I know where the path to the stars lies. The gate opened once, a long time ago. And then it closed, all but the tiniest of cracks. Now we have a wedge in that crack.
You see, Sharon Nagy was a physicist and Tom Schwoerin was a psychohistorian. That was the heart of the business right there. That was the beginning of it and the end of it, and most of what happened in between.
Or perhaps you don't see. Well, neither did they, at first. Who would? Medieval settlement patterns and unified field theory seemed worlds apart. They were worlds that touched at only one point: in the living quarters that Tom and Sharon shared.
They wee an old-fashioned couple, holding to the old-fashioned values. They "lived together" in a "condo," one of a cluster that had been built back in the '70s or '80s. She furnished it with antiques: water bed, pillow furniture, that sort of thing. Quaint, but nice.
During the summer sessions they both worked out of the condo. Tom was usually hunched over the PC, tracking down obscure references on the DataNet. Sharon preferred the organic computer she kept between her ears. She liked to lie in the pillow-sofa, her notebook open, surrounded by wadded up balls of paper and half-finished cups of herbal tea, thinking about whatever it is that theoretical physicists think about. At such close quarters they couldn't help learning something of each other's work. That was the fulcrum on which they turned the world.
But I was into the affair last and least of all and perhaps it would be better to let the story tell itself.
She floated in a world that was not a world. Spheres were not spheres and the geodesies were warped and twisted things. Space and time fell away in all directions in curious vortexes. But she sensed order. There was something patterned underneath the chaos. She intersected the world with a slice of 3-space, sneered at the result, and changed into a Lobachevsky 3-space. That was better, but still not right. It was ugly. Ugly.
"Damn!" she heard Tom smack the terminal across the room. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying not to listen. A lattice formed and danced before her. Almost. Almost, she could see it. The equations hinted at multiple rotation groups connected by a meta-algebra.
"Durák! Bunözo! Juki!"
The lattice shattered into a kaleidoscope of disconnected thoughts. For an instant she sat, overwhelmed by a sense of infinite loss. Then she threw her pen at the coffee table, where it clattered against the china tea cups. God obviously did not mean for her to solve the geometry of Janatpour space quite yet. She glared at Tom's back.
"All right, dammit," she demanded. "What is it now? You've been muttering multi-lingually all day. Something's bugging you. I can't work, and that's bugging me!"
He spun in his swivel chair and faced her. "I can't get CLIO to give me the right answer!"
She made a pout with her lips. "Poor CLIO! I hope you were able to beat it out of her."
He opened his mouth and closed it again. He looked embarrassed. With a scowl, he crossed his arms across his chest. Sharon knew that meant he was about to get stubborn.
"Look," he said, "I've run twenty-three simulations of the Schwarzwald settlement pattern and Eifelheim won't go away!"
Tired, she massaged the bridge of her nose. Be patient and eventually he would make sense. "I take it from context that Eifelheim is a settlement in the Schwarzwald, the Black Forest. Why should it go away?"
He threw his arms out wildly. "Because it's not there!"
She greeted that announcement with the silence it deserved.
"Okay, okay. Rosen-Zipf-Christaller theory says that there should still be a village on the site of Eifelheim. But there's not. It was abandoned during the Black Death and never resettled."
She shrugged. "Then change the theory."
He goggled at her a moment. "Oh sure," he sputtered. "Throw out one of the cornerstones of psychohistory!"
"Why not?" she snapped. "Theory has to fit the facts, not the other way around. At least it does in the hard sciences."
"Does it? Does it really, a cushla? Galileo's first tests seemed to show the Earth stood still; and Newton's initial calculations of planetary positions were dead wrong. They didn't junk their theories. Which at the time, I might remind you, had very little to back them up. They tried to find out what was wrong with their so-called facts. And wasn't it Dirac who said it was more important for the equations to be beautiful than to fit the experiment?"
She clenched her teeth. Curse Dirac! Why had he ever said that? It was true, of course; but why had he ever said it? So soft scientists like Tom could quote him at her? She remembered how she had felt earlier, before his interruption. She had known her equations were not quite right because they were still ugly. The real world always held an elegant simplicity within itself. But Tom made it sound so ... arbitrary.
"Besides," he continued. "I read somewhere that each measurement of lightspeed has been lower than the previous one. Why don't you throw out the theory that lightspeed is constant?"
She frowned. "Don't be silly!"
"Silly, hell!" He slammed his hand down sharply on the terminal and she jumped a little. Then he turned and faced the screen once more. She could see the CRT over his shoulder, flashing green on green.
We're both being silly, she thought. She could see the two of them, as if from the outside. Sitting across the room from one another, bickering over some problem. And she didn't even know what the problem was. She looked down at her own work. I'm not helping me by not helping him.
The silence dragged on.
"I'm sorry."
They both said it at the same time. She looked up, startled, and he turned around. They both laughed and the tension evaporated. Sharon decided that the fastest way to get peace was to hear him out. She crossed the room and perched herself on the corner of his desk. "All right," she said. "Tell me about it. What is this Zip whatever theory?"
"Rosen-Zipf-Christaller," he said.
"It describes how human settlements are distributed. The Department's working under a grant from Matsushita-Bandierantes Corporation. They hope that with better understanding of the forces that influence settlement location, they can site their orbital, lunar, and ground facilities to best advantage."
She nodded. "You've mentioned it. But what 'forces' are you talking about?"
He tugged on his lower lip thoughtfully. "Well, there are market forces, and population forces, and—"
"Oh, not 'forces' like in physics, then?"
He looked annoyed. "I'm not sure what you mean by that. If you mean they're not real, you're wrong. If you mean they're not based in matter, you're wrong, too. Take ... oh, take affinity. People choose behaviors that maximize their positive reinforcement. Natural reinforcers like food, sex, and approval are built into our genes. Conditioned reinforcers like money or prestige serve as substitutes for them."
"Well . . . that makes sense, but—"
"Let me finish. Now imagine a landscape. Each point gives reinforcement to those living there. Soil fertility, mineral resources, connections to other sites, and so on. Got it? Doğru. That defines a potential function over the landscape. A force—the desire for material reinforcement—proportional to the gradient of the potential, draws people toward the more desired locations. We call that affinity."
"A 'desired location' can be different things to different people," she objected. She didn't feel like a mindless particle drawn by a mindless force. She had free will, dammit.
His lips thinned and she knew she had annoyed him again. "Don't you think I know that? Not everyone wants to be a farmer; but the good farmland will attract those who do. Ditto good fishing grounds, or silver lodes. And along with the, ah, herbivores come the carnivores. A concentration of farmers draws millers, equipment salesmen, and loan officers, just like the land itself drew the farmers. It's just like an ecosystem, but with money or trade goods instead of calories."
Tom put his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair. "Population density defines a second potential, one that works against the first. People prefer low density to high density. So there's a tendency for the population to spread out evenly across the landscape. A kind of cultural 'heat-death.' "
He sat back upright and clasped his hands together. "The interaction of these two forces define a set of equilibrium sites where population will accumulate. As the region approaches equilibrium, the sizes of the settlements follow Zipf s rank-size law. Each one will be the center of a cultural-economic potential field that obeys the inverse square law and defines market regions and political territories. Geographically, the settlements form interpenetrating hexagons called Christaller grids. En, Nagy kisasszony?"
"Ertekjol, Schwoerin ur. Reinforcement is your gravity and Christaller grids are your solar systems. And to think: all these years, when you've talked about the forces of history, I thought you were using a metaphor. You've always meant real forces—"
She couldn't help wondering if his cultural forces were warps in some sort of cultural continuum, the same way gravity and the rest were warps in space-time. What sort of topology would such a space have?
"Here," Tom was saying as he tapped keys on the terminal. "A picture is worth ten thousand words. I've tested the theory on scores of regions over the last couple months. Colonial America, medieval Russia, ancient Mesopotamia—" He paused and grinned. "In fact, the theory predicted an ancient Eblaite city on a particular site. I sent old Hotchkiss a cable, telling him to move his dig. That made him mad; but what really pissed him off was when he found the ruins right where I'd said they'd be." He chuckled. "Well, anyhow, take a look at these maps and tell me what you see." He pressed the return key and a series of Christaller grids marched across the screen.
Sharon studied them carefully. They looked like honeycombs. Each cell contained a dot inside it. The brighter the dot, Tom explained, the larger the settlement.
"Wait. Go back one," she asked. Tom entered a command and the previous map reappeared and remained on the screen. One of the cells was blank. Just one. She looked at the heading: Black Forest, this year.
She stretched out a finger toward the screen and touched the empty hex. "This is the only one like this?" It did seem odd. She looked at the nearby villages. They formed a rough hexagon around the empty cell. She frowned. Yes, dammit. He was right. There should be a village in between.
"You think that's something?" he asked. "Check this." He hit three more keys. A web of lines appeared on the map. "The road system," he announced.
She saw immediately what was wrong. The roads all went around the empty space. Some of them went out of their way to go around it, doubling back. She turned her head and looked at Tom.
"That," he announced sourly, "is Eifelheim."
She looked back at the screen. "The little town that wasn't there," she murmured.
Tom snorted. "Quite the contrary, my dear. It was there, but it isn't anymore. Watch. Here's the same region in 1300, reconstructed from LANDSAT photos." He looked at her and smiled. "It's funny. Up close, on the ground, you can't see a thing; but from miles above, the . . . ghosts of vanished villages stand out clearly. So do the outlines of ancient fields and roads. It's amazing how space science has helped historians and archeologists." He looked at the screen and pointed. "There's Eifelheim."
She looked. The little dot stared back at her. "I don't suppose you can just call it a ghost town and forget it."
"You mean like Ashcroft or Fourth-of-July? Or the colonial iron towns in the Jersey Pine Barrens? No way. They became ghost towns for well-known psychohistorical reasons. The resources were depleted to a level where the sites didn't give enough reinforcement any more. That's not the case here."
He entered another command and the computer began running the map back toward the present. A score of dots vanished abruptly, others dimmed. Sharon glanced at the heading. 1348.
"That was the Black Death," Tom explained. "See? Eifelheim's gone."
"So are a lot of other villages."
"Yeah; but wait. See there? And there?”
One by one, the lights reappeared and brightened, sometimes on the original site, sometimes nearby. In the end, every ghost town had been reoccupied or replaced. All but one. Tom clenched his fist.
"You see the problem? People lived there for four hundred years; then no one ever lived there again."
She shivered. The way he said it, it did sound unnatural.
"The place became taboo. I have a copy of a letter written in 1810 by a traveling gentleman who writes that he will 'abide this night in Urach, lest darkness catch me on the malign ground of Eifelheim.' And Anton Zaengle sent me a newspaper clipping." He opened a file drawer and pulled out a slim manila folder. He shoved it into her hands. "It's on top. Go ahead. Read it."
She opened the folder. There was a clipping from the Freiburger Wochenbericht.
