Eifelheim

by Michael Flynn

  Sin lay not in the concrete act, but in the will. Behind the woman’s recitation lay the cardinal sin of which these mean transgressions were but the visible signs. One could return a brooch or visit a parent; but unless the inner flaw were healed, repentance — however sincere the moment — would shrivel like the seed upon the bad ground.

  “And I have taken pleasure with men who were not my lawful husband.”

  That being the worst-kept secret in Oberhochwald. Hildegarde Müller stalked men with the same cool deliberation with which Herr Manfred stalked the stags and boars that adorned the walls of Hof Hochwald. Dietrich had a sudden and disconcerting vision of what might dangle from Hildegarde’s trophy wall.

  Trophies? Ach! That was the inner sin. Pride, not Lust. Long after the fleshly pleasures must have palled, the stalking and capture of men remained an affirmation that she could have whatever she desired whenever she desired it. Her kindness to the Irish pilgrim, too — not paradox but confirmation. She had done it for show, so that others could admire her generosity. Even her endless recitation of venial sins was a prideful thing. She was bragging.

  For every weakness, a strength; and so for pride, humility. Her penance, he decided, would require the usual restitutions. Return the brooch, restore the flour, visit her father. Have no other man than her husband. Treat any distressed pilgrim, however mean his station, with the same charity as she had shown the Irish lordling. But she must also, as a lesson in humility, scrub the flagstone floor of the church nave.

  And this must be done in secret, lest she take pride even in her penances.

  * * *

  Afterward, robing in the sacristy for the morning Mass, Dietrich paused with his cincture half tied. There was a sound, like that of a bumble-bee, at the edge of his hearing. Drawn toward the window, he saw in the distance, above the Herr’s forest, woodleafsingers and acorn-jays flying in mad gyres above the place where earlier had glowed the pale luminescence. The glow had either faded or was now insensible against the brightening sky. But the vista seemed odd in some indefinable manner. There was a pinchedness to the outlook, as if the forest had been creased and folded on itself.

  At the base of Church Hill, a knot of people milled as witlessly as the birds above. Gregor and Theresia stood by the smithy in agitated conversation with Lorenz. Their hair was wild and unkempt, sticking out from their heads, and their clothing clung to them like iron filings to a lodestone. Others were about as well, but the usual morning work had come to a standstill. The smithy’s fire was unlit and the sheep bleated in their pen, the sheep-boys nowhere in sight. The pall of smoke that usually marked the charcoal kiln deep in the forest was absent.

  The humming grew distinctly louder as Dietrich approached the window. Touching the glass lightly with a fingernail, he felt — a vibration. Startled, he pulled away.

  Dietrich passed a hand through his locks, only to feel his hair writhe like a nest of snakes. The cause of these curiosities was waxing in strength, as the sound and size of a galloping horse grew with its approach — which analogy would argue that the source of the impetus was drawing nearer. There can be no motion in a body, Buridan had argued, unless an actor impresses an impetus. Dietrich frowned, finding the thought disturbing. Something was approaching.

  He turned from the window to resume vesting and paused with one hand on the red chasuble.

  Amber!

  Dietrich remembered. Amber — elektron, as the Greeks called it — when rubbed against fur impressed an impetus to the fur that caused it to move in much the same way as his hair. Buridan had demonstrated it at Paris while Dietrich had been in studies. The master had found such delight in instruction that he had foregone the doctorate — and had become from his fees that great anomaly: a scholar never in want. Dietrich saw him now in memory, rubbing the amber vigorously against the cat’s-skin, his mouth pulled back in an unconscious grin.

  Dietrich studied his own image in the window. God was rubbing amber against the world. Somehow, the thought excited him, as if he were on the verge of uncovering a form previously occult. A dizzy feeling, like standing atop the belfry. Of course, God was not rubbing the world. But something was happening that was like rubbing the world with amber.

