Valentine Michael Smith—Jubal Harshaw

Valentine Michael Smith and Jubal Harshaw form a water-brother relationship that becomes one of Smith’s central bonds on Earth: a kinship of chosen affection, teaching, trust, and sometimes sharp disagreement. Jubal helps Smith enter an unfamiliar human world without demanding that he simply accept its assumptions. Smith responds not as a dependent guest but as a brother whose own principles can unsettle and instruct his host. Their relationship carries private tenderness into public consequence when Smith credits Jubal with helping him find a way to present Martian theology to human beings.

Formation of a Chosen Kinship

When Smith arrives in Jubal’s household, he has been educated by his Martian keeper and the Old Ones, but has not encountered many human experiences that he cannot yet understand. Earth offers him a rush of unfamiliar pleasures and relationships. He becomes lighthearted, gains new friends, and welcomes Jubal as a new water brother. This bond gives Smith both a place within a human household and a relationship he can understand through Martian kinship.

Jubal’s role is not merely to shelter Smith. He helps orient him, while Smith’s own curious and deliberate way of learning makes their exchanges reciprocal. At Jubal’s suggestion, Smith devotes a day to learning to read quickly, with Jill pointing to words and pronouncing them. He gives up swimming to do so, though the pool has become an intense delight that he would otherwise struggle to leave. Barred from swimming at night, he reads through the night, moving through the Encyclopaedia Britannica and sampling Jubal’s medical and law libraries. When Jubal questions him about what he has read, Smith answers carefully; Jubal is unsettled by the answers, and Smith responds by spending an hour in contemplation. Even an ordinary lesson becomes an encounter between different habits of knowledge and judgment.

Trust, Guidance, and Moral Difference

Jubal’s care for Smith does not take the form of claiming authority over him. When Jill worries about being indebted to Jubal, he insists that she is not, explaining that he acts because he chooses to, not because he expects repayment. He warns that gratitude can turn into resentment. The exchange reveals a principle that also shapes his bond with Smith: affection should not be converted into an obligation that diminishes the other person’s freedom.

Their trust is tested when Smith makes two men disappear. Jubal reassures him that the men would not have been fit for food and that Smith had acted rightly because he had understood the fullness of the situation. Smith is comforted, but also recognizes the limits of his judgment: only an Old One can always be certain of right action at a cusp, and he still has much to learn and much growing to do before he can join them. He asks Jubal whether he may make the remaining object disappear, and Jubal gives permission. The scene shows Jubal offering practical reassurance without pretending Smith has completed his moral education.

That difference in experience does not weaken their bond. In a later test, Jubal asks Smith to make a gun disappear while Jubal begins to point it at him, without stopping or harming him. Smith answers that he would never hurt Jubal. He speaks of hoping, when Jubal eventually discorporates, to share and cherish him as food, and asks that Jubal share him with Jill if Smith is selected first. Jubal controls his reflexive distress and answers gravely. The exchange exposes how radically Martian understanding differs from ordinary human ideas of death and reverence, while also showing Smith trying to express love and respect within the terms he knows.

Learning Across Different Worlds

Jubal is a human guide, but Smith does not take him as the final authority on what is true. Smith later judges that the Fosterites have grasped some things, though their understanding is distorted and their teaching fails to correct its mistakes. He makes a book lift as he explains his objection, then considers where a fuller answer might lie. Science, he says, describes the physical universe in terms he learned as a nestling, but does not address what he seeks; philosophy often returns only the assumptions with which it began; and religious texts contain pieces that seem true without presenting a pattern. His complaint is not that Jubal has nothing to teach him, but that no familiar human system has yet satisfied his search.

The contrast clarifies the kind of guidance Jubal can offer. Smith credits him with having explained matters so well that Smith could eventually work out how to present Martian theology to human beings. Inside the Nest, Smith gives Jubal credit for having instigated the larger undertaking. The recognition turns their private conversations into part of the origin story of Smith’s public religious work, without making Jubal its leader: the interpretation and its eventual presentation remain Smith’s.

Public Consequences and Continuing Affection

Jubal follows Smith’s development with sustained interest. News of Smith’s growing public prominence sometimes depresses him, especially as Smith and Jill visit home less often, but Jubal treasures their visits and takes particular pleasure in Smith’s growing sense of humor. He is not alarmed when Smith is driven from Union Theological Seminary, or when Smith enlists in the Federation armed forces under an assumed name. Jubal believes the military cannot cause Smith lasting distress, and regards the experience as a useful, if unconventional, part of the young man’s growing up.

When Smith returns from military service, he tells Jubal that he followed Jill’s wishes and did not make people disappear, apart from a few dead things. He also indicates that there were occasions when he thought Earth might have been improved by removing people, but that Jill’s reluctance had restrained him. Jubal does not argue the point; he acknowledges that he too keeps a list of people he considers better off dead, though he has not acted on it. This moment places their moral temperaments side by side: Jubal understands the impulse, while Smith’s restraint is shaped partly by Jill’s wishes and by his own developing judgment.

Jubal hears that Smith’s military career included practical jokes: the commanding general and his staff lost their trousers during a parade, and a company sergeant’s shoes briefly froze to the ground. He takes the incidents as signs of a delayed boyhood and an atrocious comic taste, not as evidence that Smith has become cruel. The affectionate interpretation is characteristic of their relationship. Jubal can criticize Smith’s behavior while still treating his unusual path into adulthood with fondness.

Independence, Trust, and Legacy

Their relationship includes confidence in Smith’s independent competence, not just Jubal’s protection of him. When Ben suggests Jubal could make decisions about Smith’s money because Smith would accept them, Jubal rejects the premise. Smith recently drafted his own will and sent it to Jubal for criticism; Jubal found it an exceptionally shrewd legal document. It accounted for Smith’s extensive assets, anticipated possible claims by heirs connected to both his legal and natural parents and by members of the Envoy crew, and set out ways to settle plausible claims outside court. Smith had also made the will difficult to contest, kept track of his holdings, deposited handwritten originals in several places, and arranged for Fair Witness copies to be held in reliable memories. Jubal’s refusal to manage Smith’s affairs as though he were incapable is grounded in evidence of Smith’s careful understanding.

Smith’s regard for Jubal also shapes the community that grows around him. He calls Jubal the patron saint of the Church of All Worlds, though the designation is unofficial and not publicized. Within the Nest, Smith credits Jubal with having set the whole project in motion and explained matters well enough for Smith to work out how Martian theology could be put across to humans. Jubal reacts with horror at the honor, but the attribution marks the enduring influence of their early exchanges.

As the church faces opposition, Smith’s followers discuss closing it down, moving, and reopening under different names while preserving its disciplined core. The plan depends on patience and continued growth, not on Jubal’s control. Yet the public institution still bears the mark of his private relationship with Smith: Jubal helped give the new arrival a human setting in which to learn, question, and choose, and Smith remembers that contribution even as his work carries him far beyond the household where their brotherhood began.