Recalling the Gospel according to Saint Luke, Joshua wondered if the aliens would now “let the broken victims go free,” but he doubted it. The destruction of Ceres proved that they would let no one live, if they could help it.

Heresies flooded into his mind as if being churned out by a theological mill. One suggested a new meaning to the idea that “the kingdom of God lies within,” that salvation for humankind had always been in looking toward the inward shore, away from the jealous stars, in cultivating its own garden, in not calling attention to itself.

And then the theological mill threw out his name—Joshua—and he was suddenly struck by the strangeness of giving it to a clone of Jesus, even if Jesus was in fact Latin for Joshua. Why not David, Solomon, Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, or Jonah—the names of the Old Testament people that Jesus himself had called upon as having prefigured his life? Why Joshua, a warrior, the conqueror of Canaan?

He felt his stomach tighten and wondered whether this realization might in fact be God’s grace at work, subtly leading him to a knowledge of himself that he had long denied. The reality might be that the Second Coming of Christ was this very discovery within himself of the savior-warrior. If the historical function of religion was that of social engineering and moral leadership, then it might be his duty to supply that kind of protective response, even if he was Jesus without the benefit of God the Father and the Holy Ghost waiting in the wings. Maybe this was the nature of Providence for what was mostly an irreligious age.

He thought of his friend Justin, the expression of Buddha’s DNA, and wondered if he was having similar thoughts. After all, they had both been forced to flee Earth for putting forward the same heresy. And both had come to view the brief but tortured march of civilization, from the time of Hammurabi to the present, as an attempt to define and justify moral codes and keep the fires of justice alive. The trick, then, was to hide judgment in the smoke of fear. All religions were essentially the same in their expressions of human kinship and longing for justice. Humankind had always tried to reform itself by invoking divine sanction for moral codes, so that people might behave out of fear if not faith. Having accomplished the trick, one might even win over men’s souls, so long as one never let his followers see that their morality was merely fear, lest they become judges, and one be martyred at the hands of his frightened, judgmental followers.

Followers? Fifty-three of them? Joshua wanted to crumple that thought up and toss it away.

The Cat had turned out to be anything but a random sampling of humanity. It was a Lunarian facility, populated largely by scientists and writers. Agnostics all of them; and as agnostics they had come to know and accept Justin and Joshua for who they really were, even to seek in them the qualities of leadership that made their historical twins legend, even in the age of Armageddon. So it seemed that Joshua had followers, whether he wanted them or not. And so the need for ethical behavior remained, however one justified the ethics, whatever their pedigree, whether God decreed them or not— even if it turned out that God was opposed to them.