And now the Romans had come again, crucifying all of humanity, making a bitter mockery of love and benevolence.

“How will we leave?” Justin asked.

“By playing a game of celestial billiards,” Joshua said, coming out of himself, feeling a new strength as he saw what would have to be done to save his fellow survivors. Was this, then, grace for the irreligious? A merciful God might wish to give him strength even if he had no faith. Right action was right action, however it was sanctioned, even if it was all power of suggestion, and Jesus being his exact twin had nothing to do with it.

“We’ll call a meeting,” he said, “and make everyone understand what we’re up against. We have to be as one now.”

Justin nodded, and they looked at each other as if seeing themselves for the first time.

Bill and the Luftig boys were cabling animated maps of the light-years surrounding Sunspace onto everyone else’s pads. They were—all fifty-five men and women—gathered in the Belly of the Cat, which was what they called the mess hall.

“I agree with our two theologian friends,” Bill announced. “We simply won’t survive if we remain in Sunspace, because sooner or later the Intruders are bound to find us, if they look closely enough.”

“Yeah!” said a young technician named Carlos, laughing. “Where do you have in mind for us to go?”

Joshua cringed inwardly at the young man’s lack of imagination, and saw that it would require trumpets at the walls of Jericho to crack the masonry around such minds. He hoped that there weren’t too many like him in the hall, because any decision on a course of action would have to be as close to unanimous as possible. A simple majority would produce too many bad feelings—divisions that the last of humanity could ill afford.

The pads showed nearly a hundred pancakeshaped objects scattered across the cubic parsec of space between the Sun and Alpha Centauri. During the dawn of interstellar flight, it had become necessary to chart every one of the nearby “pancakes,” for they had turned out to be the most abundant large structures in the galaxy, which made them the reefs and shoals of the twenty-first century … with the added complication that these reefs and shoals were constantly moving.

Every screen closed in on a single pancake whose central dark star was a ball of roiling gas more massive than Jupiter and all the planets combined, but not massive enough to burn brightly, like the sun. The star was invisible against the scale of its electron-charged ring system—which was even more beautiful and more intricate than the Saturnian system and wider than the orbit of Jupiter. Gaps in the rings marked the paths of minor, planetlike objects, comparable in size to Miranda and Triton.

“You plan to bring us to one of those?” asked Carlos.

“There’s a suitable one a little more than three light weeks out,” Joshua explained. “It has everything we’ll ever need to live.”