Eifelheim

by Michael Flynn

  It was not that Welles did not think, but that he thought about things beside physics. Budgets, grants, tenure, promotions, the administration of the department. Someone must think of such things. Science doesn’t just happen. It’s a human activity, performed by human beings, and every circus needs a ring-master. Once, a very long time ago, a younger Welles had written three papers of exceptional merit deriving quantum mechanics from Maxwell’s equations, the contents of which were still emitting doctoral dissertations around the world; so don’t think he was a Krawattendjango — a “tie dude,” as our kids say in Germany. It is not given many men to write even one such paper. Perhaps a longing for those heady days, and an understanding that a fourth was not in him, informed his attitude.

  “I’m sorry,” said Sharon. “But what has VLS to do with Noah’s Ark?” Even then, she thought that maybe it was some abstruse joke on the head’s part. He did have a deadpan sense of humor, and Sharon was more accustomed to clowns.

  “Do you really think you can prove young earth creationism?”

  Perhaps it was the earnest expression on his face. The grim-set line of his mouth. Inquisitors may have had such an expression when they relaxed their charges to the mercy of the secular arm. But Sharon finally realized that he was serious.

  “What,” she asked, “is young earth creationism?”

  The department head did not credit such innocence. He thought everyone as attuned as he to the vagaries of legislatures, school boards, and other such sources of madness. “That God created the universe only six thousand years ago? Tell me you never heard about that.”

  Sharon knew how Tom would have answered that, and fought hard to keep his words from her lips, saying instead, “Now that you mention it, I have heard that.” She really had needed the reminder. She spent most of her waking hours in Janatpour space. There were no creationists there, young or otherwise. It would have confused them and they would have gotten lost along one of those nameless dimensions of hers.

  “’Now that you mention it,’” Welles mimicked. His sarcasm was famous in the higher reaches of the school’s management. Deans fled at his approach. “There is nothing so well established as the constancy of lightspeed.”

  It was the wrong thing to say, not only because there really were several other things better established, but because there is nothing guaranteed to get the back up a no-fooling scientist than argument from authority. Neither Welles nor Sharon had been raised religiously and so neither of them realized that they were having a religious argument, but something atavistic rebelled in Sharon’s heart. “That’s the current paradigm,” she said. “But a more careful inspection of the data -.”

  “You mean until you can spin the data to prove what you want!” Welles said this with no sense of irony. Kuhn may have been a poor philosopher, but he was right about the cold, dead hand of the Paradigm. “I researched it myself when I heard what you were up to, and there has been no change in the measured speed of light for several decades.” He leaned back in his chair and linked his hands again under his breastbone, taking her silence as acknowledgement of the devastating impact of his rebuttal.

  “Excuse me,” Sharon said with only a minor tremor in her voice. “A couple of decades? That’s like measuring continental drift for a few hours. Try a couple of centuries, like I did. You need a long enough baseline to -.” And here her thoughts slip-slid away in an unexpected direction as her memory pulled a factoid from her hat. She examined the factoid top to bottom, side to side, and around and around. Welles’ eyebrows rose at the sudden silence. It was so sudden and so silent that his ears hurt. But when he opened his mouth, she raised a hand to him. “Did you know that when Birge reported the decrease in light speed in Nature in 1934, he’d found no change whatsoever in wavelength?”

  Welles, who hadn’t known the first, was equally in the dark on the second. “You mean when he reported an error in his measurement…”

  “No, wait,” she told him, “this is really interesting.” She had forgotten that she was on the carpet in her department chairman’s office. She had found a glittering nugget in the ore and wanted to show it to everyone, supposing they would be as delighted as she was. “Think it through, Jackson. Light speed is frequency times wavelength. So if c is dropping and wavelength is constant, frequencies must be increasing.”

  “So…?” Welles drew the question out. He was no ignoramus. He saw suddenly where Sharon’s thoughts were headed.