DRACULA CULT FINDS NEW GRAVE
(Freiburg i/Br.) Although officials discount it as superstition, some US soldiers on maneuver here believe they have found the tomb of Count Dracula, hundreds of miles from Transylvania. A spokesperson for the US Third Infantry Division acknowledged that something between a cult and a fad had emerged among the soldiers over an obscure medieval headstone decorated with a carving of a demonic face.
The grave is the second adopted by the cult. The first lies near their divisional base in the Bavarian town of Kitzingen. The new grave, which authorities date to the 13th or 14th centuries, generations before the real Count Dracula lived, lies deep in the Black Forest on the site of the medieval town of Eifelheim. The region is heavily forested and the precise location of the tomb is unknown. The soldiers refuse to divulge the information, fearing that tourists would offend the grave's alleged inhabitant. This suits nearby farmers also, who have a superstitious dread of the place.
Monsignor Lurm of the diocesan office is concerned about possible desecration of the cemetary, even though it is centuries old. He also pointed out the possible connection between the supposed carving on the stone and the local folk-tales of flying monsters. "After a few hundred years of wind and rain," he said, "my face would not look so great, either. If modern American soldiers can make up stories about a carving, so can medieval German peasants."
She looked at Tom. "There's your answer," she said. "The place is taboo. They've got their own version of the Jersey Devil flying around."
He made a face at her. "That's no reason. Name one town in South Jersey that's taboo."
"Camden."
"Funny. I'm serious, Sharon. The abandonment caused the stories and the taboo, not the other way around. People don't wake up one morning and decide that the place they've lived in for four centuries is suddenly verboten. Das ist Unsinnlich. No, there must be a material reason."
"The Plague? That must have been a pretty horrifying experience."
"A third of Europe died. The Mongols allowed more organisms than Marco Polo to cross Asia. But that was a common cause, not special to Eifelheim. The answer has to explain not only why Eifelheim was abandoned, but why only Eifelheim was abandoned. The Plague affected nearby villages, too; and they were resettled." He rubbed his eyes wearily. "The trouble is, there's no data. Nada, Nichts, Tida, Zilch. A few mentions in gazetteers or letters. Nothing contemporary. The earliest reference is a theological treatise on meditation, written three generations after Eifelheim had vanished. That's it there." He jabbed a finger at the folder.
Sharon looked. It was a computer facsimile of a Latin manuscript. Most of the page was occupied by an ornate capital D. The capital was supported by a trellis of vines, weaving and branching in a complex pattern, breaking out into leaves and berries and, here and there, oddly shaped triangles.
"Not very pretty," she said.
"It's positively ugly. Worst example of manuscript illumination I've ever seen. The contents are even worse. It's called "The Attainment of the Other World by Searching Within." Gottes Himmel, I'm not kidding! Gobbledy-gook about a trinity of Trinities; and how God can be in all places at all times 'including times and places we cannot know save by looking inside ourselves.' But!" Tom stabbed his index finger straight up. "The author credits the ideas to an earlier manuscript by—and I quote: 'an old man whose father knew personally the last pastor at the place we call Eifelheim.' Unquote. How's that for first-hand data?"
"What a curious way to phrase it: 'the place we call Eifelheim.' " She flipped idly through the printouts. She wondered if there were some way of getting him out of the condo for a while. All he was doing here was spinning his wheels and making her life miserable.
"If this is all the data you have," she said, "you need more data."
"Kini o mu ni ãro? Tell me something I don't know! Bozhe moi, Sharon. Ya nye durak! I've looked and looked. Povtorenia—mat' uchenia, after all. CLIO's chased down every Eifelheim reference in the Net."
"Well, surely not everything's been coded," she replied testily. "The Net's not that old. Aren't there musty old papers in archives and the back rooms of libraries that no one's ever read, let alone entered into the database? I thought that's what you historians used to do before you got computers: rooted around in dusty shelves, blowing away cobwebs."
"Well—" he said doubtfully. "Anything off-line can always be scanned into the database by phone."
"That's if you know what's there and what's in it. What about the unlabeled stuff?"
Tom pursed his lips and looked at her. He nodded slowly. "There were a few marginal items," he said. "They didn't look too promising at the time; but now . . . Cantābit vaceus cōram latrōne viātor." He grinned. "A penniless man sings before the robber," he explained. "Like me, what can he lose?" He leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling, pulling absently on his lower lip. Sharon knew that habit and smiled to herself. Tom was okay, but he was like an old-time motorcycle. You had to kick hard to get him started.
Later, after he had gone to the library, she noticed that CLIO's screen was still lit. She went to turn it off, but paused with her finger over the cancel button. She stared at the map. Eifelheim. The empty cell . . . there was something sinister about it. A singularity. A black hole—with a ghost inside—surrounded by a constellation of living villages. Something horrible must have happened there once. Something dark. She shuddered, suddenly chilled, as if by a draft.
Abruptly, she cleared the machine. Don't be silly, she told herself. But that made her think of something Tom had said. And that made her wonder, What if ... and nothing was ever the same afterwards.
The Teliow Library kept its uncatalogued papers in cartons. There were letters and notebooks, registers and estate papers, ledgers and accounts. The raw material of history. Primary sources, never edited, never published. They were grouped loosely by subject and origin into separate folders, tied in stacks between pieces of heavy cardboard, and hidden away to await a scholar desperate enough to want to wade through them.
Tom spent several hours planning his assault on this jungle. He laid out scores of theories on an Ishikawa cause-and-effect diagram, free associating, letting his imagination ran wild. Most of the theories, he knew, would be utterly implausible; but the important thing was to keep the ideas flowing.
Then he applied K/T analysis. Listing everything the problem was and everything it was not. Who, what, where, and when. Who not, what not, where not, and when not. Like he had told Sharon, a successful theory had to explain why Urach, Donaueshingen, and other nearby settlements were not abandoned.
He prepared a list of cartons whose contents might prove helpful, and gave it to the night librarian. Then he took a deep breath and plunged in.
A few hours later, his eyes red and his brain muzzy, he came up for air. . . .
The night librarian brought another carton and laid it on the reading room table. Tom rubbed his eyes and stretched. His back hurt. He sighed and checked the carton tag against the list he had prepared. He jabbed his pen at the carton he had just finished. "You can take that one back now," he told the librarian.
He took a folder from the new carton, untied the string, and gazed bleakly at the contents. Halfway through his list already and nothing useful. He had found only one passing reference to Eifelheim, in an 18th century "index of episcopal court cases. The index had been compiled partly from an earlier 16th century index, based in turn on the 14th century originals. Whoopee, he thought sourly, I'm hot on the trail. It was a simple note that "de rerum Eifelheimensis, the matter of the baptism of one Johannes Sterne, wayfarer, has been mooted by the death through Plague of all the principals."
He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. Give up. If there ever was an answer, it's been long lost.
"You know, Doctor Schwoerin, we don't get many live ones in here any more."
He looked up. The librarian had not left. She stood there with the other carton braced against her hip. She was small and fine-featured, with her hair tied severely into a bun. She wore a long dress and large, plain glasses.
Lieber Gott, he thought. An archetype! The Librarian!
"I beg your pardon?" he asked.
She flushed. "I meant, usually you professors just phone in a request if what you want isn't on the Net already. One of us scans it in, charges it to your grant money, and that's that. It is terribly lonely here, especially at night. I try to read everything I scan. That helps some."
The lonely librarian wants some company. A human conversation. Well, the lonely psychohistorian wants a break from his fruitless hunt. He smiled at her. "I just needed to get out of the condo a while, is all."
"Oh, you do not need to make excuses. I'm glad you came. I've been following your research."
"What?" He was startled. "Why would you do that?"
"History was always my first love. I mean, how could the present ever make sense if we did not know and understand what went before? I majored in history, under Doctor LaBret at Massachusetts, but switched to computers and library science. Differential topology was just too tough for me."
"It's not easy," he agreed, remembering his own difficulties with Thorn's catastrophe surfaces. "Sit down, please."
She remained standing. "I don't mean to keep you from your work. It's just that I meant to ask you—" She seemed hesitant. "Oh, it is probably very obvious. I just do not see it."
"See what?"
"You are researching a place called Eifelheim?"
"I'm trying to discover why it disappeared. " Briefly he outlined his problem. She had taken enough theoretical history to see why it was a problem. Ghost towns were always replaced by other towns, unless the soil or the silver gave out completely.
"Then there is one thing I do not understand," she said humbly.
"Only one?" he chuckled. "Then you're way ahead of me."
"Why have you never cross-referenced Oberhochwald?"
"Oberhochwald?" The name was vaguely familiar. He had run across it here and there. "Why Oberhochwald?"
"That was Eifelheim's original name."
"What?" He stood up sharply, knocking the heavy reading chair backward. The librarian, startled, dropped her carton. Folders spilled across the floor. She stooped to gather them up.
Tom came around the table and pulled her to her feet. He was surprised to see how small she was. She came only to his chest.
"Never mind that now," he said. "It was my fault. I'll pick them up. Tell me how you know about Oberhochwald. Are you sure?"
She loosened her arm from his grasp.
"Well ... I thought you already knew ... I think it was a month ago. A brother in the theology school was researching the witch mania in Europe. We located and scanned a book for him, a little known supplement to The Hammer of the Witches. As I said, Doctor, I read everything I scan. There was a reference in it to Oberhochwald and someone had added a gloss that the name had been changed to Eifelheim. I recognized the name because I had already scanned it several items for you."
"Do you have it here? I need to see it."
"It's at Yale, but we have a facsimile in memory. I can call it up on the terminal, if you like."
"I like. Do it." She crossed the room to the CRT in the corner. Tom noticed his hand was shaking. Calm down, he told himself. Sure, it's a lead, but . . . hot damn! Another blow struck for serendipity. He stooped and began gathering folders together. A name change. That's why he could find no contemporary references to Eifelheim. It probably hadn't been called that very long before it had been abandoned.
He glanced at the librarian. She was busy at the keyboard, her back to him.
"Excuse me." She paused and turned. "What's your name?"
"Judy. Judy Cao."
"Thank you, Judy Cao."
It was a slim enough lead. At some unspecified time in the 14th century a wandering Minorite named Fra Joachim had preached a sermon against the "witches of Oberhochwald." The text had not survived, but Brother Joachim's oratorial fame had. Comments on his sermon had been included in a treatise on homiletics directed against witchcraft and devil-worship. A later reader —15th century to judge by the calligraphy—had added a marginal gloss: Dieser On heisst jetzt Eifelheim. This place is now called Eifelheim.
Together, he and Judy went through the two cartons in the reading room. This time, they looked for references to Oberhochwald. They found two.
One was a fragmentary journal entry in a collection of miscellany. No date. No author. But it described graphically the anguish of the plague years. A brief glimpse into the suffering of one soul.
