Jubal's swimming pool

Jubal's swimming pool is at once a protected hiding place, the household's center of ordinary life, and a setting where water becomes a medium of trust and belonging. Smith first enters it on Jubal's urgent instruction during a threat to the house, using its deepest point to conceal himself; later the pool gathers friends, embraces the household's meals, and provides the water for a bond that Jill describes as more enduring than marriage alone.

Refuge and Withdrawal

When Jubal sees two large air cars approaching from the south, he orders a general alert and tells Anne to hold the panic button on its dead-man setting. He sends Smith into the pool, specifying that he must remain in the deepest part and not surface until Jill comes for him. The pool is thus not simply a convenient hiding place: in the crisis, Jubal turns a familiar domestic feature into a shelter and gives Smith a precise role in protecting himself.

Smith obeys without knowing why he is hiding. He swims beneath the diving board, settles on the bottom, and treats Jubal's instruction as sufficient reason to wait. Once there, he curls into a fetal position, empties most of his lungs, swallows his tongue, rolls his eyes upward, and slows his heartbeat almost to nothing. He is effectively dead but has not discorporated; he can restart his body's processes at will. By stretching his sense of time until seconds seem like hours, he makes the pool bottom a chamber for contemplation as well as concealment.

The inwardness of this refuge is emotional as well as physical. Smith reviews his conversation with Jubal and concludes that he has again failed to achieve the perfect, mutually merging rapport he expects between water brothers. He attributes the failure to his misuse of human language: long words seem dependable, but short ones shift their meanings unpredictably, unlike the Martian word grok. His stillness beneath the surface therefore holds both the immediate danger outside and his remorse at having upset Jubal.

The Pool After the Attack

After the attack, Smith returns to the group by the pool. His friends are shaken; Dorcas sobs while Jill comforts her, whereas Anne appears untouched by the emotions Smith senses around him. Smith recognizes that the wrongness and trouble that had disturbed his meditation are gone. He also trusts Jill to understand Dorcas's pain fully and help her recover more quickly than anyone else could.

Smith is not yet ready to absorb the events at the cusp or to praise and cherish the men he was forced to move. Instead, he goes back into the pool, finds his body where he left it, confirms that it is unharmed, and slips back into it. The pool gives this extraordinary action an intimate, domestic frame: his body is not lost or destroyed, but left in familiar water while he acts beyond it. Returning to himself, he resumes his earlier word-learning, moving through entries around Sherbet and Tinwork until Jill's approaching touch draws him from the task.

When Jill reaches him, Smith takes her face in his hands and kisses her. He understands the gesture as carrying the growing-closer of the water ceremony, though he senses that it means something more that he has not yet fully understood. The pool has shifted from a place where Jubal orders him to wait apart from danger to a meeting place where bodily closeness becomes a new question between Jill and Smith.

A Domestic Center and a Public Window

The pool remains part of the household's everyday life after the crisis. Anne kisses Jubal on his bald spot and proposes feeding him, getting him drunk, and putting him to bed; when Smith eagerly asks whether he can help, she gives him the practical task of carrying trays. Dinner, she says, will be by the pool because the night is hot. This small domestic arrangement places Smith within the household's routines: the same space that sheltered his near-motionless body can host a meal and give him a way to take part.

Later, the pool stands in striking contrast to Smith's first experience of the wider human world. During the trip to the Executive Palace, he rides in a chartered Flying Greyhound with Jill and Dorcas, crowded with an arm around each, and watches the cities through the vehicle's astrodome. Until then, his world had been bounded by Jubal's house, its pool, and the surrounding garden, grass, and trees; he had not even gone as far as the gate. The ride makes visible how small and protected that world has been, while the pool remains its defining center of safety and familiar life.

Water, Trust, and Welcome

The pool's water also belongs to the social practice of sharing water. When Jill explains the ceremony to Patricia, Smith sends a glass from the drinks tray into the bathroom and has a tap fill it, then returns it to Jill. Jill tells Patricia that the act resembles baptism and marriage, establishes trust and partnership, and cannot be broken without grave consequence. She stresses that Patricia is free to refuse, especially if accepting would conflict with her faith. Patricia decides that she wants the bond; Jill drinks first, passes the glass to Smith, and he offers Patricia the water of life.

This exchange makes the pool's associations extend beyond its physical basin. The water used to create a lasting relationship can be carried in a glass, so the practice is not confined to the swimming place; nevertheless, the household pool gives the ritual a visible domestic home. Trust is presented as a deliberate offer rather than an obligation imposed on a newcomer, and Patricia's choice turns welcome into a reciprocal commitment.

That larger meaning is made explicit when Patricia later shows Ben Caxton the Innermost Temple. Its circular room has a soft floor, no furniture, and a central pool almost the size of a swimming pool; Patricia explains that new brothers are received into the Nest there. The Temple's pool is an institutional ritual space, unlike Jubal's household pool, but the repeated form links water, entry, and belonging. Patricia invites Ben to share water or simply swim, and accepts his hesitation without pressure: waiting is permitted.

Patricia's account of her own initiation gives the contrast its human scale. She and Sam advanced through the circles while learning the language and discipline, and Smith recognized their readiness early enough to offer them water after a Third Circle service. At their later Sharing-Water service, Patricia was frightened that she could not merge herself with the group. She remembers entering the Innermost Temple, being struck by a spotlight as her robe vanished, and stumbling into the pool while the Nest called them to share the water of life. She describes the experience as entering the water and never wanting to come up again. Against that ceremonial pool, Jubal's is not itself a temple; it is the everyday refuge and meeting place through which the book first binds water to safety, bodily presence, household affection, and the possibility of chosen kinship.