Jubal

Jubal is a lawyer, skeptic, and adopted father figure whose practical intelligence remains in tension with his growing commitment to Mike and the Church of All Worlds. The ending brings that tension into focus: grieving Mike’s death, Jubal condemns himself for having goaded him toward martyrdom and attempts suicide, but Mike rescues him. In the shared-water ritual that follows, Jubal accepts his son’s teaching without surrendering the judgment and worldly resourcefulness that have defined him throughout.

Skepticism and Religious Institutions

Jubal assesses religious movements with a lawyer’s eye for organization, incentives, and the social climate they exploit. The account of Reverend Foster situates the New Revelation within a culture marked by a contradiction between restrictive public morality and intense private interest in sex. Foster, charismatic and outside conventional sexual norms, built his movement by adapting organizational methods from sources as varied as Freemasonry, Catholicism, communism, and advertising, while presenting its teaching as a return to primitive Christianity.

Jubal’s analysis distinguishes the church’s public-facing layers from its inner organization. The outer church let seekers participate for years; the middle church offered members social and economic benefits and an atmosphere of continual celebration. Behind both stood an unnamed Inner Church of committed leaders and keepers of records and policy, described as reborn and eligible for direct admission to Heaven. This account shows the kind of institutional machinery Jubal can recognize: a movement does not rest on belief alone, but on recruitment, hierarchy, loyalty, and the management of its public image.

That skepticism does not make him dismissive of every organized faith. Patty explains that she is ordained in the Church of All Worlds, teaches beginners’ Martian, and works with Dawn and Jill, both High Priestesses, to show Fosterites that membership in the two churches need not conflict. She also shows Ben the marks associated with Foster’s kiss and Mike’s accompanying sign. Jubal’s world is therefore not arranged as a simple contest between reason and religion: he watches religious authority become social practice, and weighs the claims of faith against what its members actually do.

Reading Mike’s Church

Jubal sees that Mike’s public meetings combine performance with discernment. Mike uses his experience as a carnival magician to stage apparent miracles, but the performance is also a means of reaching and assessing the audience. Under a system of nine circles, newcomers are not told of the innermost levels until they are ready to advance. While Mike speaks and performs, he identifies possible candidates; Duke follows their positions from behind a grille, and Dawn helps manage the subsequent selection. The meeting is at once an invitation and a screening process.

The church’s appeal, in Jubal’s view, depends less on spectacle than on discipline. When Mike wonders whether he has failed his brothers because few people have advanced quickly, Jubal answers that the practice is a method of efficient functioning, not merely a faith. He imagines its effects unfolding over generations: even if only a tiny fraction of the population can understand the teaching, sustained practice could gradually change who thrives. He does not claim to have proved Mike’s belief; instead, he counsels him not to lose heart over slow progress and insists that truth must be demonstrated rather than established by talk alone.

Jubal also understands that the church’s survival depends on adapting to opposition. After the congregation has faced repeated hostility, Sam describes a plan to close one church, regroup elsewhere under another name, and build again, carrying a disciplined core forward each time. The Church of All Worlds has already grown from Mike’s uncertain beginning, supported by three untrained priestesses, into a substantial Nest with more advanced pilgrims who can be contacted later. Jubal considers the plan plausible, comparing its small beginning to the early following of Jesus. His response joins caution to long-range thinking: persecution is a present danger, but organizational persistence may turn it into a problem the movement can outlast.

Grief and the Attempt to Die

After Mike’s death, Jubal interprets the loss through the very teaching he has spent time examining. He regards Mike as his son and laments that the young man had so much to live for. In Jubal’s bitter accounting, he himself helped provoke an unnecessary martyrdom by speaking too sharply. He imagines that a more entertaining gift might have attracted people, while the truth Mike offered has failed to hold their interest. The thought breaks into sobs and bitter laughter, exposing how completely his affection has outrun his skepticism.

Jubal then retrieves tablets he has kept in his travel kit since Joe Douglas suffered a stroke had reminded him of human mortality. Believing that his own capacity to endure has finally failed, he takes three tablets with water and lies down. The act is not presented as a considered philosophical conclusion but as a crisis of grief: his legal acuity, protective instincts, and ability to think ahead have narrowed into an attempt to escape the pain of losing Mike.

Mike wakes him and says that fullness has not yet come, then helps him recover. Jubal allows Mike to lead him to the bath, accepts help while sick, drinks water, and rinses his mouth. The rescue reverses the roles that had shaped their bond: the father figure who once sheltered Mike is now dependent on the son he thought he had lost. Mike’s insistence on waiting keeps Jubal alive, and the episode makes the teaching’s language of fullness a concrete counterweight to his despair.

Water Brotherhood and Continuance

Jubal’s recovery culminates in a shared-water ceremony. He raises his cup and leads the exchange, and the company drinks broth slowly, honoring and understanding its donor. Rather than returning him to his earlier distance, the ritual gives him a way to express attachment without the earlier fit of grief. Jubal finds himself calm and happy, remembering Mike as an eager, naive young man who became powerful without losing his innocence. His recognition is personal as well as doctrinal: he now understands his son and would not change him.

The ceremony does not end with private consolation. Sam says that the plans will continue because a movement with sound teaching can grow after its founder has died. Saul points out that new temples require time, capital, staging, and equipment, and mentions the need to support Stinky and Maryam during a year or two on Mars. Jubal answers that money is no problem. Although he acknowledges the conflict between professional confidentiality and his new obligation, he chooses to act as a water brother and calls for Anne. His legal and practical resources, once chiefly instruments of worldly negotiation, become part of the community’s continuation.

Character and Narrative Significance

Jubal is defined by an ability to test ideas without reducing people to their ideas. He scrutinizes religious organizations, notices the mechanics behind Mike’s miracles and recruitment, and questions whether the church’s discipline can produce lasting results. Yet when Mike’s death makes those arguments personal, Jubal’s response is neither detached criticism nor sudden conversion into a credulous follower. He first collapses under grief, then survives through Mike’s intervention, and finally commits himself through a concrete act of support.

His arc also gives institutional continuity an intimate meaning. The church’s circles, teachers, temples, funding, and migration plans can appear as mechanisms for preserving a movement; through Jubal, they become the means by which a father honors a son without pretending that loss has vanished. His final offer of money does not prove every religious claim he has examined. It shows instead that he has accepted a bond and an obligation, carrying his characteristic practicality into a community whose future now depends on those who remain.