Eifelheim

by Michael Flynn

  When he was certain that Joachim had not lingered, Dietrich rose to his feet. “Hans,” he said softly when he had donned the krenkish head-harness and had pressed the sigil that awoke the Heinzelmännchen. “Was it you I saw in the clerestory during Mass? How came you into those heights without being seen?”

  A shadow moved under the roof-beams and a voice spoke in his ear. “I wear a harness that gives flight, and entered through the bell tower. The sentence was in my head to watch your ceremony.”

  “The Mass? Why?”

  “The sentence is that you hold the key for our salvation, but the Kratzer laughs, and Gschert will not listen. Both say we must find our own way back to the heavens.”

  “It is a heresy many have fallen prey to,” admitted Dietrich, “that heaven can be reached without help.”

  The Krenk servant was silent for a moment before answering. “I had thought your ritual would complete inside my head the picture of you.”

  “And has it?”

  Dietrich heard a sharp clack from the rafters above him and he craned his neck to spy where the Krenk had now perched himself. “No,” said the voice in his ear.

  “The picture of Dietrich inside my own head,” Dietrich admitted, “is also incomplete.”

  “This is the problem. You want to help us, but I see no gain for you.”

  Shadows shifted in the flickering candlelight, not quite black because the flames that cast them guttered red and yellow. Two small lights gleamed in the vises. Were they the Krenk’s eyes catching the dancing fires, or only metal fittings securing a beam? “Must there give always a gain for me in what I do?” Dietrich asked of the darkness, uncomfortably aware that the gain he sought was his own continued solitude and freedom from fear.

  “Beings act always to their own gain: to obtain food or stimulate the senses, to win acceptance in one’s place, to reduce the labors needed to possess these things.”

  “I cannot call you wrong, friend grasshopper. All men seek the good, and certainly food and the pleasures of the flesh and a surcease from labor are goods, or else we would not seek them. But I cannot say that you are entirely right either. What does Theresia gain with her herbs?”

  “Acceptance,” was the Krenk’s swift reply. “Her place in the village.”

  “That won’t make the cabbage fat. A man in want of food may drain a swamp — or steal a furrow; in want of pleasure, he may love his wife — or fick another’s. The way to heaven is not found in partial goods, but only in the perfect Good. To help others,” he said, “is a good in itself. Our Lord’s cousin James wrote: ‘God resists the proud and gives grace to the humble,’ and, ‘Religion pure and undefiled is this: to give aid to orphans and widows in their desperation.’”

  “Manfred’s cousin carries no weight with the Krenk. He is not — our — lord, nor is Manfred so strong as Gschert has feared. When his own folk defied him over the haycocks, he did not strike them as they deserved, but allowed — his servants — to decide the matter for him. The act of a weakling. And they came back, his own underlings, and said that the gärtners had right. Duty binds them to gather Manfred’s hay, but not to place the cocks in the carts.”

  Dietrich nodded. “So stands it in the weistümer. It is the custom of the manor. ”

  The Krenk drummed on the rafter and leaned into the ambit of the guttering candlelight so far that Dietrich thought he would topple off. “But that leaves next year the haycocks standing in the fields,” Hans said, “while the serfs wait in the curia to unload. That is — thought-lacking.”

  A small smile crossed Dietrich’s lips as he recalled the muddle that had ensued in the court following the findings of the inquest. “We gain some small amusement from paradoxes. It is a form of entertainment, like singing or dancing.”

  “Singing—”

  “Another time I will explain that.”

  “It is dangerous for one who rules to show weakness,” Johann insisted. “Had your Langermann made such a demand on Herr Gschert, he would be picking-food ere now.”

  “I do not deny that Gschert is choleric in his humor,” Dietrich said dryly. Lacking true blood, the Krenken could not balance their choler properly with a sanguine humor. Instead, they possessed a yellow-green ichor; but as he was no doctor of the medical arts, Dietrich was uncertain which humor the ichor might govern. Perhaps one unknown to Galen. “But no worries,” he told Hans. “The hay cocks will be loaded into the carts again next mowing season, but the gärtners will do so not from duty but from charitas — or for a fee for the added labor.”

