Eifelheim (63 page)

“Where is she?” Dietrich asked.

“Don’t know! Mami,
I don’t feel good!”

“Where is your father?”

“Don’t know! Vati, make it stop!” Then the couging racked his body once again.

“And your sister, Anna?”

“Anna’s sleeping. Don’t wake her! Mami said.”

Dietrich looked at Klaus, and Klaus looked at him. Then they both looked at the cottage door. The maier set his jaw. “I suppose we must …”

Klaus opened the door and stepped inside, and Dietrich, with the boy in hand, followed.

There was no sign of Norbert and Adelheid, but Anna lay on a pallet of straw, with a countenance of peace and contentment.

“Dead,” Klaus announced. “Yet not a sign on her. Not like poor Everard.”

“Atiulf,” said Dietrich sternly, “was your sister ill when you went to bed last night?” The boy, still whimpering, shook his head. Dietrich looked to Klaus, who said, “Sometimes the murrain strikes people so, when it enters the mouth instead of the skin. Perhaps the pest acts the same way. Or she has died from grief over that boy.”

“Bertam Unterbaum.”

“I would have thought better of Norbert,” Klaus said, “than that he left his boy to die.”

Reason would have told him to fly, Dietrich thought. If the boy was doomed, what purpose was served by staying—and falling himself victim? And so all reasonable people had fled—from ancient Alexandria, from Constantine’s Plague-wracked army, from the Paris Hospital.

Klaus picked the boy up in his arms. “I will take him to the hospital. If he lives, he will be my son.” Norbert had acted contrary to his temperament, but Klaus’s offer was astonishing. Dietrich offered a blessing and they parted company. Dietrich continued toward the Bear Valley end of the village for no other reason than that he had started out in that direction.

A cottage door flew open and Ilse Ackermann ran from it with Maria in her arms. “My little Maria! My little Maria!” she shrieked over and over. The girl was a blackened figure soiled with vomit, with lips and tongue dark
blue, and blood flowing freely from her mouth. She exuded the pest’s peculiar odor. Before Ilse could say more, the girl spasmed and died.

The woman cried out one more time and dropped her daughter to the ground, where she lay like the blackened doll that the selfsame girl had rescued from the fire. The pest seemed to have invaded every thumb’s-length of her body, rotting it from within. Dietrich backed off in horror. This sight was more dreadful than Hilde with her delirium, or even Wanda with her blackened, lolling tongue. This was Death in all his awful majesty.

Ilse threw hands to her face, and ran off toward the autumn field where Felix labored, leaving her daughter in the dirt behind her.

D
EATH HAD
buffeted Dietrich from all sides and too quickly. Everard, Franzl, Wanda, Anna, Maria. Peaceful or agonizing; long or short; rotting with stench or simply falling asleep. There was no order to it, no lawfulness. Dietrich quickened his pace. The pest, after three days’ rest, had redoubled its efforts.

Vile fruit dangled from the linden tree in the green: a human figure twisted in the hot July breeze. It was Odo, Dietrich saw as he edged closer, and he thought first of suicide. But the rope was tied to the trunk and there was nothing under his feet from which he might have jumped. Then he understood. Returning to his son-in-law’s house, Odo had been waylaid and killed for the sin of bringing the pest.

Dietrich could endure no more. He ran. His sandals clapped against the wooden planks of the millstream bridge and found the Bear Valley road. The track was baked hard in the sun, except where it ran between the swell of the land. Here, the rivulet had turned it to mud, which splattered Dietrich’s legs as he splashed through it. At the bend, he came upon one of the Herr’s rouncies, a gray one, fully saddled and caparisoned, nibbling from some succulent bush by the pathside.

A sign!
he thought. God had sent a sign. Seizing the reins, he scrambled up the bank and settled himself into the saddle. Then, without a look behind, he directed the unwilling horse eastward.

8
NOW
Sharon

T
HE SUBCONSCIOUS
is a wonderful thing. It never sleeps, no matter what the rest of the mind does. And it never stops thinking. No matter what the rest of the mind does. Sharon was in the middle of her galactic structure class—seven upper-class physics majors—when, in turning about after making a point, her eyes fell on the poster-sized chart of the distribution of redshifts.

Of course
.

She fell silent, and the student who had just answered her question shifted uneasily in his seat, wondering where his answer had gone wrong. He tapped his stylus staccato on the tabletop and looked for support to his classmates. “What I meant …” he temporized, hoping for a hint.

Sharon turned around. “No, you were quite right, Girish. But I just realized … Class dismissed.”

