“Negative, Highgate.”
“You did cause some damage on the ground, however. It will be included in the report.”
“Thank you. Wouldn't want you to leave anything out.”
“Your attitude will also be noted.”
“Okay, Alex,” said Gabe, “I have several references.”
“Show me.”
The auxiliary screen lit up:
The Heaven-Bound Soul: A User's Manual
People You Are Bound to Meet in Heaven
The Boundless Heavens Attest to the Eternal Glory
Bound for Heaven: Your Brain Is Your Link to God
Bound for Heaven: Riding the Celestial Express
The list expanded and filled the page, filled a second, and started on a third. Alex broke in: “How many references do you have?”
“Don't know yet. Counting essays, speeches, individual journals, letters, even some commercial listings, nine hundred thirty-seven so far.”
“Okay. Hold it. How many of these are contemporary to the Villanueva era?”
“Nineteen. The others are from histories written after the general collapse and various types of fiction and speculation.”
“Okay. Stay with the nineteen. And let's narrow it a bit more. Add symbol. Emblem. Statue. Totem. Watchword. Regalia.” He looked at me. “What am I missing, Chase?”
“Well, maybe representation. Talisman. And glyph. Maybe I could be more help if I knew what we were looking for.”
Alex nodded. “Good,” he said. “Use those, too, Gabe.”
“Okay.”
This time we got three entries:
Church of the Annunciation, in Carabana
St. Anne's, on Greentree Avenue in Halicon
The Sunrise Church, in Valaia
Each was extracted from a contemporary history, two dating from that world's most prosperous era, and the third from Eskala Gafna's World's End, which was written during the crisis period.
Alex was still poring over the results when we got back to the Belle-Marie. I berthed the lander and set her to recharge. We got up to the cabin, and Alex immediately sat back down in front of a monitor.
I stayed on the bridge, closed my eyes, and would have liked to sleep. I was tired, but my arm was keeping me awake. The burn was by no means serious, but it wouldn't let me think about anything else. My emotions still hadn't settled down. So I set Belle to scanning the landscape, instructing her to lock in on everything that looked remotely like a church. She said okay, and images began flickering across the navigation screen.
But none of it meant anything. You see one church, you've seen them all. So, eventually, I got bored and went into the cabin to see how Alex was doing. He was bent over a document.
“Find something?” I asked.
“Maybe,” he said. “Look at this.”
… Many of the churches, including The Church of the Annunciation, adopted the Heaven-bound watchword. Originally, angels were employed as symbols of the movement. But this was at a time when angels were still connected too closely to terrestrial traditions. The Villanueva churches, which were establishing their own usages in a spirit of independence from the old procedures, decided they needed their own imprint here, also. They eventually chose the koslo, which, ironically, bore a close resemblance to Earth's eagle.
“So,” I said, “what's the point?”
“Read the rest of it.”
The heaven-bound tradition caught on as the ultimate descriptor of the off-world churches. The koslo remained, for a century or more, the base symbol. It appeared in stained-glass representations. It shared space with depictions of the saints, and gradually it moved outside the buildings, where it could be seen, wings spread majestically, arcing toward Heaven.
Gradually, however, it was replaced by aircraft. Many churches even used images of blimps and balloons. In their turn, the aircraft also gave way, and the ultimate image for the movement became space shuttles, whose various incarnations were put on display around the globe.
“Alex, I have no idea where we're headed with this.”
“Look for what's out front.”
“I'm not following.”
“Chase, Robin, and Winter were here in 1383. Two years later, Robin started acquiring yachts.”
“And-?”
“What do you suppose they were actually doing?”
“I have no idea.”
“I think the yachts, somehow, were connected with Heaven-bound.”
“Alex, this sounds really off-the-wall.”
“Sure it does. This whole business is off-the-wall.” He shut down the screen. “Look, there's no real record of the interstellars they had here seven thousand years ago. Nothing. We don't even know what they looked like. We know more about the churches than we do about the technology.”
“I still can't see why anybody would care.”
“Bill Winter cared enough to sacrifice his life in the effort.”
“What effort? Alex, I don't know what you're thinking but we are not going back into the churches. You gave your word.”
“That's not a problem. Just stop and think for a minute. If you're putting an angel on display, showing people what an exhilarating ride it would give you into Heaven, where do you put the angel?”
“Outside the front doors?”
“That's where we should be looking.”
And that was how we began a planetwide search for lawn ornaments. Belle trained her scopes on every building that had steeples or a cross or a bell tower, locking on any accompanying sculpture, or anything else that wasn't either vegetative or part of the building. We even took pictures of signs.
We discovered how difficult it could be to distinguish between a church and a town hall. Most of the churches had crosses, but the crosses tended to get lost in the trees if our angle wasn't right. And it looked as if a fair number of civic buildings eventually morphed into places of worship. So we found ourselves looking at a variety of public structures. And of statues of old men who had probably been politicians at one time, or industrial magnates. And boats that stood outside nautical supply shops. And pieces of art just off to the side of what had once been retail outlets or malls or whatever. Mixed with them were a substantial number of saints and angels.
After about fifteen hours of unadulterated frustration, I finally fell asleep. When I woke, Alex was also out. Belle had compiled a record of everything we'd passed. “In case whatever it is you're looking for is there somewhere.”
Occasionally, we were tracked by aircraft, but nobody seemed capable of achieving orbit.
I tried to imagine what it must have been like at the end, on a world with a billion staunch believers watching the stars gradually disappear, feeling the temperatures drop.
It became the ultimate test of faith. There'd been attempts to ship in food and supplies, to render whatever assistance was possible, but all efforts had fallen woefully short. Eventually, all those who weren't evacuated died. At least, that was the conclusion. I wondered whether those who'd been rescued, when they'd gotten back to
