Eifelheim

Dietrich became aware of the silence. “Thousands perished,” he told the Krenk abruptly.

The Krenk was silent still. In the quiet, the wood of the church groaned.

Dietrich said, “Hans…?”

“The Kratzer was wrong. Our folk are very different.” Hans leapt from roof beam to roof beam, toward the rear of the church and then up into the clerestory, where a window stood open.

“Hans, wait!” Dietrich cried. “What mean you?”

The creature paused at the open window and turned its gaze on Dietrich. “Your peasants killed their lords. That is an — u

Dietrich, dumbstruck at this off-hand pronouncement, found his voice only with difficulty. “You… number animals among your ancestors?” He imagined foul couplings with beasts. Women lying with dogs. Men futtering donkeys. What might be born of such unions? Something unspeakable. Something monstrous.

“In ancient times,” the Krenk replied. “There gave creatures like your honey bees. Not in form, but in the divisions of their labor. They had no sentences inside their heads to tell them their duties. Instead the sentences were written into the atoms of their flesh, and these atoms were passed from sires and dams to their offspring, and so after an age, to us. So do each of us know our besitting in the great web. ‘So it was; so it is.’ ”

Dietrich trembled. All beings, desiring their proper end, move toward it by nature. So a stone, being earth, moved naturally toward the earth; and a man, loving the good, moved naturally toward God. But in animals, the appetites are moved by the estimative power, which rules despotically, while in men, they are moved by the cognitive power, which rules politically. So, the sheep esteems the wolf as enemy and runs without thinking; but a man may stand his ground or flee as his reason suggests. Yet, if the Krenken were ruled by instinctus, the rational appetite could not exist in them, since a higher appetite necessarily moved a lower one.

Which meant that the Krenken were beasts.

Memories of talking bears and talking wolves enticing children to their doom flickered in his memory. That the being in the rafters above him was no more than a beast that spoke, terrified Dietrich beyond measure, and he fled from Hans.

And Hans fled from him.

3. Now: Sharon

Sometimes Sharon felt that she and Tom did not actually have a life together, but two separate lives that shared an apartment. The whole thing ran on inertia. She never said this to Tom, and Tom was not the sort to divine her belief from subtle cues. So any mistakes in her perception, if they were mistakes, were never addressed. Instead, she set up half-conscious tests for him to fail. After her big breakthrough, she wanted to celebrate, and that was hard to do alone. So she prepared, as she had so often in the past, an intimate di

Sharon was little practiced in the domestic arts. Tom had once described her as only half-domesticated. She was no gourmet cook, but then neither was Tom a demanding eater, so things usually worked out.

Yet so accustomed was she to having him underfoot that his newly recurrent absences had not yet registered as fact. She had not thought to warn him. Consequently, he was late for a di

Subtlety was lost on Tom, but subtlety was not in it. The food had gone cold and, worse, had been warmed in the microwave. So despite the reheating, there was a chill in the room.

“Nice of you to come,” Sharon said, placing the serving dishes emphatically on their trivets. She had often used that same phrase in more intimate moments, but Tom knew that this was not one of them. The complaining trivets had made that clear.

Tom was sorry. He was always sorry. Sharon suspected that contrition was a strategy he had consciously adopted, and this fed her irritation. There was something patronizing about being continually apologized to.

“Some old manorial records on loan from Harvard,” he said. “Originals. We had to finish them up today and ship them back. You know how easy it is to forget the time when you’re engrossed in something.”

She took two salad plates from the refrigerator and put them on the table, though more gently than the serving dishes. She did, in fact, know how easy it was. “’We’,” was all she said.

“The librarian and me. I told you she’s helping out with the research.”

Sharon said nothing.

“Besides,” he added, “it was you who talked me into trolling original manuscripts.”

“I know that. I didn’t think it would be every day.”

“Every couple of days.” He was deploying reason and fact, to no avail. Quantity was not the issue. “Say, I told you about Eifelheim, didn’t I? I mean, why I couldn’t find any data on it?”

“This makes the thousand and first time.”

“Oh. I guess I do repeat myself. It seems so obvious, now. Oh, well. Lúchshye pózdno chem nikogdá.”

“Why can’t you just say ‘Better late than never’?”

He looked baffled and Sharon let it pass. He really didn’t know when he was doing it. She hesitated a moment after they had seated themselves. She had intended the di

Tom may have saved his life with what he did next. He lifted his wine glass and saluted her, crying, “Sauwohl!” And his delight was so obviously heartfelt that Sharon remembered that she had in fact been in love with him for many years. They touched glasses and drank the toast.

“Tell me about it,” Tom said. He felt aggrieved over the surprise di

“Well, it all suddenly clicked.” Sharon began slowly, almost grudgingly, but began to gather enthusiasm as she went. The polyverse and the universe. The inside of the balloon. “And light speed. That’s why I’m so grateful to you, even if your help was unwitting.”

Tom was two or three phrases behind. “Ah… The ‘inside of the balloon’?”

She didn’t hear him. “Do you know how it feels when two unrelated bits of information come together? When suddenly a lot of different things make sense? It’s… It’s…”

“Beatific?”

“Yes. Beatific. That business about light speed getting lower? Well, I checked it out and you were right.”

Tom set his glass down on the table and stared at her. “I wasn’t serious. I was just blowing off steam.”

“I know; but sometimes steam performs work. Gheury de Bray saw a trend in 1931, and Sten von Friesen mentioned it in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in 1937. A few years later, a statistician named Shewhart showed that test results from 1874 through 1932 were statistically incompatible with a constant. Halliday and Resnick found that still true in 1974.”

“I assumed it was measurement imprecision.”

“So did I, at first. Look at the spread in the Michelson-Morley data! But precision is random. No secular trend. But the use of different methods…”

Tom nodded vigorously. “A measurement is defined by the operations performed to produce it. So different methods give different numbers. It’s even worse in cliology—”

“Right,” she stopped him before he could hijack the celebration. “Partly, the trend was physicists discovering more accurate methods. Galileo used shuttered lanterns in two towers a mile apart, and concluded that lightspeed was infinite. But clocks weren’t precise enough back then and his baseline was way too short. Using stellar aberration, the mean value was 299,882 kilometers per second. But the mean value using rotating mirrors—”