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Just finished "Balshazzar's Serpent" by Jack L. Chalker, bought from Baen many years ago. This is the first book in the "Three Kings" trilogy.
Earth has expanded out into the galaxy via artificial wormholes, which has led to an explosion of religious sects, each occupying its own planet. In an event known as the "Great Silence", however, all the wormholes leading back to Earth stopped working, for unknown reasons, cutting off the colony worlds, which has gradually led to technological civilisations failing, due to Earth's policy of keeping the colonies dependent on Earth for high technology, ship-building, etc.
Several centuries after the Great Silence, a scout ship from the Roman Catholic world of "Vaticanus" discovers a fabulous solar system called the "Three Kings", where three habitable planets are in orbit around an immense gas giant, and strange alien artefacts litter their surface, but the scout fails to report their location. The quest for the "Three Kings" has become a kind of interstellar search for "El Dorado".
The leader of the missionary ship "The Mountain" learns the location of the "Three Kings", and the book tells the story of how he attempts to get there.
This is the first of Chalker's books I've read, although I have many of them in my library, and I'm very impressed. He's an excellent story-teller, and I look forward to reading the rest of the series. Highly recommended!
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