Eifelheim

He stooped to squint at the chased metalwork of the candlesticks: the chi-rho emblazoned on the Mother Pelican. He stretched a tentative forefinger toward the candlestick. When it came within a thumb’s-length of the base there was a snap, and a spark appeared in the air between fingertip and candlestick. Though he had known what would happen, he pulled away as quickly as had Joachim. His fingertip felt as if pierced by a hot needle. He stuck the digit in his mouth to soothe it and turned to Joachim.

“Hngh.” He took the finger out and inspected it. “A small hurt,” he a

“But, the small lightnings…”

“Lightning,” said Dietrich. A new thought had struck him. He rubbed his finger absently. “Joachim! Could this essence be of the same species as the lightning itself?” He gri

The lightning struck without warning!

Dietrich felt fire run through his entire being. Beside him, the Minorite arched his back, his eyes bulging wide and his lips pulling back from his teeth. Sparks leapt between the two candlesticks.

A great burst of light washed through the stained glass lancets in the north wall of the church, casting rainbows. Saints and prophets blazed in glory: Mary, Leonard, Catherine, Margaret of Antioch, bright as the sun. Radiances streamed through their images and played across the dim interior, speckling the statues and columns with gold and yellow and red and white so that they seemed almost to move. Joachim fell to his knees and bowed, covering his face against the radiant windows. Dietrich knelt also, but looked everywhere at once, trying to take it all in.

An avalanche of thunder followed upon the flash; and the bells in the tower pealed a mad, arrhythmic clanging. The timbers of the church creaked and moaned and wind rushed through the vises and passageways under the roof, howling like a beast. Griffins and wyverns growled. Carven dwarfs groaned. Window glass shrieked and cracked into spider webs.

And then, as abruptly as it had begun, the light dimmed and the thunder and the wind faded. Dietrich waited, but nothing more happened. He took a deep breath and found that the feeling of dread had left him as well. Whispering a brief prayer of thanksgiving, he rose to his feet. He glanced at Joachim, who had curled on the flagstone paving with his arms wrapped around his head, then he turned to the credence table and touched the candlestick.

Nothing happened.

He looked at the cracked windows. Whatever had been approaching had arrived.

1. Now: Sharon

During summer sessions, Sharon and Tom both did their research from home. That is easy enough today, when the world lies literally at our very fingertips; but it can be a trap, too, for what we need may lie just beyond the tips of our fingers. There is Tom hunched over the computer by the window, tracking down obscure references over the Net. He has his back to the room, which means to Sharon.

Sharon lounges on the pillow sofa on the other side of the room, notebook open, surrounded by wadded up balls of paper and half-finished cups of herbal tea, thinking about whatever it is that theoretical physicists think about. She gazes in Tom’s direction, but she is looking on some i

It is not a beautiful thing, this world of hers. The geodesics are warped and twisted things. Space and time spiral off in curious, fractal vortices, in directions that have no name. Dimensions are quicksilver slippy — looked at sideways, they would vanish.

And yet…

And yet, she sensed a pattern lurking beneath the chaos and she stalked it as a cat might — in stealthy half-steps and never quite straightforward. Perhaps it lacked only the right beholding to fall into beauty. Consider Quasimodo, or Beauty’s Beast.

“Damn!”

An alien voice intruded into her world. She heard Tom smack his PC terminal and she screwed her eyes shut, trying not to listen. Almost, she could see it clear. The equations hinted at multiple rotation groups co

“Durák! Bünözö! Jáki!”

…But the world shattered into a kaleidoscope, and for a moment she sat overwhelmed by a sense of infinite loss. She threw her pen at the coffee table, where it clattered against white bone china teacups. Evidently God did not intend for her to solve the geometry of Janatpour space quite yet. She glared at Tom, who muttered over his keyboard.

There is something true about Sharon Nagy in that one half-missed detail: that she uses a pen and not a pencil. It betokens a sort of hubris.

“All right,” she demanded. “What is it? You’ve been cursing in tongues all day. Something is bugging you. I can’t work; and that’s bugging me.”

Tom spun in his swivel chair and faced her. “CLIO won’t give me the right answer!”

She made a pout with her lips. “Well, I hope you were able to beat it out of her.”

He opened his mouth and closed it again and had the grace to look embarrassed, because there was something true about him also. If there are two sorts of people in the world, Tom Schwoerin is of the other sort. Few thoughts of his failed to reach his lips. He was an audible sort of man, which means that he was fundamentally sound.

He scowled now and crossed his arms. “I’m frustrated, is all.”

Small doubt of that. Sharon regarded his verbal popcorn much as a miser does a spendthrift. She was the sort of person for whom the expression, That goes without saying, really does induce silence. In any event, Tom’s frustration was only a symptom. “Why are you frustrated?”

“Eifelheim won’t go away!”

“And why should it go away?”

He threw his arms out wildly. “Because it’s not there!”

Sharon, who had had another why ready in wait, massaged the bridge of her nose. Be patient, and eventually he would make sense.

“Okay, okay,” he admitted. “It sounds silly; but… Look, Eifelheim was a village in the Black Forest that was abandoned and never resettled.”

“So…?”

“So, it should have been. I’ve run two score simulations of the Schwarzwald settlement grid and the site gets resettled every time.”

She had no patience for his problems. An historian, Tom did not create worlds, he only discovered them; so he really was that other sort of person. Sharon yearned for her geodesics. They had almost made sense. Tom wasn’t even close. “A simulation?” she snapped. “Then change the freaking model. You’ve got multicollinearity in the terms, or something.”

Emotion, especially deep emotion, always caught Tom short. His own were brief squalls. Sharon could erupt like a volcano. Half the time, he could not figure out why she was angry with him; and the other half of the time he was wrong. He goggled at her for a moment before rolling his eyes. “Sure. Throw out Rosen-Zipf-Christaller theory. One of the cornerstones of cliology!”