The murmur became a roar.

The Resurrectionists had expected their prophets to provide answers. But for a world in which every faction prided itself on possessing the one and only true faith, these were the wrong answers. They began calling Joshua an imposter, claiming that he had been resurrected from the wrong DNA, and seeming to notice for the very first time that his hair was “too dark and woolly” and that his skin was “the color of bronze.” The pictures that had graced churches for hundreds of years—the stained glass images of an Aryan Jesus— were suddenly judged by his followers to be historically correct. They became afraid of him and began to hate him; and it wasn’t just the Resurrectionists who feared him. The Vatican Society of Jesus had always regarded the Resurrectionists and their walking dead as borderline abominations. Seizing upon the sect’s internal divisions, the famed Jesuit explorer Ashley Hollis, though she had never met him or spoken with him, closed her mind against Joshua and began calling for his downfall. And thus did Joshua become convinced that religions were inventions for gaining and holding social power, each hewing closely to the impulses, needs, and fashions of its time.

And so, as the Jesuits stirred the glowing coals of discontent, Joshua, being more shrewd and cautious than the sponsors who had summoned him to life, quietly fled Earth before the story of Jesus could repeat itself.

Six days since the Cat left Saturn … all the poisons of Earthly persecution were gathering again in Joshua’s mind as he stood before the wallscreen and stared into the great pool of darkness ahead. He wondered if all that the Resurrectionists had amounted to was the asking of one question: What if Jesus had come back but there was no one left to save?

The answer hardly mattered, for it was clear to Joshua that even his creche father must have been on the edge of madness when the end came. He had heard that they actually murdered the clone of Saint Peter …

And he wondered, too, about the alien persecution of humanity, about the many decades of travel that would be required to reach the hoped-for safety of the brown dwarf; and as the full weight of these coming decades pressed back on him from futurity, he became aware that someone was standing in the entrance behind him.

He turned to face Justin and said, “I am not Joshua,” with defeat in his voice. “I feel closer to Moses, because I expect I won’t live to see the Promised Land, much less take part in its conquest.”

“Maybe not,” Justin replied, maintaining his seemingly unbreakable equanimity. “Unless you live long enough to get to be Joshua, who Moses wanted to be if he had lived.”

“Do we have the means to live that long? Do I want to live that long?”

“Of course you do,” Justin said. “We’re doing phenomenally well, so far. We got away without emitting any signs of our presence. The Luftigs say the only way the enemy could have seen us is if they happened to have a very powerful telescope aimed at nothing except our little patch of the Rings. And they’re convinced we owe this happy circumstance to a very timely distraction.” “You mean the solar anomaly saved us?” “It was rather more than an anomaly.” “What’s engineering calling it today?” Justin took out his pad and called up a telescopic view of the wounded Sun. “Bill calls it a crater. He says a huge area of the Sun simply swallowed itself.”