The two men, both now pushing fifty, had never thought of themselves as Jesus and Buddha, even though their creche father had openly discussed the history of the genetic materials from which they had been cloned. Buddha’s tooth from the Temple in Sri Lanka, and a few surviving bone fragments from an ancient golden chest, had been enough to re-create the two individuals. That much was certain; but whether they were Buddha and Jesus could never be an absolute certainty. Good enough, but not guaranteed, because there was no way to check the chain of physical evidence across the centuries. Teeth and bones were not great rarities. No one could ever have been tried for murder on the hearsay basis of their authenticity. Faith still held its vague domain.

Justin and Joshua were the names they chose for themselves when the pressures of life on Earth grew too great and it became necessary for them to hide in the Rings of Saturn.

Although he had, over the years, embraced the role of doubting Saint Thomas and gravitated toward a robust agnosticism, Joshua had sometimes wondered if God’s grace, assuming there was such a being to bestow it, could be attracted in something like the same way the Cat’s whiskers drew power from the electrostatic sea of the Rings. What kind of feelers did a human being have to put out, he wondered, to draw Yahweh’s or Allah’s grace? And how would that grace, which he could not help but imagine as being a kind mercy, benefit a human being? As near as he could tell, it might quiet the fear of personal death, or perhaps strengthen one’s faith in the human species’ survival, if not an afterlife.

As they listened to the life of Ceres fade away, Joshua almost gave himself up to the delusion and reached out to the invisible king of the universe, asking bitterly why he had forsaken humanity. What crimes had been so terrible in God’s eyes? And why now, so long past the worst ages, when humankind had begun to improve so consistently in its behavior toward itself, toward the Earth, and had begun to look outward not with conquest in its heart but with renewed curiosity and a thirst for knowledge? Why now fulfill the biblical prophecies of destruction?

The people of Earth were by no means perfectly reformed. They would never have become angels. Joshua could admit that. After all, VR Zoners were completely out of touch with reality. And the Resurrectionists, who had recalled him and Justin out of the genetic library of life, could not be said to have been playing with full decks either, having ultimately rejected their idols because they had put forward the idea that all faiths might be correct about the reality they were attempting to grasp, that the “awful rowing toward God” from the sinking Titanic of life revealed more about the nature of human aspiration than it did about any transcendent being; that perhaps God would be the fruit of cosmic history, emerging only at its end, when all intelligent life had fulfilled itself. But then, what could anyone sane say about a religious group that cloned Einstein twenty or more times and forced their clones of Jesus and Buddha to flee the planet over a speculation about doctrine? Of course, he and Justin might just as easily have disappeared into the mass of secular humanity that was not Resurrectionist or Zoner, which did not care a whit what any kind of religionist or political dogmatist wanted to believe, and simply wanted to get on with chasing its mirage of a steadily improving daily life.