  Dietrich stepped to the sacristy door and looked into the sanctuary, where the Minorite was finishing the altar preparations. Joachim had thrown his cowl back, and the tight black curls ringing his tonsure danced to the same unseen impetus. He moved with that lithe grace that betokened gentle birth. Joachim had never known the villein’s hut or the liberties of the freetowns. The greater wonder when such a man, heir to important fiefs, dedicated his life to poverty. Joachim turned slightly, and the light from the clerestory highlighted fine, almost womanly features, set incongruously beneath shaggy brows that grew together over the nose. Among those who measured the beauty of men, Joachim might be accounted beautiful.

  Joachim and Dietrich locked gazes for a moment, before the monk turned to the credence table to fetch two candlesticks used for the missa lecta. As the Minorite’s hands approached the copper prickets, sparks arced forth to dance on his fingertips.

  Joachim jerked and reared his arm. “God’s curse on this wealth!”

  Dietrich stepped forward and seized the arm. “Be reasonable, Joachim. I have had these prickets since many years and never have they bitten anyone before. If God is displeased with them, why wait until now?”

  “Because God has finally lost patience with a Church in love with Mammon.”

  “Mammon?” Dietrich gestured around the wooden church. From beams and rafters wild faces looked down on them. In the lancet windows, narrow saints in colored glass scowled or smiled or raised a hand in blessing. “This is hardly Avignon.”

  He stooped to squint at the chased metalwork of the candlesticks: the chi-rho emblazoned on the Mother Pelican. He stretched a tentative forefinger toward the candlestick. When it came within a thumb’s-length of the base there was a snap, and a spark appeared in the air between fingertip and candlestick. Though he had known what would happen, he pulled away as quickly as had Joachim. His fingertip felt as if pierced by a hot needle. He stuck the digit in his mouth to soothe it and turned to Joachim.

  “Hngh.” He took the finger out and inspected it. “A small hurt,” he announced, “seeming greater only through surprise.” It had felt much like with the aquamanile, only stronger. Further argument that the mover was drawing nearer. “But it is entirely material. A moment ago, I recalled a trick with amber and fur that creates a similar effect.”

  “But, the small lightnings…”

  “Lightning,” said Dietrich. A new thought had struck him. He rubbed his finger absently. “Joachim! Could this essence be of the same species as the lightning itself?” He grinned broadly and touched the candlestick again, drawing another arc from it. Fire from earth! He laughed and the Minorite drew away from him. “Imagine a waterwheel rimmed with fur,” he told the monk, “rubbing against amber plates. We might generate this essence, this elektronikos and, could we but learn to control it, we could command the very lightning!”

  The lightning struck without warning!

  Dietrich felt fire run through his entire being. Beside him, the Minorite arched his back, his eyes bulging wide and his lips pulling back from his teeth. Sparks leapt between the two candlesticks.

  A great burst of light washed through the stained glass lancets in the north wall of the church, casting rainbows. Saints and prophets blazed in glory: Mary, Leonard, Catherine, Margaret of Antioch, bright as the sun. Radiances streamed through their images and played across the dim interior, speckling the statues and columns with gold and yellow and red and white so that they seemed almost to move. Joachim fell to his knees and bowed, covering his face against the radiant windows. Dietrich knelt also, but looked everywhere at once, trying to take it all in.

  An avalanche of thunder followed upon the flash; and the bells in the tower pealed a mad, arrhythmic clanging. The timbers of the church creaked and mo
aned and wind rushed through the vises and passageways under the roof, howling like a beast. Griffins and wyverns growled. Carven dwarfs groaned. Window glass shrieked and cracked into spider webs.

  And then, as abruptly as it had begun, the light dimmed and the thunder and the wind faded. Dietrich waited, but nothing more happened. He took a deep breath and found that the feeling of dread had left him as well. Whispering a brief prayer of thanksgiving, he rose to his feet. He glanced at Joachim, who had curled on the flagstone paving with his arms wrapped around his head, then he turned to the credence table and touched the candlestick.

  Nothing happened.

  He looked at the cracked windows. Whatever had been approaching had arrived.

