Stranger in a Strange Land

choice- But that would have left him no choice. This was contradiction; at a cusp, choice is. By choice, spirit grows.
                He considered whether or not Jill would have approved had he taken other action, not wasting food?
                No, he grokked that Jill's injunction had covered that variant of action, too.
                At this point the being sprung from human genes shaped by Martian thought, and who could never be either one, completed one stage of his growth, burst out and ceased to be a nestling. The solitary loneliness of predestined free will was then his and with it the Martian serenity to embrace it, cherish it, savour its bitterness, and accept its consequences. With tragic joy he knew that this cusp was his, not Jill's. His water brother could teach, admonish, guide-but choice at a cusp was not shared. Here was "ownership" beyond any possible sale, gift, hypothecation; owner and owned grokked fully, inseparable~ He eternally was the action he had taken at cusp.
                Now that he knew himself to be self he was free to grok ever closer to his brothers, merge without let. Self's integrity was and is and ever had been. Mike stopped to cherish all his brother selves, the many threesfulfilled on Mars, both corporate and discorporate, the precious few on Earth-the as-yet-unknown powers of three on Earth that would be his to merge with and cherish now that at last long waiting he grokked and cherished himself.
                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 bad 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 Qiut 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 hail, was delighted to encounter a water brother. 
                "!!!!"
                "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,