Eifelheim

by Michael Flynn

  Tom chewed on the tip of his lightpen. He envied physicists. The answers were always “in the back of the book.” If the physicist were only persistent enough or clever enough, she could pry them loose from the universe. Cliologists were less fortunate. The facts themselves did not always survive; and those that did, survived by luck, not importance. No amount of persistence could interpret a record that had perished in a long-ago fire. If you couldn’t live with that — with the knowledge that the answers were not in the back of the book — best stay out of history altogether.

  He studied his list and diagrams carefully, referring to the original documents from time to time to refresh his mind on the details. On a map, he checked the flight of the “Feldberg Demon” from St. Blasien “in the direction of the Feldberg.” Oberhochwald lay on its path. In the end, he saw no other possible explanation. In fact, he wondered now why he hadn’t seen it earlier. What had he told Sharon that day in the restaurant? Maybe the subconscious is smarter than we think.

  Or maybe not. He leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling, pulling his lip. He couldn’t see any obvious flaws in his reasoning; but what did that mean? Sometimes the obvious is only wishful thinking. He needed a second opinion. Someone on whose judgement — and discretion — he could rely. He copied his files and added a summary. When he looked at the old digital wall clock with its liquid crystal display, it was 03:20 hours. That meant 09:20 hours in Freiburg. He took a deep breath, hesitated, then, before he could have second thoughts, he downloaded all of it to my office, a quarter of a world away. It contained a single question: Was glaubst du? What’s your guess?

  * * *

  Tom’s message piqued my curiosity. I e-mailed that a reply would require several days’ research, at least, and strolled off to the library at the Albert-Louis. There, I found some of the documents he had asked about and compared them to others he had sent. Then I searched out further documents and blew off the centuries and read them as well. Afterward in solitude, I smoked my heavy, carved, schwartzwalder pipe and in the tobacco smoke, I pondered. Dignity, we save for our old age; and what I had of it, I had earned. Yet, Tom was hardly the sort of man to leap to conclusions or to play a prank on a friend.

  But a friend is a friend, and you may have noticed that he and I were duzende. We used “du” with each other, and that is no light thing.

  So two days later, I scanned the documents I had found and compressed them and did all that wonderful stuff that modern technology allows; then I attached them to an e-mail. Cautiously — very cautiously — I outlined my conclusions. If Tom had the brains that God had given turnips, he could read between the lines as easily as on them. That is what “intelligence” means.

  * * *

  “What are you doing up so early?”

  Tom started violently; his chair nearly rolled from under him. He caught himself on the edge of his desk and, when he looked around, he saw Sharon standing in the bedroom doorway, rubbing her eyes. “Don’t sneak up on me that way!”

  “Why, how should I sneak up on you? Besides, a Mack truck could sneak up on you, you were so intent on that printer.” She yawned. “That’s what woke me up. The printer.”

  She padded in her bare feet into the kitchen and turned on the tea kettle. “Time to get up anyway,” she called back over her shoulder. “What are you up to at this hour?”

  Tom pulled the last sheet from the printer and scanned it quickly. He had been reading my message as it emerged. “I’m linked with Anton. We’ve been IM-ing for the past hour.”

  “Anton Zaengle? How is the old dear?”

  “He’s fine. He wants me to come to Freiburg.” Tom flipped through the stack of printouts, riffing them with his thumb. “This is the bait to lure me there.”

  She poked her head around the kitchen archway. “Freiburg? Why?”

  “I think he thinks what I think.”

  “Oh. Well, I’m glad you cleared that up.”

  “It would take too long,” he said, “and sound absurd.”

  “That hasn’t stopped you before.” She wiped her hands on a dish towel and crossed the room, where she stood behind him, leaning with both her hands on his shoulders. “Tom, I’m a physicist, remember? Next to strange, charming quarks nothing sounds ridiculous.”

  Tom pulled on his lower lip. After a moment, he tossed the printouts into his desk basket. “Sharon, why would a medieval, backwoods priest need two hundred feet of copper wire?”

  “Why… I don’t know.”

  “Neither do I; but he ordered it specially made.” He leaned forward and pulled a sheet from the stack. It was underlined heavily in red. “And during the summer of 1349, monks in a monatery near Oberhochwald heard thunder when there were no clouds in the sky.” He put the sheet down. “And peccatores Eifelheimensis, the Sins of the Eifelheimers. Something Anton found. It denounces the heretical 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.”

  Tom was suprised to discover how reluctant he was to say his thoughts aloud. “All right,” he said. “About seven hundred years ago, sentient beings from another world were stranded near Oberhochwald, in the Black Forest.”

  There. He’d said it. He held up a hand to forestall Sharon, whose mouth had dropped open. “Their vessel malfunctioned. I think it traveled through Nagy hypospace. They weren’t killed, but it was enough to start a forest fire and injure some of them.”

