Eifelheim (69 page)

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 teakettle 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 multidimensional 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
Weltanschauung
unequipped to handle it. Read Ockham someday; 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 jigsaw 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 hypospacecraft. 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 teapot 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 the 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.”

S
HARON LEAFED
through the papers until she found the diagram she wanted. She laid it side-by-side with the manuscript and studied the two together. Were they the same? The illumination was all twisted, like a real vine; not laid out geometrically. She tried to match the leaves and knots and grape clusters with the arcane nucleonic symbols. Only the connections in the drawing mattered, she told herself; not the length or shape of the vine-wires. Almost, it seemed to her. The two almost matched. Not quite, though.

“Garbled in transmission,” she told Tom. Garbled, or was she the one now seeing things that she wanted to see? “That linkage is impossible—” She pointed to the capital. “And that is a shorted circuit. And those two components should be reversed. Or should they …? Wait a minute.” She traced the vines carefully with her fingers. “Not all the differences are garbled. This is a
generator
, not a detector. See there? And there? It’s part of a generating circuit. It has to be. Part of their stargate. Damn!”

She had reached the bottom of the page.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Part is right. It’s not complete.” She frowned and left the kitchen, deep in thought. She reached her pillow sofa and dropped into it. She closed her eyes and began swinging through the jungle-gym lattice of her hypospace like an ur-hominid not yet out of the trees.

“This may sound weird,” Tom announced, “but I feel oddly disappointed.”

She opened her eyes and looked at him. He was studying
the medieval circuit diagram. “Disappointed?” She couldn’t believe he had said that. Disappointed? When they had just been given the stars?

“I mean, that they didn’t leave a complete set of plans. Then you’d know what to do.”

She stared back at him where he stood framed in the kitchen doorway. “But I already know the only thing that matters.”

“What’s that?”

“I know it can be done.”

10
NOW
Anton

I
MET
Tom and Judy at the Hauptbahnhof in Bismarckallee, where the magnetic train slid up from Frankfurtam-Main. We took the Bertholdstrasse streetcar to Kaiser Josef Strasse and walked from there to the hotel on Gerberau. I pointed out the sights like the worst of tourist guides. Tom had seen it all before, of course; but it was new to Judy.

When we walked through the Schwaben Tor, she commented on its storybook appearance. This gate had been standing a century in the walls of the Old Town when Pastor Dietrich had befriended certain strangers. Nearby stood the Red Bear, which had been an inn already in that same era. The wind from the Höllental was cool, a sign that summer’s end was near.

After settling them in their rooms, I took them to lunch at the Römischer Kaiser. We gave our full attention to the meal. To do otherwise in the Schwarzwald would have been a cardinal sin. No one on earth cooks like the Schwarzwälder;
even our department store mannequins are portly. Not until the waiter had delivered our streussel did I allow the conversation to turn to business.

Tom wanted to leave for the Forest immediately. I could see the eagerness in him, but I told him we would wait for morning. “Why?” he wanted to know. “I want to see the site for myself.” Judy waited patiently, saying nothing.

“Because Eifelheim is deep within the Forest,” I said. “It will be a long drive and a hike, even if we can locate the site quickly. You will need a good night’s sleep to recover from the jet lag.” I took another bite of my streussel and set my fork down. “And another reason, my friends. Monsignor Lurm from the diocesan office will be joining us once he has received the bishop’s permission. I have not, naturally, told him what we expect to find. Thus, he will be a valuable check on our preconceptions.”

Tom and Judy glanced at each other. “What do you mean?” asked Tom. “Why do we need someone from the diocesan office?”

Sometimes my friend is a little slow. “It is a Catholic cemetery,
nicht wahr?
You did not come all this way only to look. Surely you will want to exhume the grave and see who, or what, is buried there. For that we need the permission.”

“But …” Tom frowned. “That cemetery is seven hundred years old.”

I shrugged. “What of it? Some things are eternal.”

He sighed. “You’re right. I suppose we must wait until morning then.”

Americans are in too much of a hurry. A single fact is worth a volume of deductions. Best to plan carefully how to find that fact. Tom would have had us on the site sooner—but without a shovel.

W
E DID
do one thing first. I took them to the crypt in the Franziskanerkirche and showed them the mural of the grasshoppers in imitation of the
Last Supper
. The colors were faded and the paint chipped, and the figures had that
odd appearance that those unused to Klimt or Picasso think unnatural.

Tom stood close and peered at them. “Do you suppose this is
them?”
I only shrugged. “Why are there only eight?” he wondered.

“I suppose to avoid a charge of blasphemy.”

Judy said, “There are names under some of them.”

That, I had not noticed on my previous visit. We gathered round and tried to read the corrupted letters. There had once been names under all, but the centuries had destroyed many of the letters, even entire names. One grasshopper wore the mantle of a Knight of the Hospital and was called—if we guessed the missing letters properly—Gottfried-Laurence. Another sat with its head tilted back and its arms outspread—in death? In prayer? That name began with the letter U, and must have been very short. Uwe, I thought, or Ulf. The one in the center, sharing out its bread, was “St. Jo—” and leaning on its breast was “-earic-.”

“Not your traditional names for the apostles,” I commented.

But Tom made no answer. He could not take his eyes off the figure in the center.

M
ONSIGNOR LURM
met us outside the hotel the next morning. He was a tall, gaunt man with a high forehead. Dressed in a faded bush jacket, only his collar revealed his calling.

“Na, Anton, mein Alter,”
he said, waving some papers. “I have them. We must pay the proper respect and disturb nothing but the one grave. Personally, I think Bishop Arni will be more than happy to bury this Dracula nonsense.” He looked at Tom and Judy. “That is something, isn’t it? To bury it, we must dig it up!” He laughed.

I winced. Heinrich was a virtuous man, but his puns had earned him many years in Purgatory. I also felt guilty that I had deceived him regarding our intentions. “Permit me,”
I said. “This is my friend from America, Tom Schwoerin, and his assistant, Judy Cao. Monsignor Heinrich Lurm.”

Heinrich pumped Tom’s hand. “Dr. Schwoerin. It is to me a great pleasure. I much enjoyed your paper on the gene frequencies of the Swabian tribes. It greatly clarified the routes of their migrations. A good thing for you that my ancestors dropped their genes everywhere they went. Eh?”

Before Tom could respond to this latest
bon mot
, I interrupted. “Heinrich is an amateur archeologist. He has excavated several Swabian villages from before the
Völkerwanderung
.”

“You’re
that
Heinrich Lurm? The pleasure is mine. I’ve read your reports, father. You’re no amateur.”

Heinrich flushed. “On the contrary, ‘amateur’ comes from the Latin
amare
, to love. I do archeology for love. I am not paid.”