"My friends are dying," Judy read from the Latin original, "in spite of all that those remaining here at Oberhochwald can do for them. They eat but take no nourishment from it. I pray daily that they do not succumb to despair, being so far from their own hearths, but face their Creator with hope and faith in their hearts. Two more have taken Christ in their last days, which gratifies Hans no less than me. Nor do they place blame with us who took them in, knowing full well that our time, too, is coming."
She flipped some more pages over, then looked up. "That is all. Just the one page."
Tom handed her the sheet he had found. "Not much concrete information in this, either. It's a letter of complaint from the smith at Donaueshingen to his lord. He says that one hundred feet of finely drawn copper wire, made specially to order, has been returned by Pastor Dietrich of Oberhochwald in lieu of payment. It's dated 1348, 'two days before the feast of the Virgin.' "
"Perhaps there will be more in the other cartons on your list."
Tom looked at all the carton numbers he had already crossed off and groaned. "I don't look forward to re-reading all the offline stuff I just finished."
"I could help," she said shyly.
He looked at her. "Are you serious?"
"It really shouldn't be too difficult. I must do these cartons in real time, of course, but I can also research the Net Master Index. You have already tried Eifelheim. I can write a worm to search out Oberhochwald, Pastor Dietrich, Fra Joachim, and Johannes Sterne, as well. Whenever it finds something new, it can add it to its search list. No offense, Doctor Schwoerin, but no one can mouse in the Net like a trained librarian. There is so much information out there that knowing how to find it is a science in itself."
"All right," Tom agreed. "I'll pay you a stipend from my grant money. It won't be much, but it'll give you a title: Research Assistant; and your name will go on the paper with mine."
Tom gave Judy a special access code that allowed her to load whatever she found directly into CLIODEINOS.
When he left the library building it was late at night. The campus was deserted and quiet. The classroom buildings blocked the traffic noise from Olney Avenue and the only sound was the rustling of the leaves as soft breezes shook the branches overhead. The shadows of the trees danced eerily in the moonlight.
He was halfway across the quadrangle when it suddenly hit him. According to the two items they had read, Eifelheim was still called Oberhochwald right up to the plague. The name change must have come afterward. But why would a village that no longer existed change its name?
It was Judy Cao who found the answer. Like all good answers, it led to more questions.
Sharon watched Tom from the corner of her eye as she chewed her salad. He seemed light-years away. They were dining al fresco at a small vegetarian restaurant she had found in Chestnut Hill. Tom was somewhere else. Back in the Middle Ages, she decided.
She pointed to the stores across the street, getting his attention. "The crowds get thinner all the time. Boutiques aren't as popular as they were when we were young. People hardly go out to shop anymore."
Tom shrugged. "It's easier to shop on the Net. Besides, the styles they sell here, the ones you and I grew up with, aren't in fashion. Who wears jeans or decorates in earth tones anymore?"
She speared a cherry tomato with her fork. "I know," she said. "I like coming here because it's like the old days. It hasn't changed."
"Maybe it has," Tom said smiling. "The past is never really the way we remember it."
The past. Time. She thought about her problem, and about his. She asked, him about Eifelheim and he told her about the name change.
"In hindsight, it seems so obvious," he finished. "I've been kicking myself all week. Oh well. Lúchshye, pózdno chem nikogdá."
Sometimes his habit of scrambling languages annoyed her. "Why don't you just say, 'Better late than never'?"
He looked baffled. "I just did."
She sighed and let it pass. He really didn't know when he was doing it. Sometimes she thought he had his own private language inside his skull and when he spoke it was a matter of luck whether it came out in English or not.
Well, she had her own success to celebrate. She raised her wineglass in toast. "To Tom Schwoerin," she said. "The best lay physicist around."
He paused with his own glass in midair. He frowned. "Best lay, I can understand; but why physicist?"
"Remember what you said last week about light-speed measurements getting lower? Well, I checked it out and you were right. A fellow named Shewhart first made note of it in 1939. He showed that the differences were not statistically compatible with random chance. In 1974, Halliday and Resnick noted the same thing. There were only two exceptions to the downward trend, and both of those came from the Soviet Union. Taken as a whole, the measurements form an exponentially decreasing series approaching an Einsteinian constant as an asymptote."
He put his glass down and stared at her. "I wasn't really serious when I said that. I thought it was just the usual problems of operational definitions. Different test methods, or even different test sets, never give precisely the same measurements."
"Oh, there was some of that all right. Scientists and engineers have always been a little careless with their definitions. They assume that a number obtained by one method means the same thing as a number obtained by another method. But I asked myself, What if progressively lower measurements meant that light was actually slowing down?"
"What if? is an annoying kind of question. It can lead to all kinds of trouble."
She grunted. "Don't I know it? Wait till I publish and you'll see what trouble means. You see, when you include experimental error, each one of those measurements is compatible with a constant light-speed. It's only as a series that they look suspicious
Tom cocked his head. "I don't know much about physics, but aren't there good reasons why light-speed is supposed to be constant?"
She grinned to herself. "What if it's both?" she asked.
He shook his head, confused. "You lost me. How can light be both constant and variable?"
"How could Schroedinger's cat be both dead and alive? This is physics, not common sense. Let's just say that light-speed is constant in a higher geometry but has been decreasing in the perceptual universe."
He smiled. "Makes perfect sense to me."
"No, seriously. It fits in with my own work on Janatpour space. That's why I'm so excited—and so grateful to you. Even if your help was unintentional."
"Thanks. I think. What is the 'perceptual universe' you mentioned?"
"Oh, that's the surface of the balloon. The part of reality we can perceive." She saw the look on his face and hastened to add, "The balloon is an image some physicists use for the expanding universe. You see, galaxies are racing away from each other, not from a common center. They aren't flying out into space. Space is expanding between them. If you imagine galaxies as dots painted on a balloon, you'll see what I mean. As the balloon expands, all the dots appear to be receding, no matter where you are on the surface of the balloon. We just happen to live on the three-dimensional 'surface' of a very weird balloon."
Tom jerked up. "Hey! I think I understand. Velocity is distance over time, right? Well, if a beam of light has constant velocity in, what was it you said? A higher geometry? And space is expanding the way you described, then the light will take longer today to cover the same number of kilometers as yesterday. Because the kilometer itself is a little longer."
She reached across the table and patted his cheek. "Tom, sometimes you amaze me. You really do. You're about one-third right. If you paint a meter stick on the balloon and expand it, the stick will grow longer, even though it's still labeled 'one meter.' "
"One-third right?"
"Yes. Forces like gravity and the strong force keep physical standards from growing as fast as 'empty' space."
"But then—" She saw the realization grow in his eyes. "Distance over time? Wo, madoda, ngi hudelwa yi hubulu!"
"Exactly," she said. "What if time were accelerating? If seconds were getting shorter? Then a constant beam of light would cover fewer kilometers in the 'same' length of time, and thus appear slower. When I project the light-speed series, extrapolating backward to the Big Bang, I get an infinitely long second—and infinitely fast light-speed at the decoupling, and that's . . . Well, it's interesting because it ties in with Milne's theory of kinematic relativity, developed back in 1933. Experimentally, there was never any way to distinguish between his model and Einstein's."
Tom leaned back in his chair. He linked his hands behind his head. "So, time is accelerating, eh? Y'know, I've always thought the years went by faster as I grew older."
She took another forkful of salad. An advantage of salad, she had always thought, was that it never grew cold while she jabbered.
"No," she replied. "That's a psychological phenomenon. The effect is negligible over a person's lifetime. Less than experimental error, so it's practically indetectible."
"Who knows. Maybe the subconscious is smarter than we think."
Now that was a thought. She had assumed that the perceptual universe was restricted to the usual four dimensions. Perhaps we could sense other dimensions as well. After all, if time were accelerating, didn't that argue for at least one other sort of time? She realized he had spoken. "I'm sorry. What did you say?"
"I just asked if this meant you were going to throw out old Einstein."
"What? No, certainly not! Look, for all practical purposes, lightspeed is constant. It's the same regardless of frame of reference, too. It's just that it's a special case of a more general theory." She waved her fork in the air. "We don't replace a valid theory, we expand it." She suddenly remembered that Tom had said almost the same thing about one of his psychohistorical theories. "I mean, for all practical purposes we still use Newton."
She paused with her fork in midair. A trolley car rumbled noisily past, up the cobblestoned street, but she scarcely noticed it. She had just remembered what it was that Newton had said. A change in velocity requires a force to explain it. So, if time were accelerating ...
She patted her lips with a napkin and began building geometries in her mind.
He looked up from his reading when Sharon handed him the phone. "Here," she said. "It's your new girlfriend,"
Tom chuckled and plugged the phone into his terminal."Did you hear that, Judy? Sharon thinks you're my girlfriend."
The image on the CRT looked troubled. "That would not be proper," she said. "I hope I have not caused you problems."
Tom looked at Sharon and grinned. She rolled her eyes upward. Sometimes the stuffy conventionality of the younger generation was a little hard to take.
"No, Judy," he said to the screen. "Everything's fine."
"Ah. Then I have something that you ought to read."
"Good. Load it over." Tom waited eagerly. Judy's literature search had yielded a moderately bountiful harvest, now that they had the right key. Items had been appearing in his Eifelheim file for two weeks now. All properly referenced and annotated. She had found monastic annals, manorial accounts, tantalizing odds and ends. One day it had been a memoire of a local knight recounting his discussions with the pastor of Oberhochwald concerning seven league boots, talking mechanical heads, and other notions of Fra Roger Bacon. Another day it had been copies of the annual corvee going back to the times of the Dukes of Zähringen.
"What is it this time?" he asked.
"I think I know why the name was changed."
"What? Why?" The name change and the site's inexplicable abandonment had occurred at roughly the same time. There had to be a connection.
Judy's face was replaced by a manuscript facsimile. Crabbed handwriting. It looked like fourteenth century work. The Latin was awful; Cicero would weep. As he read, he listened to Judy's voice.
"I took another shot at the witchcraft files, using the Soundex to pick out variant spellings. Most of what turned up was not relevant to our purpose, but I did find this: a 1377 bull denouncing the Beghards, the Brethren of the Free Spirit. It seems that Oberhochwald's new name was not originally Eifelheim at all, but—"
"Teufelheim," he finished. He held his place with his finger. Devil-home. He chewed on his thumb knuckle. What sort of people lived there, he wondered, to have earned such a name from their neighbors? "Shun them as we shun the unholy soil of Teufelheim. Pastor Dietrich was tried and found wanting and God has passed judgement on his actions," he read. "The writer doesn't care much for our friend Dietrich. I wonder what he did that was so terrible; besides sticking the smith with a hundred feet of wire, that is." He dumped the file over to the printer and Judy's face reappeared on the screen.
"Did you read the descriptions of the devils?" she asked.