  “Charity.”

  “Ja. To seek the good of another and not your own.”

  “You do so — question.”

  “Not so often as the good Herr commanded; but yes. It gathers merit for us in heaven.”

  “Does the Heinzelmännchen overset correctly — question. A superior being came from the heaven, made himself your Herr, and ordered that you perform this ‘charity.’ ”

  “I would not phrase it so…”

  “Then all fits.”

  Dietrich waited, but Hans said nothing more. The silence lengthened and waxed oppressive, and he had begun to suspect that his stealthy visitor had stolen away — The Krenken were not long on the formalities of greeting and farewell — when Hans spoke once more.

  “I will say now a thing, though it shows us weak. We are a mixed folk. Some belong to the ship, and its captain was their Herr. The captain died in the shipwreck and Gschert now rules.

  Others form a school of philosophers whose task is to study new lands. It was they who hired the ship. The Kratzer is not their Herr, but the other philosophers allow him to speak for them.”

  “Primus inter pares,” Dietrich suggested. “First among equals.”

  “So. A useful phrase. I will tell him. In the third band are those who travel to see strange and distant sights, places where the well-known have lived or where great events have happened… What call you such folk?”

  “Pilgrims.”

  “So. The ship was to visit several places favored by pilgrims before bearing the philosophers onward to a new-found land. The ship’s company and the school of philosophers say always that on such journeys into the unknown there may be no return. ‘It has happened; it will happen.’ ”

  “You have right,” Dietrich said. “In my father’s time, some Franciscan scholars sailed with the brothers Vivaldi to seek India, which Bacon’s map placed but a short distance westward across the Ocean Sea. But nothing was again heard of them after they departed Cape Non.”

  “Then you have the same sentence in your head: A new voyage may fare one-way. But in the pilgrims’ heads there stands always a return, and our failure to reach the correct heaven must be from someone’s… I think your word is ‘sin.’ So, some pilgrims place our present failure on Gschert’s weakness, and even some of the ship’s company say that he is nothing beside he who was captain before. One thinking himself stronger may seek to replace him. And if so, Gschert will likely raise his neck, for it is in my head that he may think the same.”

  “It is a grave matter,” Dietrich said, “to overthrow the established order, for who is to say but that the result may not be worse. We had such an uprising twelve years ago. An army of peasants laid waste the country-side, burning manor houses, killing lords and priests and Jews.”

  And Dietrich recalled with sudden, unbearable immediacy, the swirling intoxication of being swept along by something greater and more powerful and more right than oneself, the safety and arrogance of numbers. He remembered noble families immolated inside their own houses; Jew moneylenders paid in full with hemp and faggot. There had been a preacher among them, a man of some learning, and he had exhorted the crowds with the words of James:

  Woe to you rich! Your wealth has rotted, your fine wardrobe is moth-eaten.

  Your gold and silver has tarnished and their corrosion is a testament against you!

  Here, crying aloud, are the wages you withheld from the serfs who worked
your fields! The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord. You lived in wanton luxury on the earth; you fattened yourself for the day of slaughter!

  And the Armleder army — it called itself an army, with self-proclaimed captains, and wore leather brassards for livery — sweaty, lust-mad, impatient for loot, foreboding their own death-warrants, would join in the last, so that the shout, “Day of Slaughter!” hoarse from a thousand throats, were the last words many a wealthy lord or Jew heard in this life. Manor houses lit the night with their flames, so that a man might travel the Rhineland by their illumination as if by day. Merchant wagon trains plundered by the roadside. Itinerant peddlers, promoted by hue and cry to cosmopolitan Jew money-lenders, torn apart. Free-town burgers, fled within ancient walls, watching from the parapets while their guild-halls and ware-houses burned.

