The relationship between Jubal and Jill

Jubal Harshaw and Jill Boardman’s relationship joins personal affection to the communal ethic of the Nest. Jill becomes one of the people who welcomes Jubal into its innermost circle, and their exchanges show both his teasing resistance and his capacity to accept intimacy. Their bond is not presented as an isolated romance: it takes shape within a community whose ritual language treats sharing water as an enduring commitment to trust, partnership, and growing closer.

Trust and the Water-Bond

The meaning of the relationship is foreshadowed in Jill’s invitation to Patricia Paiwonski to share water with her and Mike. Jill explains that the act resembles baptism and marriage, but means still more: the participants trust one another, can tell one another anything, and become partners forever. She stresses that the commitment is serious and cannot be broken without death, while also making clear that Patricia is free to refuse and that the invitation must not conflict with her faith. Jill’s care in setting out both the gravity of the bond and the freedom to decline gives the ceremony an ethical dimension: belonging is invited, not compelled.

Patricia accepts. Mike sends a glass of water into the bathroom without getting up, fills it, and returns it to Jill, who drinks first and passes it to him. He then offers the water to Patricia as the water of life. The sequence makes trust tangible through a shared object and a repeated gesture; Jill is not simply explaining a belief but enacting the form of relationship she later extends to Jubal. Her bond with him belongs to this same world of reciprocal trust, even when his response is colored by humor and reluctance.

Jill’s Place in the Nest

Jill’s role in the Nest combines welcome with practical stewardship of its boundaries. When Ben Caxton visits, Patricia shows him the circular Innermost Temple: a large, unfurnished room with a central pool. She identifies it as the place where new brothers are received and offers Ben the choice of sharing water or simply swimming. When he declines, she answers that waiting is part of the way. The scene presents intimacy as something a person may approach at their own pace, rather than a demand imposed by the community.

At the ceremony advancing candidates to the Eighth Circle, Jill appears in Ben’s vision as Mother Eve in a garden with a serpent. She reaches up to smooth the serpent’s head and opens her arms to the gathered candidates. Mike begins receiving them through kisses, and the candidates’ robes vanish; Jill then kisses the first male candidate for elevation. Ben is led away before seeing the full rite. The scene places Jill at the center of the community’s symbolic and bodily welcome, but also establishes that some parts of the ritual require privacy and that an observer may not be ready to participate.

The Nest’s progression does not reduce to a rigid ladder. Jill explains that Mike may judge someone ready to share water before reaching the Seventh Circle: Sam and Ruth were welcomed at the Third Circle and later became priest and priestess. Dawn and Patricia may sometimes identify people for special promotion and training, generally consulting Mike. From the Eighth Circle, members begin sharing and growing closer; later they may enter the Ninth Circle and the Nest itself, with the whole community attending the formal Sharing-Water service. Jubal is already part of the community, but his formal welcome is still to come. Jill’s relationship with him therefore develops within an organized communal practice, not apart from it.

Jubal’s Welcome and Jill’s Affection

Jubal’s inclusion culminates in a full Sharing-Water ceremony involving the entire Nest. Jill later tells him that Mike stopped what he was doing, woke, and joined the rite, holding the group together with him. Her account frames Jubal’s reception as an act of collective attention: the Nest does not merely recognize his presence but deliberately welcomes him all the way in. Jill also explains that Mike’s understanding of the ceremony changed over time. He had initially thought sharing was primarily for reproduction, as on Mars; he came to understand the human practice as a means of sharing and growing closer, while recognizing that the two functions were separate in Martian life.

The next morning, Jubal finds Jill waiting outside his door. He no longer trusts the household’s apparent coincidences, which seem as organized as a computer, and she comes straight into his arms. She tells him that they love him and calls him God. Jubal returns her kiss warmly, recognizing that it would be hypocritical not to reciprocate. He also registers a distinction he cannot explain: kissing Jill differs unmistakably from kissing Dawn, though he cannot describe the difference. The moment lets affection remain particular even within a culture that welcomes broad, shared intimacy.

Jubal soon tells Jill that she framed him. Her response is affectionate rather than defensive: she says he was wonderful and insists that the Nest needed him fully inside. Because he is shy and humble about his goodness, she says, the group did what was needed to welcome him without hurting him. Jubal challenges her use of “we,” but Jill clarifies that this was a full Sharing-Water of the whole Nest. Her account makes clear that the welcome was planned collectively, while also treating his presence and his participation as its desired outcome.

Intimacy Beyond Reproduction

Jubal initially interprets the ceremony through its most obvious biological consequence. At his age, he says, he has neither intention nor desire to produce children. Jill answers that babies are meaningful because they give the future meaning, but reproduction is not the primary purpose of repeated sharing. A woman may become pregnant only a few or a dozen times across the thousands of occasions on which she can share herself. The practice’s broader purpose is to share and grow closer, continually.

That explanation reframes Jubal’s place in the Nest. His joining is not made conditional on fatherhood, nor does closeness become valuable only when it produces a child. Jill presents the practice as an ongoing relation among people, while acknowledging that its meaning took time for Mike to understand. She tells Jubal that he has not yet grasped the fullness of Sharing-Water, but that waiting will fill. Her confidence leaves room for gradual understanding rather than demanding that he master the community’s meaning at once.

A Relationship Within a Larger Kinship

Jill’s bond with Jubal is at once affectionate and deliberately communal. She kisses him, welcomes him with the Nest, and explains the ceremony as a shared undertaking; he meets her affection directly, even as his jokes preserve his characteristic independence. The relationship’s decisive change is not a declaration of exclusive possession but Jubal’s movement into the community’s circle of trust. Jill’s part in that movement links the intimate scale of an embrace to the wider practice of sharing, where belonging is made through mutual care and renewed closeness.