Eifelheim

by Michael Flynn

  Below, the Krenken squatted and hugged their knees high above their heads.

  * * *

  7. Now: Sharon

  She heard him call distantly, a tiny, insect-voice, squeak-squeaking her name. But her universe was too lovely to leave. No, not the uni-verse, the poly-verse. Twelve dimensions, not eleven. A triplet of triplets. The rotation groups and the meta-algebra made sense now. The speed of light anomaly fit, too. She squeezed the polyverse, and her pulse quickened. Smart lad, that Einstein. He got it just right. A twist. Kaluza and Klein were no dummies, either. And bend, and… There! If she warped it in that way…

  There is an altered state that overcomes one in such moments, as if the mind had slipped into another world. Everything else becomes distant, and time itself seems suspended. Motion ceases. The sun stands still. In such moments, famous mathematicians make cryptic marginal notes.

  Sharon’s eyes refocused and she saw Tom’s face staring into hers. “I had it!” she said. “It was beautiful. I almost had it! Where’s my notebook!”

  It appeared magically in her hands, open to a blank page. She snatched the pen from Tom’s fingers and scribbled fiercely. Partway through she invented a new notation. Please, she thought, let me remember what it means. She marked an equation with a star and wrote: [Æ] is true!! She sighed, and shut the book. “Wait’ll I tell Hernando,” she said.

  “Who’s Hernando?”

  She scowled at Tom. “I don’t know whether to be angry because you interrupted my train of thought, or glad because you had my notebook handly. How did you know?”

  “Because you don’t normally pour your tea on your scrambled eggs.”

  Only then did she remember she was eating breakfast. She looked down and groaned. “I must be losing my mind.”

  “No argument here. I knew it was notebook-serious as soon as your eyes glazed over.” He took her plate to the sink and rinsed it off into the disposer. “You can have one of my soft-boiled eggs,” he told her over his shoulder.

  She shuddered. “I don’t know how you can eat those things.” She snagged a piece of bacon from his plate.

  He sat back down. “I saw that. Do you want some tea? No, I’ll pour.”

  Soon she was sipping on “the Earl.” Tom set the pot down. “So what was the Big Revelation? I’ve never seen you zone out quite that thoroughly.”

  “You don’t understand GUT physics.”

  And Sharon didn’t understand cliology; but Tom knew something Sharon did not, although he didn’t know he knew it. And that was that when your words come out of your mouth and back into your ear, your brain gives them a second rinse, and cleans them up a little better. All Tom knew was that when he tried to explain things to Sharon, his own thinking clarified. “You go ahead,” he said. “I’ll sit here, smile benignly, and nod in all the right places.”

  “I don’t know where to start.”

  “Start at the beginning.”

  “Well…” She took a sip of tea as she thought it over. “All right. At the Big Bang—”

  Tom laughed. “Whoa! When I said to start at the beginning, I didn’t mean the Beginning.”

  She tried again. “Look. Why did the apple fall on Newton?”

  “Because he was sitting too close under the apple tree?”

  She pushed back from the table. “Forget it.”

  “Okay, okay. Gravity, all right?”

  She paused and studied him. “Are you interested in my work, or not?”

  “Did I have your notebook ready for you?”

  So he had. How did the cliche put it? Actions speak louder than words. And a good thing, too, because his words could be so irritating. She reached across the table and patted his hand.

  “You’re right, Tom. But I’m still trying to figure this out, so I’d rather not be distracted by witty remarks.” She had almost said “half-witty remarks.”

  Tom shrugged and sat back in his chair. He had heard “half-witty,” anyway. “All right. Apples fall because of the force of gravity. Wasn’t that already discovered?”

  “And why do currents flow?”

  “Electromagnetism. Do I get a prize?” Surliness had crept into his voice.

  “Why does time run faster?”

  He opened his mouth to reply, closed it, and grew thoughtful. “Some sort of force,” he said slowly, almost to himself.

