Eifelheim

It was late when she left the university grounds. The semester had started and she had papers to grade and discussion notes to prepare. It was one of those schools that put great store in teaching and even its most prestigious scholars were required in the trenches. She held two graduate seminars and taught an upper division course in galactic structure that was well-subscribed, though her students thought her a cold fish. On a Monday she was likely to resume precisely where she had left off the previous Friday, and sometimes that meant in media res, while her students, bleary from weekend partying, squinted at the whiteboards and the projections from her computer, trying to remember from where the derivation had started.

It was during her preparation for the galactic structure class that she noted a further anomaly.

“Hernando,” she asked the young post-doc who worked with her. “Why should cars all drive down a highway at speeds in multiples of five?”

Hernando Kelly was from Costa Rica, a ‘tico,’ as they call themselves. He was bronze, distressingly well-built, and climbed sheer rock faces for recreation. With his arm in a sling — sometimes the rock faces win — Sharon had put him to work mining data bases and compiling the results. He scratched his head and tried to imagine what the question had really been about. “At multiples of five,” he said, hinting for clarification.

“Right. The cars are going 50, 55, 60, 65, and so on.”

“You haven’t reached the speeds on the Blue Route yet.” White teeth showed beneath a black moustache. “So nobody’s going like 62 or 57 or something?” At Sharon’s nod, he shook his head. “Okay, I’ll bite. Why?”

“I don’t know,” she answered happily. “I thought you knew because you were the one who told me.” She held up a frequency distribution, one of several dozen he had printed off of Minitab from the “galactic empire” database. Distribution of Galactic Redshifts, read the title above the chart. “Notice anything?”

“Well, yeah. It’s comb-shaped. That means the measurements resolution is coarser than the plotting scale so you get empty bins in the histogram. I’ll rescale the chart.”

“Measurement resolution,” she said.

“Right…” he said, a bit wary, for he recognized the manic tone in her voice.

“Unh-unh,” she answered. “Quantized. Redshifts are quantized. Galaxies are receeding at certain speeds, and not at speeds in between.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” she enthused. “That would only be an answer, and I’ve got something much more precious. I’ve got a question.”

Kelly didn’t see the big deal. It was like the light speed business. That had been a real bitch, because not all the literature was of equal quality. Some reports lacked the original data, some reworked previous data, some were duplicates. In some, the measurement method had been poor or the techniques for using it had not yet been perfected. Just compile all the data, the Ice Queen had told him. Oh, yeah, nothing easier.

It was all measurement error, he was convinced. Light speeds, now red shifts. He had seen “comb-shaped” histograms when he had worked summers at a metal fabricator in San Jose. The gauge had read out in increments of 0.002″ and the plotting scale had increments of 0.001″. Odd numbers need not apply. He hoped the rumor wasn’t true and Dr. Nagy wouldn’t lose her grant because of her religious obsession. He liked working with the Ice Queen.

It was a few weeks later that Sharon saw the answer, and it was a stu

XIV. February, 1348

Candlemas to the Ember Days

Candlemas Day was a work holiday. At primes, the villagers gathered on the green and Joachim distributed candles to all, including the two baptized Krenken. The other Krenken stayed to themselves or watched from the edge of the green with fotografic devices. Dietrich blessed the candles while Joachim sang the Nunc dimittis. When all was ready, they formed up in procession. Klaus and Hildegarde took their accustomed place immediately behind Dietrich, reminding Dietrich irresistibly of the parable about those who would be first.

Chanting the anthem, Adórna thálamum tuum, Sion, Dietrich led the river of light through the early dawn, along the high street and up the hill toward St. Catherine, where he spied Theresia kneeling in the damp grass beside the church. But as the procession drew nearer, she stood and ran off. Dietrich’s tongue stumbled and nearly lost its place in the anthem, but he sang the line obtulérunt pro eo Dómino as he passed through the church doors, as was customary.

Later that day, a faint yodel echoing off the Feldberg a

Berthold had summoned the lords of the Elsass and the Breisgau to meet at Benfeld on the eighth and discuss unrest in the Swiss. “I will be gone a week or more,” Manfred told the ministeriales summoned to his hall. “Too many lords will attend to hope for anything shorter.” Naming Ritter Thierry burgvogt in his absence, and dispatching Bertram Unterbaum to the Swiss to bring back a report, Manfred and his retinue departed the next day.

Rumors swirled in his wake. It was said that Berne had put some Jews on the pyre in November over the well-poisonings, and had written to the Imperial Cities to urge the same action on them. Strassburg and Freiburg had done nothing; but in Basel, the people rioted and, although the council banished the most notorious Jew-baiters from the city, they compelled the council to banish the Jews, and place them in protective custody on an island in the Rhine.

Dietrich complained to those who had gathered at Walpurga Honig’s cottage to drink her honey-wheat beer. “The Pope commands we respect the persons and property of the Jews. There was no cause for such treatment. The pest never reached the Swiss. It went up through France and into England.”

“Perhaps,” Everard suggested, “because Berne’s swift action scared the poisoners off.”

Berne actually found the poison, it was said. Everard had heard it from Gunther who had overheard the bishop’s messenger. A concoction of spiders, frogs, and the skin of a basilisk had been sewn into thin leather bags that Rabbi Peyret of Chambery gave to the silk merchant Agimet to drop into wells in Venice and Italy. Had he not been captured on his return, he might have done the same in the Swiss.

Dietrich protested. “His Holiness wrote that the Jews ca

Everard tapped a finger aside his nose. “But not so many of them as of us, eh? Why do you suppose that is? Because they bob up and down while they pray? Because every Friday they air their bedding out? Pfaugh. Besides, the kabbalists despise their fellow-Jews as much as they do us. They’re as secretive as masons and won’t allow other Jews to study the hidden writings.”

And “hidden writings” might be anything. Devil-spells. Recipes for poisons. Anything.

Klaus said, “We should place a guard around our own well.”

“Maier,” said Gregor, “we have here no Jews.”

“But we have them.” And Klaus pointed to Hans, who, though he drank no beer, squatted among them for the tallk. “Just yesterday I saw the one called Zachary standing by the well.”

Gregor snorted. “Do you hear what you are saying, man? Standing by the well?”