  But Burg walls had withstood the undisciplined mobs, and rage faded to a realization that now only the gibbet awaited. From stone citadels had poured forth a river of steel: Herrs and knights; armsmen and guild militias and feudal levies; lances and halberds and crossbows hacking and piercing flesh and bone. Coursers swifter than the most eager of flying heels. A rag-tag of farm implements, clubs, knives, billhooks thrown down by the roadside. Chivalry in mail coats riding down peasants lacking so much as breeches beneath their smocks, so that they littered the highways with the shit and piss of their terror and showed their shriveled privates as they dangled from every tree limb in the Elsass and the Breisgau.

  Dietrich became aware of the silence. “Thousands perished,” he told the Krenk abruptly.

  The Krenk was silent still. In the quiet, the wood of the church groaned.

  Dietrich said, “Hans…?”

  “The Kratzer was wrong. Our folk are very different.” Hans leapt from roof beam to roof beam, toward the rear of the church and then up into the clerestory, where a window stood open.

  “Hans, wait!” Dietrich cried. “What mean you?”

  The creature paused at the open window and turned its gaze on Dietrich. “Your peasants killed their lords. That is an — unnatural — thing. What we are, we are. We have this sentence in our heads from those animals who were our ancestors.”

  Dietrich, dumbstruck at this off-hand pronouncement, found his voice only with difficulty. “You… number animals among your ancestors?” He imagined foul couplings with beasts. Women lying with dogs. Men futtering donkeys. What might be born of such unions? Something unspeakable. Something monstrous.

  “In ancient times,” the Krenk replied. “There gave creatures like your honey bees. Not in form, but in the divisions of their labor. They had no sentences inside their heads to tell them their duties. Instead the sentences were written into the atoms of their flesh, and these atoms were passed from sires and dams to their offspring, and so after an age, to us. So do each of us know our besitting in the great web. ‘So it was; so it is.’ ”

  Dietrich trembled. All beings, desiring their proper end, move toward it by nature. So a stone, being earth, moved naturally toward the earth; and a man, loving the good, moved naturally toward God. But in animals, the appetites are moved by the estimative power, which rules despotically, while in men, they are moved by the cognitive power, which rules politically. So, the sheep esteems the wolf as enemy and runs without thinking; but a man may stand his ground or flee as his reason suggests. Yet, if the Krenken were ruled by instinctus, the rational appetite could not exist in them, since a higher appetite necessarily moved a lower one.

  Which meant that the Krenken were beasts.

  Memories of talking bears and talking wolves enticing children to their doom flickered in his memory. That the being in the rafters above him was no more than a beast that spoke, terrified Dietrich beyond measure, and he fled from Hans.

  And Hans fled from him.

  3. Now: Sharon

  Sometimes Sharon felt that she and Tom did not actually have a life together, but two separate lives that shared an apartment. The whole thing ran on inertia. She never said this to Tom, and Tom was not the sort to divine her belief from subtle cues. So any mistakes in her perception, if they were mistakes, were never addressed. Instead, she set up half-conscious tests for him to fail. After her big breakthrough, she wanted to celebrate, and that was hard to do alone. So she prepared, as she had so often in the past, an intimate dinner.

  Sharon was little practiced in the domestic arts. Tom had once described her as only half-domesticated. She was no gourmet cook, but then neither was Tom a demanding eater, so things usually worked out.

  Yet so accustomed was she to having him underfoot that his newly recurrent absences had not yet registered as fact. She had not thought to warn him. Consequently, he was late for a dinner that he had not known would be waiting.

  Subtlety was lost on Tom, but subtlety was not in it. The food had gone cold and, worse, had been warmed in the microwave. So despite the reheating, there was a chill in the room.

  “Nice of you to come,” Sharon said, placing the serving dishes emphatically on their trivets. She had often used that same phrase in more intimate moments, but Tom knew that this was not one of them. The complaining trivets had made that clear.

