Here, and all across Italy and parts of India, something miraculous was now happening. Fountains of hot water were breaking through the earth. And as the Sun burned through the clouds and the dust whirled and a stream ran forth from Vatican Hill to the dead remnant of the Tyrrhenian Sea, the springwaters filled with bacteria.

24

The Heretics

Six days after the station left Saturn, when all the obvious dangers of celestial billiards were behind him, Joshua stood before a floor-to-ceiling wallscreen in the mess hall, which made the Belly of the Cat look like a parody of the starship Enterprise’s bridge. In filtered white and golden starlight, with every lamp in the hall shut off, he took in the sounds of the sleeping ship, and slipped easily into vivid waking dreams.

He had never wanted followers, not even as a young man on Earth, and especially not during the period of increasing tensions between Karnak and Rome that had threatened to escalate into a holy war. That was when he came to suspect that not just a few of the Resurrectionists were terminally crazy.

Adolescence had been a nightmare unmatched by anything he could remember up till the day Armageddon shifted suddenly, serendipitously, from myth and prophecy to dawning reality. Growing up was difficult enough for most people under the best of circumstances, without adding a cult of fanatics who hung on your every word and expected you, by merely having the genetic makeup of a founding prophet, to be a messiah for that reason.

At the age of fifteen he rejected the throne that the Resurrectionists had tried to thrust beneath him, explaining loudly and at length that he could no more be their anointed one than could the ultimate Elvis impersonator—who painted impressionistic landscapes and expressed no desire to sing despite his indentical genes—live up to his sponsors’ expectations. But he failed to convince his viziers that a cloned man merely copied his ancestor’s physical structure, that he was growing up in a complex new environment in a completely different time, surrounded by people who did not exist when his gene donor lived. Though the genetic map had survived, preserving the characteristic laugh, the intelligence, and even the emotions of its forebear in identically laid out columns of the neocortex, Joshua alone among the Resurrectionists understood that the soul who dwelt in his neural pathways was someone entirely new.

And yet, when he first read the Gospels, he did indeed notice an odd familiarity in Jesus’s words, in the same manner that one identical twin, when reading something written by the other, will sometimes guess what words are coming before he gets to them. In fact, when the words did not come as he expected, he became convinced that these passages were the apocryphal additions made by over-zealous writers of later years. Many of these interpolations were quite annoying; a few made him smile. Joshua was convinced that if he and Jesus had grown up in the same century, they would have been able to communicate with each other the abbreviated manner of speech so unique to twins and so baffling to outside observers. But this did not make them one and the same.