"Yen. Pretty gruesome. Yellow bulging eyes. Gibbering incantations. "They danced naked but sported no manhood.' Why do you ask?"
"They flew, too."
He snapped his fingers. "The folk tales of flying monsters! This may have been what started it."
"A story in a bull? Would that do it?"
"No, you're right. The writer was repeating a story already in circulation. Ergot of rye, maybe."
"What of what?" Judy's image cocked its head.
"Ergot of rye. A natural fungus that produced LSD. It was a chronic problem with cereal grain in the middle ages. People who ate the bread made from the contaminated rye had hallucinations. They saw the skies open; heard voices. They saw the Virgin, saints, devils. The so-called traditional description of Satan as a giant goat-like satyr dates from then. The worst outbreak, as I recall, started at Aix-la-chapelle in 1374 and spread down the Rhineland; but there had been sporadic outbreaks before then. It was called the Dancing Mania because one symptom was a heightened sensitivity to rhythmic sounds. People broke into wild, uncontrolled dancing." He smiled, remembering. "The same thing used to happen at rock concerts in the '70s. But think how terrifying a bad trip would be if a whole village were dropping acid without knowing it. One effect was to convince the authorities that witchcraft was real. Too many respectable people were seeing devils."
"Oh. I didn't know about that."
"You sound . . . what? Disappointed?"
"I don't know. The writing was so detailed. The descriptions of the devils; the behaviors of the villagers."
"As if the people of Oberhochwald really had befriended demons and 'welcomed them unto their hearths'?"
"Yes . . ."
"Or?"
"Or something else."
After Judy had logged off, Tom remained seated by the terminal, pulling thoughtfully on his lip. Ergot hallucinations were another common cause, not special to Eifelheim. People had seen demons, and written vivid descriptions of them, in many places. If visions had been the reason for the taboo, there would be Teufelheims all up and down the Rhineland.
There were many horrors in the wrack of medieval civilization. Cannibalism followed the famine of 1317-1318. 'Children were not safe from their parents,' one chronicler had written. No villages had been shunned on that account. Bands of communist peasants had roamed the countryside, espousing poverty and free love, sacking manor houses and monasteries to make their point. The people who fled soon returned. Witchcraft and heresy; flagellants and plague. With so many reasons around, why had Eifelheim alone of all stricken villages remained anathema?
He called up the document file and went through it again, item by item. He studied the screen intently, as if he could wrest answers from it by sheer concentration; copies of corvees and other taxes; a scattering of manorial records of the vassals of the Counts of Urach-Freiburg and the earlier Dukes of Zähringen; the knight's memoir; the religious treatise on the "inner world'; seignorial approvals of marriages and vocations; enfoeffments encompassing Oberhochwald and feudal levies calling upon its knight; the newspaper clipping; a cabalistic prayer citing 'eight secret ways to leave this earth of sorrows' and attributed at third hand to 'Saint Johan of Oberhochwald'; an episcopal letter addressed to Pastor Dietrich affirming doctrine that a person's outward appearance did not reflect the condition of the soul. The letter was doubly interesting because the bishop had consistently used the sexless homo rather than the masculine vir. At one point, he had even written naturae voluntarum, beings of free will. That at a time when schoolmen were seriously debating whether women had souls at all.
Then there were the usual monkish chronicles of harvests, fairs, gossip, and such. One spectacular event, a lightning strike in March 1348, had set several acres of forest (and not a few superstitious minds) ablaze. The plague was then spreading north from the Mediterranean and the bolt had allegedly heralded Lucifer's coming.
I could almost write a complete history of this village, he thought. Harvest and tax records would let him estimate economic and demographic growth. The fief records showed how it fit into the local feudal structure. The knight's memoir and the bishop's letter even gave him a glimpse of the village's intellectual life, such as it was. What were seven-league boots? Oh, yes, the wearer could cover immense distances with a single stride.
In fact, he realized glumly, the only thing missing was the only thing that made it important. Why had it never been resettled?
What if it's not here? he wondered. What if the key document has been lost? Or if it was never written down at all? There's no guarantee. I might not even recognize it if I had it,
"Tom? What's wrong? You look pale."
He glanced up. Sharon stood in the kitchen archway, a freshly brewed cup of tea in her hands. The odor of rosehips and chamomile wafted through the room.
"Nothing," he said. "Nothing at all." But he had had the sudden dreadful sensation that he already had a key piece of information in his hands, that he had read it several times already, and it had meant nothing to him.
That evening Tom accessed EuroNet and loaded onto my computer at the Albert-Louis University, asking me to look through the uncatalogued papers for references to Oberhochwald, Eifelheim, or Teufelheim. It was an odd request to come out of nowhere like that, but I rummaged about as best I could and, a few days later, sent him what I could find.
"Sharon?"
She heard his voice, distant, as if through a fog. It was easy to ignore. The universe was lovely. No, not the universe; the polyverse. The same lattice she had glimpsed before. But with twelve dimensions, not eleven after all. Three dimensions of space, three of time and three of ... something else. And three more "meta-dimensions" to join the others together. A triplet of triplets. It made sense. The rotation groups and meta-algebra made sense. The speed of light business fit, too. Her pulse quickened. So, by God, did K/K theory.
She reached out a mental hand. Warp those three dimensions just so and create a gravitational force. Smart lad, that Einstein; he got it just right. Another warp there produced electromagnetism. Kaluza and Klein were no dummies, either. And there, a warp produced the weak force; and there, the nuclear force.
And there? What if she were to warp those dimensions?
"Sharon, are you all right?"
Her eyes popped open. "I had it! It was beautiful! I almost had it! Quick, give me paper. It's too much to remember." She saw Tom, sitting across the breakfast table from her. He already held her notebook out, open to a blank page. She snatched it from his hands and scribbled fiercely. It was slow going at first, but partway through she invented a new notation. Please, she thought, let me remember what it means. After that it went more quickly. Finally, she wrote a row of question marks, sighed and shut the book. "Wait'll I tell Hernando," she said.
"Who's Hernando?"
She scowled at Tom. "I don't know whether to be angry because you interrupted me, or glad because you had my notebook handy. How did you know?"
He pointed. "Because you don't normally pour tea on your scrambled eggs."
She looked down. Breakfast was a sodden mess. She groaned. "I must be losing my mind."
"You'll get no argument from me. When I saw the glazed look come into your eyes, I knew it was notebook-serious."
He took her plate to the sink. "You can have one of my soft boiled eggs," he told her over his shoulder.
She shuddered. "Too runny. I don't know how you can eat those things." She reached across to his plate and snagged a piece of bacon.
He sat back down. "Tea?" he asked. "No. I'll pour."
When she was sipping contentedly on her cinnamon brew, he asked, "So what was the Great Revelation?"
"You don't understand GUT physics."
"And you don't understand psychohistory. But when we try to explain things to each other it helps to clarify our own thinking. You go ahead. I'll just sit here, smiling benignly, and nod in all the right places."
"I don't know where to start."
"Start at the beginning."
"Well ..." She thought about it. She took another sip of tea. "All right. Before the Big Bang—"
"Whoa!" said Tom, laughing. "When I said to start at the beginning, I didn't mean the Beginning."
"Honestly, Tom. Try to be serious." She waited until he had composed himself. "Why do apples fall?"
"What?" He was startled by the question. "Gravity?"
"Right. Now, why do currents flow?"
"Electromagnetism. Do I get a prize?"
"Maybe. Ask me tonight. Now, why is time accelerating?"
He opened his mouth to reply, closed it, and looked at her quizzically."Some sort of force," he said slowly, almost to himself.
"Exactly!" She clapped her hands together. "Accelerations require forces. Uncle Isaac said so. I call the force acting on time chronity. Look at it this way: we don't move forward through time at all; we fall downward, pulled by a kind of temporal gravity." Pulled by what, she wondered. She thought about the Big Bang. "Or maybe we're pushed. I haven't decided on plus or minus signs yet."
"Chronity," Tom repeated. "Then you would say that entropy is a chronic problem."
She looked at the table for something to throw at him. She settled for an old tea bag, but he dodged it easily, still laughing. "Brace yourself," he warned. "I won't be the last to make that pun."
She groaned. "I know."
"So. Are these theories of yours just philosophy, or do you plan to experiment? Can you experiment?"
She nodded. "The first step is to detect and measure the force. Hernando is building a chronon detector for me."
"Right. Who is Hernando, and what's a chronon?"
"A chronon is a quantum of time, a carrier of the time force. Hernando Kelly over in nucleonic engineering is building an instrument to detect them. I dream up the circuits and he puts 'em together. I'm no good at etching bubbles." She wiggled her fingers. "Too clumsy, see?"
Tom shook his head in admiration. "Out of the sofa and into the lab. This must really be important. It sounds terribly fundamental. A new force."
"Oh, it is. It'll change our whole outlook on the universe." She looked at her watch. "I'm supposed to meet Hernando in an hour. Mind if I work while we talk?"
"Hmmm? No. In fact, I'll walk you over to the engineering center. I have a meeting with Judy over that way."
She looked at him. "More Eifelheim? Or is she just too good looking? Getting your jollies with her?"
He twisted his face up. "Get serious. These aren't the eighties, y'know. Her generation wouldn't know how to dress for an orgy."
She patted his cheek. "Still panting for a glimpse of calf? I know how you feel. No respect for the values of our generation. Hernando's the same way. Totally devoted to one woman."
"Tempos fugit," he shrugged. "Andere Sitten, and all that."
At their desks, Tom pulled his hard-copy file while Sharon snapped computer bubble-modules into a carrying case.
"So, how will chronity change our outlook?"
"What? Oh. It expands the universe and changes its shape."
"Makes sense to me."
"All right, all right. Forces are space-warps. I thought everyone knew that. Long time ago, Uncle Albeit showed that gravity was a warp in space-time. That was an exciting insight, so the physicists tried to do the same with electromagnetism. Nothing seemed to work until Kaluza and Klein expanded the universe by tacking on some extra dimensions. Then we discovered the weak force and the nuclear force, and tried to express them as warps, too. It got to be quite a game for a while, almost as much fun as finding 'new' subatomic particles. I got in on the tail end, when I was doing graduate study back in the '80s. Anyway, when the smoke finally cleared, we had eleven dimensions on our hands."
"Merde! You mean physicists kept adding imaginary dimensions because they had arbitrarily decided that forces were warps?"
She snorted and closed her bubble-case. "Those dimensions are no more imaginary than Newton's 'force fields.' And it wasn't arbitrary. Certain symmetry relations—"
Tom held his hands up in mock surrender. "Okay, okay. I give up. How does your chronity fit the scheme?"
"Perfectly. I can describe it as a warp, too; provided I add a twelfth dimension. Trouble was, that messed up the accepted models for the other four forces."
"Until this morning," Tom guessed. "At breakfast."