  Tom was sorry. He was always sorry. Sharon suspected that contrition was a strategy he had consciously adopted, and this fed her irritation. There was something patronizing about being continually apologized to.

  “Some old manorial records on loan from Harvard,” he said. “Originals. We had to finish them up today and ship them back. You know how easy it is to forget the time when you’re engrossed in something.”

  She took two salad plates from the refrigerator and put them on the table, though more gently than the serving dishes. She did, in fact, know how easy it was. “’We’,” was all she said.

  “The librarian and me. I told you she’s helping out with the research.”

  Sharon said nothing.

  “Besides,” he added, “it was you who talked me into trolling original manuscripts.”

  “I know that. I didn’t think it would be every day.”

  “Every couple of days.” He was deploying reason and fact, to no avail. Quantity was not the issue. “Say, I told you about Eifelheim, didn’t I? I mean, why I couldn’t find any data on it?”

  “This makes the thousand and first time.”

  “Oh. I guess I do repeat myself. It seems so obvious, now. Oh, well. Lúchshye pózdno chem nikogdá.”

  “Why can’t you just say ‘Better late than never’?”

  He looked baffled and Sharon let it pass. He really didn’t know when he was doing it. She hesitated a moment after they had seated themselves. She had intended the dinner to be a celebration and was determined that it would be so. “I’ve cracked the geometry of Janatpour space,” she said. She had imagined crying it out, proclaiming it from the rooftops. She had not imagined a surly comment, dropped into an awkward silence.

  Tom may have saved his life with what he did next. He lifted his wine glass and saluted her, crying, “Sauwohl!” And his delight was so obviously heartfelt that Sharon remembered that she had in fact been in love with him for many years. They touched glasses and drank the toast.

  “Tell me about it,” Tom said. He felt aggrieved over the surprise dinner. He hated guessing wrong questions never asked. Yet he was genuinely pleased at her success and his request was not entirely meant to divert the conversation from his own tardiness.

  “Well, it all suddenly clicked.” Sharon began slowly, almost grudgingly, but began to gather enthusiasm as she went. The polyverse and the universe. The inside of the balloon. “And light speed. That’s why I’m so grateful to you, even if your help was unwitting.”

  Tom was two or three phrases behind. “Ah… The ‘inside of the balloon’?”

  She didn’t hear him. “Do you know how it feels when two unrelated bits of information come together? When suddenly a lot of different things make sense? It’s… It’s…”

  “Beatific?”

 
“Yes. Beatific. That business about light speed getting lower? Well, I checked it out and you were right.”

  Tom set his glass down on the table and stared at her. “I wasn’t serious. I was just blowing off steam.”

  “I know; but sometimes steam performs work. Gheury de Bray saw a trend in 1931, and Sten von Friesen mentioned it in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in 1937. A few years later, a statistician named Shewhart showed that test results from 1874 through 1932 were statistically incompatible with a constant. Halliday and Resnick found that still true in 1974.”

  “I assumed it was measurement imprecision.”

  “So did I, at first. Look at the spread in the Michelson-Morley data! But precision is random. No secular trend. But the use of different methods…”

  Tom nodded vigorously. “A measurement is defined by the operations performed to produce it. So different methods give different numbers. It’s even worse in cliology—”

  “Right,” she stopped him before he could hijack the celebration. “Partly, the trend was physicists discovering more accurate methods. Galileo used shuttered lanterns in two towers a mile apart, and concluded that lightspeed was infinite. But clocks weren’t precise enough back then and his baseline was way too short. Using stellar aberration, the mean value was 299,882 kilometers per second. But the mean value using rotating mirrors—”

  “Michaelson and Morley!”

  “Among others. Hey, did you know that Michaelson never believed his own results, and later, with Gale, claimed he detected the aether? But lightspeed using rotating mirrors was 299,874; using geodimeters, 299,793; using lasers, 299,792 kiss. But method changes took place sequentially; so how much was due to the method, and how much to the thing being measured?”

  Tom said, “Ummm…,” which was all he really could hope to say at that point.