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“That’s not true, Judy,” Tom said gently putting his hands on her shoulders. She twisted her head around and gazed up at him.
“Let them gawk and let them joke,” he said. “Oh, we’ll take measurements and holographs and chip of some cells for the biologists to wonder at. That much, he would have wanted. Then we’ll make plaster casts and hang those. But him, we’ll keep safe from harm and someday — when Sharon’s work is done — someday we’ll find out where he came from and take him home. Or our children’s children will.”
Heinrich nodded, his pipe sending filigrees of smoke toward the sky. Sepp still stood in the pit, leaning on his shovel. He had his hands folded over the top of the shaft, looking up where the stars shone through the canopy of trees; and his face was a mixture of wonder and anticipation the like of which I have never seen.
I know where the path to the stars lies. The gate opened once, a long time ago; and a few wayward travelers suffered a lonely death. Then it closed. But before it did, two creatures reached across an unimaginable gulf and touched. They didn’t flee and they didn’t fight, and because they did not they left the gate open, just a crack.
“Oh happy posterity who will not experience such abysmal woe and will look upon our testimony as a fable.”
Historical Notes
I have tried to depict the milieu of the mid-14th century Rhineland as accurately as possible, but that is difficult enough for early-21st century America, let alone a time and place where the world-view was so different from our own categories of thought.
For one thing, they took Christianity seriously; in many ways, more seriously than modern Bible-thumpers. At the same time, they took it more matter-of-factly. It was Christendom — but the first stirrings of the nationalism that was to destroy it were being felt — at Crécy and elsewhere it had begun to matter which nation or race you were.
Natural philosophers studied nature with virtually no intrusions by theologians who were themselves natural philosophers. Natural philosophy formed the basic undergraduate curriculum, along with logic and the “exact sciences” of mathematics, astronomy, optics, statics, and music. Art and humanities were not taught. Theologians, lawyers, and doctors had to first master this curriculum. Never before or since has such a large proportion of the population been educated so exclusively in logic, reason, and science.
If God made the entire world, then invoking God to explain the rainbow or magnetism or rectilinear motion added nothing to human understanding. Natural philosophers therefore sought natural explanations to natural phenomena. That a later century would invoke religion over a trivial matter of the earth’s motion would likely have astonished, and perhaps angered them. In many ways Galileo would have had an easier time of it in the 14th century than in the less tolerant and more literal-minded 17th.
With two notable exceptions, the historical events and personages mentioned in the text were as described. The likeness of Margaret Maultasch, the Ugly Duchess of Tyrol, was used to portray the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland. The Markgraf Friedrich mentioned in the text was Friedrich III, who ruled in Baden, not his cousin, Friedrich IV, who ruled at the same time in Pforzheim. The months in which the Black Death struck various cities and regions were taken from at atlas compiled by Peter Ravn Rasmussen at www.scholiast.org/history/blackdeath/index.html.
Marshall Villars really did refuse to take his army through the Höllenthal, using the excuse quoted. The overthrow of the Strassburg town council and the Friday 13th massacre of the Jews were described in the Chronicles of Strassburg. Duke Albert and King Casimir did offer their realms as sanctuaries to the Jews, and the guild militias did assemble and defend the Jewish quarter of Regensburg. The story of the Feldberg Demon is recorded in the A
The two major alterations to historical events are the Flagellant procession at Strassburg and the Storming of Falcon Rock. The Flagellants did not actually reach Strassburg until June of 1349 and the Papal Bull condemning them was not issued until 20 October of that same year, after the events of the story. I have moved both of them to February 1349, to coincide with the Benfeld conference.
The Freiburger militias stormed and took Falcon Rock in 1389. I moved it up by forty years, to March of 1349 and had Manfred participate. The romantic causus belli was as described.
A minor alteration: Nicole Oresme did not write De monete, in which he enunciated Gresham’s Law, until after the time of the story.
Physics Notes
The model that Sharon develops for the multiverse was slapped together and given a coat of paint many years ago for the novella “Eifelheim” (Analog, Nov., 1986) from which the “Now” portions of this book derive. Mohsen Janatpour, who now teaches at San Mateo State in California, was most helpful in this and Janatpour Space was, and is, named in his honor.
Recently, variable light speed (VLS) theories have become a hot topic among cosmologists. One prominent advocate is João Magueijo, whose gossipy book Faster Than the Speed of Light is a good introduction, as well as an entertaining narrative of how physics actually gets done. I was pleased to read in his book that he considered the “Kaluza-Klein” approach that Mohsen and I came up with back in the 1980s, though unsurprised to see him reject it. I decided to keep it, just because.
In all fairness, the decline in light speed has not happened over historical times, but only in the aftermath of the Big Bang. It has been proposed as a way of getting around the kludge of inflaton fields, which were made up simply to make the Big Bang model work. A mysterious force, the inflaton, invoked simply to save the appearances of the theory and afterward allowed to disappear from the universe would never have passed muster with Buridan, and Will Ockham would have howled about the needless multiplication of entities. VLS theories nicely resolve the problem using inherent feedback loops that homeostatically fine tune the universe. No new entities are needed.
When we last spoke, Mohsen and I discussed also the quantization of the red shift. Some physicists see it; others don’t. Same data. One explanation for a quantized red shift is that time is quantized just as space is supposed to be. Since I had already invented the fictional chronon for the original “Eifelheim,” this new redshift question fits right in. If it’s true, we may have to revise the universe, again.