"Right. I discovered that if I organize the dimensions as a nested hierarchy instead of an orthogonal array, everything works out. In fact, it becomes simpler." She explained about her triplet-of-triplets model. At one hierarchical level, the meta-continuum, there were three dimensions: Space, Time, and a third quality she hadn't named yet. A limitation of earlier models was the assumption that all 'extra' dimensions were spacelike. At the fine level, each of her meta-dimensions decomposed into three orthogonal dimensions. She called the whole the polyverse. The perceptual universe was a subset of this.
"A warp in the polyverse," she finished, "can intersect the universe in different ways. A single warp, seen at different angles and cross sections. Like the blind men and the elephant, we think we see different forces."
"Hmmm. We can't actually see these 'hidden dimensions.' The whole elephant, so to speak."
"No. Remember the balloon analogy? Well, you can think of the extra dimensions as forming the inside of the balloon. That's not strictly correct, but it'll have to do. The original monobloc was slightly asymmetrical. When it expanded some of the dimensions got rolled up. They're still there: inside the quarks; inside everything. What you've always thought of as a simple, dimensionless point is really a complex, multidimensional hypersphere."
The condo buildings were arranged in a U-shape around a central courtyard set back from the street. The air, when she stepped out, was fresh and clear, but muggy. A spin-off of the new hydrogen cars and their water vapor exhaust. She could remember the hydrocarbon cars of her youth—how the air stank and her eyes watered. Not to mention the cancer rates.
Tom continued to bounce questions off her as they walked. "Seems to me," he said, "that if we could take a shortcut through the inside of your balloon, we could reach the planets in less time."
She smiled. He really was very bright for a soft scientist. "That would be a neat trick topologically. Like a donut jumping through its own hole. But, who knows? If we could control the proper energies and focus them in the proper directions . . . When do you think the Brazilians will finish the L4 accelerator?"
"Eh?" He stopped, puzzled by her change of subject.
"You see, the really big accelerators take us into the past. They recreate conditions as they were in the first seconds after the Big Bang, when the separate forces weren't all that separate. We can stick our noses a little way into the balloon and see a world in which the seconds were longer and the kilometers shorter."
"And the Bandierantes L4 will do that?"
"Not all the way back to the Bang, but it should yield enough energy to fuse chronity with the electro weak force. Since we've been manipulating electromagnetism for generations, that should give us a way to manipulate the time force."
"Question mark."
"Simple. If you can make A jump through hoops and you can attach B to A, you can make B jump through hoops."
"No, I didn't mean that. Logic, I understand. What do you mean about fusing forces?"
"Oh! That's simple, too. In the Beginning, at the Bang, there were no separate forces, just a single Superforce. As the energy level dropped the meta-continuum warped and the individual forces, ah, 'froze out.' Gravity froze out at Planck scale energy, 1019 proton masses; and the nuclear force, at unification scale, or 1014 proton masses. Those are enormous energy levels, of course. Way beyond what we can achieve even today; but even back in the 1980s they could reach Weinberg-Salem scale at 90 proton masses and fuse the weak force and the electromagnetic force into the electro weak force."
"Wait, I remember. That was the breakthrough that led to the anti-nuclear shield, wasn't it?"
"One of the breakthroughs. Like I said, we can manipulate electromagnetism; so if we fuse the weak force to it, we can manipulate atomic decay. The result was the fission suppression field."
"So how does ..." He cocked his head and frowned. "Hold on. Something's wrong. What were those energy scales? 1019, 1014, and approximately 102? Why's there such a big gap between the last two? What kind of series is 19, 14, 2?"
"A question that's bugged physicists for over forty years. It's that notion of beauty again. Most series in the physical world are mathematically recognizable: arithmetic, geometric, logarithmic, Fibonacci, and so on. Just like Mendeleyev and the periodic table of the elements, the gap says something's missing. There's really no gap at all. At about 108 protons the electro weak force is unified with—"
"—chronity," he finished. "Very impressive."
"Right. I modestly call that Nagy-scale energy. That's why I asked when L4 would be finished. It's within its capabilities. Do you think it will be finished? Do you know how many orbital factories have gone bankrupt this year?"
"Know it? I predicted it. Psychohistory isn't just for the past, you know. And being in orbit doesn't make anyone immune to the four business cycles. Don't worry, though; things'll pick up in another year or so. I've calculated it."
She squeezed his arm. "Thanks for the encouragement." They resumed walking. "Anyway, the point is that with Nagy-scale energy we can get inside the balloon, as you put it, and go anywhere. If we can solve the topology problem. Lightspeed is still the upper limit on velocity; but if we go far enough in the right direction, the kilometers become very short and the seconds very long. In effect, we can pick any light-speed we want."
He blinked. "Instantaneous interstellar travel?"
She shook her head. "Instantaneous is a dirty word. But it could be as near as made no difference. Tom, we wouldn't need spaceships at all. We just disappear here and reappear there. We could drive our cars. With protective suits, we could walk to the stars. A single stride could cover immense distances. Could you imagine the looks on the crew of BRJ Yoshiba if they reach Van Biesbroek 8 and find people already there? They'd have to commit seppuku to save face."
"Shades of Asimov! Sounds like you've discovered hyperspace."
"No. Hypospace. Topology is conserved. The eight hidden dimensions are inside the universe, remember? To travel to other worlds we have to travel inside. She laughed, but he was oddly quiet. She looked at his face. "Tom?"
He shook himself. "Nothing. I just had the oddest feeling of deja vu, is all. As if I'd heard all this before somewhere."
Tom met Judy at the old Pigeon Hole, where they discussed her latest findings over a couple of cheese-steak hoagies. Tom liked his with everything on it and watched with amusement as Judy carefully plucked the green peppers from hers.
"It was my worm," she explained. "I sent it looking for Pastor Dietrich." She rolled her eyes up to heaven. "Do you know how many medieval Germans have been named Dietrich? Some of what turned up I could weed out immediately. The others I had to read, one by one." She spat the words out. "And this one?" she asked, waving a printout in the air. "The idiots didn't put Oberhochwald in their index, so it was never cross-referenced that way in the Net Master Index. Otherwise, it would have popped out right away." She bit her hoagie savagely. "Jerks," she muttered.
Tom laughed. Nothing so offended a professional librarian as bad indexing. He stopped, suddenly sober. How much more information was hidden away the same way? Buried forever in the mountains of words written over the last six centuries. He took the document from her, grateful that he had it at all.
It was an odd item. During the 1960s an enterprising group of liberals had published a book called Tolerance Through the Ages. The contents purportedly showed enlightened attitudes in many times and places. One of these was a letter from Pastor Dietrich to his bishop:
Excellency,
I have remained silent while my detractors have whispered vile accusations in your ear, hoping to turn your heart against me. Reason and truth will prevail, I thought. Yet the latest incident regarding the flagellants in Stuttgart causes me to wonder whether reason be still highly regarded in Christendom. Fra Joachim has told you we are witches here who have welcomed flying devils into our homes, and has asked that the Holy Office be used against us. Permit me now to speak in my own defense.
While it is true that Alexander IV, may he Rest in Peace, granted the use of tenure by the Holy Office in pursuit of heretics, Canon Episcopi clearly states that witchcraft, albeit a civil crime, is no heresy. Thus the request of Joachim and his ilk is improper, regardless of the merits of his argument. Quod erat demonstrandum.
Furthermore, the same Canon declares that witches do not fly to their Sabbat, save in dreams induced by belladonna and other noxious herbs, and that to believe otherwise is sinful! Therefore, it is my accusers who sin when they claim that my guests fly by supernatural means. Quod erat demonstrandum.
(Thierry, old friend, do we not both read God's Word through the means of wonderful eye-glasses, so recently invented? Though these be but natural, mechanical contrivances, yet many of the simple folk mistrust them. Simil atque, flying, if it be possible, would prove itself natural as well, accomplished either through God's Will as with the birds of the air, or though the skills of clever artisans.)
We also know that demons cannot abide the touch of Holy Water. Yet, after all their art had failed to win them home and my guests had given themselves to despair, I preached to them and won at least one soul to Christ, he who celebrated his new birth by taking the Christian name Johann. The Water of Baptism caused him no discomfort. Therefore, he is no demon. QED.
Thus do I refute Fra Joachim. "Whatsoever ye do to the least of My children, ye do unto Me." I have aided travelers lost and hungry, some grievously hurt, when they appeared here in the spring. Fra Joachim finds them ugly and calls them devils. Certes, they fare from afar land and folk there have different visage; but if Pope Clement can shelter Jews in his palace at Avignon from fear-maddened townsmen (and how marvelously rational was his bull of September last demonstrating the innocence of the Jew in the matter of this new Plague!), then surely a poor parish priest may shelter the helpless wayfarer, no matter the color of his skin or the shape of his eye.
Christ with us this Year of Grace 1348.
Given by my own hand at Oberhochwald in the County of Urach Freiburg. Michaelmas Eve.
Dietrich
"Quite a remarkable man," said Tom.
"Yes," said Judy quietly. "I should have liked to have known him. My parents were also helpless wayfarers. They lived in a boat on the water for three years before their "Pastor Dietrich" found them a home."
"Oh. I'm sorry."
She shrugged. "It was a long time ago, and I was born here. The American story." She smiled in embarrassment.
Tom looked at the letter again. "Chinese, do you think?"
The almond eyes looked at him. "What do you mean?"
"Dietrich's guests. The comments about skin and eye shape sound like Chinese."
"There was such travel in the fourteenth century."
"Damn right. Marco Polo's father and uncle went to China and back twice. We know of two Chinese Nestorians who came west at about the same time. They may even have passed the Polos along the way. Oddly, one of them was named Marco, also. When they reached Babylon, Marco was selected Catholicos, the Nestorian pope. He sent his companion, Sauma, on embassies to the Roman pope and the English and French kings. Dietrich may have taken in a similar party, one that had met with disaster. Some were wounded, he says."
"Perhaps," Judy agreed, "but—"
"But what?"
"Why would Joachim call them flying devils?"
"If their arrival coincided with an outbreak of ergot hallucinations, they might have been connected with the visions in the popular mind."
Judy pursed her lips."Well, Dietrich seems to have converted one of the 'hallucinations' to Catholicism. Johan. Do you suppose it is the same person as that Joannes Sterne, the one whose baptism was referred to the bishop's court?"
"Almost certainly. I received a transmission this morning from my friend Anton in Freiburg. He did some digging over there and came up with more of that journal. Remember, we found only that one page?"
"Yes. I believe it was kept by Pastor Dietrich."
"So do I. In small villages like Oberhochwald, the priest was often the only literate man." He handed her the pages and watched as she read through them.
She finished, nodding. "Chinese or demon," she said. "Dietrich thought well of our Johan. Or whatever his name really was." She flipped through the pages. "What was it he wrote? Oh, yes. 'I call him Johan because his own name is too difficult for my tongue.' "
" Uh-huh. He would never have heard a non-Indo-European language before. And Chinese has a lot of tonal subtleties."
