Eifelheim

“Or something horrible.”

She nodded silently.

“That’s what frightens you, isn’t it? You are a rational, secular, twenty-first century woman, who knows absolutely that alien creatures would look different and smell different; and yet you would run screaming like any medieval peasant. You are afraid you would act as badly as Fra Joachim.”

She smiled a faint, small smile. “You are almost right, Dr. Zaengle.” She closed her eyes and sighed. “Hay cu’ú giúp tôi. Cho toi su’c manh. I am afraid I would not act as Pastor Dietrich did.”

“He shames us all, child,” I said. “He shames us all.” I looked around at the tall oaks and the wildly beautiful mountain flowers — the woodmasters and butterheads — and listened to the rattle of the woopeckers. Perhaps Dietrich had had a fine burial, after all.

Judy took a deep breath and dried her tears. Then she said, “Let’s tell the others.”

Heinrich gave directions for the dig. “After so long, the coffin will have disintegrated. Everything will be filled with clay. Dig until you find wood fragments; then we will switch to the trowels.”

Gus and Sepp, the other workman, began their digging a little ways out from the grave. Because the remains would have sunk over the centuries, they would have to dig deep. They wanted the sides of the hole to slope inward so that they would not collapse. Both men were of old Breisgau families. Gus’ folk had been stoneworkers for many generations; and Sepp Fischer was descended from a long line of fishermen along the River Dreisam.

It was already late afternoon when the digging began, but Heinrich had come prepared with gas mantles to work into the evening. There were also tents and bedrolls. “I would not want to try and find my way back in the dark,” he said. “Remember Hansl’ and Gretl.”

It was only when the evening sun was setting that we discovered how the soldiers had discovered the face. The light streamed through a gap in the trees, stiking the stone and throwing the carving into sharp relief. Through some accident of weathering, it was only when lit from that angle, in the growing gloom of twilight, that the features stood out, as if it were a hologram projected into the stone. Gus and Sepp were bent over their shovels and did not notice; but Heinrich was stooped just beside it and, hearing Judy’s gasp, turned and stared.

It was a mantis’ face and it wasn’t. The eyes were large and bulging and the stone carver had given them a hint of faceting, so that they sat like gemstones in the alien countenance. (Those eyes would have been yellow, I knew.) There were traces of lines that might have been ante

Heinrich paused and stared at the stone without speaking. It was obvious that this was no weathered distortion of a human face. It was a demon. Or something like a demon. Heinrich turned and looked at us, gauging our reactions. Already the sun had moved and the visage was fading. “I think,” he said, “perhaps I should take a rubbing.”

The moon was a ghost drifting through the treetops when Gus finally struck wood. The gas lanterns hissed and sputtered, embedding a shifting circle of brightness in the dark of the forest. Judy was kneeling by the edge of the hole, her eyes closed, sitting on her heels. I don’t know if she was praying or sleeping. I could barely see the heads of the men in the pit.

Tom came and stood next to me. He held Heinrich’s rubbing of the alien’s face. Hans, I reminded myself. Not ‘the alien’ but Joha

Tom pointed to the sky. “Full moon,” he said. “Wrong time to dig up Dracula’s grave.” He tried to smile to show that he was joking. I tried to smile to show him that I knew. I shivered. It was cooler in the mountains that I had thought it would be.

Sepp called out and we all jerked like puppets. Judy came suddenly alert and leaned forward over the pit. Tom and I walked to the edge of the hole and looked in.

Sepp and Gus were standing to one side while Heinrich probed in the clay with a trowel. There was something shiny and smooth protruding from the earth. Pale. Not bone-white, but yellow and brown. He excavated around it and removed it, earth and all. Then he sat back on his haunches and scraped at it with a putty knife, cleaning it; his own face set as solidly as any carved in stone.

He knows, I thought.

A face emerged gradually from the embrace of the clay. Gus gasped and dropped his shovel. He crossed himself hastily three times. Sepp remained calm, watching with narrowed eyes. He nodded solemnly, as if he had always known the soil of Eifelheim would yield unearthly fruit.

It was a skull, and not a skull, and no earthly mind have ever sat within it. Soil chemistry had been at work on it, but our worms and bacteria had for their part found it unappetizing. The eyes were gone, of course, and two enormous sockets set on either side of the head gaped empty; but whatever had served him for skin was still largely intact. It was a mummy’s head.

Heinrich held it out and Judy took it gingerly. Tom stood behind her, inspecting it over her shoulder. Heinrich climbed from the pit and sat on its edge with his feet dangling in the hole. He took his pipe from his pocket and lit it; though I noticed his hands trembled a bit with the match. “So, Anton. Now will you tell me what I have gotten into? I have a feeling Bishop Arni will not like it.”

So I told him. Tom and Judy added the details. The mystery. The folktales. The hints and fragmentary evidence. Heinrich nodded as he listened and asked an occasional question. Tom’s explanation of hypospace physics confused him, I think; but then he was getting it at second hand. I think Tom was confused as well. Sharon lived in a different world than we, an austere world and stragely beautiful; but one whose beauty we could at best only dimly grasp. Sharon had seen the likeness of a circuit in a manuscript illumination. Let it go at that. Her insight had given Tom the courage to test his intuition; and his intuition had sent her groping down a path that might one day give us the stars. Surely, God moves in mysterious ways.

Heinrich accepted it all quietly. How could he doubt when he had held the skull in his own hands. He looked out into the surrounding forest. “There will be the remainer of the skeleton, of course,” he said pointing into the grave with the stem of his pipe. And of others as well. You say there were several of these beings? And out there?” The pipe stem swept the black forest. “Out there, what? Shards of metal or plastic, rotted or decomposed beneath the living soil.” He sighed. “There is much work to be done. And don’t forget the cries of fraud or hoax that will be raised. We will need to bring others up here; tell Bishop Arni and the University people.”

“No!”

We all looked at Judy in surprise. She still held Joha

“You know what they’ll do, don’t you?” she said. “They’ll dig him up and wire him together and hang him behind bullet-proof plastic so tourists can gawk at him and children make nasty jokes and laugh. It isn’t right. It isn’t.” When she shook her head her whole body shook.