“I think we made it, Gram.”
“Yeah, maybe we did.”
Rebecca leaned against him, and he placed an arm around her waist.
He added, “And your boyfriend’s cute.”
There was an uncomfortable silence in his head, and he felt himself blushing. He almost laughed at the incongruity.
“Hey, there!” someone shouted, and all the military people moved suddenly to point weapons toward the sound.
Parvi shouted at them all to ease up.
Standing on a rise looking down at them was a pair of identical women.
“Guess the Valentine twins made it, too.”
“Guess they did.”
Rebecca called up to them, “Where’s Mallory? Is he in charge of things?”
One of the Valentines shook her head as the pair started walking down the slope toward them. “No, he didn’t make it.”
“Who’s in charge, then?” General Lubikov asked.
“It’s Bakunin,” the other Valentine said. “No one is.”
Someone behind Flynn muttered, “Great.”
The other Valentine continued. “What about Kugara and Nickolai?”
Dörner shook her head as Brody said, “They were down with us during the cave-in. We never saw them after that—they were almost certainly buried alive.”
“Nickolai?” the first Valentine asked, “You’re sure?”
“Why?” Dörner asked. “Did you see him?”
Date: Unknown Unknown
“It’s beautiful, Nickolai.”
“You’re beautiful.”
“Why didn’t you ask me to follow you?”
“It wouldn’t have been fair to you.”
“Why?”
“The risk, you could have died on the threshold.”
“Do you know all the stupid things I’ve risked my life for?”
“It had to be your choice.”
“You could have asked—”
“You had to come here on your own account, not mine.”
“You are still annoying as all hell.”
“But I’m glad you came.”
“So answer me something.”
“What?”
“Who is that annoying rabbit?”
Across all of human space, Adam and Adam’s agents were met by Nickolai’s avatar. Few as dramatically as on Bakunin, but many worlds saw the image of the final book in St. Rajasthan’s scriptures—a tiger the height of a mountain, bearing a flaming sword to cut down the unrighteous. Perhaps the only failure of that particular prophecy was the fact that it did not mark the end of days.
It did not even mark the end of St. Rajasthan’s faith. The sight of the prophet on so many worlds ignited the faith in a new congregation. Soon, the Church of St. Rajasthan found as many of its members within the Fallen as not. And as it spread, the Church found a thread of Christlike redemption in the fact that the world had not ended.
Likewise, those monks from Bakunin, who had survived the destruction of their monastery, founded a new faith based on the salvation brought by the Dolbrians. As apostles of a renewed faith, bearing testament of Adam’s fate, they found fertile ground in the soil left raw by the assault by Adam on the core human worlds.
And, despite the fall of both Earth and Occisis to Adam, Father Mallory was proved wrong. He had not been witness to the last of his own faith. Once Adam had been removed from the worlds of men, their transhuman survivors were left themselves to face the guilt of their survival. The weight of their choice, against the billions that had chosen differently, was too great to bear alone. Many returned to what Adam had explicitly denied them, and one of the first of the ancient human structures those survivors rebuilt on Earth was the Vatican. The Kaaba followed, as did the foundations of Jerusalem, and the temples in Asia.
Beyond Earth, on dozens of worlds, Protean converts from the battle around Bakunin tached in to find that Adam’s war was over. But despite their once-pariah status, the bans on heretical technology had collapsed in the face of Adam’s destruction, and the Proteans’ alliance with humanity. The Proteans found populations more welcoming than not, especially those on far-flung worlds who still worried about being unready for Adam’s return. The Proteans suddenly found themselves given outposts all over human space.
And even Adam had worshipers. There were those remaining who still gave praise to the being that had lifted them out of the bonds of the flesh. But however many were among this number, there were twenty times more who condemned Adam as a false god.
All these, and more, now formed the people of mankind—humanity no longer quite exclusively human; all still sharing the need to understand, and to give themselves meaning.
And the expanding universe of humanity faced this diversity as it always had—painfully, inequitably, begrudgingly—with violence and joy, with denial and a near divine acceptance. Each of five hundred billion human hearts left to navigate its own path through the chaos of human belief.
Nothing had changed.
Everything had changed.
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.
Lord Acton, John (1834-1902) English historian, statesman Adams, John (1735-1826) American president.
Aristotle (384 BCE-322 BCE) Greek philosopher.
St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) Italian theologian.
St. Augustine (354-430) Numidian Bishop of Hippo.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121-180) Roman emperor, philosopher.
Bacon, Francis (1561-1626) English essayist, philosopher.
Bakunin, Mikhail A. (1814-1876) Russian political philosopher.
Browne, Thomas (1605-1682) English physician, writer.
Browning, Robert (1812-1889) English poet.
Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881) Scottish historian, critic, writer.
Celine, Robert (1923-1996) American lawyer, anarchist.
Cheviot, Jean Honoré (2065-2128) United Nations secretary general.
Columbus, Christopher (1451-1506) Genoese explorer.
Darrow, Clarence S. (1857-1938) American lawyer, writer.
Debs, Eugene V. (1855-1926) American socialist.
de Maistre, Joseph (1753-1821) French diplomat.
Diderot, Denis (1713-1784) French philosopher.
Dostoevski, Fyodor (1821-1881) Russian novelist.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882) American essayist, poet, minister.
Engels, Friedrich (1820-1895) German socialist.
France, Anatole (1844-1924) French novelist, critic.
Galiani, August Benito (2019-*2105) European spaceship commander.
Godwin, William (1756-1836) English novelist, biographer, philosopher.
Gracián, Baltasar (1601-1658) Spanish writer, rector.
Hamilton, Alexander (1757-1804) American president, statesman.
Harper, Sylvia (2008-2081) American civil-rights activist, president.
Hazlitt, William (1778-1830) English essayist, critic.
Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784) English lexicographer, essayist, poet.
Kafka, Franz (1883-1924) Austrian writer.
Kalecsky, Boris (2103-2200) Terran Council president.
Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804) German philosopher.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844-1900) German philosopher.
Olmanov, Dimitri (2190-2350) Chairman of the Terran Executive Command.
Pascal, Blaise (1623-1662) French geometrician, philosopher, writer.
Phillips, Wendell (1811-1884) American orator, abolitionist.
St. Rajasthan 2075-2118) Tau Ceti nonhuman religious leader.
Shane, Marbury (2044-*2074) Occisian colonist, soldier.
Sun Tzu (ca. 500 BCE) Chinese army commander, strategist.
Lord Tennyson, Alfred (1809-1892) English poet.
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Washington, George (1732-1799) American general, president, statesman.
Yeats, William Butler (1865-1939) Irish writer.
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