  “So,” she said, her excitement building, “atomic frequencies govern the rate at which atomic clocks tick. Of course, the speed of light has been constant since they began using atomic clocks to measure it. The instrument is calibrated to the thing it’s measuring! Oh, my gosh!” She saw the chasm gaping before her; but unlike Welles, who would not step up to the lip, she leapt right into it. “Oh, my gosh! Planck’s constant isn’t!”

  That is the way of it among heretics. They start questioning one doctrine and end up questioning everything. No wonder they used to burn them.

  That grinding sound Welles heard was a paradigm shifting. But the gears were rusty. “Dr. Nagy,” he said with heavy formality. “You have tenure, and there is nothing I can do about that. But if I were you, I would not be surprised if your grant were not renewed next semester.”

  There was the warning from the tribunal. Repent of your heterodoxy or be damned. But Sharon Nagy was on the scent of something very peculiar, and Jackson Welles knew nothing of Évariste Galois. Facing a duel at dawn, Galois had spent his last night on earth scribbling the foundations of algebraic group theory. A good night’s sleep, and he might have survived the duel; but there is a certain frame of mind that prizes discovery over life itself. If death had not daunted young Évariste, what terror had loss of funding over Sharon? She was not as young as he had been, but she knew how to take a bullet.

  * * *

  It was late when she left the university grounds. The semester had started and she had papers to grade and discussion notes to prepare. It was one of those schools that put great store in teaching and even its most prestigious scholars were required in the trenches. She held two graduate seminars and taught an upper division course in galactic structure that was well-subscribed, though her students thought her a cold fish. On a Monday she was likely to resume precisely where she had left off the previous Friday, and sometimes that meant in media res, while her students, bleary from weekend partying, squinted at the whiteboards and the projections from her computer, trying to remember from where the derivation had started.

  It was during her preparation for the galactic structure class that she noted a further anomaly.

  “Hernando,” she asked the young post-doc who worked with her. “Why should cars all drive down a highway at speeds in multiples of five?”

  Hernando Kelly was from Costa Rica, a ‘tico,’ as they call themselves. He was bronze, distressingly well-built, and climbed sheer rock faces for recreation. With his arm in a sling — sometimes the rock faces win — Sharon had put him to work mining data bases and compiling the results. He scratched his head and tried to imagine what the question had really been about. “At multiples of five,” he said, hinting for clarification.

  “Right. The cars are going 50, 55, 60, 65, and so on.”

  “You haven’t reached the speeds on the Blue Route yet.” White teeth showed beneath a black moustache. “So nobody’s going like 62 or 57 or something?” At Sharon’s nod, he shook his head. “Okay, I’ll bite. Why?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered happily. “I thought you knew because you were the one who told me.” She held up a frequency distribution, one of several dozen he had printed off of Minitab from the “galactic empire” database. Distribution of Galactic Redshifts, read the title above the chart. “Notice anything?”

  “Well, yeah. It’s comb-shaped. That means the measurements resolution is coarser than the plotting scale so you get empty bins in the histogram. I’ll rescale the chart.”

  “Measurement re
solution,” she said.

  “Right…” he said, a bit wary, for he recognized the manic tone in her voice.

  “Unh-unh,” she answered. “Quantized. Redshifts are quantized. Galaxies are receeding at certain speeds, and not at speeds in between.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” she enthused. “That would only be an answer, and I’ve got something much more precious. I’ve got a question.”

  Kelly didn’t see the big deal. It was like the light speed business. That had been a real bitch, because not all the literature was of equal quality. Some reports lacked the original data, some reworked previous data, some were duplicates. In some, the measurement method had been poor or the techniques for using it had not yet been perfected. Just compile all the data, the Ice Queen had told him. Oh, yeah, nothing easier.

  It was all measurement error, he was convinced. Light speeds, now red shifts. He had seen “comb-shaped” histograms when he had worked summers at a metal fabricator in San Jose. The gauge had read out in increments of 0.002″ and the plotting scale had increments of 0.001″. Odd numbers need not apply. He hoped the rumor wasn’t true and Dr. Nagy wouldn’t lose her grant because of her religious obsession. He liked working with the Ice Queen.