Now the singular difference between the graduate species and his undergraduate cousin is that the graduate student may be discontent with such an unexpected boon. For the most part, they are there because they
want
to be, and not because society says they ought to be. And so they filed out of the seminar room buzzing to one another while Sharon fled to her office, where she scribbled furiously.

When Hernando entered half an hour later, tossed his cap on the bookshelf, and dropped his backpack beside his desk, she was so deep into it that she never noticed him.
He stared at her for a while before he settled himself to sort out his notes for his nucleonics lecture.

“It’s because time is quantized,” Sharon said, drawing Hernando out of his own contemplation.

“What? Time is quantized? Yeah, I suppose. Why not?”

“No, it’s the redshifts. Why the galaxies are receding at discrete velocities. The universe sputters.”

Hernando spun his chair to face her. “Right.”

“Okay, vacuum energy. Einstein’s lambda, the one he called his biggest blunder.”

“The cosmic fudge factor he threw in so he could get the result he wanted.”

“Right. So, Einstein was a genius. Even when he made a mistake it was brilliant. Lambda is pushing the galaxies apart faster and faster. But the amount of energy in the vacuum depends on the speed of light—and vice versa.”

“That’s what your theory seems to suggest.”

She ignored his doubts. “If light speed drops, it reduces the amount of energy the vacuum can hold. So where does the excess energy go?”

Hernando pursed his lips and looked thoughtful. “Outside the universe?”

“No,
inside
the universe. Into ordinary radiation and matter. Into dust clouds and microwaves, stars and planets and galaxies, into whales and birds and college professors.”

The post-doc whistled. “The Big Bang itself …”

“And
with no wacky inflaton field needed as an epicycle. Quantized time is the only thing that explains the redshift gaps.”

“Measurement resolution?” Hernando suggested. “Limited samples? Unrepresentative samples?”

“That’s what they told Tifft when he discovered it. And … they were right about a lot of it; but they were also champions of orthodoxy clinging to the existing dogma. Look,
light
is quantized,
space
is quantized, what makes
time
so special? It’s just another dimension of the continuum.”

“Oh, that’s a convincing argument. Besides, if you’re right, it’s not exactly a continuum.”

“And that’s why there are gaps in the redshifts. What looks like a continuous motion picture is really just a series of frames. The universe has ‘cracks’ in it.”

The muscular young man laughed. “And what’s in those cracks?”

“Oh, wouldn’t we love to know! Whole other universes, I think. Parallel worlds.”

Hernando cocked his head and looked thoughtful. “Objective evidence?” he said after a time.

“That’s where you come in.”

“Me?” He looked alarmed, as if Sharon was about to send him into one of those parallel worlds.

“You need to build me a chronon detector.”

“Sure, my afternoon is free after my two o’clock lecture. I suppose a chronon is …”

“A ‘quantum’ of time.”

He thought about it. “Cool beans. But how do you detect something like that?”

“You and me, Hernando, we’re going to figure that out. Think of it. Someday, you may walk on another planet, or on a parallel world.”

The post-doc snorted. “I got something to do that weekend.”

Sharon leaned back in her chair, certain now that she had his skeptical mind hooked. Every enthusiast needs a skeptic, or she would run out of control.

XXV
JULY
, 1349
Ferial Days

T
HE GRAY
was disinclined to flight, and her stubborn walk was a compromise between Dietrich’s desire to gallop and her own desire not to move at all. When they reached the stretch by the meadow gate where the bushes gave way to open land, and the mare saw untied, wind-scattered sheaves of half-mown hay, she turned off the road and tried to nuzzle the rope from the gatepost. “If you are that hungry, sister horse,” Dietrich conceded, “you’ll not last the journey.” Leaning down, he undid the latch and the horse quickstepped into the meadow like a child shown his birthday cake.

While Dietrich waited impatiently for the gray to feed, curiosity turned his mind to the saddlebags, and he wondered to whom beside God he owed this boon. Searching, he found a linen maniple, dyed bright green and embroidered in thread-of-gold with crosses and the chi-rho. Below that were stuffed other priestly vestments of surpassing beauty. He settled himself in the saddle. What more sign could he ask that the horse had been sent for him to find?

When the mare had eaten her fill, Dietrich turned her toward the shade of the Great Wood. There was a stream there, he remembered, where the horse could drink, and the canopy would be relief against the awful heat.

He had not entered the wood since the Krenkish vessel’s departure, and the expression of summer foliage had altered its aspect considerably. The woods-masters and wild roses suffused the air with their fragrances. Bees hummed. New growth had obscured many of the blazes that Max
had cut. Yet, the horse seemed purposeful. Dietrich supposed that she smelled the water and gave her free rein.