Tom came and stood next to me. He held Heinrich’s rubbing of the alien’s face. Hans, I reminded myself. Not ‘the alien’ but Johann Sterne, a person, someone who died a long time ago; far from home, in the company of strangers. What had he felt near the end, when all hope had been lost? What emotions had washed through that alien mind? Did my question even mean anything? Did strange enzymes coursing his blood play the role of adrenaline? Had he even had blood?
Tom pointed to the sky. “Full moon,” he said. “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 that I had thought it would be.
Sepp called out and we all jerked like puppets. Judy came suddenly alert and leaned forward over the pit. Tom and I walked to the edge of the hole and looked in.
Sepp and Gus were standing to one side while Heinrich probed in the clay with a trowel. There was something shiny and smooth protruding from the earth. Pale. Not bone-white, but yellow and brown. He excavated around it and removed it, earth and all. Then he sat back on his haunches and scraped at it with a putty knife, cleaning it; his own face set as solidly as any carved in stone.
He knows, I thought.
A face emerged gradually from the embrace of the clay. Gus gasped and dropped his shovel. He crossed himself hastily three times. Sepp remained calm, watching with narrowed eyes. He nodded 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 have ever sat within it. Soil chemistry had been at work on it, but our worms and bacteria had for their part found it unappetizing. The eyes were gone, of course, and two enormous sockets set on either side of the head gaped empty; but whatever had served him for skin was still largely intact. It was a mummy’s head.
Heinrich held it out and Judy took it gingerly. Tom stood behind her, inspecting it over her shoulder. Heinrich climbed from the pit and sat on its edge with his feet dangling in the hole. He took his pipe from his pocket and lit it; though I noticed his hands trembled a bit with the match. “So, Anton. Now will you tell me what I have gotten into? I have a feeling Bishop Arni will not like it.”
So I told him. Tom and Judy added the details. The mystery. The folktales. The hints and fragmentary evidence. Heinrich nodded as he listened and asked an occasional question. Tom’s explanation of hypospace physics confused him, I think; but then he was getting it at second hand. I think Tom was confused as well. Sharon lived in a different world than we, an austere world and stragely beautiful; but one whose beauty we could at best only dimly grasp. Sharon had seen the likeness of a circuit in a manuscript illumination. Let it go at that. Her insight had given Tom the courage to test his intuition; and his intuition had sent her groping down a path that might one day give us the stars. Surely, God moves in mysterious ways.
Heinrich accepted it all quietly. How could he doubt when he had held the skull in his own hands. He looked out into the surrounding forest. “There will be the remainer of the skeleton, of course,” he said pointing into the grave with the stem of his pipe. And of others as well. You say there were several of these beings? And out there?” The pipe stem swept the black forest. “Out there, what? Shards of metal or plastic, rotted or decomposed beneath the living soil.” He sighed. “There is much work to be done. And don’t forget the cries of fraud or hoax that will be raised. We will need to bring others up here; tell Bishop Arni 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 the way our two workmen had reacted. Whatever was to come of all this, it boded well.
“You know what they’ll do, don’t you?” she said. “They’ll dig him up and wire him together and hang him behind bullet-proof 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 gazed up at him.
“Let them gawk and let them joke,” he said. “Oh, we’ll take measurements and holographs and chip of some cells for the biologists to wonder at. That much, he would have wanted. Then we’ll make plaster casts and hang those. But him, we’ll keep safe from harm and someday — when Sharon’s work is done — someday we’ll 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 shaft, looking up where the stars shone through the canopy of trees; and his face was a mixture of wonder and anticipation the like of which I have never seen.
* * *
I know where the path to the stars 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 an unimaginable gulf and touched. They didn’t flee and they didn’t fight, and because they did not they left the gate open, just a crack.
“Oh happy posterity who will not experience such abysmal woe and will look upon our testimony as a fable.”
Petrarch
END
Historical Notes
I have tried to depict the milieu of the mid-14th century Rhineland as accurately as possible, but that is difficult enough for early-21st century America, let alone a time and place where the world-view was so different from our own categories of thought.
For one thing, they took Christianity seriously; in many ways, more seriously than modern Bible-thumpers. At the same time, they took it more matter-of-factly. It was Christendom — but the first stirrings of the nationalism that was to destroy it were being felt — at Crécy and elsewhere it had begun to matter which nation or race you were.
Natural philosophers studied nature with virtually no intrusions by theologians who were themselves natural philosophers. Natural philosophy formed the basic undergraduate curriculum, along with logic and the “exact sciences” of mathematics, astronomy, optics, statics, and music. Art and humanities were not taught. Theologians, lawyers, and doctors had to first master this curriculum. Never before or since has such a large proportion of the population been educated so exclusively in logic, reason, and science.
If God made the entire world, then invoking God to explain the rainbow or magnetism or rectilinear motion added nothing to human understanding. Natural philosophers therefore sought natural explanations to natural phenomena. That a later century would invoke religion over a trivial matter of the earth’s motion would likely have astonished, and perhaps angered them. In many ways Galileo would have had an easier time of it in the 14th century than in the less tolerant and more literal-minded 17th.
* * *
With two notable exceptions, the historical events and personages mentioned in the text were as described. The likeness of Margaret Maultasch, the Ugly Duchess of Tyrol, was used to portray the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland. The Markgraf Friedrich mentioned in the text was Friedrich III, who ruled in Baden, not his cousin, Friedrich IV, who ruled at the same time in Pforzheim. The months in which the Black Death struck various cities and regions were taken from at atlas compiled by Peter Ravn Rasmussen at www.scholiast.org/history/blackdeath/index.html.