  Gotcha! she thought. No smart-ass comeback for that one. “Exactly. Accelerations require forces. Uncle Isaac said so. Look at it this way. We don’t ‘move forward’ through time; we ‘fall downward,’ pulled by a sort of temporal gravity. I call it chronity.” Pulled by what, she wondered? Something at the end of time? How Aristotelean! Jackson would have a cow. Or something at the beginning. God. Hah! No, better make that the Big Bang. No sense pushing the chair’s hot buttons. “Or maybe we’re pushed,” she continued. “I haven’t decided on plus or minus signs yet.”

  “So,” Tom mused. “Tempus fugit, after all.” Sure he had promised no witty remarks. He hadn’t broken that promise.

  She sighed. It was hard to remain cross with Tom. He was so damned cheerful when his own work was going well. “I know my equations are true,” she mused aloud. “I need to know if they are fact.”

  * * *

  More people should make that distinction. It’s one thing to have a bird in an equation; quite another to have a bird in your hand. A fact is an accomplishment, factum est. In German, “deedmatter.” Tom, who had been reading more Latin and Middle German lately than English, knew immediately what she meant.

  But it was easier to hypothesize hidden forces lurking behind the walls of the world than it was to find them. After all, she couldn’t just tear down those walls, could she?

  Could she?

  Never underestimate a determined woman. Universes are pretty flimsy things in their hands.

  * * *

  “CERN can rent me some time in about four months,” she told Tom a week later as she bustled in the door feeling pleased with herself. “Meaning they will give me chickens if I supply the eggs.”

  Tom nodded, figuring this was one of those right places. He was at his desk, reading a copy of the manorial accounts of Oberhochwald that I had sent him from Freiburg. It was missing many pages, and it stopped several years short of the crucial time; but who knew where gold might lie buried?

  “It would just be preliminary, of course,” Sharon went on. “CERN can’t go back in time far enough.”

  He might have nodded at that one, too; but it really demanded more. “Say what?”

  “The really big accelerators recreate conditions as they were in the first seconds after the Big Bang. We can stick our noses a little way into the balloon and see a world in which the seconds were longer and the kilometers shorter.”

  “And this is helpful because…?”

  “Chronity. I need to detect it, verify it. And I can’t as long as I’m stuck in the present with all the forces frozen out. You see, a fifth force upsets the paradigm. Forces were classified on two axes: strong versus weak and long range versus short range. The schema was so neat that everyone figured there could only be four forces.”

  “Heh, sounds like the four Aristotelian elements Judy told me about. The two axes were hot versus cold and wet versus dry. Hot and dry gave you fire—”

  There were only two people in the apartment. How did Judy manage to squeeze in? “This isn’t the middle ages,” she snapped. “We’re not prisoners of superstition!”

  Tom said, “Uh?” wondering where that remark had come from. Sharon set her briefcase on her desk and opened it, stared at its contents. After a while, Tom said, “So, like, which force is, umm, strong and long range?”

  Sharon took her notebook out and turned it absently. “Electromagetism,” she said. “And the weak long-range force is gravity.”

  “Maybe I’m putting on weight, but gravity doesn’t feel so weak to me.”

  “Yeah, but you need a whole planetful to feel it, don’t you?”

 
; Tom laughed. “Got me with that one.”

  “And the short range forces are the strong and weak nuclear forces.”

  “Wait,” said Tom, “let me guess which one is the strong one.”

  Sharon dropped her notebook to the desk. She said nothing, but said it loudly.

  “Okay. So, how does chronity fit in?” Tom asked her.

  “By redefining the ranges. Long range and short range only apply to the familiar three spatial dimensions. Other forces might propogate along the hidden dimensions. You see, forces are spacewarps. Einstein showed that gravity was a warp caused by the existence of matter. I mean, the earth orbits the sun, right?”

