The figure walked slowly in a wide circle, then paused as though listening. He raised the small object he held in one hand.
Part of the corridor that led from the great hall vanished. The destruction had happened without a sound; not even the chilly night air moved. The man continued walking, moving slowly as though he examined something as he went. Once again, he lifted the object in his hand. This time a section of wall next to where the meteorite had hit vanished, along with part of the rocky shelf beneath it. Where the crumbled wall had stood there was now just a gaping hole, like an empty pool. The figure returned to the sphere, staring deep into its intricate structure. His silhouette was clearly discernible against the light from the sphere.
“It is Jesus!” Siddhārtha gasped. “Perhaps this is one of his bases of operation?”
“But why destroy his own facility?” Asura asked.
Jesus lifted his gaze from the sphere to look out at the dark night sky.
“Perhaps he is removing traces of his organization’s presence here?” Siddhārtha said. Even as he spoke he became certain that this was what they were witnessing. Jesus’s organization had accomplished all of its objectives, so its members were now removing their strongholds, eliminating proof of their own activities. They had reached the end of their plans—now they were starting to worry about cleanup and the possibility of pursuit. “Let’s grab him, then, and find out what that sphere is!” Siddhārtha moved quietly from column to column like a shadow gliding along the corridor.
Asura slipped outside through a crack in the wall. A scant number of stars glittered in the dark sky. She strode toward the front entrance to the building, making no attempt to soften her footfalls. Stepping over the fallen door, she headed directly into the large hall.
“Man of Nazareth!” she shouted. “It seems you have finished what you came to do!”
Jesus glanced over at Asura as she walked in, showing just the slightest bit of interest.
“So,” she continued, “is your Final Judgment done, or are we still waiting? Either way, no one remains to be judged.”
Jesus waved away her words with one hand. “You did well to follow me this far,” he muttered, “but now it is over.”
Asura switched off the infrared device on her wrist, returning it to a regular bracelet. “Yes, and I lost. When I realized that a transcendent being was responsible for the destruction and decline that began on Earth five thousand years ago, I made all efforts to determine the nature of that entity’s existence and stop it. Yes, I was too late. Their plans have come to fruition. As you say, it is over.”
Jesus looked away, snorting with derision.
“Man of Nazareth, allow me to ask a question.”
A look of alarm spread across Jesus’s face.
“Don’t look so frightened,” Asura said. “I merely want to know what that sphere is.”
Jesus stared up at the large object looming above him. “This thing?”
“Yes. Its meaning has eluded me.”
The Nazarene peered at the sphere with weary eyes, then returned his gaze to Asura’s face. “These paths of light here are galactic longitudes, and the green paths there are galactic latitudes.” He trailed one sick finger along the surface of the sphere where the brightness rippled in waves. “This is the galactic equator. An entropy D index is overlaid on this curve, indicating that an entirely different spatial dimension will be generated in this area.” Slowly he moved his right hand, and the aquamarine glow within the sphere slid diagonally to follow. “See, it will be like this. You understand?”
Jesus pointed toward the sphere with his chin. He scratched the back of his left leg with the tip of his right sandal.
Choosing her moment, Asura launched into the air. Her right hand extended in a flash, striking him squarely in the chest. He staggered, and when he regained his footing, Asura was standing between him and the sphere.
“What are you doing?” Jesus shouted, his whiskers bristling.
Asura fixed him with an icy glare. “Finally, I understand!”
Jesus clenched his hands into fists and stepped forward. “What do you understand?”
“The Archangel Michael—the being you claim to have seen coming down from Heaven by the Jordan River? I know who that was. As I know the identity of the great god who plunged Jordan into darkness the day you were executed upon the hill at Golgotha, and spirited you away into the sky—”
“You know nothing!”
“I’m not finished. I know now the provenance of the two giant kings—Atlas the Seventh and Poseidonis the Fifth—whom Orionae served in Atlantis, and I understand the statue of Maitreya in the Pearl Palace. I know now of Tuṣita, that land I desired so greatly to see. I have thought long and carefully about these things—where they could possibly have come from and what their intentions might be. Though the latter are still clouded to me, man of Nazareth, I now know the path by which they entered our world!”
Jesus peered at Asura through the hair that hung loosely down over his eyes. “Gods sometimes do violent things,” he said, his voice soothing, “but it is a mistake to want to exact revenge upon them.” He held up one hand, as though offering salvation.
“Say what you wish,” Asura spat. “Yet to revere a herald of destruction as some sort of heavenly father figure is surely a sin—”
“Herald of destruction?”
“Perhaps you do not understand. In this Milky Way, there are many planets upon which higher intellects have thrived. Imagine, if you will, that these beings you look up to as gods did not approve of these emerging sentient life-forms and decided to remove them. How would you go about doing this, if you were them?”
“What do you mean, ‘how’?”
“I will give you one possibility,” Asura said. “You could visit the life-forms at every stage in their development, sowing seeds that would, over the course of millennia, result in inevitable destruction.”
Jesus’s face twisted.
“You could build in economic dead ends, military strife, population problems, declining health, psychological and physical atrophy, and much more. Take any one of these calamities that plague humankind, and you can see that its true cause lies far in the past. Some hail from as far back as the ancient age when humanity’s forerunners existed only as single-celled organisms living in a warm, shallow ocean.”
“Blasphemy! You have it wrong—”
“Not that they had to predetermine everything. Some of the conditions could have been arranged later on, when there were more variables to work with.”
Jesus fixed Asura with two eyes blazing like fire. “O, dear God who is in Heaven—”
Asura laughed merrily. “Jesus! There is a legend which says that when you were born into our world, the King of the Jews was terrified by news of the Savior’s birth, and so he took every male child from his mother’s arms and killed them.”
“A terrible thing, yes.”
Asura clapped her hands with mirth, laughing again, though in her eyes there swelled a hatred strong enough to make a strong man quail with fear. “Terrible, you say? That, I suppose, would depend on your point of view.”
Jesus looked away.
“It was I who whispered murder into the mind of the king,” Asura said. “Would that he had been more thorough in carrying it out, for in the end, the massacre was for naught. You escaped, and in later years, you joined forces with the giant beings you call gods and angels. If you had died along with all those other children, how then would things have been different? . . . Well, Jesus of Nazareth? Speaking of which—your Final Judgment never came, did it?”
Jesus looked out toward the dark horizon as though searching for an escape route.
“When the four wise men appeared to Siddhārtha, they came as Brahmin monks. Yet in his case they made a terrible error of judgment. The prince never would have met me at all without their intervention, man of Nazareth. And the knowledge they gave to him! Their teachings speak of the cakravarti-rājan, and Maitreya who is to descend to Earth in 5,670,000,000 years as the Savior, and all the cosmology—why did they carelessly leave so many words suggesting the truth? I believe they underestimated the human capacity for understanding.”
Jesus staggered, his face pale.
Asura raised a hand, pointing toward the dark horizon. “Go, Jesus of Nazareth! Go into that barren, shadowed plain, and do not return. It is a most fitting place for you.”
Jesus cursed softly under his breath. Cold sweat trickled down from his ashen forehead, collecting on his chin to drip between his feet.
“Well?” Asura’s glare grew darker.
Jesus’s eyes suddenly widened and the sweat on his brow visibly retreated. An instant later, all noise ceased.