Mike Founds the Church of All Worlds and Establishes Nine Circles

Mike Founds the Church of All Worlds and Establishes Nine Circles is the process by which Mike turns his knowledge of Martian into an institution: a legally recognized church whose central work is language teaching and spiritual discipline. Its nine circles regulate admission and training, while water-sharing rites make advancement a change in relationship as well as status. The resulting structure joins public spectacle to patient instruction, and an unfamiliar language to an intimate community organized as the Nest.

Founding and Institutional Form

Mike’s decision to found a church followed his own question about how to become ordained. He pursued a route that was legally recognizable rather than simply claiming religious authority: he lived for months at a small sectarian college, earned a bachelor’s degree by examination, received a ministerial call and ordination, and completed a dissertation in comparative religion. Jubal helped edit the dissertation, adding qualifications to its wording. An anonymous endowment coincided with the award of Mike’s earned doctorate; a distinguished university later granted him an honorary doctorate for contributions to interplanetary knowledge. Mike accepted that honor as the price of appearing as the attraction at a solar-system studies conference, after having refused invitations from institutions including CalTech and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.

Mike served for several weeks as an assistant chaplain at the college that had trained him, then broke with the sect in a schism and established his own church. The sequence gave the new organization recognized institutional standing, even as Jubal regarded its credentials and religious ambitions with distaste. Jubal’s objection was personal as well as intellectual: Mike said that the founding idea had come from something Jubal had once said about what a church could do. Jubal could not remember saying it, but conceded that the idea sounded like his own.

The apparent contradiction between church and school is central to the organization. When asked whether the Church of All Worlds was really a church, the explanation was that it was primarily a language school: its practical purpose was teaching Martian. The institution could still qualify as a church under the law, so the educational work did not cancel its legal and moral religious status. Rather, the two descriptions reveal different sides of the same organization: an outwardly recognizable institution and an inward program whose members must learn a new language before they can fully engage with its teachings.

The Temple and Its Public Face

The Temple’s architecture combines a public meeting place with protected residential space. It contains a large auditorium for public meetings, smaller rooms for invited gatherings, numerous other rooms, and extensive living quarters above the main auditorium. The living quarters are reached from the street behind the Temple. Two outer doors, followed by two sets of automatic doors and a bounce tube controlled by someone out of sight, make access deliberately difficult for an unwelcome visitor. There are no stairs. The arrangement affords privacy in a city and gives the community a controlled passage between public activity and its more secluded life.

At public meetings, Mike uses the attention attracted by the identity of the Man from Mars rather than pretending that his performances are proof of the whole teaching. He presents sleight-of-hand as the limited miracles expected of him, explains that anyone seeking more than these demonstrations must enter a circle, and invites interested attendees to sign up. The performance is therefore both entertainment and an initial screening: the spectacle draws a crowd, while the invitation makes further learning a deliberate choice.

The process is selective behind the scenes. The Church is organized into nine circles, but newcomers are not told that a further circle exists until they are ready to be admitted to it. During a meeting Mike assesses the audience and identifies a small number of people who might be suited to continue. Duke, positioned behind a grille, records where those candidates are seated; Dawn then uses the seating information to manage their next steps. The figures described are a filtering process rather than an open enrollment drive: Mike may find only a few dozen possibilities among hundreds, and only a few of those enter the Nest. The public meeting thus conceals a quiet, personal judgment about readiness.

Martian Language and Method of Teaching

The Church’s teaching is presented as practical knowledge rather than an appeal to belief. Mike explains that the community is not trying to bring people to God or to save souls. Its members regard souls as not lost and offer what they call truth that can be checked, not faith that must be accepted on trust. In this account, learning Martian is indispensable because the ideas cannot be fully stated in English. The language is not an ornamental subject added to religious teaching; it is the means through which the teaching becomes available.

