“Now our Lord was born once upon Terra, and charged those who came after with carrying the gospel over the planet. But what of other planets? Were they to wait for human missionaries? Or have some of them, at least, been granted the glory of their own Incarnations? It is not a matter on which most churches have ventured to dogmatize. Not only are the lives, the souls, so different from world to world, but here and there one nevertheless does find religions which look strangely familiar. Coincidence? Parallel development? Or a deeper mystery?”
He paused. Diana frowned, trying to understand. Questions like this were not the sort she was wont to ask. “Does it matter? I mean, can’t you be as good a person regardless?”
“Knowledge of God always matters,” said Axor gravely. “This is not necessary to individual salvation, no. But think what a difference in the teaching of the Word it would make, to know the truth—whatever the truth may be. If science can show that the gospel account of Christ is not myth but biography; and if it then finds that his ministry was, in empirical fact, universal—would not you, for example, my dear, would not you decide it was only reasonable to accept him as your Saviour?”
Uncomfortable, Diana tried to shift the subject. “So you think you may get a hint from the Foredweller works?”
“I cherish hopes, as did those scholars who conceived the thought before me. Consider the immense timeline, millions of years. Consider that the Builders must have been too widespread and numerous, too learned and powerful—yes, too wise, after their long, long history—to be destroyed by anything material. No, surely they abandoned their achievements, as we, growing up, put away childish things, and went on to a higher plane of existence. Yet surely, too, they nourished a benign desire to ease the path for those who carne after. They would leave inscriptions, messages—time-blurred now, nearly gone; but perhaps the writers did not foresee how many ages would pass before travel began again between the stars. Still, what better could they bequeath us than their heritage of Ultimate Meaning?”
Diana had her large doubts. Likewise, obviously, did others, or Axor wouldn’t have had to bum his unpaid way across the Empire. She didn’t have the heart to say that. “What have you actually found?” she asked.
“Not I alone, by no means I alone. For the most part, I have merely studied archaeological reports, and gone to see for myself. In a few instances, however—” The Wodenite drew breath. “I must not boast. What I deal with are the enigmatic remains of occasional records. Diagrams etched into a wall or a slab, worn away until virtually blank. Codings imprinted in molecules and crystals, evocable electronically but equally blurred and broken. Some, nobody can comprehend at all. Some do seem to be astronomical symbols—such as signs for pulsars, with signs for hydrogen atoms and for numbers to give periods and spatial relationships. One can estimate how those pulsars have slowed down and moved elsewhere, and thus try to identify them, and thence the sun toward which a record conceivably points …
“On a barren globe five parsecs from here, amidst the tailings of a former mining operation, I found clues of this kind. They appeared to me to whisper of the sun Patricius.”
Axor broke off, crossed himself, stared into remoteness.
After a while Diana made bold to speak again. “Well, your … your reverence, you needn’t despair yet. What say we establish ourselves in town for a few days? You can rest up while I arrange conferences and transportation and so forth. You see, nothin’ has turned up in the mountains; but Tigeries do tell about islands with what may be natural formations but might also be ruined walls, except that Imhotep never had any native sophonts. If that doesn’t work out, I can inquire among spacefolk, get us passage offplanet, whatever you want. And it shouldn’t cost you very heavily.”
Axor smiled. The crocodilian expanse of his mouth drew a shriek from a joygirl. “A godsend indeed!” he roared.
“Oh, I’m no saint,” Diana answered. He couldn’t be so naive as to suppose she had immediately fallen in love with his cause—though it looked like being fun. “Why do I offer to do this? It’s among the ways I scratch out my livin’. We got to agree on my daily wage; and I’ll be collectin’ my cumshaws on the side, that you don’t have to know about. Mainly, I expect to enjoy myself.” To mention her further dreams would be premature.