Eifelheim

The Krenken pi

“Hans?” said Dietrich, for the Krenk who held him to the earth wore leather hose and a loose blouse of homespun that fit ill on his frame. The Krenk had opened its mandibles, perhaps to answer, perhaps to bite Dietrich’s neck in two, when a sudden wind swayed the upper reaches of the spruces and birch. Limbs creaked, birds took wing. Deer bolted through the underbrush. An odd tension gripped Dietrich and he sucked in his breath and waited. It was like the morn when the Krenken arrived, only not so strong.

Terror and unease flowed through him like the mill stream over the wheel. The wind rose to a howl and lightning snapped like bolts from a cross-bow, striking trees all about and causing branches to burst. The thunder claps echoed off the Katerinaberg, piled one upon the other, died slowly away.

The brief storm ended. The trees bowed for a moment, then steadied. The Krenken who had pi

From there, he chittered something short and intense and those holding Max and Hilde and four others waiting in the woods bounded towards the top of the ridge, where, after several loud rounds of clacks, they poked one another with stiffened fingertips.

Dietrich and Max climbed to their feet. A moment longer, and Hilde joined them. They followed the eight Krenken to the ridgetop.

The clearing below lay empty.

All that remained of the great vessel were the stumps of many trees, the broken remnants of others, and a scattering of debris overlooked or ignored in the departure. One by one, the Krenken bounded down the slope, where they stood in utter silence.

One bent and retrieved some object from the ground, which he held indifferently, but which Dietrich, watching from the ridge, knew he studied with great intensity, for he twisted it first one way, then another, which is what the Krenken often did to sharpen the vision of their strange eyes.

“That device,” said Hilde, and Max and Dietrich both turned to her. “I saw it often in the hands of their children. It is some plaything.”

Below, the Krenken squatted and hugged their knees high above their heads.

7. Now: Sharon

She heard him call distantly, a tiny, insect-voice, squeak-squeaking her name. But her universe was too lovely to leave. No, not the uni-verse, the poly-verse. Twelve dimensions, not eleven. A triplet of triplets. The rotation groups and the meta-algebra made sense now. The speed of light anomaly fit, too. She squeezed the polyverse, and her pulse quickened. Smart lad, that Einstein. He got it just right. A twist. Kaluza and Klein were no dummies, either. And bend, and… There! If she warped it in that way…

There is an altered state that overcomes one in such moments, as if the mind had slipped into another world. Everything else becomes distant, and time itself seems suspended. Motion ceases. The sun stands still. In such moments, famous mathematicians make cryptic marginal notes.

Sharon’s eyes refocused and she saw Tom’s face staring into hers. “I had it!” she said. “It was beautiful. I almost had it! Where’s my notebook!”

It appeared magically in her hands, open to a blank page. She snatched the pen from Tom’s fingers and scribbled fiercely. Partway through she invented a new notation. Please, she thought, let me remember what it means. She marked an equation with a star and wrote: [Æ] is true!! She sighed, and shut the book. “Wait’ll I tell Hernando,” she said.

“Who’s Hernando?”

She scowled at Tom. “I don’t know whether to be angry because you interrupted my train of thought, or glad because you had my notebook handly. How did you know?”

“Because you don’t normally pour your tea on your scrambled eggs.”

Only then did she remember she was eating breakfast. She looked down and groaned. “I must be losing my mind.”

“No argument here. I knew it was notebook-serious as soon as your eyes glazed over.” He took her plate to the sink and rinsed it off into the disposer. “You can have one of my soft-boiled eggs,” he told her over his shoulder.

She shuddered. “I don’t know how you can eat those things.” She snagged a piece of bacon from his plate.

He sat back down. “I saw that. Do you want some tea? No, I’ll pour.”

Soon she was sipping on “the Earl.” Tom set the pot down. “So what was the Big Revelation? I’ve never seen you zone out quite that thoroughly.”

“You don’t understand GUT physics.”

And Sharon didn’t understand cliology; but Tom knew something Sharon did not, although he didn’t know he knew it. And that was that when your words come out of your mouth and back into your ear, your brain gives them a second rinse, and cleans them up a little better. All Tom knew was that when he tried to explain things to Sharon, his own thinking clarified. “You go ahead,” he said. “I’ll sit here, smile benignly, and nod in all the right places.”

“I don’t know where to start.”

“Start at the begi

“Well…” She took a sip of tea as she thought it over. “All right. At the Big Bang—”

Tom laughed. “Whoa! When I said to start at the begi

She tried again. “Look. Why did the apple fall on Newton?”

“Because he was sitting too close under the apple tree?”

She pushed back from the table. “Forget it.”

“Okay, okay. Gravity, all right?”

She paused and studied him. “Are you interested in my work, or not?”

“Did I have your notebook ready for you?”

So he had. How did the cliche put it? Actions speak louder than words. And a good thing, too, because his words could be so irritating. She reached across the table and patted his hand.

“You’re right, Tom. But I’m still trying to figure this out, so I’d rather not be distracted by witty remarks.” She had almost said “half-witty remarks.”

Tom shrugged and sat back in his chair. He had heard “half-witty,” anyway. “All right. Apples fall because of the force of gravity. Wasn’t that already discovered?”

“And why do currents flow?”

“Electromagnetism. Do I get a prize?” Surliness had crept into his voice.

“Why does time run faster?”

He opened his mouth to reply, closed it, and grew thoughtful. “Some sort of force,” he said slowly, almost to himself.

Gotcha! she thought. No smart-ass comeback for that one. “Exactly. Accelerations require forces. Uncle Isaac said so. Look at it this way. We don’t ‘move forward’ through time; we ‘fall downward,’ pulled by a sort of temporal gravity. I call it chronity.” Pulled by what, she wondered? Something at the end of time? How Aristotelean! Jackson would have a cow. Or something at the begi