  * * *

  1. Now: Sharon

  During summer sessions, Sharon and Tom both did their research from home. That is easy enough today, when the world lies literally at our very fingertips; but it can be a trap, too, for what we need may lie just beyond the tips of our fingers. There is Tom hunched over the computer by the window, tracking down obscure references over the Net. He has his back to the room, which means to Sharon.

  Sharon lounges on the pillow sofa on the other side of the room, 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. She gazes in Tom’s direction, but she is looking on some inner vision, so in a way she too has her back turned. Sharon uses a computer, too, but it’s an organic one that she keeps between her ears. It may not be networked to the wider world, but Sharon Nagy creates her own worlds, strange and inaccessible, among which lies one at the very edges of cosmology.

  It is not a beautiful thing, this world of hers. The geodesics are warped and twisted things. Space and time spiral off in curious, fractal vortices, in directions that have no name. Dimensions are quicksilver slippy — looked at sideways, they would vanish.

  And yet…

  * * *

  And yet, she sensed a pattern lurking beneath the chaos and she stalked it as a cat might — in stealthy half-steps and never quite straightforward. Perhaps it lacked only the right beholding to fall into beauty. Consider Quasimodo, or Beauty’s Beast.

  “Damn!”

  An alien voice intruded into her world. She heard Tom smack his PC terminal and she screwed her eyes shut, trying not to listen. Almost, she could see it clear. The equations hinted at multiple rotation groups connected by a meta-algebra. But…

  “Durák! Bünözö! Jáki!”

  …But the world shattered into a kaleidoscope, and for a moment she sat overwhelmed by a sense of infinite loss. She threw her pen at the coffee table, where it clattered against white bone china teacups. Evidently God did not intend for her to solve the geometry of Janatpour space quite yet. She glared at Tom, who muttered over his keyboard.

  There is something true about Sharon Nagy in that one half-missed detail: that she uses a pen and not a pencil. It betokens a sort of hubris.

  “All right,” she demanded. “What is it? You’ve been cursing in tongues all day. Something is bugging you. I can’t work; and that’s bugging me.”

  Tom spun in his swivel chair and faced her. “CLIO won’t give me the right answer!”

  She made a pout with her lips. “Well, I hope you were able to beat it out of her.”

  He opened his mouth and closed it again and had the grace to look embarrassed, because there was something true about him also. If there are two sorts of people in the world, Tom Schwoerin is of the other sort. Few thoughts of his failed to reach his lips. He was an audible sort of man, which means that he was fundamentally sound.

  He scowled now and crossed his arms. “I’m frustrated, is all.”

  Small doubt of that. Sharon regarded his verbal popcorn much as a miser does a spendthrift. She was the sort of person for whom the expression, That goes without saying, really does induce silence. In any event, Tom’s frustration was only a symptom. “Why are you frustrated?”

  “Eifelheim won’t go away!”

  “And why should it go away?”

  He threw his arms out wildly. “Because it’s not there!”

  Sharon, who had had another why ready in wait, massaged the bridge of her nose. Be patient, and eventually he would make sense.

  “Okay, okay,” he admitted. “It sounds silly; but… Look, Eifelheim was a village in the Black Forest that was abandoned and never resettled.”

  “So…?”

  “So, it should have been. I’ve run two score simulations of the Schwarzwald settlement grid and the site gets resettled every time.”

  She had no patience for his problems. An historian, Tom did not create worlds, he only discovered them; so he really was that other sort of person. Sharon yearned for her geodesics. They had almost made sense. Tom wasn’t even close. “A simulation?” she snapped. “Then change the freaking model. You’ve got multicollinearity in the terms, or something.”

  Emotion, especially deep emotion, always caught Tom short. His own were brief squalls. Sharon could erupt like a volcano. Half the time, he could not figure out why she was angry with him; and the other half of the time he was wrong. He goggled at her for a moment before rolling his eyes. “Sure. Throw out Rosen-Zipf-Christaller theory. One of the cornerstones of cliology!”