  Sharon had found her voice. “Wait a minute, wait a minute. What proof…”

  “Let me finish. Please.” Tom gathered his thoughts and continued. “The aliens’ sudden appearance out of nowhere and their physical features — yellow, bulging eyes, for example — frightened many of the villagers, who fled, spreading rumors of demons to the nearby towns. Others, including the village priest, Pastor Dietrich, saw that the aliens were creatures in need of help. Just to be safe, he obtained 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 sorcery and demon worship, the villagers tried to help the aliens repair their damaged vessel. I should have seen that in the business with the copper wire. What possible use would that have been to earthly travelers? They also flew. Were they winged creatures? Did they have anti-gravity? Perhaps they had a way to harness that vacuum energy you talk about. In his letter, Pastor Dietrich carefully denied only that his guests flew by supernatural means.”

  He had run out of breath. He studied Sharon’s face for a hint of her reaction.

  “Go on,” she said.

  “The aliens were immune to the Plague — different biochemistry — and repaid the villagers’ kindness by caring for them. At least some did. Others, I’m sure, had succumbed to apathy by then. Dietrich even converted a few. We have a record of at least one baptism. Johannes Sterne? Oh, he knew where his guests came from. He knew.

  “The aliens, too, began to die. Not from Plague, but from the lack of some vital nutrient. 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. Impressive enough for superstitious peasants. Were the demons really dead, or just sleeping? Waiting for new victims? People shunned the place and passed the proscription on to their children. If you don’t obey Mama, the flying devils will come and take you away. Shortly, Joachim’s tag of Teufelheim was euphemised to Eifelheim, and the original name of Oberhochwald was gradually forgotten. All that was left was a c
ustom of avoiding the location, vague folktales of flying monsters, and a gravestone with a face on it.”

  There it was. All out in the open now. A lot of it was surmise, inference. He had no primary sources on Brother Joachim, for example, but I had found him a memoire by an abbot at the Strassburg friary which quotes Joachim as saying, “The great failure at Oberhochwald brought the most terrible of curses on their heads, about which I had warned them repeatedly,” which seemed clear enough evidence of his damnation.

  * * *

  She stared at him, her head spinning. Aliens? she thought. In medieval Germany? It was fantastic, unbelievable. Was he serious? She listened as he described his evidence. His solution seemed more incredible than the original problem!

  “And you think this scenario is true?” she asked when he had finished.

  “Yes. And so does Anton.” He showed her a note that had come with the printouts. “And he is nobody’s fool.”

  She read the note quickly. “He doesn’t come out and say so,” she pointed out.

  Tom grinned. “I said he was no fool.”

  “That’s better left to you, I suppose. What I’d like to know is why you dragged Nagy space into it. If you’re determined to ruin your own reputation, can’t you leave mine out of it?”

  Tom scowled. “Give me credit for a little sense,” he said. “I’m saying this theory explains the facts very neatly. And, if it’s true…” His voice trailed off.

  If it’s true… Sharon felt her heart quicken.

  “I dragged Nagy space into the picture because neither Dietrich, nor anyone else, described a spaceship.”

  “How could they,” she pointed out. “They had no concept of spaceships.”

  “Medieval people weren’t stupid. They were having a technological revolution themselves. Camshafts and waterwheels and mechanical clocks… They would have recognized a spaceship as a vehicle of some sort, even if they called it Elijah’s chariot. But, no. Dietrich and Joachim and the Bull of 1377 all state that the aliens ‘appeared.’ Isn’t that how you described hypospace travel the other day? 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 would have had no idea which one was his own.”

  “Appeared. That’s a lot to read into a single verb.”

  He slapped his stack of computer printouts with the flat of his hand. “It all ties together, though. Consilience, not deduction. No single strand of reasoning is enough to support the conclusion; but taken together… A prayer attributed to Johann says that there are eight secret ways to leave the Earth. How many dimensions in your ‘hidden’ hypospace?”

  “Eight.” The word came out reluctantly. Her blood hammered in her ears. 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 those exact 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? I mean, the ‘other worlds’ were Heaven, Hell, and Earth, and ‘traveling inside’ meant searching one’s soul.”

  “Ja doch. But the ideas weren’t written down for seventy-five years. The writers took something they had heard at third or fourth hand and interpreted it according to some familiar paradigm. The rationalism of the Middle Ages was already giving way to the romantic mysticism of the Renaissance. Who knows what Dietrich himself understood when Johann tried to explain it to him? Here.” He closed the flap on the manila folder and handed the entire package to her. “Read through it the way Anton did and see if it doesn’t make sense.”

  She looked him in the eyes as she took the folder from him. He really is serious, she thought. Which, knowing Tom, could mean that he was unable to deal with the original problem’s insolubility.

  Or else, maybe his idea was not as crazy as it sounded.

