17 Fructidor CCXXX
Jesus is a prodigal son on leave from High Heaven. His ministry has not been granted a commission or mandate, and may even be technically illegal, but the Princes of Heaven have their own power bases to tap into and Jesus is throwing the full weight of his titles and offices towards this project, a revolutionary redemption which will reshape the relationship between the humans and the spirits.
Jude is a project, a projection, an implantation. one of the seven genders of angels is ambasador. the ambassadors have set up an embassy in Jude’s soul.
The angels call to speak to humanity. they reject and accept the representatives of the state, church, universities, and corporate cartels. They’ve come on a pilgrimage? they’ve been coming on pilgrimage at least as long as humans have, though the sites which interest them and the rites they observe there are not always recognizable as pilgrimages.
a cosmonaut returned from an interplanetary space walk when a malfunction in the fuel line led to an immediate venting of pressure leaving him stranded. he was given a hero’s funeral, though this became embarrassing later when it turned out he was an american asset? a double agent? a rogue? he returns, the air of his suit having been replaced with vines bearing fruit and flowers rich with perfume, to the satellite of monastery on a trojan asteroid of Saturn, his cracked vizor sealed over by the vines, the bloodstain where his forehead repeatedly made impact on the glass still there, a signature of panic from over a century prior.
More astronauts, cosmonauts, vyomanauts, and Taikonauts appeared in the following months, closer and closer to earth. In the rings of Jupiter 12 taikonauts were found. Two appeared in the storage hall of a freighter to Mars. one bore the insignia of the United States, the other the Confederate States. A probe on Mercury found an vyomanaut meditating on the slopes of a crater surrounded by stones and stacks of stones. he sat in a meditation pose and was speaking on an intercom the probe was able to tune into, excoriating his pupils for their lapses in attention, praising the quality of their questions which only she could hear, expounding upon the Upanishads and the principles of protracted warfare. after 30 hours had passed, the probe’s footage recorded her gathering most of the stones—over a ton worth of material, though of course the local gravity was marginal—with cables she kept around her waist, and hulled the stones out of the crater and over the Mercurial lava floodplains, walking west to stay in the planet’s sundown zone. sometimes she rested for an hour or so, during which she might give a short sermon to the local stones, and gather a few into her pack. stones she had carried for year, decades, she occasionally piled these at her waystations, leaving them perhaps as a landmark for the next time she passed this way, one circumlocution of the small burning planet later.
Astronauts washed up on the shores of the south china sea, prompting an international incident further complicated when taikonauts surfaced in the Potomac, a day after that a cosmonaut surfaced in the yellow river, and two days after that 20 spacegoers, in suits unrecognizable as the product of any known nation, past or present, with lilacs on their insignias and visors cracked in many places, where branches hd grown through the glass and re-sealed it, were seen by a semi-truck operator when they crossed a highway in the Alaskan interior, walking north-north-east. the magnetic pole had recently jumped two continents in 4 weeks and now concentrated in the depths of the northern alaskan wilderness, and it appeared this delegation of one score unrecognizable space-goers were intent on visiting it. in fact, as they walked the field drifted south-south-west, only a few degrees shy of directly approaching them, as if it were they pilgrim and they were its Mecca.