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 threes-fulfilled on Mars, corporate and discorporate, the precious few on Earth -- the 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 trance; there was much to grok, loose ends to puzzle over and fit into his growing -- all that he had seen and heard and been at the Archangel Foster Tabernacle (not just cusp when he and Digby had come face to face alone) -- why Bishop Senator Boone made him warily uneasy, how Miss Dawn Ardent tasted like a water brother when she was not, the smell of goodness he had incompletely grokked in the jumping up and down and wailing --

Jubal's conversations coming and going -- Jubal's words troubled him most; he studied them, compared them with what he had been taught as a nestling, struggling to bridge between languages, the one he thought with and the one he was learning to think in. The word ``church'' which turned up over and over again among Jubal's words gave him knotty difficulty; there was no Martian concept to match it -- unless one took ``church'' and ``worship'' and ``God'' and ``congregation'' and many other words and equated them to the totality of the only world he had known during growing waiting & & & then forced the concept back into English in that phrase which had been rejected (by each differently) by Jubal, by Mahmoud, by Digby.