"He also wrote how Johan and some of his companions helped care for stricken villagers after the first bout of Plague."
Tom nodded and retrieved the papers. He flipped through them. "Right. What did he write? Here it is. 'While they themselves remain untouched thus far, Hans and three of his friends daily risk contamination by visiting the sick and burying the dead. How sad that those who fled from their sight throwing rocks and dung will not return to witness true Christian charity.' "
Judy took a sip of her soda. "And there's more in the same vein," she said. "Johan and Dietrich pray together for strength. Some of the wayfarers grow despondent and Dietrich comforts them."
"So they cooked up a scheme," Tom added, "to keep their hopes up." He licked his thumb and searched through the printouts."Uh-huh. 'The folk of the village try in their own fashion to repay our guests' kindnesses by aiding them in their efforts to win their way home. I have bethought myself to secure from artisans certain items which Hans declares would be sorely needed for the endeavor. However, our own smith has already gone to his reward and I dare not venture into Urach since Joachim has been preaching.' That fits. Donaueshingen is in the other direction."
"Dr. Schwoerin?"
"Oh, call me Tom."
"Very well. Tom. There was one other scene that Pastor Dietrich described. It was on the last page but one. I should like your opinion of it."
He read the page she had indicated. "I'm not sure what you mean," he said finally. "Dietrich says he found Hans one night alone on the edge of the village, looking at the stars. They talked awhile and Hans asked how he would ever find his way home again. A homesick traveler, nicht wahr?"
"No, Tom. He wrote that Hans pointed to the stars and asked how he would find his way home again."
"I still don't understand. People in those days generally used the stars as guides for traveling."
"I'm . . . not sure. It's just a feeling. Something we've read ... It means something different. Not what we think at all."
He didn't answer her. He'd had the same feeling himself. He took a last bite from his hoagie and shoved the plate aside. It bothered him that, despite all the material they'd unearthed, they were no closer to finding the reason for Oberhochwald's abandonment. So far there was nothing that would not apply equally well to scores of other places. The cause had to be unique. He remembered the case of a Manchurian village, inhabited by mentally retarded people. That had been traced to an iodine deficiency in the soil they farmed.
Shun them as we shun the unholy soil of Teufelheim. In the last year of its existence, Oberhochwald was an ordinary village. Yet a mere 29 years later it was being called the Devil's home. Of course, the great outbreak of the Dancing Mania had come between the two events. But nowhere else had the hallucinations led to a taboo.
The subconscious is a wonderful thing. It never sleeps, no matter what the rest of the mind does. And it never stops thinking. No matter what the rest of the mind does.
Tom awoke in a cold sweat. He sat suddenly upright in bed. No, it's not possible! It was absurd; but everything fit. Or did it? He had to know.
He glanced at Sharon where she sprawled fully clothed on her side of the bed. She must have returned late from the lab and crashed. He could not remember her coming in. She smiled faintly in her sleep, dreaming of chronons, no doubt.
He eased out of bed and tiptoed to the terminal, where he called up the Eifelheim file. He carefully checked and cross-referenced each item. Data are not information, he knew, until they had been properly organized. He put events in chronological order, placing the undated items through context or logical relationships. Michaelmas Eve, for example, could have been either May 7 or September 28, depending on whether it was the Feast of the Apparition or of the Dedication. But Dietrich's letter referred to the Pope's Bull, which had also been written in September. When he had finished, he reviewed the list:
1348, Mar. Lightning strike "heralding Lucifer's advent."
Spring Foreign travelers arrive. Some villagers flee. Others shelter and care for them.
? Sir Manfred visits Dietrich; later writes memoir.
Jun. Dietrich receives letter from bishop (apparently a reply to a query from Dietrich). "The condition of the soul is not manifested in the aspects of the material body."
Summer Joachim is preaching against witches. Travelers growing despondent. Dietrich preaches and converts Johann to Catholicism.
Sep. Dietrich writes apologia to bishop. First signs of plague. Smith (and others) die. Johann helps care for ill.
?. Travelers determine to try for home. Surviving villagers help. Dietrich gets copper wire. Travelers begin dying. Two more converted. Dietrich returns wire.
late 1348. Village abandoned.
1348-1400. Heterodox theologies attributed to Oberhochwald apparently circulating locally.
1374 Major outbreak of ergot poisoning. Hallucinations.
1377 First specific mention of taboo. "Teufelheim."
1384 Cabalistic prayer of "St. Johan." "Eight secret ways to leave this earth."
1423 Religious treatise: "Trinity of trinities." First mention of "Eifelheim."
Tom chewed on the end of his light-pen. The record was spotty, incomplete. When, for example, had the gravestone been carved? He envied physicists. The answers were always there. If only the physicist were persistent enough or clever enough, she could pry them loose from the universe. Cultural scientists were not so fortunate. The facts themselves did not always survive. No amount of persistence could decipher a record that had perished in a long-ago fire.
He studied his list, referring to the actual documents to refresh his mind on details. In the end, he saw no other explanation. What had he said to Sharon that day in the restaurant? Maybe the subconscious is smarter than we think. Or maybe not. He needed a second opinion. He looked at the clock on the wall, an old-fashioned digital with an antique liquid crystal display. It was 03:20 hrs. That meant 09:20 hrs. in Freiburg. He copied his file and added a summary. Then, before he could lose his nerve, he zapped it to my office, a quarter of a world away. It contained a single question: Was glaubst du? What do you think?
Tom's second message piqued my curiosity. I coded back that a reply would require several hours in the Bücherei. I found some documents that he had asked about and compared them to what he had sent. Then I searched out other documents and blew off the centuries and read them as well. Afterward, I smoked my heavy carved Schwarzwalder pipe and was disturbed. I thought about appearing the fool. Dignity, after all, is something we save for our old age; and I had earned it.
I sighed and tied ZEITGEIST into CLIODEINOS and transmitted what I had found. Cautiously—very cautiously —I outlined my conclusion. If Tom had the brains that God gave a turnip, he could read between the lines.
"What are you doing up so early?"
Tom started violently. He looked around. Sharon stood behind him, rubbing her eyes. "Don't sneak up on me that way! I thought you were crashed."
"Are you kidding? A Mack truck could sneak up behind you, you're so intent on that printer." She yawned. "That's what woke me up. The printer."
He watched the printer head run back and forth. "The wonders of engineering. It's supposed to be noiseless."
She padded into the kitchen and turned on the tea kettle. "It's time to get up anyway. What's going on?" she called.
Tom pulled the last sheet from the printer. He had been reading my message as it emerged. "It would take too long and sound too ridiculous."
She poked her head around the archway. "Tom, I'm a physicist, remember? Next to strange, charming quarks nothing sounds ridiculous. So, what's on those printouts?"
"Anton sent them."
"Anton Zaengle? How is the old dear?"
"He's fine. He wants me to come to Freiburg."
"Oh? Why?"
"I think he thinks what I think."
"Well, I'm glad you cleared that up."
"No, seriously." He waved the printouts. "This is the bait to lure me there." He paused." Sharon, why would a medieval backwoods priest need a hundred feet of copper wire?"'
"Why ... I don't know."
"I don't either; but he ordered it specially made. And some special iron forgings of odd shape, according to Anton. And later, he brought it all back." He pulled out another sheet, heavily underlined in red. "And during the summer of 1348, monks in a monastery near Oberhochwald heard thunder when there were no clouds in the sky. Short, sharp thunderclaps echoing in the hills." He put the sheet down. "The Germans say that gunpowder was invented in Freiburg in 1350. Interesting timing.
"And peccatores Eifelheimensis, the Sins of Eifelheimers. Something Anton found. It denounces as heretical the notion that there could be men with souls who were not descended from Adam."
Sharon shook her head. "I'm still asleep. I don't get it."
He took a deep breath. He was surprised how reluctant he was to say his thoughts out loud. But Sharon's the one can tell me if my guess is all wet.
"All right," he said. "Nearly seven hundred years ago, sentient beings from another world were stranded near Oberhochwald in the Black Forest." There, he'd said it. He held his hand up to forestall Sharon, whose mouth had dropped open. "They were traveling through Nagy space when their vessel malfunctioned. The energy leak must have been tiny, but it started a forest fire and injured some of them."
Sharon had found her voice. "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. What sort of proof—"
"Let me finish, please."He gathered his thoughts and continued. "The aliens' sudden appearance out of nowhere and their physical features, yellow bulging eyes, for example, frightened many villagers, who fled, starting rumors of demons. The others, including the village priest, Pastor Dietrich, saw that they were creatures, if not precisely human, in need of help. Just to be safe, he got a carefully worded ruling from his bishop, something he could do in Latin without giving the show away.
"The aliens lived in Oberhochwald for many months. While Fra Joachim and others were accusing them of witchcraft and demon-worship, the villagers tried to help the aliens repair their hypocraft. I should have seen that in the business of the copper wire. What possible use would that have been for earthly travelers?
"I'm sure everyone knew there was no real hope of repairing the equipment; but it was a necessary self-deception to try it. Perhaps the aliens taught the villagers how to make blasting powder. They also flew. Anti-gravity? Perhaps. Pastor Dietrich wrote a letter in which he carefully denied only that his 'guests' flew by supernatural means."
He looked at Sharon, searching for a sign of her reaction.
"Go on," she said.
"The aliens were immune to the Plague—different biochemistry—and repaid the villagers' kindness when they became ill. At least, some of them did. Others, I'm sure, had succumbed to apathy by then. Dietrich even converted some to Catholicism. We have a record of one baptism, at least. Joannes Sterne? Oh, he knew where his guests came from. He knew.
"Eventually, the aliens, too, began to die. Not from the Plague, but from the lack of some vital amino acid. That different biochemistry again. 'They eat but take no nourishment' was how Dietrich put it. When his friend Hans died—this is a guess now—when Hans finally died, Dietrich buried him in the churchyard and had a carving of his face put on the stone so that future generations would know. Only he didn't realize how many generations that would be, or that the village itself would vanish.
"The taboo? Easy. There really were 'demons' there. And shortly after Joachim cursed the place, it was struck by Plague. But were the demons really dead, or simply asleep, waiting for new victims? People shunned the place, and passed the warning to their children. In a fairly short time, Joachim's tag of Teufelheim was euphemized to Eifelheim and the original name of Oberhochwald forgotten. All that was left was a custom of avoiding the place, vague folktales of flying monsters, and a gravestone with a face on it."
She stared at him, her head spinning. Aliens? she thought. In medieval Germany? It was unbelievable, fantastic. Was he serious? She listened as he described his evidence. Certainly it resolved his problem of the taboo, but the solution seemed even more bizarre than the original problem.
"And you think this scenario is credible?" she asked when he had finished.
"Yes, and so does Anton, I think. And he's nobody's fool."
