Even so, the more he read of his brother’s ancient words, the more he gravitated toward the agnostic order of the Jesuits. The closest he ever allowed himself to approach the Resurrectionist expectation of him was to regard himself as merely the perfectly identical twin of Jesus; but his relentless sponsors persisted in ignoring such pronouncements, insisting that he was the second incarnation of someone who knew the smell of spices and sweet breads wafting from ancient Jerusalem’s bakeshops, who knew what the light was like on the day Livia poisoned Augustus, and who could tell whether or not the earth really had trembled with his passing on the cross.

They refused to believe he was anything less than the one and only truth. They refused to believe it even when their one and only truth tried to tell them—when over and over again he tried to tell them—that his time and his surroundings had made another individual of him. He laid out a whole thesis on the separate consciousnesses of identical twins—that no matter how alike they might be, even when one was a clone, there would always be at least one difference between them: differing location in space—which meant that there were two of them. The only way they could be one and the same would be to abolish their separate locations, and then, by the law of the identity of indiscernibles, they would be one and the same—which was another way of saying there was only one. And still they refused to be lieve him … right up to the day he met Justin.

Justin, too, had tried in vain to convince the Resurrectionists that while they had successfully replicated the mental hardware of the Buddha, his software was that of a man who had not lived before. But his followers, like Joshua’s, seemed to lack both the hardware and the software to grasp this insight, and were determined to live by his every utterance except his denials of divinity. Inarticulately, the Resurrectionists wanted to believe that Joshua and Justin did not truly know themselves; but their argument stopped at that point. Playfully, Joshua could see how it might have been made to sound more plausible. Had not Jesus prayed to God the Father in the Garden of Gethsemane, asking if he might be relieved of his mission on Earth? Was not Joshua in fact making the same kind of renunciation? A more intelligent Resurrectionist might have asked him to look more deeply into himself and discover that he was one with his brother, with himself… but none of this reasoning, however clever, could refute the biological facts. It could only insist on the truth of an improvable reincarnation.

Justin and Joshua had struck up an immediate friendship, and it seemed that their sponsors could not have been more pleased when, together, two prophets—one from the time of Tiberius, and another who had lived before Plato began penning his tale of Atlantis—began exploring the nature of the human soul.