  Tom had been so immersed in medieval research that the question seemed weirdly counterfactual. The earth was in the center and the sun circled in the fourth heaven. The lack of sensible parallax of the fixed stars had disproven heliocentrism centuries before. But he knew by now to avoid smart-ass answers. If he knew that more often, he’d have less stress in his life. “Okay…”

  “So, how does the earth know the sun is there? No action at a distance, right? Answer: the earth doesn’t know jack about the sun. It just follows the path of least resistance and rolls around the lip of the funnel. So if gravity is a warp in space-time, what is electromagnetism?”

  Tom was no fool. He knew when he was being spoon-fed an answer. He stared at his desk lamp, trying to imagine that it was really some sort of space-warp.

  “But to make it work, Kaluza and Klein had to tack some extra dimensions onto the universe. Then we discovered the nuclear forces and tried to create warp models for them. When the smoke finally cleared, we had eleven dimnesions on our hands.”

  Tom’s mouth dropped open. “Merde! You mean physicists kept adding imaginary dimensions just to make their space-warp metaphor consistent? Sounds like Ptolemaic astronomers adding new deferants and epicycles.”

  “Those dimensions are no more imaginary than Newton’s ‘force fields.’ And it wasn’t arbitrary. Certain symmetry relations…”

  Tom held his hands up, palms out. “Okay, okay. I surrender.”

  He hadn’t, and she knew it. “Don’t patronize me! This is physics. This is real. And it’s a hell of a lot more important than why some backwoods German village was abandoned when obviously everyone in it died!”

  This really was a very worng thing to say; and more than factually wrong. What happens to human beings may actually be more important than what happens to physical theories. But it was wrong on a personal level. Sharon had created a warp in her own personal space, and the force it represented repelled.

  Tom stood. “I have to walk over to the library. I got a meeting with Judy.”

  “More Eifelheim?” she asked without turning. But it was not so simple a question as two words. English really is a tonal language — if you have an ear for the tones.

  “Tempus fugit,” he said after a moment, answering the question she hadn’t quite asked. “Quae fuerant vitia mores sunt.”

  Sharon did not respond. Tom pulled his hard copy files and stuffed them into the pouch he used for his portable. Judy seemed a pretty girl, given the current preference for wholesomeness. Did Tom find that attractive? Why had he probed so insistently over Hernando? “I do like you, you know.”

  Tom slung his pouch over his shoulder. “I wish you’d tell me now and then.”

  “It’s an established fact, like gravity. It doesn’t need continual reminders.”

  He looked at her seriously. “Yes, it does. When you’re near a cliff.”

  She looked to the side, perhaps expecting a precipice. Tom waited and when, after a while, she had said nothing more, he started for the door. He looked back before he closed it and saw that Sharon had not moved.

  * * *

  She had to tell someone; so she told Hernando.

  “If I had to guess,” the nucleonic engineer said when she had called him, “you have a warp model for your time-force.”

  “If I add a twelth dimension. But that messes up the accepted models for the other four.”

  “Until now,” he guessed.

  “Right. It came to me in a flash. You see, the sub-atomic ‘zoo’ was organized by the quark theory by 1990. Turned out, all those subatomic particles were aliases for three families of three particles. Well, I’ve organized my twelve dimensions in the same way: as three sets of three: Space, Time, and something I haven’t named yet.”

  “That only makes nine,” he pointed out. He did not point out that he probably knew the subatomic zoo better than she did.

  “Plus three ‘meta-dimensions’ that link the three triplets on a higher level.” She doodled while she talked. A triangle with a smaller triangle at each corner. It was only an icon, really.

  “I call it the polyverse. Our universe is the subset that we can sense. A warp in the polyverse can intersect the universe in various ways, depending on its orientation. Like the blind men and the elephant, we think we’re seeing different forces, but they’re just different ‘cross sections’ of a single warp. ”

  “Hmm. We can’t see these ‘hidden dimensions,’ can we?”

  “No. The extra dimensions form the inside of a balloon. The original monoblock was slightly asymmetrical. When it expanded in the Big Bang, some of its dimensions were rolled up. They’re still there: inside the quarks; inside you, me, everything.”

  “Maybe,” said Hernando, “but the simplest explanation for not seeing them is that they’re not there.”