  “Why not?” she said. “In the real sciences, theory has to fit the facts; not vice versa.”

  Tom’s face went red, for she had touched (as she had known she would) upon one of his hot buttons. “Does it, a cuisla? Does it really? Wasn’t it Dirac who said that it was more important that the equations be beautiful than that they fit the experiment? I read somewhere that measurements of light speed have been getting lower over the years. Why not throw out the theory that light speed is constant?”

  She frowned. “Don’t be silly.” She had her own hot buttons. Tom did not know what they were, but he managed to hit them all the same.

  “Silly, hell!” He slammed his hand down sharply on the terminal and she jumped a little. Then he turned his back and faced the screen once more. Silence fell, continuing the quarrel.

  Now, Sharon had that peculiar ability to stand outside herself, which is a valuable skill, so long as one comes back inside now and then. They were both being silly. She was angry at having her train of thought derailed, and Tom was angry because some simulation of his wouldn’t work out. She glanced at her own work and thought, I’m not helping me by not helping him, which might be a poor reason for charity, but it beats having none at all.

  “I’m sorry.”

  They spoke in counterpoint. She looked up, and he turned ’round, and they stared at each other for a moment and ratified a tacit armistice. The geodesic to peace and quiet was to hear him out; so Sharon crossed the room and perched on the corner of his desk.

  “All right,” she said. “Explain. What’s this Zip-whatever theory?”

  In answer, he turned to his keyboard, entered commands with the flourish of a pianist, and rolled his chair aside for her. “Tell me what you see.”

  Sharon sighed a little and stood behind him with her arms folded and her head cocked. The screen displayed a grid of hexagons, each containing a single dot. Some dots were brighter than others. “A honeycomb,” she told him. “A honeycomb with fireflies.”

  Tom grunted. “And they say physicists make lousy poets. Notice anything?”

  She read the names beside the dots. Omaha. Des Moines. Ottumwa… “The brighter the dot, the bigger the city. Right?”

  “Vice versa, actually; but, right. What else?”

  Why couldn’t he just tell her? He had to make it a guessing game. His students, waiting beak-open for his lectures, often felt the same disquiet. Sharon concentrated on the screen, seeking the obvious. She did not regard cliology as an especially deep science, or much of a science at all. “Okay. The big cities form a partial ring. Around Chicago.”

  Tom grinned. “Ganz bestimmt, Schatzi. There should be six of them, but Lake Mich
igan gets in the way, so the ring’s incomplete. Now, what surrounds each of the big cities?”

  “A ring of not-so-big cities. How fractal! But the pattern isn’t perfect…”

  “Life’s not perfect,” he answered. “Microgeography and boundary conditions distort the pattern, but I correct for that by transforming the coordinates to an equivalent, infinite plain.”

  “A manifold. Cute,” she said. “What’s your transformation?”

  “Effective distance is a function of the time and energy needed to travel between two points. Non-Abelian, which complicates matters.”

  “Non-Abelian? But then—”

  “B can be farther from A than A is from B. Sure, why not? The Portuguese found it easier to sail down the coast of Africa than to sail back up. Or, take our own dry-cleaners? The streets are one-way, so it takes three times longer to drive there than it does to drive back.”

  But Sharon wasn’t listening any longer. Non-Abelian! Of course, of course! How could I have been so stupid? Oh, the happy, unquestioning life of an Abelian, Euclidean, Hausdorff peasant! Could Janatpour space be non-isotropic? Could distance in one direction differ from distance in another? It’s always faster coming home. But how? How?

  His voice shattered her reverie once more. “… oxcarts or automobiles. So, the map is always in transition from one equilibrium to another. Now watch.”

  If she didn’t hold his hand while he complained, she would never get her own work done. “Watch what?” she asked, perhaps in a harsher voice than she had intended, because he cast her a wounded glance before bending again over the keyboard. While he did, she slipped across the room and retrieved her notebook so she could capture her butterfly thought.