The Long Mars Read Online Free PDF Page A

‘Theology? David, this is the Church of England. We don’t do theology.’
    ‘Ah, but the Pope does, and that’s what’s got everybody stirred up, you see . . .’
    Eileen looked calm, if faintly baffled, and she spoke at last. ‘The trouble is, you get so confused. The priests say one thing about the Long Earth, then the other. At first we were told it was a holy thing to go out there, because you have to leave all your worldly goods behind when you step. Well, almost all. It was like taking a vow of poverty. So for instance the New Pilgrimage Order of the Long Earth was set up to go out and administer to the needs of the new congregations that would form out there. I read about that, and gave them some money. That was fine. But then those archbishops in France started saying the crosswise worlds were all fallen places, the devil’s work, because Jesus never walked there . . .’
    Nelson had read up on this in preparation for meeting Eileen. In a way it had been an extension of old arguments about whether inhabitants of other planets could be regarded as ‘saved’ or not, if Christ had been born only on Earth. Out in the Long Earth, as far as anybody knew, no humans had evolved anywhere beyond Datum Earth. So Christ’s incarnation had surely been unique to Datum Earth. In fact the body of Christ Himself had been uniquely composed of atoms and molecules from the Datum. So what was the theological status of all those other Earths? What of the children already being born on worlds of the Long Earth, their very bodies composed of atoms that had nothing to do with the world of Christ? Were they saved by His incarnation, or not?
    To Nelson it had all been a hideous mish-mash of misunderstood science and medieval theology. But he knew that many Catholics, all the way up to the Vatican itself, had been confused by such arguments. And, it seemed, members of other Christian denominations.
    Eileen said now, ‘All of a sudden you started reading about these hucksters selling Holy Communion wafers from Datum Earth, which they said were the only valid ones to use because they came from the same world as Lord Jesus.’
    ‘They were just hucksters,’ Nelson said gently.
    ‘Yes, but then suddenly the Pope says that the Long Earth was all part of God’s dominion after all . . .’
    Nelson had a healthy cynicism about the sudden change in the Vatican’s stance towards the Long Earth. It was all about demographics. With the continuing mass exodus from much of the planet, colonies on the nearby worlds were suddenly filling up with lots of little potential Catholics. And so, just as suddenly, all those new worlds were holy after all. The Pope had taken his theological justification from Genesis 1:28: ‘And God said to them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the Earth, and subdue it.’ The fact that God didn’t explicitly say the Long Earth was no problem, any more than it had been in 1492 that the Bible hadn’t mentioned the Americas. But you did still need to have your priests’ source of blessing deriving from the Pope, so that the Datum Vatican remained the source of all authority. Oh, and contraception was still a sin.
    Some commentators marvelled at the way the two-thousand-year-old institution of the Church had survived yet another huge philosophical and economic dislocation, as it had the fall of the Roman empire that had nurtured it, and the science of Galileo, Darwin and the Big Bang cosmologists. But even some Catholics were appalled at what was called the most audacious land-grab since 1493, when Pope Alexander VI had divided the entire New World between Spain and Portugal: here was an antique ideology claiming hegemony over infinity. Hence Walter Nicholas Boyd, and his despairing cry of ‘Not those feet!’
    And hence poor Eileen Connolly with her utter confusion.
    ‘I didn’t like what the Pope said,’ Eileen said firmly now. ‘I’ve been out there, on treks and holidays and that, in the