Stranger in a Strange Land

Miriam inquired innocently. "The three Methuselah used?"
                He shook her shoulders. "Don't be obscene!"
                "Stinky says women should be obscene but not heard."
                "Your husband speaks rightly. So pipe down. The day my machine first shows three figures on its mileage meter is the day I discorporate, whether Martian style or by my own crude methods. You can't take that away from me. Going to the showers is the best part of the game."
                "I grok you speak rightly, Jubal," Jill said slowly, "about its being the best part of the game. But I wouldn't count on it any time soon. Your fullness is not yet. Allie cast a horoscope on you just last week."
                "A horoscope? Oh, my God! Who is 'Ailie?' And how dare she cast a horoscope on me! Show her to me! Swelp me, I'll turn her in to the Better Business Bureau."
                "I'm afraid you can't, Jubal," Mahmoud put in, "just now, as she is working on our dictionary. As to who she is, she's Madame Alexandra Vesant."
                Jubal sat up and looked pleased. "Becky? Is she in this nut house, too? I should have known it. Where is she?"
                "Yes, Becky. But we call her 'Allie' because we've got another Becky. But you'll have to wait. And don't scoff at her horoscopes, Jubal; she has the Sight."
                "Oh, balderdash, Stinky. Astrology is nonsense and you know it."
                "Oh, certainly. Even Allie knows it. And a percentage of astrologers are clumsy frauds. Nevertheless Allie practices it even more assiduously than she used to, when she did it for the public-using Martian arithmetic now and Martian astronomy-much fuller than ours. But it's her device for grokking, It could be gazing into a pool of water, or a crystal ball, or examining the entrails of a chicken. The means she uses to get into the mood do not matter and Mike has advised her to go on using the symbols she is used to. The point is: she has the Sight."
                "What the hell do you mean by 'the Sight,' Stinky?"
                "The ability to grok more of the universe than that little piece you happen to be sitting on at the moment. Mike has it from years of Martian discipline; Allie was an untrained semi-adept. The fact that she used as meaningless a symbol as astrology is beside the point. A rosary is meaningless, too-I speak of a Muslim rosary, of course; I'm not criticizing our competitors across the street." Mahmoud reached into his pocket, got out one, started fingering it. "If it helps to turn your hat around during a poker game-then it helps. It is irrelevant that the hat has no magic powers and cannot grok."
                Jubal looked at the Islamic device for meditation and ventured a question he had hesitated to put before. "Then I take it you are still one of the Faithful? I had thought perhaps that you had joined Mike's church all the way."
                Mahmoud put away the beads. "I have done both."
                "Huh? Stinky, they're incompatible. Or else I don't grok either one."
                Mahmoud shook his head. "Only on the surface. You could say, I suppose, that Maryam took my religion and I took hers; we consolidated. But, Jubal my beloved brother, I am still God's slave, submissive to His will . . . and nevertheless can say: 'Thou art God, I am God, all that groks is God.' The Prophet never asserted that he was the last of all prophets nor did he claim to have said all there was to say-only fanatics after his lifetime insisted on those two very misleading fallacies. Submission to God's will is not to become a blind robot, incapable of free decision and thus of sin-and the Koran does not say that. Submission can include -and does include-utter responsibility for the fashion in which I, and each of us, shape the universe. It is ours to turn into a heavenly garden or to rend and destroy." He smiled. "'With God all things are possible,' if I may borrow for a moment-except one thing . . . the one Impossible. God cannot escape Himself, He cannot abdicate His own total responsibility-He forever must remain submissive to His own will. Islam remains-He cannot pass the buck. It is His-mine . . . yours Mike's."
                Jubal heaved a sigh. "Stinky, theology always gives me the pip. Where's Becky? Can't she knock off this dictionary work and