And slowly, Justin turned his eyes from the wallscreen to the daughter of Jesus’ twin—and she was no longer merely his friend’s child but a magnificent bronze-skinned woman who was going to be more brilliant than him and her father put together.

Going to be? Justin asked himself. She already was. “No holy men,’ he emphasized for her. “And let me add that I have never heard your father mention Jesus the Son of God, only Jesus the warrior.”

“The Gospels as interstellar insurance?” Cherene asked.

“The Gospels as interstellar damage control,” Justin replied.

Joshua lifted his head. “There’s not much we can do about it now,” he said. “Jesus must be a soldier now, as far as I can see. As for God the Father, I don’t really believe in him, and I doubt that I ever will. Prayer, faith—these are ways of making up one’s mind. Religiosity is a secular necessity, especially now, but it always was, whatever people told themselves.”

With his fingers he sketched letters on his pad and the starscape rotated, allowing the three of them to turn their backs on the dying Sun and gaze forward, where the black maelstrom of the brown dwarf beckoned.

At the center of the storm, the dwarf’s heat and resources would hide and nourish a new interstellar devil, if Justin was to be believed. And this new womb, swelling with life’s surge, would continue the chain reaction of rational paranoia begun, perhaps, by some long-ago relativistic bombing of some now impossible-to-identify species. Here humanity, as it had once known itself, would linger, increasing in numbers, growing in knowledge, dying to its own disillusionment as it sharpened and transformed its intelligence and bodily aspects into something that would aspire to occupy and control as much of space-time as possible.

Cherene shuddered only slightly as she imagined the future taking Justin’s predicted path. She envisioned the community of the brown dwarf changing over time, forgetting the old ways and languages. It would still think of itself as the humanity that had come out of the nearby star, but it would in time become something better suited to fulfill the old dream of spreading out across the Galaxy’s bright stellar valleys. Justin and some of the others might disapprove, but what were the choices that she had grown up with? To live, survive, and prevail was simply to follow the way things were, even if one might imagine and even hope that they should have been otherwise. There was a big gulf between what “ought to be” and “is.”

“We’ll come out from there one day and destroy them,” Joshua said. “Disaster,” he called out to the starfields, “disaster for you all, for what you are forcing us to become.”

“Why not just let vindictiveness go?” Justin said. “Why not just go down into the dwarf forever and concentrate on survival?”

“This is survival! Will our mercy save us if they find us again? There is no room for forgiveness. This time I did not come as a lamb led to the slaughter. This time I come with a sword in one hand and a dagger in my teeth.” His own words surprised him, because in their now-familiar rancor he had felt a momentary doubt about embracing the way of the warrior, because of the fate it would set upon his daughter and upon her children. The Jesus of the Gospels would have felt abandoned by God the Father after humanity’s martyrdom. “Heresy, heresy,” his still, small voice whispered; but even the orthodoxies had once been heresies. He told himself that he had to cleave to the realities as paint did to the grain of wood. There was no other way.