  It was a few weeks later that Sharon saw the answer, and it was a stunner.

  * * *

  XIV. February, 1348

  Candlemas to the Ember Days

  Candlemas Day was a work holiday. At primes, the villagers gathered on the green and Joachim distributed candles to all, including the two baptized Krenken. The other Krenken stayed to themselves or watched from the edge of the green with fotografic devices. Dietrich blessed the candles while Joachim sang the Nunc dimittis. When all was ready, they formed up in procession. Klaus and Hildegarde took their accustomed place immediately behind Dietrich, reminding Dietrich irresistibly of the parable about those who would be first.

  Chanting the anthem, Adórna thálamum tuum, Sion, Dietrich led the river of light through the early dawn, along the high street and up the hill toward St. Catherine, where he spied Theresia kneeling in the damp grass beside the church. But as the procession drew nearer, she stood and ran off. Dietrich’s tongue stumbled and nearly lost its place in the anthem, but he sang the line obtulérunt pro eo Dómino as he passed through the church doors, as was customary.

  * * *

  Later that day, a faint yodel echoing off the Feldberg announced the approach of a horseman. The Krenken hid themselves at Manfred’s request and did not emerge until the horseman, a messenger from the Strassburg bishop, departed on a fresh horse an hour later.

  Berthold had summoned the lords of the Elsass and the Breisgau to meet at Benfeld on the eighth and discuss unrest in the Swiss. “I will be gone a week or more,” Manfred told the ministeriales summoned to his hall. “Too many lords will attend to hope for anything shorter.” Naming Ritter Thierry burgvogt in his absence, and dispatching Bertram Unterbaum to the Swiss to bring back a report, Manfred and his retinue departed the next day.

  Rumors swirled in his wake. It was said that Berne had put some Jews on the pyre in November over the well-poisonings, and had written to the Imperial Cities to urge the same action on them. Strassburg and Freiburg had done nothing; but in Basel, the people rioted and, although the council banished the most notorious Jew-baiters from the city, they compelled the council to banish the Jews, and place them in protective custody on an island in the Rhine.

  Dietrich complained to those who had gathered at Walpurga Honig’s cottage to drink her honey-wheat beer. “The Pope commands we respect the persons and property of the Jews. There was no cause for such treatment. The pest never reached the Swiss. It went up through France and into England.”

  “Perhaps,” Everard suggested, “because Berne’s swift action scared the poisoners off.”

  Berne actually found the poison, it was said. Everard had heard it from Gunther who had overheard the bishop’s messenger. A concoction of spiders, frogs, and the skin of a basilisk had been sewn into thin leather bags that Rabbi Peyret of Chambery gave to the silk merchant Agimet to drop into wells in Venice and Italy. Had he not been captured on his return, he might have done the same in the Swiss.

  Dietrich protested. “His Holiness wrote that the Jews cannot be spreading the pest for they themselves die.”

  Everard tapped a finger aside his nose. “But not so many of them as of us, eh? Why do you suppose that is? Because they bob up and down while they pray? Because every Friday they air their bedding out? Pfaugh. Besides, the kabbalists despise their fellow-Jews as much as they do us. They’re as secretive as masons and won’t allow other Jews to study the hidden writings.”

  And “hidden writings” might be anything. Devil-spells. Recipes for poisons. Anything.

  Klaus said, “We should place a guard around our own well.”

  “Maier,” said Gregor, “we have here no Jews.”

  “But we have them.” And Klaus pointed to Hans, who, though he drank no beer, squatted among them for the tallk. “Just yesterday I saw the one called Zachary standing by the well.”

  Gregor snorted. “Do you hear what you are saying, man? Standing by the well?”

  Nothing was ever settled when men complained over steins of beer; and Hans said afterward, “I see now how a folk can worry themselves into agitation.” Then, after further thought, he added, “Should they try to banish Krenken as they did Jews, I cannot answer for the outcome.”

