“Parallel development? Coincidence?” Joshua ventured.

“You are an agnostic’s Jesus, my friend. There are no coincidences.”

“But this Saint Issa? He was judged and killed by his own people, wasn’t he? Just like Jesus?”

“He was a holy man who associated with the untouchables and railed against the caste system. He drove the Hindus crazy, and it seems they in turn drove him back west. He returned to Israel in his early thirties, during the last year of Emperor Tiberius’ reign. And just when he was really beginning to get interesting, Roman soldiers descended upon him and nailed him to a tree.”

“Roman soldiers?”

“Yes, Joshua. In India they say it was an ambush by Roman soldiers, with no mention at all of his Jewish followers.”

Joshua lowered his eyes and rested his chin on two closed fingers. “So his disciples lied.”

“A little, perhaps,” Justin said and flashed his easy, ironic grin. “What would you do if you were Saint Peter and you went to Rome hoping to build an army of Roman converts? Would you expect to get very far if you said, ‘You filthy Romans, you murdered your own Messiah?’ Of course not. Where do you think the old expression, ‘When in Rome do as the Romans do’ came from? Read this to mean; ‘When in Rome, blame it on the Jews.”

“So that’s how you think it all started. The rise and fall of nation states, all those centuries of persecution and Holy War.”

Justin nodded. “Ours… is a very devious and gutsy species.”

Joshua noticed that his friend had almost said, “was a very devious and gutsy species.”

25

Room Service

The ship was under way—and had been for a very long time—to where, the enemy did not say. A faint vibration was carrying down through the many kilometers of tether into the alien cage that held Hollis and Wayville. The room was now furnished with an ultralight, foamy, yet extraordinarily resilient material which had been fashioned by the silver crabs into an adequate rendering of wood trim and fabric cushions of the Victorian era. Thus furnished, the prison was indistinguishable from a first-class suite at New York’s St. Regis Hotel.

The enemy had a name now. He called himself Thaw Tint; and before he cut Alvin loose, he demonstrated one commonality between the two civilizations, based on something Jonathan guessed the alien had gleaned from his study of countless “Star Trek” episodes and which he himself understood from personal experience: the love that a captain can have for her ship. And as he took for himself a mechanical dove and the pad on which Jonathan had composed his TITANIC ILLUSTRATED, Thaw Tint—“bless his little black heart,” Jonathan later whispered to himself—had told Hollis that his “operating budget” left room for ten kilograms of extra mass to be taken aboard for the voyage, and he asked her if there was any part of her ship she wished to keep as a memento.

There were moments when Hollis blinked away tears before she could touch the robot arm, so hauntingly human in appearance, which stood upright on her writing desk. On one finger she had placed the last object ever collected by Alvin, the golden ring that had made a mysterious journey from East Rockaway High School to the Titanic. She was sure her greatgrandfather would have been most amused to know that more than a hundred years after he began building Alvin, one of its robot arms would be carried to the stars as the last relic of human civilization.