“But it was just a TV show,” Jonathan protested. “Our real ships did go out with explorers,” Hollis added. “They went out with explorers who sought only knowledge and carried no weapons, only questions.”

“The questions your people asked required you to build relativistic rockets, did they not? To really ask is to shape keys. That first antimatter engine shining gamma rays to the stars was your key to the universe. But you never asked yourself if to use that key might be to open the gates to hell. I’m sorry for you, but in your case the answer has destroyed both the question and the questioner.”

“Just a TV show!” Jonathan stepped forward, certain that he had heard wrong.

“By a fantasy you revealed your hopes to us,” the enemy said coldly and loudly, clearly implying that Jonathan’s refutal was absurd. “By a fantasy it started. You would not have needed the Enterprise to have become dangerous. Much less would have been enough.”

“I still don’t understand,” said Hollis, still refusing to look naked and stripped of her pride. “Why this massacre? Was it necessary to kill all our people? If our fantasies bothered you, couldn’t you have responded with a demonstration! Blown up Venus, perhaps? Simply scared us?”

“People scare best when they’re dying.”

“Shit!” Jonathan shouted. He punched the tank wall hard, breaking two knuckles. “Where did you get that from? Reruns of an old Bible show?”

“Better. We got it from your own Mister Spock.”

Jonathan stood before the tank, shaking his head, cradling his broken fist. “Fuck this,” he said to no one in particular. “Don’t tell me I clawed my wayup from VR addiction just to learn that aliens blew up the Earth because of an old Michael Jackson song and Star Trek.

“I won’t believe this shit!”

“I won’t believe it!”

23

Gaia

A HOT WIND STILL SCREAMED THINLY OVER THE sands of Vatican Hill, where, according to scripture, the Emperor Nero had crucified Saint Peter.

In a chamber beneath Saint Peter’s Basilica, the last pope of the Roman Catholic Church had sheltered one of the three lost Arks of the Cross. For nearly a dozen centuries it had lain in Iram’s Cave of Blue Light—a half-meter long chest of acacia overlaid with gold—until archeologists of the twenty-first century found it. As with the spectacular but short-lived Peterson discovery, they had been searching for something else. According to legend, Christian armies once carried the golden chest before them, much as the armies of Moses and Joshua were said to have carried the Ark of the Covenant into battle.

When members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences opened the Ark, they found inside it a fragment of log with a thick iron nail driven through it. The wood surrounding the nail was studded with chips of yellow matter that turned out to be human bone. The Ark, and the Renaissance cathedral above it, had been reduced to fractions of their atoms by the relativistic blast—except for a microscopic sliver of bone that had, in decades preceding, been spirited away by Resurrectionist extremists.