Marshall Villars really did refuse to take his army through the Höllenthal, using the excuse quoted. The overthrow of the Strassburg town council and the Friday 13th massacre of the Jews were described in the Chronicles of Strassburg. Duke Albert and King Casimir did offer their realms as sanctuaries to the Jews, and the guild militias did assemble and defend the Jewish quarter of Regensburg. The story of the Feldberg Demon is recorded in the Annals of St. Blaisien. The argument for natural rights of people against their prince was advanced
by William of Ockham in his Opus nonaginta dierum. Ockham determined and incepted, but never took a doctorate. He was last heard from when he left Munich on 10 March 1349 to make his peace with the Pope. “Eifelheim” stands along one likely route. The date on his Denkmal in Munich is incorrect, as we know from documents that he was alive after that point.
The two major alterations to historical events are the Flagellant procession at Strassburg and the Storming of Falcon Rock. The Flagellants did not actually reach Strassburg until June of 1349 and the Papal Bull condemning them was not issued until 20 October of that same year, after the events of the story. I have moved both of them to February 1349, to coincide with the Benfeld conference.
The Freiburger militias stormed and took Falcon Rock in 1389. I moved it up by forty years, to March of 1349 and had Manfred participate. The romantic causus belli was as described.
A minor alteration: Nicole Oresme did not write De monete, in which he enunciated Gresham’s Law, until after the time of the story.
* * *
Physics Notes
The model that Sharon develops for the multiverse was slapped together and given a coat of paint many years ago for the novella “Eifelheim” (Analog, Nov., 1986) from which the “Now” portions of this book derive. Mohsen Janatpour, who now teaches at San Mateo State in California, was most helpful in this and Janatpour Space was, and is, named in his honor.
Recently, variable light speed (VLS) theories have become a hot topic among cosmologists. One prominent advocate is João Magueijo, whose gossipy book Faster Than the Speed of Light is a good introduction, as well as an entertaining narrative of how physics actually gets done. I was pleased to read in his book that he considered the “Kaluza-Klein” approach that Mohsen and I came up with back in the 1980s, though unsurprised to see him reject it. I decided to keep it, just because.
In all fairness, the decline in light speed has not happened over historical times, but only in the aftermath of the Big Bang. It has been proposed as a way of getting around the kludge of inflaton fields, which were made up simply to make the Big Bang model work. A mysterious force, the inflaton, invoked simply to save the appearances of the theory and afterward allowed to disappear from the universe would never have passed muster with Buridan, and Will Ockham would have howled about the needless multiplication of entities. VLS theories nicely resolve the problem using inherent feedback loops that homeostatically fine tune the universe. No new entities are needed.
When we last spoke, Mohsen and I discussed also the quantization of the red shift. Some physicists see it; others don’t. Same data. One explanation for a quantized red shift is that time is quantized just as space is supposed to be. Since I had already invented the fictional chronon for the original “Eifelheim,” this new redshift question fits right in. If it’s true, we may have to revise the universe, again.
* * *
A note on terms and sources
Certain German terms, idioms, and turns of phrase employed from time to time have been written as if they were English: thus “gof” and “doodle” instead of Gof and Dudl. But for the most part, English equivalents have been used. So, Bear Valley and Stag’s Leap instead of Bärental and Hirschsprung. Wiesen Valley instead of Wiesenthal. Birds like Waldlaubsänger and Eichelhäher are woodleafsingers and acorn-jays; flowers like Waldmeister are ‘woodmasters,’ and so forth.
The feudal and manorial systems were common across Western Europe into central Germany, although by the time of the story both had been breaking down for some time. The terminology is equally strange, whether German, French, English or Latin. I have used the more familiar term unless there is good reason otherwise. So, castle, manor, steward, dungeon instead of schloss, hof, verwalter, or bergfried. Where the English term would have sounded “too English,” the German was employed: buteil, vogt, junker instead of heriot, reeve or squire. The German for a joust was buhurdieren, so I used the archaic English word, bohorts.
Manfred’s speech on page ‹238› is adopted from the 14th century biography of Don Pero Nino, El Victorial [“The Unconquered Knight,”] by Gutierre Díaz de Gómez, one of his companions.
The decription of Manfred girded for war on page ‹239› is adapted from the medieval epic, Ruodlieb
Fr. Rudolf’s sermon on page ‹274› is from Peter of Blois, 1170. Max’s complaint about sportsmanship on p. ‹276› is likewise taken from life.
The story of Auberede and Rosamund on page ‹157›, which took place in France, is recounted in Regine Pernod’s Those Terrible Middle Ages! and combined with that of another peasant.
The famous stink of Brun, brother to Otto, and the attendant bathing practices mentioned on p. ‹273› are from the epic Ruotger and applied to Manfred’s neigbor. We often read that people did not bathe in the Middle Ages, yet we have the evidence from Ruotger and also, more offhandedly, that flagellants took an oath not to bathe for the duration of their service, and it would seem contrary to swear an oath to avoid something that one never did. More likely, in Transalpine Europe in a time before hot water heaters, bathing was a sometime thing.
“Falcon Song” on p. ‹314› was modified and adapted from Franz H. Bäuml’s Medieval Civilization in Germany 800-1273, (Ancient Peoples and Places, v. 67).
Dietrich’s discussion of the intension and remission of forms and the mean speed theorem on p. ‹105› is adapted from William of Heytesbury’s Regule solvendi sophismata as quoted and discussed in Edward Grant’s The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages.
Some of the Latin honorifics bestowed on various philosophers have been translated. So Peter Aureoli, the doctor facundus, is ‘Doctor Eloquent’ and Durandus, the doctor modernis is ‘Doctor Modern.’ Will Ockham, who never completed his doctorate, was called the venerabilis inceptor, the “Old Ineptor.” Inceptor was a “degree” short of the doctorate that enabled one to teach.
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Eifelheim Page 50
