"Interesting," Arm Wild said. "You have not once mentioned your religion. Is this significant?"

Peter smiled, bashfully. "I was testing you, Arm Wild. I know from the others that you've discussed theirs'."

"Do you not wish to discuss it?"

"I'm happy," Peter said with a shrug. "I've just never been good at it. I have a ... a core belief, that's very important to me, but which I'm not good at communicating to anyone else. And, despite what my co-religionists would say, I'm on a ship with a Jew and a Moslem — I'm not sure what the other three believe — and I'm not going to hit them over the head with my faith. Life's too short and the ship's too small for that kind of thing. It's counterproductive, anyway. It makes more non-converts than converts."

"Your religion is Puritan-"

"Um — wrong. My religion is Christian, Arm Wild. I'm from a group of practitioners who call themselves Puritans. We compare our emigration to Mars with a similar emigration from England to America in the seventeenth century."

"Three religions on one ship," Arm Wild commented. "Does it not strike you as arrogant for any one religion to claim to be the absolute truth?"

"Depends," Peter said. His nervousness was forgotten now as the conversation came round to his joint-favourite topic. Opening the subject naturally was never his strong point, but once he had got going ... "A religion based on philosophy, on human thought, would be arrogant, yes. But a religion that claims to be revealed, that is as much part of the reality of the universe as gravity and light ... no, that's not arrogant. Truth can't be arrogant."

"Yet the religions on this ship have fundamental differences," Arm Wild said. "You believe in the divinity of a man called Jesus Christ. They do not. You cannot both be right. How do you reconcile this?"

"I would ask, why don't they believe it?" Peter said. "I'm not going to claim that all religions say the same thing, which I've heard said, because you just need to look at them for three seconds to see that they don't. But, I also believe in a just god, remember that. He's not some cunning lawyer, just waiting to trap you and catch you out. He'll give you every benefit of the doubt that there is. If I was seeking, if I was uncommitted but believed there was something there, and ... oh, say, the Dalai Lama explained his worldview to me, and one of my more extreme brothers from New Plymouth Rock explained his worldview to me, frankly I think I'd go for the Dalai Lama. And frankly, I don't think God would condemn me for it. He'd recognise where my heart was at."

Peter paused, and grinned.

"And that's another reason why I left Mars," he said. "That view isn't very popular down there."