This requirement sets a demanding pace. Prospective members must be willing both to believe what they can observe and to do the hard work of learning the language. Mike screens large crowds day after day, brings a few people forward, and trains those who reach the Nest further. The planned growth is gradual: as members become thoroughly trained, some may be able to establish other nests, allowing the work to spread. But the process is not presented as a race to expand. Even those already living in the Nest are described as incompletely trained, and Mike does not hurry their formation.

Circles, Water, and Membership

The circles connect instruction to changes in social belonging. In some cases Mike offers water to someone before the person has reached the Seventh Circle. Sam and Ruth, for example, were selected at the Third Circle; after Mike offered them water, they continued through the circles and became a priest and priestess. Dawn and Patty may occasionally recognize someone for special promotion and training, though their choices are usually made in consultation with Mike. Their judgment can accelerate a person’s progress, but the narrative presents Mike as the one most able to recognize readiness early.

The Eighth Circle is associated with the beginning of sharing and growing closer. The Ninth Circle leads into the Nest itself, where the Nest attends a formal Sharing Water service and welcomes the new brothers—usually a couple—as permanent members. Ordinary water-sharing may occur throughout the day, but the named service is a distinct act of reception. Duke explains to Ben that Ben already belongs in one sense, although the Nest has not yet held the ceremony for him; his welcome is important enough that other activity is set aside for it.

The Innermost Temple gives that transition a dedicated place. It is a large circular room with a soft floor and a pool at its center, where new brothers are received into the Nest. Ben is invited to share water there but declines for the moment; the response, “Waiting is,” treats delay as compatible with eventual participation rather than as a rejection. The pool is thus both a physical setting and the focus of a communal rite: entry is invited, but the invitation does not erase the candidate’s choice about when to accept it.

Patricia’s initiation gives a concrete example of the trust the rite establishes. Mike sends a glass of water to Jill through the bathroom rather than fetching it himself, and Jill explains to Patricia that sharing water makes them partners who can trust and confide in one another. She stresses that the bond is permanent, while also making clear that Patricia need not accept and should refuse if the rite conflicts with her faith or conscience. Mike reinforces that freedom by telling her not to drink if she has any reason not to. Patricia chooses to participate, drinks after Jill and Mike, and receives Mike’s blessing. The rite is offered as a serious commitment, but the participants explicitly preserve the possibility of declining it.

Initiation and Community

The circle system is also staged through ritual, not only explained as a curriculum. At an advancement ceremony, Jill appears to Ben and the other candidates in the role of Mother Eve, beside a serpent. She opens her arms toward them, and the candidates begin to move toward the Garden. Ben, however, is led away by Patricia so that the ceremony can continue without interruption. He sees Mike approach the first woman in line, but leaves before witnessing the subsequent transitions. The scene distinguishes the candidate’s invitation from the observer’s access: the ceremony is not simply a spectacle for everyone present.

The community’s account of Sam and Ruth’s progress shows that learning changes how initiation feels without making it effortless. Ruth recalls that she and Sam reached the Third Circle while she studied hard to remain with him. When they began to think in Martian, Mike recognized their progress and offered them water. Ruth describes an emotional struggle afterward: she felt torn by what the new intimacy seemed to imply about her prior judgments, yet wanted to return and share water again. As the couple moved through the inner circles, she continued to need help and feared the final step into a community of eight. At the Innermost Temple, the rite’s formal boundary gave way to welcome: robes were removed, the Nest called them into the pool in Martian, and Ruth entered. Her recollection makes the circles more than administrative ranks. They structure a gradual passage from outsiderhood through uncertainty toward a membership experienced as home.

The Church’s design consequently depends on more than Mike’s public reputation or the Temple’s legal form. Demonstration attracts attention, the circles pace learning, and the ceremonies give membership a durable relational meaning. Yet the system also insists on work and readiness: not everyone who arrives at a meeting is admitted, not everyone advances at the same speed, and even those within the Nest remain learners. Its projected expansion into other nests depends on training people who can carry the practice outward, but the immediate measure of success is closer and smaller: whether a person can learn, choose to participate, and be received into a community of trust.