"No," she said thoughtfully. "But then he didn't come and say it flat out, did he?"
Tom grinned. "I said he was no fool."
"Hunh. That's better left to you, I suppose. What I'd like to know is why you dragged Nagy space into it."
"That's easy. No one ever mentioned spaceships. Medieval people weren't stupid. They were having a technological revolution themselves. Camshafts and waterwheels. They would have recognized a spaceship as a vehicle of some sort, even if they thought it was Elijah's chariot. But, no. Both Dietrich and Joachim and the writer of the 1377 Bull insisted the aliens 'appeared.' Isn't that how you described hypospace travel yesterday? A single stride covers great distances, was how you put it. No wonder Dietrich was so interested in seven-league boots. And that's what Johann meant when he pointed at the stars and asked how he would ever find his way home again. Traveling the way he did, he had no idea which was his home."
" 'Appeared.' That's a lot to read into a single verb."
He held up the computer printouts. "It all ties together, though. Rope-logic, not deduction. No single strand is strong enough to support the conclusion; but together ... A prayer attributed to Johann says there are eight secret ways to leave the Earth. How many dimensions in your hypospace?"
"Eight." The word came out reluctantly. She felt her pulse begin to hammer in her ears. What if. What if?
"And the religious treatise attributed at third hand to Dietrich: to travel to other worlds you have to travel inside. You used almost the exact same words. Your twelve-dimensional geometry became a trinity of Trinities. The writer mentioned 'times and places we cannot know, save by looking inside ourselves.' "
"But that really was a religious treatise, wasn't it? The other worlds were Heaven and Hell, and traveling inside meant searching one's soul."
"Sure; but the ideas weren't written down until seventy-five years later. The writers took something they'd heard at third or fourth hand and interpreted it in some familiar way. Who knows what Dietrich himself understood when Johann tried to explain it to him. Quantum physics just wasn't in his medieval Weltanshauung. Here." He handed her the folder. "Read through it the way Anton did and see if it doesn't make sense." She looked in his eyes as she took the folder from him. He really is serious, she thought. Which, knowing Tom, could mean he couldn't come to grips with the problem's insolubility. Or else his idea wasn't so crazy as it sounded. Give him a fair chance. He deserves that much.
She read through the items slowly and carefully, relying mostly on his English translations. The old-style German was too hard to follow, and the Latin was Greek to her. She could see Tom fidgeting nervously at the edge of her vision.
Crazy. Disconnected items. But there was a thread that ran through them. She came at last to the treatise. She recognized the ugly, angular capital.
When she had finished, she thought long and hard. Finally, she shook her head. "It's all circumstantial," she said. "No one comes right out and says they had alien visitors from another planet." The tea kettle began to whistle and she went to the kitchen and turned it off. She laid the copy of the treatise on the kitchen table, where she had dumped her own papers last night, while she searched for a morning tea.
"Yes they did," Tom insisted. He had followed her to the kitchen. "They did come right out and say so. In medieval terms and concepts. Oh, we can talk about planets orbiting other stars. We can talk about multi-dimensional continua. But they couldn't. They didn't have the words to define the words. Everything they learned had to be filtered through a Weltanschauung that wasn't equipped for it."
"I'm still not convinced," she said. It suddenly occurred to her that she was not playing Devil's Advocate. It was Tom who was advocating the devils. She wanted to share the joke with him, but decided it wasn't the right time for it. He was too deadly serious. "Everything you have," she continued, "could be read another way. It's only when you put them together that they seem to form a pattern; but have you put them together right? Why should there be any connection at all? Maybe the journal was not kept by Pastor Dietrich. There could be other Oberhochwalds in Bavaria, in Hesse, in Saxony." She held up a hand to forestall his objection. "And maybe the lightning flash was really a lightning flash, not an energy leak from a crippled hypospace craft. Maybe Dietrich sheltered Chinese travelers, like you thought. Maybe Joachim was high on ergot when he thought he saw flying demons. And copper wire and iron fixtures must have other uses than repairing alien machines!"
"What about the descriptions of the hidden inner worlds and the trinity of Trinities? Doesn't that sound like your hypospace?"
She shrugged. "Or it sounds like medieval theology. Physics and religion both sound like gibberish if you don't know the axioms."
"What I find significant is the way Dietrich always refers to the aliens."
"If they were aliens, and not ergot hallucinations."
"All right," he said impatiently. "If they were aliens. He always calls them 'beings,' or 'creatures,' or 'my guests,' or 'travelers.' Never anything supernatural. Didn't Sagan once say that alien visitors would be very careful not to be taken for gods or demons?"
She snorted. "Sagan was an optimist. The ability to cross space doesn't make anyone wiser or more ethical. I remember, though, what he said would be convincing evidence of alien visitors."
"What's that?"
"A set of plans for some sort of high-tech hardware." She smiled at him and set her tea cup down on the table. As she did so, her eyes fell on the sheets spread out there. Printouts of her plans for the chronon detector. And the illuminated capital. She froze. Her throat felt tight. "Oh, my God!"
"What?" He jumped up.
"I don't believe it. I don't believe it." She grabbed the illuminated capital and waved it in his face. "Look at it. Vines and leaves and Trinities? That's a circuit diagram! Those are Josephson junctions! Tom! Hernando and I built this circuit only last week!"
Tom felt it run through him like a shot. Could it be true? He watched Sharon leaf through the printouts on the table until she found the one she wanted. She laid it side by side with the illuminated capital.
He looked over her shoulder. Were they the same? The illumination was all twisted, like a real vine, not laid out geometrically. He tried to compare them topologically, by matching the leaves and knots and berries with the arcane nucleonic symbols. Almost. There were some differences.
"Garbled in transmission," said Sharon. "That hookup is impossible," she pointed. "That's a shorted circuit. Those two should be reversed . . . wait a minute." She traced the vines with her finger. "Not all of it's garbled. A generator, not a detector," she muttered. "See there? And there? It's part of a generating circuit. It has to be. Part of their stargate. Damn!"
She had reached the bottom of the page.
"What is it?" he asked.
"Part is right. It's not complete." She frowned and walked across to the pillow sofa and threw herself into it.
Tom picked up the sheets, feeling oddly disappointed. He looked at them, trying to see what Sharon could see. It made no sense to him. "Too bad they didn't leave a complete set of plans," he said. "Then you'd know what to do."
She stared back from the other side of the living room. Tom could see her framed in the kitchen archway. "But I already know the only thing that matters."
"What's that?"
"That it can be done."
Freiburgim-Breisgau has no aerodrome, so I met Tom and Judy at the Hauptbahnhof on Bismarkallee, where the magnetic train slid up from Frankfurt-am-Main. We took the Bertoldstrasse streetcar to Kaiser Joseph Strasse and walked from there to the hotel on Gerberau. I pointed out all the sights like the worst of tourist guides. Tom had seen it all before, of course, but it was new to Judy.
When we walked through Martin's Tor, she commented on its storybook appearance. The Dukes of Zähringen had founded the Freiburg in 1120, the first of the established "free towns," and this gate had been standing a century in the walls of the Old Town when Pastor Dietrich had befriended certain travelers. The wind from the Hollental was cool, a sign that summer's end was near.
After settling them in their rooms (separate, of course), I took them to lunch at the Römischer Kaiser. We gave our full attention to the meal. No one else on earth cooks like the Schwarzwalders. Even our department store mannequins are portly. Not until the waiter had delivered the streussel did I allow the conversation to turn to business.
Tom wanted to leave for the Forest immediately. I could see the eagerness in him, but I told him we would wait for morning.
"Why?" asked Tom. "I want to see the site myself." Judy waited patiently, saying nothing.
"Because Eifelheim is deep in the forest," I said. "It will be a long drive and a hike, even if we can locate the site quickly. You will need a good night's sleep to recover from the jet lag." I took another bite of my streussel and put my fork down. "And another reason, meine Freunde. Monsignor Lurm will be joining us once he has received the bishop's permission. I have not, natürlich, told him what we expect to find."
They glanced at each other, puzzled. "What do you mean?" asked Tom.
Sometimes my friend is a little slow. "It is a Catholic cemetery, nicht wahr? You did not come all this way only to look. Surely you will want to exhume the grave and see who, or what, is buried there? For that we need the permission."
Tom laughed and looked embarrassed. Americans are in too much of a hurry. A single fact is worth a volume of deductions. Best to plan carefully how to find that fact. Tom would have had us on site sooner, but without a shovel.
Monsignor Lurm met us outside the hotel the next morning. He was a tall, gaunt man with a high forehead. Dressed in a faded bush jacket, only his collar revealed his calling.
"Na, Anton, mein' Alt," he said, waving some papers. "I have them. We must pay the proper respect and disturb nothing but the one grave. Personally, I think Bishop Willi will be more than happy to bury this Dracula nonsense." He looked at Tom and Judy. "That's something. To bury it we must dig it up!"
I winced. Heinrich was a virtuous man, but his puns were surely earning him many years in Purgatory. I also felt guilty at deceiving him regarding what we hoped to do.
"Permit me," I said. "This is my friend from America, Tom Schwoerin, and his assistant, Judy Cao. Monsignor Heinrich Lurm."
Heinrich pumped Tom's hand. "Doctor Schwoerin. It is a great pleasure to me. I much enjoyed your paper on the gene frequencies of the Germanic tribes. It clarified greatly the routes of their ancient migrations. A good thing for you that my ancestors dropped their genes everywhere they went. Eh?"
Before Tom could respond to this latest bon mot, I interrupted. "Heinrich is an amateur archeologist. He has excavated many ancient Swabian villages from before the Völkerwanderung."
"You're that Heinrich Lurm? The pleasure is mine. I've read your reports, father. You are no amateur."
Heinrich flushed. "On the contrary. Amateur comes from the Latin amare, to love. I do archeology for love. I am not paid."
He had rented two Japanese pickup trucks. Two men with drooping moustaches waited by them, talking quietly. There were picks, shovels, and other paraphernalia in the bed of the first truck. When the men saw us coming, they climbed into the bed of the second.
"I think there is an old logging road that will take us close to the site," Heinrich said to me. "It cannot be too far a walk from there. I will drive the first truck. Anton, you take the second. Fraulein Cao," he turned to her. "You may ride with me. Since I am celibate, you will be safer that way." He grinned at me, but I pretended not to notice.
We took the Schwartzwald-Hauptstrasse into the mountains, turning off at Kirchzarten. The road began climbing as we drove into the Zastiertal. I rolled the window down and let the cool mountain air blow into the cab. In the back, the workmen laughed. One of them began singing an old country song.
"Too bad Sharon couldn't come," I said.
Tom looked at me. "No. She's working on another project. The one I told you about."
"Ja, the circuit diagram. That was the most remarkable thing of all. Never again will I look at a manuscript illumination in the same way. Think, Tom. Could you or I ever have recognized it for what it was? Let alone what it meant? Pfagh." He waved his hand.
