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 Earth, or wherever they'd gone, had built more churches.
There were literally thousands of Christian buildings. They filled the cities, commanded towns and villages, guarded rivers, held sway over mountaintop resort areas. One stood beside a pier at the edge of an enormous lake. A hologram depicted Jesus standing nearby on the surface of the water. Some were guarded by facsimiles of the Virgin, others by soaring aircraft. And then, in a desert area with a small village, we came across a church fronted by something unusual.
An interstellar.
Alex switched to Belle. “Can you ID it?”
“I believe so,” she said. Then: “Yes. It is the Coragio.”
The Coragio had been the original exploratory ship, the one that had found Villanueva. It had been one of the symbols of human greatness. Then when things got bad, people had cursed it, blamed it for the approaching disaster.
We recorded it as we passed. It was sculpted, narrow body, bullet prow angled up, its name displayed in ancient English. But it looked as if someone had taken an ax to it. Pieces were chipped away. “The AIs don't seem to have made any effort to repair it,” I said.
Alex, I knew, was thinking what it would have sold for had it been maintained.
Mostly, we found angels. Male angels. Female angels. Angels with children gathered in their arms. Heaven-bound had caught on. Ride to Heaven first-class.
And then, outside a church in the center of a small town, we saw another spacecraft.
It was a molded figure, some form of plastic, probably. Maybe six meters long. Mass-produced. The actual vehicle would have looked primitive, ponderous, not at all the sort of thing you'd want to ride around in, and I wondered if the early interstellars had really looked like the one on that church lawn. “Is that what we're looking for?” I asked Alex.
“Close,” he said.
We passed over and left it behind. Minutes later, we came on another one, same model, same design. Another church, on the edge of a city, had a real spacecraft. It was half a block long, and it was supported on a metal grid that kept its prow angled skyward. It wasn't a superluminal, but it looked pretty good anyhow. I suspect the kids had loved it, and I wondered if they'd opened it to the general public. We couldn't find an entry for the church in our guidebook, but a name was engraved on the building, and it was still legible, though barely: CHURCH OF THE ASSUMPTION.
There were other vessels, of a wide variety of types, all primitive, though, most lumbering and ungainly. Looking at those early vehicles, I couldn't help wondering that anyone would have chanced leaving the atmosphere in one of them. Most, of course, were undocumented, unknown, starships lost to history.
This world's golden age, if you could call it that, had come at a time when people were first spreading out from the home world, were demonstrating that the old dream was actually going to happen. The human race owned the universe. Look out, baby, here we come. And, of course, they were very close to being right.