The Long Earth

isn’t it? It’s like a dream of humanity’s evolutionary past, many hominid types together.’
    ‘But what of the future, Lobsang? What happens when human colonists get out here in earnest? How can this survive?’
    ‘Well, that’s another question. And what happens if they are all driven East in the greater migration? Do you wish to go down?’
    ‘No.’
    Later, as the airship sailed on, they talked it over, the strange uniqueness of mankind in the Long Earth. And Lobsang described how, not long after Step Day, he had initiated searches for human cousins across a thousand Earths, and he told Joshua the story of a man called Nelson Azikiwe.

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    ACCORDING TO THE official family story he was christened Nelson after the famous admiral. However, in reality he was probably named after Nelson Mandela. According to his mother
that
Nelson now sat on God’s right hand, and Nelson junior, growing up, took the view that this was a good thing, in that Mandela would be in a position to prevent the vengeful god of the Israelites loading yet more troubles on the backs of humanity.
    His mother had raised him in Jesus, as she put it, and for her sake he persevered, and in the end, after a somewhat complicated career, and a still more complicated philosophical journey, he took holy orders. Eventually he was invited to Britain to bring the Good News to the heathen: proof positive that what goes around comes around. He quite liked the English. They tended to say sorry a lot, which was quite understandable given their heritage and the crimes of their ancestors. And for some reason the Archbishop of Canterbury sent him to a rural parish that was so white it glared. Perhaps the Archbishop had a sense of humour, or wanted to make a point, or possibly she just wanted to see what would happen.
    This wasn’t the United Kingdom that his mother had talked about when he was young, that was certain. Now, with her long dead, he walked through a London that contained a great multihued population. You hardly saw a news bulletin that wasn’t delivered by a reader whose recent ancestors had walked under African stars. Hell, there were even black men and women to tell you when it was going to rain on the cradle of democracy. This despite the eeriness of an emptying country, a capital city being abandoned suburb by suburb.
    He said as much to the retiring incumbent of St John on the Water, the Reverend David Blessed, a man who clearly supported the theory of nominative determinism. And who said, when he saw Nelson Azikiwe for the first time, ‘My son, you won’t be short of a dinner invitation for the next six months at least!’ That turned out to be a successful prophecy on the part of the Reverend Blessed who, with the help of some family money, was retiring early to his own cottage, so that, in his own words, he could ‘watch the fun when you take your first service.’
    He left the occupancy of the rectory to Nelson, who had it to himself apart from an elderly woman who cooked him his lunch every day and tidied up around the place. She wasn’t very talkative, and for his part he didn’t know what to talk to her about. Besides he had enough on his plate due to the fact the presbytery had no draught-proofing whatsoever, and a plumbing system that the Lord Himself could surely barely understand; sometimes it flushed itself in the middle of the night for no apparent reason.
    This was a part of England miraculously untouched by the Long Earth. Or even, as far as Nelson could see, the twenty-first century. The Middle English were the Zulus of the British, he concluded. It seemed to Nelson that every other man in the village had at some time been a warrior, quite often of high rank. Now retired, they looked after their gardens, drilling potatoes instead of men. But he was taken aback by their courtesy. Their wives baked him so many cakes that he had to share them with the Reverend Blessed (retired), who, Nelson suspected, had been told to hold on and report back on Nelson’s progress to the authorities in Lambeth Palace.
    They were talking in David’s cottage while the Reverend Blessed’s wife was at a meeting of the Women’s Institute.
    ‘Of course there will always be those who are perennially unreconstructed,’ said David. ‘But you won’t find very many of them around here, because the reflexes of the English class system take over, you see? You are tall, handsome, and speak English considerably better than their own children