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moiety, the watch with the day's duty, then served all hands with bowls of thin mush. No one touched it.
The Chief Officer banged her spoon on her bowl and spoke briefly and emphatically.
Her son followed her. Thorby was surprised to discover that he recognized a portion of the Captain's
speech as being identical with part of the message Thorby had delivered; he could spot the sequence of
sounds.
The Chief Engineer, a man older than Krausa, answered, then several older people, both men and
women, spoke. The Chief Officer asked a question and was answered in chorus -- a unanimous assent.
The old woman did not ask for dissenting votes.
Thorby was trying to catch Doctor Mader's eye when the Captain called to him in Interlingua. Thorby
had been seated on a stool alone and was feeling conspicuous, especially as persons he caught looking at
him did not seem very friendly.
"Come here!"
Thorby looked up, saw both the Captain and his mother looking at him. She seemed irritated or it may
have been the permanent set of her features. Thorby hurried over.
She dipped her spoon in his dish, barely licked it. Feeling as if he were doing something horribly wrong
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but having been coached, he dipped his spoon in her bowl, timidly took a mouthful. She reached up,
pulled his head down and pecked him with withered lips on both cheeks. He returned the symbolic
caress and felt gooseflesh.
Captain Krausa ate from Thorby's bowl; he ate from the Captain's. Then Krausa took a knife, held the
point between thumb and forefinger and whispered in Interlingua, "Mind you don't cry out." He stabbed
Thorby in his upper arm.
Thorby thought with contempt that Baslim had taught him to ignore ten times that much pain. But blood
flowed freely. Krausa led him to a spot where all might see, said something loudly, and held his arm so
that a puddle of blood formed on the deck. The Captain stepped on it, rubbed it in with his foot, spoke
loudly again -- and a cheer went up. Krausa said to Thorby in Interlingua, "Your blood is now in the
steel; our steel is in your blood."
Thorby had encountered sympathetic magic all his life and its wild, almost reasonable logic he
understood. He felt a burst of pride that he was now part of the ship.
The Captain's wife slapped a plaster over the cut. Then Thorby exchanged food and kisses with her,
after which he had to do it right around the room, every table, his brothers and his uncles, his sisters and
his cousins and his aunts. Instead of kissing him, the men and boys grasped his hands and then clapped
him across the shoulders. When he came to the table of unmarried females he hesitated -- and
discovered that they did not kiss him; they giggled and squealed and blushed and hastily touched
forefingers to his forehead.
Close behind him, girls with the serving duty cleared away the bowls of mush -- purely ritualistic food
symbolizing the meager rations on which the People could cross space if necessary -- and were serving a
feast. Thorby would have been clogged to his ears with mush had he not caught onto the trick: don't eat
it, just dip the spoon, then barely taste it. But when at last he was seated, an accepted member of the
Family, at the starboard bachelors' table, he had no appetite for the banquet in his honor. Eighty-odd
new relatives were too much. He felt tired, nervous, and let down.
But he tried to eat. Presently he heard a remark in which he understood only the word "fraki." He
looked up and saw a youth across the table grinning unpleasantly.
The president of the table, seated on Thorby's right, rapped for attention. "Well speak nothing but
Interlingua tonight," he announced, "and thereafter follow the customs in allowing a new relative gradually
to acquire our language." His eye rested coldly on the youngster who had sneered at Thorby. "As for
you, Cross-Cousin-in-Law by Marriage, I'll remind you -- just once -- that my Adopted Younger
Brother is senior to you. And I'll see you in my bunkie after dinner."
The younger boy looked startled. "Aw, Senior Cousin, I was just saying --"
"Drop it." The young man said quietly to Thorby, "Use your fork. People do not eat meat with fingers."
"Fork?"
"Left of your plate. Watch me; you'll learn. Don't let them get you riled. Some of these young oafs
have yet to learn that when Grandmother speaks, she means business."
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Thorby was moved from his bunkie into a less luxurious larger room intended for four bachelors. His
roommates were Fritz Krausa, who was his eldest unmarried foster brother and president of the
starboard bachelor table, Chelan Krausa-Drotar, Thorby's foster ortho-second-cousin by marriage, and
Jeri Kingsolver, his foster nephew by his eldest married brother.
It resulted in his learning Suomic rapidly. But the words he needed first were not Suomish; they were
words borrowed or invented to describe family relationships in great detail. Languages reflect cultures;
most languages distinguish brother, sister, father, mother, aunt, uncle, and link generations by "great" or
"grand." Some languages make no distinction between (for example) "father" and "uncle" and the
language reflects tribal custom. Contrariwise, some languages (e.g., Norwegian) split "uncle" into
maternal and paternal ("morbror" and "farbror").
The Free Traders can state a relationship such as "my maternal foster half-stepuncle by marriage, once
removed and now deceased" in one word, one which means that relationship and no other. The relation
between any spot on a family tree and any other spot can be so stated. Where most cultures find a dozen
titles for relatives sufficient the Traders use more than two thousand. The languages name discreetly and
quickly such variables as generation, lineal or collateral, natural or adopted, age within generation, sex of
speaker, sex of relative referred to, sexes of relatives forming linkage, consanguinity or affinity, and vital
status.
Thorby's first task was to learn the word and the relationship defined by it with which he must address
each of more than eighty new relatives; he had to understand the precise flavor of relationship, close or
distant, senior or junior; he had to learn other titles by which he would be addressed by each of them.
Until he had learned all this, he could not talk because as soon as he opened his mouth he would commit
a grave breach in manners.
He had to associate five things for each member of the Sisu's company, a face, a full name (his own
name was now Thorby Baslim-Krausa), a family title, that person's family title for him, and that person's
ship's rank (such as "Chief Officer" or "Starboard Second Assistant Cook"). He learned that each person
must be addressed by family title in family matters, by ship's rank concerning ship's duties, and by given
names on social occasions if the senior permitted it -- nicknames hardly existed, since the nickname could
be used only down, never up.
Until he grasped these distinctions, he could not be a functioning member of the family even though he
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