The Long Earth

the universe was, it certainly wasn’t something that could have been discerned by a quarrelsome bunch of antique ecclesiasticals.’
    David barked a laugh.
    ‘And I loved palaeontology. I was fascinated by the bones and what they could tell us. Especially now that we have tools that researchers even twenty years ago couldn’t have dreamed of.
That
was the way to the truth. And I was good at it. Extremely good, it was as if the bones sang to me …’
    The Reverend Blessed wisely stayed silent.
    ‘So, it was not long after Step Day, I got a call from the people at the Black Corporation, who said they had fixed it for me to set up and lead expeditions to as many iterations of Olduvai Gorge as funds would allow. To the birthplace of mankind, on the new worlds.
    ‘Now when you are dealing with the Black Corporation, funds are essentially without limit. The problem we had was a shortage of skilled people. It was a very good time to be a palaeontologist, and we trained up many youngsters. Anyone with a suitable degree and a trowel could have a gorge of his or her very own to work. Whatever else was happening, the bone-hunters had found their Eldorado.
    ‘Well, something like the African Rift Valley persists across much of the Long Earth; geology is relatively fixed. And, as hoped, we did find on many occasions bones in the target area that were definitely hominid. I worked on the project for four years. We extended our fields of work, and it was always the same: oh yes, there were bones, there were always bones. I selected other likely sites around the world which might possibly have been the home of a different Lucy – a Chinese branch, for example, the result of an early diffusion out of Africa.
    ‘But after more than two
thousand
excavations in contiguous Earths, by Black Corporation-funded expeditions and others, we never found any sign of the development of nascent humanity beyond those very early bones, some deformed, some mauled by animals, most of them very small. There was nothing past the australopithecines, the Lucies. The cradles of mankind were empty.
    ‘There are still workers out there, still searching, and until last year I was still running the programme. But in the end the emptiness of the Long Earth – empty of humanity at least – disturbed me so much that I resigned. I took the generous amount that the Black Corporation gave me as a farewell present, although I know they hope that one day I will return to the fold.
    ‘I’d had enough, you see, enough of those empty skulls. Enough of those little bones. You could see the striving, but not the arriving. And one day I suddenly found myself wondering where it had all gone wrong, in all those other worlds. Or maybe it went wrong
here
? Maybe the evolution of mankind is some ghastly cosmic mistake.’
    ‘And so you returned to the Church? Quite a change of course.’
    ‘I’ve been told that no one in recent history has been ordained as quickly as I was. I understand that in times past the Church of England was benign to people who, in those days, were considered natural philosophers. Many a vicar spent his Sunday afternoons cheerfully trapping new species of butterfly in jars. I always thought what a wonderful life that was: the Bible in one hand and a stout bottle of ether in the other.’
    ‘Isn’t that how Darwin got started?’
    ‘Darwin didn’t get as far as Holy Orders. He became rather distracted by beetles … And that is why you see me here. I needed a new framework, I suppose. I thought, why not get to grips with theology? Take it seriously. See what I am able to tease out of it. My tentative preliminary conclusion, by the way, is that there is no God. No offence.’
    ‘Oh, none taken.’
    ‘That means I must find out what there
is
instead. But right now, as for my own philosophy, there is a quotation that rather sums it up: “When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.”’
    The Reverend Blessed smiled. ‘Ah, good old Marcus Aurelius. But, Nelson, he was a pagan!’
    ‘Which rather proves my point. May I help myself to another splash of brandy, David?’
    ‘Nelson was essentially right,’ Lobsang told Joshua. ‘The hominid line, and the apes from which they came, clearly had great evolutionary potential. But if the ability to step first originated on the Datum, evidently the stepping humanoids quickly moved out far from Datum Earth,