“Are you thinking we might take the station down into Saturn?” Buddha asked.

“No,” Joshua replied. “We’ve got to get completely away from Sunspace, and we’ve got to leave quietly. I’ve spoken with Bill and the Luftig boys. There seem to be places beyond Oort, between one and three light-months out. If we can get that far, there will be enough resources for our continued survival, and we will be undetectable.”

“How long to get there?”

“A few decades at best. And we’ve got to start soon, before we’re caught up in the final death sweep.”

“Are we kidding ourselves?” Justin asked. “Can we really escape? Or are we merely imagining our salvation, believing whatever we wish to be true, as have all the oppressed peoples of the past?”

Joshua looked at his friend and imagined himself as Moses, who would never cross the Jordan because his followers had turned judgmental and doubted the Lord. “No, my friend, it will be done because it can be done.”

“I think so, too,” Justin said. And for a moment,

Joshua’s theological mill ground to a halt. This was not quite the Exodus from Egypt, although something like pharaoh was in pursuit; neither was it the wandering in the desert or the time to conquer Canaan. And he was not quite Jesus or Joshua, although he had certainly been resurrected, after a fashion. He could be Joshua, but he would have to play Moses first and part the Red Sea. All the biblical prophecies for the end of the world had been fulfilled, but the Earth had not been purged in order to be recreated, transformed, or renewed. Obviously, the historical and personal typology, prefiguring the future from the vantage point of the Old and New Testaments, was not working. Of course, it had never worked, except by bits and pieces, as a self-fulfilling vision. Jesus had never harkened back to Joshua the warrior. And yet, and yet…

“What is it, my friend?” Justin asked.

“I think I’m losing my mind.”

“The next best thing to do, under the circumstances …” Justin said. “Of course, the best line of action is always to rend the familiar way, to make ready an unfamiliar way.”

“And yet… and yet…” Joshua repeated to himself, realizing that Jesus had been a bringer of human possibilities, challenging the reptilian vindictiveness of the Romans and their power brokers with the Kingdom of God that lay somewhere within the potential of human evolutionary programs. If the human “soul” was in fact nothing more than an electronic program run through a piece of computer hardware called the brain, then Jesus had died attempting to enter a new reform software into his followers. Many had been moved to change their lives, but how permanent had it been? Basic structures had not been affected, because no one had known any bioengineering in the ancient world; but Jesus had pointed the way out of the instinctive labyrinth of evolution’s slaughterhouse. His had been a strategy without reliable means, without tactics, offering counsels of perfection and discipline that worked occasionally in saints, but failed too easily in most people….