Please, God, let this be worth it.
He stared at the screen as the numbers dipped below sixty. He clenched his teeth, and for the last fifteen seconds, he didn’t breathe.
Zero.
Light washed the screen, and then the image went dark. Static washed across all the radio channels. He flipped controls, trying to get something, some indication of what happened, but everything seemed blinded, overloaded, or dead.
He finally found an optical sensor that hadn’t been pointing directly at the cloud. He ordered it to point at the space where the cloud had been.
For a long time he stared at what he had wrought, and finally said, “Christ preserve us.”
* * * *
On the surface of Bakunin, it was nighttime on the western coast, and Nickolai Rajasthan looked up as the sky above him briefly became bright as daylight. With his Protean eyes, he could stare straight up into the sky and see the boiling heart of the plasma flames that consumed Adam’s cloud.
“It has begun,” he whispered.
* * * *
Apotheosis is concluded in Book Three:Messiah
<
* * * *
APPENDIX A:
Alphabetical Listing of Sources
Note: Dates are Terrestrial standard. Where the year is debatable due to interstellar travel, the Earth equivalent is used with an asterisk. Incomplete or uncertain biographical information is indicated by a question mark.
St. Ambrose (340?-397) Bishop of Milan.
St. Augustine (354-430) Numidian Bishop of Hippo.
Bakunin, Mikhail A. (1814-1876) Russian political philosopher.
Balzac, Honoré de (1799-1850) French novelist, playwright.
Beecher, Henry Ward (1813-1887) American clergyman, writer.
Boerne, Ludwig (1786-1837) German political writer.
Butler, Samuel (1612-1680) English poet, satirist.
Calvin, John (1509-1564) French Protestant reformer.
Celine, Robert (1923-1996) American lawyer, anarchist.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) English poet, critic, philosopher.
Confucius(ca. 551-479 bce) Chinese philosopher.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882) American essayist, poet, minister.
Frederick (II) the Great (1712-1786) Prussian monarch.
Galiani, August Benito (2019-*2105) European spaceship commander.
Gibbons, James (1834-1921) American cardinal.
Harper, Sylvia (2008-2081) American civil rights activist, president.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864) American novelist.
Jefferson, Thomas (1743-1826) American president.
Joan of Arc (1412-1431) French national heroine.
Lowell, James Russell (1819-1891) American poet, critic.
Luther, Martin (1483-1546) Leader of German Reformation.
Manning, Henry Edward (1808-1892) English cardinal.
Milton, John (1608-1674) English poet.
de Montaigne, Michel (1533-1592) French philosopher, essayist.
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1812) Emperor of France.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844-1900) German philosopher.
Olmanov, Dimitri (2190-2350) Chairman of the Terran Executive Command.
Paine, Thomas (1737-1809) American revolutionary writer.
Pascal, Blaise (1623-1662) French geometrician, philosopher, writer.
Rajasthan, Datia ( ?-2042), American civil rights activist, political leader.
St. Rajasthan (2075-2118) Tau Ceti nonhuman religious leader.
Rabelais, Francois (14957-1553) French satirist.
Shakespeare, William (1564-1616) English playwright.
Shane, Marbury (2044-*2074) Occisian colonist, soldier.
Webster, Daniel (1782-1852) American statesman, lawyer, orator.
Heretics [Apotheosis 02]] Page 39
