Colonising a new planet had given the settlers a long-range perspective on the workings of religion and it all seemed so distant to them here; so irrelevant, so faintly childish. Religions were still studied, though, if only as mythologies, and as a way of understanding some aspects of Terran politics and history. But nobody was very interested in knowing much about the past of that distant world now, anyway. People had much more important things to worry about. Katya was raised as an atheist from birth, but she knew about angels. When she died, she was slightly surprised to find herself taken to Heaven by one. The angel carried her upwards through the darkness of space, leaving Russalka behind. Higher and higher they rose, until she saw the distant lights of the Celestial City. She wondered how she was going to apologise to God for being wrong all the time about Him. Still, she wouldn’t be being taken up in rapture from her worldly existence unless He was a forgiving God; the vengeful version suggested in other comparative religion files would have left her in Limbo or worse.
