At the age of nine, the child-king was anointed God-king, and took the throne at Karnak. By this time, the technology that had permitted an identical twin of pharaoh to rule thirty-seven centuries after his death had become widely available, and the Resurrectionists had begun dividing into opposing factions; and as something much like the Egyptian concept of Judgment Day approached from the direction of Sagittarius, it did indeed appear that the dead walked the Earth, and that the prophets had returned.

Only the followers of Islam resisted. They viewed virtual people in general, and cloned prophets in particular, as abominations against God; but it was their rejection of zoning technology that made all the difference in the world for them. The Koran forbade alcohol and recreational drugs, and virtual reality came to be regarded as just another recreational drug. Consequently, as a third of the rest of humanity became lost in virtual worlds, the number of Islamic scholars at Port Chaffee, at the Ceres colony, and aboard the Valkyries grew proportionally higher.

“The meek have finally inherited the Earth,” they were often heard to say. “The rest have gone to space.”

** ** **

The Cat swung around Saturn, whiskers extended into a dry, surprisingly narrow band of pebbles, ice, and soot. The research station deep in Saturn’s Rings had a company name and a number, but no one ever used them. Everyone simply called it the Cat, because its long wire whiskers reached out into the electrostatic field of the Rings and by induction drew enough electrical current to run the small habitat. The station itself, only sixty meters long, was composed of two oppositely rotating cylinders embedded in a large chunk of rock that had once belonged to the Rings.

It was here, one Saturday morning, that Jesus and Buddha listened to the death cry of Ceres, and then, along with most of the other fifty-three researchers and technicians of the Cat, drifted away to their small private quarters to absorb the shock of this latest blow.

Unlike the Cerans, most of the Cat’s workers had not brought their families with them. Even if they had been surrounded by their families, it would have been small comfort against the fear that the Ceran fate, or something much like it, awaited them all. They now looked with a strange envy at those of their childless colleagues who had their wives or husbands with them to share the end that would surely come, and who did not have to live each day with the knowledge that their wives, husbands, children, and lovers were all gone. In their grief they did not consider that even the single members of the station had lost parents, siblings, and friends.

The Buddha had anticipated a fatal reprogramming such as that which had overtaken Ceres. So together with his Nazarene friend he had built a replica of an ancient TRS-80 computer, limited to only 4K of memory, and this was what they connected to the Cat’s ”ears,” making doubly and triply sure that there was no line of access to any other computer.