"Never. And Sharon? Would she ever have thought to look at it? Medieval manuscripts? No, physicists do not do such things. Only because the two of you were together could it ever have happened the way it did."
Tom looked out the window at the trees whipping past. "I know. It was the wildest sort of coincidence. Who knows what else may be out there, lying in archives and libraries, unrecognized because the right people haven't looked at it, or haven't looked at it in the right way? Things for which we've found safe, acceptable, believable explanations?"
A few kilometers past Oberreid the road became rough and I paid all my attention to the driving. The Feldberg loomed high on our right. Shortly, the Monsignor honked and his arm jabbed out of the leading truck, pointing left. I saw the old logging road and honked back to show I understood. I pulled the floor shift to put us in four-wheel drive.
Heinrich drove like the lunatic he was. He seemed unaware that the surface under him was no longer paved. Our truck bounced and shook and I wondered if we would lose the two workmen in the back. I silently praised the Japanese quality control workers who had helped make our shock absorbers.
The sun was already high when we reached the area where Eifelheim had once stood. There was no sign of it. I had copies of the satellite photographs in my hand, but close up things looked different. Nature had reclaimed its own, and the trees had had centuries in which to grow. Tom looked around bewildered. Where had the village square been? Where the church? We might have gone past the place entirely, except that the American soldiers had thoughtfully left their empty beer cans behind.
Heinrich took charge with the ease of long practice. The rest of us fell quickly into the roles of his assistants. But then, he was a field man and we were not.
From among his equipment he took a transceiver of the kind the airlines use. In a few moments, he had signals from the NAVSTAR satellite pinpointing our location on the photograph. He made a mark on the photo and pointed with his pencil. "The church must be buried under the cruciform mound, a few meters that way. The graveyard is most likely to the rear of the chancel, though it could be to the side also."
We found the mound and split into three teams, each searching the ground in a different direction from the chancel end. It was not long before one of the workmen, Augustus, found what might have been a headstone, smashed to rubble. We could not be sure. Perhaps they were natural rocks. We resumed our search.
Judy found the grave. I saw her on my right when she stopped and stared down at the ground. She did not call but, but only stood quietly. Then she crouched down and I could not see her through the brush.
I looked around. No one else had noticed. They continued to pace forward, searching. I made my way across to where she had been and saw her kneeling next to a sunken and broken stone. Soil action had already swallowed the lower half of the stone, but it had sunk at such an angle that the face of it had been partially protected from the elements. Its outlines were obscure, barely visible.
"Is this it?" I asked quietly.
She gasped and sucked in her breath. She turned and saw me and visibly relaxed. "I think so," she said. "It's the one the soldiers found." She held up a cigarette butt to show how she knew. "The inscription is nearly illegible, but near the top I can make out'. . . H-A-N-N-E-S S-T-E—' "
"Johannes Sterne," I said for her. "John from the stars. The name he was baptised under." I looked at the face. The features were indistinct. How had the soldiers ever noticed it? Was it the face of a monster, at all? Or was some harmless burgher resting here, about to be disturbed by a bizarre chain of misunderstandings? "Do you realize how many graves there must have been?" I said. "And this is the one we find."
"I know. I'm scared."
"Scared? Of what?"
"When we dig him up. He won't be the right shape. He'll be something . . . wrong."
I didn't know how to answer her. Whatever the shape, it would be wrong in one sense or another. "Gus found another stone," I told her. "So did Heinrich. Both were smashed. Tom thinks that when the Plague swept through here the neighboring villagers came and destroyed the gravestones. Yet this one—presumably the one that most frightened them—wasn't touched. Why?"
She shook her head. "There is so much we do not know and never will know. Where did they come from? How many were there? Were they explorers or commuters? How did they and Dietrich establish communication? What did they talk about?" Her face, when she turned it up to me, was on the verge of tears.
"I imagine," I said gently, "that they talked about going home and the great things they would do when they got there."
"Yes," she said more quietly. "I suppose they would have. But those who could have told us are long dead."
I smiled. "We could hold a seance and ask them."
"Don't say that!" she hissed. Her fists, clenched tight, pressed on her thighs. "I've been reading their letters and journals and sermons. They don't feel dead. They feel alive, like I know them. Anton, most of them were never buried! Toward the end, who was left? They must have lain on the ground and rotted. Pastor Dietrich was a good man; he deserved better than that." There were tears on her cheeks now. "As we were walking through the forest, I was frightened that I would see them, still alive: Dietrich or Joachim or one of the villagers or—"
"Or something horrible."
She nodded, silently.
"That's what frightens you, isn't it? That you are a rational, secular, twenty-first century woman who knows that aliens would look different and smell different and yet you would run screaming like any medieval peasant. You are afraid you would act like Fra Joachim."
She smiled a faint, small smile."You are almost right, Doctor Zaengle." She closed her eyes and sighed. "Hāy cu'u giúp tôi. Cho toi su'ć manh. I am afraid I would not act as Pastor Dietrich did."
"He shames us all, child," I said. "He shames us all." I looked around at the tall oaks and the wildly beautiful mountain flowers. Perhaps Dietrich had had a fine burial after all.
Judy took a deep breath and dried her tears. Then she said, "Let's tell Tom and the others."
Heinrich gave directions for the dig. "After so many years the coffin will have disintegrated. Everything will be filled with clay. Dig until you find wood fragments. Then we will switch to the trowels."
Gus and Seppl, the other workman, began digging out a little ways from the grave. Because the remains would have sunk over the years, they would have to dig deep. They wanted the sides of the hole to slope inward so they would not collapse.
It was already late afternoon when the digging began, but Heinrich had come prepared with gas lanterns to work into the evening. There were also tents and bedrolls. "I would not want to try and find my way back in the dark," he said. It was only when the evening sun was setting that we discovered how the soldiers had noticed the face. The light streamed through a gap in the trees, striking the stone and throwing the carving into stark relief. Gus and Seppl were busy digging and did not see it, but Heinrich was stooped just beside it. It was a mantis's face, and it wasn't. The eyes were large, bulging, and multi-faceted. (They would have been yellow, I knew.) There were lines that might have been antennae, or whiskers, or something else entirely. Instead of insect like mandibles, there was a mouth of sorts. Judy grabbed my arm. I could feel the nails dig into my skin. Tom was rubbing his mouth nervously.
Heinrich paused in his work and stared at the stone without speaking. It was obvious that this was no weathered distortion of any conventional face. It was a demon. Or it was something very much like a demon. Heinrich turned and looked at us, gauging our reactions. Already the sun had moved and the face was fading. "I think," he said, "perhaps I should take a nibbing."
The moon was a ghost riding through the treetops when Seppl finally reached wood. The gas lanterns hissed and sputtered, creating a shifting circle of brightness embedded in the darkness of the forest. Judy was kneeling by the edge of the hole, her eyes closed, sitting on her heels. I didn't know if she was praying or sleeping. I could barely see the heads of the men in the pit.
Tom came and stood next to me. He had Heinrich's rubbing of the alien face in his hand. Hans, I reminded myself. Not "the alien" but Johann Sterne. A person. One who died a long time ago, far from home, in the company of strangers. What had he felt near the end, when all possibility of pretense had been lost? What emotions washed through that alien mind?
Tom pointed to the sky. "Full moon," he said. "The wrong time to dig up Dracula's grave." He tried to smile to show that he was joking. I tried to smile to show him that I knew. I shivered. It was cooler in the mountains than I had thought it would be.
Sepp called out and we all jerked like puppets. Judy came alert and leaned forward expectantly. Tom and I walked to the edge of the hole and peered in.
Sepp and Gus were standing to one side while Heinrich dug in the clay with a hand trowel. There was something shiny and smooth protruding from the earth. It wasn't white like bone, but yellow and brown. He dug around it and removed it, earth and all. He sat back on his haunches and scraped at it patiently with a putty knife, cleaning it, his own face set as solidly as any carved in stone.
He knows, I thought.
Gradually a face emerged. Gus gasped and dropped his shovel. He crossed himself hastily, three times. Sepp remained calm. He watched with narrowed eyes, nodding solemnly, as if he had always known the soil of Eifelheim would yield unearthly fruit.
It was a skull, and not a skull, and no earthly mind had ever sat within it. Soil chemistry had been at work on it, but our worms and bacteria had, for the most part, found it unpalatable. The eyes were gone, of course, and gristle hung in the two enormous sockets set on either side of the head; hut whatever had served him for skin was still largely intact. It was almost like a mummy's head.
Heinrich held it out and Judy took it. Tom stood behind her, studying it over her shoulder. Heinrich climbed from the pit and sat on the edge, his legs dangling in the hole. He took a pipe from his pocket and lit it. "So, Anton. Now will you tell me what I have gotten myself into? I have a feeling Bishop Willi will not like it."
So I told him. Tom and Judy added details. Tom's attempt to explain the physics of hypospace only confused him. I think Tom was confused as well. But the rest Heinrich accepted quietly. He had dug up the skull himself, hadn't he? He looked out into the surrounding forest.
"There will be the remainder of the skeleton, of course; and others as well. You say there were several of them. And out there?" He pointed with his pipestem. "What? Shards of metal or plastic, rotted or decomposed under the living soil. Perhaps an engine or a control panel, shattered and rusted. Now that we know what to look for, finding it will be straightforward. There is much work to be done. Don't forget the cries of fraud and hoax that will surely be raised. We will need to bring others up here; tell Bishop Willi and the University people."
"No."
We all looked at Judy in surprise. She still held Johann's skull in her hands and Gus, his initial fright over, was peering at it curiously, eyeball to eyesocket. I was proud of our two workmen and their reactions. It seemed a good omen.
"What do you mean?" Tom asked her.
"You know what they'll do, don't you? They'll dig him up and wire him together and hang him behind bulletproof plastic so tourists can gawk at him and children make nasty jokes and laugh. It isn't right. It isn't." When she shook her head, her whole body shook.
"That's not true, Judy," Tom said gently, putting his hands on her shoulders. She twisted her head around and looked up at him.
"Let them gawk and let them joke," he said. "Oh, we'll take measurements and holographs and chip off some cells for the biologists to wonder at. Then we'll make plaster casts of him and hang those. The originals? Well, those we'll keep safe from harm and someday—I know Sharon will help—someday we will find out where he came from and take him home. Or our children's children will."
Heinrich nodded, his pipe sending filigrees of smoke toward the sky. Sepp still stood in the pit, leaning on his shovel. He had his hands folded over the top of the handle, looking up where the stars shone through the canopy of the trees; and his face was a mixture of wonder and eagerness the like of which I had never seen before.
I know where the path to the star lies. The gate opened once, a long time ago, and a few wayward travelers suffered a lonely death. Then it closed. But before it did, two creatures reached across the gulf and touched. They didn't flee and they didn't fight, and because they didn't they left the gate open, just a crack.