Eifelheim

“So,” Tom mused. “Tempus fugit, after all.” Sure he had promised no witty remarks. He hadn’t broken that promise.

She sighed. It was hard to remain cross with Tom. He was so damned cheerful when his own work was going well. “I know my equations are true,” she mused aloud. “I need to know if they are fact.”

More people should make that distinction. It’s one thing to have a bird in an equation; quite another to have a bird in your hand. A fact is an accomplishment, factum est. In German, “deedmatter.” Tom, who had been reading more Latin and Middle German lately than English, knew immediately what she meant.

But it was easier to hypothesize hidden forces lurking behind the walls of the world than it was to find them. After all, she couldn’t just tear down those walls, could she?

Could she?

Never underestimate a determined woman. Universes are pretty flimsy things in their hands.

“CERN can rent me some time in about four months,” she told Tom a week later as she bustled in the door feeling pleased with herself. “Meaning they will give me chickens if I supply the eggs.”

Tom nodded, figuring this was one of those right places. He was at his desk, reading a copy of the manorial accounts of Oberhochwald that I had sent him from Freiburg. It was missing many pages, and it stopped several years short of the crucial time; but who knew where gold might lie buried?

“It would just be preliminary, of course,” Sharon went on. “CERN can’t go back in time far enough.”

He might have nodded at that one, too; but it really demanded more. “Say what?”

“The really big accelerators recreate conditions as they were in the first seconds after the Big Bang. We can stick our noses a little way into the balloon and see a world in which the seconds were longer and the kilometers shorter.”

“And this is helpful because…?”

“Chronity. I need to detect it, verify it. And I can’t as long as I’m stuck in the present with all the forces frozen out. You see, a fifth force upsets the paradigm. Forces were classified on two axes: strong versus weak and long range versus short range. The schema was so neat that everyone figured there could only be four forces.”

“Heh, sounds like the four Aristotelian elements Judy told me about. The two axes were hot versus cold and wet versus dry. Hot and dry gave you fire—”

There were only two people in the apartment. How did Judy manage to squeeze in? “This isn’t the middle ages,” she snapped. “We’re not prisoners of superstition!”

Tom said, “Uh?” wondering where that remark had come from. Sharon set her briefcase on her desk and opened it, stared at its contents. After a while, Tom said, “So, like, which force is, umm, strong and long range?”

Sharon took her notebook out and turned it absently. “Electromagetism,” she said. “And the weak long-range force is gravity.”

“Maybe I’m putting on weight, but gravity doesn’t feel so weak to me.”

“Yeah, but you need a whole planetful to feel it, don’t you?”

Tom laughed. “Got me with that one.”

“And the short range forces are the strong and weak nuclear forces.”

“Wait,” said Tom, “let me guess which one is the strong one.”

Sharon dropped her notebook to the desk. She said nothing, but said it loudly.

“Okay. So, how does chronity fit in?” Tom asked her.

“By redefining the ranges. Long range and short range only apply to the familiar three spatial dimensions. Other forces might propogate along the hidden dimensions. You see, forces are spacewarps. Einstein showed that gravity was a warp caused by the existence of matter. I mean, the earth orbits the sun, right?”

Tom had been so immersed in medieval research that the question seemed weirdly counterfactual. The earth was in the center and the sun circled in the fourth heaven. The lack of sensible parallax of the fixed stars had disproven heliocentrism centuries before. But he knew by now to avoid smart-ass answers. If he knew that more often, he’d have less stress in his life. “Okay…”

“So, how does the earth know the sun is there? No action at a distance, right? Answer: the earth doesn’t know jack about the sun. It just follows the path of least resistance and rolls around the lip of the fu

Tom was no fool. He knew when he was being spoon-fed an answer. He stared at his desk lamp, trying to imagine that it was really some sort of space-warp.

“But to make it work, Kaluza and Klein had to tack some extra dimensions onto the universe. Then we discovered the nuclear forces and tried to create warp models for them. When the smoke finally cleared, we had eleven dimnesions on our hands.”

Tom’s mouth dropped open. “Merde! You mean physicists kept adding imaginary dimensions just to make their space-warp metaphor consistent? Sounds like Ptolemaic astronomers adding new deferants and epicycles.”

“Those dimensions are no more imaginary than Newton’s ‘force fields.’ And it wasn’t arbitrary. Certain symmetry relations…”

Tom held his hands up, palms out. “Okay, okay. I surrender.”

He hadn’t, and she knew it. “Don’t patronize me! This is physics. This is real. And it’s a hell of a lot more important than why some backwoods German village was abandoned when obviously everyone in it died!”

This really was a very worng thing to say; and more than factually wrong. What happens to human beings may actually be more important than what happens to physical theories. But it was wrong on a personal level. Sharon had created a warp in her own personal space, and the force it represented repelled.

Tom stood. “I have to walk over to the library. I got a meeting with Judy.”

“More Eifelheim?” she asked without turning. But it was not so simple a question as two words. English really is a tonal language — if you have an ear for the tones.

“Tempus fugit,” he said after a moment, answering the question she hadn’t quite asked. “Quae fuerant vitia mores sunt.”

Sharon did not respond. Tom pulled his hard copy files and stuffed them into the pouch he used for his portable. Judy seemed a pretty girl, given the current preference for wholesomeness. Did Tom find that attractive? Why had he probed so insistently over Hernando? “I do like you, you know.”

Tom slung his pouch over his shoulder. “I wish you’d tell me now and then.”

“It’s an established fact, like gravity. It doesn’t need continual reminders.”

He looked at her seriously. “Yes, it does. When you’re near a cliff.”

She looked to the side, perhaps expecting a precipice. Tom waited and when, after a while, she had said nothing more, he started for the door. He looked back before he closed it and saw that Sharon had not moved.

She had to tell someone; so she told Hernando.

“If I had to guess,” the nucleonic engineer said when she had called him, “you have a warp model for your time-force.”

“If I add a twelth dimension. But that messes up the accepted models for the other four.”

“Until now,” he guessed.

“Right. It came to me in a flash. You see, the sub-atomic ‘zoo’ was organized by the quark theory by 1990. Turned out, all those subatomic particles were aliases for three families of three particles. Well, I’ve organized my twelve dimensions in the same way: as three sets of three: Space, Time, and something I haven’t named yet.”

“That only makes nine,” he pointed out. He did not point out that he probably knew the subatomic zoo better than she did.

“Plus three ‘meta-dimensions’ that link the three triplets on a higher level.” She doodled while she talked. A triangle with a smaller triangle at each corner. It was only an icon, really.