  * * *

  Sharon tried to patch things up with Tom over dinner. She waited until he came home from the library — was he planning to read every book in that place? — and announced that she was treating him to goulash and palatschinkes at Belváros Café. Tom, who had already eaten cheesesteak hoagies with Judy at the Pigeon Hole, knew that there were times when a few extra calories was a bargain price, and agreed with as much cheer as he could muster. “Jo!” he said, getting into the mood. “Paprikás csirkét kérek galuskával és uborkával. És palacsinta!”

  She even let him chatter on about long dead people in ghost towns, the gist of which was that there had been a hospice called St. Laurence somewhere in the Black Forest in the late 14th century dedicated to plague victims and operated by a small order of friars named after “St. Johan of Oberhochwald.” What that had to do with anything, Sharon did not know. He started to show her the emblem of the Order, but her patent disinterest stopped him. Instead, he asked about her own work.

  That was her cue. “What’s wrong with the sequence 19, 14, 2?”

  “Umm… The gap between 14 and 2 is too great?”

  “Right. In the Beginning, there was just a single Superforce, because the extra dimensions hadn’t rolled up yet. As the energy levels dropped, the polyverse warped and the individual forces, ah, ‘froze’ out of the soup. Gravity became separate at Planck scale energy, 1019 proton masses; the strong nuclear force at unification scale, or 1014 proton masses; and the weak force at Weinberg-Salam scale, 90 proton masses, which is about 102.”

  For once in his life, Tom was able to leap ahead of her. “And you think your chronity ‘froze out’ somewhere in between.”

  She grinned. “My guess is about 108 proton masses. I call that Nagy scale energy because I’m just so freaking modest. CERN can’t reach that; but maybe the new L4 accelerator will. Even back in the 1980’s, they could reach Weinberg-Salam scale. They fused the weak force with electromagnetism and create the electroweak force.”

  “Wait, I remember. That’s the breakthrough that gave us the anti-nuclear shield, right?”

  “Eventually. The weak force governs atomic decay. Once we could hitch it to electromagnetism, the fission suppression field was only a matter of time. Holy shit!”

  Tom blinked. Perhaps it was from the flash of insight. “What?”

  “We know how to manipulate electromagnetism. If we can fuse chronity with the electroweak force… that should be able to manipulate the time force.”

  “Tim
e travel?”

  “No, no. But Nagy-scale energy gets us inside the balloon, and we could… well, go anywhere. Lightspeed is still the upper limit; but if we go far enough in the right direction, the kilometers become very short and the seconds become very long, and we can pick any freaking lightspeed we want!” Well, taking a short-cut through the inside of the balloon would be a neat trick topologically, like a donut jumping through its own hole; but, who knew? With the proper energies, focused in the proper directions…

  He blinked again. “Instantaneous interstellar travel?”

  She shook her head. “As near as makes no difference. Tom, we wouldn’t need spaceships, at all. We could drive our cars to the stars. With protective suits, probably, we could walk! A single stride would cover interstellar distances.”

  “Seven league boots! Sounds like you’ve discovered hyperspace.”

  “No. Hypo-space. Topology is conserved. The eight hidden dimensions are inside the universe, remember? To travel to other worlds, we have to travel inside.” She laughed, but this time he was oddly quiet. “Tom?”

  He shook himself. “Nothing. I just had the oddest feeling of déjà vu, is all. As if I’d heard all this before.”

  * * *

  XXIII. July, 1349

  The Feast of St. Margaret of Antioch

  Joachim was tolling the Angelus bell, when Dietrich left Nickel Langermann’s hut, where he had lanced malignant pustules on Trude Metzger’s arms and on the back of little Peter’s hand. The pustules worried him. The ‘wool-sorters’ disease’ was often fatal. Lost in such thoughts, he blundered into a press of chattering villagers returning from their fields. “Come to visit your daughter, old man?” he heard people call. “Ach, Klaus! Klaus! Here comes your father-in-law!”

  “That is a hard path for a frail old man; are you well?”