Eifelheim

“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.”

Sharon 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 co

“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 lattice like an ur-hominid not yet out of the trees.

“This may sound weird,” Tom a

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 Bismarkallee, where the magnetic train slid up from Frankfurt-am-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 Martin’s 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. 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 Schwartzwald would have been a cardinal sin. No one on earth cooks like the Schwartzwalder; even our department store ma

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.

We 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 u

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 “-ea-ric-.”

“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.

Monsignor 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, meiner Alt,” 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. “Doctor 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?”