"We are?" asked Jupiter, wondering. Then he recovered himself. "Of course we are," he said. "You mean you don't understand why we eat twice?"
"Not really," Jutch confessed.
"Then," Jupiter said kindly, "you should have asked me. You see, this is what they call the 'cocktail party.' It's an old Earth custom."
The erk said, "I see that, but why do we eat twice for the same meal?"
Jupiter said regretfully, "I wish I had time to explain that to you, but look, we're almost at the head of the line! Now, don't forget. Get up on your hind members and let them stroke your foreknuckles, all right?"
"Yes, thanks," said the erk with a grateful flick of whisker, and scuttled ahead to make his duty obeisance to the distinguished visitors. Jupiter watched him with a full heart. To touch the hand of the true and real and only President of the United States! A transcendental experience! The most fantastic dream of his childhood, incredibly come true!
Only, you know, once you'd done it it wasn't really all that transcendental. The President of the United States was—well, not a letdown, certainly. Your President couldn't be a disappointment! But it was true, all the same, that Jupiter had not expected President Pettyman to be hardly older than Jupe himself and hardly more practiced in the rites of protocol. All Jupiter could think of to say when he pressed the flesh of his President was "Hello." The President didn't seem even to hear that, being preoccupied at peering down the length of the waiting line and frowning when he saw how long it still was. Nor were the two sisters with the President particularly grand. It was impressive that they were of Cabinet rank, but why did they look so peculiar? Why were their faces so flat and their eyes so black? Had there been something wrong with their implantation? Was it possible that all Real-American sisters were like these? (And if so, what was it like to copulate with them?) As he left the dais, having had a perfunctory handshake with the Governor and one or two other Yanks he hardly noticed, he almost tripped over the erk Jutch. "Oh, sorry," he said, flushing. It wasn't so much that he minded stepping on the erk— the erk should have got out of his way—but he didn't like being caught still staring at the President.
"Have you got a table reservation for dinner?" asked the erk.
"Reservation? No. What's a reservation?"
The erk said considerately, "I guess you got here too late for that. Anyway, you're welcome to sit at my table."
"Thanks," said Jupiter, thinking fast. "I, uh, I think I will use the excretion facilities now."
"Of course," said the erk, backing away. A well-mannered erk, thought Jupiter approvingly. Having invented the excuse, he decided in fact to excrete. He walked to the head of the waiting line without even thinking of the fact that he took it for granted that no one would be using the one stand-up urinal in the excretion chamber. Of course, no one was; everyone else on line was a sister. Struggling with the unfamiliar uniform fly made Jupiter rueful at his own clumsiness, and he bantered back and forth with the sisters waiting for the cubicles. At the very end of the line as he left he found his own Congressone, Mary-May. "I'm surprised to see you have so much difficulty opening your pants," she called jokingly. "You never used to have that trouble in the nest!"
Jupe grinned at her fondly. As nest male the choice of the Congressone was his, as the choice of the nest's Senator was the Mother Sister's, so in a sense Mary-May was his protegee. "It depends on whether there's anything worth taking my pants off for," he explained. "Now, if one of those Real-American sisters were here—" There was a chorus of giggles and hisses from the waiting sisters.
"Ugly things," one young sister exclaimed. "Did you see how kind of spoiled their skins look? And neither one of them has a decent nose... Of course," she added lamely, belatedly remembering whose looks she was criticizing, "they do look very, uh, dignified, don't they?" She looked around for support. There wasn't much to be found. She made another effort. "I was quite close to them for nearly two hours," she said with pride. "I was an usher in the stands when the parade passed in review, so actually I was near enough to touch them. I could even hear what they said to each other, quite a lot of the time."
Well, that made a difference. The sister's gaffe was forgotten as the rest of the line closed in to hear what she had to say. Even Mary-May cocked an ear, for her place on the platform had been a good deal too far away to hear any exchanged confidences between the Earth sisters. Jupiter himself might normally have tarried to hear more, but he was beginning to worry about where he was going to sit in the dining room. Why had no one told him to make a "reservation"?
When he circled the dining hall he discovered that the failure was important. There was a head table, easily recognizable by the huge three-dimensional figure of a Living God holoed on the wall behind it, and of course by the fact that the table was elevated a meter above all the others. There were plenty of tables set around it and nearby, in concentric half circles. But every one of those nearby tables was marked "Reserved." There were place cards (so they were called, the smart erk waiter Jupiter buttonholed patronizingly informed him), and the names on the cards were either important erks or high-ranking humans. For semi-important people like Jupiter, no places were set aside. The semi-important were left to take their chances in the unreserved tables. Furiously Jupiter boiled back to the excretion chamber and caught his Congress-one just as she reached the head of the line. "Mary-May, this is terrible!" he complained. "I can't sit way at the back of the room like that! Can you get me in at your table?"
"Oh, no, Jupe. There's no room."
He glared it her. "Have you forgotten whose Congress-one you are?"
"Of course not, Jupe," she soothed, giving him a peaceable smile. "You picked me, I know that. But I didn't make the seating arrangements—and really, Jupe dear, you're making me hold up this whole line, and they're going to start serving dinner very soon—"
He gave her a black look. At least he had the erk's invitation to fall back on. He started to turn away—then remembered the young sister who had been in the reviewing stand. He waited for her to come out of one of the cubicles, took her arm, led her away. "You can sit with me," he said generously; and when he found the table where the erk Jutch was sitting, far back against the distant wall, he said, "This is my friend. I've invited her to join us." If the erk had any objections, he kept them to himself.
Anyway, the occasion was exciting enough for anyone, even those condemned to sit practically against the far wall. Smart erk waiters were bringing little dishes of cut-up fruit soaked in wine. Dumb erks were trying to steal some of the dishes, amid laughter from all the guests. Gradually Jupiter's temper improved. After all, it was the greatest occasion of his life!
And the company was not bad. The erk Jutch turned out to be rather important in the hierarchy of erk affairs. Why he was not up in a reserved seat, Jupiter could not imagine, but there was much about the way the erks ran their lives that was still mysterious to the Yankees, even after two World-born generations.
Not only that, but the strange sister, whose name turned out to be Emilia, was full of interesting gossip about the Real-Americans. The President was quite shy, she said. He hardly ever spoke to either of his Cabinet members unless they spoke to him first.
But the most startling thing, said Emilia, was the ignorance of the Real-Americans. She gazed around the table. "Do you know," she asked solemnly, "that the Real-Americans never heard of the Living Gods?" All at the table, human and erk alike, automatically turned to gaze at the Living God figure behind the head table.
"How did they think we erks got smart?" asked Jutch in amazement.