  * * *

  On St. Agatha’s Day, Dietrich recited the Mass alone. There were the sick and lame to pray for. Walpurga Honig had suffered a kick from her mule. Gregor’s older son, Karl, was laid up with a fever. And Franz Ambach had asked prayers for the repose of his mother, who had gone to her reward this past month. Dietrich asked also the intercession of St. Christopher for Bertram’s safe return from Basel.

  He gave thanks, again, that the pest had gone to England and not to the high woods. It was sinful to take joy from the suffering of others, but Oberhochwald’s good fortune was annexed to it, and it was in that annex that he took joy.

  “Meménto étiam, Dómine,” he prayed, “famulórum famularúmque tuárum Lorenz Schmidt, et Beatrix Ambach, et Arnold Krenk, qui nos praecésserunt cum signo fídei, et dórmiunt in somno pacis.” He wondered if that were true about the krenkish alchemist. He had certainly died with a “sign of faith” clutched in his hands, but self-murder was normally a bar to heaven. Yet God moved no tragedy but that some good might come of it, and, seeing how affected the visitors were by their companion’s death, many of the Hochwalders who had before been wary or fearful of the Krenken, now greeted them openly and, if not warmly, with less marked hostility.

  As he put the sacred vessels away, he thought to go by Theresia’s cottage. Lately, he had invented reasons for pausing there. Yesterday, she had told him about Walpurga’s leg and that she had set the bone. Dietrich had thanked her and waited for her to say more, but she had dipped her head and closed her window shutters.

  She must by now know that she had been wrong about the Krenken. Recalling his own terror upon first sight, it was easy to forgive Theresia her more lingering dread. She would admit her error to him, she would return to the parsonage and do his chores, and in the evenings, before she returned to her cottage at the base of the hill, they would eat sweet-cakes together as they always had beforetimes and he would read to her from De usu partium or the Hortus deliciarum.

  * * *

  He found her arranging some herbs for drying by the glass light in her window. These herbs, she had grown in clay pots set on the sill. She bobbed to him as he entered, but continued cutting. “How goes it by you, daughter?” Dietrich said, and she answered, “Well,” and Dietrich searched for something to say that did not sound like an admonition.

  “No one attended Mass today.” But that was an admonition, for Theresia had attended daily.

  She did not look up. “Were they there?”

  “Hans and Gottfried? No
.”

  “Fine new communicants you have admitted.”

  Dietrich parted his lips to debate the point. After all, few ever attended the daily Mass. But he thought better of it and commented instead on the warming weather. Theresia shrugged. “Frau Grundsau saw no shadow.”

  “Herwyg says it will be another cold year.”

  “Old One-eye feels the cold more each year.”

  “Do… Do your herbs prosper?”

  “Well enough.” She paused in her labor and looked up. “I pray for you each day, father.”

  “And I for you.”

  But Theresia only shook her head. “You baptized them.”

  “They desired it.”

  “It mocked the sacrament!”

  Dietrich reached out and took her by the sleeve. “Who has been telling you such things?” But Theresia pulled away from him and turned her back.

  “Please leave.”

  “But, I—”

  “Please leave!”

  Dietrich sighed and turned to the door. He hesitated a moment with his hand on the latch, but Theresia did not call him back, and there was nothing for it but to close the door behind him.

  * * *

  Manfred returned from Benfeld on Sexagesima, morose and taciturn and, when Dietrich came to the manor house, he found the Herr thoroughly drunk.

  “War can be honorable,” Manfred said without preamble, after Gunther had closed the door of the scriptorium and the two were closeted together. “A man puts on the cloth of war and his opponent also, and they meet on a field agreeable to both, and they use the tools of war, such as have been agreed upon, and then… God defend the right!” He saluted with a goblet, drank it dry, and filled it again from a flagon of neat wine. “God defend the right… Drink with me, Dieter!”