through the ripples; it was a goodness, a beauty, even though he did not need it. They picnicked by the pool, then lay back on the grass and looked at the stars.

“Mike, there’s Mars. It is Mars, isn’t it? Or is it Antares?”

“It is Mars.”

“Mike? What are they doing on Mars?”

He hesitated a long time; the question was too wide in scope to pin down to the sparse English language. “On the side toward the horizon—the southern hemisphere—it is spring; the plants are being taught to grow.”