  Give him a fair chance. He deserves that much before I call the men in the white suits.

  She went to her beanbag chair and slumped into it. She read the items slowly and carefully, relying on his English translations. Middle German was too hard to follow, and Latin was Greek to her. From the edge of her eye she could see Tom fidgeting.

  Crazy, disconnected items. But a thread that ran through them, tying them together. She came at last to the treatise that Tom had shown her originally. She recognized the ugly, angular capital. Another illustration was the icon of the Order of St. Johan, which showed each Person of the Trinity within small triangles set at the corners of a larger triangle. Curiously, the Holy Spirit was shown at the top. It was eerily similar to her own doodle of the polyverse.

  When she finished, she closed her eyes and tried to see her way clear to the answer. She tried putting the puzzle pieces together as he had. If this went with that… Finally, she shook her head, seeing the trap that he had fallen into. “It’s all circumstantial,” she said at last. “No one comes right out and says anything about aliens or other planets.” The tea kettle began to whistle and she went to the kitchen to turn it off. She laid Tom’s papers on the kitchen table, where she had dumped her own papers last night. She opened the cabinet above the sink and searched for a morning tea.

  “Yes, they did,” Tom insisted. He had followed her into the kitchen. “They did come right out and say so. In medieval terms and concepts. Oh, we can talk easily enough of planets orbiting stars; but they were just beginnning to realize that their own planet turned on its axis. ‘World’ meant… Well, it meant the ‘polyverse.’ And ‘planet’ meant ‘stars that moved.’ We can talk about multi-dimensional space-time-whatever continua. But they couldn’t. They were only just grappling with the concept of a continuum — they called it ‘the intension and remission of forms’ — and Buridan had only just formulated the first law of motion. They didn’t have the words to define the words. Everything they learned from the starfarers was filtered through a Weltanshauung unequipped to handle it. Read Ockham some day; or Buridan or Aquinas. It’s nearly impossible for us to make sense of them, because they envisioned things differently than we do.”

  “People are people,” she said. “I’m not convinced.” It occurred to her that she was not playing Devil’s Advocate. It was Tom who was advocating devils. She wanted to share this Tom-like joke with him, but decided that it was not the right time for it. He was too deadly serious.

  “Everything you have,” she told him, “could be read another way. It’s only when you put them all together that they seem to form a pattern. But have you put them together right? Do all your pieces even come from the same jig-saw puzzle? Why should there be any connection at all? Maybe the journal wasn’t kept by your Pastor Dietrich. There might be other Oberhochwalds — in Bavaria, in Hesse, in Saxony. The ‘upper village in the high woods.’ My Lord, that must be as rare in southern Germany as Main Streets are in the Midwest.” She held up a hand to forestall his objections, as he had done to her earlier. “No, I’m not mocking you. I’m just pointing out alternatives. Maybe the lightning flash really was a lightning flash, not an energy leak from a crippled hypospace craft. Maybe Dietrich sheltered Chinese pilgrims, as you thought originally. Maybe Joachim was high on ergot when he thought he saw flying monsters. And copper wire must have other uses than repairing alien machines.”

  “What about the descriptions of the hidden, innner 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 basic axioms.” She poured the hot water into a tea pot and let the brew steep. There was no room on the kitchen table, however. It was littered with papers. When she had dropped the folder there, some of the contents had skidded out. Tom’s printouts
were mixed with her own from the lab. Medieval manuscripts and circuit diagrams for chronon detectors. She tsk’ed at the mess and began to straighten it up. Tom stood in the doorway.

  “Do you know what I find significant?” Tom said. “The way Dietrich referred to the aliens.”

  “If they were aliens, and not hallucinations.”

  “All right. If they were aliens. He always called them ‘beings,’ or ‘creatures,’ or ‘my guests,’ or ‘travelers.’ Never anything supernatural. Didn’t Sagan once say that alien visitors would be careful not to be mistaken for gods or demons?”

  She snorted. “Sagan was an optimist. The ability to cross Space doesn’t make anyone more ethical, any more than the ability to cross Ocean made the Europeans more ethical than the Indians.” That page was Tom’s and that page. This page was hers. She put each into its proper folder. “I remember what he said would be convincing proof of alien visitors. It was in that book he wrote with Schlovski.”

  “What was that?”

  “A set of plans for some sort of high-tech hardware.” And that page was Tom’s. And that was hers… No, wait. That wasn’t a circuit diagram; it was Tom’s illuminated capital. She froze suddenly, her throat tight. “Oh, my God!”

  “What?” He jumped away from the wall. “What is it?”

  “I don’t believe it!” She grabbed the copy of the treatise and waved the illuminated capital in his face. “Look at it! Vines and leaves and trinities? That is a circuit diagram! Those are Josephson junctions! Tom… Hernando and I built this circuit only last week.”